Runt Read Free Page B

taking the pills too which didn’t really matter cos My Times just sick’d them back out anyway.
    —No shaking. Have they put you on clonazepam?
    Nor did I know that name as well so I shook my head. I wanted those names to stop.
    —I’ll have to have a word with your mother.
    Funny eyes in my Drunkle again there was then. Little fires in them from the burning chair or his burning brains I didn’t know but they turned his words again and there wasn’t much left in his bottle.
    —See, my Drunkle said putting a looking at the flames. —There is no God in happiness. When yur happy, see, there are claims and demands made on you and these can seem to you like interruptions, like a distraction and an undermining of your contentment. They’re not wanted in laughter. When two people laugh together, they don’t need a third voice butting in because that weakens their unique togetherness. But, see, when yur in pain? Well, then you go to Him for comfort and all’s you find is an absence. The fucker’s not there. All there is is silence.
    Like the bit of nice silence then that came into the room when Drunkle stopped his talking but I knew it wouldn’t be for very long only the pops of the chair in the fire and the crunching of Arrn at his bone. And a noise in my ears maybe my heart pushing the blood up into my head and I wanted that Quiet to go on I wanted to go up to look at Bala Lake on Drunkle’s screen and wait for the monster. I went to ask him if his screen was still showing Bala Lake but he carried on with his funny talk looking now down into the nearly empty bottle as if the little hole in the top of it was a little ear he was talking into. A little round glass ear.
    —She speaks to me, y’know. As do all the dead to all of us. You’ve got to learn to listen to what the dead say because they have tales to relate and lessons to teach us. All the dead everywhere in the earth beneath your feet in the thin soil. Listen to what they’re saying.
    Glug glug and another bottle was empty. I saw the lump in Drunkle’s throat jump up and down as he made the bottle go empty with his head back over the back of the couch.
    —Remember the chrysalis we watched last summer? Remember when it hatched and the butterfly came out?
    I went nod cos I did. The butterfly came out like a wet thing like something you’d spit out at school dinner cos it was yacksome and then it opened its wings and it was like something else, something dead different to anything yacka. And then it became even better when it flew away and that was the best thing about that summer maybe even the best thing ever or one of them anyway.
    —Well, when the chrysalis was empty, when the butterfly had gone …
that’s
what my body is now. Her death is a shock to my body; this thing I live in was once the body of her lover and now it isn’t so it is completely different to me now. I don’t recognise it. I don’t even
like
it any more. I don’t want to live in it any more. So do I just wait? Or do I follow her? But if I did she could be broken even further and she wouldn’t want me to do it. But if she can observe my sorrow then she knows that there’s nothing she can do to relieve it so her purgatory is made worse, always worse. There’s nothing either of us can do, now, and we did everything we could for each other when she was alive. Except for at the end, when she was alone. Completely and utterly alone.
    He drank again from his bottle even tho it was empty so he just drank the air inside it and I was glad cos it made him stop his Words. Putting a big sad in me them Words were and I remembered my Auntie Scantie making a cake for me the summer before it had cherries in it and I remembered her too taking me for a ride on a horse around the lower field I sat between her legs with the horse’s big brown neck between mine and it was great to be between that horse and my Auntie and I remembered the two warmnesses around me and Auntie Scantie’s arms holding