The Boy from the County Hell Read online

CHAPTER TWO

  It wasn’t until he had reached the stairwell that he took more than a second to measure the weight of every breath that he hadn’t taken and he stood there; hunched over himself, fighting to fit that breath into his lungs and slow his heart before it exploded out of his chest.

  “Mammy, are ya dere?” he shouted.

  There was no reply.

  His chest was pounding so heavy. He’d never make a light thief. Not with these lungs and not if one of the conditions were surprise. He wheezed as loud as the sick young girl and between every exhaled breath, he cursed and moaned feeling a cruel burn in his lungs and in his chest.

  When he gathered his breath, he stripped down to his yellow briefs and his soggy socks walking around the apartment pulling the cloth that tucked up into his bum back around the sides of his cheeks. And he stepped up onto his toes as he rolled out machine gun rhythmic gusts of wind; farting away as he pranced around the apartment like a pasty white ballerina.

  “Mammy?” he shouted.

  He expected to see her, here in the kitchen or smoking away on the lounge watching Eastenders re-runs. He’d often see her and his love; Teresa, sipping tea and arguing about this and that; his mother calling her a junky whore and Teresa, taking offense to the word junky; preferring the term, sobriety impaired.

  There was nothing he could ever really do except wait for them both to tire out and eventually nod off, nursing their cups of tea like a newborn baby with no danger at all of a single drop spilling to the floor. It drove him mad how they drove one another mad and he loved them both. He could never choose between one and the other.

  Humming away to himself, he walked out onto the balcony and watched the rain lashing down upon the city’s seedy underbelly below.

  He loved his veranda.

  Ever since he was a boy he was always asking his mother, first, when they could live up some stairs and then; when they finally found some decent council flats when they could have a veranda. All he ever wanted was like what all the other lads had; somewhere outside that he could decorate with a nice chair, maybe a table and a wee pot plant; nothing too big, maybe a fern or something.

  From this height, he could see many things.

  Below him was Industrial Avenue, named at first for the hundreds of factories that once lined the avenue for kilometers during the good days but which now were all abandoned and boarded up; places of dark seclusion and lurid detail.

  Now, as a labour of love, it become the factory of fallacious folly with the entire avenue; stretching from here to there, becoming the parade of dealers and junkies, the drunks, the pimps, the whores and it looked like a marvelous production line of filth and abhorrence with the dimly lit street being the conveyor that carried the box like cars along at crawling speed, their windows down, their drivers all looking with scented perversion at the pouting red lips, the licking tongues, the lifting skirts, the wiggling bums and stopping, only when; from the cheapest and dirtiest of the whores, they found what might just be the cleanest one.

  Shane used to enjoy watching the cars pulling up to each whore and he imagined what types of things they might be saying to one another aside from, of course, how much and can my mother watch?

  He imagined them debating philosophical precedence and that each whore were presenting their model for understanding the nature and interplay of the conscious and sub conscious minds and sometimes they just made fish sounds to each other and held their hands to their cheeks so that they moved like a fish’s gills.

  When he was younger, though, he imagined that they were all just being somebody’s mother. That each car would come along with a father behind the wheel and a sad boy sitting in the back seat and only the right type of mother would smile at the right type of boy and when she did, the car would stop completely and she would get in and they would travel back to their house where the mother would ask the father about all the things that had happened in his day and while he talked away, she would blow kisses to her son that was hanging like a monkey from the door frame and just dying for his two minutes alone with her. And when dad was done, he would show her that thing he did earlier on today with his friends.

  Now, though, as a man himself, he preferred just to watch down below at the cars and the whores and guess to himself what disease each one might be carrying.

  Normally he could see Teresa from where he was before everything went sour of course. She always worked below the veranda so she could shout out things to him and get him to throw down smokes whenever she ran out.

  A lot of the time he would just throw three or four smokes and the wind would pick them up and carry them off somewhere far. He tried once to sticky tape the smokes to a small rock so that they would carry better to where she was. He ended up misjudging quite a bit, put a bit too much grunt into it. The rock carried further than he had hoped, hitting some poor hooker on the head while she was polishing some young bloke; almost bit his thing off completely.

