Lies

‘So that’s the story of how Lynn Bartholomew became the first woman to win Wimbledon with an underhand serve,’ I said when I’d finished, and I smiled with all the conviction of a second-hand car salesman trying to look angelic.

She pushed the dinky gold-rimmed spectacles that cost, don’t-tell-your-dad, back up her nose. Her nose is not yet formed enough to hold them in place so it’s like watching one of those mechanical statues that lift their hats up and down on a timed cycle. She had returned to watching THE expert storyteller, Spongebob Squarepants.

Charming, I thought. But, I knew the little men running around inside her head would be pressing buttons, making calculations, scouring through manuals, and sooner or later, they’d admit defeat and she’d ask some questions.

‘That Patrick is stupid,’ I said in-between crossword clues.

She didn’t even flinch, she just pushed the spectacles up.

‘Your Mum’s lying you know,’ I said to get her attention at another mental pause doing the crossword.

She turned around to give me a dirty look.

‘Those spectacles don’t make you look more intelligent,’ I said.

I got another dirty look as she left the room.

The back door banged just as I turned the telly over. I waited a couple of minutes then I got up to close the back door. She just slams it and never lifts the handle back up to close it proper.

Later that night in bed, the Mrs and me were reading our books when something she had read made her think, and she whalloped me over the back of the head with the book.

‘You – stop telling the wean lies,’ she said.

‘What,’ I said with an innocent tone, and chuckled inside.

I knew the wean would ask questions eventually, she always does.

Freeloader

‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ I asked her.

All I got for an answer was a big grin with clenched teeth. She then returned to the homework she had been pretending to do for a half hour.

After a while she said, with her puzzled, but, I am trying to be intelligent pushing my spectacles up look, ‘Dad, what does freeloader mean?’

Now, picture yourself at work, or in the pub, and someone asked you the same question; you would be perfectly entitled to counter-ask why they asked such a subjective question.

Ha, the thing is, I’m too experienced at this Father hood stuff to be so naive, and I know, if she asks a question, any question, the last thing I want to know is why she asked it.

Questioning questions is a poisoned chalice; believe you me … I know, and I've got the T-shirt.

‘Why don’t you ask your brother? He knows,’ I said.

I did not tell any lies, he does know, in fact the skinny git is freeloading aficionado. If we had bunk beds, he would be the one sleeping on the bottom bed. He is so languid, that climbing the ladders would be too much like effort. Mind you, his Mother would lift him up, so maybe he would sleep on the top bunk.

I’m convinced he is the unfortunate result of an administrative error, and we brought home the wrong baby from the maternity hospital. There is no way anyone - without winning the lottery - can exude such a picture of happiness, and, and, to be as lazy as he is, there is no way on earth can he come from any genes belonging to me!

Her Mother returned from where ever she had been, and I was excused from any involvement in further conversations. I just slinked back into the shadows, and watched the football.

Toast

‘What you at?’ I said. I was in her bedroom putting clean clothes in her drawers and to retrieve the dinner plate and empty glass she took up to her room earlier.

She put the handset down and switched the Play-station off. ‘Nothing,’ she said while looking out one of her colouring book and pencils.

I knew what she was doing; I know the signs and the tone. She won't make eye contact, she just deals with things, and she does it her own way.

I’d invaded that space, her private escape world, and I’d burst the protective bubble and brought her out of the dream place she escapes to and copes.

I sat on the bed for a minute or so, and watched as she coloured in. Not once did she go out side the lines, and the colours were so light I could barely make them out. She does it with such deft delicacy and patience way beyond her years.

My baby had grown up so much in the past two years.

Her Mother had cancer, and passed away. In the end, it was a relief, she was suffering too much and it was for the best

Although I didn’t ignore her, I did give ninety percent of my time to her Mother. No, not my time but, certainly my love and my effort.

Anything I had to give was given to make sure her Mother was comfortable and happy in what was as far as she was concerned, the last season of happiness she would have.

So, through no fault of her own at the age of nine, she had to spend so much time alone with nothing but colouring in books and her games for company.

She was an angel then, and still is, my special angel now.

Not once did she complain when I said she couldn’t have friends around. She never cried when I shouted at her for making a mess when all the time, there was no mess. Without her I can’t say with any kind of honesty I wouldn’t have ended it all myself, I’m sure I’d have gave up long ago.

I don’t know how she did it, but I’ll always be thankful she did.

I stood up. ‘D’you want me to go?’ I said and ruffled her hair.

‘Dad!’ she said annoyed, and buried her head further into the book.

I left her and her thoughts alone and returned to finish ironing school clothes.

