The Girl in the Slayer Jacket

  The Girl in the Slayer Jacket

  By Courtney Milnestein

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2020 Courtney Milnestein

  ISBN 9781646563364

  Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  The Girl in the Slayer Jacket

  By Courtney Milnestein

  She knew her, of course; everyone knew her, after a fashion. It was hard to get away from her when the circle of her friends was so small. She was tall, that was how Madeline remembered the other girl being described, tall as a descriptor that became a gesture, a way of saying what could not be said, a nudge, a wink, a hint. She didn’t like it, she wasn’t comfortable with this kind of reaction from people, and yet she couldn’t really say that she liked the other girl much either. The girl in the Slayer jacket, as the song went, Tippex slogans etched upon the hem, decorated in button badges and patches not entirely dissimilar from Madeline’s own arrangement, but somehow made distinct by virtue of her height, a fact so readily inferred by others.

  A few years back, Madeline had first met her, seeing the shock of dyed blue hair in the crowd, her wild gestures indifferent to those around her. She had not been impressed, offering the girl a forceful shove when her elbow had come dangerously close to smashing a younger girl in the face. The girl had stared back at her, unable to understand what she had done wrong, unable to comprehend why she had been pulled out of the moment, and why Madeline, a head shorter than her, long red hair and too much eyeliner, was shouting four-letter words in her face. It could have gone better; as first meetings went, it could have gone better.

  For the next couple of years, Madeline was sort of aware of the other girl’s presence, though she didn’t know her name. At the Assembly Hall, clutching a plastic glass, she saw her in the crowd; at the Forum, she was there by the bar, talking with a friend, the blue in her hair all but washed out, whilst, at the Electric Ballroom, she could be seen on the fringes of the pit, cautiously evaluating when was the right moment to pitch herself forward into the crowd.

  Madeline had not felt it necessary to learn her name. What was the point, after all, it wasn’t like they were going to be friends or anything, they were just two people who happened to like the same music.

  Very tall, one of her friends, Rosie, she thought, had said when trying to describe the other girl, whilst relating an event that had transpired one weekend. Madeline rolled her eyes and tried not to engage in the conversation.

  Agatha, she had later heard the girl referred to, begrudgingly at first, as if by naming her, those discussing her when being deprived of a more fruitful conversation relating to how tall she was. It had not occurred to Madeline until much later that the other girl must have picked this name for herself and that her name certainly hadn’t been Agatha when first she had glimpsed her, blue hair, moving through the crowd, her elbow all but in another’s face.

  What did it matter though, she thought, it wasn’t really any of her business what name the other girl picked, what choices she made, none of these impacted Madeline in the slightest; they weren’t friends, they didn’t even know one another, they simply happened to be at a lot of the same venues at the same time.

  She took a deep breath, drawing in the scent of rain and cigarette smoke, shivering slightly, holding onto the square polystyrene box of chips from across the road as she stood at the bus stop.

  “She’s very tall, isn’t it she?”

  Madeline turned, glancing over in Rosie’s direction, pretending she had not been looking down the long road, past the coffee shops and the Black Heart, down towards competing fast food chains and the statue of Richard Cobden, the old politician crowded out by resting pigeons come home to roost; pretending her eyes had not been following the sight of the girl in the Slayer jacket.

  “What?” Madeline asked.

  Rosie nodded in the direction of the other girl, still visible by merit of her decorated jacket. “That girl. She’s very tall.”

  “Oh right,” Madeline replied, feigning disinterest. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  The situation was stupid, and she resented it. She didn’t like her, she wasn’t interested in her.

  “Know her much?” she asked, her accent seeming stronger the more defensive she became about the situation.

  Rosie shrugged, long dark hair tied back in a loose ponytail, a heavy jacket that trailed almost to the damp pavement, weighed down by almost every useless item that could be summoned in any given situation, the kind of things most people left buried at the bottom of their handbags; books, surgical tape, a box of plasters, out of date sweets, the kind of things most people brought handbags for. Getting into any venue was always a nightmare, each security guard seeing it as their duty to try and lessen the amount of crap the young girl carried around with her. And yet, despite all this, she insisted it was all of vital importance. It clearly wasn’t, Madeline reflected, otherwise Rosie would have had some need to call on each of the items she carried more regularly, not keep them embalmed in lint within the folds of her heavy coat.

  “Not really,” Rosie answered with a shrug that must have taken a tremendous effort considering the weight of her coat. “Seen her about, that’s really it. Bea knows her though, says she’s all right.”

  Madeline nodded.

  “Sure,” she answered, the most non-committal of responses, a word that wasn’t even suitable given the preceding statement.

  “Tall, isn’t she?” Rosie continued.

  Again, Madeline nodded.

  “Guess so.”

  There was a weighty pause between them.

