eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781907461040 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Legend Times Group |
| Publication date: | 11/19/2005 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 671 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
If I Never
By Gary William Murning
Legend Times Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Gary William MurningAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-907461-04-0
CHAPTER 1
It had never been a joke that I'd found especially amusing, and George Ruiz was more than well aware of this. Squinting at me through the oddly static cigarette smoke, he waited for my response — seemingly counting off the seconds it took for me to raise the coffee cup to my lips and take a sip. When one was not forthcoming, however, he merely nodded thoughtfully, taking it all in his stride, and leant over the table, winking playfully.
"I said," he said. "'My dog's got no nose.'"
"I heard you the first time."
"I said," he said. "'My dog's
"And that's it? You're not going to play the game?"
We'd been sitting in his mother's grotty kitchen for
We'd been sitting in his mother's grotty kitchen for the past hour, talking about everything from the state of local politics to the way the rain ran through the dirt on the kitchen window. It had been riveting stuff, and had I had anywhere else to go on such a grey, shitty winter's afternoon, I would have. As it was, I'd decided that this was at least better than sitting in my flat listening to Ray LaMontagne and picking my toenails. Even with the dog joke.
I looked about the kitchen at the pots piled up in the sink, the greasy newspapers stacked by the kitchen door and the three in-need-of-emptying litter trays at the side of the sink — and thought that maybe there were advantages to my condition after all. I was sure that had I shared George's olfactory ability, I'd have been well on my way to lung cancer, too.
"So you're just going to keep right on ignoring me?" he said.
"I'm having a bad day."
He sniffed with disgust and lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the last. "You're always having a bad day. Your life is one long run of bad days, mate. If you want my opinion —"
I didn't, but that had never stopped him before.
"— what you really need to do is get a fucking grip. Not being offensive, you understand, just telling it like it is."
One of his mother's cats — Gemini, I think she called it, though for the life of me I didn't know why — had oozed around the door from the hallway. George got to his feet, sticking the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and picking up the moggy by the scruff of the neck. Opening the back door, he threw it out into the rain and returned to his chair at the table.
"Bloody things get right on my nipple ends," he explained. "If it was up to me, I'd drown the bloody lot of them. Or just hit 'em with a good, hefty brick."
"You could always set your dog on them."
"I haven't got ..."
George wasn't the nicest man on the planet, which was understandable, really, since he had never been the nicest boy on the planet, either. He was a bully and a lout — the kind of person I'd always striven to avoid, even as, all those years ago in the school playground, I'd found myself perversely attracted to the prospect of being his friend. He was more than happy to ridicule another's failings, publicly mocking the dragging-footed gait of cripples and cruelly toasting port-wine stain birthmarks with a nice glass of the house red. But when the joke was on him, when the tables were turned and he found himself caught out, George was unexpectedly generous. His smile would light up the room with its nicotine glow and he would positively chortle at the absurdity of it all. It didn't do to push it, however — as I'd learnt on more than one occasion.
"Bastard," he chuckled. "Nice one, Price. You got me for a second, there." He slapped me on the upper arm; a little over one year and one adventure later, it's still tingling. "Don't let it happen again."
As the afternoon dragged on, George became increasingly morose. We sat in that kitchen, the light fading completely, the windows misting up (on the outside, George insisted, the room was that cold), and what little conversation there'd been had totally dried up. I wanted to leave, but all I had waiting for me were four channels on a cracked fourteen-inch television and two working bars on a five-bar gas fire. That and five tins of beans and one bottle of Stella. Not the most promising of Saturday nights, then.
"I've been invited to a party," George told me, without looking up from the tabletop. He said 'party' as though it were fatal blood disorder. I could understand that.
George shrugged and sat up a little straighter in his chair. His lank, greasy hair fell across his face and, perhaps for the first time, I noticed he was greying at the temples. It wasn't the startling shade of grey that would make him look distinguished in middle age, either. Rather, it looked as though he'd rubbed cigarette ash into his scalp and I knew it could only ever contribute to his unhealthy air of disassociation.
"A family gathering," he told me, begrudgingly. "Stale sandwiches and dentures. You know."
I nodded. I'd been to a few of those in my time. Yet another bond to tie dear, despicable George and I together.
"I take it you're not going, then?"
"I have to." He smiled. Or sneered. "Call it familial obligation."
"There might be some money in it for you, you mean."
"Pots of the fucking stuff." His eyes were sparkling with malevolent glee — the prospect of such unrivalled riches almost more than his little heart could bear. He told me of his ailing Aunt Martha, a spinster of this parish and drowning in financial success. As he told it, her investments were famous in family lore. She saw opportunity where others saw 'inevitable' financial ruin, and had never been afraid to pounce — accumulating the kind of wealth no one in their family had ever dreamed of.
