The Blueprint
THE
BLUEPRINT
A novel by
Marcus Bryan
Text copyright
© 2016 Marcus Bryan
All Rights
Reserved
Contents
Act One – The
Big,
if not Necessarily Bright,
Idea
Scene I –
The Inciting Incident
Scene III –
Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Scene VIII
– The Dreamers of the Day
Too Many Movies
So farewell hope, and
with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse: all
good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my good:
by thee at least
Divided empire with
heaven’s king I hold
By thee, and more than
half perhaps will reign;
As man ere long, and
this new world shall know.
I used to have a family.
I used to have
friends.
I used to have
a girlfriend.
I used to have
a future.
I used to
attend a reasonably well-regarded university. I was once on course
for an upper-second class honours degree, then - with a little help
from my father, or one of his friends - a half-decent entry-level
graduate position at a London IT company. With a little effort I’d
have found myself on £35k a year by the time I reached my
mid-to-late twenties. Thirty-five grand is nothing to sniff at.
That’s a second-hand Audi kind of a salary.
I used to have
freedom, in the strictly legal sense of the word.
I don’t have
any of those things any more. I traded them for the chance to try
my hand at armed robbery. It sounds like kind of a stupid idea, now
that I see it written down; especially when one considers that the
place I pulled my heist on was a Marks & Spencer mini-market.
Perhaps I should’ve written it down before I went through with
it.
Why did I do
it? I don’t really know, to be honest. I’ve always suspected that
Hollywood might be partly to blame. Maybe I’m just easily led. Or
maybe, just maybe, it was all about a girl.
IN MEDIAS RES
Sixty years
from now, when I’m sat in a chair at the old folks’ home and
wondering when the grandchildren whose names I can’t recall will
pay me a visit, I’ll still remember every detail of my seventh-year
school disco. By then I was old enough that the prospect of
snogging a prepubescent girl was within possibility, but young
enough that the prospect of actually talking to one brought on
waves of pants-soiling terror. I was not alone, either, in feeling
a combination of wild excitement and crippling nerves. The opening
act of the disco was spent with every male butt-cheek parked on one
side of the hall, and every female one on the other. The teachers
took turns sneaking out for cigarettes and standing inside,
checking their watches.
I didn’t have
a watch to watch, so I don’t know exactly how long everything
stayed that way, but I do remember that I’d drained eight cans of
Irn Bru by the time first contact was established. The most popular
arses eventually unpeeled from the walls and started to drift
toward the centre of the hall, and toward one another. Drunk on
e-numbers and food colouring, I eventually decided to join them. I
had a target in mind, as well. Lucy Cogburn. She sat four seats
away from me in maths. She had a different hairband for each day of
the week. I think she lent me her rubber once.
Not far into
the walk my misplaced bravery jumped ship, and I began to wonder if
I’d made a mistake. From the way Lucy’s eyes were fixed on me,
something like dread in them, she must have known what I was going
to say. The problem was that I had no idea what I was going to
say.
‘Hi Lucy,’ I
mumbled, lips stuck together with sugar-syrup. Her friends, all
gaggled around her, tittered. Lucy herself seemed to wince. No
language came back at me, though, so I was forced to persist.
‘Do you want
to, erm…’ The words tailed off. Want to what? Dance? Even the cool
kids weren’t dancing. Fuck? I still wasn’t quite sure what that
entailed.
‘Want to
what?’ she asked. I desperately pushed the first thing my
twelve-year-old brain could squish out through to my mouth.
‘Wannabemygirlfriend?’
Half a second
before I’d blurted it out the song finished playing, and I found
myself in the no-man’s-land between tracks that you tend to get
with the DJs who play seventh-year discos. My words echoed
throughout the school gymnasium. In the silence, I could feel the
stares of my classmates welding themselves to the back of my scalp.
Lucy’s face had gone all pink.
‘No. Sorry,’
she said.
Then the
titters erupted into full-blown laughter, resounding front and
behind me, and I had to make the long walk back to the boys’ side
of the hall, where I would remain for the rest of the evening. I
don’t know why that particular humiliation has stuck with me for
all of these years; I’ve done plenty of embarrassing things since
then - Christ, I’ve done more embarrassing things this week, even -
but it has. Formative experiences and all that, I suppose. Even at
the time I couldn’t have told you the name of the song that
accompanied my lonely trudge back across the disco, nor who sang
it, but if it ever came on the radio I’d recognise it straight away
from the sudden, irrational surge of blood to my cheeks.
It’s strange
how your brain works, sometimes. I remember that a few months ago
my housemate and I were watching TV, and all of a sudden he started
scowling. When I asked what was up with him he didn’t know, he just
knew he was pissed off about something. It happened more than once;
we’d be sat there trying to guess the answers to one of those
four-in-the-afternoon quiz shows with a barely comprehensible
rulebook when a dark shadow would come over his face and he’d spend
five minutes being all morose and snappy. As it turned out, there
was a new advert doing the rounds - I think it was for coffee -
which made the exact same sound as his alarm clock. Not being the
type to enjoy being shaken out from beneath his duvet, this sound
would Pavlov my friend back into the grumpy pre-midday version of
himself.
