Read Online Peripheral Vision by Paddy O'Reilly - Free Book Online Page B

He is called by his people, I will seek refuge with mine. We will peel apart, the twin strands of DNA untwisting from the helix.

After the Goths
    Before they were even in their bowling shoes, Cody started on the stories. He was talking about back when Dan was fifteen and he was fourteen, and his brother would swoop out of the house at night like a bat in his long black coat and smoky eyeliner. Around dawn, Cody would wake to Dan’s footfalls along the hall and his bedroom door clicking shut, followed by the muffled thump of his clothes hitting the floor.
    â€˜Strike coming up!’ Dan’s girlfriend, Hannah, called out. She chose a pocked maroon bowling ball from the rack and balanced it on her upturned fingers. Standing with her toes on the line at the start of the lane, she swung her arm back and threw the ball. It bounced twice on the wooden floor before slumping into the gutter. Above their heads a cartoon figure popped up on the video screen and shouted, ‘Bummer!’
    Cody had a plastic bag with a change of clothes sitting beside the bench. His ticket and passport were in his pocket and his luggage was in Dan’s car. In six hours he would be taking off to America.
    â€˜Did you ever wear the Man Skirt?’ Cody asked Dan loudly. He turned to Hannah and his own date. ‘I saw it in his room. A symbol of our faith and our deviancy , the label said. It had a “discreet zip fly” in the front,’ he said, rolling his eyes and making exaggerated quote marks with his fingers.
    Cody told the Goth stories more often than he should, but he knew they would always get a laugh. And those days were still so vivid to him, ten years later, that he could almost smell Dan’s clove hair oil and the sweet scented wax of the candles burning in his room.
    â€˜It was a bit of fun. Not a big deal.’ Dan spoke in a murmur directed at Cody.
    Cody couldn’t stop.
    â€˜What about the vibrating tongue ring? I always wondered which lucky girl you tried that on. Was it the fat one who used to recite death poetry in your room?’
    Dan kept staring at the bowlers in the next lane as he sipped his beer.
    Cody needed to say one more thing, and he needed to say it tonight, before he went away.
    â€˜She died the next year,’ he told the girls. ‘The fat one. She offed herself.’
    â€˜Oh my God,’ Hannah whispered. ‘How did she do it?’
    â€˜Whoa,’ Cody’s date said. She opened her mouth as if to go on, but closed it again. After a moment, she walked to the ball return rack and picked up bowling balls one after another, testing their weight, while the others kept talking.
    â€˜Wrists,’ Dan said. ‘Do we have to talk about this?’
    â€˜How old was she?’ Hannah asked.
    â€˜I really would rather talk about something else,’ Dan said.
    â€˜Okay, sorry.’ Cody pulled his wallet from his back pocket and checked the notes. He asked if anyone else wanted hot chips, then went to the food counter and watched the girl shovel chips from the bain marie into a cardboard cup. She had black painted fingernails and a thin plastic serving glove on one hand. The nail of her index finger, filed to a sharp point, had pierced the end of the glove. It seemed like everything here was meant to remind him of Dan and the Goths.
    The video screen was blaring out an old-fashioned marching tune when Cody got back to the lane.
    â€˜You should have seen Dan’s fingernails,’ Cody told the girls. ‘There’s a girl at the counter with nails like he used to have. His were much longer though. They were painted black but the polish would peel off like sunburn, and they clicked against each other when he tried to hold the cutlery. After a while he gave up. He picked up pieces of food in his claws and dropped them into his mouth like he was feeding a seal. My dad called him The Vampire.’
    He kept going, describing Dan’s friends, the