I wasnt in Florida.
What are you talkin about? What about the jersey and the helicopter and . . .
My aunt was down there with me cousins and Mom got them to send stuff back.
What? That’s fucken burnt out Mikey. Why would . . . where were you then?
I’m not supposed to tell anyone. You cant say nothing to . . . not anyone . . .
Say nothing about what? Jesus b’y. What about all that talk about Disney World and the beach and naked women and shit?
I was in the hospital in St John’s.
Fuck off. Why? What happened? Are you sick? Is that why youre not in school?
Yeah . . . I mean no.
What then Mikey?
I had to talk to some doctors . . .
The Mental? You were in the fucken Mental?
Youre not supposed to call it that!
Mikey hauls off like he’s gonna hit me, like he wants to. We leans against the bridge for a while, quiet, watchin the current. I reels both of our lines in. Mikey’s spinner is busted off. Brand new Red Devil. I dont know what I’m supposed to ask him or what I’m supposed to say to him. He sets his head on the old wooden railing of the bridge and starts to cry. I just goes about tidying up the rods and the gear, listening to him hiccuping and sobbing. Finally he raises his head.
Voices.
I looks around and listens but all is quiet around the harbour. The faint echo of a chainsaw coming from the north side, that’s it. No voices. I tells him I dont hear no one.
No, me. Voices. I hears em.
Where Mikey? I dont fucken hear no one.
In my head Johnny. Voices in me head.
Whose voice? Like your father’s or . . .
No . . . it’s not . . . it’s strangers I guess . . . not anybody I knows . . .
Stuff you remembers?
No! It’s just voices . . . mean things . . . sayin shit . . . tellin me stuff . . .
What stuff?
Just . . . bad shit . . .
Curses or stories or . . . ?
Nasty voices Johnny. Tellin me I should do things, sayin shit that’s not true.
I dont . . . like now? Do you hear em right now?
No. Not always. Some days it’s bad. They gave me pills to take, but . . .
Shit man. That’s burnt, that’s . . . that’s just burnt.
He lays his head back on the railing and starts to sob again. I dont . . . I mean I have no clue what this is, what it means. I dont know what I’m supposed to say. I lays me hand on the back of his neck and leans in right close, my mouth barely an inch from his ear.
Hey! You in there! Get the fuck out of my buddy’s head! Hey!
Mikey pulls away and winces, gives me a little shove.
Jesus Johnny! Bust me eardrum why dontcha?
I will if you wants me to, if you thinks it’ll help. I’ll drill a hole right into your head and march in with a big stick and kick the shit out of whoever’s in there making a racket.
Mikey straightens up now, rubs his eyes. He’s almost on the verge of a smile. He grabs his rod and sees that his new spinner is busted off.
That’s three spinners you owes me now John-John.
Dont fucken call me that.
We trudges on up the hill in our rubber boots, not talkin much, neither one of us in any rush to get home to either of our houses. I’m tryna work through what it means but I cant figure which way to think.
That’s why you never had no suntan when you got back!
Ha, yeah.
Youre a fine hand for the bullshit, I’ll give you that.
Thanks man.
So what was it like, the Mental?
I said youre not sposed to call it that. But . . . yeah it was pretty mental. Crazy people everywhere. I was on the youth wing, I guess, but youd see the others. Some woman shit herself and rubbed it on the wall in the hallway. One guy chopped up his neighbour with an axe while the whole family was eating dinner. He cant even remember doing it.
The last of the evening sun sinks behind the trees. My head is spiralling. I dont know what to make of it all.
Hey Mikey, the voices, what do they say? What . . . what do they tell you to do?
Mikey turns and juts his chin forward as if he’s about to say something, then he decides against it. He kicks at the gravel and stirs up a little cloud of dust, spits into the ditch.
It’s just . . . nasty, messed-up shit Johnny, that’s all. It’s not even real. None of it is real.
