Boris Belony

A Bard

One morning I decided to stage a musical in my front garden. If Gilbert and Sullivan can do it, I said to myself from beneath the pillow, other people can! I informed my mother over breakfast.

      ‘Yes, other qualified people,’ she replied.

      ‘Are you an autocrat?!’ I challenged – staring deep into her caring eyes.

      ‘Of course not! I just mean that musicals require a lot of technical expertise!’

      ‘So you’re an autocrat!’ I insisted. ‘Was Disney an autocrat? Or Dickens? Or Dewey? Or Dostoyevsky? No! But my own mother? Yes! An autocrat!’ It hurt me to lay the truth out so brutally on the table amongst the marmalade and egg shells, but I was frustrated by my mother’s unending conservatism.

      Knowing by parents were going to provide scant support (my Dad had been killed in an army) I phoned my Aunt Margaret for help.

      ‘Aunt Margaret hi! Could you come over to help me stage a play-musical thing in the front garden?’

      There was silence and then the sound of movement as the phone was passed to someone else.

      ‘Your Aunt is very sick,’ said her nurse, ‘and can’t help you out with your production’.

      I was devastated, but held on tightly to theatre’s foundational assertion – “the show must go on, no matter what happens at all”

      I walked out to the garden to survey my options. The garden was small. A driveway stage left (or house right from your perspective!), and a short bald hedge; twiggy, exposing a chickenwire fence at times, occasionally in bloom with a few berries – sometimes festively around Chrizmas – stage right. A modest and neat pansied flower bed lay beneath the sitting window. The discreet porch would have to be the changing room – its naked bulb adding a modest flare of glamour. I measured out the stage area and marked out the perimeter with a hoe. Father’s hoe. I hoped he was proud of me in whatever state he presently existed (was time even a factor in such a place? If not, could a sense of pride even be established without time’s movement to grant it context and contrast??) Sweat broke out on my forehead and lips and I had to put down the hoe and go inside to watch a few episodes of Mythbusters to calm my mind. A short time later I returned to the front garden and continued mapping the space. The stage extended slightly beyond the porch and the space between that and the public footpath would be reserved for the audience. I paused to imagine the eager faces of the waiting crowd, craning their necks to see into the dressing room. I would probably be upstairs in the toilet at that point, pooing, and relishing in my own excitement. I would no doubt sneak to my bedroom window (just above the porch) and peek down through the net curtains at the expectant bustle, safe in the knowledge that nothing could possibly, by an means, have gone wrong yet because it hadn’t started.

      I snapped myself out of this fantasy and went straight to my room where I set to developing characters, plot, dialogue, melodies, lyrics, action, pace, choreography, lighting, costume and soliloquy: everything that a successful musical might need. Later, I phoned my friend Claude to see if he would be interested in playing the prancing orc, but he was crippled with the new Call of Duty. My other two friends had moved house a few years previously and I had forgotten to get their new phone numbers. Mum didn’t have them either. It would just have to be me and Jess.

      Once the script was complete, I embarked on a swift leafleting campaign covering all the houses in the area. The musical was to be performed in two days’ time. Rehearsal took up every single moment of the intervening period. On the morning of the performance I was exhausted and just about ready to cancel the whole thing out of fright. But I remembered that foundational assertion:  “the show ought to go on; irregardless of anything”. I gathered every gram of courage I had and when the time came, strode out onto the stage; singing, dancing, marching, and waving with absolute enthusiasm. As I went back inside afterwards, I knew I couldn’t have done a better job – and Jess had played her part marvellously. Yes I was disappointed by the turn out, but I had completed my mission to stage a musical in the front garden. Two weeks later, I was overjoyed when two skateboarders stopped me and asked me about it.

      ‘Did you put on a play about orcs in your front garden?’ enquired one.

      ‘Faggot’, added the other.

My twiggy joy turned to bloated despair after running home to consult the compliment on an online dictionary.

Why do Cunts get all the Jobs?

I couldn’t believe it - I was fired before I had even heard about the job! This was one more firing to add to the long list: fired from McDonalds for believing in ghosts, sacked from my friend’s Auntie’s solicitors business for looking up Tumblr porn on her phone, discarded from Coras Iompair Eireann for filling a City Imp with mannequins (so as not to have to stop for anyone), and snapped off the payroll of Pengiun Books IRL for publishing a novel by a woman without grey hair. This took the biscuits though - took them, made a cheesecake base with them, and flung them out a window of the top floor of the SIPTU building.

