The Big Pink

IT ENDS

  It was all over by 30th June 2003.

  That was the final day. Oh, the tears they wept. Looking out the window at the house across the road, the tree by the church, the big soot-blackened gothic tower, the bells, the children screaming on their way back to school for their final day of term. Lease ends. Bulging hole in the wall.

  Levin louched out his window, rattling the old plastic frame, lousy lock that had never kept the thing shut, always rattling at night. And the goldfish bowl gulping, and the drums drumming at 3am thanks to McIlroy – That was an interesting point. McIlroy. Was the dude gone?

  Levin jumped and leapt downstairs. He felt a smile of happy pleasant summertime with the light streaming through the slatted windows. The place was looking an awful lot better, they might even get some of the deposit back on the place. He smiled and felt wonderful and surrounded by happiness. This was the future, a greater leap into the unknown and then he would come back and the place might not look any different but then it might and then he would listen to some music and play a game of chess when was that Emmett back they would be moving into Dunluce today and have a good time of a year with Meabh and Erwan and Emmett and Levin in one house and Levin MacHill and Eddie and John and Hilary in the house the other house and Shaun and James and Sarah in the other house the other other house the house and then the house this house the pink would be pinkless out of time and luck and he would look at the church. The clock ticked. He looked at the time of the TV, lines flicking back and forth with the tennis ball careering. Tock, tock. The tennis ball clicked. The net sprung back and forth – go on, Tim. He was out of Tim. He had sprung one too many but no, he’d probably well who knew. He looked on anyway, sighing out of the corner of his eye at the disassembled drum kit that he’d have to pack and transport down the road what a drag. A drag of a joint would be good. There was no gear. Even the sofas had been rifled. Always this give and take, this ebb and flow of material that made its way in and out, appearing, disappearing, like pockets of punch thrown in the air and pecked away by the microbes floating in the currents.

  James walked in.

  ‘Aw yes! Go on, Tim!’ he said.

  Levin stood mesmerized, staring like a Grecian statue at time, time trickling away, filling up his glass where he could drink it forever.

  James said: ‘Man, are you all right?’

  Levin nodded.

  ‘Oh … ok.’

  James took a hook off the wall. Shaun came in. ‘What up?’ he said, smiling somewhat discomfortedly but pleasant at this bizarre dream.

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Shaun. ‘Have you seen Emmett today?’

  Emmett! The stream became a jungle, his mind encompassed in the differences between light and day.

  ‘Nope,’ said Levin.

  ‘What about James?’

  ‘Yeah man. He was here a minute ago.’

  ‘Cool. What’s happening anyway, we going to clean this place up, or what?’

  Levin shrugged. ‘I dunno. Probably.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  Night time passed. It was one o-clock in the morning. Already he’d seen the sun rise and set that day, a long day, looking out the window, wondering when he’d see home again. He was there. He’d see – he’d see Meabh at eight in the morning, nine in the morning, and Neil, and Sarah. They’d throw a Frisbee in the park. Only Mitchell was in Australia, looking for the hidden desert. He had tried to obtain amnesty but his negotiations had failed – now he was in the desert. Enough of that desert.

  ‘Hi Emmett. Last day!’

  ‘Yeah man, but I’ll come back next year. Erwan’s got my room covered I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Levin was momentarily confused. Instead of it being the last day, it was now Emmett’s last day, when young McFickle had moved out of the Big Pink in 2002, end of June that year. One year ago. It was today.

  ‘Oh, ok. Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  Why’d you move out and leave me with these monsters?

  Levin grinned and cackled with the sheer existence of it. All that he could think of was peanuts – Hamish and peanuts, handfuls of them, flooding out of his pockets, the grin on Hamish’ face, the pints he had drunk, the volume of nutrients he held in his hands, thrown all over the snooker table. Why had that crazy kid done it? Blown £15.50 on thirty-five packets of HP salt and roasted. Jesus couldn’t have done it better. That dude wasted it all on fish and chips but Hamish bought the peanuts. That was God all right, joking and laughing. Levin sighed sentimentally, thinking of the good times. Oh yes. There had been good times all right. He was cured all right, he thought. Clockwork Orange. How many times had they watched that film now? Dozens. Still a classic. Still a strange mixture of nasdat and Russian the slang of the future. But not of the future: of the past. They were not droogies the moment they were born.

  It was back to Monday 30th June 2003. This was no drill. This was it. They had to be gone by midnight tonight or else they were in legal forfeit.

