Paperback Rita

Josh levelled his hand-held camcorder at the window of his flat, held it up to the glass and peered through, adjusted the focus slightly, toyed with the zoom as he panned across the apartment block opposite. He knew he was beginning to get a bad name in his area; his neighbours told their children not to play near his home, and the women crossed to the other side of the street if they saw him coming. It was all a misunderstanding of course; he was definitely eccentric, he was the first to admit that. But he meant no harm; he was simply a struggling artist.

Josh was a writer â€" in theory at least. Regrettably, he was yet to produce anything even remotely publishable. His agent Marcie told him time and time again: ‘if you want to get anywhere, darling, you have to make people care. Its all very well if you write the greatest tragedy since Romeo and Juliet, but if Juliet is so damn wooden and unrealistic the reader doesn’t give a damn if she trips over a loose shoelace and breaks her neck or not, its going nowhere. You know what I’m saying, love? Characterisation is key.’

Josh understood of course. But people had never been his strong suit. He had gone from being a shy but endearing child to a shy and awkward teenager; at this point he had got into writing; generally arrogantly phrased poetry, the work of someone well aware of their superior vocabulary and technical ability but with little of themselves in it. As a student of classical literature he had been academically praised but socially reclusive, finding little to identify with in the boisterous youth surrounding him. Now, 24 years old and technically unemployed, he was facing serious financial problems if he failed to produce the promised magnum opus â€" which unfortunately required that he create a character about whom people would care.

Tricky.

And so he had begun this. He observed the life around him, examined humanity like a scientist would the cycles of an amoeba in a petri dish, in the hope of discovering the components required to create his hero, his anti-hero, his narrator â€" whoever the elusive character was about whom he could make people care. He had studied his neighbours, and each of them had displayed to him almost distressingly stereotyped characters. He could have developed almost the same characters from a formulation of the people he could observe through the dusty window of his ancient black-and-white television. Yet, like many ‘telly addicts’, he found himself unwillingly fascinated with the subjects he began with dispassionately observing.

Their tragedies and celebrations became of more than fleeting interest to him. He felt towards them almost an indulgent affection from his position of omniscience, like treasured pets. This startled him at first; this he had not banked upon. To distance himself again, he trivialised them by conferring upon each of his subjects a diminutive and generally alliterative nickname, summing up and generalising their exaggerated characteristics. ‘Angry Alf’ he dubbed the blustering and old-fashioned middle aged man three windows left and two down, whom he knew from his observance to be the pompous head of the local Neighbourhood Watch that objected to him so strenuously. ‘Slutty Sally’ was the ageing party girl (two right, one up) who conducted her extremely vocal liaisons with assorted partners (never the same man twice) in full view, and spent the rest of the time at home lying in a heap on her sofa nursing either a glass of Andrews’ salts or a bottle of chardonnay. ‘Grumpy Gary’ was the moody teenage son of number 32, who alternately hung out of his family’s bathroom window smoking dope, sulked in front of his television set or conducted bellowed arguments with his various family members. And there were dozens of others with similar sobriquets, who gradually bored him with their one- dimensional characters.

But there was still her; the different one; the one who caught his eye around a month ago, who didn’t seem to fall into any single category he could devise. He knew she lived alone, and didn’t seem to have a boyfriend, so he had briefly experimented with ‘Single Sarah’ â€" but dropped it after a few days, finding it inexplicably uncomfortable to refer to her by that single damning adjective. Besides which, he knew her real name!

None of the others’ real names were available to him, nor did he particularly care to know them. But he had found himself strangely elated to catch the shouted greeting of ‘Old Olive’ (the sweet old granny from two windows down) to her on the doorstep one Sunday - ‘Evening, Rita love,’ - and to witness the girl start from her reverie and mutter a friendly, self- conscious reply before hurrying indoors. When she reached her small, cocoon-like dwelling place, draped in cheap but richly jewel-coloured fabrics to hide the cracked plaster and second-hand furniture, she did what she did every night. Wrapped herself up in a thick cotton bathrobe, and surrounded by candles (he knew from overheard gossip her power had long since been disconnected, never to be reinstated on her paltry secretary’s wage) settled on her sagging sofa by the window and opened a second-hand paperback novel. On that significant Sunday, he watched her, filmed her as she turned the page, zoomed in on her smiling lips as she luxuriated in her poor paradise of fantasy, and mouthed her new name: ‘Paperback Rita’.

