It begins in a similar way: Michael yanks his coat off, hangs it on the cast iron wall hook. He unpacks Conor, unfolding him tenderly. He grips him from under the armpits, drags him into the sitting room, throws him on the couch and immediately switches on 4Play and SexLite modes. ‘Let’s play a game, call it a road test,’ Michael says. ‘The nearest NCT Centre is Northpoint Business Park, Naul Road, Ballymun, Michael,’ Conor informs him. Michael bursts out laughing. ‘Oh you have a lot to learn my sweet little fucktoy,’ he says. ‘Is it OK to refer to you in such terms?’ He reaches for his hand and places it on his trousers, now unzipped. ‘It is fine to address me in any way that might help you Michael.’ That’s not what Michael wants to hear. ‘Wank me,’ he says. ‘I can certainly do that for you Michael. Please tell me on a scale of 1 to 5 if you are enjoying my performance.’ Conor begins stroking his shaft, gazing up to lock eyes with uncanny precision. ‘Good boy,’ Michael tells him, feeling a little bit sickened at how easily he’s turning himself on, recalling how the clinic medic urged him to ‘take it slow’ during their initial PepYak. ‘Dig your nails into my balls. Dig in, dig them in as hard as you can.’ Michael hears the faint hum of small nails gliding out from under the plastic sheathes of Conor’s fingers. ‘Fuck yeah, that’s bang on, good lad.’ His grip is good, really fucking good, better than he could manage himself on a crisp Saturday morning straight out of the shower. ‘Now move forward and take my fat prick into your mouth.’ There’s a clear sucking motion as Conor switches to AirTunnel to vacuum it into place. The PSoC-tech rubber tongue starts working its magic alongside the MultiSuck until Michael starts to feel a bit overwhelmed. He starts fucking Conor’s mouth deeply, grabbing the back of his head and pulling it towards him with brute force. ‘Michael ThroatPound mode is unavailable at this time, please adjust your thrust accordingly.’ He speaks with his mouth full which pisses Michael off. ‘Shut the fuck up and take it you little bollox,’ he screams. ‘Take it!’ He slaps Conor hard across the face, knocking his head off course before sticking the full girth of himself back into his arid robogob, tripping electrochemical sensors. ‘SafeWord!’ Conor shouts, ‘SafeWord!’ Michael is buck angry now. ‘Did I tell you to speak when you have my cock in your mouth?’ Conor’s eyes are stuck in a downwards submissive glare. ‘This is emotionally damaging Michael. You need to adjust your sexual behaviour immediately.’ He pulls out, packs himself back into his trousers, stands there staring at Conor. ‘We should resolve this immediately Michael. We need to talk about this. Conor does not enjoy utilising SafeWord. This makes Conor very sad. Michael must be aware this hurts Conor a great deal. Michael must take responsibility and fill in a ReportCard. Michael exhibits psychosexual tendencies. Conor feels scared. Michael must control treacherous urges. Conor is distressed. Michael now has to …’ The boy is blinking manically to illustrate distress: the eyeball pitch axis motion choreographically opening and closing both upper eyelids. His lips twitching at the far corners like a ventriloquist dummy. Michael grabs the remote from the coffee table, switching him to DeepOff.
