“Yes, I think so.”
He was warming to his new best friend. He knew him better that anybody ever could and believed every word. They had only just met but he felt like he had known him all his life. The future couldn’t come soon enough.
Eamon nodded. “Yeah, sure, I’m listening.”
“Yeah, it was good, wasn’t it?”
“What about Jack and Sally? They saw everything. Jack pissed the floor.”
“He-he, it is funny, isn’t it?”
Eamon put Mother back the way he found her, more or less, and as he left the bedroom he couldn’t help but wonder when he would see his new best friend again. He hoped it would be soon. The expectation of waiting as an eleven-year-old boy for his best friend to return was a daunting prospect. Nevertheless, he smiled and wiggled like a crazy boy chasing happiness to the bathroom to clean up. It was the best day of his young life and things could only get better.
Part Two
Seventeen Years Later
11:
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
“For tomorrow it will keep.”
Margaret ushered her body closer to the side of the bed and made a disquiet moan when she felt the touch to the base of her neck trace down her bare back and meander the form of her delicate spine and a hand tuck under her arm. She pressed down to thwart the advance but the wandering hand persevered until it found her ample breast and squeezed it as though it were a stress ball. Soft flesh protruded between the fingers. She opened her eyes, startled, but not surprised. The pain from her husband’s fingernails, eight years together and five years married, ran the diameter of her breast.
“Eamon, please, you’re hurting me. I’m not in the mood.”
Her voice might have irritated him. It was unexpectedly calm, as if she had been awake for hours, probably not his intention. She leaned her right shoulder into him, not wanting to find out, only to relieve the pressure on her breast and pull him free with her hand. The silver chain with emerald heart, the one he’d found for her and insisted she wear, slipped from the curvature of her breast and landed in her cleavage. She looked back toward him to ask him to stop and noticed the vacant stare, the one he sometimes showed when in the throes of passion, if indeed that is where he was, before things became brutal. The refined piece of green jewel magnified in his eye. And she could feel his heart pick up pace against her side to accompany whatever images skipped through his mind at that moment. He pulled a handful of her hair and twisted it around his fist like tug-of-war rope, bending her neck back to expose her jugular. Her eyes widened as he thrust his pelvis into her backside. Her rectum felt full, stretched, and painfully uncomfortable, dragging the surrounding skin when his penis protracted.
“Eamon, Jesus, you’re hurting me, stop it. Don’t be so rough.”
His grip tightened on her breast and on the knot of her hair, the green emerald still in view. Unconcerned for his wife’s gratification, he pushed down on her head and smothered half her face into the pillow, his mind elsewhere, not with her, with the jewel that had fallen away. She fought to keep above the suffocating pillow. The sound of birds singing outside the window of their four-bedroom detached house was in stark contrast to the sounds that panted and puffed above her head. He thrust again, wanting to go deeper, wanting to hurt, if necessary. She was dryer than a desert in a drought; if it pained his penis as she fought against her own displeasure, it failed to show.
“Ahhh, Eamon, let go, it hurts. Stop it, stop it! Eamon, you’re scaring me,” she pleaded through squashed lips. She reached for his arm on the back of her head and scratched the skin with her nails. It was just enough for him to come back from whatever dark place his mind had wandered and release his grip with one final squeeze of her breast as he pulled out.
Margaret never wished to offer her body to him when things got out of hand like they had just done. She felt not even the thinnest residue of the attraction she’d once enjoyed. Then, his attention was all about her when he bound her and worked up to a spanking that was mildly satisfying and humiliating at the same time. But not like this, not when he had found a way to separate love and some perverse need. She wondered where he went, what he fantasized about when he moved upon her with loathing, and his eyes grew vacant. It made the sexual act feel like a violation, for that is what it was, as though gratifying a previous owner of the jewel she now wore around her neck. He said he’d bought it for her but she wasn’t so sure about that. It didn’t come in a box with a receipt when he presented it to her. And when he put it around her neck he’d wasted no time bending her over the kitchen table and treating her as he’d just done.
She had tried to go elsewhere, too. To conjure up images of past lovers to make the experience less unpleasant, more bearable, but they were few and didn’t last, so she returned. He didn’t.
