Despite
his best efforts to the contrary, Brother Skunk is still frustratingly sober
when they leave the restaurant, ache1 a little less so.
ache1:
Why the fuck would anyone make a coat
without buttons?
pulling
the flapping black fabric tight around her, her hand catching the satchel strap
diagonal across her body.
ache1:
And who, tell me, precisely who else would
be dumb enough to actually buy such an impractical... garment?
Her
suggestion of a taxi back to his late mother’s now empty house Skunk interrupts
with
Skunk:
There’s a, somewhere near here, just... Jesus Jesus Christ. Follow me.
his
reeling frame the faulty sextant by which she navigates all her own uprights, and
horizontals.
Crossing
the road and moving on toward the beach, the generic roar of waves begins in
its increasing proximity to generate audible detail.
ache1 (laughing):
Tell me we are not going swimming, it’s November.
and
then responding to his silence,
ache1:
Okay, I will tell you this right now, we are not going swimming. Skunk!
Skunk
is visibly reaching back into his past for something, that one thing as will sustain
him upright, while even at the same time trying to level himself senseless to
it all and betrayed by a bloodflow simply refusing the alcohol as a body might
reject a donated organ or a bride her undesired suitor, filtering it as waste
direct to its own sluice.
ache1:
It’s just a personal thing of mine: no swimming in the sea at night. In
November.
Skunk
(unhearing, digging into the pocket of his Levi’s): Do you have, how much
change do you have on you?
ache1:
What, nothing, I just, didn’t I just leave
all my change as the tip?
Rounding
the corner, with the sea directly ahead and vast and invisible in the dark
beyond this short stretch of road, they come upon a pocket of shops remote from the town centre, on the wall between two of which Skunk encounters
only disappointment, what he had hoped to find not there.
He
stands shrunk within this new muted defeat, one finger still repeatedly
pointing at the empty sandstone,
Skunk:
Of course. How else could it be?
and
still jabbing at the air turns to ache1
Skunk:
How could it be other?
His
shoulders rise briefly on the inhalation, to then sink whole inches below that previous
horizontal as the breath collapses on out.
Skunk:
This, there used to be a a chocolate machine... on the, on the wall right here...
with
only the remnant fixture holes bored deep into the stone surface now testament to its ever having existed at all.
Skunk:
Chocolate bars. This was where you came if you, if you stayed over at a friend’s
house, if you were at an all-night party or something. It wasn’t like we were
going down there at break-time at school but, if you were out at night, three
in the morning, you’d come here, you know, with twenty pence or something,
whatever, whatever it cost. And these chocolate bars, you couldn’t get ‘em in
the, they were, I seem to remember they were like a, were they Nestle Rice
Crunch, or some-, I think there was a range but that’s the one I used to get, a
kind of, like ehm, Rice Krispies in a, in in, I don’t know what the hell it was
With
both hands now flat upon the sandstone, he leans his face in to the rough
texture, placing one cheek close as if listening to hear anything as might echo
back to him from off those ghosts he once had known.
Skunk:
And this here,
stepping
back, pointing now at the gift shop adjacent,
Skunk:
this was, one of, was a little second-hand bookshop. And it’s that thing, you
know, when you’re... at... school, when you’re, that age,
laughing
Skunk:
Pfft, you are that age
sighs
Skunk:
This was the shop we used to go to to get all of those books... that, either
you never read or you read and... they just passed through you, I mean these
things left no, for me, anyway, I I,
you know, maybe it was different for my friends but for me these things left no
residue, at all, and, it was always uh... Sartre, Hesse and uh... Camus, that
was his name, that was the other guy, and they were the, the Holy Trinity of this stuff. And you had to read these books, right? Everybody read them, probably at
that age te-, you know, I mean, maybe that’s the age you’re supposed to be when
you read this stuff, I don’t know. It didn’t mean anything to me. I think the
thing is to, to say that you’ve read them rather than anything else. It was almost as if eh...
sighs
Skunk:
It’s that desperation to establish for yourse-, any kind of intellectual
credentials. But... for me, it was almost as if the words were, even as I w-,
the words were disappearing
laughs
Skunk:
I mean they may as well have been disappearing even before I got to them, ehm,
overtaken
as he speaks by those same ghosts of himself, oblivious to all this future.
