Breakfast on Pluto

by Patrick McCabe

  When I went up on deck, the air was sharp and clean and the dawn was beginning to come up. I leaned over the railing and sucked in the salt breeze. Strung all along the coastline, they set my heart atingle, winking: ‘Hello there, Puss!’ at me, each one glistening through the fog, the lovely lights of Liverpool.

  Suddenly – An Expert!

  I’m well aware of course that a lot of people might say – certainly Terence said it often enough – that while I seem to have had no problem sympathizing with Charlie’s tragedy (she had a breakdown not long after Irwin was murdered – but we’ll go into all that later) there appears to be no similar generosity of spirit evident when it comes to my treatment of Father Bernard. Who – Terence kept coming back to this – must have been tormented, not only by my persistently vindictive missives but by the sight of me strutting about the town in the ostentatious manner I did. ‘I mean – we are talking about a small, enclosed village here,’ Terence said. Now suddenly he’s an expert on Irish rural life – after me telling him everything he knew! Before that, he wouldn’t have known where to look in the atlas – for Ireland, never mind Tyreelin!

  Chapter Sixteen

  In a Pig’s Ear, Sweety-Pie!

  But he’s right, of course. I mean – I suppose I did turkey-hen around the place a little, crushed velvet purple loon pants one minute, baby pink satin jacket and stackheeled glitter boots the next! ‘After all,’ he said, ‘one could hardly expect the poor priest to invite you up to the presbytery and say: “Sit down there son and have a cup of tea like a good fellow. Myself and yourself have a lot to catch up on! By the way – I love the powder blue, puff-sleeved shirt – or is it a blouse? Ha ha!”’

  All of which is fair and reasonable enough, I suppose. But I wasn’t bothered about any big speeches or get-togethers like that. All I wanted him to do was say: ‘Hello there, Patrick,’ once in a while. Even nod, for heaven’s sake! But he couldn’t even do that much! As a matter of fact, any time he saw that I was sitting on the summer seat, he put his head down and made a detour around by the back of the chickenshed. Did I mention that ever since I’d been dumped on the front step of Rat Trap Mansions I suspected Whiskers had been getting extra cash for my upkeep, over and above what the government gave her? (‘Mickey money,’ they called that locally.) Well – she was! For definite! From good old Father Bernard, believe it or not! And, to be fair, when all’s said and done, at least they can’t take that away from him! Only Caroline let it slip one time she came to visit me in Charlie’s, I might never have found out. I was furious and stormed off down to the house straight away!

  ‘How dare you!’ I said to Whiskers. ‘Cheating me out of my rightful inheritance! I could have you in court! You realize that! Don’t you!’ Then what does she do only start to blubber. Caroline too, of course! Then next thing I look out the window and who’s there staring and noseying in – O’Hare! I flung the window open and shouted: ‘What are you looking at? Think I’m going to steal your bloomers again, do you? Well, you needn’t worry! I don’t need your old drawers! You can stick them up your backside, that’s what you can do!’ I was in a right fury, I can tell you! I was especially sorry because Caroline’s boyfriend Frank arrived right in the middle of it and was mortified.

  I mean – I was chucking things around and everything! I have to say that I really felt especially sorry for Caroline – because when I was living with Dummy, she used to bring me food and money. (As if I needed it – I was loaded! But I couldn’t tell her that!)

  ‘What’s to become of us, Paddy?’ she said sometimes and seemed so genuine. I even embraced her once, when she was leaving – I swear to God!

  And now, here she was with her new boyfriend – he was a lovely fellow, Frank from the bank I called him – having to listen to me! ‘You could have fucking told me!’ I said. ‘You could have given me something! But no! All you ever gave me, all you ever handed down was the smell of piss and clothes nobody ever bothered to wash! Thanks a bunch! Thanks a whole pile, fucking Whiskers!’ I hadn’t meant to call her that. On the way over, I had said to myself: ‘Don’t call her that now. Whatever you do, don’t call her that, it isn’t fair.’ And now, here I was, doing it. ‘Fucking Whiskers!’ I said again. Once or twice, Frank tried to calm me down but I’m afraid I wasn’t taking any of that from him, I mean, at the end of the day it was our family. ‘Fuck off, Frank!’ I said. ‘You don’t know what it was like! What it was like being reared by a thief! How would you possibly know!’

