Bonemeal: part I

A barmaid with a dress shorter than the gap between your finger and thumb winks at you as you order your food. ‘Poached eggs, good choice’. She winks. You struggle to keep it down, any moment now the table might give you away - lifting itself off the ground like it’s got a mind of its own, but your cocks the real puppeteer of this piece of diner furniture. 

‘You ever caught a fish with your bare hands?’ Funny. You don’t remember bringing your ‘If you’re a cunt sit next to me’ sign but apparently you’ve got it sewn into the back of your denim jacket. ‘You ever caught a fish with your bare hands?’ He slurs his words, drunk at 2PM, Jesus Christ the state of this world. You got two options here, you tell the guy to fuck off or you ignore him. Three options, you tell the guy to fuck off, you ignore him or you answer his question. You say ‘yeah, yeah actually mister I have caught a fish with my bare hands, it was the same fishing trip as the one my best pal drowned on, yeah, while I was busy manoeuvring my tiny child hands around a slippery snake of a sardine, my best pal fell out the boat. I didn’t hear the noise on account of my hands makin a splash right there in front of me and by the time I’d hauled the fucking thing into the boat Timmy was long dead.’ You go for the second option of saying nothing.

But like a wealthy white man he felt you owed him something. Except he wasn’t rich, he wasn’t rich in money anyway. When the currency changes to stories, oh boy this fucker would be top of the food chain. The head honcho, the CEO of the best firm in London town, swinging his dick around an office without a care for who gets a whiff of the cheese. Hell when the currency changes to stories I reckon the world’ll spin round pretty much person for person. Every fuckin’ building will be owned by the homeless, the addicted, the criminal. Every trust fund baby’ll be lying on the streets begging for a story to get them to the end of the week. ‘Please man, just a short one, I’m dying for a toasty bed and some hot food’. But this time it’s their turn to be turned away. It’s their turn to share an eye-line with ankles.

You remember her tattoo. She had it on her achilles heel, the eye of Horus. You fuckin’ hated that tattoo, anyone with an extra eye anywhere on their body is a prick. That’s number one on your manifesto. Anyone with one less, or two less eyes on their body now that fucker’s got a story. But an extra eye, be it painted or mutated, that there is a pretentious prick. But you loved her anyway, you learnt to see past the seeing eye of the son of Ra, and you loved the hell out of her. You loved the hell right out, you stuck a vacuum cleaner down her throat and switched it to fire and brimstone and you loved the hell up her windpipe and right out of her soul. And without hell she took one look at you and bolted, maybe you were the only one keeping her company down there but she sure as hell didn’t need a reminder of the heat.

But all this ankle talk feels like a tangent from the fish smelling problem you’re facing at a much more pressing time of your life, that time is the present, often mistaken for the most pressing time of your life, which is of course the future, but it can sometimes, almost always, be more pressing than the distant past. Now I know that’s a lot of pressing to get your head around but if you think of it as a button that you gotta press in order to press another button somewhere down the line, you’ll realise that the button you’re pressing later on is more important than the one you pressed to get there. Does that clear it up? 

So you’re waiting for your food and the heavyweight ribbed jumper has another go at sparking maritime conversation. ‘You ever plucked all the teeth off a comb save the one and used it to gut a fish?’. Fuck me this guy loves a specific question. This guy must have a BA honours in lines of specific questioning from the University of somewhere very specific. Maybe somewhere in the Pacific. But somehow he’s hit the nail on the head again, because you have, once, plucked all the teeth off of a comb, save the one, and used it to gut a fish. You remember it cause, well cause that’s not something you forget, that right there is a story and a cracking one at that. But how the hell did this walking belch know? Catching a fish with your bare hands, that’s one thing. A lot of people might’ve done that, you can let that go on account of coincidence, but gutting a fish with a single toothed comb, a single toothed comb that you’ve performed the dentistry on yourself, well. I’m not sure you can call that coincidence.

By now your table is far from being lifted off the ground, by now your table is threatening to sag into your lap. Where’s that waitress? You look around the diner, careful to avoid the walking belch but everything’s covered in this smell now that even if you did see her she’d be hard pressed to make you feel a damn thing. Your eggs arrive at the exact moment you forget you ordered them. The hand holding the plate leaves a grease print around the rim and you consider wiping your bread in it to give em’ some more flavour. 

