Swinging Empty
Today, living near the edge of London is an Irishman, tall, a rough bag of skin, pock-marked, flushed, that a paper cut would slice right down to the bone. His teeth are discoloured with café au lait spots, from smoking or drinking you’d say, but it’s something worse. Hidden under his shallow flesh the same mouldy splotches are starting to graffiti his bones.
His words are moist, phlegm-encased, almost gurgled, like he keeps the taste of cider in the back of his throat. Deprived of cider his voice has a scratching buzz to it, harsh and corrupted, the smooth mucus of his throat turned to grit.
He has eleven children, borne lovingly by one woman. He has seven sons, three named Kevin and four named John — two with the same middle initial. In the evenings, some of them steal copper.
He smokes as they watch TV, but not when the baby is there, or then only with an open window. Drawing themselves from box to hand, forcing themselves to his lips; the cigarettes inflate his lungs and pull out smoke, rising, lingering, then moving off, content.
Recently he brought some of his children to a public swimming pool. He climbed high to a diving board and did a hand-stand at its edge. Pushing off sharply he fired himself head-first at the water and survived, delighting his children.
Swimming was a special day for the children before the hard time coming. Prison for 90 days: driving while drunk and disqualified. Even one of his battle-hardened Kevins welled-up as he was leaving. Leader of the pride, he grabbed the boy roughly and squeezed him hard, then safely kissed him through his hair. “Are you crying son? Stop it now.”
In life, he dampens the feeling daily that he has arrived in the middle of something. In prison, he reflects. His stomach turns with wonder as he balks at the blank of extreme youth. Born, and then, years of nothing. A slowing blur into now. Before, he lived in a bag of fluid in his mother’s belly, and the vile killer under this roof too. So unsurprising in a busy street, life’s fairy tales grow obscene in his cell. And then his fear turns to joy, and wordless love, as he gapes into that chasm of billions of years that he and that killer missed together, when they were both elemental.
Freed, blissful, he is at the playground with his children at sunset. Thousands have sat on the rock he’s sprawled on, and seen that sunset too. Watching his overweight wife tending to the children, he longs for two more, to fill the empty swings with just wind blowing through them.