by John Lynch
I blink, and then I close my eyes. When I open them she has gone. Time has passed.
The Boys
I’m telling myself that I care. But I don’t. The truth is I liked the Troubles that held sway in this tiny state of ours for so many years. It told me that the terror I felt in my bones since the day I was born had a name, and everywhere I looked I could see it in action. Man killing man, killing woman, killing child. I resent the glee I can see in the faces of the people around me, some I know, and some I don’t care if I never do. I am in a bar on the outskirts of town. I thought that I could escape the bleating horns and the flag waving but I was wrong. Everywhere I look it seems as if the streets are blooming tricolours, they hang from open windows and passing cars. They line the roads like over-eager trees showing their blossoms before summer has arrived. I am trying to get drunk quickly to disappear into the past where the bogeymen still wore balaclavas and shouldered an Armalite or two. I read somewhere that there is no such thing as victory and that both sides lose when they decide to engage. I feel like spitting it into the face of the man who is grinning at me across our half-empty pint glasses.
‘We showed them,’ he says. ‘Don’t fuck with the boys,’ he continues.
I nod and look away, hoping that when I look back he will have found a new victim for his vainglory.
‘The boys will do you every fucking time,’ he says.
I look back and stare at him.
‘What boys?’
‘The boys in green.’
‘You mean fucking elves. Or sprites or some fucking thing…’
‘What?’
‘Elves.’
‘You taking the piss?’
‘No. Are you?’
‘Oh fuck off.’
‘No, you fuck off,’ I say.
I can see him debating whether to drop it. I can almost read each thought as they pass across his beady little eyes. It’s when he nods at me, his eyes full of anger, that I know that he’s decided to pursue it. But he’s drunk and I’m not yet so I wait, knowing that I have very little to fear from this small man who wants the world to be full of fanfares and victory parades. He sits there and I know that he’s working up his next line of attack. I feel sorry for him, he looks comical and I know that somewhere he realises that no-one has won, no-one ever does. I wait, holding him with my eyes, watching for any sudden movement. But when he speaks all he can say is: ‘Fucking elves. Are you with us or are you not?’
‘I’m not with anyone,’ I spit back.
‘People like you don’t…’
‘Don’t what?’
‘You couldn’t give a fuck. But when there’s a knock at the fucking door and some fucker’s there, wanting to do you and your family damage…then…then…’
‘Then?’
‘Then you’ll come running.’
‘Oh please…’
‘You know. You fucking know…’
‘You’ve been watching too many fucking films.’
‘You’ll see. You’ll fucking see. They thought they had us, the cunts. They thought that they could fuck us up. Think again, you bastards.’
As he says this he gets to his feet and raises his pint glass above his head and looks around the bar. Someone gently taps him on the head with a large green, white and gold inflatable plastic hammer. The people around us laugh, one of them a young man with spiky red hair nudges me in the back. I turn round to find myself staring into his eyes. They are hard, and glitter like frost on stony ground.
‘I heard what you said,’ he says to me.
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah. There’s a word for people like you.’
‘Is there?’
‘Yeah. And a place too. It’s not far from here. It’s a small beach. Where fuckers like you can rest in peace.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Yes, I am. That’s exactly what I’m doing.’
Baby Man
How beautiful he was, like fresh snow on old tired ground. His eyes were wide, his small hands pawing at life. The doctor congratulated us, he moved with a businesslike air as if he was in a boardroom. He had seen it all before; I resented him, I wanted to push his nose into the miracle that was before him. You sensed this in me and squeezed my hand and looked for calm in my eyes.
I hadn’t drunk that day. I wanted to be present. I remember you were pleased and had given me a tight little hug when I arrived. You did what you always did, smelled me, and checked my breath as my head came close to yours. You were very good at it; after all you’d had a lot of practice. You gave me a smile and led me to our son. I said something like shouldn’t you be resting, and you said no, that you were strong; you said it almost as a challenge, as if I doubted you. Anyway, you said the doctor was a practical man and believed in people getting on with things.
I said that the doctor sounded like an idiot and you said, why does everyone have to be an enemy? They don’t, I said. Then you gave me that look that you wore more and more whenever I was around, that look of disappointment.
So I came to see our son as prepared as I could be. I was clean, I wore a jacket, the one you insisted I buy, and a fresh shirt that I had hurriedly ironed that morning. Yes, I was alcoholfree but my skin spoke of it every chance it had. It felt tight on the bones of my body. Fear lay across the palms of my hands, and my eyes questioned everything they saw, that is of course until I saw our child.
As we gazed down at him, and I looked to you and I saw the love in your eyes, we were briefly joined and the world we had built righted itself and hope fluttered like a flag in a sudden breeze. But that moment gave birth to another darker one, and I saw you move from me across the burning love you felt for our newborn child and look back at me as if to say that now you had found what you had spent your life looking for. Here was someone you could mould and teach. I remembered that night years before on the pier, when you told me that love was doing, not just saying. I never understood what you meant until I saw you look at our son. I knew then that I was losing you, and that the towers of our love were falling.
