*

Forever Angels. The name of both the website and the products it sold. I navigated through the site, looking at the pictures and darkly comic testimonials, thinking Who the hell buys these things? before remembering that Mum had.

There were some ‘standard’ Angels for sale, but it seemed like the unique selling point of the site was that you could design your own. The pricing page (Valuing Your Angel) had no set fees, just a form to fill in for a quote. Couldn’t be cheap. I thought of Brendan sheepishly asking if Graham and I could help out with their gas bill three months ago, and wondered with a sting of anger where Mum had been hiding the money to throw at Forever Angels. I went back to the home page, and the image of the infant-sized thing staring from the screen with eyes of violet glass.

‘Who’s that baby, Mom?’

I jumped, a rush of embarrassment heating my cheeks. I hadn’t heard Sharon come in from the kitchen. She plonked her pointed chin in the crook of my shoulder.

‘It’s not a baby, sweetie,’ I said. ‘It’s a doll.’

Sharon’s small hands twined absent-mindedly with my hair. ‘It’s creepy.’

‘I think so too.’

Her hand stopped twirling my hair. ‘Are you gonna get one?’

When I said no, she jerked her chin from my shoulder; the urgency in my voice surprised us both.

*

I’d kept an entire afternoon free in work for a twelve-year-old girl coming to start a full neuropsychological assessment. No show.

I rang the girl’s mother, knowing what to expect. She’d insist that things were fine at the moment, so why should the girl need an assessment at all? Until the next blip in the girl’s behaviour, when mum would drag her in to the hospital demanding that somebody do something, she’s been in an accident.

Struck by a car six months ago. Midday, but the file offered no explanation as to why she hadn’t been at school.

I logged the afternoon session as DNA: Did Not Attend. I mentally phrased the harsh letter I would send to the referring solicitor, stating I would not be offering the girl – although I really meant her mother – another appointment. Then I thought that I’d sleep on it, be more charitable for the sake of the little girl whose mother wasn’t her fault.

I told myself that my decision to leave work early and visit Mum was unrelated.

*

That look of near-panic again when she opened the door to find me there.

‘Oh love, do you never call ahead anymore?’

‘Is this a bad time?’

I sounded casual, but she paused just long enough for me to know that she was thinking about it. ‘Eh, no, not at all,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

Into the living room. Scattered drifts of old supermarket magazine-rack fodder, their covers trilling a psychotic mix of diet tips, soap gossip and ‘My son tried to rape me’ horror stories. Doilies hung askew on the arms of the sofa and chairs, and despite the amount of cleaning products that she kept buying from the Eazy Klean hucksters that called around every month, it didn’t look like the room had been tidied in a while. A forty-inch flatscreen dominated one side of the small room. I knew what her monthly payments for it were, and wondered how it compared with what she had spent on that... I didn’t even know what to call it. The word ‘thing’ seemed to dignify it too much.

‘How come you’re not in work?’

‘A patient cancelled on me,’ I said. ‘Where’s Brendan?’

‘Oh, pub I think.’

It was three in the afternoon. I said nothing.

Mum ran through a carbon copy script of what Brendan had asked the other night – Sharon, Graham, work – but something was off. It took me a few more minutes before I realised it. Something I would have twigged in an instant with someone in therapy, but when it’s your own mother ...

‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Why are you speaking so quietly?’

Her eyes flicked towards the ceiling. ‘Am I?’

‘Yes, you are,’ I said. Too loudly, trying to balance it out, and Mum winced, as if she was about to tell me to keep it down.

I took stock of her. She wasn’t fat, but looked swollen, her face rounded out by extra flesh, yet the watery eyes behind her thick glasses looked sunken. Her black hair – so luxurious in Sharon, her only grandchild – was lank and greasy, with a pale gleam of scalp showing through. Open-toed sandals showed uneven, yellowing nails. Her thin blue t-shirt struggled to contain an expanding paunch that should really have worried me, this recent protuberance from her thin frame. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to walk out of the house.

Her mouth gaped open, closed. She looked at the ceiling again, at the TV, out the window, everywhere but me. I held my therapist’s pause, feeling dirty.

‘She’s upstairs in bed.’

*

It was.

Brendan had said that it looked like something from a mortuary slab. He had never seen such a thing, but I wondered if he knew just how accurate his description was. I looked down into the cot – Mum had bought a fucking cot! – at the figure that lay there under a familiar blanket I remembered covering me and my sister Aoife. In the dimness of the room, there was no light source to reflect off the glass eyes to give it the sparking lie of life.

Mum stood on the other side of the cot. With a smile so content it made her almost beautiful, she reached down and stroked its cheek. Even in the gloom, I could see the faint tracery of blue veins under its skin ... No! I caught myself. The veins weren’t under its skin, they were blue lines drawn or etched on the ceramic or porcelain or plastic or whatever the hell it was made of.

‘She’s only gorgeous,’ Mum whispered. ‘I’m going to call her Evelyn.’

No therapist’s pause this time; I just didn’t know what to say. ‘But... Mum. What about Aunt Evelyn?’ Dead ten years.

‘She’s the image of her, do you not think?’ Her finger moved from the cheek to the eddy of black hair that cascaded from beneath the bonnet on its head. I remembered Sharon idly twirling her fingers in my hair the other night, and suddenly what Mum was doing looked obscene.

‘I don’t see the resemblance.’

‘Sure you do. The eyes are just like hers.’

‘Mum, it’s a doll.’

The smallest of pauses before she said, ‘I know that Caitriona. But she still reminds me of my sister, and I think it’s okay to name her after her, don’t you?’

‘What are you even naming a doll for Mum? What’s going on?’

She straightened up, looked at me properly for the first time since I got here. ‘Are you asking how I am now, Caitriona? After all this time?’

‘What?’

‘You never visit ...’

‘I was up just the other day!’ I heard myself sound like a grumpy teenager.

She continued. ‘You know that me and Brendan have been struggling with money, and you haven’t offered to help once, even with you and Graham both working ...’

‘Struggling with money? Stop buying those shite cleaning products ...’

‘Language!’

‘... and get rid of the TV maybe. And how much did this thing cost?’

Her intake of breath at the word ‘thing’ was sharper than when I swore.

‘That has nothing to do with anything. And I hardly ever get to see Sharon.’ A typical turn of direction from Mum. She couldn’t stay on topic, always strayed to the next tangent like a cat following the most recently dangled piece of string. I had always thought that she just had a short attention span, but as I looked down at the thing in the cot my thoughts grew darker and began to whisper ...

... braintumourvasculardementiapsychosis ...

‘You see plenty of Sharon,’ I said.

‘No I don’t. You never bring her round, I never see her. She hasn’t even met ...’

She broke off. Her eyes cast downward again.

Something swelled in my belly. ‘Were you about to say that my daughter hasn’t met this doll?’

I reached down and grabbed its wrist. It was like hard but pliant rubber, disgustingly warm yet not warm enough, and again I thought of mortuary slabs, of handing a swaddled bundle around the same size to a mother whose face looked like it was coming apart under the skin. I meant to pick the thing up, let it dangle in the air, show it for the toy it was, but before I could, Mum reached across the cot and slapped me in the face.

*

‘So what the fuck is up with this doll?’ Aoife said. Her nasal voice cut through the clatter and murmur of the small off-chain coffee shop.

I shrugged. ‘No idea.’

‘Oh come on, you’re the psychologist. There has to be something weird about it, right?’

