The setting is familiar, this being one of those very rooms in which her own fitful and elusive sanity had finally abandoned her, absconding with all she had ever known of language.

Skunk: This is unfamiliar… and this is not me.

For months now she has watched her still-living son navigate the same furniture and collapse upon the same carpet, recognising in him an exact echo of that demented self from which she was annulled only by death; watched him with restored to her that maternal concern forfeited in life to madness. She is herself again whole, undamaged if no less silent than through those final months alive.

Her belief in his current state as reactive, as not anything to which (at least on the distaff) he might be heir, is devout. Irrefutably guiltless still she knows too it is the paradigm of his response as defines that degree to which he is afflicted by patrimonial damnation, a blight unpredictably erupting in their successive generations, that common ground scorched by an awful lightning now scorched again.

During these months of what would be in any lexicon an incarceration, she is witness to the one child she had successfully placed upon the earth wasting himself away in relentless and measured pursuit of that drunk to deaden all, his memory proving to be the sole intractable factor from which even in this condition he cannot remove himself.

Pacing the room’s length and back, his bearing that of someone pretending not to notice the pain caused them by such activity, he repeatedly limps past the low coffee table upon which sits a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, today accompanied by two shotglasses rather than his habitual one.

Though his ruined scalp is somewhat calmed, perpetually absent any requisite nutrient his body naturally continues its slow atrophy, the empty belly distended by malnourishment almost suggests he carries within himself some phantom of the lost child. His left eye is bright with the blood of its broken veins, and weeping from the recently administered eyedrops. His bones give visible suck at their covering of increasingly colourless flesh, which skin is itself a patchwork of scratches; he is feeding himself wholesale to that very grief by which he is simultaneously sustained.

She now listens to his words as once, before she lost their use, he had listened to her own, finding them bearable only in that passivity relative to the actual wounding he carries out upon himself.

His talk is damn near constant, its occasional coherence exclusive to the logic of what appears a single, sustained, and unceasing performance by which he is so engaged he will, in the sobriety he eventually attains, struggle to determine the actuality of those individual moments unique to so many variant narratives.

This is the terminal and absolute collapse of that half-year’s grace where she had witnessed his grief of her tempered by the knowledge that hope, however slowly, had been crawling toward him from out the coming months.

For that bereavement of which she was the subject, she understands there had at least been some provision; accustomed as he was to witnessing her lifeless approximation mute in its hospital bed, a degree of that intensity of sentiment had gradually ossified into a kind of pre-grief, itself already partly spent by the moment of her actual passing. But if she imagined her own death a mere dummy run for what to him would constitute the real thing, she was wrong; nothing could have ever prepared him for nor served as prelude to that by which he had been ambushed not six months later.

Suddenly, he stops walking and places the heel of his left palm tight to his eye.

Skunk: Help me.

Lacking corporeal form she cannot intervene, the regret wrung from this one fact causing her to forever rage at the constraining parentheses of whatever form it is in which she finds herself to now exist.

Skunk: No. No no NO! HELP me. I need help.

His voice having collapsed beneath the carrying of these words, Brother Skunk now seems himself almost surprised at the desperate anger with which it is revived, panting as he shouts

Skunk: I need HELP!

slapping his palm flat and hard to the wallpaper. He tries to bring his erratic breathing back within control.

Skunk: Inasmuch as I am the man asking, I need help.

She is left wondering again at his Jesus’ hesitation to acknowledge even one of these exhaustive prayers to which she has herself by now become accustomed.

Skunk: The main problem is that everyone is dead. Everyone is dead

The subject is not unfamiliar, although on this occasion each of his pauses suggests to her a gathering of thoughts, that this is today perhaps a more measured appraisal of his bereavement and therefore signals potential progress.

Skunk: I am grieving, but I can’t... It’s almost a year since my mum died, and I can’t, I can’t... I don’t have a

In the ensuing silence, the only sound is that of his fingers dancing madly upon his naked knees.

Skunk: The more time passes it just seems the worse it gets. I know I should be, I should, it should be getting easier to ehmmmm, to, to

At such moments, when despite his focus he is albeit briefly lost in the language, she is more able to see him again as the son she knew, and too not just her son but a boy, any boy, engaged in his struggle to determine the world.

Skunk: I don’t know, no, it shouldn’t have been so bad, really. Mum had been, she’d been kind of dead for a long time, so

ruminating on her collapse within the confined logic of his own. There is truth to this, the degree of which he cannot know. Whatever strength she ever had she had expended across whatever length of time it had taken her to see him only to that first glimmer of independence she felt might bear his weight, her trauma suppressed and sublimated into a maternity she always understood as finite, indeed could only ever have persevered with knowing it as such, lacking as she did the psychological stamina for the longer haul. And with him gone she was permitted the grace of drifting just a little on the momentum she had established throughout his childhood and adolescence, until that reprieve too fell away.

