VOAT - April 2017 - "Lost" - Vote Here.

Mr E

3 stories for your enjoyment. Vote for one or more of your favourites. Voting is open for 5 days and results will be hidden until then. When voting ends, you'll be able to see who voted for what.

On a sidenote, Boards still has a symbol issue (quotes become ‘ and so on). I've fixed it in the stories that I received, but if I've screwed anything up, send me a PM and I'll fix any reported issues.

Mr E

Story 3

The house is dust. Furniture crumbles to wood-chip under my hands, the windows are opaque from spider grime. You are lost to me, and this house is just a sawdust circus.
I sit alone as the clock ticks around to noon. It is not loneliness that is my problem. I have always been comfortable with myself. It is that there is an absence of you. There is nothing now to shake up the dust and let me see again.
A little after twelve the doorbell rings and Jennifer lets herself in. She's my care worker cum skivvy.
'Hello, Mr Jolly,' she calls.
'I told you not to call me that,' I say.
'Sorry, Jim. It's such a lovely name, I can't stop myself,' she smiles at me as she comes into the room, pulling off her coat.
She can have the name. I never liked it. It's like a coat that you have to wear but you know it doesn't suit you.
She has a brush out and is sweeping the floor. The rats scuttle away from her.
'It's filthy,' I say. 'The house is filthy.'
'Nonsense, Jim. I'd not leave you in the house if I didn't feel it was completely sanitary. Did you sleep well last night?'
Last night. I slept on and off, laced with dreams of you. I never saw your face, though. I don't remember what you look like.
'Fine.' I pull myself up out of my chair, it holds my shape and sucks me back in. My bones are not what they used to be.
'Ah, grand, you're up.'
'I need the toilet.'
'Great.' They seem to like to hear that you're going to the toilet. Nothing pleases a health worker more than some healthy bowel movements.
The walls are empty of you, full of other faces. I have hundreds of photos of you but I never put a single one up. As I climb the stairs, knees creaking, my three beautiful babies grow up until, on the landing, they each appear proud and ready in their graduation gowns. Alice, Aoife and Brian. I touch their images, and wish your face was there among them.
Spiders crawl over me as I sit on the loo. Wasps chew over your books, your little shelf of books on the back of the door that you read from, before I lost you, and they eat them to pulp to spit out intricate spiral nests. I am surrounded by the detritus of you.
When I come back down, I catch a ghost, a smell of flowers, lilies maybe. They don't exist but I can smell them, then they are lost to me. Can something be lost if it never existed? When was it I lost you? Was it the day you died, or that day when you went missing in the supermarket and I found you wandering confused in the frozen food, looking for your mother. A thousand losings as you drifted away, as neurone after neurone self destructed and you found a piece of incontinent childhood to retreat to.
I sniff again, but it's only Jennifer's perfume I can smell now.
The door opens again. Brian has arrived with an armful of equipment.
'Dad,' he calls. 'I have it, the DVD.'
The dust is swept away from the hall by the energy of his shouting. I follow him into the front room and watch as he tries to find some place to plug the DVD player into my Reagan-era tube television, cursing at scarts and adapters and the like.
Then the TV bursts into life.
You are there. Not the lost child that I came to care for, and often to curse, but the young woman that bought this house with me, that carried my babies home from the hospital, that put on birthday parties and stood on the beach while our children swam. You smile out at me, your hair at its best.
'Took ages to get the tapes transferred, Dad, real mess. What do you think?'
What do I think? There is a life in the house again, is what I think. Then suddenly I am afraid. Is this only an illusion? Will I lose you again? Like the smell of lilies, can I really lose something that is already gone. Already gone.
I reach out to the screen, expect to feel that zip of static as I touch the tube, but my hands go straight through. I touch you, your warm soft skin, that twist of curl in your hair. You laugh and it beats my heart. You smile and it warms my bones. You pull me in, through the tube, into your world and I do not fight it. I am with you, and I will never lose you again.

Mr E

Story 3

Outside the open window, the city slumbered under a blanket of muggy heat. A slight breath of air moved the blinds to an inhale-exhale rhythm and the wooden slats made shadow-stripes on Simone's bare legs. She was stretched on the office couch, fanning herself with the brim of my new fedora. I was sitting with my feet on the desk, watching her through half closed eyes.

"You know, this hat makes you look like a movie detective from two hundred years ago," she teased.

"That's the idea, sweetheart," I told her, in my Bogart voice. "Gotta give the clients what they want." I was only half joking. Image is important in this business. If cigarettes weren't illegal, I'd have one dangling from my lip.

