Rocks in the Belly (12 page)

I order another drink and the bar maid gives me a face like she isn't sure if she should. Nevertheless, she puts a fresh drink down on a new coaster and I sit here as if in the eye of a storm. All around me people are living normal lives, couples showing each other their fillings as they throw their heads back and laugh together. The laugh
exceeding the joke. How couples lubricate one another's lives — making the other seem more attractive, more interesting, funnier. Until they leave.

The bar itself is a long, low, polished table that creates an insubstantial barrier between the bar staff and me. Friends share beers, froth lacing the inside of their glass. Others look into the glint of their mobile screen, their thumbs chasing people out of the bushes. I watch all of this, a stranger, people avoiding my gaze but staring when they think I can't tell.

Two women come in and take a seat at the other end of the bar. A man comes to the bar at my left, and in looking like I make room for him I move closer to the two women.

One of them is showing the other what look like holiday snaps. She still has her tan. I imagine the one looking at the pictures is bored.

The bar maid realises the music stopped a while ago and puts it back on, the owner giving her a frown so she turns it down a little — up again when he turns back to a wallet looking at a menu.

People raise their voices over the music which, like their conversations, is as light and insipid as cordial diluted into an almost nothingness. But they speak it louder, the music forcing mouths closer to the other's ear so that lips are moving beside hair and earrings. As if the whole place is whispering about me. Like they know.

I burp some beery CO
₂
into the glass, slouched on my bar stool and looking over at those women like they're the last cake on the plate. The opposite of the way the old lady looked at me today. A thought that makes me put my beer down too hard and faces turn my way.

Look at that man on his own.

I shrink a little as if Mum is screaming at me now — standing over there among all those people at tables and just wailing. Pointing.
Everyone staring and she's there, crying and balding and screaming and pointing. At me. Here at the bar.

It's this familiar pain that always leads me to a familiar consolation. It's only women that comfort me. I seduce more and more of them until they've caressed and sighed me innocent. Each acceptance, the grace of their acknowledgement, like the glistening embrace of validation. Of forgiveness.

So I'm sitting here in this bar bistro restaurant reaching out to the women in the room. Noting each caught glance my way. Noting more each moment in which they aren't looking at me. Sat here playing peek-a-boo with people who don't know we're playing.

The women to my right are locked in on one another but the one with her back to me is giving me the corner of her eye from time to time. She has a slender back, a red sweater clinging to her, a large leather belt wrapped around over it — not holding anything up but a belt all the same. She'll be naked under that sweater, barring the bra I can see. I like the way it cuts into her flesh. I imagine unhitching her and her ribcage expanding. The skin red beneath the bra, a little sweat where the under-wire is, her breasts dropping that unique distance and I'm cupping them but my grip is around my beer and I'm staring.

I look down and my hand is really squeezing and I can still see my old lady's ankle in the car door, her head thrown back. She was quiet as I bandaged it for her when we got home. As if she'd already forgotten how it happened. I fed her a nice meal, then escaped as soon as she was asleep on the couch.

The sweater girl has a corduroy skirt on and stockings. I'm using my teeth to eat away at the crotch of them, eating at her tights until they start to give, and she's not looking at those photos but at the top of my head — a mixture of fear and consternation and excitement on her face. Flushed with desire and this piquant thrill at my unpredictability — the way I'm showing her I know what I'm
doing. My hands touching her without trace of shaking or doubt or holding back. Her mouth trundling out lame words for me to stop. Her fingers sliding among the hair on the back of my head.

And yet I'd still be alone. With each sexual encounter I'm usually standing somewhere in my childhood. Just me and the empty corridors of the past. That habit sex has of vanishing me. Of making me haunt my own childhood — standing deserted in memories of loneliness. Aloneliness.

I swig my beer again, order another. Sweater Girl looking out of the corner of her eye, and her friend frowns for a moment.

