crunchpoint

And so he opened it.

....

The next few days were rather humdrum as London life goes. He went to lectures. He came home. He turned on senseless TV programmes and ate defrosted food. But all the while the red book was there. It seemed to hover in a corner of his brain even while he was busy or sleeping.

The pauses, the commas and semicolons of -'s existence were in what he read. The innocuous flow of everyday events, lunchtime sandwiches and flirting conversations with well-groomed peers, chained from one to the next like verbs and nouns. The day stopped flashing by when he started to pay attention to this punctuation. When the uncomfortable silences in his conversations with Susan and Prijet from the Shakespeare class hung in the corridoor and made the last word uttered seem more meaningful. But also in the moments of boredom and interim. Sitting on the cocked red plastic 'n' of a bus stop bench which was purpose designed to prevent bums from sleeping on it, he shifted and coughed his way though the minutes preceding the arrival of his bus. But now, since the red book, he began to notice the neat cleavage of the back of a knee, the bulging stomach pouring over a low-hanging jeans of the girl who gazed impatiently into her mobile phone, sensing his gaze. He noticed the freckles on her chin. Apostrophes of melatonin.

The red book wasn't well written.

The pages were blank, no lines or squares, and most of them filled with a scrawling black handwriting. It was quite hard to decipher, which reminded - of a magazine article he had read about people who had confused handwriting being confused or complicated themselves. But after a while, - was able to tell the l's from the i's, and piece together the puzzle of writing.

It was some sort of a novel. A biography perhaps. It was set in London, from the point of view of a young male narrator, Luke, who was American. Luke's view of London was fairly superficial, and - guessed that the author of the little red book was planning to sell this as some sort of short-lived airport novel. Simplistic in its imagery, it opened up in Hackney, with Luke waking up to a 'red sky' warning him of the pending doom of that day. He was going to get in trouble somehow. Either fall desperately in love, or die or something cheesy like that.

Safeway cheddar plot. Luke starts off going to his boring job, and miraculously wakes up in the middle of photocopying his boss' memos, realising his life is empty and worthless. He leaves the office without any explanations, and heads off to meet the girl he's been infatuated with for months, but has never dared to speak to. He wants to take her away somewhere, but knows her boyfriend is a big shot nightclub owner who will " 'ave 'im". - left off on the chapter where Luke is in his car, planning how he will get past Marcinko, the Kosovar club mogul who kneecaps his rivals...

- looked out the 133 bus window, out onto the murky London sky. The billowing mass of grey above the city looked as though the concrete had evaporated and then gathered above London to punish all the traffic for crushing it all day long. - wasn't sure what time it was. As soon as - got on the bus, the evening would unfold itself in the familar way. Newspaper, couch, TV soap, takeaway or salad, evening news, reading up for the next term paper or writing it up on the computer. Then to bed with a novel, eventually self-induced ejaculation, and then oblivion. - never remembered his dreams.

Luke's scenario was impalpable, nondescript. A plot which would gradually unravel the mystery, transgression, and conclusion of a neatly organised story. A routine life becoming a life less ordinary, culminating in death, despair, or radical change for the better, was what was stuck in the chunk of unread pages which weighed in -'s right palm while he read. Same old stuff.

Lukewarm stuff really, nothing to write home about. But for some reason, - read on.