"And me," George Ruiz said, winking at me, "I've always been her favourite, Price. She thinks the sun shines out of my shit-hole."
"Which it does."
"Naturally."
Asound came from upstairs. Adull thud that no doubt meant his mother was finally getting up. We both looked at the ceiling, George still puffing on his ciggy as if his life depended on it.
"She doesn't want me to go," he told me. "Thinks I'm spoiling her chances — which, I have to admit, I am." He looked at me and shrugged, a sadness behind his eyes that I didn't think I'd seen before ... or, at the very least, one that I had seen and somehow managed to block out. "It's all academic, anyway," he continued. "I'm probably not going to go."
This was a fairly typical tactic of George's; as he saw it, his self-contradictory statements kept the enemy guessing. And in his confused little world, everyone was the enemy. Even me, it would seem.
"And miss out on a sausage on a stick and the promise of untold riches? Are you a fool, George Ruiz?"
He smirked and defiantly stubbed out his cigarette on the tabletop, a few inches away from the overflowing ashtray. "Maybe I am. Wouldn't put up with the likes of you if I wasn't, now, would I?"
The sound of movement upstairs was growing louder and more urgent. I heard a grunt of frustration and a barely muffled curse, before something fell to the floor with a muted thud. George said, "She always drops it when she's getting it down off the top of the wardrobe. Especially if she's been on the piss the night before. I've told her, keep it by the bed, where it's handy, but ..." Again he shrugged. "You know what they're like. Can't tell them a bloody thing."
I shook my head and smiled sympathetically — wondering just how bad it was for him, living at home with Carla Ruiz, her prosthetic limb and all her cats. Whenever I met her, she was always polite, if a little crapulent, with the air of one who felt as though she should have been born into more elegant times. Her cigarettes were always smoked through an ivory holder and she often enunciated with a mathematical precision that was never quite convincing. Occasionally, as she passed him on the way to the drinks cabinet, she would ruffle her son's hair affectionately, but George's reaction would always tell me far more than the act itself. Pulling away and cringing, it would have been obvious to anyone observing that he detested her with a passion. What they may not have noticed, however, was the tension in his neck and shoulders; the tightness around his jaw and lips that informed me, the more educated observer, that George Ruiz was afraid of his mother ... or, perhaps, afraid of what she could inadvertently do to him.
"I think you should go," I said, a little sadistically. "You can't let yourself miss out on an opportunity like this, Georgie. It's too ... you know, monumental. Money like that ... it could change your life forever."
It was the most I had said all afternoon. He eyed me suspiciously as I tried not to let the guilt show, imagining Carla beating him over the head with her false leg when she found out that he was intent on stealing her sister's money out from under her nose. For a moment, I thought he was onto me. If I could see his vulnerability through the angry, violent façade, it was no doubt true that he could also read me like a book. In the playground — the memories of which still haunted me some twenty years later — he had always worked me like a well-trained puppy, knowing just what to say and how to say it. He'd called me to heel and used my fear of exclusion (from our gang of two, rather than school itself) to make me do things I wouldn't ordinarily do. Today, however, he seemed oblivious to just what was going on inside my head. Or, if he wasn't, he certainly hid it well.
He rubbed his face and sat back in his chair, rolling his head from side to side to relieve the tension in his neck. "Don't think I could stick it," he finally admitted. "Familial obligation or not, I hardly know any of them and ..." He twitched his eyebrows at the ceiling. "Well, she'd be looking daggers at me all night. More than a boy could bear." Lowering his eyes to meet mine, suddenly smiling, the realisation that I had yet again been played came too late.
"Unless ..." he said.
* * *
It was still raining heavily when I left, but it was nevertheless a huge relief to be out of the Ruiz household. I had escaped, it was true, before Carla had managed to hobble her way downstairs for her 5pm breakfast of cigarettes and Malibu, but I had not successfully avoided the snare that had followed George's planned 'unless'. Better men than I had been trapped by his machinations, this I knew — but as I pulled up my jacket collar against the wind, the welcome rain beating down on my balding head, I couldn't help feeling that it would have been better if I had spent the afternoon alone in my flat after all.
Cursing my bad luck and rank stupidity, I stopped at the kerb, preparing to cross. Apiece of cardboard floated by in the gutter, as limp and lifeless as I felt, and as I looked up from watching it slip down into the drain, I caught someone scrutinising me from the other side of the road.
She stood within the shadow and shelter of an old familiar oak — holding a cat that, although I couldn't have been certain, I thought might have been Gemini beneath her chin, stroking it mesmerically and staring at me unashamedly. Wearing a long, unfashionable raincoat and green Wellingtons, her drenched auburn hair plastered to her head, neck and face, she was anything but attractive ... and, yet, I couldn't stop looking at her.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
And the rain continued to fall.
