Torn Water. John Lynch
take my leave, I tell my mother to look for me in the night sky for tonight a new star will be there. She is crying. I tell her I am taking the dark journey. I tell her I will be joining my father tonight in Ireland's heaven, where the rivers are green like our fields. Yes, I tell her tonight, I will be with my father in Heaven, two true Irishmen lived and died. She smiles, even though she is crying.
The barracks is quiet. I tell the desk sergeant that my mother's car has been stolen. He doesn't glance at me but looks at his watch as I talk. I wait until a couple of his colleagues join him and then I rip my gun from the shopping-bag I'm carrying. I enjoy the surprise that flits across their faces and the lost expressions in their eyes. I kill two of them before I am shot. Not a bad return. As life leaves my ripped body I see heaven hover before me like an vast alien spaceship. Manning its bridge and beckoning me aboard is my father, another true Irishman lived and died.
‘Get up … James, up.’
‘What?’
‘Up … Out of it and up.’
He opens his eyes. His mother is standing over him, barking at him. She is hung-over: he can tell by the sideways droop of her head.
‘Come on … Up. We have a visitor.’
‘Who?’
‘Sully.’
‘Shit.’
‘Hey … None of that … Two minutes … And up.’
She leaves the bedroom. He catches her taking a peek at herself in the wall mirror as she exits, running a moistened finger across her eyebrows. She has a thing about her eyebrows, always teasing and pulling at them, coaxing them into arced crescents. It revolts him. She revolts him. Sully revolts him.
Sully was his mother's on-off, come and go boyfriend. He arrived one May evening five years before, announced by the rasp of his van's exhaust as it growled along their estate. James had been in the front field, guillotining the tops of ragweed with his hands and feet, when he heard the vroom of Sully's arrival. He had run to the hedge that bordered the estate and arrived just in time to see Sully get out of the van and run the toe of each shiny shoe on the back of his flared trouser legs before he sauntered up to the front door. James had watched the flush come to his mother's cheek as she had greeted him, the shyness with which she had received the small box of chocolates, then offered her lips to him, closing her eyes in a way that James found devastating.
‘Hey, kid – Luke Sullivan. My friends call me Sully, but you can call me Luke.’
He can remember looking up into his cat-grin face, squinting into the blister of the afternoon sun as it peeped out from behind Sully's head. He can remember the nervous way the man had tousled his hair, and how his mother had glared at him from behind Sully's back.
‘Get up.’
Eventually, he jumps out of bed and dresses, pulling on his jeans over his pyjama bottoms, cursing softly in the cold air. He can hear their giggles down on the pathway leading up to the front house.
‘Come on and see what Sully has brought us.’
Sully was back with his maudlin country music and his taunting smile. Crawling back to terrorise his mother once more, as he always has, as it seems he always will.
‘James, come and see,’ his mother shouts. She sounds like a fishwife, her voice cutting through the still morning air.
What had he brought this time? What peace-offering was he laying at her feet? Once it had been bricks freshly lifted from a building site he was working on. He had proudly shown them to James, saying that he was going to build his mother ‘the finest and securest garden shed known to man’. Another time it was the carcass of a freshly killed pig, which he had hung proudly from a hook in the garage, saying it was a neighbour's and that it had strayed out on to a busy road. He said that it had been looked after like a child when alive and that it would melt in their mouths. His mother screamed when she saw it, throwing her hands to her face and running for the house.
He thuds his way down the stairs and steps out of the front door, working up a large fist of spit in his mouth, hawking it deep from within his throat, then launching it just like the lorry driver had done the week before.
‘Look! Look, Jimmy – oh, please, don't do that. You're not an animal.’
No, but Sully is. He looks at them both. They look like they're posing for a photograph. On the pathway lies a huge mound of logs. It reminds him of a large goat dropping. His mother stands beside Sully, as if she has just won a raffle. So that was it, that was his penance: a mound of wet, mouldy logs.
‘Hi, kid. Long time no see,’ Sully says.
‘For fuck's sake.’ He says it quietly as he turns to go back in.
‘What did you say?’ his mother asks.
‘What?’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Don't be disrespectful.’
‘He says it.’
‘He's an adult. He can use those words.’
‘Leave him be, Ann,’ Sully says.
Before Sully there had been other men. James noticed that they all had the same tight force in their eyes. Some stayed longer than others, and some were so brief that their faces melted quickly from memory like a lantern lighting a man's way home slowly being swallowed by blackness.
He can remember looking up into each new face, his eyes narrowed in distress as yet another stranger tried to woo him. Sometimes James believes he dreamed some of them, but he knows this was not the case.
He remembers being in bed one night. He woke and felt the presence of someone sitting at the end of it. He can remember his body freezing in a spasm of fear. The smell of cheap whisky filled the room, and the pale sickly scent of aftershave.
It was a builder his mother had met a few weeks before. A large shaven-headed man, who didn't smile but viewed the world with thin-lipped distrust. When he had been introduced to James he had bent down stiffly extending his hand, his scalp pitted and cracked with scars. His eyes were large and seemed to bore straight into James. He didn't like the man. He didn't like the way he shadowed his mother as if she was a lassoed calf, following her about the house, watching every move she made. His left arm was covered in tattoos, deep blue-green drawings of half-clad women, their cartoon bodies pouting from the bristle of his arm. He frightened James, and when he was in their house there seemed nowhere to escape to, because he seemed to fill every part of it.
They had brought James with them to the local working-man's club earlier that night. He can remember riding in the back seat of the builder's Ford Granada. The seats smelt musty and were covered with dog-hair, and the ashtray in the well between the two seats was full of mint-humbug wrappers. The journey seethed with silence, punctuated only by the squeak of the passenger seat's visor as his mother pulled it down to check her makeup in the mirror.
Excitement scurried in his stomach as he looked forward to his evening at the club. His mother had told him earlier that the only reason they were bringing him was that she couldn't find a babysitter and he was too young to be left on his own.
He can remember the layers of smoke that hung in the air, the cigarette butts and the dried circles of spit dotting the floor like ringworm rounds. It was a large cavernous room with long runs of fluorescent lighting, filled with steel-tube chairs. Groups of drinkers sat together, ringed by empty and half-empty glasses. They were mostly men, their nicotine fingers jabbing the air like small yellow stems.
Young men carried laden trays of drinks to and fro, their slim hips slipping expertly between cluttered tables.