Fifty/Fifty and Other Stories

First Kindle Edition, 2012

Copyright 2012 by
Matthew W. McFarland

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

For my family – Mum, Dad, Nick, Carrie and Sam.

The Burning Bar

J
oe stood, shoulders slumped, looking forlornly at the dingy nightclub where he had made his living for the past 2 years, as the fire began to lick at the edges of the grimy windows. It wasn't unusual for a fight to break out amongst the patrons, as they drank their whiskey and argued over card games and women, whilst the band beat out a dense rhythm on-stage. What marked out that evening's brawl was that tonight an oil lamp had been sent flying by a wayward swing of a fist, and the fire had spread quickly through the old and rotten timber.

In the commotion of the fight and the stampede away from the blaze he had lost sight of her, and could do nothing to stop himself from being swept outside with the crowds. He couldn't just stand and idly watch whilst she perished inside – they had been through so much together.

The danger to himself never even crossed his mind as he wrapped his shirt around his face and plunged through the smouldering doorway. Smoke filled the dark and airless room, stinging his eyes through the thin fabric of his shirt as he frantically swept the room looking for her. The heat was almost unbearable, and he could hear a symphony of cracks and pops as the bottles of cheap liquor behind the bar succumbed to the heat one by one. The beams holding up the low ceiling were groaning under the strain, as the old building slowly disintegrated around him. The flames were getting stronger, and the room brighter, as the fire spread and spread. The smoke rolled around the room in waves, as the blaze sucked in oxygen from outside to feed an insatiable appetite for anything that would burn.

Suddenly, through the smoke he saw her lying in a heap on the stage, already covered in thick soot, looking trampled and broken in the hellish light. He scooped her up into his arms, afraid to hold her too tight in case he made worse her already fragile state.

The noise and smoke had distracted him, and only now he realised that the door through which he had recklessly plunged only minutes before was now impassable, a chunk of ceiling having collapsed before it, blocking his means of escape.

Once more he pulled his shirt tight around his face, and with a strength and clarity of purpose that comes only to a mind and body coursing with adrenaline, he leapt through the grimy window and into the street beyond. The weakened frame gave way easily with an explosion of glass, and he was back out into the open air, gasping for breath, coughing and spluttering as his body fought for oxygen, and his lungs screamed of the heat and smoke he had endured to save her.

The street was still full of the bar's occupants, most of whom had stayed to watch the death of their favourite back-street watering hole, and they now crowded round him, yelling and shouting.

“
Man, you must be fucking crazy! You any idea how stupid that was? You ran into a burning building for a trumpet?”

Joe smiled.

Defenestration

T
he apartment building rose up from a sea of car parks and wasteground, hemmed in on three sides by industrial steel railings from which the paint had long since begun to fade, replaced by a coating of dust which left red-brown stripes on the backs of the businessmen who squeezed through the gaps to get to their cars instead of walking the long way round. There were four or five different sections to the building which ascended in height from left to right, climbing up into the evening sky above Belfast.

From the garish yellow bricks, there jutted out hundreds of glass and steel balconies, uniform in their placement and size. They started out just a few feet above where I stood, waiting outside the building, and finished some twelve stories above me, from where I could hear the sounds of a party already well under way. As I pulled the heavy security door towards me, a cigarette butt fell through the air and hit the middle of the street with a fizz, and lay there smouldering as a few remaining tendrils of smoke drifted into the ether.

The penthouse was filled with people, all shouting to be heard over each other and the sound of a cheap stereo turned up much too loud. The speakers buzzed and popped along with the rhythm, adding to the din. I knew only a handful of the people there, and couldn’t help but feel out of place amongst the leather, chrome, and opaque modern art which hung on the pristine walls.

For several hours I jostled for space against one of the walls whilst the party ebbed and flowed around me. The view over the city was spectacular when I was able to catch the odd glimpse through the throng. A few hundred metres away, and far below, a busload of tourists had just alighted, and were milling around outside some of the older pubs, snapping photos of the buildings and each other, and generally getting in the way of the regular drunks who huddled around their cigarettes. Further away the faded green domes of the City Hall marked the centre of town, and in the distance you could see the spire of the cathedral, with its silver needle reaching upwards. Away to the east the glass and blue lights of the new shopping centre shone hopefully.

I don’t know why he took such offence to me, for I had made little impact on proceedings until that point. Two girls, tottering in their high heels had fallen against me as they moved to the music, and all three of us had ended up in a heap on the floor. The crunch of glass could just be heard over the noise, and one of them yelped in shock as a shard pierced her back, and wine surged over the polished wooden floorboards towards the expensive furniture. My head was fuzzy from the alcohol and the heat of so many bodies in such a confined space, and I think I may have knocked it against something blunt on the way down, for a dull ache began to spread from the base of my skull.

It's funny sometimes, the things that go through your head. As I plunged through the flimsy French windows and over the railing of the balcony, out into the cold night air beyond, my mind was drawn back to something I'd once heard about the survival rate of cats falling from buildings in New York. Apparently, above a certain floor, the fifth floor if I recall, the survival rate of a falling cat increases in direct relation to the height of the building. I guess this is something to do with the surface area of the cat's body as it innately spreads its limbs like a skydiver or a flying fox to slow its descent. As terminal velocity is a constant, it doesn't matter if the cat (or stone, or television set, or whatever) is thrown off the tenth floor or the one hundredth floor, it will reach the same maximum speed as dictated by the Great Constant – Gravity. As the building gets higher the cat has more time to slow down, and thus hits the ground at a lesser speed, increasing the chance of survival.

I don't know how this was discovered. Did some curious academic systematically climb the stairs of a New York brownstone, pausing at each landing to fling a cat out the window, whilst a research assistant (who was only looking for extra credit towards their degree), measured the magnitude of the splat in the alley below? Did they take into account the different breeds of cats and other important variables such as weight, thickness of fur, length of tail? No doubt they came up with a complex formula to predict how much of kitty would be left depending on what floor you let go. In any case, I would dearly love to see their application for funding.

Below me a black taxi trundled along, cruising for the next fare. Its headlights painted the road in asymmetrical arcs, the driver’s side beam flickering in the dusk. I could hear only the wind rushing in my ears as I left the noise of the party far behind me. Then I was drawn back to an extremely vivid dream I once had, unusual in that it had stayed with me for such a long time. For me, dreams are always gone before I have had the chance to give them any waking thought. I had dreamt that a killer whale had me in its jaws and was swimming at enormous speed through the water towards the shoreline. The sensation of the force of the water pushing against me as we swam was unlike anything I have ever dreamt before or since – the feeling was so real that like the dream it has stayed with me for years.

I had woken to find myself safe in bed, with no windows or doors open letting in a breeze to explain away the incredible pressure I had felt, the way a ringing telephone or a doorbell can sometimes migrate from the real world into a dream. Strangely, I had felt no sense of danger, either in the dream or upon waking. Neither did I feel that the whale was particularly benign. It was a killer whale after all, not a blue whale or a humpback. In the language of dream analysis this surely has some significance. Perhaps I had just accepted my fate?

I suppose this is why that dream came back to me now as I fell through the air. Dreams where one is falling are amongst the most common of all, and there are a multitude of explanations for what such dreams mean. I have had them too, many times. In my dreams however, I always enjoyed that feeling of falling, and I would turn to look at the ground rushing up to meet me, with the same sense of calm that I felt in the jaws of the orca.