The gang of prairie girls, at the gas station, they’re pushing this one squirt of a girl back and forth in a circle, laughing and squealing, and the girl in the circle, a long shiny streak of bright pink cutting down the middle of her otherwise dark hair, she’s sobbing, trying not to lose it, trying not to get mad. Cause that’s what they wants. She’s pushed up against one of the girls who shouts Oh God, get her away from me, she stinks! Then she’s down on the busted concrete and Johnny sees the other girls, vampire bats, swoopin in and tryna get good grips on the waistband of her jeans. One girl, taller, her hair the colour of coal dust and her eyes shaded in almost to the bridge of her nose, she stands at the edge and watches the others, watches gleefully. The girl on the ground, she’s no more than twelve, thirteen. None of em are more than fifteen. The tall one, with the painted eyes, she hauls off and boots the fallen one square in the guts, and then a total frenzy, total chaos as the others take their cue. Johnny’s heart racing, shouts out Hey! Let her alone! Hey! Get the fuck off her! Running towards the pack of em, still half buzzed, hungover, half the bottle of frothy Labatt 50 swirling in his guts. All the girls stop and stare. The girl on the ground hiccuping, sobbing, her chin bleeding. One little tart sporting what looks like fifty-odd earrings and lip studs and nose rings, she’s got the young one, the one on the ground, she’s got her by the hair, lifting her off the ground. Johnny shoves her aside. None of the girls knows what to make of Johnny’s sudden presence. Johnny bends down to look at the girl on the ground and when he does, out of the corner of his eye he sees the smile spreading across the tall one’s lips, sees the nod, feels the rush of bodies closing in, and he hasnt far to go to hit the ground after the first direct kick to the back of the head. Boots and giddy hisses and claws from all angles. He pushes himself to his knees, catches hold of a sneaker and yanks it off. The outraged squeal from the girl who lost the sneaker. Johnny swings into the swirling pack of teenage fury, hoping to connect with the tallest one, the obvious leader. Johnny thinks if he can bull through the initial onslaught, muscle through long enough to take that big tall one down, well then it’s game over, they’ll all scatter. He struggles to his feet momentarily, catches sight of her. A boot to the nuts he barely feels. Then a thick whooshing sound and a flash of neon as the two-by-four takes him in the jaw. Johnny staggers backwards from the blow, weak-kneed and dazed, collapses into a putrid pit of grease and piss underneath some sleepy rusted propane tanks. He tries to crawl away, squeeze himself into the corner where the last tank meets the gas station wall. Hands on his ankles, dragging him back out in the open.
Get his bag, get that bag.
Down comes the two-by-four, speared into his ribcage. He feels the urn disintegrate in the front pouch of his poncho and when he tries to turn away from the next blow from the two-by-four he sees Madonna’s ashes pouring onto the ground around him, jagged chunks of grey porcelain. He stuffs his two hands into the pouch to salvage what’s left of the ashes and he curls into a tight ball and hopes for the best. He hears something about a whole bag of pot. Last thing he remembers is the young girl, the one they’d all been beating on, she stands over Johnny, blood streaked across her bottom lip, her foot raised high off the ground. The sole of her sneaker, patterned with different sizes of diamonds, all very intricately connected. She seems to hold it there for a long time, her foot in the air, hovering tentatively over Johnny’s head, until Johnny almost believes the blow aint gonna come. Then the tall one ordering Do it Brittany, do it! Then a hospital bed. Flashlights in my eyes, s
tream of nurses. Pissing blood into a bedpan. Pain. Opening me good eye this afternoon, a doctor talkin to a man in a suit, looming outside the curtain that surrounds my bed . . . This is not his card, no, this is not his ID . . . He told the nurse his name was Mikey . . . Multiple fractures . . . bacterial infection . . .
Johnny eyeing the man in the suit, knowing, knowing. He reaches for the poncho, draped over a metal chair just out of arm’s reach. A dusting of ashes, Madonna, clung to the fabric at the mouth of the big front pocket.
This one night, back in the old place, me and Madonna are lying there, lying around all peaceful and easy like, just after having a good romp. I was after sayin something during, something about not wanting to hurt her. We had this banter, ya know, when we were in bed. We were always talking, pretending we were other people, like as if we were younger than we were sometimes. She’d make out like she was right innocent and nervous and I’d have to talk her through it, all this dirty talk about how it’s hard the first time but it gets better. We fucken loved that. And afterwards we’re lazing around sharing a smoke and Madonna starts tellin me about her first time. She was sixteen. Her boyfriend was this big jock type of fella, basketball hero. He was leaning on her for weeks, tryna get it in her, but she dont want to. Finally they finds themselves in the shower together and he gets it in her. She says it hurts, there’s blood. She dont like it at all. And then she dont see him no more. He dont come around no more. That fucken prick, I says.
