by Thomas Ryan
“Phone Dad,” Sally said.
John hand produced his mobile. He speed dialed his father’s work number but couldn’t get through to him…
“Shit. A recorded message. Dad’s in a meeting. Come on, let’s go find someone who can help.”
###
Ellen’s libido levels had climbed like mercury in a barometer and threatened to explode through the top of her head. She could bear it no longer.
“Now Ricardo. Now! I’m a slut! I’m a slut! Take me.”
Ricardo freed her hands and legs. He climbed onto the bed beside her and leaned forward kissing her neck.
“For God’s sake, Ricardo. I don’t need foreplay. Just bloody get on with it.”
###
Sally and John rushed into the motel office. John pressed his thumb down on the buzzer button embedded in the counter top and held it there.
“Alright, alright I’m coming,” a voice called from the back. The man who stepped through the curtained door towered over the two teenagers. He was overweight and waddled as he walked. A stained purple T-shirt desperately tried to cover his pot belly.
“What can I do for you two?” He grunted.
He was huge and that was enough for Sally.
“You have to help us,” she said. “Our mother is in trouble.”
The motel manager scratched his unshaven face and looked at Sally and John as if they were aliens. “She is in one of your motel rooms. A man has her tied up and is beating her.”
“She’s working undercover for the police,” John added.
“Which room?”
“Sixteen.”
The manager reached behind him and took a key from a rack on the wall, “You kids stay here.”
“No way,” Sally said. “We’re coming too.”
“Well, stay back, out of my way. Got it?” he scowled.
Two nods.
###
Ellen was reaching her climax. Ricardo egging her on. Sweat dribbled from his chest onto her face. She didn’t care. She wanted to taste his sweat. The excitement and intensity of this moment of passion was crashing through new boundaries. She had never experienced such ecstasy. They had climbed a mighty mountain. Now they had reached the peak.
“Mum!”
Somewhere in the deep recesses of Ellen’s mind she heard the call.
“Mum!”
The voice was softer. Not Ricardo’s. His thrusting had stopped. Then the weight was gone from atop of her. She flung her arms to the side. Exhausted, but frustrated that she had not exploded as she had expected to. She opened her eyes. Searching for Ricardo. Why had he stopped? She saw faces looking down at her.
At first, comprehension evaded her. Then realization dawned.
“Noooo…!” Ellen screamed as she reached for a sheet.
“Mum, what’s going on?” Sally cried. “Dad, what are you doing here? What are you doing to Mum?”
John turned away in disgust. Ellen continued to wail.
###
Months passed before Ellen, Larry, John and Sally returned to a semblance of normality. A psychologist had counseled the children through the trauma of seeing their parents copulating. Helped them understand that adults sometimes role-played to add spice to their sex lives. It was healthy. Sally was not convinced and asked a local Catholic priest what steps she needed to take to become a nun. John went back to eating and his computer.
Sadly, Ellen acknowledged her relationship with her children was now different. Instead of simply ignoring her, as they had in the past, they now ignored her standoffishly. The shocked looks on Sally’s and John’s faces continued to haunt her. She had not made love to Larry since the day in the motel.
But as the weeks passed the fretting waned and deviant thoughts began to return. After six months she longed for Larry’s alter ego Ricardo to reappear.
One morning Ellen heard a noise over the sound of the vacuum cleaner. It seemed a hundred horses were galloping across her driveway. Turning off the appliance she went in search of the cause.
Outside was the largest motorcycle she had ever seen.
Dressed in black leathers and legs astride the rumbling engine sat Larry, both hands gripping the handle grips. His right hand rolled the throttle back and forth. The revving was deafening. He smiled and turned the engine off.
“Larry, what the hell is this?”
“I don’t know any Larry. On the road I’m called Bear. I need a biker bitch to go riding with. I’m told I might find one at this address.”
Ellen’s eyes lit up.