How the fuck did someone like you end up in a place like this? Someone like you who drives a Rolls Royce and wears suits cut so tight to your leg you can’t walk. Someone like you who could start and support a family with the money you skim off the top for golf holidays, someone like you who could send your kids to school with enough respect to make the bullies punch themselves in the face. Someone like you whose so high up the only way is down. The only way is down down down down down. Down from the crown. Down to frown. So you end up down-town. Down-town fawning over a hot waitress who could make you cry for hours with the tip of her little toe, sat down next to the closest personification of a bad aftertaste. 

But the thing about an aftertaste is that it follows a before taste. The stench of the aftertaste sitting next to you is serving as a reminder of how powerful his before-taste might’ve been. And as you think about before and afters, about lingering sensations of flavour, you remember something. Or you remember someone. And for the first time you put a face to the smell. A face to the voice that trawled out such specifically tantalising questions and, as though your eyes were cannonballs that wished they could sink, you break the reciprocating gaze of egg to pupil and turn your crusty neck to look at the past. 

Now you might have forgotten so I’ll remind you, and don’t feel bad, people forget all the time. It’s part of growing up. It’s part of moving on. Especially this type of forgetting. This type of forgetting is like surgery. It’s like self mutilation. This is selective forgetting. This is cutting off your arm cause it reminds you of the thing you did with it. Yeah you know the one. This is taking a real human, a real human who you connected with once, who you cared about once, and peeling him off the shoe you dragged him in on. It’s washing the shoe afterwards so thoroughly, using a stick to get the last remnants of him out of your boot-print, that there’s no trace of the guy left. 

So I’ll have to remind you cause you’ve just about bleached this poor fucker out the toilet of your memory. There were two things that happened to you as a child that you believe shaped you into the person you are today. Numero uno was little Timmy drowning in the lake, that taught you a lot. Mainly about balance. Don’t stand up on a fucking boat you fucking stupid fucking kid. And secondly, the time you gutted a fish with a comb. It only occurs to you now that both the stories that are fundamental to your very being are about fish. Maybe that says something about you, that you’re a slippery character. Or that you can breathe underwater. You make a mental note to test how long you can hold your breathe next time you get in the tub. You shake the fishy thoughts and remember the comb story. Getting taught to use whatever you’ve got to hand, Bear Grylls style, lucky for you you’re an arrogant son of a bitch and you carry a comb wherever you go. Also lucky for you you got plenty more at home so you don’t mind shoving this one into a red sack of fish gut. But when you learnt, it was never Bear Grylls style, it was Raymond Bonemeal style.

Now, Raymond Bonemeal was a mixed bag, he was one of those people who look older than they are even though they’re old as stories. Now you’re forty and pretty wise for it but if you cut Ray in half and counted the lines on his severed torso there’d be at least twice your own. When you were a kid he ran the local scouts, of which you were their proudest member, their most prized possession. Along with his son Timmy, he taught you everything he knew about surviving in the wilderness. How to start fires, how to tie knots, how to skin rabbits and gut fish. But, like pythagorus’ theory, you learnt it all when you were young and never fuckin’ used it. 

Cause you weren’t cut out for the wild life, you hated hard work and you get terrible sun-burn. No, you were destined for bigger things. You were destined for money. And when I say destined I mean you were born with more money in your account than most die with. Cause your Dad, Randy Bonemeal senior, got into the napalm trade just before the Vietnam war. This motherfucker made so much money off that war he hung his boots up at the age of forty one and spent his last twenty years on earth being your Dad. Sixty one years old when he died, with a twenty year old kid. He loved you, you knew that. You never wanted for anything growing up, the world was your oyster and your Daddy made sure of that. 

