Like So Many Others

LIKE SO MANY OTHERS

A novel, like so many others, a tale written out…
by Sean McNulty

This is what happens in May and June.
This is what happens every May and June.
Endurance and adventure in the midst of upsetting break-ups.
Mystery and excitement, sadness, aloneness, grave introspection.
A girl up on a table on all fours getting a tattoo done on her arse.

I began writing this book for a girl on a whim. I sent her an early draft and she tore it up and posted it back to me. That’s what a whim gets you. I’ve never known such rudeness in a person.
How rude can you get? I asked.
About this much, she wrote on the envelope that contained the shredded early draft of this book you’re holding.
This book exists because of her and nearly didn’t exist because of her.

So then I thought for this book I’d write about girlfriends and woe. I decided to cancel the admittedly puny billet-doux I’d been pampering like a baby and change it to suit my agony. No longer a love letter to the girl. Instead a wrestling match with perhaps the most profound forces of nature man has had to contend with in the whole history of contending with. There may not be a happy ending. The ending may turn out sad, I’m not sure yet. We’ll have to see. I’m going into this really not knowing what to expect.
I hope to see you at the end of this book, hope to share a glad moment maybe, and we can all then sleep peacefully and happily.

1.

Like so many others, I like to see the weather change. I like to see it change from bad to good and from good back to bad. Wouldn’t like it so much if it was simply good all the time. Wouldn’t like it so much if it was simply bad all the time either.
It had been bad for a long time though. We’re talking months and months and months. Months of dark and gloom. I was just in the right mood for a change. I would have savoured a nice big slice of summer.
And then it arrived, to my utter surprise. Quite a slice.
Summer in the city. In May, of all months (how strange it is that how strange that was!)
A real summertime.
That made me feel good, but it didn’t take long for gloom to catch up.
This city is Dublin, in Ireland. Not a colossally outrageous city, like so many others, not tall and provident and breathtaking, not at all; basically a normal city, like so many others, beastly and improvident, but fascinating.
It was a real summertime. It was not like the summertimes we usually get that have presumably been passed around all the other countries first and when they finally get to us they’ve been used to an extent beyond excessive, GREYCRAPPYWETHEAVYNAUSEOUS, and better off we would be donating them to Oxfam or some charity organisation of similar sway.
This was a real summertime. With blue skies and pop music and arms hanging out of car windows and kids shouting louder than usual and the strong odour of tanning lotions everywhere and people wearing shades and t-shirts and light frocks.
The day Lili split up with me I finished work kind of early, so it gave me the opportunity to walk around and experience the first day of sunshine. There were so many people walking around happy who would normally not have been so happy. The sun can have that effect on people. Like an anti-depressant.
I was one of the people affected.
I caught my reflection in a shop window and I was smiling. I didn’t even realise I was smiling. I’d been reflecting on something sorrowful in my life, so it was a great shock to see me smiling.

2.

Like so many others, I get up every day, I go to my job and come home, and once home I’m exhausted and need to have a cup of tea. I enjoy that cup of tea part. If it was taken away from me, I’d just be left with going to the job and coming home exhausted and that would be a shame.
But even though I love the tea, is that really all there is?
Actually, now that I think about it, it’s not always tea. Sometimes cream soda, hot chocolate, coffee, sometimes a blackcurrant cordial…ah, they’re all the same. They all mean the same thing to me.
A minor luxury at the end of the day, honouring myself for my continued stamina, for surviving the day by dayness.
But tea more often than the rest, so I’ll simply round them all up and call the lot of them tea.
It’s gotten so I can see nothing but this minor luxury, this cup of tea, at the end of each day. I’m starting to feel there should be more, much more, than just a cup of tea waiting for me when I arrive at the end of the day.
I don’t have an awful lot of options; that’s for sure.
A cup of tea is the only thing currently offering its support.

3.

Like so many others, I’ve been unlucky in love. Recently, I’ve been unlucky again. My girlfriend dumped me. I’m her rubbish. Her refuse. The binmen haven’t come to collect me and take me to the dump yet, so I may as well continue with the book, and you can come along too if you like. The book is one of those trivial jeremiads we humans are always putting into the world, but please,
bear with me.

This is it.
I had a girlfriend.
Now I don’t.
That’s that.

She meant the world to me.
A cracker she was.
Dynamite.
Ashen skin.
Longish, very black hair, shoulder-length.
She spoke highly of Sonic Youth.
Brilliant!
She had these delicate brown beauty marks, you know. On anybody else, I wouldn’t have noticed these beauty marks.
She wore them magically.
Lili. That’s the name. The name I cannot delete from my phone book, address book, or memory.
It happened a week ago. She rang me and told me.
She said she realised somethings lately.
First, that we just weren’t suited.
Second, that we shouldn’t have got together in the first place.
Third, well, we’d just been rash about the whole thing.
She hoped we could still be…she’s met someone else. I know it. Someone better-looking. Someone better. I can’t think about that. Shouldn’t. But that’s it. They’re a couple. A better couple than when I was included in her couple. She picks and chooses who can be included in her couple. It’s her couple. She owns the copyright. She’d have her solicitor out with all guns blazing if anyone else tried to claim ownership.
She’s picked him now. I hate him whoever he is.
Whoever he is.
I’m thinking, it could be that busker I hate who plays Spanish guitar, looks like a groomed revolutionary, obviously a favourite among the fairer sex, with his lady-distracting feather-cut.
I’m thinking, it could also be the tall, English guy who works in the coffee house that I visit every morning. He has a silken demeanour. He has a silken voice. Silk-smooth everything, except for clothes. In that area, he is the denim prince. The girls where I work are always talking about him, sharing their tea-break experiences with him. I like to listen in on their conversations. I’m a fabulous eavesdropper in the tradition of nervous men.
Lili liked both of the aforementioned handsomes. I noticed her staring at them on numerous occasions.
You fancy him, don’t you? I said once. I’d caught her eyeing the busker.
Who? she asked.

It was plain to see, the plain of it.
And now the pain, the pain of it
You know of this pain, don’t you? Tell me you do, we’ll be buddies.

This is what’s WHAT.
And here’s what else: she said I was a stinking bastard!
A stinking bastard? That’s embarrassing, isn’t it?
Why’d you dump him, Lili?
He was a stinking bastard.
I’m not stinking. I clean all the time. She said it as a joke. Now it’s got me thinking forever in terms of stinking.
It’s such a pity she’s gone. Together, we could have been the best ever. Better than all those couples you see in the parks just TALKING to one another.

As is custom in these kinds of stories, here are things I miss about the girl:
I miss her eyes and her hair and her eating quite inventive but disgusting things when we went to restaurants.
I miss her voice and her smile and her reaching over and grabbing me by the balls when I least expect it.
I miss her whisper and her sniffles when she has a cold, her juvenile loathing of celebrities, and her being able to tell me the time because she had a watch and I hadn’t.

I don’t want it to be over.
But that’s it.
I pleaded with her. I asked her not to go through with it. Finally she said, Kaput, okay!
That was the first day of summer, last day of Lili.

This past while, I haven’t been able to tell what time of day it is. Time matters little to me. That’s your fault, Lili, if you’re reading this. You could have at least left the watch as consolation.

4.

Like so many others, when I first came to this city, I had a problem getting somewhere to live. That’s the current state of the nation. So I resided in hostels and B&B’s for an awful long time. At least I have a place now. It’s a place of my own and I’m glad of it because I didn’t know if I was coming or going before eventually getting here. Getting sick of it now though. Might start looking elsewhere.
I’ll tell you about one time when I was staying at a hostel, seeing as we’re here. It was a small tidy hostel and I murdered an alarm clock. There was nothing special about the alarm clock. It was as average an alarm clock as your average alarm clock. It was about four in the morning or thereabouts and this damn alarm clock began howling and yowling. It wouldn’t stop.
There were five people asleep in the room. All of them were out for the count, except me. Nobody lifted a finger to silence the clock.
Somebody turn that thing off! I wailed, but nobody was listening.
Out for the count.
I was on the top bed of a bunk.
The alarm clock was resting on the cabinet next to the bed directly below me. It evidently belonged to the people asleep in that bed.
Two of them.
The people in the bed below me were a young couple, peaceful, beautifully entwined, exotically out for the count. They looked Italian. That’s the first nationality that sprung to mind when I looked at them. Maybe they weren’t Italian. Maybe they were Croatian.
I reached down, grunted Fucking thing! to myself, and slammed the alarm clock to its death. I hit it a good whack and it toppled from the cabinet, and I listened as it choked on the floor, croaked its last breath.
You deserved that, I said to myself, triumphantly.
After that, I settled into my tiredness.
5.
4.
3
2.
Sleep.
That’s when everybody woke.
Just as I was in the countdown to sleep.
At about two in the countdown, they woke.
Everybody in the room. They all woke up wondering what had happened.
Somebody got up and put the light on.
They had to face up to a scene of horror, an act of dreadful malice (Gasps!), the corpse of one mute, mutilated alarm clock lying on the floor (More gasps!), and the murderer still in the room, snoring happily, not a trace of guilt to be found with him, as he was now finally, exquisitely, out for the count.

I am happy with living alone, but I would prefer the company of another.
That’s just that.

5.

Like so many others, I was easily seduced by sunlight. With me, as with many others, any reason at all to spend some time wallowing underneath a ball of fire. That’s a big ball of fire, isn’t it?
The other day I was late for work because I spent too long sitting around in St. Stephen’s Green under the baking hot sun. I couldn’t help it. I did not go into that Green place often, but this day was not like many others. It was so pretty and so very quiet and the sun was shining. It was early in the morning. I went in because I had a little time to spare before work started and the sun was prompting me – perhaps to sin.
And wouldn’t you just know it? Sitting right across from me: the perfect couple, a young man and woman, attractive, confident and just sitting there TALKING to one another. It’s not fair, I winced.
Sitting on the bench next to me was an old man with his newspaper. One of the groundskeepers came over to him. He set his wheelbarrow down beside the old man’s bench. They knew each other and they had this conversation:
Well, you’re clearly a happy man, Pat, said the old man, laying down his newspaper.
I am a happy man, Andrew. How can you tell?
You’re working away there with ease and the sun’s beating down.
Too right. They’re saying it’s gonna last for a few weeks too.
It’s great, isn’t it?
Oh, sure.
No stress, eh?
No stress at all. It’s paradise all day long.
Well, you keep the flowers coming, Pat.
Exactly, Andrew.
When their conversation ended, I realised that I was five minutes late for work and sped off.
All because of those old farts.

The summer has turned the street where I live into something resembling the neighbourhood from the film Do The Right Thing if you’ve ever seen that. There are people on the street each day, sitting on the footpath drinking beer and shouting at each other and there are kids on the street who could well be up to no good, it’s anybody’s guess, and shy unmarried people sunning themselves discreetly by their doorsteps.
The people who clutter the streets during the sunny days are harmless. But I always have my headphones on and can’t hear what they’re saying. Today I didn’t have my headphones on and it sounded like Hell on Earth.

The sun, the sun.
It’s a ball of fire.
What if it crashed down upon us all?
Imagine that. You’re out tanning yourself, everything great
and suddenly
FLASH! Flames and death, eh?

6.

Like so many others, I worry fairly often. I especially worry about muggers. Primarily, I am frightened of two things. Fire and being mugged. I’ll get to fire later, but for now I’ll talk about muggers.
About a month ago, I was coming round a corner on the bus and I saw a woman being mugged on the street. A boy, say about fourteen or maybe even fifteen, went up to her and snatched the bag she was carrying. It was a plastic bag full of groceries. It only happened in the instant the bus came around the corner. The boy and the woman and the groceries were gone within seconds. I thought about standing up and shouting, Stop the bus, someone’s getting mugged! But I didn’t do that. The bus wouldn’t have stopped anyway.
You are told to expect to witness scenes like this in the city. It comes with the situation. I calm my fear of muggers by accepting that all of us have to deal with such things. What can I do about it? Be ready when the time comes, I tell myself. Don’t freak out too much.
I mentioned my fear of muggers to a person at work and he laughed at me. When he saw that I was a little offended by his mockery, he toned it down slightly to keep me in his good books. But pretty soon he was at the mockery again, spitting all these horrific inner-city crime stories in my direction, each of them far worse than any grocery-snaffle.

7.

Like so many others, I take the route home from work that passes the tattoo parlour. I always glance in the window when I’m passing like so many others out of interest.
There is always something fabulous to see.
The people are always keen and carefree.
They sit getting their tattoos done with such impressive expressions of calm on their faces.
And I like to look at some of the tattoo designs themselves.
There are usually sample designs hanging up in the window. They mostly consist of extremist images or oblique designs like something out of the Book of Kells except insinuating nihilism instead of religion. Or symbols like hearts and clubs and such things. Or Chinese characters even. Skulls, dragons, stars, biomechanical tattoos, tribal tattoos, fire tattoos. And lettering. Lots of styles of lettering. You could have had the name of your loved one printed in any font you wanted. Let’s say your loved one’s name was Lili. You could have had that written in the style of the Iron Maiden logo.
Those were just the serious ones though.
There were also very silly ones which I liked a lot.
There was one I saw once, a crazy rabbit on a motorcycle. Pretty funny.

Yesterday, when I was walking past, I saw something peculiar. I saw Lili inside the tattoo parlour. She was up on a table on all fours, staring out the front window. She was getting a tattoo done on her behind.

8.

Like so many others, Lili had sharply-cut black hair which touched her delicate shoulders, but didn’t go further. And she had a pleasing fringe. I liked a bit of fringe. I often fiddled with girls’ fringes if they would let me. They usually did. Girls like it when boys like their hair. I had a fringe fetish.
When I first met Lili, her hair was longer. It wasn’t much longer, but it was certainly longer. It went past her shoulders. It obscured her shoulders. That was a pity. Soon her shoulders would be free however.
Girls with sharply-cut straight black shoulder-length hair and a pleasing fringe were turning my head of late.
Maybe that’s Lili over there.
No, it’s not.
Maybe that’s Lili.
No, that’s not.
Maybe it’s her there.
No.
When I saw the pleasing fringe looking out of the window of the tattoo parlour, I was taken aback, but elated. I’d found her. I’d been misreading other heads for Lili so long that the thought of her existing in actual life now appeared kind of implausible.
There she was.
Up on a table on all fours.
She didn’t see me.

9.

Like so many others, I enjoy catching the eyes of another human being in the middle of all the coming and going that happens daily in the city. A stunningly beautiful girl held a look with me today. It happened right in the middle of a Lili haze. I was walking down the street thinking about Lili and then this look occurred between me and this girl and it took me by surprise. She was much taller than I was. But it didn’t seem to matter. She still held the look. She wore blue all over. It was the same blue as the sky. Like her wardrobe decision that morning had been to reach up and rip away a strip of sky and just wear that.
Then she was gone.
And the haze came back.
I’ll tell you about a nasty thing that happened right after this brief and wonderful meeting of eyes, seeing as we’re here. I’d been looking for a phone box to ring the tax office. It was a harsh period of taxing. I needed to ring them up and get it all sorted out. I got to a phone box and I dialled the number of the tax office. A lady answered and I gave her my tax information and she talked in a way that suggested she knew her job very well but really the words didn’t make any sense at all and then she asked if I wouldn’t mind being put on hold for a moment and I said that’s fine and she put me on hold and then came back and spoke some more crap and then asked again if I wouldn’t mind being put on hold for a moment and I said that’s fine and I waited and waited and waited and then my money ran out. I had no more change left. I started punching the phone and shouting, THIS FUCKING CITY! THIS FUCKING CITY! Some people walked past and they could hear me shouting, THIS FUCKING CITY!

10.

Like so many others, this book is set in Dublin, but I don’t think Dublin has much to do with it. I like Dublin. It’s a fun city. But there have been enough books written about it. This book is more about Lili (and Chupi also – I’ll get to Chupi soon) than Dublin; Dublin merely plays a supporting role.
The great writers of Dublin fucked off. They obviously felt it was time to move on. Like Lili. To show my respect, I will make this chapter completely about Dublin and only partially about Lili.

The spike is currently sticking out of Dublin and everyone’s fussing over it. If you haven’t seen it, basically, it’s a big spike in the middle of the street. It’s pointless, hah hah, and Dublin could do without such a thing, blah blah. That’s the fuss.
I can’t see what’s wrong with a spike. They all say waste of public money, but I think people are just upset because they can’t go up it like a building. They all want to look down on each other, and also maybe see their houses from the top.
That’s all people want from a city, isn’t it?
I don’t have a beef with Dublin. Sometimes it gets on my nerves a bit, but I’ve grown to love it. I’ve grown to love it because I’m rebounding and I’ll take whatever’s going. I’m on the rebound, on the pull, trying to forget, looking for action, and the city is playing that available strumpet, that most willing strumpet.
Recently I feel the city has been acting as a substitute for Lili. All the time I would have been devoting to her I have been devoting to the city. I had some special nights out planned for Lili and me from back before we split, but even though I lacked a companion I wasn’t required to cancel any of the engagements at all because the city, being a companion of a sort, agreed to take Lili’s place. And the city can be an elegant companion when it wants to be. I don’t need to ring the city up and ask her if she’s in the mood to go out tonight. The city will gladly join me if I choose to venture. The city is my date anytime, any day, week, month, or year. It’s a city, like so many others, willing to lead me astray and be led astray, always up for a do.
I wonder if Dublin is the only city I’ll ever get to see.
I nearly saw London once. In a dream. Only got as far as Stansted Airport though.

