GERALDINE
I moved into a house on Eglantine Avenue, having lived on Sandy Row. Not that far to move. One time in the new house, blood started pouring down the walls – I had taken six e’s. That was too many. I didn’t noticed any effects at first. I kept taking them until something happened; what happened was blood.
Billy, my friend, was an odd kind of creature. He seemed to be deaf; he didn’t hear what was said to him. Sometimes, though, he seemed to hear perfectly well. It depended on when it suited him. Well, not entirely. Sometimes it seemed that he really was deaf and dumb. He was a difficult boy to understand.
I met Billy in a nightclub; we danced, everyone was dancing. He seemed to want to come home with me afterwards. That seemed harmless; he said he was gay, and so he seemed to be. From that time on he spent more time with me, in my room or going to clubs, than he spent with anyone else, anywhere else. That was fine; I didn’t mind.
It was at a nightclub that I took the e’s. A friend of mine bought some from a guy at the bar. Someone should have told me that they take a while to start working. Everything in the nightclub became very strange – I enjoyed it, but it was strange. When I got home it stopped being enjoyable. I stood in that empty, cold livingroom, at 4 am, wondering what was going on, where I was, and big droplets of blood came out of the walls as big as balloons. I couldn’t sleep all night, tossing and turning and getting up and walking around my room and thinking about the blood.
I was sitting in my room. Someone knocked on the door. I opened it. It was that middle-aged guy I’d met in a nightclub the week before.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘A guy downstairs let me in and told me your room was at the top. He said he thought you were in.’
‘Oh?’
I was thinking, so what the hell do you want? But I said: ‘Oh. So how are you?’
He sat down and told me all about his wife.
At the nightclub, when I met him, he seemed like quite a moody guy. He was pudgy and balding, although his hair was neat and brown. He danced with me and my girl friends, not particularly well. He bought us all drinks so we talked and danced. We shared a taxi home; he paid for it, then he went on to wherever he was going.
Three days later he turned up at the house.
‘Geraldine, what do you think your life is for?’
‘What is my life for?’ What kind of question was that?
‘My wife hates me. She won’t talk to me any more. My job, my wife, the taxes, the house …’
He’d go on and on like this, telling me everything that was wrong with his life. I don’t know why he’d chosen me to reveal all this stuff to. I nodded and said how awful it was for him. He kept on coming over every week, at random times – one time I walked into my room and he was sitting there waiting for me. He could have been waiting for an hour for all I knew. I didn’t mind that much, but it was my room, and Billy’s. Billy didn’t like him and usually stayed away when the old guy was around.
‘Billy, give me that comb. That’s your comb there. Not yours. That’s yours. No, you don’t understand.’
Billy typically treated everything that belonged to me as belonging to both of us. He treated his own things as if they were mine as well, but I didn’t really want any of his things. Sometimes I think that he knew that. He always borrowed money off me, either pretending or not pretending to be helpless. Needing money for a taxi to God knows where; needing money for a takeaway; needing new shampoo; needing this, that and the other. I gave him the money sometimes and sometimes I didn’t. He’d throw a strop or else didn’t seem to care or even remember what he’d asked for a few minutes before. He was an odd kind of boy.
Ma called round at weekends, sometimes drunk. I put her up on the sofa on the worst occasion, where she slept all the next day, not even realising that the other housemates were trying to talk and have a fry in the livingroom. I think they thought that was pretty weird. I tried to stop my Ma calling over at the weekend after that but it happened anyway. She couldn’t climb stairs very well. She had to sleep in the livingroom.
‘Are you going to leave your wife?’
‘No.’
‘Are you going to give me my money back, Billy?’
‘Neee – eeee…’
Annoying.
‘Are you going to stop coming here drunk, Ma?’
No.
She moved in some time after the rest of us, during that second year.
She was really normal; that was the strange thing about her. She attracted weirdoes. There was one night, I remember, it was the middle of the night and I was lying in bed, trying to get a bit of sleep before the day arrived. I thought that they’d all finally gone. No. There was the sound of loud, really loud music. It made me so mad that I even got up. I stood in my pyjama bottoms, shivering with fear and anger and cold, listening to the music blaring upstairs and thinking, should I go and turn it off? I was afraid, fearful of the wreck and carnage, the blaring and shouting, the physical sickness, whatever. But it was evident that they weren’t even there. They’d just gone and left the stereo on repeat. That was what they always did. I was determined to go and turn it off.
