K8 the GR8

 Part I/Part II/Part III/Part IV/Part V/Part VI/Part VII/Part VIII

The family’s plans for Halloween were somewhat spurious this year.  Given the option of a night in my mother-in-law’s or a weekend at my cousin’s house in Mullingar, I chose option C; (I had to fake a rather good breakdown for this option to be plausible) a weekend away on my own.  Not being entirely flushed with cash, I did an inter-net search using the words ‘Guesthouse, cheap, remote, Ireland’.  The search engine asked me if I was feeling lucky, and it just so happened that I was…

I browsed the comments, of which there were only two. 

The first said: ‘My sister had to be booked into the clinic after she stayed here’, the second: ‘This house tested the limits of my humanity! To be avoided.’  Sheer curiosity made me book a room right there and then.

3:00 am

The baby in my arms is screaming fitfully, its jaws look dis-jointed, much like those of a snake as it attempts to swallow something five times its size.  Its hands… no, its claws grab at my hair and pull it out in fistfuls, but all I can do is cuddle it in the hope it could be pacified.  Its eyes bulge, grow larger and larger… they turn into balloons filled with a noxious fluid which sloshes around inside, threatening to drown me when the child’s eyeballs inevitably pop.  The eyeballs don’t pop… the image dissappears as I wake, sweating.  Shouting.

“Please don’t!!!  He didn’t mean it, please don’t do it!!!” 

It’s all gone away and I am extrmely grateful.

My stomach curdles in remembrance of the nightmare, it’ll take a while for those images to abate.  I look around, lost for a second until I remember where I am.  A strange smell wafts that wasn’t there when I had fallen asleep, and a peculiar scraping noise can be heard from above.  I slide out of bed and look up, searching for form in the dusky light.  Holes.  There are holes peppered into the ceiling plaster.  Ugh.  I put my tracksuit on and distinctly hear a disappointed groan. 

That can’t be good.

A baby screams.  My blood curdles and suddenly changes direction rending my extremities cold and the hairs on my body prickly like a million thorns… the memory of my nightmare returns and threatens to stupefy me.  If intuition came in neon lights, mine would be putting a serious energy scourge on this godforsaken grid in this moment, for it is screaming to me that madness is standing right behind my bedroom door.  The benign piece of wood seems to throb as I stare at it and against all my wishes, the doorknob begins to turn.

“Hey!” My voice squeaks in a panicked cadence that isn’t my own.  “How about an old-fashioned knock first?!”

The door swings slowly open and light oozes into my room like a puddle of radioactive waste.  A woman stands on the threshold holding a bundle.  Her hair is long and straw-like and her eyes… her eyes are bearing right into my core, into my past.  I can tell she knows my worst fears immediately.  I freeze as she holds the bundle towards me.  This is too surreal for me.

“The baby hassssssssh to go.  We don’ wannishh.  You wannisssh?  Can’ take’n no more!!” her accent is masked by her stumbling speech pattern.

I pull my adrenaline together into a virtual wrecking ball and slam my body against the back of the door in an effort to close it.  Fuck the baby.  Its cries are all wrong, just like in the dream… I don’t care if I hurt it.  My shoulder crashes against the outer edge of the door, but it goes nowhere.  A dart of pain storms through my shoulder and neck and I fall back towards the bed, now in full view of the occupants of the doorway.  I screw my eyes shut in horror and tell myself it isn’t real.  Even foulness has its limits in everyday society.

The blond lady with the crazy eyes is not alone - she drops the bundle she has been carrying to reveal that it had been a decoy.  The moth-eaten material falls pathetically around the heels of the man who stands beside her… a man whose features are wrong, all wrong, in the manner of a person who is borne from genes too closely linked.  His stumpy fingers hold a rope, and attached to the other end is a rotting mass of child.  The suggestion of bone beneath the mess is indescribable, the smell unbelievable. The baby.  Oh, this is too evil.  Too wrong.  I beg with my sanity to stay with me.

