Second Chances

 This was written for a challenge over at RPG Directory where we were given a sentance about a character and then told to create a person around them. I chose Karen Johnson. 22. Unemployed, brunette, lives with parents and ran with it. It's probably one of the most bloated of all of my short stories, really it works far better as a character study and practise peice then something final and polished because the description is incredibly overwrought and shall we say more than a little self indulgent.

I find myself wanting to write a little more about the two main characters in the story David and Karen.Sometimes its not the stuff that you write that has the most impact but the stuff that you deliberatley leave out. Have a  read if you like.


Drawn curtains cast a blue tinted glow, as the light crept in through chinks in the fabric, moth bites in the material. The midday heat rose through the carpeting, sounds of life from the street below came in through the cracks in the window. It wasn’t enough to try and block out the world, the world always did its best to find you no matter what. Reaching a little way over to the nightstand, Karen lit a cigarette and lay back in bed, the sheets stained brown with blood pooled around her, her makeup wiped into the pillow, in some hideous approximation of a face. A warped mask.

Karen used a can of half drunk, warm flat cider- the kind you saw tramps drinking on the sidewalk- as an ash tray. Underneath that, a pile of job applications, a few résumés that had once been impressive and bloated with qualifications, now sprayed with old cigarette ash and damp in rings from the warm cider.

The job applications were her mother’s idea. To get Karen back on her feet- like yanking back the thick curtains and letting in the light. She must have read through a hundred- Supermarket checkout girl, Sales assistant in a shop that specialised in clothes for overweight men, Someone to do administration at a dog sanctuary, Supermarket checkout girl again. Good hours, plenty of job satisfaction, good prospects- in four years time Karen could hope to be assistant to the assistant regional manager at her local branch of Sainsbury’s. Surely that was the very definition of living the dream. Exactly what she’d envisaged at her graduation last year; honour roll student, that big wide future ahead of her and three long bloody years of grafting at Oxford university behind her- even then she’d been dreaming of the day when she could put on a gaudy coloured smock with her nametag pinned proudly to the front and stack shelves.

Karen sighed, wiped a crust of mascara from her eye and knew what her mother would say. You didn’t get to turn your nose up at this sort of thing when you were lucky not to be in prison. Pulling herself out of bed, she yanked up the leg of her pyjamas and tapped the security tag wrapped tight around her ankle, working it up a little and seeing the prickles of brown fuzz that were growing underneath. And everywhere else on her legs really.

To say that Karen had let herself go as of late was quite the understatement- evident from old crisp packets, pastry crumbs trodden into the carpeting and the new layer of fat she’d amassed around her thighs and arse. Her face was blotchy, from crying, from a general lack of vitamins and an aversion to taking showers these days. Her brown hair hung half out of the pony tail she’d tied it in four days ago, limp and dull like greasy noodles. There were bald patches at her temples where Karen had pulled and tugged hard at her hair, thin scratches, scabs and scars on her fat thighs underneath the unwashed pyjama pants where she’d tried to make herself feel something- anything. John used to love her hair, would run his fingers through it when they lay in bed together. But Karen had told herself she wasn’t going to think about John anymore- had taken all of his pictures down from the walls, ripped them from frames. As though the last three years, the best three years of her life hadn’t happened at all.

Going into the kitchen, barefoot and bra-less under her vest top Karen scratched at a hairy under arm like a monkey and pulled open the fridge. In the reflection of condiment jars Karen saw her mother, Shelly, emerge from the den, wearing track pants and sweaty from the aerobics DVD she had been working out to, she wore a stupid sweatband and stupid matching pink leotard like she thought she was Olivia Newton John or something. She also- and this really got on Karen’s nerves- liked to work out in full makeup. Who even did that?

“Hello love,” said Shelly breathlessly looking down at her daughter, chest heaving from the exercise. She poured herself a glass of water and Karen watched her, sticking a spoon deep into a tub of chocolate fudge flavoured cake icing. “Any plans for today?”

Karen had plans, sure, and they mostly involved her tub of chocolate fudge flavoured cake icing. That and her pyjamas, and a lot of pretty crappy daytime television. Living the dream. Part of the whole ‘not going to prison’ deal was that Karen was supposed to be quite seriously depressed and it was better for her to have a curfew, according to her therapist it wasn’t healthy to stop showering, pull your hair out in clumps and watch Sally Jesse Raphael all day- but when you gave it a go it was really very pleasant actually. No wonder Karen wasn’t ready to give it all up for a menial job that quickly.

