Falling out of Heaven

Higher and higher up the mountain we pursued her, the grassy hills giving way to scrub and tufts of wiry heather. Through pools and brackish water, past half-slumbering cattle and bearded silhouettes of goats, eventually she gave up, collapsing only minutes from the top, her breath leaving her body in a little pleading whine, her arms lying about her.

When we reached her we stood in a circle around her. I ignored the look in her eyes that told me she knew me. I tried not to pay attention to it because I was someone else; I had worked very hard at it, day and night, minute to minute, and hour to hour. I had killed the dreaming child, the one who had talked of the courtship of butterflies, who had opened himself to the world like a daisy reaching for the sun.

The rest of the gang wanted to rape her, but I put myself between them and her. I knew that as an act it was complete, it was pure. We had taken everything from her, and that what was left of her dignity was hers, and not ours to brutalise. Some of them said I was chicken but I challenged each of them to back what they said with action but none of them did. They had seen what I had done to her dog.

So we left her there, in the pool of her sweat and her misery, her strong profile broken by the shadows that grew up around her, her eyes a mist of confusion and sadness.

Blue-grey

‘Your episodes will come and go, that’s normal…You will panic like you did yesterday…We will have to restrain you…That’s normal too…You have divorced yourself from reality…And these dreams…notions that you have are not unusual for someone in your state…At the moment I believe you can hear and understand me though you are still refusing to speak…So I am taking this opportunity to let you know what’s happening…You must try and trust us, we deal with cases like yours all the time…We are set up for it and have a great deal of experience…The most important thing to remember is that you are not alone…In spite of what you may think there are a great deal of people who care about you…As the days pass it will be our job to see that you sleep…That’s where your mind will repair itself…And if you trust us gradually you will come back from where you’ve been until you will wonder if it ever happened at all…My name is Doctor Rush and I will be in charge of you while you are here…Any questions?’

It is the young doctor from before, the one with the syringe. She is sitting on the side of my bed. I look at her and want to ask her if she is real but I just lie there and shake my head.

‘What’s wrong? Tell me. I know that you understand what I’m saying to you…By not communicating you only make this process longer and more painful for yourself.’

She waits. Her eyes are blue-grey like the sky on an October morning. She wears a wedding band and her fingers are long and slender.

‘Very well,’ she says.

As she moves to get up I take her hand and hold it. I see a slight fear rise in her eyes. I watch as she decides what to do. Eventually she sits back down.

‘You don’t want me to go…’

I don’t say anything.

‘My first name is Moira.’

I blink, and then I close my eyes. When I open them she has gone. Time has passed.

The Boys

I’m telling myself that I care. But I don’t. The truth is I liked the Troubles that held sway in this tiny state of ours for so many years. It told me that the terror I felt in my bones since the day I was born had a name, and everywhere I looked I could see it in action. Man killing man, killing woman, killing child. I resent the glee I can see in the faces of the people around me, some I know, and some I don’t care if I never do. I am in a bar on the outskirts of town. I thought that I could escape the bleating horns and the flag waving but I was wrong. Everywhere I look it seems as if the streets are blooming tricolours, they hang from open windows and passing cars. They line the roads like over-eager trees showing their blossoms before summer has arrived. I am trying to get drunk quickly to disappear into the past where the bogeymen still wore balaclavas and shouldered an Armalite or two. I read somewhere that there is no such thing as victory and that both sides lose when they decide to engage. I feel like spitting it into the face of the man who is grinning at me across our half-empty pint glasses.

‘We showed them,’ he says. ‘Don’t fuck with the boys,’ he continues.

I nod and look away, hoping that when I look back he will have found a new victim for his vainglory.

‘The boys will do you every fucking time,’ he says.

I look back and stare at him.

‘What boys?’

‘The boys in green.’

‘You mean fucking elves. Or sprites or some fucking thing…’

‘What?’

‘Elves.’

‘You taking the piss?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘Oh fuck off.’

‘No, you fuck off,’ I say.

I can see him debating whether to drop it. I can almost read each thought as they pass across his beady little eyes. It’s when he nods at me, his eyes full of anger, that I know that he’s decided to pursue it. But he’s drunk and I’m not yet so I wait, knowing that I have very little to fear from this small man who wants the world to be full of fanfares and victory parades. He sits there and I know that he’s working up his next line of attack. I feel sorry for him, he looks comical and I know that somewhere he realises that no-one has won, no-one ever does. I wait, holding him with my eyes, watching for any sudden movement. But when he speaks all he can say is: ‘Fucking elves. Are you with us or are you not?’