That night I lay with a prostitute. She was Korean, and younger than you, she was soft and fresh like a spring flower. She worked out of a house not far from the hospital, and her room smelled of old sweat and fading perfume. She called me Baby and for the best part of an hour fooled me into thinking she cared. She was good at the act, the one that involved touch and noises that women make to reassure men that the world is not as cold as they think it is.
An old woman had answered the door and brought me to the small room that had a massage table in it with a blue, worn towel draped over it. She looked at me for a moment, eyeing me up and down before asking me if I had been there before. I said yes, I lied.
‘When?’
‘A few months ago.’
‘What girl?’
‘What?’
‘What girl?’
‘A young one.’
‘No, what girl you with last time?’
‘Can’t remember…She was pretty.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Is there a problem?’
‘You police.’
‘No.’
‘Wait here.’
She left and returned two or three moments later with a young Korean girl who was probably no more than twenty-three or -four. She wore a short white lab coat, and underneath nothing more than a tight, green two-piece bikini. Her eyes were dark and shone with mild interest as she looked me up and down. Her lime green eye make-up matched her bikini.
‘Forty for the room, mister,’ the old woman said.
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘Half hour, forty…’
‘The hour.’
‘Eighty.’
‘You pay the girl separate. Between you and Cookie.’
‘Who?’
‘Me,’ the young girl said. ‘That’s me, Cookie.’
‘Hi, Cookie.’
It was a few moments before I noticed that the old woman had left. She was good at leaving her girls to it with the minimum of fuss, without disturbing the client.
‘You want massage,’ Cookie asked me, her large eyes smiling at me.
‘Yes, massage,’ I said as if it was the answer to all my problems.
‘You tired.’
‘Yes, tired…’
‘You look tired. Life hard.’
‘Yes.’
I was almost twice her age but I had become her child.
‘Undress from your clothing, please.’
I looked at her for a moment and then obeyed, peeling off my jacket and the freshly ironed shirt, the one I had worn to see our newborn son. I remember the stab of guilt that caught me in the chest, causing me to wince.
‘You okay?’ Cookie asked me.
‘Yes, okay.’
She watched me as I undressed; I suppose to see what she had to work with. I tried to hide my belly from her with its small bulge of sadness and approaching middle age.
‘Don’t be shy,’ she said. ‘You nice body.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, stammering like some fool knee deep in embarrassment.
‘Lie down, Baby Man,’ she said.
The massage table creaked as I lay across it, and I felt her hands on me as she guided me down. I felt a twitch of desire begin in my groin as I looked up into her face.
‘Other way.’
I turned over onto my front and felt her run her fingertips the length of my body, stopping briefly as they reached my buttocks then continuing on down to my heels.
‘Massage hard or soft.’
‘Hard,’ I mumbled.
Her hands moved across my shoulders and dug themselves into my neck and began kneading. Her fingers were firm but gentle and I drifted with them as they moved across the broad of my back. I saw your face briefly and dismissed it as quickly as it rose in my thinking. She made noises as her hands touched me, delicate sounds like a breeze tugging at trees in a meadow. I wondered at all the bodies she had seen, that her young eyes had sized up as they undressed in front of her. I wanted to see behind the mask of sweetness she was careful to present to me. Did she leave herself behind every time she crossed the threshold to greet another customer? Outside in the grubby corridor that I had walked to get to this room, I imagined her soul sitting in a small jar waiting for her to return after she had done what she was paid to do. I saw it gleaming like a berry after a rainfall.
I imagined rows and rows of jars lining the corridors of every brothel in the world. I wanted to ask her how many times she had put her soul out of harm’s way, locked it down as she walked into another man’s arms, knowing that she was the fantasy that he had dreamed up in the sewers of his mind. She is getting bolder with her hands, spending time around the round flesh of my rump, her fingers separating and coming back together. Then she wipes the hair back from my brow and asks me if I am okay. I grunt and shift my face and realise that I have been drooling like an ape on the point of sleep. I know now that I died in that room, a part of me left and walked free of the suffering I was heaping on myself. I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t tell anyone, how her hands became his, tough needy hands digging out the badness in my hide.
She took off her coat and began to move across my body, climbing gently up onto it as if it was a tilting boat. I could smell her cigarette and chewing gum to hide it. It reminded me of school; it also reminded me that I was an older man wearing a younger girl’s skin. Her knees began to walk my back, tentatively digging into any resistance it found there. She asked me again if I was alright, I nodded this time. I was used to being at someone else’s mercy; I was well-schooled in it.
Eventually she got off and asked me to turn over. As I rolled onto my back I saw her take off her bikini, facing towards the door, away from me. Then she turned and I saw her nakedness. Her body was brown and her breasts small. She didn’t say anything but moved slowly towards me, her hips swaying slightly.
I saw so many things in that young girl’s nakedness, as she stood before me. I felt the jaws of the world close around me like a dog that has found a bone. I heard the baying voices of my childhood, the ones that told me I was no good, the ones that told me that I deserved everything that was happening to me.
