BONE IDOL [bohn ahyd-l]
noun Chiefly North
Belfast
1. a person from the Oldpark, known as “The Bone”,
with aspirations of a career in the arts or above their socio-economic station.
6
PAULIE HAD
TO move school during Primary Three thanks to his parents splitting up. One day he was in class, the following day he
was missing and our PE teacher was sporting a black-eye. They’d move house to something smaller and
more affordable for his beautiful mother but not just yet, it took a while for
the old place to sell. He’d live a few
streets away in a new apartment complex so we could still hang out but he had
trained our group of friends too well.
At the slightest wobble two in particular sensed weakness and made a
play for leader of the gang, Paulie barely put up a fight.
A lot of the older kids in the
neighbourhood promised, each time they saw him, that the next time they were
round at the apartments they were going to fuck his mum good and proper. It would turn his skin red and send him
swinging digs towards them. I agreed with
them and wanted to tell him that I considered our friendship important and
hoped that it would mean he wouldn’t mind if I fucked her first but I thought
twice about it when he caught a sixteen year old on the nose and covered both
their shirts in claret. They still said
things about his mum after that only it was no longer to his eight year old
face.
The new family that moved into
Paulie’s house was a husband, wife and two daughters. I had promised myself out of loyalty to
Paulie that I would hate them all and not be behind the door in demonstrating
it. The two kids were incredibly ginger,
so ginger they made our friend Ginge (Marty) look like a tanned Adonis. The dad was little better. He had red hair that was beginning to look a
little like auburn straw as it thinned to reveal the shape of his head in well
lit areas but he was a good guy. When my
mum finally purchased a VHS player he called to the house and tuned in all the
television channels on it and showed me how to operate the remote.
“So
what’s a kid like you doing sitting indoors watching videos?” he’d ask.
“I play out loads, I want to be
able to tape Kolchak the Nightstalker and
my dad’s movies.”
“Well that’s something then.”
Teresa had
gotten bigger. On top of her mental
disability she had some sort of physical condition that meant her body didn’t
interpret the message to stop growing.
Her two brothers were younger than her but both seemed to be touched
with the same physical explosion towards the sky. Teresa
dirty hole had stopped being funny so the kids just yanked on her ponytail
which now swept at the street. I sat on
the porch with my sketchpad and watched as a new group of young ones that
included my brother Jeff took turns in tormenting her and belittling her for
the sake of getting a chase.
“Stop it! Stop it!” she screamed swinging large
shovel-like hands at the small children.
“Teresa dick breath!” roared one
of Jeff’s friends.
I laughed at that one, it was a
funny image.
Paulie called to my house with
Malachy. Malachy had a harelip and when
he said his own name it sounded like he was saying ‘Malarkey’. He also had a wonky leg making him a risk
when we were off exploring, something we didn’t want to get caught doing. The rest of the kids called him “Sixty-Six”
because of the fact that when they tried to make him say Sixty-six silly sausages it sounded hilarious. I wondered when anyone would ever need to say
something so fucking stupid but the name stuck.
Paulie used to only call for Sixty-Six when he was bored but now since
we’d broken away from the gang me, him and Sixty-Six were like the three
musketeers. I liked that idea. I would be the one my dad played.
“What are you doing?”
“Just drawing.”
“I didn’t know you were left
handed.”
“I am.” I said.
“Me and Sixty-Six are going down
to the forest, we heard there’s a house at the other side filled with bin bags
full of money.”
“That sounds like bullshit to
me.”
It
was our generation’s Nigerian lottery win and even at a young age I hadn’t
really fallen for it.
“It’s not, it’s true!” Sixty-Six
replied spraying us both on his S’s.
“That’s shit. It’s stuff ones like your brother says so
that when we go down there they bust our asses for whatever money we have on
us.”
“Maybe,” offered Paulie “but
maybe it’s not. Maybe the house is coming
down with money. You want to be the one
that got left out so you could sit here and watch Dirty Hole beat up five year
olds?”
“Let me get my coat.”
Mum was on the phone with
someone in the kitchen. She was using
her secret phone voice so I knew something was up. It wasn’t any of our birthdays coming up and
it was too early for Christmas so I figured it had something to do with
Dad. I grabbed my coat from my room and
soft-stepped it back downstairs and out the door with Paulie and Sixty-Six.
