Skunk: What was the Lone Ranger’s name though, do you know what
deleted name: I’m just, hang on I know it.
Skunk: No but not, not the actor’s name. The name of the Lone Ranger himself, the the character’s proper name?
deleted name (snapping fingers): John Reid.
drinks
deleted name (shaking his head): God, that’s... okay, so... what do all these people have in common?
pausing briefly to collect these back from some depth of his memory
deleted name: Mrs Leslie, Penny Dreadful, Sugar Finney,
folding down a finger for each, the rhythm of their being spoken serving to prompt each subsequent
deleted name: Gramercy 5, uh... Faye Miller... hang on, hang on
struggling now to remember
Skunk: I mean I
deleted name: Sh sh
holding up one hand, before
deleted name: ..Tony Roberts, and Miss Caswell?
Skunk (shaking his head, without having to even think): No idea, none of, none of these, I don’t think I’ve heard of even one of these.
deleted name: No? Well they were all pseudonyms, not pseudonyms as such, they’re all... aliases of Marilyn Monroe.
Skunk: Which name was itself an alias.
deleted name: Yes, yes correct. Correct. These were, these were names she would use to register in hotels, that kind of thing.
Skunk: How do you, why would you even know all those?
pause
deleted name (shrugs): Oh God no reason, no real reason. Just an exercise? Let’s call it a memory thing.
continuing witless
deleted name: And of course her mother was
stops
Skunk: Her mother was what?
deleted name: Nothing, it it’s nothing.
Skunk (angry): No, no no, her mother was what?
deleted name (emphatic): Nothing.
bending over to collect the bottle of Jack Daniel’s up from off the carpet, understanding that having written himself into a corner his best defence is simply to abandon the pen.

 

 

 

 

Her autumnal morning occurs itself in slow increments, another unseasonably warm day’s sky already another cloudless blue.
She understands how selfish to welcome this fresh sense of relief, even if just for herself, even if only physically comprising too the absence of her hair’s weight in the wake of its recent cutting for the funeral, within which inherent the suggestion of a new beginning, his perhaps having to momentarily piggyback upon her own. She suffers sudden embarrassment to have forgotten albeit momentarily the presence of that new life she is gestating, and of whose gender they remain as yet unaware.
Brother Skunk, exhausted by his grief, she has left asleep upstairs, and she is damn near halfway through her first coffee, remembering something he had said yesterday
Skunk: I held my face up to the sun for the prayer. Maybe the only time you can face God directly for whatever reason is following the burial of your mother.
when the telephone’s ring makes her jump within herself, now crashing across the room to nullify the possibility of his being woken.
cog: Hello, will you accept a call from [...] who is deaf?
finding herself so wrong-footed by the query’s strangeness she fails to catch the profferred name, the attendant upset over-riding her any inclination to ask or have it confirmed.
ache¹: Excuse me?
cog: This is a deaf relay telephone call; I will relay the caller’s words to you, and if you could let me know how you would like to respond I can then type those words out for them to read, and then read their response back to you.
She struggles to comprehend these words’ meaning, already finding herself in the middle of her reply before even fully aware of whatever it is she has just been told.
ache¹: Uh, yes? Uh yeah yeah okay, yes, yes go ahead.
pause
ache¹: Proceed.
the whole scenario’s seeming absurdity so removing her from the context of her being in this particular house at this particular time she cannot even begin to conjure any possible reason for the call itself.
cog (reading): “Hi it’s only me again, how are you? Are you feeling any better? Sorry I have left it for so long this time.”
pause
ache¹, suddenly realising this to be indeed a call for Skunk’s mother, experiences a chill descend and curdle the coffee loose and pooled in her gut.
ache¹: I eh, I I I, I don’t know what ah, she eh, she she she... she died on Saturday, the funeral was just yesterday, what do I, what do I say?
cog: I’m sorry, I’m only able to type what you tell me to, I can’t ehm, I can’t tell you what to actually say.
ache¹ (bluntly): Well, she’s dead, I don’t,
and then almost immediately speaking as if she too is reading off the words
ache¹: “I’m so sorry, I’m her son’s girlfriend. She died on Saturday and the funeral was yesterday. I’m so sorry.”
embarrassed at her lack of that maturity demanded by the moment.
pause
cog (reading): “I am burst into tears at this news.”
pause
cog (reading): “Oh my God.”
pause
cog (reading): “Oh God.”
pause
cog (reading): “Oh my God.”
pause
cog (reading): “I am so sad.”
pause
cog (reading): “I am so, so sad."
pause
cog (reading): “I have to go."
cog: She has now left the call.
prompting ache¹ herself to hang up quickly before having to deal further with any subsequent fallout, the gesture’s inherent violence causing the telephone’s bell to vibrate a high and persistent ringing that only seems to increase in volume; she tightens her grip on the handset, holding it fast to the cradle as if in so doing she might prevent escaping whatever she now perceives it to contain.
She feels herself suffering the flood of minutes, and in the call’s ongoing aftermath, in her subsequent attempt at any comprehension of its entirety, she actively fights her body’s understandable desire to embrace convulsion, still clutching hard to hold the telephone together and too suppress that tremor she can sense erupting amongst her fingerbones.
Unaware of his having risen or his any subsequent movement, the voice startles
Skunk (from the top of the stairs): Who was that?
ache¹: It was...
shaking her head as if waking from a dream
ache¹: It was a deaf woman wanting to speak with your mum.
Skunk (descending rapidly): A, what, a deaf woman on the phone, how does that
ache¹: It’s a, there’s an eh, an interpreter who, they, the deaf woman typed her words and then a middle-person reads them off, then I spoke and she typed my words out for them.
Skunk: Who was it though? Who’d be calling to speak to my mum?
ache¹ (upset): God, Skunk I’m so sorry, I didn’t get the name, it was
Skunk: What, what d’you mean, this, what d’you mean you didn’t get the
ache¹: It was, I was, I was completely... thrown, I’ve never had a call like that before, I didn’t
Skunk: Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.
ache¹: I
Skunk: Seriously? Jesus Christ.
disappearing off-kilter back up the stairs to leave her standing tearful, aware now as she is of the separate elements of the telephone’s plastic shell audibly compacting in the ever-tightening grip of her fist.
She knows the coffee will be cold before retrieving it with her free hand, still she tries it even if just to have this confirmed. Setting down the mug, the inflated pulse booming through her other arm, she takes up one of her E.T. doll’s flaking vinyl hands in her own, saying
ache¹: It’s all happening, this is all happening way too fast.
her pregnancy, this death and its funeral, her own “mother” replaced by his “cowboy”, the spoiled Christmas cake, the attempted comfort of fellatio failed at his bait and switch, and now this consolidate mass of upset and worry tugging at whatever rug upon which she felt her feet to have had at least some little purchase.
ache¹: Am I losing him, do you think? Is that
tipping her head to one side to look at the little doll as if after all these years she is only really seeing him for the first time.
ache¹: “He is afraid. He is totally alone. He is 3 million light years from home.”
and then remembering
ache¹: “You wanna call somebody?"
pause
ache¹: Jesus I do.
remembering now as she speaks to finally release from her grip the telephone, her stiffened fingers offering resistance as their forced unfurling reveals deep in her palm the imprint of the handset’s moulded plastic.
ache¹: I do.

