A toe prods this. A toe kicks that. This continues. Someone beckons. Someone shrugs. Someone yawns. One fans a wallet out, plucking cash and credit cards with crow-beak hands. Another hyena’s jewellery. The radio in the jeep crackles with sibilant authority but it’s unintelligible. Maybe ghosts swim between the syllables. Who knows?
In semi-slumber the paramilitaries are not good at using their own initiative. They’re waiting for orders but nobody is in a hurry to give them.
As the sun sets he climbs into the back of the jeep—Land Rover, whatever the fuck it is. What do I know about cars?
Air thick with the smell of body odour and tobacco, I jostle, as he does, like we’re doing a routine together as we traverse the farmland terrain. They talk, him and the others, but to me it sounds like the yapping of dogs.
I think he’s forgotten about me, militia man. Oh well. I may as well sit back and enjoy the trip, because I’m thinking right now I’m going to end up in the nearest dumpster. Every day a fucking adventure.
Outskirts of a village, he leaps off onto the mud of a track.
A gate gives, and then a door into warmth.
The Kalashnikov is propped against the wall, in the manner you would an umbrella.
The burden of the belt unbuckled, divested.
He genuflects in the manner of the Moscow Patriarchate before washing his face in a bowl. I bend and rise with him, accidentally anointed. He remembers being in Slovansk when they shot a Protestant priest, needing to turn the Drobray Vest Church into an armoury, but he hates the Evangelicals even more. Spawn of the USA and the West.
But enough for today. He is home. Enough death.
He aches of it and wonders the purpose.
Then he remembers the flying of the tricolour of the Donetsk People’s Republic over the police headquarters in the city. He remembers throwing that city councillor in the river.
Without touching or approaching his wife he eats from a ladle dipped into a broth on the stove. The drips sizzle where they fall. She knows better than to show affection at times like these. Finding those moments is an art beyond Michelangelo these days. Her father dug coal. She’s no longer sure what this one digs.
So, this I deduce, lying splayed like spatchcock on the kitchen table, this dribbling dog of a man is too preoccupied to have wishes. Too untroubled to have dreams, because dreams open doors.
He’s too tarred and withered to allow imagination. He leaves that to others, the leaders, men wiser than him. Those with a vision for the future. Something he cannot create, but can cling to in his desperation for certainty and purpose. He’s a lightning-struck tree that no longer sucks in the light, but he can do that.
He can build a house or knock it down. For the cause, for the flag, he will be told more things to do and he will do them because he knows in his heart they are right. The meat on the table, the gasoline in the car, the roof over their heads, the angry fire in his guts that won’t be put out—that is what matters. Beyond that, there is nothing. You might as well think what is beyond the stars.
The oil and filth under his fingernails negate the need for optional extras. His fear sneers at the possibility.
But to have no wishes—none? That’s something.
A first, for this hairy ape, who thinks himself unshockable.
So now I’m picked up and he regards me in the glow of the fire, as his other hand delivers three mouthfuls of vodka, then a fourth, more from habit than requirement.
He takes me to another room and in the flickering almost-darkness crouches beside a small bed.
He wiggles me in the air. Nods my head using his index finger behind my neck. Dances me on the edge of the mattress.
I’m being introduced to her, and her, me.
She emerges, so.
Tiny, elfin concoction, itchy blanket tucked under her chin. Under the blonde fringe, scissor-cut by her mama, the too-tired eyes of a five-year-old unable to close until her father gets home, now wide and sparkling. Mouth agog, half in delight, half in disbelief, as she beholds me.
I’m adorable. I can’t help it.
He holds me out, closer. He smells of onion broth and aviation fuel and burnt plastic.
The stupid grin, she loves to bits.
She takes me in her arms, snug as a bug in a rug. Then it’s my chin that pokes over the blanket. And I love it that she kisses the back of my furry head. Especially as she doesn’t know where I’ve been.
Seriously? The softness of me, it’s a slam dunk.
I’m hers now. Official. I tell ya, this one is an impressive hugger. From one who knows. If I had a spine it would be broken. The hell. Spines are overrated.
From the first cuddle, I’m a keeper. I know it.
When her father has diminished and the light is lesser then lost, and she’s alone with me before sleep, she looks at what’s in her little hands.
Monkey’s been in the wars. Monkey has blood on him, look.
I can say nothing.
Monkey needs a wash. Monkey needs to be clean.
I have no doubt she’ll wash me in the morning. I’ll have a good old wash, old Monkey will. Old friendly, funny Monkey will. She’ll see to that. I like this one already. Then again, I’m easy to please.
And I’m waiting.
As Papa says his prayers by his piss-pot.
It may not be tonight, and it may not be tomorrow, but I’m waiting.
It might not be while she sleeps, and it might not be when she wakes, but it will come.
And I’m here for when she makes those three wishes. The ones that come with love and trust and pain and life and primates.
She’s a child. She is the future. She will have wishes. I know that for sure. Children do.
All I have to do is lie in wait and enjoy the hugs.
What does she really want and desire, this babe in arms? I have no clue. I never do. It’s a mystery. It’s a wink from a stranger. A stiletto in the ribs. It’s a monkey up a tree. It’s a painted grin.
Her mind is roaming. In her dreams she swings from branch to branch on the back of glee, clinging to her saviour, this circumstantial cousin, pink-eared, long-limbed, one of her evolutionary brethren, button-eyed, holding it together as buttons do, then tearing them apart. The way the universe does.
What will her first wish be, I wonder?
So, this.
THUMBSUCKER
Robert Shearman
My father has become a thumbsucker. I know, it took me by surprise too. I’d taken him out to dinner, and it had been a fine dinner—my father and I always try to have dinner together once a month or so, but sometimes I get busy, I have to cancel and he always understands—but I’d made the time, we’d been out and had this most excellent steak in a restaurant I’d seen reviewed quite favourably in one of the Sunday supplements. We were talking about something inconsequential—cricket probably, or which Wodehouse novel he was re-reading—and the plates were being cleared. And he sighed contentedly, he smiled, he folded his hand into a fist, tapped it gently a couple of times to make the thumb pop out—and then, without any embarrassment or explanation, proceeded to put the thumb into his mouth and hold it between his teeth like the stem of a pipe.
I made no comment on it. And we continued our conversation: “What about that Bertie Wooster?” he’d say, or maybe, “What about that test match?” Puffing on the thumb as he listened to me, then removing it from his mouth and jabbing it in the air to emphasise a point in reply.
The waiter had been attentive all evening, checking that we were enjoying our meal and keeping our wine glasses filled. And when he approached we assumed it was to offer us dessert—Father had decided upon the tiramisu, and I thought I’d plump for a crème brûlée.