by David Louden
“Yeah,” I said wide-eyed, my heart racing “I’m sorry too mate. I didn’t mean, I mean I’m sorry I hit you and I didn’t mean to be a dick to Fiona, those two bitches she hangs around with said she said something about my mum…”
“Fiona wouldn’t do that, she likes you. We’re both coming to your birthday at the weekend right?”
I nodded, I tried to breathe to stop myself from passing out but when I looked across the sickly lit canteen all I could see was Fiona watching us, watching me, ignoring the chattering gums of those two twits and eyeballing me. She had a look on her face that made me think of those weathered magazines in the forest. Richard left and I returned to my book though the words seemed to move every time I tried to soak them up. I looked over again, Fiona was no longer watching but that didn’t matter, not anymore. She had been, she had been watching me talking to her brother and god knows how long before that. It was going to be a weekend to remember.
On the way home from school the tall kid came after me and tried starting something but Richard grabbed him, raised him up over his head and dumped him down on to the grass by the side of the road rubbing the kids face in dog shit. He’d run off screaming how he was going to go blind and we all laughed at him. Fiona walked along beside me and I tried to pay attention to what she was saying and block out the shit that Sixty-Six was whispering in my other ear. Fucking little cock-blocker.
I floated through the door of our three bedroom house in Poleglass happy. The world was coming together just right, Fiona was one step closer, I had set my mind on becoming a writer though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to work on and Ronan was a pretty solid friend. Mum sat on the edge of the couch in the living room smoking a cigarette. Her face hung from her skull, her hand shaking droplets of ash on to the carpet. A voice boomed from the blind spot by the television set.
“Hello son, why don’t you come here and say hello to your dad?”
He stood squared in the shoulder, his hair had a little more salt in it, his face a little more weathered with a few more lines to map springing out from the corners of his eyes and nose but it was him alright. Jack Morgan had come home.
10
MUM SQUIRMED over dinner, Dad sat at the head of the table with a real shit eating grin tattooed across his face and commented “how wonderful it is to be back with my family”. He looked along the line of children, exhibits A to C of his existence and heirs to the twisted throne of his corrupt genetics. What chance did any of us stand? Tara smiled earnestly.
“We’ve missed you Daddy.” she added.
“I should think you have princess, what about you Douglas?”
I shrugged my shoulders and could feel the pleading stare of the old lady.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I wanted to tell him I hadn’t missed him at all. That he’d left me hanging without a role model, without a father and he’d been replaced so his services were no longer needed and if he would kindly fuck off and stop monopolising the conversation I could get down to business and tell Mum all about my day. But it came out I’ve missed you too, can we go to Leisure World on Saturday? He looked me up and down surveying the sincerity of the statement, fired a glance towards his wife and shoved a fork full of tangled spaghetti into his large gub.
That evening I lay on my bed reading, the old man appeared at the door and I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye. I pretended not to notice, I pretended he wasn’t there harder and more determined than all the times before when I pretended he was. He’d invite himself in regardless and took up a point on the edge of the bed.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
My reply was a book. It was too straight for him because he’d snatch it from between my hands to study it. I fought the urge to hit him and take it back.
“D’you know how rude it is to read while someone’s talking to you?”
“I was reading before you were talking.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“So what is this book anyway?” he asked, flipping it between hands.
“It’s about a guy who’s a writer and he falls in love with this waitress.” I felt myself getting excited about the connection that was blossoming. It was a spark too early.
“You reading about love Douglas? You’re reading fucking love stories like some faggot or little girl. You should be reading books about adventures, or war. Who gave you this piece of shit?”
“It’s not a piece of shit it’s good, it’s better than anything you’ve read.”
The slap stunned me before it turned the house silent and my face red.
“You’ve a mouth on you these days son, I don’t know who’s been teaching you this shit but it stops now!”
He left the room with my book tucked under his arm. That night when he fell asleep in front of the TV with a beer in his hand I would toss the house looking for it. Mum grabbed both my arms as the search became frantic with each dead end. She knelt before me in the kitchen in front of the heavily packed cupboard that sat under the stairs.
“Douglas, calm down son. You can’t take your book back. If your dad finds out you’ve got it again…look I’ll buy you a new book ok?”
“I don’t want a new book, I want that one.”
“You tell me the name of it and I’ll get you that book, a brand new copy for your birthday I promise.”
“He’s a real fucking asshole isn’t he Mum?”
“Ok I’ll give you that one but we’re going to talk about where you picked up that tongue of yours.”
The following night came and I still hadn’t got my book back, though I had given up the search in order to insure it wasn’t ripped to pieces by the old man. The TV blasted some alien programme. This wasn’t one of our shows, we had an evening routine and Jack was stomping it out and re-establishing his own. I stood at the kitchen sink on top of a chair. I’d taken a bottle of beer from the fridge and removed the lid dumping half of it down the drain before topping it up with bleach and patting the lid back down. I’d climb down from my chair and slip the beer back into the fridge alongside the rest of his real children and go back to my room. Tara and Jeff sat lovingly by his side, I shot them a fuck-you glare before climbing the stairs.
