One Foot First : A Short Story.
I am experimenting with some short stories which I will eventually publish I guess! This happens to be one which I wrote in a work-shop recently. Not so much about marriage, as divorce though!
One Foot First.
By Ned Hoskin.
Ange felt the chill of the wind that whisked down the street, whip at her face as soon as she shut the door firmly behind her. She strode onto the street purposefully, although the nerves were working silently at her stomach making her feel heady and nauseous.
The Courthouse Building on Main Boulevard in Belfast loomed gray and forboding and only made her stomach tighten more at its imposing sight as she neared. Today would be the end of the past 15 years of hell, a hell which she knew she had helped to create.
“ Let me buy you a coffee” . The voice came smoothly enough from no-where and yet it made her heart jump and her hands immediately damp.
Looking around she saw his gorgeous brown eyes and dark curly hair framed so naturally in the dullness of a damp Belfast winter day. Gathering herself and trying not to see his beauty, she scrambled for a response. This was the unexpected hand held out in friendship which she did not want, and did not see coming.
“Err…ah…Hi Mike, how are you….?” The words fell out of her mouth like a jumbled mess of rope on to a floor. “ Umm..coffee? I suppose so”
In an hours time, she was due to stand in that Courthouse building and fight him for everything he had. Or that they had, as once was the case.
“ I went to see Terry yesterday” . The words fairly slapped her in the face.
“ What?” she yelped , in that broad Belfast accent that she only adopted since moving back from London a few years earlier.
“You mean my brother? In prison? What the fuck for?” The words spat from her mouth with a venom which he knew only too well.
“ Because I thought he might be able to help us”
“Help us! Help us! You nearly killed my brother in a rage and now you want him to help us? Help you more like it!”
Her heart pounded so fiercely she thought she would faint.
“ I know how much he means to you and I know how much you mean to him” he offered up, without explaining. “I don’t want us to end like this”
He had silently guided her to a bench seat, where they had instinctively sat down. The city and its noises and traffic whirled and swirled around them and yet they heard nothing except each others broken hearts and staccato sighs.
“ I thought if I went to see him he might help me to understand why you want to leave me like this. I don’t think you want to leave me like this”
“Well I do” she lied again, as she had a hundred times before. “ You nearly killed my brother and now you go to him for help. And he’s the one who ends up in that damn prison cell for the next 10 years! I just don’t believe your nerve!”
Many nights Mike had lay awake going over and over the events which lead to the fight. At 6ft 3 inches on the old scale, and fit and sharp, he had finally taken umbridge when Terry had abused Ange in a drunken rage, accusing her of everything and yet not specifically anything at all. But the innuendo was there, that he was accusing her of sleeping around although even now Mike wasn’t sure whether he had meant a time before or after the arrival of Mike on the scene.
But the constant abuse of alcohol and walking the dangerous road of befriending the local known IRA members had become too much for Mike, who didn’t ever touch a single drop of alcohol. This had of course lead to Terry thinking of Mike as a wowser, so even in his drunken state Terry only remembered thinking that the way Mike had picked him up and held him high over his head reminded him of a ride at the Fair many years earlier. The room had spun into a dark whirlpool before he had found himself launched like an 80 kilogram projectile.
“So amazingly slow” Terry had thought at the time. Like a dream. How it feels like I am flying , but so slowly. But the feeling of slowness didn’t stop the feeling of speed when his head had hit the walnut leg of the old piano and his head and cheek sounded a sickening “ crack” which was followed by an eerie silence. His head was lying crooked and bent. His eyes open but still. Everyone in the room thought he was dead. No one moved for at least a minute, although it seemed like hours.
Finally Ange had stooped over him in silence expecting the worst until a cough of blood and vomit oozed from his bloodied lips and gently formed a moving sludge which stretched the few inches to the floor.
That was 2 years ago and Terrys’ lucky recovery was somewhat attributed to the alcoholic haze which constantly shadowed his life and to which the whole family would always drink a toast.
“ To Terry and the Demon drink” they would laugh. “Long Live Terry and Long Live Ballogens Scotch Whisky!” and they would all clink glasses again and laugh and talk about what would have happened to Terry if he were sober and thank God for whisky because it had saved Terrys’ life. Or so they had argued anyway.
Unfortunately the severe blow to the head may have dulled Terrys better judgment and so after a couple of months rehabilitation, which basically meant going home and drinking every day until he couldn’t stand up, Terry had one day hatched a plan. Of course it was a stupid plan and one that was borne over a drinking session with lots of crazy IRA mates who thought that shooting Mike would be a good idea.