  Anyway they were going to the caravan next week so it didn’t matter.

  And Neil would be there. He was not living in the Big Pink now but he was still hanging about, taking photos. Photos that would end up, years later, Levin knew, in the appendix of some book or other. If not a scrapbook. Yep.

  He took in the whole room at one glance: the defunct plant loosely draping its leaves on the mantelpiece, the sofa with the Mensa book and Shakespeare’s illegally procured works, and a broken brush with only half a handle lying against the side of the sofa, one of the sofas, the fourstar pizza box (empty), the wrecked chipped vinyl faux floorboards (black, black with ingrained beerstains and muck).

  He thought of memory and time and space and floorboards and equations describing time and space and the blackboards and the remembrance of things past and his own two minutes of rage and stupid Tony Blair and fucking George Walker Bush and the whole mess of Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan, with friendly fire, and socialist ideas, and Russians, and throwing things out of windows in Levin MacHill’s room, in Hamish’ room, now Aaron’s room, once Geraldine’s room, with the weird noises and the man who came to visit her even though she didn’t know him. All of this was normal, comprehensible. If it hadn’t already happened it would. The energetics of the situation weren’t so resolved or difficult. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, he thought. How could he have messed it up so incorrectly?

  He smiled, laughed at himself. That was a joke. So was the circles, the unavoidable return to point A like the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche’s, indeed the theme of the Strauss that went bum – Bum – BUMM – de neh; bum Bum BUM, de-Neh! What a song.

  A long time ago they’d listened to that song, stuck Strauss on the stereo, laid in stoney nothingness while the great theme washed over them, mangled them, pinned them to their seats. Him, Neil, Erwan. Never had he listened to it all before – and how extraordinary, how incapable they were, lying prostate, at the total mercy of the musician who was dead. Levin remembered that incredible symphony, how it had drained him and filled him up and told him a lesson he had learnt but never understood, never, until it became the music. Or was he –? Or was it –? It could never be understood not even now. That was rubbish. He was talking and reminiscing.

  He ought to clean up.

  Hello Stankey my old friend

  He took the brush, the one with the half handle.

  Has your day come to it’s end?

  He swept the pizza box into a corner.

  Something something something, na na

  He lay down the brush and sat on the sofa, staring out the window at the church, the cars driving past.

  Something something, something, na

  Yep. This was life.

  Something, something, and something.

  It’s the sound, of something.

  He decided to stick on the stereo. It was on radio; on that most surreal of stations. Radio, radio, radio failté. Radio radio. Radio radio radio. Radio … radio failté. br />
  Radio.

  Radio failté.

  Radio radio radio radio radio radio. Radio radio – radio failté.

  Levin fell into a trance. The mesmerizing sound of the same words became different, like the sound of a key turned in a lock and listened to, over, and over again, until it mutated, until he ears were deaf to the original tones and he could only hear the harmonics. He became words. Filled with uncanny straightness, he puzzled the lock on the key. Now, now, he –?

  Levin MacHill interrupted his madness. ‘Hey man!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘What’s happening! Are we cleaning here!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why be fuck?’

  Radio, radio …

  Is that thing going to play any music?

  That was MacHill. Was it going to play any music? Maybe. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was good to have a radio station that only played one thing, its own jingle, over and over and over again, with infinite repetition and infinite variation. Bounded infinity, a limitless way to be a single thing.

  ‘Is that thing going to play any music?’

  The eternal recurrence was a small frog, with two eyes, beadily staring at him from the Belfast Reptile Emporium. Crickets, locusts, all willing to be eaten. Hungry lizards, staring with independently revolving eyes. He dared, thinking that it would be enough, to poke an eye out, to simply stare with unblemished intensity. There wasn’t any way to render his desires to this mutant creature. Slimy frog. There was one thing he hated, and that was the dead frog that the bastards in the Reptile Emporium had taken out and thrown out the back. He’d seen it, just like he saw it all. He stroked his red beard, vomit slaked down one corner. He saw it all, and did not like it one bit.

  ‘Is that thing ever going to play any music?’

  The tramp kept on walking, walking and walking infinitely down the never ending street. Each street simply led to another. Down some streets were strangers; down other money and people he knew or indeed anything. He didn’t even bother to anticipate now, there were only things, one following the other, and sometimes not necessarily so. He blanched and clutched his stomach, wishing he had something to eat. He wanted cider, or vodka or something stronger. Didn’t matter what. His stomach hurt. He lived in bins and he puked nearly every day and soon he would be dead.