Later that night, we were in the lounge, she had returned to the real world, our world. A world where we can steel a laugh without feeling guilty. A world where we don’t care if other people will think we are being heartless and insensitive if we smile.

She sat watching the telly and ate toast before bedtime. I read the paper, and for the first time since the funeral, some seven months before, she kissed me goodnight before she went to bed.

Comfy

‘Y’know Bill, I reckon fish’n’chips is what makes life worth living,’ said Wilma as she unravelled the large paper package in front of her.

She then took her jacket off, and the two of them sat at the big wooden table Bill made the first year they got married, some forty years earlier.

Bill took his fish’n’chips from the newspaper wrapper, and placed them on his plate. ‘Aye, I reckon you’re right love,’ he said as he shook some salt then vinegar over his Friday night tea. ‘Aint much beats Harry’s fish’n’chips.’

They followed a ritual almost religiously for the last twnty years. Every Friday since William Jnr had left home, they'd come home from work, and Wilma would fetch the fish’n’chips for tea around six o'clock.

When they were done, Wilma spoke first, ‘I’ll tidy up love, you make us a cuppa!’

She then proceeded to place the plates in the sink. She had hot water running into it, and bubbles spilled over the side like an avalanche as she wiped the table with a wet cloth.

Bill made two cups of tea after the kettle boiled, Wilma put the plates in the pantry, the cutlery in the drawer, and they then retreated to the lounge; just in time for the news. The gas fire was up high, and the room was comfortable. Bill was asleep before the news finished, and Wilma wasn’t far behind him.

#

William their son, who had moved to Australia grew concerned when he didn’t get an answer when he made his usual phone call at ten the next morning. Father is always up at this time, he thought.

Carbon monoxide the doctor told him over the phone two days later;

Junkies

Everyone has their secrets in this place. Behind every set of twitching floral print curtains lies a world more surreal and fucked up than anything any of the junkies they tut at and treat like lepers, could ever dream up. If you used practical biology and dissected this shit hole, you’d find scenes and scenarios far worse than some fucked up youngster sticking a needle in a vein could imagine. Behind those facades things happen, things people pretend don’t happen, but they do.

Grown men dress up as women and get thrir kick by being fucked by their women using giant vibrators.

Little kids who by nothing more than birthright are battered, and abused by ignorant and sick parents because they were battered, and abused, and think its their right to carry on the family tradition.

Respectable housewife’s who deny they have a problem with the Mothers Helper they drink to cushion the blows reigning down from their angry bitter men, and still have the nerve to walk to the shops carrying their tartan bag with their nose in the air.

Women who miraculously walk into doors that strangely resemble their men’s fists with such regularity that its strange when you see them without a black eye caked in badly applied makeup.

At least us junkies are honest fucking scum. We came out of the fucking shadows, bared our souls, and opened the fucking can of worms.

They sit in their rent arreared castles guarded by gnomes and complain things have changed, well they have, something’s changed alright. People don’t like the way the wind blows anymore, they cant pretend things are normal. The smell of shit isn’t hidden behind closed doors anymore, the shit is in their face, and right up their snooty fucking nostrils.

They aren’t any different from us, they only think they are. Were not fucking animals, were only human just like them, there isn’t the six degrees of separation between us they like to think there is. Despite the fact they can shut their front door to hide their fucking depraved secrets, they are and always will be, just as much scum as we are.

Treacle

What can I say – embarrassing isn’t close, bury your head in sand and hope the world isn’t looking is more apt. Jack and his obsession with toffee treacle was always going to – excuse the pun – get him into a sticky situation, and situations do not come any stickier than the one he found himself in on that balmy August day.

The evening had started off ok, his charm had worked a dream, and after only an outlay of two half pints of draught beer the lady agreed to accompany him home. 'To ahem, look at his vast stamp collection'

After a bout of mutual ear licking and more than a little giggling at photo albums and tall tales from when he was incarcerated in the local jail for bad deeds, Jack was brave enough to enquire if the ‘lady’ would by chance be interested in being covered in warm sticky toffee treacle. Surprisingly enough she thought it would be a marvellous idea.

After lighting the stove under the vast vat of toffee treacle Jack kept for such occasions, he returned to the living room and continued the courtship. To add to the suspense he asked the ‘lady’ to lie down on the floor while the sweet smelling goo became warm and malleable.

Sadly, some would say tragically, they both fell asleep, and the toffee treacle, left alone boiled over and engulfed them both rendering them unable to move.

