VKG (The Novel) - chapter one

I wasn't really planning to write a novel, I was looking at re-writing my VKG script and was considering switching the narrator to Edward. I started writing some stream of consciousness as Edward, trying to hear his voice more clearly and it came out as this chapter. I enjoyed writing it more than expected, enough to consider continuing with. I have doubts about the style, language and grammar (this is the untouched first draft) and an objective glance would be appreciated.
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Chapter One

I do not remember how or when I died. I’ve often wondered if I crashed or drowned, if I was murdered or took my own life, if it was painless and quick or a slow ordeal of agony. I have a hunch; (although even that is too strong a word) I have the faintest tremor of certainty, that whatever killed me had been carried from birth. A weakness in the wall of my heart. A fatal flaw in the wiring of my brain. A single savage allergy just waiting for its long-lost trigger to unleash a rampant ecstasy of swelling, suffocation and stillness. I hold-out little hope of ever solving this most intimate of mysteries. I have no means of obtaining fresh evidence from an objective source and my own memories of the weeks leading up to my demise are shattered and burnt, they will provide no illuminating insights. Besides, in all truth it matters not. Even if all the facts were gathered, the story of my end laid out in undeniable fashion, I would still not be satisfied. The flow of life runs through a one-way door, life to lifeless, there is no return.
I do not remember drawing my last breath or closing my eyes for the final time but I do remember my first realisation that I was dead. I say my first because after each such incident the realisation would slowly fade, be forgotten, and leave me blissfully unaware once more. It took many such moments, somewhere between one and two dozen, before knowledge of my death became constant, a nagging companion I could not escape. That first realisation was by far the most shocking, the most brutal. I feel nauseas even recounting it for you. Each following realisation tapped back into the emotions of the first, reinforcing and building upon the foundation it laid. It is on that rock in this roiling sea of the deceased that I have constructed, laboriously, this artefact of awareness I preach from on top of today.

