You were born in the Coombe Hospital, Dublin, on a rainy Tuesday morning to a cacophony of fuckin’ bastardin’ fuckstick bollixes and fuckin’ fucks!”. The windows were steamed after your Ma’s solid fight with your oversized head, forced through a demi-virgin’s holy curtains, ended in a bloody sigh and resounding, “Jesus Mother of Jaysus, thank fuck for that.”
Her soft laughter soothed your giant melon-head, and her warm soft breast informed the blank contents inside that odd-shaped dome that shrieks of pain were a prelude to comfort and joy. Not that you knew what you were thinking because that big bonce was running on autopilot while you were whinging about the cold. Inside you, semi-consciously, a question had reached out for a connection. A parallel synaptic reach in the aul grey matter. Brain cells began their semi-conscious journey to understanding, while you got angry at the nurse for smacking your arse.
When you blinked, consciously, into the light with wonder, pleasure and pain grew more acquainted. You looked into several eyes, not that you knew what you were looking at, and wondered more. Somehow semi-conscious feelings and thoughts, that had begun to form inside your ma, figured out where you were and who was on your side. You were thinking about a myriad of things, subconsciously. Fundamentally, you wanted comfort and those arms had rocked you, and your head went, ‘yep, that’ll fuckin’ bollixin’ bastardin’ do for me. ‘
Arms and warm breasts said, this is your story. Yet to you, it was theirs. They were already there while you had beamed down from some unknown realm. Eyes gazed lovingly at you, bloodshot with laughter and tears. Pain and pleasure. Must be connected.
Moments before, while the nurse was sponging your ma’s innards off of your wrinkled, purple avatar, you were transfixed by an exhausted, exuberant, sweaty, familiar woman and thinking about nothing, apparently, but sights, sensations and sounds. In the blur of your semi-conscious mind, which had battled for hours to get out of a corporeal wormhole, which could never have humanly facilitated your monsterous bonce, you wondered, ‘is this hell?’ As you were handed back to that sweaty, strangely familiar woman, you weren’t thinking, “how the fuck did I get here? Do you fuckin, bollixin’ know where this is? And what’s that bastardin’ smell, did you shite yerself, woman? Why has nobody cleaned you yet? Why am I the centre of this drama? If I am to be, remember, I did not ask for this. Now someone tell me what in the Jaysus is going on here. And why haven’t I been fed yet?”
Except you were thinking all that.
They looked down on you like you were a precious gift, while you felt like a turd shat out of someone who’d been constipated for nine months.
After leaving the hospital, routine thoughts became questions, then stomping demands to know “what the hell is all this about?” Of the many loving arms, which placated you but never extinguished your need for deep and profound answers, only one pain held onto you, until one day she said:
“There’s a drink in the press.”
“Thanks Ma.”
She had grown weary of rearing your wear; sick of burning looks; pityful from giving everything she had and more. Had you hoped as much to have yourself a new love, to lift the burden you didn’t apparently see fit to question? Had you any idea about responsibility or transference? Of burdens so complex that might have been the only pertinent, in the sense of her immediacy, question.
You had wondered a little about love, a distraction for her; a way for you to learn all about what you had missed in her. An elusive thing. A common thing. Yet still it had all failed to prove a worthy conquest, other then to explore the pleasures that young love promises and breaks as swiftly. So when she sighed and said those words, ‘there’s a drink in the press,’ you hopped up. Without a second thought, you poured yourself a can of the black stuff and plopped down on the couch, gazing into that roaring fire, which you had routinely poured your semi-conscious thoughts into for eighteen years. In there, life manifested and burned out like a silent ocean acquainting but never truly meeting the shore. In there, the unprocessable was half-processed.
***
As you watch little bubbles of brown settle into the stillist, blackest familiarity of smells; of baked berries and day-old dishwater, you find a place inside your normal sized head that acquaints the semi-conscious with any activity you do, like ball of wax rolling down an endless slide covered with fragments of lost and stolen treasure. Things clear for a brief period. A sense of wonderful connection to vague happy feelings slipping away too soon. Pain is pleasure. You go to the press for a second
and a sixth.
Your Ma likes that dow-eyed look on your face anyway. No more pointless questions. Her heart breaks over the bridge of her once dainty nose, now bulbous from drafts and mould. A face had longed to go back and relive all those childish moments of semi-conscious genius: blurts of pain into laughter, emotions flowed easily; like with a drink. Stress levels find a way back down, and you allow an imbecilic smile before a muttered, feckless joke about her being a moany auld crank when she has a few in her.