  He never really threw anything heavier than a fountain pen after that. But it was always his favourite place to be. It was where he met Teresa to begin with.

  From this height, he could see perfectly down her gaping cleavage and would hang over the edge, almost fall straight over the rails every time she bounced up and down on her feet to brave the freezing cold and with her, her ginormous breasts would wobble away like two giant jelly mountains.

  The first words they had shared were a few brief insults; she for his lingering and he for her whoring, though the latter it seemed; in the end, he had very little argument with.

  But from the first time he heard the words cheap lousy drunk, he knew off the bat that she’d past his stellar demeanour and found the true poet inside, the part he only really kept for his mother and when she said those words he thought to himself; “well if she knows me that well den we should stop all dis carryin on.”

  The first kiss they shared was on his mother’s couch, staring out through the grimy sliding door at the rain pelting down outside, no doubt making slurry of all the debauchery taking residence below.

  Back then, Teresa was a fickler with time and at that time, she should have been down in that slurry getting her knees grazed for a pound or two. But she was up in the villa playing Sociable Suzy to a young lad with funny teeth and a nefarious veneer.

  Shane paid her a pound that night; borrowed the money off his own mother and he dabbed on small splotches of Betadine onto her knees and picked out tiny bits of loose gravel with his long yellow fingernails. They kissed staring out into the rain and it was almost a tragedy conspired by love with Shane losing a wobbling tooth and Teresa almost choking as it got caught on its way down the back of her throat.

  But they were in love, from the first insult to the first kiss. Not even Shakespeare himself would have the dramatic sensibility to etch to life a story like theirs. Maybe he would, but he’d surely leave out the heroin and the blow jobs.

  There wasn’t only one good thing in Shane’s life and that one other had been his staple for as long as he could apologise. His mother had helped him to tie his shoelaces when he was a boy and again as a man when all his training came undone. She picked him out of the snow and poured boiling water on his frozen sores, thawing him out night after drunken night, always ensuring he was up bright and early every morning in the best state she could induce him to be.

  She was the Jupiter in his solar system, taking the fair brunt of all of his mistakes and all of the vengeful plotting by the world abound because not matter how tall he got, no matter how filthy his mouth became, no matter how much he cursed, no matter how many whores he brought home, no matter how many beers he drank, no matter how many fights he lost, no matter how many of her own dreams he cost her; no matter what he did, in the past or even what matter may come, he was her son and she always saw him as her baby, albeit a giant, gangly, toothless, cursin, whore loving, drunken baby.

  Mrs. MacGowan didn’t take well to Teresa. She didn’t like how this foul mouthed, chain sm
oking prostitute had worked her way onto her two-seater; between her and her son, and commenced the stealing of his spark.

  She saw Teresa as a black hole; a dark, soul sucking force that turned like a warped old vinyl through a paper sleeve world, looking for someone or something to feed her starving lecherous soul and the longer he stayed with her and the more his skin scraped against hers, Mrs. MacGowan could see how the love she brought out of him was reverting him to nothing like the death of a star and that the love she gave; at the cusp of her heart, was like the junk they shoveled into their veins; it made them both older and more worse for wear.

  But Shane loved Teresa and he loved his mother and it grieved him something horrible when he had to sing along as they played out of tune, acting as if it could all be ok; that they would learn some way and somehow, to just get along and there was no reason why punk and country couldn’t share the same light.

  And both of them should have been here, sitting on the couch, sipping sugared tea, one cursing the other and the other cursing back but neither bothering to take themselves outside of the crossfire.

  Shane stood against the railing of the veranda, staring over the edge, looking for his mammy down below, but he couldn’t see her anywhere so he shouted out to the other girls.

  “Oi” he shouted.

  Nobody looked.

  “How much?” he shouted again and heads turned, looking up to the veranda; some with insulted scorn, others with negotiating eyes.

  “Don’t be a prick Shane” yelled one of the women.