I had walked into the building brimming with confidence. I knew I looked the part. I had bought a white shirt in Penney, found my school tie, borrowed a pair of my Dad’s plastic nylon slacks, and smoothed a black sac over my runners to make them look “patent”. Gunning up the stairs to the manager’s office had made me feel, well, Real. I rapped on the door with a mixture of politeness, confidence and impatience, sweeping in with an air of enthusiasm when admitted.

‘I like working on my own and as part of a team’, I announced as I entered. ‘I also have a plethora of hobbies like walking, reading and going to cinemas’.

I sat down and introduced myself, before moving on to an account of my lengthy skills in customer caring.

‘You know this is a professional clinical hypnotherapy position?’ asked the interviewer.

‘Of course I do!’ I replied, utterly caught off guard.

‘It’s just that you don’t seem to have any qualifications.’

‘I do! I have a FETAC level 1, awarded by Raoul Watson.’

Beads of sweat were beginning to roll into my eyes and mouth. I had taken a few liberties with the truth here. I had a FETAC level 1 alright, but it was from a course I had done in standing still. I hoped she wouldn’t penetrate any further with this line of questioning.

‘Oh, ok. So what year did you graduate?’ asked the manager.

‘This,’ I answered, sweat pooling on my upper lip.

‘That’s very impressive,’ said the manager. ‘Professor Watson is a leader in the field. I think it’s safe to say you have the job! We don’t normally get students from the Watson Academy looking for jobs here! What’s your primary method?’

I shifted awkwardly, prompting a sweat-squelch from between my buttocks. ‘I don’t really remember.. We were learning so many things so quickly. The FETAC man was always there staring at us to see what knowledge was actually going in. We were under a lot of pressure..’

‘That’s no problem’ said the manager. ‘You did it so recently that you’ll still be fresh for hypno-recall. We require all our practitioners to undergo regressive hypnosis before starting anyway, so I’ll just pop you under and we can see what you went through with Professor Watson.’

‘Oh I’m not so sure that’d work. I’ve had a cold since then, doesn’t that cloud the memories?’ I asked, standing up slowly, but not quite to full height.

‘Don’t be absurd!’ she answered. ‘Now just sit in that hypnocratic chair there while I get the light.’

With little choice, I moved over to the chair she had pointed at. It looked a like a big black fruit gum. I hated fruit gums, they pulled your teeth out, almost.

‘Are you sure this is necessary?’ I asked. ‘What if I get stuck in a memory?’

‘Nonsense,’ replied the manager, taking out a little pendulated torch. ‘Ok, just relax. Give me a date you were studying with the professor and we’ll have a look at what you were doing.’

‘Eh the fifteenth of January,’ I said.

‘Ok, Sunday the fifteenth of January,’ she said and started pendulating the small light. I tensed in frustration, angry at myself for picking a Sunday. Who does FETAC on a Sunday? Who does that?!

But before I could berate myself any longer, I was slipping out of contemporary consciousness and sliding towards the fifteenth of January, guided by the omnipotent voice of the manager.

‘Go to the fifteenth of January. Tell me what you are doing,’ she suggested soothingly.

‘I’m in bed,’ I answered. ‘I’m in bed and my penis is engorged. I’m watching a Beyonce video on MTV Black. There’s a bag of Skittles beside me, full of Valium. My penis is engorged loads.’

‘OK, let’s jump ahead a bit. What are you doing in the afternoon?’ asked the manager.

‘I’m still in bed, but I’m asleep now. There’s a fly annoying me ever so much. It keeps hitting off the window and buzzing around, but I’m too tranquilised to exterminate it.’

‘Oh. Oh when do you go to see Prof Watson? Is it in the evening?’

‘No, the only knowledge I have of Professor Watson is the signed photo of him on the wall I notice when walking into your office in nine months time. I’m still in my room in the evening, but I have a nosebleed. I’m using my penis for pleasures again, but there’s nothing on TV, so I’m looking out the window to see if any of the neighbours are around outside. The smell of the window is making me feel really lonely.’