‘I’m not with anyone,’ I spit back.

‘People like you don’t…’

‘Don’t what?’

‘You couldn’t give a fuck. But when there’s a knock at the fucking door and some fucker’s there, wanting to do you and your family damage…then…then…’

‘Then?’

‘Then you’ll come running.’

‘Oh please…’

‘You know. You fucking know…’

‘You’ve been watching too many fucking films.’

‘You’ll see. You’ll fucking see. They thought they had us, the cunts. They thought that they could fuck us up. Think again, you bastards.’

As he says this he gets to his feet and raises his pint glass above his head and looks around the bar. Someone gently taps him on the head with a large green, white and gold inflatable plastic hammer. The people around us laugh, one of them a young man with spiky red hair nudges me in the back. I turn round to find myself staring into his eyes. They are hard, and glitter like frost on stony ground.

‘I heard what you said,’ he says to me.

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah. There’s a word for people like you.’

‘Is there?’

‘Yeah. And a place too. It’s not far from here. It’s a small beach. Where fuckers like you can rest in peace.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Yes, I am. That’s exactly what I’m doing.’

Baby Man

How beautiful he was, like fresh snow on old tired ground. His eyes were wide, his small hands pawing at life. The doctor congratulated us, he moved with a businesslike air as if he was in a boardroom. He had seen it all before; I resented him, I wanted to push his nose into the miracle that was before him. You sensed this in me and squeezed my hand and looked for calm in my eyes.

I hadn’t drunk that day. I wanted to be present. I remember you were pleased and had given me a tight little hug when I arrived. You did what you always did, smelled me, and checked my breath as my head came close to yours. You were very good at it; after all you’d had a lot of practice. You gave me a smile and led me to our son. I said something like shouldn’t you be resting, and you said no, that you were strong; you said it almost as a challenge, as if I doubted you. Anyway, you said the doctor was a practical man and believed in people getting on with things.

I said that the doctor sounded like an idiot and you said, why does everyone have to be an enemy? They don’t, I said. Then you gave me that look that you wore more and more whenever I was around, that look of disappointment.

So I came to see our son as prepared as I could be. I was clean, I wore a jacket, the one you insisted I buy, and a fresh shirt that I had hurriedly ironed that morning. Yes, I was alcoholfree but my skin spoke of it every chance it had. It felt tight on the bones of my body. Fear lay across the palms of my hands, and my eyes questioned everything they saw, that is of course until I saw our child.

As we gazed down at him, and I looked to you and I saw the love in your eyes, we were briefly joined and the world we had built righted itself and hope fluttered like a flag in a sudden breeze. But that moment gave birth to another darker one, and I saw you move from me across the burning love you felt for our newborn child and look back at me as if to say that now you had found what you had spent your life looking for. Here was someone you could mould and teach. I remembered that night years before on the pier, when you told me that love was doing, not just saying. I never understood what you meant until I saw you look at our son. I knew then that I was losing you, and that the towers of our love were falling.

That night I lay with a prostitute. She was Korean, and younger than you, she was soft and fresh like a spring flower. She worked out of a house not far from the hospital, and her room smelled of old sweat and fading perfume. She called me Baby and for the best part of an hour fooled me into thinking she cared. She was good at the act, the one that involved touch and noises that women make to reassure men that the world is not as cold as they think it is.

An old woman had answered the door and brought me to the small room that had a massage table in it with a blue, worn towel draped over it. She looked at me for a moment, eyeing me up and down before asking me if I had been there before. I said yes, I lied.

‘When?’

‘A few months ago.’

‘What girl?’

‘What?’

‘What girl?’

‘A young one.’

‘No, what girl you with last time?’

‘Can’t remember…She was pretty.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘You police.’

‘No.’

‘Wait here.’

She left and returned two or three moments later with a young Korean girl who was probably no more than twenty-three or -four. She wore a short white lab coat, and underneath nothing more than a tight, green two-piece bikini. Her eyes were dark and shone with mild interest as she looked me up and down. Her lime green eye make-up matched her bikini.

‘Forty for the room, mister,’ the old woman said.

