Getting it in the Head

by Mike McCormack

‘One is all I’ll need. Besides, I’ve only got one shell in the breech and if I have to reload you’ll have gained another twenty-five yards. At that distance you’ll be well in the clear.’

  ‘What happens if I only get wounded? Suppose I take it in the lung and lie there bleeding to death?’

  ‘Then I will leave you there and the crows will make short work of you. I’ll walk out every day for as long as it takes and see how your death is progressing. On the day of your death I’ll dump a bag of lime over you and within two weeks there won’t be a trace of you except for a small, damp pile of chalk in the middle of that field.’

  ‘A bag of lime isn’t much of a memorial.’

  ‘You’re not much of a son.’

  ‘Suppose I make a miraculous recovery and wake up to find that you have come and stolen my fortune? What then?’

  ‘That won’t happen. Whatever else I am I’m not a thief.’

  ‘You won’t try and profit from my death? A young, smooth body like mine would fetch a fair penny from research institutes or on the organ donor market. It would have considerable freak value. You might take off to Latin America with a mistress.’

  ‘No, there will be no profiteering. This is a matter of principle not profit. Besides, there’s not much of you in it and I’d prefer you to go to hell all in one piece.’

  ‘I’m glad. I don’t fancy the idea of some clueless medical student with a hangover poking around in my guts. The thought of it alone would put me off my stride. Nevertheless, you’ll have a lot of explaining to do.’

  ‘I’ll tell everyone that you set fire to the house and took off in shame and fright. I’ll dissuade any search party by telling them that you know every one of these hills and forests and that you will probably return in your own good time. I’ll tell them that you were depressed lately on account of your condition.’

  ‘That’s a dirty lie. I’ve never once been depressed by what I am.’

  ‘You haven’t but I have. Every time I look at you I sink deeper into misery and despair. Right now I’m so low that if I sank any lower I’d disappear into the ground.’

  By now the sun was a heavy rind over the hills and the earth glowered in shadow. The terms had been set out and I could think of nothing else I wanted to add to them. I was very calm and confident. I believed that at that moment I possessed every piece of worthwhile wisdom and knowledge in the entire world, every axiom and formula and instruction that was going to enable me to live longer. Nevertheless I wondered, did my father have any parting words to send me on my way?

  ‘You’re not going to wish me good luck or anything?’

  ‘There’s no point in wasting fortune on a dead man.’

  ‘Then I guess I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘We seem to have covered everything.’

  I jogged out to the starting post, moving at a steady lope, conserving energy. The ground was even and the going firm, a wide stretch of pasture sloping away from the gable of our house to a downhill finish running into the conifer plantation at its furthest edge, about one hundred yards distant. I had no worries that my father would cheat and shoot me in the back within the agreed range. This was his game and he had defined the terms and he would honour them with that vain integrity that only the truly wretched possess.

  Ten yards from the whitethorn I burst into a sprint, running in a sharp zigzag from left to right and rolling my head. I passed the bush and veered wildly into its shadow, putting it between my father and myself. Ten yards beyond the bush and I was making good ground, breathing evenly and almost in the safety zone. Then there was a massive explosion in my head, a sunburst of white light and I was cast up into the air as if by a giant hand, hurtling forward almost on the verge of flight. I pitched through the gloom like a missile and then all was darkness.

  Jesus, I had to hand it to the little runt, he wasn’t going to make it easy for me. There he was, running faster than I would have thought possible on those useless little legs of his and jogging that massive head from side to side as if it were some sort of beach ball.

