‘Take the worms away,’ I screamed. ‘Take the worms away.’ I knew he couldn’t hear over the merciless, throbbing beat. ‘It’s my heartbeat they’re playing with,’ I told him. ‘Make them stop before they smash it and I die.’
Anonymous hands were helping to lift me down from the platform. Carl was there suddenly, holding water to my lips. It slid like an eel down my throat, coiling up inside my stomach. I wanted to dance and never stop. But the dance wasn’t about joy any more but necessity. I needed to be lost inside that beat. I didn’t need their music to make me dance. The rhythm was inside me and had always been. I didn’t need Al or anyone. I hardly even recognised him now. Trust no-one, that was the rule I had learnt. Just keep dancing, keep running away, keep running.
‘How much did she take?’ I heard someone ask, a vast distance away. ‘What was it cut with?’
‘How do I know?’ Al sounded scared and defensive. ‘It didn’t exactly have “made in Hong Kong” stamped on it.’
‘It was cut with a knife.’ It didn’t sound like me talking or my voice alone laughing at the joke.
Doors were opened for me to be carried out, my feet dancing inches above the ground. The night air attacked my face. Even the bouncers sounded worried. The building leaned right back so that I could rest against it, but the pavement heaved and swelled before I found my sealegs. I was eleven years of age now. I wanted dolphins and swordfish. I wanted just to be held. I had to find the mother I’d abandoned in this city. I tried to trace my path back along a map of hairline cracks on a hotel ceiling.
Al left me alone for a second and I jumped overboard, my feet skimming the waves, hearing car horns and brakes as I stumbled against the fender of some car whose brake lights flickered and throbbed like Al’s heart. I staggered on, not sure where I was going or what age I was. I tried to sense the ground under my feet but couldn’t even hear the echo of my shoes when they slipped on cobbles. I was casting no shadow. If I spread my arms perhaps I might fly. But I hadn’t time for games. I was in terrible danger, that’s all I knew. I had to find myself before the man in the moon caught me again.
For whole seconds I was lucid and scared for myself, wondering was this the acid or what the E had been mixed with. I tried to control what was happening, but then the logic of dreams overwhelmed me again. I staggered down the tilt of Fishamble Street, genuinely believing I would find my younger self there. I still knew who I was, yet I was also that child I had once been. I ran to save her in time.
It had become that June day again in my mind, after I deserted my mother and ran across O’Connell bridge to stumble into the tinker children begging beside the balustrade. I relived my terror as they surrounded me, sensing easy prey and pushing me back with their jackets across their chests so their arms were free underneath. My knickers were suddenly wet as their vacant faces stared and they jostled and pinched me with so many hands that I had no way to combat the fingers rifling my pockets. My cheap ear-rings were gone. Fingers pulled the comb from my hair. A twelve year old boy pushed through the blur of faces. I only saw a plastic bag at first, then he lifted it away from his mouth and nose and the stench of glue was sickening. His lips loomed towards me as he spat and gave the order to run.
Suddenly I was alone and screaming on the bridge. Adults rushed to my rescue, shouting questions. People called to a policeman across the street. He approached and I pushed through the crowd and ran, just like the tinker boy had said. I could feel his sour spit, as though it had congealed on my face. My head hurt where hair had been pulled away at the roots. I ran like a frightened animal, not even sure why I was running. But I just didn’t want to be found. It was too soon. My mother wouldn’t have reported me missing yet and the police wouldn’t have phoned Harrow. I found a public toilet. I hadn’t money to lock the cubicle door. I crouched with my back against it and got sick into the bowl. I held my face under the tap and scrubbed my checks dry with my sleeve but I still felt the boy’s spit. Ladies came and went as I hid in the cubicle, until finally one woman got suspicious and pushed the door in.
‘Are you okay, child?’ she asked, leaning down to where I crouched beside the bowl. ‘What are you doing all alone here?’
‘My mother ran away,’ I sobbed. ‘She got a bus to Donegal.’
‘You’re from England,’ the woman said. ‘Show me your face. Has somebody beaten you up?’
I walked with her along the quay. It was twilight. I thought of the swing beside the pond in our garden. I imagined my own bed with clean sheets and pop posters on the wall. I wondered was I famous in school? Motorbike radios crackled outside the police station. The woman let go my hand to open the heavy doors. The floor was made of hard patterned stone. Her footsteps were loud. I turned and fled, knowing that my mother would tell them it was me who ran away and I was to blame. Everything was my fault. She was mad, like the girls in school had sneered, and I was old enough to have known not to run away with her.
I raced through darkening streets with her face haunting me until I had no strength left to run. I knew she was searching this city and that strangers would find her soon. Hunger was an ache inside me. I was stumbling along by the river when voices and footsteps charged behind me. A shabby street lay to my left, up a steep hill where almost everything was knocked down. I read the sign for Fishamble Street. The voices came closer and I ran up it, past the last ruined houses and swung left into a small laneway where everything was so dark and silent that my breath sounded loud.
