The Uncaring of Arguemena Interferon

Prettiest girl I've ever seen

Grass and vines consumed the shed. Timbers blackened with age and rain and the slow rot of years chewed away as it squatted in Racheal’s garden like a fat old wooden toad without memory of where it was going. Next to a shopping trolley with a carrier-bag of damp rags like abandoned smiles and a car battery with chalky blue terminals blind eyes and the weathered brand a mouth rubbed dumb by rain. It looked like it had died thinking. Inside. A bulb hung from the rafters softening the whispering dust that floated and coated everything besides the little patch against the side wall where they would sit barely adults barely children barely leaving shadows wherever they barely went.

Her father’s workbench a history of toil left in burns and gouges and the rusted arcs of sawblades stacked against the wall like shed skins of giant insects that inhabit the dreams of children. I always thought nightmares had something to do with horses he said and Racheal nodded her head.

Doors slammed slurred voices rose all senseless and angry like a storm beating its fists against the turning earth. A gut cry. The sound of wood on meat. Tins. Pots pans and domestic seizures. The undoing of a poorly tied and resentful knot. Racheal handed him a copy of an old Scottish cartoon called The Broons. It had a printed yellow and black tartan cover. The Broons he said in his best Scottish accent. That’s Maw Broon she reminds me of my mum. Innocence landing badly like the difference between Maw Broon and the saggy breasted dirty white bra wearing cigarette holding menace that was Racheal’s bruised and pickled mother. She headbutted my cousin at his wedding said Racheal and he frowned because although a wretch her mother most certainly was he’d not been able to control himself and wanked more than once after seeing her big anaemic teats threatening to spill over the edge of her bra as she fumbled around the back of the sofa pulling out fluff and peeshcha and mukfell guth o’gorny shatsch and shit and yesterdays and looking for her fucking fags all fucking day as she put it.

Did you get your swimming badge? Yes she said. I thought I’d not be able to pick up that brick at the bottom of the diving area. We didn’t have to do that. Yes you did everyone does. No we didn’t. I don’t know. Yeah.

Do you believe in love he said because he wanted to be kind to her and maybe if he loved her everything would be alright. No but you can kiss me on the lips if you want. The fitba papers Joe Broons choice it’s the scores he likes tae see but when the bairn gets it first they need a referee. Racheal takes The Broons annual from his hands and looks at the back of the shed door where coats hung sleeves stiff with dust. Leather tool bags beneath them split and gaping and the rusted mouths of idle wrenches.

He looks at the freckles on her cheek and the faint flush there like something just born into the world. He leaned towards her almost a spasm as if afraid the moment would shatter his lips drawn to hers like a thing moved not by will but by the gravity of things unspoken. Do you like the rain. No he said. Do you. Sometimes. And they touched lips. And then they did not.

You can touch me if you want. OK. But you can’t touch my fanny. OK. Dad said it’s my Arguemena Interferon. OK. She looked over her shoulder and then she lay herself down to the floor her elbows and her shoulders and then the back of her head. Now? If you want. He placed his hand upon her breast hesitant and levitating for a second something ghostly following the white rabbit and the heat of her passed through the nan-knit wool as through some veil of gauze and he thought of his father dying in hospital and the breath in his own chest became known to him. He thought of disinfectant sharp and clean the way it clung to his clothes long after he left the hospital. The purple yellow bruise on the back his father’s hand where the needle nosed into him through skin thin as paper as if life had already left or at least packed its bags. His father’s chest would rise and fall the way something struggles just before it stops struggling for the last time. He felt Racheal’s breast rise and fall and thought about her mother. The dirty bra and tits and the cigarette and smeared lipstick and he thought that nothing would ever be the same. If it ever was. If it ever could be. He thought he was a bad person. Don’t you like it. I think so he said. Rachael pushed her elbows back and straightened her arms so she was sitting up again. Do you think about dying he asked. Racheal looked again at the back of the door and tilted her head. He thought she looked lovely. I do when I have to cut up the crayfish my brother catches. I use scissors to cut off their legs and heads but they still move. I saw one without a head and legs jump out of the sink once. I put it in a glass of water but it died later and my dad ate it. Did he cook it. No.

He moved closer slow as a child yet unclaimed by urgency his thigh meeting hers and then the arms and then the shoulders and in time her head came to rest upon him like it was the first place ever meant for it. They sat thus in the failing light the hush of the shed as outside the wind stirred and it turned dull and colorless and the dust in the air lost its glow.

You still in there her father said. She looked up because it wasn’t like him to ask. About. Anything. The door opened and there he was as big as ever. Stooped some but he still filled the frame and strong like he might break it just by standing there. His shirt was halfway tucked in and halfway not with the sleeves shoved up past his elbows. His forearms inked in a mist of green from tattoos riding around on the skin for too long. They’d meant something once and they don’t mean nothing now. His arms had once worked hard and harder still alas now only that which the Devil makes.

He wanted to rage and throw his weight around yet some part of him recoiled. Seeing his daughter Racheal and her friend and something hopeful there stopped all his fury and for a moment he was someone else who he had once been. If only you could stay there forever he said before closing the door and walking back to the house.

I’ve got to go he said noticing the light outside almost gone. OK. I like being with you. OK. He left through the garden setting set off down the path that separated the ends of one series of gardens from another and through the estate the railway bridge black in the dusk and the iron bones of it humming underfoot. From pissy pubs beside him came the rawthroated vellocet caterwawen of ungulate devotchkas pink with heat and the baying of men playing hunters loosened from wife and child and drunk and chasing rabbits and forgetting. Saturday nights tense and then down the old Roman road he walked. Towards the house. His mother. His father. Up the path and at the door. Home. And to bed. Still looking for that blue-jean baby-queen. Prettiest girl I ever seen.

He felt in ways unknown and thought like one remade. The world presented itself as a calm thing as something in which he might live without

shame.

Chris Dangerfield

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