He
sits on the floor with his back to the wall, his legs stretched out before him
and the bottle empty between his knees. He will join his pregnant girlfriend in
the bed in a few minutes, at the culmination and amen to his drunken prayer.
Skunk:
Hooo Lord. Remember those eh, those little, remember when it was raining last
week and the eh, I saw those little girls? Remember that? And eh
coughs
loudly, and then remembering ache1 there in the bed, he covers his
mouth tightly with the palm of his hand before coughing again.
Skunk:
It was, the rain was almost horizontal. I was changing the window display or
something, or I was up at the till, I must have been changing the window and
eh... Anyway eh, this morning I was getting some orange juice at the shop, I was
coming back from that and eh when I was coming back, I realised I was behind
those, it was the same two little girls, well, last week I didn’t know if they
were girls or boys or, you know, but... It turns out that they’re two little
girls, lovely little red-haired girls, twins, and ehm, the eh, the path down
the, the pavement down the side of the shop, it’s on a slope, but the
landscaping, the garden area eh, it kind of stays straight so, you know, one
section’s going down and the other section’s staying level so there’s this kind
of discrepancy between the two levels, and the little girls, probably it’s a
routine or something by now but
coughs
again
Skunk:
they ehm, they went, they climbed up on this sort of slated edging to the
landscaping and they walked along there and they stood at the end of it and
they were with their I assume it was their dad and they waited there for him to
catch up, they’d run on ahead and run along this thing, so they were up on a
bit of a height from him and eh, he came along and obviously it’s a sort of
daily routine for them by now because he took one of the girls hands in one
hand and, you know, sort of lifted her down and then he reached with his other
hand and got the other little girl and he lifted her down as well, and then
they walked off, you know, the three of them, hand-in-hand like that, and... I
think maybe when I saw that eh, you know, the whole twins thing, the first
thing I felt... I felt for, it was my mum and... but eh I felt, I felt, it
wasn’t a bad thing I felt, it was, I felt really... I felt positive about this
whole thing, that rather than thinking about disasters and eh, the nightmare of
it all, and the pain, the worry and that side of things, I suddenly felt that
this is okay, this is right, and I think maybe we weally rill, maybe we really
will have a beautiful child, that it doesn’t have to be a tragedy.
There’s no, there’s no basis for that, just my worries and my own history, but
it doesn’t have to be, this doesn’t have to be a tragedy. This could really...
be our... I don’t know, this is...
falling
asleep right there on the floor, still propped against the wall.