  “You know, she used to be a—”

  “Ah, shut up, Rosie,” Madeline said, rolling her eyes.

  Of course, she knew this, of course it was common knowledge. She didn’t want to go over it, not because it mattered to her, but because it didn’t matter. It was none of her business.

  The other girl shrugged.

  “She used to go out with Zoe,” she said, paused, and then added, “You remember Zoe, right? Worked in Lush.”

  Madeline sighed, feeling the diminishing warmth of the polystyrene box between her hands.

  “Yeah. I remember Zoe.”

  “Guess they broke up. Probably because, well, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Madeline said, “because she’s tall, right?”

  “Right,” Rosie agreed. “She is tall though.”

  “Definitely.”

  She sighed again.

  “I wish this bus would get here.”

&
nbsp; A mischievous smile crossed the other girl’s lips.

  “You could go talk to her. Ask her if she wants a chip.”

  Madeline scowled in her direction.

  “You could do one.”

  She turned the matter over in her head.

  “I’m not asking her if she wants a chip.”

  “Ah,” Rosie continued, “everyone likes a chip.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Past the coffee shops and the Black Heart, down towards competing fast food chains and the statue of Richard Cobden, she saw the shape of the 31 bus in the dark, battered and old, long since past its better days, happier days. She watched as it slowed begrudgingly, and the doors pointedly opened, Agatha holding out her Oyster card amidst the crowd, disappearing within, her breath crystallised in the bright light of the bus’s interior.

  And that, she thought at the time, was that.

  * * * *

  That year had been a tumultuous one for Madeline Calohan. In the autumn, two weeks before Halloween, she had broken up with her boyfriend of two years, though, in all honesty, the demise of their relationship had been a process that had lasted for at least a year. They had been good together, he had told her, and then they hadn’t. She remembered that, though she didn’t exactly like it, and throughout November, she had told herself that it was somehow her fault, that she had asked too much, that she had let her own anxieties about being left behind change how he had felt about her.

  She resented that, resented the idea that she was somehow weaker than him, that she was somehow hysterical just for being able to express her feelings about a situation. She had drunk a lot during that time too, drunk to the point of her behaviour becoming very noticeably erratic. She had likewise invented grand theories as to the reasoning behind the demise of their relationship, holding up everyone but herself as culpable in the act: social media companies, friends and family, a society that she decided encouraged emotional dissonance, producing a generation of sociopaths. Everything was at fault.

  By the beginning of December, she was beginning to ‘get her shit together,’ as Rosie had termed it. She stopped drinking so much, started going out more, tried changing the way she dressed, made more of what would be considered, again by Rosie, as ‘an effort.’

  When Callum had left, she had been filled with irrational fear about her capacity to fall in love, and had started to worry that there were only a finite number of times that she could genuinely love another person. Perhaps she had used up all her chances, she thought, perhaps Callum had been her last real shot at having any kind of meaningful relationship—after all, they had known each other for so long, nervous glances during the first year of uni, the usual small talk that had helped pave the way for overexcited and drunken kisses outside his student halls on Holloway Road.

  With distance between them, it was easy for her to see that they had not been the most ideal couple, that their relationship had been mostly founded on a sense of vague compatibility and the desire not to be alone, the weird need for status that is demanded of interactions whilst still at university. Once they had both graduated, once they had both settled into the long stretch of their student debt and all the meaningless jobs they were destined to do in order to repay such debt, the disparity between them had become sadly evident.

  She didn’t want to think about it, she realised, and, with a sigh, straightened her back, catching a glimpse of herself in the gleaming coffee machine to her right, mint green T-shirt and black cardigan, red hair tied back, a dusting of childish freckles across the nose. Three years of fashion and design at university and here she was, working at a coffee shop in Brent Cross, the silhouette of a faun encircled by a thin line of mint green behind her head.

  They had opened a Faun’s here after one of the big supermarkets had bought out one of the other coffee chains and started closing branches, she recalled. For most people, she didn’t think it made much of a difference, after all, there was already a different coffee shop at the other end of the shopping centre, and if you took the Northern Line to anywhere, even as far as Wimbledon, you could find one of the more popular places, but she found herself missing the old shop that her eventual employer had superseded. There had been a cute German girl working there, she recalled, a university student named Caroline, along with the manager, a pale man roughly ten years older than her with bad teeth and messy hair, his broken iPhone constantly in his hand. She wondered what had happened to them.