‘Ok, come back to today, come back to today please,’ said the manager urgently.

I opened my eyes and looked with dismay at the infuriated face of the manager. I tried to explain myself. ‘Please, you must understand, I was very sad at that time-‘

‘Get out of my office!’ she yelled. ‘Never in all my years hypnotising people have I ever come across someone so disgusting! You’re beyond repair!’ She threw a tissue at me.

‘You can forget about this job too - you’re fired!’

Devastation and contempt erupted inside me. ‘Fuck you Alan Sugar!’ I shouted, getting up and fleeing from the office.

As I ran down the stairs and out the front door, red hot tears belched out of my puffy eyelids. The words ‘failure, failure, fucking disgusting failure’ strafed my mind as I ran. You’ll never work again, my mind shouted above the din of failure - you’ll never work again. Not to worry, screamed my sense - just about audible over the other yells - you can always fly to the USA and start again! But just as that thought threatened to settle me, I tripped and fell onto the road in front of an oncoming LUAS and was smashed into a vegetative state where the only cognitive possibility was the looped recall of the moments just prior to my birth.

Néw

I sat there trying to think up something new. I was long past the point of trying to think something novel like “bird-skittle-smut-fluke, oh I bet no one has thought that combination of words before!!!” - it created nothing new, and besides, Googlewhacking had made it a popular activity. No, this had to be an absolutely new thought, something which ripped through the fabric of forms, media, figures, and schemas behind the genesis of ideas. I had to walk around outside of logic and crack open the egg of intuition. All this thinking about it was maddening - I could think about thinking up something new, but never dive off the edge into a new thought. I was forever pointing away off round a blind conceptual corner, but never passing into it myself. In utter desperation, I filled a latté glass with genetically-fortified neurotoxins stolen from my Dad’s lab, and fell asleep into outright mind-engorging being-transmutation-panic.

Est’eem

I’ve always thought I have a good figure. Sure, it might be a little gelatenous in places, but whose body isn’t? I suppose there is the odd college girl who looks like a skeletal hawk. You see them draped in pink felt, stabbing their way through an orange cloud across the car park, but I don’t really mean those kinds of people. I’m talking more generally about how people look. Most people have pipes and rings of fat circling their bodies in places - it’s a fact of life! Bingo wings, spare tyres, bulbed ribs, swollen neck, water of the brain; everyone bulges somewhere. Why the fear of fat anyway? One of my teachers told me that men used to be attracted to fat women in the middle ages because it was a sign that they were loving. That’s apparently why all the women in paintings are pudgy. I don’t know why I’m even having this discussion about my body anyway - if I’m happy with it, surely I don’t need to justify it. But I look like I’m wearing a sleeping bag under my skin and that my back is covered in fat-shadows - and I feel horrific naked in front of my family! Suddenly, I’m not so sure.

Delighted

I put christmas lights on the tree, wrapped them round in a spiral, but realised that there were still lights remaining. I trailed them across the sitting room floor and lined the window with them. But there were still lights remaining. I brought the lights out of the sitting room and into the hall. I draped them around mirrors and picture frames, made Xs with them on the ceiling and cris-crossed them along the wall, but there were still lights remaining. I turned the entire interior of the house into an intricate web of dangling coloured lights, and still, even after that, there were lights remaining. I heard the dog barking at the door - it needed food. I walked around the house, sticking the lights to the wall as I went, and wrapped the lights around my dog. Each arm and claw was wound with the skinny bulbs until it was little but a tangled ball, with two constantly sniffing holes out front. But there were still lights remaining. I laid a path of lights along the driveway, made an outline of every leaf in the hedge, and fired the rest up into the sky to double the stars; and finally, after all that, the plug landed beside me - there were no more lights remaining. I knocked on the neighbours door and demanded an extension lead. I brought it to the plug and plugged it in. There was a rush of colourful light; christmas came into existence; and the dog screamed.

Deadicure

The girlfriend didn’t like being tickled. The boyfriend said ‘I’m going weaseling,’ and went for her feet. The girlfriend shrieked and tried to kick him in the head as he nibbled on her toes.

   ’Whatever you do don’t push the toenails back!’ she screamed, dead serious.