“Well, hello Bear. Let me go in the house and get her. Don’t you go anywhere.” Ellen rushed inside wondering if she could still fit into her jeans. What did it matter? She had a pretty good idea of what Bear’s taste in a woman’s dress sense would be.
The tighter, the better.
The End
Mending Kittens
I stayed out of sight and watched from the tree line.
Alicia would not have liked this day. No sun. She loved the sun. Said the rays cleansed her. Like having a shower without water.
“The rays kill the bacteria,” she’d said.
I’d shaken an unbelieving head.
But today, on the one day that was Alicia’s special day, sorrowful heads of battleship-gray clouds hung low robbing the world of colour. The flashes of lightning were drawing closer but the rain held off. It seemed that not even God was about to shed tears over a tortured soul lost to Him long ago.
No family members at the graveside. No friends. Only a policeman and a female clerk from Social Welfare, both there as a public service acknowledgement that Alicia Bunning’s begrudging presence in government departments had ended. Her, now to be closed file would doubtless discover more ready acceptance in the archival crypt.
The government lady, fifty-ish, bespectacled, blue and silver streaks through light brown hair, glanced up at the overweight cop. She said something. He laughed. Almost a snigger. She checked her watch. Turned her wrist to the cop. He nodded. Alicia had taken up too much of their valuable time.
My attention turned to the priest. The man of God clutched a tattered Book of Common Prayer, a papery prop that would have been held aloft through many sermons to ever diminishing congregations. His knuckles gleamed white in response to the falling temperatures. He whispered a prayer of eternal rest then touched the casket lid.
Two men in luminous orange vests stepped forward and lowered Alicia’s plain coffin into the cold, muddied hole. Even before the small gathering of indifferent mourners had turned to leave, the graveyard employees had bent to shoveling the sod. Perhaps their haste was in fear that the approaching storm might collapse the walls of Alicia’s place of interment. Perhaps it was just disrespect for a young woman of little substance who had died before her time.
###
Fingers of light played with my eyelids. I resisted being wrenched from slumber. An aching head needed rest. But a dry mouth demanded water. I had suffered a sleep deprived night due to the incessant buzzing of a mosquito above my ear. Now, my surroundings awash with dawns early light I held out the back of my hand. The greedy little creature, more interested in blood than safety, settled. I slapped and wiped the bloodied residue onto my jeans.
Yawning, I stretched then sat up. Fingernails rasped through the growth on the side of my face. It had gotten longer. I could almost twirl the scraggy ends between thumb and forefinger. Officially a beard now I supposed. I fell back onto my bed of cardboard spread over the grass. Droplets of water splashed onto my face and drew my attention to the darkening heavens.
I needed to move.
Grabbing the sack that held my meagre belongings, I leapt over the ‘Do not walk on grass’ sign and ran across the manicured lawns. I paused on the sidewalk and waited for a road sweeper to crawl past me. Whirling brushes swept up plastic bottles, paper, and probably a few used condoms. Two hookers, mascara seeping from the corners of their eyes, sipped on take-away coffees at the bus-stop. The ni
ght people were heading home and day workers not yet filtering in to replace them.
Rain droplets now spotted the pavement with increasing rapidity. I stepped off the kerb and made a beeline for a canvas canopy protecting the doorway of a menswear store. I would wait out the heavy rainfall. Keeping dry a priority. I hated begging for money in wet clothes.
Mocking me from the shop window was the reflection of a thin, haggard creature of jaundiced complexion. It caused me the same twinge of horror that I had seen many times reflected in the faces of passers-by. Disgust from the general public for an unhealthy specimen doomed to have his face on police posters and disease advisory booklets.
###
The family doctor had described me as suffering from excessive consumption disorder, a kinder way of informing my parents their son was a junkie and an alcoholic. Righteous conscience mandated that they should waste inordinate amounts of money on quacks. There would be no miraculous cure, the doctors had said. In other words, just leave him with us and keep sending cheques.
