Sonny

You ever seen a prison before? I have. It’s nothing special. From the outside, anyhow. It’s just high walls and a big metal gate. Impressive at first I guess, but once you’ve looked at anything more than five minutes, it gets boring.
I should know, I've stared at it long enough.
The outside of something never tells you the whole story. I mean, look at me in this Lexus. Sat in the dark with nothing to do but wait outside the prison gates. I know if I was you, I'd be thinking up a lot of questions. Like why am I in this shiny new sportscar on my own, and what am I doing outside a jail at six o'clock in the morning, and how old am I anyway?
All you need to know right now is I stole the car about half an hour ago. And I drove it here. The details don't matter. The point is, I had a reason. All you know is that I'm a car thief. And I can do it without scratching the bodywork, or hotwiring the ignition. I use the key, just like the guy who bought the car and parked it on his big flash driveway. In about an hour that guy is going to wake up and look out at all that fancy tarmac and cry like a baby.
Obviously I don't usually wait about in a stolen car outside the prison. It's not a smart thing to do. But this is a special occasion.
Now the sun’s coming up you can see rubbish all over the place, piling up outside the gates. Probably blown here from every part of town. Just like the people inside, I guess. And I've heard almost everybody inside has tattoos, just like the tags spray-painted on the gate. Kids writing their names on everything, so they don't lose it or something. You can tell it's kids because it only goes up the gate about four feet. So everybody has a nickname, a street name. Except me.
My only name is Sonny. I don't have a job and I don't go to school. I'm not a member of any group, and nobody owes me anything. If you're bothered what I do, if you want to know the truth about my life, then you should know I've probably spent more time in front of these gates than anywhere else.
And that’s why I got here at six am, because I didn’t want to fuck it up and miss the Grand Opening.
I haven’t waited five years for my dad to come out of jail for nothing.

So now I’m thinking you should know something about my father. He’s probably the best thief in the world. He’s the smartest guy I know, apart from me. And everything I didn’t learn myself, I got from him some way or other. You know how most kids have enough troubles learning how to walk, talk and shit in a bowl. Well I was stealing by the time I was two. In case you think I’m bullshitting, wait until my Dad gets out. We'll show you. You can learn a lot from us. We should charge people for lessons. Because if you think about it, most real life criminals are losers. They make mistakes. They get caught. My dad was just unlucky.
I'll tell you one thing, just so you know I'm not messing around. One day my dad comes picks me up with this stick, twice as long as I was high with a hook on the end. I thought he'd got a job at the funfair messing about with plastic ducks.
He says to me: 'We're going fishing.'
So we walk around town until he spots this big house with a Ferrari parked outside. It looks empty, like the owners are off at a swingers party or something. He goes right up to the front door and slides the pole through the letterbox. Couple of seconds later he pulls out some car keys.
He tells me: ‘Anyone leaves his keys hanging round deserves to have his car stolen.’
You can bet that person won’t make the same mistake twice. So it’s really like a kind of educational service. He claimed it was like seducing a woman. 'You don't just smash the window and pull the radio out,' he goes. 'You have to sweet-talk your way inside the bodywork before they even know what’s happening.'
This is the kind of stuff they should teach at school.
Then he goes: 'It's up to you what you do next. You can wear it out, grind out the clutch and sell it on,' he says. 'Or you can take care of it, polish it, keep it working for years.'
I asked him how you'd know just looking at it. 'Oh, you'll know,' he said. 'It's all in the way they walk.'
But if you ask me what I remember most about my Dad, and you want the real answer and not some shrink bullshit, what I remember most is my Dad's moustache. You don't see them about these days, not a real one. So you're bound to notice it straight off, soon as he walks in the room. I checked all his photos, and it’s like he always had one. Like he was born that way.
Everybody knew my Dad by the moustache.
I still have this dream. It’s like a music video where all the dancing girls all got moustaches.
I used to stare in the mirror, waiting for my own to grow.
So the point is my Dad shouldn’t be too hard for you to recognise..
I've stood outside this place for hours, and never been inside the whole time. I've seen a lot of people walking out of here. They could have been murderers, or paedos or anything. A few times I’ve fooled myself one of them was my dad, seen his walk or his moustache. Then seen him embracing some other kid, some other woman.
I’ve even asked a few if they knew my dad inside. While they’re stood outside, smoking, waiting for a ride. Mostly they said no. A couple of them laughed, said ‘Go home, kid’ or something like it.
This one guy, about a year ago, you could tell he’d been in there a life-stretch. Scar right across his face. Half his ear missing. This guy, he just looked me up and down. He had those dead black eyes you get from killing people.
He said: ‘Oh yeah, I knew him.’ And that was it.
‘So… how is he?’
He stared at me again. ‘Who is he, more like.’ He laughed. ‘You his kid or something?’
I said something lame like, ‘Yeah, he mention me?’
That got a laugh too. Real comedian, that guy. And then his friends squealed up in this shiny car, and he was gone. So I could tell Dad had a reputation inside. He earnt it the hard way, and you don't ruin that kind of image by telling every sucker about your son on the outside, that's for sure.
Dad did send a letter once. One page, no address. Not like I didn't know where he was. It was maybe a week after he got caught. He told me, remember the deal we made. That if he ever got locked up I wouldn't come see him, not even on his birthday. I always used to tell him he was too smart to get caught, so it wasn't a problem, but he just said 'Nobody can run forever.'
He said prison is where you teach yourself not to get caught next time around, just that most of the people inside are too stupid to realise it.
And that was the last I heard.

