Coffee and Sugar by C. Sean McGee (primary phonics .txt) 📖

in the light and blocking the entrance, where nine older boys, some of them young men and one of them; the one with the booming voice, hardly a boy.

“You know, when I was in school, kids like you wanted to pick on kids like me. Put him down,” said the man with the booming voice before continuing, “you see, I was just like him, different, special. But you and all the little cunts like you, you gang together and you tried to pick on kids like me, like my friend here, because you’re not special, you’re ordinary. You think havin a mum and dad that tuck you in every night and mash up your potatoes and dice up your steak makes you special, it makes you ordinary. And you know what happens when you get older? Nothin. You still have someone to cut up your food and hold your willy when you pee and you still need mum and dad to make you feel safe when you’re not with your little faggot friends. Come ere buddy” he said to the boy now cowering on the floor, waving his hand gentle and invitingly, giving a consoling stare while around the gargantuan man, there stood another eight boys and men of all ages all dressed in big black combat boots with white laces, jeans that ended strangely above their boots so that their white socks were plainly visible, red braces holding their jeans to their waist and dark blue bomber jackets with swastikas and crucifixes branded all of the arms and zipper in button and badges and well sewn patches.

The boy lifted himself shakily. He had small bits of faeces on his forehead and in his hair and he had wet himself during the ordeal.

“Hold on little buddy. His money, pick it up for him” said the booming voice to the group of trembling boys.

One of the mean boys leant down and collected the coins from the ground that were now covered in urine.

“Clean them before giving them back. Don’t be rude” said the booming voice.

The boy went to wipe them on his shirt before the man with the booming voice stamped his boot on the floor and like a clap of thunder, scaring all of the boys into attention.

“Not with your shirt. Wash em. In your mouth” he said.

The mean boy took the coins and put them inside his mouth and washed them around, gagging as he did with the flavour of urine stinging his tastebuds.

“Come ere buddy” the man said, taking the boy close to his enormous frame, kneeling on one knee and resting a trusting, confident arm across the boy’s shoulder.

The boy looked to the man and felt the same calm that he would receive whenever his grandmother chased away the spooks that were camping beneath his bed.

“You know, being special is a good thing. It’s good to be different. You’re mum and dad died and that sucks but life is like that. You’re not alone though. You got family. We’re your family” he said, stretching his arm around and showing off the other boys and men who stood staunch, glaring at the mean boys like pit-bulls resting upon a single command.

The boy smiled, the man with the booming voice clicked his fingers and the other boys and men; primed to attack, did just that. They leapt from where they stood, taking to each mean boy in pairs, taking them by the arms and legs and swinging their limp bodies into walls, doors, porcelain bowls and smashing their faces against the massive mirror that hanged above the seven small sinks along the far wall.

They stomped and kicked and very quickly, the mean boys went from tears and screaming to whimpering and then silence as black combat boots came crushing down on their hands and backs and faces and their blood gushed from their body as quick as their bravado as the boys and men followed the mean children’s lead and lined up along the crumpled children and urinated all over them.

As the boy walked out of the toilet under the wing of the man with the booming voice, he caught sight of his own reflection, seeing the end of years of torment from these cruel children that were dressed up as educated and moral and middle class but were as mean and vile and filthy as any sewer rat. He caught in his own reflection, the end of his youth marked with a brown stain across his forehead.

On the other side of the door he was much older and as they passed through, Joao could see the young boy was now a young man and he was no longer weak and feeble, shivering to himself at the thought of violence, threat or altercation. Now looking in the mirror, he could see that this young man was the threat, he was violence and he was altercation.

“Your father would have been so proud of you and your mother too” said The Grandmother, her voice old and crackling, spoken with a pinch of pride and a dash of imminent shame which; from the silence that trailed her words like an aftershock, welcomed to lash upon the young man’s ears at any moment.

The Nazi said nothing. He continued to dry his body whilst catching the shadow of his grandmother behind his mammoth reflection in the mirror, her small, frail fingers curling around the door, holding it just enough so her voice could enter unchallenged into the room.

“Don’t put it on, please” said The Grandmother.

The Nazi said nothing.

“It’s not the boy I know. It’s not the boy your father would want you to be. You’re better than that. You don’t believe all those things” she said.

“They’re my family” said The Nazi.

“I am your family, not those monsters” said The Grandmother.

The Nazi unchanged his stare, seeming unmoved by the plight of his grandmother whose light breathing now sounded out a light cry and the sadness that ´pulled beneath his conscious sea, spilled anger into his mind and spurred fury at his fists so that his unchanged stare now yielded a heady glare in his eyes that set fire to his blood and had him want to say the worst things imaginable, but he couldn’t.