5.
4.
3.
2.
Sleep.

11.

Like so many others, I am interested in tattoos, but do not think I could ever get one myself. I admit I find them kind of alluring, but still I don’t understand them or their purpose.
I desperately needed to find out about Lili’s tattoo. I was walking past the tattoo parlour today and I considered going in and asking the man who does the tattoos if he could remember doing Lili’s tattoo. But I couldn’t bring myself to go in and ask him about it. He would have thought I was a pervert coming in and inquiring about some girl’s ass.
When I got home, I made a cup of tea and put on the television. It was the first time I’d put the television on in about a whole year. I had lost touch with it. I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between a programme of substance and a programme of little or no. The programme that was on didn’t make any sense to me. There were lots of people talking and lots of fast images. It was all too much, so I turned it off. There was a time when I really loved fast images. But I think now fast images have been done to death and I can see slow images making a big comeback very soon. That’s just that.
I walked around my flat for a bit looking in places I hadn’t looked in a long time. I was getting bored of the place. I’d looked everywhere before. I used to do this all the time when I’d nothing constructive to do. I would comb the place stupid. So I’d looked everywhere before and knew the place out inside, down upside. I looked in the cupboards. Nothing new. I looked under the chairs. Nothing new. I looked along the shelves and the windowsill. Nothing new. I looked behind the radiator. Lo and behold, I happened to find something that hadn’t been there the last time I looked. I found an old pair of socks. I’d put them there to dry a good few months ago and they must have slipped down. I got them out and I put them in my sock drawer. Then I sat down and imagined being married to Lili.
A tattoo? Why didn’t you discuss it with me first? I’m your husband, for Chrissake.

12.

Like so many others, I wrote a poem about beautiful Lili. I wrote it when we were still together, but did not compose it with a plan for her to hear it. It was not necessarily for Lili. I wrote the poem for myself. To satisfy the urge to express my feelings through art. That’s the way it is with art.
‘I Hope She Doesn’t Die.’
It wasn’t a flowery, romantic poem. I filled it with gritty everyday realism:

I hope she doesn’t die
Jesus, that’d be fucked up
The two of us happy as Larry and Lucy
And she goes and fuckin’ dies on me HOLY SHIT!

I decided to place this poem in a poetry competition. I shouldn’t have done that. Looking back now, I am able to assess it as a terribly bad poem. And of course it didn’t win. The poem that won the competition described things very prettily. In that poem, the best description of a day I have ever read, I think.
I have never been the best when it comes to describing things in a pretty kind of way.
I try very hard though.
I’ll tell you about one occasion I wound up bang in the middle of the description zone. I rarely found myself there. It was in April, about two years ago.
I happened to issue a description of something and I really managed to capture the essence of the thing I was describing. I cannot recall what the something I was describing was, but I do clearly remember the description itself.
I described the something as like a sad Hawaii.
It is the only time I think I have ever got a description right.
What a pity I can’t remember what it was that was like a sad Hawaii. But I do remember the people I was speaking to when the description came blasting out of me, an explosion of colour within a dead and dreary grammatical sequence, typical of my usual. The people were a friend of mine from south of the country and his young wife. When they heard me describe this thing as like a sad Hawaii, they nearly fainted awestruck. They were not used to hearing me describe things with such finesse, with such eloquence, with such I don’t know what exactly.
I have since tried to use sad Hawaii again in subsequent conversations when the chance to describe something has come up. But of course sad Hawaii is one of those descriptions that will only work once. You can’t just produce it at the drop of a hat.
But who knows? Maybe it’s staring me in the face right now like so many other descriptions that I never got the hang of.
Maybe sad Hawaii sums up my pitiful poetic endeavour.
Maybe sad Hawaii is Lili breaking up with me.
It could be anything.
Sad Hawaii could be your next door neighbour’s new hairdo, a car that won’t start for its driver, a shopkeeper chatting up a lady, a drunk man pissing in the air thinking he is standing at a wall when in fact he is not, or I don’t know what. Breakfast in a B&B in Galway. I don’t know. A Sad Hawaii could be anything.

Note: Regarding Blue Hawaii by the King, you can sing it now if you want to, replacing Blue with Sad; that’s what I’m doing, and that’s what the King is doing

13.

Like so many others, a death occurred and it had a potent effect on me. There, see: that poem I wrote ‘I Hope She Doesn’t Die’. At its core, there is genuine torment.
It was a while ago now, a few years, so I shouldn’t still be dwelling, but everytime I get sad…no, I shouldn’t have mentioned it even. I always bring it up when feeling despondant, sorry for myself. I’m using Lili going as an excuse. You don’t want to hear about death anyway. You’ve had death also, I presume. You’ve had to cope with that too. I’m not the only one.
The person who died was the girl who lived on my street when I was young, Chupi. We knew each other from the very start almost.
She was a few years older, but not that much.
She was my best friend for a long time.
Then she wasn’t.
Then she was my first girlfriend.
Then she wasn’t.
Then she was just a friend again.
Then she wasn’t.
Then she was my best friend again for a long time again.
Then she wasn’t.
Then she was a girlfriend again.
Then she wasn’t.
Then she was just an acquantance for a long time.
Then she died.
It was Chupi who told me about books and films and especially music. Jesus, she dropped so many names (Sonic Youth was one…that was the first time I heard about Sonic Youth). I’d never met a girl before who could tell me who was who and what was what. It was something, I can tell you.
Chupi went to university in England, came back because she couldn’t stick it, and had a few boyfriends before dying. If she was here now and could hear me going on and on about losing Lili, she would kick me on the leg and say, What the fuck you on about, ye dope? Chupi would be a star now if she hadn’t died. She would be at the Oscars and at the after-show parties and I would be there too because I was her friend…then wasn’t, then was, then wasn’t, then was.

14.

Like so many others, I don’t think Chupi was ever truly happy. For years, she didn’t talk to me. She treated me with disdain when we bumped into each other in the mornings on the way to school and then disappeared from my day without further remark.
I hated that.
Well, so would you, wouldn’t you?
It got on my nerves.
Chupi went through this period where she hated everyone and me included. She even told me once. She said, I hate you. It was a terrible thing to hear. I nearly cried in front of her. I tried hard to hold back the tears, but she knew right well I was holding back. I think she got a twisted kick out of that. From my nearly crying. She was awful at that time in her life. Just terrible. I’d never seen anything like it. She was caught up in her own makeshift Hell.
She beat the shit out of me once. It was during the teenage years when we weren’t really on speaking terms at all. It was because I stole her younger brother Jonathan’s football and I kicked it out in the middle of the road (by accident?) and a lorry came along and turned it into a mushy football. I wasn’t a bully – no way was I a bully! If anything, Jonathan was the bully. Chupi’s younger brother was a sneaky little prude who was growing up to be an over-educated elitist, so I had no qualms about doing what I did. I didn’t count on Chupi being witness to it though. She came up to me, smacked me on the face, and kicked the shit out of me. It was some hiding she delivered. And I was much taller than Chupi. How did that happen? She had the appearance of a rather fragile girl. She was small with short brown hair and she wore thin spectacles. She was bookish-looking and grim-faced.
I guarantee you now you wouldn’t have been able to speak to Chupi. You would not have known what to make of that girl. She mystified people as though mystifying people was her vocation in life. Even religious pamphleteers avoided her.
The day after our fight, we were both of us completely silent, not a word to each other, or to anyone.
It was a bad time for our relationship.
I can’t help but think of those nasty moments. I try not to, but they’re there all the time.
Here’s a nice one to make up for that nasty one: she said once that she considered me during the day sometimes when she was bored and not considering anything else. She said, You’re gonna be like Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth in a few years. You’ve got his potential for extreme noise.
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. But when I look back, there was a time when I sure was very loud. From age 9-14 years, I think. The volume button was turned way up on me.

Speaking of Jonathan, Chupi’s younger brother, he ended up in Dublin too studying at some university and honing to perfection his elitist and despicable identity, like so many others.
I met him once.
Well, I say met him once, what I mean is spotted him once.
He didn’t say Hello to me. I tried to say Hello, but he probably didn’t recognise me.
It was in a queue at a cash machine.
He was quite a bit younger than me, but he had a spruce look about him which I certainly could not have mastered.
I remembered the time I kicked his football out onto the road and a lorry came along and squashed it.
I giggled to myself.
I still didn’t feel at all remorseful about doing that.
The devil will want a word or two with me, I know it.

15.

Like so many others, I’ve had my good fires and my bad fires. The bad fires outnumber the good fires though. I haven’t had many good fires. There have been a few of them. There was a Christmas Eve fire that I remember and my father made me toast by it, holding the bread up against it with a fork. There was also a bonfire that my friends and I organised when I was about twelve. But that shouldn’t really count because I didn’t stay to look at the bonfire with the others. I went home before the bonfire started. All the fun and adventure was had whilst gathering materials for the bonfire (I remember we found an old tractor tyre somewhere and we wheeled it right through town).
The other fires are all bad, I think.
Fire is BAD! Tell your kids that.
I recognise its role in the miracle that is life on Earth, a milestone in our time here, but I can’t see past that even.
I am troubled by the flame. The thought of a fire happening makes me shudder.
I hate fires.
Give me a fire and I’ll give you a corpse.
That’s the current state of my thinking.
Flames and death.
I can’t see a way past that.

16.

Like so many others, Chupi reached the age of twenty-one. I didn’t get to see her at that age though. And nobody got to see her after that age. She had already moved away and was living in a flat on the other side of town with some of her friends. It was in that flat that she died.
Chupi was intensely shy and reclusive before she went to university. I think going to university for that one year changed her dramatically. Before Chupi went to university, I began hanging about with her other brother, James, so I was in their house a lot and saw Chupi at her very worst when she was a style of hermit and never went out at all. When she returned from college, there wasn’t as much moping around the house the way she usually did. She went out drinking with her friends, went to clubs, and she even started seeing boys which I’d never seen her do before (not counting myself here).
But, make no mistake, her old reclusive routine continued in subtle ways. She was very good at disguising her isolation leanings with sporadic nights on the town and short snappy love affairs, but at heart she was godforsaken.
I only met one of Chupi’s flatmates, but she had three. The one I met was a girl called Karen. She was a bit stupid and quite mean and I didn’t like her. None of her flatmates were around when the fire happened. They were students so they weren’t at home often. But Chupi liked to stay at home. She was one of those people who simply preferred solitude. A preference we did not share. I am not a solitude person myself, but I don’t think I have a say in the matter. I’m always left on my own. They must pick names out of a hat for solitude at the very beginning, because some people get it and some don’t. I’m sure I was one of those names. Chupi may have been one of those names too, but it didn’t bother her so much. She was quite happy with solitude.
On sunny days like the ones currently going, Chupi would stay indoors and play computer games. This was during her hibernation years when I was in her house a lot, a time when we were just old acquaintances.
She had a megadrive in her room.
I often heard her shouting, Damn!
She’d been at the end of the last level and she’d been killed or something.

I’m here to write about Lili dumping me during particularly sweaty weather, not to write about Chupi dying, so back to Lili.
Sometimes I feel Chupi’s ghost is forcing me to mention her. She’s capitalising on my grief to grab herself a kind of extended obituary. I’m sorry, Chupi, if you’re reading this up there in Heaven in their library but I’ve got to get back to my own life. It’s okay for you sitting in the library all day long. Some of us are still stuck down here in the real world.

So getting back to Lili. Sometimes when I’m going to sleep, I put on some harp music. It helps to create a sweet sleeping moment. I find myself repeating Lili’s name in my mind as the harp music plays. Her name sounds nice when repeated over music being played on a harp. I told her this once, but I don’t think she was listening to me. She was watching a television programme and giving out about celebrities at the time. I thought it was a very romantic thing for me to say. I was pleased I’d said it. But she didn’t acknowledge the romance of it.

Lili
Lili,
Lili

5.
4.
Lili 3. Lili
2.
Sleep.

17.

Like so many others, I enjoy a drink now and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…

18.

Like so many others, my pubs charge unbelievably high prices for the drinks they serve. They do this because it serves us right.
I drink stout because it’s a little cheaper and after buying a few of them I have sufficient small change gathered from the individual purchases to have enough for one more. Any other drink and there would be no small change left at all. And just when I was in the mood for one more.
My pubs are small and fun. These are nice ingredients for a pub. Small and fun. If you own a pub and you get small and fun right, you’re onto a winner. Although I say my pubs, they are not mine. They do not belong to me. I belong to them.
Philomena is a girl who used to work at the same place where I work. She doesn’t work there anymore on account of finding somewhere else with better pay.
Philomena and her boyfriend Dominic and their friend Helen share drinking sessions with me regularly. We all get drunk and talk about old comedy shows and music. Helen tries to get the talk onto politics a lot. That’s mainly her thing. She can’t really talk about comedy shows and music. It’s politics with her. But Philomena, Dominic, and myself don’t really like to talk about politics (although Dominic goes there on occasion). The rest of us are more comfortable with old comedy shows and music. That’s just the current state of the nation.
I said these drinking sessions happen regularly, but that was a lie. They really don’t happen that often. I tend to make a great deal of them because I don’t exactly have a roaring social life. Philomena, Dominic, and Helen are about as roaring as it gets. I don’t let the fact that they are not around so much get in the way of my drinking though. I go out drinking alone a lot. I can’t resist it sometimes. I am a vehicle for alcohol and the world likes it that way. Without people like me the world would be a tedious tee-totaller with a line in forbidding sighs. I blame the city and its lack of a decent societal blueprint for being a vehicle for alcohol. Lots of people, lots of societies. Somebody’s bound to get lost in all of that. I know more street names in Dublin than people names. That’s just that. I wonder how many people with the name O’Connell walk down O’Connell Street each day and how bloody insignificant they probably feel. The only comfort I get is knowing that I’m not the only nonentity. But you wouldn’t catch me talking to those other nonentities. I saw one of them masturbating on the street the other day. I was on the bus and we’d stopped at a bus stop to let people on and he was standing there with his hand down his trousers and going at it. He had a face like a melting plum. I think I may have been the only person who saw him with his hands down his trousers. I was the only one privy to the spectacle. Or maybe that was just a common occurrence. Maybe that guy was just sick of being nameless in the city and thought if he did that, he would at least acquire a moniker of some kind.
I pondered something.
If Lili knew that I thought about her all the time when I masturbated, would she mind so much? Some girls are cool about that. They understand. They’re cool about it. Lili’s cool. She got a tattoo on her ass.
Philomena called earlier. She says that they’re going out for some drinks later and she asks if I want to come along. I play down the importance of it, and simply say yes. If I had not played down the importance of it the way I did, the yes would have come out as Of course, of course! Definitely! Oh, I’ve been waiting so very long for your call. Finally! Finally, some time with people. Oh, finally!

19.

Like so many chapters in this book, this one’s dropping into the narrative like a man on a parachute landing suddenly in an old couple’s backyard while they’re out sitting in the afternoon discussing how mossy their backyard is. It’s a rogue chapter. It has barged its way in here, taken 19th place, and now I can’t do anything about it.
Philomena was the first Philomena in my life, Dominic the first Dominic, but Helen was the second Helen. The first Helen had been Chupi’s best friend. She doesn’t have a part in this book at all really, but when I think of her name, I’m reminded of an incident. Something happened to end their friendship (Chupi and Helen’s), but I’m not sure what. Just before their falling out, Chupi and Helen left town together and they weren’t seen again for a year. Word found home that they’d joined a circus. When they came back, I asked Chupi about it. I couldn’t believe they’d joined a circus. It was too fanciful. I thought perhaps she was speaking in some kind of metaphorical language and that by circus she meant the city, or the rat-race. But then she said, No, it’s true. An actual circus. With lions and elephants and everything. I still didn’t believe her, thought it all codswallop. I was shocked when I saw her one day in tears and she said, Our trapeze instructor died. I didn’t see her for a week after that. I didn’t know what to make of it. Never knew what to make of Chupi.
You don’t imagine that people are running off to join the circus in this day in age. But it’s happening. There are fed-up people running off to join the circus as we speak.

20.

