Compelled?

Do you know what circular logic is?

Graham Dowd did, or so he believed. In fact the very postulation, that some situations can only ever give rise to a certain outcome because each demands the other, had guided his life from the time he first saw Shannon to now, as she climbed into the passenger seat of his dilapidated fire engine red Fiesta, wet to her freckled skin.
He’d met her months back, she an accidental tourist cutting through the shopping centre on her way home from school, he a cleaner in that same emporium – cash mans palace. Thirty shops funnelled and tunnelled with an overarching glass roof, mock Victorian. Top Shop and the Works. Argos, Boots and at its centre, a food hall. That’s where he’d first seen her, in the food hall, her very presence slicing through the banter and the jags of bacon and hams, through the smell – faint copper from the butcher, baker warm and yeasty and she just waltzed on in – big as a neon sign and twice as bold.
She noticed everything except him.
High slapped hands with another girl at the sweet stall, pointing to a jar of gobstoppers that rattled in the scales like marbles in a Billycan. Sat down on a bench near the coffee shop, jacking words with her friend – mobile at her side playing drum and base without the base, phone’s speaker long since shot.
He was used to being invisible. Had been since always. Way he saw it, some people got noticed and some people took notice. He was the latter and she was the former. Simple as that.
That first day, she hung out about an hour or so. After twenty minutes, her friend had upped and left and she just stayed there, happy to suck on her sweets and listen to some tunes whilst the world flickered by like a guttering flame. Graham worked his mop past her thirty times or more, the floor at her feet fair gleaming – as if in homage to her. She didn’t notice, but he did.
She was young. Maybe fourteen, maybe less. Her hair was long and hung in shaggy curls around her shoulders – he figured it would smell like Timotei. Her face freckled. De-rigour uniform – short-short grey skirt, tight round her hips, blue tights, white blouse and blue jumper – all of it curvaceous, a lascivious tease. To him.
He had liked them – girls. Since. He had liked them. It was predefined in him. He just awoke to it as one awakes to a foggy morn – he never asked to be this. In his younger days, it was easy. He just kept to himself and shut his eyes to it. But that was forty years back, before the world changed.
Now he lived in a cake shop. Everywhere they strutted around him as if to mock him, as if they knew his inner secret and in defiance of him – in disgust even, they would parade around him, their flesh taunting him with that which he could never have – but wanted.
He had long since accepted his lot in life – an edge gazer with a taste for the taboo fruit. Never eaten it, never would. Nothing was made for him. He didn’t want what everyone else wanted, much less, what the girls who laughed and whooped at him thought he wanted. He wanted to hold them, that was all. He wanted to be silent and to feel the beat of their heart against him. Nothing more.
They called him pervy and spack. Mongo, some even hoiked up their skirts and flashed their underwear at him, called him a dirty old man. He wanted to say that they were the dirty ones. But how could he. Who would listen? Somehow, he figured, it would only make things worse.
So he just kept on keeping on. A cleaner in a dirty world. Pushing his mop and bucket around, emptying out the bins, picking up the detritus of life – and when they called him names he shut his ears to them for fear that one day, their words might bring forth a vengeance that would destroy them all.
But that was before Shannon.
The second and third time she came, she noticed him not. But the fourth time she came, as he worked his mop on by where she sat, she spoke to him.
“You gotta name.”
He had almost frozen at that simple question. At the acknowledgment of his existence. As if sensing this, she re-iterated the question, her voice was Manchester and bubble-gum, magical.
“You gotta name.”
The answer had come in his slow, measured drawl. “Aye. Name’s Graham.”
“I’m Shannon. You don’t half give that floor some mopping.”
“Gotta keep it clean,” he felt tingle-pricks of static on his skin. Like a smack head in a room full of fix, knowing that it’s no fix – yet wanting it all the same.
Wanting it. His whole life spent wanting it.
And now she was talking to him. And not in mocking disparagement either. Talking to him as if she liked him – as if he was normal.
Was he? Could he at least pretend to be? For her.
The weeks tripped by helter skelter, fractured moments between her, and an absence of her - electric inceptions like a magnesium slap every time she so much as walked in the air he occupied.
He learned that Shannon was a pretty much bog normal teenage girl. She went to school, lived in town with her mum, her dad had left years back - and beyond that, she was Shannon. She was just Shannon. A freckled girl who liked drum and base, gobstoppers and bubble gum and him. She liked him. Said so. Said stuff like, you’re ok, and you’re cool to be chillaxin with, you got no heavy baggage. If only she knew.

Inside his car, ensepulchered as the rain lashed at the windscreen as if it meant to denounce its form. Cast it asunder even. Never before had he been so close to her, in such a confined space as this. The air was tagged with her perfume, her breath hitching in and out – she had run, pelted like the very rain she meant to avoid, from the shopping centre to the car park – yet even so, she was bone soaked. Wet beyond wet. Her blouse sticking to her arms, hair matted around her face.
“Where’s home,” he asked, his voice flat as a docker’s cap.
“You can take me for a little ride first. If you want.”
In all the months he had known her, he had never once felt compelled to break his covenant. To seek satiation for the insatiable – knowing that his own Pandora’s Box ended not in hope, but in oblivion. Yet now, after all this time, she was – enticing him. Wasn’t she? He thumbed the indicator, “You’re soaked. Catch your death.”
“Na, I’ll soon warm up if you stick the heater on.”
“Mebe.”
Graham Dowd worked his car through the arterial thrum of town, like a man traversing his own prophecy. Along streets sheeted with pelting rain, sluicing in rabid torrents down gutters and downspouts, before being swallowed in drains that soon, very soon, would have their fill and more.
Wash it all away, he thought as he turned off the main drag and headed on out towards the estates and their brick-thick sprawl.
“You some place in mind then.”
“Suppose we could go up in the hills. Great view. See forever.”
“Cool, the hills it is,” then added like a verbal appendage, “Aint never been up there before.”
“Ok, but then straight home, your mum will be worried.”
“I doubt it mate. I seriously doubt it.”

