Coffee and Sugar

by C. Sean McGee

TWENTY THREE

  Joao slept well that night, smiling good thoughts inside his head and stirring only once or twice to shake off the sleep in his arm so that he could scratch at the mosquito bite in the middle of his back.

  He had laid his head for the first time feeling useful and not used and for the first time in days, he had managed to unhinge himself from the feeling of small purveying eyes watching him at every corner and stalking upon his every thought. It felt good to have someone to care for and it felt good to matter.

  When he woke, his arm was numb again and he dragged himself up quietly so as not to disturb Charity who was asleep on the mattress above his head. He tip toed out into the kitchen and turned on the stove to boil some water.

  The church was in a horrid state, how they had left it after Charity had fallen asleep lying across his lap. He thought about her head propped on top of him and he, petting her like an injured puppy, but, of course, thinking nothing of the sort.

  Outside he could hear the racket of drunks and junkies stumbling about, kicking cans and picking fights, no greater threat to their own shadow than they were to anybody else but they shouted and they groaned, begging for loose change and sex and half smoked cigarettes as the sun cast shadows over the desert of their dawning sobriety.

  Joao paid no mind in his childish glare for if he could not see them then they were not there. Instead, without any sense of creeping or dread, he gathered his things around the kitchen sink to prepare a coffee for Charity; one sweetened with courage that would tell her exactly how he felt about her.

  He closed his eyes and took a long deep breath, holding it in his lungs a swilling it in his mind, saying Charity’s name over and over while his heart beat three times singing; I, love, you.

  His mind felt light and his consciousness dizzy, as if he were a mere thought away from turning on his end and spiraling out of control, beyond approach and beyond repair. He felt unsteady and uncertain, saying her name over and over in his head, wondering what he might see as her bitter struggle, wondering if he wanted to and if it was right for him to see something that she could not see herself - to show him the scars etched in her soul.

  Finally, he imagined her face and the currents of his delusion settled. They stopped their violent spin until the ocean of uncertainty settled into a waking calm, like a universe spilling out from the still end of a black hole. Joao bathed in her stare as Charity; in his conscious theatre, stared back at him; neither daring to blink in case the other should not be there when they returned again.

  The breath he had taken had given him the time needed and nothing more, for his fingers to gently find their way into the fine dark grains of coffee and for his mind, to find a way into the woman he loved; a portal that would take him to the most profound depths of her repressions, into the thick grimy culture of her personality, of her heart and of her soul.

  The breath of air burst out of his chest and he followed with it; in his conscious theatre, into the sea of the open void in Charity’s eyes, from where her universe spilled out and shone life; into the very black of her eye.

  And when he gasped for air, he opened his eyes and there she stood; triste, in attendance of her own reflection.

  Her breath was like the spit of a hot spring as the cold morning shivered against her bones, her sadness expelling from the pit of her belly, clouding out the image staring down at her; her true complexion, looking less than she had ever convinced herself to imagine.

  And there, though her skin was white and soft and washed and scented and though there was not a mark on her entire body, her eyes welted, for in her reflection, her skin was bruised, her knees were cut and sore, her wrists were scarred with long bulbous lines of regret and recovery that ran the length of her arms; some clean and straight running from her wrist to the elbow, some angled and abutting; from one side of the street to the other and many, in their frantic scores, jagged and frenzied; along her arms, on the inside of her thighs and on the virginal skin, hidden beneath her supple breasts, away from perverting hands.

  Then, as she wept, her reflection lifted its hand out of the mirror and took hers. She felt its fingers crease gently around hers and its long nails scratch against the palm of her hand and it tickled more than it irritated her.

  Charity smiled.

  Her reflection lifted its other arm out from its bind and took Charity’s other hand and slowly stepped out of the mirror and into the cold morning air, tremoring its body briskly as it shook off the shiver that courted the fine hairs on its body and brought its wounded skin to a thousand small bumps.

  The two girls stood side by side, Charity on the left and her reflection beside her, their hands locked as they stared silently into the mirror, their eyes casting on nothing but an empty pane of reflecting glass.

  The reflection turned its head slowly and whispered in Charity’s ear; no words, just the secretive telling of murmurs and sounds, spoken so that the accent of its innocent tenure, snuck into Charity’s hardened skin and attached itself to her abjured and insentient nerves.

