Blazed(2)

I was glad that I looked nothing like Henry. My eyes were subtle olive green like my mother's rather than the murky brown of his that reminded me of wet clay. He was paunchy and bulbous, the rosacea in his cheeks and nose worsened by the mop of receding ochre hair that sprouted wildly from his scalp. He was more monster than man, and more Bugsy Malone mobster than monster. He even had the barely-worth-growing pencil moustache to complete the cartoon villain illusion. I couldn't think of a one single uglier man.

"Emmeline!" he greeted me warmly when I begrudgingly took the empty seat next to him, folding his newspaper in half and tucking it away into the door's side pocket. He at least had the decency to still treat me like a human despite the fact I was the only person who refused to fall under his command. "How are you, sweetheart?"

"You don't need to spare me the pleasantries, Henry. Just tell me what you want." The almost genuine smile fell from his face in an instant. To my knowledge, I was the only person both immune to Tudor charm and able to disarm the mighty business beast. Without any kind of prompting, Oscar set off in the direction of my flat, so I knew the conversation would be graciously short.

"Well, I've come to try and sway your decision to attend the wedding."

"No." He could have arrived on the back of Cerberus or loaned a stallion from one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, taking me home via the fiery gates of Hell, and I still wouldn't have changed my RSVP.

"Don't you think you're being a little selfish? Obviously he couldn't have you as a best man, but—"

"Surely it would be more selfish for me to attend and make a scene?" I had absolutely no intention of provoking drama, but the threat was all Henry needed to seriously rethink his request. Any misbehaviour of mine reflected badly on him and he knew it.

And he obviously knew how to pick his battles, because he nodded once to himself and shifted to a new, just as undesirable topic. "Then maybe I can convince you to reconsider taking over from your degenerate sister? Honestly, she's a total liability and appears to be singlehandedly turning my office into a grooming parlour. If I hadn't been at the conception, I would honestly think she simply sprang into existence like a germ."

The way Henry spoke about his eldest daughter might have seemed callous and cruel if you didn't know Tallulah directly. While I had no will to network but a keen mind, Tally had little more than a bad laugh and an Oedipus complex. The business was wasted on her, but honestly, I thought that was a fair price to pay for being corrupt. There was a fair chance that she would be the person to make the off-hand comment to one of Henry's associates that might ruin him and nothing would have made me sadistically happier.

"Still no."

"You won't even come down to The Parr and sit in on a few meetings?" I didn't let him see me roll my eyes. He owned six buildings worldwide as business centres and named each after a wife of Henry VIII. Of course, he worked in the building named for the wife who survived...

"No."

He sighed and nodded again, casting a weary eye out through the window. "I'm not giving up on you yet, Emmy. And when I do wear you down, you'll be glad for all of the exposure you have." And there it was. His true reason for turning up was subtle but detectable to the trained ear.

"You want me at an event," I groaned, sagging back into the soft leather interior that creaked a little under the strain. I'd sooner go to the wedding, at least that wasn't about him and his damn networking. "No, Henry."

Even though I refused, he still pressed on with the details I tuned out like white noise. I got that it was a mixer being held by a Cornelia Alexander— a woman I knew only as a model. Nothing drastic and even less necessary for me to put myself out for, so the finer points of his monotonous droning went unheard. I could have wept with joy when my building slid into view, and let myself out of the Mercedes before it had even fully stopped.

"Just consider it, Emmeline."

"Non, nein, bu, nej, den, nai, aniyo, nie, niet, nema, NO!" I somewhat childishly slammed the door behind me and set off into a ramble of expletives, not really caring whether he heard. There was no way that eleven languages of 'no' would mark the end his pestering, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that it was four more languages than he knew. Working in a book shop had its advantages.





"YOUR ROUND." CHRIS smirked at me across our usual table in Esme's and shook his head with a slow growling criticism of a laugh. "Lightweight." I thought I was doing quite well considering I'd been drinking for three hours longer than usual and was still standing, or rather slumping. Past the point of feeling just fuzzy enough to forget all my problems, I was well into the realms of wanting to cry over them. This was nothing new, it was just happening three hours earlier than usual.