A crooked old church loomed to the left, hinting of ghosts and mice. To the right was a yard with mobile library vans parked behind a wire gate. Two bins stood beside it, crammed with newspapers and rubbish. I crouched between them, wrapping damp newspapers around me. The ground was cold and dirty. I watched the full moon above the church. As a child I had loved to see the face on it. Now it drifted between clouds and emerged brilliantly white to stare down at me. I could make out a man’s features, though I knew the lines were only arid canyons and ocean beds. This was what God’s face looked like, I thought. The coldness passed right into me and I was too frozen to cry. I decided that my disappearance would have shocked my mother back to sanity. She would find me soon and she would be calm and forgiving, grateful to have me safely back.
Footsteps approached. I was scared. I pulled the newspapers above my face. The footsteps stopped, inches away. I smelt hot chips with salt and vinegar. Somebody was laying them at my feet. Was it her with a peace-offering? But the footsteps were loud, like a man’s. My stomach ached for food but I was too scared to make a sound or peep out. Maybe God had heard me and told some man to leave chips down this filthy laneway. Then I heard a zip opening and the splash of urine against the wall. It stopped. Coins jangled as he zipped himself up and I heard a match being struck. The bag of hot chips was picked up off the ground. My stomach was like a hollow cavern. The man might be kind. If I raised my head and begged he might leave me some. But I was too scared to move as the footsteps faded away and only the taunting smell of watered vinegar remained.
Some time afterwards a stray dog came down, nosing in the bins. He pawed at the newspapers and growled, attracted by the scent of my fear. Much later, when the moon had retreated behind clouds, a couple came, whispering together. The girl leaned back against the gate which creaked in rhythm and groaned for oil. I heard their breath quickening and her muffled whisper of ‘not inside me’. ‘Your hand then,’ he said as though in pain. His breath came in one long gasp and then the swaying gate was still. The couple held each other in silence for a long time before their footsteps moved away.
I must have slept then, although I don’t know for how long. I dreamt that I was found and I was being tucked back in my own bed. But I couldn’t get warm between the sheets because the man in the moon was staring through the window. The sheets were thin as newspapers and he was taking them away. His face was grey and serious and his eyes blinked. Then the feel of his hand caused me to wake fully.
‘You all alone?’ Th
e man’s voice was soft as he bent down between the bins.
‘No.’ I looked down, away from him.
‘Yes you are.’
‘No.’ My voice was so low I could barely hear the word. I wanted to wake up, even though I knew I was awake.
‘I won’t hurt you.’
‘No.’
‘You just be my friend, eh?’
‘No.’
‘See, my little man’s already perking up just to see you.’
‘No.’
He tried to lift my face and I stared away, up at the cold moon that had reappeared over the church roof. I wanted him to go away and leave me alone. I wanted someone to find me.
‘Just touch it,’ he coaxed. ‘I bet you’ve always been curious.’
‘Please. No.’
‘It won’t bite you. It likes little girls to play with it.’
‘No.’
‘It’s just like an ice-pop really.’
‘Let go my hair. Please.’
‘Do what you’re told, you little English tart or I’ll make it far worse for you.’
‘No. No.’
‘You won’t choke on it, for Christ’s sake. Open your mouth properly, girleen, I know you’re on the game.’
My ears were ringing where his fists held them along with fistfuls of my hair. He kept slapping the side of my face until the world grew dark and stank and I couldn’t breathe. All night he had been watching and waiting, I thought, up there in the sky above the church roof. It was my fault for being here. Now I was going to choke, I was going to drown. I don’t know how long it went on for, before I heard a petrified moan from him as the thud of a boot registered. I twisted my head away, my teeth accidentally biting into his flesh before it popped out. Later, Gran would never understand why I brushed my teeth twenty times a day, but I still wasn’t able to shed that taste.
Now I just spat and retched, hunched up into a ball and not even realising at first that it was the tinker children from the bridge who had come along. I crouched down but they ignored me, gathering around the man to kick him from every direction. He flailed out, occasionally catching one of them, but there were always others circling and waiting their chance. Girls scratched at him with their nails, tugging his hair, seeking out his eyes. The twelve year old boy led them, his face animated with hate, his boot slamming into the man’s face even when he lay still with blood oozing from his face.
Finally the boy stopped and turned towards me. I was next to be killed, but I was so numb I couldn’t even scream. He grabbed me by the jacket and pulled me up out of the way as other children dragged the man into the space between the bins. The boy dumped the rubbish from one bin over him. It covered him so I couldn’t see if he really had the face of the man in the moon. But his fly was still open with an inch of flesh protruding, flaccid and bleeding where someone’s boots or my teeth had ripped it.
The boy aimed one last kick at him, then gave the order to run. They scattered like a flock of startled birds. I wasn’t cold any longer or hungry. I couldn’t feel anything. The boy turned back. ‘Run,’ he shouted again, ‘feck you, will you run.’ My sleeve had ridden up and I gazed at the white skin on my arm. The man’s leg stirred, with an involuntary tremor. I wanted to kick him but I seemed paralysed. Then I looked down again and found that I had scraped my arm. There was a hairline crack and blood came. Still I felt nothing, except a numb ache as though nothing was left inside me. My arm was being tugged. I stumbled forward and stared at the boy who was leading me.
