Kevin Boyle
Kevin Boyle lives in Sligo, where he works with people with special needs. He recently returned to full-time education, and in October of this year graduated from NUIG with a BA with Creative Writing. He has previously been published in the Dolly Mixtures anthology and Ropes 2010. He was also long-listed for the Over The Edge Best New Writer in 2010. In 2011 he was a team-writer in the play The Devil You Know which was staged in NUIG.
Ruby Tuesday
‘She would never say where she came from.
Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone.’
We’re lying on the floor again. She invited me to share her sleeping bag last night. I wake and watch her breathing. She is not quite as beautiful as I had thought the night before. Her mouth is open, exposing those slightly horsey teeth. Her skin is smooth and pale. One breast is artfully exposed. She is a slightly disturbed Greek goddess reeking of alcohol: I am Zeus with a hangover.
‘Yesterday don’t matter cos it’s gone – that’s what Melanie sings and it’s a better
version than the Stones.’
‘Oh come off it. Nobody does it like Jagger. They wrote it anyway.’
‘You’re talking through your arse as usual. Now when you have lived as long as I
have…..’
‘You’re four years older than me for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t make you my mother.’
‘Well I should hope not. Not after what we’ve been doing. It could give you a nasty
complex lovey’
Last night’s cigarettes had left a coating on my tongue. Last night’s cider has left a humming in my brain. She insisted on climbing out onto the flat roof to see the moon. I think we howled a little. She said she felt drawn to the moon after drinking cider.
‘Must be the silver fucking apples.’
‘The what?’
‘God, you’re useless. Don’t you know anything? I don’t know what I’m doing with you.
You’re just out of nappies for God’s sake.’
‘Yes. Well that can soon be remedied. I’m off, Missus-friggin-Robinson.’
I’m eighteen. We are playing the game again. It feels like we’ve been playing this for years. The mood-swings. The insults. The departure – The capitulation.
‘Don’t go. Please don’t go. You know what I’m like. I don’t mean it. I really do love
you.’
I know what everyone says about me. They think I pick up strays. There are so many nice girls out there, they say. They meet and greet my girlfriends and then they whisper about their inadequacies. So! That’s the problem. Yes, I like colourful women, and they don’t come more colourful than that discarded Indian dress over there. She’s mumbling in her sleep now. Not to happy. Well-there’s her mother. There’s also her father. Doesn’t everyone have loopy parents? However, it seems that hers excel in that department.
Shopping has taken on a new edge. Every outing is an excursion into danger. I’ve never felt so alive.
‘Now what do we need from the shop today?’
‘Oh no. Not again.’
‘Don’t be such a coward. What is it to be? Pierre Cardin? Calvin Klein? Perfume I think.
I feel I need to replenish my stock of cosmetics. I get so bored so very easily.’
She is sitting at the dressing-table, posing in the mirror, fingering a large bottle of Opium perfume. A half-torn sticker declares “Tester”. She was indeed tested. Challenged anyway.
‘I lost the battle to temptation and won – the right to smell like a star.’
‘I love your perfume’ the other girls say.’
‘It’s Opium’ she says. ‘Costs an absolute fortune’
She makes me buy something worthless and then stands beside me at the check-out. While I pay the girl, my heart is racing and I’m overheating. There are beads of sweat on my upper lip. She’s standing behind me now, rubbing up against me with the concealed glass bottle protruding through her poncho. The manager, a friend of my mother’s, waves at me. I smile stiffly and raise my head weakly. I just want to run out of the shop. The till-roll has run out. The girl has to re-load another one. Oh God. She’s behind me now. I can feel her breath on my neck.
‘You’re such a good boy, aren’t you? Is that mummy’s friend over there?’
We’re out and free. I gulp in air. I’m shaking. We get around the corner and run. We’re laughing manically. It’s the best feeling ever.
‘You mad fucking bitch!’
I’m pushing her into an alley. She’s beautiful. We’re kissing. My hands are under the poncho. Her hands are on me. Then,
‘Stop it-will you? You bloody peasant. Stop mauling me. I was meant for more than this.
Get away from me!’
I wonder where she gets this regal streak. I wonder why I find it so damn attractive. I know it’s only one of her delusions but I like it. Sometimes I play along with it. I am her courtier or her gardener. She deigns to be with me. She wants to be with me. Her pleasure depends on me. Lady Chatterley – even I’ve heard of her.
The game extends beyond the bedroom. Her loopy family have metamorphisised into fallen angels. I overhear her talking to a stranger when she’s drunk.
