Art by Barry McKinley / Fiction / Untitled Books

"She was the other side of the Kim Sutton coin. Instead of bright, fresh, strawberry blonde and healthy, Nancy was dark and curly and dangerous. She looked like an oversexed gypsy, someone who would take your hand, read it, and then sit on it."

Art by Barry McKinley

Diary: Aug 4th, 1979

When we got to Bath it was dark and late and there was nobody there to meet us. We rambled around for about an hour looking into every pub with livestock in the title: The Three Ducks, The Pig and Otter, The Olde Bull and the Farmer Fucking a Sheep - there was no sign of Billy and Irene. Kim looked at me nervously because she could feel the anger getting ready to spill.
      "You're blaming me," she said.
      "He's your brother..." I didn't finish the sentence.
      The framed picture I was carrying was getting heavier by the minute. She bought it on Oxford Street, in one of those shops that specialise in raping foreigners. It was a young couple in silhouette running on a beach. They were naked, but the boy didn't appear to have any genitals, or maybe the weather was cold.
      "It's not my fault," she said.
      "If you wanted me to haul something heavy through the streets, you should have just bought me a big wooden cross."
      "Now you're being a martyr," she replied, seemingly unaware of the irony.
      Eventually we came to a place with a Watneys red barrel and through the leaded glass we could see Billy and Irene. They looked identical with their long hippie hair and flat, dull expressions. Irene was from San Francisco and called everybody "guys".
      "When did you guys get in?"
      I felt like saying, "About a week ago, thanks to your fucking vague instructions," but Kim headed me off at the pass.
      "We just got here. Here's our wedding present."
      Irene pulled the brown paper from the picture and instantly started to sob.
      "It's sooooo beautiful. You guys are too much." Then she hugged us both.
      "Where did you get it?" asked Billy.
      "Portobello road," Kim lied.
      "Wow, man. It's really authentic".
      They propped it up on the bar counter and everybody in the place was forced to look at it.
Bert and Frieda, two of Billy's friends, dropped in and allowed me to buy them booze. They both drank cider. They both slurped.
      Nancy arrived a little before closing time; she was Kim's older sister but I hadn't met her before. She had been drifting around different communes in Ireland and England, doing strange tribal stuff that she couldn't remember. She was the other side of the Kim Sutton coin. Instead of bright, fresh, strawberry blonde and healthy, Nancy was dark and curly and dangerous. She looked like an oversexed gypsy, someone who would take your hand, read it, and then sit on it.
      "Little sister is doing all right," she said, taking me in from top to toe with great curiosity.
      Kim looked away. She didn't often blush.
      "What are you doing in London?" asked Nancy.
      "I work for Armitage Shanks," I said.
      "Wow!" said Billy, "Don't they make the urinals?"
      "Wash hand basins too," I said with enthusiasm. "Flush cisterns, bidets, vanity units..."
      Nancy winked at me and said "I think he's taking the piss."

When the pub closed we headed back to the Billy-abode, a two-bedroom flat that smelled of patchouli oil and damp dog. We sat around and smoked dope. The wedding present was placed on a mantle where it drew all conversation; its beauty expanding as the hours wore on.
      "It's so trippy," said Billy.
      "I think we know those guys," said Irene, "They look like that couple we shared a tent with."
      "In Glastonbury?" said Billy.
      "Uh-huh. Remember we all got nude and danced in the rain?"
      "I don't think it's the same couple," I said.
      "What do you mean?" said Irene, pulling back her hair like a woman opening curtains.
      "Guy in the picture doesn't have a cock," I said. "Did the guy in Glastonbury have a cock?"
      Kim looked at the floor to cover her embarrassment. Irene wasn't happy. "What exactly are you?" she asked with a twist of sourness, "some sort of cock expert?"
      I leaned over very close to her face and replied, "Well, I do work for Armitage Shanks".
      Nancy laughed and slapped the back of my hand. She produced a ball of black gum from Helmand province which was put in a teapot lid and cooked over a low flame. The smoke rose and curled and twisted and we were illuminated like tinkers around a campfire. We sucked it up through a Biro tube until nothing mattered. Nothing mattered at all. Only smoke.
      "You guys are sooo special" said Irene, and she started to sob again.
      Bert and Frieda appeared to live in the flat next door, and yet they asked if they could crash for the night. Billy said "Sure, man, no problem," and then he gave them the second bedroom. I looked over at Kim and gave her my what the fuck is this? expression, but she was too stoned to notice.
      Irene took their pet dog; a witless forty-watt pooch called Sammy, and led him out to a folded blanket in the kitchen. I was gobsmacked. "Even the fucking dog is getting his own room," I said, loud enough that even the mutt got the message.
      We were given some cushions and a blanket. Nancy lay down on the sofa base; she covered herself with a shawl. Kim, as stoned as I'd ever seen her, crawled under the blanket on the floor and shut her eyes tightly.
      The streetlight outside seeped in around the edges of the tie-dyed curtain.
      "The room is going around," said Kim.
      "That's what rooms are supposed to do," I replied.
      She pressed herself against me in that state of demented horniness one gets at the apex of a buzz, when every part of the body becomes a sexual organ. I flipped open the top button on her jeans. "No", she whispered, "we're not alone".
      I looked over her shoulder and straight into her sister's eyes, no more than three feet away, half-closed but not sleepy, and I said "Nancy passed out ages ago."
      And Nancy smiled.
      "Are you sure?" Kim asked, without opening her eyes.
      "Certain," I whispered.
      Nancy was like a wet shadow in the dark as she watched us make love. She had a front-row seat in a sexual circus. Her features doubled in size as she moved closer to us, putting one hand beneath her skirt, the other on the floor where it was used to cantilever her body. She hung suspended in the air like that Dali painting of the giant head supported on spindly sticks. Her face loomed up over Kim Sutton's shoulders, and for a brief, glorious moment it was almost like fucking a two-headed woman in the vastness of outer space.
      Sammy the dog shuffled around in the kitchen. Kim dug her fingers into my back and imploded in a series of tight muscular seizures. Nancy gritted her teeth and rolled her eyes over and stifled a groan in her throat. She withdrew. Kim withdrew. And finally, I withdrew.