  As their breaths left their bodies and touched the glass, strange shapes upon the mirror; haloed by the ghostly fog of their warm breath, came into light.

  They were the imprints of hands and fingers, each coming clearer than the last before disappearing into every next clouded breath that fell upon the pane and with every print, Charity’s reflection would shiver and quiver and clutch at her hand, digging its nails into her palms, crying out like child, wise enough to sense a wrong but muted into a frightened and educated silence.

  Each print confessed of a hand that had touched her skin; that had dug deep into the fibres of her being and undid the small ties that kept her ligated to her soul so that the fine threads of her emotional tapestry frayed and snapped, separating her from her reflection and the tremor of warning in its touch and in its shrill and sagacious infantile verse so that; addressed in disconnection, it jingled about silently within her being, like a sailboat, cut from its moorings and drifting unattended in the open sea, eventually, shipwrecked by the rising swell of her conscious dispassion.

  As another of her breaths fell upon the mirror, Charity’s reflection began to speak so quietly as if in song.

  “And remember when I moved in you? And the holy dove was moving too? And every breath we drew was hallelujah.”

  In the mirror, both Charity and her reflection preyed their eyes upon something they had both wished to have forgotten and to never need to address but in her culture; the thick sediment of her struggle in the pith of her depression, played an act that she and her reflection must accept as both having played an integral yet unfortunate part.

  The act started with Charity and her repressing reflection first as a child, laying discreetly in the shadowy confines of a dank midnight cellar. Her breath was light and her eyes transfixed on an infinitesimal fracture in the darkness, where the cellar door met the neighbouring stairs.

  The unbroken light was a temporary figure of surety meaning there was no-one above the stairs, that there should be no more visitors in the coming seconds. And her eyes dared not flinch, should she miss what could have been a warning, dressed in the shadow of her father’s footsteps.

  Staring into the mirror, Charity grasped firmly at her reflection’s hand and her reflection the same as before them, the young girl in which they had both once been was stifled and quilled as the transient light was eclipsed by the epitome of unforgivable love.

  The girl whimpered lightly, fearful of making any sound which would celebrate the inevitable. So accustomed was she to these nightly visits from her father that she knew any unworldly gesture would only see this misplaced affection prolonged.

  She remained completely still and unemotional.

  The darkness that once attained her bedside had now given way to the light she wished she were blind to. The cellar door opened, peeling back the darkness above the stairs and an imperious figure appeared, completely blackened in the wake of the daylight pursuing.r />
  It was a man, her father.

  His musky scent was unmistakable.

  It was her father, appearing anything but vestal, making his way down the stair case on another of his nightly conquests to relinquish her innocence and trust. Love was what he called it, a duty he commanded of her that he said was her obligation to the only man who loved her in the way that only god understood.

  “You remind me so much of your mother” he would say. “You have her eyes, her gentle touch and her forgiving heart. She would be so proud of you.”

  He would say these things as if they should offer some reassurance for what would become another torturous memory, another emotional scar; another black spot on her subconscious; as if she should somehow be comforted into accepting that this sacred violation was normal.

  “I love you” he whispered as he removed his belt and laid a cruel hand on the girl’s trembling thigh.

  Charity and her reflection; gazing into their repression, cast an itinerant sigh that seemed to travel neither here nor there. Instead it lingered before them, echoing their discontent to none but themselves and as the image of the young girl vanished with one of her escaping tears, the two stood with their arms locked and their fingers entwined, closer than they had ever been; knowing that it was at this moment, such a long time ago, when they had first stopped speaking to one another.

  Charity and her reflection took a moment to brave one another before an image in the mirror had that moment adjourned and in the second act, the girl appeared once more, though older; in adolescence, but still far too young for these factitious definitions.

  She was in a room that could only be described as squalid, with men twice her age, six men to be exact, all with emaciated appearance. Her half naked body was slumped on a sofa, between three men who were leering over her exposed breasts. Her right arm was bound in a tourniquet and in front of her, one of the men, being approximately five feet ten in height, grossly underweight, and having an uncanny resemblance to her father, was hunched over a blackened spoon with a dirty syringe, preparing a cocktail of drugs.