I marched out of my room; unlocked it, and marched out. Upstairs I went. Her room, or their room, or whoever was living there, not exactly above mine, but more or less so. I marched up the stairs. I could hardly stand the noise, it was so painfully loud. What the fuck was it? Some kind of dance music?
The door was open. That was all right.
I stepped in. I was shocked to find someone in there, sitting in the red gloom, at the far end of the room. The room was lit by some unknown red light, and there seemed to be blankets draped over the walls, and knickers and tops over the floor. The deaf gay guy. He was known as this though both his deafness and his gayness were in dispute. He certainly seemed deaf, sitting in his skimpy y-fronts, watching the blaring TV, completely mesmerised, eating a bowl of cornflakes and dropping little slathers of milk across his bare legs.
I hesitated on the threshold. I waved to the bloke, but he couldn’t see me; he had eyes only for the dancing bodies on the TV. I waved and waved. I took a step further.
I came up right next to him. I waved right in front of him. He didn’t react. I wondered what the fuck to do. This situation was weirding me out. And I’d seen plenty of weird things by now. But most of those weird things had been instigated by me or else designed for my amusement or edification. Whereas this was beyond properly strange. I could not control this fellow; I could not understand him.
Why was he even in this room, wearing knickers and nothing else, watching dance music, dripping soggy cornflakes onto his skinny blonde legs, his oddly-shaped head immobile and fixed?
I looked in desperation for a remote. Not seeing one, I stepped over to the TV and turned down the sound. The moment I did so, he leapt into the air and released a short squeal. I turned to him and signed that the music was too loud – ‘Too loud,’ I said, distinctly mouthing it for him. He was too busy patting his chest, to get his heart under control, to notice. He squealed and made incomprehensible noises, word-like. I shook my head, meaning ‘no’ or something – I don’t even think I was trying to say anything – I left the room. That is, I waved my hands up and down, as if patting a pillow, which was meant to sooth and reassure him, and then I tapped my ear, which was meant to make him think that he was a bastard who played his music – at three in the fucking morning! Then I went back into the safeness of my own bedroom, locking the door, feeling exhilarated and unable to sleep. Good work me, I thought, in the relative silence, only vague murmurs of a TV and the broom of vehicles up and down the avenue.
Neil lay in his bed, wondering what was going on. He could hear somebody clunking up and down the stairs. Hmf. Well, nothing to do with him. He was nice and cosy. Indeed, he had left the electric radiator on again, deliberately. Ah, the cosiness of a nice warm bed. The stromping up and down the stairs continued. If he had to assign an adjectiv
e to it, he would have chosen ‘irritable.’ Despite himself he speculated on the reasons for all this stomping. Could it be that they were going out, to a nightclub, again, after what was now seventeen days of straight clubbing? Surely not. His bedside clock, digital, told him that it was 4.30am. That, he suspected, was no time to be seeking a nightclub.
Well, sleepy-time, sleepy-time. No point worrying about it. His door was closed and locked – after last time – and he was safe and secure in his cosy, sauna-like room. The fact that he was sweating a pint of water every hour just made him all the more content. This was the only room with heat in the house. Why had nobody got any oil? Well he wasn’t going to. He’d ordered it last time and it had been a nightmare trying to get all the money organised so that they could actually pay the man who delivered it. This time he’d offered to get the heating if everybody gave him fifty quid by Friday. Friday had passed over three months ago and no money had changed hands. So there was no heating. This was the logical, inescapable conclusion. The laws of thermodynamics had full reign over this house, except in one important regard: entropy increased, but there was no increase of heat. He wondered at this paradox.
James said that a bird had flown into the oil tank. What arrant nonsense. Birds did not simply fly into oil tanks, as James was well aware. And yet the fellow continued to insist that he had watched it do so, and moreover claimed that this would cause an explosion if they ever obtained oil and attempted to use it. This was very well, Neil thought; except that almost everyone accepted this theory from James and refused to listen to even the most forcefully expressed reason from himself. Fools.
Neil thought about his philosophy classes. He was taking night classes now with Sheila in the Peter Frogatt Centre. Excellent classes. No greater exercise for the brain, in truth. And what was truth? Ah, a philosophical question. It was extraordinary. The more they probed into these questions, the more it became clear, to Neil, and also to the whole class, that all of these questions depended simply on the use of words. If the words were used properly, then there were no puzzles. Neil had good reason to believe this. They had together debated many issues, from metaphysics to ethics to epistemology and logic, and time and time again, if the issue was resolved, it was by agreement that the original dispute had been caused by a lack of agreement on what the words actually meant. Thus there was no substance to philosophical debate, and upon consultation with Erwan, the philosopher had seemed to concur. But the poor soul remained wrapped up in his insoluble puzzles, rather than freeing himself from them. Science involved a much more satisfying search for testable truth.