   The boyfriend thought she was only messing, however. She had to be messing - who genuinely cares if their toenails are pushed back? 

   Ignoring her command, he drew one of her middle toenails underneath his front teeth and pulled back with all his might, snapping the nail down the middle to its root. A trickle of warm blood ran into his mouth.

   The girlfriend screamed and kicked out, narrowly missing her boyfriend’s face. Pain seared through her pudgy little foot-finger.

   ’I’m so sorry!’ exclaimed the boyfriend. ‘I didn’t mean to shatter the nail!’

   The girl pulled her foot up towards her stomach to investigate the damage. Blood was oozing out of the crack. She looked up with fury at her boyfriend. ‘Look what you’ve done, you’ve snapped it! It’s snapped! What the fuck did you do to my nail!’

   The boyfriend wasn’t listening. He was too busy licking the dribble of blood off his chin. In an instant he had grabbed her by the throat and eaten a nipple off. 

   She screamed.

   She stopped screaming, because she was dead. Her vampire boyfriend had eaten her dead.

“The Early Bird Catches the Worm”

One of the most profound experiences of my life concerned a phrase I learned when I was in first class. Our teacher at the time, Mr McNaninov, was a stern but fair man. He was obsessed with discipline and had an extraordinary ability to justify everything he did. We truly felt like learners; sitting beneath his solid gaze, bathing in the luminous knowledge which flashed over us.

   One day in particular, Mr McNaninov was reading from a book of old English proverbs; asking us to represent each one in the form of a biro illustration. My biro was snapped, so I was using a stubby navy crayon flecked with colourful scud on its exterior. I can remember the broad strokes of this dumb implement so well. I would write the proverb first and then spend ten minutes on a drawing, before moving on. I had just finished an image of a clown taking a man’s entire hand because the man had offered him his finger when Mr McNaninov explained we were moving on to the next proverb. I swept up the large mottled grey sheet of paper, and prepared a new one; waiting with ear cocked for the new proverb. Mr McNaninov cleared his throat;

   ‘The early bird catches the worm.’

   I felt the world stop.

   ‘Sorry master, could you repeat that,’ pitched Anthony from the back corner of the room.

   ‘The early bird catches the worm,’ repeated the teacher, blowing my mind for a second time. The words were like fireworks in my fragile little nest of neurons, setting of thoughts at the speed of a hawk. My arm instantly shot upwards.

   ‘Gentle Mr McNaninov, please, who first came up with this idea?’ I enquired sweetly. The man looked up sternly from the book.

   ‘We do not inquiz as to who wrote the proverbs,’ he stated, pointing a long, sharp stick of chalk at a sign above the blackboard.

   THE PROVERBS WEREN’T WRITTEN BY PEOPLE, it read.

   My cheeks burned with embarrassment.

   ‘Of course,’ I answered meekly.

   A ripple of eager conversation was spreading across the classroom as everyone came to terms with the immensity of the phrase.

   ‘The first bird out gets it - he simply gets that worm!’ stated Maurice, incredulously

   ‘If there’s something to be had - not just worms - the earlier birds will get that! It could be cotton, tin, bread, berries; anything! Simply anything!’ enthused an excited Glen.

   ‘Instant silence!’ shouted Mr McNaninov from the toilet. ‘I leave for two seconds and you are all bellowing!’ Talk evaporated immediately. The teacher emerged with a scowl from the doorway beside the blackboard. ‘Well, why aren’t you drawing?’ he enquired.

   ‘Please sir,’ shuttled Robin. ‘It’s just that it’s impossible to draw! I am afraid I shall become exhausted if I try.’

   The teacher nodded. ‘Is everyone finding it difficult?’

   ‘Oh yes!’

   ‘Yes sir!’

   ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ cried the class.

   Mr McNaninov gave a great sweep with his cloak. ‘Well then, I shall have to show you.’

   The man took up his sharp stick of chalk and began to draw on the board. His lines arced, intersected, spiralled, fell, rose and stuttered across the dusty green surface. We marvelled as the image came together. One final stab of the chalk completed the bird’s eye. Everyone gasped. The teacher had accidentally drawn a picture of his own inadequate genital instead of a worm. Gravity evaporated, and we were thrown up against the ceiling.