It may have worked if one of them had taken the correct size of bullets for the gun, an error which they only discovered as they surrounded Mike on his way to work one night. The darkness had failed to hide their identities and then one of them had used Terrys’ name by accident and in about an hour they were all in the local courtroom at an Out of Hours session hearing. Unfortunately they were all Wanted for something and the bunch of them became more and more entangled in the misery of the others until finally an angry Judge, who may have had a tipple of whisky himself, had them all sentenced to 10 years for attempted murder, as well as a string of other unrelated charges.
“ I don’t want us to end this way and I don’t want us to separate because it will be too traumatic for the boys” Mike had pleaded.
Oh Christ she thought. Now the reason she was here today had come flooding back into her head. How desperately hard she had tried to tell herself that this was what she really wanted.
Her beautiful Irish blackish, reddish long hair seemed to wave in the breeze at the audience who moved by endlessly. They were aware of the solemnity as they approached the glazed looking couple on the bench seat, catching a few words of the conversation, before gliding by and losing any involvement in that secretive moment, forever.
Ange thought about her father whom had driven the family to poverty on several occasions, and who could always justify everything, providing he was drunk.
And she thought about how that had driven her brothers to fighting for the IRA and the God-only-knows illegal activities that had involved them in.
But it had also led to her escaping to London where she had first met Mike. The beautiful, handsome caring tall Mike, whom she was now going to divorce.
It also lead her to thinking about how she had had so many other men before Mike and how she always knew that her insatiable appetite for men, especially new men, had always lead to this moment, over and over.
But with Mike things were different. She had always loved and admired him but couldn’t help herself when the opportunity arose. Even after the birth of their first son, Aaron, named after Mike’s Dad.
But after their second son, Zac was born, Mike also had noted that things had changed and that Ange often seemed distant and somehow grumpy.
She knew she was her own worst enemy. Could she go back now? No, she egged herself on. You must go through with it. Its now or never. I have held this secret for too long and this is the only way that I can partly move on she thought to herself. She also knew that that was a lie. She could never move on from where she was now. How could she when she knew that she was the only one who knew the truth, except her brother. Terry.
“ What did he say to you? Terry I mean”
“He was very friendly actually. He greeted me like a long lost brother, which I guess you would when you get almost no visitors” he quipped, although even to Mike it seemed a little inappropriate.
“ Helpful? How? “
“Well for a start he told me how he knows that you love me totally. Something I have never doubted”
“Did he now? And?”
“ Well, that he knows that in a thousand years you don’t want t see the two boys separated from us”
She mulled this point, it hurt and he knew it. The thought of her two beloved little boys hurting that much ate at her. She felt sick and terror struck.
She felt his arm brushing hers, she knew that in 20 minutes they could be in bed making passionate love and putting the rest of the nightmare behind her. That she could be enveloped in his arms, so safe and snug with his musk breath gently brushing over her face.
She thought of how good it would all be again, about how none of this fear has to happen. She thought about Mike going off to work and coming home to roast chicken dinner, and steamy kitchen windows and 2 boys greeting him and hugging him and wanting to play games with him until they all went to bed. And about the long cold nights so toasty and warm in bed together, sleeping as they always had, entwined as one.
“So, do we go away from here and forget about the court case?” he asked, almost casually, knowing exactly what she was thinking, knowing that she was well within his grasp.
The traffic began to gain focus, and the hour hand on the old Monastery clock in James Square indicated that it was five minutes until they needed to be inside the Courthouse, for their final legacy. Or not.
This was the moment to decide.
“Thank God Terry was true to his word” she thought. He hadn’t mentioned the secret that had plagued her, that had driven her sick. To despair and back and back again, like a wind up clock ticking, first thrust this way, then back again. Every day. Endlessly and relentlessly.
She wanted so desperately to say yes, lets go home. But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t ever face the truth nor tell Mike the dreadful truth.
“Come home with me now” he murmured. The words were delivered as though lined with velvet.
“Come home. I know what it is you think you are hiding. I don’t mind. I have learned to live with the truth about it.”
“ I know that I don’t want to ever live without you. And I do know, that Zac is not my son.”
Suddenly the soft velvet words froze her.
They stood up at the same time, staring blankly into the distance.
“ Come on” he said. “Lets go”
She had turned and fixed her eyes on the courthouse doors.
And until one foot had stepped in front of the other, she didn’t know which way she would go.
Ned Hoskin
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