Tattoos: A Novel

by Denise Mathew

  “Jackson? Are you up yet dear?” Gran yelled.

  She was the only person in the world who still called me Jackson, my full name. To everyone else I was just Jax.

  I stared at the red numbers on the clock and groaned. 6:00 am. was downright inhuman. My head ached and my eyes were sandy with sleep. Three hours of z’s just didn’t cut it after a long night of sets at the dive of a bar that my band did gigs at. I knew the only reason why we’d been hired was because we were the cheapest act in town, but I didn’t let that little fact get me down. It was a place to play, even though the smoke that saturated the space seemed to cling to every part of my body for days after. It didn’t matter how many times I showered and changed my clothes, I always smelled like a burning cigarette or at least I thought I did.

  “Yeah Gran,” I said, throwing my bedspread off. It was supposed to be my day off, a rare occasion when I didn’t have to work at my paying job at the retro record store called Vinyl. Unfortunately I’d had a moment of weakness and had agreed to do a shift at my non-paying job at St. Martins Hospital for Children. A choice I was already beginning to regret.

  I sat at the side of the bed like I did every day, taking a second to stare down at the track marks on my arms and the tattoos that were slowly covering them. I stood up, moving to the cracked window in my bedroom that faced the street. From the look outside it was going to be another shitty day of rain. That meant I was going to get drenched in a few seconds flat, probably as soon as I stepped out the door to go to work.

  I hiked up my boxers, pulled a wrinkled Led Zepplin t-shirt over my head and strode down the hall of the two bedroom apartment that Gran and I shared. The scuffed beige linoleum was cold on my bare feet. I knew if Gran caught me without my socks on again she’d skin me alive, literally. I chuckled to myself, thinking that an old woman as skinny as a stick and only half my height, scared most of my so called tough friends into submission.

  She just had to give them a look, one that said just try and mess with her, and she’d set you and your world right. But as tough as Gran could be she also had a soft side, like gooey marshmallow, and all my friends loved her for it. Gran loved to take care of people and she usually never picked a fight unless, in her opinion, it was warranted. Like if I skipped a meal or went out in the winter without a hat. Major offenses in her opinion were ones that involved the possibility of someone getting sick. In her youth Gran had been a nurse and had seen too much sickness and death not to worry about people.

  “The bacon and eggs are already on the table, the toast is coming,” Gran said without turning around. She was positioned in front of the two burner hotplate, bobby-pinned curls covered every part of her bluish-grey hair as usual. It was Gran’s ritual to put her hair up every night in pin curls.

  “Bacon, what’s the occasion?” I said, tugging one of the metal and plastic chairs out from under the wooden table. Bacon was expensive and as far as we were concerned, a luxury reserved for special times. But as soon as I’d said the words I remembered that it was four years already since…

  I grinned. “You have a memory like an elephant,” I said.

  Gran spun around quicker than I’d expected. She shook a spatula my way. A wide smile spread across her face, putting even more creases at the corners of her eyes and showcasing her pearly white dentures. So far all her teeth were intact since she hadn’t dropped her dentures in the sink yet. Gran had snapped more teeth off her dentures than I thought possible. It was an odd experience to see her with a perfect set, how long that would last was anybodies guess.

  “And because it’s such a special day I want to turn the cards for you,” she said, giving me the beady eye.

  I heaved out a huge sigh. Before I could protest she cut in.

  “Please Jackson, just do it for me this once, it won’t take but a minute.” Her blue eyes twinkled in a way that I couldn’t resist. I shook my head and shrugged.

  “Fine, but it has to be quick I have to work at the hospital today…” I started to say.

  Gran passed me a few slices of buttered toast. She placed an arthritic hand on her waist. “I didn’t think you were working there today.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be but…they were kind of stuck so I offered.” I stuffed a fork full of fried eggs into my mouth and bit off a piece of toast.

