CHRISTMAS CARACKER

This weather we all have our own way of being  born. Wiccan ceremonies. Underwater cameras.  Strap-on midwives. Laughing gas in near space  orbit. You name it, somebody has got to be online  streaming it. 

Well, I am a child of disaster like the rest of you, and  this is my being-born story. It happened in a back garden bedsit on the deep southside of Dublin  around six weeks ago. It was the evening of the 25th  of December at approximately twelve minutes past  nine. 21:12. Two-one, one-two. That’s a good one for  the numerologists, isn’t it? The mirrorologists even,  but don’t mind those fucking liars. 

Before that there was Lizzie, the pediatric night nurse, and Tom with the Van, her fella. 

Lizzie was anaemic and underweight and bruised  too easily. She always had welts and blotches  ripening on her arms and legs. She occasionally  sported a lumpy green or purple bruise so large and  glossy you could mistake it for a leech. She had  dizzy spells and headaches and she puked more  often than she shat. The semi-circles under her eyes  were grey somedays like military helmets. On other  days they were stormcloud black. They could have carried lightning in them if they weren’t so sad. She  got these permanent black eyes from the nightshift  at the hospital and from never ever sleeping at the  weekend. And from worrying. Lizzie had always  been a worrier. She had nearly always had  something to worry about. These days most of her  worrying was focused on Tom with the Van. 

Like many Irish manuals, Tom with the Van was  both muscular and gross. He had the shanks and  shoulder-blades of a lean and well-worked horse,  but a beach-ball midriff. His shape was therefore  more seal-like, more amphibian, than fully bipedal.  Nothing would have been more natural to Tom than  to slop along mud-flats on his belly, half-in and half out of the sea, propelled by his podgy, flipper-like  arms. Especially if that sea was made of cider. 

But by now he had been nearly three months off the  piss. He was due to get his ninety day achievement  key-ring at the lunchtime meeting of AA in St John  of God’s in Stillorgan on Stephen’s Day. The fact  that it was to be his fourth, or fifth, ninety day  achievement medal, did not in any way detract from  its significance. Or so he kept being told at the mass length meetings by others slightly less brain 

damaged than himself. ‘Each day sober is a miracle  for a drunk,’ was one of the mantras the chorus of  ex-and/or soon-to-be-again drunkards continuously drilled each other with, meeting after meeting, day  after day, decade upon decade. A miracle!  Miraculous Tom! The miracle of Tom, of Tom with  the Van. It had a ring to it, didn’t it? 

While stuck in traffic mornings, afternoons, and  evenings during the weeks leading up to the  holidays, Tom found himself daydreaming a  lot about receiving the keyring and the uplifting  ritual applause that would accompany it. This was  the motivation he needed to make it through the  excruciatingly boozy holiday season without  leaping off the wagon. He luxuriated in the dozens  of encouraging hugs and congratulatory  handshakes he had coming to him from tweedy old timers, the ones who stood in silent rooms in boxy  homes before secretly laughing mirrors, shining up  their liver-stains like the character-giving blotches  on wooden antiques, before marching out to preach  the sober way to the demented. These old  missioners promised him that everything they had  could be his, if only he stayed away from that first  drink, a day at a time, or a minute at a time if needs  be, for the rest of his life. It was that simple, that  rewarding. 

Everyone with an input—counsellors, family, boss,  mates—said Tom was doing well. He even said so  himself, quite regularly.  ‘I’m doing well, amn’t I not?’ he would inquire of  Lizzie, softly, as they were drifting off to sleep  together after a long joint and a short ride, each  leaving one lazy eye open to be mesmerised by the  glutinous gyrations of the lava-lamp, or to stare up  at the slime-green luminous stars a previous tenant  had stuck to the ceiling. 

‘Yes, you’re doing well,’ she told him. 'Very well  indeed, babes. Keep it up now though won’t you  not?’ 

‘I will. Don’t you worry, love of mine.’ 

Then they would squeeze each other’s sticky hands  and gaze into each other’s bloodshot eyes and  maybe even go at it again, or at least think about  going at it again. 

Because of Tom’s new sober reliability, Christmas  Day was going to be very special this year. The  nearest thing to a declaration of intentions. An  engagement to be engaged, sort of. If everything  worked out, only good things would follow for the  two of them. Not that they would be getting  married or anything as old-fashioned or  uneconomical as that. They would just move on to  the stage many of their friends were already at,  saving up for a deposit for a house together. And,  yes, Lizzie had an idea of where, at a stretch, they  might be able to afford, and some ideas on interior  decoration, and on what organic greens would  sprout out of the tidy drillrows in the vegetable and  herb garden out the back. 

The agreed Christmas Day timetable was as follows:  Tom with the Van would collect his mom from the  home in the morning as soon as the 8 o’clock  Yuletide mass in there had ended. Then he would  van her to Glasnevin graveyard to say hello to all  her friends and relations. Then they would zip  down to Lizzie to start into the ceremonial meal at  midday on the dot. 