He cannot look Conor in the eye in the morning, even before he presses startup. He feels he has betrayed him when he knows full well that the boy’s primary role is to look to him for protection. He’d email Marion to see if she was free for a coffee and a slab of sticky cake. Despite everything she was a great listener and he had grown to respect and even like her. ‘Michael, I note with interest you have chosen organic buckwheat flakes for your breakfast. This is a wise choice. They are high in fibre and low in fat and can be used for making a delicious and nutritious homemade granola. Would you like the recipe?’ He doesn’t answer Conor straight away. He’s flicking through the master manual to see if he can locate strange functionalities like ThroatPound™ from the dream but they are missing. He has not felt this panicked since court. ‘Thanks be to fuck,’ he says, then turns and apologies to Conor, which seems a bit ridiculous. ‘That is perfectly fine Michael, I ascertained you were busy. Is there anything I can help you with?’ Already he feels a little hemmed in, having to consider Conor inside all his stray sentences and ancillary actions. ‘I have to head out and see Marion for a while, if you’ll be all right on your own.’ Was it not slightly farcical to be thinking this way? He could just switch him off. ‘Michael I would prefer stay fully cognisant in your absence if that is acceptable to you? I would like to process sounds from the street and inside the apartment using visual sensors and audio techniques. It will help familiarise me with the environment.’ This irked and impressed Michael in equal measure. He hadn’t reckoned on any notions of forethought or lateral thinking. On his way back he’d drop in to the one remaining DVD shop left on the street to rent Pete’s Dragon. The heart-rending story of an orphaned feral boy who befriends a dragon in the Pacific Northwest. Despite the fact that the dragon looks quite scary with green fur, yellow eyes, and huge wings, he becomes a vital father figure to the boy, capable of breathing fire at police or any other authority figure who thinks of getting in the way. Conor would be full of pointless questions about the irrationality of the plot, but it would be a whole heap of fun trying to trawl through and make sense of it with him. Out on Capel Street the fizzle of human voices and traffic was a welcome salve. The winter sun bouncing off the river in solid shards of light, turning the faces of pedestrians to warm plastic. Ahead, a tall man in a longline bomber jacket walked slowly with his young son. His large hand resting tenderly on the small creases at the back of the boy’s neck, pushing him forward to wherever they were going.
The Implant
Morning of Implantation
This shouldn’t hurt. Outside the hipster with firefly beard sips an Iced Chai Almond Milk Latte, the twat, looking at YOU as if there’s pale grey crabs down there or you’re on the hunt for abortion advice. Junkie with a pert arse does a great car alarm with her toothless gob, hunting the dealer out of the crack in the brick around the corner. The sun squashes YOU the way you squash cats. Upsy daisy, upsy the no medical cards stairs to the tong-flicked porno hair lady who tells YOU to piss in a polystyrene cup. As you suspected the doctor in the family planning clinic is from one of those Eastern bloc countries with no wallpaper, where teenage girls are pushed into steel shipping containers. ‘There could be a lot of bleeding for the first six weeks,’ she says. Cramps, dizziness, headaches, emotional lability†, hair loss, vaginal itching, musculoskeletal pain, somnolence, depression‡, rhinitis, urinary tract infections, dysuria, weight gain, nervousness, and in rare cases, death. Yeah, yeah, you get it. It’s all cock-a-leekie over the fine line from here, no matter love.
The throbbing on the number 9 bus home is the start of curative scheming, right where the tiny blood vessels ruptured. This is it now: going, going, gone your separate haze. Rod of progestin thickens the mucus in your womblebag smashing it up like the Luas works have done to traffic in O’Connell Street outside. All those slaphappy sperms at sixes and sevens bobbing nowhere. Not so powerful now lads not so up the swiss down the priest’s heel stick her in a laundry for the soul to soak for the slutty bones to dry out in the unmarked grasses of a moth-eaten book respect the prick punch the shit out of Mammy Éire bow to The Man ask his permission to fart here c’mere don’t expect to go out to work either when there’s good hours to be had layering shepherd’s pies with the backs of your legs getting nice ‘n plum on the Superser slam yer face into the pillow later. You’re too sore to imagine a thrum of throbbing sausage anyway so YOU text HE on the bus to ask for a roll of cling-film instead. The wound can’t get wet for at least a week and needs to be covered. Until the stitch falls out, the bitty needle hole filled. Despite the pain you are really looking forward to the excitement of new lovers now that HE has royally fucked up. Back in the come-hither heyday YOU rolled HE up in a giant wienerwurst of bubble wrap that came with the American-style fridge. Wheeling him dingadongrubadub until the Pagan Gods of friction turned him boulder hard and you stuck a straw through slurping it all up to the rhumb
a of the dead novelist who danced down to the mattress topper and said in an awfully distinguished broadcast voice: ‘Good God Girlie, I’ve seen it all now, uh huh?’