Skunk: She, she was in a, she was looked after, she didn’t talk or, I think she just, it was as if she, she couldn’t function anymore, and she just had to be looked after. All the time. So I don’t think it should have been so difficult when she died.

There is nothing here with which she is not already familiar, each day of this summer seeming to have followed a routine, at least of sorts, and thus left less inclined to notice such, she just at this moment comprehends him to be dressed in something other than the habitual Levi’s: today he wears black shorts and a bright yellow short-sleeved shirt, its stomach circled with a black vandyke.

Skunk: Well I had to do it. There wasn’t anybody else. I mean, I don’t think the neighbours... It was almost a, it wasn’t, it didn’t... What it was was eh, she’d been in hospital before, and and then she got out and things seemed to be, you know, I really thought she’d come through and...

When he speaks of these things, they occur to her less as memories than as something once heard spoken of by others, as if she could only passively place herself within her own history; with Skunk in such current prolonged drunks, she would have to doubt his every offered truth.

Skunk: Oh there were lots of things, whole pile of them. You ever, you know that thing... Actually, this is something that I used to love, that thing where say you’re watching a film with someone, or anything on tv really

These interstitial responses, distractingly audible only to himself, convince her his words on this occasion form no prayer, their context instead perhaps similar to the way each nightly dream will source itself, at least in part, from the preceding day. Thus the person here addressed is, she does not doubt, a persistent resonance from out his past. Even having already borne witness to some of his protracted hallucinant imaginings, she could not ever have situated him in that neighbourhood currently providing his delirium a location.

Skunk (now laughing oddly): Well, maybe not. But I used to love that thing of having to leave the room for whatever reason, say you need to go to the toilet, or the telephone goes, whatever, and then when you come back you get to ask the person in the room what’s been going on in your absence, and they quickly fill you in on whatever, you know, the little plot developments, or who’s done what while you were away. And I used to do that when I visited my mum at home, you know, watching tv and stuff. But ehm... I ehm... I noticed that if I was

He coughs to clear his throat,

Skunk: I noticed that if I was gone to the toilet for

again covering his eye with the cool skin of his palm.

Skunk: If it was obvious I’d been gone longer than for just to take a piss, and when I came back downstairs, mum would always go... You know, instead of me coming back down and asking mum what had been happening in the film or whatever, she’d always say, well, she would go up to the toilet as well, after me. And that happened too often for me to think, it wasn’t just a case of, some kind of trigger-suggestion that she... I knew, I knew she was going up there and sitting on the toilet and, knowing I’d just been on the toilet... I can’t explain it, and it’s one of those things you instinctively understand or you don’t. And I don’t think any amount of analysis could make you see that

and how might she have ever communicated such, that intimate residual sense of him in the warmed plastic, her son. Her son, that lone pulse by which she would be survived. He talks on, of things she knows and does not know.

Skunk: Oh Jesus, loads. One time she was having some cornflakes when I came down to breakfast, and yet when I went to get mine I found the milk was off. And I mean, it wasn’t just on the turn, I mean it was actually rancid. And another thing was she started to... Ever since I was a kid my mum has hated any tv programme or film she saw that had that, you know when one actor plays two parts? It used to happen in “Star Trek” when there’d be a sort of replication thing going on, and William Shatner would play not only Captain Kirk, but also an evil Kirk as well.

Instinctively she flinches at the connection, these initial words enough to disappear those ongoing others, occurring to her first as smell; in that minuscule immeasurable instant before hearing determines knowing there is the sense of something already burnt, and too a texture to that inhaled breath held in her mouth, the powdered dryness of chipped plaster. She pulls her clenched fists tight to her groin and stares down at the carpet between her feet.

Skunk: But you know if I was at home, and that kind of thing was on, it as almost like mum would have some sort of fit, and I’d have to get her to bed and just...

Knowing the meaning of these words, she is conscious too of equally not knowing their meaning. She is reminded of that facility whereby even within a dream, she might make mental notes to investigate those circumstances of the dream when she is no longer dreaming, and those notes still part of the dream itself. She only now comprehends she can no longer hear his voice because he is no longer talking, until

Skunk: I’m dried out. I need something to drink. Do I get something to drink included in my five cents?

at which she raises her face. Five cents? That they had never really travelled, neither together nor apart, suggests to her he may have lost himself inside some subconscious America, exchanging notional currency for the very real alcohol he already owns, and whatever else he believes himself to buy. With both hands inside the yellow polo shirt, he raises its belly’s black zigzag to blot at the sweat breaking out upon his face.

Skunk (sucking odd noises from out the gumwalls of his mouth): Thank you. Is it just me, or does this feel like the hottest day of the year?

