Some Great Thing (7 page)

Long sip spaghetti wine.

“So ya come here and ya sit in some rat’s arse of an apartment and ya think who are ya, is what you think, and who would I be, you see, if I weren’t sittin here in this apartment. And ya get some courage, some comfort, they say, thinkin of the bad things you’ve
avoided and the bad things ya could’ve become or done, or even the boring things that weren’t all that bad that you avoided because they just bored you, and ya think, right, I’m not so bad off, but that’s utter bollocks is that, Jer, when yer actually sittin there with shite around you, isn’t it, because deep inside ya know who you are and that no matter what comfort yiz are getting from thinking of the people you aren’t yer still the person you are, who is a cold and lonely one sittin there surrounded by shite which slowly yiz are realizing only yooz can clear away. That’s what I realized anyways, Jer, and that’s in my circumstances, Jerry, where the plannin really starts, and could ya just top that up for me there, that’s delicious that. I thought about what me mam said before I left which I won’t repeat because I don’t want ya to think less of her. She’s lovely. But she told me yiz are making a mistake followin that man and she was right, I will grant the woman that. But she said yooz’ll be lost, and that is where she was exactly wrong. Wrong, Jerry, because that’s what I’m saying and you know it, that when yiz are sittin out there completely alone yer found, found, found, not lost. Ya sit there and ya think, so this is me. Ya find yerself, and that’s the difficult part. And that’s what I’m sayin. Ya reach that point and ya think, right, what do I do with this me. And there’s some, Jerry, like you, who find some great thing to do.”

There was something so exciting about that point right there that made us chew on our glasses when we drank.

“And no flippin thinkin yiz have done it all wrong, because you cannot, Jerry, you cannot think of the past. You burn your bridges, Jerry, is what you do, or it’s what I did. Do ya have many bridges, Jerry? And maybe that was good for yiz, but for me it was, I’m leavin, you know, and it wasn’t just one person it was one bridge after another and I don’t want to think about it and get all sad, but it was me mam and me dad and me brothers and sisters and Gran and Tom, in a way, and everyone in a long line of people ya can feel like yooz’ve disappointed if ya let it, but ya mustn’t.
Moving forward is what yuv gotta do in that truck there outside. Isn’t it beautiful? I mean isn’t it a flippin beauty, Jerry, cause it’s mine and I’m thinkin of repainting it even brighter yellow to cheer you miserable lot up in the morning. Driving around in that, free like that, is a beautiful thing, like the sight of a new plate of spaghetti. Do ya want more?”

Yes!

“And I will never be what I was, Jerry, just a flippin maid cleanin up and wiping the arses of all my brothers and sisters and the Catholic flippin Church, Jerry. The Catholic feckin Church lookin over every cold day when ya wake up and ya jump out of bed and kids, kids, kids, and yiz are never alone at all. Yooz have got it here and I respect that and if yer a Catholic, Jerry, I apologize, but over there it’s something else, Jerry, and it’s what makes ya feel like ya have to clean up them kids all the time and I don’t want to start ranting. But there it is outside, Jerry, that van and I hope ya like it. I was driving around the other day thinkin that if it wasn’t for the petrol, and it’s feckin expensive, Jerry, but if it wasn’t for the petrol, and the money I owe on it, I could drive for ever, you know, like drive around these lovely streets and they drive into my dreams and I drive into them and it’s just a lovely gliding feeling all free, do ya know? Because I’m all new Jerry and ya don’t need to know about all them things from the past, and there’s something in your eyes Jerry that’s very sort of wise and I love it. I hope ya don’t mind. And you know, if it wasn’t for the money for the petrol I could drive absolutely everywhere sellin sandwiches, because that’s the lovely thing about a sandwich. You can laugh, Jerry, but people eat sandwiches everywhere. That’s what I like about it. And I love meeting the new people. That’s lovely wine isn’t it, that wine. I only drink on bonfire nights such as this one. Do ya like singing? Men don’t sing over here and I respect that but I love singing. Will ya hum a tune for me, Jerry? I’m only joking. I’ll hum for ya sometime, shall I, Jerry? And I have to say. Jerry.”

We leaned closer across that table.

