The Missing O

“How about a cook book?” I mused. Chocolate foam coated the rim of my white cup and I ran a finger over it. “She likes to cook, right?”

The Sykes brothers, sat across from me, both sighed.

“Her kitchen may as well be a library,” Tom groaned. “She has Gordon Ramsay books in the bathroom. The bathroom, Morgan.”

I sat back in surprise, trying to imagine being in the bathroom whilst reading up on how to spice a Thai-style Beef stir-fry.

“Besides,” said Oliver, “we got her one for Mothers Day.”

At ten o’ clock this morning I had been called up by a distressed Oliver and ordered to report to the town centre by noon. Apparently he and his brother were faced with the trauma of finding and purchasing a Christmas present for their mother, and I was their call to arms. We’d been sat in Starbucks for the past hour, brainstorming our battle-plan.

“This is hopeless. We’re never going to think of anything,” said Tom.

Oliver was no better than his younger sibling, “At least not anything half decent. Maybe we should just throw in the towel and go with the Avon spa set. I think she lost the one we got her last year.”

“We can’t give up now,” I said. “Come on, get off your arses, we’ll go look around for a bit.”

The boys grudgily pulled their coats on, gloves as well. Snow had settled again, not as thick as before, but it still nipped at your toes, bit your nose and clawed at your fingertips. Winter really was a bitch. Outside of the coffee shop the high street was overrun with a throng of Christmas shoppers; the type of people that didn’t give a damn whether or not they bruised the shit out of you when they mowed you down with a wheelchair, or pelted you with their bags. They were ruthless, as if the very season brainwashed the entire nation into retail shopping robots. Their mission: bargains.

It seemed like the three of us were humans in a city of machines, fighting to survive. But then again, I could be exaggerating.

After not very long Tom had bumped into a group of friends, abandoning ship for an hour or two. Oliver didn’t seem to mind having his younger brother out of his hair for a while. So it was just the two of us, dragging ourselves like festive zombies through endless shops and boutiques, trying to find something to suit a woman one of us knew nothing about. Oliver didn’t appear to know much more than me.

“I hate shopping,” Oliver grumbled, following me down an isle in Boots. A group of teenaged girls stared as we walked past, giggling as Oliver blushed. I’d figured that young girls found Oliver appealing; everywhere we went he seemed to attract female attention. Even boys seemed to watch him as he slunk past, eyes down and hands in pockets.

“I can see why,” I muttered, looking over my shoulder warily at the awing girls. One of them, a girl with one of those swishy fringes, who was also wearing too much black around her eyes, glared at me. Was it because I was gawping at her, curious of her interest in Oliver, or the very fact that I was walking side by side with their eye-candy? I turned away and ignored her.

“So what’re you doing over Christmas,” Oliver exhaled, holding up a pair of eyelash curlers. He squinted, opening and closing them in confusion.

I shrugged, “Same as always. Me, Kaitlyn and Charlie at the flat. What about you?”

He put the eyelash curlers down, seemingly beaten by them, and walked on a little. “Not sure yet. Might stay at my place with the lads, if Mum and Dad go away. They usually go on a cruise or something for Christmas.”

“What does Matt do for the holidays?” I asked. I thought most people went home at this time of the year, spent it with the parents. But Oliver was claiming he’d be staying at his own place this year, with his friends.

He shrugged again, “I don’t know. I haven’t asked to be honest. But Tom will probably come stay with me. Last year me and him couldn’t be arsed with cooking a roast, so we ate Nacho’s and three boxes of Mince Pies,” he started smiling, laughing at the memory. “Tom drank nearly an entire bottle of port and threw everything back up. Was pretty grim.”

Even though he found recalling this memory amusing, I felt a pang of guilt. Nobody should spend the holidays alone, even I would find it depressing considering I steer more towards The Grinch than Chris Kringle.

I stewed in my thoughts for a long time, and when we found ourselves slipping into a bookshop, I texted Charlie behind one of the shelves, hidden from Oliver. When she’d replied I slipped my phone away, sucking in a dry breath to ready myself.

“Hey,” Oliver nudged me with his elbow, showing me the open page of the Tattoo book he was skimming through. I looked at the twisting colours for only a moment; they weren’t anywhere near as interesting as his. “You think you’d ever get one?” he asked.

“Not sure,” I replied briskly, not really thinking about it. “Oliver, look. Don’t feel obliged to say yes, I’m just putting an offer out there as an option for you and Tom. But if you guys want a bit of company at Christmas, me and Charlie wouldn’t mind having you over. It’s not exactly great at our place.” I could feel myself turning red, my words tripping on themselves. “But I just thought maybe you’d like an actual Christmas dinner, y’know. Plus we have stockings. All of us. Just - just think about it, okay?”

“Stockings?” Oliver was grinning.

“Oh, shut up,” I slapped his arm, embarrassed, but he caught my hand in his.