I woke up a little before seven. Everyone was gone, except for the two greasy neighbours. They were still in the second bedroom, fast asleep and wrapped around a pillow like snakes around a stick. They smelled like they were sweating turpentine.
      I woke up Kim Sutton.
      "They're gone."
      "Who's gone?"
      "Billy and the blushing bride. What time is the ceremony?"
      "I don't know, he didn't tell me."
      "You didn't get an 'RSVP, dude' sort of thing?"
      Kim always hated the dumb hippie voice I used when imitating her brother. She dearly wanted to see her family as normal, but none of them were. She was as close as her family got to a straight arrow. She always had a job and never scrounged off the state. She believed that you could improve yourself, that you came into this world as raw material, to be shaped and formed and bettered.
      About an hour passed and then the dog scratched on the door. Irene entered wearing a small crown made from twisted wildflowers and twigs. She looked especially fucking stupid. She was followed by Billy.
      "So", I said, "what time is this wedding at?"
      "That's all taken care of, man," said Billy.
      "How do you mean 'taken care of'?"
      "We were up early, so we just got the sunrise ceremony out of the way."
      I threw a quick glance at Kim and could see the look of alarm.
      "We were going to wake you, man, but you looked so comfortable."
      "Was it in a church?" I asked.
      Billy laughed. "You couldn't see a sunrise in a church, man. No, it was on the top of the hill."
      He got down and scrubbed Sammy's chin with his knuckles.
      "Sammy had a great time, he woofed it up. You woofed it up, didn't you Sammy? You really woofed it up."
      "It must've been good," I said, "if Sammy woofed it up."
      "You really woofed it up, boy."
      "What about Nancy?" I asked.
      "Nancy went back to Bristol."
      "Was she at the sunrise ceremony?"
      "No man, she caught it last month."
      "You did it last month as well?"
      "We do it every month, man, you have to keep it fresh, you know?"
      I didn't turn around and look at Kim, but I knew she was mortified. The whole journey had been nothing but a dumb waste of time.

On the Intercity back to London I teased her relentlessly:
      "The bride said a few words, the groom said a few words and then Sammy woofed it up!"
      Kim turned away and buried her head between the seat and the window.
      "And then a passing sparrow made a speech. And a badger threw confetti..."
      Kim twisted her head further away from me and her shoulders started to shake and I was glad. I had lost a day's wages and we had made fools of ourselves; never mind the forty quid we spent on the dickless boy on the beach.
      "And then Sammy woofed it up again," I said.
      The more her shoulders heaved the better I felt. Taking me from London and dragging me half way back to Ireland, well, somebody had to suffer. It was only right that she should pay with tears. It wasn't my family. It was her fucked-up family.
      "Yeah, man, you gotta keep it fresh," I said.
      Two weeks earlier I had seen her face glow when she told me that Billy was getting married; it was like a triumph of normalcy, the first step on the road to regularity. If Billy got married and Nancy gave up her gypsy wanderings and Rosie stopped sleeping with men twenty years her senior and Seamus stopped getting arrested... Then all would be right with the world and Kim would be just like everybody else. I despised the aspiration for all its ordinary hope.
      "The sunrise ceremony!" I spat.
      When she tried to stifle her sobs I knew it was mission accomplished. My hands were clean and now I could offer her comfort. I reached out and touched her shoulder.
      "Kim," I said in a voice so soothing I wondered for a moment if I was in fact a schizophrenic, "Kim, it's okay".
      And then she turned to face me and I could see that she was laughing. Really laughing!
      "Sammy woofed it up," she said, a smile bursting across her face.
      In five seconds I went from stunned to confused to outraged to angry to almost happy. I never made her laugh. Never. I didn't even know she had dimples.
      All the way back to London we took turns saying "Sammy woofed it up" and the people around us picked up on it. An elderly man close by made a low bark and said "woof." A woman with a purple umbrella said "woof, woof." Another woman in a frayed anorak was even more adventurous, she went "woof, woof, woofoooo!"
      I saw my reflection in the window and it didn't look as mean as it usually does. And though I knew it wouldn't last, I too allowed myself an ordinary dream. In it I wasn't a monster; I didn't want to hurt people and bend them over backwards until they snapped. I didn't have strange desires and wicked fantasies. I really wasn't that bad. I looked at the reflected face before it disappeared in a burst of bright sunlight and I thought maybe, just maybe, when you arrive at your final destination, they'll turn down the heating in hell.

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Barry McKinley is based in Kilkenny. His play Elysium Nevada was nominated as Best New Play in the 2009 Irish Theatre Awards and his short fiction has been nominated for the Hennessy XO Literary Awards. This story is from a collection in progress.
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Thursday, 24 February, 2011

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"She was the other side of the Kim Sutton coin. Instead of bright, fresh, strawberry blonde and healthy, Nancy was dark and curly and dangerous. She looked like an oversexed gypsy, someone who would take your hand, read it, and then sit on it."