She has already lost count of how many shotglasses he has filled and emptied, marking instead the bottle’s volume of whiskey as it creeps down into and then out from underneath the familiar label. She watches him attempt again the discipline of his breath, a repeated pantomime of self-control in which it is clear he has little real faith. Again, time surrounds them both.

Skunk: I don’t know, I get, sometimes I start to feel a, I panic, and that’s when things get, you know, I lose any

The manner in which he now relinquishes his glass embodies the exact levelled tension as those movements supposed across the surface of a Ouija board, as if some otherwordly governance is forcibly and against his wish planting the drink back down upon the tabletop.

Skunk (his empty fingers climbing each side of his skull, then filling themselves with what remains of his hair): Mmhm. Well... I don’t, I can’t allow myself to look at it too closely

With a sudden grab he seems to almost slap the empty glass into his hand, clutching it up in his fist and crashing it against alternate temples. Veins break visibly within the skinny flesh of his head, and release their colours.

Skunk: but I, you know, it just seems to me that God, before my mum was born, God mapped out a life for her with, you know he’d have a chart or a grid or something and he’d be plotting all these points on it with, say ehm, okay, you’ll fall in love here, really young, and this’ll be the man you marry, and you’ll have a little boy, and then you’ll have twins,

She experiences a sudden and violent sense of lost focus, everything now too near or too remote to be perceived with any clarity.

Mother (with small involuntary movements of her head): You cannot know this. You cannot know this.

repeating these words over and again that she might lose her sense of them, hoping thus to dispel her blindness and restore to her perception its accustomed order, confirming for herself the balance between what he knows and cannot know, his knowledge and its lack.

Such upset is exacerbated by the realisation that when she again registers his speaking it is as if she has lost no time at all in wonder, knowing neither pause nor breath to exist between his words, and yet too she knows for fact she has been thinking this for years, decades, forever.

Skunk: and you’ll be a lovely family and and, but then someone else got hold of that of that chart or graph and just flipped the whole thing over, so all the co-ordinates instead of heading up towards

plotting with the shotglass each co-ordinate of her downward trajectory through the unfocussed and empty air before his face,

Skunk: the whole thing now

passing the glass between hands

Skunk: is over here, or even down here, so now you’ve got tragedy here, here, aaaand here. Oh, and here as well. And that’s what, that’s my mum’s life, and that’s what I walked out from, that’s my life too. All that, I’m part of that too, and that’s

Even before he speaks, before he can respond to whatever words he alone can hear, she witnesses dissent unmistakably writ within his eyes.

Skunk: I don’t see it like that, I don’t see it like that at all. I can’t see it like that.

This time his filling both little glasses leaves the bottle damn near empty.

Skunk: My girlfriend. She ehm, she was pregnant, and she died with the baby. The baby died. It didn’t...

These words seem drawn from him as actual substance, and depleted by the exact mass of their creation he collapses back in upon himself; the rhythm he imposes upon his breath does not match those movements of his body dictated by this same breathing.

Skunk: Can I tell you a joke? Do you want to hear a joke? It’s not, I think it’s relevant.

Suddenly she comes aware of hearing a woman’s voice, the words being borne on little more than a gritty whisper of sickness

cog: Yes, I suppose we should say goodbye because we probably will never see each other again.

and then gone, with nothing to convince her that this voice was not her own.

Skunk: Oh nothing, nothing that’s... I can... Okay. Once upon a time there was a beautiful woman, and she lived in a beautiful house, but the

This may not be anything she wants to hear, knowing too she may not be that woman of whom he speaks.

Skunk: Shush! It’s a joke, okay? Anyway, she lived in this beautiful house, but the only problem was that sometimes when she was going around the house, which was rather large, she would smell a terrible smell, a really noxious odour the source of which she never could quite locate.

Mother: No. No.

Skunk: Anyway, one day she decided that since the house would be perfect without this foul stink, she decided she would find it and purge it, and then the house would be, you know, perfect.

She shakes her face violently,

Mother: No. No.

then clutching her head in both hands crosses the room to where she can place her cheek flat against the textured wallpaper, and focus instead on the familiar finger-thick circular stain of dried coffee.

Skunk: So she spent a whole day going through every room of the house, from top to bottom, from way up in the attic to way down low in the basement, even out in the garage

She begins to force one finger repeatedly round and around the outline; his words move into her hearing, and on out again.

Skunk: Whatever, I say garage myself, but... “even out in the garage” if you must, but she still couldn’t find where the smell was coming from. And then finally, just when she was about to give up, she happened upon a door she’d never noticed before, so she opened it, and behind the door was just just a, she could see a little way in, and it looked like a long and narrow room, but it was very very dark and she couldn’t really see what she was doing, but the smell! Oh, the smell. So she knew that this was the cause of all her worries.