‘Come on, for Jaysus sake,’ he urged. ‘If the cops come they’ll crucify us.’
When my hands slammed against the wire gate everything felt so funny that I laughed. The crumbling church had been transformed into what a banner proclaimed was a Viking Adventure Centre. Lights shone in new office blocks on Fishamble street, while Yuppie pubs and restaurants lit up the far end of the lane. So how could those stinking bins have survived outside this gate when everything else was changed?
I knew who I was now. I was twenty-two and seriously stoned. I had to get a grip but reality kept shifting away. I still kept thinking I had to find myself in time. I felt my mother stare out through my eyes, frantic to find her daughter. The ground swayed and I staggered against the pebbled wall. I pushed the bins over, kicking at the rubbish dumped there. I stumbled across the road, searching every corner. What if the bastard had got her again? Where was he and why wouldn’t he come out to face me?
I lashed at the bins with my feet, I picked one up and flung it against the wire gate. Nobody had ever oiled those hinges. The creak came back from a hundred dreams. But this time I wasn’t scared. I would finish him off now and kick him until his bastarding heart was still. I’d smash his teeth with my heels. I would steal my own life back from him. I wouldn’t be afraid to squeal any longer. I was finally ready for him if only the pathetic bastard would stop hiding.
‘Come out, you fucking coward’ I screamed, rattling the gate until my fingers ached.
Then his footsteps came, loud and dragging reality back. They stopped and I turned to face Al and Carl. They looked scared as they panted for breath.
‘I don’t need you here,’ I said, ‘I don’t need your help this time.’
‘Trace, just take it easy, eh?’ Al approached cautiously. I saw Carl move to one side, blocking my exit. ‘You have us freaked out. It’s just a bad trip.’
I knew who Al was. I wanted to be back dancing with him. I hunched down, crying.
‘I hate this place.’ I said.
‘You’re stoned, Trace. You were never here in your life. This will be like a bad dream tomorrow.’
Al helped me up. I thought I’d flinch from his touch but I didn’t. I wanted him to hold me. I wanted comfort. I put my arms around his shoulder and heard myself laugh, swaying to an inaudible beat.
‘I had my doubts,’ Al said, ‘but now I know you’re a Duggan. You’re cracked enough. Let’s get the hell out of here.’
I must have wandered off on our way to the car because I remember a taxi beeping and some driver cursing as Carl pulled me from its path. I couldn’t stop talking out loud to myself. I didn’t care what secrets I gave away, although I was so incoherent that I doubt if Al could follow anything I said. Then we were back in his house, although I didn’t remember getting there. I wanted glass after glass of water. I kept laughing because the only glasses they had were pint ones stolen from pubs.
‘Come outside,’ Al said. He draped my arm around his shoulder and staggered under my weight as he forced me to walk up and down the back path. He was stoned himself. I suddenly realised the crazy bastard had driven us home instead of leaving the car in town.
‘I want a bath,’ I said. ‘A long cold bath.’
Carl had disappeared. We had gone inside again and were climbing the stairs. Fingers plucked at my clothes. I felt the shock of freezing enamel against my arse. I lay back, chilled as my naked back touched against it. Water splashed over my face and I opened my mouth to swallow.
‘Don’t drink this.’ Al’s voice was clearer, registering more. The jet of water moved from my mouth, cascading over my neck and then down my breasts. It was cold but not quite freezing. I kept blinking as I trained my eyes to focus on the bathroom. Al knelt with his sleeves rolled up, carefully aiming the shower hose over my body. Goose-pimples colonised me. I felt vulnerable and wary and then a protective anger took over. I raised my hand but found that I still had my bra and knickers on. I stared at Al, who moved the shower hose away so that the water drummed on the enamel between my legs.
‘You scared the wits out of me,’ he said, apologetically. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I was frightened you’d fall asleep alone in a bath. I haven’t … I never touched …’ He looked at my face. ‘I mean, we’re half-cousins, aren’t we? But I wouldn’t take advantage anyway.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s okay. The water feels good, but make it even colder.’
I lay back and closed my eyes, gasping as the
jet struck me. I trusted Al, a rare thing with a man. What you saw with him was what you got. Then what was I doing with Luke? My system felt poisoned. The drugs were still coursing through me. I fought against their chemical tricks to get back possession of my own body. I opened my eyes to look at Al.
‘How are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Not too good looking at you,’ he confessed. ‘If you don’t mind maybe I’ll use this hose on myself next.’
‘We’re cousins I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘That’s the way it goes. I wrecked your night, didn’t I?’
‘You certainly took my mind off other matters.’
I motioned for him to cut off the water. As he put the hose down I took his hand.
‘I don’t know much about this business with Christy,’ I said, ‘but it’s dangerous. Do nothing stupid, you hear? Leave it to Luke.’
‘Why do you always call him Luke and never your father?’
I didn’t reply. I reached for a towel to put around me and sat up on the side of the tub. Al lit two cigarettes. I took a long pull. The smoke made me sicker in one way and better in another.
‘Luke doesn’t live here,’ Al said, sourly. ‘He just comes home and acts tough like he knows everything.’
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