by Lee Dunne
‘Oh, Tony, don’t,’ she begged, ‘don’t even get me thinking about it. I’m going crazy enough as it is.’
She put her arms around me: ‘It must be murder for you.’
I pushed her away gently: ‘Not if you don’t tease me,’ I said, suddenly realising that I was speaking the truth. In all the weeks since we’d last made love, I hadn’t wanted sex. ‘You’ve bloody well ruined me for other birds, do you know that?
As long as you love me, I wouldn’t care if you did have other women.’ She smiled, and then she said. ‘But all the same, I’m glad you haven’t anybody but me.’
I wanted to kid her, to tease her with the idea that I’d only had the odd one, but, she was so soft and gentle, so vulnerable, that I couldn’t do it. I kissed her forehead: ‘It just doesn’t arise.’ I stopped. ‘And that’s not a pun...there just wouldn’t be any point.’
She held me. ‘I’ve done that to you?’
‘Yes, you bitch, that’s what I said, you’ve ruined me, you have stopped me sharing myself around, all those poor girls gasping. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
‘You just wait until the weekend, she vowed:, her eyes on my face: ‘I’m going to kill you, ride you to death.’
She ground her teeth, happiness bursting out of her pores. Then she said quietly: ‘That is, if I can wait that long.’
She came out of the doctor’s surgery and waved at me, I got out of the truck and she ran and threw herself at me, her arms around my neck. ‘It’s all systems go,’ she whispered, ‘every thing is fine.’
‘Oh, my baby.’ I kissed her passionately for the first time in a million years. Her lips were on my mouth and I held her tongue gently, savouring the taste of her love for me. ‘I adore you.’
We were in the truck and our lips were glued together, our desire a palpable thing, going at it so heatedly that Jimmy in the back passenger seat of our old truck, began groaning.
‘Do you have to go right now,’ Jenny asked me.
I nodded. ‘We have to go right now, love, yeh.’
‘But I want you now.’
‘Jesus!’ Without looking you could imagine Jimmy with the eyes thrown up to heaven: ‘Have you ever heard the likes of it in all your puff.’
‘Jenny love, you can’t have me now. Jimmy and me, we have an important errand to attend to.’
Jenny sighed and threw a fast prayer; ‘Oh, please make tonight come quickly, please, please, please.’
Jimmy was snorting like a stallion in heat.
‘I love you,’ Jenny said, getting out of the truck I got the engine going and she was still waving as I took it away on our most important chore of the year.
‘That’s living, Tony, that’s really living.’
I nodded, smiling to myself, thinking how good life could be. And with the sun shining and a long summer before us, with Jennie loving me as she did, any wonder it seemed to me that the trees were singing as we headed along the road to Joe Dominick and the booth.
‘We came through, Jimmy!’
He passed me a cigarette: ‘Touch and go there for a while.’
I laughed, nudging him with my shoulder. ‘Get out of it, you old bastard, didn’t do us a bit of harm,’
‘Speak for yourself. Once or twice, I felt like packing it in.’
‘Bull...’
He cut across me. ‘No. Joking apart, I got so fed up at one stage that I nearly slung my hat at it.’
‘Ah, you weren’t serious.’
‘I’m not so sure. And no bullshit, I’d never have made it without you.’
‘Bollox!
‘Good team, us.’
I pulled a half bottle of Courvoiseur out of my jacket. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
Jimmy chuckled: ‘You need an excuse.’
I passed the bottle back to him again. ‘Keep a drop for Joe.’
----------
When the noise of the truck didn’t bring Joe Dominic out to greet us, I thought that maybe he was in a drunken stupor, but, when I jumped down from the running board, I just knew something wasn’t right.
There was no lean-to-shelter by Joe’s cottage. The flat dray trailer was there, right where we had parked it. But the wooden shelter was gone and there was no sign of our booth on the trailer.
The canvas roofing lay crumpled with the sack of nuts and bolds and braces in the middle of it, but that was all.
I turned to Jimmy. He stood looking down at the canvas, his face the colour of cigarette ash, and he was shaking his head, as though doing that would change the scene that his eyes didn’t want to believe.
He followed me into what had been the cottage, through the hanging of old canvas that served as a door. The place was empty and there was little of nothing of the two windows left.
There wasn’t a single piece of timber, in any shape of form, left in the one roomed cottage. Not so much as a table and chair, even the window frames had been chopped out, while hunks had been gouged out of the solitary support beam that no longer had much roof left over it. But there was no shortage of ash, there was ash everywhere as Jimmy said, his voice coming from some very pain filled location: ‘He chopped it up, along with everything else, he chopped up our fucking booth!’
I bent down and took up a handful of ash. Somewhere in it was part of the booth we had built as our Summer Theatre, and our poor, crazy old mate, Joe Dominick had burned the whole fucking thing in his fight to survive the worst winter in God knows how many years.
‘The poor bastard, he was freezing to death.’
‘Poor bastard, my arse,’ Jimmy hissed, like someone holding down a serious pain. ‘He did well to clear off for I would have killed him.’
‘He was only trying to stay alive, Jimmy.’
‘Fuck him and staying alive. Jesus! We only got through our worst ever fucking winter because the booth was keeping us alive.’
‘And while it was doing that for us, burning up the wood was doing the same thing for Joe. Like it, or not, saving you and me and the gang, and Joe hopefully alive somewhere, I’d say it was worth it.’
Jimmy looked like he was going to throw himself at me but his eyes flipped over and he just stormed out of the ruined cottage, while I got a cigarette going, hoping to find a way to get him grounded again.
I found Jimmy outside, sweeping dirt and rubbish off the canvas that was the roof of our Summer booth. Without looking at me, he said: ‘I know you’re right, Joe had to try and stay alive, like the rest of us.’
‘You can bet he was freezing the death when he burned out booth.
‘I know, and I’m sorry it has to end this way, when we had so much feeling for getting a real break in the booth this summer.’
‘Well, we were going to have a few days rest anyway before we opened the booth. We’ll build a new one. We have the roof. You’re standing on it.’
‘Sure,’ Jimmy looked at me as though he was thinking I had lost my mind. ‘And what’ll we use to run up this booth you have in mind? Were you thinking bull rushes or what?
I shook my head, wondering if this was why my son had died before he lived.
‘With the baby’s money,’ I said.
‘Baby’s money?’
‘I gave it to Jenny when she first told me she was pregnant. She gave it back to me.’
‘You’re saying we build a new booth?’
‘Well, Christ, we’re not playing stuffy halls all summer if I can help it.’
Jimmy’s face came back to life: ‘How much have you got?’
‘About a hundred and fifty quid,’’
Jimmy was fully present now- his mind adding and doing whatever it did when money was involved.
‘We can make it bigger with that money, if you’re serious.’
‘I’m a
lways serious where money is concerned.’
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