Like so many others, I tend to squint as I’m passing the tattoo parlour. I’m afraid to stop and look straight in the window, so I squint as I’m passing in the hope of taking in at least something.
One of the sillier tattoo designs I managed to obtain from one of these smoothly conducted squints was a tattoo of a frog. It appeared to be a frog rip-off of Howard the Duck, the character in the comics. Howard the Frog. The frog had a cigar, looked streetwise and cocksure. Funny. There was also a duck tattoo, speaking of which. I think it was a duck. It was shooting a machine gun. Now that I think about it, wildlife was covered quite heavily. With ducks, frogs, rabbits, and rattlesnakes, lizards, and tarantulas, the tattoo parlour seemed big into promoting the natural world.

I prefer the silly tattoo designs.
What maniac would get one of those?

Lili?

I have to wonder about her tattoo. What style of tattoo was it? Surely it wouldn’t have been something silly like a cavalier frog or a militant duck. You wouldn’t get something like that on your ass.

21.

Like so many others, Dominic was a guy who wore a terrifically neat goatee beard. He was a real funny chap, Dominic. He could make jokes up on the spot about anything. He was very witty. I envied his wit. A lot of the time, we all just found ourselves sitting silent at the end of a period of hysteria waiting for him to start into the next witty monologue.
When I arrived at the pub to meet them all, Dominic was in the middle of one of his jokes and they were all laughing. There was somebody else there too. It wasn’t just Dominic, Philomena, and Helen. The other person was a friend of Dominic’s from where Dominic worked. His name, Geoff. He wasn’t at all quiet when first we were introduced and I didn’t like this about him. When you meet people for the first time, I think it’s always good to be a little gentle with your conversation and ease into it to make the meeting comfortable, but he didn’t do this at all. He almost immediately ignored the fact that I was a new member of the party and went off on a blab trip. He jabbered away endlessly and seemed to want to keep the conversation restricted to himself, Dominic, Philomena, and Helen. This is the impression I got. He didn’t acknowledge me at all, only included the other three in his sermon. He was witty like Dominic also. I started to hate Geoff, began running at him with a spear in my thoughts.
I try to be a nice person. I always give people the benefit of the doubt. If on first impressions, things don’t go well, I leave a little space there for good feelings in case the first impressions prove to be mistaken. This wasn’t the case with Geoff. He made no attempt to occupy that space. I didn’t feel right about him being part of our drinking session. He was clearly getting on very well with Helen, and she evidently liked him back.
I’d never harboured designs on Helen and likewise she’d never had designs on me, but there was always an understanding between the pair of us. Dominic and Philomena were the couple, and we were the other two. Helen and I were mutually unattached. We represented the single folk on the opposite side of the table from the attached folk. But now things were looking different. Geoff and Helen were teaming up. They had me cornered.
I was the fifth wheel.
You know what it feels like to be the fifth wheel, don’t you?
Tell me you do, we’ll be buddies.

22.

Like so many others before him, Geoff the bastard did the deed of denigrating something I loved more dearly than life. He actually called The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin ‘not that good really’ when we started on old comedy shows like he was some bloody professor of everything and his opinion mattered to anyone. He had the nerve to criticise it and he’d obviously only seen probably one scene or something because he hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. Him and his fucking Coupling.

23.

Like so many others, I walked past the condom machine in the toilet sad because I’d no need for any. As I was returning to the session, I decided that a good way to get everybody’s kind attention on me would be to buy a round of drinks, my treat.
This is the way it is with modern socialising. It’s a competition for attention. I never win. I’ll keep trying though.
I wasn’t sure if I could afford the round of drinks, but I just went up and ordered it anyway.
They were all delighted with the action I’d taken, of course.
Ah, you shouldn’t have.
But pretty soon they’d forgotten all about it.
I got talking to Philomena about Lili while the others were having one of Helen’s political discussions. I told her all about seeing Lili in the window of the tattoo parlour up on a table on all fours getting a tattoo done on her arse.
Jesus, she said. That’s a good one.
Yeah, it was strange seeing her. I didn’t think she was the type for a tattoo.
Did she ever mention it to you?
What do you mean?
I mean, did she ever say to you that she would like a tattoo?
No, never. It never came up. I think if she wanted a tattoo, it would have come up at some point, but it never did.
Maybe she secretly wanted one. It’s possible that it’s just something she never discussed with you.
Yeah, maybe, I suppose.
Yeah.
I just never would have figured her for the type. A tattoo, you know. It doesn’t make any sense. I keep thinking that it must be something to do with what’s going on in her life at the moment. Like maybe she’s met somebody else and he’s one of these tattoo people, you know.
I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that though. I don’t know her awfully well, but from what I do know, I’d say she is quite capable of doing something like getting a tattoo. And capable also of making the decision for herself. She’s a little…dare I say it, insane, sorry. But I couldn’t say really. Maybe it is the way you’re imagining it. Maybe there is someone else! When did the split happen again? Three weeks, is it?
Eh, no, last week.
Last week? I wouldn’t say she’s started seeing somebody that soon.
Oh, I don’t know. She’s a flirt and I always got the feeling she was looking around for something better when we were together.
Oh, you were the paranoid kind, is that right?
Well….
That could be why she called it a day.
No, I think she called it a day because she met some hog with scribbles all over his body and he’s got her doing the same thing and now they’re walking around hand in hand with scribbles all over the both of them.
Ah, goway willye.
Philomena said that a lot. Goway willye. She will no doubt say it again when she reappears in the book.

24.

Like so many others, drunk as shit.
Said goodbye to everyone and aimed for home.
That round I bought cleared me out.
I have to bloody walk the whole way back now.
No money for a taxi.
And no money for chips or anything.
If that Geoff had said anything about Sonic Youth, I would have clocked him one.

25.

And like so many others, I was mugged, yep.
A fear realised.
The muggers timed it perfectly to coincide with the twenty-fifth chapter. They knew I’d be alone at around that time and knew I’d be drunk as shit and knew they’d get away with it.
They came out of nowhere on that same dark peopleless street you always imagine it to happen on.
It happened very fast.
They hit me in the stomach and I fell.
Two of them.
They took my wallet; it didn’t have any money in it because I’d spent all the change I had left on one last pint of adequately priced stout. They took the wallet anyway with my bank card and all my little membership things.
Then they ran off.
It was all over very fast.
Quick and painless.
I thought nothing of it.
I got up and continued my stagger home, kind of unaffected by the incident.
I figured, that’s that over with.

I’m drunk. Being mugged doesn’t matter. All I want to do is go to sleep. When you’re this drunk, anything could be happening, but all you want to do is go to sleep. It could be your wedding day, you’re just about to assert your vows, but when you’re this drunk, all you want to do is go to sleep. It could be the birth of your first child, it’s a girl, she’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen on Earth, but when you’re this drunk, all you want to do is go to sleep. It could be the funeral of a close friend, someone you hadn’t spoken to in ages and now they’re gone and you never got the chance to say goodbye, but when you’re this drunk, all you want to do is go to sleep.
I arrived home.
I was so drunk.
It probably wasn’t even my home.
I was so drunk.
It probably wasn’t even my bed.
I just fell blind drunk into it and
5.
4.
3.
2.
Tomorrow afternoon.

26.

Like so many others, I’m thinking, tomorrow afternoon is a horrid thing if you have been very drunk the night before. I had a day off work, so that mades things easier for me with the state I was in. I was in a terrible state with a really bad hangover. I lay in bed and looked at the roof and started to think about Lili.
Haunting the mind long after, I bet she enjoys that. I bet she gets a kick out of haunting the mind long after.
I met Lili near six months ago now. It was in a fancy pub in a fancy part of the city. I won’t say the name of the fancy pub because I don’t do fancy pub placement. Shitholes, fine, but fancy pubs, fuck that! I’m sure they can afford advertising.
Lili caught my eye within forty-five minutes of being inside the place. I know this because I looked at my watch at around that time (I owned a watch then, but soon it would be broken, and I would be relying solely on Lili’s watch to reckon on time).
She was the prettiest girl I’d seen all night and I decided to talk to her. In those days, she had quite long black hair. She was wearing a strawberry-red t-shirt. I usually preferred girls with fair hair who wore it in the cropped manner like the way Chupi wore hers right up to her passing, but there was something uncommonly fine about Lili. Long black hair on her was not like long black hair on anyone else. I walked up to her very slowly.
Hello there, I said.
She looks at me for a second, looks away, then looks back and replies,
I would like to do with you everything that is imaginable within a sexual manner of doing,
and then she reached over and grabbed my balls and laughed.
This took me by surprise. Up to that point in my life, I don’t think I ever even considered my balls. They just hung underneath my manstick and that was that. I never gave them a minute’s thought until Lili reached over. I think it was an historic moment. I wouldn’t have mentioned my balls or my manstick in this book if she’d done it in a less impassioned way. But it really was an impassioned manoeuvre. Her grabbing my balls was a moment of truth. Everything made sense. Nothing had made sense before. Nobody’d grabbed my balls before. It doesn’t happen all the time in a socialising context. I know because it never previously happened to me. I was expecting a rebuff because that’s what always happened. I only approached her and said Hello because she was too pretty not to give it a try and I was already too plastered to care if she said No.
We didn’t do everything that is imaginable within a sexual manner of doing on that particular night. She had to help one of her pissed up friends get home. We swapped numbers and she gave me a kiss, but then I didn’t see her again for weeks. She didn’t answer my calls or anything. It drove me crazy. I wouldn’t have deleted it from my mind, not for all the money in the world, that moment when she reached over and grabbed my balls. My balls had continued their aching sensation ever since. I wanted so much to see her again, but there was no sign of her.
Then one day, she happened.
Sex happened.
I was walking home alone from the cinema alone having just watched a film alone. I cannot recall what the film was. Sex was about to happen after all. Recollections of that day are vague except for the part where sex happens. The film must take the back seat, sex is happening in the front seat.
I was at Parnell Square. I suddenly noticed Lili on the other side of the street. It was like a dream. I wasn’t sure if she’d remember me, but I waved over anyway. I was delighted to see her waving back. We were only at waving, so sex did not appear likely to happen yet.
I crossed the road to her.
I nearly got knocked down as I was going across because I was so excited and darted over with the kind of frenzy that’s described in the dictionary. The driver of the car rolled down his window and shouted, You want to get flattened, pal, is that it, yeah?
I ignored the driver.
I was so happy to see Lili. She looked beautiful. She was wearing an orange top that clung tightly to her, making her breasts look like the most wonderful round things ever, and she had a bizarre tartan cap on. She looked like somebody from Europe, not Ireland.
Hi, I said. She said Hi back to me. Sex still didn’t seem likely to happen at this point.
Do you want to go somewhere for a coffee? she asked.
Yeah, I said.
We went to a café that was nearby.
We got talking about relationships and lovers as if we were just two people on a late night talk show, not once putting the spotlight on our own predicament.
I like to ease into relationships slowly, I said, doing my best sensitive.
I was making myself sick trying to be sensitive, but I kept with it because I couldn’t be anything else. I find it easy to fake sensitivity, but hard to fake forthright. When I pretend to be forthright, I wind up looking like a complete idiot.
I don’t agree, said Lili. I prefer people who are forthright at the beginning. I like for someone to take the bull by the horns.
I smiled then, recalling her grabbing me.
Lili smiled also.
Her smile was warm.
She reached over and touched one of my hands. It was a restrained move, not as forthright as reaching over and grabbing my balls, but still, sex suddenly appeared likely to happen.
Lili apologised for not answering my calls. She said she wasn’t the sort of girl who went around picking up men and that evening when we met she’d just been a little bit drunk and for a moment I truly believed that she was accustomed to maidenly procedure.
We ended up heading back to her place. She told me she would make me some marshmallows. I said that would be great, thought it a bit of a weird proposition though. Marshmallows? It was then that I noticed the lust in her eyes. Sex was definitely on the agenda. However, I was perturbed. I felt that there was something peculiar about the whole thing. I did not understand how I had managed to get myself into a situation where sex was likely to happen. I went through all the events of the day in my mind, trying to figure out how it had happened. I simply couldn’t understand. I became convinced that sex was not going to happen, and worried that something else was going to happen, something possibly perilous. Was I in danger here perhaps?
My nerves were shot as we arrived at Lili’s place. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was near paralytic.
But everything panned out okay. I don’t really need to go into the details of what eventually happened because I’m sure you’re already aware. I have alluded to sex happening, made it clear earlier that sex happened, so it should already have registered with you that sex did in fact happen.
Everything that is imaginable within a sexual manner of doing?
Everything I imagined anyway.

27.

Like so many others, we were a couple (and now a couple in a book, like so many others). We were a shindig, for lack of a pretty way of putting it. But I wasn’t overly familiar with this kind of shindig. I could not get my head around the whole going out with each other thing. That was to me even stranger than the sex happening. I didn’t normally do things like that. I was more used to an occasional evening of dirty squelchy bliss with a girl, but to actually start seeing her on a regular basis was genius. The only real honest shindig previous to this had been Chupi, and that was a shindig of an entirely different nature because at once it was a shindig, then wasn’t, then was, then wasn’t, then was…

I am incredibly self-conscious these days. That’s what Lili has done to me. She ran off and left me a self-conscious wreck of a man.
(look at your feet.)
Something possessed me to look at my feet.
(look at those shoes. they’re filthy, aren’t they? tatty and scruffed.)
The shoes I’m wearing are tatty and scruffed.
Sometimes my brain notices things that have slipped by me, and it forces me to address the situation. That’s what happened in this instance. My brain wanted me to get a new pair of shoes. But I’m broke. I am poor. These tatty and scruffed shoes perfectly match the character I’m playing.
I’m terrible with things like buying shoes. I always buy ones that are reasonably priced and a bit trendy maybe, but what I’m left with in the end are the shabbiest examples of footwear around. They end up tatty and scruffed and instead of looking hip I look like a tramp. When I get some money, I must buy a new pair of shoes. I can be better than this. I’ve got a job. I don’t need to look tatty and scruffed. I can stand out from the vagrants.
Damn, now all I can think about is the time Lili called me stinking. She said it in a cool, off-the-cuff way and then let on she was only joking and laughed a friendly just-kidding-laugh. But you don’t say something like that right after you’ve dumped somebody.
To tell you the God’s honest truth, it’s because you’re kind of stinking. You stink! Nah, I’m only pulling your leg. It’s true though. No, I’m only joking.
Fuck this, I’m gonna stop writing for a bit to have a shower and shut her up. There! I’m having a shower. Are you happy, Lili?

28.

Like so many others, I make the most of a shower. I make the most of the circumstance, make the most of my privacy. I make the most of my inept singing abilities. When I sing a song in the shower, it starts off resembling something that has previously been released by a renowned recording artist, but soon twirls and tumbles into a faint, perplexing hum.
What do I know about singing, eh?
Today I had an epic shower. An Iliad shower. But they don’t teach these showers at school. You’ve got to figure them out for yourself.
During the shower, it occurred to me to use sad Hawaii again to describe something. But then whatever it was I’d been meaning to describe disappeared, and sad Hawaii was left floating in the air above the shower, unused and fed up with its indecisive inventor.
Maybe the shower itself was like a sad Hawaii.
It was a singular shower.
Got thinking about stuff and forgot I was in the shower. By shower’s end, I had thought out the rest of this book in my head without having to actually write it. But I wouldn’t get anything done if I just thought it out in my head. I have to keep writing it down.

29.

Like so many others probably who have been in the same situation, I took it upon myself to investigate the tattoo. I rose this very morning in fact with the one thing on my mind being Lili’s tattoo and finding out all about it. I got up and had my breakfast. Toast and tea and a bowl of Start cereal (That happens to be my cereal of preference – must do some cereal placement here in the case of Start), but I didn’t eat them in that exact order. Let me see now, it was more like Start cereal, then tea, bit of toast, tea, bit more toast, tea, last of the toast, then tea again, tea, tea, tea, and then Finish.
I washed my face, brushed my teeth, got dressed, looked at myself in the mirror to make sure I didn’t look like too much of a wimp before entering the tattoo parlour.
I looked a bit like a wimp, but not too much. I’d seen wimpier.
It would have to do.
Then I set off for the tattoo parlour.
The sun was beating down again as it had been doing a lot recently. It was a glorious blazing sun that actually for a moment felt like this very impressive thing from space and not just the usual old yolk in the sky. It was a Sunday afternoon.
There was a match of some kind on (I think, football, because of the jerseys a lot of them were wearing). The people were all out on the streets, hanging about outside the pubs and takeaways. There was a smell of alcohol and junk and urine in the air like the sewers had been raised a level. Some of the football fans drinking on the streets were beautiful – a lot of them weren’t. I saw a very beautiful woman and a very beautiful man having an argument in the middle of it all. They were bawling each other’s heads off in public. All the uglies were looking at them and thinking, Get a grip on it, you two!
The tattoo parlour was closed when I got there. Probably because it was a Sunday. I was kind of relieved. I had actually made up my mind just minutes before getting there that I wasn’t going to go in and ask them about Lili’s tattoo after all. But because they were shut, I could kid myself with bogus backbone. Aw, no, they’re closed. I’ll have to do it another time then. Tut-tut.
Forget about that bloody tattoo!
I’m obsessed, and it’s just a tattoo. Actually, it’s not just a tattoo. I’ve got the obsessive nature inside me. The tattoo has just made things worse and easier to deal with because it’s something my obsessive nature can hone in on.
I know all this, yet I proceed, sauntering along, obsessed as they come and obsessed when they go.
I shouldn’t be so worried. I think that obesession is quite natural behaviour. It’s not restricted to sinister people. It happens to everyone at some point. Most people don’t even recognise it when it happens. Obsession is typical of a human being. That said, if you do it in extremes, then it’s bad. But that’s always the way if you do something in extremes, isn’t it? It can sure cause damage. Taking everything I’ve learned from history books, newspapers, and television docuentaries, and piecing them all together, I have come to believe this is true.
Here’s a transaction by way of obsession: I went out and bought a lot of albums I recall Lili speaking about. They were albums I would never have bought if she hadn’t mentioned them. I wouldn’t even have bought some of them when we were still together (some of them maybe, but some of them no). I was clinging miserably to the relationship as though it was this dream: the relationship was a rope hanging from a high building that I was dangling from, and letting go would have meant falling to my death. But I couldn’t see that it was all just a dream. Let go! It’s just a dream.
Forget about it! Bring those albums down to Freebird Records or somewhere and flog them all when you get the chance, okay.