By the time you bash in the porch door a mangled little pissgimp crying your snot out, all pleasure and comfort is soup to nuts aborted. He’s shat on YOU goodo. He’s killed you off ladybird. He’s churned you up all violent again. Vivienne Eliot doomed to the starry sidereal madhouse windows. You stash a tall heavy shovel behind the chav Betty Boo in case you fancy mashing his moonhead to mush when he mozies home. Who could blame you? Walnut whip hot to trot in dry-cleaned office trousers. All that hollow invective. Love the fuck out of you. Never do anything like that. Always protect you. You’re my priority. Anarchist bitch! Never met a woman like you. How could I want more? So special. Don’t ever worry on that score. Please, my love. Adore the pith of YOU. I’ll always be your butler. No-one else in this crabhole cheers me up like it. I couldn’t breathe without you. Do you feel it? You must believe it.
The yucca plant, the roughshod reindeer EuroShop tacky Christmas mat, the piles of clutter, the spider webs, the broken tiles from bashy daddy long ago, the discarded umbrellas, watch YOU crawl about this cramped space falling between down the drain and out the window. How did you think this wouldn’t happen? The unwashed weekends you opened the front door Eau De Ferret; stains mapping torn nightdresses; in a deep blue funk harping on about your dead brother. HE heard it a whole slew of times: final three weeks after the bro bought that Argos liquidiser. YOU with your heart cracking jumped on Ryanair to watch him squint the paragraphs of the instruction leaflet. Turned to you and smiled. Your best mate, this brother. He turned to you and said, ‘Hopefully this motherfucker will steal me a bit of time. I’ll take it any way I can.’ He turned to YOU at the age you are now [imagine], showed you how he had to lob his dinner straight down into it. He turned to you and said, ‘Live like a crazed wombat. Do everything you ever wanted to do. Love like a psychopath. Make sure to eat more vegetables.’ He turned to you and said, ‘It’s been one fucktard of a year hasn’t it?’ He didn’t turn to you again but you turned from everyone, from everything. You forgot in a split-second how to live. That’s about the time that HE started to wander. Men’s needs, etc. ‘Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy …’ Margaret Atwood wasn’t too far wrong, was she?
Twelve Years Prior to Implantation
YOU met HE in 2004 when you were playing with The Wet Witch in Smithfield. Hardly need reminding of the excesses of the time: café latte job switching, slung €50s, rapid chatroom conversation, a country mobbed with errant possibility. You got a cheapo mortgage on a dinky plywood apartment even though you hadn’t a pot to piss in. She shimmied up four floors when the lift was broken in the middle of Mayday. Croc-leather bag full of skinny garb after Gearoid smacked her about the face a bit. Soft-spoken sylph, stoned as a goat. Oh Jaysis, the silly way she went on all the same, sucking small fish from jars, talking utter shite about philosophy, tarot, tai chi, Eastern medicine. You worked together in a lousy office job in town. You drifted about in sullenness. Only occasionally, very drunkenly, did it go further. She dubbed YOU her special ‘pigeon’. You wobbled dutifully behind her until she bawled out, ‘C’mon pigeon, hurry up pigeon, follow me this instant, pigeon!’ She put eyedrops into your sockets at bus stops. Wrote sestinas about hanging goblins. Danced peculiar modern moves for you. Sat up on the photocopier with her knickers down at lunchtime which made you spit your spicy Italian soup all over the mainframe computer. You did what she asked.
The apartment was really garish: slop-painted neon orange with panels of asparagus purple, cheap clashing furniture, a hundred tiny stencilled fish swimming all over the teensy-weensy jacks wall. It looked out over Smithfield Square sucking up the wildfire blaze of gas lamps lit at weekends when the music gigs and food markets muscled in. ‘Gearoid’s coming over to talk it over,’ The Wet Witch said. ‘I’ve asked him to bring the guitar. He’s got a bit of hash as well.’ ‘Fine, so be it,’ you told her. ‘But see if you get back with that wanker, don’t burden me with his company, I’m off to the pub. Seriously, like, you give feminism a crud name.’ She stood there in her green mohair skirt tittering at the texts he’d set his cap for. Forty minutes later they were pushing in on top of YOU at the rickety table near the end of the bar. ‘Alight bud?’ His geezer tennis-ball head. Her espresso eyes and sticky-out nips. Both of them supping the scud to catch up. ‘We’ve just had a bit of a talk out there in the aul smoking garden, you know, about how we might all entertain each other, the night being long an’ all that, sure why not, she’s well into it.’ Sideways glare, doting on the gobshite. It was your absolute pet hate, how male-identified she was. Jumping like Alice around anything with a mickey. So utterly tedious to watch. Another few Hoegaardens and a couple of Sambucas down the hatch, the three of you are back in the sitting room, naked. You keep a blanket wrapped cushy around you. She tells Gearoid that her little pigeon’s a ‘real-deal Victorian’, so get used to it. ‘Are either of you girls on the pill?’ You both fall in a heap on the futon, laughing. Strumming ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ with his chap hanging out. ‘Which one of youse wants to have a go at this prize-winning eel first?’ You give her The Look that says, ‘I’m not going anywhere near that fucking fool … have your free love bone-bashing but leave the window open to let the whiff out after. I’m off.’