Through the darkness of my eyelids I sense movement and realise that blackness is an even worse enemy than the truth, so my eyes snap open to welcome the horror.  The baby is being held at arm’s length, as though it was being offered to me.

“She seen it now, that be th’end of tha’ gird’le!!”  His nostrils flare as he laughs with mania, a flash of silver crosses his palm as the door is all too suddenly slammed shut, defying the laws of physics.

Darkness, but not silence. 

Hissing.

Snakes?  A jar of insects?  What the hell is the noise?  The answer reaches me before I have a chance to search for a light switch.

I gag.  The air is suddenly scarce and filled with a billion microscopic razor blades.  When it fills my lungs I retch as I feel it try to turn me inside-out.  My eyes burn, fluid streams not from my tear ducts, but from my eyes themselves, like they are melting and are trickling down my cheeks in scalding rivers of putrid pus.  My nose is occluded by two red-hot pokers and is frantically trying to extinguish the heat itself with a torrent of mucus… it oozes into my mouth and onto the carpet as I bend forward and gag helplessly.  Even my ears are suffering from an unruly hell.  What the hell is this stuff?  This clogging, fogging gas that makes me want to shove my head down the unsavoury toilet and flush? 

Death perhaps seems a welcome escape, but not before I notice the old cracked window frame through the noxious fug.  I drag my body to an almost upright position, and sneeze the poison out violently.  Liquid gushes from my head as though I am a possessed hobo and I frantically wipe and claw at my face to clear my view.

I hurl myself at the window and cherish the sweet sound of shattering glass and cool clean Irish air as I plunge to my death.

Or not.

I land on the porch roof and roll… THUD… onto the leafy ground below.  The last of the poisoned CS gas leaves my lungs with the blow and I gasp.  Oxygen floods my brain, enough to fuel the last remnants of adrenaline I have left and I run.

See Kate run.  Run Kate run.

I am almost at the gaping maw of the front gate when I hear it… the all-too realistic human plea.

“HELP!!!”

This is a quick post just to say thank you.

Your comments bowled me over.  The traffic my page received from the countless links you loaned me is astonishing, and your kind words and promises to pass the information on are similar to an over-sized fleece jumper straight out of the tumble-dryer.  Thank you for helping; for queuing and stamp-licking and filling in blank spaces… even if you could only afford the time to read the story I’m eternally grateful.

I do so love this blogging lark.
(In thy face, Mr. Waters.)

I wrote a new post just now, but decided that it was way to important to me to let it trickle down the page and out of sight as soon as more stuff is written.  So, I turned it into a new page instead.

It’s a story and a cry for help and if you could mosey in and have a look at it I’d be ever so grateful.

CLICK ME!

There I was, minding my own business on a playground bench, quietly reading a book while Puppychild played and spun and bounced.

I’m not in the habit of standing awqwardly while she does her thing, nor am I in the habit of following her around to ensure her safety.  She’s big and ugly enough now to experiment with the laws of gravity herself without me pointing them out.

So there I sat, and read and watched.

Then, out of the blue, my darling child shouted and pointed loudly from across the playground;

“Look!  Mommy’s sad!”

All heads turned.  Ok, so my hair wasn’t brushed and I was neurotically dressed against the cold, and I was reading a particularily intense book so was perhaps hunched over a little too much, perhaps I was giving off the impression that I may indeed have a sneaky gin bottle concealed in some inner pocket.  Other parents gazed at me sympathetically, so I waved to Puppychild with a tad too much cheer.  Damn, my desperate cover up did me no favours. 

It’s like that time at the supermarket checkout when she shouted; “Mommy take her tablets now?” 

Always so bloody out of the blue! 

I’m not a staircase gin guzzler, nor do I pop Prozac like there’s no tomorrow… I don’t take pills at all.  I don’t have a clue where she gets these notions, but get them she does, and she uses them to their utmost effect and always with perfect timing.  She has a flair for the drama, does that one.