She was his grandmother and he loved her.

“You don’t need them anymore. They’re no good criminals and they’ll get you in trouble. You should be in school” she said.

“They’re my brothers. They’re my friends. They’re my family. They were the only ones who ever looked out for me” he said.

“What about your mother and father?” she said.

“They’re dead” he yelled back.

“And what about me? You’re the only family I have” she cried out.

The Nazi said nothing.

“If you put that jacket on, you can’t come back here, ever. You’ll be nothing to me. I’ll never want to see you again, do you understand” said The Grandmother, her tears and sadness now overwhelming so that her words spilled from her mother like a torrent of water from a crumbling dam wall.

The Nazi looked beside at the jacket folded neatly over the chair beside his bed and his eyes studied the badges and insignia etched and sewn across it. They were what his identity was built upon, all that he knew and all that he believed in. They were the symbols of strength that flexed in his muscles, beat from his heart and echoed from the fight in his soul.

These symbols took him from being a young child, embossed in torment and ridicule, trampled by the abandon of his mother and father and preyed upon by his need for his adoring grandmother; always being the insect having its wings and limbs torn from its body, to being a young man; confident and strong, a leader, powerful, listened, learned, well spoken, assuring, domineering, hardly a victim, always the threat; a king amongst men.

The Grandmother wept out loud. She collapsed to the floor with her head buried in her hands while the only family she knew walked out of her life, stepping over her frail body and marching out of the house to never return again.

The Grandmother cried.

The Nazi swelled with anger.

When he walked out of the door he was much older, almost the man he was today. He wore the same jacket though many of the badges had been removed. His skin was more scarred, the effect of being accountable for the things he had said and done in his life and more so, for those done by men he longer eluded to being his family.

The Nazi sat alone on a stool.

He had no brothers.

He had no friends.

He had no family.

He was, entirely alone.

All he could do was to sit and stare as his mind rambled like a broken radio, a strange hiss that when he gave it the attention it deserved, became clearer as the sound of his dear grandmother sobbing and weeping as he had stepped over her frail body all those years ago, leaving her alone like his parents had done to him, leaving her alone like he had done to himself.

Joao gasped as he closed the theatre in his mind, seeing once again The Nazi staring him long in his eyes, tapping his fingers away on the counter, looking mean and demanding and short of patience.

He moved his hands to the sink and ran water over his stained fingers, washing away the remnants of this man’s bitter past. He wiped his hands clean and dry and then returned his stare to The Nazi before pressing his fingers gently into a bowl of sugar, one; like the coffee, that only addressed his hands and of which every grain belonged to someone’s history.

When he closed his eyes, his mind was blank. There was no vision at all playing out for him and every grain of sugar seemed to dissipate away from his touch almost as if there were no sweetness at all in this man’s life, nothing at all that would warrant him to will away the shadow of his own death and have him return day after day for more of this existence.

He moved his fingers slowly through the bowl of sugar passing in and out of hundreds of thousands of individual grains and each grain screaming in vile contest as his fingers passed through with not one sweet moment belonging in his life.

Then as he pulled his hands from the bowl, he opened his eyes and caught drift of The Nazi’s stare and saw in him, a look he had seen before and so he closed his eyes again and imagined someone else as his fingers slid through the white grains.

He saw the face of an angry old lady, the one who had stolen from him, lied to him and taken his money and then abused him when he had asked for it back. Her anger was so much like this man; this tattooed, broken, dishevelled lonely man.

The Nice Old Lady with that same vacant look in her eye, defending her sadness with venomous spite. Joao pictured her standing out the front of her store as he had seen her every morning and in every eve when he exited his bus and made his way up the hill to his home. Her arms were folded over her chest pushing her breasts high up into the air and her chin was raise up so that her nostrils flared at Joao as she saluted her disapproval to anyone who passed her store, especially Joao.

She had no friends.

She had no family.

She was; as The Nazi, entirely alone.

Joao smiled to himself thinking that nothing in the world is entirely alone, pinching grains of sugar, small seemingly insignificant grains that would tell this story and remind The Nazi that he was not the only person in the world to have ever felt this way and so he was not alone.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Hey there handsome, you wanna get away?”

Joao was exhausted, the days were so long and every minute seemed like it had a whole week stacked upon its back. In his brief moments of rest, he allowed himself to drift off into light dream, keeping his eyes open