In the three days since Mum had slapped me the same question had snagged in my brain like wool on barbed wire. I’d even considered bringing it to group supervision, pretend that Mum was a patient and see what some of my colleagues thought. It took me longer than I like to admit to catch myself going so horribly easily down a very unethical path.

‘I was looking stuff up online,’ Aoife said. ‘Saw something about a ‘transitional object’, something that young kids hang on to as they get older. Is that what this is? Some kind of messed up delayed grief reaction to Dad?’

‘Is ‘delayed grief reaction’ another term you found with Google?’

A smile – or possibly the beginnings of a smirk – tugged at the corners of her mouth. ‘As it happens. But seriously, the transitional object thing. What do you think of that?’

I made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. ‘As a psychological explanation?

‘Why not?’ She didn’t even have the gall to look embarrassed.

‘It’s no more sophisticated than the problem page advice in those rags that Mum reads. Do you honestly think that those are the type of interpretations I make in my job?’

Aoife waved a French-tipped hand. ‘I really don’t know, Caitriona. You hardly ever talk about what you do.’

‘That’s because whenever I start to, you get that same stupid fucking condescending look on your face.’

Another wave. ‘Oh, I do not.’ She sounded like Mum.

I set down my cup with a clatter that caused heads to turn. ‘Yes, you do. And now you think there’s a problem with Mum and because I’m the psychologist, suddenly you think I can just fix it?’

I thought that Aoife’s half-smile faltered, but she said, ‘Well?’

She had never asked about my job before. Only snide comments about paying for friendship, and talking-but-not-doing.

‘Have you ever seen a dead baby, Aoife?’

At least that got rid of the smile. ‘Jesus, Caitriona, keep your voice down. That’s horrible.’ Then, her voice became softer than I’d heard in years. ‘Have ... I mean, do you see that kind of stuff?’

I almost didn’t reply, wondering how much would come out, knowing that it had been building since the moment Mum carried that thing into the kitchen like a newborn.

‘A few years ago,’ I said, ‘me and the other psychologists at the hospital wanted to do something to minimise the trauma that parents experienced when their kids came in with life-threatening injuries. Nothing revolutionary, we just set up a protocol for keeping the parents informed all along how their child was doing. No matter how bad things were, the more parents were kept in the loop, it lessened the trauma just enough to count.’

‘To count when?’

‘When they get told their child has died.’ I thought I saw a shimmer in Aoife’s eyes. ‘So whenever a critical child came in to A&E, I liaised with the parents throughout. That was it. Nothing too in-your-face, but enough so that if things were getting hopeless they knew about it. One evening, this baby, around three months old, gets brought in. This was probably about a month before I found out I was pregnant.’ My voice cracked. I’d never thought of that little coincidental detail before. I cleared my throat. ‘Meningitis. The parents hadn’t seen the warning signs, and things were critical. Huge pressure on the baby’s brain. The surgeons did their best, removed a bone flap, put in a shunt. About two hours of surgery and monitoring, and all along me and this young nurse, Ciara, were shuttling information from the surgical team to the parents. As per the protocol I’d put in place, I was the one that told them their baby was dead.’ As per. Lapsing into more formalised speech, my voice felt stronger once again. ‘After the news, the parents were almost serenely quiet, which I took as a bad sign. They just wanted to see their baby. But there’d been a nasty car crash with three people to be worked on, and it was a Bank Holiday Friday evening, so lots of staff were off, just agency cover. The team was too swamped to prepare the ... remains.’ I shrugged, sat back. It felt important that I appear casual, in control. ‘So I did it.’

Aoife cleared her throat. ‘Did what, exactly?’

‘With Ciara’s help I cleaned up the baby, wrapped it in a blanket, and gave it to the mother before bringing it to the mortuary.’

It.

Aoife’s hand fluttered up to her throat. ‘Oh Christ, Caitriona.’ Her voice shook, and I felt a perverse stab of pride that I could deal with something that she couldn’t. My mind flashed on the details I’d left out: The baby feeling lighter than I expected. Wrapping her in a blanket, her pudgy muscles showing a hint ofthe tone that they will never develop. Ciara, crying quietly and steadily all the time, placing a perfectly fitting woollen cap – where did she get that? – on the head to hide the hastily patched up evidence ofsmash-and-grab emergency surgical intervention. The baby’s limbs complying as I swaddle her, but stiffening already. Hearing a choking sob, just one, and realise that it has come from me. Picking the baby up, flinching at the oddness ofno movement, the lack ofinstinctive infantile clutching. Bringing her to her mother. Handing her over with that automatic shoulder dip even though the reason for it no longer mattered.

Support the head.

Aoife leaned forward and hissed, ‘Why are you telling me that horrible story?’

It took me a while to process the echo of the words I spoke. ‘Is it horrible?’

*

We didn’t come out and say that we were going to talk to Mum about it, but we knew that’s what we were going there to do. It wasn’t so much the slap that made me realise we had to do something; it was the fact that I didn’t want Sharon to have anything to do with the thing that Mum had brought home. If things didn’t change, it might come down to Sharon not seeing her grandmother. I told myself I didn’t want that to happen.

Brendan answered the door. He still looked tired, but different from the nervous exhaustion I’d seen before. There was something about the way he held himself, some new set of his shoulders maybe, that I tried to place. I couldn’t get it.

‘Hello, girls,’ he said. ‘Your mum’s upstairs.’ Not using her name. Again, I wished I had a different job with my family, wished I wouldn’t notice these things.

‘Why don’t you go up to her?’ Aoife said to me. ‘I’ll help with the tea. There is tea, right Brendan?’

A relaxed smile. ‘There is indeed. And stronger stuff if you like.’

They both laughed their way into the kitchen. I went upstairs.

A few feet away from the bedroom door, I heard my mother weeping.

Not the soft, sad crying of a few days ago. These were deep, choking sobs, made all the worse because it was obvious she was trying to stifle them. I heard gentle, wooden rattling that must be the bars of the cot; I pictured her clutching them. I had a flashback that was hallucinatory in its quality: I was eleven, in the grips of my first ever migraine, trying to dampen those same heaving sobs because each one ignited further fireworks of agony. Mum held me then, and stroked my hair as I buried my chin in the crook of her shoulder, just like Sharon had done with me a few nights ago.

The hall shimmered and doubled as my eyes suddenly overflowed. I wanted to go into my mother and sob with her and hold her and be held.

But I went back down the stairs.

On the way, I swiped at my eyes and glanced at my reflection in the hall mirror. You couldn’t tell how I felt. Good for a psychologist doing therapy, but where else?

Tea with Aoife and Brendan should have been excruciating, but wasn’t. Brendan was more talkative than he’d been in weeks. Aoife’s laughter at his little stories and turns of phrase, while polite, was genuine. I settled back into the couch, sipped tea, and almost relaxed.

Mum came into the room.

It dangled from her hand by the ankle

‘Stupid thing’s broken,’ she announced to no one, and tossed it on to the couch beside me. I don’t think I flinched.

Mum poured herself tea.

Aoife glanced at me, as if for permission to speak, then said, ‘Are you, eh, alright Mam?’

Mum snorted. ‘Typical internet company. I won’t be buying from them again. They better give me my money back, I can tell you that.’

I looked at the thing on the couch next to me. It looked the same as it ever had. I reached out (why so slowly?) and picked it up. I turned it over in my hands, feeling the pliant flesh-like substance its midriff was made out of. I worked hard to dampen down memories of similarly proportioned unresponsive flesh. I saw that the hair had been combed back, and behind the ear, I saw the damage.