There was that banging and clunking again. How much walking up and down stairs, moaning incomprehensibly, could a person perform before becoming weary and returning to their bed like any rational citizen? Ah, but therein lay the rub, for he was not dealing with any particularly rational citizen.
Came a knock upon on his door. He ignored it, not even feeling the slightest compunction to answer it. The knock on his door continued and, rather than finding it irritating, he found it satisfying in the extreme to know that he wouldn’t answer it no matter how long the knocking continued, that he would cocoon himself in this cosy, almost lethally hot room under a quilt until the fellow’s hand started bleeding and the sun rose.
The fellow gave up long before that, as Neil knew he would. The chap was moaning about something, probably in some kind of irrational distress. This made Neil feel even happier and more content. He could hear knocking against Levin’s door now, but that was entirely a futile endeavour, since as Neil knew Levin was paying the parentals a dutiful visit this weekend.
The strange chap sounded like he was opening Levin’s door – always unlocked as it was – and wandering in and then wandering back out again. What was the fellow playing at? Neil was beginning to wish the chap would just go away and let them sleep. He did not think to protect Levin’s possessions – after all, Levin had a perfectly serviceable lock, and if he chose to leave his room open, it was evidently because he cared little to protect his chattel. Alternatively Levin saw no need to protect his chattel since they were under little threat. In either case it was too snug – or killingly hot – in this room for Neil to contemplate rising. He enjoyed listening to this little charade outside.
The grunting and murmuring and stomping about on the landing outside his room continued persistently for fifteen minutes. Then the chap seemed to wander downstairs. He could hear him clattering about.
‘What on earth is that fellow doing?’ wondered Neil. It was entirely mysterious why, having failed success in whatever objective he had, he did not give up and go to bed. Or just leave the house and go somewhere else. Why, upon not achieving an aim, did he persist with it for so long? The fellow was evidently without a deal of wit.
Neil glanced at his bedside clock sleepily. He had gone into one of the two or three levels of sleep, half-aware and half-unaware. Now he had come out of it. The ridiculous fellow was up and about again. What a strange fellow. Neil had woken up one night, vaguely aware of some annoying dream where a dark figure had been standing at the foot of the bed. He had groaned and tossed over on his side to try and get back to sleep, only to become horribly aware that there was a dark figure standing at the foot of his bed. Quick as a flash he had sat up and flicked on the bedside lamp. It had been him – that fellow, his thin-stalked head and wearing only underpants, mouthing stupidly and trying to gesture something, apparently in explanation. No explanation was possible, was Neil’s view. Neil had angrily ushered the fellow out, pointing at the door and saying ‘out, out!’ repeatedly until even that dense fellow had come to grips with the idea he was trying to communicate. Neil had locked his door firmly ever since. Oh, now he was knocking Neil’s door again. No, that will not work.
He heard the fellow wander in and out of Levin’s room again. Neil glanced at his clock, in case he had been mistaken. No, it was 4.57am. Knocking on Erwan’s door now. Knocking, knocking, knocking … oh, hello!
It sounded like the deficient young man was having a conversation with somebody. No, that was Erwan. Erwan was saying: ‘What do you want?’ Such an angry tone.
The mental deficient began slabbering unremittingly about nothing comprehensible. Erwan was interrupting him saying It’s 5 in the morning. Now what do you want? and the idiot was still blabbering and not making any word of sense. Neil felt disturbed and yet amused now.
‘Ax-ee! Ax-ee?!’
‘Ah, taxi!’
‘Uh!’
‘Well where are you going?’
‘Uh ee rur ee ah ah err oh eee! EE!’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘ET Aax –EE!’
Erwan refused. He seemed to be angry, very forcefully refusing to get anyone a taxi and telling the fellow to get upstairs and shut up. Neil found this very satisfactory. The fellow was not listening to Erwan’s rage advice however, and continued to make a disturbance. ‘No I’m not going to get you a taxi. Go away!’
This continued for a little time but then Erwan must have shut his door, for Neil could hear knocking again that went on for quite some time. But the fellow obviously received no response, for he went away, moaning and gammering, upstairs. Neil heard a TV being switched on. Ah, that was better. Neil felt he could sleep now – indeed, the room was so swelteringly hot that it was only by miracle that he was conscious at all. He rapidly fell into a swoon that became a deep and untroubled sleep.
