if the head had it

counting down

V

If the head had ever had it, now it had gone. Shaping west, making out with anything that comes its way, scrambled Fray Bentos aerial, dog food brain. Made my money in cool Velcro pants that’d hug a greyhound tight, chased rabbits round and round, back to front, y oh why am I so shy? See him then, dwarf’s cap, a tight mince-pimp-walk like he’s just secreted a foil capsule up his choke and is squeezing his cheeks to keep it from falling; one eye out for the bluebottles, one eye out for a score.

‘Please, I’m all at sea, I need to land!’

‘Go, fetch!’ and he chucks it over the churchyard wall.

Over I follow, scrabbling by a gravestone and digging around the dead, my mind about to spurt.

Father Derek appears. He senses my urgency: ‘God has plans for you, Michael. God has plans for me. God has plans for everyone.’

‘A planner, this God, is he?’

‘He is.’

‘That’s it?’

‘It is.’

I see it poking from under his shoe.

‘God bless you, Father.’

Up the steps to the steeple I go, knees to elbows, lungs emptying, heart poking through the chest bone, horizons all merging at the top. Sweet unwrap; sour musk tongue, head expanding – botulism from an arse’s arse, my hands join in prayer, a diver’s poise, ground swelling up and body going down.

 ‘Some come here and jump like Eddie the Eagle, making spectacles of themselves,’ is all Father Derek will say.

‘Eddie the Eagle wore glasses,’ I might reply if I were still able to. Poor calculation for a jumper though: Eddie never reached enough speed for lift off and his bulk always dragged him down.

‘God has plans for you,’ Father Derek had said.

And that made no sense at all.

*

Passing over the rooftops, pink-grey grime of ridged Toblerone, chimneystacks belching out reclaimed pallet fumes. Mum’s house sits silent, a fog of doom, her black cloud engulfing the kitchen, Guinness pinafore bustling, the toucan cast out of paradise to crumple at her lap as she gets to polishing, casting out demons: her son, a jumper, a bailer out:

‘There’s a priest, a rabbi, an imam and a junkie standing together in a hot air balloon. The balloon is falling to the ground. One has to agree to jump to save the others. The religious men start praying.

“I’ll get my needle,” says the junkie.

”No!” the religious men shout but too late, no calculation needed and the balloon plummets to the ground.’

The whistle on the kettle screeches. Father Derek arrives to offer prayer, his dark figure looming on the glass panel of the front door, and Mum screams as if she’s seen a ghost.

*

The first time was with Katherine, artistic bohemian Katherine from the other side. Her father was an architect, her mother an art teacher, fragrant stock to a lowlife like me. A newbie at university studying maths, a geek in every sense from my home-knit Feargal Sharkey cardigans to my market-stall trainers, I was ripe for sabotage. Katherine wore cool black polo necks, smoked white filtered Kents and blew out circles above my head to tighten the noose, to rein me in. When she unfolded a pair of black silk pants from her bag, a syringe rolled out onto the mattress between us. She’d spotted the flaw, smelled desperation through the cracks, and knew there’d be no hesitation.

*

The funeral is underway, and my brother Aiden is stalling: ‘Michael, Michael, what can you say about Michael?’

Father Derek shrugs his shoulders as if to say ‘don’t expect me to answer that!’ Aiden is struggling because in common with practically every one else in this sorry congregation, he hasn’t seen me in years. Not only that but he’d never forgiven me for plaguing Mum when things had got rough, borrowing and stealing from her to pay a debt, to keep alive on the streets, to keep things going. Hypocrite that he is, with his fine infidelity suit, the serial womaniser with the brood safely tucked in at home, flaunting his pitiful giblet to any woman he could pass muster with.

‘Michael was a beautiful young boy, who was good at maths but sadly lost his way, God rest his soul. May he find peace and salvation for his sins.’

Is that it? Is that the best he can do? The mood overall is tense rather than sad. There is some general sobbing and more and more chair scraping. People want out.  Mum looks like a cadaver, the flinty cheekbones protruding under her eyes arched like chicken wings, her irises exploding bloodshot from tiny strained vessels into the white of her eyes. She looks like a junkie too now.

*

Mum in the cold clasp drape of her bed, eyes up to the cross. I blow low notes through the tiny hairs in the bassoon of her ear and she responds with a faint smile and sighs.

