Diamonds in the Mud and Other Stories (10 page)

I shake my head.

‘I thought I knew everything about you back then – thought I knew your hand as well as I knew my own. Try it on for me. Prove I was wrong about that too.'

Slowly I do as he asks. I try the ring on my right ring finger, attempt to force it over the knuckle, because he wants me to, and because I want his eyes to smile again, but the ring won't fit and his eyes won't smile. I shake my head, hand him the ring.

He takes it and the hand that held it and he slides the solitaire onto my finger. ‘Right hands are always larger than the left,' he says. ‘What did you do with our baby? Did she get her way about that too?' His fingers holding my hand are gentle, but they burn my flesh as I stand dumbly there looking at the ring, and at his hand, dark against my own skin, darker than his child's hand, but oh, so similar.

‘Her name is Karli,' I say.

‘A poor bastard is getting as blind as a chicken-yard rat, sunk to his eyebrows in chook shit,' Jack Burton philosophised, feeling his way through the cluttered passage to the kitchen, where his hands groped wildly for the bottle of whisky on the sideboard. Papers, books, a handbag and other odds and ends obstructing his fumbling aim were swept to the floor.

He never turned the lights on when he wandered in the night. The white electric light flooded too well the dark corners, flushing out half-forgotten truths. He and the night had a covenant. They kept each other's secrets.

He'd slept like one of the dead until three am, but oblivion bought with whisky wore off faster these days, and he'd awakened with a skull crushing headache. He knew the cure, the cure-all. His hand touched, almost tipped the bottle. A reflex snatch. Held. A priceless thing, this corked bottle.

Decay was eroding his left eyetooth, and he yelped as the tooth bit down on the cork, snarled as he yanked the cork free and spat it onto the floor. Then, lips compressed, his tongue massaging, he felt his way back to the door and the miserly light from the moon.

Six foot plus, his back unbowed by labour, he cut an odd figure in his white t-shirt. It was his only garb and barely covered his backside; still, he'd discovered a new freedom since the last of his kids ran yelping from the shack only a week ago. It was his now. His again. Bare feet dancing on the cold cement of the passage floor, he saluted the empty rooms with his bottle.

His feet were cold. One foot, investigating its surrounds, stumbled on the rag mat his wife placed near the kitchen door. He picked it up and positioned it on the doorstep, then he sat, the mat giving protection to his backside with enough left over to keep his feet from direct contact with the floor. Leaning then, one shoulder against the doorjamb, his throbbing head propped immobile on a rigid neck, he lifted the bottle to his mouth.

A groan of near content escaped him. He drank determinedly, unable to draw the bottle away, feeling the comforting, burning blur of whisky sluicing his throat and settling in the warm swamp of his gut. Almost instantly there was gratification. Tiny fires sent feelers out to singe the nest of termites gnawing at the back of his skull, their teeth white hot.

‘Die you little bastards, die,' he said, and he sucked on the bottle again. It fitted his large hand well. He could sense its level by its weight, its balance when tilted.

Carefully, he placed it on the floor, close to the wall, and he shook a cigarette from the packet that was never far from his side.

‘Oh God,' he prayed to his weed, blowing smoke into the dark. ‘Give him a fag and a bottle, and a man's a bloody king.' Again the bottle was lifted to his mouth.

It had burned once. Like boiling oil, the whisky had stolen his breath and raged in his throat and gut. ‘Once,' he nodded. ‘In my youth said the sage as he shook his grey locks. You poor old bastard,' he commiserated with himself for the years he'd lost. ‘If only a man had known at twenty what he knows now.'

He was only fifty-nine, but his old age would not be kind. The once tall, lithe ladies' man was evolving into a featureless old drunk. Old age, cruel slayer of vanity.

Jack Burton had never believed in old age. That was for others. He'd believed himself born with a natural immunity to the scourge, but it was a creeping disease and he'd caught the leprous killer.

‘The ugly bastard is the lucky bastard, the ugly bastard who loses his teeth when he's sixteen, he's the lucky one,' he mused, manipulating the aching eyetooth that had now taken precedence over his headache. ‘He's never had anything to lose, has he?' he asked the night and his tooth. ‘It's the poor bastard who's had it all who can see it all dropping away with his teeth. Ah!' he commented and again lifted the bottle, sucking on its hard teat with wordless gratitude.

‘Look at her,' he suggested to his friend the bottle, pointing it towards the room where his wife lay sleeping. ‘Take her as an example, the ugly old bitch.'

