Utterly Monkey

EARLY MORNING AGAIN

Two miles and forty-seven yards away, Geordie was skinning up a morning spliff to lessen the stress of Trisha. Two men were arguing over an enormously fat girl who was dressed from head to foot in Adidas. The two men were both at least three times her age, which appeared to be around thirteen. Man One and Man Two would periodically stand up and shout at each other and then sit down. Like little figures wheeled out on the chime of a fancy wooden clock, they’d wave their arms, clang around for a while and retreat. The fat girl’s brown hair was scraped up away from her face and sat in a tuft on the top of her scalp, like the green parts of a pineapple. It was becoming apparent that Man Two was the girl’s father and that Man One drove her school bus. It was also becoming apparent that Man One had fathered Pineapple’s baby. This, the offspring of Pineapple and bus driver, was now being brought on stage for some kind of curtain call. It was a pink-faced wailing package and nobody wanted to hold it.

Geordie took the last hot drag on his spliff, and stubbed it out, crooking it like a baby finger. This was interesting. He was alone in Danny’s flat. He stood up. He was wearing only pale blue creased boxers. He lifted his rucksack from the foot of the sofa and emptied the contents out onto the sleeping bag. He replaced everything bar one white plastic bag. He set about counting the cash it contained. Geordie had not left home empty-handed.

The morning of his going he’d been fit to burst with worries about what to take and where to go and how to get. The usual going concerns. He’d rang Janice at work and asked her to meet him in the old children’s playground over in Kildrum. It was out of town and across the road from a housing estate that was being emptied out, house by house, to swankier estates. The windows on some houses were boarded up and some were flung open on the warm summer sky. The place had the look of an advent calendar. Janice had taken her lunch hour early from the chemists and driven out in her wee red Fiesta. Geordie watched her carefully and clumsily reverse the car into one of the outlined spaces in the car park, even though it was completely empty. She sauntered up to him. Tight scant denim skirt, white trainers, a navy V-neck top and a long open maroon cardigan. Her hair was tied back and Geordie fancied she’d been crying or maybe it was hay fever. She looked good, great even, if you forgave the wonky eye, and Geordie did, as he held her waist and kissed the soft swell of the top of her breasts.

‘Jan, I have to disappear. You know your fucking brother has put the word out on me.’

I heard Brewster talking about it in the kitchen. Geordie, I don’t know what to say. It’s my fault. I tried to talk to Greer but he wasn’t having any of it. And Da said to shut up or he’ll turf me out. Should I come? Should I come with you? Where are you going?’

Good old Janice, Geordie thought. Good old stupid sexy Janice, with her little waist and little feet and big lips.

Better not, at least not yet. I’ll try and send you a message at Martin’s when I get something sorted. I don’t know where I’m going, to be honest Jan. And I’ve no cash. I was thinking of Australia but there’s visas and stuff to be sorted out and I’ll have to do that in England. You could try and come over and meet me in London maybe, or in Australia even, in a few months. You could do your hairdressing again and I could work in a bar or drive a cab.’

‘Geordie, if you need money, I can get you money.’

He had turned her round and she was leaning into his lap as he drifted slightly on the swing, pleased with the airy movement. He was considering whether or not she’d let him slip her skirt up and fuck her gently from behind, here and now, as a little leaving gift.

‘How can you get money? You can’t nick it from work Jan. They have security cameras in there.’

‘Geordie!’ she snapped a little, ‘I love that job. I wouldn’t steal from Mr and Mrs Martin. They’ve been really good to me.’

‘Aye, Charlie Martin’s been very keen to be really good to you. Mad keen. Mad keen to get you in the back of the shop all alone and be really good to you.’

‘Shut up. Listen to me. Greer has money in a box behind the panel in the bath. He doesn’t know I know it’s there. You have to work the panel off with a knife or screwdriver but the other day I was in there and Da was shouting to let him in the bathroom but I was shaving my legs and I turned round to let him in for a piss and kicked the side panel of the bath and it made a clangy sound, like metal. Geordie, I can feel you.’

Geordie had slipped his hands inside her cardigan, which she’d zipped up, and he was cupping the underside of her breasts. His cock was running lengthways to the left, over the side of his thigh. ‘Hold on,’ he said, and slipped one hand under the pinch of his jeans and pulled his cock up straight, to fit in the shallow indentation that her tight skirt allowed her ass to make. ‘Go on then. What about the bath?’ He pulled her tight to him now, holding her hard little waist. She was rubbing a little against him and her voice was softer, sinking.