  Bad and all as it was, practically destroying the kitchen (which really looked quite nice now that Frank and Caroline spent a lot of time in it, keeping it clean and what have you), it really made me feel an awful lot better and by the time I had calmed down I was able to say to Whiskers: ‘I’m sorry. But it really did upset me when I heard it.’ Unfortunately, nothing I could say or do could placate her and she was still blubbering when I left. But Frank and Caroline left me to the door and would you believe – actually offered me twenty pounds! Which I said I couldn’t take. I did? In a pig’s ear, sweety-pie!

  ‘Thanks, Frank,’ I said and held Caroline in my arms. It was lovely giving her just a little peck on the cheek. ‘I wish we could have done that a bit more often,’ I said and she began to cry. There was no doubt about it but she was a really good-looking girl now – quite beautiful in fact. ‘You’re a lucky man, Frank,’ I said and gave him a big grin. Then off I went. I really was quite lightheaded after my little outburst.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I Work Here

  But am still not quite sure how I ended up in the church! I’d just about had it, I suppose! Fortunately there weren’t too many worshippers in the vicinity. I could imagine what they’d have had to say. ‘What’s he doing here? He never darkens the door!’ Which is a darned blooming cheek when you think about it, for if I, Tyreelin’s only genuine son-of-a-preacher-man, haven’t the right to be about the place then who, just who, I would like to know, has? I was as giddy as a goat as I swept through the doors and I am ashamed to have to admit there was a distinct whiff of BO emanating from the regions of my armpits. ‘Oh, dear,’ I said to myself – don’t ask me why! Guess Who was on the cross as usual. Looking down to say: ‘Ah, Paddy.’ ‘Ah, Paddy, what?’ I said and shook my head. What was He on about? As long as I could remember, there He had been with His crown of thorns, just hanging there, ah this, ah that, ah what. That was the question I had been meaning to ask Him. ‘Ah what? Ah what??’ So I asked Him. ‘What are you aahing about?’ I said.

  Like I say I was lightheaded and in no humour for waiting but fortunately just then the door of the confession box opened and in I went. ‘The Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt’, said the pamphlet. I rolled it up in a ball and threw it away. Just then he drew the shutter back. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ I said as I knelt down in the dark and you can imagine the shock I got when it wasn’t him. All I could see was this baby fellow hardly older than myself looking at me through the grille. ‘What are you doing here?’ I said. ‘I work here,’ he says, as I began to realize just what an idiot I’d made of myself!

  By then I didn’t care though because, to tell you the truth, after the row with Whiskers I was exhausted. ‘Bye bye, Father,’ I said as the confessional door clicked shut behind me. ‘Ah’s’ eyes following me, wondering, I suppose, what He’d been drinking the day He went and made a twilight zone of a disaster like me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Look! She’s Lost Again!’

  Well, how many times did I manage to get myself lost in that old London town – don’t ask me! After leaving Euston station, I must have walked the square mile half a dozen times – each time ending up back at Gower Street. Bright-red Pussy! Thinking all of London town’s ten million people are saying: ‘Look! It’s her! She’s lost again!’

  It was a miracle I found my way to Piccadilly Circus at all, there at last to begin my trade. (I had read about it in Weekend magazine – ‘Nocturnal Vice! The Boys Who Ply Their Trade by Night! Sins of
the City That Never Sleeps!’) Sounds just like me! I thought!

  Although I would have given it a lot more consideration if I’d known of the likes of Silky String – only my fifth or sixth customer, for heaven’s sake! (‘Ah’ getting His own back on me maybe!)