"Speaking of clients," Simone's gaze shifted to an unseen place. "Looks like we've finally got one."

"An email?" I asked.

"Yeah, take a look," she said, and flicked her wrist in my direction. The message appeared in my mind's eye.

I read the important bits aloud. "Dear Mr Sullivan..blah blah..your assistance in locating our employee Elinor MacKenzie..yada yada..."

"Did you miss the good part?" asked Simone. "The letterhead."

I had missed it. "Oh yeah, how do you like that? Fujimura BioMedical."

Even a dolt like me knows Fujimura. There are forty million souls buzzing around this beehive of a city, every one of us with a Fujimura memory chip and comm-link buried in the base of the skull.

"A missing person," Simone mused. Her distant tone told me that a part of her was no longer in the room.

"You're checking the software upgrade schedule?" I asked.

She nodded. See, that's why Simone and I complement each other so well. She's the tech whiz, whereas I'm more of a people person. So, Simone started by looking for a technical explanation. If Elinor MacKenzie's memory implant had bugged out, then she could be wandering around some dank corner of the city with whatever random memories happened to be stored in her organic brain. That may or may not have included her own name and her home address.

I took a different approach. The first thing I needed to know was, how much could we charge for the case? That meant knowing something about the person. I closed my eyes and accessed Elinor's social media accounts. She had lots of online activity. I scanned her bio. Her childhood flashed before my mind's eye. She was an only child, born when her parents were in their sixties. Not as common forty years ago as it is now. Good student. Well qualified. Senior engineer with Fujimura. Parents dead from natural causes before their hundred and tenth birthdays.

"There was a software release yesterday," said Simone. "The problem could be a bad software patch. She has no cloud backup last night. No GPS trace. She's offline."

"Alright, let's take the case. Treble the fee. Fujimura can afford it."

The search kept us busy for weeks. We tried all the usual places. I put on my detective hat and went to talk to Elinor's neighbours in one of those gleaming sky towers in district fifty. Some of them knew her to see, but none of them had known her name or that she was missing. The landlord let me into her apartment. It was sparsely furnished, and lit with the same white light as the empty refrigerator in her kitchen. There was a bottle of wine on the counter, unopened, and a single glass.

When an implant is offline, there's always a chance that the user is face down in the river. Nothing knocks out a chip like a hundred foot belly-flop from a bridge. Simone checked the databases of the morgues, hospitals and psych wards. She found a few dozen possibles, and I followed up in person. The hospital wards were bright and busy. The morgues were cool and peaceful. The psych wards were a different kind of peaceful. The patients there had Fujimura implants that were more about control than augmentation.

Simone hacked a few thousand cctv networks and worked her facial recognition magic. Not exactly legal, but she covered her tracks. Of course, most of the other data we needed was available legitimately, so we bought it and billed it to the client. Every purchase Elinor made, the transport she used, and all of her movements were laid bare right up until the evening she disappeared. We pored over every scrap of information until we knew her better than we knew ourselves.

We exhausted our options with no result. For some reason, I couldn't let it go. I started to see her on the street but it was never her. At night, I closed my eyes and scanned through everything we had, which was a lot. She had spent more time online than she did in the real world. It seemed to me that she had no friends, just online acquaintances. There was no Elinor-shaped hole in anyone's life because there was nobody to notice she was gone. She was invisible in life and then she vanished for real. To my surprise, the injustice of it angered me.

We eventually moved on to other cases that were more quickly resolved. One of these was Michael Romero. One dark December evening, his wife arrived at our door. Michael had been missing for six days, and the police could do nothing. I interviewed Mrs. Romero. I probed and prodded and made appropriate noises of sympathy. Simone sat with her hands folded in her lap, listening silently. I knew without asking that she was already online, searching and sorting the digital life of the city, hunting for any sign of the man. Simone can surf deeper and faster than anyone I know, while still being aware of her surroundings. I, on the other hand, close my eyes and move my lips when I'm reading a simple text message. Soon enough, Simone pinged me with a location.

"Mrs. Romero," I asked, "Would Michael have any reason to be outside the city, in the old town?"

"No, I don't think so," she said. "I've never heard of the old town."

"Alright, go home and wait for our call." I stood, and grabbed my hat and trench coat. "We'll have an update by morning."

She seemed startled by my exit, but I left Simone to explain. I went downstairs and outside and turned my collar against the sleet. I took a surface taxi to the edge of the old town and paid the driver and got out. As soon as I did, I had doubts. The warren of twisting streets was lit by flickering light that spilled from windows and fires that burned in oil drums. Silhouettes moved around the fires. I pushed my hands into my coat pockets and gripped my old police cosh in my right hand. Simone opened a voice channel. She must have been tracking my movements.