  “Jackson you’re too good, you work yourself to the bone…” she started to say but then seemed to reconsider. Her voice trailed off. “I know, I know…I just worry that you’re working yourself too hard, I couldn’t bare it if you got sick…” she said before I’d said a word. Sudden and unexpected tears shimmered in her eyes and seeing her like that made me swallow a few times more than was necessary to get my food down.

  I couldn’t help but remember how much I’d put her through over the past few years. I wished with all my being that I could take away her fear that she would somehow lose me. But I knew I couldn’t, she’d seen me at my worst and she knew. Sadly once you knew something there was no way to un-know it. Desperate to divert the conversation away from a time in our lives that neither of us wanted to recall, I did the only thing I could, I bit the bitter bullet.

  “So are you going to do my cards or not?” I said, shoveling more food into my already stuffed mouth. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but if Gran reading my cards meant that she’d get some sort of peace about my future, then it was the least I could do.

  As expected Gran jumped on the offer. The tears that had filled her eyes miraculously dried up. She was up and off to our poor excuse for a living room in a flash. She moved toward the one piece of furniture that she’d kept from our old house. A hand carved teak armoire that my grandfather had built for her, not long after they’d been married. The piece was almost fifty years old and it was the one bit of memorabilia that Gran had managed to hold on to over the years. My grandfather had died from a massive stroke when I was too small to really remember him. From what Gran had told me about him, he’d been a great man who’d done everything he could to take care of his family.

  Gran said that I was the spitting image of him, only a Goth version. I laughed because it was funny that Gran called me Goth, something I wasn’t even close to. As far as Gran was concerned anyone with tattoos, of which I had two sleeves, was Goth. Although lately she’d taken to calling me Emo, obviously a word she’d heard somewhere. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that Emo wasn’t actually my style either, since my hair was too short and I didn’t sweep it to the side to cover one eye like a twisted Cyclops.

  Sure I had shoe black dyed hair and piercings, but I didn’t have enough to rate, not to mention that I hated Screamo music. It also didn’t matter to Gran that I was the lead singer in a three man band that played cover pop music, that was so far from Emo. She had no idea that those two types of music resided in different zip codes. The bottom line was that I preferred not to be labeled. I was just Jax and with the crap that I’d lived through, being just me was more than enough.

  Gran eased out the third drawer of the armoire. She pulled out a dark wooden box with a brass inlay of the Eye of Horus that she kept her tarot cards in. Gran was what people called a sensitive, intuitive, or the name she hated the most, a psychic. Whatever you wanted to call her, Gran told people’s fortunes. For the most part she did it for fun and didn’t charge, but if people insisted that they pay her she never took money. Instead she usually did a trade for something else, like a gift card or a dozen eggs or pretty much anything someone wanted to give her. The oddest thing that she’d gotten was a brass thing that looked like a miniature birdbath with a spike coming out of the center. Neither Gran or I knew what it was, even so she had it on display with all her other knick knacks. Something Gran had a crap load of.

  After she slid the drawer closed, she ran a hand over the ornately carved front panels of the armoire. I’d seen her do that more times than I could count, as if she were somehow caressing a living person not an inanimate piece of furniture. Every time Gran touched the armoir
e, a dreamy expression crossed her face and for just a second. I knew she was remembering my grandfather Pat and the life that they’d had together. Watching her like that made me never want to love anyone that much, because I knew more than anyone else that death was always waiting for us especially when we least expected it.

  Before Gran came back I cleared my dishes from the table and put them in the sink, already filled with warm soapy water. I picked up the scrub and started washing the dishes.

  “Jackson leave those alone, I’ll do them later. Come here and shuffle the cards before it’s time to go to work…”

  I grinned again, Gran knew me too well. She was well aware that by doing the dishes right there and then I was trying to put off the inevitable. I dried my hands and peered out the micro-window over the kitchen sink. Rain still pelted the world outside, making the pavement shiny black. Once again I dreaded that I had to go out into the onslaught on my crappy excuse for a bike that had one speed, painfully slow. Even before I’d sat in the chair across from Gran she had the stack of cards in my hands.