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘Half hour, forty…’

‘The hour.’

‘Eighty.’

‘You pay the girl separate. Between you and Cookie.’

‘Who?’

‘Me,’ the young girl said. ‘That’s me, Cookie.’

‘Hi, Cookie.’

‘Hi.’

It was a few moments before I noticed that the old woman had left. She was good at leaving her girls to it with the minimum of fuss, without disturbing the client.

‘You want massage,’ Cookie asked me, her large eyes smiling at me.

‘Yes, massage,’ I said as if it was the answer to all my problems.

‘You tired.’

‘Yes, tired…’

‘You look tired. Life hard.’

‘Yes.’

I was almost twice her age but I had become her child.

‘Undress from your clothing, please.’

I looked at her for a moment and then obeyed, peeling off my jacket and the freshly ironed shirt, the one I had worn to see our newborn son. I remember the stab of guilt that caught me in the chest, causing me to wince.

‘You okay?’ Cookie asked me.

‘Yes, okay.’

She watched me as I undressed; I suppose to see what she had to work with. I tried to hide my belly from her with its small bulge of sadness and approaching middle age.

‘Don’t be shy,’ she said. ‘You nice body.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, stammering like some fool knee deep in embarrassment.

‘Lie down, Baby Man,’ she said.

The massage table creaked as I lay across it, and I felt her hands on me as she guided me down. I felt a twitch of desire begin in my groin as I looked up into her face.

‘Other way.’

I turned over onto my front and felt her run her fingertips the length of my body, stopping briefly as they reached my buttocks then continuing on down to my heels.

‘Massage hard or soft.’

‘Hard,’ I mumbled.

Her hands moved across my shoulders and dug themselves into my neck and began kneading. Her fingers were firm but gentle and I drifted with them as they moved across the broad of my back. I saw your face briefly and dismissed it as quickly as it rose in my thinking. She made noises as her hands touched me, delicate sounds like a breeze tugging at trees in a meadow. I wondered at all the bodies she had seen, that her young eyes had sized up as they undressed in front of her. I wanted to see behind the mask of sweetness she was careful to present to me. Did she leave herself behind every time she crossed the threshold to greet another customer? Outside in the grubby corridor that I had walked to get to this room, I imagined her soul sitting in a small jar waiting for her to return after she had done what she was paid to do. I saw it gleaming like a berry after a rainfall.

I imagined rows and rows of jars lining the corridors of every brothel in the world. I wanted to ask her how many times she had put her soul out of harm’s way, locked it down as she walked into another man’s arms, knowing that she was the fantasy that he had dreamed up in the sewers of his mind. She is getting bolder with her hands, spending time around the round flesh of my rump, her fingers separating and coming back together. Then she wipes the hair back from my brow and asks me if I am okay. I grunt and shift my face and realise that I have been drooling like an ape on the point of sleep. I know now that I died in that room, a part of me left and walked free of the suffering I was heaping on myself. I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t tell anyone, how her hands became his, tough needy hands digging out the badness in my hide.

She took off her coat and began to move across my body, climbing gently up onto it as if it was a tilting boat. I could smell her cigarette and chewing gum to hide it. It reminded me of school; it also reminded me that I was an older man wearing a younger girl’s skin. Her knees began to walk my back, tentatively digging into any resistance it found there. She asked me again if I was alright, I nodded this time. I was used to being at someone else’s mercy; I was well-schooled in it.

Eventually she got off and asked me to turn over. As I rolled onto my back I saw her take off her bikini, facing towards the door, away from me. Then she turned and I saw her nakedness. Her body was brown and her breasts small. She didn’t say anything but moved slowly towards me, her hips swaying slightly.

I saw so many things in that young girl’s nakedness, as she stood before me. I felt the jaws of the world close around me like a dog that has found a bone. I heard the baying voices of my childhood, the ones that told me I was no good, the ones that told me that I deserved everything that was happening to me.

‘You okay, Baby Man?’

‘Yes, fine.’

‘Relax.’

‘Yes, relax.’

‘You want everything?’

‘Yes, I want everything.’

‘You want fuck?’

‘Yes, I want fuck…Cookie…I want fuck.’

