My Little Dove
written by: David Milner
A semi-rural suburb, some two miles east of a coastal town, is the setting for this (particular) tale. You’ve read it all before, but just listen when I tell you: Hell is personal.
“I’m good with people. Comes quite naturally.” This is what he said to me one afternoon in the kitchen at my mother’s bungalow. “I’m funny.” What sort of person comes out with something like that? What sort of insufferable “I put people at ease,” while chopping and slicing romaine lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions to toss in a glass bowl with pitted green olives, feta cheese, splash of olive oil? In my mum’s kitchen, a running commentary on the health benefits of a Mediterranean diet. Because he’s got her taste buds going for Greek and Italian cuisine. She never went near an artichoke, fresh onion, garlic, and thought hummus looked like dog sick. But this cock blows his own trumpet at a distance of twenty-five metres. “I remove the stalk from the bulb, and this simple technique completely eradicates the aftertaste and smell of the garlic.” Had a high opinion of his own opinions; his feet were so special he wore silk socks. I wasn’t having it, not from the likes of him. No. Not him. Not Terry.
“He has the stubby fingers of a child molester.”
“Oh, listen to yourself, will ya!” My sister stood with her hands placed on her hips. She’s a trained nurse and volunteers with Christians Against Poverty. A couple of years my senior, Lynsey is the mother of two young girls. She is a good person. We were tending dad’s graveside, which was something I would never have imagined myself doing, like you see in films and such, dappled sunlight, murmuring leaves. Never knew what to say to dad, though. Mum wasn’t with us that day. She was off with Terry somewhere.
“She’s booking a Scandinavian cruise.”
“Yeah, I know.” My sister said.
“She told you?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“When?”
“The other night when she phoned, soppy bollocks!”
Lynsey went on at me that I was interfering and stressing myself out, that Mum was a vivacious woman of fifty-six and more than capable of making her own choices. She said I needed to take an objective step back from the situation.
“We are predisposed to the acceptance of fate, Lynsey, I know this! Ask the Greeks!”
“The crap you come out with….”
“We don’t know anything about him, Lynsey.”
“He’s a local businessman,” I remember Lynsey looking at me. “They fancy each other,” and the sound of her measured breath.
“He sells stuff, that doesn’t make him a businessman.”
“Mum hasn’t looked this radiant in years. What more is there to know? It could be love. You should try it sometime!” Lynsey thought I looked underweight, malnourished, dark-eyed, ill. She had a lot on her hands with the girls and everything. She is a practical person.
I prefer the sombre elegance of graveside over cremation memorial site. It’s a slab of marble. There wasn’t enough left of Dad to bury. We’d scattered the ashes – the ash of his remains – on and around it.
I was twelve when my dad was killed in a helicopter crash. Killed in a helicopter crash coming home from the eastern Irish sea rig. Three weeks on ten days off, I dimly remember. It’s difficult to knit my memory from the threads of him. Pilot error was said before, during, and after the inquest. Pilot error, when a woman out for a walk with her dog on the limestone grasslands near Morecambe Bay swore that she saw flames and smoke before the helicopter hit the ground. Pilot error rolls off the tongue in a media-friendly way, concise and comforting; it absolves. Blame the pilot! Imagine how the pilot’s family must feel, they get Pilot Error. No survivors. Bodies of hard-working, strong, sexy men smashed to bits, hands and feet and heads turned to cinders. Mum, a widow at the age of thirty-six, not coping, on Valium, me on Ritalin. Lynsey had to pull herself together and look after us. She was fourteen. Fuck all that now… I was on to Terry… I was having him.
Easy to follow someone in this seaside town as all roads lead to and from the raised area of land near the centre, with its ornate chocolate box pavilion, known locally as the Mound. Couldn’t miss the sight of Terry’s refulgent silvery grey hair, as he minced his calumny from place to place. A glad eye for all the ladies and old dears. Terry deals in antiques and military paraphernalia. Like many a crook, he wears suede loafers.
