Thick and Fast

by Tommy Dakar

bungalow, which although in urgent need of repair was still clearly inhabited, with flower pots on the porch and clean curtains hanging at the windows. The front door swung open, and Spotty gestured to Bro to make it quick.

  Inside it was dark, but the heat had worked its way through the thin walls and hung in the air like pending doom. Ambrose caught a glimpse of a bedroom as he walked along the corridor. It was a woman’s room, he knew, far too tidy and adorned to have been Spotty’s. He passed on into the dining room cum kitchen.

  ‘This is Myra’s place. She’s...’

  He winked at Bro.

  ’… a friend of a friend. Great kid. A sensitive soul.’

  By which he meant that Myra, like the folk back at the Bandstand bar, knew about losing, knew how difficult it was to survive on the streets, knew that the odds were stacked against them and that the good life would never be theirs, or at least not for long. Even if they did hit lucky, they all knew it wouldn’t last. It was their lot, so they had best stick together as best they could.

  He told Bro to get him a beer, but in the fridge there was only a jug of water. Better than nothing. He switched on the fan that sat on the table and aimed it at them both. Now at least they could breathe. Ambrose took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. They drank their water in silence for a while, listening to the whirr of the electric fan.

  ‘You got to be lucky, see.’

  Spotty often did that, just plunged into a conversation as if picking up from where he’d left off. He knew it confused Ambrose, and enjoyed the effect it had on him. But it was not merely a trick. It was his philosophy, his world view, and he felt he deserved to be heard. Spotty was no fool, he had been around and seen things most people wouldn’t care to see and done things he was not particularly proud of. And he had learnt things from all of that. And by talking, by going over it again out loud, he got the impression that he understood parts of it, could maybe pass on the lesson to others, or at least sum it up so that he could remember the lesson himself.

  He talked to the ceiling, happy to have an audience no matter who, even happier to have Ambrose there, he was a good listener, he was always willing to learn, always trying even if he never got there in the end.

  ‘It’s all a question of luck. I don’t mean good luck or bad luck, just luck. What is good luck to some is bad luck to others, and there’s nothing you can do about that.’

  He was getting bogged down. Good and bad, treacherous ground. Time to bail out; Ambrose would be none the wiser.

  ‘Well, maybe there is, but that’s another story.’

  Ambrose settled back in his chair and said nothing. It was like being back in his cell. Now Spotty would talk, on and on, building up his theories, working on them until he was happy with the outcome. There would be pauses, and self correction, and the odd rhetorical question it was not polite to try to answer. It was soothing to Ambrose; all those words so well put together, all those incredibly subtle ideas threaded together one by one until he had made a necklace of nuances and concepts. He knew it would all be too much to grasp, too intricate to fully understand, but he loved the sound of it, it was like listening to someone think.

  Spotty had been thinking about luck for some time now, ever since Myra, recriminating him, had said that he was lucky to be there. Was he? Or was he unlucky to be there? Is luck a theory of relativity? Was he ‘relatively’ lucky or unlucky? True, he was out of jail now, enjoying her generosity, a free man. But he was also unemployed, unemployable probably, with a criminal record, struggling to get by as best he could, living off his old friendships until they wore too thin to be of any help.

  ‘You can’t change your luck for the better, Bro, but you can change it for the worse. And you can change others’ for the worse, too, if you put your mind to it.’

  Ambrose had heard all this about luck before, because Spotty was prone to repetition, but he did not agree with his friend on the subject. For Ambrose it was all about consequence, of sequences and movement, of dominoes and butterflies. Which meant that the course of events could be changed by direct or indirect action. Except he could never put any of that into words. Words were a hinderance to him, not a help. Over the years he had seen the look of bewilderment, surprise, even anger, on people’s faces as he had tried in vain to express himself, to explain what he was thinking, or rather feeling. He faltered, he stuttered, he fell silent in shame. Stringing words together like pearls on a necklace was not for him. Spotty had informed him once that ideas and emotions can only exist if there is a word for them, that things have to be named to become real. That was nonsense. Words were invented precisely to translate ideas and feelings so that others could share them and hopefully understand them too. The problem was finding the right word, or inventing a new one if all else failed.