A spider web of concentric cracks, with a tiny hole at the centre.

As if it had been dropped on a sharp corner.

Or held by its ankles and swung into one.

I turned it again, looked at its face.

Mum sipped her tea and asked Aoife how she was.

Brendan was watching me, the psychologist. In the matte reflection of the flatscreen TV I saw myself as a dim outline, and the way I was holding the doll.

Cradling it.

I dropped it on the couch again. When I looked up, Brendan had engaged in Mum and Aoife’s conversation. He reached out and took gentle hold of Mum’s hand, and I saw her squeeze back.

And then I understood the expression on Brendan’s face when he had answered the door. If someone had been watching me the day I handed a newly grieving mother her lifeless child they would have seen the same thing.

Brendan looked like someone who had just finished doing something unpleasant, but that needed to be done.

[from issue #1 – autumn/winter 2015]

II. THE DRINK

I suppose I ought to have applied the same panic-stricken wariness I have towards drugs to alcohol, but nobody warned me. Or I didn’t listen. Six of one. Hi my name is and I’m a pre-alcoholic. Hi-ii!

Pralcoholic /pralkəˈhɒlɪk/; Someone whose youthful lifestyle allows problematic drinking to seem merely gregarious.

I’m fun now. Later I’ll be pathetic. I’m enjoying lounging in the meantime of my life, suspended between the tripping, and the landing. I’ve learned a bit. Like the fact that nothing kills pride and opens you up to the skin-scraping sensations of shame and despair like being an utter fucking disgrace in your teens. It’s character-building.

(Late sub-heading: That Waking Feeling, or, The Fear)

Regresst /r I ’grɛst/: a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over an occurrence or something that one has done when attempting to minimise mature consciousness. (See pralcoholic.)

Regret for sentences discharged unexpectedly from my syrupy mucous mouth. Idly flirting through Bulmers hiccups with a friend’s father, from the back of the car on a lift to the train, God, you’re such a wonderful driver Mr. Molloy! Aren’t you so good to us? Catching his eye in the rear-view mirror as I fix my hair, chest pressed forward against the back of his head rest, bulging.

(Even then sex was the thing, really) 

Rogue, bold words would be conceived rutting on my tongue and sluggishly birthed out out out, without any say from me.

Regret for passing out in veiled corners of dark rooms at parties whose hosts had groaned inwardly when they saw me walk through the door a few hours before, quiet and smiling with my hair all curled, tits up tummy in, raring to go, bottle in hand.

The centre couldn’t hold. Leakages occurred. Tell-tale seepage at the seams. Then craaaack! Tears and wailing caoining tears unleashed. For all and any of the young men ever flung out of currachs off the coast of Mayo whom I could’ve birthed or loved, táim ag caoineadh! Flooding insides out out out onto humming electric-lit suburban footpaths, dull-achingly safe, patterned knickers down precariously plopped on cold pavement (tired, resigned, finished with all this now, for good this time!), somewhere on the brink of the soundly sleeping real.

What a fucking idiot.

Regret for stains on remains of clothes, abandoned over hedges mornings after, down icing-frosted laneways in the back-arse of nowhere. Shuffling crippled pilgrimages to bus stops on exposed roadsides, with women’s mini marathon t-shirts or faux-leather jackets or animal-print pyjama bottoms, Penneys, borrowed from reluctant acquaintances with shuttered behind-your- back eyes. Regret for the disgusted underside glances of those cuntish morning dog- walkers with to-do lists and errands and intentions.

Christ, that time your grandparents, off out for lunch and a stroll, why not sure, life’s good sure, saw you meandering back to the house with only one shoe and yesterday’s make-up, sluttish now under God’s good sun, and said nothing of it, which was only worse, of course. That discomforting smell of matted hair off your pillow, hair never to be clean again. Not the way it was, once, when washed by a mother’s expert fingers in the bath before bedtime.

(For times when there was a bedtime)

Oh Christ Almighty, and let’s not forget, regret for cherry-bloodied sheets from first piercing time that night with yerman, you know the one, just because he said he loved you back; bundled up in a school backpack and stuffed in restaurant bathroom’s sanitary bin, at brunch the day after, with the whole fucking family there. Your baby brother’s birthday maybe? Yuh filty hoor. Little did they – ah but sure no bother, never happened, now. Only now.

These are some of the actions I could regret, were I the type. As it stands, I have a beautifully clear conception of my inconsequentiality, which allows me bounteous freedom, to not. Everything that can happen to a person happens in the present alone and is happening to me now, and now, those things are not happening. They are all gone, dead things, now. Going going ...

Gone /gɒn/: no longer present; departed; non-existent; gone.

III. THOSE DRUGS

Still, drugs, they seemed different, somehow. Pills and powders; potions cooked up in filthy labs by glistening caramel-skinned stocky people in South America, wearing your dad’s old football t-shirt, with scars across their eyes and growling short-haired dogs.

We’d all been told, in hand-me-down scéals of terror and giddy whispers (at the back of bowling alleys and en route to bonfires, over naggins decanted in fat 50%-extra-free Pepsi bottles, from the raw, nicotine-diffusing lips of girls older and wiser than ourselves) that drugs, immediately upon ingestion, could result in a sudden, ignominious death. How humiliating. Hard drugs were for dropouts, failures. For girls with ‘baggage’ or ‘emotional shit’. Only those idiot boys with no apparent futures ever did proper drugs, and actually got away with it. Boys could do what they liked.

Ah, you know them; those long-haired ones who’d spend parties discussing FIFA and Fender versus Gibson in the corner over Dutch Gold, before the pills kicked in. Then the shirts’d come off, as they, in unblinking rapture, crowded together in humid condensation-coated rooms to bang sweaty heads to their friends’ amazing next-big-thing bands – Almost Cliche, Skeptic Tank, IX Lives and After the Math – revealing children’s pale and pimpled jagged torsos.

We pitied them, we mother superiors, and scorned their openness to experience. Their freedom.

You see, young women have so much more to prove. They have to project themselves into the future. Their physicality – let alone their history – insists upon it. They bulge forward foreward fore-ward with fertile potentiality. And besides, young women always know they’re being watched, so can’t let themselves go. Not properly. So we watched those boys, listened, and hid our unease in the presence of that great unknown beneath an itchy woollen coverlet of unwavering disapproval and grimacing disgust.

Fuck, how I envied them.

IV. THIS SEX

Sex holds more thrilling risks anyway, for the female. No, I don’t mean in matters of the fucking heart. I mean in matters of that disingenuous bitch, the womb. People are so terrified by the scene in that film Alien. Well, imagine watching that as a young woman. When it’s not a nightmare, but more than likely an inevitability. That there’s our fate, handed down, from our loving mothers, if we choose to succumb. To suck. To come.

I’d imagine, although feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, that one great difference in those trepidatious masturbatory years between a boy and a girl, is that sex is virtually always available to a girl, if she wants it, and not to a boy. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why girls are conditioned to believe, not only that they most certainly shouldn’t desire sex, but should actively reject it, while boys have been coerced into seeking it out as though their lives depended on it, through whatever means. Although, that’s a bit of a chicken/egg hypothesis.

