Where new writing finds its voice
Short Story

The story of Big

Sam Oborne

Big came downstairs while I was sitting at the dining table. He walked past me and went into the kitchen. I didn’t look up from my laptop. I heard him put squash in a glass, then fill the glass with water, then walk back past me, stop, and wait for me to say something.

I looked up. ‘Hi,’ I said.

‘What you up to?’

‘This and that,’ I said.

‘Okay.’

I watched him tip the glass towards his mouth to drink. The squash disappeared quickly. He smacked his lips and walked back past me into the kitchen. I heard him put the glass in the sink, then heard him walk back past me and stop again.

Big is called Big because there’s this rumour that his dad invented Viagra. It’s not true, although he did have some kind of involvement in its development, I think. Their whole family has Viagra merchandise, which they wear with pride, especially Big. ‘My dad invented Viagra!’ his t-shirt screams to those aware of the rumour. Of course I know differently, because I know the family, but the
nickname has stuck.

He said, ‘Can you write me a story for Christmas?’

‘What kind of story?’ I said.

‘Something nice, about me doing something good for everyone.’

‘I don’t write those kinds of stories really.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What kind of stories do you write?’

‘This and that kind of stories,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said.

He turned around and walked back upstairs, where I could hear him sit down at his desk and turn on whatever episode of Stargate SG1 he was watching at the time. I could hear him tapping on his keyboard and clicking his mouse, probably playing a game at the same time as watching the television. His tapping sounded disappointed. I thought about what he wanted from me, which wasn’t much in
the grand scheme of things, and that I should really help him out.

I started, ‘There’s this guy and he draws and paints and watches things on the television that others find boring,’ but I stopped right there because it was terrible. Then I started again, ‘He’s a jar, with a heavy lid, a pop quiz kid,’ but I stopped again because he wouldn’t get the reference, so it would be pointless. I could still hear him tapping away. I felt sorry for the guy, that I couldn’t begin anything about him. He had no beginning, that I could find anyway. He had no defining point.

That was how I started, the third time, and I went on from there:

 

He has no defining point, which is his trouble, he has nothing that makes him him, just things that he does and makes and pushes, punches out into the crowd and says, Look, this is what I have done, and the crowds say, We don’t want to hear it, man, we don’t want nothing to do with it, and he just says, You’re stupid, because we don’t want nothing is a double negative that means you want something, and they say, Screw you, man, screw you.

 

I turned on my computer’s Bluetooth device and found Big’s and sent him the paragraph with the note, ‘I’ve started’. Upstairs I could hear the ping that told him he had a Bluetooth message and I could hear him clicking to open and read it and then he was downstairs again with his hands on his hips.

‘What was that?’ he said.

‘Your story.’

That?’

‘Yes – well, the beginning of it anyway.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Okay then.’

I could tell he was puzzled.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

‘You’re not meant to,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You’re meant to think about it a bit.’

‘But there’s not even any quotation marks or proper punctuation and who the hell is the crowd shouting at anyway?’

‘They’re life, man, they’re life,’ I punctuated the words with my finger and laughed.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Okay then.’

He went back upstairs and I started typing again, but I started from scratch and made it more accessible for him:

 

Big had trouble finding himself. He had plenty of talents, plenty of skills, plenty of passions. He had things he liked, he had things he loved, even, but he couldn’t find anything that he burned for. He couldn’t find anything that made his heart constrict, that turned his legs into pillars of fire, that made his eyeballs bubble and burst and his nostrils flare and shoot flame in front of him. He was a shell of a man, with passion but no drive, no fire, with love but no sense of martyrdom. Life screamed at Big to find this something. It screamed at him to go all the way, to push himself to the limit and find that spark that would tip him over the precipice. He could hear the scream but he was lost, he was trapped inside the world that he had created for himself, the pressures that weighed him down, hemmed him in, limited what didn’t want to be limited. He tried God but couldn’t find Him. Whether He was lingering somewhere absent, crouched in a corner or on a boat trip down the Thames, Big just couldn’t find Him. He tried drugs. He found a guy, a street sleeper, it seemed, who had a sharps bin in a pull-tie rucksack with pills in the bottom stolen from chemists’ bins. He took the pills, one by one, and lay on his bed to wait for the burn to kick in, but it never came. He was left empty and sick to his stomach. Bile covered his bedroom floor but there wasn’t a hint of buzz behind his eye sockets, which was what he had been promised. Big thought about whether or not a woman would get him there. He wondered whether or not there was a girl in the ether powerful enough to drag his soul awake, to make his heart pump with fire, to kick him into touch. He had read about that kind of love but never found it. Finding it seemed like too much effort, so he remained lying on his bed. Big was lost and he knew it. He felt numb.

