by David Jester
“That’s a shame,” she said, looking genuinely disappointed. “Will you be here tomorrow?”
I smiled back, ready to answer, but someone answered for me.
“No.”
My smile turned into a frown. Unless my mouth was fucking with me, then I hadn’t said that. I turned to look at Ben, wondering if he had just spoken his first word, if he was trying to tell me something, but he grinned back at me with the same vacant expression that he always had. “You can tell he’s your child,” my mother would say when she saw it. “He has that stupid look on his face.”
I turned back to Charlotte to apologize for what must have been a minor stoke when I saw that her attention was aimed above me. That’s when the realization hit, when I recognized the voice.
“Hi, what are you doing here?” I asked as I greeted my wife. I was smiling at her, hoping she would reciprocate, but she looked like she would sooner cut off my smile and wear it than commit to one of her own.
“I think you better go,” I whispered to Charlotte, for her safety and for mine.
“Yes,” Lizzie said, stepping around to the front of the bench so that we could both see her. Eddie also saw her and decided to break the tension by humping her leg. “I think you should leave.”
“Who is this, Kieran?” Charlotte asked, giving me a look that asked if she should be worried, a look that speculated that the woman whose leg was being sexually assaulted might be an insane stalker.
“Yes, Kieran, who am I?” Lizzie asked.
“Well, if you don’t know then—”
“This is no time for jokes. Tell her,” Lizzie said.
I sighed, lowering my head into my chest. “It’s my wife,” I said feebly.
“Sorry?” Charlotte asked.
I looked at her and nodded. “Yes, she’ll make sure of that.”
“You’re damn right I will.” Lizzie reached down, took Ben away from me, strapped Eddie to his lead, and then kicked me in the shins, forcing me to spring to my feet.
“I didn’t know you were married,” Charlotte said.
I showed her the ring on my finger. I had never taken it off and had simply tried to keep the hand hidden. I felt like removing it would be breaking a cardinal sin, while if I just let them assume I wasn’t married, and surreptitiously hid my hand, it would be okay.
“But I thought we had something,” Charlotte said, sounding hurt. “I told you everything.”
I shrugged. I was a little baffled as to why she thought that was relevant, as if the fact that I was married would have stopped her from telling me about her incestuous ex, but now wasn’t the time for those sort of arguments. It was the time for other arguments, ones with more screaming and much less interactivity on my behalf.
We left Charlotte on the bench, but as we walked away, with Lizzie seemingly keen to drag me somewhere quiet before butchering me, another one of my fans was heading our way. She waved to me excitedly and I tried to ignore her, but that only made her more frantic and that’s when she shouted my name.
Lizzie glared at me. “Be polite, wave back to your little whore.”
I gave her a little wave and, just when I thought it was over, she blew a kiss. The kiss was probably intended for Ben or Eddie, but it didn’t put me in the best light either way.
“How could you do this?” Lizzie said, finally snapping when we were on the road back to our house, with Eddie on his chain and Ben in his stroller.
“I’m sorry, nothing happened.”
“And how can I be sure of that?”
I shrugged. “It was just a bit of mindless flirting. I got carried away. They were there to see Ben and Eddie, not me. I was just an added bonus. An idiot on the side who told stupid jokes and made them laugh.”
Lizzie nodded. “Yes, an idiot, that explains you perfectly. This is why you were going on all those walks. I knew something was amiss, I knew you were up to something.”
I nodded and hung my head. “It was harmless and nothing happened, honest.”
“I would never do anything like this to you, so how—”
I saw my chance and decided to use it before it passed. I raised my head, suppressed a smile, and seized on her like a mongoose striking against a deadly cobra.
“What about Max’s party?” I asked her. “When all those geriatrics were stumbling around you, offering to take you back to their retirement homes so you could suck their saggy scrotums and watch Murder, She Wrote?”
“That was different,” she said.
“How, exactly?”
“Because I’m a woman. I was just having fun. That’s the way it works. It’s okay when women do it, but when men do it, they’re after something.”
“Bullshit. What makes you think I wasn’t just having fun, as well?”
“Because you’re a man, and you don’t think with your brain, you think with your penis.”
“I saw you that night. I saw you way you smiled, the way you played with your hair and rubbed your nipples. If men think with their penises, then you were definitely thinking with your vagina.”
Her mouth gaped open and she looked incredulous, but when it sank in, she realized I was probably right, which made me happy for a brief moment and then incredibly worried for a longer one.
“And I wasn’t rubbing my nipples,” she told me.
“You may as well have been.”
She nodded. “Okay,” she said with a long sigh. “Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s not different. I just got carried away, and I’m willing to believe that you did the same.”
I nodded. “Although I got carried away with attractive young women, you got carried away with men old enough to be your grandfather.”
“Good point.”
“I mean, one of them looked like he was going to have a stroke next to the buffet table when he saw you puff out your chest, and when I say stroke I mean—”
“Yes, yes, you mean his penis. I get it. Very funny.”
She was humoring me, but I could take that as a win. I nodded proudly. “Thank you, although I’d appreciate it if you let me finish my jokes.”