Sex in ideal circumstances is dependent on a willing partner. Luckily, I’m young and free, and can apply the appropriate laces and lacquers and silty salt-water lighting to disguise myself as a creature desirable to the male of the species. All that is required of me as a female, is to ensure I am not entirely repulsive. Luckily, my person is irrelevant. *

On that note, I’m amazed at how ugly a whore can be, while still being able to make a living. It is the monetary exchange that is strange to me. There are so many willing, beseeching, ugly women in the world. Why not pick one up for free? Or masturbate? Why pay for an overweight, bulging creature, line-drawn and roughly coloured-in, excreting chicken meal deals and daytime television from her pores, whispering savoury nothings? I suppose it’s for the freedom of it, the guarantee. I guess buying an ugly prostitute’s services is the sexual equivalent of purchasing rental car insurance. You’re covered for all incidentals, accidents and oddities.

Actually, now that I think about it, I can definitely see the attraction in that, for a man. Yes, I can, really. To be free to do anything, any whim or grave-buried notion, and have no fear of admonition. Of disgust. The control of ownership. The idea arouses me, here where I sit; that sudden awareness of myself, down there, the burst of heat, the convulsion.

I shift in my seat, and make a mental note to masturbate under the warm cover ofdarkness later. Yes. All for now.

Ugly gigolos wouldn’t do so well. Surely they couldn’t? From what I’ve heard, it seems women like to create fantasies, to avert their frantic thoughts from the wretched raw meat of their own brutality. From nails-on-blackboard fucking.** Perhaps then, in my tastes, I am more the cigar-wielding gentleman’s club male than the winsome young female (on wind-beaten hilltop, yearning) than I care to admit. I have, after all, often summoned up, in my single child’s bed in the attic of my family home, a sticky, fat, russet and greying man, greased-up with paper notes in sweaty inside pockets and the trickling buttered blood of the rarest steak, taking me, taking my body, and fucking it. Chortling in rolling rolls of cloying laughter as I – me, in this body, now – fulfil his outermost desires.

I’ve always loved to be objectified. Always. From having to sing songs by heart for my grandmother at the kitchen table, to violin recitals, to dancing up against the taut trousers of a stranger under coquettishly diverted lights, fluttering and drowsy, in some swaying basement in the bowels of the city.

* It does not take much, for any woman, to fuck a man, externally. ** According to popular belief, women want men to make love to them, although I have never, in reality, found a smidgen of evidence to confirm this claim.

V. FORGIVE ME FATHER: AN AMATEUR’S PSYCHOANALYTIC DIAGNOSIS

Last year I had sex with twenty-four men. Or was it twenty-seven? I can’t remember. I chewed them up and swallowed them down, and a person simply doesn’t remember all the meals they’ve had in a year. Sex gives me an incredible sense of calm. Of achievement. I feel my worth through it, consummated. This is presumably a terrible reason to derive pleasure from something. But, well. Fuck it. It feels good now. I love to give myself to a man, and to know that, through this coupling, whatever he has inside him, whatever there may be about him that’s superior, I’ve stolen. Taken it between my legs up inside me, for safekeeping. His knowledge, his passion, his eyes, his laugh, his art, his hope. Mine. I’ve reduced him to this animal quivering urge, pressing itself against me. His vulnerable, piteous erection, seeking out its home, blindly, like a mole exposed above ground. You can’t help but want to torture it, slowly; it’s so helpless.

The act itself is a pleasure, in a way, but also an infinite desert nothing. Men seem very keen on giving head nowadays, licking and sucking and offering. I suppose it’s their way of apologising. Supplications: here I’m sorry take it here have this all for you. I’m a selfish lover. Although I do allow them to do what they will with my body. I’m there to be enjoyed, in return for their more precious submission. To demean themselves, reveal themselves like that, simply for!

In the act, I’m not present. I’m observing, waiting. It is a fiction. Playing on visceral tactile 3D screens, all around me. Simulated stimulation, live. Now. It is not dissimilar to the disinterested half-watching of dogs humping in the street from the misty window of a bus in traffic. I watch myself, in the act, and try to angle my body accordingly, for maximum impact. *

* According to a currently disused and little-known text of the O.E.D., sex is in fact two people compiling memories for future masturbation in the same room.

BOOK TWO

VI. CASE STUDY: THE ANOMALY

(Sub-heading: A Man Descended)

I met a man recently, and knew, from the capability of his mind, that I wanted to bring him down to fuck me. Down down down and with that crude ejaculation he’d be mine and so we’d be down here, in the pits, together, and I’d have taken his power in my body.

Then I’d be able to escape the fear of him, of his knowledge. His other, out there, beyond me.

This man was tall and solid and unfleshed. He had a lurching, crooked voice which pondered over words as though squeezing their skins for ripeness. He had black rat’s eyes which I found hard to meet without tipping forward.

He was, frankly, too much for me. I should’ve seen it then.

This man’s squid ink seeped into my white aqueous mind and left a stain, indelible. He knew things I didn’t, and made me nakedly aware. Of my naïveté. My lacks, my gaps. I didn’t like how translucent his searchlights made my skin. So I sought him out, using my greatest grandmother’s imparted methods, shape-shifting my self towards him. Interlaced, we wove our way through reams of cross-hatched streets back to a bedroom hanging off the edge of the city.

He fucked me, and I took it. He fucked me again, and again, and I took it, and it hurt, which was all the better. All the more a real thing. He smoked finger-rolled, seam-licked cigarettes in the lulls between and told me he had a girlfriend, an open relationship. They were both accomplished artists, on the up and up. It was all very complicated, but oh so simple, if you only knew.

He was older than me, and lorded his years on earth prior to my conception over me, with relish. He’d seen the world and come home to bathe in the glory of one returned from an odyssey. He’d read authors whose names I couldn’t pronounce, seen sights I couldn’t dream up, and felt things my chest had not yet developed the capacity to withstand. Because of this, his sheets were threadbare on my skin, and I shivered. I adored and despised this man upon impact.

This was not how I had known my sex to be. He was winning. I took all I could, grasping, frenzied, yet gained nothing. He was liquid in my hands. He made me come, and then forced me to come again. He’d pierced a hole in the side of me, and all my potency was leaking out across the sheets and drip drip dripping down between the floorboards.

This man drank well, and had no fear of drugs, and I resented him his apparent future; for all I’d foregone, and endured, only to end up lagging, still. We discussed books and he taught me various things until I thought my ribs would crack under the weight of them. I hated him for my ignorance, and for knowing that all I could ever do, would be this.

To be stood by his guiding hands late at night in a dimly-lit living room before the mantelpiece while he fucked me from behind, groaning, alone, all the while keeping his best secrets to himself, locked tight away. There was a mirror before me, and so I closed my eyes, not wanting to look, or to be seen looking. This was not my now. I muttered ‘no’ beneath my breath, lamenting the poor bargain I had struck, but he kept furiously his rhythm, all for himself, until the final shudder and collapse, and panting, rested his hot hollow cheek on my maternal, patient back. And I bit my lip and abhorred myself for wanting it all again.

AFTERWORDS

VII. AND SO

I left that night and caught the train home, to my father’s house. On the way I thought about sex. I know that to be true, because it always is.

You could smell it off me. The well-meaning brightness growling to a halt before me stung my redraw bitten face and, blinking, I pulled my coat tight around me, as I boarded. I sat directly across from a sucked-tight junkie, unabashedly lost in her own roving, labyrinthine narrative. I felt the urge to pat her deflated leg, but stopped myself just in time. I pitied myself for being lonelier than she was. I watched her eye-whites, star-gazing. Only just inaudible mumbled affirmations. Messages from on high. Say what we like, she must have great craic on it, all the same, I thought.