You might be wondering where Mummy fits into this picture, if you are wondering that then clearly your memory aint what it used to be. Your Pa didn’t hang up his boots cause he had enough moolah, he hung up his boots cause he was grieving. He was grieving for the love of his life, your Ma, who he met when he was just 14 years old. She was eighteen at the time but he knew he’d win her over eventually, she told him to wait 4 years then give her a call. But four years is a long time to keep the same phone number and the scrap of paper he’d written it down on had faded something awful. Your Pa tried every single phone combination there was, it took him a month of nothing but sitting at a phone trying numbers. He’d wake up at 7AM and sit by the phone swirling the digits round, crossing them off a list. At 12 O’clock he’d look up from the phone and make himself a sandwich and a strawberry milkshake before returning to the table at half 12 to start the process again. Once he’d set his mind to something there wasn’t a damn thing in the world that could distract him. On the last day of the month your Pa was still regular as clockwork, and maybe fate decided to reward his diligence cause at precisely 12:01, as your Pa was raising his head from the latest failed phone call, he looked out his window. And who’d he see? Well, not your Ma that would’ve been ridiculous, she moved out of town two years ago with a fella she met at work, but your Ma’s Ma. I swear your Father left a dust shaped version of himself sitting in that chair the speed he shot out the door. He pleaded with your Grandma to tell your Ma that he was after her, and eventually she put the two back in contact. I gotta feeling she didn’t approve much of her daughter’s current beau. Your Ma was so amazed your Papa had waited the four years that she immediately called it off with her boyfriend and went travelling round the world with your Dad. When they came back they were madly in love. 

They lived happily, real happily, for decades. No arguin, no cheatin, no lyin, just pure lovin. When she fell pregnant your Dad was the happiest he’d ever been. Excited to have a family with his one true love. But all good things must come to an end, that’s what your Dad learnt. That all the money in the world can’t fight nature. Birth complications, your Da lost the love of his life and was left with a scrawny bloody mess of cells stuck together to vaguely represent a baby version of yourself. You couldn’t talk then but if you could’ve your first words woulda been ‘Why the long face?’ A question you’d keep asking your Dad until he told you the story of your Ma on your eighteenth birthday. When you heard the news for the first time it was like the final piece of the jigsaw, that looked a little like sky and a little like water, slapped down into place. You remember crying all night for your Dad, you remember him crying along with you. That night your bed became a boat in a sea of salty, newly adult, tears and you learnt a valuable lesson. When men rain they pour. 

Now, I know what you’re thinking. How does a loving family man like that get into the napalm business. Well, your father’s father, Randy bonemeal senior, was the man who invented glue and his wife, Randess Bonemeal, well she invented fire. One day the pair went out dancing and came home so drunk they woke up in each-others workshops - Randy added glue to Randess’ fire and vice versa. They both met up in the garden holding the first ever globules of sticky liquid death. Of course when they made it, they were thinking more of using it as a light source for the poor in destitute housing, they just couldn’t work out how to remove the desperately dangerous aspect. Truth be told your father never knew his parents’ secret recipe was being used in wars, he was told someone had worked out how to take out the burny part, as he had dubbed it, and to his knowledge it was indeed being used to help out those less fortunate than himself. ‘God, who knew there’s so much money in helping out the poor’ He’d say, ‘it’s amazing more people aren’t getting in on this.’. When your father eventually saw the photos of his parents liquid fire being used in Nam, and he’d recognise the stuff anywhere even in black and white, he drove to the nearest bridge and jumped right off to find his dear departed wife. You were twenty at the time, as I mentioned, and already rich enough to buy Paraguay if you wanted to. 

I know what you’re thinking. Randy Bonemeal, Raymond Bonemeal. Brothers. You’re damn right brothers. The best brothers that ever there were. Best friends, worst enemies. Randy got the brawn, Raymond got the fishing. He was your Uncle, and you loved him like you loved your father. If ever your Dad was having one of his ‘locked in his room’ days, as they came to be known, Raymond would take you out fishing with his boy. Now this takes us to the first moment of your childhood that shaped you. The death of Timmy. Now listen, because I lied to you. You know it, I know it. So let’s clear the air. The way you told yourself the story, in your head, wasn’t quite right. You were making a splash tryna get your fish into the boat, you were manoeuvring your tiny child hands around a slippery snake of a sardine. But you weren’t so loud you didn’t hear the boy fall in. You did hear him fall in, hell you even saw it out the corner of your eye. It’s funny how memories change, if you tell yourself enough times you’re not a monster you might just trick yourself into believing it. But you do remember, you know better than anyone. And as you rowed back to shore, with Timmy’s dead body lying next to your catch, you were already working out the story you were gonna tell Ray. 

“Uncle Ray” you start. But that’s as far as you get. The tears flow hard and fast, so fast you start to choke and snot dribbles freely out of your nose and forms a pool of goo above your top lip. Ray tried to calm you down, wrapping you in his big arms and holding you tight whilst you nuzzle your face into his chest. But from this position he can see over your shoulder, and from over your shoulder he can see something in the boat. He can see someone in the boat, getting slapped and tickled by a fish, but not flinching. He pushes you aside like you don’t weigh a damn thing and scoops up the soaking wet body of his only child.