  In the grimy spoon lay a concoction of heroin, crystal meth and cocaine. Into this, the man squirted eighty units of water, lifting the spoon and holding a flame to it, dissolving the powder into a milky white fluid. He dropped a filthy cigarette butt into the solution to act as a filter even though the carcinogens present would have done more harm than good.

  The man resembling her father then took the worn syringe and drew back the fluid until there were forty units pushing up a tiny point of air towards the needles tip. He lifted the needle to the horizon and gradually pulled back on the plunger, flicking the syringe with his index finger as he gradually moved the plunger towards the heavens, removing any residue of air from the liquid.

  The man gave the syringe one last invigorative flick and turned to the girl whose body had become a mantel piece of sweaty, cumbersome hands.

  There was not a sign of emotion on her face at all. Her eyes were irreflective and stared in abiding neglect out into an adjacent room where a running tap dripped water homogeneously into an underlying sink. One of the three men fondling her positioned himself to her right, steadying her bruised arm as the other two men elatedly remove her panties and continue the only display of affection she had ever known.

  The girl whispered silently, a rhyme that time and time again remained caught in the chambers of her mind. The words seemed to trip over one another as they fell from her tongue.

  “There goes that girl over there, whose not really here as she is over there. Unbound and unknowing, unwilling to care, mute to your calling and blind to your stare. See her you will and by that you will swear, that the girl over here is the girl over there.”

  The father figure leaned over her body, pushing his whole weight on her right leg and aligned the syringe with her exposed sinking vein. He pushed the needle vigorously through her flesh and the sting provided her with a familiar sensation of being alive; pain being the only feeling kinder than love.

  The man drew back on the syringe, filling the milky solution with explosions of dark blood and upon seeing the mix of colour, immediately forced the solution into the girl’s vein.

  Her mouth palpitated for a brief moment as the liquid soared through her veins, accelerated by her failing heart. The taste of the drug coated the back of her dry aching throat. She swallowed several times, savouring the evidence before escaping once more with her eyes never straying from the tapping of tiny droplets of water, escaping from the clutches of man to join its brethren in the search for the open sea.

  The girl caught flight of one drop perched in midair and before it departed the obscenity of this passing sight, she cast out her soul in a single tear so that it would not have to remember, what she willed it to forget.

  Charity let go of her smile and her distant stare and she cried; still holding tightly to her reflection’s grasp and grasping the thin air with her other free hand but her skin no longer felt tough, her nerves no longer felt dead.

  She no longer felt strong and fighting.

  She felt scared.

  She felt less alone.

  She felt safe enough, to cry.

  And as the tears rolled from her eyes, her salted struggle wetting her broken and blistered, acrid lips, the markings of all those men and women, stained upon her body; from her ankles, all the way up her legs and between her thighs, branded on her buttocks and her breasts, around her wrists and around her throat and so that they covered her eyes.

  Her body was a temple of another’s touch; greasy marks all over her soft white skin, looking less like the girl that she sold to herself and more of the girl that she sold for the barest of prices.

  As she cried, her body stained more and more. The cuts and scratches and scars and scabs and bumps and lumps that she had painted with an avoiding eye; the debris of her repression, all became clear and stinging and they glistened as the morning light touched upon her streaming tears.

  And she cried more and more; still clinging to her reflection that was now losing all of its wounds to the girl who clung desperately to her soul’s forgiving touch. And when she cast her final tear, her reflection let go of her hand and turned to her.

  Charity looked helpless. Her body was hurting and she felt abandoned; without her tough skin and her defenses to keep her far from the chill of her own guilty acclaim.

  Her reflection touched the side of her face, looking her long in the eye and though hers were heavy and slated with truth and burden, her reflection’s were not. They looked clean and without deformity. They looked knowing and without oppression. They looked young and without fever. They looked cleansed and without fear.

  Her reflection smiled and stretched its arms around her, pulling her tight against its body so that the morning chill no longer bumped against her skin and no longer danced with the fine hairs on her arms. Her reflection held her in a loving embrace, whispering in her ear as it laid its head upon her shoulder, smiling as it drifted into her body and vanished beneath a blanket of bruised and battered skin.

