'Hatty'

 This is a short story I wrote for a writing class a few years ago. At the start of this academic year I was feeling a bit lazy, a bit project-less, so I spent one mad evening converting the story into a short play, with three characters: The Narrator, Hatty, and James. The piece was selected for performance at the STaG (Student Theatre at Glasgow) theatre festival, held for three consecutive nights at Stereo, Glasgow. My friend Kate and I collaborated to direct the play, holding auditions and developing the script to make the story work as a piece of theatre. The photo above is mid-rehearsal, with our brilliant actors Angus, Sarah, and Richard - who played James, Hatty and the Narrator.


                                                                        Hatty

‘You give me just a taste so that I want more
Now my hands are bleeding and my knees are raw
Now you've got me crawling, crawling on the floor
And I've never met a girl like you before…’

Edwyn Collins – ‘Girl Like You’

* * * * *

NARRATOR: Our own little butterfly. I’ll tell you her story, though I skip many night-times, many moons and stars and men. She wrote her own version, you see, but it was shaded with pastel colours – too many dusty pinks and russets where it should have been all black. For everything must be beautiful on paper. One blank sheet and she can shade it any way she likes. So I will tell you the tale of the one evening the mask slipped. She fell in love – but the broken cannot see love – and broken she was… as were the rules. She relished the chill that ran through her bones as she stepped from her flat, a crumbled Glasgow tenement on Melrose street, nestled somewhere behind Queens Crescent. Her senses were sharp and vicious with the cold as she turned to regard the building in its decayed splendour. A single light burned dull crimson in the highest windows, dark curtains parted just enough to reveal the strange and beautiful interiors within. Twisted mannequins adorned with silver and, a dusty black spinning wheel casting spidery shadows on the walls, chased by Oscar the tabby cat, impervious to their stillness.

A fleeting glance to her right set her nerves ablaze, and her fingernails drew blood against her wrists, the imprint of the streetlights forcing her from her reverie. The lights and cries of Friday night in the city repulsed her in their simplistic vulgarity, for she dealt only in secrets, and the quiet wonder of things untold. Yet, in the twist of her revulsion, tonight’s task seemed easier. She could hear the faint screechings of her distant commanders, somewhere in the back of her mind; the threatening plea for action stirring her into the night.

Avoiding the sequins and screams of the main roads, she detoured slightly in her chosen route, finding herself in the furtive, inky grandeur of Blythswood Square. Branches swayed against a purple sky, as in the distance, she heard the click of heels, a cackle, the dull thud of a car door. As she walked on, the shadows of the square curled themselves around her body, beckoned from the clandestine places of the night, where whispers and pleas shivered gently and were lost. She had been here before, in another time, when deals were harsher, and her vengeance honey-sweet. Pausing, she heard the screams again - their orders - louder and more urgent, and knew she had lingered too long. Her nails embedded in her palms, she slid onto Sauchiehall Street, and into the stark warmth of the people who had yet to fall between the cracks.

This night, her choice was immediate, and easy. He was tall, with dark scruffy hair and that ruffled, ‘just-out-of-bed’ look that has fuelled heartache and self-compromise among women for centuries. He carried his lean body with effortless grace, and his shirt clung to him the way it should. His clothes spoke of inherent good taste, yet were not chosen to do so. A smile lingered on his lips long after he had finished laughing, and his eyes were the colour of her bathwater, framed with long, sooty lashes. She watched as he stood at the ironically ‘kitsch’ juke-box, eventually settling on a song with a jangling, twisting introduction, prompting a drunken nostalgic cheer from his friends.

‘Never met a girl like you before…’

He danced, turning slowly, with his pint glass aloft. The pink blossom of excitement spread from her neck to her cheeks as she thought how rewarded she would be, when she had changed him forever, made him vulnerable, her own. She stood in the dark space separating the toilets from the bar, biting her lips hard to bring the blood to the surface, a technique inducing an effect far superior to that of any lipstick against her flawless white skin. The synthetic tang of bad cocaine was beginning to fade from the back of her tongue, the bridge of her nose. The capillaries lining her nostrils were largely severed and torn, a nod to the varying levels of rot and decay masked by her porcelain outer shell.

A glint of silver in the dark corner as she drew her hair pin from inside her 40s coat. Her dark, gently fragranced hair swept into an elegant bun, loose curls licking her neck, the black of her pupils pulsing in time to the music. She would be happy to stay here, in the shadows, a dark wallflower thriving quietly from the lives and laughter of others. But - as she had decided long ago - that lifestyle is better suited to the ugly, lonely and deranged. She must flit in and out of the gaudy charade, adding her own faded shades of watercolour beauty to the lives of the men who needed her, to whom she belonged for one night, before her disappearance annihilated them. This was her duty, and she undertook it with the solemnity of the gods. Her gods.

 She could pinpoint the exact moment he fell in love with her; about twelve minutes later. James. She had followed him outside, hovered near him on the pavement, wasting matches until he approached with a light. An unimaginative routine, with an unfailing success rate. She had let her hair fall to her shoulders and her eyes fill with tears when he had asked her where she was from. He’d just stared. His smell intoxicated her; her pupils fighting off the fine mahogany outlines struggling to encase them, thin as gossamer. She wanted to take him there and then, some back alley somewhere, desolate and depraved. However, she must uphold the pretence. Shy, intellectual art student. Hatty, she told him. Hatty was her name.

The implicated intelligence, the vulnerability of the persona always made them shiver. He asked her where she had come from, and if she liked Glasgow. France, she said, and yes. She had started out working at the Citizens Theatre, enthralled by the dark places beyond the stage, where murder and rape and manipulation had etched their marks in the wooden beams and dusty costume halls. She would linger when the grand circles emptied and the lights burned out, watching the dull glimmer of the chandelier as it hung in its ghostly opulence.

 She played her part well, whispering to him of her paintings - paintings that did exist - on the outskirts of her memory. She spoke of twisted, gnarled visions, but all he heard was the velvet of her voice. She was too thin, yet he was surprised to find himself getting hard the more he thought on it. The visibility of her ribs, the fragility of her wrists. Even the dark circles under her eyes contributed to her collective beauty, which was frightening, like a third presence. He told her so, and then he dared to kiss her. Deep red spots throbbed behind his eyelids when she let him. She took him home.

* * * * *

She wore a dusty pink linen nightgown, and smelled powdery, like roses. They lay among musty sheets, and Oscar the cat nuzzled his neck. She slept quietly in his arms, and he kissed her head. She was wide awake, and could see him. She had to make sure he’d forgotten the sex. The mirrors and the teeth and the fire. She did as was expected, and he left as the birds sang.

 They came that night, in their hordes. A flaw in the routine, they said. A fatal flaw. She had forgotten something, and they changed her face as punishment, until it resembled the paintings on the outskirts of her imagination. Her body crumpled, and Oscar died of fright. As the faded green of her bathwater turned dim with blood, dark pictures slid through her mind, of a city whose streets had masked and bathed her in their lonely beauty. A tower, a spire, or television wires against a steely bright sky. The displaced elegance of a forgotten park while the safe ones slept. These visions had been hers, and had held her though her pain. These, they could not steal.