a quietness smothered the room.
From next-door’s backyard we could hear a dog barking. It was Miffy, the pitiful Pomeranian we loved to hate, but still walked a few times a week anyway.
“Sounds like Miffy’s a bit upset,” Rube said after a while.
“Yeah,” and I laughed a bit.
A bit of a lonely bastard. A bit of a lonely bastard.
Rube’s statement reverberated inside me till his voice was like a hammer.
Later, when I got up and sat on the front porch and watched shadows of traffic filter past, I told myself it was okay to be like this, as long as I stayed hungry. It felt like something was arriving in me. It was something I couldn’t see or know or understand. It was just there, mingling into my blood.
Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me.
Even in the night, in bed, they woke me. They painted themselves onto the ceiling.
They burned themselves onto the sheets of memory laid out in my mind.
When I woke up the next day, I wrote the words down, on a torn-up piece of paper. And to me, the world changed color that morning.
WORDS OF CAMERON
The city streets are lined with truth, and I walk through them. Sometimes, they walk through me. Thoughts are like blood sometimes, when I think of women and sex and everything in between. I collect my thoughts as if they will stain me, murder me, and then resurrect me.
I’ve stopped sometimes and felt the world turning, and I think there are hands that turn it.
I guess I think we turn the world ourselves, often making our hands and fingers dirty, and our wrists sore, from the work.
I feel like the world is a factory.
It’s the factory of God’s light and we just work here.
I clock onto the truth — that I’m small in terms of this world, but I’m awake.
Days and nights fight each other. The hours and minutes are the bruises, and as each day passes by, I know that ’m alone.
They say that no one really likes being alone, and I know that I am one of them. Having said that, I think there’s something tough in it. Something stoic and strong and uncensored.
Another truth is that I am an animal. A human animal.
With feral thoughts, and ragged furry hair that reaches for the sky.
God, how I want the skin of women! I want it on my lips and hands and fingers. How I want to taste her…
But then — then—
Beneath that.
That’s not enough!
Yes, when that’s done, I also want the everything that’s her to fill up so much in front of me that it spills and shivers and gives, just like I’m prepared to do myself.
But for now, happiness throws stones.
It guards itself.
I wait.
CHAPTER 2
My oldest brother Steven Wolfe is what you’d call a hard bastard. He’s successful. He’s smart. He’s determined.
The thing with Steve is that nothing will ever stop him. It’s not only in him. It’s on him, around him. You can smell it, sense it. His voice is hard and measured, and everything about him says, “You’re not going to get in my way.” When he talks to people, he’s friendly enough, but the minute they try one on him, forget it. If someone tries to trample him, you’d put your house on it that he’ll do twice the job on them. Steve never forgets.
Me on the other hand.
I’m not really like Steve in that way.
I kind of wander around a lot.
That’s
what I do.
Personally, I think it comes from not having many friends, or in fact, any friends at all, really.
There was a time when I really ached to be a part of a pack of friends. I wanted a bunch of guys I’d be prepared to bleed for. It never happened. When I was younger I had a mate called Greg and he was an okay guy. Actually, we did a lot together. Then we drifted apart. It happens to people all the time, I guess. No big deal. In a way, I’m part of the Wolfe pack, and that’s enough. I know without doubt that I’d bleed for anyone in my family.
Anyplace.
Anytime.
My best mate is Rube.
Sten the other hand, has plenty of friends, but he wouldn’t bleed for any of them, because he wouldn’t trust them to bleed for him. In that way he’s