I didn’t expect for her to learn how to take the piss so early, but I suppose it was inevitable, given her genes.

That’s just what the world needs!  Another smartarse.

Maybe mixing Guinness with her milk was a bad idea after all…

I pushed XtraVision’s door open and found it as grudging as my want to start the confrontation I’d been building up since the final episode of the box-set I was returning.

“Hi”  I said to the grizzly looking teeshirt behind the counter - “I’ve got a complaint about this rental, I feel ripped off.”  The girl said nothing, just looked at me expectantly and gave me a micro shrug of indifference. 

I stood in blank abandon for a second.  “Umm… this ‘Entourage’ box-set was only four hours long from start to finish, but I paid a tenner to rent it for a week.  The characters were pretty shallow too, but I s’pose that’s not your fault… “  I laughed nervously and inwardly kicked myself for being such a sap.

“So?” 

“So… when I rent a box-set for a ten euros a week, I expect it to last for a week - pretty much like the others do - and not for just two nights.  I was expecting at least sixteen hours of entertainment, but I only got four!  That’s a rip-off!”

“I don’t price ‘em.” She shrugged again and turned her back on me, assuming that the conversation was over.  I fucking hate that.

“HEY” I stated.  I sensed her eyes rolling as she stopped in her tracks and turned slowly, fixing a BDI on me.  “Notice how I’m being nice here?  See how easy-going I am?  I’m not that customer, okay?  I just think I’m owed compensation… I’m not demanding refunds here or slapping my fists on the counter screaming for the manager… y’know?”  My tone was dry.  God, I hate these conversations. 

“I’m the manager here.”  Her demeanour was infallible.  Her teeshirt was her mojo and I understood.  I remembered vividly.

“Oh.  Really?  Okay then… I’ll guess I’ll take these then.”  I sheepishly handed over three DVDs.  Her civil politeness thereafter made me want to hurl bags of M&Ms at her face, but I said nothing, I just raged at my weakness and at XtraVision’s ability to crush my spirit once again.

I used to work in XtraVision see.  Their regiment is tight as a nut, run by iron maidens hatched in jam-jars.  All staff had to be off the premises by 11:00pm which gives you exactly ten minutes to sort out the returned videos and settle up the accounts (while the customers are still milling around) at the end.  Not to mention all the hoovering and polishing and emptying of ashtrays - ahh, the good old days… they gave me regular bollickings for hanging around too late.

Friends of mine used to try to get me to cancel any owings on their account, and I would have if I was able.  The computer system needs everything but your date of birth on each transaction, it’s airtight.  I couldn’t figure out how to cheat the thing for love nor money, it had my heart broke, as mammy would say.

In the end I got kicked out when they thought I’d stolen a shit load of mobile phone credit.  Remember when the codes used to come in cards?  There were baskets of them just behind the counter, and I took my eye off them for a few seconds to throw a few returned videos into the back-room one night, so sue me!  The area wasn’t the poshest place and was frequented by all sorts of nutters, 

and gangs of nutters.  And little groups of nutter children… they were most obviously robbed.  I wouldn’t mind, but there’s a CCTV camera that absorbs the whole beautiful lot.  Fuck all use that turned out to be.

Also, their Christmas party was a disaster but I’m not going to go into that. 

I have no cable TV.  Xtra Vision have swallowed up Movie Magic which was my favourite haunt, so now I am their bitch as there is nothing else in this town. 

I must have invested thousands of euros in that place by now, the ungrateful fuckers. 

Entourage my hole!!!

It always happens on those rare nights out with Best Bud.  We agree to spend a few civilized pints in each other’s company and catch up and swear that we wouldn’t even entertain the thought of entering a club afterwards, but we always do.

