by Limmy
But wait.
Wait a minute. Something wasn’t right.
Aaron paused it. He paused it right there, and then he turned to Emily.
Emily pointed to the telly and said, ‘What you doing? Press play.’
But he just looked at her.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘How did you know?’ he asked her.
‘How did I know what?’ she asked.
He looked at the telly, at Reno lying in the car park, and pointed at it.
‘What?’ she said. ‘That? Him getting knocked down? I didn’t. I didn’t know.’
‘But you said I was going to miss a bit.’
Emily looked at him like he was talking shite. ‘Gonnae just press play, Aaron?’ She reached for the remote. But he pulled it away.
‘Did you watch it?’ he asked. ‘You watched it, didn’t you?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Then why did you say that I was going to miss something? How did you know?’
‘I didnae know,’ she said. ‘I just meant that you were gonnae miss the episode. You’re looking at your phone and it’s the last episode.’
Aaron was sure he’d looked at his phone at an earlier part of the episode as well, but she’d said nothing then. Why was that? Why didn’t she say he was going to miss something then? Why did she only say it before Reno got hit by a motor?
‘Did you watch it?’ he asked again. ‘Tell the truth, Emily. I don’t care.’
He did care.
She looked back at him for a moment, and then told the truth. She started laughing, then told him the truth.
‘All right, I watched it,’ she said. She took his hand and laughed again. ‘I just wanted to watch it.’
‘What?’ he asked. ‘What? Why did you do that?’
‘Because I wisnae tired and I wanted something to watch.’
‘The last episode,’ said Aaron, pointing at the telly. ‘You serious? You fucking serious?’
He was pissed off.
‘Aaron, I wanted to watch it and you didnae. You went to bed. The final episode, and you decide to go to bed. Fair’s fair. Anyway, it’s just a fucking programme. Get a grip.’
Aaron thought that maybe she was right. Maybe he was blowing it out of proportion. It was just a programme.
But it wasn’t just that, was it? There was something else. Something wasn’t right about it. There was something bigger, but he couldn’t put it into words just yet. So he took his hand away from hers, and looked at the telly, with the series still paused. He tried to figure it out.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘Press play. It’s good.’
He didn’t like that. That was something there he didn’t like. He didn’t like hearing her saying that it was good, reminding him that she’d gone ahead without him.
Was he overreacting?
He looked back over his mind to see if he’d ever done the same thing to her. He probably had. In fact, he knew he had. He remembered that he finished watching a few episodes of The Wire once when she wanted to watch them with him.
But that was different.
It was different because she wasn’t that interested in The Wire. He’d asked her night after night if she fancied watching those episodes, but she said no, preferring to watch something else. She said she wanted to watch them eventually, but she was in no rush, whereas he wanted to watch them right away.
But it wasn’t just that.
He’d owned up. That was one difference here. He owned up the very next day. He told her the very next morning in bed, before they got up. He said sorry, but she didn’t mind, and then he told her what had happened in the episodes that he’d watched. And as he was telling her, she cut him off, because she wasn’t that interested after all. She didn’t even know half the characters’ names.
But it wasn’t just that either. There was something bigger.
‘Aaron, gonnae press play?’ she said.
So he pressed play and pretended to be watching, when he was thinking more about this other thing. It was starting to come to him now, what was really wrong here.
While she had been watching this episode, before he found out that she’d already seen it, she had been pretending that she hadn’t already seen it.
She had been laughing. She’d been laughing at things that she would surely no longer find funny, because she’d already seen it. When you see a funny thing for the second time, you don’t laugh the way she had laughed.
She had opened her mouth in shock at things that she could not have found shocking, because she had already seen it. She looked right at him with surprise on her face, as he looked the same way back at her. He thought he was sharing an experience with her. And he hadn’t been. And she knew that.
She had deceived him. And she was good at it.
Too good.
And what about the tears? The tears at that bit when Reno knew he wasn’t getting his daughter back. Aaron had turned to Emily and pointed at his cheek to show her the tear rolling down it. And he saw that Emily was in tears as well.
Had she faked those tears?
Can you be in tears twice, at the same thing, two nights in a row? Surely you need time to let the memory clear from your mind in order to be upset again, for the grief to be new?
He wanted to ask her.
He paused the episode, and said ‘Emily’. But then he said ‘Forget it’, and pressed play.
He couldn’t put the questions into words. He didn’t know what it was he wanted to ask, or if he wanted an answer.
How was she able to fake her emotions so convincingly? When, during their relationship, had she done it before? When would she do it again? Could she be truthful from this point on? If she said yes, how would he know if that was the truth?
They watched the rest of the episode, and Aaron pretended that what she did wasn’t important, that it was nothing.
‘Sorry for overreacting,’ he said. But he didn’t mean it. So in that respect, he was a bit like her.
But he wasn’t. What she had done was different.
Six years later, her dad died. By that time, Aaron and Emily had split up, but Emily had invited him to the funeral, because he and her dad had got on well.