I threw my purse at him, trusting him to not take advantage of the credit cards I refused to touch, and collapsed face down onto the table. Every sensible bone in my body told me to stop drinking when another work day stood on the other side of midnight, but those bones appeared to be the smallest ones in my body. The ones in my fingers, maybe. Or the ones in my toes. More likely the ones in my ears. Any time I tried to let them take conscious control, I was met by a roar of objection from the rest of my body that far preferred alcoholic escapism to waking up sober.

In keeping with comfortable patterns, my company was made up only of the social rejects who had a very different outsider impression of my life. Three fifths of that circle sat with me, excluding myself, with our spare, Esme, choosing to extricate herself from our pity party to attend to some pressing 'business' in her office.

What that really meant is that she had a private bathroom, had eaten her weight in the brightly coloured cupcakes she insisted on selling, and preferred to save face in front of her customers. Her shock of red Veronica Lake hair and Bette Davis eyes somehow kept her enigmatically charismatic through being absolutely trollied, and she rarely had any will to dispel the illusion that she carried herself with anything other than utmost grace and poise by being caught worshipping the porcelain throne in the ladies bathroom.

Chris, on the other hand, was a beast of a man with a stocky build who might just have had an unfulfilled wanderlust to rival my own. He too craved the change he wouldn't actively seek to discover and overcompensated for that lack of motivation with relentless cynicism and sarcasm. He would be at his finest and most resentful right around the time I hit the full blown depressive drunk zone and we would have tremendous rants about the state of the world, and how our misery was everyone else's fault bar our own.

The other two fifths of our circle were definitely more of a completed whole than two separate segments. Daniel had been my best friend since I was five and consequentially had a fairly good idea of exactly who the real Emmeline Tudor was. He was his usual bitchy self, dripping in designer threads and too much sparkle. His outlandish approach to 'casual' came less from his excess of wealth and more from the fact he had a civil partner who preferred him to be the femme, and dressed him as such. There was no 'too much' for the man who wore what should have been a women's charm bracelet between neon leather strapped wrist bands— the man who could name more shades of pink than an interior designer. It had taken a long time for him to accept his sexuality, but as soon as he had, he embraced his right to be flamboyant. Women loved him for it, and so did his preferred type of man. As a result, the first gay partner he met turned out to be the one he kept.

Jonathan was good for him, and maybe my third favourite person in the world because he was the embodiment of everything I loved about the city. He was a sweet Asian cartoon aficionado wrapped up in a suit, topped with purple tipped spikes and the smell of dirty business and cigarettes— diversity capped professionalism with a penchant for the unusual and a flagrant disregard for anyone with a shred of an orthodox lifestyle. He encapsulated the modest snobbery and paradoxical individuality I lived for. He was so liberal and yet so disciplined— nothing ever seemed to phase him. He was everything I envied in almost plush toy form, and he loved Daniel just the way he was. Even better.

What strange company I kept. When you looked at the five of us— the dowdy billionaire's daughter, the relative supermodel, the mismatched Brokeback Mountain replicas and... Chris, it hardly seemed likely that we'd be friends, let alone that we'd be united by the one quirk that made us compatible...

We were all nerdy by nature. Beyond the bar, Esme was a voice actress for numerous video games and cartoons, and had an obvious extensive knowledge of everything she'd starred in. Daniel and Jonathan were computer programmers, Jonathan a little less 'legitimately' so, and considered a Star Trek marathon to be a date night. Chris was a writer for an international nerd-based website and reviewed all manner of obscure media with one eye firmly on everything zombie.

And me... well I was just the little nerd who could. I'd dabbled here and there, working in character design within the same company as Daniel, chasing comic conventions around the country with my sketches and occasionally bingeing on video games when the right one came along. But now I was the odd one out, the one with no ambition. I was happy working by the Dewey Decimal System and doodling in my lunch break, not looking to make it big, just to comfortably exist. Still, we had some interesting conversations about teaming up to create some kind of geeky monstrosity.