Utterly Monkey by Nick Laird Read Free Book Online Page A

Macklin’s river, feeling sated and lazy and sexy, Janice told Geordie to meet her back at the playground at two, and to bring a bag. She went back to work and told old soft Mr Martin that she wasn’t well. Woman’s problems. He was getting ready to complain when she pushed her chest up against him and made as if to cry. He told her to go straight home and get to bed. They could managewithout her. She drove to the semi-detached house at the edge of the Dungiven estate she shared with her parents, Malandra and a varying number of brothers (Budgie’s marriage had faltered, as predicted, almost immediately, and Jackie and little snub-nosed Greer Junior lived with her mother over in Coagh, and Chicken had just moved across town into his girlfriend Jenny’s flat which was, too conveniently, above the offy). She told her mother, who was sitting at the dining-room table doing a jigsaw of two poodles in a pram, that she’d period pains, and needed to take a bath and some aspirin. Her mother, holding two edge pieces between her pursed lips, looked up, nodded and then looked down again. Some old sitcom was on the telly. Janice thudded up the stairs into her room and emptied her toilet bag onto her bed. She carried it into the bathroom and set it on the edge of the bath. She leant against the sink and looked at herself. The mirror was overcast with dust and constellated with stray white flecks of toothpaste. Janice thought how old she looked. She stretched the skin at the side of her eyes to flatten the little crow’s feet that were appearing. She must remember to wear her glasses more when she drove, not squint so much. And she should stop smoking, they say that’s not good for the skin. She turned and looked at herself from the side. Her breasts were still high and still firm, for breasts that size. She cupped them as if weighing them, and thought how last week some asshole down at the building site on the Benaghy Road had shouted after her, as she passed on the way to the solarium at lunchtime, You don’t get many of them to the pound. She felt like kneeing him in the balls as she had Budgie, when he’d tried to get into her room three yearsago, drunk. No way José. She hadn’t let him in since she was sixteen and he never tried any more. She lifted her top. Her stomach was still flat and still hard. Good. She could do with losing some weight off her bum she decided, and suddenly, a little viciously, tugged off her top and wriggled out of her skirt and knickers. She stepped cleanly out of the puddled clothes, and looked at the pale mass of herself again. Skin and then inside that flesh and inside that bone and then inside that what? Didn’t people say the marrow of the bone? People had bone marrow transplants didn’t they? As she stood and stared in the mirror she saw her face waver and emerge as if it was fifty years old. Fleshy cheeks, a corrugated brow, eyelids thickened and heavy. She blinked and came back to herself. You’re getting old Janice, she thought, you’re beginning to die.
    She opened the bathroom cabinet. A dimpled strip of Boots paracetamol clattered into the sink, triggering a loose scree of assorted plasters. An ancient bottle of Calpol, still in its stained cardboard sheath, stood at the back of the top shelf. A stippled pink ankle support covered some squat and sturdy pill bottles. It dated from the time Budgie, up playing on ‘the pitch’ (really a partly gravelled field behind the Costcutters which had been earmarked for a car park that never appeared) had his ankle sprained by a dangerous tackle from Jackie McMenemy. That was the first time Budgie had been in trouble, apparently, according to Brewster, as Janice had only been one or two then. As payback Budgie had lifted a broken brick from the pile they were using for one of the goalposts, hobbled over to Jackie, who was sitting cross-legged nursing his own ankle, and smashed it inhis face. Her dad had given the McMenemys money so that Budgie