Agoraphobia, CharlieandEm [booksvooks TXT] 📗

For a month, at the beginning of October, the clouds rebel against the sky; so the air smelt of rain and blew its chilly currents over the heat that lay, prostrate, as a remnant of the day’s furious summer spirit. No matter how much spring wanted to be summer; the clouds and the wind would still coax the rain. No matter how much the freshly bloomed flowers yearned to shrivel into mounds to escape the overbearing heat; underground waters spurred their roots to drink deeply. In this time, a year before this moment, the balance was perfect between purity, thought and the future. This afternoon; the ground spattered with rain and the parking lot silent with lifelessness; there is no purity and there is no future – there is only thought.


Every moment, every person, every situation; is a room. Every room is bare with four walls, one door that can be locked from the outside, and one small, high window. This is Sebastian’s theory. I found it once, written as a paper for which he received only sixty percent. I had not been meaning to look for anything, but he had left me alone in his flat. Waiting for his return only lasted an hour. Hunger and its satisfaction lasted half an hour, and I could stand to watch television for only an hour after that. His music collection and modest library under went observation for forty-five minutes, at a stretch. Finally the tall, slim cupboard, that mimicked his rigid self so perfectly was the only object undiscovered. Once he returned, Sebastian was angry. He left his car angry, he walked past into the kitchen angrily and he made coffee, two mugs, angrily. Although I was aware that this should be intimidating; I knew that his mood would settle once I asked about his paper and flattened even further as I insisted that he had been mark far below the standard of his work; but the eventually expressionless figure of Sebastian Wren was more comforting than the queasy smile he enjoyed mocking me with when I was antagonistic. He ended up explaining his theory to me, related it to various successful encounters he had had, and showed me how the theory helped him fit to me. It was an infallible, catastrophic, wondrous theory – so I left, quickly, and thought about his suggestion to try it.


Sebastian and I met at an autumn dance in a Baden-Powell Scout Hall. We were both guests and seemingly equally listless about the idea of meeting other members and their guests of the hunting club. My brother, Robin, was a ruthless pilot and the only reason I had attended the dance. We stood together for the beginning of the evening as all good attendees to a party do; every person darted too and fro between the wall and the buffet table with their partner or friends at the heel. The dance was designed for the younger member and children of the older members of the hunting club and so, by eight o’ clock, the two generations were split by a thin, wooden folding door. The door must not have kept much of the music out, but once the dance began few, if any, adult members ventured into the auditorium. Some of the girls and braver boys collected in the middle of the dance floor, the girls dancing together and the boys watched, captivated; but the rest gradually slipped outside or towards the table of food again. I felt no compulsion to leave the buzzing, lit room and eventually, without even noticing, Sebastian and I ended up standing together behind the once superfluous, but now puddle-like bowl of salad.
“I only like the croutons.” He said to me, leaning closer to avoid shouting. As if to support his statement he picked a large, chunk of crusty bread between his fingers and let it crunch into dust in his mouth.
“Me too,” I smiled, shouting to avoid leaning closer, and ate the crouton next to the one he had taken.
“Why?” he asked after bobbing his head to the music for a few counts – enough time for my brother to notice me talking to him and give me a thumbs up in full view.
“Because he thinks I am socially inept.” I replied.
“No, why do you like the croutons?” he asked, leaning down again. I watched the crowd, larger than when the music first started, and thought about what he was asking.
“They’re the odd ones out. They are not grown, they are not fresh – they are hard, cooked in oil, and only have to touch the green bits when they have to.” I told him, trying to impress him and repel him with my answer at the same time. He looked at me for a while, so I looked at the floor expecting him to leave as my comment had obviously achieved one of the two options. In the time it took to wait for his reaction I considered both walking away and talking to him again; but I realised that I had been standing here first and that I had no obligation to leave or to entertain my visitor.
“That was a metaphor.” He said into my ear. The initial aversion I had felt to his contact was starting to ease, but a new sense of uncertainty over his intentions was welling.
“Yes.” I laughed, suddenly comfortable as I realised that after each encroachment into my territory he had stepped back, out of it. “Were you deciphering that the whole time, or was there something else that slowed the process?” I asked him. Unaffected by my sarcasm he flashed a lengthy smile and popped another crouton into his mouth.
“I was considering all the interpretations.” I smiled, sincerely, at his rebuttal. “Sebastian Wren.” He introduced himself, shaking my hand gently. I hesitated, considering his ability to hold a conversation and tendency to omit hovering.
“Olivia Vaughn.”
“Oh, not the sister of Robin Vaughn?” he asked. I nodded and he dropped my hand in the middle of shaking it. “Part of the bottom third too, I see.” He continued, looking at me amusedly, and without giving me a chance to react to his first comment.
“Who are you to say such things about me? You don’t know me and I doubt that you know my brother.” It irritated me when I was under pressure to defend my brother, because I seldom saw merit in it at the best of times. My brother was a misguided young man with much potential and equal amounts of laziness to allow his abilities to waste away. There was nothing unique about that, of course, and the only error he had made was buying into the cliché. It was a form-fitting stereotype, and exactly his size. Sebastian smiled and mouthed ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying’. He pointed to the pair of doors closest to the table, indicating that we should go outside. I followed him, slowly, and had allotted a fair amount of time to decide what I thought of him before standing beside him on the step under the light. When he moved over the threshold, into the darkness and headed towards a group of people, who had ditched the dance to sit around a small fire, he doubled back to find me stationary under the light. Darkness stretched out endlessly into the pine plantation. The pine needles on the floor and on the branches infused the night air with their smell. With each step back towards me Sebastian encouraged the wafting of the damp, earthy smells to surround me. Each time the plantation breathed, a chill swirled through my dress and into the hot, loud hall – the dancers oblivious to the mystical, silky darkness beyond the toes of my shoes. Sebastian gazed at me, now only a few centimetres taller than me, and motioned for me to follow. “I meant the bottom third of the alphabet.” He called, as the music was still too loud to hear him from just a few paces away. I stayed still, uncertain of the way that his smiles were attractive even though he smiled near me and not at me; his comments were clever, but not sincere; and his intentions seemed clear, but allowed for ambivalence. “You don’t trust me.” He said.
“No.”
“Do you think that you ever could?” his face was imploring but not yet hopeful, until I smiled.
“I think that, one day, I could.”
“Fine then,” he murmured as he settled next to me on the step, “Until you can trust me, we can do things your way.”
“Suits me,” I almost sang.
“Exactly.”