She slapped me on the arm, gave me a smile and a shake of her head. “Come on then, Mr. Funny Man. Let’s get you home before you start screwing everything with a Justin Bieber backpack and a squeaky giggle.”
“And let’s get you home in time for bingo.”
11
The Stoning: Part One
“I have nothing against drugs, and I’ll be the first to admit to trying a few in my time, albeit inadvertently, but they don’t work for me.”
From the look that Matthew gave me, you’d think I’d dropped my pants and pissed on his shoes.
I shrugged in reply to his disgust. “They just turn me into an idiot.” His distaste reverted to a smile, but I jumped in before he could reply. “More of an idiot,” I added, doing the work for him.
He seemed disappointed.
“And since when have you been into drugs?” I asked.
“I’m not into drugs,” he told me. “I smoke a bit of dope, that’s all.”
“You know that’s a drug, right?”
He glared at me fiercely. “Out of the two of us, which one got high on prescription medication and insulted a room full of women at a speed-dating event?”
I hung my head in shame. It was a day I had tried to forget, but Matthew wouldn’t let me. What was one of my biggest embarrassments was Matthew’s wet dream. I was sure the only reason we were still friends was because he enjoyed reminding me of my embarrassing moments and then watching as I made more. Maybe that was what true friendship was all about.
“Yeah, I thought so. Keep your opinions to yourself, McCall.”
Matthew had come over to watch the soccer game, but instead of bringing a few beers, he brought a small bag of cannabis. He bought it from one of his many dodgy friends, people he hung out with because they reminded him of his youth—mainly because they lived with their parents and spent their days masturbating and talking shit
.
He used to spend all of his free time with me. This had its upsides, but there were many more downsides. In the last few weeks, he had spent more time with a new group of people.
“I’ve known them forever,” he’d told me, which was a complete lie. He hadn’t known anyone as long as me, and we didn’t meet until I was seventeen. After meeting Matthew, very few people stuck around. All of the women in his life, minus his wife, rarely gave him more than a few months before disappearing off the face of the earth, and those were only the ones he didn’t sleep with. For the ones he did sleep with, he was probably the one who disappeared off the face of the earth.
Matthew had a weird way of choosing friends. Basically, anyone who had enough self-loathing and enough of an inferiority complex to look up to him; anyone who wasn’t offended by things that should offend everyone; and anyone who had so little luck with the opposite sex that they looked up to his misadventures as something to aspire to. That described my younger self perfectly, and it also described Marcus, but with these other “friends,” the tables had turned somewhat. Matthew seemed to be the one who looked up to them, as though the fact that they sat around in their underpants all day, masturbating to Game of Thrones reruns and ordering around parents who had all but given up on retirement and life, was something to aspire to.
“I really don’t know what you see in those guys,” I said, for what must have been the hundredth time.
He shrugged and gave me the answer that he always gave me: “I guess they’re just cool. You don’t know them so you wouldn’t know.”
But what Matthew had yet to realize was that I did know his dimwitted friends, as I had gone to school with one of them. Chris Peterson was the laziest and most pathetic of Matthew’s lazy and pathetic friends. He was the self-abuser who the other self-abusers looked up to, the one whose crude jokes and lewd come-ons had gotten them all barred from the local clubs and blacklisted by the female population.
I hated him and I always had. It was probably going a bit too far to say that he was my arch nemesis, but he was definitely my arch nemesis. If I was Superman then he would be an overweight and sweat-stained Lex Luthor. If I was Spiderman, then he would be whatever fat and sweaty adversary Spiderman had. He was one of the few people in the world who made me sick at the mere thought of him. And not just because he beat the crap out of me and locked me in the girls’ changing rooms. Although that did help.
I thought that Chris would recognize me by name, just as I had done with him, but the fact that Matthew hadn’t said anything led me to believe that Chris had either forgotten about me—losing my memory among the faces of the dozens of innocent kids he had tortured—or Matthew was so ashamed of me that he hadn’t mentioned me. I didn’t know which one I would have preferred the least, so I tried not to think about it. I didn’t want Matthew knowing about my history with Chris anyway. I wasn’t sure how that would be received, but I knew it wouldn’t be comfortable.
“Do you want some?” Matthew asked. “The game is starting in an hour; it’ll make it a lot more interesting.”
“England is playing,” I reminded him. “The only thing that would make it more interesting is if we changed the channel.”
He shrugged. “Your loss. Mind if I smoke this outside?”
“Yes, actually, I do.”
“What?” He looked baffled. He was already on his way to the back door, but he stopped and gave me a blank stare.
“I do mind. You’re not smoking that outside my house.”
“But—But—” He paused to stare at the bag of cannabis before moving his eyes back to me. “Are you kidding me?”
“You’re not polluting my air.”
“Kieran, we’ve had this discussion before. You don’t own the air outside your house just like you didn’t own that duck that you tried to kidnap.”
“How dare you!” I said. “I loved that duck. And I did not try to kidnap it.”
