Mission Read online

  To the underdog

  Copyright © 2021 by Paul Forrester-O’Neill

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Hookline Books, Bookline & Thinker

  www.hooklinebooks.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Mission by Paul Forrester-O’Neill. -- 1st ed.

  Cover Design: More Visual Ltd

  ISBN 9781838057947

  Part One

  It began on that Saturday morning in early February when John Cassidy sat in his room, his bag packed, his winter boots on, and waited for his father. Every once in a while, he’d stand up and walk over to the window and look out, not because his father was the best father a child could ever wish for, not because he was heroic or even everpresent, but because, in spite of the absence, he was still his father. Now, John, at five and a half years old, didn’t know what that meant. He couldn’t find words to describe it, but it was there all the same.

  His mother, Margaret, and Dwayne, the usurper, stood in the kitchen downstairs. They looked up at the clock. They made drinks. They watched the snow begin to gather on the neighbours’ rooftops. And, as time went on and one cup of coffee melded into the next, Margaret began to plot. At first, it was just a reaction to the lateness. It was plain and ordinary bile, a vent of frustration only. But then, stoked by the disdain that’d started in courtship and grown through pregnancy, childbirth and the few half-hearted years of rearing, it twisted. And, by the time Jack arrived two hours late, at 12.30, with no better excuse than he’d risen late, Margaret’s plan had hardened into something altogether more brutal. She stood on the sidewalk; a coat draped around her shoulders. From somewhere close by came the sound of a wood-saw piercing the frosted air. The car window was halfway down.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s upstairs.”

  “Is he ready?”

  “He doesn’t want to go,” she said.

  “Because I’m late?”

  “No,” she said, the snowflakes starting to fall around her, “… ever. He doesn’t want to see you anymore, Jack. He’s had enough. And he’s got Dwayne now. Why would he want to suffer you for a day every few weeks when he’s got a real man here?”

  The wood-saw wheezed to a stop and, in the sudden, white silence, Jack didn’t know what to say. He was tired. He was hung-over. He’d had a week of fruitless travelling from one town to the next where one person after another had shaken their heads at his shirt boxes and now the situation that he dreaded the most, the crushing monthly exchange of his only child, had just got a thousand times worse.

  “Can I speak to him?”

  “There’s no point. You’d make him feel uncomfortable. Just go and don’t come back. Let him get on with his life. That’s what he wants. That’s what he said.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yes. Now go.”

  The neighbourhood was turning white. Driveways and roofs, lawns and sidewalks, the hoods and trunks of cars. Jack sat there for half an hour at least, the layers of snow forming on the windshield. The window stayed halfway down even though Margaret had turned and walked away after she’d said her piece. The side of his face was cold, his gloveless hands whitening on the wheel. Sometimes he looked over towards the house hoping to see his boy run out, across the snowy path and into the car, but he didn’t. He saw no-one and nothing, because the three inhabitants of the Cassidy household, Margaret, John and new kid, Dwayne, were upstairs.

  “I don’t know the whole reason, honey,” she said, kneeling in front of him as he sat on the bed, “he just said he didn’t want to see you anymore. He said it wasn’t working. He was going away and it would be a whole lot easier for him if you weren’t around. That’s what he said. He didn’t explain.”

  John felt like he’d been punched hard in the stomach. He looked down at the winter boots, at his packed bag next to them on the floor. At just before one o’clock his father drove away from the house for the last time and two hours later, with the snow still falling, his bag still packed and his boots still on, he went downstairs.

  By the time he’d reached his mid-teens John, his mother and Dwayne had moved house no less than four times. The theme of the moves was always hope. Hope for something better, something more solid, whether it was a job for Dwayne, a good neighbourhood or an increased quality of life. And why so many? Because the difference between their version of hope and their reality, in every single case, was always greater than they imagined.

