Torn Water Read online

  He remembers being in bed one night. He woke and felt the presence of someone sitting at the end of it. He can remember his body freezing in a spasm of fear. The smell of cheap whisky filled the room, and the pale sickly scent of aftershave.

  It was a builder his mother had met a few weeks before. A large shaven-headed man, who didn't smile but viewed the world with thin-lipped distrust. When he had been introduced to James he had bent down stiffly extending his hand, his scalp pitted and cracked with scars. His eyes were large and seemed to bore straight into James. He didn't like the man. He didn't like the way he shadowed his mother as if she was a lassoed calf, following her about the house, watching every move she made. His left arm was covered in tattoos, deep blue-green drawings of half-clad women, their cartoon bodies pouting from the bristle of his arm. He frightened James, and when he was in their house there seemed nowhere to escape to, because he seemed to fill every part of it.

  They had brought James with them to the local working-man's club earlier that night. He can remember riding in the back seat of the builder's Ford Granada. The seats smelt musty and were covered with dog-hair, and the ashtray in the well between the two seats was full of mint-humbug wrappers. The journey seethed with silence, punctuated only by the squeak of the passenger seat's visor as his mother pulled it down to check her makeup in the mirror.

  Excitement scurried in his stomach as he looked forward to his evening at the club. His mother had told him earlier that the only reason they were bringing him was that she couldn't find a babysitter and he was too young to be left on his own.

  He can remember the layers of smoke that hung in the air, the cigarette butts and the dried circles of spit dotting the floor like ringworm rounds. It was a large cavernous room with long runs of fluorescent lighting, filled with steel-tube chairs. Groups of drinkers sat together, ringed by empty and half-empty glasses. They were mostly men, their nicotine fingers jabbing the air like small yellow stems.

  Young men carried laden trays of drinks to and fro, their slim hips slipping expertly between cluttered tables. They all wore white shirts and flared black trousers, and pocketed their tips quickly with deft thrusts of their hands.

  At one point a man stopped by the table. He knew the builder and greeted him with a soft punch on his shoulder. ‘Hi, Clive, how's it hanging?’ He had only one eye, and the left side of his face was disfigured by a twisted mesh of scars.

  Clive greeted the man as ‘Nelson’, then winked at James's mother and laughed. James couldn't take his eyes off him. He thought Nelson looked like a mannequin after it had been caught in a shop blaze. The man was drunk and at one point threw a look at James, staring at him with his one good eye, his head bobbing to a jaunty tune it seemed that only he could hear. James remembers trying to avoid looking at the scar, the dense shadow that nestled there.

  Before he left Nelson turned to Clive and stuck out a hand. After a moment Clive reached into his pocket and placed a few coins in the man's palm. James watched him walk away, and noted that he hadn't said thanks, just took the money and moved on to the next table and hit a small wiry man who sat there a punch of greeting on the shoulder. James had been put at a small side-table, next to his mother's larger one, and given a Lucozade and a bag of crisps. He remembers his feet dangling from his chair, banging against its steel limbs. He watched as Clive and his mother sat and sipped their drinks, staring into the middle distance like people who had just suffered a loss.

  As soon as they had finished, one of the young waiters was called over and a new tray of drinks arrived.

  Periodically Clive would throw a hopeful glance at James's mother. James remembers how her eyes glittered. She looked as if her mind was hunting, stalking some hidden paradise, far beyond the thin walls of her life.

  By the end of the evening they had been joined by a young red-headed man, his skin the colour of milk. He sat beside James's mother and seemed to know her quite well, a little sly smile coming to his face whenever he spoke to her. James can remember watching the three, from his side-table, sipping his flat Lucozade noting how their bodies were halved by the table-top. He became fascinated by the shuffling dance of their legs beneath it, seeing the red-head's feet slide to within inches of his mother's, his right foot begin tickling her ankle knot. Above, in the more visible half, he saw a smile flash across her lips and watched as she dipped her head.