So now it’s eight o’clock. About time.
I put the air conditioning on. I check out the sat nav. A woman’s voice says hello. I turn it off. She reminds me of my mother.
I look in the glove box. Empty.
You notice how empty this car is? It's full of nothing. Like a lot of things around here. People too.
My mother is dead, in case you're interested. It all happened a long time ago, so I don't reckon there's much point going into it. All it means is I don't have someone harassing me all day, asking me what I've been doing, telling me to tie my laces and brush my teeth. Well, some people try, but I don't let them because when it comes down to business, they're not my mother. The worst part is when they get all concerned, and they talk to you real slow and put a face on, and all the other fake tricks that old people pull. There are a lot of screwed-up relatives in my mother's family, and that's who I was lumped with when Dad went to jail. It might have gone all right if they hadn't stopped harassing me all day, because then I wouldn't have set fire to the kitchen, and I wouldn't have had to run away. 'We're very disappointed in you Sonny,' they said, as if I cared. I bet they were real disappointed when I left. I bet they were all out looking for me, crying their disappointed faces off. It didn't matter anyway, because by then I knew when my Dad was getting out of jail.
I look at the prison gates. There's nothing going on but I get out the Lexus anyway. I was starting to choke I was so bored. Nothing but grey. I walk over to the curb where there's a dead bird rotting away. I turn it over with my foot. It's a bird, like I said. A couple of flies jagging about. One of them's checking out the bird, the other one's just flying about in this weird holding pattern. One fly per bird, maybe that's the rule.
I step up in front of the gate, a big green metal thing made to look like painted wood. A smaller door in the middle with a little closed hatch in the top of it. I look around, thinking there might be a bell or something. Suppose it ain't really a surprise there isn't one.
I think about knocking, but I don't even want to touch the prison. These things are infectious. I'd probably touch it and end up a choir boy. Then I'd get fucked by the priest and have to kill myself. Things can go wrong real quick when you're not paying attention.
So I go back to the car and sit.
It's lucky I'm so patient.
If I think about it for too long I get freaked out. I'm waiting for a guy I've not even seen for five years. Five years ago I was a foot shorter and three shades greener. Five years ago I didn't know how to drive, or fuck, or fire a gun.
Maybe I got it wrong, maybe this isn't the day.
Maybe he beat up a screw and got ten days in the hole.
Maybe he forgot he even had a son.
Crash goes the prison gate. Yeah, I jumped a little. Because I feel like I know what it is right away. Someone coming out. I grab the wheel tighter. You can't see it but I can feel my hand starting to shake.
But it doesn't look too much like Dad. Same height maybe. A faded check brown and white shirt. Standard issue prison bag hanging down his right side. Same sort of boots though, cowboy style, tapered at the end. Dark brown.
I try and remember what he was wearing when he went inside.
The face is all different somehow. Same brown hair, but the face is all wrong.
I don't see it until he's ten yards away. He takes out a cigarette and cocks his head to light it. The same old slant of the neck, the same old Larry.
That’s my dad.
And then I get it. He's dumped the moustache.
I wind the window down and shout out: 'Need a ride?’
Great line, huh?
He steps off the curb slowly and heads over to the car, bowing down slightly, and squinting. The steel in his boots scrapes the tarmac.
He knows me. You can see it in his eyes.
Dad goes to lean on the door frame, smiling. Then he stops his hand an inch above the paintwork and just stays there bent over, scanning the inside of the car.
He breathes in and holds it, like he's waiting for the words to come out all by themselves.
I start getting restless. 'You like the car?'
He just looks at me straight in the eyes, so long I don't know whether smiling is a good idea. Then he grins.
'Hook and pole, right?'
The old Larry Anderson is shining out from the wrinkles. The gold tooth lighting up his mouth.
'Could be,' I laugh.
And then it’s gone again, and he’s all serious.
He stand there a while, smoking. I keep my eye on the ash slowly burning down. I can't think of anything to say, just watch him standing there taking long deep draughts and blowing out the smoke through his nose. I see lines in his face, under his cheeks. Like an old pro, I think. I'm just about to go ahead and ask him how it feels to be out, when he takes one last draw. I see him looking at the butt, like he expected it to last longer. Drops it on the floor and grinds it down with his boot. I see the butt squashed on the pavement, giving out the last grey curl.
He doesn’t look at me when he says: ‘How about we take a walk? I'm hungry.'
I shrug. ‘Sure.’ I leave the keys in the ignition. I can get another car just as easy.
He starts walking down the road towards a cafe on the corner. I catch up and walk alongside him for a while, looking at him, side on, seeing where the moustache used to be. He’s wearing clothes I can’t remember seeing him in before. Chinos, that old checked shirt. These prison people really know how to break a man down.
He catches me looking, gives an eerie kind of smile. The kind of smiles you put on for photographs. I fall back a little, digging my hands in my back pockets. Keep a couple of paces behind him, kicking stones in the dirt. Then I just focus on the faulty neon flicking on and off above the doorway.
I hold off from saying anything until I find something decent to say. I don't do small talk. One thing I hate is small talk. You know, how are you, how's your mother, going to rain later kind of thing.
No doubt he's got a lot to think over. The future or whatever. House, car, woman, all the everyday crap you have to organise. He'll be saving the big plans for after, once we got settled somewhere.
I keep on walking, six paces behind now. The road is quiet and there are only a few trucks in the car park. The wind picks up the dust and puts it on my shoes.
It doesn't feel how I remember.
The diner smells of grease. Oily smoke from the griddles avoiding the extractor fans and coating the place with black, sticky sweat. Fat dripping off the cookers on to the floor.
I pass a big lady, the hair in a bob, t-shirt and no bra, hip fat spilling over their trousers type, trying to take a burger down. I feel myself cringing as the juice comes out and slides down her top. Then she notices and grabs her t-shirt in her greasy fingers and sucks it out so now it's just a big old grease stain pointing down to her belly.
Down the aisle the waitress serves two girls sucking milkshakes so hard their cheeks collapse and their eyes pop out and you can’t hear anything but slurping and giggling.
Dad’s gone for table near the window. I slide in opposite, staying in the shade. I sit there looking at him, as he fidgets with his fingers.
I sit on my hands.
He clears his throat.
And he says: ‘So you in school?’
He’s folding the paper napkin into strange shapes.
‘Some days.’ I didn't mean to start out with a lie.
He’s brushing crumbs from the table.
I say: 'How was prison?'
He’s rearranging the sugar and the mustard pots into a neat line.
'Good.'
I half laugh.
He looks at me again, a look I don't remember from five years ago.
'You remind me a lot of your mother, Sonny.'
And I don’t know how to start with that one.
Then his hand moves across the table and touches mine. His fingers, sweaty and colder than I expected. Lightly resting on my knuckles.
This has never happened before.
I have to fight just to keep my hand there, stop it shaking or jerking away. The plastic cover feels like it’s rotting under my fingers. Maggots are crawling out and up my arm and over my shoulder and into my ear and nose and mouth and taking out my brain one bite at a time.
Then just as I'm feeling like I'm going to scream, the waitress comes up and asks us if we want to order. Dad takes his hand away and throat-coughs before saying: 'Just a water please.'
I try cracking a line. 'You gone soft or something?'
He just gestures and me and tells the waitress: 'He'll have the same.'
'Make it a Coke,' I say.
I put my elbows on the table and fold my arms in front of me. I see him looking at them like he wants to say something.
So I say something first: 'I thought you were hungry.'
Dad strokes his top lip. Says: 'We need to talk.'
'OK.' Thinking it can only get better.
He smiles a little. ‘I just wanted to say... ’ And pauses a while.
I say: 'You must have some great stories...'
He brings the glass down on the table and the bang rings out across the diner.
Dad frowns, then says out of nowhere: ‘Don't interrupt me.’
'What?'
He can probably see I'm getting spooked, because he says, ‘Ok, let’s start over.’
My left leg starts jumping all of its own, like a rapid fire nervous twitch. I stretch my leg out into the aisle to make it stop. Then the waitress comes over with the drinks and nearly trips over it, so I take it back and the jumping sets off again. She's cute. Cute with a few extra few pounds. She leans over the table to set them down and her cash bag hangs from her waist, open to the world. It's too easy to ignore, and anyway I need something to distract myself. I slide my hand under the table and finger a ten note while she’s making sure each glass has got its own paper coaster.
It's what they call the dip.
I catch my Dad’s eye as I palm the money in my left hand. His look isn't what I expected.
‘What?’ I ask him.
He turns to the waitress and says: ‘Miss, I think you’ve dropped something.’ And he looks at me and nods his head at the girl.
So I look my Dad in the eye, and those eyes are still there. Like's he's begging for food. Nah, that's not it. It's more like he’s disappointed in me.
I think about braving it out, just to spite the old man, scanning the floor for something I can use, some dropped napkin or coin or wrapper. But all there is on the floor is a smear of ketchup and some shredded lettuce.
Dad’s still fixed on me while I switch the tenner to my right hand.
I stare him out.
‘I can’t see anything.' I say.
The waitress just stands there nervously twirling her hair.
So Dad's still looking at me, but I can see him reaching into his pocket. He holds his hand out to the girl. ‘You dropped this.’ He’s holding out a twenty in his hand.
‘Did I?’ She goes all shy, and checks her purse.
'Sure,' I say, giving it the fake smile.
She blushes and mumbles thanks and skips off with the twenty back to the counter.
Dad’s looking at me again, and his lips are parted. He always looks like he's about to say something. So I beat him to it.
‘That was real sweet of you,’ I say.
‘It was a cheap trick, Sonny.'
I shrug. ‘Can’t be a genius every time.’
But he just says: ‘Give me the note Sonny.’
‘What?’
‘The ten. Hand it over.’
‘That's not how it works.’
'And who told you that?'
I stare at the lemon stuck on the top of my glass all fancy. I take it off and eat it, whole, just for show. Then I look back at him, trying to work out what's going on here. No clues. I sink back into my chair and throw him the money. 'Oh just some guy. Not seen him for five years though.'
Bitter taste in my mouth, burning my throat.
'I'm sorry, Sonny,' he says.
'For what? You didn't do anything.'
He takes a slow sip of the water.
'Maybe I should just come out and say it.'
'Go ahead.'
And then: ‘I don't know what kind of boy you are now... The point is... I don't want you to turn out like me...'
I say, without thinking: 'I thought that was the whole point.'
'Maybe you liked the whole idea, I don't know... but it was wrong.'
'And who told you that?'
But he isn't listening. Just rubbing his jaw with his hand, so it covers his mouth and I can hardly hear what he's saying. All I know is that it's starting to sound like a bad movie.
'So now I've been given a chance, it's time I was a proper father...'
I almost shout back at him: 'I don't want a proper father...' Notice people starting to look up. 'I just want my father. The guy from five years ago. Is that you or not?'
'Well,' he says.
'Tough question I know,' I say, all sarcastic. Thinking about getting up and walking away until this whole nightmare gets sorted out.
'I just mean, I've changed... my outlook on certain things.'
I just look at him. The way he said 'certain things' like a teacher. I'm working out some kind of comeback for that when he just blurts it out.
'I'm going straight, Sonny.'
So this isn’t a feeling I like. It's a cold sweat, a pain right behind my eyes, a giant pressure building up in my temple like its about to blow, a cramp hitting my stomach. It’s like some doctor is going to cut me open and change my blood for anti-freeze. But he carries on while I sway there trying to focus on the place where his moustache used to be, the white shivering lip that right now just looks pathetic.
'I'm going to get a job, a house, maybe find you a new mother... Get you back in school. I know you've not been in school... set up a real home, with a garden and a front gate and an honest car...'
He reaches over and grabs my hand again. This time I'm too freaked to move.
And I’m thinking, I’ve only been waiting five years for this crap.
'That's all I want, Sonny, an honest life. You probably think it used to be fun, how it used to be, but it's no fun looking at you now, Sonny. I made a real mess and I'm sorry...'
And then the Coke comes right up my throat and splashes off the table in front of me in a stream that keeps on strong with every jerk of my stomach as I stand up and grip the table until I’m dry heaving and nothing’s coming out of me but air and spit but it’s still going on and on and I’m thinking I don’t want to be here any more.
I start to back away, wiping the acid taste from my mouth.
‘Sonny,’ he says, standing up.
People are watching. They’ve stopped chewing, stopped talking, stopped sucking.
I start to turn. I’m almost round and aimed at the door when he grabs me by the arm, tight, creasing my skin. There's still strength in him somewhere.
I feel his cheap lousy words branding themselves on the back of my head. ‘Now hear me out, Sonny.’
And then out of nowhere I tense up and lash round blind in a circle. My right hand balls up as my arm straightens out in the spin. I’m not even looking to hit anything, I'm just swinging for the hell of it because this feeling in me has got to get out somehow.
I don’t even feel my hand hit anything.
But I hear a low click, then a sharp cry.
When I come out the turn there’s just silence. My eyes focus on the floor.
Dad’s flat on his back, hands out by his sides, feet pointing to the ceiling. His eyes are wide open, staring, stunned.
Just like mine.
He doesn’t move for a while as I stand there, nothing else moving, nothing sounding.
Dad lifts his head up, slowly, looks at me in the eye. There’s nothing there. I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
There's nothing I can say. I'm already running.

