forward with a loud clunk. You looked for the images hidden in the beam of light overhead. Just light, until it landed on the big screen showing the last of the ads. You took a couple of slugs from the bottle and then carefully held it on the ground between your feet. Cigarette unwrapped from its toilet paper and examined for cracks, you sparked a match off the back of a seat. It took, first strike, as if it had been waiting for you all along. You were back, caught up again with the smoke and the heady rush.
Betty’s round body appeared, naked, beautiful, a lover between her open legs. The great cries of pleasure coming off the screen sent one couple scurrying off in search of a refund. You sat with your head tilted to the dark, every inch of her known to you, frame by frame. You missed some of the words, but just bits here and there, it didn’t matter. You understood he loved her, right up to the end, even when he covered her face with a pillow and held it there until she died.
The credits rolled, but you didn’t move. You were drenched with feeling. You didn’t move, not when the houselights were pushed to full beam; even the aggression of the cleaner didn’t rouse you. It was not until the empty bottle dropped from your fingers and rolled to a stop that you stood.
The lobby was bright, unfamiliar. You saw the old woman in the ruffled shirt who had taken your stub. When you held her hand in yours, it felt unbearably soft.
“Thank you,” you say.
“All right, get home safe now, love. Jimmy?” she called out. A fat man in a shiny dark suit had an arm around you. He had a drift of dandruff across his shoulder, but you didn’t say anything.
“Good man,” he says. “Good man, this way,” and his arm felt nice as he led you outside. You were planted along the dark quays, with the river on one side and, on the other, bodies escaping Saturday night on the last bus.
You decided to walk. It was dangerous, you knew that, but you wanted the chance of seeing the girls who walked along the canal. The streets looked the same, and you lost your way more than once, until you finally met the slow-moving water. Cars crept by and sometimes stopped and waited for the girls’ heels to crackle to life. They would lean across the glass and talk low and get in and get out and wrinkle like wrapping paper on Saint Stephen’s Day.
“You looking for company, love? Then what are you looking at?” one of them says. “Jaysus, your ma know you’re out?” She laughed, and her lips rolled back tight across her teeth, her skin painted and rough as calf’s leather. A car slowed but wouldn’t stop. She was annoyed then. “Here, young fella, fuck off and leave me work,” she says, watching the car disappear like a wish.
“I’m sorry,” you say. She looked at you, and with no hurry she pulled the string of her handbag across her shoulder and walked, joining some other girls who stood smoking by a bench. She lit a cigarette off the burning tip of another.
You sat on a bench farther along the canal, listless, dull. Ex-
hausted, you thought of the long walk home. Your head spun and your eyelids began to droop. If you didn’t open them, you knew you’d be sick. And then your head lurched to one side and you were.
The footpath rolled out in front of you. Your own feet on it, one took the lead, then the other, endless. Sometimes a car passed, sometimes leaves scraped together in the wind, but you didn’t look up. When you thought of her, she was sleeping, in her warm bed, surrounded by clean sheets and soft pillows, in a perfect room, in a perfect house on Montpelier Parade.
It was like a dream, that’s how you’d remember the four or five miles you walked to deliver yourself to her doorstep. You banged on her door with your fist and called to her, “Missus.” It was loud. It felt good. “Missus.” You roared until your voice went hoarse with the relief. A light went on upstairs, and there was movement beyond the heavy door.
“Who the bloody hell is that?” she says. “I’ll call the guards.”
“It’s me,” you say. “Me, you got the wine for.”
Silence, and then a key moved in the latch and the door opened. She stood there, light thrown around her; you could feel it on your own face, and you could feel your eyes squint.
“You’re joking, you have to be joking. Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“No,” you say. “I’m sorry.”
“Christ, I knew I shouldn’t have bought it. I knew,” she says. It was mostly for herself. She leaned her forehead to the edge of the door.
“What do you want? What? Because I’m about to call your father,” she says.
“I want—I was at the pictures, and it started me thinking.”
She looked at you, confused. She was wearing the same robe, pulled in a tight knot across her waist.
“Why are you here?” she says, her voice pouring in and extinguishing you. On the long walk you’d had it, an idea, a thousand gorgeous things to tell her, but now, as you looked shyly down, every one left you, and even the lit cigarette you thought you held was gone.
“I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have.” Your foot was already feeling for the first step as you began to back away.
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“I’m so sorry, I wanted to . . . Thanks, thanks for the wine, it was the good wine. I noticed that.” She came forward, and her face fell into shadow, and you were standing at the base of the steps and could no longer see how she looked at you.
“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry,” you say again before you panicked and ran.
“Wait.” She called after you once, then stood there a moment, pulling her robe around her. You saw from your hiding place beyond the wall as she stepped back inside the house, turning once before she closed the door.
9
Get him, get him!” You were running as fast as you could through the brick lane at the back of the bicycle shed. You were fast, impervious to the uneven tarmac. You didn’t dare look back to the prefect chasing you. Graeme, that was his name. Graeme something. He wore a cricket jumper. He was tall and had shy, sandy eyebrows. He’d been waiting for you, hidden inside the tuck shop, where he had a clear view into the shed.
He may have been there for hours, hunkered low to the floor, and all the while you sat through a class, both of you measuring the lazy strokes of a clock. He had had the thought of marching you roughly to the principal’s office. There he could detail the minutes of your crimes and stand proudly, having prevented them.
Before the bell at eleven you’d left the classroom. Your shirt covered a small vise grip, and there were pliers jammed under your belt: you needed a front derailleur. It was one piece of hundreds that made up a bicycle, the last piece. You had to break the chain to remove it; smashing it would be quicker, but you hadn’t smashed it. Instead you’d found the release clip, removed the chain, then the derailleur, and reattached the chain. At least the bike still would work, unlike when you stole a wheel and later had to walk past a student in tears dragging the misshapen frame behind him.
It was a ten-speed Raleigh, blue. You’d seen it that morning the second time you circled past, at close to nine, when the shed had begun to overflow, bicycles littered this way and that. You took the pliers from under your belt; they had been painfully pressing cold into your skin, and you were sure they would leave a mark.
That’s how the prefect wanted you, your hands covered in oil, tool clasped tight, bolts one by one inside your pocket, bent defenseless over the now-mutilated mechanics. He waited.
You felt none of that, how he must have thought, I’ll let him get a little further, I’ll let him settle in, I’ll get him, all right. You sensed nothing, even when he’d crept a few feet from you, and it was only when a pebble, dislodged by his foot, skittered quickly toward you that you turned in time to see his raised hand over your shoulder, collapsing your body like a broken spring across the frame.
You pushed back against him, but he had hold of