30.

Like so many others, I was convinced that this one girl was the girl for me and there was nobody else, but I was just fooling myself. I’m a fool; I can’t help it. It’s too early for me to completely lose all hope and that’s why these words are here, I suppose, eh? But occasionally I’ve let myself forget. I’ve allowed myself to imagine another girl for me. Sometimes I get thinking, maybe I was wrong about her all along, you know. Maybe there’s someone else out there.
I’m pointing now at my fluctuating affections. If you look there at the top, you’ll see Lili. And below Lili, maybe Chupi. But just below Chupi, you’ll see ------- ------. She’s an authoress. She’s Swedish and writes these sassy novels and plays. I think if I ever met her, I would disintegrate with love before her very eyes. I was in love with her before I even saw her picture. Her stories and her characters and her phrases all made perfect sense to me (even though I was reading them in translated-into-English editions). But then when I saw her picture, I fell for her, and I was thinking about her all the time and Lili could go and fuck herself. But the next day I would realise the futility and feeble-mindedness of this and go back to loving Lili again.
Another time when I forgot about Lili and thought I’d found the one I was meant to spend the remainder of my life with was some days ago when I was on the bus going through town. Talk about an embarrassing rebound judgment. I shouldn’t really be revisiting this, but I’ll revisit nonetheless, seeing as we’re here now.
The bus was travelling along slow, I was looking out the window, and I spotted this girl walking along on the footpath with her friend. She was wearing a stripy top that reminded me of Lili’s punk chic. I couldn’t see her face that well, but something told me everything was fine. It was an instant attraction and I couldn’t stop looking at her and pondering the possibilities. I would not have done anything about it if it hadn’t been for the fact the bus was travelling so slow with the traffic. The girls were walking at an equal pace, so I was given a lot of time, perhaps too much time, to peer and ponder.
I finally had enough and decided to cut the bus journey short, go down and ask her out. I got off at the next stop and ran to catch up with them. I wasn’t thinking about what I was going to say to her when I eventually caught up. I just ran. She had a green bag over her stripy top, her friend had bleached blonde hair, and those were the things I was looking for among the pedestrians. But I couldn’t find them. They were gone. I nearly cried right there on the street; the persistent agonies were unbearable.
Ah, the pain…But then I saw them. They were behind. They must have stopped to go into one of the shops.
I ran towards them, stopped right in front, and begged them to wait for me to catch my breath before I spoke.
I was breathless, but I enhanced it somewhat for dramatic effect, and then said to the girl with the stripy top, You’re beautiful.
She laughed; her friend grinned.
I mean it, I said. You are really beautiful.
She blushed slightly and said, Thanks a lot.
I don’t know you, do I?
Nope.
I didn’t think so. I’ll just get straight down to asking you. Are you seeing anybody?
Yep, thanks a lot.
Okay, then, that’s a shame.
Yep.
Okay, well, I’ll be seeing you then…well, not seeing you obviously…but saying goodbye so.
Yep.
I waved pathetically which didn’t seem right at all because I was standing so close to them and started to walk away. I could hear them laughing to themselves behind me.
Ah, the pain of it, eh?
This has happened to you before, hasn’t it?
Tell me so, we’ll be buddies.

31.

Like so many others, I complain about noise from my neighbours when actually I’m capable of much worse myself and have in fact caused much worse myself. Remember that Chupi even told me once I had the potential for extreme noise. She was right. I’ve caused a deafening amount in my time. But I live alone now, and am mostly alone all the time, so I have an excuse for a reduced noise.
I came home one evening late from work and they were making a racket upstairs that annoyed me simply because I was jealous. I wanted to have fun too. But I wasn’t invited. They didn’t even know I lived downstairs. They didn’t even know I existed.
There was music playing. Think it was a PJ Harvey album (one I liked very much). So much laughter. I never like to be downstairs when there’s laughter upstairs. Laughter upstairs, loneliness downstairs. I went to pour a glass of cream soda, but they were laughing upstairs. I made a sandwich with some peanut butter I’d just bought, but they were laughing upstairs. I sat down in front of the television and switched it on, but they were laughing upstairs. I turned the television off, ate my peanut butter sandwich and drank my cream soda, but they were laughing upstairs. I went to bed, but they were laughing upstairs. Laughing and fucking upstairs, I was sure of it.
The next day as I was going out the door I surveyed a chaos of empty cans and cigarette packets in the corridor of the apartments. The Scoundrels, I thought, and the next thought, You Bitter Lonely Puritan!
I really wanted to get a new flat somewhere. I needed to get away from loneliness. Too much solitude for one man. Spread it around a bit, will you. Solitude loves company, I hear.
I did not start off well with the people in the house I was living in, you see. When I first arrived, I didn’t introduce myself to anyone else in the building, so loneliness followed that, and followed me. If I got a new flat, I would not make a similar mistake. I would introduce myself to everybody and they would know I was living downstairs and sometimes they would invite me upstairs to laugh with them…and maybe fuck too.
But where? Where to go? I had such a hard time looking the last time. I didn’t want to end up in hostels again.
How to get a new flat?
How to get a new Lili, nevermind the flat?
I need love, not a roof. Shit to a roof and a home, just want a lover to hold and kiss and talk to.
I couldn’t replace her. There was no way. How did I get her in the first place with all those sensitive souls on the streets, their collective aim to spoil the cosmic journey for the rest of us? How can any of us find love with so many sensitive, sensible souls out there, stealing our romantic destinies from under our noses? There are too many sensitive souls in this city. A hundred times more sensitive than me. I’m sensitive (see ‘just want a lover to hold and kiss and talk to’ if you require proof), but not nearly sensitive enough. I see the sensitive, sensible souls stopping to talk to the charity volunteers in the middle of the street. They actually stop and have conversations with the charity volunteers about serious issues whereas the rest of us walk past too busy, or just embarrassed by sensitivity. That’s how I lost Lili. I lost her to a sensitive, sensible soul with a Greenpeace membership and a tattoo on his arm of a dolphin or maybe a puffin.
Later that day, I came up with a plan for going into the tattoo parlour. I believed I could possibly pass myself off as a journalist if I put a little effort into it. Maybe not a journalist from one of the major papers or anything, maybe just some drippy rag nobody reads until three years have passed and somebody finds an old issue in one of the waiting rooms of the world. I thought I could probably pull it off. I would go in and ask the proprieter if he wouldn’t mind sitting down with me and answering a few questions for an article I was going to write about tattooing. It could work.
Just as this brilliant plan appeared in my brain, I got a phonecall from Philomena. They were all going out again tomorrow night for some drinks and if I wanted to come along, I could.
So soon after the last one?
I had to query this.
I got excited for a moment, but then it hit me.
Of course! Helen and that Geoff were now seeing each other. I would have bet my life on it. The four of them had been double-dating all week and now they wanted their fifth wheel along for the ride too.

32.

Like so many others, when moments of courage come along, I act with impetuous immediacy, forgetting reason and rational, leaving them far behind to laugh at my hapless charge.
The courage for going into the tattoo parlour came today AGAIN. With it came a large dose of rashness. I headed for the tattoo parlour without any clear thinking whatsoever. I didn’t check to see if I looked like a wimp beforehand or anything. I just went, looking extremely wimpy indeed. Foolish.
As I was going along, questions filled the mind. I was planning out in my head the questions I was going to put to the owner of the tattoo parlour.
How long have you been a tattooist and when did you first become interested in it?
Where did you learn the craft? Are there tattoo schools?
What is your most popular tattoo?
How many tattoos do you have yourself?
What was the last tattoo you got?
Do you tattoo yourself?
How long have you owned this parlour?
Oh, so the establishment had a previous owner? Okay? And what was his name? Florgy MacShitmouth? Really?
What tattoo has proven most difficult for you to complete?
What part of the body have you found most strange to decorate?
Are you often asked to tattoo a lady’s buttocks?
Outline a recent case and describe the lady.
Did you sleep with her?

33.

Like so many others, a tattoo parlour has a door at the front which you are supposed to pass through if you wish to travel within the building. I was so nervous about what I was doing that I went in the wrong door, the door next to that of the tattoo parlour – this door belonged to a barbershop.

34.

Like so many others, I could have got a haircut and it wouldn’t have done my appearance an awful lot of harm, so I sat down and I got a haircut. The clientele looked at me funny because they could see that I didn’t get my hair cut as often as they did. The hair hung over my ears in a beggarly fashion. The barber was cheeky and overcharged me. I knew he was overcharging me, but I paid the money anyway. I wasn’t going to argue. I imagined a society of barbers, all of them sharing experiences of argumentative customers. What if this barber went and spread it around that I was a little shit?
I wasn’t going to start an argument with a barber in this city.

35.

Like so many others, I felt great after a good haircut. Even though I enjoyed having messy hair, it still felt great having it all shaved and tidied up. I felt really fresh and new. What better time to take on the tattooists, eh?
I’m just a boy with a new haircut, I thought to myself as I left the barbershop.
And that’s a pretty nice haircut, said a passer-by.

36.

Like so many others, I was immediately treated with suspicion as I crossed this big tattooed man’s threshold. He was in the middle of tattooing some guy (at least I think it was a tattoo) and looked up from what he was doing for just enough time to induce sufficent consternation, have me acknowledge the monster of a mistake I’d made in coming within a yard of the place. He didn’t say Hello to me or anything. He just glanced at me and then continued working. Then I thought he was probably like that with everyone. Maybe that was how he conducted his business. His business was based on decorative roughness, so he was brassy to everyone until such time as real communication was to occur. Then when he was finished what he was doing, he would come over to me, say Hello, get to know me a bit, and then we’d be buddies.

37.

Like so many others, I sat down and read a magazine that was waiting nearby. The magazine was a strange amalgamation of biker magazine and martial arts magazine. One half seemed to be photographs of guys in karate outfits (gi’s, if I’m not mistaken) and articles about kickboxing tournaments, and one half seemed to be photographs of guys flexing their heavily-tattoooed biceps and articles about Harley’s, Honda’s, etc. What a magazine! Forget what I said about drippy rags in waiting rooms – the single most fulfilling magazine experience of my entire life!
The tattooist seemed to be finishing up whatever he was working on. I suddenly became insanely anxious and realised that I could not accomplish what I’d gone there to accomplish. All the questions I’d composed in my mind to ask were in limbo. They were no longer in my head. I realised that I hadn’t brought a pen and notepad with me either. What kind of a journalist doesn’t carry a pen and notebook around with him? A pretend journalist, that’s what.
Shit, I was in trouble.
The tattooist was just finishing up. He was saying some finishing up thing to the man he was working on.
I was about to stand up and leg it when something amazing happened. I spotted a notice hanging up in-between a Celtic football club design and a gothic butterfly. The notice was talking about a flat to let. And, you know, the flat that was letting happened to be in that very building.
It was the flat above the tattoo parlour!
There you go.
I no longer had much of a relationship with God to speak of, but at that moment I felt it only proper to make an appreciative gesture up to Heaven.
I’ve come about the flat upstairs.
That’s what I’d say when the tattooist was ready (heh).

38.

Like so many others, I get excited about going out to socialise. I think it must be my age which is twenty-four. I’m a purposeless twenty-four year old with severe gaps in his education. I guess you may have guessed that from the way I talk (or write, whatever). Or maybe you thought I was seventeen, I don’t know. It’s twenty-four. I’m twenty-four and I’ve just been dumped – that’s why I’m excited. I want to go out and have the time of my life. I want to go apeshit, you know. I want girls to see me and think, Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see, we’ll see.
I have this t-shirt that says Soiled on it in a cheeky way (I can’t think of another word for it except cheeky, but you would call it post-modern if you lived in the correct period for post-modern). The thing is, Soiled has been soiled many times during some of my past nighttime activities. I’m kind of embarrassed saying this. Dirtying yourself on nights out can be quite embarrassing.
I put Soiled on for going out with Philomena and the others. Hopefully by the end of the night that was the only Soiled to be seen.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Still wimpy. But I must say I looked okay wearing Soiled. I felt good. Maybe this was my look. I imagined bumping into Lili that evening. Maybe when she saw me looking this good, she’d reconsider. Or maybe she would simply point at Soiled, turn to whoever she was with, and say, See, I told you he was stinking!
The pub where I was meeting them was on Wexford Street. The place was very busy when I got there. I was squeezing past people. I couldn’t wait to find them all and tell them that I’d been mugged going home the last time. That would get me sympathy and give me the edge on any social contest that happened to announce itself. But I couldn’t find them. I scoured the place, but they weren’t around. It was obvious to me when I thought about it long and hard that they hadn’t turned up yet.
So I waited.
There were no seats at the bar, so I just stood, drinking, trying not to look directly at groups of people because it looked weird when somebody standing on his own did that.
.

39.

Like so many others, they turned up together in a jolly group. I wished I had turned up in a jolly group. I’m destined to repeat this night of standing at the bar on my own waiting for someone to turn up forever and ever.
Philomena was looking a little rundown, like she’d already had quite a few.
Helen and Geoff didn’t look too much like the couple I’d been picturing, but I was sure if nothing had happened between them yet, it was in the process of.
I instantly told them about being mugged.
They took my wallet with all my cards in it, I said.
Did they get any money? asked Dominic.
No, I’d planned it so there would be no money in my wallet by the time they mugged me.
How’s that? asked Geoff.
Well, I’d spent everything I had on drink.
Jesus, I can’t believe that! said Philomena. You should have got a taxi home. It’s bloody dangerous on those streets at night.
I would have got a taxi, I said. But I’d no money. I’d spent it all on drink.
My brother got a beating last month up near Christchurch, said Geoff. He was on his way home from somewhere and he met these hooligans looking for a fight. They really did him over. He was left in an awful state.
I ‘d spent all my money on drink, I said.
What’s your brother’s name again? enquired Helen.
Frank, said Geoff.
Frank, that’s right.
It was all over very fast, I said. They ran off. Quick and painless.
You’re lucky they didn’t pull a knife on you or worse, said Philomena.
Yeah, I suppose.

Yeah, I suppose. Jesus, I hadn’t thought of that. What if they’d pulled a knife on me or worse? Fuck!

There was good music playing in the pub. I used the music to start a conversation, but quickly Geoff took the conversation over and it was a conversation I couldn’t really get into.

40.