  Charity stood in front of the mirror as she had when Joao had followed his expelled breath and she was enraptured in her own giving embrace, her arms stretched across her body, clutching to her skin, her nails digging in, not wanting to ever let go. She could feel her reflection stretching its arms inside of her heart. She could taste the tear that she had expelled so many times on the edges of her lips and it reminded her that she need not feel alone, not in any of this struggle.

  Joao gasped.

  He felt sick.

  He pulled away from the steaming cup and purged on the floor. He was shaking feverishly. Anger enshrouded his whole conscious being and he wished only to take her into the safety of his arms and if need be, to spend an eternity redefining trust to this poor broken girl for whom every man had betrayed when they ushered the words ‘I love you’.

  He closed his eyes once more, in search for some kindness, some attribute of swe
etness that this world had for her, and when he followed another drawn breath in to delusion, opening his eyes with a meddled worry, her last act washed over him.

  She was standing on the shore of a beach somewhere on the other side of the universe and she was staring into the horizon where the ocean blue met the cerulean sky, tasting every breath that she welcomed into her lifeless body.

  She sighed uncontrollably as she ran through a catalogue of undisposed memories.

  “How I failed” was how she thought.

  She blamed; at first herself, for how her life did unfold and then, with every new breath, she gained clarity and accepted then, the inevitability of circumstance.

  Her idea of love was different to Joao, to me and probably to each of you who read this story. To her, affection had meant intolerable cruelty. A vacation was not merely an exercise in family togetherness; it was escaping to her subconscious where her soul and last drop of sanity were spared from her incestuous father and all the men in her life that fate would have her drawn to.

  Succumbing to this revelation would not prevent it from happening again; it would just add unconscionable irony to an already predestined path of surrendered faith and molested love.

  She opened her eyes to remove the images from her mind, watching a tiny leaf being towed along by the gentle current, bobbing up and down on the even lapping swell.

  With every transitory breath, she was alive.

  She stood; as Joao did, her toes twitching and moving in the wet sticky sand beneath her feet while his did in his old ripped socks out of nervous apprehension.

  Joao could sense in her that, for the first time in her life; since she met with forgiveness with her reflection and long after the people she had known had long since disappeared, including Joao, she was akin to innocence.

  The gentle wind lifted her fringe so that it flapped like a sail and the clear escaping air filled and expanded her lungs.

  She exhaled her final breath and dove into the ocean. With no desire to take another breath, she sank lifelessly into the water and gave herself to the currents which took her invitingly out to sea.

  Joao inhaled profoundly and exhaled a long sigh of relief. She was now free, moving in spirit with her brethren as the essence of life.

  Soon clouds would form above her and her spirit would evaporate momentarily, parting from the sea and moving through the sky to rain down on the world below.

  Her soul would scatter into millions of droplets that would descend upon the earth, filling the cup of every man and cleansing the soul of the earth. She would nourish the thirsty planet that would in turn feed its starving guests.

  Her soul would exist in every flower, in every grain of sand and in the heart of every man. And it is the heart of man that she would judge astutely.

  Those she deemed worthy would be wrapped in her delicate arms. She would sing to their spirit and lesson its state of alarm. Those undeserving would taste her in every breath. She would poison their souls and send every man to his death.

  When he opened his eyes, he could hear stirring near the bathroom. He felt destroyed. What a horrible weight this girl had had to suffice. And what strength she must have behind her smile to be able to keep that suffering from making her its pet.

  He took her coffee in his hand and though he hurt horribly and was infected by her pain; as god must have felt, watching all of it happen but doing nothing to interfere, he did as she and wore himself a hardened smile to greet her as she woke.

  When he entered the room, he could see that she wasn’t in her bed. He heard noises coming from the bathroom and assumed she must have woken while his mind was in dream and he inherited some of her displeasure. He walked over to the door and when hearing a pained cry, he worryingly called out but there was no word, only another pained cry.

  “What should I do?” he thought. “Charity, are you ok?” he said through the door in a low whisper, but there was no response except for another pained cry.

  When he turned the handle and pushed the door open, he saw Charity, naked and leaning over the sink. Her hands braced at and her finger nails almost clawed their way through, the filth ridden porcelain.