We seem to forget after months of abstainment that it won’t be as great a buzz at it seems to be, that it used to be.  The club entity itself hadn’t changed… they still played No Diggity and Fearless just like the good old days, and the clientele was exactly the same mix of badly dressed nervous looking men hanging around in groups (with the obligatory nutter mate dancing his little socks off), and scantily clad ladies sipping demurely on their straws, eyeing up the talent.  You watch them, they watch you.  It’s a gallery of desperados. 

We keep forgetting that it’s us who has changed, we’re older, wiser, but still feel that need to be watched like that now and then.  We feel superior somehow in the knowledge that we’re in disguise.  Sold merchandise, sorry boys!  As if this was the reality… but we can dream.

We found ourselves feeling awqward.  We couldn’t talk so were limited to shouted statements and room-gazing… we found a clear corner and did this for a while, until…

“Oh wait” I shouted.  “Let’s move, this is definately the farting corner.”  Best Bud laughed, but didn’t take my word for it as people rarely do.  Her face contorted as she inhaled just as a random bloke approached and distracted her with a chat-up line.  Nice… score 1 to Best Bud.

I pulled her away from the methane cloud and hopeless conversation and we advanced to the heavily populated hang-around zone.  A pair of spectacles were proffered to me by a tall chap, not entirely talentless by any means.  I removed my own glasses and handed them to him.  Boy was he in for a surprise.

“Woah… Jesus… Fu….” he reeled and bumped against a table full of pints.  “You’re pretty shortsighted, aren’t ya?”  I thanked him for reminding me.  He asked me where I was from.

“Latvia” I said, flowing with the moment.  “I’m Ruby Dubidoux” I shook his hand.  He didn’t seem to notice the lack of accent.

“I’m from South Africa - I guess we’re both tourists, heh heh!” Bless him.  “Can I get you a drink?”

“No thanks, I’m fine.” I find that accepting drinks means that you’re stuck with dead-end pfaff talk for the rest of the night and then get branded a prick tease afterwards which rarely feels nice. 

“I noticed!”

“Wha?  Oh…” (blush) “Thanks! I mean I’m ok, I already have a drink.”  Yipee! Score 1 for me!  Best Bud and I bumped knuckles as the South African dude admitted defeat and slinked away.

I caught a glimpse of the pair of us in the flowered mirror a few feet away, and saw a strange reflection.   I panicked, and noticed the same lost look in Best Bud’s eyes. 

“Mooo”  I said.

“Mooooooo” she replied.

We left with a decent one-all draw and spent the rest of the night planning madcap adventures by the sea-shore, wondering why we didn’t just bring a six-pack and a naggin of vodka to the beach in the first place.  Oh yeah!  The whole dressing up and hiding the baggage thing!  That weird need to be reminded every now and then that we’re still female - it’s quite sad, isn’t it?  Oh well.  Cattle-fever is out of our systems again for a few months at least.

My son came home from school in parts today.

The main part was in his wheelchair as it usually is, the rest was wrapped in a tiny piece of tissue and sealed in an envelope.  Hollah to the Tooth Fairy - you’ve a stop-off here tonight!

It fell out in school, much to the dissapointment of his daddy, the Accidental Terrorist.  Terrorists like to exact pain on their victims… you know, the usual… for information, to make a twisted point, or just for the fun of it.  This terrorist however, has a more noble motive.

I’m sure you remember having wiggly teeth - impossible to leave alone, the focus of many hours of intesive tongue-work until finally it’s either knocked out, or pulled out by a cruel relative and a piece of string.  This is the natural way.

With Laughingboy however, it’s different.  His physical abilities are still on a par with a three month old’s, so he can’t deliberately play with it.  He can’t wiggle it or give it gentle tugs like your usual seven year old, and he certainly can’t muster up the courage to give it that final yank.

Instead, one of us has to do it.  We can run the risk that if he swallows the tooth, he’ll most likely be fine, but if he inhales it, he could do some nasty damage to his breathing apparatus.  When I say ‘one of us’, by the way, I mean ‘not me’.  I’ve tried.  I can’t pull teeth.  It’s not in my genes apparently.