His head lifting suddenly in anger jarred the nest of scorpions into life. He whimpered. His shoulders rounded as he allowed his head to sink slowly down.

‘A man thought he'd caught himself first prize when he caught her, but he copped the bloody booby prize,' he sneered. ‘Your fertility defeated me, Beauty,' he muttered, making a mock bow to the crates of eggs piled against the passage wall. ‘You sunk me with your bloody kids and your bloody chooks, that's what you did.'

He sat on, sucking smoke, sipping whisky, until the ache wandered from his head to the shoulder pressed against the doorjamb.

Slowly then, he straightened, his chin lifting, stretching the sagging skin of his throat, testing for pain while his thoughts wandered back to his youth, to a time when dreams had hope of substance. He thought of Rella, his first woman. His parents had named her the red whore, but for thirty years Jack had called her a friend.

The image of the redhead slapping cream on her neck forced a smile to his lips, and he slapped at his jaw in the dark and laughed at the memory, keeping his laugh low, jealously guarding his stolen night hours.

‘It keeps me looking young, Jacky.' Rella's voice was in his mind, encouraging him to laugh again. He'd never had the heart to tell her she was wasting her money on those creams. Her battle with age had been fought until the day she died.

He sighed, shook his head, negating the memories pouring in. ‘We had a pact, you old whore. We were going to go out in a blaze of glory. You opted out, left me here alone for age to weary. It's got me by the short and curlies and it's pulling 'em tonight.'

Maudlin tears came then. He let them flow. Sucking again on his bottle, sniffing, wiping his nose and mouth with the back of his hand, enjoying his memories and his tears.

‘You never blamed me, never took me down the old guilt trail. We used to laugh. Christ we had some laughs. Why can't I laugh now? Why can't I sleep? Why can't I die? Jesus,' he sighed and wiped at his mouth with his shoulder. ‘Oh memories that bless and burn.'

His chin cupped in the palm of his hand, his gaze turned towards the slim moon strung low in the black sky. ‘If a man had enough guts, he'd shoot himself and get it over with,' he told the moon, then dreamed on.

The bottle was feeling light. He lifted it again to his mouth, allowing the whisky to wash around his aching tooth, to slowly trickle down an anaesthetised throat.

‘Peace,' he commented. ‘Sometimes a man would sell his soul for peace. I never knew peace.' And he sipped again. ‘Only this, the old peace bringer.' He saluted his bottle and placed it down.

He never left an empty bottle for the morning, just as he never left an empty packet of cigarettes to greet his new day. Always a sip in the bottle, one smoke in the packet. Perhaps this was his only self control.

Mornings he held at bay for as long as he could. He wished himself dead in the mornings, only the knowledge of his bottle and his cigarette moving him from the bed.

His wife's witless, ‘Jack, love! Breakfast's ready, love,' was a death knell to his ears. He hated her in the mornings. He hated her in the afternoons and at night. He hated the sight of the crepey throat and the sagging jowls, and the dried-out breasts that flapped around her waist like a pair of empty shoulder bags; still, with a choice of four beds in the house, he used her bed, and her. And he still woke up screaming, wrapped in her flabby arms, his face buried in the silk of her hair.

‘Ugly bitch,' he snarled, but memory of her youth, plus the whisky he had put away, now teased at his loins. His old colleague in crime was awakening. ‘Go back to sleep, you rapacious bastard. Be like a blind worm seeking paydirt in a hummock of dry grass tonight,' he muttered.

He hated women. Hated the power they still had over him. He wanted them still, and he hated himself for wanting them, and he hated them for no longer wanting him.

‘A man should have been a monk, sworn off the bitches, locked himself up in his monastery with his books. The world is a bastard.'

The wind wailed around the confused roof of the house, attempting to find an easy pathway through haphazard hips and valleys. Failing again, it bruised itself on unexpected corners. Loose spouting grasped and tugged at the wind until it turned and howled around the chimney like the hounds of hell on Jack Burton's bare heels.

He straightened. His chin lifted and he sat erect, listening. He didn't like the voices on the wind. He heard his father's accusations there, and others. They haunted him, the voices on the wind. Turning now from east to west to east, his eyes strained to see that the night at either end of the passage was clear of ghosts.

Other noises united with the wind. Walls murmured, doors moaned and floors creaked like footsteps in the empty bedrooms.

‘Stop haunting me,' he moaned. ‘Stop haunting me.'

