Wrap it in Words

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‘And if you let them sweat on a low heat, they’ll release their juices quicker and you won’t have to add water. Pass the-’

He handed her the butter-dish again and she scraped ruefully at the inside of the white porcelain. The hard, thick smell of fat filled the room and he made tiny whooshing motions with his hands to clear the air. Cara took a deep, dramatic breath and shuddered in pleasure.

‘Nothing like a bit of butter, a bit of bought butter, the best bit of bought butter.’ She repeated the tongue twister, once, twice, and tittered as she stumbled over the words.

She wasn’t really talking to him, he knew, but he listened anyway. Every now and then she would address a remark to the air, and seeing as he inhabited that air, it was enough excuse to remain perched on the kitchen table, waiting.

‘Where’s the – thank you, meat – I’ll brown it in this one so that it doesn’t stain,’ she said to herself, beginning to slice chunks off the slab of beef, keeping them uniform and well rounded. They bled only slightly before she tossed them into the old cast-iron pan, sizzling in the hot oil and spitting bits of fat back at her like an ungrateful child. She stirred, oblivious, ignoring the goblets of oil that flew through the air and caught in her loose hair.

She brandished a jug full of slurping, tumescent brown. ‘… And the amazing thing about stock is that it lasts forever – this is the turkey from last Christmas, can you believe it?’ She looked briefly up at her second son, legs dangling over the table.

He could believe it. He remembered the turkey well. It had been monstrous, far too big for the five of them, but that was Cara. Some fancy about stuffing growing boys had been drilled into her when she was young, and she had never left it behind. And so she had surrounded the bird with mounds glistening potatoes and vegetables fried into anonymity, and had bowed her head when they couldn’t manage a third helping.

She scooped the fat from the top of the jug and set it aside for the potatoes, then poured the yellow-brown mix in with the vegetables. It left the jug with a soft glump-glump sound that sickened him to his stomach.

Molly, their greying and overweight lab, groaned in her sleep as Cara stepped around her, perhaps taken by some fleeting scent memory. Well she should remember the smell. The massive turkey bones and entrails had been left out for the dogs in the days after Christmas. They had bickered and fought before settling into the usual order – Molly was first; she took the choice bits of flesh and dragged them away to a safe distance, glancing up to make sure the others had not followed. Stinker had nipped forcefully at Trudy’s muzzle with his greening teeth and had gained the second spot, leaving the dirty-white poodle mix to dart in and out between his legs. Still, Trudy had eaten till she was sick; a corrosive stream of bone fragments and white meat, then lapped it up again, growling at Stinker till he lost interest and retreated. Then they withdrew to sleep off their swollen bellies and return.

Their Da had done the same, dabbing gracefully at his stained and pocked chin before retreating to his room for a nap. Cara had cleaned up while the three boys watched a Disney movie that they were all too old to enjoy, but no one had dared to change the channel.

The vegetables were swelling again, taking in moisture from the stock. ‘Salt-and-pepper, salt-and-pepper’, she chanted. ‘Your father loved beef casserole. Oh yes, he did. He did! My recipe, anyway.’

Her son hadn’t spoken, but she hadn’t lifted her head from the stove or turned towards him, so he did not respond. It had been six short weeks, and this was the first time Cara had mentioned him since they had finished with all the fussing around coffins and flowers and priests. He watched her carefully, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming.

He worried for her, sometimes. They had mourned, as much as they could, for a father whose rotting and flabby body repulsed them and had gradually eaten away at any affection that had remained. But Cara seemed to have just erased him from her life, wiped the slate clean. Now she looked only to her sons.

She still slept in the same bed, on the side that he had died on. It had always been her side, in truth, but in his final throes he had rolled over, gasping and rattling his life away. He hadn’t reached, or hadn’t wanted to reach, the panic alarm that had been installed by the bed just a few months previously. When she found him, she had dragged her sons up the stairs, as if their presence was needed to make it true.

Niall, the eldest, had called the ambulance and made the arrangements. His mother had just sat by the bed, holding his hand and weeping.  He remembered the low, throaty sound that had come from Cara’s mouth, like a wounded animal that was trapped in her throat. It had filled the house until the walls reverberated with her keening. Steven, only seven, had wept at her tears. The ambulance had taken him away with sirens muted and unhurried. The dead could wait.

Danny felt he should say something, something to fill up the silence that had slunk into the room as the meat stopped sizzling and began to slide sullenly around the pan. But he didn’t.