  “Shuffle,” she ordered.

  I shook my head without comment. Any protests at this stage of the process would fall on deaf ears. I shuffled the oversized cards. Though my hands, much like the rest of me, were large, since I was just under six foot four, I always found shuffling tarot cards an awkward proposition. After I’d done what I could, I passed the deck back to Gran. With expert efficiency that never failed to impress me, she laid out what she called “the Celtic spread” in mere seconds.

  “Did you make a wish?” she asked.

  “You should know by now, I always make a wish… you know that million dollar lottery ticket I’m waiting to get,” I said with a chuckle. Gran was too busy studying the cards to be bothered by my comment. If I knew anything it was that Gran took her tarot seriously. Nothing could pull her focus away when she was in the middle of a reading.

  “Here you are Jackson,” she said, pointing at the card that had a guy sitting on a horse in a suit of armor.

  “The Knight of Wands…a passionate and liberal guy who doesn’t like to be told what to do, yep that sums me up just right,” I said.

  Gran brought her gaze to me. Her grey eyebrows hiked up in obvious surprise because not only was I paying attention, I’d even known what the card meant. It was hard not to pick up some of it. I’d seen Gran do tarot cards so many times that there was no way I couldn’t know some of the cards and their meanings.

  “Well, maybe you should be doing this reading,” she said after a few beats.

  I shrugged, grinning. She brought her focus back to the cards, flipping them over, all the while having a mini conversation with herself as she read the meanings. As far as I could see I could have left the room and she wouldn’t have noticed. Gran was in the mode, meaning she was too deep in her reading to be aware of much else. I glanced at my watch and realized that I was almost out of time. I needed to wash the stink of smoke and cheap beer off my body and head over to the hospital in less than an hour.

  That’s when Gran turned over my most despised card in the tarot deck, the Tower. I was quite sure that even if someone didn’t know the cards meaning it wouldn’t be difficult to know that it wasn’t a good one to get. A picture of a burning stone tower with people falling to the ground was on the cards face. Just like the picture depicted I took it to mean that a person’s whole world was going to be turned upside down, and of course disaster would follow. I might have been a little melodramatic in my explanation but that’s what it meant to me. I remembered the last time I’d had the misfortune to get that card in a reading, and it had been just before my life had gone to hell. I shivered involuntarily and shook my head.

  “See, I knew this was a bad idea, I hate that card…” I said, touching the cardboard rectangle with the tip of my finger. I gave it a little shove toward Gran. She shook her head.

  “No Jackson, it’s not like before, this is different, this is the end of something and the beginning of a…” She paused and flipped over the last few cards.

  “It’s about a relationship, a girl and…”

  “Well that’s crap since there’s no girl, and even if there was one, the Tower isn’t exactly the kind of card I want to have next to a girl,” I said, cutting off Gran.

  For some reason just the mention of a relationship rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn’t like I didn’t hook up with girls. No matter how sucky a band was, just being in one was like a chick magnet. I knew from personal experience that if I wanted a new girl every night I didn’t need to try very hard. But the whole thing was, I didn’t care about hooking up with someone new every night.

  I couldn’t deny that once, before life had dealt me a shitty hand, one that had almost killed me, I’d bought into all that ego driven bull crap. I’d used girls, letting go of them as quickly as I’d picked them up. But that person, the guy who’d took, took and took some more had died a while back.

  “No, this relationship is different, not love…well not exactly…” Gran said, locking on my face. Her clear blue eyes that were almost the color of a stormy sea, exactly like mine, seemed to bore into me. Even though I loved her more than the world and knew that she’d never hurt me, the intensity of her stare was unsettling.

  “Fine,” I said hoping to deflect her gaze. Suddenly she gave her head a quick shake, as if breaking her trance and she was back to my sweet Gran. I was grateful for the rapid change.

  “I gotta go Gran,” I said getting to my feet. I turned to walk away, but before I did I spun back to face her.

