Atlas, Broken

by Jeremy Tyrrell

up, “That's fantastic! What else? What else?”

  Slumping into a chair, he brooded for a good while. His stomach, still on the bench, would have to wait for a bit. He was in too much of a mood to make any repairs.

  No more would he smell the rains of summer. Visiting the beach, with salt water and fish and chips and vinegar and dead seals, would lack the amusement it once did.

  He slumped a bit more.

  Whether milk was good or sour, he couldn't tell. He wouldn't be able to smell the hops in beer, or the roast of a coffee. Or the scent of Loretta.

  The problem with chairs, he realised, is that they only allow a certain amount of slumping.

  He looked at his stained tee-shirt. There was no getting away from it. He had to do something to fix it. Sitting around moping wasn't going to help. He had to soldier on.

  Honestly, he wasn't sure exactly how to tackle it. The stomach was all wobbly and squishy. Glue might not be the best method. Sure, it would hold it in place for a bit, while he came up with something better, something more permanent. He scratched his head a little in thought.

  Nothing really came to him, so he scratched a little more.

  A corset. Well, not a corset exactly, but something like it would be fine. It needed to fit around his midriff rightly and tightly. It needed to be flexible, or he wouldn't be able to bend. It needed to allow him to breathe. It needed to be unaffected by water.

  Probably most importantly, though, it needed to be worn under clothes. The last thing he needed was a bunch of nosy interrogators at work, plying him with questions about his gut. The less obvious he could make it, the better.

  He scratched a little harder. This was going to take some work. The rags and oily cloths that were in the rag-bag would simply not do. They were smelly. They were old. With the stresses of him flexing, they would certainly tear apart.

  He scratched until it hurt.

  Rope. Rope was a good idea. It would certainly hold him in, all the bits and pieces. But it was bulky. And it wasn't flexible, not if it pulled taut. He imagined that if he adjusted it to be tight when his lungs were full, the whole contraption would be slack when he exhaled. Similarly, if he tightened it when he exhaled, he would find it too hard to breathe.

  His finger scratched in a fury, burrowing a hole through his skull, down into his brain. He struck an idea. The timing could have been coincidence, or it could have been that his finger probed some vital part of the cortex in its scraping. Either way, an idea was an idea.

  He stopped scratching, pulled his finger out of his skull and swore at the mess on the end. Without a proper place to scratch, he would be sure miss out on ideas, and with the thin hole in his head, they might just leak out. He hurriedly stuffed the end of a rag into the hole to keep his idea where it was, holding onto it before it escaped.

  “Occy straps,” he said to himself, repeating it over and over so as to keep it fresh, “Occy straps. Occy straps. Where the heck did I stick them? Occy straps. They've got to be around here somewhere. I had a whole packet of them. A whole, bloody packet.”

  Cupboard after drawer after shelf yielded nothing. It wasn't until he reached the spark-plugs that he spied the tell-tale hook of a strap poking out the top of a bag a little overhead.

  “Aha!” he cried, moving a bundle of used headlight bulbs out of the way and pulling the bag out, “Aha! There you are. I knew I had a bag-o-bungees.”

  He tested the bungee cords for elasticity. Satisfied, he took the bag back to the bench, applied a little glue to his belly and fitted it about right. Next he hooked two occy straps together and wrapped them around his waist, holding his bump on nicely. With the primary hooks in place, he wrapped another couple of pairs in a criss-cross fashion, up to his ribs and down to his groin, hooking them securely to each other.

  “There. Wait, wait, that's a bit tight.”

  The leads were a bit snug, so he swapped a couple over with a different pair from the bag. Running his finger around the inside, he worked the cables a bit to get them comfortable, then stood in front of an old mirror in the corner to view the result.

  “Not bad. Not bad. Just wear a baggy shirt and I'm done.”

  “Henry? Henry? Are you back? Who are you talking to, Hon?” Loretta called out from the backyard.

  Henry slumped. What now?

  “Eh?”

  “Who are you talking to? Is there someone on the phone? Is it about the merger?”

  “No, dear. Just talking to myself,” he called back.

  “Figures. When are you going to clean up in there? That place is a tip!”

  “It's fine just the way it is!”

  “It's a bloody mess!”