The field was like a swamp, the
ground unstable and the grass was overgrown.
Sixty-Six lost a shoe right out of nowhere. One moment he was limping along the next his
foot was soaking wet and we couldn’t find it.
He muttered something about going home but Paulie correctly pointed out
that I had come along for the same reason he should stay.
“You go home Sixty-Six and
you’ll get nothing you hear me? It’ll be
split between me and Doug, do you really want that?”
He shook his head and we
ploughed on.
We reached the forest as the sun
began to slip from the sky. From my
bedroom window the tire swing seemed to be the furthest point possible to
travel but yet here we were about to pass it surrounded by empty cans of Tenants
and skin magazines. The unclothed women
plastered across each page excited us all but the magazines were little more
than a collection of badly weathered pages; any attempt to move them from their
environment would lead to their beauty being lost to the world forever. We’d have to settle for committing as many
top pages to memory before pushing on.
The forest cleared eventually, though now it was almost as dark outside
the woods as it was inside. A duel
carriageway was all that stood between us and either a house full of money or a
ball-beating from a lot of drunken teenagers.
Either way. The only way to know
for sure was to look straight ahead and run as fast as your legs would carry
you. I had taken part in a couple of
school sports days winning a few sprints and considered myself powerful in the
legs. I feared for Sixty-Six. The oncoming traffic was fast and
indiscriminating; he’d be cut down for sure.
There was a momentary break thanks to a red light which set Sixty-Six
off like a shot, Paulie sprinted after him and caught him easily. He tried to wrestle Sixty-Six to the ground
in order for the two of them to play chicken with the traffic but he was too
powerful for Paulie and shrugged him off.
I started running as the lights turned green and caught up with Paulie
as we raced for the imaginary tape on the other side. We both left Sixty-Six eating our dust as
blasts from a multitude of vehicles swore at him to get off the fucking road.
He’d reach safety by a hare’s breath – had he been two pounds heavier he
would have had his ass taken off him by a big rig.
Sliding down the embankment we
landed in a sod covered heap at the steps of the money house. I got to my feet and helped Sixty-Six up
before the three of us marched purposefully towards our ill-gotten
fortune. The house was blind, all the
windows boarded up and the wood had been well worn by at least two good
winters. The front door had a steel
sheet bolted to the frame making it impenetrable.
“You see that door?” asked
Paulie “Would hardly go to all that hassle for no reason, right?”
“How’d you reckon we’re going to
get in?” asked Sixty-Six
I was already halfway round the
back of the house when Paulie answered him.
If there was anything in that place worth money I was sure to be getting
my hands on it. Money had been tight
since we moved to Poleglass. Mum wasn’t
able to work because it cost more money to have someone look after three kids
during the summer than she could make and most nights involved her pretending
she had already had dinner because there was only enough in the house for three
small mouths. That money was going to be
mine, fuck those older kids.
The back window’s boarding had
been pulled away so frequently that it flapped limply in the wind. I pulled it to one side and climbed into the
dark, piss stinking abyss. The house was
cold and frighteningly quiet. Paulie and
Sixty-Six climbed in behind me and we checked our way through all the cupboards
and shelves on the ground level before climbing the stairs. The house was a damp wreck. The stairs swayed from left to right and back
again as three kids ascended them to the first floor but there was nothing
there either. Several of the steps on
the stairs to the second floor were missing and when we got to the top I knew
we weren’t alone. Groaning and coughing
reminded me of Saturday mornings as a voice growled from a masked far room.
“What the fuck are you punks
doing here?”
“We’re here for the money.” I
answered.
“Oh the money, yeah the money’s
in here boys.”
“Throw it out!” dictated Paulie.
“No I don’t think so, you boys
want it come in and get it!”
Paulie pushed Sixty-Six forward.
“Go get it Sixty-Six.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re strong as a
Hulk.”
Sixty-Six inched forward, he was
on the verge of the doorway and the endless darkness of the money room when an
old figure jumped out and grabbed him.
