In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan Read Free Book Online

really had reached out and maybe helped save a life, then that was great, so much the better. All he wanted was for her to be happy. But deep down, they both knew that he wouldn’t go.
    Staying was partly down to the fact that this was a place he knew better than anywhere else in the country, but it had even more to do with the fact that she was there, Melissa, light of his one thing, fire of his other. She was not perfect, of course, but who in the world was, and when she smiled all the bothers slipped away, all the ragged clothes and the dirty hair, all the bad thoughts that nibbled with such fever at her mind. When she smiled she was as pretty as a country morning and that is a memory far more precious than gold. He stayed because of her, and even though she has been gone a long time now, three years, he continues to stay. The reasons for his staying have shifted somewhat, but they have not diminished. The lights may have dimmed, but that is all.
    Life out here on the street is defined by the empty stretches, the torpid meandering of darkness into day and then slowly back again. That emptiness breaks a body down, ravages a quick mind down to the slowest liveable beat, but it serves to brilliantly heighten the moments of brilliance and dream, the punctuations of terrible night-time violence and the occasional offered smile. Johnny walks the streets and collects smiles, gathers them up and stores them in his many pockets and in the folds of his clothes, sporting them like badges. Sometimes he is convinced that, worn in such a way, the smiles will protect him from the worst that the dog days have to bring, though they didn’t help at all on the morning that Melissa was found. Terrible things happen in every city. When so many people are caged together and armed to the teeth with money and fear, the odds are good that someone in the crowd will be stewing bad thoughts. But even knowing that, even braced against it, it hurts like hell’s pitchfork when it stabs your life asunder. What happened to Melissa settled in that bad rocky place far beyond the realms of terrible, but what it did not do was to chase him away and off these streets because now these streets are all he has, they are where he had met and come to know her, and they are where he can continue to savour even the merest hint of that thing, whether it was love or something as close as bedamned to love, that they had once been so blessed to share. She is three years gone, but out here he can still feel their closeness, perhaps not to the flesh and bones of her, but at the very least to her ghost. That, at the very least, because she haunts this city now.
    To his knowledge, there had been no funeral. They don’t bother, generally, not for the likes of her, not unless a priest or church minister intervenes. Two men had come, police, but of a different variety than those who were already crowding the scene. Armed with a black nylon sack that zipped all the way up the front and shut with an ugly snap, there was nothing gentle or sympathetic about the way they gathered her up and loaded her into the back of their grey, windowless van, nothing even the least bit compassionate. One was black-skinned with a neatly-trimmed goatee beard and the other was white and wore very delicate wire-framed glasses, but essentially they were mirror images of one another. Large men, here to take care of some dirty business. They dressed the same, in dark grey overalls and heavy coats, and they pulled on gloves and bagged Melissa up like they were dealing with a spill of trash. Their faces registered nothing, which somehow made the whole act even worse. So, no funeral, or none that Johnny was aware of, but that was all right. Melissa had never been much for the business side of religion, though he knew that she did like to pray, that she did take comfort in it, not in a churchy sort of way or anything, but in her own manner of simply talking to God, asking him for things and