Everybody knew it was a wasted journey

0000 GMT
Cruising at 34,000ft in a rusted snuffbox the Airforce peaks like to call Strat, the Tynan brothers were jacking around on autopilot, smoking giant reefers in a cloud chamber cockpit. “Poley” Dan, the more obese of the two, can’t see “Styrene” Larry for the haze and hallucination just now.
A pretty hostess is leaning over the controls wiping condensation from the viewing windows and trying to ignore Dan’s arm snaking between her smooth, tanned legs, pretending to check the flight instruments. She knows by instinct his eyes are beady, crossed to focus with the surge of adrenaline lust. Larry has a lockjaw grin, his eyes pleading at the back of her fair head in desperate jealousy.
“I don’t know how you guys fly when you can’t see where you’re flying to.”
“Too true, darling Karen,” says Poley, lifting up her skirt to get a better view before turning to Styrene with a comic entertainer’s wobble, “but I know where I’d like to touch down tonight.”
Karen had a hooker‘s smile as she clamped her legs shut. “Later honey,” ruffling his hair and skipping out the door. Larry can only grin wider and tenser, his teeth biting down harder on the butt of his joint.
“Stop flirting with the staff lover boy.”
“That wasn’t flirting, brother, what you’re seeing is foreplay.”
“I could turn you in for harassment, Dan.”
“Yeah?” Styrene only stares. Dan chuckles and a mountain of ash dumps on the pocket of his bleached white shirt. It spreads a grey stain across his chest when he fumbles the flick away.
“Jesus.”

0200GMT.
“Thirty-four, single as the wind through a crowded beach,” Dan croons through the microphone, its lead safely disconnected.
“Dammit,” Larry is jerking back on the flight stick repeatedly.
“I’ve got my health, my pension, life insurance. No ex-wives or starving children. A pecker in my pocket and a wad full of cash…”
“No, no, no, ah,” jabbing at the controls and hurting his forefinger, sucking on it.
“…money in the bank, sperm in the bag….”
“Where…on God’s earth…” It’s like an insistent whinge from Styrene now, but Dan presses on.
“I’m due a little fun before my faculties start resigning and living on the proceeds of…”
“Turn your goddamn faculties on this problem, you fuck.”
Poley’s attention is caught more by the muffled sounds emerging from around Larry’s fingers than his exasperated moaning.
“What?”
“I’d like to take control of this goddamn B-52 and land it. And..” He breaks off because Dan has both chins in his hands and is tapping his cheek with one finger, audibly. “What?”
“…”
“See?” Styrene goes berserk with the controls, rocking them furiously through 360 degrees and seemingly more, jabbing the “manual” and “autopilot” buttons, “override” switches and dripping foam on his two-tone shoes.
Dan coughs and stares out the window, cleaning it with the cuff of his shirt. He sighs, “It’s the middle of the Atlantic. There’s nothing to land on.”
“Just humour me and take control of the plane, Poley.” Dan scowls at the nickname and reaches for the stick, pushing the “manual” button once. He grins.
Styrene sweats nervously.
“You ever put a jumbo in a flat spin?”
“It’s impossible.”
“Oh yeah?”
“…”
Dan stands up from the controls. Suddenly he lashes out with his left foot, connecting high and hard, sending the stick flying forward with a squeal. He looks puzzled.
“Theoretically we should have gone straight into the sea with that one." He takes a cigar from his pocket “It worked simulated, anyhow.” A hand grabs the cabin Tannoy.
Letting out a high Texan-frequency squeal, he sinks to a low moan. “Karen, darling, come to mama.” He clicks off. “She’s mine.”

