Room Little Darker

by June Caldwell

  All five stand up in a splodge of vibrant PVC blushes, making their way to the bars so the rest of the room is concealed from our view. They bend over us, all whoop and holler, pulling at the cage so it tips slightly. We topple about as if inside ferry kennels on top deck on a stormy day. I know exactly what to do. I fling myself on my back and open my legs wide. Two paws scrunched up over clamped breasts, head hanging to the side for a champion view. With the temperature rising I begin to pant heavily, sweating like mad. I make it achingly clear for Master there’s only one option left to cool me down, to cool us all down. It rests solely with him now to do his thing and get enough oxygenated blood back into this ecosystem. I pant even more to seal the deal. After it’s over we’ll curl tightly together, snuggling into well-deserved sleep. Free to run at breakneck speed along the most beautiful sweep of beach. Tearing up lumpy dips of sand so relentlessly our tails stop wagging and our legs collapse under the weight of yummy ecstasy. Running, scampering, sprinting, until nothing we’ve ever been through before matters.

  Dubstopia

  Scrambled egg beside a steaming gee-pad Carol left on the mattress. Lidl brownie with ants. Two empty packs of Amber Leaf. Wet jeans. Sun tearing in the window through an A-line skirt she stole from yellow teeth Bag-Face in Oxfam. Book of Yeats’s poetry open on a fumble in a greasy till and add the halfpence to the pence. Leather Joe’s address book with dead dealers whacked by the Nike gang in Finglas. A picture of his granny curled on a couch holding a bunch of chrysanthemums; monster Holy Mary in a Punto-blue dress peering down her seersucker top. Carol’s shoe stuck in an antique trumpet. His passport. Loose turf. Sunglasses mounted on a Stanley knife. Pink edible necklace.

  It was too late in the morning to leave the Old Bank. Pinstripe would be downstairs showing clients around giving it high-dough this and that. Sash windows, very versatile, safe room intact. De Valera lived around the corner. They locked horses on the towpath around the back, used to be a hotel, ladies with hats. Imagine what you could do with it now when the stock market gets back up, priceless mirrors. Legend says there’s a ghost. Sixteen rooms up above; would make a great hostel, original Victorian chimney pots. Gonzo decided to hang on a while and have a wank.

  He wanted to bang the nurse in the Mater who took bloods. He wanted to bang her cos she talked down to him. He wanted to bang her cos of the dirty way she leant over and smacked the vending machine. Big pillow tits blobbing all over the gaff and well she knew it and well the old codgers with the fucked hearts knew it and well the pleated receptionist with the tall latte knew it and well the trolley-pushing hunchback in plastic green knew it and well he knew it: they’d jelly wobble when he gave it to her goodo. She’d have to shut the fuck up saying shit about Hep-C, muscling, skin-popping, if Carol took mushrooms when breastfeeding the day the baby died. He wanted to bang her for saying things he didn’t understand – subcutaneous – legs tied back with washing line rope so it could all slug out: Abrakebabra sauce on a big hot smelly kebab. He wanted to bang her.

  He didn’t mind what Carol did as long as no one came inside her. She’d be back with the scag in the afternoon, giving it the full candy, ‘Darling baby I fucken love you, d’ye know dat? I’d fucken keel over fur yew.’ They’d lie on the wet mattress after slamming the stuff. Then they’d green out and imagine all sorts. The two of them rolling into the hills biting sweat gashes off rivers, green slime, bits of broken helicopters, church bells in ears, cold tinny blue and God’s feet, big as cheese urns, landing unceremoniously in a crumpled scared heap. The room would turn into a spinning fucken barrel turning shrill pork belly with them naked rolling and banging into the ridges with running whiskey gag. Wood burner he nicked farting out the leftover specks of fire on cling-film skin. When they’d come down with a crash twenty minutes later, she’d hear the ghost of the bank inside the old windows, telling her to pick up the horse shit and bring it to the man in the Botanic Gardens for the flowerbeds.

  ‘D’ye hear him?’ she’d say.

  ‘Wot?’

  ‘He’s in here, talking again.’

  ‘Course he is, shurrrup and he’ll go away, fuck’s sake!’

  She’d hear the dead baby too, asking for his doo doo, ‘Gimme boy doo doo, doo doo mine!’ He’d have to pretend to hand the absent baby something, anything that might look like a doo doo. Then he’d slap it into her to get her to stop seeing the baby and she’d ask for another baby, tits well gone since they’d started using again. Looked like teacher’s eyes squinting at the crap way he pronounced Irish words. Sometimes he’d bash them, but she never ever gave out about that.

