Sucker

Joey left as wordlessly as he'd arrived. He came in from work round quarter past seven that evening. Finn and the girls had already eaten and had migrated into the front room, Melissa on the floor doing her homework, Tanya with a colouring book, pretending to do hers. He put his head around the door and said, 'Hello all', just like he always did

'Hi Joey,' the girls chimed, lifting their faces to flash him quick sunflower smiles. Finn was having trouble lighting the fire. She was crouched over the grate, trying to create a backdraft with yesterday's paper. She'd probably sounded put upon and certainly hadn't bothered to look up as she told him he could find his dinner in the microwave. He headed upstairs to change out of his overalls and wash up. All perfectly normal. If she thought about it, she had then heard an unusual amount of banging from the bedroom. One particularly loud thud had prompted Melissa to look up from her maths workbook and give Finn one of her private looks, like she was old enough now to be in cahoots with her mother, to know, or be knowing about things that Tanya couldn't. But then it was half-seven, she shushed the girls, yelled 'Eastenders' at the ceiling and got stuck into her soap.

Round about the ad break, he clomped down, perhaps a little heavy on the stairs. There was a bit of a shuffle in the hall, then the sound of the front door closing meekly behind him. She thought he'd probably left his phone in the car. Then she heard his engine start up and he took off down the street. She thought he must have gone for cigarettes.

The girls were sent up to bed, Ally McBeal came and went. She thought she'd give him a right bollocking for skiving off to the pub like that. Her friend Tricia rang to see if she was going back to Pilates after Christmas, then one after another three regulars rang looking for appointments, one cut and colour, one trim, and the other just a wash and blow job for some big do next weekend. Then she remembered she'd said she'd call Linda back and they got into one of their telethons. It was past midnight before she tried his mobile. 'Hi,' Joey's voice, situated some place far too quiet to be a pub, sounding deliberately distant, neutral.

'Where are you?'
'I'm here.'
'Where's here?'
'At Mandy's'
'Who's Mandy?'
'Mandy is a person.'

Finn wasn't used to being the dumpee. It was definitely a first as far as anything long-term or live-in went. Joey wasn't the father of either of her girls and no one had been required to call anyone 'Dad'. But he'd been with them over a year now and they'd both seemed to like him well enough--even Melissa, who could get snotty about her boyfriends. It had to be said, Joey was easy to like--or at least hard to dislike. For one thing, he never seemed to mind much what other people did. This included the girls. He had this lopsided smile that showed up easily and settled in, making you feel somehow bestowed upon. He gave the girls two euro on Thursdays after work. He sometimes took them out on a Sunday afternoon, to St. Anne's to watch the model car racing or out to the airport with his CB radio for a bit of plane spotting. He ate like a child, loved McDonalds and take out pizza, kept a constant supply of coke in the fridge and could polish off a pack of choclate biscuits in one sitting. These were all things the girls could appreciate, even admire.

Finn liked him alot too, at least in the beginning. For starters he was a fine thing--leather jacket-man, earring-man, with a gypsy-black taggle of curls and the slow, sloppy smile that said sex please. She and Linda had decided he was a serious Stephen Rea lookalike and Finn had always liked the motherless son type. But what stood Joey out from the crowd ocurred the very first time she'd met him; he'd done something that night that was right up there with her top ten most erotic experiences. Herself and Linda had spotted him and his brother, Phil, in a bar and had moved in for the kill. Five minutes into their mission it was decided by way of the faintest of nods that Phil was Linda's, Joey all her's. They were lucky that way, even with brothers, they never picked the same bloke. By closing time they were heading to a party the lads had the suss on. She was standing on the pavement with Joey and Linda waiting for Phil to show with the wheels. Joey had left his lighter in the pub. The bouncer wouldn't let him back in so she went fishing in her bag and managed to stab herself on a pair of nail scissors. She held up her thumb, watching it bleed, cursing Daisy, who'd given her the scissors to 'mind'. Linda was searching through her pockets for tissues. He said nothing. He took her hand, pulled it up to his face, inspecting the damage in a curious, almost admiring way. Then he separated the thumb from her fingers, put it into his mouth and sucked softly on it, as if it was his very own. To this day it amazed her she hadn't snatched her hand back and decked him one. As it was, she just stood there, looking up at him, her knees giving beneath her, so astonished she forgot even to be embarrassed in front of Linda. In a rare moment, the pair of them were collectively struck dumb, though not when they got to the party and legged it into the loo. 'Dirty sucker!' Linda screeched. 'You'd better go out there right now and tell him about the virus!' This had crossed Finn's mind too. Would he not be worried about catching something? But at the same time she had to think, I've just met a guy who, fully clothed and without so much as a fumble, managed to locate my g-spot.