I was in a coffee shop. The air was thick and pungent. The only sounds that reached me were the slurps of customers drinking cappuccinos and the soft papery flick of book and newspaper pages turning. Later, the frothy gargle of the coffee machine and road noises of traffic and pedestrians muted outside. I made out this delicate whirring noise, a continuous scratch of metal on wood. Someone was spinning a coin on their table. The noise continued for twenty seconds, thirty; it was a good spin and I was impressed. The revolutions widened and the coin fell rattling onto its side.
“Can I help you, sir?” she said. Her voice was Indian or perhaps Pakistani, a strong, rich accent that seemed poorer for the angular English utterances forced through it. I fell in love with her voice before I opened my eyes. It sent shivers down my spine and raised goosebumps across my neck and shoulders. My fingers tingled, my toes twitched and I bit my tongue to stop my jaw from dropping. In the tones of her greeting, the seriousness, boredom, impatience, curiosity, amusement, exasperation and playful suggestion I felt her melody of emotion caress my soul.
I opened my eyes. My feet had drifted unbidden to the counter. I was in a Starbucks. To be specific I was in the Starbucks at the entrance to Hammersmith tube station, London. I’d had coffee with a ballet choreographer there twice, over two years ago. I recognised it instantly. While part of me went ahead with the business of ordering coffee; scanning the menu, ordering the usual, digging change from the pouch in my wallet in my pocket, most of me was screaming about the girl. It was her! Her! The girl from my dreams. The dreams I’d awake from in tears because the woman I’d cherished with all my soul had vaporised before my opening eyes. It was her, she was here, she was real and I loved her. Her nametag badge said “Zee”. When she returned my change a spark passed between our fingers on contact, a real spark of static electricity that shocked us both with its audible crackling zip and unexpected sting. We flinched, Zee and I, spilling coins either side of the counter and both bent to chase them, mumbling apologies. The second time she touched my hand, nervous of another fleeting pain, I closed my fingers around hers just a little. She looked at me and I was lost in the velvet depths of her brown eyes. I looked at her and she smiled shyly. Understanding blossomed, nurtured by our unending eye-contact. I broke away exhilarated and took my coffee to a table in the corner.
I was dressed, I suddenly realised, in my black gi, my martial-arts uniform. I normally only wore it for nunchaku-do classes, why was I wearing it in London? I slipped my backpack off my shoulders; it contained no nunchaku. I reasoned that I could not have been to a seminar session in Hammersmith. My bag contained my writing kit, several notebooks and dozens of loose pens and highlighters. I’d used this Starbucks before to meet and interview a local, perhaps that’s what had bought me here again. The question of my outfit nagged at me. I’ve suffered from inexplicable holes in my memory for as long as I can remember (or not) so I wasn’t overly worried to find myself in London without reason. I checked my phone; it was the forty-fourth of March, two in the afternoon. I hadn’t made or received any calls all day so there were no clues to be found there. Out of long practiced nervous habit I touched my fingertips in turn to my thumb, counting them, one, two, three, four and five. Oh. Oh dear. I looked down at my hand, my human paw, with its four spindly fingers and one amazing opposable thumb. I looked away again, distressed, watching a fat man in the opposite corner inhale a chocolate éclair without chewing and repeated my nervous habit. Thumb to fingertips, one after another, one, two, three, four and five. Five fingers and a thumb: not good.
The coffee shop was becoming distinctly claustrophobic; the slurps that surrounded me became sickening. I was overwhelmed by the unearthly roar of the coffee machine and hauled out my phone again. The forty-fourth of March? How had that nonsensical detail escaped me? The explanation was obvious, I was dreaming again.
With a pop of depressurisation like an airplane coming in to land the claustrophobia evaporated. I looked around with new eyes, feeling sad and lonely. None of these people were real. If I had a pin they could pop like balloons. How had I ever believed this tissue-thin façade? I felt ashamed.
There are basic tricks to establishing lucid control of a dream, I learnt them long ago. This liquid isn’t coffee, its whiskey: I knocked the cup back and let it’s warmth seep into my bones. This is my dream to control as I see fit: I crushed the cup into my hands and pressed the china dust between my palms, transforming it into a scarlet butterfly which flapped lazily through the glass window and away. I clicked my fingers for dramatic effect and Zee came running to sit at my side. Like a bad exhibition opening when the free booze runs dry, all the customers quietly folded up their newspapers and vacated the premises. Zee’s colleague, a thick-set bald man with a permanent ravine deep frown shut-off the coffee machine and slouched away. The pedestrians stopped passing, the cars all drove away and darkness fell on our dreamland corner of London. Throughout all this my eyes never left Zee, I was aware of this other activity in the same way an orchestra conductor is aware of the audience’s collectively held breath behind his back. She was pleading with me in silence through her bottomless, oh, so articulate eyes.
“I know,” she seemed to say, “that you’re angry with me. You think I’ve duped you once more. I’ve seen you, you know? I’ve seen the tears you shed on your pillow; seen you curse whichever name you met me under last. I do not mean to make you angry; our time together is no joke to me. This is my only route to you and I must grasp it whenever I can.”
I looked away, resentful of her silent supplication.
“Do you have anything to say?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, (that voice, my god!) “what is that motion you make with your fingers? How does it help you to see this place truly?”
I repeated the gesture, slowly in the air between us. Thumb to finger four time over.
“I count my fingers with my thumb. It only works when I am not looking, when I let my hand hang at my side or under the table on my lap. My dreams, these dreams, are primarily audio, visual and emotional. Taste and smell here are, for me, rudimentary; only occasionally recreated in detail. When I see my hand I have four fingers but touch, touch is the most frequently confused sense here and as such the easiest to find discrepancies in. This motion, thumb to fingers, fingers to thumb, it’s a litmus test for dreaminess. I know deep down, we all know, from our childhoods that the sky is blue, the grass is green, and we have five fingers on our hands. In my dreams all five of my fingers can find my thumb. In finding my invisible finger I find my focus and take control of my dream.”
I felt suave, debonair, the experienced dream-hopper sharing his tricks of the trade. She pulled her lip to the side, unsatisfied.
“But why make the movement if you do not already suspect where you are?” she said.
“Ah, my lady, that is indeed the real secret to my success. I take the test frequently, even when I’m certain that I walk in the waking world. In the moments when other men smooth back their hair, or the lowbrow toy with their balls I rarely miss an opportunity to test my waking state. As such it is never long into a dream before the illusion is dispelled.” I had slipping into a sing-song cadence.
“What then?” she said. “What do you do with your dreams?”
I moulded the tabletop like it were made out of clay and drew forth a candle which I sparked with a snap of my fingers and a goofy grin on my face.
“Normally, let my imagination run riot, track you down wherever you’re hiding and begin anew my efforts to win your affections.” I followed that with a bouquet of roses from behind my back.
“Oh, Edward!” She laughed; music to my ears. “You’re such a romantic, I love them!”
“You always do,” my breezy reply, “my bride of a thousand names.”
I was settling into our usual rhythm, becoming complacent. I’d been here a hundred times before but this time my dream-love threw me a curve-ball.
“Have you ever told anyone about me? When you’re awake, I mean.” She asked.
“No!” I was outraged. “No, never think that of me. Our time together is precious and private, there’s no-one I’d share you with. Besides, I can’t remember the last time I awoke.”
That last line hung in the air. Her smile dropped. Her eyes glazed over.
She sounded a single, “Oh?”
She looked like a woman who, having long suspected her husband’s affair, is about to be faced with the evidence. I tried to make light of this unexpected twist, tried a bad joke that sprang into my head.
I said, “I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever wake-up again!” I even laughed.
“No,” she said softly, “perhaps you won’t. Perhaps you’re dead.”
Her eyes, those luscious windows into serenity, were filling with blood. It pooled in their corners and I couldn’t breath, couldn’t remember how I’d ever drawn breath before. Then she cried blood. Two perfect strips of redness that defied gravity and hooked back under her jaw then slid down her neck and disappeared inside her Starbucks uniform’s collar. Without further ado she dropped her jaw, dislocating it with a sickening crack and began vomiting maggots in a frothy pink scum onto the tabletop between us. They sloshed onto my lap, a wave of wriggling decay that didn’t stop coming, splattering around my feet. Zee’s flesh melted from her bones, her organs and muscles consumed by the maggots that gushed from between her teeth. She shrunk down to a skeleton wrapped in crinkled skin like an ancient mummy. Her terrible jaw snicked closed. Casually she tore the skin from her visage; it put up less resistance than spider web would. I sat facing a grinning, gleaming skeleton.
I tore my eyes away at last, the transformation complete. There was a terrible pain in my chest. The skeleton swept most the maggots from our table, those that remained swelling to pop like meaty pea pods, each containing a chess piece. Grooves denoting a board were scored into our table with skeletal fingers and the pieces carefully arranged. The only piece missing was my king. Still I sat silent and scared; the pressure in my chest was unbearable. With a guttural bark I puked up my heart, slick with mucus and still beating. Like a time-lapse video of an orange rotting in super fast-forward it dried out and cracked apart. I fished out my king, set him in place and locked my gaze with Death.
“Would you like me to explain the rules?” he said; his voice a noble whisper in my ear.
“No,” I said, feeling utterly numb. I robotically ran chess openings in my mind. “I know the rules and I know the consequences. I know where I am. Let’s play.”