He’d been watching the kids play across the street for a while before the police had showed up. He didn’t know what time it was exactly, but knew she’d be here soon. She always came round after her Thursday shift.
The sun had dipped slightly out of sight, but the chill of evening had not yet cloaked the estate. In the distance, he could still hear lads kick a football outside the chippy. Washing no longer flapped on lines, but had yet to be taken in. The pubs hadn’t turned out, so he knew he had a while before his father returned, red-faced and heavy with lager.
Near where he sat on the front step, pressed into the damp lip of an discarded Tennent’s, were the spent ends of three cigs. He calculated that he must have been perched there for at least 20 minutes when he saw the blues silently flickering towards the end of the road.
The kids – two boys – were playing on a trampoline that took up the entirety of the square front yard of number 43. As they leapt about, it’s metal framework skittered and giggled across the concrete, echoing against the parallel walls of the estate. Two coppers exited the car. A man and a woman.
You probably already know about them: where the group is from and how they banded, what year their first EP came out, if the lead guitarist is left or right handed.
Maybe you own a few of their albums, perhaps you’ve known of them forever, but this song reminded me of you though we’ve never listened to it together.
We didn’t ever hear it in that place we like where the barmen all wear pocket flowers, and we never queued it on the juke box that night we drank and laughed for hours.
And it wasn’t playing in your car when you dropped me at central station, but this song reminds me of you and fills me with a blue elation.
So I reckon, several years from now, needing something to get me through I’ll play this song I’ve played so much because it reminded me of you.
John caught the 73 bus back from school every day, except on a Thursday, when Mr Bradshaw did football training at four o’clock, after which, all the lads of St Bernard who stayed behind would find their way home on foot, roving the town streets like stray cats.
The uniformed huddles of boys saw the bus approach: the same nameless driver as they’d always known, pulling in with a precise one-half turn of the great wheel, and flexing his fat red fingers out as he hauled the bus into the stop. His arms, marked with pin up girls, blued by age, and stretched wide by nightly fish suppers and Fray Bentos pies, pressed against the plastic divider, as he put his tab back into his mouth, multitasking by taking coins and pressing the button for the machine to dispense its long ticket tongue through the feed gap.
His four gold sovereign rings had long since lost hope of escape from between joint and knuckle, wedged on tight. John flinched, imagining the pressure, each time he looked, but today he took little care to examine. It was Monday, and the worst part of his week – Geography with Mr Cairns – was once again a whole seven days away. He made his way to his usual space, in one of two aisle seats downstairs, securing the window with his bag for Liam Doyle, who was always late being let out of the labs in Block A. John knew that, once he showed, Liam would have a story or titbit for him, about Mr Murphy.
Liam was almost a year older than John, despite being in the same school year, but had been put into the bottom set for sciences, with Arthur Murphy. John had once seen Murphy tackle a first year, in a since discontinued student-teacher touch rugby match – a friendly – and, despite never having had a class with him, Liam’s stories had bolstered John’s picture of the man: that first year had gone down like a sandcastle in a tsunami, and Mr Murphy had pulled the boy up by his collar, legs like limp spaghetti plucked from a pot, brushing him down and laughing in front of the other boys, not so much in concern but in warning.
the trees have long since popped their soft confetti trails mingled with the dirt trodden brown no longer pink tiny tissue papers dropped in a quarry and I think
As they sat in the garden with sun on their shoulders, they saw two moths mating: Elephant Hawks, enormous, olive winged and brightly tipped – pink as a kiss, their bodies tail-pinned in a union older than them. Both gawped and tutted at the audacious clasp. This is a family neighbourhood, he said, smirking, and they left the Fornicators to it.
*
What she didn’t tell him though was that, later that same night as she went out to lock the gate she saw them again – still stuck together, one dead, the other not, but flying low, unable to breach the garden wall or free itself from bondage as, in frantic flutter, it dragged its cold mate through the blue light of summer night.
do you remember when we had to cancel our very first date because I had a last minute shift at the bar, but you came to see me anyway and asked me about the movies I love and drank gin and winked when I walked back and forth past you serving other people but how I’d always circle back
and another time you asked me to get free drinks for you and your mates, got hammered hogged the juke box broke the top button on your shirt and called someone a fucking rat lost a tooth threw a glass and got kicked out and I had to quit later that week standing up for you
I just remember that’s all and wondered if you might too
The other night I dreamt you came into my house and wouldn’t leave. At first, I didn’t mind – we were just sitting together in my kitchen – but as I neared the dregs of my second cup of tea, I started to wonder when you planned to go. When I woke, I considered the parallel universe where we now somehow coexist: your keys in my fruit bowl; your hands on my bath taps; your feet on my couch. And in the haze of my morning I wasn’t sure what it had meant or whether it had even been a dream at all, and half expected to see you pass by, step-less and slight, like a ghost on the landing.
Shark
Finally! A good one. Can’t remember who asked. Who knows how these things come up, just go with it fast. Which creature would you least like to be killed by? If you had to. If you just had to. Doesn’t matter why. We dipped into silence, underwater in thought, each seeking an answer in the fashion we’d wrought. The lot of us sat in a circle of green bottles and spent ends, barely friends in a debauched fairy’s ring – and, for a second, not saying a thing. Godzilla doesn’t count. Then one spoke out. A grizzly bear. Why? You could just run. From a bear? You’re fucking joking, son. A few others offered and we talked through the zoo. But I didn’t have to think – I already knew. How, being frozen in the deep, I’d die thinking of you, as it swam, torpedoed steel, and took what it wanted. It’s eyes gloss and haunted. I wondered if you’d feel it burst you apart. Turn your organs to mulch. Teeth through the heart. After a while, we spilled beer, and turned to something new, but I sat for a while, and thought of the blue, of the dark and of death, and of it, and of you.
Secret
Later on, as I’m walking back to the station, I remembered when she used to do her lists. They started years back, before she started ditching mass, before she started pinching things – even before Nan. She would spend hours somewhere secret, because I never saw her do it, writing list after list of all the families we knew – our neighbours’ families, our teachers’ families, our friends, their mothers and fathers, families off the telly, their names, their ages, aunties, uncles, cousins – all the many ways in which they belonged to one another. All the families we had ever known, all but our own, hidden away in drawers and under mattresses for years. In that quiet house, I always found them, and when she didn’t think I was in, or if she didn’t think I could hear her, she would cry, and no one ever came.
It was like lugging a dead cow, and that was the way we would forever describe it. All four of us had heaved it, the great patterned reject: digging our fingers into the threadbare fabric of the arms and sweating, our faces red and determined. Two at each end, and another – less of a help – trotting along near the middle. Every dozen yards or so, we’d stop, taking loud, open-mouthed breaths of chilled October air and grinning at one another, before tackling the next stint.
Shaun and Luke had calculated that it would take us about an hour to cart it from the layby outside Victoria Wines, where we’d found it, to Broan’s Field, behind Shaun’s house.
‘An hour. How’d you work that out?’ Siobhan had scowled.
‘Just worked it out like. Maths.’ Luke had shrugged.
‘You’re in red group for maths and your mam says you still can’t tell the time.’
ataraxicat 