  She was crying in pain, but she was crying for more as behind her, with his left hand in a strangling curve around her neck while his right pinched, slapped and punched her buttocks and her back, The Bishop cursed wildly. He expulsed horrible words, calling Charity vile and degrading names with his repugnant fat, sweaty and hairy stomach folding over her arching back while his eyes rolled backwards in his head, thrusting like a savage heated animal until he turned his head and saw his son’s disbelieving eyes wishing him to stop.

  Joao stood in silent protest, the cup in his hand and disbelief on his conscious mantel. He couldn’t say her name. He couldn’t say a word.

  As he stood there dumbfounded and broken, The Bishop watched him, grinning swimmingly while he defiled the only thing Joao had ever had in his life that mattered; biting her shoulders and spitting on her back.

  He wore the same lecherous look that he had had when he paraded around the farm with his loose shoes slapping on the cold tiles and his right hand bent over his shoulder with his leather case pinned to his back. He wore that same arrogant, molesting smirk.

  Joao looked defeated.

  He started to cry.

  The Bishop laughed heartily and with his strangling hand still curved around the back of Charity’s neck, he clutched her hair with his free hand, ripping it back with sadistic vigour and lifting her pained and wanting face so that as he came inside her and as he screamed out her name insultingly and as she screamed out his, her eyes opened to the sight of her only friend, the boy who loved her without condition, now having found just one.

  “Joao, please” she screamed as he ran out of the church.

  “Get off me you fat cunt” she yelled to The Bishop, pushing his heaving body and slipping out from under him.

  She ran out of the bathroom as The Seductress had done, covering her breasts, akin with her shame. She ran out of the church and out onto the street and down the hill as far as she could, calling his name.

  “I’m sorry Joao. Let me explain” she screamed.

  She walked back up the hill and into the church, seeing The Bishop still naked, pouring himself a coffee, looking proud and descent.

  “You did this,” she said pushing The Bishop.

  “Oh don’t be so melodramatic. He’ll be alright. He always is. Useless. He’ll never fuck you like I can. He’s just a donkey. You need a stallion inside you” said The Bishop, pressing his naked body against hers.

  “He’s your son you fat prick. Not a fucking donkey. He’s your fucking son and he’s my friend, the only friend I have, the only person that gives a shit and sees me as something more than a cheap cunt to fuck. He’s my only friend and now he’s gone. Why the hell can’t you see? He’s the only sweet thing in our lives. And I fucked it up?” she said.

  The Bishop leaned in to offer a consoling embrace, but Charity pushed his arms away.

  “Whatever,” he said, taking his mug from the table and dropping some loose change on the table by a steaming mug.

  “I’m a fucking whore,” she said.

  “And don’t you forget it,” said The Bishop wiping himself with an old shirt.

  When the coffee touched his tongue, The Bishop shivered with familiar fright as if he had just turned a page he thought had already been torn up and then an air of arrogance escaped his lungs as he froze and the morning air and time, they swam around him as if his body were a giant stone at the bottom of an idly moving stream.

  He stood; in his mind, in front of a tall dressing mirror and there was no colour or light around him except for the glow of the reflection before him of which he could not turn away.

  A loud crashing brought him from his delusion, from the insight of his soul as the mug in his hands slipped from his weakened vice and married with the floor below, the hot liquid scalding his feet and the pieces of
the mug, shattering across the floor.

  “What did you see?” asked Charity, knowing exactly how The Bishop felt.

  The Bishop slumped himself on a rickety white plastic chair, his naked skin folding over itself many times and slushing about as he stapled his hands over his eyes and shook off the fever of regret that tickled at his nerves.

  “What did you see?” Charity asked again.

  The bishop took a long bleaching breath, icing the fire in the back of his throat.

  “Joao,” he said, referring to his own reflection.

  Charity took the insulting loose change that The Bishop threw behind, collecting the coins in her trembling grasp; adrenaline fueling the shame that she felt. She took the mug of coffee in her hands and rested it against her lower lip, pausing in reflection while the steam ran the length of her face and beaded as small droplets on her brow and for a second she pretended it was a tear and that she could actually care.

  She felt a warm apology dress her mind and she thought of Joao for a moment until she took a sip and was reduced to hysterical tears feeling the bitter sweet resonance of her own reflection, feeling her soul stretching; for the first time in so long, inside of her heart.

  Charity finished her coffee and fell to the floor weeping with a shaky smile on her face. She felt both subtle and soiled in a single breath.