 

 

 

"Multiple old scars present."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not yet established in this new environment to any such degree as would allow her that settled sense of being resident, and thus still making whatever requisite adjustments, she comes to find her every morning subject to the aromatic potpourri of her en suite bathroom’s complimentary scented handwash, shampoo and body lotion,
deleted name (reading): “All the perfumes of Arabia”
as something she can almost taste from out the otherwise inert air, become nauseating from their simple proximity and association.
Theirs a perfume seemingly blended solely to counter the fear and anxiety-induced odour her body exudes across the night and into that moment of her waking, accompaniment to whatever damage she might have visited upon herself throughout those hours, a self-inflicted punishment manifest in guilty hands tearing at that skin covering her not long emptied uterus.
The cleansing ritual begins with the soaking of her fingers in the sink’s warm water, to then swab the nails clean with a cotton bud, absorbing blood from out the underneath of each, now cut purposefully short.
ache¹: Wash your hands, oh wash your hands: you cannot bandage ashes.
Next, she deploys a pair of nail scissors, their blades’ minuscule rust incongruous with the immaculate daily-cleaned state of the surrounding everything else, digging at the lingering residue still caked beneath her fingernails for a frantic and demented quarter hour.
At times the scraping to become almost beyond manic, as if she is perhaps not yet fully conscious enough to register the pain inflicted, still aware enough to imagine exactly what that blood comprised, and in such desperation breaking through to tear into and bleed the tender nail bed itself, the blood now present at its primary source rather than those dregs of her body’s elsewhere, the cleaning an appendix to her grief.
Later and more actively herself, she will again bathe the ache of her bereavement and wonder at the volume of blood contained in... and yet not to think on it, not to ever think on it, fingers to her face
ache¹: antler’s burned, the smell of the blood still.
and then to cradle again her tender belly in its ongoing agony.
ache¹ (again): You cannot bandage ashes.
Still worse, those mornings where she wakes with the fabric of her pyjamas already sealed fast in the blood already dried and scabbed, necessitating the skin’s being broken a second time to expedite its release, and always the pain sounding too from the inside, as if the spirit of whatever she had gestated for even such a short time might have suddenly now determined to counter-mine itself out, a ghost foetus’ frantic clawing with those soft and unformed nails of its own.