Linda and Phil went nowhere fast but Joey moved in three weeks later. The first few months were pure brilliant. Like a pair of sexually deranged teenagers, they threw matching double sickies for days so they could stay in bed while school was on. Weekends, the girls jangled round on a permanent sugar high they were sent to the shops so many times so the two lovebirds could grab more time alone.

Truth be told, though, Joey never again did anything that quite measured up to the promise of that moment outside the pub. He had the moves all right and at first it was easy to pretend. But the more she got to know him the less sure of himself he seemed. She also couldn't help noticing how he took an inordinate interest in the slightest bruise. 'Look,' he'd say, all wide-eyed, holding out a hand or an arm, hitching up his jeans to show her his shin. 'Look at the size of that!' She had wonder had he actually been thinking what she was that night or could it be that he was stuck in some kind of 'my cut's bigger than your cut,' kindergarten groove?

Another thing: When they were first together, he'd sit and listen to her for hours, a half-smile on his face. This had made him seem like an interested person, someone who viewed the world with detached amusement. But, since the summer in particular, she'd found herself, bit by bit, beginning to reinterpret Joey. 'What are you thinking?' she would ask, just to hear him say again, 'Nothing much.' The smile, once sweet and sexy, became childish and half-witted, like his eating habits, his silly CB radio. His lack of words, his shortage of opinions, became more and more just signs of a slowness, an inability to think for himself. She began to avoid him, to ask him for money and use him as a sitter more than she knew she should. And every time he handed her a twenty or agreed to stay in with the girls while she went out she'd feel that hot, acid mix of scorn and suffocation.

All sorts of stuff began to bug her then about Joey, stuff that in fairness he had no control over. People didn't call to the house as much now that he was there. Briany and Steven used to knock in on their way home maybe a couple of nights a week. They'd sit and drink a few tinnies together, a bit of a laugh. They hadn't been seen for months. Alan and Johnny, same story. Even her girlfriends weren't as free and easy about dropping in. Probably Linda was the only one who just ignored Joey and got on with it.

She started finding herself going to bed early, pretending to be asleep, willing herself not to move when he'd sidle up behind her and arrange his body along the length of her, his hard-on pathetic, pleading. She wasn't sure why but every so often she'd turn around sharp and haul herself on top of him. He never could last too long and she'd make sure she moved in such a way to speed his coming. When she told Linda about it, she'd made it sound funny. Linda said she should consider it a mercy fuck and offer it up to the holy souls. But Finn knew there was no mercy in it. Still, Joey never questioned her. Indeed he seemed to take it as an exciting new twist in their love life. It got to where sometimes she couldn't even stand to let him kiss her. To relieve the tension she'd bite his lip too hard. Once she even sunk her teeth into his shoulder, like someone about to endure something. 'Grrrrrh,' he'd growled back at her, all smiles and she hadn't known whether to laugh a mean little Ha Ha right into his face or kick him down the stairs.

He'd bought her this flash watch she'd had her eye on for her birthday in July. She completely forgot his in September, had to send Melissa running to the Spar for a box of choclates and one of those 'oops' cards. That hadn't appeared to bother him. Shortly after, he started getting lots of overtime at the garage, which seemed like a good thing--more money and less Joey coming in.

