Room Little Darker

by June Caldwell

  Steelknuckle’s mate, bloated as a Cosmonaut, took another punch, swatting him back onto a moss-slush wall. He reefed open his jacket and pulled out what looked like a shoehorn.

  ‘You know what this is Oirish?’ he said, rubbing the white bent-fish shape up and down under his nose. ‘This is going inside your stink tunnel and it’s going to hurt like your mama did when she pushed you out her blood sack.’

  They reefed his arms and snapped them so fast Gonzo bent himself in half on a silent command. He was there backwards on the ground with Cosmonaut reefing his jeans down to the back of his kneecaps. He felt it scoopslide right in and up on over and back through sideways out again on up and down up in left slip up and on the turn back for a second go he hoped they’d whack him in the skull. His dead granny hovered like a helium balloon showing him her chrysanthemums, her apple trees and the pink flamingos her friend Betty brought back for her from Florida. ‘Off ye go up there, have yourself a good look at the seagulls love,’ she told him. ‘Me fucken arse gran, me fucken arse!’ He could hear them mumbling about the stash having gone up into him even further.

  ‘Don’t!’ he roared. ‘Fuck’s sake, don’t!’

  ‘You don’t shut up we cut your face off and make it into a mask.’

  ‘We could feed this fucker to the dog, you like bulldogs Oirish?’

  Cosmonaut pulled hard on the shoehorn getting the other knack to shove his whole hand in. Then quick as weather in February, they were gone. Already it would be a problem remembering what they looked like. Blood dripping from his arse, jeans ripped and just one shoe left upright against the skip like a bag of spuds.

  There was no way he could explain this to Dessie, unless they fucken set him up rightly, but even that made no sense. He could already see Carol’s head mashed open. These cunts didn’t mess about, arms broken up like a discarded doll in the playground up at the flats.

  ‘I’m fucked, I’m fucked!’

  Two teenage girls pointing, laughing.

  ‘Yez’ve no idea, I’m fucked!’

  Up Henry Street with its orgy of phone shops and factory leggings and onto wet brush Moore Street. Last of the stallholders manically plying for trade outside the Euroscoff supermarkets that had colonised the gaff. On by Ballsy Bingo where his Ma used to take him long ago. All those mad bitches with Rothmans-stained chins shouting, ‘Two fat ladies, go on Jimmy, get up and run, thirty one … dirty Gertie, clicketyclick, staying alive, eighty-five!’ Some were able to handle four and five cards at a time, marking the numbers like Phil Collins on drums. Bash bash bash. He used to lie on his spindlies gazing up their skirts. Musty whiff of brown tights on an afternoon in November 1970-something. Disco lights, apples sours, Dusty Bin. Around by the broken Luas tracks up Parnell Street down to railings stuck with cat fur. Crossing barrister-brain Church Street towards home. No way would he be taking the usual route. Did he tell them where the squat was? Was he boasting about it before they iglooed his arse?

  Carol would still be down at the Old Mill on the canal sucking off Leather Joe for a bag. Willy would be there too with the scab-ho wrestling over a lukewarm tin of Stonehouse, sucking her face off. Beamer the old tramp with the no veins. Hasslebat, his ginger eyebrows lighting up as hot worms in a snowy forehead. Smell of piss hacking the sun-up. Widearse Wendy with her tales of Berlin, before Guzz floated down the river with a bag of leaves in his mouth. Guzz who survived winters in Leeds in the 1980s sleeping under truck stop lorries, draining antifreeze through slices of white bread under the engine holes. Fuckface the Jack Russell in a rusty pram licking stolen satsumas. They’d be swaying by now, talking bollox, tapping passers-by. ‘Scuzzz me scuzzzz me scuwizzzzmeee. Do you want me to be like you? Is that it, do you want me to be like fucken you?’

  ‘You’re nothing but poxy trouble,’ she’d say when he’d tell her what happened. ‘Useless prick like ye. And ye gave them your card?’