‘Daddy had money, and land. All gone now. Mum is still distraught. Sometimes I feel I
have been robbed of my heritage. All that heritage and style. House was burned down
during the civil war. Oh Mummy was such a beauty. She played piano. So sad. Hands
twisted with arthritis now. Looks out the window at the ruin of the big house. Another
era really.’
Next say I enquire.
‘So your mother played the piano?’
‘Piano? My arse! Oul bitch doesn’t have a note in her head. Look pet you wouldn’t
want to take me to seriously when I’m drunk. Now be a love and go out and get some
fags, will you.’
“Who could hang a name on you
When you change with every new day?”
Her mother is an alcoholic. Her father died young of Cancer. That’s the truth, I think. She doesn’t go home very often. She came here to go to college, but dropped out after a few months. Now she works in a whole-food restaurant. I have a nick-named it The Limp Lentil.
She’s not impressed. I continue the ribbing.
‘Golden fucking Dawn? It sounds like a guerrilla group’
‘Well in a way, it is pet. We’re attacking the preconceived nutritional notions of the
Bourgeois establishment.’
‘So you’re really committed then?’
‘Well for this week anyway. They make a mean broccoli quiche.’
“Dying all the time
Lose your dreams
And you will lose your mind.”
The periods of moroseness come and go. She likes to expound her theories on the meaninglessness of life from a height above the earth. It seems the universe is more open to her pleas when she is on a roof or climbing a tower. Her quotient of despair tends to be in proportion to the amount of cider consumed, and directly follows some unconnected rush of adrenaline. She knows how to scare me.
‘It wouldn’t take much you know. I could just jump. I could be impaled on those
railings there. It would be just like that guy in Mrs. Dalloway. Oh what was his name?
-Oh would you look what I’m asking? A goddamn illiterate. Would you be fucking
happy then boy? If I was dead? You would. Wouldn’t you?’
I’m reassuring again. I’m pleading again. All those times I’ve walked away. Called her bluff. She knows I can’t do that just here. It strikes me that that is why she likes the heights. She can threaten. She is in control. The game goes on. I really don’t want her to die.
‘Please stop it. I love you.’
She is perched on the edge. I can see her bare toes grasping the ledge. Her back is turned to me. Her arms are raised. Victory. She turns her head and smiles. I’ve never seen her smile so contently. Slowly, she steps back from the brink and faces me,
‘Have you got any Rothmans left darling?’
The day of the phone-call home. She thought that she was pregnant. Her sister was going to help her take care of it. She didn’t even ask for my opinion.
‘Get me change for the phone. Get me cigarettes. Get me a drink. Get out of here while
I talk to my sister.’
I stand outside the booth. I listen to the rise and fall of the conversation. She cries. She laughs a little. Then a turn for the worst. Some old wrong remembered, some rash response. Her voice is raised. She’s shouting. I open the door. She’s banging the receiver off the wall. I grab that hand and then the other one swings around and scrapes my face. I try and manoeuvre her off the street, behind the booth. I put my hand over her mouth. She knees me in the privates. I’m on the ground. She’s gone.
“While the sun is bright
Or in the darkest night
No one knows
She comes and goes.”
She was gone for four days. I phoned her sister. She didn’t want to know. She had never been away so long. I saw her impaled on the railings. I dreamed of her drowning. She had said she would make a good-looking corpse (like Janis Joplin). On day four, I heard there was a party going on in a well-known squat. The bash had been going on for two days now. My spaced-out informer said he had seen her there. She was alive. I had to see her. I never even thought of the baby. I thought her hold on life was so tenuous that she would never be a mother.
“Don’t question why she needs to be so free
She’ll tell you it’s the only way to be.”
Everyone was at the party. I had to fight my way through a crowd on the stairs. The music, I was told, was in the basement. They had fairly basic flashing red lights and sheets of aluminium foil on the walls to reflect them. I suppose she didn’t see me at first. It seemed my worries had been exaggerated. Her tenuous hold on life had now been extended to a taller, better-looking guy than me. He was older too, with an impressive full beard. They sat on the floor and she was wrapped around him from behind. He was rolling a joint and she was kissing his neck. I froze for a moment.
Then an unfamiliar calm spread over me. I strode over to them and stood looking down on them. She looked up at me through dilated pupils. She was stoned.
‘Hey, It’s you. Great party. Where have you been?’
‘Oh I’ve been around – and you?’
‘Well I just had to, you know…..chill. You were so strung out. Hey, great news. Got
my period. Bleeding great. Huh? Listen sorry about….’
‘Hey don’t worry about it. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. I’ll see you
around then.’
I didn’t hear a reply. Smiling, I turned effortlessly around, walked up the stairs, out of the building and onto an empty street. It was dawn already and the chill gave me sudden goose-bumps. I felt the cold brightening like excitement. The party was over. I kept thinking – the party is over, and you know, it feels sort of good.
“Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday.
Who could hang a name on you?
When you change with every new day
Still I’m gonna miss you…..”
‘She would never say where she came from.
Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone.’
We’re lying on the floor again. She invited me to share her sleeping bag last night. I wake and watch her breathing. She is not quite as beautiful as I had thought the night before. Her mouth is open, exposing those slightly horsey teeth. Her skin is smooth and pale. One breast is artfully exposed. She is a slightly disturbed Greek goddess reeking of alcohol: I am Zeus with a hangover.
‘Yesterday don’t matter cos it’s gone – that’s what Melanie sings and it’s a better
version than the Stones.’
‘Oh come off it. Nobody does it like Jagger. They wrote it anyway.’
‘You’re talking through your arse as usual. Now when you have lived as long as I
have…..’
‘You’re four years older than me for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t make you my mother.’
‘Well I should hope not. Not after what we’ve been doing. It could give you a nasty
complex lovey’
Last night’s cigarettes had left a coating on my tongue. Last night’s cider has left a humming in my brain. She insisted on climbing out onto the flat roof to see the moon. I think we howled a little. She said she felt drawn to the moon after drinking cider.
‘Must be the silver fucking apples.’
‘The what?’
‘God, you’re useless. Don’t you know anything? I don’t know what I’m doing with you.
You’re just out of nappies for God’s sake.’
‘Yes. Well that can soon be remedied. I’m off, Missus-friggin-Robinson.’
I’m eighteen. We are playing the game again. It feels like we’ve been playing this for years. The mood-swings. The insults. The departure – The capitulation.
‘Don’t go. Please don’t go. You know what I’m like. I don’t mean it. I really do love
you.’
I know what everyone says about me. They think I pick up strays. There are so many nice girls out there, they say. They meet and greet my girlfriends and then they whisper about their inadequacies. So! That’s the problem. Yes, I like colourful women, and they don’t come more colourful than that discarded Indian dress over there. She’s mumbling in her sleep now. Not to happy. Well-there’s her mother. There’s also her father. Doesn’t everyone have loopy parents? However, it seems that hers excel in that department.
Shopping has taken on a new edge. Every outing is an excursion into danger. I’ve never felt so alive.
‘Now what do we need from the shop today?’
‘Oh no. Not again.’
‘Don’t be such a coward. What is it to be? Pierre Cardin? Calvin Klein? Perfume I think.
I feel I need to replenish my stock of cosmetics. I get so bored so very easily.’
She is sitting at the dressing-table, posing in the mirror, fingering a large bottle of Opium perfume. A half-torn sticker declares “Tester”. She was indeed tested. Challenged anyway.
‘I lost the battle to temptation and won – the right to smell like a star.’
‘I love your perfume’ the other girls say.’
‘It’s Opium’ she says. ‘Costs an absolute fortune’
She makes me buy something worthless and then stands beside me at the check-out. While I pay the girl, my heart is racing and I’m overheating. There are beads of sweat on my upper lip. She’s standing behind me now, rubbing up against me with the concealed glass bottle protruding through her poncho. The manager, a friend of my mother’s, waves at me. I smile stiffly and raise my head weakly. I just want to run out of the shop. The till-roll has run out. The girl has to re-load another one. Oh God. She’s behind me now. I can feel her breath on my neck.
‘You’re such a good boy, aren’t you? Is that mummy’s friend over there?’
We’re out and free. I gulp in air. I’m shaking. We get around the corner and run. We’re laughing manically. It’s the best feeling ever.
‘You mad fucking bitch!’
I’m pushing her into an alley. She’s beautiful. We’re kissing. My hands are under the poncho. Her hands are on me. Then,
‘Stop it-will you? You bloody peasant. Stop mauling me. I was meant for more than this.
Get away from me!’
I wonder where she gets this regal streak. I wonder why I find it so damn attractive. I know it’s only one of her delusions but I like it. Sometimes I play along with it. I am her courtier or her gardener. She deigns to be with me. She wants to be with me. Her pleasure depends on me. Lady Chatterley – even I’ve heard of her.
The game extends beyond the bedroom. Her loopy family have metamorphisised into fallen angels. I overhear her talking to a stranger when she’s drunk.
‘Daddy had money, and land. All gone now. Mum is still distraught. Sometimes I feel I
have been robbed of my heritage. All that heritage and style. House was burned down
during the civil war. Oh Mummy was such a beauty. She played piano. So sad. Hands
twisted with arthritis now. Looks out the window at the ruin of the big house. Another
era really.’
Next say I enquire.
