John Lynch - Torn Water

‘Get up.’

Eventually, he jumps out of bed and dresses, pulling on his jeans over his pyjama bottoms, cursing softly in the cold air. He can hear their giggles down on the pathway leading up to the front house.

‘Come on and see what Sully has brought us.’

Sully was back with his maudlin country music and his taunting smile. Crawling back to terrorise his mother once more, as he always has, as it seems he always will.

‘James, come and see,’ his mother shouts. She sounds like a fishwife, her voice cutting through the still morning air.

What had he brought this time? What peace-offering was he laying at her feet? Once it had been bricks freshly lifted from a building site he was working on. He had proudly shown them to James, saying that he was going to build his mother ‘the finest and securest garden shed known to man’. Another time it was the carcass of a freshly killed pig, which he had hung proudly from a hook in the garage, saying it was a neighbour's and that it had strayed out on to a busy road. He said that it had been looked after like a child when alive and that it would melt in their mouths. His mother screamed when she saw it, throwing her hands to her face and running for the house.

He thuds his way down the stairs and steps out of the front door, working up a large fist of spit in his mouth, hawking it deep from within his throat, then launching it just like the lorry driver had done the week before.

‘Look! Look, Jimmy – oh, please, don't do that. You're not an animal.’

No, but Sully is. He looks at them both. They look like they're posing for a photograph. On the pathway lies a huge mound of logs. It reminds him of a large goat dropping. His mother stands beside Sully, as if she has just won a raffle. So that was it, that was his penance: a mound of wet, mouldy logs.

‘Hi, kid. Long time no see,’ Sully says.

‘For fuck's sake.’ He says it quietly as he turns to go back in.

‘What did you say?’ his mother asks.

‘What?’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Don't be disrespectful.’

‘He says it.’

‘He's an adult. He can use those words.’

‘Leave him be, Ann,’ Sully says.

Before Sully there had been other men. James noticed that they all had the same tight force in their eyes. Some stayed longer than others, and some were so brief that their faces melted quickly from memory like a lantern lighting a man's way home slowly being swallowed by blackness.

He can remember looking up into each new face, his eyes narrowed in distress as yet another stranger tried to woo him. Sometimes James believes he dreamed some of them, but he knows this was not the case.

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.