Rocks in the Belly (9 page)

The dashboard clock buzzes gently, the second hand sweeping continuously around the face. I remember when that was something to marvel at — not ticking but sweeping.

I get out of the car and pace up and down, smoke a cigarette, kick a tyre. Hands in pockets. Hands out of pockets. Scuffing bits of gravel under my shoes. Pissed off that I'm smoking again, as if it's some sign of the other old weaknesses I'm losing the fight against.

I get back into the car — this being the model after the one I locked her out of. There's Robert's ballpoint scribble on the roof interior. This being the car they used to strap him into after what happened. Strapping him in and taking him to swimming or physiotherapy. To the doctor's. Not that measured, thoughtful Robert, but broken Robert.

A couple of old women come out of the beauty parlour with this look of sadness and sympathy on their faces and I know it's about Mum. They're doddering up the pavement towards me, obviously talking to one another about the gravity of what was inside the beauty parlour, a sort of forced sympathy on their faces. They aren't good people but people
being
good people. There's no such thing as a good or bad person, there are just people who do good or bad things. And we can swap, like that.

I sneer at them as they get close with their shaking heads and faces of solemnity. They're only thinking of themselves. There's no such thing as genuine sympathy. There's only empathy. Only with
a seed of ourselves can we feel for somebody else. Just watch what a man does when he sees another man kicked in the balls.

Is that sympathy?

Working in prisons finished off whatever faith I had left. Seeing what happens to a person and their supposed goodness when they have their backs to the wall, even the low-security inmates. But mostly it's about what happens to the prison guards. Even the good, kindly men who joined us. How succinctly power corrupts. You don't know who anyone is until you've seen them with power or powerlessness.

I get out the car and slam the door, give the geriatrics a menacing grin and they accelerate quickly away, linking arms and looking back to see what I'll do.

‘Morning,
ladies
.'

Suddenly they're not so slow on their feet. I stare at them all the way, even after they've stopped looking back.

Another cigarette.

A few years after Robert's accident I was in town and saw him out with The Sunshiners, the organisation that took him every other Saturday, shoe-horning some religion in along with their compassion.

Those Saturdays were supposed to be a respite for us but the house always felt sad and brittle without him. All of us feeling guilty for being relieved of the burden, but uncertain somehow about what to do with ourselves in his absence. Like it was a guilty pleasure. That's what living with Robert was, his absence like the ringing in your ears after a rock concert. The way he had of being there even more when he wasn't.

I was probably about fourteen that day, walking in town with a freshly purchased album in my hands. I saw The Sunshiners on the other side of the road. There was Robert out and about in a wheelchair, surrounded by his retarded friends, all of them
filling the street with their happy madness. I stood and watched from a distance, feeling like I was seeing Robert in a different light, perhaps how others saw him. And I was savouring the sensation of that somehow, because he didn't look tragic or wronged for once. He looked happy.

Then this bloke left their side of the road and crossed over, our eyes meeting in some implicit acknowledgement of the gaggle of kids. ‘Where's a shotgun when you need one,' he said and grinned at me as if we shared an opinion.

I look down at my cigarette. I've always thought back to that bloke and his comment, wishing I'd stood up for Robert rather than turning the comment against myself.

I had to watch Robert go through puberty in that state, stubble on his face — our little volcano of humanity, so distorted and yet all the more human for that somehow. All the emotion and life in him still, but shuffled into an incomprehensible jumble.

Jumbled up as he was, he could still touch you like no person has ever touched me. Always such candour in the way he reached out to stroke your face, his eyes full of tears. The same candour Mum expresses her emotions with now, so that you can't help but be swept along with them.

I shuffle away from the car and come back and lift my foot, rest it on the side mirror, pushing it on the cabled joint that allows the mirror to absorb an impact instead of smashing. I adjust my balance and move the mirror to its full extent, then try for a little further. The cable creaks. I push a little harder, daring myself.

I let it go and it snaps back.

I lean against the car, feeling the fender bowing a little behind me. This car will have to be sold once she's gone. Everything from the day-to-day is going to have to go.