My Mum’s Friend’s New Eyebrow Piercing

So my mother’s friend, Attracta, just bought a new ear ring and had it inserted above her eye in that little pad of fat at the limit of the brow. I was eating a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes at the breakfast bar when she called over to show it off.

   ‘What do you think of my new piece?’ she asked my mother, who was busy putting some granules of instant coffee into a mug.

   ‘Wait until the kettle has finished boiling,’ replied my mother. ‘I can’t really hear you.’

   Attracta stood like a dumb slab of meat, waiting for the rush of steam to ebb.

   ‘What do you think of my new jewelry piece?’ she asked again.

   My mother handed her a cup of steaming coffee and inspected the ring.

   ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s really nice.’

   Attracta marvelled at her own coolness, barely able to contain her pride. 

   ‘You’d think that at this age you couldn’t get an eyebrow ring! The only reason I went for it was that I got a book out of the library recently about doing anything. It’s called Go Ahead and Do Anything - you should read it! It’s amazing, it tells you to just do whatever you want! I started smoking and going to the cinema again as well. Then I went to get that ring put above my eye! You’d love it, it uses psychology. It just explains that doing what you want is what cavemen used to do - makes total sense doesn’t it?’

   I nearly choked on my sweetened, nutty corn.

   ‘Yeah it’s fantastic,’ answered my Mum, taking down the name of the book on her phone.

   Then the words I had dreaded.

   ‘You have an eyebrow tattoo don’t you?’ asked my Mother. ‘What do you think of Attracta’s?’

   ‘Stud.’ I replied, in my grumpiest tone.

   ‘You have a tattoo?’ asked Attracta.

   ‘No!’ I shouted, turning around and revealing my swollen and pussy eyebrow stud. ‘I have an eyebrow stud! And it will heal - it will heal soon.’

   Attracta stood in a chilled silence. No one spoke for a few seconds.

   ‘I’m going to the toilet, and then I’m going to work,’ I said, leaving the kitchen.

   We all knew that Attracta’s eyebrow piercing looked better. And it killed me.