‘So your mother played the piano?’
‘Piano? My arse! Oul bitch doesn’t have a note in her head. Look pet you wouldn’t
want to take me to seriously when I’m drunk. Now be a love and go out and get some
fags, will you.’
“Who could hang a name on you
When you change with every new day?”
Her mother is an alcoholic. Her father died young of Cancer. That’s the truth, I think. She doesn’t go home very often. She came here to go to college, but dropped out after a few months. Now she works in a whole-food restaurant. I have a nick-named it The Limp Lentil.
She’s not impressed. I continue the ribbing.
‘Golden fucking Dawn? It sounds like a guerrilla group’
‘Well in a way, it is pet. We’re attacking the preconceived nutritional notions of the
Bourgeois establishment.’
‘So you’re really committed then?’
‘Well for this week anyway. They make a mean broccoli quiche.’
“Dying all the time
Lose your dreams
And you will lose your mind.”
The periods of moroseness come and go. She likes to expound her theories on the meaninglessness of life from a height above the earth. It seems the universe is more open to her pleas when she is on a roof or climbing a tower. Her quotient of despair tends to be in proportion to the amount of cider consumed, and directly follows some unconnected rush of adrenaline. She knows how to scare me.
‘It wouldn’t take much you know. I could just jump. I could be impaled on those
railings there. It would be just like that guy in Mrs. Dalloway. Oh what was his name?
-Oh would you look what I’m asking? A goddamn illiterate. Would you be fucking
happy then boy? If I was dead? You would. Wouldn’t you?’
I’m reassuring again. I’m pleading again. All those times I’ve walked away. Called her bluff. She knows I can’t do that just here. It strikes me that that is why she likes the heights. She can threaten. She is in control. The game goes on. I really don’t want her to die.
‘Please stop it. I love you.’
She is perched on the edge. I can see her bare toes grasping the ledge. Her back is turned to me. Her arms are raised. Victory. She turns her head and smiles. I’ve never seen her smile so contently. Slowly, she steps back from the brink and faces me,
‘Have you got any Rothmans left darling?’
The day of the phone-call home. She thought that she was pregnant. Her sister was going to help her take care of it. She didn’t even ask for my opinion.
‘Get me change for the phone. Get me cigarettes. Get me a drink. Get out of here while
I talk to my sister.’
I stand outside the booth. I listen to the rise and fall of the conversation. She cries. She laughs a little. Then a turn for the worst. Some old wrong remembered, some rash response. Her voice is raised. She’s shouting. I open the door. She’s banging the receiver off the wall. I grab that hand and then the other one swings around and scrapes my face. I try and manoeuvre her off the street, behind the booth. I put my hand over her mouth. She knees me in the privates. I’m on the ground. She’s gone.
“While the sun is bright
Or in the darkest night
No one knows
She comes and goes.”
She was gone for four days. I phoned her sister. She didn’t want to know. She had never been away so long. I saw her impaled on the railings. I dreamed of her drowning. She had said she would make a good-looking corpse (like Janis Joplin). On day four, I heard there was a party going on in a well-known squat. The bash had been going on for two days now. My spaced-out informer said he had seen her there. She was alive. I had to see her. I never even thought of the baby. I thought her hold on life was so tenuous that she would never be a mother.
“Don’t question why she needs to be so free
She’ll tell you it’s the only way to be.”
Everyone was at the party. I had to fight my way through a crowd on the stairs. The music, I was told, was in the basement. They had fairly basic flashing red lights and sheets of aluminium foil on the walls to reflect them. I suppose she didn’t see me at first. It seemed my worries had been exaggerated. Her tenuous hold on life had now been extended to a taller, better-looking guy than me. He was older too, with an impressive full beard. They sat on the floor and she was wrapped around him from behind. He was rolling a joint and she was kissing his neck. I froze for a moment.
Then an unfamiliar calm spread over me. I strode over to them and stood looking down on them. She looked up at me through dilated pupils. She was stoned.
‘Hey, It’s you. Great party. Where have you been?’
‘Oh I’ve been around – and you?’
‘Well I just had to, you know…..chill. You were so strung out. Hey, great news. Got
my period. Bleeding great. Huh? Listen sorry about….’
‘Hey don’t worry about it. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. I’ll see you
around then.’
I didn’t hear a reply. Smiling, I turned effortlessly around, walked up the stairs, out of the building and onto an empty street. It was dawn already and the chill gave me sudden goose-bumps. I felt the cold brightening like excitement. The party was over. I kept thinking – the party is over, and you know, it feels sort of good.
“Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday.
Who could hang a name on you?
When you change with every new day
Still I’m gonna miss you…..”