I stub out the cigarette, fold my arms. All the talismans of my childhood will have to be sold up and gone and I don't know what
lies beyond that. Because if your home and your family are taken away from you, what tethers you to life then?

Robert had to face that at thirteen.

A train's coming, the familiar sound of scratching steel. Now I can see it, carrying a smattering of passengers and a ton of graffiti. It thunders across the metal bridge, little brown stains where the rainwater rusts the rivets, the sun coming from behind a cloud and blinding everything, the beauty shop standing out with its two pink awnings down over the windows like made-up eyelids. The train heading away again and suburban silence swallowing its sound.

Here she comes, helped out of the shop by a bleached blonde who's looking up and down the street until she sees me, then relaxes and waves. I don't wave but I do traipse a little closer to Mum as she approaches the road, stopping to turn and wave goodbye to the blonde who takes her hand quickly from where it's been hovering, concerned at her mouth, probably wondering if this is the last time.

Mum has a side road to cross before she can continue up the hill to where I'm parked. She stumbles a bit down the kerb, then lifts herself upright as if dignity is to be found in the higher climes. Especially now that what hair she has is tinted, cut and blow-dried. She seems fluffed up in herself too, more plentiful. A wry smile on her face, all of her emanating this self-satisfied aura. Feeling like she just struck a blow against the monster gorging on her.

I relax my hands, little red crescents left behind on my palms. She looks tiny out there in the middle of the road and yet she's that shape of my childhood.

I move to her door and unlock it. Here comes my mum, soft and fragile now in her illness. I stand straighter too, the door open and ready for her like I'm a private in the army. Here comes the general. Standing up even to cancer — a car hurrying towards the junction
she's crossing. I leave the open door and head down there, looking from the oncoming car to my beaming mum — a porcelain woman surrounded by metal and tarmac.

The approaching car brakes reluctantly for Mum and she stops to take it in, confused. The car halting just shy of her and hooting a sharp impatient blast that sends her stumbling over, another train clacking across the bridge and I'm marching down the hill, our car door still open behind me.

Now I'm jogging.

Running.

Mum on her hands and knees in the road, her handbag spilling contents, a scrunched tissue rolling away in the breeze, the receipt from the beauty parlour still in her hand, her red face looking up, a hand out towards me. The road sharp on her bare knees. I'm sprinting, my vision narrowed to the door handle on the guilty car still sat there shining in the road, its engine growling. My head full of breathing. I leap over Mum, the car driver's hand locking the door but realising his window is down, his face whitening and I'm shouting as incomprehensibly as Mum, down there on the tarmac. The driver crunching the gears towards reverse, the engine revving and I'm running with the reversing car now, pulling at his door, roaring, running full speed until he is too fast and away, my hands going to my pockets for coins to throw at him then boom.

I catch up with him and the parked car he's backed into, the blonde coming out the parlour and screaming something, the driver covering his face because I lunge in through the window and he's so pathetic now I've punctured his safe little car-world. The feel of my knuckles on his face. That sound bone makes. That thunk. The feel of the python. The driver falling into the passenger seat, lying over the handbrake and all caught up in his seatbelt, his hands covering his face, music coming from his stereo, rosary beads swinging from the rear-view mirror. My top half in through his
window like a lion at a safari park. My swinging arm going through the rosary and splitting it, the rear-view mirror coming unstuck from the windscreen and clattering on the gearstick. I'm flinging the beads at him and shouting, picking them off the seat and trying to stuff them into his fucking mouth. He bites down on me, wet and painful. I hold his face and his biting mouth, bang his head back into the other door, blood on his face and I'm pummelling him again — bad punches, my elbow glancing the interior ceiling of the car, taking the power out of the swing. I fire another towards his face but it strikes him on the ear and he's rummaging at his seatbelt button, the engine stalled, his console beeping, he's screaming.