‘In you go,’ she told the beef, not unkindly, letting it slide into the bigger pot of half-sweated vegetables. The smell of roasting flesh had begun to rise through the house, and Niall could be heard stirring from his computer upstairs. Steven was in the front room at the television and had a unique sense of when food was on offer. He would not appear until the plates were set on the table.

‘A can of Guinness, if you wouldn’t mind.’

He slipped, surprised, from his perch on the table, stepped carefully over the elderly dog and out into the pantry. He knew where the remaining beer was kept; it had been doled out liberally during the three or four days it had taken for his Da to be buried and forgotten. Cara didn’t seem to notice the missing bottles that often ended up on Niall’s floor, nor the slowly sinking level of whiskey that had been brought by neighbours and friends. But his father’s Guinness was never touched. This was the first time they would be used, since he had died.

Without turning the solitary light on, he found a can from memory and brought it back to his mother. She cracked it open with a flourish and tipped it into the stew as he took his seat again, watching his mother’s fingers as she stirred. They were as slender as they had ever been, her wedding band loose below her second knuckle. Sometimes he thought she was shrinking, like a wicked witch doused with water, but then he felt unkind.

The stout bubbled and simmered; the smell of sour earth pouring from the pot.

His Da had loved to eat, and she had been overjoyed to oblige. Even when he had come home with the doctor’s orders – no fats, no sugars, no alcohol – she had snorted and merely reduced her portions by a finger’s width. His father hadn’t complained – three meals a day set before him and a few cans of stout in the evening were all he desired in the world. Their father had taken his diabetes seriously, at first, but under Cara’s care he had soon forgotten all thoughts of diet plans and exercise. She had told him his chest was too weak to take long walks in the cold. She had fed him like a prize cow, beaming when he cleared his plate and looking so sorrowful when he left drippings that he had always reached for a hunk of bread to wipe up the rest.

The stew simmered in its own juices, and she hummed to herself. A dozen waxy potatoes flew out of their jackets and fell sizzling into the turkey fat.

When he had begun slowly rotting away, she had only fussed and fretted more, sure that he just needed some more of her attention. He had been twenty-odd stone before he took to his bed, and on his second heart attack, but Cara insisted. Soon, the smell of proud flesh had sunk into the room’s oak panelling as his feet began to ulcerate, but still she had tended him with fried meat and eggs and batter. And so he had stewed, alone in his bedroom.

Now she took a carton of cream from the fridge and poured it into the casserole, glub-glub, tapping the bottom with a wooden spoon to get the last few drops. The mixture turned a marbled white-and-brown before the cream was swallowed whole, sucked down to the bottom where it would thicken and simmer.

He wasn’t really hungry. His waistband was already uncomfortably tight and he felt bloated, like he had swallowed a child’s balloon animal. But the potatoes promised to be golden brown and the casserole was so thick he felt he could take a bite out of the air and live for a day off the fumes. The other dogs, Trudy and Stinker scratched at the door, aware that it was dinnertime. They would get their own meal of the fatty, discarded meat, perhaps topped off with some gravy and crisp fragments. He let them in and they joined his silent vigil as Cara stirred, and hummed, stirred and hummed.

Soon, she set out four large plates and heaved the massive pot of casserole over to the worktop, teetering slightly under its weight. She built a buttress of roasted potatoes and ladled a generous amount of meat and vegetables into three of them. For the forth, she merely dribbled some gravy over the puniest roasts of the batch. She opened the door to call for her eldest and youngest soon, but there was no need. Niall was already blinking in the doorway, dazed by the kitchen lights. A door slammed in the house, and Steven’s footsteps echoed down the hall. The three boys took their seats at the table and she laid out their meal.

She stared at her own pitiful plate for a moment. They pointedly did not look towards their Da’s empty chair. The angles in her face caught the light and her eyes were hollowed, like she had darkened her lower lids by mistake. Then she turned to her three sons and smiled, swollen with pride. 

The cover is bright - unbearably so - slashes of colour that spin and intersect in ways that hurts the eye to follow. The title is illegible, in stark dark red, hidden behind the joyous loops and swirls of the blues and greens and yellows. They seek to bury it, bury it alive, drown it in saccharine sweetness.

The dedication page is blank, but the reviews are good, sliding into their quotation marks like obedient dogs, slinking home to look up at you beatifically. You do not notice their bloodstained gums.