The man was dirty from head to toe, covered in ground-on mud and track
marks. He was skinny, his ribs sat out
like a xylophone on his naked body as he pressed his wiry arms out, grabbed
Sixty-Six and began pulling him into the nothingness. Paulie and I charged forward grabbing an arm
each and pulling back on Sixty-Six causing him to lose his other shoe as the
naked old pervert fell to the ground and grabbed a hold of the kids wonky
foot. Running towards the scrambling
hobo I flung a boot into his face and he scuttled back into his nest. Sixty-Six leapt to his feet with a level of
agility I’d never seen in him before and the three of us charged down the two
flights of stairs bringing down slabs of plaster from the wall as the stairwell
swung severely from the supporting wall.
We hit ground level and rushed to our exit.
When we made it home that night
Paulie’s mum was camped out in my living room with mine and the rest of the
women in the neighbourhood. They had
sent their husbands out searching in the pitch black of night for the three
little troublemakers of Laurelbank. I
barely had a moment to savour Paulie’s mum’s beautifully firm buttocks, encased
in denim and planted squarely on my couch before I was pointed towards the
stairs. In the morning we’d be in a
position where our parents had finally stopped yelling at us long enough to
tell them about the naked old hobo who tried to pecker Sixty-Six.
“Douglas,
are you making this up?” Mum asked “Because this is very serious.”
“I swear Mum, he was staying in
the house and he tried to grab Malachy.”
“Leave it to me.”
That was the last on the
matter. Later that day I came home to
find three men in leather jackets sitting in my kitchen with my mum leading the
conversation which stopped as I entered the room. I was sent to my room which Jeff had been
rummaging around and had managed to find and partially destroy my A-Team van
which I cherished. It led to another
swinging match, mutual bruised lips and all on the eve of our school photograph
day.
I can’t
remember how long it was after the money house rape attempt but I sat by my
window drawing and looked up to remind myself of what the old house looked like
before I tried to lay it down on snow white A4 only for it to not be there.
I’d tell Paulie all about how
the house was no longer there as he couldn’t see it from any of the windows in
his apartment. He’d stare into the air
for a moment as though he was waiting for the wind to confirm what I’d relayed
to him before blinking three times.
“You know what they’ve done
don’t you Doug?”
“And what’s that Paulie?”
“We got too damn close and
they’ve moved the money, we might never find it again.”
7
“Hey
Sixty-Six, come tell that joke you know!” screamed Richard McCluskey.
Paulie had been coming around
less and less recently. Me and Sixty-Six
had found ourselves hanging out with a load of older boys. There was even a couple of girls in the
group. Fiona McCluskey was Richard’s
sister and had the face of an angel; she was in my class in St. Kieran’s though
I had never dared to speak to her. When
I started hanging around with her older brother she’d say hello in the corridor and every once and a while she would come
play with us all and send me goofy.
We’d been playing in Richard’s
backyard for a couple of hours. His old
man supplied hay and the like to farmers all over Northern Ireland and had a large
silo reaching out beyond his property where he kept it all. Richard had piled up ten stacks and convinced
everyone it would be aces if we all jumped out of his bathroom window on to the
bales. I stood by the bathroom door
waiting my turn to climb over the green sink and out the window. I tried ignoring the frilly little panties
that could only belong to Fiona as they hung on the radiator drying. I wanted to own them more than anything I had
ever seen in Leisure World; I wasn’t too sure why and worried that it made me
what my dad called funny.
“Sixty! Come over here and tell that joke!”
I pulled myself over the sink
and out on to the window ledge looking down at the hill of hay that lay below
ready and willing to catch me. I wished
goodbye to Fiona’s panties and the little buns they usually wrapped themselves
around and pushed myself out off the ledge, off the house and towards the
absent arms of gravity. I hit the hay
moments later, unsure of whether I had broken anything or not. Another kid landed beside me near breaking my
neck with his dropping leg. Rolling off
the hay I looked up towards the window and the sight of Jeff. Richard also had a younger brother, Charlie, who
was probably why my baby brother was about to chuck himself from a twenty-five
foot drop.
“Hey Doug, come here a minute
and hear this joke Sixty-Six knows.” requested Richard.
I watched Jeff land and roll, he
seemed ok. I walked over to Richard who
was smoking one of his dad’s cigars. It
almost completely masked his face it was so large. Inside one of our friends had started
scratching with Richard’s dad’s Black
Sabbath LPs and I knew that was going to lead to a beating being put on
someone.