Guilt has been the main emotion you’ve felt throughout your life. It’s been there for different reasons, hurting a loved one, tricking a friend, breaking a heart. But they’ve all been overshadowed by the constant umbrella of guilt you hold over your head to keep away the droplets of reprieve that life has tried to dribble on you. You were always jealous of Timmy, you were jealous of Timmy because he had a Mum, you were jealous of Timmy because his Dad never seemed to get sad, you either wanted to have his Dad all to yourself, or for him to have a sad Dad. Unfortunately the combination didn’t work so well when they both came true.

Now, if you really had pummelled that information so far down it was scraping the bottom of your stomach along with that gum you swallowed ten years ago, then I imagine that’s a lot to remember all at once. But I’m afraid you’re not quite finished remembering are ya? Cause that second memory wasn’t just about the gutting of a fish. That second memory was your first and last attempt at purging some crippling guilt. Now you were 13 when you waited for the air to explode in Timmy’s lungs, and it was seven years you carried that inside you before you owned up, not that it did anything to alleviate the pain. Now after your Dad let you in on his heartbreaking story, you were in the mood to get some things off your chest, the main one, of course, was letting Uncle Ray know that you were responsible for his whole world collapsing on top of him, but you wanted to get some little ones out the way first. You went round your neighbours house and let them know that it was you who threw the infamous brick into their fragile greenhouse and the response filled you with confidence for the main course. They were annoyed sure, but they thought it was a real grown-up gesture to admit to something you’d done as a child, you hoped for the same response from Ray.

You walked up his driveway, a fishing rod in one hand and a ‘I’m sorry I killed your son’ card in the other. Your hands were shaking and little scraps of cold dead skin flapped loosely in the wind as you lifted your knuckle up to knock on his mouldy front door. Each thump reverberates through your body and you almost throw up when you hear someone’s boots come a thudding closer and closer. “Who is it?”. His voice isn’t warm no more, it doesn’t remind you of Summer or old spice it reminds you of thrashing hands and bubbles on the surface. You squeak your name out and ask “I wondered if you wanted to go fishing.” The door creaks open and Uncle Ray is there. At least you assume it’s Uncle Ray,  his beard seems to have swallowed his face and the skin you can see is red and cracking. His eyes have shrunk back into his head and his hair is long and matted, flowing over his moth eaten clothes. You’ve automatically hidden the card behind your back, unsure if now’s the time, but he spots the rod and see’s that you mean business. “Ah. Why not eh? Be good to get some fresh air.” 

See, Ray doesn’t blame you. He bought your bullshit and the only thing he feels towards you is pity, pity that you had to see it, had to go through it at such an early age. Believe it or not you weren’t the only one feeling guilty, Ray had wanted to be there for you but couldn’t bare to leave the house more than the one time a week he goes to stock up on food and drink.

“Give me a minute and I’ll grab my stuff”. By the time you’re eighteen, you’re a good looking cat. You had good genes that lent you a sharp jaw bone, piercing eyes and a six foot frame and that was complimented perfectly with your Dad’s cash. Your clothes were cut tight, your watch worth more than the average house and you had a diamond ring for each day of the week. Of course you weren’t wearing your finest clothes, you knew you’d be fishing, but even so your fishing gear would get you into the poshest nightclubs. Ray comes out with the same clothes he was wearing before accompanied by the same rod he was using when you were thirteen, he hasn’t had much time for fishing in the last half decade. You get in his truck, swinging open a rusty door and sit on the leather seats that have their stuffing pouring out the top like someone was squeezing a tube of toothpaste. It’s a surprise to you that the old thing starts, but start it does and off the two of you go. Lucky for you, even if you could have mustered up the beginnings of a conversation, the sound of the engine blocks out all noise; forcing you to listen to your own head screaming at you to get this over with. 

