Jog On Fat Barry (2 page)

“Oh, not again,” Miss September grumbled when she walked into the room and saw Tony rocking back and forth on his bed, covered in shit. “Let’s be having you then.”

She led him over to a small sink, turned on the tap, and told him to hold his hand under the water while she changed his bed.

“Could we have the window open, nurse?” Kenny asked.

“It’s not allowed,” Miss September replied.

“Oh, com’ on,” Kenny pleaded. “It smells like fifty arseholes in here.”

“Well, just for a few minutes then,” she said, stripping the cover from Tony’s bed and bundling it up under her arm. “But only because I know you boys won’t do anything silly.”

Nice One moved aside as Miss September stepped up to the window and took a key ring from her pocket. She searched for the right key and unlocked the deadbolt. As she slid the window open, the shouts of boys playing football on the little green spilled into the room, and cold air swirled around Nice One’s face.

“Hello there, Colin.”

Nice One turned around. A woman was standing in the doorway smiling at him.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, stepping into the room. “Only, I couldn’t get away.”

Nice One didn’t know what to say and just stood there staring.

“Breathe, pet,” Miss September whispered to him.

Nice One sucked in a lungful of air without taking his eyes off the woman. She looked just like she had when he last saw her three years earlier, only, there was something different about her this time, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“I’ll be back to close that window,” Miss September said as she left the room with Tony’s soiled bedclothes.

Nice One glanced at Tony and Kenny. They were gawking at the woman like two little boys peering through a sweetshop window at things they could never have. He turned back to catch the woman looking at the folded sleeves of his pyjamas.

“It must’ve been terrible,” she said.

“What, this?” he said, feigning indifference. “It’s nothing. I’ll be getting new ones soon anyway.”

She took another step into the room and glanced at the medal on Nice One’s bedside table.

“Is that what they gave you?” she asked. “For saving your mates’ lives?”

Nice One didn’t reply. The woman smiled at Kenny and Tony. They looked away.

“Your mum’s ever so proud of you,” she said. “She’s forever telling people what it was you did over there.”

Nice One shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He would’ve pushed his hands into his pockets had he hands to push. No one spoke for a moment.

“So, you’re alright, then?” the woman asked.

Nice One nodded. The time ticked by uncomfortably. The woman smiled again. Her teeth were so white. Nice One remembered the first time he’d seen them. They’d been at a party: had too much to drink. He was all over her in the garden. She’d pushed his hands away.

“Get off,” she’d said. “You’re like a blooming octopus.”

“Idle hands are the devil’s tools,” he’d laughed.

The woman waited for Nice One to say something but he didn’t. She waited a little longer but he still said nothing.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” she said. “Perhaps I should go.”

She turned.

“You got a boyfriend then?” Nice One blurted out.

“I’m engaged,” she said, turning back and holding out her left hand. “Look.”

There was a ring on her finger with a big sparkly diamond that looked expensive.

“Is he a footballer?” Nice One asked.

“Yes,” she answered.

Nice One tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it.

“You always said you’d only marry a footballer,” he said, looking at the floor.

His eyes stared to well and he gazed at the pattern on his shabby slippers to avoid looking up. He listened to the boys playing football on the green and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“What I did. What I done to get that medal was—”

He stopped speaking. Time ticked away.

“What I did,” he began again, quietly, “was shoot this woman. I killed her. She wouldn’t stop screaming. Her kid was playing in the street and we accidentally ran over him. Hadn’t meant to. Still, the woman started screaming. She started and wouldn’t stop. So I shot her, pulled the trigger and blew her head—”

“She’s gone, mate,” Kenny said.

Nice One looked up. The woman wasn’t there. He could smell her perfume, but that was all that remained of her. He closed his eyes. Inhaled. Smiled.

“Lovely weren’t she?” he heard himself say. Moments later he added, “Only she didn’t want to look at us. Did you notice? Not that anyone could blame her. Who’d blame her?”

Nice One glanced at Tony and Kenny. They stared back, poker-faced. Snot started to trickle out one of Nice One’s nostrils. He lifted up a shoulder; wiped his nose. Moments later he shuffled over to his bed and stared at the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross.

“They got me and I got you,” he said flatly.

For a minute or two he tried to think what it was that had seemed so different about the woman since the last time he’d seen her. He knew it wasn’t the way she had done her hair, or what she’d been wearing. It was more to do with how her clothes had clung to her. He realized it was her body that had changed. Somewhere along the way she had stopped being the girl he’d known, and turned into the woman she was. Nice One nodded knowingly. A moment later he leaned over his bedside table and picked up the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross with his lips.

“What you doing?” Kenny asked.

Nice One didn’t answer. He turned away from the bed and started shuffling toward the open window with the medal in his mouth.

“You better not do anything stupid,” Kenny told him. “You heard what Miss September said.”

Nice One started moving faster but stumbled and fell to the floor. Kenny called for Miss September. Nice One tried to find his feet but they kept slipping out from under him. He used his head and the end of Tony’s bed to haul himself up. Tony was still beside the sink with his hand under the tap. He watched Nice One for a moment, then glanced at himself in his little mirror and started mumbling.

“That’s not me that’s not me that’s not me that’s not me that’s not me that’s not me that’s not me that’s not me that’s not me that’s not…”

Kenny called for Miss September again as Nice One reached the window, but there was no sign of her. Nice One leaned out onto the ledge and his feet left the floor.