What’s his name? Want me to track him down?
He was a kid, Johnny. What did he know? What does a sixteen-year-old boy know except for what his balls tell him? What about you Johnny? Who was your first time? Who was your first love?
And of course I tells her it was her, that I never even knew what the word meant until I met her. I knows that’s what they all wants to hear, the ladies. But the truth is I dont know if ever . . . well it’s kinda like you feels what you knows youre supposed to feel, right? But you cant say for sure if what youre feeling is real or not. And it’s always tangled up in sex. And the better the sex the more tangled up it is. But with Madonna it was, well I think . . .
Alright you fucken sap. Mr Casanova. What about your first time then?
So I tells her the story anyhow, about my first time. I was twelve, turning thirteen. The girl was a little older, maybe she was fourteen. Dont know if ever I uttered a word of it before. Once this psychiatrist, this decent, gentle old gal she was, like someone’s grandmother, tried to drag it out of me in a group session, but I didnt, I couldnt. But you meet these people, dontcha, you meet these certain types and they makes you feel like it’s okay to spill it. Madonna was one of them types, one of those people. And they’re few and far between aint they?
Me and Mikey are in the woods above the track on the south side of the harbour. Blueberry season. They were scarce that year but we were at it for a couple of hours already. We each got ten-pound buckets and mine is nearly full to the brim. Only time I’d get a smile in the house from the old girl, Pius’s missus, was when I brought home a few blueberries. I always picked em clean too, no leaves or white ones, no bugs or nothing. You could pretty much dump em right from the bucket on into the mixing bowl. This is the weekend before we starts high school, Labour Day weekend. I’ll be thirteen the end of that month. Me and Mikey were right into this dirty MacLean and MacLean album that summer and I had the whole thing memorized. Filthy, filthy songs and jokes and poems and shit. I useta do pretty much the whole album for Mikey and he’d be in the knots. We’re just there carrying on, having a laugh and picking our berries, when something whooshes past me head and lands in the bushes next to Mikey. Neither one of us seen what it was. Then we hears these raspy giggles from down on the track somewhere. I turns and sees Lizzy O’Neill, big townie girl, crouched behind a young cherry tree. She’s only ever up around in the summertime but goes around sayin she’s from the Shore and puts on this fake accent and everything. She bends and laughs and picks up another rock from a small mound at her feet and whips it up at us, but she misses. She starts to run out the track now and Mikey finds a clunky piece of old wood and flings it at her while she runs past. It dont come close. She squeals some more, lobs another rock while she’s running. The sun is right in me eyes. Her silhouette lumbering past. She stops and stoops and picks up another rock and I sees her arm swinging towards me again. Then the dull crack of the rock above me left eye, knockin me back on my hole. I lies there for a few seconds, not quite convinced that what just happened was real. Golden flecks of dust floatin around in the corners of my eyes. The sound of a motor coming from somewhere inside me head. Lizzy screamin, horrified at the sight of the blood.
Oh my God, oh my God. Is he alright? Johnny?
The blood now, hot and thick, runnin into my eye, down me neck. I sits up and hears her scream. She’s been running up into the woods towards me, stops when she sees the state of me face, the blood, the eye. I’m literally seeing red.
I’m sorry Johnny, I’m sorry . . .