"Straight ahead, one klick," she said. "Michael's GPS is working intermittently."

I walked down a hill and past the first of the ruined buildings. The smell of cooking and the sound of conversation drifted out through a broken window. I widened the comms channel so that Simone could see through my eyes.

"Have you ever seen anything like this?" she asked. "This is literally off the grid. Off the data grid, off the electricity grid, everything."

"Feast your eyes, angel-face," I replied. "It's real."

"This place is supposed to be abandoned." She was ignoring my Sam Spade act. "It will be under water in thirty years."

I walked on. After a few minutes of oppressive darkness, I wanted to hear her voice again.

"How far now, sweet-lips?" I asked.

"Ninety meters. The red building on the right."

Two large men walked around a corner and stopped in front of me. Simone gasped. Shadows flickered on their faces from the burning torches they held aloft. I adjusted my hat with one hand so that I could see them better from under the brim. My other hand gripped the cosh tighter.

"Say, fellas, what gives?" I sounded more relaxed than I felt.

"Are you lost, brother?" asked one of them. There was no menace there, just genuine concern.

"No, I know where I'm going." I gestured towards the red building.

"Ah, you're looking for Joanna. You're new?" he smiled. "Here, the road is wet." He passed me his torch and then the two of them said goodnight and walked on.

I heard Simone release a breath that she had been holding. I relaxed my grip on the cosh and moved towards the red building. To say that the road was wet was an understatement. A stream ran down the centre. I used an abandoned truck tyre as a stepping stone to jump across, but cold water still sloshed into my shoes. The building was an old library. I looked in through the double doors. The bookshelves were empty but they had been moved around to create private spaces and alcoves. One person was sleeping. A few others were sitting around a steaming pot of food, with blankets over their shoulders. I pushed open the doors and they turned to look at me.

"Michael Romero is on your left," said Simone. "He's the one lying down."

A smiling woman approached me. She was offering a bowl of what looked like carrot soup. "Hello, I'm Joanna. Are you lost?" she asked.

"No, that's ok. I've just come to find this man here. His family are looking for him."

"Ah, I see. Can you help him? He's injured." She walked with me to the sleeping figure. It was Michael Romero alright. His expression was pained. I examined the back of his head. A wound, recently bandaged. It was very close to the location of his implant.

"Are you seeing this, Simone?" I asked quietly. "He took a knock to the head."

I fished the portable diagnostic kit from my pocket and attached the leads to his inputs, trying not to wake him. The machine uplinked to Simone. It would take a few minutes for her to run some tests. A young man joined us and put an arm around Joanna. She smiled and offered me the soup again. I accepted it and nodded my thanks.

"Michael has been missing for six days," I told them. "If his chip is undamaged, I'll restore his last backup."

"Is that his name?" Joanna looked down at the sleeping figure. "He couldn't remember. He thought he had a wife, but he couldn't find her."

"He was lucky," whispered the young man. "They normally wander for a long time before they get here."

"What about you?" I asked. "Do you remember where you came from?"

He grinned and bent forward and tapped the back of his neck. It was unmarked. No data ports. "Some of us were born here in Freetown, brother."

"And you?" I asked Joanna.

"I remember...a view from a window in a tall building." Her brow furrowed as she spoke. "Everyone else was far below. I remember being unhappy, and alone." She looked at her companion then, and her frown disappeared.

"Michael's chip is intact. It just needed a reset," said Simone. "You can restore his backup."

"You did a good job of looking after Michael," I said to the couple. "We'll have him home in no time." I attached another data lead and started the process of making him whole again.

Joanna smiled. "Everyone looks after everyone here."

It was a smile I hadn't seen in her photographs. I finished the soup in silence, thinking. Of course, I knew her real name, even if she didn't. I knew without asking that Simone recognised her also. You can't spend weeks poring over every detail of somebody's life, and then not know them when you meet them. I also knew that we wouldn't be claiming the payment from Fujimura, and that Simone would be ok with that.

Mr E

Story 3

St. John's Cathedral broods over the city, a grey limestone church for a grey, glum people. The streets around Irish cathedrals are always so dismal you'd need to believe in an afterlife just to distract you from this one. Crosses' removal home lies in its shadow, the promise of somewhere better when our earthly worries are ended. Saint John the Revelator, St. John, the only apostle to die a natural death, watch over all of us. The Cathedral also guards the Market's Field, where all of us as kids dreamed we could be Robbie Fowler or Cantona.