The first page does not disturb, simple random strings of words; amino acids creating endless chains of DNA. But a pulsing behind the eyes begins. Barely noticeable, surely not worth throwing two ether-drops into a glass to sizzle and melt. An itch even.

By the end of chapter one, the words have passed straight through the mind and left but a faint residue. But the itch has become a scratch. And so you scratch, and the pain swells twofold for every fingernail you claw across your raw and tearless brow.

To continue: For you are not one to leave a book unfinished. They are only words, and words are your friend, and friends are your words.

You fly through chapters two, three, four, five, skimming over the paragraphs, for that vague sense of unease you began with has become not-so-vague at all. Your gorge rises. Swallowing will not clear this tightness. You scratch at your eyes again; the throbbing is not easing.

A break, your body cries, take a break! Leave this behind. Close the covers, leave no bookmark. Leave it under the bed to gather dust with the rest, with the words that were not remarkable enough to endure. Put it away.

Yet you persevere. Why not? A book can cause no stir, no ripple in the wider scheme of things. Yet you do ripple. Waves of blood wash up from your feet to rest on the top of your brain, to join the rest and add to the weight. Scratch.

The next few chapters are hard, the pressure builds and builds, but you must finish. Ink begins to bleed from between your fingers. Yet it is red, not black. Curious. Scratch. The pressure builds. Everything is frantic, frantic, no time to pause, to consider, just scratch, and go, and run, and -

Relief. Sweet relief. The final chapter is here, and it is but a page long. You gaze at the chapter as a whole, unwilling to begin dissecting the words just yet; revel in the moment of success. Scratch. Something pops - a bursting balloon, releasing the steam and screams that had been building up since the very first sentence. There is a whistling in your ears. How distracting. The words have vanished too, washed off the page by a sea of blood. Vexsome, vexsome. So close. But perhaps the darkness is better.

‘And if you let them sweat on a low heat, Danny, they’ll release their juices quicker and you won’t have to add water.’

She wasn’t really talking to him, he knew, but he listened anyway.

‘… And the amazing thing about stock is that it lasts forever – this turkey from last Christmas, can you believe it?’

He could believe it. He remembered the turkey well. It had been monstrous, far too big for the five of them, but Cara always thought they ate more than they did. Some fancy about stuffing growing boys and men had been drilled into her when she was young, and she had never left it behind. The turkey bones and entrails had been left out for the dogs. They had bickered and fought before establishing the order – Molly the lab was first; she took the choice bits of flesh and dragged them away to a safe distance before tearing at them with her rotten teeth, glancing up to make sure the others had not followed. Stinker had nipped forcefully at Trudy’s muzzle and gained the second spot, leaving the dirty-white poodle mix to dart in and out between his legs. Still, Trudy ate till she was sick; a corrosive stream of bone fragments and white meat, then lapped it up again, growling at Stinker till he lost interest and retreated. Then they withdrew to sleep off their swollen bellies and return.

His father had done the same, dabbing gracefully at his stained and pocked chin before retreating to his room for a nap. Cara had cleaned up while the three boys had watched a Disney movie that they were all too old to enjoy, but no one spoke of changing the channel. That had been before his father had taken to his bed for good.

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Have you ever heard a red fox cry, deep in the night?

It is something unearthly. People past took it for the cry of that herald of death, the banshee, and locked their doors and prayed all night for deliverance. I do not blame them. It is not unlike the scream of a severed hand, or a mother who has left a child alone in the bath too long. It is a shriek, if ever there was a shriek. It will freeze your marrow and you become fixated by the silence that follows; eardrums pounding.  Unable to move or breathe. And it comes out of the dark.

It is terror.

When we heard it the cry, we knew it was no banshee, but it brought death all the same. We knew we would find bloody feathers strewn across the field and there would be no eggs for dinner.

The cattle would spook and try to run somewhere, anywhere. One, a mottled cow, broke its leg on a twisting rock and bellowed its agony until morning. My father shot it at dawn. Another time, one tried to escape through the barbed wire by the shore and managed to slit its own throat. The blood was dark and thick and the crows had already eaten out its eyes by the time we found it.

The worst were the lambs. We would often find one mauled in the field; wool clotted with dirt and blood. I would cry, because I would name each and every lamb that was born to us, and knew them all well.

My father set out poisoned chunks of meat for the fox and nailed shut every gap and tear in the fence, but it was no use. All we found was a couple of dead rats and, once, the sheepdog foaming and convulsing beside a chunk of half-eaten meat.