‘Is that you?’ she asks, and tries to sleep in case she finds me there.

I think of smothering, an act of kindness, but no, I fill her glass by the bed for her to put her dentures. They drop in with a fixed grin and small bubbles chase up to the rim. I kiss her on the cheek, and her eyes close.

In her sleep I am washed clean, and she is rocking me on her knees. Numbers silenced in my head for a moment, I cling on and try not to fall.

IV

1975, the year of being born, and me not yet fourteen, in a pair of coach seats to my own, near the back away from the dark lords and dusky maidens upfront – the brothers and nuns – and two up from the VIP sofa rear, the cool kids, their piss awful laughs and catcalling. An away-day escape to the jaunty seaside, mixing up hormones, tangling barbed wire braces, gum, stutter and smarting cheeks with the local convent girls.

Aiden is back there with tarty Frances, fingering away under her satchel, discreetly poised over her ugly lampshade gingham skirt. She’s at it too and he makes a low moan when he comes – then a handy tissue bound in gents fluid tossed (!) towards the back of Kevin Connor’s head, miraculously fixing onto his trailing locks – and Aiden tells me later that Frances holds onto his prick like no other. I think of a girl’s fingers squeezing around a racing handlebar and get a slightly sick feeling deep inside the holy pit.

‘Are you children behaving?’ shouts a Brother, too lazy or too frightened to venture to the back.

‘All Hunky Dory,’ yells a boy with a rebel-tinge of henna to his spike-top.

‘No sticky fingers round here, Bro,’ says Aiden softly enough, so only Frances and his friends hear.

The hyena giggles start quiet at first, then pump up to bursting, but before madness breaks out and revolution hits the air, they artfully puncture things, hiss it all out, hot and wild eyed, gasping like they’ve stepped out of a furnace. Frances lets go a stunted scream, finally faking her arrival: ‘took your time, Aiden,’ she says, punching him on the arm, then re-arranging her skirt into an innocent pose, satchel returned to the floor by her feet.

I recite multiplication tables in my head, temples numbing out the deluge of unwanted sounds, numbers way beyond the yellowed sweaty school texts: 22×24 is 528, 23×24 is 552, 24x 24 is 576, yes, oh, fucking yes!!!

From the top of the town, the sea arrives onto the coach window, framed beside the hairy-man driver, a carpet of cool, a flagrant call to undress; I hope we don’t get to see his gorilla arse and wild garden back parting the waves.

We straggle onto the pebbly beach, each group finding a rock to collect behind, to undress, fleeting hands sneaking modesty towels (‘too small, Ma, I told you it was too small’) away from skinny blue-white chicken flesh:

‘Do that that to me again you feck, and I’ll skin you of all your skin!

‘That makes no fucking sense, Jon, and you know it.’

‘Shit off or I’ll shit on you!’

‘That’s better, but you’ve a way to go before anyone could call you a poet.’

I find a rock of my own and start counting down numbers in elevens until it’s time to go: 233,000, 232,989, 232,978, all the while not being able to keep my eyes off the sea, its swirl, rise and fall; the grating shingle pull back, the letting go; patterns forming further out, globs and gloops, bubbles popping onto the surface; the draw under.

Soon enough the weakening sun rots amongst a mass of grey sweltering clouds. We congregate under a tin roof shelter, assemble for foul smelling sandwiches, fish paste as pink as Angel Delight. The milk is sour as sick but we drink it anyway. The Brothers look troubled in their inappropriate thick clothes, like bachelor herdsman driven out for the yearly pull, practising lines on each other; nuns huddled up too close in the cramped shelter, agitating towards the saviour tea flask for another sup.

‘You look nice in that horsehair vest, David,’

‘Thank you, Tom, you look very nice too, a grey tank-top suits you. And isn’t it nice weather we’ve been having, Sister Anne?’

Blood violates her cheeks, a faint animal sound emitted through dry untouched lips; it may be a response or a cry for help.

Sister Bernadette steps into the breech: ‘And isn’t tea always welcome on a day like this.’

A murmur of approval, an away-day Amen.

*

At the end of the pier is a concrete tower, a small derelict lighthouse. It’s fenced off by barbed wire, with a large sign saying ‘DANGER, DO NOT ENTER’, and some nut job has scrawled in red-blood-ink under: ‘Enter and you will surely die. Suiciders welcome.’

