THE RED BULL

I WAS SCRUBBING a red acrylic paint off a statue of a bull in the sink that a girlfriend had given to me to apologise for cheating on me. She knew I always wanted a bull statue but she thought a red one would look better. Anyways, it was meant to be white and I scrubbed that paint right off and there was beautiful lacquered shiny white underneath. I never managed to totally get the red coloring off its feet - there's felt under the feet.

So, the day I was doing this was the day we were all moving out of our share house. Gared was one of the people living there and he rented the garage space for fifty a week and wasn't on the lease. He used to carry knives around with him but somehow he always handed them over to me when I talked to him; but he'd always find another one somewhere.

Gared used to sit in the garage all day and night playing Xbux games on a machine that I'd lent him. He'd come out into the kitchen between his bouts of whatever it was he did in there and would start "some people talk the talk, but I walk the walk." then he'd walk off back into the garage and you wouldn't see him for a while until there was cake or something in the fridge that he somehow found out about and stole.

I never cared though. Everybody ought to enjoy the pleasures of cake when they can get it. Whatever man.

I was working as a scaffolder at that time and one day it was literally 113 degrees Fahrenheit. I'd been working in that heat for twelve hours that day with a one hour trip on the train each way to the job site.

When I got home I was in pain. My head was spinning and I lay on the lino floor in the loungeroom full of shitty furniture we'd found on the streets. Who have I upset now? I thought, Apollo? I was delirious and needed water badly but opened a beer can instead and it brought my some relief.

"I'm sick of paying for this electricity" Gared said as he appeared above me.

"You don't pay for it, Gared. You pay a flat rate of fifty bucks."

"I want to live out of an ice box - we don't need electricity here."

He cracked one of my beers and started drinking it.

"In fact, we need nothing here, I hate it here! You have a job and you said you would get me a job there too!"

"Yeah I'm working on it Gared man, just wait up. Let me think"

"I want a job! I want to start tomorrow!"

"I'm not the boss but whatever, come along; they can always use someone" and they could. They took just about anyone and put them on trucks to go around and lift heavy steal to create cages around buildings and houses so others could paint and repair, build, pull down, or put roofs on things.

"I'm going to hit you" he said.

"Ok"

And before I knew it, he had hit me. But I always could take a punch. It was only on the side of the head but he put his whole shoulder into it. Gared was much taller than me. I'm short and stocky and Gareth was tall and wired.

I got up off the floor, grabbed him around the waist and threw him out the door and into a hedge in the back yard.

*

The next day when I got home from work Gared was looking in the refrigerator and he had a big scratch up his chest that ended somewhere under his chin.

"You're stronger than you look" he said to me.

I didn't say anything and slumped down on the couch and looked at a DVD case on the floor with no disk inside. There was a picture of a handsome man with a knife on the cover and his face reflected in the knife. AMERICAN PSYCHO. it read underneath the pretty man's face.

Anyways, I still have that white bull statue. It sits on a sideboard I also found on the street and moved into where I live now.

When Gared and I moved out of that house years and years ago we were the last two to leave and (it was actually about fifteen years ago now as I write this) he stole my Xbux. He needed it more than I did, but for some reason I've never forgotten about it.