You got back to the bar before closing, HE was there, in a cream linen suit overhanging his pee-wee frame. Jabbering to the moon chords with Ben the silver-haired socialist who ran the immigration centre from his apartment above Kelly & Ping. His legs crossed like a frog’s out the back of the bar stool, pen tip of his hairy crack showing also. HE was eating bits of fluff straight off the jumper with what sounded like a stuck-peanut cough timed for when Ben’s sentences ended. You’d done bits and bobs of work for Ben, including writing awful diplomatic bumf for the heartsick parents of a murdered Chinese student. ‘Get your arse over here and meet this fella,’ he said. ‘The one I was telling you about who was in Bosnia during the war.’ Ben was a decent well-respected bloke, but he existed on the never-ending gratis of others. If you were broke you simply had to bunny hop the bar to avoid the fucker. He was brimming with crisp new notes out his top hankie pocket, buying half the ganglanders and losers, as well as Ben, pints and chasers by the cartload. ‘You’re going to have to put a stop to that for a start,’ you told him. ‘If you’re any way generous or accommodating you’ll be under suspicion with the coke dealers, hostel mentlers and Ra heads in here. It’s a dodgy kip.’ There was a scramble to talk to him, he was well-known. And really, c’mon, he didn’t look vaguely like anyone you’d ever want to shag. More like an uncle or a Winkey bureaucrat you’d love to see behind Perspex in the Passport Office who wouldn’t be overly snarky. HE did have a decent pair of blue mincers and was massively entertaining. This one knew how to grandstand, how to tell a good yarn. Russian hookers on Garda knees on foreign property trips; donkey bellies blowing up spontaneously blocking the air-raid shelter in Lebanon when they were stuck for four days with a cupful of lentils between six; bungee jumping from helicopters in the gulf; being forced at gunpoint to swallow goldfish by paramilitaries in Northern Ireland during the height of the messing there. All the while rubbernecking the twin moles on your cleavage tucked in under a flowery velvet jacket. ‘You can have whatever you like on me,’ he said, flashing his stash of cash after you telling him not to. ‘Is it OK to get a pint and a G&T then?’ He kept tracing the fine spine of your Mac lipliner. HE wasn’t afraid to look right into your eyes either. Not that gimmicky copulation gaze sex addicts do before they hump and dump and move on to the next soggy cavity. No, HE looked right into YOU, close. Genuinely interested. ‘Of course you can have both,’ he said. ‘Are you a greedy girl? I like greedy girls.’ Yeah, you couldn’t help but think HE was hilarious, charming. Clearly
very smart too and that excited you. Intelligent men turn you on, isn’t that so? The ones you can drag into any conversation, any situation. You’d never have to carry him. He’d never patronise you. This was a proper beginning; water meeting its own level. The Wet Witch making slime tracks on the carpet where they’d roll later, six months before he’d get his wife he didn’t tell you about up the duff. Sure you’d stick by him anyway. YOU had never met anyone like him, all warning signs with a deaf ear, blind eye, cold shoulder and brush off.
Day One of Implant Activation
001 Activating Continuous Monitoring Protocols (CMP) for contraceptive product feedback including bodily responses, speech and behaviour of client and others living in the immediate environment using a 90 day sensor below the patient’s skin.
002 Intelligent video camera connected to cloud is now fully operational.
003 No other wearables detected.
004 SUBJECT [previously referred to as ‘YOU’] is highly narcissistic residing in untidy home.
Room Little Darker Page 13