  Firstly, they moved out of the house where John’d grown up because, for his mother, it reminded her of Jack. And she didn’t want that. She wanted somewhere she couldn’t see or feel the presence of her shirt-salesman mistake, no matter that John looked like him, walked like him, and even ate like him. So, based on a job opportunity for Dwayne as an instructor in a fitness centre, they moved. But Margaret didn’t like it. Margaret didn’t like the morning birdsong, or the church bells, or the way the quiet seeped into the house. Margaret got bored and when Margaret got bored, she drank. And when Margaret drank it was to escape whatever reality she found herself in. So, they moved again, to a neighbourhood thirty miles away which meant that Dwayne had to get up an hour earlier just to get to work and where, in the larger bedroom that got the sun in the morning but the glue factory at night, they tried for a child of their own. But it didn’t work out, and when they went to find out why it was, they discovered that Dwayne, for all his fitness regimes, was firing blanks. The news changed them. Margaret started to drink again and Dwayne’s toned façade began to creak under the strain of his impotence. So, they moved again. And then again. And when John was just short of his sixteenth birthday, they were living in a small suburban house on the edge of an industrial city out east.

  For Dwayne, with too many hours to fill and not enough things to fill them with, John was only ever Jack’s son and until that day in the doctor’s surgery, he treated him as if he was an attachment only, a piece of machinery that served little to no purpose. But that afternoon changed everything. From then on, instead of ignoring the boy the way he had, Dwayne started to drag him into the wake of his own resentment. He criticised him. For everything. The way he looked, the way he spoke, the friends he had, all kinds. By the time they’d been in that small suburban house for a year, baiting John was a sport.

  On John’s sixteenth birthday, there was a party in the house. As it was August, it was hot and so the party spilled out into the garden. There were a good thirty guests, including a handful of school friends, neighbours and some of Dwayne’s work colleagues. After the first gifts had been handed out, the fake-marble chess set, the local history book, the T-shirts, it was Dwayne’s turn.

  He walked slowly towards John, a thin pall of barbecue smoke behind him and, with a smile that to everyone else there spoke of kindness and the selfless nurturing of another man’s child, handed him a box. Inside the box, wrapped in tissue paper and smelling deliciously of every gym he’d ever walked into, was a pair of nutbrown boxing gloves. Dwayne undid the laces, squeezed the leather into his fingers and suggested there was little point in having a pair of man-sized gloves unless they were tried out, properly. John knew what was coming.

  A makeshift ring was set up. Towels were fetched, stools brought out from the kitchen and one of Margaret’s garish gold belts was offered up a
s the prize. The MC, a car salesman neighbour, announced the two contestants who nodded they understood the rules, removed their bathrobes and stood face to face in the middle of the garden in shorts. Now, even though Dwayne was at least seventy pounds heavier, though he was bedecked with ranges of body-hair and he himself had a visible rib cage that looked like one of his collected fossil prints on a chalk-white surface, John was prepared.

  The first round he ran. His guard held abnormally high, he watched through the gap between his forearms and gloves as Dwayne pursued him, shoulders hunched, and as the glass was chinked for the end of the first round of three and the crowd laughed and cheered; not one punch had been landed and John’s gloves were as shiny and as squeaky as the day they were bought. He sat on the stool and drank water. His coach, a bespectacled chemistry student called Kyle, dabbed the beads of sweat from his face with one of the towels and offered what he considered to be sound, logical advice into John’s ear: “You can run, buddy, but you can’t hide.”

  The second round was the same. John ducked and dodged and Dwayne’s pursuit was reduced to a turning of the upper body to whichever direction the boy was running in. He got close to him once, just as the timekeeper was checking his watch. He moved forward and, at the very point that he was about to penetrate the guard, John closed his eyes and threw himself forward onto his chest and held on as tight as he could. The timekeeper picked up the glass in one hand and the fork in the other, Kyle grabbed the towel and the onlookers smiled. This was, wasn’t it, the stepson holding onto the man who’d stepped up to the plate? This was a big thank you, not only for the birthday present that he quite patently didn’t want to sully, but for the party, for the whole day, for everything. They cheered at the end of the round as both man and boy separated themselves with an audible click of sweat and they cheered again as the two fighters emerged for the third and final round with not a single mark on the judges’ scorecard.