The rooms are always the same, every time I go. The heavy dull brown, ditch brown curtains and the red and grey almost industrial carpet. I'd been queueing for ages, even though I'd gotten there early. Everyone in the queue making awkward conversation and there's always the drift of muted laughter, as though to fill to silence we have to joke, tell a joke so funny you'll forget your heart is broken. Well, my heart was too broken to speak, so I stood there and waited for the doors to open and reality to change. Some of lads are back a bit in the queue, they came together but I hadn't the stomach for it. I can hear random phrases "Pure rapid" and "Unreal kid, unreal." The words follow me as I walk on through into the room.

The room, those never changing rooms, how sad this is the view of you I'll take with me. How strange, of all the rooms we shared, the changing rooms, the bars, the clubs, the pitches, the spaces, the spaces we shared. Shaking hands with people I've known all my life, your father who was our first coach, your mum, who once waded onto the pitch to shout at the ref when you were nearly knocked cold out and he'd waved play on, and I can remember the slagging we gave you for it. Yesterday these conversations would have been fine, had I met your parents by chance. We'd have passed the time, but now there will be a subtext, a "I wonder if", and "one minute either way." God, I can feel the loss in the room, God, I can feel heady nervousness of the unreality of everything.

Your father leans in and I lean in, and suddenly he has his arm around the back of my neck, our foreheads nearly touching, and I break then, I'm broken right through, and we're crying, and why not, why not cry for all we've lost. All I can think of how much he looks like you Danny, and you lying in a coffin 5 feet away. He looks like you Danny if you had gotten old, Danny as you will never be.

Later, outside and away, the lads are talking but honestly we've nothing to say, we are furtively exchanging gossip, and rumours about rumours, and the I can hear the same rumours flit all around the pub, and I can feel the currency of lies and the trading in stories about better times that are lost and gone forever. I get up for a drink, I can see your photo on the wall, the city championship photo, we're lined up, with bad hair and badly fitting jerseys, and smiles that look like they'll never leave our faces. That photo, of all the photos, always catches my eye. God, just at Christmas we were joking about it, saying the too big jerseys would be much too small now, well too small for me anyhow, you kept yourself well in shape. You said I should come training with you, "we're not getting younger, Glen,". Knocked down out training, no way to go.

That trophy, it wasn't the only one we won together, but that trophy, that final, stays with me, I can remember you running across the box, no one could touch you, and I, losing my balance but managing to get the pass away, and it's a lousy pass, it's too far ahead of you but you're moving swiftly as I'm falling backwards, and I'm just losing sight of you when you hit the ball and wrongfoot the keeper. I never saw that goal go in, but I knew there was no stopping it, just from how you moved. And you jumped on me, before I could get up, and you're screaming and all the lads piled on and in that delirious scrum we felt like champions. Never felt better, probably never will.

Fitzy behind the bar isn't even telling us to keep it down, and the bar probably won't close tonight when they lock the doors. We'll sit and drink, and drink and sit, and try to find some sort of true story we can live with. Fitzy has been here forever, it seems, nothing much changes, occasionally a new picture goes up, if the club wins something but that doesn't happen often.

The lads are telling all the old stories now, and how you could have gone for trials, should have, but that you never had any luck and it was harder to get spotted back then and anyway, better off to go to college anyhow. They're comparing notes about hatricks, that time you rounded the team up from Cork, it gets better with each telling but it was pretty amazing when it happened anyhow. Three of that team played in England later, Joe tells us, and he'd know, he's kept track. Stephen is re-enacting the penalty you missed in the semi-final, Roberto Baggio-like, row Z, if the Market's Field had a row Z behind the away goals. Didn't let it bother you though, you played me through for a goal five minutes later, and I remember shouting, "that's how you finish, thought you were Shearer?" and you just shouted back, "Sure, that was a shot, you only tapped it in", but God it felt great, felt great, to be on the pitch those days. When we were young and fast, when we were winners.

I'm telling Barry about that goal from the city final, to see if he remembers it, and he laughs, said it was pure pox on my part to hit the ball at all, but I say it was all intentional, me and Dan, telepathy you know. Barry looks at me and I look back at him and I swear the ghost of despair howls across our eyes, in just a flicker, before we shrug it off and drink to fill the silence.

I don't even play 6 a side these days. I don't do much of anything, except stare at excel spreadsheets, resent my wife, and gain weight. Except sit at home and wish for something to happen. Sit in the office and pretend to care. Fitzy who is quiet at the best of times is collecting glasses and letting us off, he's seen it all before. Some of the lads are in lower huddles, chatting quietly but there's no one I want to talk to one on one, funny how you were always the one I'd talk to one on one. Fitzy puts a glass of water in front of me, and I'm glad of it. My insides feel like paper passed through a shredder, I don't really want to be here but I've nowhere to be. I could head home and not speak to my wife, to do something normal on this extraordinary day. Sit in silence, nothing new to be drinking on Wednesday these days anyhow.