Aaron listened to the movements next to his room with fear and some distaste. He lay on his bed with Eminem playing softly in the background. The room was dark apart from a lamp shining on the ground. Shuffling, banging, someone running all the way down the stairs, leaving the front door open for hours, someone else still in the room, a party of four, a party of one, music playing in an empty room. Playing music at all hours; keeping him awake. Work in Four Star Pizza. Back home, with a pizza. Eating, trying to sleep, going to class half the time. Having pizza and working.
Aaron got the
room. The moment she left, he seized it. Much better than the tiny closet he had been staying in. He put the mattress on the bed and hoovered the floor: it was covered in shreds of paper, bits of card, old panty receipts, a single unsmoked cigarette with the tobacco spilt from it, a single unopened condom, a used condom, a postcard of a mountain (unused). He threw all this away, except the unused condom, which he carefully put in the top drawer of his bedside cabinet beside his BB gun.
He took his picture of the scantily-clad model bending over, cheekily looking back at the viewer, and stuck it to the wall with blu-tak. Later that week he wrote ‘cum in my bum’ on a file-page and cut it out, speech bubble style, sticking it beside the woman’s head. He also put up his four foot by two foot poster of Eminem menacingly holding a silver gun by his side in a dark and rubbish-strewn American alleyway. Then he lay on his bed and thought of things with fear and some distaste.
One evening he was eating pizza and reflecting on his life. Things had improved immeasurably for him since Geraldine had moved out. She’d been asked to move by the landlord who promised not to move anyone in whom the tenants did not approve of. Aaron reflected that this did not mean him. He was ok.
This world that he lived in was a desolate place, wailing children, dead or dying old ladies, guns, dark noises, shame and fear and terror. Dead streets of Belfast, some cobbled, cold rusty water poring down century-old drain pipes. Green with copper; slime growing down the sides; dampness and decay long and old. He looked at his BB gun and thought about shooting some disabled people in the ass. He liked his new room much better than the old one: it was bigger, and now the only music he could hear was his own.
The fridge outside was beginning to release its CFC gases. The door was torn off. It lay, rusting, unforgotten and uncared for. He didn’t care about it one jot. He liked to sit in his room at the top of his house, lie on his bed while Eminem played on the stereo on the floor, and think of naked women and BB guns and pizza.
One day he drove around with his mates from school in a red Peugeot the windows rolled down. Gangster rap beat out. They drove around and around, up the Lisburn road, down all the side streets between it and Malone, beeping nothing, liking it, liking the horrible clouds that rained incessantly, beeping their horns at anything.
One day he drove around with his mates. Four, five weeks ago. He hadn’t called his parents in eleven days. They lived in Belfast. He lived here, in the Pink House. He wished his life was darker so that he could write a rap. He pointed his BB gun out the window and desired a building site he could pop a ball bearing at.
He went to work in Four Star pizza. He got a blue Four Star t-shirt with four golden stars above the right breast and wore his Four Star shirt. This was the only time he smiled. He was fed up being fat, but liked pizza, and wanted to be dead to the world, but something in him was living and breathing like a new-blossoming plant, something he’d rather kill and squash. How could he be dead to the world with happiness growing in him everyday?
He tried not to smile when he was in the kitchen in the Pink House, but he liked it, he liked the people he lived with and thought they were quite witty. Nevertheless he maintained his values of deadpan uninterestedness. His ideal was a featureless plank of wood. That meant he could be what he was: a foundation without a house. He took his pizza upstairs, when they left the kitchen, and ate in his room, this time. Last time he ate in the kitchen and threw his empty pizza box into the alleyway next to the house.
He sat in the livingroom, looking at the Wall. Where was the love? Where were the pictures of peace and harmony and of things being created? Where was the picture of Nelson Mandela, smiling across Africa? He tried to think of an Ethiopian joke but failed. Those miserable Ethiopians.
He lay on his bed, thinking happily about the comfort he found here, at least. Not like in the kitchen and livingroom, where it was freezing, even now in late March. Geraldine had moved out of this room several months ago. He’d claimed it good. Now the livingroom was sealed off with stolen police tape. Everyone used his old room instead. He watched Serpico with Levin and Erwan, but they got increasingly stoned and incoherent, so that he didn’t think they were even conscious for the last hour of the film. He liked that. Serpico was one of his favourite films. He loved the way Pacino could take the piss out of anyone and everyone, and still care, and get shot, and how he popped a cap into the ass of some lowlife, and the whole system was fucked. He didn’t want to live in a world where the system wasn’t fucked. He lay on his bed and thought about it with fear and some distaste.