0400 GMT.
“I can’t say there’s many options available here and now,” Larry is musing. “Any chance of making it to New York?”
Poley is taking his tie off. “Let‘s just forget the real world, Larry.” He jerks the lever on his seat and springs it into recline mode. “I’m going to have some fun.”
“Meanwhile…”
“Meanwhile nothing. And close the door after you.”
Larry is confused, if nothing else, and he edges out of the cockpit. “The radio?”
“I’d prefer to die without the fuss of some schmaltzy flypast from a hotshot F-18 pilot who wants to get a closer look at mortality. Let them do the work when they find the black box.”
Stunned by the sudden ferocity, Larry shrugs and acts offended.
“Joe Public likes a mystery. So I’m going to give them one. Including why nobody went ballistic and started screaming Mayday just to get attention.”
“And what if I tell the passengers?”
“You’re welcome to them. Dim fucks.” Poley unbuttons the first three buttons of his shirt and takes out another cigar. “Give them my love. And tell Karen to get her ass over here. That‘s two things to remember.”
“Yes Captain,” Styrene mock salutes and turns to face the bulk of the plane.

O410 GMT
“Hello. Hello. Hi.” Styrene shakes every hand the same way. “That’s a tight one. How are you?” His grip is weakening slightly now, greased with the oily palms of more than fifty handshakes in two minutes. “You look ravishing… Not so many on the flight today is there … that’s good, fewer fatalities..” Exaggerated laugh. Perhaps too exaggerated, because that lady thinks the air of jokiness he was aiming for may have flown past into manic despair.

0401 GMT (Approx.)
Standing at the head of the aisle, Larry Tynan could see an indistinguishable sea of heads bob and wave before him in curiosity. He was fully suited up, caressing his peaked cap with both hands nervously. Larry could see they fed on it ravenously. He ploughed forward to the first row where an obese woman slouched over three seats, brushing away gravied crumbs down her blouse in long agonising brown streaks. She stared at him blankly and he stood there for some moments making eye contact. Measuring her bulk, considering what to say. In the end he just nodded and moved left to the children climbing over the seats opposite. He brightened up falsely.
“How are you doing boys? Enjoying the flight?”
They solidified instantly and peered at him mid-clamber, suspiciously. “OK mister. How’s the plane?”
“The plane?” Styrene was caught blind by the directness of the question but recovered quickly. “It’s doing just fine. We won’t be landing for a while, though.” Their parents smiled grimly at him and he allowed himself a shallow smirk.
The pretty lady behind them had been eyeing him throughout and he slumped into the seat beside her. She drew breath softly. “Aren’t you flying?”
“No… My brother’s taking care of that.” Larry smiled.

0402 GMT
A finger traces ever bigger aureoles on Karen’s breast as Dan takes a deep breath. “No,” he says, finally, but Karen still has a glazed dreamy look about her.
“You haven’t even partially comprehended the mechanics of this here sitcom, Karen.” His forefinger hovers over her nose, and her eyes cross in concentration.
“No plane, however technically advanced can ever hope to be in perpetual motion above the earth’s surface. This here monument of Air Force technology depends on fuel to keep it moving, and in our case to keep it going at cruising speed at 34,000ft until a pilot, preferably me, takes over the controls and directs it towards the nearest strip of tarmac.” Karen kisses his finger, but he moves it back to her breast.
“Unfortunately, that course of action remains impossible...” and now his hand sinks down across her belly, “the result being we’ll be flying like this until the gas runs dry, the plane plummets, the autopilot takes action in a futile attempt to keep us level and we will impact upon whatever surface we happen to be floating over at that moment.”
Karen gasps and her eyes roll back to get a better view of her struggling neurons. Poley chuckles.
“I thought you’d like that.” He takes a last drag of his cigar and stubs it out pretty much sadistically on the leather upholstery.
“So darling, your delightful theory that we’ll still be here in our old age is quaint - but plainly dumb, ridiculous, and surprising even of such a superficially perfect being as yourself.”
Karen stirs, eyes drugged. “What?”
“Any chance of a coffee?”

0415 GMT
Styrene was talking to the businessman because the pretty lady had long since departed to the washroom, forcing a long line of handshakes upon him. Half of Larry believed she had wanted him to follow him there, mainly the lower half, because of the way she brushed past him and the hem of her skirt lifted to expose the beginnings of a pert fleshy ass. He saw futility where his cocky brother saw fertility, Styrene thought, maybe. He looked deep into his coffee remembering while the suit pushed on.
“I’m due for a conference. It could make me a rich man.” He looked strangely like a ridiculously bronzed Charlie Sheen and he stroked his leather briefcase constantly.
“You look like a rich man already.”
“You think so?” slyly.
Larry just sat there, mesmerised by the man doing his business over a laptop, concluding transactions, clicking windows out and away, transferring money and typing flirty messages to his secretary. For some reason Sheen didn’t mind him peering over his shoulder after the conversation died and Styrene was grateful for it. It was one of those situations, like watching a carpenter at work in close harmony to his tools and the wood beneath him, that brought up a pleasant feeling, an almost sexual tingling through his entire body that he had never been able to explain but had gloried in since childhood, sitting on the edge of his father’s chair watching him sign papers.
But then the body odour began seeping into Styrene’s space. A dark, rotten smell of garbage, rich rubbish and richer aftershave mingling with morning ablutions. Shit and piss, vomit and stale sex. Fouler because of its clear higher class fragrance. Styrene suffered a minute in silence as the two feelings fought each other inside him, and then gritted his teeth.
He saw how the hot coffee in his hand would look fantastic searing its way through Sheen’s expensive clothes and offensive BO. But just as he was set to give in to temptation and release his anger, he paused. Still holding the conversation about the derivatives market, he quietly trickled his drink down the arm of Sheen’s chair into his seat. Slowly so the feeling isn’t instantaneous and quick enough to drain the cup and excuse oneself to the bathroom. The exclamations began as he closed the door and malevolent glee took over. He felt an urge to purge himself but worried how much time he actually had to himself. It wasn’t right to die with his pants down, but then it wouldn’t be the best way to go with that impatient nagging of a full bowel ruining his last moments. It wasn’t as if he had many other simple pleasures to hand.
So it was only when that feeling was replaced by the sharp thrill of heavy freefall and the screams of a hundred passengers that he gripped the sides of the cubicle to stand. It took a long time for anything else to happen.

