Comma Translation

Inside Out

by Robert Philbin

Tyler put a chisel through Mr Woodward’s hand. The blood was like red porridge and kind of bubbled out.

After that, he spent the school year bouncing a rubber ball from Kosovo Kevin’s roof.

If a pensioner shuffled past to get to the shop, Tyler would stop bouncing and greet them with ‘Morning’ and a nod, and sometimes he would know their names. If a parent of a kid he knew walked underneath, he would ask if that kid was allowed out to play. If Nappy Woman walked past he would bark at her until she went away. If a girl skipped by, he would throw the ball near them and they always gave it back saying, ‘Eee, fuck off, Tyler’. If a boy went past, he’d keep bouncing and sometimes say ‘Faggot’ or ‘Shitbag’, then spit huge blobs of saliva, like jellyfish, onto the grid below.

I knew all this, because it was me who walked past him the most. Every weekday I posted the Echo through the letterboxes around Croxteth Estate. Kosovo Kevin paid me twenty pound a week for it and Tyler took ten from me every time.

‘Giz me money, Altar boy.’

With that ten pounds he would buy all the best sweets from Kosovo Kevin and then sell them from the roof for double the price. If Tyler was selling, no kids ever bought from the store. He threatened to set his rottweiler onto them – or onto their dogs.

One Friday though, Tyler let me go. All he said was, ‘Make sure you save that up, Gay-boy.’

For the next six Fridays he said the same, and I did what he said. I saved a hundred pounds.

Then mum took me to Aunt Rosie’s in Spain for a week. I bought a pen knife with my name engraved on it and spent the rest on a Safari trip.

When I got back Tyler was gone.

I walked into the shop and the door didn’t make its little – Doon-dun. The loaves of Warburton’s weren’t arranged in order of colour anymore, but randomly stacked on top of one another like Lego bricks. The windows were open and the whole shop felt like the box where Kosovo Kevin used to keep his Mr Freezies.

A woman with a brown face was behind the counter.

‘Where’s Kosovo Kevin?’
‘Who?’
‘The man, I don’t know his name.’
‘I’m sorry then, I can’t help you.’
‘He used to work here.’
‘Mr Solana is gone now.’
‘So what am I going to do then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m the paper boy.’
‘We already have a paper boy.’

The newspapers on the counter blew open and I spied Billie Piper’s boobs. The brown woman’s hair didn’t blow around. It was stuck to her head like the way mum got hers done in Spain. The wind had come in through the door and brought Tyler inside with it.

The yellow bag didn’t look as big on him as it did on me.

‘Oh hello there, Joe? It is Joe, isn’t it?’ He said with a gobstopper trying to poke out from his cheek. ‘Have a good holiday? You caught the sun didn’t you?’

On the way out, I knocked into his shoulder, the way he used to do to me in school, then pushed the pyramid of tinned beans over.

His dog was tied to the lamppost. I looked back through the shop window and Tyler was tidying the cans up off the floor, the brown woman was on the phone. I gave the mutt a Rocky to eat while I cut its lead with my new knife.

I didn’t know what I was going to do; my legs went all floppy, like when I got off the plane.

The estate is one big circle, I done a lap and the dog started to wheeze, like mum. All the kids from Emmaus were scared of us as we went past the school.

I sat down on the mud path behind the chippy and Nappy Woman came around the corner. She walked like I imagine a crab would walk if it discovered the forward direction. She stopped when she saw me. She had a grey head, arms like rhino skin and white legs like an emu. Her veins were pushing out from underneath the skin – the dinner lady in school had the same legs. She wore a blue vest top, black leather gloves and a flowery mini skirt and was having a yellow shit in the path. It splattered on her socks. Chicken-korma.

She hobbled past, mumbling to herself. I stood and offered her the dog’s lead as well as my knife, like those people hold out the water in the marathons. She took them without saying anything, and booted the dog behind its legs with each step.

I climbed up onto Kosovo Kevin’s roof – or now Brown Woman’s roof. I could see half of the estate. Green gardens, like the thick sliced loaves and orange houses like the mediums. Nappy Woman’s garden was grey and was the closest to me.

She used the knife. The mutt had been peeled from the spine as if unzipped from the arse to head. Bones, thin yellow bones the colour of a smoker’s finger tips, and muscles, shiny burgundy muscles the colour of dad’s Escort, slipped in and out of each other as it circled in the middle of her yard, but not in a chase-your-tail kind of way. It was in a much wider circle than that.