A group of lads, Aiden, naturally, now disentangled from Frances’s grip, have left the watchful eyes of the Brothers and made their way through a gap in the fence and gone inside. I follow up damp winding stairs. We meet on a small metal balcony at the top. A flimsy rusty railing holds us from the sea, circling way down below.

‘Jesus, Aiden, Mad Michael has followed us.’

‘Piss off, Michael,’ says Aiden.

I stare through them, eyes to the horizon

‘Mental boy, you’re not wanted,’ says one of the others, pushing me in the chest.

‘Leave him alone,’ says Aiden.

They let me be, and start discussing what order they should jump in. Pat, the one who called me Mad Michael, says he’ll go first. Obviously, they all want to go first but after a while they agree and he gets himself ready, the railing trembling as he climbs onto it. He tries to compose himself at the edge, taking in deep breaths, his body teetering, arching forward, the sea looming below. He’s like that for at least a minute.

‘Go on, Pat, get on with it, for fuck’s sake!’

‘I am, I am, just don’t rush me.’

‘Ha ha, his legs are shaking.’

‘Like Elvis, whoa, whoa.’

‘Shut up, will you!’

‘Jump then, you faggot.’

The boys form a chorus: ‘jump! Jump! Jump!’

‘I can’t, I can’t!’

‘You’re a frozen bloody chicken, Pat,’ says Aiden. ‘Get down’.’

Pat climbs down and Aiden takes his place.

‘Jump! Jump! Jump!’

‘Fuck this, lads,’ says Aiden after a few moments swaying at the railing.

Another boy tries. Same thing.

As he gets down, I jump up onto the railing, glance down at the sea, and go. All speeded up. The rush as I drop, breaths emptied out, my heart so heavy, it’s like it’s slipped down my chest and into my legs, and then a smack as I hit the surface of the water, a sheet of metal, which jars my body, re-aligning things so I can break through. I feel my left leg ripped sideways as if a Great White has grabbed it.  I go under.

III

Big as the house he set himself against, Dad’s bullish shoulders heaving down, the hammer striking the wall. Dust, plumes of brick ash, a one-man demolition, and the wall came crashing down. If he whacked you, you were winded for hours, flesh smarted and glowing, a bruise spreading under the skin, a sulphurous flower opening out, poisoning the bloodstream, his anger spreading through you.

Six weeks before the seaside sortie, and Mum is pushing me towards the bed in the far corner of the ward, the scent of decay and old man piss flooding the nostrils, Dad’s death trolley waiting to take him away. Only Dad is 52. Shrunken, corpse-like apart from the sorry groan to greet me, an outstretched arm, emaciated and gleaming with sweat, his anchor tattoo shrivelled in the creases of his skin.

‘Don’t smoke, son,’ he says. ‘It’ll rip you.’ He pinches my hand, an echo of his force reduced into something singular and unmanly. He winces and points to the drip by the bed.  ‘Hit the button, please,’ he says, a formal curtsey I’d never heard him use before. And he says it again: ‘Please, son. Please!’

I do as he asks and the morphine plops down the line and into his vein.

‘More, he says. ‘But don’t let Nurse Ratched see.’

Mum arrives with a carrier bag and sits by his bed. ‘I’ve bought some rhubarb and some apples.’

‘For the love of God, woman, I don’t want it. None of it.’

I hit the button and after a moment he sighs and relaxes back into the pillows, his face beatific and wan, the trace of a smile

‘It’s an air bed,’ Mum says. ‘It’s just as well he can’t smoke anymore.’

Three weeks later he was gone. Ashed. Dusted away.

*

After the dive, I was rescued by a fishing boat, heaved in unconscious. When I woke in hospital, the pain was ballistic but I knew a cure. The drip was attached and screams abated, all those sums, numbers melting away. A pale mist descending onto my eyelids, an icy rush into the vein, a moment of nausea I’d come to know well, learn to push through, and then this new delicious feeling, a cossetted weight in and around me, cocooned, released from harm and responsibility.

The ward radio is on. ‘Thank you for the music, for giving it to me’.