 

 

 

 

 

At eight-thirty of a late April morning a well struck golfball cracked an echo through the course’s border trees where Brother Skunk rose awkwardly from his squatting position to wonder just what the hell it was he thought he was doing.
At his feet and just off one of the woodland’s trampled pathways lay a clattered nest of peanut M&Ms, with barely visible in the leafmould some twenty or thirty feet back, another. The one beyond that was out of sight, and so on invisible all the way back to the third floor of the hotel where ache¹ was only now opening her bedroom door.
Skunk imagined himself some manner of fertile toystore poultry, stepping out a course between the trees, periodically discharging himself of the brightly-coloured cargo until permitted rest by an unwound internal mechanism.
Skunk: What the hell am I doing?
Unlike his partner’s, the second golfer’s ball failed to soar and having burped its shallow arc defied momentum to pull up far short of expectation. Skunk smiled, sat down with his back to the nearest tree trunk with the sun in his face silhouetting the leaves green to black, and closed his eyes in prayer.
Skunk (laughing): Remember this, me and this guy, ehm, Johnny, we used to go golfing after, after school every day, well, not every day, but ehm, well, almost every day
speech lazily befitting his calm environs
Skunk: and... We’d, it was about a mile from school to where we lived, he didn’t live, he lived just round the back of my house and eh, we’d run home from, yeah exactly, me running, but we would, we’d run home from school and we’d get our, either we’d... His dad had a locker at the golf club, and eh, we’d either leave our clubs there, our clubs would be there and we’d just run home and get our, we’d get something to eat really quickly, our mums would knock up some food for us and then we’d either, we’d cycle down to the golf club and pick up our clubs, or we’d actually cycle down with our clubs which was always a bit hazardous because they’d be swinging around like mad, but ehm...
He brought out another packet of peanut M&Ms. Biting down hard on the candy shell he felt his mouth fill with a tired peanut flavour that did not appeal to him at all.
Skunk (spitting broken nut and colour): Jesus, M&Ms aren’t breakfast are they?
and was relieved to acknowledge that in one sense at least, the morning’s endeavour had not been a waste.
Skunk: The one really vivid memory I have of me and Johnny is sort of like... We were, when we were golfing and we...
clearing his throat
Skunk: What we used to do was, sometimes we just played eight holes, ehm, we’d play the first four and then cut in and play the last four back but ehm, this wasn’t, this was a, I think this was maybe a Saturday morning we’d gone out to play, but we were coming in, I remember we were coming in the back nine holes and probably somewhere around either fifteen or sixteen we were on the tee and there were a couple of older guys, old, older golfers ehm playing behind us, and I think they must have been on the green when we were on the tee and eh, I, I think ehm
Skunk clambered up and back to the bare dirt track, tipping a few M&Ms into his open hand, the palm deep-patterned with its memory of earth and twig as he moved again through the woods, laying additional deposits to his trail. Another driven golfball punctuated his words with a clean thwack.
Skunk: I can’t remember the exact, it’s a long time ago now but I hit a really poor drive and eh, I mean, it might have been a good drive for me but these old guys that were watching us from the green, you know, they would probably just look at it and think, oh, not, not see it as being relative to the rest of my game, just, you know, seeing it as being a weak drive which is basically what it was, and ehm, Johnny hit another one and we sort of shoved our clubs into our bags a bit disgruntled and headed off down the fairway and these old, one of these old golfers shouted at us “SWEAR AT IT BOYS. IT HELPS”, you know, as if this would, it wouldn’t improve our golf any but it would, it would make us feel better about having hit such poor drives, so eh, we thought this was pretty funny and we just kept on walking and then Johnny just bellowed out “FUUUUUCK!” like that, and that was it, we just walked down until we came to our balls, you know, Johnny just screaming out these swearwords, and, I mean, I don’t know what they thought about it, but... You don’t really think of anybody listening to you on a golf course, even when there’s people there it seems like quite an empty place, probably because of the distance between the people, you
hoking down into his pocket for more sweets and suddenly realising that the nearly empty packet he held in his hand was in fact the last.
Skunk: Oh Jesus, there’s not going to be enough of these is there?
but his Uncle Jesus knew a rhetorical question when he heard one, and let it go.