  “Is dat Nicole?”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “Dijya dye yer roots? Da top o yer head looks different.”

  “Feck off Shane. I did yeah. Does it look good, natural like? Do ya like it?” asked Nicole.

  “Kinda looks like a bird shat peroxide on yer head. Looks great. Listen Nicole, ave ya seen me mammy?” shouted Shane.

  “Not since yesterday, no,” said Nicole.

  “Did she pass by today, sellin? What about da udder girls? Ave dey seen er?” he shouted.

  “I’ll check” Nicole shouted back.

  She tapped on the head of her colleague that was bobbing away beside her. The woman; Stacy, was none too impressed.

  “What is it? I’m workin here” she said.

  “It’s Shane. He’s lookin for Mrs. MacGowan. Ya seen er?”

  “Yeah, she was ere earlier on”

  “Well, can ya tell yer man. Ya know more dan me.”

  “Yeah, Shane. She was ere earlier on. Came down tryna bum a smoke. Had some nice red as well. Doesn’t come off on yer man’s tings ider” she shouted, up towards the veranda.

  “What time? Do ya know where she went?” Shane shouted back.

  “I wouldn’t know ta tell ya the troot. She was talkin to some lads in overcoats. Looked all serious and dat” said Stacy.

  “Were dey Garda?” shouted Shane.

  “Not police no. FBI maybe. Dey had dat whole X-Files type a ting goin on, ya know what I mean? And dere was a man, askin about you dis mornin too. Handsome lookin fella. You done sometin wrong Shane?”

  “I can’t remember,” he said.

  “Yer man was asking about a song. Asked me to hum a few bars. I tought dat was code for sucking his dick. He got a bit offended I tink. Poofter. Yer man looked pretty serious dough. Are ya alright fella, yer all soft” she said, looking up at the client who had an awkward look on his face while the conversing woman worked her two pound magic with her hands.

  “Ah tis a bit strange,” said the man shyly.

  “Hold on a sec Shane,” Tracy said before turning back to her client. “Ya don’t like it? Are ya gay? Cause further down the street ya know…”

  “No it’s not dat,” said the man. “You know. Yer talkin away to yer man up dere and well, it’s a bit strange.”

  “Would ya prefer I didn’t talk to him?” she asked.

  “It’d be grand yeah,” said the man.

  “Sorry Shane. Lad ere is gun shy. Be wit ya in two shakes; more or less” she shouted out.

  Shane looked around the floor beside him. There was some squashed cigarette butts, their ends blackened and burned, smoked right to the filter and beside them were five green bottles, sitting on the floor and he wished to Christ, he wished to Christ that he had fifteen more.

  Shane reached for the phone inside his pocket. His eyes were blurry and his head was light. It was hard to concentrate with only one pint in his system. How other men survived on mere diet and exercise was sheer amazement alone.

  He dialed the number for Spider and the phone didn’t ring, it went straight to voicemail.

  “Spider, it’s Shane. Fucking weird mornin man. Ya wouldn’t fuckin believe it. Ya, remember da landlord? Yeah, I tink I might ave fucked up dere man. Do ya know anyting about DNA? Ah, fuck it. Listen, a lot o weird shit today and some people are askin about me, about some song. I don’t know what da fuck we got up to last night man, but dere’s a lot a strange shite goin on. Fuckin priest died in me hands. Fuckin FBI or MI-5 is houndin everyone I know about a fuckin song I wrote and now me mammy, she’s gone. Listen, man, you couldn’t lend us ten pounds could ya? I’ll buy ya a drink. Come oe man, don’t be a fucking…”

  A long beep cut him off and then phone cut out.

  “Bollocks,” he said, redialing the number.

  As he did, there was a knock at the door. Nobody he ever knew knocked on doors. If they knew where he lived then he knew who they were and if they were here for his company, they were accustomed to walking right on in, whoever they were.

  Shane lifted himself off the seat and scuttled back inside. It was freezing cold out on the veranda and inside the flat but still for some reason he was undressed and walking around in yellow briefs, coloured that way not by the factory but by laziness and a weak bladder. He picked his underwear out of his bum as he peeped through the eye of the door.

