by Adam Cloake
But the joy of this moment is short. The image of the delighted boy and girl is suddenly blocked out by the face of his wife, interposing itself. Dean tries not to hear Karen as she speaks, but her words are plain and vivid. She is reminding him that he is again being foolish and dishonest, this time, with himself. What he has been witnessing is not a memory; it’s just another of his deluded fictions.
“You weren’t around often enough, or for long enough, to tell them that many stories, or to cook them that many meals,” she insists. And then: “How would you know what their cheering sounded like? You barely paid them a moment’s attention.” And then: “Ronan was afraid of you. And Sally! Well, she was just indifferent.”
With relief, he sees Karen’s face fade away.
But it is instantly replaced by the face of Pavel. And Pavel has brought a list with him. “Late at least once a week! Stoned at least twice a week! Too much back-chat, too little productivity! Despite our friendship, Dean, you were the worst employee I ever had.” Dean must now admit that the reluctant, regretful shake in Pavel’s head on that final workday had mostly been relief.
He hears again the disappointed voices of friends who loaned him money, and never saw it returned. There are women, many of them, who rise again within his mind, bringing with them a myriad of disappointed physical detail. Even his parents briefly drop by, thoughtlessly sporting their crash-created scars and crushed faces, to deliver their own bevy of complaints about his childhood brattishness.
Dean tries to deny the veracity of these memories in favour of his happier, falser ones. But he can’t. He tries to blame the poison powder for sending his mind astray along a twisty path, but he can’t do this either. He cannot deny that he deserves his own loneliness, that the map to this alley of isolation was drawn up solely by himself. And it’s a map long in the making.
With three minutes remaining, this painful realisation is accompanied by a fresh gust of wind, stronger than its departed older brother, the lighter breeze from before. With more insistence, this new gust pushes the white object along the ground, closer to Dean. He squints into the darkness. He can see now that the thing is an envelope. As it draws closer, the stench in Dean’s nostrils grows stronger. The foul odour seems to be on the wind itself, as it pushes the envelope towards him. It’s a smell like rotten breath. His grandfather had a smell like this. It came from deep within the old man’s lungs.
The envelope comes to rest touching Dean’s fingertips. The wind dies down, as if its job is done. The stench abates, but just a little.
As he stares down at the crumpled object, the poison sends a shudder through him, seeming to attack all his organs at once. The pharmacist had been mistaken. Or he had lied. The bastard! Dean is experiencing what will be the first in a series of alarms. His body is signalling to him to prepare. Just two more minutes left now!
Despite the unpleasant feeling, like needles washing through his veins, Dean finds that his curiosity has become bizarrely focussed on that envelope. It is practically staring up at him, like a little pet wanting to be picked up. In all his earlier imaginings of this moment, he has never seen himself use the last of his strength to examine something as innocuous as a stray envelope.
Now, however, with just over a minute left, his curiosity finally defeats him.
He stretches out his hand, and picks up the envelope.
He smooths out the plastic window with his thumb.
He reads the name and address.
To his shock, he sees that they are his own. At least, the name is his own. The address used to be.
The postmark tells him that the letter was sent a week earlier. Those people! Those awful people living in his home! They must have received this letter, and cruelly chosen to discard it to the wind. And the wind had blown it here. Or something in the wind.
As his eyes begin to lose their focus, Dean rips open the flap. Inside is a typed letter.
The banner head is that of a London publishing company.
Through the gathering mist in his eyes, Dean reads. A light weight on his left shoulder tells him that something else is reading along with him.
They hope their letter finds him well. They have read – and were greatly impressed by – his recently submitted novel, titled Don’t Do This! They praise the darkness of his writing and the unsettling ambiguity of his characters. They can see potential for his work in a wide market place. They hope they can arrange a meeting with him at his earliest convenience to discuss the publishing and marketing of the novel. An advance payment will, of course, be forthcoming.
The letter is still open on Dean’s lap a minute later, as the sound of the Demon’s cackling fades from his ears.