I crossed my legs and leaned my head on cold glass. I comforted myself with thoughts of future unsuspecting conquests awaiting me, so many to be had! Forward forward and out there somewhere now, across Sandymount Strand and the lights of Howth and the big dark sea, somewhere, breathing, now. Waiting, right now.

Ones that’d prove more successful than that tricksome black hole of a man, back there, who bore me no gifts, in return. Gone now.

I sighed, my lungs’ moisture blossoming white short-lived blooms on blackened yellow-streetlight speckled glass. Earth stars. If I were not such a coward, I could use drugs to be here, now, and then I reckon I wouldn’t need this sex of mine so much. As it stands, my options are limited, and sex is my current method of choice. *

* As all the while out of me his seed spilled forth, seeping lazily into my black lace underwear, causing a warm, moist unpleasant itch, in the meeting place of my body.

[from issue #1 – autumn/winter 2015]

*

There they were, drinking Heinekens. A tableful of fellas with no girl accessories. It wasn’t exactly a bet, it wasn’t exactly a dare. It was Mary-Kate whispering in my ear and saying we should take them home with us. We couldn’t take them home any more than we could take them with us to Sunday Mass. But we could suggest it, as it were, or lead them in that direction, their direction, whatever direction, that wasn’t important. What was important was that it would be our idea. Why? We were liberated.

Hey Mary-Kate, I shouted, and she said What? I pointed to the empty bottles that littered the sticky table and said, Look at all this liberation!

The craic was ninety, the music not too loud. The bar gleamed with bottles sparkly and lovely under warm pub lights. Mary-Kate’s silver bracelets clattered as she tilted her head back and downed a long drink of cider, pressing her knee against mine under the table.

I sidled up beside the midfielder and then Mary-Kate had made her selection. Hers was taller and better looking. The team captain. He drank pints like they were water and I saw where his hand went under the table when he thought no one was looking. Get a room, we used to screech.

The midfielder’s name was Eamon. He worked at the airport at the Hertz rental car counter. He said he had to be at work at eight the next morning. So you’ll want to go to bed early, I teased. I whispered in his ear that it was past my bedtime. He said I looked so innocent, then tugged out the rubber bands that held my hair in bunches. I laughed. Mary-Kate looked as young as I did, but when they asked, if they asked, the answer was always the same: eighteen.

By the time I realized I might be on my way to drunk, I was already meeting myself coming back. We drifted into a pub off Grafton Street to catch a few songs by a band called The State Pathologist Dr John Harbison. It was too loud to talk so we ended up in another pub with a dark sticky basement and Thin Lizzy on the jukebox. When we wobbled out into the lane with our fellas, I didn’t know where we were headed. I only knew I was still too drunk to go home. And then I remembered: we weren’t going home.

The streets were streaked with the grease and neon of the takeaway, the smells of vinegar and kebabs frying. Talk turned to a night bus home. We asked where they were headed and they said Bray.

– Bray! said Mary-Kate. I’ve always wanted to go to Bray!

We missed the last DART and that’s what condemned us to the Nitelink. Stagecoach of the sloshed and sledgehammered, your last chance out of Dublin on a late night weekend. We bought our tickets out of the bus parked on Westmoreland Street, then found our bus and staggered up to the top deck. There were burger wrappers and beer cans rolling up and down the aisle under the seats. There were lads absolutely locked and cross-eyed girls screeching at their antics. Then the aggressive and sweaty ones who didn’t get lucky at the pubs and clubs and thought they’d get lucky on the Nitelink. If you got onto the Nitelink and found you had to vomit, you were not alone.

We lurched up the spirally stairs, fellas on our arms. The bus was jammers. It was revellers all, not a single aul wan in a headscarf clicking her tongue. As the bus pulled away from the stop, Mary-Kate handed me a brown paper bag. The whiskey burned a path down my throat and was swiftly dispatched through my body, working its way down the arms and all the way out to the fingertips.

On the upper deck was a drunk man in a patriotic mood serenading passengers. Mary-Kate shouted at him to shut the bloody hell up but then I called him the Rebel Song Jukebox and she decided that was gas. If we gave him a coin, any coin, he’d sing any song we asked him to, so long as there was a spate of brave souls dying for Ireland. After two and half songs, the body count was already up to seven. We had to stop our body count during the Jukebox’s rendition of ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ because no one could decide whether dismembered body parts counted as dead bodies.

– Of course they bloody well count, Mary-Kate said. Where do you think the body parts come from?

Then the Jukebox had a change of heart and gave out with a rousing rendition of ‘Wild Rover’ to lift the spirits. No dead soldiers, no weeping widows, no rifles of the I.R.A. Just a load of roving and rambling and whack- fol-the-do to take us home. Or away from home.

The sky stretched out over the sleeping houses as the lit-up bus rattled along the dark N11. It was well past midnight when we arrived in Bray. The last thing we heard was a rambling chorus of ‘Piano Man’ swallowed up into the suction of the closing bus doors. Then it was dead quiet.

We made our way down the dark side alleys till the boardwalk stretched out before us. Down onto the squishy sand we went. Come on said our fellas. Or we said to them. I forget now who said what. A drink too many but only one too many. Could still see the sand, still knew my name. Mary-Kate unlaced her boots and wriggled out of her socks, stalking across the cold sand in bare feet. A hard white moon gleamed above. An abandoned ice cream booth stuck out in the middle of the no-man’s land, a livid-eyed seagull pecking about its splinters. We were all four of us strewn out in the sand looking up at the stars. Eamon put his arm around my waist and pulled me in for a long, lager-heavy kiss. What was it like? It was like this: goal.

Mary-Kate shot up and said they were going out for cigarettes. I asked where were they going to get cigarettes at that hour and she said the Superquinn. I said it was the Superquinn not the Miraclequinn and did she think they’d be open? She laughed and they left. I don’t think she went out for cigarettes. I don’t even think there was a Superquinn.

My head sunk in the damp sand. I looked over the horizon at the sideways water and rolled over on my side. The midfielder pushed his hand in my hair and kissed what was left of me. The night went up in smoke.

They call it blacking out. But what do they call it when there are flashes of light in the shadows? When you can see it wasn’t you at all but someone who only looked like you, who’d broken into your wardrobe and, yes, your life? When you can remember some details and not others: the zipper but not the face, the ash but not the cigarette, the punishment but not the crime?

*

I could tell something was wrong straightaway from the taste left in my mouth, tar and stale beer and ashtray. I was covered in damp sand on a beach when I should have been in my bed, waking up to the smell of my ma’s rashers and eggs. This wasn’t home and it wasn’t a hostel. It wasn’t, as far as I could tell, even Dublin. The boy from Meath, the midfielder with the leafy, lager smell? Gone. My hair was a mess. There were bits of sticks and seaweed stuck to my coat sleeve. In the sand I hunted for them. Clues, that is. Where were you, Greta Gardner, on the night of. Eyewitnesses? Only Mary-Kate. And she didn’t see a blink of it.

I turned my stiff neck to the rolling waves and looked out over the craggy black rocks. Slowly, without much conviction, dawn was forcing its way in. A rusty sign riveted to the wall nearby informed me that we were being watched by CCTV. Some show it was. Hi Ma. Hi Da. My neck felt stiff. I shook the sand from my hair and smoothed down my skirt. When I opened my eyes again there was Mary-Kate standing over me like a surgeon. The clumped mascara, the lips chapped and tinted slightly blue. She looked lost, ruined. She looked like something dumped off the back of a lorry.