“We’re not going to stitch you up.” This from the lips of a detective constable. Her name is Kirsty, and she’s been solicitous, verging on the friendly, thus far, so this hoary old we’re not going to stitch you up line she’s using baffles me. The thought never entered my mind. It’s not the worst of crimes I’m being accused of. I’m hardly a hardened criminal.
“Mister Haynes will be pressing charges.” This from the lips of the steely-eyed balding detective inspector as he rolls his burly shoulders forward. Were sat in an interrogation room. And this is happening now. Too much reality and no mistake.
“I will need a lawyer, then?” I look to Kirsty and suppress an urge to smile.
I’m on Terry’s trail one bright and frosty afternoon, a devil’s wind blowing in from the sea. He was wearing a three-quarter-length gaberdine overcoat. I was on the opposite side of the high street. Thing is, Terry saunters. His gait is louche as though he were being gently nudged through his pelvic bone, and this presented one or two problems for me, with all the stops and starts due to his man-about-town casual handwaves and whatnot at people through shopfront windows. Honestly, it was like following someone on a catwalk. Ten minutes go by, and then he meets up with this woman known locally as Joke Shop Joyce. She got this name, incidentally, because she took over her dad’s old joke shop that had been a part of the town since God knows when, and by all accounts ran the place into the ground after he died. Nice looking woman, I avow. Similar age (or vintage?) as my mum, fair-haired and skinned, like my mum, slim with a serviceable shape to her bust, like my mum. And on this shivery afternoon, Joke Shop Joyce is wearing a long, tight-fitting, animal print skirt – the type of skirt my mum would wear – with black leather, knee-length boots, that wouldn’t go amiss on mum’s long legs.
Getting the picture? I followed them to a used car lot. Terry knows about cars, you see. There was, I remember, a gentle fall of snow that afternoon. I watched from a reasonable distance as the “silver fox” led Joke Shop Joyce about the length and breadth of a sleek black Tesla. He slid his arm around her waist, and she, against the cold, leaned into him. Old flames. An envious shiver passed through me.
“I never do this.” The uniformed PC is dead sexy, not especially tall, with a teasing ripple of muscle under the regimental crisp white shirt, scarring of teenage acne in the delicate hollow below cheekbones to die for. A break, this is in the invited-under-caution thing. We’re in the brick-walled yard at the back of the station. “I never do this.” He repeats.
“I’m surprised that you smoke.” Say I in return.
He cups his hand over the flame to light me up. Lovely touch!
“There you go.”
I inhale and exhale and wish we were sat in a bar somewhere telling each other a million and one things. I’d love to know his name. I haven’t the confidence to ask. It doesn’t work like that. Not for me. And under these circumstances?
“A mess of little consequence, my life, measured against the mess the world is in just now.”
“You’ll be alright.”
“You think?”
“Plead guilty… easier in the long run. Be yourself. Say you’re sorry.”
“Wish I hadn’t killed now!” An old joke my dad used to crack
It makes the PC laugh.
Mum isn’t speaking to me. She has never forgiven me since she discovered that I didn’t like girls. She’s something of a girly woman is mum. I have never sought a long-term relationship. I could never follow the straight path by aping the convention of marriage; pay a priest to lead us through the vows. Adoption next? My mum would never accept an adopted kid as a real grandchild. Let us not judge the woman too harshly. I’m one of those disappointing sons.
Everything happened quickly when I turned up at Terry’s that night. He was sheepish.
“You said I was to drop in should I be passing,”
“Did I…? Well, come…”
He was wearing beige corduroys. They looked nice on him. He has a male model type physique, I’ll always give him that, clothes hang on him beautifully. It’s man maketh the clothes with Terry! Up a short flight of stairs, he led me to a nicely proportioned two-bedroom flat. And I came to a standstill…
“Everything alright?” Terry inquired.