  After a minute of the third, though, with a calmness that belied the fact that he’d been running around his garden half-naked for the last seven minutes, John stopped. His guard dropped. He looked at Dwayne, Dwayne looked back, and for that moment, they understood each other clearly. They understood the dislike, the disdain and the monumental lack of connection between them. John moved a step closer. He took a breath in and, with the audience keening in and the sunlight beating down, he began to pummel into his opponent. He pounded into the terrain of his chest and the paunch of his belly for what seemed like a whole minute until that point where he felt Dwayne ease himself away. He was ready.

  The blow hurt less than he imagined. Yes, his head did rock back with a jolt that made the back of his neck jar up into his skull. And his nose, both flesh and bone, did feel like it had been sliced and spread like a banana split. But he knew it would happen. And it was only pain.

  As he lay there on the ground looking up at the sky, he could sense the blood sliding across his cheeks and down into his mouth. He could feel his hands ringing inside the casing of the gloves and, as faces loomed goofily over him, partially blocking out the sunlight, as his mother never moved from the door of the house, cradling a tumbler of something clear in both hands and Kyle the corner-man draped a dampened towel over his nose and mouth, his frontal lobe, that storage area of so many of his better chess moves, began to pound like a piston. But he was calm. And, through the pain, through the sense of jagged bone somewhere below his eyes and above his mouth, the invaluable lesson was slowly seeping and trickling into him; that expectant pain can do more damage than actual pain, so that at just sixteen years of age he learned something that would stay with him ‒ the ability to detach himself.

  They moved again after the fight. There were patterns by then. From the house where they’d tried and failed to have their own children onwards, they’d gone gradually smaller. They’d also gone further east, more industrial, and Dwayne’s working hours had got fewer and fewer. This time he worked weekends only as a doorman in a downtown bar. The rest of the time he either spent drifting through the TV noise of the house looking for projects or down at the gym. When he was home, he checked out the mechanics of the car, or the aerial on the roof, the guttering, the tiling, or the masonry. And when he was doing the twisting and the tapping and the tweaking, he was thinking about anything that existed outside of Margaret and the old sofa he’d find her in when he got home from the bar, head at an angle, the skin on her sallow face as though dragged by gravity and pinned.

  One of the first things John did after they’d moved was to make peace with Dwayne. He apologised. He was contrite. It’d been hard, he said, to accept another man into his life. He hadn’t given Dwayne enough of a chance. He’d judged him. He would speak to him more respectfully. He asked if he could go with him to the gym, to help him fix things around the house and to eat with him when his mother was passed out on Prozac and peppermint gin.

  Over those first few weeks his connection with Dwayne seemed to blossom. In fact, John told him one morning, as they ran through those neighbourhood streets tinged with the russets and golds of fall, that he’d actually helped him; that, in life, he realised, you get what you deserve, and that that short, counter-attacking uppercut that’d disfigure his nose for the rest of his life had shown him a way of becoming a young man who could deal with things. It’d taught him a lesson, he said. And for that, he was grateful.

  They had similar regimes; running and rowing machines, followed by weights, upper body work, and punch-bag. An hour-and-a-half altogether. Then the warm-down, the energy drinks from the vending machine and the mile run home. In a move suggested by John and picked up readily enough by Dwayne, they got into the world of proteins and supplements, some purchased by recognised suppliers, some not, some with listed ingredients, others not so much. Each day, morning and evening, they’d sit at the breakfast table and open up those packages of powders and pills that’d come in the mailbox. Dwayne’d sort out the tablets and John’d make up the drinks. And then, with Margaret either asleep or blue-lit from the TV, they’d put those cocktails away.