  Chapter Nineteen

  Theme from ‘A Summer Place’

  ‘Cold, isn’t it?’ I said and put my hand on his leg. ‘You remind me of someone,’ he says then, with this great big charming smile that would make you think: ‘I’ve met a right old Cary Grant here and no mistake,’ and the pair of us racking our brains to find out who this remind-person is. And who does it turn out to be – the one and only David Cassidy! ‘That’s what I should call you,’ he says. ‘My little David. My little David Cassidy.’ I didn’t ask him what his name was, because unless it was going to go further and he was going to do a sugar daddy and set me up in a flat as his kitten, I didn’t really see the point. Which I would dearly have loved him to do, let me add, for it would have suited me down to the ground. An English version of Eamon Faircroft was just what I needed right in those early England days of ’73 and let there be no denying it. Exactly the very thoughts going through my mind as we zoomed off through the night-time streets of London – THE BODY REVUE ’72! NON-STOP AVANT GARDE NAKED SPECTACULAR! GODSPELL! PYJAMA TOPS! 5th GREAT YEAR! SWINGING STEWARDESSES! TECHNIQUES OF LOVE! – ‘I wonder what he works at now, this latest pick-up chappie of mine?’ One thing I was glad of – he was certainly a lot better turned out than some of my previous customers! Absolutely appalling having to deal with some of them it was! ‘And you talk about the dirty Irish!’ I said to one of them. His fingernails! You wouldn’t believe them! ‘Dirt! I farking love it!’ he says. ‘Fuck me in the dirtiest place imaginable – squeal like a pig, I will!’ Not with me he wouldn’t!

  As I said to Silky – which he wasn’t called then, of course! – moving a little bit closer to him, and organizing a little nose-crinkling: ‘You’re nice!’

  ‘You really think so?’ he says then. And I nod. Simply because it was true. Neat suit, steel-grey hair and not a single speck of dirt on his fingernails. Or anywhere else for that matter. ‘Do you like music?’ he says then and I said: ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I absolutely adore music.’ Then he looks at me and smiles. ‘Wonderful. So do I. So already we have something in common.’ I have to tell you – I was really beginning to like Silky. And when it was Vic Damone and ‘Stay With Me’ that came over the airwaves just then – well! I must have jumped a little or shrieked perhaps, because he started laughing and said: ‘You like that, don’t you?’ as I dropped my eyes and replied: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Quite old-fashioned for a boy your age, aren’t you?’ – to which I once more eagerly replied: ‘Oh, yes!’

  ‘So that’s another thing we have in common!’ he said, and gave my thigh a little squeeze. ‘For I love Vic Damone.’

  As we sped along that night – going north but of course I didn’t know that then, I hadn’t the faintest clue! – I just cannot describe how happy I was! All of a sudden I seemed to see the inhabitants of Tyreelin, all massed there in the square between the creamery and the petrol pumps, obligingly leaning forward, the better for me to inspect their individual features.

  ‘Remember us?’ they said but what could I honestly do only shake my head? ‘Sorry,’ I said and were they sad. But, as I told them, ‘That’s life! We all now must move on!’

  ‘Yes! True love!’ Silky was saying. ‘That’s what we’re all after! And Vic – boy does that man know how to sing about it. You reckon, my little friend?’

  ‘I reckon,’ I said, all huggy-warm.

  ‘And Nat King Cole. “The Girl From Ipanema” – hmm?’

  ‘Mm,’ I purred.

  ‘You that little girl? You a little girl from Ipanema maybe?’

  We laughed.

  ‘It’s so lovely to have met you,’ he says then and looks at me all glittery-eyed.

  When I look back on it, I really have to hand it to Silks. To listen to him you would have thought he was the sort of person who started drenching the place with tears anytime anything remotely upsetting came on the cinema screen, for whom the abuse of a dumb animal was a tragedy of awesome proportions. Which perhaps it was of course! Just because you get a kick out of strangling people doesn’t mean that another side of you can’t be humane and kind and sensitive – perhaps even more so indeed.

  In any case, that was all I saw in him as on we cruised with Vic still singing and the whole warm London night surging in through the open window. Crayon neon all about and jiggy-sparked inside! With swells of emotion that went right through you as you thought: ‘At the end of this journey, something special is going to happen. My new lover is going to pull the handbrake and when we look out the window we will see something that will look like a shining light. Then he’ll just turn to me and say: ‘We’ve reached it. We’re home.’