  I knew the moment I lifted the gun to my shoulder that I’d been hoodwinked. The little bastard had kept me talking just long enough for the sun to disappear beyond the hills. His head was nothing more than a blur between the ridged walls of the gunsights and he was darting from side to side, shortening and lengthening each burst at random. He was now abreast of the bush and he suddenly veered behind it and disappeared from sight. The canny bastard had put the bush between us and, with the field dropping away behind it, he would now never emerge into the open. I would have to shoot through the tree. I saw a gap in the foliage and sighted through it, waiting for his head to bob into the open space. When it did, filling the bottom of the space, I waited a split instant before the rifle boomed and recoiled heavily in my shoulder. I saw his small body come hurtling sideways out of the silhouette, swimming through the air before crashing to the ground and tumbling head over heels in an untidy mess of arms and legs. And I knew then that it was all over; I knew that my son and only child, Edward Coon the second, was dead.

  Edward was neither dead nor seriously wounded, he was just out cold with barely a scratch on him. The bullet had grazed the top of his head, parting his thick hair with a terrific red lesion which cut through to the bone of his skull. He just lay there on his back breathing lightly as if he had lain down for a nap.

  I saw straight away that his condition placed him outside the terms of our agreement. He was neither dead nor seriously wounded but the danger now was that he might wake in a matter of hours and wander off into the world as an imbecile with neither wit nor memory, easy prey for thieves and malefactors. This was not what we had settled on. I wanted him either dead or alive, not queering up creation further as an idiot.

  I picked him up and turned to the house. His head lolled heavily off my elbow and a thin rivulet of blood seeped through his hair. His tongue lolled thickly from his mouth. As I gazed upon him I saw for the umpteenth time how everything rank and misshapen in the world was summed up in this small bundle of flesh and bone. This child of mine seemed the very distillate of all the world’s cruelty and malice. But beneath my disgust there welled also a deeper, more unspeakable feeling. It rose through my heart and leaked into my throat, swelling it and threatening to choke me. It had the same intractable presence as the rifle which lay across my son’s chest.

  For the first time in my life I recognized clearly that everything in my son which repulsed me was nothing more than my own mirror image.

  I woke with a brutal headache; some implacable demon was working in my skull with a lump hammer. My room, a horrid prospect, smelled of charred timber and petrol. Shafts of light spilled through the shattered roof, settling in the room like converged lances. I walked through the ruined hallway and into the kitchen clutching my head in my hands. My father sat at the table cleaning the rifle, yanking a pull through from the barrel.

  ‘You don’t look like God and you’re not forking stiffs into a furnace. What happened?’

  ‘I creased your skull and you fell unconscious.’

  ‘And you took pity on me?’

  ‘No, I just honoured the terms of our agreement. Have a drink, welcome home so to speak.’ He pushed a bottle of whiskey across the table to me.

  ‘No thanks, you know well I’m only a minor.’

  ‘Suit yourself. I would have thought that any man who had come within a hair’s breadth of hell would want to celebrate his deliverance.’

  ‘I’m not in the mood for festivities, I just want to get my head together.’

  I pulled up a chair and watched him cleaning the gun. No matter how many times I had seen him do this simple task, the way he worked those stubby fingers of his still enchanted me. The guile and seamless grace of his movements. I had often reflected that somewhere in him there was a craftsman howling to get out, someone with patience and poor eyesight who worked with precious materials and terrifying degrees of accuracy. He laid down the rifle suddenl
y and stared into space for a long moment.

  ‘We can’t go on like this,’ he said finally. ‘It’s nothing personal but this has got to end. People like you and me have no place any more in the world, Edward. We’d be better off dead.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing. I am so lost, so lost. It’s a matter of scale, I think. We’re told every day that the world is getting smaller and smaller and that distances are narrowing down, bringing the peoples of the world together in harmony. But for people like you and me it just gets bigger and bigger until we’ve dropped right through the meshes of it and into this pit. We have no life any more.’

  ‘Was it ever any other way?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said vehemently. ‘Yes, it was. There was a time when we had status and valuable skills. It’s hard to believe that people like us were passed down from kings to princes as part of inheritances and that we were privy to their inmost thoughts. And it’s harder to believe that some of us were real artisans and craftsmen, shoemakers and fullers and spinners of gold thread, diamond prospectors even. Did you know our forebears trafficked in foundlings for depleted bloodlines and that we made ends meet with a bit of cradle-snatching? All honourable trades in their own worlds. But not any more, that’s all gone now. Now we’re not even good circus material. History has passed us by, Edward, and we’re dead men, dead men both of us.’