Grey Cat
Although his excitement was clear, Alan turned the pages of the sketch book with care and reverence. It was filled with photos, drawings, and descriptive detail, which Alan was sharing with the boy sitting on the grass next to him. They were both thirteen years old, but Alan felt like he had kept these secrets hidden under his bed for an eternity. Now, finally, it seemed he had found the ideal moment to show them to someone else.
Ben, the older boy by just a few weeks, had very little knowledge of the images being described to him, but he was willing to give his new friend a full hearing. After all, they were still getting to know each other.
They were sitting side-by-side at a riverbank on the outskirts of Killora. It was a warm September Saturday, just a couple of miles walk from their respective townlands. Ben sat on his crumpled jacket, but Alan had brought a towel along to act as a cushion. Everything about the day seemed languid and peaceful.
There was not the slightest hint of the imminent outbreak of violence which was about to change both their lives forever.
“I love this colour,” Alan said, his voice reedy with enthusiasm. “That's Hedy Lamarr in Samson And Delilah. I wasn’t sure if that frock was orange or brown, but I just love the way she drapes it over her arm. See?” The boys were looking at a glossy print of Lamarr’s untroubled pout. She sat looking off to her right, her thumbs seemingly kneading her fingers, as if she had been interrupted while meditating.
The page had the same combination of photographs and sketches as all the other pages in the book. Ben could see that Alan liked to first glue in a photo, usually one he had cut from some sort of film magazine. He then made sketches around the rest of the page, based on that image. His sketches were magnificent. Not only were they perfect copies of the photos, but they were also vivid and thrilling in their own way. They had clearly been created within the mind of a genuine artist.
Alan turned the page. “Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday! See the little bow at her waist? And the medallion? She played a princess in the film. She really does look like one, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, she's lovely, all right,” Ben agreed, attracted to the image, but also slightly amused, as he always was, by the light manner in which the other boy spoke. As he looked across at Alan, Ben could see that the voice perfectly fitted his overall delicacy. Alan was small and thin, his features darkly – but delicately – handsome, almost Italian or Spanish. His hair was a pure black, his eyebrows sharply defined above deep grey eyes. The prominent lines of his jaw and cheekbones gave his face a thin prettiness, almost the male equivalent of the picture of Audrey Hepburn which lay open on his lap. Ben, taller and stockier, with a round face and prickly reddish-blonde hair, felt it easy to admire Alan. And yet, he often feared this admiration, asking himself why he should be drawn to someone so different from himself.
The boys had attended separate primary schools, miles apart, to either side of Killora, so they had met for the first time just three weeks earlier at their new Comprehensive. They found themselves sharing a desk on their first day in Art class, and Ben became instantly fascinated by Alan’s artistic gift, whether with paint, crayon, or marker. Alan had shown him how he was also playing around with some more unusual media, like charcoal and candle wax.
Ben had very littl
e skill in Art himself. He presumed this was a result of his wide, awkward fingers, in contrast to the narrow delicacy of Alan’s. Ben was more adept with words, preferring History, Geography, and languages. He was used to being praised for the imagination shown in his essays and compositions. Ben’s secret, kept hidden even from Alan, was that he passed many of his evenings writing his own superhero stories, based on what he found in Marvel and DC comics. Ben allowed his characters, like The Blue Raven, or Captain Trident, to indulge themselves in copious amounts of violent, after-midnight crimefighting, while the city slept safely around them. Strangely, although Alan was willing to share his sketches and drawings with his new friend, Ben had chosen to keep his own dabblings to himself.
Alan flicked through more pages. With relief, Ben learned that Alan was also interested in male outfits. He was showing him images of Robert Redford in The Sting, Errol Flynn in his Robin Hood green, and someone called Michael Rennie, wearing a futuristic silver jumpsuit in The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Alan also revealed some of his original ideas, in sketches of devious clowns, medieval sorcerers, and aliens – both benign and menacing. The costumes were colourful, elaborate, bizarre. And they were wonderful.