Girl in Black Jeans

The girl in the black jeans and army fatigues looked out of place in room 13. The Old Masters, the Young Mistress, he wondered idly, letting his gaze sweep the length of her, the lecher's caress. The lustre of her bronze-long hair, sculpted derriere, a girl of classical proportions flowing down to scuffed white Converse trainers. Slacker's choice. There was always one flaw, somewhere, he thought.
He felt his focus wander to other faces, other rooms, other paintings. Lovers on the far side in awkward contact, limp hands around sagging waists. A middle aged ectomorph, spindle-thin, bent double at Da Vinci, as if looking for evidence of painting by numbers. And then another couple next to him, but a couple in contradiction. The woman with neon wire hair and even brighter lip-gloss, a command bunker perched on beef joints in high heels, fussing over her taller, slighter companion in glasses and beard. A pained look of exasperation on the man's face. 'You have cappuccino on your lip,' she barks. The man murmurs inaudibly and turns away, one hand through his hair, the other across his mouth. 'Let me see,' she commands, pulling his chin towards her like a drill sergeant. The man tries to shrug her off. She shrieks. 'Do you want me to smack your Botticelli?'
Sharp glances from the surrounding crowd, but only a brief respite from the show of ignorance on display. He felt the urge to laugh, but felt stifled by the masses. Only then, floating above the silence, came the shimmering flute-giggle of the girl in the black jeans. He looked at her once more, her face glowing in a brighter light than before. He found himself smiling at her, willing her to share the joke, share a look, a connection. She appeared not to notice. Just a sneer on her lips as she regarded the couple squabble over to the next room. Her head tilted sideways, hip curving out, a slender model of grace. He felt his stomach shear as a gelled-up guy moved in with predatory eyes and whispered in her ear. The guy, all blue jeans and untrustworthy brown loafers, laughed at his own joke and touched her on the arm. A nudge of self-satisfaction, an explicit invitation. She smiled and turned away, swaying on her toes. And so begins the dance, he thought, and watched with melancholic dread as she skipped over to Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa a few feet away to his left. The guy followed, a calm composition, obvious and assured.
He tried to turn away, back to a painting he had no interest in, a lazy muddle of trees and washerwomen, but each time found himself darting glances over to the black jeans, to the heavy gold watch on the guy’s wrist, the naked man stretched out on the raft, dead or comatose, with his feet in the water and his genitals exposed.
‘I‘m painting something rather like this at the moment,’ he heard the guy say half-whisper. ‘Perhaps you’d like to pose for it.’
He instinctively snorted in disgust, and then, quickly recovering himself, turned away and feign an innocent cough. He did not hear her reply, if she gave any at all. He felt only eyes upon his back, and prayed for a return to the anonymous shadows. He stared uncomfortably at a chiaroscuro drawing, obsidian black, and forced his mind inside its frame. He heard the boards creak further and further away, and allowed himself to breathe out. The room was empty. He assumed the girl was being hounded by her paramour elsewhere, before other works of art. He erased that image and replaced it with one of her standing alone, naked Venus on a shell, tilted head and swan-like neck, modest and immodest, unmolested by human hand.
She was on the wall before him now. The last painting for the last visitor. He knew he would see this painting again and think of the girl, a dry-hot hunger within his blackstone heart.

Bitch

The dog looks at him with an expression he’s only ever seen on animals and babies. It’s a pleading stare, a guilty smirk. The forehead wrinkles slightly and the eyebrows tilt downwards, asking forgiveness, but you can tell it’s proud about something.
Don Everett knows what this means and he’s prepared. He will move in with the cocksure swagger of a former cop and clean the streets. He’s seen this mongrel dog before, number One on the Dog Patrol wanted list. Its face is plastered on the back wall of his office. If it was a stray then his task would be simple: Arrest the mutt, using force or chocolate drops if necessary, and render the area safe for law-abiding pedestrians with smart shoes everywhere.
Don’s brain holds a map of every street and alleyway in every district. In his pockets there are a notebook and pen, a list of known offenders and their photos, five non-porous plastic bags, his identification as Head Dog Warden, Evergreen City Council, and an embossed rules and regulations booklet. Not for his own information, but for the owner’s. Another pad holds the blank fine notices, to be filled in at his discretion. They range from ten pounds for urination to fifty for flagrant abandonment of excrement on a public highway. The bigger the dog, the bigger the fine, although usually it’s the little ones that really shit up the place.
Don has put away some real critters in his time. He was awarded a grey plastic plaque two years ago for catching the worst culprit in the city’s history. Each day this Jack Russell would deposit seven or eight sticky crap-balls in the doorways of supermarkets and corner shops. The public nuisance it caused made page 12 of the Evergreen City Examiner. Don was appointed to solve the case. It took him a week to confirm the culprit, but another month of covert surveillance to track the furbag to a rundown apartment in the Bennington Heights. Another week to catch the owner, an incontinent spinster who fed her beloved Cartier too much tuna and let him out the back door every day at 11am. Don gave her the fifty pound fine, riding over her protestations of deafness and poverty, and then splashed out on some new slacks to celebrate. He pinned Cartier’s arrest photo on his wall at the top of a board headed ‘Neutralised’.
But until today, three months of intense 24 hour stakeouts had brought nothing on the new Public Enemy One. Don had nicknamed the dog Sophie after the ex-wife who took out a restraining order on him last year. ‘They’re both evil bitches,’ he told anyone who asked. He had one photo of her, a fuzzy long lens shot, and kept a faeces sample in his breast pocket. ‘It’s important to know the smell of your opponent,’ was how he explained it to his new trainees. That sample had given him his first break when it whitened up indicating a high-calcium diet. That told him it was a big dog, possible an Alsatian cross-bred.
She liked to excrete three or four times a walk.
Don looks at her, squatting on the pavement, and focuses his video camera on his target. He records her features relaxing. Her forelegs stutter forward, her backside close to the pavement as the hind legs shuffle slowly. Don watches intently through the eyepiece of his camcorder. This is his first view of The Movement. His breath quickens and shallows out as the first specimen drops and adheres to the pavement. The rest follows with grunting regularity forming a neat line across the concrete slab. The last part twists around itself with an almost imperceptible movement of her haunches. Don gasps. It is an almost perfect exclamation mark:

!

It starts to rain. Don’s still glued to the lens, focusing and zooming in and out of it in awe and disbelief, when the dog turns and sets off with a bark. Don jolts into action, letting the camera slap down against his thigh as he quicksteps into a hard sprint to catch up. He’s panting heavily by the time they get to central square, but he can see the bitch’s tongue is hanging out. Never has he got so close to his goal. Don staggers on across pedestrian crossings, through parked cars and crowds of schoolkids, across open parks, slowing with every pace. His clothes are already soaked through. Don starts to think she’s playing with him, keeping him at the same distance, waiting for him on the other side of the road, hanging on the corners of junctions so he knows which way to go. Don realises they’re going in circles when they hit central square for the second time. His feet are hurting, his lungs are grating and he’s feeling a pain in his left hand which is slowly creeping up towards his shoulder. The bitch is waiting for him at the crossing, looking back at him with the lolling tongue. Don can only feel a mixture of hate and admiration, like the big game hunter or a fisherman stalking a Great White. The pain in his shoulder is intense now and he stumbles, hitting the floor with his left hand, grazing it and sending shooting pains up his arm. He can’t breathe, he feels like he’s been shot in the chest or stabbed with a poker between the fourth and fifth ribs. But the bitch is only feet away from him, inches, he’s got to at least touch her, lay a hand on his enemy. She’s looking at him with that same expression she had on the pavement 20 minutes ago, and that’s what he sees as his head slumps to the ground and his vision fades out.
The dog slowly trots over to his side and sniffs at his neck. Sniffs at the wet hair plastered around his bald patch, sniffs his hand. Her tongue laps one of his fingers.
She turns round, lowers her rear and etches her mark on the pavement next to Don’s body:

?

Teenage Swipe

About me children are fermenting

sugar short-changed

to tart malt liquor

they sit bowed in drunken

by the taste of each other

Something is Happening Here But I Don't Know What It Is

I told everybody it started the night I heard ‘Great Balls of Fire’ in Joe’s Bar. The time I took to Rock and Roll. I was twelve, and I reckon Jerry Lee Lewis would have dug my twin sister in the audience. But the sad thing was, Jerry wasn’t singing. The deranged piano-less wonder on stage was my dad. Drunk like every night on lager and whisky chasers, leaving the staff to look over his kids like makeshift childminders. I swigged ginger beer and pretended to be the barman’s son, collecting glasses and stacking them on the tabletop until he stopped towelling long enough to tell me I was doing a good job, son, have to start paying you one of these days. I wanted to be anyone but a relation of the long-haired schizo on centre stage barking out the chorus in shrieking falsetto.