At the reception afterwards, Aaron was standing near Emily, as she was talking to one her uncles, one of her dad’s brothers.
Aaron watched her as she wiped away her tears.
Emily saw him. Saw him looking at her. Looking closely at her face, from only a few feet away. Looking very closely.
Studying her.
‘Don’t, Aaron,’ she said. ‘Just fucking don’t.’
Trainers
Yvonne went to the shops to buy a new pair of trainers for her son Paul. He was in primary 2, and there was going to be a race at the school. She wanted him to win, but he had no chance. He was too slow.
She took him to the shops and bought the trainers from one of the assistants. He was a strange person to be an assistant in a shoe shop. He was a very old man with a long beard. Everybody else in there was young.
Yvonne told the man that Paul was going to be in a race. Paul said that he never won, and he looked sad. But the old man smiled.
‘Then perhaps you would like these trainers here, young man?’
The old man handed over a pair of trainers, the likes of which Yvonne had never seen before.
‘These are special shoes, my fellow. Magic shoes. With these shoes, you will run faster than before. You will jump higher than before. You will run longer than before.’
‘I don’t need to jump,’ said Paul. ‘It’s just a race going straight forward.’
Yvonne laughed, and so did the old man. He had an old man’s laugh that went ‘Haaa haaa haaaaaa’.
She asked the old man how much they cost, worried that they would break the bank, like all trainers these days. But he said to Paul, ‘For you, my child, I give them to you for free.’
Yvonne said, ‘I wish. But how much really?’
The old man said, ‘I’m bein
g quite genuine, my dear.’
So Yvonne thanked the man and so did Paul, and away they went.
Paul wanted to try the trainers on right away the second he left the shop. He said they were magic trainers. Yvonne went along with it and said yes, they’re magic, but she didn’t want him getting them all dirty right away.
They waited until later that day, and Yvonne took him to the park to try them out.
Yvonne said to Paul, ‘On your marks. Get set. Go!’
And you had to see the speed of Paul. He was running fast as fuck. He wasn’t running unnaturally fast, but a lot faster than usual.
They really were magic trainers.
‘Oh my God,’ said Yvonne. She knew that when it came to the race, her son was going to win. She couldn’t wait, and neither could Paul.
On the morning of the race, a junkie stole Paul’s trainers.
What happened was, Yvonne had walked Paul around to school wearing his normal shoes, so that the magic trainers didn’t get dirty. Then when they got there, she took the magic trainers out of her bag and put them on the wall at the school fence, while she took the normal shoes off Paul’s feet. And that’s how quickly it happened. A junkie was off with them, just like that.
Paul was heartbroken.
‘I’m never going to win now,’ he said. ‘Never. Not without my magic trainers.’
Yvonne said, ‘Wait here.’ And she drove back to the shop to try and buy another pair.
When she got there, she asked around for the old man, but none of the staff knew who she was talking about. Was there something they could help her with? Yvonne told them she was after a pair of trainers, a specific pair of trainers, and she described the ones she was after. They didn’t know what trainers she was talking about. They couldn’t help.
Yvonne picked out a pair, the cheapest she could find, which weren’t that cheap at all. They looked dreadful. All purple and black with green bits. Nothing like the magic ones.
She rushed back to school and got to Paul just before the race. She showed him the trainers she got, and he burst into tears.
‘I know, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I know, they don’t look good. But the old man told me that they’re even more magic than the ones before.’
Paul looked up to her, wiping his tears.
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ said Yvonne. ‘They’re the most magic ones in the world.’
Paul began to smile, and looked at the trainers with new eyes. Then Yvonne helped him put them on.
She felt seriously bad. She knew that Paul was going to come last, then he’d know they weren’t really magic.
Paul took his place at the start of the race, and Yvonne watched on, her hands almost covering her eyes. She didn’t want to look.
The head teacher shouted, ‘On your marks. Get set. Go!’
And off they ran.
Yvonne closed her eyes until she heard the cheer at the end. She opened them, and expected to see Paul not even past the finish line.
But guess who had won?
That’s right.
Paul.
He ran fast as fuck, and he won.
Yvonne gave Paul a big cuddle, and he told her that he loved his new trainers even more. He said they were the most magic trainers in the whole world. Even though they weren’t.
Which just goes to show you.
If you believe. If you believe and you have a dream, and you think you can do it, and you want to do it, you can do it. You can do anything you put your mind to. Anything you set your heart on.
It goes to show you that all your dreams can and will come true. The magic isn’t in the trainers, but within each and every one of us.
They caught the junkie and gave him 18 months.
Throw away the key, that’s what I say.
The Tree
Billy woke up one morning and there it was. A tree, no more than two inches high, growing out of his shoulder.
He tried pulling it off, but to no avail. This wasn’t some young sapling he could pluck out like it was a blade of grass, this was the chunky and ancient type that looked like it had been there for hundreds of years, rooted to the spot.