  ‘Gimme a baybeee, I want me babee back.’

  He stopped bursting into her cos all three kids were reefed away by the social workers. No way would he be fucken doing that again, so he’d pull out and squirt on the wood floor. She’d slip on it going to the jacks and call him a wanker. Then maybe they’d fall asleep until the headerballs came by later, never knowing how to get up and in. He’d collect them on the fire escape, one by one. Lucky to have this place. Most had to sleep in the bandstand on the canal or in the laneway behind Doyle’s that burnt down, sausaged in giveaway blankets with Leather Joe screaming inside night terrors of his ginger arse rape Da until the sun flew up over the broken roof tiles and car beeps gnashed at them. Pong of Spar hash browns, burnt dry and useless as donkey pelt.

  By 3 p.m. the pains were ripping and no fucken sign of her with the gear, down the fire escape and out onto the North Circular hustling past the shops of shite. Quick glance down Goldsmith Street and onto more slice of side road. Every step up step down hurt like fuck. Fatsos by the cattle-cart stomping into Curves gym to the lyrics of ‘I Will Survive’. He sang along to stop the pain from slit-sucking out his intestines. And now you’re back from out der space … I just walked in to find ye ’ere with dat sad look on yer face. ‘Come on now ladies, knees up and up and up again. That’s it, keep going, let me see those legs moving!’ Brenner in De Joy on the left, IRA prick, dying for Mother Ireland in a 15x20 exercise yard. The Mater Hospital with its wheelchair morgue; militia of swollen ankles. Around by the battered yellow flower shop and on and on. Holding on to his guts like a stolen Christmas present. Sweats horsing down under denim, face the colour of fresh snot. Passed the launderette where his Ma used to wash the boys’ sports gear on a Saturday. ‘Don’t sit on the machines Patrick, what did I tell you Patrick, are you listening to me Patrick?’ When he was just small enough to be growing that nose that would give him ‘Gonzo’ for all his days after. He’d probably never see her again. She certainly didn’t want to see him again. Most days he’d clear forget what she looked like. He turned the corner onto Berkley Road and puked: a stream of moss-green gooey liquor, pouring onto slick brick, damming at a To Let sign.

  ‘Look at de fucken state of him!’ he heard someone shout out from deep underground. Then more voices. More laughter. More bawl. Someone shouting from inside the elderly sewers under Dublin filled with fibre optic cables, acorn turds, dead Vikings.

  ‘Down here ye cunt!’

  In the basement of the Spare Parts Shop the ugly bake of Dessie Kearney peeking up from his flat.

  ‘Have you got any?’ Gonzo asked. ‘I’m in de bads.’

  Dessie beckoned him down the spiral staircase. In the sitting room on the table, he could see the spoon. Skinhead in a Sideline jacket handed him a leprechaun cup of Nescafé.

  ‘We can sort you out if you do us a fave,’ Dessie said.

  The drug scene in Dublin had got boiled-egg bad. Four friends in as many months dropped dead from bad score. Pyramids of empty syringes, citric wraps and codeine bottles stuffed into shores and mashed in doorways. Blister packs of Lyrica, benzodiazepines, ice, legs full of maggots. What couldn’t be crushed down and turned into liquid was snorted, licked, smoked. From Talbot Street to Gardiner Street and down into the flank of docks to Fairview, casting into surf and howli
ng out of rust-caked eyes into waves, sand shifting beneath drug boats, narrow little sea gods sucking at gravel and dancing a slithery leap. Low-cost booze and spat-back-up methadone from lippy whores was all you could see in the city centre before one o’clock in the day. Cops didn’t give a gypsies as long as people like him hurried the fuck up and died.

  He looked at Dessie who was eyeing up two lezzers on the couch. One of them, skinny as rashers, was pretending to grate her tongue. ‘Yewer fucken gas,’ her bird said, bending over for a sludgy on the cake hole. Both wearing dolphin necklaces, glitter leggings, squeegees of burnt yellow hair in bobbles of teapot spouts. He noticed they had front teeth missing as well.

  ‘We need a drop-off of our gear up the flats at Baker’s Yard. Cops are all over it. They won’t know your ugly mug. Not many left we trust, int dat right Skinner?’

  ‘I’m not doing the numpty for no fucken cunt,’ Gonzo told them. ‘Carol would brain me if I end up back in the slammer. She’s not doing great after Charlie got taken from us and the other one not long dead.’

