The Cheek Perforation Dance

by Sean Thomas

  — Doctor Lewis, thank you

  The doctor steps down, and crosses the court. As she passes a few yards in front of Patrick she shoots a strange surreptitious glance at him. And a tiny but definitely there smile. Then she passes on, passes out of the courtroom. A silence ensues. Patrick sits in the dock pondering the doctor’s glance, until with a shiver of mild shock he realises that the doctor fancied him.

  Alone on the roof, alone on the gravelly roof terrace, Rebecca lies there, tied up by guitar wire, by her ankles and her wrists. The guitar wire is digging into her flesh; as is the gravel of the roof terrace. Lying on her side, as she is, Rebecca can feel the pressure of the gravel on her hips, her hipbone, her cheek. She wonders where Patrick is. Where he’s gone. Mnnn, Patrick. She feels woozy. She feels woozy, and warm. From above she feels the sun beat down from the early summer sky; she feels this sun on her cunt. It is nice, almost hot. It is healing. As she moves and wriggles to rid herself of the gravel irritations Rebecca feels Patrick’s semen trickle down her inner thigh like melting ice cream; like Häagen-Dazs on an infant’s sunburnt arm.

  The sun beats down. Rebecca lies there, blinking. She senses the office buildings around her. She wonders if the office workers have pulled up the sunblinds and seen her lying naked and tied up on her own roof terrace. The thought of this makes Rebecca orgasm, again. The thought of all these people seeing her naked, and fucked, and trussed with guitar strings. Inside herself, Rebecca feels the pulsing, slowly, she feels the noonday, the Patrick, Cherry Garcia, cherry and black. Slack.

  Just as Rebecca is about to fall asleep she hears a door open and she senses someone; then she senses muscly arms pick her up and she smells Patrick’s skin as he hoists her over his Viking shoulder, and carries her back down, out of the sunshine, back down the stairs to their bedroom. Where he kisses her on the lips: once, three times. As he lays her out on the bed.

  The wires are taken off. Rebecca relaxes, spreads. Her eyes shut, she rubs her wrists, her painful wrists. Then she half opens her eyes and looks up at her torturer, her rescuer. He is looking down at her. She smiles and opens her legs and relaxes, and with her eyes still shut, she senses his head go down between her thighs again, again again again again.

  He is so hungry, so thirsty, so famished without me, she thinks. He is so poor, so impoverished, so homeless, so needy.

  So have me, she decides, have me again, take what you want, have my money, rob me blind. For I shall climb up to the second storey of my house in Mainz, and lean out of the leaded window, and shower the young Crusaders with my Jewish gold.

  20

  The Dying Father. Thinking that this sounds like a Michelangelo sculpture or a lit crit archetype or something Rebecca might have written a thesis on … Patrick slides his car into a slot between two crappier cars, and steps out into the warm, lovely, early summer air of the hospice car park. Car door slammed, Patrick stands, and taps his pocket to check the car keys are his. Then he strides towards the warm friendly sloped-roof vernacular of the Nineties building, checking out the suckable sweet colours of the jolly wooden window frames as he goes.

  Patrick smiles, snidely, at the building. He wonders whether the architects of the building know that They’re Not Fucking Fooling Him. The place might look like a posh nursery school near Highgate, but Patrick can see the redbrick, Auschwitzy chimney tucked away at the back.

  As he approaches the wide glass door of the hospice, Patrick contemplates the truth and potency of this Holocaust metaphor. Standing here in his cool white shirt and brown strides, flattered by the lovely sunshine, Patrick considers how this place, this hospice, is indeed the Auschwitz we are all headed to. We are all on the cattle-train, he decides, we’re all slowly making our way to these places, these nondescript places on the outskirts of town. Even if we choose to ignore the evidence, even if we spend our lives in determined ignorance of the uncanny smells on hot summer days, of the browny-grey ash that sometimes floats through the streets …

  — Yes!