When you get to the lake Ray is trying to force a smile. It looks wrong on his face, like a Picasso painting looked in the mirror and started crying, but it’s there for your benefit and that makes you feel even fucking worse. “Let’s see what we can get!”, you sit on the bank and silently set up. Once the lines are cast and the beers are opened the waiting begins and the stillness sets in. One way to relieve yourself from the guilty knots in your stomach, you’ve discovered, is to drink beer. A cold beer after a long day of feeling sorry for yourself has become your medicine and you’re an expert in self medicating. Ray seems to have the same doctor and you both knock back the first four before the fishes have even had a nibble. Six in and you feel yourself loosening up, you feel like you could get away with saying anything, that the tone and the time is right for an apology and just as you dive into your back pocket to find the card that has everything you need to say perfectly printed on its insides, your line starts moving. “Quick lad! You know what to do.” And you do know what to do, you’ve done this a million times, your hands move without having to be told and before you know it a slippery slab of fish is flapping in your hands. “What a beauty, that’ll do wonders for our supper!” Ray beams, and he looks happy, he looks real happy. You kill the fish, Ray reaches for his knife but pauses, looks at you over his shoulder and asks “You got a comb on you lad?” You remove one of your spares from your jacket pocket and go to hand it over. “No, keep it. You reckon you could do the gutting with just ya comb?” You smile. It’s been a while since you were handed one of Ray’s special challenges. You turn the comb over in your hand, run your finger along the bristles; they’re all too thin except…The last tooth has some girth to it so you go about plucking the twig-like ones from their plastic gums until you’ve got what looks like a miniature pickaxe in your hand. 

You’re successful with your surgery, after which Ray takes over and expertly turns the inedible into the delicious. You’re eight beers in now, and Ray’s on twelve, leaving you seeing the world through a hazy unfocused lens. Your stomach clenches and your butt cheeks hold their breath as your over-confident brains let them know that now is the time. You open your mouth wide and suck in as much air as you can, filling your lungs and feeding your brain, and say the words “Ray, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Now, these seven words are powerful words. On their own they’re useless: There’s. Something. I. Need. To. Tell. You. But group em together and stick them in the right order, you’ve got seven words that become the lexical embodiment of a cliff-edge. Once you’re over it, there’s no going back, you’ll either land safely in the sea, carried comfortably by it’s familiar waves or be found a few days later mangled on some rocks, blood dripping into your open eyes and seagulls picking at your fingers.

Ray looks at you, drunk yes but with a genuine softness not garnered from the liquor, and opens his arms up to the heavens “tell me whatever you like buddy.” And so you do. You describe the lake of five years ago, you describe the selfish thoughts thought by a selfish thirteen year old, you describe the tone of the cries for help, the splashes, the thrashing, you describe the glimpse you got out the corner of your eye of a body grappling with an enemy it couldn’t get a grip on, and finally you describe the wait, the just to be sure wait, as you watched the last ripples on the water’s surface fade out into stillness.

Now you’ve seen a heartbreak before. You’ve had your own one broken many years ago, but what you’d never seen then, and haven’t seen since, is a broken heart break again before it’s fixed itself. Ray looked at you for what felt like months, boring a way into your soul without a word, and you kept his gaze, eyes locked on to eyes, hands clamped onto your knees. Slowly, gradually, you saw his eyes start to wet, a syrupy glaze caked over his vanilla iris. His lips, hitherto sewn shut, parted and started to quiver. His two eyebrows, bushy and almost amalgamated, ascended from the middle causing his forehead to crease. His hands started to tremble and the shaking spread up to his arms, his shoulders, until his entire torso was vibrating. You stood, afraid of what would happen next but Ray didn’t move, or rather he continued to move in the same place, you watched him crumple. He fell to his side, tucked his knees into his chest and wrapped his big arms around his shins. Shaking in the foetal position, you didn’t know what he was thinking, you didn’t know if he was angry, if he was sad, if he would kill you or kill himself. And that’s how you left him. 

Ray tried to contact you a few weeks later but you were terrified, you ignored all his letters and all his calls, with your Dad passed away you moved into a modern monolithic mansion miles away from Ray’s rotting place and never saw him again. 

There were a couple of times you thought about finding him when you were feeling particularly sorry for yourself, you had an image of turning up on his doorstep with two big bags of cash and a new fishing rod but you couldn’t ever go through with it. When you woke up this morning Ray wasn’t any where near your mind so as you broke the reciprocal gaze of egg to pupil to face the man sitting on your right you were surprised to feel the cold steel of a gun barrel up against your forehead. You wanted to know how he found you, how he recognised you, hell, you wanted to know how he was doing. But I suppose the weapon attached to your head answered your questions far better than any words could. 

Speaking of words, he tried to give you the last ones you’d ever hear.

But a guns awful loud, and you couldn’t quite make it out.