I raised a hand uncertainly, wondering if I should cross the road and talk to her — ask, perhaps, if she was lost or if there was anything I could do to help — but my hand got no higher than my waist before she turned and started walking down the road, away from me, in the direction of the abattoir. Hunched against the onslaught of rain, she looked somehow older from behind. I estimated that she was possibly only in her late twenties and, yet, as she walked quickly away with the cat still tucked under her chin, she looked much older ... forty and prematurely frail, I thought, weighted down by innumerable burdens.
As I started to walk after her — not quite knowing why, or what I was going to say once I caught up with her — a car pulled into the kerb behind me and beeped its horn. Turning, I saw the familiar Renault Clio and groaned, torn between running after the old young woman and returning to the car. The cat-cuddling woman promised something — I didn't know what, but it had to be preferable to the bad news the car and its owner would inevitably be delivering. And, yet, it would look odd if I didn't do what I knew I must. To chase after a stranger was one thing — but to do it while my father was sitting in his car waiting for me to get in was another.
I thought of George's phrase familial obligation and opened the passenger door.
"Now don't say a word," Dad said. The dry, warm interior was welcoming — reminiscent of the family days out we'd suffered through my childhood, when it had always rained. I very briefly wondered if I could get Dad to follow the strange girl with the cat, but as he continued talking, I realised just how impossible that was. My fate had been sealed the minute I got into the car, as surely as if I had been a little boy accepting a lift from a stranger. I really should have known better.
"This is how it's going to be," Dad said, pulling back out into the road. He put the windscreen wipers on their fastest setting as the rain came down more heavily and I had to look away. "I've stuck my neck out for you, here. No question. But I don't mind because that's what fathers do for their offspring." Only Dad could make me feel like a malfunctioning mattress. A rare talent. "I had a word with Tony Fraser. You remember him, right? Used to fix fridges for McArgills? Anyway, he works for the parks and gardens people, now –"
"Fixing fridges?"
"Eh? What? — No. Not fixing fridges. Jesus, Price, get a bloody grip. What on earth would he be doing fixing fridges for the parks and garden people? No, what he —"
"Do they still call them that? Parks and garden people, I mean."
Dad stopped at the traffic lights on Waterhouse Road. He took a long, deep breath while I looked out of my side window. Twisting his hands on the steering wheel, the vinyl squeaking against his sweaty palms, I imagined him counting to ten under his breath — and took far too much satisfaction from the thought.
"I did say, didn't I?" He spoke with a forced calm that had once terrified me. Now it just made me smile. "When you got in the car — I told you, right?"
"What did you tell me, Dad?"
"I told you not to say a word, did I not?" I nodded, not saying a word. "So don't. Ok? Just sit there quietly like a good lad and listen to what I have to say."
I pointed out that the traffic lights were on green and he muttered something I didn't quite catch as he put the car into gear and drove on. I expected him to immediately pick up where he had left off, but instead he sat quietly for a few minutes, concentrating on the road and sucking on a Werther's Original that he got out of the glove compartment (without even offering me one.) Thinking that this might go on all evening, I used the conversational lull to look for the mystery woman, even though I knew that we must have overtaken her a good way back. We passed closing corner shops and disused cinemas, school grounds and multistorey car parks. Five more minutes of silence and the rain started to ease up. I listened to Dad crunch the last of his sweet, feeling suddenly quite old and pathetic — sleepy from the warmth of the car's impressive heater.
"So, like I was saying," he finally continued, "I was having a word with him and I happened to mention that you were looking for a job."
'Looking' was probably stretching it a bit, but now didn't seem a good time to point that out.
"He always liked you, you know," Dad said. "He told me that. Said that he saw something in you. He didn't say what, and I didn't ask, but to cut a long story short, they're looking for ... they're looking for an assistant gardener at the Italian Gardens at Redburn and ... well, the job's yours if you want it."
I didn't want it, of course. The last thing I wanted to be was a gardener, assistant or otherwise. Unqualified for the job in every respect, I could already see just how much of a disaster it could well be. It wasn't so much that I wouldn't be up to the job; the truth was, I could pretty much turn my hand to anything. But my heart needed to be in it. Were I to do a job as well as it had to be done, it required a certain degree of motivation and commitment on my part.
"An assistant gardener," I said, trying to figure out the best way of breaking the news to him.
"Could be quite an opportunity," he told me, indicating a left. I didn't know where we were going, but I had a funny feeling. "There's the chance of promotion and, well, who wouldn't want to work in such beautiful surroundings?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from If I Never by Gary William Murning. Copyright © 2009 Gary William Murning. Excerpted by permission of Legend Times Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.