  Those fucking bastards, those bastards, taken his job? Or had he left it? That hardly mattered. Things were always better when you didn’t care about the past anyway. On top of the cars! Now that had been some kick! Getting loaded on the local pastry juice til it was swilling out of his ears! Ah, the rare old times! He allowed himself to shuffle a little slower, stuck in a pleasant reminiscence. It had been a rare moment of summer, so it had, one of those moments when a jug of alcohol finds its way into your hands and you don’t even care what you do with it afterwards. As long as it is empty. His name was Gerry; other people called him other things, if they didn’t know his name, but he had never forgotten his own name. It was bokebeard. It was redbeard. It was something else that he’d forgotten. Maybe he wasn’t human after all. After all they didn’t treat him like one. They treated him just like some slimy tramp that stalked the neighbourhoods.

  Well. Would he let it get to him? The bastards. Pinned him down and beat his ventricles so bad he couldn’t breathe now. Wouldn’t it be, to go back to the old days, his heart and his healthy body? He’d told them, commanding in that fierce voice, of military officers used to giving orders of his. If he’d done that, well, he’d remember doing it. This street was new. No. It was the same street he’d walked up before.

  His own faeces on his hands. Was that a problem. Nope. Same old day, different kind of shit, but shit all the same, just like his mother’s shit, just like he was a shit, a shit, a shit. Shit shit. That’s all he fuckin did shit and shit. Shit up your own fuckin hed

  ‘Is that thing ever going to play some music?’

  He listened carefully any time he heard the radio. He wanted to hear if they were playing his name again. They sometimes did. Nope, not today. He shuffled on. Some lad was beating some other lad in a phone booth. I asked them for some money. They wouldn’t give me any. I said, ok lads, some other time. There was some other young kid walking past too. I asked him, do you have any spare change? Nope. Not for me. He didn’t even say anything, just shook his head and looked at the two boys beatin each other like it wasn’t the same thing he saw every fuckin day.

  Well that was grand, I remember doin that. I don’t remember doin those other things they say I did. I don’t think I did do them actually. Nope. There wasn’t any mention of me today. I shuffled along, thinking this wasn’t a great place to be sleeping anyhow. Beside some house with a bunch of boys in it. That had been all right, living down some alleyway with a bunch of takeaway boxes keeping me warm. There’d been a load of bins round there too, plenty of food to rummage about in. I knew all about it. Thought it was an all right place. Well what do I do now.

  Well, I wasn’t going to live there now. I was goin to go some place else, like down into the centre again, if the peeler’s’d leave me to stay there for a fuckin night. I’d already gone. Didn’t take much. Me leavin was just me thinkin of leavin. Soon as a thought, I was gone. Nowt more to it. Some lad taught me that – nowt more to it. I’d learnt so lot so I had. Fuckin, stupid brother of mine. Shit, I didn’t even know if I had a brother any more! Only joking. I’m not fuckin stupid. He was some bastard though. Only joking. I wasn’t a bastard. It was him that done it.

  Anyway, I was thinking of hangin. Then I got some good bread and a bit of wine down me and that was all right. Shuffled along the good old street, same fuckin street I lawsy worked down, stinkin, vomitin in me own pool of fuckin vomit. Somebody should fuckin clean the steet. Someday, I’m going to get myself one of those audjo cassettes. That’d be some joke. Don’t even have a machine to play the thing on. If I’d wanted one I could have got one though. Otherwise, though, wasn’t I just lookin at my own shoe? Looking and looking at my own shoe like some heroin addict. Never touch the stuff. Except once or twice, black needle I shared behind Tomb Steet. Caught the bug, the HepC one. Bad shit now, but the peelers won’t touch me in case I spit on em. Or so they say. I never done anythin. Won’t spit on nobody. Cept those that don’t need spittin on, but I’m not a spittin man. I like to sit on me couch on Saturday afternoon and watch the livin daylights be beat out of each other, just like any other man. Don’t have a couch, don’t need it. Got a can to piss in. Throw my urine across the road if it gets too full. Drunk it a few times, got a bob for at. Don’t have bobs now. Wish they fuckin would clean this steet once in a while. Why’d I leave it there anyway? I should’ve been lookin for somethin. Instead am here. Fuck at

  ***

  THE THIRD TEXT