– Where are we? I managed.

– Where are we? Christ, Greta. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.

– Remember what?

– Remember what?

Before me in the sand was a green plastic bucket with a crack in it. Reminded me of what we used to take with us down to the seaside. Holidays on Bray. Nothing to do but kick round collecting shells, keeping our eyes peeled for a jellyfish, those were the days.

– We took this bucket to the beach, I said, feeling tears rise up. We’ll build sandcastles with it!

Beside me in the sand a red triangle on a bottle blinked at me like a hazard sign. Warning: Bass Ale Approaching. A melody was scratching around in my head, rolling from side to side like a stray can on a bus, and a memory along with it. I knew what it was. It was ‘Beautiful Meath.’

In the palm of my hand I was holding a coin the midfielder had placed there, telling us to get home safe, telling us to take the first bus in the morning back. But when I opened my hand I saw what the sharp edge was all about.

– Put that down, will you?

– No!

– Drop it, Greta. It’s trash.

– I want it. It’s mine, it’s mine.

That’s what I was going on about. That and the sandcastles. No wonder Mary-Kate smacked me. It didn’t hurt as much as it surprised me.

It did make me drop the bottle cap. That hit, I had coming to me.

The first dirty white light of day came crawling up the chimneys. Soon we would be in church singing the Latin: agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi and listening to the gospel of Matthew, the one about the five wise virgins and the five other ones. But now we were on this beach. The dim lump of Bray Head loomed in the distance, a cross stuck into its peak like a syringe.

According to my piece-of-crap watch it was 7:44. We had exactly one hour and fifteen minutes to get back to town and into our Sunday clothes and show up for Mass. Mass, then bed to conk out. A bed was a faraway, magical thing, unthinkable as a unicorn.

Up we walked. Up streets so vast and deserted in the early morning light. A bent man in a yellow vest was sweeping up last night’s leftovers. All of town to clean up, and just him and that bristly broom. A wrecked black umbrella was sprawled upside-down in a dustbin, nothing left to it but the skeletal silver spindles. There were cans and bottles, a soggy cardboard French fry shell with the golden arches. And the red pinstriped straw from a strawberry milkshake, you know the one: post-pub, 2 a.m., on a stomach of five pints of cider.

Churches all over town were ringing out with bells clanging, doors flung wide open begging: please come in, good people of Dublin! O not today my Lord, I’m afraid. A bit indisposed, outdid myself unfortunately, not up to the task. The only god you’re praying to this morning is the deity in the porcelain bowl, who shakes His I-expected-so-much-more-from-thee head and says: not you again! Only come to me when you’re in trouble!

All the church bells were ringing out, calling us to Mass. Calling us to confess. What is Sunday for but to repent for the sins of the night before? Should carry a notebook and pen to keep a running tab: sins I’ve done and sins to do. Always some sins you forget about. And then the ones you don’t. And it’s no, nay, never, no nay never no more, will I play the wild rover, no never no more.

I watched a wave as it came coasting over the seaweed and stones and swept away a Tropicana drink box. It was something to behold! All that trash! That rubbish making its way bobbing out to the Atlantic! We used to sit for hours on the beach along Sandymount Strand, sticking out our toes and dipping them in the cold summer surf. Can you believe this water’s connected to the ocean? I remember saying to Mary-Kate once as we gazed out over the bay, thinking of the unthinkable future, awestruck to believe that in this dirty old town there existed such beauty, such water.

[from issue #1 – autumn/winter 2015]

III

San José del Pacífico. They say you can see the Pacific from up here on a clear day. I’ve never seen anything other than heavy flying carpets of water. The beans and eggs are tepid but the salsa made from crushed chillies in oil warms the tongue. Breakfast finished, I wipe my mouth and beard with a warm tortilla of which I then take a bite followed by a last gulp of the sweet coffee. Cinnamon and piloncillo. The first truck south delayed for about ten minutes as the driver has to change a wheel. I’ve been rationing my intake of food for days and so, despite the eggs and beans, am still quite hungry and half asleep. Time enough to dash into the internet café, check my email (nothing from you), order a coffee and a slice of blackberry pie. I get a seat up front and settle in. The road from San José to Pochutla is long and winding. It rises slightly to San Miguel Suchixtepec before beginning its descent towards the coast. The conifer' s dominance soon challenged by the swaying alien tentacles of dispersed, and later, widespread, magueys. More tropical fronds come later. The barbecued goat meat, so popular in the mist, is seen less as we creep south. Sheep-wool gloves and key-rings in the shape of the hallucinogenic mushrooms begin to make way for organised rows of fruit. Opened and wet watermelons lie gaping at the passing traffic as pips and flies swarm in buckets of discarded flesh. The soursops are green and deformed. The tough skin, when pierced, gives way to the warm sweetness of a dirty white mush. The coconuts are the best. Nothing like the hairy nuts from Halloween back home. Living bubbles of water with sloppy meat liked cooked codfish.

IV

I’d decided to stay at La Cumbre. High up above the town it had normally been the perfect place to be alone. However, as soon as I arrived I realised that Easter week was a busy time up there. A wooden structure clinging strangely to the mountain slopes, La Cumbre is dusty and cold and multiple blankets and a mezcal or two are needed at sundown. I was shown to a one-bed room. Mattress on the floor, eight woolly blankets and mushroom-trip graffiti on the walls. I took out my battered Toshiba and got ready to settle in for some work. I stopped. I thought I’d lie down and think for a while and look at the mountains through a light vapour. Talk to you. I’ve told you before that I have conversations with you when you’re not around. I always say what I feel. I told you that I missed you. I must have dozed off as I remember drool on my chin followed by a hazy awareness of the insistent comfort of Familyman Barrett on the bass from the speakers next door, shaking La Cumbre. I heard a table fall and some heavy shuffling around the room. Oh god! Jesus! said a Southern accent. I went outside to see what was going on and my neighbour, clearly American and probably Texan, was shaking dirty clothes from his rucksack, crusty and creased. Six soft pellets of pinkness on the floor by his feet. A mouse must’ve come into my room one night to nest, he said. I found her babies in my clothes. Man I need to get my stuff washed. I knelt down to look at the little fleshy lumps. They were pink but almost transparent. I could see blue and purple veins and capillaries pulsating on the floor. Each one vulnerable, cold and living. Tiny lucent eyes looking for help. I feel bad, man, but what can I do? I can’t be looking after a family of mice. He placed them carefully on the corrugated ceiling of the lower floor' s mezzanine that jutted out from our own floor. They lay in the shade for a few hours as the sun continued to rise and its reddening light encroached. The next morning I saw them in the same place. Dry and dusty; of course they were dead.