Sex is always like that for me, the way it brings back images of childhood. As if the thread of a muscle or ligament tears fractionally from the exertion, and gives off where I was the moment it first formed — every cell in me like a time capsule full of the past. So that I might be having sex, but in my head I'm standing by the garden shed, or the wicker washing basket I used to hide in outside Mum and Dad's room, until they found out and moved it into the bathroom.

Or I'll be standing on that spot where Robert changed.

Sweater Girl's friend asks her if she's alright and gets an enthusiastic nod. She probably took most of those pictures in order to come home and show them. As evidence. Most people can't enjoy a holiday because they're always standing outside themselves wondering what sort of holiday they're having and how it would look to those at home and how to capture it so that it looks like they had
the
experience. They don't take the pictures for themselves, to remember, they take them to show. Doesn't sound like much of a holiday.

The friend heads for the toilet and Sweater Girl swivels to face her drink, gives me a look. I slide my stool a little closer and lift my glass to her, give her a smile. She smiles back, looks down, her elbow on the low bar, her other hand playing with the twirls of
black hair spiralling out from under her ponytail, her neck smooth, pure, the hair curling.

In this moment she looks like Perfect.

She fidgets and her corduroy skirt rises up a little and there's a tiny ladder in her stocking. I'd tear them there.

‘Holiday snaps?' I say and she blushes, leaning closer to me because she hasn't heard over the music, and I have to wilfully relax my hand around the beer glass.

‘Holiday snaps?' I say again and point at the pictures sitting near a puddle of something on the bar.

‘Oh. Yes,' she says, touching the photos. ‘The Gambia. Looks nice.'

I raise my eyebrows, sip my beer. ‘Impressive. Stay with me for a drink if you like, once the intrepid explorer goes home.' I say it as if I'm not connected to her answer at all.

She leans closer, blushing again, and I watch her bum inch to the edge of her seat. She hasn't heard what I've said again, her friend weaving her way back between the tables.

‘I said, once you two have finished catching up, you might like to share a beer with me.'

‘Both of us?' she says, probably looking for clarification it isn't her friend I'm interested in. Her friend who's standing behind her now. Not sitting down but watching the interaction like she's in a wedding dress and there's nobody waiting at the altar.

I know who Sweater Girl is. She's the person who sits listening to others, resenting them for taking up all the airtime and yet not daring to broadcast herself. She thinks she's boring and so is great at remembering facts about everyone she meets. She probably already knows what beer I drink. She's a master at detail so that when she sees someone for the second time, in that desert that is a social function — dry, unforgiving, endless, lonely — she can say, ‘Oh, how did your x, y, z go?' Or, ‘Did you manage to make it to blah
blah on time?' And she's the type that puts a little light touch on you at that moment, to emphasise her sheer niceness. She is nice. She gives head. She doesn't like all the attention in bed. She's used to selfish lovers. She's been with a string of those weak men who feel threatened. Men who like women that don't say much. She falls for men who take. Not men like me who need vindication, who need to give back too.

Sweater Girl has selfish lovers and so her orgasm face would probably be one of surprise.

My beer arrives and I let the bar maid flirt with me a little, watch what it does to SG. How she waits, forcing her friend to wait too — nausea rising in me from all the alcohol.

The problem though is that after that orgasm, life will shrink everything again as I succumb to my view of myself as second best. At best. Right now I'm going through life like one of those fluorescent bulbs that can't jump start itself. I'm only blinking towards lighting up. Everyone is, aren't they? You need another to spark across the gap, someone to meet you halfway so you can rest in the glow awhile.

But for a brief spell after we've gorged on each other, our bodies lying there humming, I'll get to feel as if a chiropractor has just clicked my brain back into the right shape and maybe for the rest of the night it will sit in its white bone throne in my head and look down on its kingdom, and feel glad. Me and Sweater Girl will both be there, holding hands, our chests expanded. And for a brief moment I'll experience that elusive wholeness.