‘What? Oh. Well, I let Da in and then when I went back in to finish my legs I took Brewster’s penknife from the cabinet, which Malandra had in there cos it’s got tweezers on it, and I took the panel off and there’s a metal box, with a lock on it but the key was in it, and it’s full of money. I mean full of money. It must be Budgie’s. No one else in the house has cash like that lying around.’ Her voice trailed off as Geordie moved one hand down and under her and touched the warm, wet patch of her cotton knickers.

‘You’re full of money.’ He slipped a finger in under the strict elastic and felt that smallest part of her hardening. With his palm on her thigh, holding her legs apart, his finger moved down to feel the lips loosening, moistening.

‘Geordie, not here. Come into the car and we’ll park down by Macklin’s river.’

‘Ach, come on, there’s no one round. It’s the last time we’ll see each other for a while. Are you saying, Janice,’ and here he moved the other hand up over her breast and freed it from her bra. Loose and soft and billowy. He held the dense little nipple between his finger and thumb, gently, then firmly, ‘that you’ll steal Budgie’s money to give to me? What are you saying?’

‘You’ve nothing to lose. I’ll deny everything. No one knows the money’s there. He never checks it. That first night I put a hair between the panel of the bath and the wall so that if someone took the panel off the hair would fall and Geordie, the hair was still there this morning. I’ll take some of it. Just enough to see you right. Come on.’

Clever girl, Geordie thought. Janice stood up, shivery, adjusted her bra under her top and tugged her skirt round to straighten the seam. She dragged him by the hand to the car, and as she walked she felt the friction tingle between her legs, as if his fingers were still down there. Geordie pulled his checked blue shirt out of his jeans to cover his cock: it had thrust its angry head over the parapet of his belt.

Driving back into town, after a frenetic half-hour at Macklin’s river, feeling sated and lazy and sexy, Janice told Geordie to meet her back at the playground at two, and to bring a bag. She went back to work and told old soft Mr Martin that she wasn’t well. Woman’s problems. He was getting ready to complain when she pushed her chest up against him and made as if to cry. He told her to go straight home and get to bed. They could manage without her. She drove to the semi-detached house at the edge of the Dungiven estate she shared with her parents, Malandra and a varying number of brothers (Budgie’s marriage had faltered, as predicted, almost immediately, and Jackie and little snub-nosed Greer Junior lived with her mother over in Coagh, and Chicken had just moved across town into his girlfriend Jenny’s flat which was, too conveniently, above the offy). She told her mother, who was sitting at the dining-room table doing a jigsaw of two poodles in a pram, that she’d period pains, and needed to take a bath and some aspirin. Her mother, holding two edge pieces between her pursed lips, looked up, nodded and then looked down again. Some old sitcom was on the telly. Janice thudded up the stairs into her room and emptied her toilet bag onto her bed. She carried it into the bathroom and set it on the edge of the bath. She leant against the sink and looked at herself. The mirror was overcast with dust and constellated with stray white flecks of toothpaste. Janice thought how old she looked. She stretched the skin at the side of her eyes to flatten the little crow’s feet that were appearing. She must remember to wear her glasses more when she drove, not squint so much. And she should stop smoking, they say that’s not good for the skin. She turned and looked at herself from the side. Her breasts were still high and still firm, for breasts that size. She cupped them as if weighing them, and thought how last week some asshole down at the building site on the Benaghy Road had shouted after her, as she passed on the way to the solarium at lunchtime, You don’t get many of them to the pound. She felt like kneeing him in the balls as she had Budgie, when he’d tried to get into her room three years ago, drunk. No way Jos´e. She hadn’t let him in since she was sixteen and he never tried any more. She lifted her top. Her stomach was still flat and still hard. Good. She could do with losing some weight off her bum she decided, and suddenly, a little viciously, tugged off her top and wriggled out of her skirt and knickers. She stepped cleanly out of the puddled clothes, and looked at the pale mass of herself again. Skin and then inside that flesh and inside that bone and then inside that what? Didn’t people say the marrow of the bone? People had bone marrow transplants didn’t they? As she stood and stared in the mirror she saw her face waver and emerge as if it was fifty years old. Fleshy cheeks, a corrugated brow, eyelids thickened and heavy. She blinked and came back to herself. You’re getting old Janice, she thought, you’re beginning to die.