Margaret’s breath was heavy. “Eamon, Eamon, why do you do that?” she asked without turning to face him, tears in her eyes. She took the chain from around her neck and dropped it on the bedside table.
Lying beside her, slowing his heart rate, all he said was, “Put it back on.”
Then he pulled back the duvet cover and jumped out of the bed, landing on the soft beige carpet that matched the curtains. She could hear him go toward the en suite bathroom and grab the bar wedged between the doorframes with both hands. “Don’t you love me anymore, honey?” Eamon asked in a tone that expected only one answer. He was on his fifth chin-up. “I can’t hear you.” Each word came slowly and deliberately as if speaking to a foreign national with limited or no English.
She was caressing her breast, trying to ease the pain and reduce the imminent bruising. Another reluctant tear seeped from her eye. It ran down the bridge of her nose and spattered on the bed sheet. Her vision blurred as she tried to focus on the small wet stain and regain her composure.
“Yes,” she said, her voice hiccupping, “of course I do.”
“Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty,” he counted aloud before letting go and hit the carpet with the fineness of a gymnast dismountin
g the high bar. “Good. Now, be a good girl and go make me some scrambled eggs on toast. Put that back on, it’s nice, it suits you. I like it.”
Without looking back, Eamon walked into the bathroom. The door shut behind him, leaving Margaret to go downstairs to begin breakfast.
She got out of the bed and reluctantly slipped the filthy green jewel back over her neck. Her hand came down to rub her backside as she took her dressing gown from the back of the bedroom door. The shower played a lashing sound as she left the room. She used the bathroom on the landing to wash the filth from her skin.
Eamon brushed his even and shiny white teeth and washed his dark brown hair, both of which he was immensely proud, in the walk-in frosted-glass shower. He then lathered his chest and neck with the bar of soap he had taken from the white soap dish that secured to the run of the shower hose. He moved his hands around to his frontal area, rubbed the lather between the cheeks of his ass, under the ball sack and finally to the semi hard-on that arched out in front of him.
It was the thought of the day, of the weekend ahead that excited him now. He had waited a long time, years. He watched in amusement as his penis pulsed up and down as if tugged from above by a piece of invisible thread tied to the shaft.
He rinsed off the remaining suds and stepped out of the shower after having had relations with his soapy hand for a brief two minutes and before the point of ejaculation. His penis bounced up and down like a springboard when his foot hit the bathroom floor. He took the blue towel from the warming rack and brought it around his lower back. With the towel outstretched in both hands, he looked down at his penis with approbation.
“Is that a tear I see in your eye? You think I am a tease, don’t you, my lovely?” He paused to give his penis a chance to respond and began shaking his head from side to side. If anyone had been listening they would have sworn Eamon was talking to an infant lying in a cot. He continued. “Yes, you do. Oh, yes, you do. Wait until you see the surprise I have waiting for you. It won’t be long now and all so very worth the wait. In you go, my precious.” He secured the towel firmly around his waist and adjusted his manhood from the outside.
The vision, which had recurred so often in his mind, would soon play out in reality. The time was so close he could taste it. He stood in the centre of the bathroom with his eyes closed and his tongue out, lapping at the tiny water particles that occupied the enclosed space. It was easy to imagine the surrounding water vapour as fine particles of blood, soaking his body in crimson and sticking to his tongue as he lanced for every smidgen.
In a stupor, he moved in front of the bathroom mirror and rested both hands on either side of the white porcelain sink. He locked both elbows and positioned his nose inches from the mirror. He tongued at the glass feverishly, licking at the imaginary bloody condensation that had formed soon after he opened the shower door. It tasted good to his mind, not a patch on the real thing, but hey, it was an exciting sense of what was to come.
Having cleared away most of the condensation, Eamon now admired the handsome reflection staring back at him. Beads of water droplets merged from a thick hairline. The water ran down his face through a course designed by the smirk that spread across his face. He also saw the water as thick blood, and again tried to catch the drips on both sides of his mouth with a strained tongue.
Looking ever more attentively at the exquisite manifestation that was before him, Eamon spoke into the mirror in the hope that his best friend would hear him. “There are great days ahead, my friend, great fucking days, indeed.”