  By early November, John had bulked up by almost twenty pounds. He looked like a different kid from the one who’d celebrated his sixteenth birthday with a broken nose and a visible rib cage. Mainly it was the upper body, but the arms and legs too had grown more muscular and, if you looked closely enough and weren’t distracted by the general adornment of bulk, you’d notice the eyes: where once was that adolescent lack of conviction, that teenage roam that went nowhere, there was purpose and direction and, in a matter of weeks, he began to walk those neighbourhood streets not like the freshman he was, but as if he’d lived there all his life. Some nights he just walked. Some nights he stood on the bridge and watched the traffic. And, on those weekend nights, he hung around the line of downtown bars. He found a street corner where he could stand and watch without being seen. And watch he did.

  He watched the neon signs splash the sidewalks, the cigarette smoke, the steam of the hydrants, the whole thrum and buzz of the place. But essentially, he watched Dwayne. He watched him rooted to his spot by the door, chewing gum, cling-filmed in black. He watched his assertion, his decisiveness quick and economic when it came, and how some nights when the bar had closed, he walked over the disused lot to his car with one of those many sleek girls clinging to him like a mollusc to a rock. He’d see the back door open and close, his hands clawing at the curve of the shells. Then he’d see no more.

  John could, at any point, have done a number of things. He could’ve just told his mother about the girls, for one. He could’ve taken photographs, shown them to her and watched as her face melted even more than it had already. That would’ve been easy. It would’ve been chicken-feed. Or, he could’ve hit him, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a nose for a nose. He could’ve stolen from him, cut up his clothes, sabotaged his car, his ladders, his weights. He could’ve found anything from the boxing match onwards. But he didn’t. Instead, he chose something that used that frontal lobe of hi
s, something subtle and nuanced and that fucked up Dwayne in a way he could get to see, every day.

  Buying the amphetamine sulphate was easy. You take some money from your neglectful, forgetful mother’s purse and stand on one of those street corners long enough someone’ll come along and find you. The painstaking part, the part that needed the most care and attention, that took place in those early hours when Dwayne wasn’t there, was getting it into the individual supplement drinks, lining up Dwayne’s containers next to his own and making sure they didn’t get mixed up. Then, when the morning came and the evening came and Dwayne had set out the protein pills on the table, they took their drinks together, as was their routine, and Dwayne and his chemical descent was none the wiser.

  Around Thanksgiving things started to get a little different. Or, should that be that Dwayne started to get a little different. For one thing, when they got to the gym he would concentrate almost entirely on the punch-bag, beating into it, his teeth bared, his eyes tight shut, an occasional deep growl coming from somewhere inside of him. The run home, too, was faster, the words between them fewer. There was a violent incident outside the bar and a rumour that one snowy night in early December a young woman was seen running and screaming from his car on the lot.

  He got edgy. He couldn’t take a walk down the street or drive his car or go to the corner store without being edgy. He couldn’t stay home without something, whether it was Margaret, the TV noise, the untidiness, making him unable to sit still and do regular things. The only time he found solace was at the gym, so he went more often, sometimes with John, but usually without, so that by mid-December he was there every day. He knew something was going on but he didn’t know what. He couldn’t explain it, not the edginess, not the surges of violence. He couldn’t say why by seven o’clock on Christmas morning he had, with his bare hands alone, been the first in the neighbourhood to build a snowman; man-sized, hard-packed, carrots and coal. Then, at the request of some of the kids, built three more just the same in less than an hour. Or why on New Year’s Day, while Margaret lay on the sofa, he’d ripped every sheet of wallpaper from the upstairs of the house. When he mentioned it to people, they suggested all kinds: too many pills, too much protein, not enough sex or fresh air, no father figure, no son, no best buddy, no therapist, no love. And some of them may’ve contained grains of truth in them somewhere. But none of them were the real reason.