“Maybe we could fill in your job applications together, wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Not really,” shrugged Karen, still spooning chocolate fudge into her mouth. Shelly suggested because she didn’t want Karen to do anything stupid, like tell the truth on her job application or at least to artfully conceal the worst of it- like the tag, that she couldn’t drive anymore and anything else surrounding the crash. “But I suppose I haven’t got a choice, have I?”

**

Predictably, Karen wasn’t inundated with job offers- there were things that not even Shelly could artfully hide under a warm blanket of mistruths like her shiny new criminal record. Of all of the hundreds of jobs she’d applied for, only one agreed to the all important interview stage- some doctor who needed an assistant to go through his papers. It was, Karen had to admit, the sketchiest job of the lot- but beggars couldn’t be choosers Karen’s mum said, and Karen herself said the sooner she messed up this interview too, the sooner she could go back to wallowing in her own filth at home.

Her mum drove her to the interview, but dropped her a street away so Karen didn’t look totally co-dependent, some kind of elaborate ruse so she looked at least a little bit socially competent. This doctor worked at home apparently, in an old gothic style house, with stone balustrades and gargoyles atop them. The windows were large and at least eighteenth century, and like any town house it stretched upwards into the skyline- Karen’s heart sinking at the thought of all those stairs. With its grey bricks and those gargoyles and though it was hardly enveloped by foggy moors, Karen thought of Wuthering Heights, she thought of the House of Usher and of Thornfield Hall. It certainly seemed like a house filled with something dead or dying, something of a melancholy spirit. It fit Karen a little more than ASDA might.

Karen reached up to ring the doorbell, a real chiming metal bell sounding as opposed to something electronic and he came to the door. Both of them seemed as equally startled to see each other, Karen to this tweedy academic type when she had been expecting Lurch from the Adams family and him to only knows what.
He was in his fifties and had probably been quite a looker in his days- perhaps better than John who had been the fittest bloke Karen had known. But where John had been blonde and muscular, this man a swarthy type of some Mediterranean, or possibly Arabic descent, his hair a dark grey and slightly curled, his facial hair a grizzled grey. Unlike most middle age men who attracted a paunch around their stomach he was slim as a twig like a man who still played tennis on a regular basis, wore a tweed jacket and thick, almost hipsterish glasses. Karen was sure she wasn’t going to get this job. This guy had probably imagined some blonde bad girl in a short skirt young enough to be his daughter who he could charm into bed in the midst of his mid life crisis. Karen, who was young enough to be his daughter but nothing else, frowned to let him know he was onto his game.

She’d made an effort at least, taken a shower for the first time in a long time- had dressed neatly in an expensive trouser suit and done her best with her brown hair to hide the bald patches.

“David Mowshowitch,” he said, - Jewish then- holding his hand out awkwardly to Karen who took it and shook firmly. He was surprised, “That’s…that’s a good handshake there.” Karen knew, she had practised it, taken courses in interview techniques back when she could have been CEO of a company before she was forty. His accent was a mismatch of American, English and something else that Karen couldn’t place.

He led her into the study and took a seat, speaking quickly as though he were more nervous about this interview than Karen, the way he fumbled a little charming “So..uh.. I guess you know a little about the job,” Karen nodded. “I’m sort of in between research papers right now, if you like- I uh..specialise in embryonic and stem cell research. And I have a vast amount of information taken from studies, case notes etc that are strewn about the place rather disastrously that I desperately need sorted and put away.”

Karen wanted to ask, had done from the minute she’d found out about embryonic research if he actually, you know, had real life placenta in his house- or pickled foetuses like some house of horrors, but had remembered her seminar on good interviewing techniques and rather thought that this wasn’t something that was encouraged.

“I have an office at the university, but most of my writing I do from home. You’d get a set of keys when I’m lecturing so you can let yourself in, and it’s just me…so um…you won’t run into anyone else while you’re working.”

It was just him, but Karen looked at his hand and saw a wedding band on his hand; it was shined as though new, as though he took remarkably good care of it.

“Now the files I want sorted through are on the ground floor…but um, the bathroom is upstairs…so, I’m not sure how to, I’m sorry if I’m being indelicate-”

“I’ll hold it in,” said Karen. “Or bring a diaper. That was a joke, by the way,” she added quickly, because sometimes if she said something like that people just gawked at her awkwardly. Mr. Mowshowitch however had gotten it, and was smiling. Yep, he had definitely been very handsome at one point. Just like Karen had been pretty last summer, time and circumstance had a horrible way of catching up on you.

“Look, Mr Mowshowitch-”

“David, please.”