Like on so many other occasions, there was one girl in the pub who wasn’t like so many others, and everyone was looking at her.
She was absolutely stunning.
The reason I think she stood out so much was because she was naïve about her beauty. She was dressed like a model, but she was uncomfortable in the getup. It seemed as though maybe she couldn’t comprehend the wardrobe element of her magnificence, so her friends had stepped in and recommended an outfit that would greaten her already considerable display. She was not tall or glossy, but her face was fatally gorgeous, and the cut of her body exquisite, everything measured to perfection. Everyone was staring at her and I felt sorry for the other girls, so I tried not to look so much. But trying not to look at this girl so much was the hardest thing I think I have ever had to do in my purposeless life, so I gave up and just stared headless, like the rest of the gobsmacked assembly, apportioning the blame with my purposeless life.
Geoff and Helen were both college students. They were younger than the rest of us, but only by a year or two. As they were both students, they had something very basic in common. That they were both students. They spoke about their assignments, their lecturers, their essays, their seminars, their courses, but mostly their expenditure.
That’s the current state of academia.
I would have liked being a student.
I had a grudge against students because I envied their lifestyle.
I envied lots of lifestyles.
I would list the lifestyles, but what’s the point? A list of them would only end up making me sick as a dog with envy.
I’d like to be in a position where someone envies my lifestyle.
But I can’t see that happening ever. Even if this book was well received, won lots of awards, and I became a household name, the fact of my unexciting company would make people take comfort in their own flaws.
I may be this and I may be that, they’d say, but at least I’m not that.
But it wasn’t just the lifestyle-envy that brought about my grudge against students. Some of them were too-educated. I had a grudge against people who were too-educated. I think there is a point in education you just can’t go past – if you reach that point of being too-educated, you automaticlly become a self-righteous twit who cannot walk past a lesser-educated person without rubbing it in their face. All the too-educated people I’ve met have been like that, and also I believe they lose opinions of their own because the opinions of others become too overwhelming. Geoff was too-educated, I felt. The way his voice travelled from his mouth to my ears told me this. His voice was guided by conceit as it travelled from his mouth to my ears.
I’ve read a few books and Sherwood Anderson wrote some of those books, so when I heard Geoff deliver a heavy-handed criticism of his work because those happened to be the books he was reading for college at present, I felt it right to pipe up and get involved in an argument. I shouldn’t have really. Geoff went to college, and even though I could tell he was merely spouting the ideas of some nameless fool, he was educated enough to be capable of pummelling me in debate. Which he did.
I’m not a college person. Geoff made me doubly aware of this.
I’m not saying his work is entirely worthless, he said. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying it’s never moved me in the same way that novelists of that era have done. I’ve studied the work. I’ve read everything, you know.
Hey, just because you went to Trinity College, it doesn’t mean you’re all-knowing, I said. In fact, especially because you went to Trinity College, it doesn’t make you all-knowing.
That shut him up!
But the conversation didn’t end with me shutting him up. Geoff didn’t stay shut up for long and returned with some more motifs, which eventually shut me up.
I don’t care to repeat his motifs. I think Sherwood Anderson deserves better than that.

41.

Like so many others, the stunning-naïve-dressed-like-a-model girl started to get men approaching her and hitting her with their cheeky-lovable-put-like-a-sledgehammer personalities. She giggled along with them for a bit and then swiftly sent them scurrying off with smiles of admitted defeat.
But it was worth a shot, eh?
God loves a tryer, stated each unsuccessful applicant.
She wasn’t the only person who stood out in the bar that evening. In the corner of the room, there was an enormous Chinese man. He was standing on his own and trying not to look directly at groups of people, but failing miserably. He looked like Oddjob in the James Bond film. It was a strange sight, and I think you’ll agree, worth a mention in this book. It’s only a little book after all. I might as well fill it to capacity.
Suddenly, Geoff and Helen kissing each other took my attention away from the gorgeous girl and the big Chinese man. I knew it! They were on. They looked so happy. I tried to suspend my ill-feeling, and got on with being part of the social gathering. I smiled and pretended that being the fifth wheel didn’t matter to me.
So I got a new place, I told them.
Goway, willye! When? asked Philomena.
Actually, just today. It’s above a tattoo parlour.
A tattoo parlour? said Dominic. That’s great.
Yeah, that’s brilliant! said Philomena. Maybe Lili will come in one day, eh? Sorry for saying that. Do you mind me saying that? Shit!
No, it’s okay, I said. I’m starting to get over her now, I think.
My face twitched just at the point of saying this.
Who’s Lili? asked Geoff.
Oh, my ex-girlfriend, I said. Very recently ex-girlfriend.
What’s Lili’s connection to the tattoo parlour? asked Helen.
Very recently seen getting a tattoo on her ass, I answered.

42.

Like so many others, a bunch of guys out and about having just watched a rugby match have a particular sound you can tell them apart by, a sort of laughing foghorn. There was a group of them in the bar. They were drinking so heavily that they made everyone nervous. I noticed one of them slap the gorgeous girl on the behind as he was going past her on his way to the toilet. She turned to him and laughed it off jokingly. He said something to her then and laughed a loud frightful laugh. I don’t think she minded at first because she started chuckling about it with her friends. But when the guy was coming back from the toilet, he slapped her again and laughed frightfully again and her face did not react amicably this time.
Later, one of the other drunken rugby guys came along on his way to the bar, and he slapped her too. She turned around, glared at him, and told him to Fuck off! He laughed and waved at his companions who also laughed. This went on for a little bit more with a few more of the guys slapping her as they were walking past. She was very uneasy about it, but stood her ground and didn’t complain to any bar staff. She moved into a more concealed position beside one of her friends, a position that wouldn’t allow anybody the chance of touching her. I think the people who observed the occurrence were uneasier about it than her. It definitely made me feel uneasy.
I started thinking then. What if this is what Lili had been doing when I first met her? Had she been going around grabbing guys by the balls in a salacious way?
No, no.
Anyway, even if she had been doing that, I bet most men would not have called it harrassment. I enjoyed being grabbed on the balls. It didn’t bother me in the slightest. That’s the thing. Men and women. There’s a fundamental difference there.
I had a few drinks in me, and was feeling in a moral mood. I wanted to erase from my mind both the thought of being beaten in an argument and the knowldege that I was the fifth wheel. I decided to say something to the big rugby guys. I knew that saying anything at all was plainly a resolve to provoke, but I decided to anyway. Dominic tried to stop me. He didn’t want to be dragged into anything. I didn’t want to start a fight. Chances were I’d get beaten up. Or maybe they would respect my comments and leave it at that. Chances were I’d get beaten up.
But I felt I had to do it. I know it sounds a bit too chivalrous and righteous, but behaviour like tnat annoyed me. It annoyed me that they thought they could just get away with it. It was not just fun. I realised that they were doing it because they knew they were formidable in size, strength, and number. They thought they could get away with it. Let’s face it, if you were a short-arse style of degenerate, like so many others, you would not have done such a thing in a crowded bar.
I walked over comfortably.
They didn’t bat an eyelid, even when I was standing right before them.
Hey, fellas, I said. Did you boys watch the match today?
Yeah, said one of them; actually, the one who’d slapped the girl on her ass the first time. Terrific, eh? Clockwork!
Yeah, it was a blinder, I said.
Yeah, said another.
Oh, yeah, ha-ha, said another.
Yeah, said I.
Then, out with it:
Hey, I have to say it was a bit pathetic the lot of you going past and patting that girl on her behind like that.
They just laughed at me after I said this.
Yeah, I just wanted to say it to you.
Oh, that’s very big of you, one of them sniggered. Respect!
Fuck off, you little fag! another one said. They all kept on laughing.
Right, fellas. I’ll be off, I said, and started to walk away.
They didn’t do a thing.
I heard one of them say, We should thump the head off him, but they just laughed away to themselves; even thumping my head off was a joke to them.
Lucky me.
I knew I had to leave though. If I stayed any longer, the incident would build in their minds.
As I was walking back to the others after braving the rugby guys, I glanced at the gorgeous girl. Hopefully, my chivalry would be rewarded with a smile of gratitude. But she hadn’t even seen it happen. She was talking away to her friends and didn’t even notice me as I walked past. I was angry at this, for going to all the trouble, and contemplated smacking her on the ass for overlooking my courage, but then scrapped that idea with a giggle.
I’m off, I told the others.
What happened? asked Philomena. What did you say?
I just said they were pathetic for pestering that girl and added that I wouldn’t be having any of it, and would meet them outside if they went any further with it.
Ye didn’t say that, no? exclaimed Philomena.
No, I didn’t offer to meet them outside, but I did tell them off for slapping the girl’s bum. Anyway, I’m out of here. I shouldn’t be around anymore.
I said bye, and left.
I walked home a hero. I thought to myself, that didn’t take too much, did it? All it takes is a little gall, and suddenly you’re a hero.
I arrived home a hero.
I made a cup of tea a hero.
I brushed my teeth a hero.
I went to sleep a hero.
5.
4.
3.
2.
Hero.

I woke up in the morning with a bad hangover and didn’t want to leave the flat in case I happened to bump into one of the rugby guys by accident. But I had to leave the flat. I had to go to work.

43.

Like so many others, I went to work today with a hangover. I was glad to get home at the end of the day and enjoyed my cup of tea, which today appeared in the form of blackcurrant cordial.
I work a lot. I do a lot of work.
Why is there not so much work in this book?
This book happens in the spaces in-between work. Work takes up a lot of time, so the book has to be content to happen in the spaces in-between.
The daily grind doesn’t care about what happens in this book. All the daily grind cares about is me showing up on time and doing what it’s paying me to do.

44.

Like so many other suns, it got tired of the Irish sky pretty quickly and took off. From bad to good, and from good back to bad. Realising the sun had gone, rain made its move in an impassioned way, grabbing summer by the balls. Soon there was a flood thicker than broth and you couldn’t walk on some pavements. You had to either walk on the roads or take another route altogether.
The day I was moving to my new flat, it was an awful slushy one. The street where the tattoo parlour was situated was badly affected by the floods. It was a shit day to move into a new place, splish-sploshing in and out with my belongings.
The night before leaving, last night in the old flat, I had a terrible dream about a fire happening in the place. In the dream, I went to bed forgetting to tend to some sausage rolls I’d left under the grill. While I was asleep, a fire started and it got out of control very fast and suddenly the whole place was on fire. The house burned down and I instantly turned into a ghost (There was no death in the dream. I just turned from an alive human being to a ghost.)
I walked through the ashes. I had killed all the people upstairs. They’d been having a party and they were all in their beds making love to one another when it happened. They died happy, I suppose. Laughing and fucking.
The dream skipped to my funeral. Everyone was sad and there was crying. It was a dream scenario. I was dead, and they couldn’t stand it. They couldn’t believe it. They were mortified.
It was a long dream. It went on for a while after the funeral. I dreamt right up to a time when everyone had gotten over my death. They had come to terms with my passing and were rid of the grief. Suddenly, they were all back on track and I wasn’t a fixture anymore. It was shit.
Then I woke up. That dream felt so shit. I wish it had just ended at the funeral. That would have been a suitable ending. Even if it did mean sacrificing the people upstairs. (To be horribly unfair, they had it coming.)

45.

Like so many others, I thought it funny that the owner of the tattoo parlour’s name was Pearse considering his list of services included piercing. I didn’t say that to him though. He looked a fierce Pearse.
Pearse liked to smoke grass. He rolled a big joint on the first day of my moving in and brought it up to me.
Get a toke off this! he said.
I didn’t really smoke grass too much. I had done a lot of it before. I had gone to Amsterdam once and got lost there for a short while in hotel rooms. But nothing since then.
Thanks, I said.
It was essential that I become friendly with Pearse and his girlfriend. I wanted to leave the loneliness of the last living arrangement behind.
I took the joint and started smoking it. Because I hadn’t smoked any in a long time, it worked immediately on me and I started to feel relaxed.
Hits the spot, doesn’t it? said Pearse.
I watched the smoke coming out of the joint in a slow stupor. It came out like silk caught in a breeze or a flamenco dancer splashing around.

It was a tiny flat that took up a little corner of the building. The rest of the building was a larger flat where Pearse resided with his girlfriend and the rest was the tattoo parlour. My flat was more like three half-rooms stuck together. No wonder it was so easy to get. If somebody had done a review of this flat, the review would have said ‘small, grotty, unthinkably depressing – all in all, a sensible human being’s nightmare’.
My first night sleeping in the flat was odd and a little frightening. I was the only living being in the flat and also in the building because Pearse and his girlfriend had gone to a family wedding and were staying in a hotel that night.
So much for leaving loneliness behind, eh?
As I was trying to get to sleep, I suddenly thought of all the intense tattoo designs that were downstairs. They started to come alive in my mind. I could see them all coming alive downstairs and roaming the building. Some of them didn’t worry me. Like the cavalier frog, that didn’t bother me so much. But the idea that some of those more heavy-handed designs had come alive startled me. Like the scorpions and rattlesnakes, like the avowals of nihilism, they bothered me. I got over it pretty fast though, and went into a nice sleep.
5.
4.
3.
2.
Nice.

46.

Like so many others, I was offered a discount and advised to accept. It was a tattoo discount. Just the other day, Pearse proposed a modest tattoo at a spectacularly low price.
Just something small, he said. Not anything big. Not a giant tarantula on your abdomen or anything.
Yes, a giant tarantula on my abdomen would be going a bit far, I think, I said.
Yeah, he laughed.
Perhaps a woodlouse on my wrist, eh?
Perhaps, he said.
No, I’m fine, I said. I’m happy with this bland skin here.

47.

Like so many others, I was completely under the spell of Harriet, Pearse’s girlfriend. She was Swedish. Like my authoress. She was a tall, slender woman and I never saw her wearing anything but leather. Her body wore it in a way that reminded me of heroines in comics.
There was something about her that screamed artistry from the treetops.
It turned out Harriet was an actress. She appeared very occasionally on the stage. Her most recent turn had been as Katherina in Taming of the Shrew, in some celebrated Dublin theatre or other. She had one of her costumes hanging up in the back room of the tattoo parlour.
I asked her if she’d ever written any books like my authoress.
One, she said.
There you go.
What was it? I asked.
It was called At the Middle from the Start. She said it was a complex ghost story about a team of lesbian explorers in Greenland and their anthropologist companion who is male and also gay. They are searching for the Lady of the Arctic, a great northern mystery. Along the way, they meet a hermit who lives in a little hut in the middle of the freezing landscape. He invites them to stay with him to recuperate for a while and soon becomes sexually crazed as a result of their visit. Near-foaming at the mouth, he tries to rape the gay anthropologist. The Lady of the Arctic is awakened by the sexual violence, and then…
That’s all she would tell me.
I was very interested from her describing it and asked her if she would let me read it. She said it was still back home in Malmo in Sweden, which was where she was originally from, but she was trying to get it sent over and when she got hold of it, she would let me read it.
Harriet mostly did piercings in the parlour, while Pearse concentrated on tattooing.
I watched her doing a piercing the other day. I think she frightened the customers. She had a malevolent way about her. If someone made even the slightest movement during the piercing, she would snap at him or her in a terrifying manner.

48.

Like so many others, I think I am very slow when it comes to reading the opposite sex. That could be why I have got myself into this state about Lili. Today, I found out something that frustrated me. I got a phonecall from Philomena. I was surprised to get the phonecall. She didn’t ring me that often. It felt good to get a phonecall. It always feels good to get a phonecall when you’ve been feeling lonely and rejected.
Philomena’s call was just to check and see how I was getting on in my new flat, but as our conversation progressed, she went on to inform me that Helen had actually really liked me for a long time before meeting Geoff. Philomena said that she’d always hoped Helen and I would end up with one another, and now it made her angry because Helen was so head over heels in love with Geoff. I told her I’d no idea Helen had been in any way been interested in me, and found the whole thing a bit surprising. We were the mutually unattached, not anything else.
Knowing that I could have been with Helen if I’d been wiser to her inclinations, and if she hadn’t fallen in love with Geoff, made me feel very lonely, even lonelier.
I said good-bye to Philomena and saw a new figure of loneliness in my reflection.
But this loneliness didn’t last long because money came into my life all of a brilliant sudden.
I got my wages, and whenever I get my wages, the world can take a walk off a plank, as far as I care. I’m a hot potato in the big container.
I went out and spent money. I had a good time in the shops. I bought a new pair of shoes, dumped the tatty and scruffed ones. I bought a new watch. The watch made it to my wrist at 3:15.
Don’t need your watch anymore, Lili.
3:15.
Did you catch that?
However, the money didn’t last long either.

Things don’t last long in my life anymore. When I was small, things lasted for just the right amount of time. Now I’m being hurried on with everything. I feel like there’s just a certain amount of time available for me to do everything. Three years for a career, four for a wife, five for a child, six for a home. With all that going on, there’s no time left for anything else. Those few years come with many additional years attached.
I’m quite given to contemplating the transience of things now; I’ve time on my hands to do so.

49.

