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Excerpt from 'No Time Like The Present'

(© 2007 Debbie McGowan - A sequel to 'Hiding Behind the Couch')

But that she’d tested the lights in the first place, not now, when they were a tangled mass of wires of varying thickness, with absolutely no way of determining where one set began and another ended. Brute force pulling only resulted in cracking sounds, quiet ones indicating that the cable itself was under duress, louder ones sounding as branches gave way to the pressure.

It had seemed quite exciting initially, all that time ago, operating in the dark, no idea what the final result would be. Each bauble carefully placed, each dangling loop of tinsel precisely draped, then the grand turn on. Plug in socket, switch down. Sudden swell of glorious illumination, slight fizz of current, then enormous bang and instant blackout.

Funny how the tree had seemed to come to life all by itself, as soon as it was released from its netting, flaying spiky arms flung themselves in all directions, protesting wildly against having been scragged from a managed forest somewhere bleak and northerly. Now it seemed it was getting its revenge, refusing absolutely to relinquish its hold on the broken fairy lights. Each tug resulted in a further torrent of baubles crashing to the floor (thankfully they were mostly plastic) and if the tinsel hadn’t seen better days before this whole saga began it was certainly past utility now, not that tinsel is especially useful in any situation.

There was no other option. Scissors were the way forward, the only chance to save the tree, at the expense of the lights, which no doubt would have pleased it considerably, had it been a living thing instead of a dying plant dumped in a chunk of tree trunk in a living room whose carpet was now almost entirely covered in needles. It was some consolation that the lights hadn’t been particularly expensive or impressive last Christmas, although all this unnecessary expenditure for at most one month of spectacle and a further twelve of digging bits of old pine tree out the sofa seemed entirely futile.

Eleanor returned from the kitchen with the scissors, a vast pair of wallpaper shears to avoid contact with the psychopathic tree as far as was possible, and snipped randomly wherever she could, cursing under her breath each time she snagged her skin or her jumper. This was not her doing in the first place. The room was too small for the tree, or it too big for the room. Perhaps it would have been better, as James had originally suggested, to have got a house somewhere together. It was her own stubbornness, mixed with a sense of losing control over her destiny that led to the decision to keep the flat. James was “satisfied” with her decision, he said. Whatever she wanted, whenever she was ready, then that was what they would do.

He said these things and it sounded so lovely; so caring, thoughtful, ever considerate and infuriatingly indecisive. He passed the buck back to her every time, patiently waiting for her to reason through each suggestion made, all of the possible options and their potential outcomes. This thing with the house for example: he had a house to sell, so could more or less buy another property outright. But then, Eleanor explained, if, not that she thought it was likely, but if their relationship ended she’d have nowhere to go. So, he said, he would effectively lend her half of the money and she could pay him back. This was a marginally more attractive suggestion: it would certainly save a lot on the interest. However it still meant he would have some kind of hold over her, again, not that she imagined for one minute he would be anything like that. Had it entered her mind at any point in time there would have been no chance of her falling for him in the first place.

The last ditch attempt was the suggestion of getting a mortgage together, whereby James would pay his half at the start as the deposit, leaving them with a fifty percent mortgage, which of course was Eleanor’s share. He would pay the bills and help out with other expenditure as and when. She wasn’t having that either. So finally James moved into the flat, leaving his house empty, but for when he was needed at head office, which was the most convenient place for him to be located, hence that’s where his house was. Eleanor was implicitly aware of this sacrifice and how selfish she was being, yet somehow couldn’t stop herself from doing what she was doing.

The fairy lights now looked like stringy green lametta, hanging in little arches over the branches that appeared less feisty, almost satisfied that they were responsible for the slaughter of the lights. She carefully pulled out each strand of cable and dropped it on to the mounting pile of broken decorations in the centre of the lounge floor. Any minute now James would arrive home and she had desperately wanted the tree to be ready for his return. She restarted the Christmas CD and tried again to get in the festive spirit, shoving the tree’s helpless victims into a plastic bag and humming along to the music as it played. It was almost working.

Excerpt from 'Hiding Behind the Couch'

(© 2007 Debbie McGowan)

Josh didn’t like heights, a fact he was more acutely aware of in this context than in any other, in part because this was a very high platform over a body of water that did not appear vast or deep enough to take the fall. This, he had concluded long ago, is not phobic, in the sense that it was rational, based on the only possible outcome of falling from a great height, which at the very least would involve a certain level of physical injury.

Damage of this sort was perhaps more akin to a phobia for Josh. He could fix most kinds of mental injury, real or imagined, through a variety of tried and tested procedures, adjusted to take account of the particular foibles of the individual in question. Phobias often did harp back to a past event that was related to some extent to the basis of the fear, and he had himself fallen down the odd flight of stairs, including those from the upper deck of a bus. He could recall exactly the sensation of losing his footing at the top, sliding down the first couple of steps relatively slowly, grasping for the rail as it slipped into an impossible distance, then free-falling the rest of the way. He had landed on a couple of younger students, his diagonally strapped bag stayed behind him and provided an effective cushion. No major injury, just embarrassment and the unforgettable wave of laughter that accompanied the rest of his journey home from school.

Now, he was standing on this platform; in front of him a long, wide, blue, winding tube, gushed a torrent of chlorinated water through its belly to carry each and every soul safely to the pool below. Never in his life would he have willingly chosen to engage in such an adventure, and had it not been for the impatient queue of revellers forming behind him, right at this moment he would be turning on his heel, clambering back down the ladder that he must have ascended in order to be here, about to fall head first into the plastic abyss. Grunts and grumblings aside, this was something he had to do.

“For God’s sake get on with it.”
“This place shuts at six you know.”
“What’s that man doing, Mummy?”

Josh edged closer to the mouth of the tube and peered as far into it as he could see, about fifteen feet he estimated, at which point it twisted sharply to the left. He felt that familiar surge of neurochemicals as water splashed against his bare legs and glimpsed down to his feet, in time to realise that firstly he had been pushed from behind, secondly he was now tumbling into the tube and thirdly he was wearing no trunks. No trunks, no shorts, nothing whatsoever. The light turned sky-blue around him, his head started to spin and he awoke with a start.