  It’s a nurse. A pretty, young, almost World War I nurse, in stiff starched cotton, holding a parcel of towels, has just turned at the door, and smiled through the door. At Patrick? Patrick smiles back. Patrick stands in the sunlight smiling at the nurse. The hospice doors close, reopen, close, and then Star Trek open again. The nurse grins. Then goes.

  Eros having thrown Thanatos to the ground, and spat in his face to boot, Patrick turns off his mobile phone, and enters the hospice. Inside he is at once engulfed by unsettling feelings. There is an air to the place; it all has a slightly different smell to hospitals. Quiet, pensive, resigned. Fear filling Patrick’s mind again he walks up to the reception, where a middle-aged lady, in an apricot blouse and black plastic name tag, sits, looking rather dreamy. Patrick opens his mouth:

  — Er, I’m here to meet … Mister

  — Yes

  — David … um … David …

  Patrick does again his newly mastered impression of an idiot as the lady stares at him. The lady tries to look kindly and understanding:

  — Do you have a surname?

  — Yes. Of course. It’s my dad … it’s Skivington

  Assessing her list of names with a pursed-lip nod, the woman scans down, looks up, and says:

  — Room one seven-two … just down there

  The fears and the horrors filling Patrick’s heart, he nods abruptly and he turns, trying not to think about old times with his dad. His old drunken cunt of a dad. His warm-hearted sarcastic old man. The Dying Father.

  Trying not to look in the separate barracks, at the skeletal Jews and the sunken-eyed Gyppos and the various Polaks and Slavs and Untermenschen, trying not to peer voyeuristically at the dying, at the soon-to-be-gassed, Patrick looks anyway in the wards and sees one room is inhabited by a seven-hundred-year-old skeleton of a woman, who seems to be staring at a picture of Jesus pinned to the wall. Jesus? Jesus?? What’s that about? Patrick speculates. Why this shrine to the fucker who’s doing this to them? Were there portraits of Hitler on the walls of Belsen? Suppressing the urge to march in the ward and spit on the religious poster with a cackle of contemptuous laughter Patrick coughs and walks and … indulges in a mild sex fantasy about Rebecca as a naked Belgic slave in the slave market of a sunlit Roman town. But then he has to think about his dad, the Dying Father, because he has pushed open the door to his dad’s room and he is now staring at his dad. Half asleep; half dead.

  — Dead? I mean … Dad?

  A stir. A twitch of skin under an eye. A twitch of old thin skin, rosy with the sunsetting light of life behind it. Lampshade skin. Turning and twitching, Patrick’s Venetian-paper-skinned dad opens his eyes. Slowly, prehistorically, David Skivington turns and looks at Patrick through the festoons and swags of tubes, pipes, catheters and thingies which Patrick now notices are positioned next to his dad’s bed for the purpose of pumping stuff into his dad’s wrists and torso.

  — Dad?

  The Benetton poster that is his dad, the moving piece of unflinching modern photography that is Patrick’s dad, my dad, my dying dad, blinks and smiles wanly at Patrick. Patrick swallows, stiffens, finding it hard to accept that this, this really is Dad, this really is his father, this is his smart, drunken, funny, savvy, unfulfilled, this-is-a-boat-don’t-drown-you-stupid-kid (was that on holiday in Wales?) dad, looking like nothing more than an old sad ill person, like someone’s dad dying.

  Quickly Patrick says:

  — Dad

  His dad’s eyes open wider, but slowly, but slowly. His father says:

  — Thought you’d never make it …

  — Oh. You know. Worried about my inheritance …

  The Dying Father croaks; he actually croaks. Then he opens his dry-looking mouth and Patrick can see that buttoned up to his father’s throat are some pathetic pyjamas with paisleys. The pathos of these night things makes Patrick feel very very very sorry for his dad and he doesn’t want to feel sorry. Especially not for his father; his boozy, lecherous, pitiabl
y brilliant father.

  His father speaks:

  — Inheritance?! A fucked-up old motor … some debts?

  — Yeah, why not …

  — I have got a bottle of Scotch in the cupboard, you can have that

  — Fine. I’ll take it

  His dad shakes his head:

  — You got anything for me then?