Tom kept telling Lizzie how much he was looking  forward to sharing the first Christmas of his new life  with the female of his dreams:  

‘A recovering drunk is supposed to have one happy  vision to focus on and keep him sober. whenever  thoughts of booze assault him I always think of  sitting by an open fire with one arm around the  woman who brought me into the world, and the  other around the woman I hope and pray will be  seeing me out of it. I imagine us there in the heat  and glow, cuddling and chatting and keeping each  other company, forever and ever.’ ‘Aw shucks, I’m so touched to be one half of your  antibooze charm,’ said Lizzie, and she meant it. 

Tom broke out on Christmas Eve. The mother never  got collected from the home on Christmas morning.  She didn’t notice. She was past noticing anything.  Lizzie tried ringing Tom dozens of times, always  going straight to message. Then she started ringing  round friends for clues and traces. No one knew  anything, or so they said. She heard a lot of children  in the background of the calls, laughing, crying,  babbling, whining. 

The last time she tried Tom’s mobile she found the  messaging service’s language had changed, the  accent having deepened in an easterly direction,  towards somewhere a lot colder and darker than  here. She hung up, quitting the Tomhunt, switched  off the phone and exiled it to the very bottom of her  handbag, burying it under tampons and condoms  and fags and codeines and a jumble of other spares  and necessaries. 

She sat on the beanbag in front of the TV eating  brandy-soaked pudding out of a plastic bowl. Then  she drank the wine and vodka she had been hiding  from Tom. No need to hide it anymore. Around nine  o’clock in the evening she had a paralytic tantrum and tore the burnt turkey to shreds, spreading it in  bits and pieces all over the kitchen-cum-dining cum-living-cum-bedroom. Stuffing got plastered to  the violet lightshade, the window-sill, the Seraphim  atop the plastic tree. 

Then Lizzie started keening like a stone church full  of island widows after all the curraghy men have  been smashed to unrecoverable pieces by a freak  wave, by a malicious heave from the deep striking  up through a deceivingly tranquil sea. 

Outside the bedsit, through concrete and hedgerow  and drizzle, cats, rats, pigeons, crows and foxes fled  in all directions from Lizzie’s ear-splitting grief. 

A few minutes later, at the very apex of her  screeching, at precisely 21:12, Lizzie picked up a  glossy blue Marks and Spencer Christmas cracker,  embroidered with gold-foil constellations, and  featuring an artist’s impression of the three wise  men, the tall one wearing sunglasses, and pulled it  between her left and right hands. Against the odds  her left hand won. But that fact failed to register  because of what she saw ballooning into existence  out of the Christmas cracker, which was me. In my  birthday suit, of course, except for the cocaine: I was  covered from head to foot in cocaine. A snowman indeed, and an impressive sight I assure you. I had  some cocaine-coated cock on me, for a young lad. 

Now Lizzie was in total shock, without a doubt, and  croaking and spluttering something like a thousand  Amazonian toads being put through a wine press.  Pan-de-fucking-moany-um, what? 

When she recovered herself a bit she started to lick,  to lick off my cocaine caul. She licked my soles and  my ankles and in between my toes. She licked my  heels, my calves, my knees and thighs, my ass-crack  and balls, my belly-button and my nipples and  underneath my arms. She licked my eyelids and my  nostrils and the inside of my ears. She licked every  last particle of cocaine off my hair. She licked and  licked until all the cocaine had been licked off me  and until her tongue was as dry and white and hard  as a stick of chalk. 

Then she had a seizure. 

I know most people are going to say the least I  could have done is stuck around and kept poor  Lizzie company while she was dying, since it was  the depth of her rage and misery and her utter  futility that gave birth to me. But look at the state of  most people. Most people are in no position to give  the likes of me advice. And if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s moral whining, especially from  grown-ups. The best anyone can expect out of this  dump planet is to get our hardcore thrills from it,  right? 

What’s the point in saying or doing otherwise?  Tenderness and all that shite is for hypocrites and  mealy-mouthed muffin-heads. 

I’m with Blake when he says ‘Drive your cart and  your plow over the bones of the dead.’ 

So, without a moment’s dallying, I said my  goodbyes to Mom. Then, right after I took my first  ever indoor piss-in-a-corner, I quickly donned Tom  with the Van’s red-and-white Christmas costume. It  made me look like a crash-diet Santa Claus on  account of its superior girth. I also took Lizzie’s  iPod and the Bose headphones she had bought  herself for Christmas - her only present, as it turned  out. They were part of my inheritance after all. Then  I put on the techno loud, real loud, like the  battledrums of Beelzebub, and then I fucked off in  search of a rave or a brothel and someone to screw. 

I’ve been having a fucking ball of a time ever since,  telling all the twisted skags I meet at parties and  bridewells and prison cells just how it is I got born.