My first incarceration was in a New Age health clinic hidden away behind two-metre-high hedges in the revamped buildings of an abandoned school. We inmates spent our days listening to waffle and sitting on wooden benches in the shade of giant oaks. I must admit that for a time I was lulled into an artificial serenity, partly because of the surroundings, but mostly because I was overdosed on sedatives and various forms of psychotic drugs.
But an unexpected side effect began to evidence itself. Somewhere deep within the recesses of my brain, memories of past infringements lay stored like aging bottles of wine. For years alcohol and drugs had snaked through my cerebral arteries, building barriers between distasteful reality and a quixotic world all of my own. The pulling down of these barriers exposed truths that repulsed me. That caused me to confront the hopelessness of my lack of future. And worse, to confront a plethora of despicable deeds. If that was not enough, hours of cravings during the early stages of withdrawal contorted my body with agonizing spasms. It was more than I could bear.
I hated the clinic. I hated the confinement. I hated the cure.
And so I escaped through an open window and crawled back to the shadows and the security of oblivion found in alcohol and drugs. I wasn’t yet thirty years old. A university graduate with a Masters in English and I had torpedoed a potentially bright future. I had not just fallen from grace but from the comforts of an upper-middle-class home. It seemed that all the education in the world was no defence against a disinterested mind and a disengaged attitude. I did, from time to time, experience an overwhelming sadness that my life had become worthless. But sadness is easily placated with a pill washed down in the company of a bottle of forty percent proof.
I had no friends, no close companions, and only nodding acquaintanceships with other nomads of the street. Like me, they were society’s cast-offs, eking out an existence in states of paranoia and solipsism. There was a kind of comradeship, but only the type that develops amongst thieves; tolerance without trust. Many a night I had lapsed into a coma and woke in the morning to find my half-consumed bottle empty and any money scrounged off pedestrians that day, gone. Whenever I was sober enough to remember, I hid the cash in the lining of my jacket pocket.
And so my days were spent on corners begging. In the afternoons I roamed the lanes of the cities back streets stealing anything left unguarded.
One particular day had been a truly lean day.
Hunger gnawed my insides. I made my way to the city mission and joined the queue. The soup was watery and the meat served with a dollop of mash and a spoonful of peas, chewy. But it filled my stomach. It meant the meagre amount of coins rattling in my pocket could be used for gin.
The going down of the sun was the signal to make tracks to my spot in the park. Two bottles of the cheapest gin clinked in my knapsack. The shittiness of the day would be forgotten after half a bottle and I looked forward to that. On my way I stole a handful of chocolate bars from a dairy. Tonight would be like a party of sorts. My route led past the park fountain. It had once spewed a watery cascade over a mosaic of sunflowers but now sat in silent tribute to civic indifference. The greenish water now home to leaves, condoms, and mosquito larvae. My warm spot was thirty metres the other side.
But company awaited. I had seen the girl in the soup kitchen earlier. Her name was Alicia. That’s all I knew. She sat on the tiled wall that circled the fountain. Eyes fixed on me.
“Whaddya think you’re fucking looking at?”
She couldn’t have been older than twenty but already looked fifty. An oversized yellow T-shirt under a black leather jacket hung down over grubby faded jeans.
“Go on. Get the fuck out of here.”
Her voice rose several notches.
An elderly couple passing heard Alicia’s rant. Their pace quickened. The man muttered to the worried face of his wife that he would call the police. This focused my mind. Mostly the cops left us down-and-outs alone as long as we left the good citizens alone. But this couple meant trouble. I needed to get Alicia out of sight.
I took a step to her side. Alicia eyed me up. Uncertainty creased her brow.
“What the fuck do you want, asshole?”
She rubbed her hands on her jeans. She kept rubbing. The glazed look told me she was high on something. But the agitation told me that she was now on the way down from whatever it had been. Maybe she was hallucinating and the same bugs that sometimes crawled over my body were now crawling over hers.
