Loyal

When he was 13, he used to set fires. The teachers couldn’t figure it—he was such a happy kid. All grins and jumpers for goalposts, licking scraped knees like a cat nursing its wounds. Or maybe more like a dog because he was happy and loyal, a scrappy little run around, truly loyal to the end, even when the belt appeared. He grinned his sticky-tooth grin and set fires when his parents weren’t looking. Blamed it on the ginger kid who wanted to see something with his own hair colour dance.

Now he’s 33 and wakes up in the cold sweat of dreams, bedroom pale-lit from daybreak and burnt out cinders (he was old fashioned that way, with the coal and the kindling and something appropriate to set alight, not this central heating he’d heard about, this myth of convenience he couldn’t afford), imagining a life in Paris where diamond girls hung around his neck like scarves and he drinks champagne. Talks of going to Vienna, just for kicks. But like all the men in his town, he was split in half, walking on razor blades, all of them far away, here without being here, longing to escape wherever here was. Longing is an appropriate word for its meaning—want stretched out so far you can’t see the horizon, yet can’t stop looking for it. He was always looking for it, in dreams, maps, bottles. His voice once jingled like sleigh bells. Now it rattled like a penny in a tin can, tin man without a heart, one step forward, three back, voice more cracked than eczema-prone skin in Greenland and still smoking, despite the cough, despite the doctor warnings. He was only 33.

Some men are born weary. Some are knocked down too many times to bother standing or getting sober. Some men don’t have fathers and others are afraid of theirs (and which is worse?) There’s only one pub around these parts—poor parts, with the coal and the men that mine the coal—so he and his father both drank there, in different chairs. He’d hear whispers of his parent’s arguments, ones he didn’t have to hear or set fires over anymore, and hope, for his mother, that nothing turned physical. But good news never came in bloody nosed. His father wiped the red away, muttering curse words, then organised the rounds with the lads in fishing caps, coarse palms scraping against amber bottles, speaking about the past as if it were somewhere they were going, not somewhere they'd been. Cheers with sticky smiles—as if they were happy. As if they didn’t once talk in jingles and dream of Vienna, too. But he knew no happy man nursed a pint every day; the sound of calluses scraping glass no happy man’s lullaby. Then he looked down at his own glass, knowing exactly where he was headed. To the chair across the room, with a fishing cap and blood on his hands. Loyal to the end.