“You must be joking!” Sebastian crowed. I could hear that he was walking and the sounds of shopping drifted through the receiver. “You brother actually agreed to let Ron cook? Is she using a recipe at least?” his voice echoed my thoughts perfectly, a trend among our conversations. At first, once he had bargained my number for a large scale abduction of all the croutons in the salads left at the dance, calls from Sebastian had been sparse. He would call when appropriate; when he saw me in passing or needed to ask of my brother; but became more calculated over time and then, suddenly, on a Tuesday night, calls were no longer formal. Once I had accepted the fact that Sebastian would be suitable as more than a pushy acquaintance, with a due amount of insistence from Robin, calls came at regular intervals. Over time subjects that I had prepared, in anticipation of his call, and tried to introduce casually into our conversations, grew unwanted. Sebastian was interesting, and he seemed content to listen to the amount of information I supplied to him; his tolerance for my rambling was exactly right in proportion to the amount I could mentally designate to talking about myself. He had kindly let me court the idea of him, and this was to his favour. I did not like to be pushed into things, and I took encouragement from only a carefully trusted minority; Sebastian had performed his extended introduction by the book, and for this I admired him.
“I’m not sure I feel safe eating whatever she makes.” I said, without intentionally providing an opening to him. In that stomach clenching second, moments that I frequently endured, I realised that I had given him a chance to affirm or deny me.
“Hang on,” he said, and I heard him move the phone around and argue with someone about a cut of meat. In this short squabble a million worst case scenarios ran across my mind; they were the unnamed pedestrians running across the road at the cross because of my green light. The phone tapped and whooshed back to him ear and he spoke with a smile in his voice – the first opportunity I had had to imagine what Sebastian considered a triumph: “Can I assume that you eat meat?”

He took my jacket, let me choose music, and offered me a drink. I am a fairly comfortable plotter and recognised the motions that he was going through to make me comfortable. Although his means were poorly concealed, the intention led me to smile at him more sweetly than I had intended.
“I’m seventeen.” I answered his offer.
“You kids don’t drink at seventeen?” he asked amusedly. I smiled and accepted whatever he was having. “I don’t drink,” he replied.
“Not even water?” I countered. He grinned and left me to forage through his music collection. Instead I took the chance to examine his