“So what’s this joke then
Sixty?” I asked.
“Tell him Sixty, tell him it…”
Richard insisted impatiently.
“So there’s this kid called
Buckerharder…”
“What sort of stupid name is
Buckerharder?”
“Will you fuck up and listen to
the joke, continue Sixty…”
“Right, so there’s this kid
called Buckerharder and every day he walks home from school, goes to his room
and pretends he’s kissing his girlfriend…”
I figured if I went upstairs
again I’d grab a feel of Fiona’s panties for sure.
Sixty-Six starts groping the air
and pretending he has a girl locked to his lips. He looks stupider than usual.
“And every day his mum comes
home after work and yells Buckerharder! Buckerharder! Get downstairs and eat your
dinner! And every day Buckerharder finishes off sticking it to his fake
girlfriend and goes downstairs and eats his dinner.”
Richard is laughing and nudging
people who agree it’s funny already.
“So one day Buckerharder is
walking home from school and there’s this big blonde girl with a big hairy
pussy standing on the street corner bent over with hunger.”
Richard’s bent over too, only
he’s in fits of laughter.
“The blonde says Hey kid I’m starving you got any food on
you? And Buckerharder says I don’t
but I’m going home to practice kissing in my room and then my mum’s making me
dinner so the blonde says Well if you
bring me home I’ll kiss you for real, I’ll suck your dick and let you fuck my
pussy for as long as you want, as long as I can have some dinner. So Buckerharder thinks about it for a moment
and then says Yeah, my mum makes too much
anyway and your pussy looks pretty fuckable. So Buckerharder takes her home, takes her
upstairs and starts kissing her.”
Sixty-Six tongue flicks the air
as he begins running his hands up and down in front of him.
“Then he undoes her bra and
begins sucking on her titties.”
Fiona catches me looking at her
when Sixty-Six said titties and I
start turning red from the collar up.
“Then she drops to the ground,”
Sixty-Six drops to the ground “and starts sucking his cock. Then he picks her up turns her over and
starts riding the life out of her.”
Richard is close to pissing
himself by this stage. If awkwardness
was deadly we all would have dropped stone cold.
“You guys ought to tell your
folks this joke, they’ll love it!” he said slapping his leg.
“Next thing you know Mum comes
home and starts yelling Buckerharder! Buckerharder! No answer, so she walks to
the bottom of the stairs slams her hand on the banister and yells Buckerharderrrrrrr! And he screams back I’m trying Mum, I’m trying but if I buck her
any harder I’ll get my balls stuck!”
Richard collapses on to the
ground. Two or three of the other guys
pretend to laugh but it doesn’t even reach their eyes. Sixty-Six looks at me; I shrug my shoulders
and go back upstairs to jump out the bathroom window.
Richard’s
dad came home and threw everyone out. Richard’s friend had scratched through
his dad’s copy of Black Mass and
drank three of his beers for which Richard was getting an ass whooping. I walked home with Sixty-Six and Jeff trying
not to think about the panties Fiona wears, or the toilet she sits on, or the
bath she bathes in.
“Can I ask you something Sixty?”
“Sure Doug.”
“That joke you told, the one
about Buckerharder…” I paused for a moment, I felt vulnerable.
“What about it?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Me neither, my brother told me
it and they all seem to find it really funny when I tell it with all the
actions.”
“You see Fiona’s pants?”
“Where?”
“Doesn’t matter, night Sixty!” I
waved as Jeff and I got dragged into the house.
The living room was in darkness,
not even the TV played. Mum stood in the
doorway smoking a cigarette as our neighbour Ronan made himself her favourite
person by fixing the electrics which had burnt out. The house was recently built but whatever
they had managed to do with the electrics meant that the system overloaded
quite easily.
“I think it might be the
transformer Ruth, but if I’m honest I’m not one hundred percent.” came a voice
from the downward-facing-spark.
“What’s going down, Mum?”
“Going down? No more American TV for you.”
“What’s Ronan doing?” I asked,
correcting myself in the hope she’d forget her threat.
“Electrics have gone again. Ronan’s lending us a hand, would you like a
cup of tea Ronan?”
“Milk, three sugars Ruth-love
that’d be wonderful.”