“Look, David, I know the chair is off putting,” she continued gesturing down to her wheelchair and her prone, paralysed, fat thighs. “But really it isn’t a hindrance, not in an office situation.” It didn’t have to be forever either, with the physiotherapy- but Karen caught herself, it almost sounded like she wanted this job, which she emphatically didn’t. Or any job at all. She just wanted to close all the curtains, block out the world and sit in her pyjamas.

“No, no, of course not, I know,” said David, his brown eyes very earnest, “If anything…I would have said you were overqualified. I mean, you have a first in economics from Oxford…that’s quite, that’s really quite something. You shouldn’t be wasting your time here, not in this sort of job.”

Karen clenched her fist. This idiot had only asked her here to give her some inspirational talk about achieving her dreams, that if Karen were in a good mood might have played along with so David Mowshowitch could feel better about himself at dinner and she would have gone home and stayed in her pyjamas and watched crappy daytime television because nothing ever bloody changed.

“I know I can’t comment,” he continued, “but if you think it’s the chair holding you back then I can assure you—“

“I DON’T,” snapped Karen, “I DON’T .FOR ONE. A MINUTE THINK. IT’S THE BLOODY CHAIR.” Karen hauled up the leg of her neat work pants, bought back when she was doing work experience at banks in the city to reveal the tag. “It’s the bloody drunk driving charges that are holding me back! It’s the bloody sodding arsing constructive manslaughter charges holding me back!”

Karen realised she was panting, that one stray tear had slipped down her face which she wiped furiously aside. David Mowshowitch just gaped at her, and Karen was really sure now she wasn’t going to get the job.

“I did write it down,” she said in an accusatory fashion. He didn’t get to look shocked or appalled, not when she’d bloody written it down. Sighing, she fixed her handbag on her chair properly and began to wheel out of the room. But then David spoke.

“Karen…Karen, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you. I was…I suppose I was seduced by your qualifications, all that work experience…Oxford... Oxford turned me down. I only went to Bristol.”

“Someone died,” said Karen coldly. “An Oxford degree doesn’t quite excuse that.” David tried to interject, tried to argue something but Karen didn’t let him finish. “I should…the interview is over isn’t it?”

“What happened?”

Karen blinked. “What?”

“It’s an interview; I’m supposed to ask questions to ascertain whether you are the best person for the job. I’m asking you a question,” Karen was surprised at how measured he sounded. She was sure this was the kind of thing that inspired revulsion, she’d been drunk, she’d driven and a person was dead now.

Karen breathed out, “John…my boyfriend…we’d just graduated and were celebrating. There was a party, way out in the middle of nowhere,” she shut her eyes and could hear the shouting, the music, could smell the barbeque and the summer air and then she could taste blood, hear screaming and shattered glass in her hair.

“He’d been drinking and we needed to get home. I felt fine. I knew I’d been drinking less than him- drinking, yeah, but less than him. We almost made it home…but I…in the crash I hit my head and was under for a month. When I woke up they told me that I was paralysed and that John…” Karen couldn’t bring herself to finish, gripping hard at her thigh, tears on her cheek.

“John was dead?” asked David and Karen shook her head emphatically.

“No John was alive. But he never wanted to see me again, not after what I did…and, I don’t doubt, after what had happened to me. There was a girl, she’d just passed her driving test, seventeen years old…I hit her. We were both in comas, but I woke up. And she’s dead now,” said Karen thickly.

David Mowshowitch said nothing, just breathed heavily.

“Everyone keeps telling me I should get on with my life, I know my legs got me out of a prison sentence and that I should consider myself lucky. I’m not dead. Not banged up. But how the hell do you carry on knowing that someone died because of you? It isn’t fair, that I get to carry on, not when she doesn’t . And that, Mr Mowshowitch, is why you shouldn’t hire me… I’m going to go now.”

***
So Karen retreated into the darkness again. After a week, her hair grew limp again, dogs in the street smelt better than she did and she’d worked her way through two pints of ice cream, four packets of cookie dough and a mountain of pies and crisps. The smell of cigarette smoke was thick around her, the cuts on her thighs deeper.

In a way it was a tribute to that seventeen year old girl who had died that night. What Karen was living now wasn’t ever going to be considered any kind of life, now was it? She could close her eyes and pretend that the feeling didn’t just stop at the neurones in her legs- that she had gone ahead and died right there with her, with her career and her relationships, and any kind of semblance of self respect. Her mother could tut all she wanted in her garish leotards.

And then, one evening, Karen decided to check her email- looking for the status of a new order of pyjama pants- her fat ass was getting too big for the ones she wore now, and found something from a D.Moshowitch@SussexUni.Gmail. The email subject header was labelled SECOND CHANCES?? and Karen found herself crossing her fingers before she clicked to open it.

End.