Goodness gracious, whose son am I?

My sis Katie was staring at Dad with moon-dog eyes, sucking at a lollipop and maybe sticking out her tongue at the greasy tramp at the bar who had a habit of staring in our direction. She didn’t listen to the music, which was dumb for a girl in Joe’s bar. It seemed I was the only one who really noticed how he was singing. Slurring the words and swinging his arms. I considered maybe that’s how it’s meant to be sung, seeing as it was the first time I heard it, but even at my age I thought I knew enough about music to recognise something wasn’t right.
It wasn’t right, too, how dad pointed frantically at his own pants every chorus. Christ!

“Great Balls of Fire!”

It wasn’t my mother’s kind of music. Mom liked the clear sound of Jazz, the smooth, clever trumpet doing ragtime, the Bird or the Duke’s big band. It meant she would sing, and there used to be nothing better than playing in the lounge listening to the gramophone with her hands running through my hair.
It was Dad who brought in the devil’s music.

“Goodness Gracious, I just fucked the choir!”

My flirt of a sister only encouraged him. Mom would let them swap it anytime because of Katie’s shifty pleading, so I had to endure the sight of sis dancing to some Latino with an oily voice to match the quiff. Her favourite film of all time later turned out to be Grease, and that told you everything. So I had to watch her flaunt her skin, some second-rate copy of Mom. Mom’s dancing used to get Dad out of his TV chair anytime.
It’s so different now she’s not around. These days, worst of my life, so much has changed. This is Dad’s first night out in a month. He’s barely anywhere else but the chair these days. It’s a quiet, dead, noiseless house, even with the flicker-box. I don’t like to sit in the same room with him anymore, waiting for the lame small-talk to start. It’s the fake buddy routine, no different from down the garage where he sells wasted motors to nobodies.

“Nice and Spacious, and Here’s the Spare Tyre!”

I hadn’t spoken to him all week, and I sure as hell wish I hadn’t agreed to come down here and have him humiliate me. It’s a grotesque freak show from Coney Island taking centre stage. Pay a dollar, puke right up in this here bucket. He can’t even hold the microphone properly. And then you got the retarded Frankenstein monster movements, sending his hair flailing all directions. Course I realised after, Jerry used to do that on the piano, but there wasn’t any piano on stage to make dad look less of a dick.

“Goodness gracious, my pants are on fire!”

Shame is when you need your mother to hide behind. Some protection from the elements which others think you need to grow and Be A Man. So fuck this father of mine, who brings us here in this week of all weeks to get drunk and make a fool of us. Sure, make a fool of yourself, daddio, but why dump it all on us kids? Why leave us to pick up your pieces and take it full in the face?
My sister clapped absentmindedly every song, but you should have noticed what I was doing. Bo Diddley squat, that‘s what. Not even looking your way, Pop, and not only because I’m hiding behind this pool table either. I’m looking at the freaking back wall!
There was the swearing too. Not sticking to the words on the monitor one bit, changing words everywhere with every curse on God’s earth. Words I knew but he shouldn’t have known I knew, and should be furious that I knew. Words spitting out every line of the song. You’re a respectable man, father. You’ve got a good job on the Ford plant. You give orders, they give you respect, and you come here and blow it all away. You‘re playing in the gutter, and don‘t think everybody knows about those Greenback whores you‘re bringing home every night...

“Go see Tracy, Her Hole’s for Hire!“

Shit, everybody in the joint started to notice it, pointing at his dirty gestures and laughing. No, God, they were pointing because he had his pants down round his ankles. They were pointing and laughing and they were looking at me, the poor son of a respectable man losing it in front of their eyes. Some of them were clapping. And sis was just sat there, ponytailed up to her neck in a girly comic, enjoying it all like nothing was happening. She looked at me hiding behind the table and laughed.
I said to her: “Don’t you care what he’s doing?”
Her, the most infuriating girl in my life: “Daddy’s just having fun. Like old times.”
“But we should be at home in bed. He should be reading me stories, even though I’m old enough to read any book I want. I should be asleep.” Then, half-heartedly, “It’s ten o’clock.”
“You’re mad Billybrains. Who told you all that stupid stuff?”
“That isn’t stupid. It’s how everybody normal lives.” Pointing at dad shaking his belly. “That is stupid.” He was whirling his shirt round his head in a fury. At least thank God he still had his jocks on, if that’s any consolation.

“Jesus Baby, You‘re Such a Liar!”

And all the damn fool girl did was giggle.
He got a standing ovation when he finished that song. They shouted and they hollered. The crowd went crazy for Dad. The foul language, the strip act, his pasty skin, shaggy black hair and dirty stubble, the printed boxer shorts. Dad got back slaps and beers while I slumped behind the pool table chalking up the cues. Three cheers for Frank, he’s the best. Oh yeah. Eventually the barman saw me and tousled my ashamed hair. “Your old man’s really something special, Billy, you know that?”
Oh yeah, real special. You really think Mom would have put up with that? That greaseball music, put-on smiles and phoney hysteria? I was willing it to end, just to go home, leave him here seen as he’s having such a great time. When the music started again, some other whiteboy kissing a black man’s sound, tracks of my tears are streaming til it’s painful, but satisfied, with bloated sorrow. Fists clenched so hard I could feel the nails scrape the bone and the blood pound in my ears. Feet stamping, hands beating the floor in one last tantrum. Just thinking, Mom aint going to be around any more, or her music, it’s just me and them and the blues, not her, she’s dead, I picked the flowers but they didn’t look right, wrong colour for the stone, for the gold inscription, for the raw mud, grass, the damn empty blues sky, and they were nicked the next day anyhow, kick the headstone but it still won’t budge and the ground won’t rise and the only place I’m going to see her is those useless photographs my idiot father can’t take and none of them just me and her, not anybody else. He’s the one who wouldn’t let me choose her coffin dress from the cupboard. Now sis just ransacks it every useless film date with the latest loser. Got to move on without them, just me and her...
“What’s up with you, Billybrains?” My sister, still smiling, still sucking on that sweetstick, left hand on her hip. It looked like she was wearing blood on her lips.
“Nothing.”
“Oh really? So why are you crying then? You lost your dummy or something?”
And if that ain’t enough to bate you, what is? So the anger rose, too quick to feel it, until I just felt my head and nothing else. Anger at the way she’d always treated me like a baby, just because she’s a couple of seconds older. And I just wanted to cause her pain, use my hands so they squeeze something shut, pop something open, tear something up, and grit my teeth like a torturer in cheapshot movie.

“Aint nothing but a Hound Dog, dying all the time.”

My hands around Katie’s neck, and see the smile sink into her stomach with the rest of her guts.
“So you didn’t cry any when mom died, did you?”
She had no answer to that, and I felt better for it. Felt better to see the disco lights twinkle in the water flowing through her eyes. Then she stamped her feet herself and jabbed me hard in the ribs, most likely bruising the heart knowing her aim.
“You’re not the only one who misses her you know.” And she stamped off, shaking her ass. Mock indignity, I reckon. She never feels anything, just watches it pass by.
Then dad was doing a shameless James Brown number, the same gross-out actions on top of drunk-ass singing. My chest aching, and I couldn’t bear to watch it any more. I could see he was trying to catch my eye, though, kept on looking over, jumping about, as if I wanted to see any more of that. Finally I glanced up just to make him stop it, and he waved his hat at me.
“Hey Billy!”
It was plain horror then because everyone turned round to me, smiles on their faces and blood in their cheeks. I let a weak smile come to my lips.
“Hey Billy! Come down here and help your old dad out.”
That was no stage-fright I was feeling, just pure sickness. Embarrassment, rage, loathing kind of sickness, enough to make you think of puking. Tears brimming again and an uncontrollable tic in my jaw.