  Which he did – turn to me, I mean – just as soon as he pulled the handbrake. But it wasn’t to say anything about love or home, I’m afraid! Although at first I thought it was, because his eyes seemed to have something close to deep affection in them, which made me feel real yummy. Especially when he said again: ‘So you like Vic?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ I replied. ‘I really like him.’

  ‘Why?’ he said and my first inclination was to chuckle because we both knew why, but then because it was so exciting just thinking about it again, I sort of shivered and closed my eyes as words just wriggled out of me and I said: ‘Because he knows so well what it’s like to be in love and what it can do to two people, when they’re just dancing there and everyone’s gone home and all you can hear is the sound of the city night as it slips now towards the dawn . . .’

  ‘Take off your clothes,’ he said then and I have to confess the abruptness of it did take me aback a little. But I took them off anyway, as neatly and decorously as I could – because that was what he wanted: (‘Take them off – but not in a vulgar way,’ he said) – and laid them on the seat beside me. Did I say he liked that? He couldn’t take his eyes off them – that little piles of clothesies sitting there (Oxfam glam-rock cast-off Department, Oxford Street, I’m afraid! O how my fortunes had changed! But which were about to improve – I knew it! For without a doubt my newfound friend would give me lots and lots of cash with which to take myself to Biba’s fab boutique, there to pick and choose with glee!)

  And was about that particular development – re: fortunes! – Sweet Puss soon proved right! But not for the better, dreary! For no sooner had I my gold chain removed and my long brown hair tossed back than he had slipped his hand in his pocket and removed his silky string – although if it was indeed from that fabric fashioned, I could not say for sure. All I can accurately state is that it was a ligature of some sort, soft but not so when about your Adam’s apple it’s drawn tight as it will go. For some reason, at that precise moment, when he began to strangle me, I saw Charlie standing there tossing back her scarf and going: ‘I want to read you a poem. It’s by Adrian Henri from Liverpool. It goes like this: “I want to paint two thousand dead birds crucified on a background of night . . .”’

  As I’m sure you can imagine – each and every one of those silly birds I saw as Silky String pulled tight. ‘So you believe in love?’ he was saying – hammering away at his tootle now, of course, into the bargain! ‘So you believe in true love? Well – let’s have some of that! Let’s have some true love, then – true fucking love, let’s have it!’ He released me for a moment to turn up the music – the theme from ‘A Summer Place’ now, would you believe! – and it was now playing so loud I cannot understand how someone didn’t hear or see us. I suppose he knew the area well – I can remember Hammersmith Bridge in the distance, but it was obviously some sort of disused industrial estate – and he knew what he would and wouldn’t be able to get away with. With the little bit of sight that was left to me in those bulging eyes, there seemed to be a dump outside the window. I could have sworn a seagull walked pa
st on top of it. But then maybe that was one of Charlie’s imaginary birds. ‘All the things I’m going to paint,’ she said, as Silky forced his tongue inside my mouth. The music was absolutely deafening now and why a passing snatch of South Pacific came into my mind just at that precise moment I to this day do not know why but it did and then – the moment in fact he twisted that stupid fucking string around my neck again – it really was Mitzi Gaynor who was coming across those airwaves and perhaps because it seemed so beautiful and pure, it made me feel ashamed. It was as if she was standing there on the beach with her hair pinned back and her hands on her hips going: ‘Patrick – why?’ How I got a grip of his ear but once I did I sank my teeth into the flesh as hard as I could. What made getting away easier was the fact, of course, that his other organ was still pronging away.

  In my mind I called to Charlie: ‘You want to paint: “One blood-pumping liar crucified against a background of refuse!”’ Which was what he was now, yelping as he stumbled out of the car, howling: ‘You fucking Irish bitch! I’ll murder you! You facking Irish facking filth! My eyes! I’m facking blinded!’

  Which was lies – he wasn’t blinded. I hadn’t connected properly with my nails.

  What on earth they must have thought, poor drivers, looking out through their windscreens to see me pulling on my clothes in the middle of a motorway, with the eyes still bulging out of my head. All I was worried about was that it was going to turn out like the horror stories where you leave one madman and climb into a car with Mr Nicey who’s going to save you – except it transpires he’s madder than the first one!