“Jerry, I’ve been thinkin about nothing else but what we did in the van, Jerry, the other day in the van. And it was lovely. I hope ya don’t mind me saying that, a strong man like you mustn’t like that talk, but it was lovely, Jerry. Because ya just came up into the van, didn’t ya? Jerry.”

Look at her there.

“Ya came up into the van and that was a lovely kiss on my lips.”

I’
LL TELL YOU WHAT
it looked like in those neighborhoods before they became neighborhoods but while they were on their way. It’s men like me you have to thank for making them solid and tight.

Much of this earth, in those days, was meant to be built upon. I didn’t see much land that was pure and beautiful. A lot of it was sacred because the sacred part of land is the use you make of it, and most of this land was saying “use me.” There was so much developing or prospecting around that the world looked like it was going to roll up and leave, and if you didn’t hold on to it, if you didn’t put your boot down on the dirt and say, “That’s mine,” it would move under the boot of the next man who would change it. The earth knew it, and it made itself as unfinished and in-between as a twelve-year-old boy. Hills weren’t hills and rocks would barely need blasting. It was land that was either aching to be touched or aching to get back, and my choice was to touch it. And I’m not talking about some sort of Eden. It wasn’t a case of spoiling or leaving innocent or doing anything at all of bigger meaning than building a house for Mom and the kids and a building for suit-wearing Daddy. I already knew about the sweat of my brow. I know the Bible. I know about women and change and searching and evil, and none of it has to do with building a neighborhood, because a neighborhood, like the unused earth before it, is just a vessel.

So have a look on the map here and I’ll show you. From here, which is now Hunt Club, all the way over to here, now, see there, McCarthy
Street, was nothing but moving aching land, all, as I say, half land, half nuisance, half pitiful and perfect. There were some small farms but the rest of the land wasn’t even clean, a lot of it. There was a young boy drank from one of the puddles before we built there who lost his eyesight for a little while because of it. Sometimes land comes poisoned before you bring the machines.

Eventually that area was taken by eight different developers, including me. My point is that there was a lot of land and a lot of interest. This section here, from what is now John Street to Uplands, is what I wanted to put my boot on first. You hear about homeowners now—that’s what they call you people and me—who want their privacy, who want their hills and trees and all sorts of other things between them and everyone else, and I say it’s a big bag of shit. First thing they do is wonder who the neighbors are and it’s all the same in the end, love and gossip creeping over the hills as easily as straight across the yard. And you ask any developer even now with machines that can do anything what he thinks of a proper hill where he wants to build, and he will say fuck. It’s easier to make hills than build around them, especially in those days, and that’s why I had my eye on that section there. It was flat, my friend, like the palm of a friendly hand.

There was wet mud and dry mud and wild grass and dandelions and some cement laid down from years before when people had empty messy plans. It was land that people knew they could build on but hadn’t finished thinking it through. It started at a bit of a rise, more of a rise before I crushed it, over here from the northeast and slid down smooth across the south-southwest onto the back of the old suburbs.

Good soil, some of it. Iron in it. One old man I liked kept a little garden out there that he shouldn’t have and grew tomatoes, nice red ones. Wetter at the bottom of the rise but that’s where the old houses already were, so the earth I eventually moved was dry, light.

It was foresight, and I don’t mind pretending it’s a gift. Some of the other developers, Edgar Davies one of them, thought that land there was boring. They thought they had foresight. And they were right in a way because they thought the people would want the interesting “contour” they called it, farther over here, and ignored the difficulties of building on it because they knew they could charge more. That’s eventually, to tell you the truth, what I did. But that’s not how you start. You start making the good solid houses, farther out, as many as you can, clean and simple, a white smile away from the frown of the city. I knew that then and you can feel free to admire me. Walk up to those walls and knock.

But the land, the land, that was how the land was. I won’t declare I miss it. It was an interesting time and there it is for the record. It was dirt and water and rocks.