‘I like sluts,’ he said.
He drove around with some mates. They shot at some losers. The losers yapped about it. Someone started following them in a car. What the fuck? Following and following them. Someone shouted at them from the car. Dark so they couldn’t see much – it was about about 8 in the evening. Aaron began to get the shivers. He had a premonition of his impending death. They’d shot some bad motherfuckers – the worst kind, the kind who track you down and kill you. They drove all over the place and eventually Aaron rapped his fist against his mate’s head and said Let me out!
Aaron scurried away into the night. It enveloped him like a shroud, but still he could hear the steps following him, the trigger being cocked, a knife being slid out of its cover. He began to shake uncontrollably. He didn’t know where he was. He ran down one street and ran down another; sweat pored down his face and in his clothes and under his armpits. He was a struggling, wobbling mess but still he kept running, and running, until all the street lights were blurred under the stream of mucus and sweat that covered his face like a mask. He tore at his eyes, trying to see. People were shouting at him, obscene things. All the haunting things he’d done came back to him. Fear and some distaste covered his face. He ran and ran. There was a grocers. There was a church he knew. There was a bin lying on its side. He ran, his lungs feeling like two red balloons. He ran into his house. He shook and shook. He ran upstairs, into his old bedroom. His parents nowhere. Dark house. He shook. He climbed into the cupboard. He stayed there, stayed there, making no noise, crying silently, wringing his hands and trying to be as quiet as he could possibly be. He stayed there all night, aching. When daylight crept through the crack in the cupboard door he whimperingly clambered out and went to his bed. He dreamt of terror.
He went to Four Star pizza and worked his six hour shift, efficiently taking orders and passing them back to the ‘cook’ behind in the kitchen. The cook was no older than he and knew how to put a precooked pizza in an oven and no more. He coughed when a cloud of chip fat rose like a globular mushroom from the deep fat fryer.
He sat on his bed at four in the morning watching soft porn on Channel 5. He had an expression of complete immobility on his face. There was nothing in the room except the flashes of shifting light. He may have been alive or dead.
He perspired a little when he thought of his exams.
He performed averagely in his exams, failing one and passing two others. This confirmed him in his lack of worldly response.
He slept in and woke up and fell back to sleep and woke and shivered in the cold of the frosty February morning and fell back to sleep and woke and pulled his covers up tighter around him and fell back to sleep and then woke.
He had a slice of garlic bread with his pizza.
There was a fire exit sign in green on the wall in the hallway. He looked at it, wondering if he should peel it off and put it on his lever arch file cover. He experimentally picked at a corner. It seemed to be fairly well stuck on. He left it there reluctantly.
He lay in bed and thought with fear and some distaste of the time he’d popped caps at the prostitutes round the corner from the cinema on the Dublin Road.
‘How many roads must a man walk down?
‘Before you can call him a man?
‘The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.
‘The answer is blowing in the wind.’
His housemates were in the livingroom listening to Bo
b Dylan again. They were doing that a lot these days especially on Sunday. They seemed to have a ritual: eat a big fry and then smoke a big number of joints whilst reading the Observer and then listening to this Bob Dylan CD over and over. Aaron did not like the sound of Bob Dylan. He preferred hip-hop. He liked the dark incessant rhyme after rhyme about crime and beatings and killing and money and showing your homies that their asses were about to be popped. He liked the misogyny and homophobia associated with some practitioners. He liked the money and glamour associated with the same. He liked the high-pitched nasal complaint of Eminem’s disaffected voice and the deep confident timbre of big Daddy P.
It was his last day. He’d spent nine months here, September through to June, four months of it in Geraldine’s room. He’d eaten pizza. His exams were over so he was moving back home. His face was still the same as when he’d moved in. He’d had a learning experience. His attitude towards that learning was indifference. He’d move somewhere else next year. He endeavoured to make less overt effort in all his acts. He smiled. He caught himself. He was a like a zen buddhist clutching at passing twigs of thought at will, or letting them go, floating down the meaningless stream. He was like a gangster, taking pops at the weak and disaffected. Fundamentally he was nothing. He enjoyed it. When the next Eminem album came out he’d buy it from HMV. It was June the 12th 2003.
***
TEXT FOUR
There’s a red house over yonder
That’s where my baby stays.
Yeah there’s a red house over yonder
That’s where my baby stays.
Well I ain’t been home to see my baby
In about a ninety-nine and a one half days.