Her Fragrance (Part One)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

It was over a year since Sonia had walked out of Callum Franklin's life, and he was just starting to purge her out of his system. He had even had a few dates over the last couple of months, nothing serious, but dating in itself was a miracle because when his girlfriend of seven years left him he thought he would never be able to trust another human being again, especially a woman, but ever so slowly time was healing his wounds.

Or at least he had thought so until he booked a long overdue three weeks off work, he had to have the holidays he was due before the end of April or he would lose them. He had planned to do some decorating and tackle a few other jobs that needed doing around the house, but it wasn't until he started moving stuff around that he realised how dirty the place was, so he had an awful lot of cleaning to add to his already extensive list of toils. Callum had lost himself in his career after Sonia took off (she had shacked up with his best friend Glyn, of all people) and all he had done in the house since was eat and sleep and laze around. Now he was there all day he found memories of his lost love at every turn, and he knew he had to banish those memories or they would slowly drive him crazy. Sometimes he could even smell Sonia, he was sure of it.....

Callum was tackling the hallway. It was a dirty job because he had applied a thick coat of Artex some years back and it was taking some scraping off, though luckily he had applied it over wallpaper, which made the task of removing it marginally easier. Though he had put polythene sheets down the dust was getting everywhere, and the mess would more than likely ruin the carpet. Tough shit, he told himself - the ugly beige carpet had been down almost ten years, and he had always wanted to rub down and varnish the woodwork and fit one of those fancy stair carpets with brass fittings to hold it all in place. It wasn't as if he hadn't got the money, he had grabbed all the overtime his boss could throw at him over the past year and his bank balance had never been so healthy.

He couldn't find anything decent to listen to on the radio; he had been listening to Radio Four all morning, but a dried up old fart who sounded like he was sitting on a large cucumber was wittering on about some obscure Polish composer, and that really wasn't Callum's cup of tea, so he had rooted out his old Bowie CD's and he was slowly working his way through them. Later, he promised himself, he would play his Kings Of Leon albums for a change of tempo. He was listening to Hunky Dory, and when Kooks came on he had to skip it because it reminded him too much of Sonia; shit, he thought, he used to serenade the two-timing bitch with that song when he had had too many beers.

'Half way up the stairs is the stair where I sit,' Kermit the frog said in the song, but halfway up Callum's stairs there used to be a plaster of Paris cast that he had made of Sonia's elfish face plastered into the wall - he had taken it down, smashed it to pieces and painted over the scar it left not long after she left. He had just reached the place now, it was slightly above eye level, and something odd had happened to the surface of the wall. It was wet and spongy, just where the cast used to be, nowhere else. But that was impossible; it was the partition wall between Callum's property and the house next door, there were no pipes in there that could be leaking. As he touched the pliable surface he caught a whiff of Sonia's perfume as if she had just walked past him.

“You need to get out more, old pal,” he told himself. “This isn't healthy. The bitch has gone, after all this time you should have accepted that and moved on. You might have thought Sonia was the love of your life, but she certainly didn't love you – not towards the end, anyway. She shat all over you from a great height and pissed off with a man you thought you could trust, a man you'd known since you were five years old, and if the truth's known Glyn had been boning her for bloody months..... Let her go, man, for fuck's sake.”

The surface of the wall was bubbling, it looked like porridge simmering at a low heat. Callum almost touched the spot again to see if it was warm, but the thought that there might be a live wire buried under the plaster entered his head; it was highly unlikely considering the location, but he guessed it was within the realms of possibility.

'Touch me,' a voice in his head said. 'Touch me, Callum, touch where you proudly displayed my image when you and I were one. If you still want me call me from the abyss – if you call me you can have me back, my only true love!'

“This is a frigging joke,” he mumbled, “I'm imagining things.” He put down the scraper he was using and went downstairs to make himself a drink.

************************

A few minutes later Callum returned eating a Mars bar and holding a mug of coffee. He climbed almost level with the area that had perplexed him before he looked up because he was wary of tripping over the plastic sheeting, and what he saw turned his legs to rubber; he sat down on the stairs in the uncomfortable debris of the morning's work.

The cast was back, only it wasn't the same as it was before – not if his memory served him correctly, anyway. It was deeper, it displayed more of the face, and it was sticking further out of the wall. Though it was just inert, pale pink plaster the face was angled downwards as if it was looking at him. “This ain't possible, matey,” he said firmly as if he was speaking to a child. “This isn't right, you must be going fucking barmy.....” Gingerly he touched the cheek of the cast, and it was cool and dry just like the rest of the wall. “This can't be happening, only it is, and I have to do something about it.” He picked up a hammer and a broad bladed chisel from the upper landing and positioned the sharp blade at the side of the face.

'No, don't hurt me!' the voice in his head, Sonia's voice, whispered. 'If you destroy the mindless plaster I've manipulated to communicate with you you're only delaying the inevitable. You know that, don't you? Listen to me, please. Glyn is a bastard, he's not what I thought he was, and I can't stay with him. I've made a mistake, Callum, and I want to come back to you. I only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me..... I'll never hurt you again, I promise - I love you, you have to believe me!'

“Fuck off, whore!” he snapped, raising the hammer, changing his mind at the last moment and placing the blade of the chisel in the middle of Sonia's forehead. The first blow shattered her face into several pieces that tumbled swiftly down the stairs. Just before the hammer struck Callum was sure that he saw the face turn slightly towards him, and he saw it smile. “No matter,” he said. “You've gone now. And don't ever come back, gradually I've learned to live without you and I can do without your shit.” Before he cleaned up the wall where the impossible intrusion had been he picked up the pieces of the face and deposited them in the dustbin outside the front door.