  Henry looked around where he was standing. With all the searching he had removed a lot of items from their homes on the shelves and in the cupboards. There was a dark stain on the bench where he had rested his stomach. The rag in his head was dripping a steady pattern of flax coloured goo on the ground.

  “Yeah. It sort of is,” he admitted, closing up and turning the light off, shuffling into the backyard, “One day. One day I'll get to it, alright?”

  “How about now?”

  “I'm a bit tired now. I only just got my stomach back on.”

  “It's on now,” she pointed out, “So what else is stopping you?”

  “I'm tired, alright?”

  “You're always tired. That's your excuse for everything!” she cried, “Do you want to stay in bed all day?”

  He smiled, “I wouldn't mind giving it a try!”

  “Useless lump!”

  “Look, I've had a really hard trot recently, can you just – just back off for a second.”

  “If I didn't push you, you would stay in bed all day.”

  “Humph.”

  Henry considered the extraordinary prospect of a day without responsibilities, a day where he was free to do whatever he wanted to do. What would he do with such a day? What could he get up to?

  His mind was blank. It had been so long since Henry had even bothered to think about what he might do. It had been an age. A quick look into his pile of dreams found nothing but a few cobwebs and an earwig.

  “What the Hell do you have hanging out of your head?” Loretta asked, breaking his thoughts, “Is that a rag?”

  “I scratched a hole in my head.”

  “How?”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Pfft. Looks like you weren't thinking.”

  “I have to scratch something when I think! And you won't let me grow a beard.”

  “So scratch your balls!”

  “They're worn them away, Loretta! They've been scratched off. There's nothing left down there.”

  Loretta threw her hands up, “So you've gone and made a sodding great big hole in your head. Fantastic. What will the Thompsons think?”

  “I don't give a rat's arse what the Thompsons think!”

  She leaned forward, “And what's with your hand? Haven't you fixed that yet?”

  “It's almost fixed.”

  “It's grey.”

  “I've been busy.”

  “It's starting to smell, Henry!”

  “I can't tell.”

  “Or you just don't care. I'm going inside. I'm getting bitten by mosquitoes out here.”

  Henry was left outside, looking up at the dull clouds that blocked out the moon.

  Junk

  Walking was difficult with the occy straps on. They worked a treat, but they were riding up a bit, digging into his side and groin, and the hooks rubbed on his ribs. His leg dragged behind him, barely supporting his weight. He didn't care to think how he would shower, or get changed, or sleep. That would be a problem for the future, not now.

  Now he needed a serious sit down and a beer, coupled with five minutes of silence. No coffee. No nagging. No television or phones or anything.

  He bumbled through the fly-screen door, shambling his way over to the beckoning fridge. He caught Timothy on the way back to the lounge.

  “H
ey, Tim.”

  “Hey, Dad,” he replied, “I died.”

  “You what?”

  “I died. The round'll go for another couple of minutes. Got fragged in the first few seconds. The other guy's a gun.”

  “Ah. Right. A game, right?”

  “Just getting a coffee.”

  “A coffee? What are you drinking coffee at your age for?”

  “I'm fourteen, Dad, I'm old enough.”

  “Yeah, sure, but that's not a reason. Take it from me: you've got all the time in the world to drink coffee. You're better off sticking to tea or water.”

  “Or beer?” he asked hopefully.

  “No,” Henry said, “No beer. This stuff'll kill you.”

  “You drink it.”

  “Not lately. Look, do your old man a favour, will you? Don't grow up too quickly, yeah?”

  “Sure,” Tim said, boiling the kettle, “Whatever.”

  “So how's school?”

  Tim shrugged, “Boring. Dave got a new Play Station. He's got the new controller and everything. It's really cool –”

  “That's not school.”

  “That's what we talk about at school.”

  “What about science and maths and stuff?”

  Tim shrugged, poured the water on his coffee and stirred. He pointed to Henry's shirt.

  “You've got something coming through,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah. Stomach dropped out. Just happened before when I dropped Pea off, you know, so I got some occy straps and fixed it around like this –”

  “Cool story, Dad,” Tim called out, skipping back to his room, “Needs more dragons!”

  Well, that was interaction. Of a sort. Kind of.

  “Heck,” Henry said to himself, “There were whole sentences.”

  He remembered, as he picked up his cold can and moved to the lounge, how so long ago he had waited for Timothy to speak. Pea, they used to joke, was doing all the talking for him