She opened the bathroom cabinet. A dimpled strip of Boots paracetamol clattered into the sink, triggering a loose scree of assorted plasters. An ancient bottle of Calpol, still in its stained cardboard sheath, stood at the back of the top shelf. A stippled pink ankle support covered some squat and sturdy pill bottles. It dated from the time Budgie, up playing on ‘the pitch’ (really a partly gravelled field behind the Costcutters which had been earmarked for a car park that never appeared) had his ankle sprained by a dangerous tackle from Jackie McMenemy. That was the first time Budgie had been in trouble, apparently, according to Brewster, as Janice had only been one or two then. As payback Budgie had lifted a broken brick from the pile they were using for one of the goalposts, hobbled over to Jackie, who was sitting cross-legged nursing his own ankle, and smashed it in his face. Her dad had given the McMenemys money so that Budgie wouldn’t go to borstal. You still saw Jackie round the town on a Saturday, holding the hand of one of his wee boys who’d look up, wailing or smiling, into the gap-toothed grin of a village idiot. You can fix that sort of stuff now, Janice thought, wiping her tongue like a polishing rag over the neat ornaments of her own front teeth.

There were pumice stones and scalpels and bunion and corn plasters for her mother’s gnarled feet (the legacy of twenty years standing behind the counter in Marshall’s bakery). And there was Brewster’s penknife with the tweezers that saw heavy usage. The hair on Malandra’s body could best be described as adventurous. Her eyebrows, left alone as they had been for approximately fifteen years, had sent out expeditions to explore the rest of her face. The small of her back had fleeced itself. She was pretty, Janice knew, and unlike her was dark, which was really why the flecks of downy, shadowy hair on her face used to be noticeable. From when she was twelve, if she ever pissed any of them off, they’d called her Elvis, what with her sideburns and all. Which was why there were four half-empty tubes of Immac in the cabinet, and the tweezers were kept busy applauding in the natural light by the bathroom window.

Janice banged the cabinet door and pulled out the blade of the knife with her thumbnail. She wedged it in between the panel and the side of the bath. The panel shifted slightly ajar. She turned on both bath taps: they squealed as she twisted their heads, and dripped in some gloopy orange bubble foam. The panel was a sheet of plywood, painted white, and the green deposit box was still behind it. She pulled it out from its hiding place. It was lighter than she remembered. She put the lid of the toilet down and sat on it, the box and the lid burning her bare thighs with cold. The cash was in rolls packed in little plastic bank bags. They reminded her of messages in bottles somehow. She hadn’t time to count it or estimate how much it was. She quickly took the bags out and pushed some into her trainers, and then pushed her socks in after them. The rest she stuffed into her toilet bag. She stood up then, and touched, gently, as if in remembrance, the cool damp hair between her legs. She would miss him, she thought, and his lovely big cock. Maybe she would try and meet him somewhere. Fuck Budgie. It had been a long time since she’d felt anything but hate for him. Fuck Greer and Chicken and their vicious mouths and fists and friends. Fuck the lot of them. Except Brewster. He was all right, just a bit pathetic. He floated around like a ghost, shocked to be noticed at all. She went to the toilet, wiped, stood and yanked the chain. It was an old-fashioned toilet with the cistern up high on the wall. It glugged and then whimpered, filling up. She stepped into the bath and hunkered. It was too hot to lie down in. She could hear the bubbles in the foam popping softly, audible as an opened can of Coke. She lowered her ass into the water and raised herself again. She cupped some water and let it drizzle down over her knees, onto her thighs, into the nest of hair between her legs. She sat down properly and then, with the dragged, reverberant sound of skin on wet plastic, slipped down into the bath to submerge herself completely. Pinching her nose closed, she felt the water funnel into her ears. She could hear the sounds of the house much clearer here: the television spilling canned laughter in the living room, and the steam whistle of the kettle on the gas ring, and then her mother’s chair scrape back on the lino tiles as she got up in her sheepskin slippers and shuffled into the kitchen to warm the teapot. I live underwater, she thought suddenly, and pushed her feet against the bottom of the bath to surface for air and shampoo.