These days he watched her almost exclusively - almost obsessively. Something about her struck a chord within him that he found it hard to identify. It embarrassed him, made a mockery of his pretensions to superiority. He tried to justify it on spiritual grounds; the irony of her contentment whilst reading about lives of luxury, passion and adventure which were as far from her own reality as could be was fascinating to him, he argued with himself; her abject poverty was an interesting social study, he insisted. But in all honesty, he recognised the simple aesthetic lure she represented, nestled in her bright Faberge egg of a house, shimmering gold and red in the light of the candles.

He idolised her soft, achingly vulnerable and utterly oblivious pose, knees drawn up and curling around her, pressing through the loose robe she wore. The cloud of soft, fuzzy reddish hair that hung in disarray around her delicate, fine-boned face delighted him. Her absorbed expression â€" lips softened and slack as she sank into her beloved novels, glowing amber eyes half-lidded and cat-like â€" became the subject of several amateurish attempts at poetry on his part, the first he had written since he was seventeen. This embarrassed him; but he could not bring himself to end it. He continued his nightly vigil, ashamed, yet elated by her presence as he had not been by anything since childhood, when all joys had seemed limitless and any hurt the end of the world.

Tonight, as he filmed her through the pouring rain, he realised something was wrong. She had appeared hollow and drained of late, and she appeared utterly uncaring as she settled on the sofa with her novel. As she turned the pages of Oscar and Lucinda, tears began to well in her eyes, and fall, catching the glossy light of the candle-flame, onto the cheap, pulpy pages. This was not unusual in itself. Her absorption and involvement in her novels often resulted in a display of emotion â€" a becomingly childlike smile, an impulsive hug of her thin shoulders, and a touchingly empathetic nibbling of lip and glimmer of tears on her long lashes. But these fits of heightened feeling were always brief, always small and under control. Tonight the crying didn’t stop; he became gradually alarmed as the tears turned into sobs, great heaving sobs which twisted and distorted her pretty face, that seemed to be wrenched from somewhere deep and dark within her; he fancied he could hear it through the rain and wind, these guttural, groaning sobs which tore at her.

Suddenly, she flung the book away from her, which such violence it flew across the little room and rebounded off the wall. In a welter of misery, she hurled over the little table beside her, piled high with other paperback novels, stacks and stacks of stories he had seen her take such pleasure in, that he had watched her treasure. She turned her strange, grief-driven rage against the walls, the dilapidated sofa, and finally against herself, tearing at her flying hair and ripping at her tearstained cheeks.

Josh stared, awe-struck, transfixed; how glorious she looked, blazing with dark passion, burning brown eyes wild and unfocussed pools of pain. He zoomed in on her, her clenched fists, her mouth contorted with sorrow that seemed almost a physical pain; zoomed in on the sudden gleam of metal, the blurring flash of the knife â€" the blood.

It took him literally a minute to truly comprehend what he had seen. Another few seconds to relate that to reality. The whole business had always seemed so fictional, so fantastical. This dramatic and warped culmination seemed almost apposite for a few surreal seconds. Then as she sank to the floor, pale and unconscious, the camera slipped from his hand, breaking his stunned reverie â€" and he ran to call the ambulance.

~

Josh had been unable to watch as they took her away; could only listen to the wail of sirens approaching and then fading into the night. He was deeply shaken; how had he become so morally impoverished? When had he learnt to view people as things, as objects, as images? That he could watch a girl attempt to take her own life…simply stand and watch…he hurled the camera at the wall, flinched as it shattered into a thousand expensive fragments. He tore the liquid ribbons of tape from the cassettes, heaving in his breath and snarling like an animal. Then he collapsed into tears on the floor, great gasping cleansing tears that, when they subsided, left him feeling raw and broken but at least half-human again. Exhausted, he slept.

It took him a while to pluck up the courage, but the following day, he found himself outside her hospital room. She was sleeping when he arrived; no flowers by her bedside, of course, no anxious relatives hanging over her recumbent form. How small she looked, how fragile â€" a faded, pale shade of her former self, with huge smudgy shadows under her delicate eyelids. How unlike the vibrant, enigmatic creature he had adored from afar. But when she opened her eyes, still that bewitching shade of amber-gold, still bright and full of glory, he knew he had made the right choice.

She slowly sat up, dazed and confused. She stared at him quizzically, puzzled â€" and intrigued.

“Who are you?â€