by David Jester
“And why did you shut the kitchen door and open the back door? You weren’t smoking in there were you?”
He looked incredulous that I would even suggest such a thing. “No. I promised I wouldn’t smoke in your home and I didn’t. It got a little steamy and hot in there, I was just letting all of that out.”
“You sure? Because it smells funny in there.”
He shrugged it off and took a bite before speaking to me between chews, “It’s just the pizza. Your problem is you don’t know what freshly cooked food smells like. You eat too much processed shit.”
“Hm.” I stared at him until he finished chewing. He seemed to swallow with great difficultly, after which he returned my stare.
“I’m watching you,” I told him.
“Feel free, but the game is on in ten minutes and that might be a bit more interesting.”
Ah, Matthew, ever the optimist.
Lizzie had intended to go out with her friends, but when they didn’t show, she put Ben to bed and then came down to watch the game with us. She didn’t know a lot about soccer, but she wasn’t going to let that get in her way. And while Matthew and I discussed formations, tactical choices, and the inability of England’s midfield to gel like the continental teams that often show us up, Lizzie’s comments were a little less tactically minded and a little more one-sided.
“He just spat! Isn’t the ref going to book him?”
“You think they’d be tempted to just pick up the ball, wouldn’t you?”
“Only a straight man would wear bright orange boots with a white shirt.”
There was also a lot of aggression involved. She was usually quiet, only releasing her inner demons when she was angry, but when it came to sports, she turned into a beast, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what was happening.
I had called her on it before, but she didn’t even know she was doing it. She suggested that it probably had something to do with her grandfather. I wasn’t sure how to take that. I didn’t know if he was just an angry sports fan, or if he was some kind of vicious hooligan. I decided not to ask too many questions. I reasoned that ignorance was bliss, and if it was the latter, she might punch me.
Her lack of knowledge had nothing to do with not knowing the offside rule and falling to grasp other minor rules, and everything to do with the fact that she genuinely didn’t have a clue what was happening. It was half-time before she realized that the manager was not an overly enthusiastic fan, and when a player had his name taken for remonstrating with the ref, she thought the belligerent striker was giving the official his phone number.
Sports weren’t her thing, but that didn’t stop her from trying to understand them.
Matthew found her amusing and enjoyed it whenever she watched a game with us. To him, she was like the crazy old man that you find in every pub. The one who sits on his own at the edge of the bar, butting in on everyone’s conversations, offering irrelevant advice, shouting random obscenities, and generally being bat-shit crazy.
“It’s like she’s channeling an aggressive imbecile,” was how he put it, and I couldn’t argue with that.
The last time we watched a game, he began to worry that she was actually beginning to understand what was going on and would therefore lose her appeal. She got excited over every attack, every half chance, and even every corner. She overdid it a bit, and at one point she seemed to get her sports mixed up, thinking they scored when the ball cleared the crossbar, but she was on the right track and that worried Matthew. After nearly ninety minutes of excitement from her and no goals, England scored a winner in the dying moments and while everyone cheered, she remained silent.
“What happened?” she said when the cheering died down and we sat back down. “What in hell are you getting so excited about?”
Matthew could have kissed her at that moment. “She’s so adorable,” he had declared. “Can I keep her?”
This time, England scored early on and Lizzie cheered. She was on time, and that depressed Matthew, but after the goal, she began to settle into her usual routine, complaining about the player’s haircuts, the spitting, and the commentator’s voice.
“And what’s with the cameraman?” she asked, annoyed. “Doesn’t he know that women watch this shit, as well?”
Matthew shrugged. “Do they? I mean, for one thing, you just called it shit, which—”
“Shut it, dickhead,” Lizzie spat, definitely getting into the spirit. “If I wanted to listen to an asshole, I would have farted.”
Matthew grinned. He was in love.
“I mean, he spends most of the time finding the pretty girls in the crowd.”
“Which I am grateful for.”
Lizzie stared at Matthew until his heart froze inside his chest. “Sorry,” he squeaked.
“And when he does show the men, for the other ten percent of the time, it’s always the fat, ugly tossers that, quite frankly, no one wants to see. First of all, what kind of idiot would get a tattoo of their team across their chest.” I grinned as Matthew instinctively put a hand on his shoulder, where his sleeve covered the embarrassment of an England tattoo from when he thought his national side was good enough to warrant branding his flesh. “Secondly, why would they expose that chest to the entire world when they have bigger breasts than their wives?”
“Maybe they’re caught up in the moment. It happens to the best of us,” I offered, hoping she would take a hint, but knowing she wouldn’t.
“Maybe, or maybe they’re just fucking idiots.”
“Yeah,” Matthew chorused, keen to side with the woman who was quickly becoming the love of his life. “I agree. What she said.”
“You’re an idiot,” I whispered to him.
“Shut up or I’ll set your wife on you.”
At that point, Lizzie stood and Matthew nearly shit himself. He looked very edgy, and as I stared at him, I noted that his eyes were glassy.
“I’m going to grab some food,” she said. “You two want anything?”
“We’re good,” I said. “We just had pizza.”
