Surviving Michael (19 page)

‘How about you, Nick?’ Charlie says.

‘Alright,’ says Nick and sits in the chair.

A couple of hours later, and we’re all done. Nick looks like a cross between Eminem and Desperate Dan. It isn’t a good look for him and he doesn’t look too pleased. Tough shit. Danny actually looks a lot better. The girl who looked like a cattle prod up her arse wouldn’t phase her, swung into action like a mini twister on his hair.

Mine’s not too bad either but to be honest about it, there’s not a lot you could change on me head to divert people’s attention away from me belly. Also because of years in the DMC and bein’ in me room takin’ care of me DVD business, me skin is a lot whiter than most people’s.

By the time I’m finished Nick, Danny and Charlie are in the waitin’ area readin’ magazines and lookin’ like they’re waitin’ on an audition for Louis Walsh’s latest boy band.

I feel as if the whole bleedin’ world is lookin’ at us as we walk out of the place. We must look like the biggest shower of nob-heads since Boyzone first appeared on the Late Late show.

We walk quickly to Danny’s car with our heads lowered.

‘So what’s Danny’s dare now?’ I ask.

‘Let’s go get somethin’ to eat first,’ Nick says.

‘We can eat later,’ I say, and they all look back at me as if in shock.

‘Not that much later though,’ I say and they burst out laughin’. Even Danny makes a half smile.

I think that’s the first time I ever made a joke about me weight and someone laughed. I’ve had loads of people make jokes about me, but can’t remember ever makin’ anyone laugh with me, especially about bein’ fat.

I can sometimes see people starin’ at me when I go down the street. That’s why I don’t go out much. I’ve always been a bit of a stocky bloke. Even when I was a kid I can remember kids makin’ fun of me belly.

I suppose it should have made me want to be thin and go on a diet, but it just made me want to be thin and eat more. It’s weird that the thing that makes people stare at me for a bad reason, is the same thing that makes me happy.

I just love eatin’, and I’ve always been a bit of a binge eater. I nearly always get a bag of chips and eat it in the car before gettin’ home and havin’ me dinner. And a lot of times, I’ll get a breakfast roll and eat it before goin’ to work so that I can have a normal fry up and people don’t see me eatin’ two breakfasts.

I remember after Mike’s funeral, everyone went to Ryan’s for a few drinks, and there was this big spread of food on a table they’d set up. I just couldn’t stop eatin’. Sandwiches, cakes, biscuits. I kept stuffin’ me face until I felt sick, and then I went into the toilets and vomited up everythin’ and I started ballin’ me eyes out until I heard someone come in. The mad thing is, after I’d washed me face and gone back outside, I just started eatin’ again. It’s funny the little moments that you remember.

I know I’m too fat. I’ve looked in a mirror, and I’m not a total fuckin’ eejit, but it’s like I have this hunger inside me all the time, and when I eat somethin’ it goes away for a while.

I can’t understand how people can say no to food. Like if there’s a party and there’s loads of food and someone says, no thanks, I had somethin’ to eat earlier, and I’m like, yeah, so did fuckin’ I, and I had somethin’ on the way here as well, but I’m still goin’ to eat as much of this shit as I can.

I once went on this soup diet I found on the Internet. It’s supposed to be for patients goin’ into surgery. I lost almost two stone in a week. Although nobody else seemed to notice. I noticed it a bit when me watch on me wrist went a bit loose. I even went out with the lads that Friday because I felt good about it and drank diet coke all night instead of beer.

On the bus on the way home, this bloke starts slaggin’ me in front of a load of girls, and I even saw other people on the bus laughin’ a bit. I got off the bus and walked the rest of the way home. Took me nearly an hour. When I got to the village, I walked into a chipper and bought fish and chips and a quarter pounder and ate them all real quickly and kept me head down in the bag so that no one would see me cryin’.

A few days later me watch got tight again, so I fucked it in the bin.

‘ARE YOU SURE?’ Danny asks me.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I tell him, ‘I saw it in a movie once.’

‘A fucking film?’

‘Besides that though,’ I assure him, ‘I’ve heard of it before.’

Liam leans forward. ‘Yeah, I seen that film as well. It was with your man from the thing and the other fella who was riding Angelina Jolie.’

‘Well, I’ve never heard of it before,’ Danny says.

‘You must have,’ Liam says, ‘It was with John Cusack and he was...’