  ‘Heard about dat,’ Dessie said. ‘This city doesn’t have no respect for no one and yez were only doing yer bento to keep it together for those fucken kids.’

  The day they came for Charlie was the worst stab in his heart ever. He saw Carol at the window of the flat from down on the broken concrete below. Foggy shadow of the social worker in navy behind her spilling the jib. Carol cocking her eyes towards the mountains, roaring and snotting, calling them all the bastards. Face pink as AstroTurf runners, nothing left but ‘goodbye’ to the little boy who slept in a cardboard box with two kittens that first winter they all tried to keep warm.

  ‘There’s pissloads of young bolloxes farting about picking iPhones like apples off O’Connell Street,’ Skinner said. ‘Muggings akimbo, robbed cars for €500, fucken break-ins. Dessie’s been done here in the flat ’n all. It’s gone mental cos of the cheap cut shite they’re putting about. Guards clamping down like steel clips on a dirt-bird’s nipples. But our stuff is good cack, it’s the barley. If we get in with the Russians we’ll have a chance making proper squids.’

  Dessie butted in, ‘If it goes A-OK Gonzo, we’ll see ye alright when we get our glasses, know what I’m saying, do ye? We’d give you and Carol a bit of work if yezer game ball.’

  Gonzo was afraid of Dessie even back in school when he lobbed custard out the window at muppets passing by. Chasing after seagulls on the Buckfast zig-zag, giving his fifteen-year-old girlfriend a black eye for buying the wrong smokes. Skinner was worse, he could tell. Grade-A psycho who’d snap your fingers off quicker than a fat kid at the zoo smashes a Kit Kat. Now they were turkey-chesting with Russians dealers, taking on the entire muscle-for-hire empire. Gangsters in silver puff jackets trafficking teenagers by day, selling pierced tits of an evening.

  ‘Sandra here used to go out with one of the Russians, they’re mad bastards, don’t mess around. Tell them what they did to Stano …’

  ‘This guy Andrei, right, a mate of a bloke I was with for a while, he nailed a fella’s nuts to the floor cos he was four days late paying them.’ They looked at one another as if to say ‘that’s enough’. Sandra started texting and snapped a pic of Gonzo’s mug. ‘They left him there, bleeding out for nine hours. It was rotten so it was.’

  ‘What happened the poor fucker?’ Gonzo asked.

  ‘Dead as a dodo, what do you bleeding think happened him? He had two young kids and a new wife ’n all. It was in the Sunday World. They pinned it on the Poles in Ballyfermot but it weren’t them.’

  ‘Will ye stop with the fucking scare stories,’ Dessie said, giving yer one the scaldies.

  Today they’d sort Gonzo out. And he’d sort them out for tomorrow by doing a lemon flavour. Quid pro quo. No one need know. Take the stuff on offer first. Relax. None of them could do it. He was one of the few not doing a miserable scoop for a debt. Bob’s your uncle. Fannywollop’s your aunt. Twenty minutes later, bonbon church bells, ingots veins, stretched out on a divan with Skinner’s spades spreading his furry cheeks apart to shove the drugs in.

  ‘You’ve got a few hours so keep your nose down, get some grub, don’t go into no pubs. If it goes roadrunner up yer hole after walking down, you’ll need to go in somewhere and have yourself a shite. Just don’t fucken wash the bags afterwards, wipe with a lump of jacks roll.’

  He couldn’t feel it much except for the arctic Vaso. They sat back on the couch and did the business, flopping like wankers for an hour or more. Skinner was right, this was good fucken stuff. Gonzo’s brain felt like mushy peas in a polystyrene chipper box. He saw his Da playing golf with Jesus and that old bagalot from up the road at the green, Mrs Montgomery, riding an ostrich across the Hill of Tara with an old transistor radio tied to its neck. When he nudged back to life, the two lezzers were dry-riding against the back of the couch.

  ‘Gwan,’ Dessie said. ‘Gerrup before ye crash, and watch yer fucken back out there.’