  — Oh yeah – course

  — Don’t give me any fucking grapes. No fucking grapes! – Eyes watery but sparkly, his father looks up above the bed at something floating in the middle of the room. And says – I’m thinking of having a sign over the bed. No Fucking Grapes!

  — I haven’t brought a thing

  — Good

  — Dad …?

  — How’s your sister anyway she still with that idiot boyfriend with the suit and the car and the constant adding up?

  — He’s an accountant

  — He’s a boring little tit, is what he is

  — She loves him – Patrick smiles, despite – He doesn’t hit her, she likes that, you know

  — I loved your mum, Patrick

  — Dad …

  — What?

  — I’ll just go and get some grapes …

  — Sit down, Patrick

  Patrick’s father is shifting in his proneness. It looks painful; at once Patrick goes towards the bed to try and help, but his dad waves him back almost angrily as he uses a thin elbow and a thinner arm to try and lever himself up a bit. The tubes rattle against the metal stand; Patrick feels something weird in his heart and his stomach as he watches his dad not really being able to move. Appalled, Patrick turns away and swallows spit and stares at a wall painting by some kids. Kids. Again the nursery school thing, Patrick thinks, again the infantilisation; again the beckoning of the womb, the reversal of time’s arrow.

  — Jesus what a place! – Says Patrick. Patrick’s father nods, says nothing; then the older Skivington says:

  — Yerss …

  And with a pang Patrick recognises the old intonation, his father’s old sarcastic let’s-have-a-whiskey way of saying yes. Patrick remembers this; remembers it all. Yersss Patrick I’m rather afraid I’m fucking off down the puh because your mum’s a total cow.

  — Things could be worse, Patrick

  — How’s that then?

  — Could still be living with your mam

  — Right …

  — You know they say I’ve got about two weeks but I’m gonna show ’em. I’m gonna see the rugby and then fuck off in my own time: you see …

  With a mouthful of angry words Patrick goes to say something but his father’s eyes, his father’s still-proud eyes, silence him. The rattle of the tubes and the sound of trolley wheels and various medical engines beeping distantly fill this silence. Otherwise there is silence.

  — See the pretty nurse?

  Patrick grins at his father: a fake grin, but a grin nonetheless. Patrick says:

  — The one with the arse?

  — Cruel it is …

  — Nice legs, as well, right?

  — Vraiment!

  — She gave me a once over at the door

  — Good – His father smiles – Good

  Patrick looks at his father. The Dying Father appears to be laughing, sarcastically; Patrick says:

  — Was it because Mum is a bit stupid? Is that why you were the way you were?

  Pyjamas, bedsheets, catheter, laughter:

  — Yerss …

  — Is it?

  — Maybe

  — Or was it just the women? All the women?

  Patrick’s father goes to speak but Patrick blurts:

  — Tell me, Dad. I want to know – Patrick pauses, wondering; then he goes on – You were seeing that blonde one, weren’t you, your secretary I mean? All that time?

  A fatherly breath, then:

  — Course I was

  — Hah – Patrick smiles sadly and says – Well. Sod it. Can’t blame you … I fancied her too

  His father slowly eyes him:

  — You were six, Patrick

  — Tits to kill for, right?

  — Yersss …

  — And a bit of an accent …?

  David Skivington nods, as much as he can nod. Then he says:

  — She was from Gloucestershire …

  — Yeah …

  — Very strange people from Gloucestershire – David Skivington’s hand moves, as if unsuccessfully seeking out a cigarette. For a moment Patrick sees his father as he was, in the pub, his local, the Bricklayers, being funny with his mates, always smoking. Seeming to give up on the futile cigarette quest David Skivington clutches the hem of his bedsheet and says – Yersss, Gloucestershire, they’re all mad there. You can see it in their village names. Bourton on the Water, Stow on the Wold, Father on the Sister

  Patrick says:

  — I’ve heard that one. You told that joke years ago

  David:

  — Did I? Oh well. Thanks for not bringing me any grapes, Patrick – A glance over – You know you’re the only one I can rely on not to bring me anything when you eventually come in and see me after I’ve been a year in hospital …

  — In fact I can remember when you told that joke, I can remember exactly when it was

  — Your sister was in last week

  — You were drunk at home. You remember that? – Patrick glares at his father’s grey-white hair – You always told bad jokes. When you were drunk – Patrick thinks, goes on – You always used to march around the house frightening all mum’s friends and saying ‘See my nipple and fear me’ … remember that?