The fire-crew that eventually came to their rescue still laugh and talk about the day - for the first and only time - they rescued the stranded lovers helpless in toffee treacle; the subject however is never mentioned in-front of Fire Chief Trustworthy who wasn’t too pleased to find his own wife lying sheepishly surrounded in toffee treacle. They divorced soon afterwards.

Umbrella

Some people are driven by obsession so great that it can make a five foot four man think he’s actually six foot six square. Harry Slocum is such a man, and the obsession – he truly thinks he is a first rate hard-as-nails gangster.

At the time this tale was happened, Harry still stayed at home with Margret, his Mother, a sour faced spinster who was married to Ted for only three years before he killed himself by telling his life story to a moving train.

The poor, poor man couldn’t take her spiteful frigid ways, or worse, the cackling sound Baby Harry had perfected just to annoy his Father, so he just … well, he just.

One day Margaret ran out of bread despite it only being Tuesday; now normally a loaf lasted until Thursday, but Harry was feeding the evil pesky pigeons again. A deed that irked his Mother so much her lips bled because she bit them when she was angry.

Harry, you get down to the shop and get me another loaf, she shouted, and take your umbrella with you it’s going to rain cats’n’dogs soon. It wasn’t, but she liked to say such things; it was she felt, better than silence.

Harry was only in the shop two minutes when suddenly a thief came in demanding to be handed over the day’s takings. The shop-keeper couldn’t move, he was so startled, not because he was being robbed – he was used to that, but Harry in his shop on a Tuesday, buying bread, that was something to be startled about. The man thought he had slept for two days and no one had told him.

Harry, he was cheesed because the thief being impatient had jumped the queue, and as far as Harry knew; he was the only gangster in town – so he stabbed the thief with the deadly sharp bit at the end of the umbrella. The thief promptly died, Mr Patel, the shop-keeper he was so pleased he wasn’t getting robbed that week, he gave Harry two loafs for the price of one, the pigeons, they feasted like royalty that day, and Margret, when Harry told her what had happened, she bit her lip so hard she went into shock and also died right there on the kitchen floor.

The moral of the tale – even though he is only a short assed thirty six year old orphan, Harry is indeed a hard as nails gangster who has a soft spot for feeding pigeons, so be fore-warned, don’t get into scrapes with genuine lunatics.

Oh, and no matter how pleasant you may think it is, don’t bite your lips too hard or you’ll end up like Margret.

Holiday Blues

‘Well Bill, this is it, a moment of truth,’ Ina said to her husband handing him a bottle of water.

Bill gagged when he looked at the size of the blue diamond shaped pill he held in his hand, ‘are you sure this is safe?’ he said to his wife as she fixed on some lipstick.

‘Oh for God sake Bill, stop being such a fuddy duddy, and take the bloody thing,’ Ina said, and snapped her handbag shut.

Bill popped the pill in his mouth, and with the help of the water, he managed to swallow. He wasn’t as convinced as Ina, he was still trying to figure it all out. How could a little blue pill make something work, some things just don’t seem right? He thought.

Dressed in their finest clobber, they then went down to the hotel dinning room for the evening supper and a few in the mood drinks.

Ina could hardly contain her excitement, it had been a few years since they had managed anything resembling sex, and the last few menopausal years she hadn’t missed it either. Now she felt a need to feel womanly again, and Bill, for all he was willing, other parts weren’t. Ina did all the research, and she bought them from a web site that came with some encouraging users comments.

The comments proved to be true, and Ina made a note to add her recommendation when they got home.

#

The next day at the pool Bill couldn’t get rid of the erection, he lay beside the pool sunbathing on his belly, and Ina, you would have had to slap her to remove the grin from her face.

Bill never uses sun cram, and unable to turn around like a spit roast, he felt his back burn. In a rare moment of quiet when no one was looking he made a dash for the pool, and immersed himself in the cooling water.

After a while, a little boy came ambling by with a ball under one arm, and eating an ice lolly with the other.

‘Hey mister,’ he said, squinting his face from the glare reflecting off the water, ‘what are you doing sitting in the shallow end?’

‘Go away,’ said Bill splashing himself with water, but the child wouldn’t move, he was a defiant little shit.

Ina, she was no help; she had fallen asleep with the grin still intact, and no doubt dreaming about later.

‘Throw the ball in,’ Bill said, thinking about how he could get out of the situation without any embarrassment.

The child thought about it still squinting, looking at Bill, and trying to figure if he meant what he said.

‘It’s a real football mister,’ he said.

‘Just throw me the fucking thing,’ Bill said, agitated enough that if he had a gun, he’d shoot the annoying little shit, and he’d shoot anyone who complained about it.