‘Not the fucking film,’ Danny shouts at him, ‘I mean the part about being thrown up into the air behind a landing plane.’

We’re parked on a grass verge beside a ten foot metal fence that runs the perimeter of the entire airport. It’s still early evening, but the lights on the planes light up the grass as they approach the runway. An Aer Lingus plane lands about five hundred metres from us, its tyres screeching loudly as it bounces off the tarmacadam sending up a billow of white smoke behind it.

Danny’s head involuntarily bounces back at the sound, and then shakes in disbelief.

‘I don’t know, Jesus,’ he says to himself and then to us, ‘how am I going to get in there anyway?’

‘You can scale that fence no bother,’ Charlie tells him.

‘They might see me first.’

‘Liam,’ I say, ‘give him a lend of your jacket, will you?’

‘Fuck off,’ he says, ‘it’ll get destroyed.’

‘Your fucking jacket’ll get destroyed?’ Danny shouts at him, ‘what about me, for fuck’s sake?’

‘Alright, then,’ he says, and starts removing everything from the pockets before handing it to him.

Charlie gets out and looks across at the runway. ‘What about his hair?’ he says turning back around to us.

‘What about it?’ I ask.

‘Look at the state of it,’ he says, ‘he’ll light up like a giant golf ball across the grass.’

We all try to think up a solution.

Danny sighs heavily and says, ‘I think I have a black hat in the boot.’

‘Great,’ I say, ‘come on, it’s starting to get dark.’

Danny pops open the boot as the sound of another plane landing screeches in the background. He slides the hat over his head.

‘Danny, Danny,’ I joke, ‘where are you? I can’t see you.’

‘Fuck you, Nolan,’ he smirks, ‘come on and give me a hand over.’

We walk over to a dark part of the fence.

Liam calls over to him, ‘and don’t forget the circumstances if you chicken out.’

‘It’s consequences, yeh gobshite,’ Danny calls back to him, and then placing his foot into my hands, grabs the fence and pulls himself up and over.

He lands awkwardly on the far side of the fence, but picks himself up. He looks over to the airport and then looks back at me. There’s nothing to say, so we say nothing, and he turns and starts to walk towards the runway.

‘Do you know what?’ Liam says, when I join them, ‘I haven’t watched a porno in almost two days now.’

‘Are you bragging or complaining?’ I ask him.

‘I’m not sure,’ he says. ‘A bit of both.’

It’s getting dark, and Danny sticks to the darker parts of the grass. As he gets closer, he crouches down and runs slowly until he’s about a hundred metres from the end of the runway, then lies face down on his stomach.

‘Now what?’ Liam asks.

‘We wait,’ I say.

‘No need,’ Charlie says and points to the lights of a plane approaching the airport.

A Ryanair plane swoops down, and we see its landing gear being lowered.

‘Is he not supposed to stand up?’ Charlie asks.

‘He will,’ I tell him, ‘but he has to wait until the plane is over him. Otherwise the pilot will see him.’

‘So?’ Liam says.

‘So then the cops will be here before the plane even reaches the end of the runway,’ I say. ‘Besides it’s the thermals at the back of the plane that’ll lift him into the air.’

‘You seem to have put a lot of thought into this,’ he says, but his accusing tone is interrupted by the noise of the approaching plane.

When the jet’s lights hit him, Danny looks like a black bag lying in the grass. The noise must be tremendous, as I see him raise his hands from his sides and cover his ears. For a moment, I hope that he just lies there and lets the plane fly over him, but he doesn’t.

‘Here we go,’ says Charlie and puts his face closer to the fence.

Danny is on all fours as the plane flies over him and then jumps quickly to his feet. He’s timed it well and is standing up when the engines are above him.

Not sure what to expect, I grip the metal fence tighter and hold my breath. As if someone were standing in front of him and gave him a hard shove backwards, Danny falls back quite hard onto the ground.

‘Is that it?’ Liam asks after a few moments.

We all stare out at Danny, still on the ground.

‘What was supposed to happen again?’ Charlie asks mockingly.

‘Shut up for a minute,’ I tell them, but with relief we see Danny’s head lean forward and then his upper body sit up.

‘Well, at least he tried,’ Charlie says. ‘He can always say he gave it a go.’

‘You said he’d fly up off the ground,’ Liam says, genuinely annoyed.

‘Well, he didn’t,’ I tell him.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he says, ‘can we go get something to eat then?’