She was astride me slowly bringing me to orgasm, her hands moving down to play with my nipples, her fingers slowly circling them, tweaking them. Yes, her body was young and for the next few minutes it was mine. I looked at her as she lifted her head back and closed her eyes. I saw the long graceful sweep of her neck and the small gulp in her throat. I tried to fool myself that it meant something, that I was the stranger that she had been waiting for, the one that would change everything for her, but I knew that she couldn’t give a fuck, literally. Now and then she threw a look my way, and nodded her head as if to say, you’re doing well. She reinforced it by bending down slightly and running her hands along the sides of my body. Everything she did had a practised sensuality to it, seamless, full of purrs and coos. I didn’t think of you, I didn’t even think of me. I thought of nothing, you see, it entered me and swallowed me whole.

The Gift

We have a chance, you said to me. We have a gift from God. He is beautiful and he has your eyes, you said. Let’s begin again. Stop the visits to the bar after work and come home to us, your son and me. I remember nodding like a twelve-year-old who had just been reprimanded. Yes, I said, I would like that, yes. You are a teacher, you said, be one, act like one, show yourself and your family the way. I remember listening to you and how the tears rose to sit in my eyes. You placed your hands on mine and smiled and for a moment all the pain and all the filth of my past fell away from me. It was the closest I ever came to telling you. I could feel the dark truth of what he did to me begin to move through my body and rise to sit on my tongue. Maybe if I’d said something then as we sat in the garden beneath the canopy of autumn leaves, things would have been different. But I didn’t, you see he had told me not to, he had made me promise deep in the belly of the night when the rest of the world was asleep. You talked of when we had first met, of the young man who spoke with the bright fire of a poet. I was kind, I was generous and I had love, you said, such love to give not only to you but to the world. You told me you wanted that young man again. He still exists, you said, I am sure of it and you smiled and for a moment I believed.

That night we celebrated and you did your best not to notice how much I drank as we ate our meal in our favourite Italian restaurant. We talked of the future and the fine life our son would have. I did as you asked me to, I acted. I pretended that the world was suddenly mine and yours again. I humoured you and nodded when I thought it appropriate and smiled when you made a joke or told me you loved me. I tried, I really did, but I still wore the perfume of the brothel, it smelled of shame and sex. You suggested that we go home and light some candles and make love in the shadows they threw against the walls of our bedroom. I nodded but somewhere I knew that our time had gone.

The next day you woke and looked at me and the disappointment had returned to your gaze. We hadn’t made love the night before, we had barely touched when I had got up and made my way downstairs to open a bottle of wine to find the touch that I knew lived there. I am sorry but you see my heart was only strong enough for one. Your mother called round and you both found me passed out on the couch in the living room. When you tried to wake me, I said that I had no need of you. I don’t remember saying it, but then again I don’t remember you trying to waken me.

Peter

He was his pipe. It defined him, it was an extension of the measured, watchful way he approached life. He would stand there and pack its bowl and ask me how I was doing, his eyes squinting as he lifted the moist, peaty tobacco from the battered tin he carried and placed it in his pipe. I would watch as his fingers prodded and padded before he lifted the stem to his mouth and began to light it. No words would pass between us as he did this; I knew better than to interrupt his ritual. I would watch him pull on the pipe, his cheeks being sucked in and out as he tugged. His eyes would close as the small knots of smoke began to rise. He would then take the pipe away from his mouth and regard it, as if he was seeing it for the first time and then gingerly pack the glowing embers at the top of the bowl down a little deeper, and place the pipe back in his mouth. When I was very young it impressed me, how he would stand there and take the time he needed, as if to say the world can wait until I have this thing going. As I got older I began to resent it, and I would quietly shift my weight from one foot to the other as I waited for him to get through his routine. He was my mother’s self-appointed guardian and somewhere I know that she welcomed it, was flattered by it although she always had one eye on the watching God in the skies. They both attended a monthly prayer meeting together. He considered himself a proper man, a man of principle and fortitude. He viewed the world and its events with dispassion and quiet resignation. He was strong, you could tell from the way he carried himself, with a slow, studied amble. He had a short thick neck and hard, tight shoulders and he was bald except for two wiry tufts of hair that stood up on either side of his head. He had removed himself from the real business of life, he had his pipe and his ways, but he never read a newspaper or watched the news, what’s the point, he would say, it’s all going one way, and that’s down. Jesus was his news; he gave him all he needed to know, he would say, He’s the biggest newspaper of them all. Then he would laugh, it was more of a wheeze, full of old smoke and burnt tobacco.