I suppose now
might be a good time to explain why I’m telling you these tedious
anecdotes. In part, it’s probably a half-hearted attempt to win
your sympathy. If you feel sorry for me because I got rejected by a
girl during secondary school, it might take the edge off when I get
around to telling you about the murders. In another part, it’s
because I needed to segue into the subject of Pavlovian reflexes,
since this narrative begins with me adding a new one to my resume.
Apparently, the sound of gunfire in movies now causes my adrenal
and sweat glands to fall open and leak their contents into my veins
and out of my armpits.
I discovered
this fact just a couple of moments ago, when a calamitous
BANG
yanked me out of sleep, cracking through my dreams and
flinging me back into reality. My eyes wheeled open and found a
twenty-foot bald man pointing a revolver at my head. I suppose that
some part of my brain had noticed the edges of the cinema screen,
but I was too busy scrabbling around inside my jeans, trying to get
hold of my own gun and start filling the gigantic, terrifying
bastard full of lead to pay any attention to it. After a good
minute of rummaging consciousness catches up with reflex, and I
remember that my gun isn’t in my trousers anymore. Also, the man
threatening to kill me is Jason Statham. Also, the girl sat about
three seats over is wearing a disgusted look, and pointing it at
me. Now I’ve got my wits halfway back, I’m not surprised by this; I
am sitting on the back row of a cinema jerking my hand around in my
pants, after all. I hold her gaze for a moment, then another
gunshot clatters through the auditorium and I go leaping into the
row in front for cover. When I’ve regained my senses for a second
time, I decide that I’m in no fit state to be watching an action
movie, and that it’s time for a swift exit.
My plan hits a
snag when the bald fellow who had, until that point, been reclining
on the seat I dove into, decides that I shouldn’t be allowed to
make my exit without first receiving a few hefty blows to the
skull. I can’t help but admire the fact that he unloads this
beating as discreetly as possible, so as to not interrupt the movie
for anyone else, first grabbing me by the neck and stuffing me into
the foot well, then shooting a few short, sharp stamps into my
throat and chin with the heel of his shoe, then punching me hard,
twice, once in the cheek and once in the eye-socket, then giving me
a toe punt while I’m crawling away, which lands in that sweet spot
between my anus and scrotum.
I grope for my
bag and hurry toward the fire exit, feeling humiliated. For a
moment or two I consider delving inside the bag, pulling out the
gun, and planting my second-last bullet into the back of his shiny
head, but I quickly reject the idea. It would make a waste of those
five-hundred-odd words of sympathy building I did earlier, for one
thing. I do feel a strange kind of comfort, though, in knowing that
I
could
do that, if I wanted to.
And so, with
that sociopathic interlude, I find myself back out in the world.
I’m walking down the street towards Haymarket Metro Station with
blood starting to seep out of my nose and a rapidly swelling left
eye, watching police cars zoom past. I have a funny, albeit
entirely justified, feeling that the sirens and lights might have
something to do with me. My hands won’t stop shaking. I can’t work
out whether this is because of the adrenaline comedown or because
it’s minus-five and I’m wearing a t-shirt. I fold my hands under my
armpits and recite a calming mantra in my head:
Unless they
catch somebody literally fleeing the scene with a dollar-sign bag
over his shoulder, the police’s first job is to rope off the area
and start gathering evidence, not to stop-and-search everyone that
comes within four hundred meters who happens to be carrying a bag.
Public-sector cuts and unnecessary lawsuits don’t mix.
Where did I
get that?
Kojak
?
The Wire
?
The Guardian
? I
can’t recall. I tell myself that it’s definitely true, wherever it
came from, but that it can’t hurt to keep the bashed-up side of my
face hidden, just in case. I briefly debate ducking into the
off-license to buy cigarettes. I’ve never smoked before, but one of
the many things I’ve learned from movies is that manly men fumigate
stress with tobacco. I discard this idea, too: firstly because -
even though I look like I’ve just lost a boxing match - ‘manly’ is
not an adjective that springs to mind when I catch my reflection in
the shop window, and secondly because the only money I’ve got on me
is the fifty-or-so thousand pounds I’ve got in my backpack, and
digging that out might cause the cashier to raise an eyebrow.
A large piece
of the road has been cordoned off, pavements and all. All the way
past Haymarket, I think; it’s difficult to see. As is only to be
expected from our species, which has long since had to bother
paying attention to its survival instincts, a large crowd is in the
late staging of gathering, perhaps hoping to see some more chaos
break out. The only traffic is of the blue and yellow variety,
forced to creep through the gaggle of onlookers, tooting as it
goes. Between brief periods of yelling at them all to go home, the
policepeople mill about as though they can’t find anything
particularly useful to do but don’t want to miss taking their part
in all the commotion. Using the crowd as a curtain between myself
and them, I too succumb to the morbid allure of the car-wreck in
the distance, crouching down and peeking through a gap in the
bodies and, praying that I don’t catch an errant puff of flatulence
to the face, trying to piece together a narrative from the
three-frame snapshots I can make out through the forest of legs and
the little snippets of gossip I can discern from the background
chatter.