The day or so after he moved out, she felt herself in some vague, bewildered sort of shock. When he tried to sneak back to pick up the rest of his stuff, she lay in wait for him, stood in the hall demanding explanations. Apart from his front door key, all she managed to extract from him were the following two statements; 'I didn't know how to tell you' and 'I didn't think you'd mind.' When she lay in bed that afternoon she thought about it and she realised she didn't actually mind, or if she did it was only on point of principle. Truth was, the slight bruising to her pride would heal far quicker than the injuries that might have been inflicted in an effort to dig an unwilling Joey out. Joey had done her a favour and once she'd come upon this revelation, she found herself seized with such giddy relief that from that moment on, all she could see was the positive side of things. It was amazing how even someone so uncomplicated, undemanding, un-anything really, could free up so much energy and space in his wake. The very air in the house seemed lighter, thinner, drier, like you could sail about the place, instead of having to swim through some soupy mix. The girls took the news of Joey's departure almost as a foregone conclusion. Only Tanya made any noises of regret and then only to complain about lost pocket money.

On Saturday, for the first time in ages, she went and did a big shop. Donkeying back and forth from car to kitchen, calling the girls to come and help, Finn met with the standard response; Melissa, who was well capable now of providing genuine assistance, rolled around the couch moaning about a sore arm and how she was watching something while two-steps-backwards Daisy came running. She gritted her teeth, set Daisy to stacking tins and knelt on the floor to tackle the fridge. 'One day, Daisy,' she said, pelting dead food at the bin, 'we're going to have one of those great big, f-off American refrigerators.' But even relieved of half its former contents, there was still no room in her little under-the-counter jobbie. Her eyes fixed on the twelve pack of Coke taking up the entire top shelf. She'd always hated the stuff, had never liked the way Joey kept slipping cans and sneaky sips to the girls. 'Hey, Daisy. Outside. Now,' she ordered, unlocking the back door.

Minutes later, Daisy came dripping sticky brown into the front room, laughing like a loon and begging her sister to come quick. Some after that, Miss Cassidy next door parted her nets to see what all the shrieking and roaring was about and witnessed Finn and those girls of hers, half dressed as usual, chasing round the back garden in the dead of winter, shaking up perfectly good cans of coke and squirting the contents all over each other.

From that moment on, the process began in earnest and in the days that followed the mildmannered Joey morphed into some kind of moody, brooding, bullying ogre who had imposed his standards, his will, on their fun-loving, free-spirited, home. As if he'd insisted they all sit up straight and eat at the table, constantly shouted at them to keep the sound down, they left every piece of electronic equipment in the house blaring day and night, ate breakfast dinner and tea on the sofa, the living room floor, up in bed, even in the bath. Anywhere, anywhere but the kitchen. By the time he'd gone a week, he was some disgraced, deposed dictator and they the dancing masses, exhausting themselves with their reckless behaviour. Like one big all-girls-together pyjama party, Finn would stand up suddenly, nine o'clock on a school night and announce 'Let's all go to McDonalds!' Or, another night, 'Right girls, it's homework time...but guess what...we've got tickets for a real live circus!'

The sleepover mood went on until Melissa began to get ideas, notions that she too could make whacky pronouncements and carry the rest of them, Finn included, on the wild-and-crazy high of it all. When Melissa declared one Thursday evening that school tomorrow sounded like a pain and what was really in order was a nice long weekend, she knew it was time to call a halt. She needed them in school Friday so she could get her scissors out, start putting together some funds. All the living it up was costing money, money she certainly didn't have now that Joey boy was handing over his 120 euro a week to a 'person' called Mandy. She realised there and then she was tired of the group hugs. All that womanly wagon circling was getting to be a bore. She was ready to go out again. She knew there was only one sure fire way to forget a man. She was on the prowl for a new pair of arms. Perhaps even a new sucker.

Biography

Sophie Spalding lives in Dublin's Northside with her husband and two
sons. She has recently started writing short stories and poetry - one short story was chosen as a runner up in the 2003 Fish Competition.