His name was Dan and he was strange and memorable. He told me he couldn’t drink mezcal because he used to go down to Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz to drink until he could drink no more because he wanted to die. I wanted to die, he said. Why? Well I had a lot of problems. My dad’s a Baptist preacher and he doesn’t approve of the way I live. I just wanted my parents to love me but I thought they didn' t and, for that reason, I wanted to drink until I died. I once spent seven thousand pesos in one night down there. Are you one of those guys that goes binge drinking, buying shots for everyone in the bar so that they’ll hang around with you? Yeah, I guess I am. He told me that he had just put a suppository up his arsehole and that he was feeling good but kind of sick. Over the next few days I learned a lot about Dan. Too much to set down right now. He was the son of a missionary couple and he grew up in Kenya. That' s where he started smoking weed. Then he was moved to Corpus Christi to attend high-school. I wasn’t too good at school, he told me. I’m dumb, he said. He left school to join the army. He thought that would set him straight and so did his parents. He was involved in communications and lived in Germany. He was kicked out of the army in Germany for smoking weed and for being an alcoholic. I didn’t talk much to Dan but I did listen to his life story many times. I felt sorry for him. It wasn’t his fault he was the child of missionaries growing up in Kenya and Texas. It wasn’t his fault that a part of his brain never worked. He didn’t stay off the drink for long. About six weeks later I heard the news. He was stabbed in the belly outside a cantina in Miahuatlán.

V

She gets onto the truck just outside Candelaria and sits in the seat frequently reserved (unofficially, but oh so obviously) by the truck drivers for girls travelling on their own. In other words, she takes her seat between the driver and me. The conversation starts and it’s clear that they’re sure I don’t understand their Spanish. Just coming from work? Yes, that’s right. Where do you work? I work at the coffee plantation we just passed. Picking the coffee, right? No, I do the cleaning. Finished for the day now? No, just a few hours off in the afternoon to go down to Pochutla to the Banco Azteca. I’ve seen you before haven’t I? With a couple of youngfellas? That’s right but I’ve left them with their grandmother now. And their father, a skinny lad, always wears that cap? Ah, sure he left about six months ago. He said he wasn’t ready to be a father. He said he’d rather leave and not be their father than to stick around and be bad. He was right I suppose. Do you have some free time in Pochutla? I know a place. I’ll pay for the room. No, my mother expects me back at six. Call her and tell her you’ll be late, go on. Ah go on. Ah, stop that I can’t. This goes on for the best part of an hour as we get closer and closer to Pochutla. They talk about her bills and how she’s struggling to make payments. He badgers her relentlessly to go to a room with him for a while. It won’t cost her anything and she’ll make enough to pay the bill she’s on her way to pay anyway. It makes sense, the driver insists. He won’t leave her be and she keeps saying no. When we reach the terminal, she stays behind when all the other passengers alight. I want to tell her to get out, to choose for herself without any pressure and to only do something that she wants to do. I don’t say any of this and I tell myself that she has made her own decision, to stay behind and to go with the driver, some twenty years her senior, to a room to make some money. I picture the room with one window and a rusty fan whirling slowly. Their bodies sweating and heaving, sticky foreskin peeled back in the half-light. She’s a young, round-faced girl with a tight pink t-shirt and shorts. She’s as fat as the driver. A single mother with two children in rural Oaxaca.

VI

Almost dusk in Pochutla and, after stopping at a cash machine, I make my way to the plaza for a glass of fresh hibiscus water. I place the glass up against each cheek, my forehead and neck. Sweat streams pool in the small of my back. My shirt is sodden. I have a look around the square. People are listening to a marimba duo, laughing at one of the clowns, smoking or just leaning up against the evening. They call it the Plaza de las Golondrinas and it’s no surprise. The crisscrossing power cables above the square are always lined with swallows in the evening. Not a millimetre of cable is spared the hopping feet of birds getting ready to settle in for the night. I see that the odd pair of sneakers has been slung upon the cables, splattered with bird shit. I finish my drink and turn off towards the truck-stop. The truck to Mazunte is empty and I jump in the back so I can stand in the open air and let the warm rush shake the dust from my hair and beard.

VII

What opinion do you guys have of me? Tell me the truth, I’ll know if you’re lying. An uneasy silence followed as always it must when someone asks you what you think of them out of the blue. While I had always preferred to eat down in the village, for some reason, that night I decided to dine up at La Cumbre. Amarillo de pollo, something similar to a light curry. Don Esteban, permanent resident and owner of at least part of the property, had managed to rope me into a small but dedicated drinking group after dinner. Shots of mezcal flavoured with nanches. Alberto from Chiapas, a very thin boy with long hair and an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things hallucinatory, was part of the group. He had come up to La Cumbre to give himself some time to think after finding out his girlfriend was expecting his baby. I wonder if she got to go anywhere to think. I had dismissed his Paulo Coelho as a charlatan, an empty proponent of the worship of the self, and he had gone quiet. So there we were, about five of us, drinking and all smoking something or other. Esteban, an ex-convict, had to get up early to go to the jailhouse in Oaxaca (a three-hour drive) to register and, thus, prove that he still resided within the state. He’d have to wake up at four. His wife and daughters watched nervously from the kitchen to see how much he was drinking. They gently asked us to intervene. Take it easy Don Esteban, don’t forget you need to get up early. Sure we’re all gonna hit the sack soon enough and so on. Then he stunned us with his question. The silence began to hurt my face and so I told him that while I didn’t really know him he seemed like a nice guy to me. Do you think I’m an alcoholic? No, I said. Good, he replied and urged me to down another shot. We finally got him to go to bed. His wife and daughters led him away by the arm and he stumbled towards the family cabin. Alberto said he had a button of peyote. I told him he needed more than that. I told him he needed at least three per person. But no, he told me he was going to smoke it. I’d never heard of anyone smoking peyote. We went down to the balcony overlooking the black valley of clouds and he skinned up some weed and peyote. We swigged from the nanche flavoured mezcal and smoked that bitter cactus mixed with the weed. Time to sleep. I slept instantly and with dreams of stars. Then, cold and uncovered, I awoke in convulsions. My body shook and I wretched and felt a mustard-coloured acid in my stomach and tried to picture a river of cooling milk. I recovered, drank some water and stared below into the abysmal woods. I was never going to write anything up there. I needed to go to Mazunte to meet you as we had planned before later deciding we would never see each other again. I needed to go and to believe that you would be there and I needed to go soon.

VIII

I arrive in Mazunte just before dusk and know what to do – hike up to Punta Cometa (a small peninsula slightly west of town) to watch the sun go down. The sun is always red in the evenings in Mazunte. Its hacked body trickles its rivulets across the horizon. A hand-beaten drum counting down the seconds, getting quicker and quicker as the sun approaches its disappearance. I feel your hand on my shoulder just as the sunlight begins to disintegrate like an effervescent vitamin pill. A quick flash in your eye. A flame in the retina, kindled then quenched. The sun now subaqueous. An apricot lava oozing through saltwater. You have some worm-salt mezcal in your bag and you give me some and it makes me feel warm. Are you really here? As darkness floats in from the sea like a sad fog we decide to head down to the beaches to find a palapa or a hammock or somewhere to sleep later on. While the morning began in mist, the humidity in Mazunte is different. A hot steam that emanates from every pore and you feel the evening as a gelatinous residue in your nostrils. Just before the descent we stop to catch our breath in the small unfenced-off graveyard. Desperate wet gulps of oxygen. My shirt heavy and pointless. Did you see that? Yes, did you? Yes. One followed by another, then another, then another. The paparazzi madness of a hundred drunken fireflies. I capture one then feel guilty and let it go. I tell you to bury me in that place. I tell you I want the tendrils of the saffron cempasúchiles to hook onto my dead bones and to use me as an anchor. Flashes of light all around us. You smile, but I’m only half joking.

[from issue #1 – autumn/winter 2015]

They didn’t have a hoover or a washing machine, they had to sweep the floor and beat the rug out on the washing line and they washed the clothes in the stream and got water from the well for cooking and washing up the dishes. That’s a lot to do.