TAT, however, sent me a photo of the first one he pulled from Laughingboy’s skull.  He was proud as punch, his son’s hero.  When the next one (the one that fell out today) showed first signs of wobbliness, TAT was right on it.  He wiggled it religiously every day, gave it gentle tugs… ‘I’ll have that out any day now!’ became his mantra.  I just watched and cringed.

This was why TAT was gutted to see the little brown envelope today and a big gap in Laughingboy’s smile.

“That was mine to pull.”  he sulked.

I would’ve been slightly disturbed by that comment if I didn’t know better.

The cloaked figures huddled together in a solemn circle and murmured in unison. Their tears fell slowly for the loss of the last great sorcerer as they watched his body being immersed slowly in the soil he had battled for and won, many times over. He was their last great leader and without him they were lost, without his power they were unsure of their strength as an army from this point forth… they mourned not only for their legendary friend and comrade, but for their future.

A tree was planted on the sorceror’s grave… a Hawthorn seedling which grew steadily and slowly for the next 3,000 years, untouched by human hand, despite the many battles that raged on that field over time. It stood strong and wise, the blood of the magician flowed through its roots, and it learned many things.

-o0o-

Crispin (Tayto) Doyle sat dangling his steel-toed work boots from the uppermost height of the scaffolding he’d just erected, and gazed at the muddy chaos below. The road was taking an eternity to build thanks to the Godawful weather, progress was painful and cold. His mobile phone rang, startling him into an almost death-inducing jump. He slid backwards into a more secure seating position and reached for the phone, hoping it was Claire. He could do with the warmth of her voice about now.

“Yeah, Tayto… work away on your lunch there… a bit early, yeah, but we’ve hit a serious batch of bedrock here, we’re on to the base about upgrading the digger but it’ll probably take a while.”

“Sound, man… I’m starved, give us a shout when ye’re ready to go!” Tayto flipped the phone shut and shimmied down the scaffolding with the ease of a baby monkey. He scanned the area for some shelter and spotted the tree. The mud squelched underfoot and mirrored his enthusiasm for his job - if only a way out was an option, but it wasn’t. Times were hard, jobs were scarce.

Claire had packed his lunch that day… bless her, he’d have preferred vinegary chips and a batter-burger, but his wholegrain rasher and mayo sandwich did the job nicely. He sat and ruminated afterwards, working the seeds out of his teeth with a piece of loose bark from the tree. The wood tasted surprisingly fresh and warm, as though he were chewing on a piece of tasty ham crackling, and he felt a peculiar warmth spread through him, like the early morning rays of sunshine on a prisoner’s face. He felt strange. Empowered, but strange.

Awake.

He knew he hadn’t slept, but his mind kicked awake with a fitful jolt - his eyes took in an array of peculiar information and he could see the wind. He could track the flow of the breeze and learned its purpose instantly, understood its pattern and yearned to follow it to see where it went… he immersed himself in the new understanding and felt himself pushing against the airflow not with arms, but with wings. Startled, he watched as he flew further and further away from the pile of clothes and the opened lunchbox below. He had a new shape, but he understood and was not afraid.

Tayto alighted on the uppermost branch beside a ladybird and winked a greeting with his new beady blackbird eye. The ladybird nodded, and spoke in a voice unheard of by man. He warned Tayto, pleaded with this link to mankind, and pointed with urgency with a tiny quivering feeler - to the bulldozer below.

Such perfect timing! Was it Tayto’s purpose in life to protect this tree, right here in this instant? He didn’t know, but knew to act fast. His wings flapped furiously, faster and faster until they became a low-droning buzz. The world slowed to a snail’s pace to his waspish awareness as he darted towards Neelo, the bulldozer’s driver. He had to stop him, and could think of no other way. Once he was inside, he could sting the man, then change into something bigger again, something more persistent.