Lads are coming back from all over, and at short notice too. There's an air of weird carnival in the air, and I know it's only because we're never all back here and in a sad way people are glad to be seeing each other. One word keeps coming up, "natural", and you were, a complete natural. You made it all look very easy. Seán Moloney, who I barely recognise, is telling a story about how you nutmegged him on his own line with a back heel. Seán hasn't aged well, but few of us have. I can remember he nearly broke my ankle with a sliding tackle from behind, and how I had to be taken off when I swung for him at the next corner. He doesn't seem like a bad lad now though, same as the rest of us really. I can hear Tommy shouting "the ref was a bandy gowl, he did us over" and I wonder vaguely what lost match he's talking about.

Fitzy is beside me now, pretending to wipe the counter. "You must have played with Dan all the way up?" he says. I know he knows the answer already. "Sure Fitz, from under 8's, I can't believe it." "He was some lad, funny, he never played the same once you headed off to college." I don't particularly want to chat, especially to Fitz, who is probably trying to work out if I'm going to be sick. "Sure, neither did I, never found a striker who could link up like Danny, it was like he could read my mind." I want to throw my hands up and leave. I want to laugh and joke and say I can't believe Dan didn't see the car, or that he didn't have time to react. "Makes no sense, Fitz, makes no sense at all. God, I guess I always thought we'd play again, in some strange way." "No, I guess it doesn't" he replies. Johnno behind the bar is serving now, letting me and Fitz talk. I wish he'd call Fitz back to help him, but Fitz says to me in a low voice, while rearranging beer mats, "Mind yourself Glen, if you need to talk," he pauses, "over a coffee, I'm always about here." I look at Fitzy, and behind him, to the photos on the wall. All those smiling lads with no idea how the game would go.

I felt like running away into a night without end, into a night so dark I could really hide. I felt every year of failure course through my bloodstreams, congealing it, corrupting it. I felt I could feel the cool water cover over me and close in on me, forcing the air from my lungs, erasing the ache that comes with living. Deeper down, where no light goes, where the water is really black, I felt I could find the calm I'd lost so long ago.

Fitzy is still talking, "Gwan home Glen, there's a taxi outside waiting." It's no night to walk, especially when you have to cross a river and walk by the pitches. Jesus Danny, you should be here, you'd love to hear all these stories. Life made sense running beside you on the pitch.

I feel lost that I never answered when you called me for a run, when we could read each other so well. I feel lost when I think of how alone you must have felt, under the fluorescent street lights, when the car didn't stop. I feel lost when I think I stood on the river bank in late December and didn't have the nerve to jump and how I'd stared at my phone, wishing I could find the nerve the call you. You'd have come too, wouldn't have left me there. And we'd have sat by the river and you'd tell me to quit the job and the drink. You dying under orange lights, lost and alone, makes no sense to me.

You were always faster Dan, pure rapid, can't believe anything could catch you. I know now I won't be seeing you for a while, a long long while. Life takes a lot from us, and some things we just lose, for no good reason. I promise I'll be as old as your old man when we meet again.

St. John, John the Revelator, Patron saint of Friendships, watch over us all tonight, wherever we may be.

Mr E

Story 3

Just over 24 hours left to vote, folks...

Mr E

Story 3

Sorry for the late commentary - I was away for the weekend!

Story 1 was from km85264
Story 2 was from LionelNash
Story 3 was from HarveyHunt.

There is a tie between km85264 and LionelNash.

Since km85264 voted for themselves (I assume by accident), I think that puts Lionel out in front. Congrats to Lionel for winning this round!

redser7

Story 3

Story number 2 - Ray Bradbury meets Philip K Dick, loved it. And well done to stories 1 and 3 also.

km85264

Story 2

Didn't realise (or didn't read carefully enough) there was a prohibition on voting for one's self though I can see the logic, so hats off to Lionel, great story.
I really enjoyed this challenge, and the stories that came out of it, many thanks for setting it up, Mr E!

LionelNashe

Story 2

Thanks folks - I enjoyed the other two stories; thought they each had a nice original slant on the topic. I enjoyed writing mine as well. The discipline of the word count and the deadline was very helpful.

Story 3

Great story Lionel, really reminds me of the style of Sam Thompson in his (Booker nominated) Communion Town.

Really enjoyed reading the first story too. Great depiction of a life falling apart I think.