Like so many others, I quickly became an absorber of Pearse’s stories. Like so many before me, I was taken under his wing, a buyer for his tall tales. And these tales were quite lanky. He had some good ones though. I’m not complaining. And being with him and Harriet, listening to their stories, drinking tea with them, made me less lonely.
I would be invited into their place sometimes, Pearse would roll up a big joint, and he’d start telling me these preposterous stories about events in his life. I won’t tell you them all. That would take up too much space and I have signed an agreement with myself that this is only going to be a very short book. But I will tell you this story he told me about when his wife died and some of the mad things that happened just afterwards.
Pearse’s wife was called Genevieve. He said she was beautiful, but annoyingly patient with him. Their marriage did not accommodate an awful lot of conversation. Their relationship was for the most part silent. On their wedding night in fact, they silently agreed that conversation wasn’t their strong point and the marriage would more likely survive if they didn’t bother with all that. People assumed they were unhappy.
Pearse and Genevieve went to pubs often and just sat alongside one another in total silence. They didn’t smile. They didn’t even look at one another. They sipped their drinks and watched as everybody else talked and enjoyed themselves. Once, a zealous type of pub-person took a break from all the talking and enjoying, went up to Pearse and Genevieve at their table and said, Come on, relationships can’t be that bad, these days. Pearse and Genevieve took sips from their drinks and simply stared past him.
There was a history of ludicrously loud snoring in Pearse’s family. If Pearse had not also been such a ludicrous sleeper, he may have one evening woke to hear his wife voicing her disgust. Genevieve was a quiet woman. She sometimes went through an entire day without uttering one single word. But Pearse’s snoring activated a cataclysm of swearing in her every night. She got a lot of untried words out of her system.
Although Pearse had never once heard her nightly tirades, he knew of them (from moments of half-sleep when he thought he could faintly hear her raised voice), and suspected that she secretly enjoyed it. Like it was her little private deserved break from their silent relationship. Kind of like when I went to the bookies, he thought. But Pearse had not heard the sounds that came from his nose and mouth during the nighttime. These sounds not only kept his wife from sleeping, they made the windows rattle and very nearly the walls too. When Genevieve could take no more of it, she instigated a lawsuit. The lawsuit was embarrassing for Pearse. He was instantly prey for local amateur comedians.
The lawsuit was ridiculed. They were thrown out of court like so many other bickering couples with snores to settle.
Pearse got his revenge on Genevieve one night. He gave her a dead leg and that was that. They were in bed having just made love (they enjoyed a spot of sex each night, lawsuit or not) and Pearse hit her a great big wallop of a kick, gave her a dead leg, and then swiftly rolled over onto his side facing away from her as if nothing had happened.
Oooooyaa! Genevieve screamed.
This was how Pearse knew he’d really hurt her because Oooooyaa! was her customary cry of pain. He felt a little guilty then, knowing this.
Following the incident, they called it quits. That is, (by quits) their ruckus over snoring, not their relationship.
And get this, Pearse told me: Genevieve would eventually herself snore most horribly to the annoyance of a lot of people.
Thing is, she waited until she was a corpse before it started.

49.

Like so many others, I found Pearse’s tale difficult to believe, but his biceps and his demeanour and his tattoos and his piercings and his bulk convinced me.

Genevieve took ill one year.
It was cancer.
Even though it was a trying time for both of them, they maintained the silent relationship. The silence made the whole thing easier to deal with, in fact.
As Genevieve’s last sleep approached, Pearse took her hand. There was nothing said between them. Why start now, they were both thinking. They smiled. That was enough.
Genevieve could not get comfortable on the hospital bed. She wriggled a little, but couldn’t get a proper comfort going. Her last words (spoken to the doctor who was present, Dr. Tierney) were, Ah, this is a bloody shit death-bed.
Dr. Tierney did not have time to respond because shortly after she said this she died. Dr. Tierney went to the bed and he examined her body for a moment, then looked at Pearse, and slowly bowed his head.
Is she dead? Pearse had to ask because Tierney didn’t say anything initially. Was it a guessing game? thought Pearse.
Yes, she’s gone, replied Dr. Tierney.
Genevieve’s snoring started almost immediately after her death. It was loud. The windows rattled and very nearly the rock-hard hospital walls too.
What was it all about? thought Pearse. Was she playing a joke on me or something?
He looked to Dr. Tierney for an explanation. The doctor explained to him that it was one of those things doctors couldn’t explain.
The snoring stopped after a few hours, but then started up again a few days later as the coffin was being lowered.
What’s that sound coming from Aunt Genevieve’s coffin, Mammy? asked Laura, Genevieve’s young niece.
Sssh, Laura, Laura’s mother said.

If having his wife die wasn’t bad enough, Pearse was knocked down four days after the funeral. He was hit by a bus. The bus driver was also an unhappy man, but more the crabby irritable sort, not on the same level as Pearse, and he was going along the road, way too fast for a bus carrying lots of people in it, and noticed Pearse crossing but wouldn’t wait for him to cross fully (I have right of way. This guy better get a move on, the driver was thinking) and clipped him. Pearse was lifted off the ground and thrown onto the kerb. Pearse was so wrapped up in sadness that he didn’t even realise he’d been hit by a bus. His legs were badly smashed up, but it didn’t seem to be anything terribly terrible to him and certainly it could not have been untreatable. He went to hospital and was placed on a bed in a room and told to wait for Dr. Tierney to arrive.
It was ages before Dr. Tierney arrived and Pearse started to get nervous and worried as he waited.
How’s the bed, fella? asked Dr. Tierney when he finally showed up.
Oh, it’s fine, Dr. Tierney, said Pearse, bouncing a little on the bed to show he was fine with it.
That’s good. I’m glad. Fella, I have to tell you, it’s not good news.
Pearse’s heart sank for the second time that week.
Dr. Tierney then told him the not good news.
Well, it’s like this, you see.
Pearse was told he would never be able to WALK ever again.
Are you serious?
I’m serious, fella.

50.

Like so many others, I found Pearse’s tale difficult to believe, but his brawn and his savage stare and his previous convictions and current conviction convinced me.

The doctor told you that you couldn’t walk anymore? I asked.
Yeah, that’s right, said Pearse. Terrible! Terribly terrible!

I am well aware of your present state of precariousness, Pearse, said Dr. Tierney, and believe this state of precariousness to be partly, no, actually, fully responsible for the accident, so I would like for you to stay here with us at the hospital for the time being until you’re back on your two feet again…oh, sorry. Did I just say that? Forget that! You can’t walk anymore, so that’s a really bad slip of the tongue, I suppose.

He didn’t say that, did he? I asked Pearse.
He did! I fucking swear! He was a bastard! He was trying to keep me there in the hospital. It was all bullshit. He didn’t want me back on my feet again. But I decided I’d walk again, no matter, against all odds.

Dr. Tierney went into Pearse’s room one afternoon and caught Hefin, the fast-talking porter, helping him try to walk again.
No! cried out Dr. Tierney.
Hefin was fired from his job at once.
It was sad for Hefin because at that time there were not too many jobs going for fast-talkers.
Pearse decided he would pay somebody to help him walk again.
A nurse answered his calling. Her name was Jeanette. She went into his room one day and said, Fifty squids.
Sorry? asked Pearse.
That’s how much it’ll cost ye.
What would cost me?
Ye’re looking for somebody to help, aren’t ye? Well, there’s my fee. Fifty squids.
First of all, Pearse wasn’t quite sure if he could come up with fifty squids as payment, but he accepted Jeanette’s offer nonetheless. He wondered how Jeanette had known that he was willing to pay for aid. He hadn’t yet spread the word. She just came in one day and said, Fifty squids! She didn’t seem at all psychic. There was nothing transcendental about her. She did yoga. That was about it.
Jeanette was terrible. She didn’t care one bit if Pearse ever walked again. She was just interested in getting her fifty squids.
She lasted about two sessions; Pearse eventually had to sack her.
What do ye mean? Ye’re giving me the sack?
That’s right, said Pearse. You’re dreadful.
Thanks a bunch, assface, said Jeanette. After all I’ve done for ye. I want my fifty squids.
I’ll see to it that you receive all outstanding payments, Jeanette. I’m sorry.
Goway, willye.

51.

Like so many others, Harriet was a woman of considerable experience with men such as Pearse, who dressed like Pearse, who acted like Pearse, who were massive and tattooed like Pearse. She showed me a photograph of her taken with an eighties metal star. They were standing beside one another. The metal star had his arm around her and she was drinking a beer. She was reluctant to go into details about it. She just showed me the photograph and left it at that.
Just as Pearse was telling me the story about being in the hospital, Harriet came into the room with cups of tea.
Harriet struck me as just the right woman for a man like Pearse. She seemed to be very worldwise. Probably somebody who understood the subjects that interested him more than others did. She could have got into a conversation about jet planes with him. That’s how capable a partner she was. (Talking about jet planes is a characteristic of Pearse you don’t get to see too much of in this book because I haven’t felt the need to explore it and why bother even now?)
Here’s some tea, said Harriet, placing the cups down.
Thanks, I said.
Thank you, sugar.
Pearse called Harriet sugar all the time like he was an American male and could say such things well because saying it was part of a tradition in Amercian males, but Pearse was not an American male and their traditions did not apply to him.
I’m just telling this fella about my erection following Genevieve’s death, he told Harriet.
Oh, the erection story! said Harriet. So I’m just in time.
The erection story? I asked.
Oh, I haven’t got to that bit yet, he said.

52.

Like so many others, Pearse had his own peculiar fears. He may have been built like a house and as tough as anyone you’ve ever met, but things scared him. And one of the things that really scared him was the idea of being locked up, incarcerated, in a hospital.
Weeks went by and Pearse started to worry. He took to reflecting on a possible Dr. Tierney agenda. He seemed to be acting very odd for a doctor. Pearse hated to think it, but he imagined Dr. Tierney was holding him captive in the hospital. The drugs he’d been receiving of late had been having way too much of a drug-effect on him for normal drugs and Pearse knew drugs well. He was seeing pink elephants jumping around in the corner of the room and Pearse was able to match a cliché like that to some kind of medicational corruption.
How are you this morning, fella? asked Dr. Tierney during one of his morning visits.
Magnifique! answered Pearse. He’d been reading The Three Musketeers, so he was a little bit France on the brain.
I want you to take these pills here, fella, said Dr. Tierney. They’re good for you. Now open wide.
There were three pills. They were much smaller than usual. They were rainbow-coloured.
Gobble these and get well soon, eh?
Pearse swallowed the rainbow-coloured tablets and drowsed away from life in the hospital.
Bonne-nuit, said Dr. Tierney.
:
Pearse knew something was up. It had been over a month and he was still lying in the same hospital bed – and Genevieve had been right about the beds by the way, awfully uncomfortable they were. Pearse was too scared of Dr. Tierney to tell him otherwise.
He was sleeping much longer than usual now and seeing pink elephants jumping around in the corner of the room a lot. He was even now on a first name basis with the elephants (won’t name the elephants, that would be silly).
Dr. Tierney’s visits became more inappropriate within Pearse’s grasp of how a curative affair should be performed; eventually a disturbing period of medical administrations arrived wherein the sinister doctor would actually ram the rainbow-coloured pills down his incapacitated patient’s throat. But was I really incapacitated? thought Pearse. He had been supine for over a month, rising only once or twice to practice walking, so he was not a man of full strength, but he was certainly capable of getting out of bed.
One day, Pearse discovered that he could walk. He was weak, but he was able to manage walking across the room.
He decided it was time to do something about his current situation. Dr. Tierney was obviously up to something, and although Pearse had no clue as to what it was, he decided that avoiding whatever it was entirely was probably less dangerous than staying to find out what whatever it was was.
Hey, Pearse, said Dr. Tierney. I’ve got some drugs here I want you to eat.
Hello, Dr. Tierney.
Mouth open, fella.
Pearse opened wide, took the rainbow pills in his mouth, a drink of water to wash them down.
: Now the normal dosage was three, but Pearse only swallowed one. He kept the other two hidden cautiously in the corner of his gob.
Lovely, said Pearse.
Good, said Dr. Tierney. Very good.
Pearse closed his eyes as though he were about to take a nice long sleep. Dr. Tierney left the room and near tripped up as he was going. He was a clumsy doctor, but this clumsiness doesn’t have a crucial part in the story. In fact, the only mention of it is his near tripping up just then. After Dr. Tierney’s departure, Pearse opened his eyes and got up out of bed. It was time to escape. He took the other two pills out of his mouth and left them placed on the pillows. He opened the window and started to climb out onto the ledge. Outside, ah, the cool breeze of mid-February. He was much higher up than he’d thought. He must have been about eleven floors up or somewhere in the number eleven’s neighbourhood. He could see Dr. Tierney below in the car park getting into his car to go some place.
A funny thing happened then. A mighty erection came on. It was so intense that Pearse thought his pyjama bottoms might split open and he would be left standing on the window-ledge naked as the day he came into the world and with a tall erection showing to make matters more troublesome. He figured it must have had something to do with the rainbow-coloured tablet he’d swallowed because there was nothing around at present to arouse him in such a way unless there was something in his relationship with great heights he hadn’t found out about yet.
He couldn’t understand it. He began to experience harsh guilt. After all, his wife had only recently passed away and there he was on the window-ledge of the hospital in which she died with an anomalous erection standing out in front of him. He climbed back inside the window. He realised that he would not have been able to escape that way anyway.

53.

Like so many others, Pearse was delighted to leave hospital when the time came. He ultimately managed to escape that day. He ran along the hospital corridors, puffing and perspiring, and hopping for joy, and many old sicklies in wheelchairs urged him on with their fists raised. Outside, the cool breeze of mid-February, ah.
But just before his escape from the hospital, something happened.
When Pearse climbed back into his room after being out on the window-ledge, he found Jeanette, the nurse, standing there. She had come to collect her fifty squids.
Hello, Jeanette. How are you?
Fifty squids, she hollered in her usual way.
I’m arranging for a cheque to be sent in the post, Jeanette. You’ll get your squids. Don’t worry about it.
She noticed the erection that was standing up in his trousers.
What the hell were you doing out that window?
Nothing, said Pearse. I was just getting some air.
Air, my big round ass. You’re up to something.
Well, if you must know, I was trying to escape. I think Dr. Tierney’s keeping me prisoner up here.
: What makes you think that?
He’s been giving me very strange drugs.
That’s what doctors do.
Yes, but these are drugs I’ve never seen before. They’re rainbow-coloured. They make me see peculiar things and I sleep way too much.
Well, haven’t you asked him what the drugs are?
No,not once, he thought.
So maybe there’s nothing wrong with the drugs he’s giving you at all and you’re just imagining all of this.
No, you see, he forces them into me. He rams them down my throat, you know.
Oh, that’s what’s bothering you, is it? That’s how all the doctors here in this hospital oversee their patients’ well-being. It’s their way of making sure the medication they have assigned the patients to take is being taken properly. It’s always been the way. And if you don’t like it – well, then, you can just take your sick old skeleton elsewhere, can’t you, eh? St. Elsewhere, maybe, ha!
: That’s exactly what I’m going to do, said Pearse, starting to clean out his bedside cabinet which only contained some clothes and the two books he’d been reading, The Three Musketeers and Dracula.
Oh, you’re not leaving for a while, boyo, said Jeanette. We have to talk about my fifty squids yet.
I already told you. You’ll be getting the cheque in the post.
I’m thinking more along the lines of a sex-deal, said Jeanette, eyeing Pearse’s recently expanded private area.
What? What are you talking about?
Well, let’s just say I’ve taken a liking to you within the past few minutes, largely due to that thing that’s trying to get out of your pyjamas, and I would be willing to let the matter of the fifty squids disappear completely, and also not a word to Dr. Tierney about your sudden departure, if you were able to return the gesture by grafifying me with that there thing.
I’m very sorry, Jeanette. I’m just not ready to be involved with anyone at this point. In fact, I don’t think I will ever be ready again, to tell you the truth. Not since Genevieve’s death. She was my wife. She died.
Oh, I know all about your wife dying. But that doesn’t cut the mustard here. I’m talking a hump and your escape from the hospital.
Come on, Jeanette, I’m one of the patients. You can’t just come in here proposing sex-deals and so on. What if one of the doctors was to walk in?
I have sex-deals going on with many of the doctors here, including your Dr. Tierney. And quite a few of the patients too. They love it. To be frank, when I heard talk of you needing some help, I thought it was a hump you were after like the rest of them.
I see, said Pearse.
So are you up for it or what? Dear me, what am I saying? It’s clear you already are.
Jeanette started taking off her clothes and humming the theme tune of some television soap that Pearse couldn’t recall the title of. He tried to identify it, but it just wouldn’t happen. I knew it, he was thinking. I just knew I knew it!
As Jeanette’s milky-skinned breasts popped into view and her rear abundance was unveiled, Pearse’s erection got worse and worse.
No, no, Jeanette! I’m sorry, I can’t do this. Stay away from me!
Okay, then, said Jeanette. If that’s the way you want it.
She started to chase him around the room, occasionally lunging forward, her hand stretched out, trying to grab a hold of his guilty erection.
The cheque’s in the post! cried Pearse. The cheque’s in the post!

54.