I walk back to the car, and Liam follows me.

‘At least me jacket’s in one piece,’ he says.

‘Wait a second,’ Charlie says, still at the fence, ‘where’s Danny going?’

I REMEMBER this time when we were kids, or teenagers, and Radio Nova was giving away free tickets to some concert in town. I think it was for Bon Jovi. You had to be the tenth caller in or something like that. We were sitting in Danny’s dad’s car outside his house, and we all got out and ran up to the phone box on the corner. I started dialing but kept getting the engaged tone, then Nick grabbed the phone and tried. No luck. Then Liam, but no joy either. Then Danny tried. And then he tried again. And again. He just kept calling and calling. It was freezing out and after a while, we all said we were going home, but he still kept trying to ring. Later on, his mam came out looking for him and found him in the phone box still ringing. He just wouldn’t give up. The funny thing is, I fucking hate Bon Jovi.

Still crouching down, we can see Danny move closer to the edge of the runway. It’s hard to tell if he’s lying on the grass or on the actual tarmacadam as he’s slipped out of sight again.

‘This is crazy,’ I say.

Liam has his phone pointing out to where Danny is.

‘I’ll call him,’ Nick says, ‘Liam, stop recording, and try to phone him.’

I continue looking out at Danny, but when I don’t hear them phoning him, I turn to look at Nick and Liam. They’re both staring off to my right, and Liam actually has his mouth open with the expression of an actor from a 1960’s science fiction movie. A giant plane is descending ever so slowly from the horizon. The three of us watch it glide down and grow larger and larger. It’s, at first anyway, quieter than the other planes, and gives the impression that it’s flying in slow motion, or that any moment it will just drop on its belly to the ground. Four huge engines roar at us, like a whale booming its mating cry. I look over at Danny and can see his head lift to see this monster charging towards him.

‘Stay down,’ I yell to Danny, but with the blasts from the engines now, I doubt if even Liam or Nick can hear me.

I shake my head in disbelief as Danny raises himself up on all fours. The lights from the jet light him up and I can see Liam’s oversized jacket on him start to flap about. He just manages to get to his feet at the same time as the nose of the aircraft passes over his head. It’s like a fucking office building on its side being thrown down the runway. He raises his arms out sideways, crucifixion style, and looks up as the belly of the plane goes over him. The landing gear must be about twenty feet above his head. As the tail of the plane passes him, Danny stands upright. We can see him lower his head and then turn towards us, as if to say, ‘is that it?’ Then, as if he were hooked to an elastic band or a reverse bungee rope, he shoots off the ground and propels about thirty feet into the air. He seems to hit a glass ceiling because his body flips sideways and flies another twenty feet to the right before diving head first towards the runway. At no more than three feet from splitting his head, he (or I mean his body, because it’s obvious that he has zero control of his movements) flips over and rockets back upwards before once again ricocheting off an invisible wall that sends him downwards. He must have gained some control because at that point he puts his arms around his head in an instinctive attempt at self-protection. Two feet from the ground, his body straightens and bounces up and down several times as if he were on a trampoline until eventually from about five feet in the air, this invisible bungee cord snaps, and gravity, unhappy with Danny’s previous defiance, smashes him into the ground. This time he bounces no more than a few inches and doesn’t move.

Like a loud radio that was incessantly being played in the background and was switched off, the evening air becomes silent and calm again. Everyone is breathing heavily, but we don’t move. All eyes stare out at the black lump lying motionless in the grass.

I stretch up and grab a hold of the fence, and try to pull myself up, but my shoes won’t grip the fence.

‘Help me,’ I yell at Nick, and he makes a cup shape with his hands. I put my foot into his hands and haul myself up the fence.

‘Hold on,’ Liam shouts.

‘What is it?’ Nick says and lets go off me, leaving me hanging from the top of the fence.

‘He moved,’ Liam says, ‘I think he moved.’

I drop back to the ground. ‘Are you sure?’ I ask.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ Nick says.

I reach up for the fence again, but then I see Danny’s right hand move slowly off the grass and then touch his head. We all hold our breaths. Then his left arm moves to the side of his body, and he lifts his head and moves it from side to side. Supporting himself with his elbows, he sits up, and then jumps up onto his feet. We explode with delight as we see him limping as fast as he can in our direction. When he gets to the fence and climbs over, he seems genuinely surprised when we all grab him and jump up and down, cheering.