John Lynch - Torn Water

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.

‘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.