  So all that philosophy had to remain inside, because the moment he attempted to give shape to what he intuitively suspected to be true, he would become muddled and confused, more often than not coming across as an idiot. A complete idiot, as they all liked to remind him.

  But just for the record he did not agree with spotty on everything, was capable of reaching his own internal conclusions. Now he had no-one to look after him, he had learnt to fend for himself.

  Yet he also understood that he could never say anything of the sort to Spotty, so he played his part, as always. Ambrose nodded, he was listening, please continue.

  ‘How do we do that? How do we change our luck, or somebody else’s luck, for the worse? Me and you know the answer to that, Bro, me and you and a load of other people we know too. It all happens when we prey on each other.’

  Ambrose understood ‘pray’, but he wasn’t really following the discourse anyway so it didn’t make much difference. The speech was not aimed at Ambrose but at Humanity.

  ‘Matti McCormack tried to prey on me, and he changed my luck for the worse. He didn’t know he was going to die into the bargain, that was impossible to calculate, but it was his determination to prey on me and my family that led to my change of luck, for the worse.’

  He was referring to what he termed his brush with fate.

  The Dodd family, of which Richard, otherwise known as Spotty, was the eldest son, had suffered an accident. Mrs. Janet Dodd had been travelling in the back of a car driven by a male friend of hers, in the company of another couple. They had been enjoying themselves at a number of bars. On the way back home, along Park Avenue South to be precise, the car had driven straight into an oncoming coach. The occupant of the passenger seat died instantly, being thrown out of the car by the force of the impact. She had not been wearing her seat belt. The driver also died later at hospital after emergency operations failed to save his life. The occupants of the back seat of the car were both seriously injured. Mrs. Janet Dodd would never walk again.

  ‘Luck, you see, just a question of keeping out of the way.’

  As a third party occupant of the vehicle Mrs. Dodd’s medical care was guaranteed. It was not until it became clear that she would require constant medical attention that her case became of great interest to the insurance company. Mr. Matti McCormack was assigned the task of finding or inventing a loophole through which the company could wash its hands of the costly Mrs. Dodd. He set about his task with dedicated professionalism.

  He discovered that the driver at the time of the accident had been drinking. Could they evade responsibility on those grounds? He also discovered that Mrs. Janet Dodd was a divorcee who had left her three young children at home that night so that she could party. She had maintained relations with the drunk driver. Could a smear campaign help? He questioned all of her medical examinations and demanded that ‘independent’ practitioners be asked to give an ‘unbiased’ diagnosis and estimation of her needs.

  The name McCormack soon became synonymous with evil and enemy in the Dodd household. How could this man behave in such an insidious, destructive way? It was not as if it was his money. He was not much to look at, average height, quite fit for his
age, clipped hair graying at the temples, perfectly aligned teeth, clear blue eyes that never so much as flinched. He had an automated machine way of talking, as if the words that came from his mouth had no real meaning, no real significance, were of no consequence. He told them that his job was to inform. He informed them that it was his duty to make sure the company was not the victim of insurance fraud.

  ‘She’s in a fucking wheelchair! How do you fake that?’

  To which Mr. McCormack had very slightly shrugged, almost as if to say ‘we’ll see’.

  ‘Accidents, catastrophes, tragedies, they are all out there, surrounding us like flies around shit, ready to hit without warning. Could be anyone. Could be your own mother, Bro. It’s like a bag of marbles failing onto the floor, you never know where they’ll end up, it’s crazy, chaotic, unpredictable. As unpredictable as marbles dropped on a marble floor. Marbles on marble. They bounce all around you, and if you’re unlucky, one hits you and wham! It’s over.’

  They smoked. Spotty reflected on what he had just said, Bro sat patiently waiting for him to finish, enjoying the sound of his cell mate’s voice and the hum of the fan.

  His brush with fate came one morning in December. The door bell rang, and his younger brother Danny told him it was ‘that