As he was about to turn away and prepare for the weekend ahead, this fucking great weekend, his friend spoke out to him.
The face, this magnificent face spoke with words of caution that Eamon found confusing. Condensation formed on the glass once again. He made no effort to remove it this time, but listened intently as the lips behind the fog began to move once more.
Eamon nodded to the man in the mirror. This was his best friend and he trusted him implacably, his eyes transfixed on the image as he hung on every word.
As the man who knew him best spoke his final words, images of that fateful day raced through Eamon’s mind, triggering a strong current that raced through him. He shook his head with a determined vivaciousness, took a deep breath, and then exhaled slowly before pushing his face away from the smudged glass of the mirror. He raised his hands from the sink, wiped a hand’s span of condensation from the mirror and focused his eyes back on his friend.
“Yes, you’re right, my friend. There will be plenty of time to get excited later. I was just telling the very same to my other little friend. And I plan to play. You know what they say; you have to work hard to play hard. And, make no mistake, I plan to play hard.”
Eamon felt as if mercury now flowed through his veins in place of blood. He felt solid, unbreakable even, and knew his plans of preparation were very proficient, right down to the last detail. After all, he had played it out in his mind hundreds if not thousands of times, down to the very last detail. To get to this point had taken not months, but years of preparation. Eamon planned to be around for the long term. And be remembered forever.
An elated sigh escaped his mouth as he stepped back from the sink. He opened the bathroom door and crossed into the bedroom. The smell of fresh coffee, cooked eggs, and buttered toast filled his nostrils.
The bulge that had been so prominent underneath the blue cloth was gone.
12:
“The wheels on the bus go round and round.”
Leaning up against the kitchen sink with the cold tap running, Margaret’s nails scraped back and forth in the bottom of the old pot. The build-up of scorched scrambled eggs under each fingernail began to cut into the cuticle and find its way through to the nail bed. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, scraping, until the pot dropped and clanged against the metallic surface of the sink. There were other pots in the house she could have used to make the eggs, plenty of them, newer, non-stick ones, but she opted for this one. Sometimes, like this morning, it made her feel better to cook with it. So she’d kept it.
She had not heard Eamon enter the kitchen. Neither did she hear the chair pull out from under the counter. She could only sense his presence. Maybe it was the faint scent of his body odour which gave him away. He had a habit of just “being there.” It was as if he could teleport himself from one place to another within the house. She was convinced she would not have heard him even if the floors had been covered in pebbles or broken glass.
Margaret turned to see Eamon immerse the knife into one of the mounds of scrambled eggs that sat neatly in the centre of two slices of toast, just the way he liked it. He touched the tip of the knife to his lips, testing the temperature of the eggs, no
doubt.
“Is everything okay, Eamon?” she asked with her hands down by her side. The pot-scraping hand kneaded the fibres of her dressing gown, irritating the density of spoilt egg underneath each nail.
Eamon picked up the mug of coffee, took a slow sip, and placed the mug back down on the table. “It’s good,” he said without looking up.
She looked at the way he sat eating his breakfast, acting as if his advances (brutal anal rape), toward her had been done by someone else, not him. Her teeth ground together as her fingers dug deeper into the fibres, pressing into the cloth of her gown to encourage the egg to climb farther up the bed of each nail.
She used to be stronger.
They’d met in their first year of college. She had fallen for him straight away, head over heels in love. He was tall, good-looking, strong, and confident. It was a privilege to be his girlfriend, back then. They spent all their time together. She would do anything for him. He would do anything for her. So she dropped out of college.
Over a period of time her friends stopped calling. They didn’t like him, telling her he was overly possessive, jealous, and controlling, but Eamon said that was only because they were jealous of their relationship, and she believed him.
Sometimes he locked her in the small apartment they rented. That became the last straw for the few remaining friends when they realised she wanted to do nothing about it. But they didn’t understand, and besides, she didn’t really mind, she didn’t need to be anywhere anyway. It was only because Eamon loved her and wanted her to be safe. What was the big deal? She was better off without them. College wasn’t the place for her.
The Ice Scream Man Page 7