  The city tipped down in a duck beak towards the Garden of Remembrance. Rain scattering Swarovski beads on the path as he plonked along. He thought of Carol’s fresh face at eighteen. Cement angels leaned chin forward from Georgian chimneys. ‘I’m out of me nugget!’ he roared. Pains fostered out elsewhere now, he felt boundless, happy. Met her here with a gang of inner-city boys from the flats around Dominic Street, drinking cans and dancing to U2 songs on a ghetto-blaster sometime in the middle of 1994. She’d weight on her then, chubby sweet smile, horse-tail of hair whooshing from end to end in the sunbeams. They kissed for an hour without stopping: wet balmy tongue slosh he’d never done with any other bird. Sometimes he still felt guilty, but Leather Joe said, ‘There’s no stopping some, and ye never forced her to take it.’ The counsellor from Rightways also explained that ‘damaged people have a knack of stumbling onto one another no matter what.’ It made sense that first time they tried to get off it together. Both their Da’s were alcos and bashed them. Both their Ma’s couldn’t see anything wrong with their Da’s, and bashed them. A few weeks later, they fumbled and gorged and slopped into one another under the flat-leaf bushes in the Gardens. ‘What ye doing to me boy, what ye bleeding doing to me!?’ Lads circling the railings, clutching chimpanzees, uuumphing them on. ‘Slapper!’ Afterwards, they took the piss saying Gonzo was a right grunter, like those fucken mating seals on RTÉ. ‘It’s you and me babe, no one else babe, you’ll do me babe.’

  At the edge of O’Connell Street where pigeons shat on the bloated head of Charles Stewart Parnell there was a big pile of cunts warbling the breeze about water charges. Slapper holding a salad cutter was screaming blue beam about not being able to pay her bills. A group of young girls, no more than five or six, carrying banners: WATER FIRST, AIR NEXT. Normally he’d stick around for the dip, but he’d only an hour and a half to get to the apartment and drop off the gear. Dessie warned him not to ‘fuckarse about’. To get it done and dusted pronto. Skinner held on to his social welfare card until he got back. They doshed him taxi fare but he shoved it straight into his pocket for later. He was heading to the Wise Wok on North Earl Street instead. For a fiver you could nab a chicken curry that blowed the banana off. Thai bird with ladybird lips always lobs loads of vegetables in. He sat at the window gawking at the courgettes wondering how yer one shaved the sea-green bits off the edges in fancy crinkles. Wondering too why his boot of a Ma never bought broccoli or other mad shit when he lived at home. Stomach rumbling something poxy; he could feel the bunk beds of turds crumpling down. ‘Fuck,’ he thought, imagining turning up to the Russians with a whole load of shit covered in a whole load of shit.

  He mozied out the door turning right onto Talbot Street. Reams of shouting shoppers nabbing cut-price bootle in Guineys. Roma pleb with a trumpet full of coins. Two alcos blocking the doorway at Dunnes Stores. It’d only take ten minutes to horse down to Baker’s Yard. If he was in a bad way he’d leg it to the underground car par
k, reef the skank out his hole, finish with a dump at the side of some tosspot’s Beamer before facing off the boys. Left right left right through the crowd shouting, ‘Move will ye! Getouttameway.’ When he reached the junction of Gardener Street, he was grabbed from behind, both arms, gutter knocked.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, stop it, I ain’t done nothing,’ he roared, But these were no cops and he knew on the fly they were wise to the stash on him.

  ‘Shut it or you’ll get it in the head,’ one of them said. He had a foreign accent, smelling of pickles and beer. Another stood over him with the wrinkle tracks of his docs in full view ready to smack a print on his face. How the fuck could they know he’d be making his way down at this time? He thought of the two lezzers. Dessie had said he didn’t know them that well.

  Aulone in brown bandaged legs to the right shouted, ‘Bowsies, fecking bowsies!’

  He turned his head and twigged he was outside the pool hall with the painted bugs all over its walls. Whichever one peppered a punch and then a fuck of clatters he’ll never know but his brain went bubbly. His mouth gassy and a thin veil of darkness shifted down from the next world to tell him he was a fly in the butchers about to be stamped out. Flipping menu boards rocked and crowed, scaffold poles on an old grey CitiHostel turned sideways to do a fiddler’s jig. Punters slithered by not giving a fuck. He could feel his legs being wrenched along the damp cobbles. Shovel hands gripping his hoodie to keep his head from meringue cracking. He came to in a piss laneway propped up against a blue skip under the rotting planks of a railway bridge.

  ‘You shit munching faggot fuck,’ steel knuckles said. ‘Who put you here?’

  ‘I know fuck all,’ Gonzo told them. ‘I’m going back home to me bird is all, I know fuck all, fuck all.’ He thought of the guy’s nuts nailed to the floor, crying blood, no one lifting a finger to help.