Mum had an old Remington portable from her office pool days she kept at the bottom of her wardrobe. I’d catch her looking at it longingly the odd night when bills were high and morale low. Thinking of the life lost then immediately feeling guilty for wishing her young away. I dragged the typer out from the wardrobe and lugged it to my room. Jeff had scattered a bunch of broken toys across the chest of drawers – which was the only piece of communal property in our warzone of a bedroom. He was quickly earning the nickname of Iron-Hands as anything he touched instantly dissolved, shattered, or simply magically stopped working. Mum had replaced the Saturday morning routine of shovelling the old man out of bed and forcing him out of the house to having a face-to-face with Jeff.
“Who broke the vase Jeff?”
“I don’t know Mummy.”
“Did you touch it?”
“No.”
“And how about honestly? Did you honestly not touch it?”
“I held it for a bit.”
“And did you break it?”
“No.”
“Iron-Hands strikes again!”
With one sweep of the arm I cleared the surface of the Gone with the Wind-like battlefield of broken and scarred He-Man figures setting the Remington pride of place. If the old man was to take my book I’d simply have to write my own, all I needed was paper…and an idea.
At school the tall kid avoided me like I had the plague. Word had gotten around and some of the less creative kids had christened him Shit-Face. I was pushing for the nickname Nugget (as in shit nugget) or even Caramel as I appreciated the subtly and figured it would be a nickname that would stick – like Sixty-Six but I was overruled and Shit-Face stuck; at least for Primary School. At a point af
ter assembly I complained of a stomach ache and was sent to the Nurse’s office. I stopped at the supply closet on the way and found it open and empty. One of the older boys claimed he caught two of the female teachers naked in there once. I liked the idea of sharing the same area as them, standing on the same spot as they did and the forest came to mind. Under the bottom shelf sat boxes of blank white paper. I didn’t figure it stealing, they had more than enough to see them through the rest of the school year and I needed only a little of it. Loading up my school bag I’d report to the Nurse telling her I had vomited in class – lie.
“Oh my!” she’d exclaim “Well we had better get your parents here to collect you.”
“Mr. O’Neill has already called my mum.”
“Where is she picking you up?”
“At the gate.”
“Ok…on you go then, get well soon.”
I’d never realised how easy it was to get myself out of school. All those years, all those classes, all those stupid kids caged up in those classrooms, walls covered in poor excuses for paintings, all trapped until 3PM. The next time I’d liberate Fiona. The next time I would take her with me but today I had work to do.
When I got home the house was empty. Mum kept a key inside a birdhouse that hung from the porch and I used it to let myself in. It would be hours before she was back, it would be hours after that before the old man came back from a fresh day of busking. I raced straight upstairs. I was hungry, my stomach was in knots but I didn’t want to disturb anything. If this project was going to work it needed absolutely secrecy. Nobody could know I had left school to become a writer at the tender age of nine. I slipped in and rolled round the first crisp sheet of paper. It looked back at me mockingly, dove shit white and defiant. I had only been a writer for a couple of minutes and I was already experiencing my first fit of writer’s block. It took most writers years to get there, I was ahead of my time. After minutes of pacing I sat down and tentatively spoilt the page with my first few clicks. I was committed to the first word, which narrowed down the possible choices for the second word, which further narrowed the third; the fourth would almost write itself as would the fifth, sixth and seventh and before I would know it I would have my first line. That opening sentence that would trap a reader the way One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill had trapped me. I had figured my main character as a Dan and wrote him as such, he’d be a lot like me.
Chapter One
I didn’t have a choice when my dad left, I didn’t have a choice when he returned either…
I wrote for hours, I wrote until the page came to an end, only stopping to reload and get underway again. Eventually I heard the front door go and my index fingers stopped millimetres from their destinations. I’d have to hold that thought for a day, maybe more. Slipping the typer off the chest of drawers I tucked it under the bed to protect it against Iron-Hands and climbed out the bedroom window sliding down the drainpipe to the backyard. It was only noon, I had hours to kill before I could legitimately breeze through the door with my made-up day. I headed towards the forest and the ancient skin magazines, with any luck I’d have a chance to practice my masturbating.
Dinner was another tense affair. The old man had cleaned up busking but emptied most of it down his neck in a fit of celebration, now he sat swaying from side-to-side in his seat at the head of the table chewing over his dinner in his cement mixer of a mouth and supping down a beer. I no longer remembered which one was the bleach beer but Mum didn’t drink so I no longer cared. After dinner I’d make a pass at trying to get my book back from him pleading Dad can I have my book back now? I’ve been really good and it’s my birthday soon.
“I’ll get you a proper book boy, you wait and see.”
“But I want that book Dad.”
“What’s so important about that fucking book?”
“It tells it like it is, I want to be able to do that.”
“You want to what?”
“I want to be a writer, and I want to be able to tell it like it is.”