He told me he had boxed when he was young and he said that all the fight had been beaten out of him. He loved to tell me of one bout when, for the first time in his life, he met someone who had the measure of him.

‘Up until then I’d battered anything put in my way…I’d let the fists fly and not stop until the fella in front of me went down…And if he was stupid enough to get up Bang…Bang…Bang…Not that fighting solves anything…But like anything else there’s a science to it. For a while there when I was a kid I believed I was it…You know, Ali, Foreman, all that gang…’

‘Right.’

‘Aye, this night anyroad I was in with a young buck and he had a tight guard…watertight…I think I got one good look at him all night and that was when I was flat out on the canvas looking back up at him. I’d gone in all guns blazing like some mad thing…Boom…Boom…Nothing, not a thing. He was as sealed as a tortoise shuffling here and shuffling there. The more he hid the more I looked for him and the more I slackened. Everything went to pot, my breathing…my stance…my power…I think it was round five about a minute from the bell when suddenly he hit me with this combination. His hands were so fast I’m still not sure if he threw them. All I know is one minute there I am banging away like a good ‘un and the next the ref’s standing over me giving that look…You know, are you still with us? To this day I’m effed if I know what that fella did. I tried to get up but the legs didn’t want to know, and the brain had gone to mush. It was then I knew there’s cleverer bastards out there than us. There’s bigger and there’s smarter. It’s like life, you just don’t see it coming…You never see it coming…Best you can do is keep the old snout clean and mind your own…How’s the old lady?’

‘She’s fine, Peter.’

‘Good. Hell of a woman. Hell of a gift she has…’

It was always the same with him. He would tell a long tale of daring-do from his youth, itching for the moment when he could enquire about my mother.

‘How’s the boss?’

‘Who?’

‘The old fella.’

‘Aye…Alright.’

‘Good…Good.’

‘Does God see everything, Peter?’

I remember he looked at me when I asked him this, for what seemed an eternity, smoke rising up his face like long grey fingers.

‘Every damned action and every damned thought,’ he said.

‘Right.’

‘What’s on your mind, son?’

‘Nothing.’

‘God is here, son, it’s only a matter of opening your eyes.’

‘I can’t see Him, Peter…I’ve opened my eyes…And I can’t see Him.’

‘See these, son?’

He held his fists up to me until they were inches from my face; I saw the knuckles, and the scars.

‘Yes.’

‘On their own they’re no good. Just weapons. I learned that the hard way. Left to my own devices I’ll misuse these feckers. I’ll start a war in a paper bag. I had to learn to lie Jesus across them, son. To put Him between me and them. That’s what I learned in that ring. No bugger can do this life on his own. He’ll get seven kinds of shit kicked out of him every time. After that fight I spent a long time just looking into my heart asking myself what I wanted. And everywhere I looked I saw the same thing. People throwing punches. Catholic at Protestant. Protestant at Catholic. Mother at daughter. Father at son…You know?’

‘I think so…’

‘Jesus came to me, son.’

‘Yeah?’

‘As surely as there’s breath in these old lungs of mine.’

‘When?’

‘At night. You know when the fear sits across a man’s heart. I was in the bed and I had a compulsion. An urge to get up and drop to my knees and pray. Unknown for someone like me. Always said no, you can keep religion, it’s messed the whole show up in this country of ours. But…it was as if a voice was working my thoughts. Had no choice, son. So up I leap…And onto the knees…And for some reason I didn’t join my hands. No, something told me to make fists with them. So I hold them out. And the voice says…Christ says…the living Christ says…Those scars are mine…Those fists are mine and they are to do my work. It was powerful, son. I haven’t struck a man in anger since.’

I remember how he closed his eyes as he lost himself to the memory of it and I stood awkwardly waiting for him to come back to me. He loved my mother, I knew that, my father knew that too and he would often tell me that the moment would come when Petey would have to raise his fists once more because he had him marked. My mother would never have done anything to hurt my father, but I know now that a woman doesn’t have to sleep with a man to make him her own. They met in secret, attended prayer meetings together, and my mother would always fudge the issue if my father asked her if she had seen Petey. They behaved as if they were lovers even though they weren’t. I felt sorry for them; I knew that in a different world, beneath different skies, it would have been different.