LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO WHISKERS OF IMMORALITY

      Pablo’s ears prick irritably as, across the street from my house, a woman screams. It’s not an ugly scream, however, but a scream with laughter oozing out of the cracks. It’s like she senses something, something magnificent and formidable stirring nearby. I drag myself to my feet and limp magnificently to the window, twitching back the curtain like a man twice my age.

      It’s New Year’s Eve, and a few minutes to midnight. The Festive Season is almost at an end. Thank God for that.

      I’ve never been a fan of the Festive Season. Especially as a child. It started well enough, with the slightly forced excitement of the last school day, but it was all pretty much downhill from there. The Festive Season was like dead air. It was slow, tense time between the predictable uproar of the special days, when the banks were closed and television was relentless. I spent this time in my bedroom, in hiding, or else playing darts at my best friend’s house, and if there was a rumpus of some description at home, I kept out of it as much as I possibly could, blocking out the bickering to the best of my ability, ignoring the tantrums, and suffering whatever contact sports Father was mad enough to insist upon with mute disdain and very occasional outbursts of my own.

      The Festive Season was fraught.

      Christmas was hateful enough, charged as it was with instinctive, seasonal self-pity, but New Year’s Eve always had something particularly ominous and dreadful about it. Unlike Christmas, New Year’s Eve was neither a time for family, nor for God. Rather, New Year’s Eve was a time for drinking heavily, going berserk and breaking things.

      By the age of six or seven, I had already begun to associate the end of the year with scenes of extraordinary domestic ugliness. Many of these scenes came to me in eavesdroppings as I lay plastered to my bedroom floor with my ear cupped to the carpet, or else crouched at the top of the stairs like a cat, coiled and holding my breath. Others I witnessed firsthand as I was summoned to make an appearance and coerced into shaking the nicotined hands of the drove of drunken buffoons whom Father had corralled home from the pub. Inevitably, one or more of these soused strangers would leave a pool of urine on the canvas floor of the toilet, awaiting my bare feet in the early hours of the morning.

      From the age of eight or nine, if I was at home, Father made a point of pestering me to join him and his friends in ‘drinking in the New Year’. The first time it happened I knew no better. He called me over and bent down beside me with a beaker of cheap whiskey. I was afraid, but warmed by the gesture. I sipped at the lip of the warm glass slowly, excited and grateful. Then the whiskey hit my tongue and I felt like I’d been poisoned. Worse still, I felt tricked and humiliated. Instinctively, I spat out the poison and fled from the kitchen, coughing and wheezing, pushing through bodies and heading for the stairs, where Mother grabbed hold of my arm and laughed smoke and Bucks Fizz into my burning face. I wriggled free and made a dash for it, slamming my bedroom door behind me. Father was laughing and shouting something up the stairs. I never accepted a drink from him again.

      During our last New Year together, Father grabbed me as I was sneaking home from a friend’s house. ‘You come and have a drink!’ he demanded, staggering through the house half full of the usual drunken jumble of strangers. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve, for fuck’s sake.’ He led me to the heart of an inebriated throng, half-filled a plastic cup with neat whiskey and fumbled it into my hands. ‘Drink up,’ he said. ‘Happy New Year!’ He knocked back his whiskey and cheered. A few of the strangers knocked back their drinks too, and a short chain of cheers spread throughout the mob and died. Someone turned the music up. It was ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. The Phil Collins version.

      ‘Happy New Year,’ I said quietly, raising my glass but not drinking.

      Father was silent for a moment. Then he knocked back more whiskey and started shouting over the music. He wanted to know who the hell I thought I was. I didn’t know. He wanted to know why he’d sacrificed the best years of his life putting food on the table for an ungrateful little bastard like me. I didn’t know. He wanted to know if I thought I was better than him. This one I did know.

      I thought I was better than him because I didn’t spend my entire life trying to belittle and humiliate the people I was meant to love and nurture.

      I didn’t say anything. I tried to walk away, but Father put his hand against my chest and insisted. ‘Do you think you’re better than me?’

      I looked into my father’s eyes. They were grey and wet, bulging like infected oysters. I was fifteen years old, full of cider and nihilistic dread. My face was hot, but my eyes were cold, and I assume my father could see something in them that made him slightly afraid. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. I tossed the whiskey in the sink behind him and he let me pass, scowling and grumbling.

      Later that night Mother fell on top of the television and cracked a rib.

      This kind of nonsense went on all year round, of course, but New Year’s Eve always came with a special tension. All that forced introspection; all that vain expectation; all that shame.

      Meanwhile, feeling no shame whatsoever, the woman across the street laughs uncontrollably as her boyfriend holds her against a wall and kisses her roughly. One of his hands disappears inside her skirt, which is, it has to be said, little more than a belt. My right hand caresses my left eyebrow instinctively, and my breath clouds up the window. She must be jolly cold. She pulls away from the man and trots off, dragging him behind. ‘Let’s go!’ she tweets. ‘It’s ten to!’

      They disappear into a party to see in the New Year. I hobble back to the settee, pull the duvet over my body and unmute the TV with the remote.

      I’m limping not because of nascent arousal, but because I have a severely bruised coccyx from a fall yesterday morning. I

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