  ‘I love this woman …’ Clive said suddenly, his body trembling with the force of his declaration. He leant into the middle of the table. He was now inches from the young man's face. ‘I fucking love this woman.’

  This time it had the force of a confessional whisper, an offered secret, and James watched as, beneath the table, his mother allowed the young red-head's hand to advance slowly along the creamy run of her thigh.

  James remembers feeling sorry for Clive. He felt anger towards his mother, a hard violent anger that wanted to stamp on the woman that had risen from the froth of beer and the snatched swallows of gin.

  So, later that night, as he slowly opened an eye and peered at Clive sitting at the end of his bed, he felt fear give way to pity. He remembers seeing his bare torso glistening like lard in the moonlight, one hand laid across his belly. He was crying. He seemed to be saying something half to himself, half to the sleeping world. How long he sat there James cannot remember, but eventually his eyes closed, the big man's mutterings lowering him into sleep. He never saw Clive again, and knew better than to enquire as to his whereabouts. Sometimes he thought of him, and saw him lumbering across the landscape of his life, half of it hidden, the other half too painful to behold.

  ‘Glad I'm back, kid. I tell you what, I aim to be here a while this time.’

  He is in the kitchen, filling the kettle. Sully has followed him into the house, leaving his stash of freshly thieved logs.

  ‘Listen, kid …’

  James notices that Sully always addresses him as if they were characters in a Western, opening his shoulders and squinting into the middle distance, especially when he feels unsure. It irritates James: it makes him feel as if Sully isn't really seeing him, that he is just something in the way.

  ‘Those logs will come in handy on the long nights.’

  James doesn't reply, pretending not to hear.

  Sully sticks his oil-stained hands under the running tap. ‘I said – ’

  ‘I'm not interested.’ James looks deep into his eyes.

  Sully just looks back and for a moment they stay that way as if they are lovers about to kiss. Then Sully says, ‘Holy cow! If looks could kill, kid, I'd be a dead man.’

  Death for the Burning Power of

  His Mother's Love

  They thought I didn't know. They thought I didn't see, They had plans and they didn't include me. After all I had done for her. Everything is clear to me now. She never loved me. She thinks only of herself, like he did, You see, they were one of a kind. As I stand here on the scaffold I think of all the times I have cared for her, looked out for her, I was her guardian, I know it sounds silly, a young son being his parent's guardian, but that's the way it was. That's the way it has always been.

  I thought he had gone for good. I thought that we had seen the last of the smug, slap-happy Sully, I was wrong. I knew then something had to be done, that drastic measures were required to stop this man in his tracks. A small crowd has gathered. Some of the men in the crowd shout insults at me. All night long I have waited for this moment, listening from my cell as the workmen put the final touches to the wooden scaffold outside.

  I think of the knife I stuck into Sully's heart, the knife that now lies at the bottom of the lake. I think of it buried in the silt. I think of the look of dismay that creased his face as the blade dug deep into his chest. I think of how I had used it to skin him, to gut him, and the hook to hang his carcass from the beam in our outhouse, just like the pig he brought home for her once.

  I hear the trapdoor snap open and feel my feet plummet from me and a hard crack travel from the
base of my spine as my neck breaks. Through the last thrashing spasms of my body I hear her call my name and see her face lift towards mine, but by then I am far beyond her, swimming in the depths of the lake, pushing down towards my gashed love for her, which lies buried hilt deep in the soft heart of the lake's bed.

  3. Teezy

  ‘Don't say anything.’

  ‘I won't.’

  ‘Come on, Jimmy, don't be like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know full well like what. Just don't say anything to her about Sully.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I just don't want to get into it with her. Sticking her nose in.’

  ‘All right, Mum. All right.’

  They are driving to his aunt Teezy's. A week has passed since Sully's return and his mother has been lost to him. She has run to the sanctuary of Sully's arms and hidden from him there. The pile of logs has stayed where it was dumped, bringing impatient looks from some of the neighbours, and one or two loud grunts of disapproval from Mrs McCracken across the way.