  His arsehole was stinging so much, he knew how she must’ve felt the first time he gave it to her up the jacksie. He’d to use HB ice cream to cool her down afterwards. Nothing would be the same after this. These were serious heads. Mavericks. Think nothing of using shooters. He was so stressed by the time he got to Broadstone he thought he saw a man snoring on a plank up a tree. Loped on towards Phibsborough. Maybe they’d be OK just hiding out in the bank. The rest of Ireland seemed to be doing the same. Stay gizmo’d there till he heard of them popped. All of them ones ended up popped. Time and time again, saw it rolling. He wasn’t going back inside either, leaving her to her own devices. They’d have to lie there, not go out, till a different kind of light shined. Come out of charity, come dance with me in Ireland, that cunt Yeats said in the book by their mattress. But he didn’t know fuck all about the skank or fiddlers like Carol, all thumbs and kettledrums, sucking off ghosts at the window in the Old Bank on Doyle’s Corner.

  Imp of the Perverse

  We’d been in a doorway in a bad part of town after some module or other finished up and I said to him open up your coat there and let me give you a hug. It’s Christmas let me in, I’d really like to give you a hug. And now that we’re here, thanks so much for all your help. I mean it, no one knows their shit quite like you. Oh and I bought you some socks with Edgar Allan Poe’s face all over them. They made me laugh, kind of funny but disturbing. Hope you don’t mind me saying that, do you, you’re not going to take offence? He had a reputation for being really savage if disrespected. He had a reputation for brute violence as well as epic romance. He had a reputation, this fucker. He’d got us to read ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ as part of the American Literature module, all about primitive urges. Impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences) is indulged. Now I knew he couldn’t stand me but I also knew he knew I wanted something else from him and everything had that awkwardness, that buttermilk sky feel to it. I couldn’t even look into his eyes for long. There was just a lot of pressure there. I knew damn well he wouldn’t piss on the likes of me. It was all high-end looks with an asshole like that. Pier glass women reflecting back his lack of lacking if they were beautiful enough. Oh God yeah, nursemaiding him at academic conferences, pop star syndrome or whatever the fuck. He had a load on the go. Well he’d the choice to have a load on the go being who he was. Everyone talked about it. How many does yer man need? Jesus, they must bump pubic bones with the turnstile comings and goings. A man like that must have to move house often. How does he get a proper rest? Fair play to him though, fair balls to him.

  We weren’t too long in that doorway when he said we should move to another, around the corner away from the bar where all the other students were drinking. A minute’s privacy idée fixe and I got a bit giddy and said OKAY so OKAY let’s do that let’s go. In the other doorway he said you really are very annoying but heaps hilarious so don’t lose that, humour’s bloody important in this game. He opened up his coat and in I went. Arms right around his pure wool jumper nice and roasty with the wind swirling and swooshing. Him clasping me back nice and tight. The two of us, our broken breath, you could hear it in the doorway there. It was so quiet I could feel the brick watching us. Passing beams of buses poking yellow fingers into our hair. His hands moved up a bit behind my back. Not so much rubbing but patting which I thought was a gas metaphor but then his nose went down a bit and mine went up a bit and I kissed him on the neck. I may have actually licked him on the neck to be honest I was so nervous. His skin warm and lovely like a chicken’s out of the oven. I said you smell nice and he sort of smiled as his nose went down again and well I think he moved his hand up under my chin to raise me to him and then that was it. After all this time, this imagining, this critical kiss. Not sloppy which I’d expected: stupidly tender actually and really toasty, mad stuff, slow and soft too. Oh Christ can I say it? There was love in it, yes, a
small snip of love that no one would ever get to find out about. He kept at it there with me, he didn’t let up. Small persistent pecks then his lips rolling and lolling without moving off mine, very concentrated, yeah. His lovely butterball tongue pushing into my mouth as he kept circling my lips. Hands moving at a different pace in under our coats. Holding me to him. Fuck, it was good, like totally good. I began to crimple a bit, buckle. I wanted to say you’re making me faint Chloroform Tongue. Oh Mister Chloroform. Instead I said finger me right now it’ll be so eighties retro. I was trying to lighten the load. Rid some of the fizzy tension between us. When the air hit my crotch I realised how cold it was out there in the steel breeze of December, how clammy I was down there in satin knickers bought in May. Squirmed the worm and the toad we did. When the muffled moans came he sniggered like he’d achieved something. He had me. This man who’d go on to tell people how much he detested me. Yacking in dusty pub corners about how mad I was. Glaring across rooms and up stairwells. Or trying hard not to look at me. The man I’d tell everyone, including university staff, was a cold heartless wanker. The letter from him saying please leave me alone please. In that doorway we were happy. It didn’t make sense. The fucker.