Mother: But not you, Skunk. Not you. It isn’t you. It isn’t you.

Skunk: She tried to feel her way along the walls, but she was afraid of how dark it was, so what she did was she went and got herself some matches, and then went back to this dark room to

praying each of these interjections to which he feels compelled to respond will be the one that suspends this line of thought.

Skunk (sighing): That’s as maybe, but it does have a punchline, believe me.

Here a notional convergence of thoughts in the cadence of the exchange almost convinces her she herself is the addressed presence, allowing her too to know she is not.

Skunk: Thank you. So, she returns to this black room where she knows this toxic stench is coming from, and standing a few feet inside the doorway, just beyond the limit of visibility, she strikes one of the matches, but before she can even hold it up there is a tremendous explosion, and the next thing she knows she is high in the branches of a tree on the other side of the street and looking down on what’s left of her house which is now no more than a pile of burning rubble, and she says, (cue drumroll), she says “Whew! Looks like I got out of there just in time!”

When by chance he now looks directly at or through that very place from which she watches him in horror, it is with his father’s face.

Skunk: That’s about it, I think. That’s what I think about, anyway, when I think about, about...

The hair is raised straight upon his bare arms like skinny black pins puncturing the flesh from the inside out, and when he pinches at the skin of his forehead he does so with such force as induces a series of intense red weals.

Skunk: I lost them both, just in that one, that was it, gone. You know, you have this idea that, a vision that moves into, that stretches way beyond, and then... that’s it.

She feels the room imbued with terrific ugliness, as if the quality of the actual light itself has come sick. Her own breathing or what she understands as such, whatever tidal essence of the self still pertains, assumes the exact arrhythmic measure of her son’s.

Skunk: I can’t say. How can I say? How could I tell you that? You know, I don’t even know if I value this at all. It’s not... You, where you’re, what I’m talking about is a commitment to something that, there’s just no way you could know.

Now in an echo of her own earlier gesture, he clamps his hands to fists and holds them between his knees.

Skunk: Okay okay. Say ehm...

clearly struggling to conjure some better connection between himself and that figment to whom he speaks.

Skunk: Imagine you’ve spent a whole day building some little model, say a, something really intricate like a, one of those old ships with all the rigging and the sails and everything. You’ve got all the pieces out and the instructions, and you build the whole thing up from scratch, and all the rigging and then you paint it all up and eh, you know, you mount it on a little stand and make a plaque for it and then just when you’re standing there admiring what you’ve done, your brother comes in and accidentally, or even, no, say he deliberately swats it with his blanket and it falls to the floor and smashes into tiny fragments. You know, that’s it. There’s your day’s work.

The brother, the blanket: even these details disappear for her; for him to even mention them by name would serve her no purpose, not ever having known those names, or having known them only once as the result of receiving from him some book of comic strips for either birthday or Christmas, and even then known only in the moment’s duration of its reading, following which they would remain forever unremembered.

Skunk: That’s exactly what I’m saying. Imagine what it’s like to spend eight or nine months making something, and then

Mother: Oh dear God no, dear God help me. Help me now.

forcibly reminding herself that she does now know what she knows, and has done these months; here she is not the subject of her own concern.

Skunk: No, but I am selfish enough to feel that way at least in part. I can’t imagine what it’s like to waitaminute waitaminute, what do you mean selfish? There is only me.

Mother: I am not the subject of my own concern.

Skunk: That’s as may be, but then I can still see what, for those parents who lose a child when it’s grown, when it’s your age

his voice now rising wildly upon this utterance into some strange new register

Skunk: or even older, you know, fifteen or sixteen, all that time spent, everything you did just to get someone, to create them in the first place, and then everything that has to be done just to get them to that point and then that’s all gone. How do you start again? That’s my question. I think that really is what I’m looking for. How can I start again? You know, what if that was your last chance to have a child, if you were at an age that dictated this was your final shot at it, and then years later your child dies or is killed, whatever, you know...

She finds herself less concerned with his words than that recognisably manic delivery in which they are couched, one she knows to precede each furious wounding; she wills him only to regain himself within the parameters of living.

Skunk: Well, I just think it’s kind of hard to see it that way. I, I see the loss in terms of, but it’s not that, I can’t

His eyes seem to have become loose inside his head. She is startled to see him grab out at the little table with both hands, screaming

Skunk: Stop, STOP IT SLIDING! STOP IT SLIDING!

Unaware of anything they might conceal, she watches his fingers as they scratch at the scrawny forearm, thinking him only to ease that perpetual itch of his healing wounds. Behind his hand the flesh suddenly falls apart as if unzipped, the split inner muscle just briefly visible before he grips wincing at the skin.

Against this she shuts her eyes so tightly as to burst colours bright across the darkness, re-opening them eventually to find the familiar furniture now empty of her son, who is gone.