Field Notes

In my head it was Monday. The garden gate didn’t cry and out- rattle me and the sun was shining somewhere in the world. Mum’s gardening shoes were sitting on the back doorstep, waiting on the weather, one on top of the other, like two bits of chewed liquorice with their tongues out. The bottom shoe was the place where she put the stash of twenty ‘Luckies’. On a good day she also pried open the cellophane and left ten dollars sticking out, a reminder of the cutesy-wootsie-Tonto on the lam, that served us all-day-breakfast in Gallacher’s on 75th and stuck customer orders in her yellow Alice band to amuse herself. My mouth was an imploded fizz-bomb and choked-up with nicotine need. I’d a ‘Lucky’ right away, sitting on one of the white plastic chairs on the decking to steady myself.

Bogey always got into a bit of a tizz when he heard the squeak of the gate and whirled through the kitchen. By the time I’d lit up he’d be frantic and whined like an out-of-sync lathe, his paws scratching at the wood flooring as if digging an escape tunnel beneath the French doors in the living-room, but it was rosewood and he hadn’t got a key. I had one but lost it, or it got stolen, or it just plum disappeared.

There was also a side door into the dining room. The lock was a bit of a pain. I heard my mum’s boyfriend Charlie wiggling the key to get it open. That was when I knew it was Sunday. He had a face like a square-nosed shovel and he was just as blunt:

‘You been drinking?’

‘No, I’ve been at the… I played a game of Six-ball in Delaney’s with Bobby Finn then I went to an AA meeting.’ The dog danced in front of me, bouncing from leg to leg, whined his freedom song and tried to edge me towards the hallway and the front door before I’d even got in the back door.

Charlie didn’t bother looking at me, just left the door open. There was usually an empty Coke tin lying about on the decking half filled with rainwater slugs and with the corpses of stubbed out fags floating about, without lifebelts, waiting to be joined by a few friends. He had two expressions, neither of which were smiles and always seemed to be chewing, or making something to eat. I followed him into the kitchen, which he’d made the engine room of mum’s house with a massive bamboo table that was covered in so much walnut oil to keep it free from scratches that it seemed to shimmer and float about the room. He sat with his back to me with his dime bald spot, which was growing a monk’s crown, deigning not to look at visitors in the hope they’d disappear. Perched on a kitchen chair surveying his island world with an Apple laptop to his left, 40-inch-wide-screen to his right, the formatted sections of his Sunday papers telling him what to think, he didn’t need me to tell him anything.

I trailed to the fridge. He’d slivery fish lying on slabs bleeding a cinematic red. Huge splays of meat were a hacked and bloodied battlefield of ribs, lungs, liver and heart on silver trays waiting for a holocaust and musty smelling vegetables, some of which were recognisable as broccoli florets, stacked like logs waiting to be shipped directly to the waste-bin.

Bogey, a reminder of what was in the fridge, but with hair on and doggy breath, jumped round about me, whining and yelping in our language, anxious to get noticed and patted. I poured myself a glass of milk. Milk was good for you.

I said what I usually say: ‘I’ll take the dog out’.

‘Sorry,’ he looked out the window towards the other gated-houses in the estate. ‘It’s just,’ and he flicked at the newspaper and ‘you-know,’ hung in the air.

I let Bogey lead me. We didn’t usually get far. I’d throw sticks and Bogey slobbered them into submission. Then he was to do his business, wrap it in a plastic bag and deposit in the appropriate bin or he’d face a stiff penalty. That was usually the deal. He never usually got to the last part before I’d have to go. A dog’s life was too short.

‘I’ve been drinking,’ I used my mobile to tell him that. He liked to know he was right and I didn’t like to disappoint him.

Charlie always sounded grumpy on the phone. ‘Just bring the dog back.’

Bogey didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go either. I missed our little mum’s nameplate on the door of our little brownstone house. I was older, of course, no longer had my Clarke’s Wayfinders with the compass in the soles that always pointed true North and the way home. We stood outside Charlie’s, hidden by the fence and the oriental shrubs. My feet felt blue-chalked to the sidewalk until I broke cover and rung the bell as if I was just an iterant dog- walker.

‘Get in,’ he said to the dog.

He also sounded grumpy even when he wasn’t on the phone. Bogey looked at him and looked at me and made his decision, nudging my hand with his nose. Bogey ran behind my denim-legs and used them as a curtain, his eyes big as a watery- moon, looking up at me.

‘Get,’ the command sounded out like a foreign bark. ‘Fuckin’dog,’ he stepped out and onto the driveway.

Whether it was the tone of his voice or the cartoon colour of his olive-drab slippers Bogey pitter-pattered away towards Mr Patterson’s house on the corner, head down, as if he’d learned when to let his ears spring up like telescopes and listen the other way from the master Scooby-Doo.

Charlie sighed. He had a red-checked dishcloth that looked the size of a hanky in his hand and he didn’t look in any condition to chase

‘You,’ he said, with a jerk of his neck muscles towards the inside of the house, ‘come in.’

His plan to use me as live dog bait worked too well. Bogey ran in at my back past Charlie, into the kitchen and hid under the table where the smell of plug-in-pine-Air-freshener lay least dense. Now Charlie had me stuck like an unwanted package in the hallway he didn’t know what to do with me.

‘You been drinking?’ He liked to be in charge. That way he could think himself fair before condemning me.