Neelo spotted the wasp instantly as it flew towards the cabin’s open window. He blew a puff of smoke from his John Player Special into the wasp’s path to stun it momentarily, and reached for his can of deodorant. The vapourised molecules hit Tayto before he knew what was happening and he fell, curled in agony onto the cabin floor of the bulldozer. He gasped his last breath and died.

Neelo plodded on, the bulldozer made contact with the bark of the tree near the root and he changed gear. With a gnarly groan, the bulldozer lifted the tree away from its bed, inducing a flurry of leaves and pollen, killing the tree instantly and cursing the road that was to lie there soon afterward. As Neelo pushed forwards, the tree collapsed with a gushing sigh and with what sounded like a chorus of keening souls. Neelo arched his neck and peered out the window to make sure he wasn’t hearing things, just as a gush of leaves blew into his face. He inhaled and gasped instantly, choking the fragments out of his windpipe.

Awake.

Neelo snarled as he jumped from the cockpit and barked viciously as he ran towards the foreman… he savoured the sweet taste of blood as he sank his wolfish teeth into the commander’s calf.

He never liked that prick.

I was stuck staring at the back-end of a bus today and noticed something funny.

Can you see anything wrong with this picture?

Here they are… all these lovely places to visit so that you can call your mates at home and brag about how cool you are… there’s Paris, Egypt, London, New York - but wait!  What’s that?

How’s that?

I sincerely doubt they have a mast on the moon, but even if they did, wouldn’t that nasty vacuum play havoc with the radio waves?  I’ve a good mind to ring yer wan in Meteor, tell her I’m planning a New Year’s trip to the moon and ask her how much roaming costs from 384,400km away!?!

That’s not false advertising, it’s just being silly. 

The man with the Panzerfaust stood inside a shattered doorway and drew a bead on me. POOOM! The shell exploded right in front of the wall I was ducked behind and left an irritating whistle in my ears. My vision blurred suddenly, so I reached into my bag of supplies and withdrew a syringe of adrenaline… just as the doorbell rang.

I put the Xbox controller on the table and tightened the belt of my dressing-gown… just in case. I trudged to the door and opened it, to find a small child - Puppychild’s best friend - standing there wearing only a pair of knickers and a porridge-stained vest. The usual snail-trail of snotty matter glinted from her cupid’s bow in the early morning sunlight, streaked slightly across her left cheek, reflecting an identical streak on her wrist. Such are the charms of three year olds.

Her mother stood behind her, chuffing on a fag.

“Mornin’” she says… her eyes look especially drawn I noticed.

“How’ye?” I replied in proper council-house order.

“Knackered! We’re just back from the Children’s hospital ’bout an hour ago.”

“Who is it this time?!” Trips to the hospital are commonplace with my neighbour’s kids… I think it’s because she keeps her house too clean.

“Young wan there!” She gestured at the snotty toddler with a fag-end. “She has pleurisy this time… they gave her two sets of antibiotics, an inhaler, a batch of steroids and a nasal spray and sent her home.”

I gazed at the child standing in front of me and shivered empathetically, her scanty clothing was odd given the fact that it was an especially chilly October morning. A bubble of goo inflated from one nostril, then imploded sending a long bungee of snot towards the child’s bare toes. She slurped the remains back up, coughed like a baby seal, and slid one arm across her face - all the way from her elbow to the tip of her index finger. My breakfast churned inside me.

“She’s dressed a bit on the scanty side, isn’t she? Maybe you should have her in bed? Not that I’m an expert, mind…” As I spoke, an errant kitten caught the kid’s attention and she scampered away, giving chase. Her bare feet slapped on the damp tarmac and I noticed her baby toe was an alarming shade of purple.

“Ahhh, lookit!” my neighbour laughed - “Sure that never works. I’m thinkin’ that if I leave her out like this, maybe the virus will catch a virus and feck off.”

There’s proper Irish logic for you… it’ll probably work, too.