Mum disappeared into the kitchen
to make a cup of tea on the gas hob, Ronan wriggled around a little more before
the house woke up and everything began screaming again. The TV started playing the football
highlights, every light in the house sprang into life and the washing machine
started up again. Upstairs I could hear Tara singing along to some terrible music with one of her
friends.
Ronan sat at the head of the
kitchen table sipping down a cup of tea and eating a sandwich. It had been years since there was a man of
the house that wasn’t me. It felt good
to take the night off. I sat beside him
drinking a cup, much to the old lady’s amazement.
“So Mum,” I said with a slurp
“there’s this kid called Buckerharder right…”
My face met with the palm of her
hand as a crash of searing pain shot through my cheek.
“Don’t you use that kind of
language…”
My lip trembled; my eyes began
to drown under their own moisture. I
felt angry with her. She had embarrassed
me in front of another guy. I got up
from the chair lifting my half empty cup of tea and threw it at the kitchen
window. What chance did I stand? It exploded into a hundred pieces cracking
and distorting the picturesque reflection that sat in it moments earlier. Mum flinched.
“You didn’t have to fucking hit me!” I screamed “How was I
to know you don’t like fucking jokes!”
I ran upstairs to my room as
another hand came down to slam thunder across my body. Banging the door Jeff leapt up from his bed.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Fuck up Jeff,” I cried “nobody
even asked you anything!”
I threw myself under the cover,
kicking out all the books I had piled up in and around my bed. I was furious and yet sad. There was a knock of the door and I tried
holding my breath until whoever it was went away but another knock came and
then I heard the squeak of the hinge as the door relaxed closed again.
“You there buddy?” it was Ronan,
relief.
I grunted and then felt the
pressure of his man-sized frame push down on the corner of my bed. Pulling the cover down from over my head I
wiped the remains of the salt water from my eyes.
“So this kid called Buckerharder
huh?” he said with a smile.
I nodded.
“Do you find that joke funny?”
I shook my head.
“Do you know why your mum
wouldn’t have found it funny?”
I shook my head again before
breaking eye contact.
“Do you know my kids Douglas?”
“Yeah.”
“I got two girls, and if you
count the wife that makes three girls…even the cat’s a god-damn girl. I’m completely outnumbered. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what that’s
like, you must have felt that before your brother Jeff came along. A man needs male company sometimes, you
know?”
I nodded even though I wasn’t entirely
sure what he was getting at.
“I thought maybe me and you
could hang-out some, maybe go fishing or ride our bikes along the forest
trail.”
“I don’t know how to ride a
bike.”
“You don’t know how to ride a
bike?”
“I haven’t had a bike. I mean I had a Spiderman bike when I was a
kid but my dad had to give it to Gandhi.”
“Well,” Ronan said, digesting
the imagery “if you want to learn how to ride a bike I know a guy who can get
us an old bike. We could fix her up over
the summer, get it up to riding standard and get you out on the road. You fancy that?”
“That sounds cool. Would it be like Easy Rider?”
“How do you know about Easy Rider?”
“The video man. When he comes around on Friday I get movies
from him, I get him to put the good ones in covers for stupid kid’s cartoons so
Mum won’t take them off me.”
“What else have you watched?”
“Mainly action movies. I’ve watched Commando, me and Paulie play Commando
all the time out in the field. Other
than that I watch movies my dad makes.”
“Your dad makes movies?”
“Sure does. I watched one were he’s wrestling with
another guy in front of a fire, I didn’t like it much so I stopped watching.”
“You like Alf?” he asked.
“Shit yeah!”
“Me too kid. How about me and you start watching Alf together. My kids don’t like Alf… you know, cos of them being girls and stuff.”
“I’ll watch Alf with you.”
“Cool, very cool Doug. So I’ll drop in this Saturday and we can
watch Alf and plan out our bike trek
like men, sound good?”
I nodded. I was fit to bust with the amount of Bromance
that was taking place, even with Jeff sitting on his bed watching like a little
blonde gooseberry.
“That’s aces Doug. You got to do one thing for me though.”
“Name it!”
“You’ve got to go
downstairs and say sorry to your mum. That
joke isn’t the kind of thing you tell ladies and now there’s bits of cup and
tea everywhere and that ain’t cool.”
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