We’d been through the whole thing before. I’d addiction counsellors and AA sponsors and Social Workers and the whole shebang. I was sick of it. There was that old AA joke: he drunk in moderation and I drunk what was left. It was genetics and dopamine; learned behaviour and who did what to whom; god and the devil. All of these things and none of these things. It was like trying to explain why a thirteen-year-old boy had a hard-on and why he shouldn’t.

‘You’re mum’s not been sleeping much.’ He tried on emotional blackmail, but his face was not framed for it. He looked as if he was trying too hard and was constipated and needing to shit.

‘I’m sorry,’ I sniffed and realized there were tears running down my face. ‘I’ve not been sleeping much either.’ I didn’t tell him I preferred unconsciousness. He didn’t do empathy, which in a way was refreshing. There was nothing worse than the nodding pin-the-donkey- head of a man who thinks he knows too much about your and his suffering.

‘You’re dad phoned,’ his face was in neutral, his voice unfazed, clicking into gear, warming up, beginning to enjoy his deliberations, his unshaved purple jowls flapping like grizzled chicken wings. He took a step closer.

I took a step back. I thought he was going to do something we’d both regret, like trying to be over-friendly and touch my arm, or hug me. I wasn’t really worried about what my dad did or said. He’d left my mum when I was about eight. I’d been having trouble with my legs. A Parkinsonian type spasm made me dance and turn full circle towards the stairs and the front door. I wasn’t interested in Charlie or my dad.

My dad had a one-sided interest in himself. Anything that didn’t start with him and finish with him didn’t concern him. My illness, as he liked to call it when I’d been younger, had cost him a wife, numerous girlfriends and countless job opportunities. He’d spent his whole life so sick with worry he’d forgotten to tell me. He’d the self-satisfaction of knowing he was right. I was a drunk. I looked up and through the kitchen at Bogey who had more affection and understanding in his doggy eyes than my dad ever had.

‘Your dad said you tried to kill yourself.’

Boggy whined and yelped and started crawling along the floor towards me. I shook my head at him, signalling that he should retreat. He’d a good life and had it cushy with Charlie and my mum.

I couldn’t figure it. Had no memory of phoning. Had no real memory of trying to kill myself. I’d cut my wrists a few times. Nothing serious. A blood donation to some skanky toilet floor. I’d taken a few tablets, but I liked tablets and kept bottling it. I couldn’t see myself giving all my stuff away and walking up and jumping off the Manhattan like Graham, or hanging myself with a light cord and electrocuting myself, at the same time, to make sure, like Stevie. I wanted an easy death, to lie in the darkness, where no self could gather to haunt me.

‘Your dad says you tried to jump out of a multi-storey window.’ Charlie’s eyebrows beetled together as if they were on steroids lifting his forehead. ‘He wondered if he should phone somebody, but didn’t know who. He said some guy’s name that was with you, but I forgot it.’

We were all the same. He didn’t need to say that. His look said it all. Front door with kick marks around the lock where the proprietor, or his friends, had forgotten his key, or had lost his key, or had given his key to somebody else who had put it down the side of the couch that sloped towards the East River for safekeeping with the Rizla papers and the boxes of matches and the tinfoil and purple three-for-a-dollar lighters that you bought out of Ramid’s. It was a snow-globe world of falling peeling whitewash from the low ceilings marking our winters.

The guy whose name he’d forgotten was Jane. No tits, fake Californian tan and ID, bleached roots, single girl for hire, pouting and parading in pairs to keep out the cold and for a sense of safety like fifty-buck ponies doing dressage. She’d worked the area beneath the bridge, Fulton, after it was all yuppified suits. Charlie didn’t know her name, but she knew the weight of Charlie, the taste of him. She was nice, but I didn’t say anything. I hated him for reminding me. And I hated him for not reminding me earlier.

‘How high up were you?’ He savoured the words, his lips snacking on the practicalities.

I was stupid then and tried goading him to get my own back. ‘About the same height as your brother. High enough to jump off a stool.’

His nostrils flared. He didn’t like being reminded that he had ghosts around him too and that failure wasn’t just on mum’s side of the family. But as soon as I’d said it I felt sorry for jumping in, stirring the same old, same old.

‘About the fourth-floor. Not high enough. I’d have probably just broken a leg or something.’ I tried using a lighter tone

His eyes flicked away from my face as he tried to figure whether that would have killed me. ‘What happened then?’ His voice sickened for drama that involved death.

The way it happened came back to me bit by bit as I spoke. ‘I put a leg out of the flat window. Then the other one. Sat there for a bit looking at schmaltzy green shamrock lighting up O’Kane’s bar and the Grill next door, dark as a coal cellar, with men with busy lives coming and going. The funny thing was I was scared of heights. Then Jane pulled me in backwards and I was lying stuck to the carpet and all I could hear was the noise of my breathing, as if I’d been flung into a fish-tank and was gasping for air. And that was it. No big deal.’

Then I remembered. ‘My denims kept riding down, falling past my hips and phone was always clunking out of my pocket. I didn’t phone my da,’ Jane did. My da’ said to Jane he was decorating and had to finish the back bedroom that night, but he’d get back to her, but he never did.’

Charlie looked through me, there was a game on, angling his head and eyeing the corner of his 40-inch-wide-screen and trying to hear it with the sound on mute.

Bogey whined as I turned to go. I was all finished up. I’d have liked to take my dog with me, but the drinking world was not tourist friendly and was too small a world with too few exits for pets. I knew that, but just felt an immense weight of sadness and was so-so-tired.