Read by Jeremiah O'Connor
Never meet your heroes. That’s what they say, innit?
Every Thursday at eight, the entire neighbourhood directing their applause towards our gaff. Bingo wings flapping up and down the terrace. Wooden spoons banging on pots. A few frustrated football fans letting off flares.
Now, I’m not saying she wasn’t sick or nothing. But the woman smokes forty a day. Has done since I was a nipper. Plus, our gaff is only fifty meters from the North Circ. So yeah maybe she had Corona, but all I’m saying is - there were other candidates.
How wiping old men’s arses made her a war hero, I’m not sure, but they were only short of putting up a statue of her outside the Nisa. Wouldn’t hear of taking money. Not even when I was loading up on Kronenberg and Cutters Choice.
Da being a truck driver helped. They were bang on trend too. Fearless logistical masterminds that kept everyone in avocados and loo roll. And if the son of these heroes, was self-medicating owing to the fear of losing his parents, couldn’t he be forgiven?
God knows, I didn’t need food from the shops. I only had to go out for my daily exercise and there’d be two lasagnes, three cottage pies and a tray of scones on the front step when I got back.
Offerings to the heroes.
My key was barely in the lock when she started yelling.
‘That you, Sean?’
I grunted, carried the tray of scones into the kitchen and tried to rejig the cheesecakes and apple pies, to free up some room.
‘I’m out of ice up here!’ She drove her heel down on the floorboards.
‘All right ma, give me a minute!’ The scones nearly went into the trifle.
‘And my lighter’s gone dead!’
‘Well slow down with the smoking then will ya!’
‘Why the fuck would I do that?’
‘Because you’re meant to have Covid 19, you thick!’
The silence creaked its way across the floorboards like a famished rat.
‘And you’re qualified to direct my recovery how?’
‘Well it’s a fucking respiratory disease, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t use that language with your mother.’ The bedroom door was open now and she was roaring.
‘But it is, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll be injecting chlorine in my eyeballs before I’ll take medical advice from a lad with half an A level in biology.’
A low blow.
I was retaking the year following a mild case of cannabis psychosis, but after busting my arse to learn all of those cell structures and chemical formulas, it was all going to be decided by some fucking algorithm. If the Scots weren’t happy with it, God knows what kind of mutant it would be before it got to us.
‘Ice, Sean!’
‘Get it your fucking self.’ I went out the back and closed the patio door.
I could see why dad had taken up gardening. Or at least had bought the gear: pots, seeds, trowels, shovels, huge bags of industrial-grade fertilizer that had ‘fallen’ off a truck in return for a few TVs that had ‘fallen’ off his.
Progress so far consisted in a pair of slug-eaten begonias in a ten-foot flower bed that the cat had started using as a toilet. The miniature lemon tree was now a scratching post and when the heat wave kicked in, the citrus smell took on a diarrhoea-riddled under-tone. Poor Dad stealing bags of nitrogen (aka. shite) when Twizzles was spraying the place with it for free.
The front door clattered open and Dad announced himself with the usual noises.
Ma started straight in about the ice.
The patio door slid open behind me.
‘Is it too much to ask?’ Da’s voice sounded like traffic on the M25.
‘I’ll bring it up to her now.’
Of course, she started in with the coughing when she heard me at the freezer.
Da rushed into the kitchen. ‘How long’s she been at that?’
‘She’s been up there smoking like a trooper, da!’
The cough sounded like it was trying to turn her inside out.
‘How long?’
‘I swear to God, she’s been fine all day.’
I waited for one of Da’s one-liners. The witty quip that said we’d get through it no matter what. But his face was as worn as an A1 underpass.
‘Okay, well just make sure you’re washing your hands, Sean.’
‘What?’
‘Just, you know, you’ve been out and about is all.’
‘And you haven’t?’
‘Of course, I have, that’s why it’s important we remember to do our bit.’
‘You’re driving all over the fucking country and you’re telling me to do my bit?’
‘Calm down, son, I’m not-’
‘I’ve had my A levels cancelled, my entire future put on pause and you’re telling me to do my bit?’
‘Okay, son. Don’t get worked up.’ He opened the porch door and directed me back into the garden. ‘Just have a smoke and I’ll bring her up the ice.’
*
Three days later the grades came out. The school set up a virtual results day. Teachers with double chins blinking on the screen. Students with their cameras and microphones off. Of course, they couldn’t have a real one with Covid, but it was obvious they knew what was coming. Ms. Win, who’d taught me in year 7 and 9 and 11, was giving a speech, apologising, about the blatant discrimination, about the flagrant elitism, about the unforgivable attack on our life prospects, before I even had a chance to login and check my grades.
I got onto the site, but Ms Win was working herself into a proper frenzy now. The hot breath from under her mask was misting up the round glasses all the young female teachers wore to look like your one Cortez from New York. When I was sure she couldn’t see through the mist, I left the call.
My pillow and duvet were looking inviting, but Da was still hanging around downstairs. He’d already made himself four cups of tea and I was going to have to put the poor bastard out of his misery.
I threw on some boxers, picked up my laptop and went downstairs.
He was out the back leaning on the ever-growing pile of fertilizer sacks.
‘I tell you, son, there was a time when a Belfast man hording sacks of nitrogen in his back garden would get some negative attention in this country.’ He dipped his moustache into the tea and gave it a long appreciative slurp.