  Raised alone by a mother who had run away from a religious commune, Madeline had spent her childhood in the satellite towns outside of London, staring up at the different deities that adorned the decorations of coffee towns: Dionysus, Diana, and the fallible idiot god-emperor, Nero. It hadn’t really mattered to her which was which, and yet, despite this, she still missed the place that had been here before the current owners. If she stopped and asked herself whether she cared enough about those old tutelary deities that decorated the varied coffee shop brands of the United Kingdom, her answer would ultimately have been, no, she didn’t give two shakes of a lamb’s tail, and certainly, she had never cared enough to envision the possibility of her working in such a place—yet, despite all this, here she was, here she had arrived, stale air conditioning, artificial lights, and the shopping centre eerily silent every Saturday.

  Located on the cusp of one of London’s biggest Jewish areas, Brent Cross shopping centre was desolate on Saturday mornings, the only footfall within the shop coming from the hapless and the lost, the impossible rich, and the shockingly profane. Things picked up in December, but this close to Christmas, when everyone had already done their shopping, Brent Cross was a wasteland.

  Sometimes, leaning against the silent coffee machine or drawing doodles on spare scraps of till roll, Madeline asked herself how long it would be before Brent Cross went under completely. Surely it could not compete with the immediacy of the internet, surely it was just a place for the perennially tardy and for boomers, now?

  For as long as she could remember, there had been talk of the shopping centre being brought out, of its translation into another Westfield, and yet, despite all this, it remained, weirdly out of step with the rest of the city, a reminder of the distant ‘70s.

  She thought, occasionally, of her father, a broad-shouldered Jewish man she had not known in childhood, a man who had re-emerged in later life after the birth of her half-brother, establishing a fragile festive peace with her mother in which they would all gather at his home during Christmas and pretend they were something more than strangers.

  It had been six years, she reflected, six years since she had seen any of them.

  “Do some work, slacker,” a voice called to her, abruptly awakening her from her reverie.

  She looked up and saw Rosie, her familiar weighty coat hanging loosely from her shoulders, one hand carrying a red and white wax paper cup decorated with a popularised image of Diana or Tiamat.

  “Ah,” she nodded at the cup in the other’s hand with mock disdain, “how dare you bring the competitors in here, can’t you see I’m trying to make a living here?”

  Rosie smirked.

  “Make a living, is that what you’re calling this?”

  “Attempt to make a living,” Madeline responded.

  Rosie lifted her cup in salute.

  “Bless our national minimum wage, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Madeline responded sourly, unable to keep the ire from her voice, “it’s obscene.”

  She allowed herself a moment to glower darkly into the middle distance.

  “So,” Rosie said, again breaking through her thoughts as she leant forward on the other side of the counter, “you out tonight?”

  Madeline shook her head.

  “Can’t afford it,” she answered plainly.

  The other girl frowned.

  “Pretty sure you can,” she said with a hint of contrariness.

  Again, Madeline afford her a glance of mock disdain.

  “Pretty sure I can’t,
” she answered, and gestured at the empty coffee shop. “The joy of being on a bloody zero-hour contract means that when shit gets like this, I only get four hours work a week.”

  “Ah,” Rosie nodded, “I see your point.”

  A wry smile crossed the girl’s lips.

  “Shame though. I hear Agatha’s going to be out tonight.”

  “Get stuffed,” Madeline said, a little sharper, a little louder than she had actually intended.

  Rosie’s smile broadened.

  “You never know,” she continued, playfully.

  “Up yours,” Madeline replied emphatically. She straightened up, paused, and then said in a softer tone, “Where is it again?”

  “New Cross,” the other girl replied without missing a beat.

  Madeline rolled her eyes and slumped against the counter once more.

  “New Cross is far.”

  On the other side of the counter, Rosie lifted her cup, that stoic image of Diana unchanging, unblinking on the decorative red and white wax paper.

  “Ah, but the things we do for true love, eh?”

  Again, Madeline rolled her eyes.

  “Ah, sod off, it’s not like that and you know it.” She sighed audibly. “Who’s playing, anyhow?”

  Rosie shrugged.

  “Some crust punk band from Tel Aviv.”

  Sharply, Madeline shook her head.

  “Can’t stand crust punk.”

  “Have a drink, it will be fine.”

  Again, she shook her head.

  “How about you buy a coffee so I can prove I’m good at my shitty job?”

  Still smiling, Rosie took a sip from her coffee cup.

  “Sorry, can’t. Brand loyalty and all that.”

  “What about loyalty to me?” Madeline protested.

  “Maybe if you come New Cross tonight, I’ll consider it.”

  Behind the counter, Madeline Calohan put her head in her hands.

  “Fine,” she muttered into her hands. “Whatever. I’m in.”

  * * * *

  The proper term, she recalled, for dry ice was ‘card ice.’ She’d never heard the term before a particularly boring shift she had spent, for the better part, with her phone in her hand, reading Wikipedia, but apparently, this was what it was called. It was solid carbon dioxide, a by-product of carbon monoxide or natural gas. It can be found on Mars. But this was not Mars. It was New Cross. It might as well have been.