“I thought you were going to be an architect? Architect is a good job boy, a real job. I thought I told you before about all this artsy-fartsy shite. You want to be a writer? You want to be a puffter, do you boy?”
I didn’t have an answer. My heart sank at the thought of never getting my book back.
“Look boy, you’re only ever going to end up piss poor and no good to nobody if you live with your head in the fucking clouds. Knuckle down, get yourself a real job and stop with all this artsy bollocks.”
I hated him at that moment but I smiled and offered to fetch him another beer.
Then I was in the bathroom changing my shirt. Jeff had somehow managed to break a pen I was using and which I only noticed had crumbled in his touch when a blue sticky patch spread across my chest. I stood bare-chested in front of the mirror and dropped the shirt into the laundry basket when I saw a streak of brown looking up at me and knew from the shape that it was my book, my beloved. I grabbed it and jammed it into my back pocket and rushed to the bedroom. Tearing through the chest of drawers I liberated a perfectly folded white shirt with little sailboats on it from the orderly mass grave of garments and threw it on. It was still early enough to leave the house, early enough to make certain the safety of my book. I slide down the banister and raced through the living room, Dad was supping down another beer. It wouldn’t be long now.
“I’m going to call for Sixty-Six for a bit.”
“Don’t stay out all night!” Mum requested.
I nodded and fled to the forest.
The forest had a small brook that babbled along in the middle of it. Sixty-Six had used it to wash his feet the time he lost his shoes. There was, what looked like, a rabbit hole to the right of it where the land sloped up towards a denser tree line. I wrapped my book in a blue plastic bag I found and hid it inside the hole; safe from the old man. He had taken my bookmark from the pages but I didn’t mind. I’d find my place in the story again.
When I got back to Laurelbank the street had erupted. Dad was in the middle of the cul-de-sac screaming his head off, Mum’s old typer and my manuscript in pieces at the front of the house. He saw me and I stood perfectly still as he charged towards me.
“You little bastard!” he roared as Ronan stepped in front of me, taking the verbal bullets the old man was spraying indiscriminately.
“Back off there buddy!”
“Get out of my way, I’m going to discipline that little piss-ant. He’ll know better than defy me the next time!”
“No, you won’t!”
“Defy who?” I added indignantly.
“Back off Douglas.” Ronan instructed.
“Get out of my fucking way ginger before I put the hurt on you!”
Dad swung that shovel hand wildly, I feared for Ronan but the man had some mad skills and before Jack could figure out what exactly happened he was up-ended slammed on to the ground that previously sat firmly below his feet and had his left arm bent halfway round his balloon knot. Ronan knelt down on top of him making the old man wince and I saw the first crack in his armour.
“Now,” Ronan started calmly “over the last while I’ve gotten to know your wife, and your children, especially this young one and he’s a good kid. I think he could turn out to be a fine young man but not with the likes of you dumping off your own baggage on his little shoulders. I’ve had plenty of words with Ruth about the state of your marriage and though I wouldn’t wish to comment on another man’s relationship I think I can say that your sudden appearance here was a shock to all under her roof. I’m going to let you up now and I’d appreciate your best behaviour as an example to the children.”
A crowd had gathered, and it wasn’t just children.
Ronan released Dad’s arm and the old man tentatively clambered to his feet before pulling his shoulders back and making himself as big as possible, more for Ronan this time than Mum.
“Whatever you’ve got going on here Jack is
your business but when you trash a friend’s house, when you hit a friend of mine and threaten another you make it my business.”
“You watch your back ginger, you hear me?!”
He turned to Mum. My attention drifted there too and I realised that her little left eye was closing over and I flashed red. If he wasn’t going to drink that beer I’d kill him my-fuckin-self. Ronan telegraphed my charge and wrapped a wing around me pulling me in close. Dad took a step towards her, she took a step back and then she said it.
“I want you out Jack. I got away from you once before but I’m not leaving here, get out of my house and don’t ever come back. You come back and I’ll cut your fucking head off!”
“Don’t threaten me Ruth!” he barked.
“Everything ok, Ruth?” asked Ronan.
“Just fine Ron, Jack was just leaving weren’t you Jack?!”
The family Morgan sat in Ronan’s living room while Dad packed up his few belongings. I watched from the window as he set his banjo and small bag of clothes by the front door and for some reason hoped that he didn’t head to the fridge to clean us out of beer. I didn’t understand the man but I felt sorry for what he’d become. Ronan’s place felt like home. Tara and Jeff asked permission for everything here but I had spent night after night drinking cold milkshakes and watching Alf and discussing adult things like life, the world, and our place in it.
Mum pulled up alongside me and watched for signs of the cloud moving on from our three bedroom end terrace. She’d rub the crown of my head and place her arm on my shoulder. In a few more years I’d shoot up and tower over the little lady but at that moment she could still lean on me.
“You ok kid?” she quizzed.
I nodded.
“Your dad read me what you wrote.”
The room was so silent I imagined everyone being able to hear my heart pound with trepidation.