It would take a bit of work getting rid of it, but he knew he could do it. He’d just get a saw, and then dig out the stump with a teaspoon or fork. He’d have to make sure the council didn’t find out about it, though, as they probably wouldn’t give him permission. He knew somebody who had a bird’s nest in his roof, wrecking his roof, and the council wouldn’t let him get rid of it.
He showed his wife and son the tree and told them not to tell anybody, in case the council got wind of it, but he may as well have shouted it over a megaphone. By the end of the day, there were neighbours and youngsters queuing at the front door to get a gander.
A wee lassie pointed at the tree, telling her mum that she liked the wee boys playing on the swing. Billy thought it was just her imagination, but when he looked, sure enough, miniature boys about a millimetre high had tied a length of rope around one of the branches and were daring each other to swing higher.
Billy shook his head and sighed. Everybody knew about the tree now, everybody from normal-sized people to the boys swinging on the tree. It was only a matter of time before the council knew about it as well.
He hoped that maybe people would lose interest in the tree, which would cause them to stop talking about it, which would help reduce the chances of word getting to the council. But then he opened the door one morning, and there on the doorstep were people from the news. People from the papers and the telly.
There were reporters that he recognised from breakfast telly pointing a camera in his face before he’d even had a chance to wake up. They were smiling and asking how it felt to have this tree growing out his shoulder, he must be bowled over with all the attention he was getting.
He said he was sick of it and he was going to chop it down.
He regretted saying that on national telly, because, surprise surprise, within an hour of saying it, a guy from the council was at the door to tell Billy he wasn’t allowed. The tree and the surrounding shoulder was now a conservation area, or some other bureaucratic claptrap like that. The council guy laid on the guilt trip about helping wildlife and preserving green spaces for future generations.
But the guy from the council wasn’t the one that had to put up with having a tree on his shoulder. He wasn’t the one being kept awake, night and fucking day, with the wee boys playing on that swing. Or the underage drinkers that would come out at night, covering his shoulder with broken bottles and sick. Or the wee miniature couples that would come and shag under the tree, just as he was about to read his weans a bedtime story.
So Billy set the fuck about it with an axe.
He popped open his son’s box of toys, grabbed the axe off the Lego lumberjack and just set the fuck about it.
His son saw him, and screamed. His wife ran in. A miniature guy who’d been shagging under the tree made a run for it, but tripped over the trousers that were down around his ankles and fell to his death, splatting onto a Dr Seuss book below.
When Billy’s wife and son tried to take the axe off him, he took the axe to them as well, chopping them into tiny wee pieces. It took fucking ages, but he did it, before turning the axe on himself. Which took even longer.
And so he was buried with his wife and son. Dead and buried.
Good, that’s the end of that.
Except it wasn’t. Nothing’s easy in this life, didn’t you know?
Because the next day, sprouting from their grave, was a tree.
It was the chunky and ancient type that looked like it had been there for a hundred years. And there, growing out one of the branches, was Billy, no more than two inches high, rooted to the spot from the waist up, next to his wife and son.
And they remembered exactly what he did. Oh, how they remembered.
He sometimes wished for a bird to land nearby and mistake him for a worm. He wished for a bird to pull hi
s fucking head off and put him out of his misery.
Or for a slug to slither over the lot of them, or maybe just the other two, to give his fucking ears a rest, even if for just five minutes.
Or simply just to be crushed by a falling chestnut. Was that too much to ask?
But that’s not how things were going to go. Because here, coming his way, was a caterpillar. A big, hungry caterpillar. A caterpillar that would munch him up one bite at a time, with that big, horrible mouth.
He wondered if he’d wake up again, after he died, to find himself sticking out the shoulder of a butterfly, the butterfly that this caterpillar would turn into.
That would be nice. He’d prefer to just die and never wake up, but if this was going to go on and on, then that would be a nice break. Riding on top of a butterfly, a beautiful butterfly, fluttering around in the sunshine, carried around in the warm summer air ‒ providing he was away from the other two.
It would be good if he was up at the butterfly’s shoulder, and the other two were far away at the other end, down at its arse. That would be nice.
But then, of course, the butterfly would be caught and stuck in a jar, what with it being beautiful and everything.
He’d spend his last few hours in the sweltering heat of an empty jam jar lying in the sun, attached to a panicked butterfly battering itself off an invisible glass wall.
Or worse, whoever caught the butterfly might see him on its shoulder. They might torture him, the way wee boys pull the wings off flies.
He couldn’t believe this was happening. How things had turned out.
So if you ever see a tree growing out your shoulder, or anything like that, don’t tell anybody. Just get rid of the thing. And especially don’t tell the council.
They care more about trees than they care about people.
The Daysnatcher
Sean and Kim were sitting outside a pub, in the sunshine. Kim was leaning her head back with her eyes closed, to get some colour in her face.
‘Some heat, in’t it?’ she asked Sean.
Sean didn’t answer.
Kim opened her eyes to see why he wasn’t answering, and she saw that he wasn’t listening. He looked distant.