I gulped hard: so hard I could hear it. In my mind flashed Choker’s big white hands, closing in on Eve’s pale and oh-so-thin and snappable neck. My heart felt too big for my chest. My temples throbbed sweat.
I should definitely go and find Eve.
As I turned into the hallway, Dinosaur Jr.’s ‘Freak Scene’ skidded into life. Eve had clearly re-appropriated the hi-fi. I was halfway to the sitting room pondering what, if anything, I could do if the orphan got frisky with the Viking, when my legs started to lose their feeling. With every step, they got heavier and heavier. This rattled me. I’d been pissed before, often enough. This felt different, like my legs were dying.
‘So fucked I can’t believe it,’ drawled J Mascis and he wasn’t wrong. I felt dead-legged, sweat-soaked and zoned-out, as if life itself was leaking out of my feet. Vanity prevented me raising the alarm. I needed Eve not to see me like this. I needed Tullamore’s teen population not to see me like this; not on my final public appearance. I had to get outside. My only hope was the back door.
It took some sort of indefinable judo throw to uproot my dead legs and hoist them around, so that they now faced the rear of the house. I set off in a straight-legged goose-step towards the back door, holding my arms ahead of me in case I fell.
I couldn’t feel my feet or legs now at all. I actually wondered if I was dying. I couldn’t help thinking how gloriously rock ’n’ roll it would be if I dropped dead right here and now, Eve cradling my head, kissing me one last time, Yoko to my John Lennon.
Suddenly one of the closed bedroom doors creaked open. Out of it came a meek-looking Tara Molloy. In the dark behind her, some fella was struggling to get his trousers back on. She stood and stared but said nothing of my dead-legged, metronomic stomp. What did she think I was doing? My own Thriller tribute?
I goose-stepped on like a Nazi on acid. I only had to make it past the kitchen now and the back door was right there.
As the kitchen clatter came into range, I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead. It seemed to take an age. Please don’t anyone look. Please don’t anyone see. I got past. Then – dread – footsteps sounded behind me. I stopped, waited, breathing hard. The footsteps went away. Thank Christ. I leaned my raging forehead against the back door’s cold glass. Relief.
I slipped the door open. The damp cold jolted me, injecting fresh will into my knotted veins. I dragged the two leaden hunks of meat, formerly known as legs, outside and closed the door quietly. I performed my paralytic can-can across the well-lit crazy paving, towards the lonely black shed, now looking a long thirty feet away. If I could just get to the shed, then round the corner into the black, no one would be able to see me. I could talk myself through this. Get my head together.
I made it to the middle of the crazy paving, then I couldn’t move my legs another inch. The paralysis had crept up to my hips. I was stuck, stranded under the hottest part of the outside security light, lucid but unable to walk. I felt real fear now. What was wrong with me? But I had to keep going. I couldn’t let anyone see me. Whatever was going on inside my head and body would pass. If I could just make it to that dark shed.
There was only one thing for it. I went all Sergeant Elias out of Platoon and dropped melodramatically to my knees, then frontwards onto my arms. Somehow, elbow after concrete-grinding elbow, I wormed my way across the dewy patio. I hoped to Christ no one was seeing this. I’d never, ever live it down.
I got to the shed and dragged myself to sitting, my elbows burning.
I bum-shuffled sideways into the shadows and sat there for I don’t know how long, frozen to the spot, crazy scenes unfolding in my mind. At one stage, I was running away from my own home, where I’d just stabbed someone. I felt myself run. I heard people coming after me, shouting, screaming, a flashing blue light, a police siren. Then, relief when I saw myself still rooted to the same spot, my hands planted against the shed wall.
I don’t know how long I’d been there when a blinding light criss-crossed my vision, scoring my sight. Next thing I knew, I was floating through a drifting starscape, arse-first like a breeched baby, slowly and in total silence. I found myself inside Eve’s bedroom, but somehow I was hovering a foot off the floor. I saw clearly the details of the room I knew so well. Across from me, illuminated light from the hallway lit the cracks around the closed bedroom door. Beside it, Eve’s clothes sat in a heap on the chair. I could see the top she wore that morning; the bank of photos of Philandering Frank on the wall; the headboard; the garish scarlet duvet cover; the bedside tables. On my side, the ashtray from Majorca, next to the lamp that refused to break no matter how many times we knocked it to the floor. On the far side of the bed blinked the clock radio. It read 01.09. My God, had I been outside for three hours?
The hallway door opened. Something glinted. It was Eve in her Viking outfit. ‘This is live!’ I thought. She pushed the door shut, placed her helmet and sword on the bedside table next to the clock radio and collapsed dramatically onto the bed. I realised all this was happening in total silence, yet I could tell she was crying.
I felt this overwhelming urge to go to her, to touch her, to put my arm around her shoulder. To say sorry. Are you okay, Eve? I said, but nothing came out. I knew it was hopeless, that I was trapped in some sort of sensory vacuum, there but not there. Here, but only in spirit.
The door to the hallway opened very slowly. First came yellow light, then a silhouetted head. I couldn’t make out who it belonged to.
Eve sat up on the bed with a start. I could tell she was asking who was there. She was telling the person to get out, leave her alone. I couldn’t hear her speak, but I could clearly read her body language.
The unidentified person didn’t leave, but shut the door carefully behind him and walked to the bed. I knew that strut, that side profile, that trilby hat. It was Choker Meehan.
Eve sat bolt upright on the bed, as still as a statue.
Choker gently took hold of her hands, sliding his right knee, then his left, onto the bed, so that they were planted between her pale, outstretched legs. He whipped off his hat, tossing it away like a frisbee towards the window. I was bursting to do something, but it was hopeless. Eve pushed back against the headboard defensively. Choker leaned forward, so he was nose to nose with Eve, his hands smothering hers.
He was saying something. Eve remained still, poised, defiant.
He placed his right hand on her left shoulder. ‘Eve,’ my shout was swallowed by black. I tried to lunge, but I was a fly trapped in an invisible web.
Now his right hand moved from her shoulder to the base of her skull, then to her pale neck. His other hand moved in under her cheek. His fingers spread round the back of her neck so that his thumbs sat twitching on her windpipe. ‘Eve, Eve, for fuck’s sake, Eve,’ I cried, but only my guts thrashed about.
Look after Eve for me, Mo had pleaded into my eyes before she left.
Eve tried to turn her head away. He wouldn’t let her. She wriggled hard. He easily pushed her back on the bed underneath him, his left hand now moving up to cover her mouth, dwarfing her face.
I’m counting on you, Donal.
I went apeshit; screaming, thrashing, fighting with all my might. But no one could hear me. She had lost her fight and just lay there, her skirt above her waist, her white panties yanked to one side. He fiddled furiously with his trousers while I just hovered, in hell.
Of course, Mrs Daly.
He pounded now, rhythmically. His downward motion revealed the clock radio on the far side of the bed, its luminous green digits flipping casually to 01.13.
Except all our lives stopped dead right then, never to be the same again.
I woke to my own screaming voice, loud, desperate, primeval. I saw blood glistening on the pebbledash,