W
E KISSED AGAIN THAT
night like wine glasses Hooray. And we also kissed in other ways that only two people kissing know, and there’s her mouth and hands and fast, and you sometimes just push hard. And we were drunk, my friend. I had never been so. Stumbling and knocking hips soft, and cheers, and where’s the truck. Up against the truck but not inside. I am in Love and it is obvious to me and some time I might tell her. Push. You come to that crossroads, and I don’t care what you hear about those days now but when a man and a woman wanted a manwoman body they just went ahead and did. And ohhh I thought about her. You’re at that crossroads pushing against jeans and she’s making noises and ohhh I
am
a lucky man. But we did not go inside that truck and it was the sweetest lasting choice I ever made, my body humming like a tire on a road.

“Goodnight, Jerry.”

“Goodnight, Kathleen.”

And I didn’t see her again for almost fifteen days.

F
IFTEEN DAYS, MY FRIEND
. I had no idea where she went. The next morning I thought it was just a hangover because I myself had a sick dizzy head. I waited thinking maybe she’d come by for lunch or maybe for the afternoon round but I never heard her horn, and waiting for it, stretching for it, put a whistle in my ears.

The next day no better and the next the beginning of Fear. Crash, kidnap, rape, or just plain new-kissed hatred. Whatever the reason, gone.

The Evolution of the Tongue, from Patricia to Renée

T
HE FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD
boy, so say the sages of ages, tires of yearning for the mouth of his mother, and should therefore grow up near a fat neighbor’s daughter. Patricia Murphy, with breasts like toffee, gave Simon lessons in tongues. The fourteen-year-old boy ideally spends his days pressed hard against something else. Patricia Murphy, with crotch of impervious cotton, was free between three and four. Spin the bottle, postman’s knock: she was an artful little teacher.

The tongue began at the hyoid bone in the back of Patricia Murphy’s mouth, was first discovered by a boy named Louis, and was later explored and charted by Simon Struthers, esq., son of a great man.

Salt is tasted on the front and back sides of the upper surface of the tongue; sour on the middle sides; bitter at the back. The tip, indeed, tastes sweet.

Beginning at the hyoid bone in the back of Patricia Murphy’s mouth, the tongue stretched over several years and continues to ignite the world with pentecostal passion and confusion.

But it briefly gave way to the finger.

The brutal dry palm of Natasha McSweeny shook his fifteen-year-old plasm to a jerky beginning. (Against the wall of the gymnasium for help with her grammar and spelling.) He couldn’t suffer the abuse for long. He struggled till it was
her
back against the wall and he learned the might of his finger, when to deepen his inquiries or to dwell on the same point.

T
HEN THE TONGUEFINGER WAS
born, a rhetorician’s dream, moving its audience—Jodie, his third cousin Lucy, whoever would listen—to new heights of understanding. But as understanding grew, new knowledge was sought, the tonguefinger became obsolete. Jodie found a deeper truth with his best friend Sam, regardless of the fact that he possessed an even greater truth than Sam’s (he knew his from the locker room).

And a glacial freeze crept over.

Subterfuge began, a sign of things to come. His howling parts, so proud, so competent before, went underground. Sixteen. Seventeen. The greatest lesson still not learned, and the body turned against itself.

Then Sue Hawke came smashing through the ice, older, larger, and a new world was born, finally, and very, very quickly. Always too quick for Sue. He was proud again, roamed the earth again in wiser form.

He learned hands all over again from Catholic Marcia (even feet on one occasion). From two whose names I have forgotten he learned that the neck can taste like butter and if one smacks the buttocks just so they will blush like a nectarine. Anthea, Sarah, Rebecca his almost fiancée. The body settled into what he thought was its final form, and the tongue still licked its purpose.

He was not an unattractive man.

There are many I have not named.

So why, when he picked her up in the car, would Renée not take his kiss?

Was he nothing but a colleague?

H
E WAS A MARVELOUS
mystery to many in those days of promotion and change. Simon Zelotes, sedulous, defiant, triumphant amid the jeers of nonbelievers. He did the jobs that others could not. His skin had the sheen of conviction. Simon Magus, perhaps not moral, undeniably charming, he gave them what they wanted. He exhaled the smoke of Delphi and many gathered around him.

He changed memos from stiff syntactic graveyards into cloistered gardens of the Word. He, Simon Struthers, arrived at C Wing seemingly out of nowhere, and changed the warp and woof of the place with the elegance of his texts. He made C Wing (floor twelve, Thomson Building) into a long sword of concision, driven into the side of our dull civil edifice to startle not to kill.