Love Story 19

I piled my shirt and trousers on the chair beside the window and crept shivering into bed with my socks on. Tossed and turned. Yawned, throwing my body a heavy hint that I was sleep deprived.  I wanted to dive into sleep. Fall away from myself like a drunk staggering home and disappearing into a hedge. A fuck you to cooing birds or people looking for me or expecting too much. I found a long hair that must have been Ali’s, but studied it just to make sure it wasn’t a giant spider’s leg. I could sleep with arachnids, but couldn’t sleep with bits of her in bed with me. Jumped up to check the rest of the bed for any other foreign objects she’d left and remembered the way she was always slyly touching me. Plucking and parting her legs for display. Slipping a finger into her mouth and poking and probed herself, without shame, like a bitch on heat. I smelled more than her sweat and I’d need to change the sheets, but I’d have to wait until morning, but I couldn’t wait.

I touched myself, wanked myself, but I couldn’t get lost in the same way Ali could. I was resigned to disgust and disappointment. Lay back on the pillow and pulled the covers like Ali’s unpainted shroud over my body. I traced the maps of distemper on the ceiling. Knew that Mum would go to bed soon and I could get up and steal on of her fags and light up. Sat up. Flung my legs over the bed. Impatient for her to go to bed. More impatient morning and everything to be back to normal.

That was when it struck me, I’d be better off dead. Nobody would miss me much. It would be all over and done with. Mrs Connolly might even feel sorry for me. Ali would feel sorry for herself, but the baby would have no dad. That was what worried me. But then figured with a dad like me it wouldn’t be much of a loss. I wasn’t sure how I’d do it and tried to imagine something painless like sleep. But I couldn’t sleep. Then I must have dozed off, waiting to hear mum’s footsteps in the lobby.

‘Thank God for his tender mercies’ said Wormwood.

I didn’t expect hell to be in a factory, but I guessed it made sense. Hell could be overtime in a job you hated. Trying to finish on time when there was no time. Workers all around doing a job they hated were a blur of gritty faces among dissolved brickwork, masonry and charred wood. A fiery constituent of a smell like domestic gas seeping up from broken pipes. Stomach churning and the explosive stink of violent death and clouds of steam.     

‘I liked to gie some folk a fair crack of the whip,’ said Wormwood. ‘A ten page, laminated, stay-of-out-hell plan with wee roses around the edges. And the picture of a Saint nobody’s ever heard of looking glum, but determined to stay that way. It’s like aromatherapy a matter of belief. Or like the weather. It’s always weathery somewhere. If we could just cut out the bullshit. It’s either God or the Devil. Some arsehole shrieking there must be a third way.

We should make it easier to understand. Make a ten-point-bullet perfection plan, based on complaints from the past. Such as I don’t think Adam should have let Eve do that. It’s gross negligence or paternalism of the most extreme kind.

Excuse me, I was there. Don’t vent and make drunken promises when you think nobody is looking and prepare the hair shirt for me. Only satisfied when you’ve worked yourself up to convince yourself you no longer felt guilt about not feeling guilty.

A message to you. Fuck you!

You don’t cure hell by calling it a shitehole, and saying it’s your own fault. It’s not underfunded council housing. No wonder you were bullied at school fuckface. And that wasn’t my fault either.

It should be illegal to blame everything on the devil, as it is in most sensible Nordic countries.

You’d think that it would make a big difference in their petty lives to those that make all the complaints when I turn up for a get-together and a little natter.

I was hoping we could cut out the small talk. Cause I can see how people are every day. All the time. I know what they really plan to do when they go on holiday. Sodom and Gomorrah.

All the holiday chatter. Your dick stays rock hard for years. And let’s not be racist. If you don’t mind a blast of heat, there’s no immigrant beggars to bother you, no midges or mosquitoes—a near Nazi paradise—everybody the same ash colour.

I guess they don’t get to meet many true celebrities on a meet-and-greet tour of self-possessed, over-possessed wankers.

There’ll be no pitiful bantering. None of the classic zingers, one-liners, I’d heard millennium ago before speech bubbles were dug out of the bodies of Piltdown man. No Kodaks and happy pictures of us standing before the barbecue.

But no, they exist on a different plane. When you visit, they insist on the complete meltdown.

Perhaps they believe that morale and morality are somehow connected. Hell is like running an Early Assessment Play Centre and if we’d just buck up our ideas and stop whinging we’d be fine. They should see the bags under my eyes.

Perhaps I should get another key cut, when I’m not visiting, they can drop in? Sometime I’m too good for my own good. Beggars are never choosers. But I’m sure I’ll see them soon enough. We can have a longer chat over coco and have a little more than shut eye.

I’m sure we can slink off somewhere quiet and work on the moral of their story. No need for shyness or microbiology to come between us. We’ll have enough time to do some star-gazing.  But I’d be hoping it wouldn’t get petty. Claims of first dibs on real estate cause you’d seen it first with visions of sun-dried tomatoes on the hell-mouth, window sill. No code of honour for beginners.

But there is an asking price. A simple song. Stripped of all so-called accomplishments, let me hear your soul sing. Hell is other singers. But you’ll hear my song in full.’