“Flee from the scene... Like a blub machine”

My mouth spasmed badly, sending the corner of my lips twitching inches at a time. My smile can’t get much lower or lopsided.
So I ran out of there feet pounding, head almost down to my knees, tripping down the short steps to the bar, almost flying nut first into a big man at the front door. He looked at me, the fly who bit his ass, just stared at the tears gushing down over my cheekbone dams. The awe, some kind of fear, dried my eyes until he looked above me and fixed on something behind.
“Need any help?”
A deep voice, the sound of my father. ‘No.’ Then his arm was around my shoulders, turning me into his gaze.
“You alright Bill?”
Naturally I couldn’t answer.
“No, of course you aint. I know that. Come here.”
It was a bear hug and no mistake. A deep blanket of sweat and warm summer beer. But there was still something under all that though, still the smell of washing suds, of our garden in summer. Meadows and barley water and great globs of melting chocolate. Comforting cleanness that I thought had left with mother in the small pine coffin. Now sweetening the earth around it in Father Brennan’s churchyard.
“We’re going to get through it, you and your sister and me. Right?”
He was looking straight at me, so I could see the cracks in his voice weren’t caused by singing or smoke. He’d been wetting the floor just as much as me. I tried to say something, even just a screw you, but my lungs didn’t seem to work and the voice box wasn’t switched on, or just drowned in seawater.
“Just stay there, Ok. We’ll sing together,” he told me, then got back on the stand and struck up an old slowie from Mom’s record collection. He’s barely got through the first line when it all rushes up on me and I have to fly. Fleeing, skittering across the hall, banging through the toilet door.
Maybe it’s because of Mom I ended up in the Ladies. I didn’t stop until I was in the cubicle and the lock had been drawn after what seemed like hours of panic-stricken fumbling. Gasps of pain and sorrow echoed through the stalls.
But then I realised it wasn’t my crying. The moans were coming from somewhere else, not from me. For a brief moment it had made me feel better to know the amount of noise I was making. Now there was someone out there stealing my grief and the blood rose back in me. The bolt slid back first time and I stalked out each door until my ears told me it was the right one to barge through. It wasn’t locked. For some reason I didn’t expect it to be, mind numb with sobbing.
Though it shocked me to see the state of my sister perched on the bowl, reams of toilet paper in her hands. Face red raw with rubbing and sobbing and broken dams. She looked up and there wasn’t any white left in her eyes.
“Get lost brother.”
I couldn’t say anything, I was so knocked out. She’d always been the strongest. She was the one who was strong for Dad, who didn’t seem as destroyed as I was. I meant to gloat at this turnaround but all I felt was shame, pity at what I had done. Though at least I had done something. Something had happened, and it involved me.
“I’m sorry sis... I didn’t mean it. You know.. I was just upset.”
“Everybody’s fucking upset. I’m upset, you’re upset, Dad’s upset...”
“I just don’t like what he’s doing. I mean...”
“Aren’t you glad he’s happy? For the first time in a month, he’s smiling. I was enjoying it.”
She looked me in the eye. “I’m 13 next week. This is the most important time of my life and she’s not here.” The crying came again but I wasn’t disgusted any more.
I got on my knees and hugged her. “I’m here. And I’ll be thirteen too.”
Dad’s singing started up again, slightly sadder now, and it caused a thrill of love, caring or something like it, to flood through me. Katie saw the look in my eyes and smiled a little. Hope sparked from somewhere.
“Are we going to have a party?”

“Pretty Woman, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

I took her hand. “The best, Katie.” Then smiled. “And I promise not to try and kiss your friends.”
She giggled then and looked in my eyes. I knew she was beautiful, because she looked like Mom, and Mom was the most beautiful girl I knew. Had known. We looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. It reminded me of the times we played the shoe-smell game, where you have to stick your nose into each other’s worst pair of pumps and take it in until the first one faints. I have to admit I had an unfair advantage because there was no going round the fact I liked the smell of her feet. No living animal could like the foul stench my feet gave off after hours of jumping in dead grass, mud and stagnant water.
“Katie.” There was a twitch in both our smiles and the blood seemed to pulse through our lips. Like alternating magnets. So we hung there millimetres apart from each other, feeling our faces radiating heat. Breathing in each other’s waste air but still finding something in it, something worthwhile, like trees from a highway and dung beetles from shit. So this is how we stayed for as long as my memory holds out, because I like remembering it without the rest of the story, the rest of our lives back with Dad, happy families. The kind of happiness you find in sad relief but not in joy, sure as clouds turn to water and back again. The rest of it hasn’t matched up to that moment. That was how we stayed. Nothing foetal about our positions, but you can analyse it like that if you want to. Sharing a space, comfortable in it for the moment, but knowing you’re going to have to break out of it one day or the next. Me and sis. Billy Webster, not even thirteen, and Katie, and the music. Rock and Roll, Jerry.

