Picking Apart The Particles

Glass shop front grab as sharp as pins dropping, the spats polishing the pavement, the row of these boys long past boyhood, pastel shirted pudgy fat fucks, clean-shaven, short sleeved, leather belted, pizza munching cunts cut on lager, sexual frustration and the heavy promise of violence. A laugh, all of them really, good lads, just out for a laugh. They will roll him into the river. After they have kicked him in the head thirty times, after they have endlessly stamped on his head, kicked him in the chest, back and stomach, punched him in the face, broken his mouth, smashed his teeth and stamped his face until he can neither see nor breathe. Then they will roll him into the river.

*****

Two boys, on bikes, on the pavement. Eleven-years-old, twelve maybe. The first boy, staring so hard, so viciously, with such a challenge that he could literally taste the pleasure of punching the boy full and hard in the face. Please, he thought, please demand to know what I’m looking at.

*****

I did, I told him, the first time I went round there at two o’clock in the fucking morning, asking him if this is what we had to look forward to all summer, his fucking dog day and night, making that fucking racket. And him going to me about the noise of my kids and me going but they’re kids you cunt, they’re kids, not fucking dogs! That fucking dog, all day and night. When I stamped on it, the little bastard, I felt its spine crack and the noise, I would never have guessed the noise.

*****

The stock phrases are always something like, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to throw her down the stairs or burn her arms with cigarettes. She was crying too much, always crying. I didn’t mean to. You don’t know what it’s like, what I have to cope with here on my own. Just me and her.

*****

Oh, snap. Bang. Crackk. Crashh. Smash. Klannnnng. Ker-Whamm. Bammmm. Ptoom. Clangggg. Pow. Blamm. Btok. Splak. Whumff. Kakk. Splaang.

*****

It flared like fireworks. Like matches in the dark. As soon as he walked through the door, the pain, searing. The heat of disorientation. The pain again, the strike, like matches in the dark. The voices telling him, pleading with him. In the dark, the cold of the outside, the pain again, the striking, the never-ending striking. Until it ends, becomes the calm and then the slower strikes, the pulse of fireflies frittering the black of the air. The slow twist pulled out of him. The crawl to the end.

*****

The boy’s reason for inviting her round tonight is a plan to get her first of all drunk and then to fuck her as many times as he can before she sobers up enough to object. It is a plan as old as the hills, of course. The boy, in normal life, under normal circumstances, is what you might call a fine, upstanding young man of good stock and breeding whose mother, were she to have the merest whiff of this dismal plan, would fetch him one so quick that he wouldn’t have time to make sense of the blow. The clock, as he watches it, rolls round to the appointed time giving the girl time to make the mistake of making him wait as he drinks longer and harder as the time passes longer and harder until, by the time she arrives – as she thinks, fashionably enough late, and late enough to teach him some vague lesson for some vague past misdemeanour – he is so angry and stupid and pathetic that he’s forgotten all about fucking her and all about his idiotic – though meticulously planned – plan. By the time she arrives he is so angry and stupid and pathetic that he swipes at her, fetches her one so quick that she has no time to register the amazement that her body has already reacted to. He lashes out again, with his fists, with his feet, with all of his might and it is only through the luck of him being so drunk and pathetic that this girl of his affections, this wonder of beauty and eroticism who has caused him many a sleepless night and many anguished days, is able to make a certain kind of escape, falling, falling as she realises, scrambling up, sobbing, frightened and lost, that she will have a hell of a job explaining any of this to her kind, loving parents who, after all, only want what’s best for her.