Something in me adjusts. Just like that, I've run out of rage. Burnt off my stockpiled fuel. His keys swinging back and forth in the ignition, I turn them and the music and beeping stop too. Silence. Both of us panting, right in close in this proximal space. I yank his keys out with shaking hands, something metal tinkling onto the floor. He's whimpering now, all messed-up hair and terror in his eyes, his face scuffed and red like he just came out of a scrum or a headlock.

Silence reverberates in the air now after all that noise, all that violence. There's no train clattering across the bridge, only this frail beseeching from Mum, standing there looking at me through the windscreen, my body still half in this car. All the pampering and make-up running down her face. She stumbles a little closer and lets out a sob, a hand outstretched, the blonde from the parlour running back into her shop the way people rush for a ringing phone.

The driver is right here with me, leaning away. Breathing. His body tense, hands up, his jacket hanging in the back. I'm holding his keys. I can smell his cologne. All of it such an unwanted intimacy. My anger having thrust me in here and then abandoned me, leaving me with the proximity and the aftermath. The passion gone but the intimacy still there. Like after sex.

I'm withering as I back out, everything trembling and I can't believe it's me that created that look on his face. I've seen that look before.

Mum's whimpering doubles in volume as my head clears the car and I'm out in the open again, breathing hard. All the pleading in her sounds but none of the sense. Just a gentle cooing, her hand out, the other hovering near her mouth and all that ruined make-up. Her handbag dangling from her elbow.

My knee starts knocking inside my trousers, the sunlight coming at me. I look at his car keys in the palm of my hand, the main key broken off halfway, blood snaking around my fingers and dripping on the road. I scuff it with my foot and it smears over the white line.

I bend to look in at him, and with an icy calm that surprises me, my heart disturbing the timbre of my voice, ‘You couldn't wait a few seconds for a dying woman to cross the road? You've really got somewhere
that
important to be? Well, fuck you, mate. Fuck you.' But it comes out more like thank you. My knee really juddering now. Mum on pause, the driver leant away, everyone waiting for what I'll do.

I don't know what to do so I throw his keys into a garden and his energy changes now he senses I'm going to leave him.

I'm relieved to walk away too, conscious of my gait because I know he's watching. The blonde from the parlour back outside and staring too. A woman in the shop window gawping from under the pink eyelids, silver foils in her hair and a back-to-front gown on. My ears ringing, like after Robert's accident.

I walk slowly up to Mum and take her arm, hushing her words but she pulls away from me and screams, stationary and defiant in the middle of the road. A car stopping behind the crashed car. Everyone's looking at me and what I did. Everybody watching as Mum's face breaks into proper tears — as she lashes out at me but
loses a little of her balance and lets me steady her, then pushes me away again. Everyone looking at the man who made her cry.

‘Come on, Mum. Please.' But I can only say it to some part of her forehead rather than look her in the eye, because she's looking at me like she's sure now. Finally she knows.

‘If we don't go I'm going to be in deep trouble.
Mum
.'

The driver opens his car door and stands, most of his body still in the car. ‘Did you see that! You're
all
witnesses! He
attacked
me. You all saw it! Don't move,
buddy
. Call the police someone!'

‘It's ok, mister, I called them. You alright?' The blonde.

I look at her and she scuttles into the shop, her face joining the other one steaming up the window.

‘Mum, we
have
to go.' I say it quietly. ‘Who's going to look after you if they lock me up, hey? You'll be all alone.'

She's crying harder but she lets me lead her away, a train coming, scratching the tracks then clacking over the bridge. My body can barely walk I'm shaking so much, conscious of their stares striking my back, our car up there with its door open.

‘You go home with
Mummy
, mate. Go on! We've got your number plate, don't you worry about that!'

Once the old lady's in the car I hustle round the back bumper and hop in. The car starts and we cruise slowly away with everything seeming muffled now in here, after the violence. Everything with a wash of blue over it like bruising. My knuckles bleeding and sore around the steering wheel. The cut bloody from where he bit me. Autopilot kicking in and one eye on the rear-view mirror but nobody's there — not the man, not the police. Not yet.