  There were two men on the side of the door, both dressed in cream overcoats, brimmed hats and one was wearing terrific looking black shades; like every cliché he had ever imagined.

  One of the men lifted his hand and knocked on the door again.

  “Mr. Shane MacGowan. We know you’re in there. Please come to the door. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Shane froze. His heart was beating a million miles an hour. His head said nothing but his legs said run. But where to? He was many stories up and only two ways down. One was over the veranda and hoping a hooker or two might break his fall if the fall alone didn’t break his legs. The other way was through the front door and down the flight of stairs and when he got out onto the streets, well there would be no catching him from there.

  The man knocked again.

  “We’re not here to hurt you, Shane. We just want to help you. We’re your friends Shane. Open the door” said The Man with Terrific Shades.

  “No,” said Shane.

  “Don’t be silly Shane. We can protect you.”

  “What da fuck are ye on about?”

  “You’re in danger Shane and we can help you. Just open the door and let us in.”

  “Like fuck. Where’s me mammy?” he said.

  “I don’t know where they are, but we know who took them. We can help you get them back Shane. But you have to let us in” said The Man in Terrific Shades.

  “Alright, give us a second,” said Shane, scouring through some draws, ripping them out and throwing them on the floor, scattering his mother’s underwear about the room looking for something in particular.

  “When dey knock on yer front door, how you gonna come, wit yer hands on yer head or on da trigger of a gun” he sang to himself.

  The door knocked again, this time firmer, angrier and with its forced opening more imminent.

  “Open the door Shane” yelled The Man inn Terrific Shades.

  One of his neighbours popped her head out of her door.

  “What’s all dis feck racket. Would ya wisht up?”

  A single shot ech
oed through the flats and silenced the old lady. Her body fell to the floor, her head sticking out on the welcome mat and the door, wedged above her shoulders.

  Shane rummaged faster and he found them.

  “Open the door, Shane.”

  “What did ya doo to Mrs. McClafferty? You shoot her?”

  “We don’t want to have to hurt anyone else. Just open the door and nobody gets hurt.”

  “So if I stay in here, you’ll keep shootin me, neighbours. Dat’s yer plan? Fucking marvelous. Ya can start wit da gobshite ta da left and work yer way down. Tell ya what, ya clear da first floor and we’ll talk” said Shane.

  “Kick it down,” said The Man in Terrific Shades to his friend.

  A black shoe smashed against the door and burst open and rain flooded in, driven by a manic gust of wind and standing in the hallway, dressed on in his yellow stained underwear and pointing both barrels towards the open door, was Shane; a crooked smile etched on his face and war, twitching at his fingertips.

  “Fuck you bastards” he screamed, firing away, the fire from the ends of the barrels warming up his naked body as bullets roared towards the door, cutting the men down, bursting through their jackets and into their bodies, throwing them back and over the railings towards the pavement below.

  Shane fired maybe a hundred shots. It was ridiculous. The gun only held eight, but he didn’t believe it and so he fired more and more, spitting and cursing and laughing and firing some more. The man with the black shoes was hit maybe fifty times in his chest and he flew backwards over the railing and twisted his arms like a human windmill through the air, trying to grip at an invisible handle as he fell downwards and smacked his head on the ground below.

  The other one; The Man with the Terrific Shades, took just as many bullets in his chest and though he had a weapon of his own, pointing in his hands, he had not a single inch of a second to put it to use. He went flying over the railing too but managed; on his way, to have the belt of his coat catch on a small satellite dish that was hanging from one of the railings below.

  “Dis is fuckin mad,” Shane said reaching for his phone again.

  He dialed Spiders number and this time the phone rang. He could hear at first the sound in his ears of the phone ringing out. Then, he could hear the echo a phone ringing, somewhere off out of his sight. It was muffled, but he could hear it. He stepped out of the flat and looked over the edge of the railing, down to the man in black shoes who was lying still on the ground below. And the sound of the phone ringing was coming from the receiver in his ear and from the pocket of the man down below.