Aside

There was a long pause before he died. In the moments between me pushing the knife into his neck and his death, he was surprisingly alive. I didn’t like that, I hadn’t planned for that. I had imagined it would be a two step affair - stab, then death. I hadn’t banked on him looking at me straight in the eyes, as we shared the fact that I was killing him. I didn’t think it would be a two-way thing. I was supposed to do it to him and that was to be that. That wide-eyed stare, as he took on board the immensity of what was happening; it was pretty intense. What was I supposed to do? There’s no social script for that kind of situation. There’s no reasonable ‘I’m killing you’ gesture or expression. That’s probably why I bared my teeth like an animal. I wasn’t particularly angry or frightened, but I looked as mean as I could anyway - more out of embarrassment than anything. After those awkward few moments, as the crazy jets of blood pulled out his life, his eyes lost their focus and he looked at something else. He mightn’t have even been conscious at that time. Then he fell over and I stood there watching him for ages until I was quite sure he was dead. Life and death were sort of collapsed in those minutes - there was no easy way to discern which was which. It was at that point that I panicked, and tried to unkill him. I remember putting the knife back into the wound and trying to unstab him by pulling it out. It didn’t work, obviously, so I tried giving him mouth to mouth, and thumping his heart back into action. There was a green plastic shovel on the counter which I used to scoop up the blood and feed it back into his system through his mouth. There must have been a blockage in his throat because it just kept pouring back out. None of this was having any real effect so I called an ambulance. They arrived in about twenty minutes and brought him straight to Beech Gates hospital. The guards had come with them and brought me into town to the station. They asked me so many questions I lost count. One of them, one of the guards, was a fearsome fucker. He had a huge beefy head, with bristly white hair and a stubbly little mustache. He kept calling me ‘lad’.
‘You’re in big trouble now lad.’
‘Lad, I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.’
I knew enough not to say anything, so I talked about anything except what had happened. If they asked me why I stabbed David, I’d start telling them why E4 was better than Channel 4. If they asked me how I knew him, I’d talk about the annoying self-service checkouts in Tesco. Eventually they got bored and put me into a cell. I tried not to fall asleep, but eventually I had no choice. As soon as I drifted off though, the prick outside smacked the door with something, making me jump. This happened pretty much every time I nodded off. The next morning when they asked me more questions I was totally wrecked and couldn’t hold myself back from blabbing.
The beefy guard was tempting me with a coffee when I broke.
‘OK, I’ve had enough of your Guantanamo Bay shit. I’ll talk.’ Beefy smiled and instantly started being nice to me.
‘Here you go,’ he said, handing me the coffee. ‘You look wrecked. Tell us what happened and we’ll make sure you get a good cosy sleep.’
I shook the exhaustion from my head and started to tell them what had happened.
‘My sister is David, well was David’s girlfriend. I never liked him from the moment the two of them started going out. He was always saying stuff like “you’re so dumb” and “get a life” to her. He was always borrowing money off her and slagging her in front of Mum. Heather is my sister’s name by the way. She doesn’t make much money at all, she works part time in a really small Bridal shop in town and that’s it. But yer man would be constantly making her pay if they went to the cinema or got Chinese or whatever. I never liked him. Then about two weeks ago I came home from college and Heather was sitting in the kitchen crying. She tried to pretend she wasn’t but I could see tissues around her and then I knew she really was. “What’s wrong,” I asked her, but she wouldn’t tell me at first. Then I noticed that there was a newspaper scrunched up beside her. When I went to pick it up she tried to grab it off me but I could see that there was a picture of yer man, her boyfriend. It turns out he was riding some other girls and paying them for it, and the newspaper had found out about it. My sister was devastated, especially now that she knew why he never had any money. I was so angry, I wanted to kill him then, but the worst was yet to come. He called around to the house later the same day to apologise to Heather, but we wouldn’t let him in. I slammed the door in his face and called him an outrageous shithead. After that I went onto the computer under the stairs to go on the internet. I was on it for about twenty minutes when I heard a wail coming from upstairs. I legged it up the stairs and realised it was coming from Heather’s room. I barged in to find her naked on the bed crying, with ten and twenty euro notes scattered around her. The prick had broken into her room, rid her and then paid for it like he had with those other girls. I couldn’t believe it. I raced out of the house looking for him but couldn’t see him on the path or down the road or anything. I ran back inside, in a total frenzy, and grabbed one of the knives from the knife block in the kitchen. After that, I ran down to the bus stop and got the next 8 down to his house. I knew on the bus that I was going to kill him. Decided how I would do it and everything. When I got to his house I found him in the kitchen, reading an Ikea catalogue. I think you guys know the rest.’
Beefy’s colleague, a guy with a really narrow fin of a face and highly angled eyebrows, replied immediately, ‘no we don’t actually, tell us there.’
‘Ok,’ I said. ‘I stabbed him in the neck before he knew what happened. Just one stab, into the side of neck, like that.’ I simulated where on my own neck. The guards just watched.
I spent the rest of the morning answering the most detailed of questions before I was let go. At that point I was completely drained and wanted nothing more than to go to bed. I was told to come back to the station in a month for a follow up, and that I could contact them at any time before that. I thanked them and walked down to the bus stop. Before going home, I called into the hospital to see how Dave was doing. They told me he was stable. I only found out later that they had meant stable as in certainly dead.
When I got back to the house Heather was really pleased to see me, but refused to talk about what had happened. Even now, three weeks later, she won’t let me discuss it. I’ve mentioned it to Mum a few times, but she won’t hear of it either. I suppose some things just need to go unsaid.

Softly Bared

I had been asleep.
I was now slowly rubbing into wakedness.
The pillow was soft and depth, with numerous edges.
The eyes and head wanted to drift back out to sleep. The knees did too. Something was telling the mind to do something.
The cheek loved how the pillow was feeling. Softly rough. My face slid along it, till it reached the edge.
I was suddenly aware of all sorts of wrongness. I couldn’t breathe. Full, waking consciousness lurched into my body. I pulled myself up into the ashy darkness. The room was full of smoke.
I pulled open my bedroom door to see my sister and five of her friends sitting on the landing smoking fags and reading magazines.
‘Will you keep it down, I’m trying to sleep’, I wheezed, realising that my penis was peeking out from my boxer slit. I turned my squinting self back into my room and closed the door behind me.