Double Talk Read Online Free PDF

didn’t like the way he called me kid. Wallace passed me the joint.
    â€œDon’t tell your mother I let you smoke dope, okay?”
    The joint was very small and thin, nothing like the kind you saw Rasta men smoking on television. I took a few inhales as they had done, making the appropriate choo-choo sounds and holding the smoke deep in my lungs. It tasted sickly.
    â€œSo you stayed with who-was-it-again in Boston?” asked Wallace.
    â€œFrank Dowd,” I said.
    â€œI don’t remember a Frank Dowd.”
    â€œHe was someone my father used to drive with back in the war, when they used to haul timber.” Suddenly I had the urge to tell the story my father used to tell me about Frank. It was not like me to want to tell stories. Also, for some reason, I felt compelled — perhaps for Wallace’s benefit — to tell it exactly as my father would have told it.
    â€œI remember one night we were carrying a load of pit props from Wexford to Navan,” I began. “I had a helper with me that day: Frank Dowd. A nice fella, Frank, but awful excitable. Bleb, some of the lads called him because he had this long beak nose and when it was cold he always had a drop of clear snot on the tip of it. We’d been on the road all day. McClusky’s, the crowd we were hauling timber for, had some awful junk heaps on the road. They didn’t give a tuppenny damn for the drivers. It was all piece work at that time, too, so every delay cost us. The lorry had broken down outside Enniscorthy that morning and we had to spend half the day waiting for them to come with the part to fix it. It was past midnight when we arrived at a boarding a house I knew about. The landlady, God bless her, Mrs. Gerraghty, I remember she stuck her head out the top window and said she had no bed for us unless we would share a double bed with another driver who was there for the night. We said we didn’t mind if he didn’t mind. ‘He won’t mind,’ she said, ‘because he’s already in the bed and sound asleep. He’s a famous sleeper.’ So we went up anyway and there was your man in the bed and we got in one on either side of him. Well, we were no sooner in than didn’t he start up snoring. Oh Mother of God, you should have heard him. I can still see him with his head thrown back and his mouth wide open. A lawn mower had nothing on him. No exaggeration now, but he made the glass rattle in the windows. I’m not kidding you. We tried everything. We slept with pillows over our ears. We poked at him and prodded at him and he’d stop for a while but then start up again, just as we were drifting off to sleep. It was cruel altogether. I suppose, after hours of tossing and turning and listening to your man, Frank decided he’d had enough. I must have drifted off because the next thing you know I felt someone standing up on the bed. I looked up and there was Frank above, squinting like he was taking aim. And the next thing you know, didn’t he piss down into your man’s open mouth! Well, bucko woke up with such a start. ‘Jeethes. Jeethes,’ he said. He had some kind of lisp or an accent. ‘Now, ya bastard,’ shouted Frank. ‘That’ll put a stop to you!’ And of course the man had no idea who we were. Well, I’ll tell you we took off out of there like a shot. It was a shocking thing to do really, when you think about it.”
    They were all buckled over laughing on the other side of the table, Fabian wheezing like a faulty car ignition. I was a hit. And then right at the high point, so to speak, I felt cold fingers creeping through my body and my brain. My hands and feet were icy cold. My mouth was dry. My prick felt both shrivelled and hard, like some kind of parody of an erection. A shock of fear and nervousness rolled through me and something else that I didn’t have a name for. I was suddenly afraid that my father’s story about Frank