So it was. All things died, and all for a cry in the night. The red fox gives tongue to death for all the small things of this world.

The fox didn’t scare us during the day; it was only at night that his shrieks left us cowering.

In the sun, we would go hunting with our stick-swords and stick-arrows to find him. No bush or earth was safe from us. Once, we even wandered down to the sea shore, but all we found there was a crab with one claw. We pulled the other claws off, one by one, and watched it die before going inside for tea. And so the hunt went on.

When the snows came and the early lambs died under frozen drifts, my father assured us that the fox had frozen too. We would cheer, but a part of me remained uneasy. Who could we fight, with our stick-swords, if not the fox? Who could we blame for the stolen eggs, the broken fences, the missing calves?

And so it was that winter was a time of suspicion, a time to watch the neighbours from a curtained window, to count their herd each day and leave a lit lamp in the barn all night.

But come the melt, the smiles and the handshakes returned. The fox was surely the culprit, once more, and grudges were put away for a season.

But one of the grudges festered, an ancient one.

For generations, the farm next door had been both our closest neighbours and our worst enemies. Our grandfathers had fought, and our great-great-grandfathers had bickered, and we were no different. Arguments would swell and soften, swell and soften, and sometimes burst like a ripe old boil.

The fox got our chickens, and he somehow gained more eggs. We took a lamb or three from his fields in the night, and suckled them from bottles in the furthest barn. And so it went on, back and forth, back and forth.

Once, my father’s prize bull got loose and impregnated three of our neighbour’s cows. He said the gate had come lose, but my father was sure that it had been opened on purpose in the night. They fought for months, but my father managed to get the rights to any male calves born on our neighbour’s farm that year, so there was a form of peace, for a while longer.

The only true peace came in the spring and summer, the gentler halves of the year, when the red fox could be blamed for each and every wrong.

And so it was. And one November, when our neighbour dared to blame the fox for yet another missing chicken, my father took up his wood-axe and lodged it in his throat.

My mother saw it happen from the kitchen window. She screamed, a little, and clapped her hands to her mouth and stood there, panting. We ran to the window to see what had startled her so.

We saw my father, frozen still, and the neighbour, looking ridiculous with a wooden shaft sticking out at an impossible angle from his neck.

It was dusk, and growing dark, but when my father looked up, we all saw the flashing anger in his eyes which meant this was not our business. He gave us the same look when we were sent to fetch him from the pub, or when we tugged at his coat asking for penny-sweets while he talked to the priest after mass.

My mother pulled the curtains closed.

She went back to her range and stirred the stock so hard it spilled and hissed on the hot surface. She set us to chopping vegetables. I was in charge of the carrots; I liked to cut them a certain way and I would fuss and fret if one of my siblings was given the job. We worked in silence.

When the soup was done and simmering, my mother did not call my father in for supper, as she usually did. Instead we sat around the table and ate without him. She had set him a place, though, and his favourite chair seemed so wrong without him that we kept stealing glances at it to make sure he truly wasn’t there. The soup was burnt, that night. I remember. My carrots were perfect, as usual, but the rest had cooked too long. No one complained.

When my father came in, we were in bed, having gone without arguing this once. Our house was thin and creaky, and our rooms sat on top of the kitchen. The heat from the range wafted up and kept us warm at night, and the smell of eggs and fried bread would wake us every morning. That night, after he came in through the back kitchen door, all we could smell was whiskey, strong and earthy.

We saw no more of our neighbour, and spoke even less of him.

And so it was that the red fox was the death of more than just small things.

These weren’t woods out of a nightmare; no slaughter had stained this earth, no spirits roamed the hills, nor were they full of moon-speckled ponds and endless spills of flowers. They just were. Trees and earth and sky met in this place and bled into each other without issue in a glorious blur that led the eye upwards, ever upwards. 

It wasn’t easy to see the forest for the trees. Even though he could smell the sap and taste the green in the air, the trees seemed more like soldiers in a guard of honour lining the way, lifting their boughs in respect, and saluting the night sky. It felt rude simply to brush stray branches aside, after they had come all the way out here just to watch him pass. So he stepped around them, and tipped his hat in polite respect every time he did.