‘You okay, Baby Man?’
‘Yes, fine.’
‘Relax.’
‘Yes, relax.’
‘You want everything?’
‘Yes, I want everything.’
‘You want fuck?’
‘Yes, I want fuck…Cookie…I want fuck.’
She was astride me slowly bringing me to orgasm, her hands moving down to play with my nipples, her fingers slowly circling them, tweaking them. Yes, her body was young and for the next few minutes it was mine. I looked at her as she lifted her head back and closed her eyes. I saw the long graceful sweep of her neck and the small gulp in her throat. I tried to fool myself that it meant something, that I was the stranger that she had been waiting for, the one that would change everything for her, but I knew that she couldn’t give a fuck, literally. Now and then she threw a look my way, and nodded her head as if to say, you’re doing well. She reinforced it by bending down slightly and running her hands along the sides of my body. Everything she did had a practised sensuality to it, seamless, full of purrs and coos. I didn’t think of you, I didn’t even think of me. I thought of nothing, you see, it entered me and swallowed me whole.
The Gift
We have a chance, you said to me. We have a gift from God. He is beautiful and he has your eyes, you said. Let’s begin again. Stop the visits to the bar after work and come home to us, your son and me. I remember nodding like a twelve-year-old who had just been reprimanded. Yes, I said, I would like that, yes. You are a teacher, you said, be one, act like one, show yourself and your family the way. I remember listening to you and how the tears rose to sit in my eyes. You placed your hands on mine and smiled and for a moment all the pain and all the filth of my past fell away from me. It was the closest I ever came to telling you. I could feel the dark truth of what he did to me begin to move through my body and rise to sit on my tongue. Maybe if I’d said something then as we sat in the garden beneath the canopy of autumn leaves, things would have been different. But I didn’t, you see he had told me not to, he had made me promise deep in the belly of the night when the rest of the world was asleep. You talked of when we had first met, of the young man who spoke with the bright fire of a poet. I was kind, I was generous and I had love, you said, such love to give not only to you but to the world. You told me you wanted that young man again. He still exists, you said, I am sure of it and you smiled and for a moment I believed.
That night we celebrated and you did your best not to notice how much I drank as we ate our meal in our favourite Italian restaurant. We talked of the future and the fine life our son would have. I did as you asked me to, I acted. I pretended that the world was suddenly mine and yours again. I humoured you and nodded when I thought it appropriate and smiled when you made a joke or told me you loved me. I tried, I really did, but I still wore the perfume of the brothel, it smelled of shame and sex. You suggested that we go home and light some candles and make love in the shadows they threw against the walls of our bedroom. I nodded but somewhere I knew that our time had gone.
The next day you woke and looked at me and the disappointment had returned to your gaze. We hadn’t made love the night before, we had barely touched when I had got up and made my way downstairs to open a bottle of wine to find the touch that I knew lived there. I am sorry but you see my heart was only strong enough for one. Your mother called round and you both found me passed out on the couch in the living room. When you tried to wake me, I said that I had no need of you. I don’t remember saying it, but then again I don’t remember you trying to waken me.
Peter
He was his pipe. It defined him, it was an extension of the measured, watchful way he approac
hed life. He would stand there and pack its bowl and ask me how I was doing, his eyes squinting as he lifted the moist, peaty tobacco from the battered tin he carried and placed it in his pipe. I would watch as his fingers prodded and padded before he lifted the stem to his mouth and began to light it. No words would pass between us as he did this; I knew better than to interrupt his ritual. I would watch him pull on the pipe, his cheeks being sucked in and out as he tugged. His eyes would close as the small knots of smoke began to rise. He would then take the pipe away from his mouth and regard it, as if he was seeing it for the first time and then gingerly pack the glowing embers at the top of the bowl down a little deeper, and place the pipe back in his mouth. When I was very young it impressed me, how he would stand there and take the time he needed, as if to say the world can wait until I have this thing going. As I got older I began to resent it, and I would quietly shift my weight from one foot to the other as I waited for him to get through his routine. He was my mother’s self-appointed guardian and somewhere I know that she welcomed it, was flattered by it although she always had one eye on the watching God in the skies. They both attended a monthly prayer meeting together. He considered himself a proper man, a man of principle and fortitude. He viewed the world and its events with dispassion and quiet resignation. He was strong, you could tell from the way he carried himself, with a slow, studied amble. He had a short thick neck and hard, tight shoulders and he was bald except for two wiry tufts of hair that stood up on either side of his head. He had removed himself from the real business of life, he had his pipe and his ways, but he never read a newspaper or watched the news, what’s the point, he would say, it’s all going one way, and that’s down. Jesus was his news; he gave him all he needed to know, he would say, He’s the biggest newspaper of them all. Then he would laugh, it was more of a wheeze, full of old smoke and burnt tobacco.
He told me he had boxed when he was young and he said that all the fight had been beaten out of him. He loved to tell me of one bout when, for the first time in his life, he met someone who had the measure of him.