“Fuck off you.” He voice is harsher; as bitter as the first time you tasted alcohol.
“Fuck sake, I’m only messin’.”
“Gwan outa dat, yer a selfish bastard.”
“I’m not the one who never calls. It’s always me who comes round.”
“Cos ye get free food and drink.”
“Yeah, ye have to blackmail me to see me these days… cos yer a moany auld crank.”
“Fuck off you.” She sups the head off a half of Guinness and gives you a glance over the glass that says, ‘get that into you and don’t be wrecken me head.’
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see all the answers to those burning questions look better dead in the bottom of a glass; a few drinks and a get-together; a bit of craic.
Ah, but then…
Like commandos, those burning thoughts are lined up to speak, ready to take a plunge into the blackness; to skydive down to Earth on their secret mission. And you, the conscious daily you–who only wants to be warm and safe in someone’s arms–become the parachute that prevents the mission from going splat. Those lines of commandos are shoved tight against each other, waiting anxiously for the green light to go, intent on carrying out their orders. You know the job must be done, and your ma handed you that first drink, trying to stop you going on. And your da, God rest his wallet, is currently down the pub, letting his commandos jump out, miles from their landing zone. You give the fireplace a distant stare and down the dregs and crack another.
“Fuckin’ listen here…”
The clock on the mantle waves at you, the old glass face and wooden sides reminding you of your da’s hollow promises on a Wednesday about weekends in the park, when he decided that a spit of rain would melt him. Quiet “fuckin’ bollixes,” Tayto, TK lemonade and ripping up beermats was the way you went; a prelude to an inevitable bitter end. How you passed happy valley days into moody Sunday peaks, until Tommy the barman kicked you out bang on 7 o’clock.
Monday in school was filled with semi-consciousness, as you endured your malnourished arse on a torturous hard piece of wood, while caged inside thick concrete walls, painted in cream and a scutty shite-coloured brown, your burning curiosity thought about wanking. That little rise in the jocks was the only muscle you had power over; an instant increase in size. Man power. It gave you a whole new definition of this confusing world; control over something, over enjoyment, anchored deep in another weekend spent ripping up beermats and waiting for hours until your next dose of cheesy crisps and tart lemonade.
The wanking also medicated the hypocrisy of being surrounded by “fuckin’ bollixin’ bastardin’ fucks,” that you weren’t allowed to shout. In lieu of getting old enough to yell ‘fuck’ at the TV when the football was on, your boredom and subversion of your unclear inner thoughts fell into the dirty little habit.
A hornball, wanky, jizzy, self fuckin’ owning scrote with sly eyes. It’s all your fault.
Right?
One day, you know it is. There’s nothing in your world to persuade otherwise. You confirm it’s validity by the fact that life is about pain and pleasure. You knew that the moment you were born. It’s in the eyes of everyone your da invited home after the pub, every weekend, to sing Tom Jones and Neil Diamond songs and play poker until dawn. And it was in the eyes of the lads in class, who were always on about gee and tits because they realised the quick way to grow a muscle and alleviate burning questions and boredom.
Even the government tells you it’s okay, plastering big billboards and page 3s with the things you know are slipways to The Low Road. The cure to your future thankless nine-to-five was just a few strokes and sips away. So when years of commandos lined up, muddied by generations of skydiving pleasure-seekers, who cared little about targets, and you send them flying without due-diligence, you do something unimaginable. You get wasted, lose all reason; liking the feeling of being in control of pain. The big man. Your semi-conscious, self-nudging unfelt self waits at the back of the commandos, who will soon be retreating from their missed landing zone to a safe zone of cowardice, security and repetition.
You had stared into the fire, silenced until in court in front of a judge, with your victim’s family sitting across from you with sobs in their chests and streams pouring from emptying eyes.
With your consciousness held down with cords thick enough to control a giant, in the flickers you saw it. You had lived it out:
“There’s a drink in the press for ye.”
You looked out the window. The sky was clear but for a single fluffy cloud that drifted easily towards an uncluttered horizon, and you said, “Ah fuck it, I’m grand.”
She winked and raised her glass. “Don’t let him have all the fun.”