“Fucking hell, mate!” Kenny yelled.

Nice One teetered for a moment. Then he snapped his head to the side and the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross flew out of his mouth. It spun through the air catching the bright afternoon light, and then plummeted like a lead weight to the ground below.

“I think that’s enough fresh air for you, young man,” Miss September said, as she swiftly crossed the floor and gently pulled Nice One back into the room.

She reached up to close the window. And as she did, one shrill voice cried out from the green below, “Come on, Spud! Square it! On me head! On me blinking head!” The window slammed shut. And with it shut, the sound of boys playing football on the green below it could no longer be heard.

chilly doyle

Two days after
Chilly Doyle
passed the $250,000,000 mark at the box office, a writer from
The Hollywood Reporter
asked me if any incident in particular had propelled me into the boxing ring, and I told him the same thing I told that knucklehead who played me in the movie: “Mind your own fucking business.”

The writer said The Academy were suckers for actors playing retards, and the knucklehead who played yours truly, was a shoo-in for the Oscar. Go figure. Last year the jerk was flipping burgers and today people were lining up to kiss his ass, just for playing me: the dummy, the guy with something wrong in his head. And it was a brave new world if nothing else, when someone a few slices short of a loaf was invisible in real-life, but worth his weight in gold when Oscars were up for grabs in the world of make-believe. But I guess maybe that’s the way shit goes; wasn’t it Samuel Goldwyn who said: “Don’t give ‘em [the people] what they need, give ‘em what they want”?

So in the movie, Lewis climbs out of the ring a winner. He just got his ass kicked and lost the title shot, but at least he was going back to school. And then there was me…

“Hey, Lewis.”

“What?”

“Do you think your sister likes me?”

“I dunno. Ask her.”

“I did already.”

“What’d she say?”

“Said she already had one asshole in her pants and didn’t need another.”

“Yeah. She likes you.”

And that’s how the movie ended: they rolled the credits; Lewis and me walked off into the sunset—it was the beginnings of a beautiful relationship.

Aileen Doyle gave birth to an 8 lb, 2 oz boy at 5:15 on a miserable, wet Saturday afternoon in the Brooklyn State Hospital: it was 1960. Aileen hadn’t taken a drink in two days, or 39 hours and 17 minutes to be exact. She made a note of it. It was a new record, an accomplishment that she took pride in, and one worth celebrating. Which is what she did. She got drunk some two hours after I came into this world at a bar three blocks away: hospital-issue gown bunched up around her waist, and watery blood running down the insides of her legs. She named me after the cop who took her back to Brooklyn State: Francis Michael. I never had no father to give me his.

Brenda Lee Washington from the Agency had an at-risk injunction order slapped on me as soon as I was born. The Agency had already removed my brother, Danny, because Aileen had dropped him on his head one too many times, and Brenda Lee was worried the same shit would happen to me. But the injunction was never enforced. Aileen and me left Brooklyn State the following morning. The rain had stopped. The forecast predicted it was going to be overcast with intermittent showers, but it didn’t rain again until the following Tuesday, which was just as well, since Aileen never owned an umbrella in her life.

Sometime in the summer of 1967, Aileen stumbled across the living room to answer a knock at the door. Danny was standing out in the hall: a beat-up suitcase on the ground by his feet. He didn’t say what he was doing, or why he was there. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, waiting to be let in. Aileen stared at her firstborn for a long time: her eyes swimming in Jack Daniel’s. Eight years had passed since she’d last seen him. She reached out and mumbled something. Her fingers tightened around the door handle. She tried to close it but lost her balance and banged her head.

“Fuck.”

Aileen stumbled backwards. She reached up and touched her forehead. Her fingers came back bloodied.

“Fuck.”

She staggered back across the living room and disappeared into the kitchen. Danny didn’t move. I stepped up to door and showed him the G.I. Joe I had stolen off the black kid on the third floor.

“Look. It ain’t got no head.”

Danny stared at the headless doll.

“You wanna come in?”

Danny picked up his suitcase and walked into the apartment. And I guess blood being thicker than water is why Aileen never sent Danny back to wherever it was he came from. She made threats, but nothing ever came of it. And whenever Brenda Lee, or someone else from the Agency paid us an unexpected visit, Danny and me just hid.

Danny loved fire and was always setting stuff ablaze. The thing he liked doing most was torching newspapers and then shoving them under parked cars. We crucified that headless G.I. Joe on a telegraph pole and set it on fire; burned all kinds of flies and bees and spiders; even tried to set a cat on fire but gave up when the little fucker scratched us. The other thing about Danny was he didn’t like being touched. Didn’t like making eye contact either. He never did much talking, and when he did, it was usually to me and me only. Danny would say a word or two and then wouldn’t speak again for a month. I counted up all the words he said that first year he came back, and they added up to seventeen: “I ran away cause the man did things to me and the lady pretended it wasn’t happening.”

Danny wouldn’t talk, but he liked to sing. He wasn’t any good at it but it never stopped him. We had this old furry wallpaper in our bedroom that smelled like a wet dog, and Danny would stand with his face pressed up against the paper and sing for hours. I asked him a million times who he was singing to, but he wouldn’t say. And then, one day, when he was humming the theme tune of
The Virginian
, he just came out with it: “Angels.”