RuKsaK

It’s possible to walk through three or four vacant streets of little red-brick houses in my hometown without seeing anyone - it makes the sky bigger. You feel less significant than in the cities. Small towns have more misfits, more obvious, palpable sadnesses, not so many blatant human triumphs. The opportunities for social suicide are wider, the chances of it being detected higher. Something as small as twitch or an unsightly birthmark can end you.

Back then we didn't feel this – we were invincible.
------
We saw the old man stretched longways, bent wrongly outside his front door. MetaBryan instantly went to lift him up:
‘Come on RuK. Give me a hand.’

At fifteen I didn’t want to touch an old man, even if he was dying, his last vision probably being the number on his house.

MetaBryan yelled now:
‘Pick up this first-story motherfucker now RuK!’

MetaBryan always shoved chunks into his sentences that woke you into puzzlement. His language was scraped from layers deeper into his head than most peoples' is what he used to say. I just said he spoke weird. It was unavoidable for him, he saw it as a defect, but it fascinated me.

‘He’s heavy Bry.’
‘Yeah, he is. He’s forgotten his life I bet. Lying here, he doesn’t even know he’s not in the womb. Mad old bastard. Better gravity will sort him - heave him up’

We got the crumpled, cardiganed guy to his feet, his armpits hanging on our shoulders. We walked him into his living room, which stank of years of old newpapers, sat him in his armchair. He viewed us, perplexed:
‘You fell back to somewhere backwards and behind you old man.’ Bryan said with joy. ‘We saved you and now you’re back in your nicey-nice upholstery.’
‘Thank you boys. You knew where I was, didn’t you?’ the old man quivered, shining at Bryan.
‘Yeah – but you’re back now. We’ll see ourselves out. You watch some crap TV now and you’ll be fine. It’s the best medicine for a falling brain granddad.’

Bryan was so composed when we left, like he’d found a cheap coin in the street, or something equally commonplace. He even seemed perkier than usual. I wasn’t sure what had just happened. Until many years later it was filed as:
‘We helped an old man who’d fallen over.’
------
MetaBryan was a spectacular looking fifteen-year-old. He had large, brown, confident eyes and lips which communicated primitive messages they shouldn’t to fifteen-year-old girls. So, he was what’s always been labelled:
‘Popular.’

We were best friends, which was a happiness, but strange to me. Girls only looked at me when popular guys made jokes about me. Girls looked at MetaBryan because they felt the twinge of something unsafe.
------
We sat in the coastal, old-ladied café and ordered a coke each and some toast to share, no jam:
‘Bryan – what was all that about?’
‘What was all what about Rukwad?’
‘The old man. I mean that was grim.’
‘He’s slipped back to his first story, I told you that and that’s why you helped.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything Bryan.’
‘Don’t be a mulch – it means everything, but you don’t see it yet. You will and that’s why I like you Rukkiplops. Anyway, got something to tell you.’
‘Go on.’
‘Me and Bren are doing it.’

Bren was Bryan’s trendy and attractive girlfriend of three months. I was hit by two things - MetaBryan’s lack of idiolect in telling me this and the chance that I could finally ask someone what it felt like. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had two more years of exclusively dating my clasped hand, every morning around seven am.

‘What’s it feel like Bry?’
‘RuKsaK - I don’t know if it’s just the angelic-gorgeous, fleshy mess a monkey feels or if there’s a lightening communication from elsewhere, but when I cum into her body it snaps my brain into pieces and the whizz and whir of it makes me so peaceful, so happy.’
‘Wow – erm, guess I’ll have to wait then.’
‘Too right, you will. Anyway, there’s something more Ruk-a-fuck. I’ve also got a problem and need your advice.’

Two more shocks – MetaBryan never had problems and never needed advice. Not from me at least.
------
Next comes MetaBryan’s problem.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Meta-Bryan part 1