He sprang to his feet. Using his hands like a sleepwalker, he felt his way to the gun that had lived out its life in one corner of the kitchen. As he carried it into the yard the wind fell silent, waiting.

The twin barrels were a tight fit in his mouth, but this added to the rightness of this action he had planned a thousand times. One of the first pieces of tissue to be blown to hell would be his aching eyetooth. It didn't strike him as a case of overkill. But the barrel of his gun was long, and in comparison to his height, his arms were not. He could get no positive pull on the trigger.

Returning slowly to the doorstep, he sat again, tentatively lifting his right foot, considering the possibility of squeezing the trigger with his big toe. Not as agile as he had once been, his waistline no longer slim, it protested the positioning. It took tenacity and considerable twisting of muscle and sinew to get a toe to the trigger and at the same time to retain his balance on the step and his hold on the gun. Pushing it once more into his mouth was not a simple task either. His tongue, no longer anaesthetised by the whisky, fought to reject the oily meal.

Then the chill of metal came in contact with his decaying eyetooth and sent a bolt of pulverising pain through his jaw. The barrel slipped from his mouth and his foot slipped, engaging the trigger; the blast and his scream reverberated through the house as the ceiling buckled overhead.

Stars peeped through to the passage as the ghostly shape of a torch bearer emerged from the bedroom.

‘Jack, love? What are you doing out here?'

‘Blowing my bloody brains out. What's it look like?' He flung the big gun away from him and the second barrel discharged into her crates of eggs, stacked ready for collection in the morning.

‘Oh, Jack. Oh my goodness, look what you've done to the eggs.' Both voice and torchlight rising, she sought evidence of damage and found it. ‘The ceiling. You've ruined it. You've ruined it, Jack.'

Prematurely old-lady thin, she was draped from neck to ankle in a washed-out rag of nightgown. Her hair, unbound for sleep, fell across her shoulders. In the dark of the passage and to a man with failing vision, she could have been sixteen, and the gown her bridal dress.

What he can't possess, man will ever crave, and on the outside of half a pint of whisky, he is prone to self delusion.

‘I just paid to have the rooms painted, Jack.'

‘You're more concerned about your bloody eggs and your bloody ceiling than you ever were about me, aren't you, you mercenary bitch? I could have been spattered all over the floor and you would have walked on me on your way to the bloody eggs, wiped your bloody feet on me like you have all your bloody life.'

‘Don't say such silly things, love. Go back to bed while I try to clean up some of this mess.'

‘You never cared about me. A poor bloody man is dying of toothache and you're lying in bed snoring your brains out. You don't care if all my bloody teeth fall out, do you?'

‘Of course I care. You're my husband. Go back to bed. You'll catch a chill in the kidneys wandering around out here with no . . . no shoes on.'

‘And die of bloody frostbite in your bed.'

‘Hush, Jack!' she whispered, as if the night had ears.

‘Hush, Jack,' he mimicked. ‘Hush, Jack, the children will hear you! Don't, Jack, the children will see you! Well you've got no bloody kids left to hide behind, so get down on the floor and play dead, you cold bitch.'

‘Jack!' Reproach in her voice, she turned her torchlight to the bedroom door and hurried after it.

‘Get the oil of cloves for me,' he demanded.

‘It's in the kitchen,' she replied from behind a wall.

‘I know it's in the bloody kitchen. Get it, I said.'

Slowly she made her way back across the passage, lifting her gown to step carefully over the pools of egg seeping from their cartons. She stepped up into the kitchen and he caught the skirt of her nightgown, roughly pulling her down beside him.

‘You know I've got a bad back, Jack.'

‘You've got a bloody worse front,' he commented, forcing her onto her back in the kitchen, then mounting her in the doorway. She lay like a length of stringy dough beneath him, attempting to ease first one bony hip then the other away from the hard floor.

‘Hail Mary . . . full of grace . . . the Lord be with . . . ' He chanted in time to his exertions, building slowly, excited by the night and the white gowned one who had materialised in the passage. She'd prayed in the early days when he raped her. Now it was his game. He prayed and she kept her mouth shut. ‘Blessed art thou . . . amongst women . . . and blessed . . . '

She felt more alive to him with the floor prodding her into action than she'd ever felt on a bed with only his prodding, and he sucked in the air and drove again and again into the deeper warmth of her, the only warmth her church couldn't kill. It was the one sport he'd excelled in, a sport of power and pain and punishment. His knees, suffering their own punishment on the floor, excited him, his ability to override that pain, to push it down and grow stronger for it.