The boy threw the ball in. Bill looked around, no one was paying any attention, so he launched it as far as he could into the manicured, and totally false green shrubbery.

The boy, pouted, put his hands on his hips, and looked at Bill with disgust, ‘What an asshole you are. That was no accident, was it? He said, and went to retreat his real David Beckham football his Mother had spent four euros’ on, just to shut him up for five minutes; she was now drunk on the all inclusive gin, and could care who little Tom was annoying.

Bill made a hunched dash for the sun-bed hoping no one would notice his shorts were sticking out too far.

Later that night, Ina dined alone, Bill couldn't get off the loo, he had a dose of ‘the skitters’ brought on by sunstroke. He spent the rest of the holiday in bed lying on his belly bemoaning the blue pill. His back was blistered, and burned raw; Ina had to keep rubbing calamine lotion into it.

Ina, wasn’t in the least bit upset, she was determined that despite the circumstances, she was on holiday, and as far as she was concerned, she was going to enjoy herself. She didn’t rest on her laurels, or lament her husbands misfortune, she sought, and found solace with Juan. The aging Don, the hotel bar manager had what seemed like an endless supply of little blue pills. Her grin grew as he grew, the holiday went on, and Bill was none the wiser.

Ina, already has them booked into the same hotel for next year.

Our Kids

############
########
####
##
#

‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ I asked her.

All I got for an answer was a big grin with clenched teeth. She then returned to the homework she had been pretending to do for a half hour.

After a while she said, with her puzzled, but, I am trying to be intelligent pushing my spectacles up look, ‘Dad, what does freeloader mean?’

Now, picture yourself at work, or in the pub, and someone asked you the same question; you would be perfectly entitled to counter-ask why they asked such a subjective question.

Ha, the thing is, I’m too experienced at this Father hood stuff to be so naive, and I know, if she asks a question, any question, the last thing I want to know is why she asked it.

Questioning questions is a poisoned chalice; believe you me … I know, and I've got the T-shirt.

‘Why don’t you ask your brother? He knows,’ I said.

I did not tell any lies, he does know, in fact the skinny git is freeloading aficionado. If we had bunk beds, he would be the one sleeping on the bottom bed. He is so languid, that climbing the ladders would be too much like effort. Mind you, his Mother would lift him up, so maybe he would sleep on the top bunk.

I’m convinced he is the unfortunate result of an administrative error, and we brought home the wrong baby from the maternity hospital. There is no way anyone - without winning the lottery - can exude such a picture of happiness, and, and, to be as lazy as he is, there is no way on earth can he come from any genes belonging to me!

Her Mother returned from where ever she had been, and I was excused from any involvement in further conversations. I just slinked back into the shadows, and watched the football.

Stupid

I used to love the song 'Sweet Home Alabama', now I cant stand to hear the first fuckin' chord. It reminds me of a night I'd rather forget. I heard it on the radio today and it all came back.

#

It was a Friday night, five years ago. I fancied a couple of beers, so I went to the local. It must have been, half past eight – nine o’clock, something like that. It wasn’t busy, a few in, not many. He was in, my brother Steve, standing playing the fruit machine. I bought two pints, and took them over to where he was. I knew instantly, the bastard was on something.

I could see it his eyes. Black fuckin' quartz that is how I would describe them, just black soul-less quartz.

He drank his beer as if it was water. He was playing pool, feeding the fruit machine, and the jukebox, all at the same fuckin' time. He was there, but at the same time, he wasn’t.

[This band, they ARE the berries! Fancy another drink big man? I’ll be back in a jiffy! Did you see the football today?]

Small talk, just trivial fuckin' nonsense, and he went on and on, non-fuckin'-stop. He wasn’t talking to me, was he fuck, he was just talking, and, it was doing my head in. He sounded like a fuckin' machine gun for Gods sake.

He was back on drugs despite the promise he made to me, and his Mother about being, a reformed man. I could tell: Smack, Ecstasy, coke or Speed, whatever, it didn’t matter, there all the same to me, bad fuckin' news.

Who the fuck did he think he was, mister invisible? I can assure you he wasn’t, and neither was the fact he was flying as high as a kite.

He was acting like a dog dying from thirst, constantly licking his fuckin' lips, searching for salt. Dehydration brought on by his kidneys screaming out for help, and drinking beer like a fuckin' fish probably made it worse. It is another sure fire sign of some cunt high on drugs. I told him to calm down, 'take your fuckin' time,' I said, but he just laughed. [What do you know big brother?]

