You and Me--forever--Donnie

Donnie stretched himself out on the marital bed he’d once shared with Ann and stared at the ceiling. Waited for the pills to kick in. Smirnoff choked his breath and ran down his unshaved chin. He coughed after a further tilt of the bottle, but it helped them go down. He felt numbed but as if he could float away.  

He remembered standing tall as a soldier at their wedding. She mysterious, somehow, in net veil, and a white dress that bloomed behind her. Flinging a posy to her bridesmaid with the red hair. Hand in hand, when they took their vows. Ready to shake the world together. ‘Love, Honour, and Obey’. He with the outline of bumfluff moustache, and a smirk on his face. Her pregnant. He’d boasted to his mates, you don’t get on the train and get off at the next station, at Yoker. You go all the way to Queen Street. But his hand shook when he signed the register and he’d a bit of a bead in him, when they took the snap. That old saying lodged in his head. We were young enough to believe that if you put a penny in a jar every time you had sex—or make love as she would have it with the lights off—you’d still be fucking rich when you were old. Spirituality was just sex with your clothes on. We were all fucking animals, fucking rabbits. He just wasn’t getting enough. That’s what he kept telling himself. His mates were always at it, scoring every weekend, home and away, while he sat at home playing houses.  

The desolation in her eyes when she told him she knew he was having sex with a man, was in fact gay, crooked his knees and caught at his feet. Her eyes a soft blurry green with tears, the kind you could sink into and beg for forgiveness. The tenderness in her eyes glimmered, and on her face deepened. She wanted one word, a ‘No’. A deception. He was fluent in deception. Schooled in lies. His face hardened. He could at least have told her he wasn’t gay, but maybe bisexual. But that wouldn’t have made any difference. He knew the pennies in the jar had long ago run out. Some given away. Some stolen moments. How few were her tears? How dry his eyes? He’d gone to the last station and needed to step off the platform like a man. Pay whoever, whatever, was waiting to collect the fares. He’d need to have the courage to do it, do the right thing, not for himself, but for her and his daughter and son. The shame would kill them. He needed to be a man.

Sometimes he tried to lift his head, but his eyes turned inward. Floating and sinking. The misery inside lifted from him. Time disappeared into the shadow of darkness.

Donnie senior had told him everything he needed to know about women. He was a big man, six-foot four with a shiny Brylcreem quiff, broad shoulders and can-do attitude. He didn’t take no for an answer. Men were scared of him, and with good reason. He’d broken Donnie’s nose when he was still a teenager. It was a hard lesson. Don’t cross him. Don’t double-cross him. Donnie, junior, was almost as tall, but not as broad.

Venetian blinds throwing dusty bars across the window. In the grey light of gloaming the nylon quilt glowed like a stain wrapped around Da’s shrunken body.  He was dying of cancer. His eyes were a milky green and the smell made Donnie catch his breath as he waved him nearer. An empty ashtray beside his bed. No fags burning in it, filling the room with the stale taste of nicotine that clung to your clothes. Da watched him like a fisherman waiting for a tug on the line when he shuffled closer.

‘You need two things to catch a soul,’ he cackled. ‘A rod and bait. Fire grows with the burning. The old and unclean eaten in the flames reduced to clunkers. Dust to dust, we return, it needs fresh flesh. Fresh souls.  We all know what happened to Sodomites in Sodom and Gomorrah. Cleansed by fire from Heaven.’

A series of jumps, like the Stations of the Cross. He was wearing a Barbour jacket, giving it large with his mates, arms around each other. Car dealership. It was all about selling, not the product, but primarily yourself. That was the first lesson he’d quickly learned.  He’d forgotten about the drunk, glassy-eyed girl. Distractible as a child. She weaved along the road, waving at cars. He’d sneaked up behind her and demanded a kiss.

That other one that talked with a pronounced middle-class lisp, but had good suckable tits, and liked to do more than typing. She liked to read books, Meister Eichart. The Gulag Archipelago. George Orwell, 1984.  He gave her 1984, liked to finger her cunt at work. Get her to suck him and some of the guys off.  She didn’t know how to say no, after the first time. He’d followed her into the ladies. She peed herself, stupid cow.

A spectral quietness. Memories carved on the other side could be touched and felt. That girl at work, the junior, June. A tattoo of a galloping white unicorn covering her arm, up over the outside of her shoulder. Her lips were the colour of Marilyn Manson’s. She was an embarrassment. Fat as fuck. Black clothes, black hair that changed to red and often blue. Didn’t know how to make her mind up.  A gold piercing in her nose. She was brain dead that way. She took drugs, after all. Lived with her loser boyfriend who in his twenties. He’d thought she’d be up for a bit of fun. Sweet sixteen and all that.

He seemed to slide into that space between him and his Da. Standing and just staring at him. She did not speak or move. Her expression mirrored the hatred in her eyes. She knew all about him. ‘Your time has come,’ she said, in a normal enough voice. But there was something maniac about her laughter.

I’m dreaming thought Donnie and he shut his eyes, but he could still hear her. A pulse of panic rippling through his body, making his right eye twitch. He wanted to run. His flesh ran together and knees trembled, but he was fixed, like a moth pinned to a board.

He felt an arm around his stiff shoulders. His Da in his striped pyjamas, breathing stertorously. His flesh wasting away, his bones bumps in the pattern of cloth. Decay oozed from him, a presence more than a stench. He struck his wormy cold tongue in his ear. ‘You want me to suck your cock?’ he crowed. ‘Take your manhood... curse you for seven generations for being unclean, you fucking poof.’

That was what he’d said to Neil when he first started. ‘You’re a fucking poof.’

He’d a pale face and cocked a dark eyebrow. ‘Just a little,’ he’d laughed, glanced around the showroom at the BMW range like a kid that wasn’t willing to share. His eyes glimmered in dark humour, and he licked the lips of his wide mouth. ‘Just when you want me to be. After all, you’re the big boss.’

He was average height, thin, in an off-the-peg funeral suit. His eyes were a very dark blue. But under his words, there was a quietness and ease that would choke Donnie, could never hold.  It was obvious he was a natural salesman; he’d smash them all out of the park.

A tapping noise, the grey light of dawn. The spectral light again and a face in shadow. Donnie recognised it as his own.