“And you intend to make all these things?” asked Ben, with incredulity. “Like, seriously, with your own hands?”
“I'm going to give it a try, anyway. I've already started playing around with some of the materials. See this one?” Carefully riffling to a page near the back, he said, “This is one of the outfits Ingrid Bergman wore in Casablanca. I've been giving it a go in my bedroom. Obviously trying to keep it under wraps, though. I don't know what the aul’ pair would say if they knew what I was up to.”
“You mean you already have some of this stuff, this material?” asked Ben, pointing at the partly open white dress, and the black and white horizontal stripes which dropped from its short sleeves.
“I do!” was Alan's proud reply. “I bought it with my Confirmation money. I could only afford a small amount of the fabric, and there's no way I can afford a sewing machine right now. But I have plenty of needle and thread, and I’ll soon be able to buy one of those rotary blades. That’ll come in handy. I'm learning a little bit at a time.”
“Amazing!” replied Ben, slowly shaking his head.
“I love Casablanca!” Alan enthused. “It’s a great film. I’d love to go there someday.”
“Where is it?” asked Ben.
“It’s in Africa.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Ben said, crinkling his nose. “Sounds kinda hot.”
“But have a look at this!” Alan continued. “This is the sort of challenge I'm really after,” He opened the last page of the book. Now they were looking at a photo of Michelle Pfeiffer in the Catwoman suit from Batman Returns. As usual, it was accompanied by a near-perfect sketch. The film had been released in cinemas during that summer - 1992 - and everybody had been talking about it.
“This stuff’s PVC,” said Alan, as he ran his graceful fingers down the image. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Ben couldn't help but agree. For a moment, as silly as it sounded, he was almost tempted to ask Alan if he could make him something similar, for the Blue Raven or the White Scorpion.
Alan said, “This was the costume that really got me thinking last summer, you know, about how much I'd like to do this kind of thing. Like, in the film business.” He laughed. “If I ever got the chance to make this, I'd even wear it myself.”
“I'll bet you would,” was Ben's reply, laughing along with the budding designer. “You could wear it running around the rooftops at night.”
“Most of the rooftops in this town are triangular,” was Alan's response. “I'd fall off them.”
“Yeah! You'll have to go fight crime in the big city instead.”
“I'd be like the Cat Man of Dublin City, Ireland’s very own Gotham.”
“No. not Cat Man!” said Ben. “You need a more original name than that.”
“Like what?”
“How about The Grey Cat?” said Ben instantly. This was one of his newest creations. He still hadn’t decided if the character was a hero or a villain.
“The Grey Cat!” said Alan, pushing his lower lip out over his upper one, his eyebrows raised as he nodded slowly. “Yeah, I think I like that.”
“'The Remarkable Grey Cat!’”
“Better and better,” Alan chuckled, although he wasn’t so sure he liked the extra adjective.
They continued to laugh together through the remainder of the afternoon. Despite the energy Alan had displayed when talking about clothes and really old films, he also proved to be a good listener when the subject moved on to Ben's fascinations. He seemed happy to listen to the other boy talk about various sports, especially football, a game that held no interest at all for Alan. Ben took a pack of football cards from his pocket, and dealt through them, describing facts about his favourite players, firing off statistics about various games, tournaments, scorelines.
They chatted like this until 5.30, when they realised they were getting hungry. The warmth and calmness of the day was making way for an evening breeze, so they were happy to put on their jackets as they got ready to leave.
“When I have more designs, I'll show them to you,” Alan said, as he packed the sketch pad and the towel into his rucksack. “I might work on one just for you. A football kit, maybe.”
“Yeah, sure!” Ben said, laughing. “Like one from an old black-and-white film.”
They started moving off in the direction of the road.
“Or one that Ingrid Bergman might have worn,” Alan joked.
“No! No! No!” Ben said, playfully showing Alan his open palm. “Don’t say that!”