 

I stopped there because my brain was starting to spin round inside my skull. I got up and went to the kitchen, where I poured myself a coffee from the half-empty pot. I could hear him in his room above the kitchen, walking back and forth from wall to wall. It was something I was used to, hearing him think with his body and not just his head. He couldn’t sit still, he was that sort of guy, he had to be on the move all the time that his brain was. I could hear him walking down the stairs. He walked past me into the kitchen where he poured himself a cup of coffee, finishing the pot.

‘How’s it going?’ he said, sipping his drink.

‘I changed it slightly.’ My throat ached as I spoke.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Okay then.’ He walked back past me and went to go upstairs.

‘Big,’ I said.

He turned around.

‘Do you remember when we had the girls round? Chrissie and Ali? I think it was them. Yes, it was, it was them.’

He screwed up his lips to think. ‘Don’t remember,’ he said.

‘You must, because I kissed Chrissie when you were washing up, and she said she had to stop kissing me because she was in love with you, and she was thinking about your face when she was kissing me.’

‘Chrissie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s weird.’

‘Yeah, so, you should ring her, or something.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, she’s, like, in love with you.’

‘I’m fine thanks mate.’

‘Don’t you think you could do with some fire in your belly?’

Big laughed, turned, and walked back upstairs. I sat back down at my laptop:

 

He went to a cash-point as the next stage of his plan. He stood behind a guy who was a little smaller than him and said Give us your bloody money or I will break your neck right here, and the guy turned round and said, Whatever, and walked off down the road tucking fifties into his wallet. Big’s fingers tingled, right to the tips, and his jaw ached where his teeth had been clenched. Aggression wasn’t the right way to go, it seemed, he didn’t even have that in him.

He crossed the road and jumped the fence into the front lot of the disused tyre place. He liked the huge bit of graffiti on the wall, it made him think of anarchy. He wanted to buy the building and turn it into a community project, set the artists loose. He climbed into the building through a broken window and thought about logistics, about how much it would cost to buy, or rent, about what would need to be done to make it safe. He saw a flickering light in another room, pulsing out of the crack in a half-closed door. He walked towards it slowly. He could hear something. It was sex, definitely, he could hear sex in the room. He climbed back out of the broken window and re-jumped the fence into the street. The tingling in his fingers had spread to his arms and his eyeballs. But there was still no fire in his belly. There was nothing.

 

My drink had gone cold by the time I returned to it. There were bits of soggy coffee dust in the bottom of the cup that got stuck on the lining of my throat. I gagged a little as I drank it, then went into the kitchen, where I stood for a minute, trying to figure out what to do. There were tears in the corners of my eyes. Big tears that wanted to get out, but I wouldn’t let them. I gripped the edge of the sink and bit my tongue, then put my cup down and went up to
Big’s room.

‘What you watching?’ I said.

Battlestar Galactica,’ said Big, not looking up.

‘Looks interesting.’

On the screen a futuristic-looking group of people were standing by a river bank with another group dressed in medieval clothes. One of the futuristic ones had a black bag on his head.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘They’ve stumbled across a cult on some planet in the far reaches of the solar system that’s a parallel of Earth.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘And the guy with the bag is about to be pushed into the river.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said, noticing the large rock tied to the guy with a bag on his head’s foot.

I went back downstairs and sat down at the dining table and started typing again:

 

Big went home and turned on his computer. He looked at websites about television programmes and eventually light started to push itself underneath the bottom of his curtains. He looked at his clock. It was six am. He stretched and closed his eyes, to see if he would be able to go to sleep or not, but he was as awake as he had been all night. He stripped and got into the shower and washed himself, then got out and dried himself, then went back into his bedroom and got dressed. Then he sat back down at his computer and put a DVD into the slot, which began to whirr and the window opened up with the DVD’s menu screen.

 

I was crying. Tears were getting on the keys, so I lifted my head out of the way to let them fall onto the table. I could hear Big walking above me, pacing back and forth. Then I could hear him coming down the stairs.

‘You all right?’ he said.

‘Mm.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What you writing?’

‘Nothing.’

He’s just so empty.