“Thanks Morgan,” he said lowly. His eyes glided over me, and I felt the sickening uncomfortableness trail behind his watch. His hand gently clasped my fingers, and the warmth of his skin made my breathing thicken in my chest. The bookshop was far too warm for how bitterly cold it was outside. “I’ll talk to Tom about it, see what he says,” his lips tipped at the edges, a soft gesture. “Sounds good to me, though.”

“Well,” I tried to swallow the dry feeling, to no avail. “That’s good.”

Two men speaking thick German squeezed past Oliver and I as we loitered in the small isle, trapped between shelves of literature. Our chests almost touched as the angered men pushed by. His hazel eyes lowered, hidden behind thick lashes. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me.

My lips suddenly felt numb, but Oliver’s breath was warm. I sucked in shallow amounts of air, smelled the scent of crisp new paper and tried to brace myself.

“Oli!” Tom appeared, poking his head around a stack of Dan Brown novels. “Pick up your fucking phone once in a while.”

Slowly, I gathered up the books that had been knocked down when I’d threw myself away from Oliver, hitting one of the shelves. Hiding behind my hair, I waited for my cheeks to stop burning. I watched Oliver’s feet shift weight uncomfortably as Tom growled at him.

We walked around for a little while, I mostly lagged behind, hiding my face behind the cover of English Language. I usually hated Classical novels, but Jane Austin suddenly became very interesting when I caught a flushed Oliver peek at me over his shoulder.

“I was looking for you two for ages,” Tom pursued to scorn us as we left the book shop, empty handed and awkward. Tom seemed non the wiser. “Ages!”

“Give it a rest, Tom,” Oliver grumbled. His brother went to bite back, but after receiving a deathly glare he buried his words at the back of his throat, brooding all the way back to the car.

I didn’t accept the offer of a lift home, just said goodbye to Tom, nodded at Oliver and walked back to the flat. Charlie was home, drawing pictures in wax crayon with Kaitlyn. Perhaps I had looked distressed because Charlie seemed to already know not to ask about the shopping trip. We had a cup of tea, I played with Kaitlyn for a while, but I soon retired to my room. The typewriter beckoned me, the keys poised at the ready.

Marlow had decided the moment that she’d been told the truth that she didn’t want to go home anymore. Why return to her mother, only to have to say goodbye such a short time later? It would make grieving so much worse. No, she would not return to her home. Acceptance of the end was all that she could do.

The end was coming. The world was dying. Few would survive; Marlow was one of those few. Kid had explained to her that there was a line of people, a line right through history of those that were supposed to last. All part of a divine plan to cleans the earth, a world to be reborn. It had all been done before, throughout time. The great flood, being one. Of course, there was no Noah’s Arc and two of each animal. But there was the line of those that were supposed to survive it all.

Why? She had wondered. Was the world really all that bad. Yes, there were the murderers, the rapists, the fascists. But her mother was no serial killer. As far as Marlow knew, her family had never put a foot out of line in their lives. But this didn’t seem to matter. They weren’t chosen.

“Who gets to choose who does and who doesn’t live?” Marlow had cried. “They aren’t God! They do not possess the power of a person’s free will. Who are these beings to decide this great cleansing?!”

Marlow had been mad, sarcastic even. Kid did not take kindly to her attitude. Of course, he had not expected her to understand such a thing right away, but he had wanted her to be a little more open minded. Not so prejudice. He did not understand the pain she would feel when all of her friends and family would be gone; it had been so long since he had been involved with anyone so intimately to feel sorrow for their passing.

“This is not your peoples planet,” he had repeated to her for what felt like too many times. “You are migrants of another world. A pollution. A virus that grew so out of control their was no choice but to try and control it in any way possible. Total extermination was not possible. You do not belong here, just as I do not.”

“How can you say such a thing. Compare the entire human race to a disease!”

“I can do so because we are the reason that the Earth is decaying. We have swarmed it and infected it with our greediness.” Kid did not want to see the girl cry. So instead he rose from his seat and turned away from her, facing out of the window. “We do not disserve to be here, Marlow. And those that have chosen are planning. I believe they want to cleanse entirely. I don’t know how, I did not believe it was possible. But they need to be stopped. And you are to help me.”

The night fell easily over the tavern they had bickered in for so many hours. Kid would sleep in the room adjacent of hers, but Marlow would not sleep at all, for she had far too much in her mind. Such deep and tormenting thoughts of everyone she knew being dragged into the dirt of the Earth, dead and gone forever. She could not say goodbye to her life entirely.

She remembered how sad she had been when her grandmother had passed away. The sorrow and longing she had felt then, she thought would never go away. It never did; she still missed Grandma Florey now, but she learned to hold the feeling close inside her, control it. But if everything she knew was to go, just as Grandma Florey did, all at once, she did not think she would be able to carry it inside her and still call herself a living creature. For what was the purpose of living if there is no person to live with?