  ‘That’s not unusual. The world is full of people who have been passed over by history – gypsies, tinkers and so on.’

  ‘Yes, but none have fallen so low. We are the lowest of the low; right now we are neither men nor beasts, we’re just nightmare creatures stalking a no man’s land between myth and history.’

  ‘You’re just full of self-pity.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Edward. I’ve lived long enough to be able to distinguish pity from disgust. I cried for six months when your mother died and I couldn’t eat for two after the first time I held you in my arms. I’m not likely to confuse the two. At this moment I’m so sickened by myself I couldn’t summon up the energy to puke. And while we’re on the subject of disgust, tell me, why did you burn down the left wing?’

  ‘That was an incomplete job: If you hadn’t come along I’d have burned down the whole house. I was hoping that when you came back the whole thing would be destroyed and we could go off together and make our way in the world. I wanted a new start. There was a time when I thought this house was our sanctuary and refuge. And it was too for many years – our own little scooped-out space in the world where we were safe and without enemies. But over the years this sanctuary has turned into our prison; there’s no house around here for miles and we have no friends or function any more. Now I think it is time to up roots and move on. Somewhere out there, in the vastness of the world, I know there is a small place where we can find our niche.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was thinking in terms of adventure and destiny, taking every day as it comes, you and me facing fortune head on.’

  He closed his eyes as if experiencing some vast weariness. ‘That’s a young man’s game, Edward. I’m too old for that kind of optimism.’

  He was right. I saw for the first time how all his years of rancour and bitterness had eaten away the fabric of his soul. He had about him now an air of utter defeat. It ran in every line of his body, coursing through his arms and legs and chest and into the curve of his blunt spine. Some terrible weight seemed to have settled upon him and it came as an immense shock to see that he was now almost shorter than myself.

  By this time the gun was cleaned and he was tidying away the oil and the lint. I hadn’t seen the hacksaw on the table and I noticed also that a piece of the barrel was lying loose beside it. He had sawn another inch off the stock, customizing the gun yet further. He handed it to me.

  ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It should handle lighter – I’ve shifted the balance nearer the stock. Today it’s your turn. The same terms and no arguments.’

  I felt my eyes start in their sockets.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ I whispered in disbelief, ‘I can’t. It’s just crazy.’ I retreated a few steps from the gun he was holding at arm’s length. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Take the gun, Edward,’ he insisted. ‘Take it.’ He thrust it suddenly onto my chest.

  ‘No,’ I yelled, ‘no!’ I fended the gun off wildly with my hands.

  ‘This isn’t an order, Edward, it’s a request.’ He had me pinned against the wall now, laying the rifle across my chest. He took his hands away suddenly and I found myself holding it. A calm, solemn note entered his voice.

  ‘I’ve hated you from the moment you entered the world and I’ve hated you all the more because you are my son. I didn’t think the world could commit the same atrocity twice in the same place. But I was wrong. And worst of all I’ve felt neither shame nor remorse for my hatred. Now, not once in all these years have I ever asked you for anything, not once because what did a wretch like you have to offer, you who had less grace than I did? But now I’m asking you for this one thing. Take the gun and be my son, just this once and final time.’

  The gun burned in my hand but I could not let it go.

  ‘Is it what you really want?’ I blurted.

  ‘Yes, it’s what I really want. I cannot suffer this any more.’

  He turned and made his way quickly through the back door and outside he stood facing towards the field. The day was cruelly lit; a high, unseasonable sun flared in the sky like magnesium, casting neither shadow nor illusion. My father turned into the field and I could see by the way he moved, the slouched gait and the hopeless slope of his shoulders that he wasn’t going to make it. I was filled with sudden panic.