Like so many others, Harriet knew Pearse’s erection story extremely well from hearing it so many times. She could have told it herself, and not missed a single detail. I could tell she knew it was all a lot of bullshit, but she enjoyed that. She enjoyed that somebody could put a story like that across to another person with complete belief in its authenticity.
Just as Pearse finished telling his tale, I noticed an expression on Harriet’s face that made me think she’d possibly decided to write her second book. Maybe it would be about erections, I don’t know. Or maybe about a vampire doctor. Or maybe about a snoring corpse, I don’t know.
The story made an impression on me also. It made me quite uncomfortable because I knew all about guilty erections. Strange as it seemed to me, I identified with Pearse’s story. I identified with guilty erections. A year after Chupi’s death in the fire, I was still masturbating about her. I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t help doing it. I always promised myself right before the doing that I wasn’t going to let it be Chupi, but it always ended up being Chupi. She was in my mind constantly. Eventually I was able to isolate her from the act. Others have subsequently wandered along to be subconsciously ravished, but she still pops up occasionally, not to be ravished, but to laugh and ridicule me right as I’m nearing the pivotal moment.
The day Pearse told me the story of his guilty erection was the last of spending any real length of time with either him or Harriet. Soon after, Harriet got a part in a pretty important play that was about to run and she didn’t seem to be around so much anymore. Pearse seemed to grow less talkative with me. He was still friendly, just not on the same level as before.

I’ve started to stay in the flat a lot alone with beer for company. I’ve been taking a lot of days off work to do so. I know this could be detrimental, but I get a joy from it. I set up in front of the stereo and listen to songs while drinking the beers.

55.

Like so many other musical disc enthusiasts, I own a copy of Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat. The reason I own it is Lili.
That album, she said. Teaser and the Firecat by Cat Stevens. It’s my favourite album. There’s nothing else.
I wasn’t into Cat Stevens then. Not even when Lili and I were an item. But after she left, I went out and bought a copy of Teaser and the Firecat. It was a good album. But my obsessive nature was apparent to me while listening to it. I only bought it because of Lili.
I was on my way down to Freebird Records. I was going to flog off all the albums I’d bought that Lili had mentioned and then spend the money on some beers. I packed all the discs into my bag and set off for Freebird.
In the Freebird second-hand racks I spotted many discs and records that had once belonged to me. I hadn’t sold them to anyone. I couldn’t figure out how they had got there. I knew they were mine because of certain distinctive marks. Like my Manfred Mann Best Of. It had an unusually straight-lined crack that went right down the back of the CD case and also it still had the sale sticker over the barcode stating the price I’d bought it for. And also there, the very first album by Blonde Redhead. It had a cardboard cover and I’d once drawn a little beardy face on the front while I was listening to the disc. The beardy face was still there.
Lili!
I’d let Lili borrow that one.
Shit, I can’t believe she sold that Blonde Redhead on me. She knew how much I treasured the noisier albums. I never parted with the noisy ones.
I took the Blonde Redhead up to the man at the counter. When I added the new price to the price I’d originally paid for it, that was nearly thirty quid I’d spent on it in total.
Thirty quid!
Lili, that’s damning.

56.

Like so many others, I have a favourite food. My favourite food is chips. I sometimes get embarrassed about this because everybody else I know in my generational quarter is more adventurous and thinking about their health when it comes to food. They eat fancy cuisines and talk about junk food as if it was Nazism. They prepare elaborate dishes and discuss the meals and are satisfied with the wise dining decisions they have made. They understand what is healthy and go in that direction. I understand what is healthy but don’t go in that direction. I do not know why this is. I think it may simply be that I am gross. I know I shouldn’t worry so much about it. I think the gross inherited the Earth a long time ago.
Still, chips.
That’s all I eat. It can’t be good for me.
I just eat chips.
That’s me.
Chips.
When I go to an Indian eatery, that’s what I order.
Chips.
When I go for an Italian, that’s what I order.
Chips.
When I go to a kebab house, that’s what I order.
Chips.
When I go to a Chinese restaurant, that’s what I order.
Chips.
When I go to the pizzeria, that’s what I order.
Chips.
When I go to a plain old sandwich bar, that’s what I order.
Chips.
Forgive me for this somewhat gross aside, but that’s what I order.
Chips
.
As I was on the way home from Freebird, I picked up some beers and then a bag of chips. It was a nice bag of chips. They were soaked in vinegar and they weren’t at all good for me, but then again I wasn’t exactly health’s young dream.
Chupi was the same as me about food. Not about chips. But beans and toast. It was the first meal she ever made for herself and right after she’d eaten it she decided that was enough for her.
Beans and toast, she would say. Who cares about everything else?
She made me some beans and toast once and we discussed the meal afterwards and agreed it had been a wise dining decision.

57.

Like so many other days spent with Chupi, the second-last day has an asterisk beside it in my memory index. She was seeing a chap at the time. His name was Sam, I think. She’d been seeing all sorts of boys about then. She was living in the flat where she would eventually perish and we bumped into each other in the street and hung around together for the rest of the day because we had neither of us anything better on.
The thought of us being an item again was long gone from her mind. But I wasn’t so sure. I still had dreams of marrying Chupi at that point. Now of course, in the dreams, the lady wearing the beautiful lilac gown is Lili. But Chupi wore it for an awful long time before Lili got a hold of it. Who knows what Lili’s done with that dress now? She’s probably flogged it along with everything else.
On the second-last day, I bumped into Chupi in the street and we went to the library together.
Look at this, she said.
She’d taken a copy of The Room by Hubert Selby from the shelf.
This is my favourite book, she said.
I haven’t read it, I said.
(I have since read it and after reading it, I must say that The Room being her favourite book: that’s a bit fucked up!)
After the library, we went to a shop and bought crisps and coke and chocolate bars and sat on a bench in the park stuffing ourselves knowing we’d never be fat.
After the shop and park, we walked along the dockside looking at ships.
Where do you think that one’s going? I asked.
How the fuck do I know? said Chupi.
After the dockside, we went back to her flat and sat up for a while talking about moths. I can’t remember how we started talking about moths.
Ooh, I hate moths, Chupi said.
I went home then and Chupi said to call round the next day for some laughs.

On the last day, we sat in Chupi’s flat and listened to Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine album and she fell asleep beside me and then woke up suddenly and went, Shit! Did I just fall asleep?

We never met up again. The fire happened about seven months later. Chupi had just turned twenty-one sometime in the weeks running up. She’d been alone in the flat. Her student roommates had all gone home for the summer. It was June 30th. She’d been staying in a lot listening to music. She fell into a deep sleep on the sofa as a fire blazed around her, started because of some kind of electrical fault. I never understood it, or found out exactly what happened. All I know is that there was a fire and she died.

I wish Chupi was still around. She would sort me out in a second.
She would kick me on the ankle, and say, Lili? Fuck that!
She knew me.
We were friends, then weren’t, then were,
then weren’t, then were,
then weren’t.

58.

Like so many other alcoholic vehicles of my financial equal, the beer thing was simple. Purchase with a shrewd degree of cheapness. I got this particular carryout I’m drinking now for only five euro. That’s good value in this valueless age.
Chupi taught me well. She has trained me to languish with craft. Now I deserve recognition for my indolence. I drink by myself and listen to music and the beer and the music and the dawdling day trick me into thinking I’m happy.
I know for a fact I’m not happy.
Every now and again in the middle of the fake happiness, I feel like weeping. I can actually feel the tears building up in my eyes, but then they desist.
This is the comedown. I put way too much effort into the Lili affair. Now I’m paying the price.

59.

Like so many others, this beer I’m drinking is of a particular volume which determines how rapidly you will become a drunk. I am going to conduct an experiment with it. I’m going to see how many cans it takes to bring the tears.

1 can,
2 can,
3 can,
I’m in tears.

Shit, what a cry-baby.
3 cans!

60.

Like so many others (probably, I don’t know for sure), I decided on fish finger sandwiches as a means of satisfying my melancholic hunger. I say melancholic hunger because my stomach was feeling neglected, was empty and required nourishment. My stomach was reacting to the sadness just as my heart was reacting, just as my brain was reacting. Along with my heart and my brain, my stomach was craving, desperately longing for something.
Fish finger sandwiches.
Covered in mayonnaise.
That was my stomach at least catered for.

61.

Days with Lili form a diary in my head. I found the diary this morning and started flicking through it, a stroll down Lili-lane.

January 15

Something fell dead from the sky and landed in the hood of my duffle coat today.
Jesus, cried Lili. What the hell?
Shit! I yelled, shaking whatever it was out of my hood.
It was a pigeon. A dead pigeon.
It’s a pigeon, said Lili. A dead pigeon.
Holy shit!
We couldn’t figure out how it had died. Lili said it must have been the polluted air.
We’ve truly fouled our air, there’s no doubt about it, she said.
Lili is so environmentally conscious. I never realised it before. She loves nature. She has these cute little badges on her bag. One is a picture of a dolphin, the other a puffin. They’re very cute. She’s not a vegetarian though. However much she loves animals, she has no difficulty whatsoever with eating them for dinner.

February 1

We were watching television today in my flat. The show was some nightly entertainment lowdown. Lili was giving out about the celebrities. I’ve always thought that very juvenile of her.
I asked her if she would like to listen to some harp music. I told her that her name sounded nice when repeated along to harp music.
She wasn’t listening to me.
Look at that waste of space, she said, referring to someone on the television.
Who? I asked.
Him there, she said, pointing.
I don’t know anybody on the television anymore. I’ve stopped watching. I used to watch all the time. I used to know all the names.
After the show, Lili turned around to me and said, Bed?

February 2

I woke up first this morning and made some breakfast. I made some toast and also fried some eggs. Lili likes fried eggs. I don’t like them so much. I prefer them scrambled to fried.
There was a dog barking next door.
I looked out the kitchen window.
The dog was on the roof of next door’s house barking at a group of racing pigeons who were gliding round and round, making marvellous whooshing sounds over the houses.
Lili had just got up.
Hey, look at this dog, I said to her. It’s up on the roof.
Lili came into the kitchen and looked out the window at the dog.
Mmm, fried eggs, she said. Good stuff.

February 15

We have been a shindig since November. That’s about four months if I apply mathematics correctly. Lili introduced me to one of her friends today. Why didn’t it occur to her earlier to introduce me to one of her friends? The friend I was introduced to was a bad-tempered friend named Annabel. I knew her only through Lili’s frequent phone conversations with her. Lili never mentioned her much at all.
Why haven’t I met this Annabel yet? I asked once. She seems to be one of your best friends.
I wouldn’t say she’s one of my best friends, she replied. She doesn’t like to go out in town much.
Yeah, but I thought you would at least have introduced her to me by now.
Why?
You seem to be talking to her a lot. If you have a boyfriend, your friend would naturally be interested in that, yes? Have you even mentioned me to her?
Yeah, of course.

Annabel was bad-tempered and unpleasant. She didn’t even look at me when we were introduced. I thought for a bit she was in a league of her own, batting for the girls’ team, and she was upset with me for nabbing her Lili, but that idea was squished soon enough when her conversation with Lili began; ostensibly, her conversation revolved entirely around men, who she’d been seeing, who she’d been toying with, who she’d been going the whole way with, who she’d been dumping.
In her company, I got the feeling there was a snake on the ground beside her hissing up at me. There was very little communication between us.
She frightened me a bit, Annabel.

March 4

We went down to Wexford on the bus today. That’s where Lili’s from. She was going down to pick up some things, some books and things to help with college. I said I’d go down with her. I’d never been to Wexford. It’s good to travel around and see places.
The whole way down on the bus, Lili picked her nose. Every time I turned to look at her, one of her fingers or a thumb was hooked onto a nostril. I found it so bloody sexy, I had to take a minute to cool off.

March 9

I have a habit of donning a catchphrase for times when I’ve nothing to say in the middle of a conversation. I find this happens with me quite a lot. I wind up in the middle of a conversation reaching for something to say but realising there’s just nothing. So I have a catchphrase on standby. Whenever I wind up in the middle of a conversation and I have nothing to say, I say, What can you do? That’s my catchphrase. The conversation could be about anything. It could be a conversation about starving homeless people, or a terrible war somewhere in our world, and that’s all I would be able to say.
What can you do?
I can’t help it now. It’s got to a point where the catchphrase has taken over and won’t allow me to even attempt to find a way into the conversation. A catchphrase is a bastard of a thing to have to carry about with you all day long.
What can you do?
I can’t do a thing about it.

Today Lili started mocking my catchphrase. I’ve always known it irritates her. She started repeating it over and over again, but emphasising each word in the catchphrase as she went along.

Like this:

What can you do?
What can you do?
What can you do?
What can you do?

It was irritating. She kept on doing it. I think she thought that maybe it would cure me of the catchphrase somehow.

What can you do?
What can you do?
What can you do?
What can you do?

March 18

We spent all day at Lili’s. Lili’s place is really big and comfortable. I wish I could stay there all the time. Sometimes I pretend I’m sick to avoid work just so that I can spend the whole day there. At first, Lili didn’t mind me doing this. She jumped at the chance of having me over. But recently she has grown tired of it, I think. I may be doing it too much. The faking illness is not just addressed to my workplace; it extends to Lili also. I have to convince Lili that I’m really sick too. That’s what happened this morning.
Ah, my stomach is killing me, I told her. Can I stay here today? I don’t think I could stand going to work today.
What’s the matter with you? she asked.
It’s my stomach. It’s giving me grief.
I don’t believe you. This is the fourth time in three weeks you’re stomach’s been feeling bad. I’m not a slave to your prick, you know.
I’m serious. Believe me, my stomach’s really killing me.
(I had convinced myself so. I really did believe it.)
You can’t stay here today, said Lili. I’ve to go into college. I’ve lots of work today.
Oh, please, Lili, I said. I can’t move. I’m in agony.
After a while of this, she gave in. She felt sorry for me.
Okay, then, she said.
She hugged me and rubbed my stomach.
But if you’re taking the piss, I’ll beat you senseless.

March 30

I normally cut my fingernails over the sink in the bathroom, but today I did it on a mountaintop. Lili and I were up the mountain and she complained about my fingernails. I hadn’t clipped them in a while and I looked sort of like a wild animal.
That’s stinking, she said. Cut them, will you!
I will, I will, as soon as I get home, I replied.
No, now! she demanded.
With what? I said. We’re on a mountaintop.
Lili rummaged around in her bag and took out some scissors.
There, she said. Now go over there and get them cut.
I took the scissors, went over, sat down on a large boulder, and cut my nails.
I looked on as blades of nail twinkled in the mountain air and suddenly I felt authentically human. I was a man of the wild countryside. I couldn’t have been the first human being ever to do this. There must have been a lumberjack once who cut his fingernails on a mountaintop.
What a disgusting thing it is to watch parts of your body flicker away, that lumberjack probably thought. That’s what I thought too.
What are you doing? asked Lili.
I’m cutting my nails like you told me to.
Jesus, cut them into a bag or something. Don’t just send them sailing over the mountainside. That’s rotten!
Sorry.

What a disgusting thing it is to cut your fingernails on a mountaintop!

April 10

Lili cancelled a meeting with me today. I’m starting to get a bit worried about our shindig. I’m not sure how she sees it anymore.

Nah, we’ll be fine.
It used to be she couldn’t get enough of me. Now I think she gets just about enough, that’s all.

April 26

I haven’t seen Lili an awful lot lately. She hasn’t been coming round as much anymore. We still talk on the phone. It’s not like our relationship has come to an end or anything, I don’t think. I think she’s got a lot going on with college or something.
As I was thinking about Lili’s time off, the dog next door started barking. He was up on the roof again. I got up and looked out at him. He appeared to be barking at me. He was hurling his barks at me who was standing at the window looking at him. I’m not sure what kind of dog he was. He didn’t look like a normal dog to me. Those in the know about dogs would have said mongrel probably. He may have been a mongrel, I think. Although I am not in the know about dogs, I will say, a Rastafarian dog. He was a dreadlocked orange dog, and I swear I could hear a Jamaican accent in that yap.
I was sure it was me he was barking at, but then the pigeons came whooshing overhead to dispel any notion that this Rastafarian dog was trying to speak to me.

62.

Like so many others, I nearly caused a fire in my place today. I was half-drunk, music playing, and fish fingers under the grill, when I heard a sssssscracklesssssscrackle. I went to the kitchen and there was smoke and flame under the grill. There was too much fat under there from previous food occasions; a thick curdy quilt just aching to start a fire in some lonely drunk’s flat.
There was smoke everywhere.
I jumped up; knocked over two opened cans of beer (I’m that type of person. Half-drunk cans everywhere.).
God help me! I’d set the place on fire!
My heart was pounding. It was like a dream.
I grabbed a tea towel and placed it down over the fish finger remains that lay blackened and burning on the grill drawer.
Soon the fire was over, but I was slightly distressed by it all, and I had to sit down and think about my life.
It is a good thing to sit down and think about your life to get over the shock of something. If you think about your life for a bit, you’ll get over the shock pretty quickly.
What I did to get over the shock of the fire was I tried to think of a good way of describing my life for this book. Sad Hawaii was out of the question. I wasn’t even going to give that a minute’s heed.
I thought then about the fire and thought perhaps sssssscracklesssssscrackle would be a good way of describing my life.
Maybe.
Sssssscracklesssssscrackle?
No, that’s stupid.
What kind of a description is…
How could that possibly…
What could that possibly…
Not even the most profound…
I am deserted.
I am not thinking straight.
Sssssscrackessssscrackle…
That is the current state of speculation.
I’m wired up perhaps.
It’s these bloody beers I’m drinking, it has to be. Even the design on the cans has a psychedelic quality that makes me feel all woozy and trancey.