‘Abba, I should hate Abba, but fuck it, they’re lovely. Clean and modern, booted out in whites and turtlenecks like they’re living the Space Age: lovely.’

‘They often talk like this on the drip,’ a nurse tells Mum.

‘Will he be okay?’ Mum asks, the bag of old rhubarb and apples by her feet.

‘Fuck, yeah,’ I say.

‘Michael, don’t you dare speak like that. Not even when you’re ill.’

My leg is cast as Tutankhamen, mummified and snow white. Soon Aiden comes in and draws a cock and balls and his idea of a vagina, hormonal witless hieroglyphics, and I’ll write the names Frida and Benny in unfamiliar girlie bubble writing beside. But mostly I sleep, and pretend to be asleep when Aiden and Mum are around, sink into the mattress, slip slowly under, swim down the depths, thrilling underwater lagoons, pearl roof caves, coral cathedrals, find sanctuary with a Terry Wogan priest in an aqualung, who makes the sign of a cross with a finger through the water.

‘Waterloo: a famous battle between the English and the French? Or water loo, a form of improvised sea toilet – you can tell they’re releasing when they suddenly stand still, eyes to the horizon and pretend they’re thinking something profound – or the name of a song written for Eurovision by the popular Swedish pop group, Abba?”

‘Would I be right in saying it’s the name of a song written for Eurovision by the lovely Swedish pop group, Abba?’

‘Lovely is right, Mad Michael, you have won – ‘ 

 ‘Push the buzzer, Terry.’

And before the nurse comes running, another dose, precise and perfect, is released.

Lovely. Just lovely.

II

Once Katherine glowed, ‘a gift to the dark’ people used to say. After years on the street, any glow had dimmed. Best viewed in shadow, stressed and skeletal, ravaged like a street cat, missing teeth, clumps of hair ripped out, eyes blazing and approaching any man in the street that has a pulse.

‘Five for a blow job!’

‘I’m not going to give you a blow job.’

‘What? No, don’t be funny, please. Come on, my arse could be yours for ten, do anything for as long as you like.’

‘You don’t have an arse, you skinny bitch.’

If he carried on, I’d step out of a doorway and give him a slap: ‘run, student boy or the ghost of her teeth will chase you around town and bite off your cock!’

‘My knight in shining armour but you should just fuck off, he would have given in.’

‘Nah, don’t think so, Kat, you were barking up the wrong tree there.’

‘Woof, fucking woof!’

‘Come on, we can share.’

‘You won’t want me to do anything?’

‘Damn right, but some peace and quiet would be nice.’

We kissed, her mouth sucking me in, but if I closed my eyes her lips felt full again, tongue tipping, lightly touching where once were teeth, that tingle through my body again.

We shared a squat, damp as a paddy field, the acid smell of vomit, always losing our sleeping bags so eventually we didn’t bother. I came down with pneumonia so badly that I ended up in hospital, and when I was kicked out after two weeks, Katherine was gone.

Rumour on the street was that her parents had mounted a rescue. I always thought she’d come back, but as years passed, no sight or sound. Then, one day, I saw her across the road, kitted out like a de-mobbed nun on her first weekend away, shapeless in a flowery skirt and frilly blouse, an auntie’s wig up top, and a set of dentures that would grace a small horse.

‘Kat,’ I shouted but she didn’t so much as look up.

For good measure, an elderly couple – the retired architect and art teacher I’m guessing – caught up with her and pulled her along.

A few days later she came and begged me to help her get away.

We scored just like the old days but I hadn’t taken into account how clean she’d become. A miscalculation, and it took her away for good, eyes up to the night sky, filling with dark; the needle traces, apart from the latest, magically disappeared in the snow of her arms, her gleaming white falsies meeting in a fabulous unintentional grin.

I

After she went and died, I took up bothering Father Derek. Not the most patient of men, easily given to cliché, but at least he tried.

 ‘God has plans for you!’ he said.

I really should have asked what he meant. And a better man than me might have jumped but I actually tripped and fell. Statistics could have taken that into account and helped lessen the load.

Lying on Mum’s lap, the numbers in my head re-surface, start to count me down, 5-4-3-2-1, and I want to shout out ‘Thunderbirds’ but I’m already gone.

*

if the head had it was published in 2022’s autumn’s issue of the American journal Exacting Clam https://www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-6-autumn-2022/