The furniture is arranged like the furniture was arranged in the old lounge we had when Dad was alive. Salmon pink and near gelatinous looking cream-coloured walls, fixtures and fittings reflected in the smoked glass top of the coffee table; there’s gewgaws, knick-knacks, a carriage clock, crenelated lamp shades, floral patterned drapes. I see framed photographs of Lynsey and the girls with her husband Ben…
“Your mum’s influence…” I remember Terry added, a cheesy gameshow host of a grin animating his craggily handsome face, “You know how she is!”
I closed my eyes, and in the darkness, I could see rooms from my childhood taking shape in the fashion of the times under my mum’s capricious whims, the rooms of my childhood consciousness superimposed on the quiver of my inner lid. I can’t remember if I laughed softly or cried. The voice of a craven spirit at my side…
“Ever changing. Never satisfied.”
A story unfolding in an unfamiliar room, my senses in need of a shuffle, I was a man remembering all the wrong things, a man not clearly thinking.
“I am so far from home.”
“Come again?”
“There isn’t a photograph of me,” I said, and in my memory of these events, it’s the sound of a whispered plea.
“Not yet,” Terry replied, his voice like the whoosh of a kite catching the wind.
I hit him hard in the face. He fell backwards against the creamy leather armchair, which overturned and landed on him as he hit the floor. Funny as anything! I kicked his legs, I kicked his arse, ground my heavy heel into his bloodied face.
“Your suits aren’t tailor-made!”
“Some… of them… Why?”
“You’re off the peg, you cock!”
“If… this is… about the money…”
“What?” I stood above him.
“Your mother, she said… I told her… Christ’s sake, she was willing to spend… Invest, I mean, invest more.”
“How much?”
“Er, well lets…”
“How much?”
“Ten thousand and I told her she can have the money back, all of it back… say the word…”
“Say the fucking word?”
“Say the word and every penny is returned…. No, no!”
I dragged him feet-first to the kitchen. I opened the door of the washer/dryer machine and shoved his head in. I wanted him on his knees and his arse in the air. Terry was blubbering. Pathetic. I yanked his corduroys down to his thighs. Funny thing was, his buttocks were flabby. Pasty looking too. Surprised me, that did.
“Thought you had a friend who runs a tanning salon?”
“Ohhnonono please no…”
I roughly grabbed at the flesh, jiggled it, one buttock up, one buttock down, singing One Day I’ll Fly Away, to my heart’s content. Do you know or remember this song? Randy Crawford (c 1980), before my time, of course, but I know most of the words as it was one of mum and dad’s favourites. Terry wasn’t singing, his desperate, terrified groans were muffled. The neighbours didn’t complain. I got a fork from a drawer and jabbed the prongs into his fat butts, bringing no more than a trickle of blood. Then I sat with my back against the cabinet below the sink. My obsession obliged. Made manifest. I was spent. And felt bereft.
“Hell is personal.”
Terry didn’t hear me.
My mum has known Terry for years. Fifteen years old when she first met him. And I was the last to know? My sister knew. And she was all, “We know what you’re like and how you take things.” Like, personally? No one is allowed to take things personally now for fear of offending folk or showing your true self as thick as pig shit because you haven’t the wit and grace to detach. I’m sick of everyone.
I should have started this story, I’ll be thirty-three next birthday, and I’ll be in prison.
Me and sexy P.C. stub the last of our respective cigarettes into the brick wall. A shared moment.
“We better get you back.”
“I blame the pilot.”
“What’s that?” He cocks his head to one side, trying to interpret my meaning.
“A useless private joke.”
“Whatever helps.”
How my incapacitation will help society beats me. I am not a threat to the public at large.
I’ve made up a name for him; it is Adam. His smiles were warm and welcoming. His laughter seemed genuine. On such a glimpse, my heart will rest. Oh, my little dove, there is hope for me yet.
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