By Stanze Quinn
Three girls sat around a table, not much older than twenty-one or twenty-two. Their skin had been kissed by the Gold Coast sun, with light freckles appearing on the most unhurried of the girl’s faces. They laid together, sprawled out across the lounge in their home for the weekend, the day fading in the glass behind them. There weren’t as many stars as they saw back home. Contentedly worn out from the day, they had barely bothered changing out of their bikinis. One even slept without clothes, the evening breeze lightly brushing against her chest.
The light coming from my computer was dim, but it was enough to see the evidence of my shame within the darkness of my cramped bedroom. I stifled moans as I pulled myself underneath my trousers. The smell of semen and stale beer filled the air.
“For fucks sake!” I yelled out loud, ejaculate beginning to clump against the polyester of my pants.
Catching my breath, I looked around. The apartment was clean. They say everything has a place, and as far as I’m concerned, all of my things were in it. Even today’s tie, laying in a pile of half-clean and half-dirty laundry, was in the spot I had designated to discard it each night. On my desk lay a stack of papers – splayed across were the details of the Whitmans case.
I looked down at my sperm-covered crotch. I thought to shower for a moment, before turning away. The laptop closed with a short snap.
—
It was a Friday afternoon, and the shoreline apartment was booked out. This was to be expected, especially during the summer. Couples looking to delude themselves that they can still have fun like they used to, groups of barely-adults (or sometimes genuine teenagers who had gotten their hands on a parent’s login details – I turned a blind eye to these ones), young, haphazard men with girlfriends left at home – whatever reason people came to stay, it made no difference to me. Their business is theirs, and my business is mine. It was just between us.
When people actually started renting out my spare lodging, I hadn’t intended on keeping the cameras active. It only took a couple of clicks on my laptop to find myself onlooking the arrival of a young couple at my newly staged apartment. The echoes of their conversation bounced between the walls of my room, and I found myself unable to turn away. For hours I sat there, enwrapped in the lives of these strangers. It didn’t take much for me to picture myself there with them. And with nothing but a few megapixels separating us, I practically was, right? It was a feeling nothing else had given me before.
Check-in was at two o’clock. The Camerons, however, would not end up arriving till nearly half past five.
“No-one could’ve predicted that car crash on the M1,” said Mrs. Cameron, feigning empathy towards her husband, but secretly happy that they had managed to get there before nightfall. She winced as she watched the sides of a large suitcase bump the edges of the door frame. The youngest of two boys took up the space in her arms, having fallen asleep in the lull of the car ride before. He wasn’t really asleep, but she revelled in the fact that she would get to do this – perhaps for the last time. The boys were eight and ten, right about the age before kids stop enjoying holidays with their parents.
I watched as the family settled in. I watched as the father surveyed the cupboards for a glass that felt just right in his hand, searching through rows of cups I had chosen and placed there. I watched as his wife lifted her ankles to rest on the ottoman that I had spent hours meticulously searching for to perfectly match the couch. The eldest of their two children sat carefully organising his toy cars on the rug in front of the television. The rug was my great-aunt’s.
The can in my hand rattled, indicating its need to be replaced. As I walked to the kitchen and back, I pondered the family in the other room, as I do with all my guests. I wondered about their lives, about what led them here. Some saw it as a weekend away from whatever they were running from back home, for others it was just another stop on an endless itinerary of business meetings and networking events. Some had spent months saving for the chance to feel like someone else.
I thought back to my own childhood holidays. We didn’t travel much while my parents were still together, but once they split up, my mother took it upon herself to try and outdo her ex-husband in ways she felt a kid would be most impressed by. One of the ways she did that was with gaudy holidays that were just outside her means, often involving novelty accommodations and activities spontaneously selected from a well-thumbed coupon book.
Besides never being more than a couple of hours away from home, the only other constant that these vacations had was the presence of whatever new man my mother had decided to rope into playing happy families. Where we went, what we did, it was always a desperate attempt to enmesh her and her current pursuee’s lives, whether that was by cosplaying a fanciful, carefree life, or devoting herself to their chosen vocation. Either way, it never lasted long.
At least I got to see the world, I chuckled to myself. Even if that world did mostly consist of roadside pubs and the couches of obscure ‘friends of the family’. There would be none of those sorts of trips for the Camerons.
Mrs. Cameron was a strong believer that holidays were not for cooking, so no sooner than they had begun to unpack their bags had an order of fish and chips arrived on the doorstep. Parchment paper spilled across the table, the only plate necessary for this type of meal.
“Did you want some chips with your salt?” chirped Mr. Cameron. Both of his sons’ heads were adorned by the same sandy curls as his own. The young boy put down the bottle of innocuous yellow powder before enveloping the plate in tomato sauce. The kind-eyed man sighed with faux exasperation.
I spun away from the desk, as the silence of my grey bedroom walls closed in on my chest.
I brought myself to the kitchen and placed a marked container into a microwave, standing silently as it bubbled under the heat of the radiation. Before long, sporadic pops and bangs erupted from underneath the thin plastic covering. Despite the fanfare, an inspection of its contents would produce nothing more than a watery, stodgy mess. One that was still cold at its centre.
The apartment on the screen was dark now, except for a small light illuminating part of the living space. Remnants of their meal were still scattered around, though now cold. Mrs. Cameron looked out at the balcony, its small area now coated in the soft glow of the moonlight reflecting off the ocean. She absent-mindedly snacked on the scraps of potato and fish that laid in front of her.
I put a fork into the plate and slowly began to share my meal.