Sweater Girl says ‘Maybe' to me over the music, then turns her blushing to her friend. Her friend who is not used to Sweater Girl being the focus. Her friend who is with her
because
Sweater Girl is second place.

Not to me she isn't. To me she looks like a temptress out of one of those 1950s films. The way they always first appear on screen in
that soft focus, as if viewed through the beginning of tears.

And I'm sitting here like a bell that's just been struck. If the other people would shut up for a second they'd hear that almost inaudible resonance coming off me. Sweater Girl having left me ringing with the promise of escape. Togetherness. Because she
will
stay late with me after her The Gambia friend has waited as long as possible to leave. The Gambia enhancing her own total insignificance by staying,
because
of her very outrage and refusal to be insignificant beside Sweater Girl. But The Gambia is surplus.

And you know what's most beautiful about this situation? That Sweater Girl, my woman, is going to turn on her friend in a minute. At this chance of glory she'll turn on The Gambia and accentuate every ounce of her new insignificance. Drying up all attention, stopping all feigned interest so that her non-friend will leave totally shrunken. Probably feeling betrayed almost. Cheated out of the usual hierarchy of attention.

I go to order another beer to celebrate on SG's behalf but the bar maid looks at the fresh one still sweating here in front of me.

I am the drunk bell, ringing at the bar. Because Sweater Girl and me will leave together and for tonight at least, I'll feel loveable.

Dad's gearbox wakes me up like usual but I don't get out of bed straight away. I'm thinking about last week when Robert's parents forgot him. I'm not allowed to talk about it and Mum's been nicer to him than before, even though she found out he's been hoarding again. Weirder stuff than EVER.

I go downstairs. Mum's normally up by now but only Robert is. He's polishing our shoes.

‘What do you think happened to your parents last week then, Robot?'

He looks at me. ‘Your mum says I don't have to talk about it.'

‘
Your mum says I don't have to talk about it.
'

‘Shut up, crazy brain,' he says and chucks one of my shoes across the room and starts walking out.

‘YOU SH-ut up, Robert.' He always remembers to be quiet when he's nasty.

Once I'm dressed I eat some Krispies. I know Krispies are his favourite but he pretends to Mum that he likes vegetables and fruit and prefers water to lemonade.

He comes back in. ‘Where's your mum?'

He always calls her that. Except once he called her Mum and
everyone got the beetroots.

I shrug.

‘I'll go see,' he says. ‘It's not like her not to be up yet.'

Like he's the expert.

I put more sugar on my breakfast and listen to him moving through the house, then thundering down the stairs. He comes in all pale.

‘She won't wake up!' He picks up the phone and dials emergency.

You get in big trouble for that. I know.

‘Maybe she's tired, Robot.'

‘She could be DYING!'

‘Alright shouty pants,' I say to him, but my heart's going. He's crying a bit.

‘Ambulance please. Yes.'

I move my sugary milk away. Even looking at it makes me want to throw up. I push back my chair and it makes a big farty noise.

‘Pardon?' Robert says into the phone, wiping his eyes. ‘I don't know,' he says. Then he turns to me ‘Quick, they want us to check she's breathing!'

Being inside an ambulance should be exciting. Robert is holding Mum's hand but she isn't holding his. The ambulance man is taking her temperature and the tubes and oxygen things and packets of needles all wobble with the road movement. The driver plays the sirens for little bursts sometimes, probably when we go through junctions. This means Mum might not be dying otherwise the sirens would be on all the time. Or they would be off because she's dead.

‘Best phone your dad,' the ambulance man said to Robert as they were putting her on the stretcher at home, and I just watched while Robert got to be the son.

I'm the fostered one now.

When we get to hospital Dad is already there and his face all red and puffy around his neck but he has the best hug for me.
He hugs Robert too. Then we hold hands by Mum's bed but she's under this plastic thing like Michael Jackson because she might have a very tricky disease that makes your brain swell.

Dad cries. A lot. I tell him it'll be ok and try to make him laugh.