It’s hard for a woman to admit that she needs help, especially an elegant woman. They’re supposed to be unruffled, get things done and not bother anyone. Keep the head down and get on with it. Be peaceful and beautiful and streamlined and in motion. Like a dolphin through the water, not a heifer loping down the road.

My great-grandad was running the farm and didn’t want to make my great-grandmother sad with all the housework but there wasn’t time for him to do it for her and the children were steps-of-stairs-small so they couldn’t really help. Granny in the attic was a list of jobs all by herself. He bought her a sewing machine. And that was something. She needed more. And so he bought a person. It makes sense in a way. We package ourselves so people choose us. Squeeze dead-eyed into bras before we’ve boobs. Looking down, you’re scared that they will come but still you want them. All we want what everybody has. And maybe more.

I don’t know how you went about choosing who would help you from the workhouse. Like a job interview or a hiring fair or what. But great-grandad came back with this bockety little woman who looked like she’d be no help. Her legs didn’t work, she’d been born that way, so she kind of snaked around on the floor to get where she needed to go. Her arms were fine. She could do anything with the arms.

I don’t know what my great-grandmother thought of the bockety woman, or if she had a hand in bringing her inside their house to mind the things and children. She liked her later on. Pretty women often like women who aren’t threats and sure who’d run off with a bockety woman.

Farmers like the land, you see, as well. So there was that to keep him, that and love.

Some people who are bockety like to sit down and complain about how bockety they are and that’s no good to anyone. She wasn’t like that. She didn’t talk about their ‘two good legs’ the way their mother sometimes did so pointedly beside her. She was fun. She’d plough down to the stream and wash the clothes, baskets on her back or pulling them with teeth. She must have had good teeth for all her poverty.

I don’t know how people open bottles, pull at plastic floss. My teeth are soft chalk, crumbling, all give and no resistance.

They loved the bockety woman and my mother would tell me the story and she would tell me how many legs I had and that I’d the use of them and list the jobs to do around the house. They didn’t have a hoover or anything back then. She had to scrub. Down on hands and knees. Or hands and legs. She was always down on hands and legs. And never up.

She loved the children. She loved their little faces. Loved to look at them. She can’t have been all good. If I were bockety, it would make me cross. It would make me angry. Angry at the things my body couldn’t do. I get that way already. Looking at the television, all the slender women. Rail thin. Nothing poking over their elastics and I worry I’m too much and not enough at the same time. And haven’t I two good legs? And shouldn’t I starve? Shouldn’t I starve myself to be as good as them. Imagine if. Imagine if her legs would work, if she could just be selfless and renounce things. Biscuit crumbs on jumpers. Brush them off, they work into the fibre. Smell them later hungry on the bus.

Did she never rage I never asked. Did she never hate my great-grandmother and her husband and her kids and little scarf. Did her mouth fill up with blood from champing down on angry, lonely tongue?

When mother tells it, Delia is a saint. That was her name. But women are not saints. Not even saints are. All of us have anger. Burrowed in the marrow of our bones, running up our spines and tensing muscles. Anger pulses through. How do you live through days where nothing seethes?

How do you keep on dragging on the grass, your little gut all wet from dew and panting with the effort of it all, you’re strong, they couldn’t do what you have done and you only do these things because you have to. What if there were other ways to be. Did she never want to die from how it was? Did nothing hurt her?

People talk a lot about resilience. Offering things up. Offering it up. My mother offers me up like a sacrifice a lot. Looking at my mouth and thinking ‘eat’ and thinking ‘eat’ and when I eat she’s analysing bites and I. am. Trying.

They had nothing back then. Nothing. But they kept on going. Delia kept on going. She had to for the children. I don’t know what they paid her. If they paid her. Probably in roof over her head. In food and bed and water. She had to work. She had to work to stay she had to please them. Love grew though. With children love can grow so easily. They’re soft. The world hasn’t carved pores into them and filled them up. Hasn’t etched the stretches on their thighs. Hasn’t butter filled them fat with soft.

Eat. She says. And softly. For fuck’s sake. She thinks it is a thing I do to her. On purpose. Sometimes she is right. But not entirely. One bite on the plate of this is spite. A little sprig of greenery. A cherry. It’s me and her. The two of us. I’m all she has. All she has is me. And I have so, so many things. There’s such a lot of things for me to do. And I am tired.

What happened to the bockety woman, Mam, I ask. To Delia. She looks at me. An apple rests between us. I slice a sliver off. Push it through the maw. When I was little, I was all for stories. Hated food. Even then I always hated food. One more bite she’d say. And then I’ll tell you. I can hear her think it. Up my spine. I hear it up my spine and work my jaw.

They all got sick and she got sick as well. My great-grandmother caught it. And so did Delia. And the pretty woman died and on her deathbed asked her to mind the children and the bockety woman lived. So she did. She was loyal and hard-working. Apple taste is soft and artificial in my mouth. Golden Delicious. I like a little sharp beneath my sweet. The mildish pulpy texture feels like rot. We all begin to rot. Food inside your stomach rots as well. It hastens things. But you can still outwit it.

My great-grandmother buried in the ground and in the cottage just a man and Delia and the children. It wasn’t right but still it wasn’t like she could get married. Who would have her? Who would have anyone at all? We’re all so human. Delia on the floor, curled up on the hay, a massive hairless cat with apple cheeks. The children there. The children were her reason for it all. And then they grew.

You feed things and they grow. Up and out. Soft fat of the apple meat. The bony little pips I’ll shit out later. Apples. Milkless tea. And sometimes toast. One slice. Crusts off. No butter. I know it’s bad but I keep wanting things.

Not many things. But her. She had a fat brain. Sliding through the mud like slug to beer. I cannot stand the broken things around me. They pad and fumble through. They offer things to gods and carry on. I want things offered me. I want an altar. For my sacrifice I want an altar. Look at me and love me. Don’t come closer. In a church, there’s places not to step. You can’t go there I’ll say. It’s mine it’s mine. And they will leave me fruits and eggs and loaves and I will leave them rot and be replaced. I want so hard to matter. My mouth. My two good arms.

The children ripened. They were fresh. They married and they moved. Her work was done. Come live with us they said. Come be a person. Crawl out of the story of the martyr. No she said. They didn’t ask again. People do not give you second chances when they’re used to taking. Hard iron of the handle of the bucket. Splintered wood. Cold water.

The colder you are, the more it burns your skin the more the padding wears. If you want to lose weight, leave your coat at home don’t bring a jumper. I was walking home and it was cold one day and I was hungry. I sat on the side of the road. Beside the stone that has the yellow square with squiggle-writing. I opened up my book. And pulled and plucked and wadded shoved and ate. A journey’s worth of chewing in the paper. All you need’s three leaves, rolled and curled and wadded. And you put them in your mouth and chew and chew and chew and feel so guiltless.

And after Grandad came home with this bockety woman, didn’t she work very hard for them for years. And when my great-grandmother died, didn’t he fall in love with her? And she stood up. Uncurled her twisted back, her little nape and wiggle-stretched her toes and scratched her ankles. True Love she said. True love was what I needed all along. And he said will you dance with me my darling and the children were so thrilled with their new mother that they didn’t miss the old one but a little. And she was small and finely built, even at her full height.

And love is what it takes to fix us all.

She died back in the place they got her from. They never saw her after she said no. I brushed the grass-wet off my two good legs and took the long way home for cardio. My heart. My heart. My heart.

[from issue #1 – autumn/winter 2015]