Her head slumped. This revealed a tattooed snake that wound its way up her back and curled around her neck. Dull eyes and two fangs signaled a warning not to come closer. Studs in her ears and nose and the gold ring looped through her lip bore testimony to a punk rocker marooned in a time when punk rock was long dead.
I had seen it all before. Alicia had fallen so far that even the brothels no longer had a place for her. My hand waved in the direction of the departing concerned citizens.
“The police are coming. You need to move away from here.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
By the tremble in her voice and the shake of her head I knew she’d be craving a fix right now. Her mouth would be dry, head aching, and if she wasn’t crashed into a torpid state quick smart, she’d soon be wailing like an Irish banshee until the police arrived.
I pulled the sack off my shoulder and showed her one of the gin bottles.
“I have two of these.”
She reached for one.
“Give me the fucking thing.”
“Not here. We need to go somewhere else.”
A blank look into my face. Then a nod. She staggered to her feet, eyes now focused on the sot’s Holy Grail dangling in front of her.
“Follow me,” she said.
Her unsteady shuffle led me to the other side of the park and into a small graveyard. Picking a spot she sank to her knees. I dropped to the ground a few metres from her.
She looked across at me and forced a smile then tugged at the zipper of her jeans. I held up a hand.
“No. No sex.”
An uncomprehending look. Then feral eyes darted side to side. Body tensed as if preparing for some unknown new threat.
“What the fuck do you want then?”
I passed the bottle. She snatched it. Eyes remained on me while she unscrewed the cap as if at any moment the precious liquid might be taken from her. She took a gulp and lowered the bottle to rest between her legs.
I relaxed and flicked the screw cap from the second bottle. With some relief I watched the tension fall away from her shoulders. Her head turned towards a lichen-covered upright slab of cracked marble.
“This is my friend Bartholomew Drefus,” she said, pointing at it. “We’ve been friends for many years. Say hello. You can call him Barty if you like.”
I read the name still visible beneath the spreading moss. Barty died in 1890.
“Barty listens to my troubles. He’s like a father to me. Only he never comes into my
room at night. Not Barty. Oh no, he’s too much a of gentleman for that.”
Alicia slumped sideways and leaned on her elbow. She managed the manoeuvre without upsetting the bottle.
We then lapsed into a silent vigil alongside Barty’s grave and got drunk. Alcohol, the baptismal beverage for the uniting of fractured souls. With half-closed eyes I considered if it was possible that our two broken lives might make one half-decent human shell. By the time we both passed out neither of us could have given a shit.
###
As always I slept the sleep of the befuddled; comatose at the start and thereafter drifting in and out of consciousness, intermittently woken by my own snoring. The onset of dawn brought chirping and the beginnings of wakefulness. I had learnt never to sleep under a tree. Crapped on by a nervous squadron of feathered fighters was an experience I vowed not to repeat. However the tweeting was natures alarm clock only this clock could not be turned off. But I had grown used to morning sounds only this morning, something else. Singing. A woman’s voice in a sweet lullaby.
Alicia was kneeling on the ground unloading what looked like possum skin hats from a plastic bag. I sat up to watch.
“Holy shit.”
Alicia looked across at me and smiled. Two of her front teeth were missing.
“Are they kittens?” I asked.
She beamed like a child and nodded. The animals appeared to be quite dead. She lined five bodies in a row, then sat back on her haunches to admire her handiwork. For somebody inured to freakishness as I was, even this I found freaky. I needed to pee. I stood, half concealing myself behind a tree. Alicia didn’t so much as glance my way. But my eyes remained on her.
“Why do you have dead kittens? Where did you find them?”
“This is what I do. I mend kittens. They’re strays. Homeless. Just like you and me. No one wants them. No one feeds them. So I break their necks and bring them here.”
For several seconds I stood statue-like, staring at the top of Alicia’s bowed head. I zipped up my pants and turned back to her.
“Don’t you… don’t you mean you’re helping them. You know? To a better place?”