He hadn’t been walking long. Or had he? The sun was gone and the moon was doing its best to stop the world from drowning in black. It did seem colder. But sure what did it matter. The bottle in his hand remained empty, though. Jesus hadn’t seen fit to show His Almighty Mercy and do a quick refill. Couldn’t blame him really, he must be busy, what with all the freaks infesting His own Church. Must take it out of a guy, even the Son of Himself, chopping off traitorous dicks and sewing up dripping ball sacks with thread pulled directly out of the Holy Spirit’s arse. At least that’s what he hoped Christ Almighty was at, because Christ Almighty, a quick refill wouldn’t have been asking for the world.

The bottle in his hand was heavy, though, too heavy for a bleedin’ empty bottle. Definitely must be some left in there. Raising it to eye level, he craned his neck backwards, the twist moving creakily down his spine while he did his best to squeeze his throbbing eyeball all the way down the bottleneck, in case some cowardly drop had hidden in the corner while its fellows had given their lives to the watery cause. His hands shook and spasmed relentlessly.

Ah. There was the source of the extra weight. Obvious, of course, when you thought about it. The moon had somehow slipped into his cheap bottle of scotch while he wasn’t looking and was huddled down at the very base, rippling and twitching in fear. The whiskey had stained it a dirty brown, but that was all right, he supposed, sure doesn’t it stain us all.

“Howdy-doody,” he crooned. “God bless. Not rightly sure what you’re up to down there in my fine bottle, but you’re welcome, I’m sure. Settle in. Best place to be on a night like this. Here’s hoping tonight does find you fine?”

He put his ear to the lip of the bottle, in case the moon was afraid and could only whisper back. Poor thing.

“S’all right. S’all right. Just you and me here.” Wasn’t it? No one else around here except his guard of honour, but they were loyal. And Christ himself, he supposed. Sure wasn’t he supposed to be everywhere.

The tremors took him again. When they passed, he glanced upwards in case his new friend had stolen back home while he wasn’t looking. But no, the moon wasn’t peering down. Of course it wasn’t. It was nestled in his very own hand, but it wouldn’t even give him a howdy-doody. Bastard. Slacking off. Should be up there in the sky turning the tide and causing earthquakes and whatever the effin’ hell the moon did.

“Get out now, get back up in that sky and stop weighing my bottle down. It’s heavy enough, y’see. I’d leave it here but it’s my effin’ bottle, mine, and you ain’t getting a free ride. Don’t nobody get a free ride. So, Mister Moon, back up you go”

Raising the bottle again, he peered down at his unwelcome passenger. It shivered, but stayed put. He shook it. He tried to pour it out. But it didn’t budge. He threw it onto a patch of down and it rolled to a stop, the bottleneck a pointed finger, accusing him, always accusing him.

“Out,” he roared, “OUT!” his voice echoing down through the glass and bouncing around the innards before echoing back at him.

“OUT out out. OUT out out”

His hands shook again. Carefully, oh so carefully, he crouched, reached out two fingers and dragged the bottle towards him. The moon was gone. Deserted him.

And the blood-blue rage came upon him again. It began low in his shrivelled balls and hummed and revved its way up through his guts and clawed at his skin, tearing wide gashes in his belly as it fought its way out. He grunted, a quiet gunshot of a sound, the force behind it spewing the air from his lungs and the bile from his belly out into the night air. And the fury came with it, in a soundless contraction that shook all thought from his clouded brain and flexed and tested its claws in the air. His fingers convulsed around the dirty brown bottle, spasms twisting his fingers into the painful shapes that sent agony bleeding down his veins towards his centre. But still it held firm, and he held firm, till all of Creation flew by.

Ah. Here now. Here was the crux of the thing.

And then, a shifting.

And then, a shattering.

To pieces, to razor blades that sliced the trees and the earth and the sky to fragments of sensations; a taste, a noise, a burning.

He was hollow now, no hands to hold him up. He let the large glistening shards of once-brown glass slide from his fingers, and twitched, as they cut deep once more. He held his hand palm up, and the moon looked balefully back at him from the puddle that was forming there.

The moon in my hand, my hand in the moon, he giggled. Christ Almighty, I’d better keep you safe, Mister Moon. So he clenched his fist tightly, this time not even flinching as the left-over shards pierced his palm. The trees swayed with him in an endless chorus line.

Keep it safe, he thought vaguely, as he sat down with his back to a friendly tree. Or was it a soldier? Didn’t really matter. He wanted to sleep. But someone should watch over him, watch over his dirty thoughts and dirty hands, no matter what. Christ, his guard of honour, all those bastard stars – surely someone would keep him safe. Watch over him, he and the moon, the moon and he, and keep them safe.