  He is fond of Teezy. She is his ally. She is his great-aunt, his grandfather's sister, his father's aunt. His grandfather died before he was born. He had been a brickie, segmenting the world into brick-size pieces, adding mortar and building walls to seal the perimeters of his life. Beyond that James knows nothing, except that Teezy had loved his father dearly, but what is gone is gone.

  She is a heavy woman, with soft, large shoulders. Sometimes when she is cooking she rolls up the sleeves of her cardigan, revealing Popeye-like arms and the little gathered parcels of flesh that hang about her elbows.

  He feels safe with her, with the bulky force of her ways. She always keeps a bottle of Bols Advocaat on a high shelf in her living room, and at the end of the day she ceremoniously pours a capful into a waiting thimble glass. Then she sits by her small television set, prises her shoes from her feet and gently caresses the small bones of her ankle with one of her toes.

  James had noticed from a very early age that there are two Teezys. First there is the serene Teezy, the ‘end-of-day woman’, with her glass, holding the world outside at arm's length. On the other hand there is the ‘street’ Teezy, who barges her way across town. A woman who is larger and angrier, who forces her way through checkpoints and grumpily ignores bomb scares, shouting at the top of her voice that it is her country and that no one is going to stop her buying her eggs.

  ‘My goodness, you are shooting up. You're still a bit mealy-looking, mind. A good feed would do you the world of good – do you hear me, Ann?’

  ‘You saying I don't feed my son, Teezy?’

  They have arrived. Teezy is ushering them through the narrow corridor of her small townhouse, clucking and fussing like a mothering hen.

  ‘No, not at all, but sometimes, you know as well as I do, you have to stand over them.’

  ‘Well, I've better things to do, Teezy, no harm to you.’

  ‘Yes, and it begins with an S.’

  She says it quietly, out of his mother's earshot; it brings a smirk to James's lips.

  ‘What did he bring this time?’ she whispers to him.

  ‘A pile of logs.’

  ‘The romantic’

  One year he got hives. He remembers clawing at them with his fingernails, trying to avoid the heads, drawing red tracks either side of them, itching so much and so often that he numbed his arm. He remembers Teezy slopping palmfuls of calamine lotion all over his body, rebuking his cries by declaring firmly,

  ‘Too many scallions.

  ‘Not enough sleep.

  Too many tomatoes.

  ‘Not enough greens.’

  Almost immediately the calamine lotion would dry into a crust, the heads of the hives peeping through in weeping clusters.

  Teezy and his mother had got together for the evening about a year after his father had died and they were preparing James for bed, fussing around him. His mother was drawing a large hairbrush across his head in hard arcs, bringing tears to his eyes. ‘You've hair like strips of wire,’ she had said, grunting as she pulled the brush across his skull. ‘Stubborn, stubborn hair.’

  ‘I wonder where he got that from,’ Teezy had said.

  As the evening had worn on the two women had filled the house with their laughter. Every now and again James's mother would turn to him, eyes misty with booze, and ask him thickly if he was all right, if his hives itched, and if they did not to touch them. He remembers feeling like a prisoner held captive in his own body, encased in the chalky suit of dried lotion.

  At one point Teezy had insisted that she was not able for more drink, raising her hand like a policeman stopping traffic.

  ‘What sort of a woman are you?’ his mother had said.

  ‘Oh, all right then, a wee one.’

  James can remember seeing Teezy's glass welcome the sherry. It was the first and only time that he had seen his auntie drunk, the only time he had seen her take on his mother at her own game. Slowly the two Teezys blurred into one, and the angrier, the ‘street’ one, began to hold sway. Once she looked over at James in a way that prompted the hairs on the back of his neck to stand up, and caused his skin to itch once more.

  His mother, he remembers, never took her eyes off Teezy. At the moment Teezy had looked at James, his mother had placed a record on the old deck she kept beneath some magazines by the television set. Then she began to yelp and dance at the edge of Teezy's vision, thumping her feet down heavily on the linoleum, and slowly began to advance on her.

