His
grief is near-Biblical in its length and profound intensity, extending from the
death itself (her subsequent cremation and his return flight home) and on out
through the summer and early autumn until the arrival at the house of a
second-hand children’s paperback.
Brother
Skunk’s drinking in earnest is only partially in response to his bereavement,
to the actuality of not only discovering himself alone in the wake of the
deaths of both woman and child, but also his participation in the physical
disposal of one of those bodies (the other to be ever unseen); also too a
continuation of the adopted anaesthetic enabling him to board the homebound
aeroplane; the choice to endure this intoxicated obliteration of consciousness
in lieu of simple sleep.
Mere
days into such routine, the walls of his mother’s house begin witness to his
crippled collapse at any hour, the random crawl down the walking stick and into
the carpet for there is no strength found in a steady diet of Jack Daniel’s and
M&Ms; his excrement is reduced to a pale and formless sludge requiring
little effort to expel. Something bilious takes root deep at the back of his
throat, his mouth now constantly aflood with a second foulness not his own
refusing to be subdued by antacids and mouthwash when he can be bothered, or
even plain spat from out when he cannot. His anguish, its need for palpable
retribution, compels him to the tearing from out his head whole fistsful of
hair. and the subsequent worrying of the thick scabs that form in its absence.
The
terrifying ferocity of abuse meted out upon his left arm.
On
two occasions his neighbours have recourse to the summoning of the police, the
second of which call-outs prompted by Brother Skunk’s sorrowful bellowing
Skunk:
ELOI! ELOI! LAMA SABACTHANI!
being
an echo of his Uncle Jesus’ ninth-hour howl of doubt from the cross, to the God
by whom he feels himself forsaken.