“Oh, pizza,” she mumbled as she wandered into the kitchen.
I turned back to Matthew. “Although I should have asked you, shouldn’t I?”
“Sorry?”
“If you were hungry.”
“I’m not, we just ate, like you said.”
“Are you sure? You don’t have the munchies or anything?”
I saw him flinch. He was good at lying; that’s how he managed to convince so many women to sleep with him. He had called it charm and charisma, but only because he smiled when he lied to them.
“I do not know what you are talking about.”
“Oh God,” I mumbled.
A stoned Matthew was like no Matthew I had ever encountered. He was slow and methodical, and when he was trying to hide it, he was even slower and even more methodical, probably because his brain was taking so long to process the information.
“How did you do it?” I asked.
He gave me a long and blank stare as his muddled brain tried to find a way out of this maze. “I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Let’s just watch the game.”
I fired a few glances his way throughout the first half, but he was dead to the world, grinning and drooling like a baby staring at a bowl of candy. His brain had gone on vacation. He didn’t speak a single word for the rest of the half, and I wasn’t sure he moved either. I didn’t know how he had done it, but I knew from the look on his near-comatose face he had taken most of the bag.
Lizzie joined us again for the final half hour of the game. She practically stumbled into the room and threw herself down on the sofa. I had managed to rouse Matthew at that point, dragging him out of his coma and forcing him to face reality. I knew I was ruining his buzz, but I didn’t want Lizzie to think I was letting my friends get wasted in our house.
“You took your time,” I told her.
She turned to me, stared for a moment, and then n
odded before turning back to the television.
I swapped curious stares with Matthew, who shrugged his shoulders.
“Where did you go?” I asked her.
She turned back to me again. “I’m not sure,” she said, her voice laborious. “I mean, I know I went upstairs for a bit, but then I kinda got sidetracked and …” she shrugged. “Now I’m here.”
I gave Matthew another stare, this one more worried and annoyed than the last one.
“Did you find some food?” Matthew asked.
When she turned back and beamed at the both of us, I knew what had happened before she spoke. “Yes. I had some of your pizza. It was lovely.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I hissed at him. “You drugged the fucking pizza, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“And then you left it in the kitchen, in full fucking view?”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “It was a big pizza, I wasn’t that hungry.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Don’t get pissy with me, I also left some of yours in there!”
“Bah!” Lizzie cut in. “Fucking ham and pineapple, I ain’t touching that shit. But the other one, with the, the, the … what was it, exactly?”
“Dope.”
“Dope,” she said, sounding it out. “Yes. That was very nice. We should get some of that.”
“Well,” Matthew sat forward, sensing his opportunity. “If it’s dope you want, then—”
I grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back before leaning forward myself. “So, are you feeling okay, sweetie?”
The grin was still plastered across her face. I had never seen her happier, which delighted and terrified me in equal measures.
“I’m feeling great!” she announced.
Of course you are.
“You’ve got a lot to answer for,” I whispered to Matthew. “Drugging my wife. This is Chris Peterson’s fault. I told you he was a bad influence. He’s nothing but a little prick. He was a little prick at school and he’s a little prick now. Nothing’s changed. He didn’t mature. And if you don’t stop hanging around with him then he’ll drag you down to his level.”
He gave me a long and thoughtful stare. I thought my words were getting through to him, that in the wilderness of his inebriated brain, I was finally going to convince him to do the right thing, but those weren’t the thoughts his brain was processing.
“You knew Chris Peterson in school?”
I opened my mouth to fire a rebuttal and then promptly closed it again.
Shit.
12
The Stoning: Part Two
I didn’t need to worry about Matthew’s questions. I didn’t need to explain my history with Chris Peterson and, thankfully, I didn’t need to endure Matthew’s laughing and perverted curiosity as I recalled the time he had pushed me into the girls’ changing rooms. I didn’t need to do any of that because within a few seconds of the revelation, Matthew had moved onto something else, his attention span shorter than the queue for a Mel Gibson documentary on Jewish history.
It wasn’t the best when he was sober, but under the influence of dope, he was one sneeze, one overheard conversation, or one ringing telephone away from losing track. I’d been there before with him. I’d once accidentally blurted out his wife’s surprise plans for an upcoming birthday party, and while his stoned brain had computed what I had said, trying to find the meaning in it, I switched on the Cartoon Network and never heard about it again.
This time there were two of them, and they both seemed to keep each other occupied with mundane chatter and theories that bordered on the psychotic, but were somehow admissible when stoned. She listened to his theory on how television had been brainwashing us for years and was preparing us for a final war, which all seemed like fairly straightforward psychosis until he explained that the final war would be fought between thin people and fat people, with those of a medium build forced to starve themselves, gorge themselves, or face a life of uncertainty. He listened to her theory that all cats were secretly preparing to declare war on the human race, that their pandering was merely just to win the trust of the humans and to make the final conquest that much easier. I listened to both of their theories while secretly wishing I was dead and wondering if there was any of his special pizza left.
Once they had finished, they celebrated their descent into insanity with a drink of whiskey. I tried to stop them, but by then they had already reverted to an adolescent state and any attempts to create order led to a fit of tantrums.