  It took a moment for Teezy to release James from her gaze and turn to look at Ann, a smile breaking across her face. She then had leapt to her feet, clapping her hands.

  The two women began to dance. He watched as they made little jinking runs around one another, their arms held out from their bodies. When a slower ballad came on they looked at each other and laughed, and Teezy eased her body back into the fireside chair. His mother had then turned to James and offered him her outstretched arms, her eyes gaily dancing like the flames in the dark mouth of the grate. ‘Come on, dance with me,’ she had said. ‘Dance with your queen.’

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  ‘Right, I'm off,’ His mother says.

  They stand in Teezy's small scullery as if at a wake, unsure what to say or do.

  ‘You've things to do yourself, haven't you, Jimmy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘See you in a bit, then.’

  ‘Send my regards to the reprobate,’ Teezy says.

  ‘Did you tell her?’ his mum asks him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I may be old but I'm not stupid, Ann,’ Teezy shouts after her.

  He can remember the way her skin had slipped on to his like moss along a stone. He can remember her breath on his neck, the way she told him to put his sockless feet on her shoes. He remembers climbing on to them, and feeling his soles lie across the bridge of her feet. He remembers them moving together.

  ‘My strong man … my fierce, strong little man,’ she had said.

  The song had finished and his mother asked quietly how his hives were; all right, he had said. They were still close together, his mother leaning down to meet the smile in his eyes.

  ‘If Conn was only here to see you …’ his auntie had suddenly said, her head nodding, the fire beating a crimson glow on the side of her face.

  Suddenly his mother's eyes had clouded. She turned and ripped the LP from the turntable. A silence sat, fat and solid, in the air. He remembers inching his way back to his seat, its springs squealing as he sat.

  James remembers turning the name quietly on his tongue, like a small fiery sweet, Conn … his father's name. A four-lettered bomb exploding in his heart. Conn … Conn … like a fist in his mind, Conn … Conn … Conn.

  ‘Don't ever mention his name again,’ his mother had said.

  And with that she had retaken her seat, and filled her near-empty glass, the liquid spilling across its lip. The two women had sat in angry silence until his mother li
fted the glass to her mouth.

  He can remember sitting there, his small fists clenched, dried peels of calamine lotion falling on to the crotch of his pyjama bottoms, watching the two women glare at one another. He began to itch and scratch at his hives.

  ‘Don't,’ his mother had said.

  He had stopped and held out his hands towards her, palm upwards, in protest, in defiance, sitting there, knowing that if a secret wore skin it would look something like his.

  ‘Do you not eat, son?’

  ‘Yeah … No … I'm fine, Teezy.’

  ‘You look like a pale streak of nothing. No harm to you …’

  He sits alone with Teezy in her scullery. He can imagine his mother scurrying down the town, bustling past shoppers, on her way to meet the heathen Sully.

  Teezy stands and gives him a twinkly smile. He turns her head away from her. He knows that look: he knows what's coming.

  ‘What about you, my boy?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Are there any little ladies in your life that I should know about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That sounds a bit final, son.’

  ‘Teezy, please.’

  ‘Come on, son.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You're so serious, son. Have a bit of fun. Find a nice young strip of a thing and have a bit of a time with her.’

  ‘Yuk.’

  ‘Yuk? What sort of a word is that? Your schooling needs to be shaped up, my boy. Yuk … Come on, son, lighten up those chops of yours.’ She leans down to him, her eyes full of mischief.

  ‘Teezy …’

  ‘You've a face on you would freeze milk and hell besides. Come on, let me fix you something and we'll have a chuckle together.’

  ‘I'm fine, Teezy.’

  ‘You're going to waste away, son, with that serious mug of yours, disappear before our very eyes.’

  ‘I think he's back to stay for good this time, Teezy.’

  ‘I know, son, I know … How about a nice boiled egg?’