  ‘Dad,’ I cried.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Run hard.’

  He turned without a word and continued on his way and when he got to the starting post he just kept on walking.

  And so we made ready. Our last summer was at an end and by the time October came round our dope supply and nixers had dried up and the days were closing in like a corridor in the autumn gloom. Our cushy summer rituals had gone into a rut and now the signs were telling us something. We opened our eyes and read them the only way possible: go, move on, leave, fuck off somewhere else, we were being told.

  And so we were ready. We bought our tickets, packed our rucksacks and flew out of Shannon on the eighteenth of October, two weeks after Emmett’s twenty-second birthday. The plan was construction work or bartending, whichever came first, and long enough to get money together to travel to Mexico or California. A vague plan right enough but with Emmett and myself there was never any other sort. With Emmett beside me I had no worries. He was my best friend, my right-hand man, my brother in arms since childhood. He was the steady one who spotted the flaws and pitfalls, the one who saw consequences when I saw only opportunity. Whatever happened I knew it would work out the way everything we did together worked out – me, blundering and impetuous, going the scenic route, Emmett, the steady one, taking time out to light a smoke and consider, then arriving there before me via the short cut.

  I sat back on the flight and closed my eyes. I had no worries.

  John Tighe, two-year veteran of a concrete gang, had a flat in Queens. He shared a room with Paul Flatley, another exile from our home town. Both were the same age as ourselves and hungry for news of the home place. That first night we stayed up till the early hours drinking beer and smoking, laughing and piss pulling, getting steadily drunker till John got up and stretched himself, announced finally that he was going to bed. Paul stubbed his last fag and killed his bottle, announced that he was going too. He stood swaying for a moment, frisked his pockets and threw out a spare set of keys. He muttered a few muddled instructions on how to find our way into the city and how to avoid the no-go areas. He clasped his head and said goodnight.

  The next day was Friday. We weren’t due to start looking for work till Monday; there was no rush.

&nb
sp; We found our way into Manhattan the next morning and came through Port Authority onto 42nd Street feeling none too sure of ourselves. We passed the entire day drifting openmouthed through the core of the bad apple, spending the bulk of our time browsing in the sex shops along 42nd Street, those dank galleries with curtained-off cubicles and overhead signs warning people to keep both hands on the magazines while reading. When we’d had enough we stumbled out into the amber sunlight with our hands stuffed deep in our pockets and Emmett lit a fag and shook his head, wondering aloud how such beautiful women could be brought to do such things. We stopped again further on, and listened to some black dude standing seven foot tall, dressed in army fatigues and speaking to the crowd through a hailer. He was yelling some garbled shite about Afro-Americans being the lost tribe of Abraham, the disinherited nation whose identity had been usurped by the Jews but who were now on their way to their lawful inheritance over the corpses of anyone who stood in their way, Paddies included. And when we’d heard enough of that we walked on further to where a cardsharp was turning a three-card trick on a tiny, baize-topped table in front of another crowd. He must have seen me coming because he suckered me into wagering my ten against his twenty that I couldn’t find the ace of spades alongside the king and queen. I kept my eyes riveted to that card but he still took my ten quicker than you could say honky-assed motherfucker. We strolled on and ate at a deli, a massive, neon-lit food hall thronged with secretaries and yuppies eating at the end of the day. At the self-service counter we shovelled lasagne and side salad onto plastic plates, weighed them at the cash point and got a bill for thirty dollars. We ate and rode the subway home in embarrassed silence, knowing once and for all that we’d some serious wising up to do.

  When we got back to the flat John and Paul had returned from work. They were sitting with their feet on the table and swinging out of their chairs, drinking longnecks and eating huge sandwiches. The day’s work showed in their faces: grey cement lines ran from the corners of their eyes. With a sweep of his boot John cleared off his end of the table and proceeded to roll up a smoke. He glanced up and grinned.