Blue Eyes

Blue Eyes

Jay Caselberg

            The man with the dog collar came the other night, standing sweating at the door, thin black hair plastered across his head.  Me Mam has dog collars, but he brought his own.  He always does.  It was too late to go out, not that me Mam would've minded, but the streets aren't safe when it's dark near our place.  So I had to watch.

            Me Da wasn't home.  He never is.  Or when he is, they fight, the stink of the booze hanging heavy in our two-roomed house.

            He stayed for maybe an hour, the man with the dog collar.  I watched as he sweated and strained, me Mam's spiked heel pressed hard against his back, the black leather around his neck cinched tight, stained blacker where the sweat runnelled down from the back of his greasy head.  Me Mam caught me looking once or twice and waved my looks away.  So I watched the wall instead, pretending to read the old newsprint behind the places where the wallpaper peeled.

            I asked her once why she did it, but she called me a brat and a stupid little bitch and told me to shut up.

            "How else we going to live?" she said.

            Me Mam is beautiful, tall and blonde.  I love the way the cigarette light sparkles in the blue eyeshadow she wears thick above her eyes.  Her eyebrows are high, arched and black.

            I saw her burn the man with the dog collar once with her cigarette.  Other times she just walks him, around and around the room.

            When the man was gone, I stood pretending to look at myself in the mirror above the old cracked sink, but watching me Mam while she sat there, smoking a cigarette and sliding her palm across the black leather at her thighs.  She'd shoved the money in the jam jar above the bed, just like always.  The bed creaked as she moved.

            I looked at her pretty blonde hair and the red upon her lips, wishing I looked the same, that I was beautiful like her.

            The man with the dog collar had been her last visitor for the night.  I watched her change, grab some money from the jam jar and head for the door.

            "Is Da coming home tonight?" I asked her.

            "How should I know?" she said and dragged hard at her cigarette.  "You go to sleep, Mary.  I'm going out."

            I sat there in the man smell, listening as her heels clicked away up the road, echoing from the dirty bare brick on either side.

            Somewhere up the street, glass broke and voices yelled at each other, a man and a woman.

            Me, I was eleven years old and I loved me Mam.  I remembered what she'd said and took out my book to write it down. 

            "How else we going to live?" she'd said.

            School was okay then.  Me and my best friend Norma did everything together.  She was a bit older than me, but she did most things I told her.  Norma wasn't as smart as me, and she didn't have a Da.  Sometimes we used to play in the old street near the school they called Rat Catcher's Lane.  There were old empty houses down there where slowly, they were pulling down the buildings, making big piles of brick and wood and glass.  Nobody lived in them any more and all us kids would play there, throwing stones at the glass to hear it crash and tinkle or digging in the rubble and seeing what we could find.  There wasn't anything much else to do.