“You can’t tell us what to do,” Matthew told me, his hand thrown around my wife’s shoulders like a pair of drunken rebels.
“We’ll be fine,” Lizzie assured me.
One drink led to two drinks, and before long I decided to join them. I didn’t want to get drunk, though—God knows where the two of them would have ended up without a partially responsible adult to take care of them. And I needed to make sure that there was a sober, responsible adult on call in case anything happened to Ben. He was probably good for the night now, but I didn’t want him to wake up to a house full of stoned, drunk people. I just wanted to take the edge off what was going to be a long night.
After the drinking, then the shouting, the laughing, and the joking started. I tried to join in, I really did, but I had no idea what was going on. I became a grumpy old party-pooper, a role that suited my mood perfectly, and one I had some experience in.
“You’re going to wake the baby,” I pleaded with them. They had ventured into the backyard, no doubt preparing to dance naked in the moonlight or set fire to the neighbors’ shed.
Lizzie gave me a long and hard stare before she asked, “What baby?”
My face dropped, and both Lizzie and Matthew took note, immediately bursting into laughter.
“Look at his face!” Matthew yelled, before prodding Lizzie several times. “Say it again, go on, say it again!”
“Grow up,” I spat.
Lizzie put her hands on her hips and mimicked me like a child, saying, “Grow up,” before sticking out her tongue and rocking her head back and forth. The joke was on her, though—I didn’t talk like that.
“I mean, seriously,” I implored. “You’re too old to be acting like this.”
“You’re too old,” Lizzie said, thrusting her finger at me.
“Yeah, you tell him.” Matthew nudged her again.
I had seen Matthew stoned many times, but this was new to me. He usually just sat there and kept quiet, occasionally talking absolute utter bullshit about something completely off-subject. In all honesty, it’s not something I minded. It was somewhat annoying when I needed to get a straight answer or a clear conversation out of him, but if he was silent then it meant he wasn’t being crude, rude, or incredibly sexist, so it had its upsides. This, however, I had never seen before and never wanted to see again. I didn’t know whether it was the added effect of the alcohol, or the fact that he had someone to be mischievous with.
“Oh, oh!” Lizzie said, sounding suddenly excited. “Look, a ball, let’s play!”
“Yes,” Matthew chimed in, clearly enjoying that idea. “We can do much better than those overpaid tossers.” He paused. “Are women allowed to play soccer?”
“Of course!” Lizzie said, surprising me by not kneeing him in the testicles and calling him a sexist pig. “There’s a women’s soccer league, World Cup and everything.”
Matthew looked genuinely shocked. “You’re shitting me.” He turned to me. “Did you know about this?”
I nodded.
“Woman and soccer, and no one thought to tell me? I mean, I need to see that. Do they do it completely naked? Are they oiled up?” Matthew had a hard time understanding any sport involving women. For many years, he believed that synchronized swimming was akin to pole dancing and was amazed when he discovered it was a sport. He was equally surprised to learn that the winners of mud wrestling matches were not contented men with empty balls, but the wrestlers themselv
es.
“They wear clothes, just like the men do,” Lizzie said.
Don’t tell him that. Not when he’s in this state. You’ll kill him.
Matthew was struggling with this one, but as soon as he had an image in his head, there was little anyone could do to alter it. “Don’t be stupid. How would we see their boobs juggle?”
Lizzie wasn’t in the mood for the physics of naked female soccer and wanted some action of her own. The ball she had spotted was in the neighbor’s garden, owned by a kid who had littered our garden with tennis balls and soccer balls plenty of times in the past. She headed straight for it, diving at the fence.
I tried to stop her, hissing at her as I tried to shout and whisper at the same time, but she was up and over before I could do anything.
Matthew looked at her and then back at me, the images of naked female soccer players put on the back burner for now. “Are you joining us?” he asked, a glint in his eye.
He didn’t give me time to answer. He bolted over the fence before I could say anything. Within seconds, I heard them both giggling and whispering on the other side.
“There it is!”
“They have a net here, as well. Come on, you get in goal, let’s play.”
I turned back to the house, instinctively looking upstairs, toward Ben’s room. I knew I couldn’t leave him, but I also knew that I couldn’t leave my wife and Matthew running riot around the neighborhood. While Ben was asleep, imprisoned by his crib and unlikely to do any harm, my wife and my best friend were free, trespassing and playing with stolen property.
Eddie, who had been sleeping on the bed upstairs last I’d seen him, came downstairs to see what the noise was all about. He stared at me, yawned, stared at the fence, and then waddled back into the house. That was enough excitement for one night.
“Look after Ben,” I told him.
He gave me a blank stare in reply. I took that to mean he understood, and I shut the back door, leaving it unlocked, before hopping over the neighbor’s fence.
Despite being the only sober one, I wasn’t as agile as Matthew or Lizzie and was also more prone to making an idiot of myself. That curse struck me when I made it to the top of the fence. I looked at the ground beneath me, judged my fall, and then went for it, not realizing that the back of my pants had become entwined on a loose nail. As I went down, my pants stayed up.
