And everything goes quiet

Noah says, What if I told you something happy?

There’s no twists here. Nothing that will keep you thinking. It will warm your heart though, but you need to listen to me.

He starts his story with, When His only son sacrificed himself for humanity—

Noah’s story made me think of my friend, who miscarried three times. On the third time, the hospital told her that she shouldn’t have kids anymore because there’s a tiny chance she might miscarry herself. Like, never? She asked.

She had thorns on her fingers that evening, ripping up the sofa until the lounge chairs turned into clouds.

I thought of my best friend Donny, and then I thought of his face seconds before he fell from the bridge. He had two strands of hair on his face. One fluttering over his lips, and the other over his left eye. He looked tired. We all wake up with sleep in our eyes and on that day he fell asleep with it. Donny, the damn frugal bastard, saved up at least five hundred quid and in his suicide note directed it towards the Samaritans. He left it jammed beneath a 330ml bottle of beer on his bedside table.

I thought of my father passing away, the same age I am now, from colon cancer. It was rare, but expected after six months of chemotherapy. I remember him in the morning rattling the shower rails with the bathroom door locked. I think he didn’t know we could hear him. My mum sang me a song and spun herself down the stairs and toasted waffles, which were my favourite, and then dad joined us later with fresh eyes.

I thought of Janie and Brian. Brian grew up with me, standing between my scrawny arse and the guys who tried to beat it. This big unloveable lad with his pink cheeks patted me on the head and left-hooked a boy who tried to steal my lunchbox. He met Janie seven years after I got to know him, and she was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, with big eyes and freckles. Her and Brian sat in the cafeteria and leaned on each other’s foreheads as they spoon-fed each other discount chips. Two weeks after we finished school, they drove off the road, and the minister told us at the funeral they were hand in hand.

I thought of Noah too. Him stuck in the toilet with bruises on his ribs and shit on his face. They’d stolen his trousers and wrapped up his genitals in toilet paper, like a nappy. What a time to give up, by the communal male-female sinks with your own future marked down by this single event, in a long line of events. When nobody came to help him, he held his crotch and stumbled through the school grounds all the way to the car park where he waited for his mother to pick him up. After that, rumours spread that he’d bought a gun, because his uncle was a farmer and he had a licence.

As if he had the heart.

Now we’re all cooped up on a tiny table in a West End pub, and Noah, unarmed, tells his ‘something happy.’ He says, It’s the awful things we experience that turn us into the ugly people we are, but let’s stay ugly and act beautiful.