  I took a few days off the course. Things were starting to shift. I emailed him: ‘I think I may stay home tomorrow and just read. I suddenly feel like an immense sociopath, like I’ve scared myself or am jittery, a weird strand of massiveness.’ He wrote back and said, ‘I appreciate your engagement and honesty very much. Forget about the world today and treat yourself.’ He sent a round-robin later on telling us to bring in a favourite lump of prose. ‘Be prepared to present it to the group, just a few minutes outlining why the piece matters to you and how the author went about it.’ Then I regretted not going in, all of them having him like that, me stranded at home wondering what it felt like. So much ugly craving. ‘You’ve a real problem dealing with desire, you’re priceless!’ my flatmate Liz said. She worked in admin at the university but had the day off too. I told her straight up: ‘He’s burrowed in deep, you know? Occupying my mind. Limiting the scope of my thoughts. He’s hunting me down on the landscape.’ He could be one of those secret shamans. Hairy chest hanging out of a sweat lodge in the Wicklow Mountains, regurgitating his inner wolf. A darker edge, something a bit sickening. He probably messes about with Ouija boards. Or a sadist, I thought of that angle too. I could smell the ignoble off him. Then I hit her with the truth. I decided I was going to have his child and it wouldn’t be human. Some pox-fiend of a son, pushing his diabolical animal head into my bladder. ‘You need a good ride,’ she said. ‘Or a weekend in Berlin to rid the stress.’ She got on with making the chickpea and sweet potato curry. I felt bereft, emptied.

  All Christmas I was really messed up about it. The fairy lights flickered fool, you’re a fool, some of them winking in a blue streak, all hypersonic and sarcastic. Liz had gone to her mother’s, so it was just me and a few stragglers around with nowhere to go. It’s a Wonderful Life did its warped splay of smarm on the telly and I roared no it’s fucking not, we stand on the brink of a precipice, we peer into the abyss, we grow sick and dizzy for fuck’s sake. I made Rice Krispie buns out of melted-down selection boxes. I imagined him sucking up Proust through a bendy straw on Christmas Day to remind himself how burningly intellectual he was. Some floozy cooking leftover turkey stir-fry for him on a burnt-out wok. Him snorting coke off her tits oh jingle bells all the way, yeah, how far off society’s rules he was. He’d say that to some of his conquests, imagine: real life doesn’t apply to me I just teach it, the fucker. When I was still good-student-brave he told me I had talent. To make sure to sign up for his course in autumn. ‘I can’t imagine it without you now,’ he emailed. I said yes, definitely, I’d like to try out that Sex, Culture and Modernity course alright, it fits with what I’m trying to do. Love supranormal lit-junk, you know, animalistic lust, Gothic appetites and stuff, it’s pretty sexy. It is cold and within me the pain of desire makes me colder than I am comfortable to be. I draw my furs about me, a wrap of beige and black, broad stripes of caramel and ebony, with a collar from which my head rises like the neckband of a tiger-lily. You have to believe this material is brilliant, edgy, he said. How many chapters have you written now (pulls ears back and squints)? I can help you with it. I know people, influential people to work with if they decide they can go ahead and work with you. Keep this up and you’ll be published in a few years. Fine so, I said, that’d be great, but I’d love if you kissed me again, that’s what I really want. No, he said, concentrate on your writing, stick with the task.

  ‘Sweetness,’ he texted, towards mid-January before classes started up again. ‘Sweetness it’s not your fault, let’s meet. I overreacted. Keep it work-related, better for everyone. I don’t actually read all of your emails, only the occasional ones when I’m in the mood.’ There was no point being hard on him. Instead the most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. On the way to the hotel I thought about all the wonderful chalk talk in the English Department throughout the year, you know, stimulus for going forward. There’d be no need to mull over recent grievances. Our bodies were more than capable of expressing the tiniest thrills up to the most walloping that’d knock Electra off her feet. Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill, go read it, he’d instructed. We’ll discuss it at the beginning of Spring term. It’s adapted from the Aeschylus play, Oresteia. But talking is a liability, drudging to a genius like him, already swamped in words for a living. Lust has carte blanche, words do not. Be on time, he’d say too. The fucker was a real stickler for time. By Christ he could fling a dirty look! Sitting in a turquoise jacquard chair off the main arts block, watching grooves of students climbing the warbled staircase to the bockety second hand of the café clock. Despite his seething arrogance, he still struck me as the type that’d lose the nelly in an existential tantrum and hang himself one day.