Too late, too late. I’m on my feet, chasing her. When I gets down onto the track I starts scooping up handfuls of rocks and drilling em at her. She’s fast for a big girl. Her house aint far, just down over the hill and across the road. I nearly gets run down by a bread truck when I crosses the road after her. I’m expecting she’ll go running into her yard and barring herself behind closed doors and then that’ll be me hanging about her doorstep waiting to show her father what she’s after doing. But she runs right on past the path leading down to her house. Instead she carries on down the side of the road and ducks across the Stage Path at the top of the beach. All the while she’s shouting back at me that she’s sorry, that it was an accident. I dont say a word, dont even curse. I dont throw no more rocks neither. I just chases her. The left side of my tee-shirt flapping in the wind, heavy with blood. We’re on a little footpath that leads to an old twine shed that aint been used in years. The only way around it is to climb down over the rocks, and then she’d be stuck down in the cove below with nowhere to go except up the side of the cliff or out into the water. I’m not far behind her now. She stops and turns and looks at me, her face a mask of shock and disbelief, panic. She says my name once more before she thumps the door to the twine shed open and slams it behind her.
I takes me time now, coming up to the door. Rotted-out wooden boards. I leans against it, peeking in through the cracks, tryna catch me breath. She shoves an old splitting table against the door. She’s huffing and wheezing in there, searching around for another way out. I realize I’ve had my bucket in my hand the whole time. It’s empty, not one measly berry left. I tosses the bucket aside and slams the full weight of me body against the door, my shoulder bursting through one of the rotted boards. She lets out a little yelp. I heaves once more and I’m in, the splitting table toppled off to the side. She stands there wide-eyed, staring at me. She steps to the side, like she’s gonna try and make a run for it, but I stands in her way. I can feel something stirring. This new heat in the room. The smell of the damp. Salty and musty, earthy. Her grey tee-shirt darkened with sweat, clinging to her chest, heaving up and down. I bends and picks up a piece of board with a nail sticking out the end. Holds it up in her face. Blood crusting onto me hand. But I’m only wanting to scare her. I’m only wanting to teach her a lesson. Not like I had some sinister plot in mind when I was chasing her up the beach. I’m only wanting to make her see what she’s done to me, to let her know that people dont get away with bouncing rocks off Johnny Keough’s head. People dont get away with that. She mutters again that she’s sorry, an accident, all that. I laughs in her face, this kinda laugh like the way the bad guy in the cartoons always laughs, this deep, forced belly laugh. I was right into laughing like that back then. She takes a step backwards. I takes a step forward. She looks back and forth between the piece of board in me hand and the blood drying onto my face. The wind sucks the door shut behind us and the room goes dark except for thin streaks of sunlight leaking through the cr
acks in the walls. And this part, this is the part I can never get me head around. I’m standin there, just tryna scare her and stuff, like I said, tryna put a bit of fear into her, and dont she just flop back down onto the mound of nets in the corner of the room. Next thing one of her legs is out of her pants. She was wearing these kinda baggy, thin jogging pants. She lies back, lookin right at me with her big wet brown eyes. But I’m more interested in that other wet spot. It’s the first one ever I laid eyes on I think. Except for them twisted magazines and stuff that we seen down in Wally B’s old bus. Lizzy O’Neill, from Town, with her furry little box all out in the open like that, offering it to me. I didnt know what it meant, what I was expected to do. I almost turned and ran and bolted for the beach. She looks up at me and nods then and next it’s my body in motion and I’m doing that thing—watchin it all from across the room. I pretty much falls on top of her. I watches meself grind and hump against her. I tries to kiss her but she wont move her face towards me. Even after I gets it in she keeps staring at the far wall, not even lookin at me, not makin any noise, not sayin nothing. I knows enough to not let go inside of her so I hauls out and squirts all down the inside of her leg. I got blood all over the side of her face and on her shirt. Then we’re on our feet and she’s pulling her pants on. I got some gum in me pocket and I takes one out and offers it to her, but she wont look at me, scurries past and she’s out the door and gone. That’s the last I seen of her too. Her crowd never came up around for a few years and then I started doing time in Whitbourne or I was always off at something.
Madonna sat up in the bed looking at me. Her mouth wide open, and her eyes, her eyes bugged out like that, like she didnt recognize me all of a sudden.
What? You asked didnt you girl? What’s that look for?
Nothing Johnny, nothing, I’m not judging, but I’m thinking . . . well it’s kind of messed up dont you think?
What’s messed up about it? She hauled her pants off and lay there . . .
Yes, Johnny, but think about it. Put yourself in her position for . . .
We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night Page 22