Event Prone

Emmenthal Clay entered the world as an earthquake rippled through the city, twisting streetlamps and buckling roads and plunging the entire Maternity Ward into darkness. So his mother June, whose eyes were closed for the last push, was greeted simultaneously by the young Clay’s first cries and the collective curses of the medical staff. ‘What’s wrong? Is it my baby?’ she cried, as the nurse struggled to work out whether she was holding the umbilical cord or a tiny kicking leg.
Ablutions completed, the baby was awkwardly wrapped in a towel and passed carefully into his mother’s arms. It was only when her eyes became adjusted to the blackness she could see him staring up at her intently, as if Emmenthal was trying to work out if this was it, this was the outside world, and not some side room along the corridor of birth.
Of course June and her husband Cleaver, who seemed to ignore the child as much as possible, could not suspect this freak occurrence was just the first of many in Emmenthal’s troubled life. It was if he sought out disaster, or naturally attracted it. Even in the church, on Christening Day, the vicar slipped on a careless sprinkle of holy water and knocked himself out on the font before completing the ritual, leading many to consider the prospect that Emmenthal may have been conceived by darker forces than the Clays.
A few weeks later June was wheeling her son through the local shopping centre when a crackle of gunshot interrupted her anxious daydream and three masked figures burst from a travel agents. One of them stumbled into the pram before speeding off in a waiting vehicle. As June hyperventilated her way into a full-blown panic attack, Emmenthal merely gazed happily at the discarded revolver lying on his stomach and clapped his hands together as if applauding the show.
Young Clay also had a habit of disappearing, almost from the moment he began to crawl. June lost count of how many times she searched the house top to bottom before finally locating him in some far-flung corner she hardly knew existed. One restless night she gave up on sleep and determinedly embroidered her name and address on every tiny piece of his clothing, just in case.
It was no surprise that his first words a few months down the line were a startled ‘Oh.’ And so her dreams became endless tortured nightmares of running from room to room, more rooms than could ever fit inside the house, but always hearing Emmenthal’s burbled ‘Oh’ from behind the next door. Each room contained a more inviting bed or more powerful sleeping pill. The torture being that her baby could be in danger just feet away, always out of her reach
June turned to prayer, and prayed hard that they were the victim of unconnected coincidences. But as her concern grew, so did the outlandish nature of events. Their first nanny, chosen at the insistence of her over-stressed husband, and after an exhaustive interview and training process, was kidnapped in the street one afternoon a by a jealous ex-boyfriend, leaving the two year-old Clay once again merrily alone in his buggy outside the shop windows. The first June and Cleaver knew about it was a knock on the door from the police. Her baby was at the police station. They hurtled downtown and parked up outside the front doors just as a stream of blue and white rushed out to the scream of a fire alarm. The police station was ablaze. It was perhaps fortunate that June Clay fainted in shock and only came round after the flames in the canteen had been extinguished and her son, cheery and unharmed, was locked securely in the back seat of a patrol car.
Despair forced the Clays to seek help, from almost any source available. They were shunted from one doctor to another, to paediatricians to psychiatrists to philosophers, mystics, seers, palmists and tarot readers. They received no answers, at least none that were satisfactory. Either they paid too much attention to him, or too little. He had a bright future and a dark one. Soon their reputation had spread across every childcare agency in the county and Dad Cleaver found himself teetering perilously on the edge of a nervous breakdown. In frustration he began scouring the internet for a last resort. He came across a series of references to an ‘experimental psychologist’ at a small laboratory in the suburbs. His name was Professor Flingmayer Phd DRCOG BSEP. Cleaver printed off the details and presented them to June that same night.
‘No so-called doctor is going to experiment on my son,’ she said, holding Emmenthal tight to her Zeppelin-like bosom.
‘You haven’t even read it!’ he spluttered, storming off to the bathroom to stare at his rumpled sleeping-bag eyes and count the wrinkles on his 30 year-old face.
‘You just want to get rid of him!’ she countered.
‘Too bloody right,’ mumbled Cleaver, before clearing his throat and shouting back: ‘All they do is observe him. It says right there. Observations. In a laboratory.’ He twisted the tap and splashed water over his face before walking back to face his wife. ‘Anyway, it will give me a chance to catch up on two years of sleep.’
Suddenly young Clay opened his throttle and yammered ‘Nono nono nonono.’
‘See, he doesn’t want to go,’ said June with a self-satisfied nod. ‘Do you Clay?’
‘Well he’s got to move out one day,’ sighed Cleaver, lumbering under the duvet and burying his head in the pillow.
‘He’s only two years old!’
‘Can’t be stuck under your skirts all his life.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ June turned and lay Emmenthal in his cot inches away from the marital bed. Cleaver remained silent, hoping to catch some shuteye before anything disastrous happened. Like last night when a pigeon flew down the chimney and pinballed blindly across the room from wall to bed to wall smearing blood and faeces across every surface before thudding into the window, dead.
June lay there for an hour, maybe more, in silence, listening to the contrasting breathing sounds of her husband and son. Decision made, she pulled the covers up to her chin and closed her eyes.
‘All right, I’ll take him tomorrow,’ she announced. There was no response. A sign perhaps. And then the Valium sent her slipping into the dark towards the same old endless nightmare.
The next morning June Clay strapped Emmenthal into his secure backward-facing car seat with added purpose. Her husband was still in bed, having refused to come along and see Prof Flingmayer.
‘It was your idea!’ June screamed at his idle form under the duvet. He remained silent, a slumbering denial of her existence.
It took an hour to make the two-mile trip to Flingmayer’s office. June was particularly cautious, as her son seemed in a even more playful mood than usual. She saw at least half a dozen car crashes along the way, including one blazing motorcycle. ‘Just behave for one minute will you?’ she shouted at Emmenthal in despair. It was a relief when they finally arrived outside the nondescript building on Acre Street with the silver plaque reading: ‘Xenotype Research.’.
‘Is it safe?’ she asked as soon as the receptionist’s voice answered the intercom buzzer.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ came the reply, and June tried to regain composure and announce that yes, they were expected, and she had brought her son and she really hoped the professor could help them and it had been a terrible journey, and then suddenly the door opened.
The receptionist looked at her curiously, then said: ‘The Professor will be ready shortly,’ pausing as if in confusion and pointing to her chest. ‘Is this your son?’
June held Emmenthal tighter, his face pressed into her woollen pullover, his arms flailing against her shoulders. ‘So was there a robbery? Next door I mean,’ nervously bouncing her son up and down until he began crying.
‘No, no, nothing like that,’ replied the receptionist, before brusquely leading her into the waiting room. ‘I’ll just tell the Professor you’ve arrived.’ And with that she disappeared through a swing door. Almost immediately a car alarm from the street pierced the silence. June jumped and quickly peered out the window, before deciding to take up a safer position seated away from anything potentially hazardous, including the fish tank bubbling in the opposite corner.
After ten minutes, a very small man with a goatee beard appeared in the doorway.
‘Emmenthal Clay, I presume?’ he said, as June bolted upright in shock. ‘Come this way.’
They passed through a corridor mounted with pictures of happy, smiling children. June glanced down at her son and failed to see a resemblance. ‘Sit,’ said the man, and June noticed the name tag on his chest. Prof Boron Flingmayer. ‘Tell me about your son,’ he added, propping himself up on a tall stool.
‘It’s… well… I told your receptionist… all I can say is that… things keep happening to him… I mean..’ June had just geared herself up to tell the whole life story, all 25 months of it, when Prof Flingmayer’s stool tipped over and sent him crashing to the floor. The curse had struck, even here.
The professor leapt up a few seconds later, apparently unfazed, and stroked his stubbly beard. ‘I see. No need to explain.’ He gazed out the window as Emmenthal clapped his hands. ‘But what you really mean is things happen around him.’
June sat in confused silence.
‘Your son… what is his name? He is never harmed, am I right?’
June struggled for a moment longer. ‘No… yes, I mean, it’s only a matter of time. I just know it. We nearly crashed the car on the way here. He…’
‘Was he driving?’ Flingmayer moved closer. Even with her sat down, his face was almost level. ‘And what is this name all about? Emmenthal?’
‘It was my grandfather’s name.’ June stuttered.
The professor sighed. ‘I say let your grandfather keep it, that’s what I say.’
June sat still as Emmenthal waved his hands wildly. She felt profoundly depressed.
The professor knelt down to peer into the boy’s face. ‘Ah, you find life exciting now. Just you wait. You can‘t suck on your mother‘s copious bosoms forever. One day, the milk runs out!’
Flingmayer turned his eyes to June, and added almost as an aside: ‘He’ll grow out of it. You just have to be patient.’
‘Grow out of what? Is he ill?’ June felt the hysteria rising.
‘No. Not exactly. Think of it more as… a phase. It will pass.’
June quickly sank back into melancholy. ‘So… that’s it.’
‘Yes. That’s it. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ Flingmayer moved to pick up his stool and began examining it closely.
She fell into a partial trance as he fiddled with a loose leg and tested the joints. Seconds passed, and young Clay lay still.
‘You go now, yes?’ The Professor turned to look at her. He ushered them to the door and down to the front entrance. A few seconds later, as June stepped warily outside, her eyes fixated on the house next door, she heard another crashing sound emanating from his room followed by a string of curses. She left quickly, unwilling to attract any more attention. June strapped her son into the car and set off at pace, anxious to get home.
But this time nothing happened. They arrived back at the house without incident. They passed through the front door, down the hall, up the stairs and into the bedroom where June’s husband still lay asleep, undisturbed. June paused in the doorway. Her twitching nose and squinting eyes signified thought, as deep as she could muster.
Cleaver slowly turned his face towards her, in something like hope.
June looked down at young Clay. The boy smiled. She smiled back, cautiously, as if trying out something new.
‘From now on we’re going to call him Al.'