  A silence. A rueful stare at the ceiling. David Skivington chuckles:

  — I remember

  — And then one day you were saying it in the Brickies, and some bloke came up and said ‘I’ll see your nipple, and raise you a penis’

  David laughs. As he laughs, the tubes rattle; the catheters sway. Grinning properly, proud to have made his father laugh, Patrick puts down his bag and casts about for a chair. There is a pause. David says:

  — The blonde nurse is alright as well, you should buy her a coffee son …

  — Nurses, schmurses

  — Stockings, they always wear stockings

  — Not any more, Dad

  — She’s better than that black bitch keeps trying not to knock me out. She’s a right old death camp Kommandant

  — It’s good that you’ve mellowed

  — How is your sister?

  — She’s fine

  — Nmm. Don’t let that black one near me. She’ll hit me with a shovel I tell ya

  — Christ! You aren’t allowed to say that, not any more

  — Really?

  — Really

  — Ah well

  Patrick listens to his father. Not to his words, but to his voice. The voice is the same. It’s still Dad’s voice. That teaching-me-to-swim voice; that shouting-at-Mum voice; oh fucking hell Dad don’t fucking fuck off you fucking fucker.

  — Why did you drink so much, Dad?

  David Skivington looks across his own supine body; at his son. Patrick is again searching for a chair; the chair found Patrick considers at what angle he should position the chair: face-on to his dad seems to Patrick to be slightly too much a sad, serious, last-ever-meeting type of approach; side-on seems excessively casual, in a kind of hey-let’s-pretend-you-aren’t-dying way. And completely facing away from his dad is probably not the thing either.

  Turning the chair halfway around Patrick leans over the chair’s back. And listens to his father say:

  — Want some of my morphine?

  — Is it a pump?

  — Yerrs. I’d give you some if I could

  Patrick chuckles:

  — I’m off the drugs, Dad

  — And you aren’t chasing tail either, of course

  — No. Actually!

  David leans up:

  — What about that posh bird I heard about, Rebecca … Jewish name, you still seeing her?
/>
  — Jessel. Still seeing her

  — Good breasts?

  — To kill for

  — See my nipple, and fear me!

  — I’ll see your nipple – Patrick wishes he could give his father a cigarette; could smell his father’s smoking again – And raise you a penis

  Another pause. David:

  — God, Patch son. Could murder a fag

  — Shall I sneak some in?

  — They’ve got alarms and stuff

  — Who gives a fuck

  — It’d be my last gasper – Smiling at his own joke David says – Do you love her? The Jewish girl?

  — Too much

  — She’s bright isn’t she, I heard she was bright? – Staring at his son’s nodding face, Patrick’s father goes on – You know I loved a bright woman once: she’d read Ulysses in French, the stupid tart, I mean what’s the point in that? – Still going on – The trouble with bright ones is that they are always mad I think it’s because you can’t have a womb and a brain working together. Something to do with the circulation – Patrick’s dad looks like he would like to properly chortle, if there weren’t a tube going painfully through a hole in his throat, a hole surrounded by yellow and bandages and bromine and Sellotape.

  Coughing, Patrick’s dad says – Girls always have circulation problems it’s their cold feet. Hm. At least your mum was honestly dim, dim as hell that woman …

  — She put me up last night, she’s doing OK since you ask

  — Yeah? – His father sighs – You know I think we should have had a dog, always thought that

  — Mum didn’t like dogs

  — Hmmm – The father looks at the son and says – Actually I think she didn’t like living things, your mum. Make too much of a mess

  — God Dad, she’s OK. She’s not that bad. A decent old stick, you used to say

  — A decent old stick? Did I say that? Hm. Old stick. Sticky old stickettystick