I Get More Than Chocolate Stains on My Pants

I live in the moral city of Sodium Glare. It is the most moral city in the world. This is a known thing because when approaching it, there are signs - Sodium Glare – The Most Moral City In The World – writ large.

As Athair demands, I tend the graves of my sisters, neither of whom are dead. We keep their graves immaculate. They are at the end of our garden. I clean the headstones with fairy liquid and hot water. I weed. I place the cheap wreaths which Athair makes on each of them. I pray. And to their souls. In case Athair finds out. It seems impossible that he would, but Athair has a nose on him that would smell a fart in a slurry pit, so better safe than tongueless.

I step into the radome. Athair fiddles with Máthair’s mouth, Máthair gurgles, “mac, mac,” he shrieks, “Máthair said summat, we must bí curamach, she don’t know the world anois.”

“Wh-Wh-Wh-at d-d-d-d—d-did s-s-s-s-s-s-she s-s-say?”, I wander over, stick my head into fridge, scavenging for fodder.

“Nílim cinnte,” Athair says, “it sounded like ɡäbəldēˌɡo͞ok, but we must be cinnte.”

I sludge treacly sauce on fodder, scald it in the microwave, sit on the cold Aga to gobble.

“Ní féidir leat sit as a good citizen might? Táimid go maith citizens,” Athair says.

I chaw on hot batter say, “n-n-no r-r-r-room,” pointing at the table with spoon. We have only one chair at the table, Athair reckons eating alone is good for perfect conversation.

“Suffering Suckatash,” Athair says, “do dheartháir will move.”

“He’s too heavy,” I shrug.

“Aieee! Aieee!,” Athair says and lifts Really Good Boy with great difficulty, plonks him in one of the wheelchairs. “Siugh Síos,” Athair says.

I huff into the chair, continue chawing with head down, I cannot look at him sat in the wheelchair. The giant stone that Athair wants to believe is my brother. Athair is a very poor sculptor, the boulder looks no better than when it was still wild and strewn at the edge of the lough. Athair hefted it up the boreen on the back of a cow that he had rustled from the Gobbins’ field. He had worked on the boulder night after long ponderous night, hewing it into the shape of my brother, October. Athair had covered it in a pullover, lightbulbs for eyes, mouth painted on, the end of a mop for hair.

I must play along. Athair is not to be crossed.

Before Máthair came home, she would escape from our local asylum on Friday nights, rap on my window, until I let her in. I would have to dress as me, then as my brother. She would cross examine us both –

“Where is your father?”

“I don’t know.”

“Get your brother.”

There was a six-door wardrobe running the length of the wall. I would go in one end and appear out the other as October.

“Bad Boy, you were always my favorite, where is your father?”

“I don’t know Mama.”

“You are a little lying whore, get me your sister.”

I would reappear as myself. This would go on for hours, until I was both myself and October together. At sun up, she would crawl out the window to the asylum. Later, she took to ransacking the house, searching for Athair, searching for answers, searching for God knows what, he had to give her something, or so she thought.

Way back when our little sand castle home was a sanctuary, Máthair was something of a King of Sodium Glare. She was a rock and roll star. She had written a song, ‘I Get More Than Chocolate Stains on My Pants.’ It had charted, things were happening, once. We never saw her. She was out there somewhere in the world being a rock star. She returned, a shell, possessing a superhuman ability to hide in our small house and large garden. I would find her in the garden, drenched and shivering, lost and scared. I would lead her by the hand, as a toddler to her cot, strip her, towel dry her, help her into pajamas with giraffes on them. She would seek the sleep of the bewildered.

“Don’t be afraid of her,” Athair had said, “any of her.”

She once was a beautiful thing. I have to see her as that. As a young pretty singer songwriter, guitar on her back, the windows of Main Street reflecting an always smiling lass with prominent teeth, high cheekbones, long black hair, dressed in a little denim suit. It’s hard to see her as that. It’s hard to equate her with the woman who lived in the asylum, Pilgrim State. The woman that could not be sedated no matter what they pumped into her. The woman who escaped and ransacked our house. The woman who cannot remember that her son had his tongue cut off with a scissors.

Máthair was born in the dying minutes of 1969. No-one came to claim her. She lived in the Lying-in Hospital Dispensary until the dying days of 1979. She escaped. She danced in clubs. She sang in clubs. She played guitar on the streets. She was a punk. She formed a band called Stoned City Wrestling Champs. She, an android in Bruce Lee tracksuit, black with a gold stripe, black runners with gold stripes, black motorcycle helmet with studded golden stones, back of her black suit embroidered SCWC in gold. She had it all then she met Athair in the dying minutes of 1989 and she soon had none of it.

I arrived in February and October in October, Irish twins. We were the youngest of five. We had two older sisters and one older brother. We were born on the same day that the Sodium Glare Head Buck Cats voted to turn Sodium Glare into the most moral city in the world. Years later, when Máthair came back from the world, she was hauled in and cross-examined by the Language Catchers. They demanded to know what the title – ‘I Get More Than Chocolate Stains on My Pants’ meant. What was the More? they asked She told them it was yoghurt or banana or mayonnaise. They wondered, was it? She told them that it was a song about a boy who mitches school in the picture house. He eats his lunch in the dark. His lunch dribbles onto his trousers. He must hide the stains or his mother will find out that he was in the picture house.