  Have you thought about the moment it all changes? The moment he makes it clear you don’t have a choice anymore … You’re his until he’s finished with you … A gesture, a word, a look … He stood with his back to me facing the black velvet curtains, rectangular gashes of sunshine breaking in to light up the room. I tiptoed in my Red or Dead high heels towards the mahogany dressing table. Pulled out the polished metal chair. Parked my bum right there. He turned around and with no warning let rip a humongous watery fart. Cocked his leg to piss sideways onto the armchair that housed a pile of tourist crap; hotel menus, spare dressing gowns. The whiff was similar to the bags of hash Liz sometimes managed to nab, you know, mucky and musty maybe from grasses and meat festering in his gut. It certainly reeked of forest and wildwoods, thickets, wealds, dead things. His face was terrifying but gruesomely beautiful, yeah the fucker. Such a pronounced snout of grey-black fur with even furrier cheeks, wide forehead, exquisite yellow eyes that were of course teeming with filth and treachery. Oh what hadn’t he pulled apart with his twelve incisors, four canines, sixteen pre-molars and ten carnassials on the landscape of his lifetime; huge feasts of cows, goats, sheep and salmon. Using his skill as a master scent roller, the art of olfactory camouflage to capture as many as he could lecherously dream up. What a disturbed greedy sap. Dances and bows. What a dangerous bastard. Dances and bows. He’d been producing sex hormones since summer but now was the time for stepping up dominance and all out severity towards the meek. He needn’t have worried. I was rightly up for it, you know, like this was totally bonkers stuff. I stupidly thought we’d meet briefly, a few G&Ts, rabbiting conversation about bestselling novels and other experimental literature on the way. Trademark fumbles maybe. A half-mast blowjob against a gloss-painted radiator. But here he was Alpine stretched to the puckered ceiling, tearing off his leather jacket, shirt, jeans. Chest, arms and legs sheathed in two coats of thick hair, nipples ruby and bulgy as Haribo jellies. I pulled my kit off pronto.

  ‘So, it’s come to this for you and me?’ he said, smirking. I
wanted to giggle too. The Casanova cliché of it. Castigating me when in my bruised mind I’d done nothing wrong.

  ‘Yeah, it seems so,’ I said, looking sideways. I would not look at him directly. I was, I suppose, afraid of him still. Looking me up and down, tail in a low sway.

  ‘How you getting on with work?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘Any headway on the dissertation?’

  ‘Not yet, still thinking exactly how to approach it, you know?’

  He took a deep breath and stared. Something he does when assuming control. Pinning with his eyes.

  ‘You feeling a bit shy? You’re uncharacteristically quiet.’

  ‘Cautious,’ I said. ‘Or suspicious, I dunno.’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Of you. The way you shift. It’s confusing. You can be a bit of a player, it’s deliberate, right?’

  He seemed pleased I was so anxious. ‘Games are not my thing,’ he said. ‘Though I admit I can be playful at times, but that’s a different fish kettle, relax.’ He moved to the bed, patting the duvet. ‘Maybe you should come over here.’ How terrible and terrific this was all going to be.

  I’d been in a musty wine bar over the Christmas break and there was this plonker he tutored on the art of acquisitioning women the year before us. Apparently he tells young women he’s a school teacher, not a university lecturer. Age gaps never tolerated in reverse. Comment on their colourful clothes, their nips, their legs, their eyes, the smalls of their backs, their brains. Women like believing they’re smart. Say it doesn’t happen often, this mind-altering intensity. You never give yourself permission to feel this deeply. Too afraid of the pain. There’s little point keeping in touch after a few goes. Move on. They’ll go berserk, firing off certifiable texts, you’ve to expect it. ‘It’s an artform,’ he cautioned. ‘Handling the erotic imagination.’