63.

Like so many periods of melancholy, it slowly started to come to an end and I felt it was okay to have sharp instruments lying around again. I stopped drinking, stopped pining, stopped whining. Stopped sitting, stopped sleeping. I stopped, decided to start my life again – starting with a bowl of Start, hehe.
I decided to get the hell out of the place. I had to get out for a bit. I’d been sitting around drinking beers for too long. My plan was to go to an inferior gallery or something. Maybe that would get my mind off the normal procedure of a day. There are some inferior galleries out there, and they never fail in blinding me to everyday human life with their lavish shenanigans.
Which inferior gallery will it be today?
I’m not sure which. I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll find one.

64.

Like so many other tattoo parlours, this one’s sights and smells take you by surprise.
You’re not expecting the smell of tomato soup in a tattoo parlour.
That’s what you get. The smell of tomato soup.
You’re not expecting it.
It takes you by surprise.

You’re not expecting a frilly costume for a Shakesperian play hanging up in the back room.
That’s what you get. A frilly costume for a Shakesperian play hanging up in the back room.
You’re not expecting it.
It takes you by surprise
.
You’re not expecting your former paramour up on a table on all fours getting a tattoo done on her arse.
That’s what you get. Your former paramour up on a table on all fours getting a tattoo done on her arse.
You’re not expecting it.
It takes you by surprise.

65.

Like so many others, I was bound to run into her again. It was bound to happen. I’d been setting myself up for it. The world will get you in the end. Sooner or later, with all the pining and whining of lately, it was bound to happen and it did.
It happened like this:
To leave the flat, I had to walk through the main room of the tattoo parlour, and that’s when she happened.
Up on a table, not exactly on all fours this time, but all the same, getting a tattoo on her behind as before. She was sort of kneeling on a chair and bending slightly over the table.
Pearse was there, working away.
For a moment, I thought, that couldn’t be her.
She had done something different to her hair, but I couldn’t tell what. I can always tell when a girl has done something different with her hairstyle, but am usually perplexed anyway, being not versed in hairstyles. I am not oblivious to the change, but oblivious to the detail.
I walked steadily over to them and stood beside. Didn’t know what to say.
Hey there, Pearse said to me.
Hey, I said.
Lili looked over her shoulder at me.
My God, she said, surprised. Hey. How are you? What are you doing here?
Still didn’t know what to say.
He lives here, said Pearse. In the flat upstairs. You two old friends, yeah?
Yeah, said Lili.
I was speechless for a few seconds more, but then said,
Eh, I’m okay. What are you doing here?
I’m getting a tattoo, she said.
Right, I said.

66.

Like so many others, my eyes cannot blink when faced with a half-naked posterior.

I tried to see what the tattoo was.
What’s the tattoo? I asked.
It’s a heart, she said.
Can I see?
Yeah, sure, she said.
I looked at her ass.
The same ass, but tattooed now. The first heart was positioned more at the lower part of her back, but the new smaller one was shaping itself a little further down, right on the buttock.
Very nice, I said. What made you get those?
No big reason, said Lili. Just liked the idea of having tattoos, that’s all.
Why two of them?
Eh, I don’t know. Just bored, I suppose. Thought I’d get another one.

I don’t know what came over me. But anger swelled up. It was strange feeling such anger. It came from some foreign land and did not fit into the cultural tradition that was my normal feelings. I could not process the anger in my mind. I have never been able to process anger. That’s not meaning to say that anger is generally a governable emotion, but some people, no matter how upset, are able to articulate their anger. They manage to get their point across and the other parties involved in conversation can ascertain the level of anger being verbalised. Not me! I cannot articulate my anger. If I get angry, I should avoid being around people or just not say anything at all because the words will come out in disarray.
I think I was mostly angry with myself for freefalling into this situation.
What the hell was I doing there in that tattoo parlour with Lili and her tattooed ass? What had I got myself into? All because of a tattoo.

I don’t understand it, I said.
You don’t understand what? asked Lili.
These tattoos. What are they? I don’t understand.
There’s nothing to understand really. They’re just tattoos. You understand the concept of tattoos, don’t you? I should think you do if you’re living above a tattoo parlour.
I understand tattoos, yeah.
Then what don’t you understand about these tattoos?
I’m not sure. I don’t understand. You’re not the tattoo girl. You’re the sad Hawaiian girl.
I’m the what girl? What are you talking about?
What is this whole tattoo thing? What the fuck? Why tattoos?
I can get a tattoo if I want to get a tattoo. What the fuck is it to you?
It’s disgusting!
Hey, leave it out, pal, said Pearse.
What the hell is this? said Lili.
You tell me, Lili. I want to know what the hell this is. What…WHAT THE FUCK? You’re not the tattoo girl.
What do you mean by tattoo girl?
Hey, calm down now, both of you, said Pearse.
Are YOU FUCKING MAD, IS THAT IT?
No, I’m NOT FUCKING MAD, LILI. I’M FUCKING CONFUSED. HERE YOU ARE, HERE AM I, AND HERE’S THESE FUCKING TATTOOS ON YOUR ASS! WHAT THE FUCK? WHY?
Jesus, WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ABOUT? ARE YOU OFF YOUR TROLLEY NOW?
No, JUST WONDERING! IT HASN’T BEEN TOO LONG, YOU KNOW, SINCE YOUR SPEECH ABOUT US BEING RASH ABOUT THE WHOLE THING ETC. ABOUT US NOT BEING SUITED. YOU NEVER MENTIONED TATTOOS BEFORE. JUST WONDERING WHO COULD HAVE PUT SUCH A THING INTO YOUR HEAD.
What DO YOU MEAN? WHO COULD HAVE PUT IT INTO MY HEAD? IT WAS MY IDEA. OH, I KNOW. YOU’RE FISHING FOR INFO. YOU WANT TO KNOW IF I’M WITH SOMEONE ELSE, YEAH. WHAT IF I WAS? WHAT’S IT TO YOU? WHY SHOULD YOU EVEN CARE?
I don’t know. ‘IT’S THE THOUGHT OF HIM UNDRESSING YOU OR YOU UNDRESSING.’
You’re a FUCKING HEAD-THE-BALL, THAT’S WHAT! YOU’RE INSANE! Have you not got it out of your system yet, is that it? WE FINISHED UP! THIS IS MY LIFE NOW!
It’s OUT OF MY SYSTEM. LIFE GOES ON FOR SOME OF US, YES. JUST SOME OF US, MIND.
Well, obviously, JUST FOR SOME OF US. AND OBVIOUSLY NOT for some. OBVIOUSLY YOU’RE NOT ONE OF US.
I MAY NOT BE OVER YOU JUST YET! THAT’S A FUCKING POSSIBILITY ALRIGHT. SOMEBODY SHOOT ME FOR THAT!
You know, I WISH SOMEBODY WOULD DO JUST THAT!
Now, hold on there, love, said Pearse. There’s no need for that.
Leave it, Pearse. THAT’S ALL SHE CAN MUSTER! SHE’S HEARTLESS. SHE DOESN’T HAVE A SOUL.
Excuse ME? I DON’T HAVE A SOUL?
You don’t have a soul.
FUCK YOU! WHERE DO YOU GET OFF SAYING THAT?
I get off WHEN AND WHERE I LIKE! I’LL DO WHAT SUITS ME. JUST LIKE YOURSELF, LILI. YOU’RE USED TO DOING THINGS YOUR OWN WAY, AREN’T YOU? WHY THE FUCK DID YOU SAY I WAS STINKING?
WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT NOW?
You said I WAS STINKING. YOU SAID THAT WAS THE REASON FOR SPLITTING UP.
No, I NEVER. THAT WAS A JOKE. WHAT DRUGS ARE YOU TAKING?
Yeah, IT WAS PUT AS A JOKE, BUT WHAT THE FUCK? YOU DON’T SAY THINGS LIKE THAT. YOU’VE NO SOUL! WHERE IS MY BLONDE REDHEAD CD? YOU SOLD IT, DIDN’T YOU?
WHAT?
You SOLD IT! I SAW IT IN THE USED RECORD SHOP?
Yeah, I SOLD A FEW CD’S, THAT’S RIGHT. I DIDN’T KNOW I SOLD ANY OF YOURS. IT’S POSSIBLE. WHO GIVES A SHIT? IT’S DONE NOW.
I don’t BELIEVE THAT! THAT’S FUCKING DAMNING, LILI!
What the hell! YOU ABSOLUTE FREAK! I’LL TELL YOU WHY I SPLIT UP WITH YOU. DO YOU WANNA KNOW, YEAH?
Yes.
OKAY. RIGHT THEN. IT WAS BECAUSE YOU CAN’T DRIVE, YOU PRICK! IT WAS BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE A CAR, YOU ASSHOLE, THAT’S WHY!
Because I DON’T HAVE A CAR?
THAT’S IT! ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? YOU CAN’T DRIVE. THESE DAYS YOU’RE NOT ANYBODY IF YOU CAN’T DRIVE AS FAR AS ANYBODY IS CONCERNED these days.
WHERE ARE YOU LIVING? IN A FUCKING CALIFORNIAN TEEN DREAM?
I’m just LIVING IN THE MODERN WORLD.
Ah, yeah! YOU’RE SO CRASS AND PHONY!
FUCK OFF! AND YOU’RE SMALL. DID I SAY THAT? YOU’RE TOO SMALL.
Sorry?
YOU’RE WAY TOO SMALL.
Aw YEAH. PENIS, PENIS, PENIS. BALLS, BALLS, BALLS. THAT’S ALL YOU’RE AFTER! THAT’S YOUR CALLING!
I’m not TALKING ABOUT YOUR PENIS, YOU PRICK. YOU’RE JUST SHORT. YOU’RE JUST TOO SHORT.
What the FUCK? You’re the SAME SIZE AS ME!
YEAH, BUT IT’S DIFFERENT FOR ME. IT’S OKAY FOR GIRLS TO BE SHORTER THAN THE MEN. BUT IT’S FREAKY THE OTHER WAY ROUND.
But you’re the SAME FUCKING SIZE AS ME!
YOU’RE TOO SHORT. IT’S EMBARRASSING!
I don’t understand this. This is SHOCKING! WHAT SORT OF A PERSON ARE YOU? I TOLD YOU I LOVED YOU. I SAID YOUR NAME REPEATEDLY ALONG TO MUSIC BEING PLAYED ON A HARP.
What ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
IT’S SHOCKING! YOU’VE NO SOUL! HOW DO YOU COPE?
I’M DOING FINE, IF YOU WANNA KNOW. I told you before. THIS IS MY NEW LIFE.
What HAVE YOU GOT THEN? TATTOOS ON YOUR ASS? IS THAT YOUR NEW LIFE?
That’s MY NEW LIFE!
Tattoos! ON YOUR ASS?
Tattoos ON MY ASS, YES! JESUS!
Well, I’ll tell you my new life, WILL I? It goes like this: WALKING, THINKING, WORKING, SLEEPING, EATING…walking, thinking, working, sleeping…
What the FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? You’re CRAZY!
WALKING, THINKING, WORKING, SLEEPING…
What the HELL IS THIS?
Yeah, what the hell are you talking about? said Pearse. Don’t lose it on us altogether now! Don’t go off the bleedin’ wall completely!
To tell you honestly, I said. I’ve no idea WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.
You’re mad! said Lili. You’re a LOO-LAH!

67.

Like so many others, I left before things got worse. I hadn’t done myself any favours there. I must have sung a pretty obsessed number.
That’s shameful behaviour, pal, Pearse said, just before I left.
He was right.
Maybe Lili was right too. Maybe I was insane.
I walked the flooded streets for a good bit following the incident at the tattoo parlour. The flood was still going strong. Everywhere was murky and muddy and depressing.
I stopped at a little shop and bought a banana-flavoured milk drink. I drank it all down as soon as I got outside and it made me extremely sick. I ducked into an alleyway, thinking I was about to vomit. No vomit came though.
I continued through the swamp that was unrecognisable summer. The rain was coming down again in its drizzle character to slime the place up some more. It seemed to be getting slimier by the hour. I looked at my new watch, and looked around me, and realised that, yes, it had been slimier an hour ago.

68.

Like so many others, I wandered into a video shop as a means of escape from my lonely life. I chose a video shop instead of an inferior gallery. I quite like video shops. In a way, I find them superior to art galleries. They’re garish and high-spirited to me in a good way.
I looked through the sale videos. Maybe I would find an old film for a reasonable price that would zoom me back to a time in my life when I didn’t have to worry about things like girlfriends.
But that was difficult.
If the films didn’t remind me of Lili, they reminded me of Chupi.
These two girls had enchanted me so much in my lifetime that I was now imprisoned alongside them within my own memory index.

69.

Like so many others, I didn’t have a hat or a hood on my coat, so my head got really wet as the rain started to come down harder. I thought then that perhaps all of this was a sad Hawaii. Giant ponds of sludge everywhere. The cars splashing up on unfortunate pedestrians. The sky heavy with overcast. Maybe this was a sad Hawaii.
Maybe it is a description you can just produce it at the drop of a hat.
Maybe.
Even if it is, I still don’t understand it. I cannot understand how anything at all can be described as a like a sad Hawaii.

I was coming round some corner when I spotted Lili approaching.
She noticed me too.
We kept at the same speeds we were going as though we would just walk right past each other when the moment of meeting came.
But then I decided to slow down, and say sorry for the incident at the tattoo parlour.
She saw me reducing my speed, so she did the same.
I was glad to see that. It would have made me feel terrible if she had just walked right past.
I noticed the difference in her hair as she got closer.
It was a lot shaggier around the sides, not as sharply cut, fashioned to jack slightly at the front, and I became aware also that she had these very fine emerald ribbons shooting through the usual black. I wasn’t sure about it. It was very much a fashion magazine’s idea of a haircut, not hers. And that showed in the burden she bore from wearing it. She kept checking her reflection very nervously in the passing windows of parked cars.
Lili, ‘take me back again to your warm design’.

Ah-ha, I said, in the style of Alan Partridge, when we met.
She stopped and stood with me.
Hey, she said.
I was smiling like an idiot now.
She wasn’t smiling. She was nervous. I was happy she’d stopped. I must have acted like a lunatic before. It’s a wonder she stopped.
I’m sorry about all of that back there earlier, I said.
She nodded and kind of went, Uh-huh.
I don’t know what came over me, I grovelled. Maybe it was seeing you again, I’m not sure.
It’s okay, she said. Let’s forget about it.
Now she was smiling.
Yeah, I said. That would be great if we could just forget about it.
I was a bit tetchy myself anyway, she said then. I let myself get carried away.
Same here. I haven’t a clue what I said. I was just all confused and it came out wrong, all over the place. I must have sounded like a lunatic, did I?
Yeah, a bit, she laughed.
That’s the stigma I have, I suppose. Looney! I laughed too.
Yeah, don’t worry about it, she said, looking at her watch (the same watch, the same watch I depended on for nearly six months).
Well, I have to go now, she said. I’ve to be somewhere. I should have been there ages ago. I’m so late.
Yeah, I should be heading off myself.
It was time for permanency in the split.
Right, then, she said. So long! No more lunacy now, okay.
No more lunacy, no problem, I said, and then added: Oh, by the way, Lili, your hair looked way better when it wasn’t that way.
Smiling, she just waved.
Smiling, I turned.
That was that.

70.

Like so many endings, this one is neither happy nor sad. It’s a sleepy ending. The words are tired. They will soon be so tired that they will be no more on the page. Because the words are sleepy, they are neither happy nor sad, just very weary, and looking forward to getting some peace and rest.
I said at the beginning of this book,
This is what happens in May and June,
but I can’t be sure of that.
I can’t be sure this happens every May and June. How would I know, eh? This is what happened to me. This was my experience. I shouldn’t have said what happens in this book happens every May and June. I feel like now I’ve short-changed those of you who have read to the end. Some of you may have been expecting the definitive account of what happens every May and June, and that’s what I said I would deliver, but of course, I haven’t delivered that, because that’s impossible, with so many variations of experience out there.
I can feel the words slowing down now. Perhaps the words have been given a shot of some kind to dull the pain of the book and now they are passing along at a slow and sleepy pace.
But no, I think they’re just tired.
They long to conclude.
It has been a trying time.
And now they’re leaving.
Bedtime. Sentences are
becoming harder to form now as the words
retire slowly slowly and
start to wind down slower slower
lazy not at all spry at
so late an hour lazy words hardly any left now as they snooze away from the book like so
many 5. sleepy sleepy words passing
4. slowly
. 3. slowly
2.
Sleep.