On the day we began secondary school, an ambulance arrived, women in green uniforms peering in the window. They relished taking Máthair away. She screamed and kicked. I watched the woman on the ground, writhing. Sodium Glare was erupting. The Giant Locusts never left the streets, they carried spotlights, shining them in people’s windows. If they found you doing anything that they thought you should not be doing, you were dragged out. They did not beat you, they did not kill you, they just told everyone what you did, and the masses castigated you, said awful things about you, called you an animal, a subhuman, a beast, everyone abandoned you, the masses ceaselessly talked about your animal nature, stated that you were filth, and not allowed to associate with proper citizenry, wherever you go, people nudged one another and looked at you askance, some people may think you not a toad, but they will call you a toad, because they fear if they do not they will be branded a toad and be treated like they see you been treated, so, they point at you, leer at you and say “Look at that filthy toad!” They don’t need to kill you, many times you end up killing yourself. Or become a recluse. Or become insane. Or allow yourself to be their toad. Anyway, they get to do to you what they wanted - cease you.

Years later, they returned Máthair to us. A changed woman. Athair had changed too. He quality surveyed every syllable that came out of his mouth. He quality surveyed every syllable that came out of all of our mouths. He moved us all out of our house and into the radome, so that he could monitor us all day. There were no rooms in the radome, just one large open space. Even the toilet and shower had no walls. If we went into town, which we rarely did, we went together.

My two sisters disappeared. Athair told everyone that they drowned on the lake. We buried empty coffins. My older brother hung himself. The Giant Locusts had caught him using contentious words to win Scrabble. Athair told everyone that he was doing really well across the water.

Toads became the victim of a massive collective projection imposed upon them by the Giant Locusts of Sodium Glare. Toads are brazen, so they need to be dealt with, to be stamped on and squelched. It had reached the stage, if you did not look like a locust, they looked at you funny, they interrogated you, they were quick to ill temper, they accessed everything you ever said, wrote or thought, they did not understand jokes, they did not bother with context, they thought logic cumbersome, they assumed the position that every action defined the person, they did not consider history of character, they reckoned that if you foul up even once, you must be punished, they shined their spotlights everywhere, they wrenched people out of the shadows, they flung people onto stages and needled them, probed them, toyed and played with them, then they would pitch you out, now a pariah to society, you could roam the darkness on the edge of town or you could bow your head under the Sodium Glare, either way you were no longer part of their tribe, you were an outsider, you were on your own, you were a figure of mirth or derision or both.

October, brave as a honey badger, was a rarity. He was one of the very few in the city who was willing to resist the Giant Locusts. He did it for the love of Chuck “Five Heads” Cassidy. Five Heads was a mover and shaker in The Independent Order of Oddfellows, they who resisted the Locusts. October had never displayed any discontent towards the Locusts, indeed I always reckoned him to be a supporter of what they stood for. But, after he fell in love with Five Heads, he signed up to the Oddfellows and began graffitiing walls of the town with slogans. They were usually matchhead small, just the Oddfellow logo or some tiny lettering of banned words. Five Heads was always rabbiting on about the necessity for a monumental act. To impress him, October, in three-foot letters, plastered -

Is féidir le do theanga dearg ollmhór mo thóin mhór a phógadh

on the walls of city hall.

Nobody knew who did it, except Athair. It would have been better for October, if everyone had known what it meant except Athair. Because Athair cut out October’s tongue with a scissors and cut his thumbs off with a garden shears.

Why did Athair do such a thing to his son? Well, Athair was a model citizen. Such a model citizen that the Giant Locusts never visited the radome. They had no reason to. Athair had received ten consecutive Red Tongue Certificates from the Oifig na nGlacadóirí Teanga. A record. They had even sent Máthair back to us. We were a model family. Athair had begun his perfect behaviour from fear of the Giant Locusts, it morphed into a pride and then an obsession. He could not face the shame of siring a son who would do such a thing. So, he took measures to ensure that it would not happen again.

October had worn a notebook tied around his neck with a little biro stuck into its spiral. He hardly ever wrote on it. One night, he scrawled on it and I read -

“If I chopped my fingers off, I would no longer be able to tell anyone, anything.”

In the morning he was gone. Athair was terrified about what October might do. October used to go to the graveyard at night to give Five Heads pleasure. I went to meet Five Heads to see did he know where October was.

“What the hell did he do?” Five Heads hissed.

I shrugged, “do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t damn know where he is.”

The word cut through the air. I hadn’t heard a curse word in years.

“What he painted, what does it mean?” Five Heads spat.

I knew what it meant but I shrugged. I guess October had over achieved on the Independent Order of Odd Fellows brief. Few knew the ancient tongue, that’s why Athair used it, so he could belt and brace our model citizenry. No Locusts knew the ancient tongue, but they knew it could not be good. The Language Catchers had painted over the gigantic letters, but people had seen it and were thinking, thinking what those letters might mean. The heat had come on the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. They were mad at October. But they must not have shipped him, because The Language Catchers did not visit the radome.

Athair however, remained terrified that they could be listening to us. So, he had dragged in the boulder and named it Really Good Boy and we had to pretend that it was October. I played along. I valued my tongue. My stammer was an invention, I used it with Athair, so that I had time to choose words that would not offend him. Not offending him was getting tougher and tougher. With October gone and Máthair spouting nothing but gibberish, it was just me and Athair. After the graffiti incident, he rarely allowed me leave the radome, keeping his eye on me constantly. Waking, I would see him watching me, monitoring my dreams. The best I could hope for was that he would die soon and set me free.

He didn’t die soon. He lived for years. So, we lived for years under his regime. Máthair expended, we at last had a body to bury. My pretended stammer got so bad that even Athair didn’t bother with me anymore. He allowed me ramble outside the radome, I was a poor fool to him that nobody could understand, so he no longer cared who I met. I was the perfect citizen of Sodium Glare, the most moral city in the world.