  “So there’s nothing about…” I drew in a deep inhalation. “About you know…” I felt stupid for even asking the question since tarot cards couldn’t really predict the future. Sure Gran had gotten a few things right in the past but it wasn’t exactly science. In my opinion you lived your life according to what made sense, not a reading from a psychic. But that didn’t mean I didn’t like it when the cards seemed to foretell good fortune. I was human after all. A part of me knew that Gran was aware of things about me that even I had no idea about.

  She shook her head and her smile was warm.

  “No, nothing about that,” she said simply. Her words had me releasing a breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding. I leaned over and gave her a peck on her wrinkled cheek. The smell of her face cream, Ponds, one she’d used from the time she was a teenager, surrounded her. And it was funny that no matter how far from home I was, or what was going on in my life, the scent of that cream always reminded me of Gran.

  “I’ve got to shower and get out in that mess of weather,” I said, scratching the stubble on my chin.

  “Yes, wash that horrible smell of smoke and sour beer off you,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  Less than thirty minutes later I was on my way to the hospital. I knew it would have been smarter to take the bus since it was like a monsoon outside, but I’d wasted too much time having the tarot card reading. I didn’t have the luxury of time to wait for a bus. I grabbed plan B, my beat up racing bike that had been converted to a single speed bike. I’d won it in a bet a few years back.

  Racing bikes were supposed to be the fastest ones out there, hence the name, but this bike wasn’t anything like that, because the frame was slightly misshapen after an unfortunate accident with a pick-up truck. The tires were bald, most of the padding was gone from the seat and since it was one speed it meant it didn’t have a freewheel, making it impossible to coast on it. Meaning you had to constantly pedal to keep it going. It made for a hell of a workout, but in the rain it was the worst thing in the world because the faster you went the worse the visibility became. Even with swimming goggles I had a tough time seeing, not to mention that I looked like a complete tool wearing them.

  Ten minutes later, that had actually felt like a couple of hours of torture, I rolled into the St. Martins hospital for Children parking lot. After I’d locked up my ride, which seemed kind of dumb since no one in their right mind would have wanted to s
teal it, I strode through the emergency entrance of the hospital. My soaked Converses squeaked with every step I took. I knew I was leaving a trail of water in my wake, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  I made my way to the linen room, using a couple of towels to dry my hair and face. My clothes would have to air dry, but at least I’d have a coverall over me while they did. That way I wasn’t completely frozen in the climate controlled environment, which always seemed to be too cold for my taste.

  Despite my attempts at drying off I knew I still looked like a drowned rat. Water dripped from my hair onto my coveralls and my wet clothes were already soaked through in patches. Not one of my best days to say the least. It didn’t help that I found my thoughts drifting back to the matter of the Tower card that I’d pulled. I didn’t want it to take me down, but I couldn’t help but think back to a time when things had gone terribly wrong for me. I shook my head, unwilling to waste anymore time in the past. The past was best left where it was.

  I made my way to the third floor Pediatric Cancer ward. I opened the utility closet that was just outside of the ward with my personal set of keys. I grabbed the utility cart, locked up and moved down the hall, still dimly lit. I checked the time and was shocked to see that I’d actually made it to work on time with a few minutes to spare. I pushed the wheeled bucket down the hall to the bathrooms, the place I knew Chip, the day supervisor, would want done first.

  It wasn’t brain science and the routine was easy enough to learn. Chip was a good guy to work for but for some reason, there seemed to be a revolving door of people coming and going. Nobody really lasted very long, in fact next to Chip I was one of the longest running employees, having worked there for just over a year.

  When I was halfway down the hall I notice room 312 was empty. The bed was stripped and all the pictures, balloons and get well cards were gone. Though I’d witnessed more than my fair share of those kind of scenarios over the past months, it never failed to hit me hard in the guts. So much so that it made it hard to breathe. Because none of it made sense, why the hell would a child with almost no experience with life have to get cancer. It wasn’t fair that innocents had to suffer.