A Twist Of Noir 657 - U.V. Ray

EXCERPT FROM THE DIARY OF A NECROPHILIAC - U.V. RAY

Her black suede skirt was up around her waist and she had no underwear on. One leg was lying flat with the other knee raised, thighs parted. She didn’t have any shoes on either: her toe nails were painted red. I found it tantalising. This is how it all started. She was wearing a tight, yellow Blondie t-shirt that had been torn, exposing her left shoulder and small breast, a dark nipple. She looked calm; her brown eyes rolled coquettishly in their sockets to the right, staring at the golden leaves scattered on the ground. I could hear the waiting truck’s diesel engine idling behind me.

Initially I thought it was just a pile of clothes dumped in the ditch that ran the length of the layby we’d pulled up in. But something struck me as not being right. I pushed my way through the bushes. I was eleven years old and it was the first time I’d seen a naked woman. She was shaved and the intricate contours of her exposed, red labia created more mystery regarding the female form than it answered questions for a kid of my years. I wanted to touch, to discover what she would feel like but I just stood transfixed. I reckoned she was about twenty. She was skinny and very pretty. I liked her dyed pink hair, cut into a bob, and the way her birdlike ribs showed through her skin. She was stretched out on the floor, her back fixed in an arch with her arms draped above her head. The only mark on her was a playing card tattoo on her bare shoulder – a Joker and the Ace of Spades. I don’t recall there being a single sign of injury. Not that I specifically looked. I realise now the life must have barely left her; she could not have been there more than a few hours. The rising sun blasted through the trees and glinted in her glassy eyes. It was the most perfect image I had ever seen.

“What have you been doing?” My father laughed when I climbed back in his Scania, finishing his bacon sandwich and wiping his hands down the front of his blue boiler suit. “You’re such a dreamer.”

“Er... It was a long wee.” I told him, realising the desire to actually have one had completely left me. I was frozen. The image of the girl stayed with me. But I never breathed a word.

The traffic started building up. It signaled the onslaught of morning rush hour, which resulted in a multiple prang as three vehicles ran into the back of each other on the approach to a traffic island. My dad engaged the gears, “twats,” he shook his blonde head, smiling as we pulled out of the lay-by and passed the three bickering motorists in their grey office suits. We were heading towards the dull lights of Birmingham. It was 1978. Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express played on the truck radio.

“What a crock of shit this is!” My dad said. He liked Led Zeppelin and the likes. All this new stuff was shit. He didn’t like my Tubeway Army album either. He said it was a travesty that Buddy Holly had been killed in a plane crash at the age of twenty-one whilst “these puffs who wear more make-up than Barbara Cartland are allowed to thrive.”

It was the 26th of September. I remember the exact day because of the date on the newspaper. I was fascinated by a photograph I was studying as I sat in the passenger seat. Two planes had collided over San Diego. The picture, taken from the ground, was of a Pacific Southwest Airlines 727 with its right wing engine spewing flames as it plunged towards the ground. We’d been doing poetry at school and it made me think of the words by T.S.Eliot:

...the dove descending breaks the air, with flame of incandescent terror...

BIO: U.V. Ray: writer, drinker, womaniser extra-ordinaire, swindler par-excellence, liar, cheat and all round filthy rotten miscreant. Find out more at U.V. Ray’s official website.