6 for 5

I had spent all our money on unlucky numbers and horses. I had been barred from all the best local shops and pubs. Most of my teeth were knocked out: the few remaining black and rotten stubs loitered like cigarette butts outside A & E entrances. I had cataracts on my eyes, ulcers in my belly, stones in my kidneys and piles on my arsehole. I schlepped around town with Morris, a syphilitic wife-abusing bastard from Sligo who shared a room with me at the hostel. Each of his fat red sausage-fingers was adorned with fat gold sovereign rings which he used to smash the walls with. He was your classic tinker, wearing the same sheepskin-jacket and buckled black leather shoes. Each day we'd go out to the pubs and steal money from tourists and students. We were alright, yeah. I was possibly happy.

Like everything that gradually becomes a part of my life, I began to find even the sound of him disgusting. But like shit on a shoe we were stuck together. No-one else in the world would have us. Our children loathed us. We'd ripped off all our friends. Even the police had come to ignore us. I owed Morris a packet. Each week the interest doubled. I was his vassal, his lackey. It was only me and this fat greasey fuck. The desperate and miserable struggle of our companionship was becoming too much to bear.

I had been planning a runner for a long time now. I'd stashed some money aside under the in-sole of my boots. Now all I needed was his cigs. I sank a few jars with him in the William Stanley, waiting for him to piss so I could swipe his fags and phone and disappear. But the fat tinker would not piss. The udder on that man! He had a gut, I tell yer. Well he had a man to meet nearby. As usual I followed without a word. Although I could hide it, the fractured flicker of his eyes showed that his nerves were shot to fuck. As we left the bustle and the battle of the high street, he asked me why.

“Why what?” I said, acting innocent, though preparing myself inside for a vicious familiar blow. My stomach stewed in a self-pity soup.

“Why what! You know what I’m talking about it man, I can see it all over your face”, he kicked back. I swiped a glance at his face, discerning immediately something close to actual sadness. This was no dress rehearsal - this was going to become one of ‘those conversations’, where the polite boundaries of friendship are kicked over and the situation changes into the most barbaric game of chess. I could see that he had already got me by the collar, and as I gaped in paralysis “what should I say? What could I say?”, he took the blade out and directed it straight to my chest.

“Why do you think it’s ok to treat people as you do? You’re a fucking user. You hurt people and lie and make dirty false slanders and fucking false lying excuses…you hurt me man…you're a twisted fuck.”

I groaned and sighed, ostensibly. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this before.

“….see you don’t give a fuck at all…you never change,…you come clean, you blame yourself, you castrate yourself in the most dramatic performances…you will do anything to get yourself out of a situation. And I am sick of it. You are a very small man, a drunk…I don’t want to see you again. You’re a hypocrite, a total fucking hypocrite bastard fucker I’ve ever met”.

I knew it was coming, but when the blade finally entered my body I still fell to the ground, like you do in films. It slipped in so easy, I looked down and almost laughed, it was mad thing seeing the black plastic handle stuck in my stomach, matching the sight of sudden great pain. I was dazed: I glanced from side to side, anywhere to avoid his piercing eyes, and clutched my queasy stomach. I felt like the bottom had fallen out of the floor. I felt really sick, like I was going to throw up all over him. Then I choked. I tried to take a deep breath but I kept missing my cue. Then I started running out of breath, but I couldn't slow down and concentrate, and as I choked more, the panic heightened. This wasn’t looking good.

Reader, I hope you will empathise with what you’re about to hear if you yourself have known this strange, and quite frankly deathly feeling. If not, I must warn you to condemn it outright. There are situations where either circumstances or something you have said results in the most disastrous piece of cruelty, all of your own making, where you become, without a doubt, nothing more than the most ludicrous lowlife imaginable. It is in moments like this that the true effect that your deplorable circumstances has on your soul is, even for the flash of a second, momentarily revealed. It is in such a moment that you find yourself recalling the lost images of all those countless eyes of persons you said to yourself you would never be, the broken and dead souls of the past, mothers, fathers, men in the street. In such a moment, you can only lie.

Here, simply responding to the accuser with the truth only exacerbates things ten times worse. If I told him that he was right, that I was just a hopeless hypocrite, a seminal bastard, perhaps even a complete gobshite, where would the solace be in that? It would not allow him to simply to spit on me: he would melt, wilt and wither right before my eyes, and disappear for good. No, I had to keep the illusion up. The truth is just another weapon in the right hands.

Truth be told, he publicly abused me and denounced me like this on a daily basis. I had quickly taken on the role of his estranged wife: listening to his moans, making him tea and breakfast, absorbing his drunken blows. He raped me in my bed and made me suck his cock. I was bound to him by a debt I could never repay. The interest grew day by day as my life shrunk less and less. Oh the agony and the ivy. Bla bla bla.

I woke up in hospital a few days later. They had me fucking morphine man, now they're proper painkillers. I looked around. Morris was sitting there. I must add that he did not even bring me grapes, the miserly sod.