Why is that? Don’t just tell me you won’t be fretted over, or missed. Don’t tell me you won’t be missed.

Graham’s mind was awash the whole journey. Through it flumed rivers of emotion as if in parody of those that coursed the downward rush of road he coaxed his little Fiesta up as they climbed out of town and towards the moors. He was where he had always dreamed of being and now that he was, he couldn’t remember why he’d drempt it.
What did he really want – more still, expect.
He no longer knew how to describe how he felt. Was it admiration, the yearn for companionship – love? And if it was any of them, what did that mean. Less, was it love more what is love.
Truth was Graham Dowd had never had a relationship before, not in the true meaning of that descriptive. Born to people he never knew and ensconced in the negative – in silence and questions and legal postulations. Shuffled from care home to care home to young offenders institute to jail, whenever he beat his fists against walls he couldn’t even see, but feel. All he had ever felt, barriers and walls and black and white accusations.
No understanding. Never. Just solitude and his own internal bleakness. Never believing. Devoid of hope, he had lived his life as if he were a spent lottery ticket tumbling along the road, awaiting the sweepers brush.
The road ahead snaked up towards the vaulted majesty of the moors, the tumultuous span of tussock and brook, hill and scarp, dale and vale, all the more breathtaking for the roiling grey cloud overhead, pierced in the distance by the arc of the sun’s rays. The rain less forceful now, no metallic rap on bonnet and roof, just the faint purr as if of a thousand tears.
“What’s up here,” Shannon’s voice was like a Mancunian brook.
“Nothing – and everything.”
She furled her face at him, folding freckles as she did and it occurred to him that he knew her and yet knew nothing of her. She, like the moors was nothing and everything all in one human being.
Could she be his human being? Without smashing the mirror. Could she be? Would she want to be?
Shannon was giggling, the back-of her hand clasped over her mouth as if it meant to lock the sound within.
“I amuse you?”
“It’s just – you’re different from what...you know. I miss having a friend I can count on and you... you make me feel happy.”
Testing the water now, stirring its turgid depths as a witches finger might stir a bowl of divining ichors. “You musta have loads of friends.”
“Na. I know pure heads, but none I can count on, you know when shit goes off at home and stuff.”
“What ‘bout that girl you came in with, back when I first saw you.”
“Which was when,” Shannon left the question hanging like jazz bar smog.
Graham Dowd sensed a slipping of sorts, a portentous pitch shift that would lead him from where he was towards what he had always believed he was. “I...I’m not sure,” he stalled.
Shannon looked at him and smiled. Did she also sense a cleave point. And if she did, which side of the division bell did she see herself. “You remember when it was, don’t you?” not an accusation, rather a calm statement of fact.
“I guess you should be getting back home,” figured it was better to get out than get real. What else could he say? That he had remembered the exact moment when they met because he had...feelings for her. That he feared deep down that all the banter was a sham. A pre-amble toward the inevitable taking of that which he craved, but could never have. And that even to entertain such would be to cross the Rubicon and then some. That it would destroy them both. What was he thinking, bringing her up here, just who was he trying to kid?
He pulled into a lay-by a few yards beyond his conclusion – was there ever going to be a different one – the silence as pregnant as the rain-fused sky. Runnels of ire foretelling of thunder and more – a future rent with the white-bright crack of...
Maybe he wouldn’t take her home.
Maybe he would take.
“S’ok,” Shannon began, “you can be you. S’ok.”
“Ya don’t know me.”
“Could do though. We’re all different. Told you before. I think you’re cool.”
“To be me is...I...can’t be...not as you think...I want...”
“Something you just can’t have,” Shannon finished for him, “ain’t it?”
Paused, like a suicide in the seconds gasp before jumping - “Yes.”
“Tell me. We can be...”

Through the windscreen he could see the road ahead wending its way towards the ridgeline of the moors, up there was a car park and beyond it, a whole vast emptiness. Pock shot hills and ice ground clefts – a maze of maybe. A place to unmask and drown in it all. No half measures, there couldn’t be, either he committed to it and the hell with the consequences, or he laid it to rest, always. Back behind, hinted at in the rear view mirror was the road down to town. To the shopping centre and the mop and bucket and the sanctuary of masks. A road whose edges were increasingly humanised the further back down you went, defined by dwelling boxes and streetlights and eyes, a myriad eyes, no spaces in which to hide. Yet perversely, the place in which he had remained hidden for all his life and so everything, he told himself in that fractured moment of indecision, was really just a question of direction – his.
His direction.
His question.
Do you know what circular logic is?
Graham Dowd did, or so he believed.
But that was before he met Shannon.