‘If you don’t do something with the sacks before Ma gets out of quarantine you might wish the Feds confiscated them.’
He laughed and placed his mug down on the fertilizer. ‘Well?’
I opened the page and read it out loud.
‘Chemistry – C, Biology – C, Maths – C.’
‘All honours!’ Da clapped a hand on my shoulder and I felt like I might drop through the earth.
I needed 3 Bs.
‘You got the brains from your mother that’s for sure.’ He had me in a hug. ‘No truck driving for the university man.’
When he held me out at arm’s length, I must have been wearing a shell-shocked smile.
‘When your mother wakes up tell her straight away. It’ll give her a great boost.’
He went out the front door whistling ‘Danny Boy’.
It wasn’t even going to get me into London Met.
*
I was rolling a spliff and planning a duvet day when Sam gave me a bell.
‘What you get?’ He was walking outside, probably picking up for tonight.
‘3 Cs.’
‘Fuck.’
‘You?’
‘3 Bs.’
The bastard had literally done no work.
‘Congrats.’
‘Whatever, man. The whole thing’s a fucking farce.’
‘Especially if you don’t get your place.’
‘Fuck it.’
Easy to say with Kings in the bag. I left the bits of an unmade joint on the desk and sat on the bed.
‘You’re still coming tonight though, right?’ Tension suddenly entering Sam’s voice.
In the next room Mam started a cough that sounded like gravel falling down a pipe.
‘Think I’ll have to give it a miss, man.’
A dog started barking somewhere in the distance.
‘You’re meant to be DJing, fam. Everyone’s buzzed to see you after that last set.’
‘I know but …’
‘I’ve sold about fifty tickets, fam, and we’ve rented lasers and everything.’
Mam knocked a glass of water off her nightstand and the coughing became a kind of strangled wheeze.
‘Listen, Mam’s got this cough and -’
‘Fam, you told me she smokes fifty-a-day.’
‘Yeah, but -’
‘She’s in her bedroom drinking cocktails while you’re meant to do what? Give up your youth? Have your grades downgraded by some fucking algorithm?’
‘I hear you, fam, but what I’m trying to say is: we’ve all got to do our bit, innit.’
‘Are they getting their grades taken? Will they be paying for this furlough shit for the rest of their lives?’ The barking dog gets closer until there’s a thud, whimper and no more. ‘Nah man, they’ll be sitting around the pool in Lanzarote while we work zero-hour contracts till we’re fucking ninety.’
All of this because I’m the only one with proper decks.
Mam finally stopped coughing and dragged her slippers across the hall into the bathroom.
I hung up and crawled back into bed.
*
That night they took Mam away in an ambulance. Paramedics dressed up like something out of Area 51. Me and Dad not allowed to ride along. Would be updated via telephone. Should now isolate ourselves for fourteen days.
Nobody brought food to our door.
The hospital called and said Mam was stable and took names and numbers of people we’d been in contact with.
After beans on toast, Dad sat at the kitchen opening bills. He was uplit in computer-blue while he typed numbers into a spreadsheet with ever rising anger.
The news came on and I got up to make Dad a whiskey in the kitchen. I was going to do it on the rocks, but when I opened the freezer, there was only a few cubes left and I thought Mam was going to need those, was going to be back upstairs banging on the floor, would be swigging gin and smoking fags out the window in no time.
When I slid the glass on the table for Dad, I saw he was buying screws and bolts on Screwfix.
‘You not gonna finish the gardening first?’
‘Oh the garden’s gonna have to wait.’ He slammed the computer shut and followed me into the front room.
There’d been an explosion in Beirut. They had footage of some lad in a kayak getting blown to fuck by a mushroom cloud that looked like something out of a cold-war propaganda film. Then another one from a balcony and the person filming it was thrown halfway across the room.
The news presenter was back on. They were talking about warehouses of nitrogen kept on those docks for six years. There were people crying. Protesting. Another commentator comes on and says the political establishment are not doing their bit.
I look at Dad and he still hasn’t sipped his whiskey. He’s staring straight ahead like he’s burning a hole straight through the TV.
A segment comes on about illegal parties in Manchester.
‘You won’t be going to any of those raves any more will you, Sean?’
I feel like I’m upside down in a kayak, current dragging me downstream with weeds growing down my throat.
Dad turns to look me straight in the eye.
‘You won’t be going, will you?’
On the news there’s images of police breaking up a street party in Finsbury Park. I look away unless I recognise Sam or Talia or Amir.
When I look towards the garden, I see the fertilizer is gone.
(c) Brian Kelly, 2021
Brian Kelly works as an English teacher in Camden, and has published stories in Penned in the Margins and other literary magazines. In 2019, he was a finalist in Penguin’s WriteNow competition. He also runs the monthly spoken word night Verbal Discharge, which is publishing its second anthology in September.
Jeremiah O’Connor is an Irish actor whose credits include the BBC’s Call the Midwife, Waiting for Godot at the Cockpit theatre, and a stint as James Joyce and Tristan Tzara in Patrick Marber’s Travesties at the Apollo Theatre. He has also worked with the immersive theatre group Punchdrunk, the central London recreation of the Crystal Maze and spent time as a Tudor cook at Hampton Court Palace.
Comments