“Whatever you did, it was weird.”
“There was nothing weird about it.”
“Dude, it was a fucking duck.”
I glared at him until he wiped the smile from his face and apologized. “Okay, I take it back, I’m sorry I said that about Donald—”
“—Mickey.”
“—Mickey.” He arched his eyebrows. “Mickey? Okay, anyway, can I smoke outside or what?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No. Not only are we adults, but I have a baby, for God’s sake.”
“He’s asleep upstairs, he won’t mind.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s irresponsible. I don’t want you using drugs anywhere near my child.”
He grunted, but gave in. I felt more responsible than I had ever done. It scared me a little.
He looked toward the front door, but I knew he wouldn’t go out there and smoke. As much as he liked to put on an air of confidence, when it came to the police, he was scared shitless. He’d had a few run-ins with them before—as you would expect from a man who treated the female race like supermarket samples—and on every encounter he turned into a repenting, nervous little boy. I knew why, because I knew how his mind worked. He had convinced himself that he was too pretty for jail and that he would wind up as a sex slave, passed around the prison like a forbidden cigarette.
“Can I make some food then?” he asked, putting the bag back in his pocket. “I’m hungry.”
He walked into the kitchen and I followed him. Matthew had always treated my home like his own. When we first moved in, I had made the mistake of telling him to make himself at home. Three weeks later, he had done just that, only stopping short of leaving his toothbrush on my sink and his porn mags under my bed.
“I thought we were going to get a pizza.”
“I’ll make one, how about that?”
Something was amiss. “You want to cook? You only ever cook when …” I trailed off as something dawned on me. “You’re not trying to have sex with me, are you?”
He winked at me and I suddenly knew how all of his sexual conquests had felt. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to vomit or swoon. “You’re not my type, trust me. Come on, it’s a piece of cake. You have cheese and tomato sauce, right?”
I had no idea; Lizzie did the cooking and didn’t let me anywhere near the oven. Or the fridge. In fact, the kitchen was pretty much out-of-bounds. She said I was a liability. In her words, “You’re the only person I know that could burn the dinner while washing the dishes.” She also said that if I had it my way, I would subsist on a diet of pork rinds, biscuits, and tea. I personally didn’t see anything wrong with that.
“Of course,” I said, not wanting to expose my cooking inadequacies to a man who already knew all of my other inadequacies.
“And the ingredients for dough?”
That one threw me. I did what I usually do when someone says something I don’t understand. I just smiled until he clarified.
“Flour and water.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding, as if I knew all along. “Of course. The tap is there and the flour …” I mumbled and then left the kitchen.
Good luck with that.
I felt like I had won that little battle. I had escaped without looking like a complete simpleton who didn’t know what dough—or pizza, for that matter— was made from. But the relief had clouded my judgement, and I had missed the fact that a friend who hated to cook and loved to get the better of me was doing both of those things in my kitchen.
I was shocked, and a little appalled, as I stared at the plate that Matthew handed me, wondering what sort of monster had used it as a toilet. “This is a pizza?” I didn’t know a lot about food, but I could tell the difference between something edible and something that required a call to the emergency services and a hazmat suit.
“It tastes a lot better than it looks.”
“It would fucking have to.”
He gave me The Look, the one I had received from Lizzie on a number of occasions but never thought I would receive
from Matthew. It was The Look that always preceded The Talk, the one that began, “I have slaved over that,” and led to a barrage of noises that only dogs could hear and culminated with sleeping on the couch.
“It’s lovely, though,” I said quickly, almost instinctively. I hadn’t even tasted it yet. “But why is mine different from yours?”
He studied my plate with a mouthful of pizza, chewing and chomping like an animal, his chin flecked with strands of warm cheese. “I made yours especially. It’s ham, sweet corn, and pineapple—all that freaky shit that should never be allowed on a pizza, but that you insist on eating.”
That cheered me up. I looked down at my plate to confirm what he had said. I could see the ham; it was a little blacker than I was used to but it was there. I could also see the pineapple and sweetcorn, looking somewhat shriveled next to the blackened pieces of ham. I had seen better, there was no doubt about that. Even without taking a bite, I could also tell that I had tasted better, but coming from someone who I wouldn’t trust to pour me a pint without leaving me sick, maimed, or wet, I was quite impressed.
“And what’s yours?” I asked.
“Just cheese and tomato.”
“And what’s the green stuff?” I asked, pointing to the substance that seemed to have leaked oil onto his plate.
He stared at it for a moment, slowly chewing. “Pepperoni?”
My eyebrows narrowed to a point. “What do you mean, pepperoni? Is that a question or are you suddenly a teenage girl from Australia?”
“It’s pepperoni,” he said with a slow nod, staring at me all the while.
“It doesn’t look like pepperoni.”
“What does it look like?”
I inspected it closely. “Herbs?”
“Ah, you’re right,” he said, his nod much quicker now.
“I’m right?”
“Yes. It’s herbs.”
“Really?”
He was grinning now, his mouth still working tirelessly as he chomped through the suspect pizza. “Yes.”