#

He even started dancing around the pool table with Mary any-chance-‘o’-a-fag-Corigan, the scheme bike. She’s nothing but a fuckin' smelly whore, bloated and scabbied through drink. She’s been used, and abused by nearly every bastard who is desperate enough. The idiot couldn't give a fuckin' monkey’s, he was oblivious to any embarrassment surrounding him, he was in his own little fucked up world.

‘Mary’s alright,’ he said grinning.

‘Sweet Home Alabama’ started up. Him and Mary fuckin' danced away like two bulls in a china shop, and annoyed every-cunt in the place.

I just shook my head: what else could I do?

I left before some-cunt punched the idiots fuckin' face in. It seemed to me it was only a matter of time the way he was carrying on. It was eleven o’clock, something like that.

Hindsight it’s a wonderful thing, what if this, what if that?

Stupid, stupid, idiot, what a fuckin' idiot.

#

Next thing I knew, the phone rang in the middle of the night. It was the Police. [Your brother is in intensive care]. It was half past five in the morning, and twenty minutes later, I was at local hospital along with a hundred other fuckin' social misfits crying out for help, or methadone, or fuckin' both.

Drunks and junkies with slashed faces, and bottled heads covered in blood soaked household towels. Scum of the fuckin' earth terrifying law-abiding decent people.

Concerned parents clung to sick children wrapped up in cartoon blankets. Mothers and Fathers thinking, was it a good idea bringing their sick children to such a fucked up place?

It’s not night porters they need, it’s fuckin' armed security guards who are allowed to shoot the bastards instead of trying to calm them down.

#

I asked at the desk where he was.

‘Intensive care, room twelve,’ said the receptionist. She had a ‘I’ve-seen-it-all-before’ look. So would I if I had to deal with that fuckin' lot every fuckin' weekend.

The intensive care unit was whiter than white, a scary place, sterile, and deathly silent. It's like the fuckin' place people go before they go to the morgue, a half-way house, and somehow, it's how I’d imagine purgatory would be like.

In a dimly lit room he was lying in bed, covers neatly folded down to his waist, and there were fuckin' tubes protruding everywhere. Machines bleeped away, and nurses busied around doing this'n'that.

His brain was all but dead, cabbaged, and there was fuckin' no chance of a recovery. A sombre bleary-eyed doctor just shook his head when I asked what his chances were. Though to be truthful, I didn’t need to fuckin' ask. It was obvious enough.

The doctor sounded like he was reading from a medical journal when he told me about the multiple injuries, internal bleeding, and irreversible brain damage. Just about every bone in his body is broken, and some, he said, were no more than mush.

I knew what he meant. A decision had to be made.

Mother, she was too fuckin' old for that shite, I’d left her at home. The woman was in no fuckin' fit state to make a decision like that.

There never was a Father, not since he died when I was five, and Steve was only two.

No, it was all down to big fuckin' brother to make any decision, mister sensible, mister fuckin' reliable, me.

#

The stupid, stupid junkie bastard, what on earth was he fuckin' thinking about?

A bus, it was a big red fuckin' bus for God sake. Why would anyone run out in front of a fuckin' bus? I mean its not as if you could say, ‘hey, I didn’t see it,’ they’re not the most inconspicuous objects in the world; are they?

I’ll tell you one thing, there is fuck all in this world to prepare anyone to cope with situations like that. How could I tell the doctors to switch the fuckin' life support off?

I mean, after all that was said'n'done it was still my wee brother lying there. I’m not God, I’m just ordinary fuckin' Joe, the man on the street, a fuckin' layman.

#

I remember looking at him, Mr Selfish, and his fuckin' angelic face below the mask helping him breathe. Ha, fuckin' angelic. It was funny, because, his face must have been the only bit of him that wasn’t fuckin' bruised.

He always was a selfish bastard, he never thought about any-cunt bar, me-me-me, all his days. He would have stolen the sugar right out of your fuckin' tea; so he would.

Even right up until the last, the selfish bastard was having a laugh at us all, especially me, his big fuckin' brother. Oh, how he would have loved to see me squirm in that hospital, he was that spiteful.

#

‘Well wee man,’ I said to him, ‘this is your last fuckin' laugh, and I hope to fuck it’s been worth it.’

I resigned to facts. He was gone, and there was fuck all I, or anyone could do about it. I couldn’t at the time decide whether it was good riddance; a kind of relief that there would be no more heartbreaking. I just remember feeling fuckin' numb, without any tears or anger.

I walked out of that depressing room to where a nurse sat at a desk in the corridor doing paperwork. She smiled as best she could, letting me know it was the right thing to do. I smiled back thinking, don’t I fuckin' know it.

I signed what papers I had sign, and I left without looking back.