As soon as he said this, he saw three older boys emerge from behind a line of trees, off to their right. Instantly, he felt his stomach tighten,
Brogan, the tallest and broadest of the three, wore a leather jacket. In one hand, he held a short branch, which he had been paring with a blood-coloured penknife. As he approached Alan and Ben, Brogan threw the branch aside, and dropped the knife into his jacket pocket.
The boys with him, Smith and Murray, wore t-shirts, despite the evening chill. Their short jackets were tied around their waists. The tightness of the t-shirts displaying how slim they were, with trim muscles rippling beneath the fabric. They all attended Alan’s and Ben’s new school, although all three of them were older; Brogan was 15, the other two 14.
“Awww!” Brogan said, “I was hoping you two girls would start kissing.” With this, he began making grotesque smacking sounds with his lips. These sounds were obediently imitated by his two henchmen, with only limited success.
“Shut up, Brogan!” said Alan, despite the rush of fear he was feeling.
“Yeah! Leave it out, lads!” said Ben. He thought how feeble this line sounded, and realised that he was suddenly more nervous than he usually was in confrontations like this. He had gone to the same primary school as Brogan and his crew, and had been threatened by them many times before, but had always found a way out of any trouble. Ben had never had to throw a punch in his life.
He quickly realised that the thing which was making him most nervous was that they had found him with Alan.
“What were you two homos doing anyway?” said Brogan. “Talking about getting married, were you?”
“Yeah!” said Murray, the smallest of the three. “They were reading something. What was it, girls? Was it about wedding dresses?” The three of them joined in harsh, guttural laughter. From the corner of his eye, Alan saw Ben take a step away from him. He hoped he wasn’t thinking about running away. Because it was a Saturday, no-one except Alan was carrying a bag. If there was to be a chase, he would be the one laden with disadvantage. Ben might get away, but he wouldn’t.
“Well then? Are you two homos gonna show us what you were looking at, or not?” Brogan directed this at Alan, but his eye quickly moved to Ben.
Shaken by the look, Ben s
houted, “I'm not a fucking homo!” His voice was louder than he had intended. There was a note of desperation in it.
Brogan sensed this. Deviously, he said, pointing at Alan, “Oh, so you’re saying he is, are you?”
Smith and Murray laughed even louder. Smith rubbed his hands provocatively over his own chest and stomach, saying, “What do you girls do when you’re in bed together? Go on, tell us!”
Ben lunged towards Smith, but Brogan was ready for this. He grabbed him, wrapping his strong arms around Ben’s arms and chest.
The other two immediately took their cue from their leader. Before Alan could move to assist his friend, Smith and Murray jumped on him. Murray punched him in the upper arm, and Smith swung at his stomach. Shocked and winded, Alan fell to the grass. When he tried to get up, Murray surprised him by landing a very swift, very painful kick just below his ribs. The suddenness of the move shocked Alan. He felt himself bounced away from reality for a few moments, but the delayed burst of agony in his side soon brought him back. As well as the crippling pain, the foremost thought in Alan’s mind was that single word “homo”. He had been called it many times before, but he still felt repelled by the unpleasant sound of it.
And this word had been used not just by the bullies. He had also heard it spat, like poison, from the mouth of his friend.
Now he was forced to hear it again.
“I'm not a fucking homo, all right!” Ben was protesting, as he wriggled around in Brogan’s arms. Being two years older, Brogan was taller and stronger.
“Oh, yeah?” said Smith, his left foot pressing down on Alan’s back. “So why do you hang around with one then?”
“Look, I don’t hang around with him, OK!” Ben replied, dropping his voice. His tone became more conciliatory than a moment earlier. “I was just sitting down, looking through my football cards, and he came along and sat down beside me. I didn't want him to. The guy gives me the fucking creeps.”
To Alan’s ears, Ben wasn’t just explaining himself. He was bargaining with Brogan and the others. He was trying to blend with them.