  “Fuck dis,” he said out loud.

  Shane ran.

  “Fuck da pants,” he thought, arguing with wasting more time.

  He ran straight out of the flat and down the stairs and when he got to the street, he did just as he had mentioned earlier. He ran and there was no way in hell they were going to catch him.

  He ran through some winding alleyways, jumping over the bonnets of cars, skipping over fences and darting through back doors of people’s houses before bursting out the front doors with their owner’s waving rolled newspapers after him. He ran as fast as he could, still in his underwear and carrying two pistols in his hands; running for the life of him.

  He ran and when he did; in his reflection, he carried with him a dark ominous figure, as if his shadow were another man, taking refuge in his flight.

  Shane ran around every bend, down every street and waited for no safe clearing around every corner. Whoever was on his trail would stop at nothing until they had him in their lurches and he would fight till the death to ensure that didn’t happen and he’d set his body on fire and curse his own ashes to be sure that whoever they were, they could never carry him away.

  Shane ran until he could run no more. The rain was pelting down on him and the wind was chipping away at his spirit and as he keeled over himself with his lungs on fire and his pistols perched dangerously on the caps of his knees, he heard behind him, the stepping of casual and meaningful feet.

  “You can run Shane, but we’ll always find you. You should come with us before anything happens to your mother” said The Man in Terrific Shades; his cream overcoat torn to pieces by the shredding of bullets, but there he stood, completely unimpaired, unspoiled and unbroken and he didn’t even seem very cross.

  Shane couldn’t get a word out. His chest was burning more with every great heave and he fought for every syllable that he was thinking, but he had not the fight to speak them.

  “Look behind you Shane. There’s nowhere to run” said The Man in Terrific Shades.

  Shane lifted his head and he was surrounded. There were cars speeding in from all corners and all fronts with their sirens blazing and gallant officers leaning out of the windows, slapping the rear door like a horse’s behind, waving their pistols in the air and shouting orders towards the toothless punk, standing in his underwear. There were so many orders being spoken that it just sounded like moaning and groaning and gnashing of teeth like a young child, discoursing their dissent with an open mouth before every gulp and swallow.

  “Put da guns down Shane and put yer hands on yer head, slowly like” spoke Officer Ryan.

  The blue lights were flickering madly and the only thing Shane could think was “I wish this rain would stop pouring down on me.”

  “Come with us,” said The Man in Terrific Shades.

  Shane stood with his head bowed to the ground; his eyes watching the side of the road where a tiny rock was wedged against the curb and the water that was rushing past burst upwards into the air and looked like a small stationary wave and all the leaves that were coursing down the running stream burst up with the mini wave and flew high into the air before splashing back down into the foamy bottom and carrying on down the road. Some of the leaves, though; the small ones, carried on in the air, pushed along by the gale wind and pelting rain and were taken somewhere far from the flashing blue lights, the gnashing orders and the cool cats in cream coats.

  This morning was all about a song. A song he couldn’t remember and so he ran through his mind; while his fingers tickled the two triggers, every tune he had ever hummed or ever imagined himself humming but at this moment, there was only one line running through his head.

  And he sang it loud into the pelting rain and coughing wind.

  “When the law break in, how you gonna go? Shot down on the pavement or waiting in death row?”

  He lifted his arms, swiveled his body, raised the guns, widened his eyes, showed his gritting teeth, dug in his feet, squeezed on the trigger and then a beanbag; shot from a nearby gun, smacked him dead in the face and knocked him off his feet and the guns, out of his hands.

  “Hands on yer head Shane” shouted Officer Ryan.

  “Just say yes and I can take you from this,” said The Man in Terrific Shades.

  His head was pounding. He was freezing cold. His fingers were numb and his buttocks were bruised. Naked; except for a pair of yellow stained briefs, Shane rolled over by the curb and rested his head on the small rock inside the torrent of water. He imagined he was a light as one of the leaves and the water would just spit him up into the air and the freezing wind would pick him up in her motherly arms and carry him to his bed so he could try and sleep this one off like he had all of the others.