At 20 years of age
I was in lust with Jules, but I shouldn’t have been
She was concentrating her efforts on illustrating anatomical dioramas
At Sheffield University, Yorkshire
I lived 50 miles away
So I tucked into our mutual friend’s car sometimes
And we visited her weekends
As we had made a connection back home
And slept together
More than once
Which means you stick at it, right?
We were young
Sheffield was a party town for students
A workplace for others
Revelries in old brick
Mixed with green trees
Mixed with new blood
Sometimes I hitched there
Just to be with someone
Adventures on a doorstep
In a similar place
One time I turn up
And Jules, who eats baby food for dinner
Tells me how she’s been dissecting testicles this day
From cadavers provided by the mortuary close to the lab
She laughed like it was the best thing ever
Non-goth like
Gleeful
I got the message
She’s been seeing someone else
No
It was the gloating of her scalpel wielding power
She scared me as she wanted to
And I wondered what the other boys she had met were like
Different than me
Or was it her dad that made her this way
I knew then it was going to be a difficult evening
So I left her to get ready and went to the student union bar
To start drinking again
The Rugby World Cup was going and I had an Ireland shirt on
It was an affectation I had when I was young
My own father being from that place
Even though I was half English myself
The English guys start to call me
Thick
Paddy
Things like that
They wanted a fight
Just because
Green or White
A finger poked me
And a head butt later
I had to run
And they had to chase
I listened for them as I scrambled
I found a wall
Dropped over but my finger caught, twisted
Painfully in a nook
Or was it a cranny
I thought
Whilst I dangled off it
Inside of the bricks
My digit turned to a degree
Even a squirrel could not believe
It was all I could do to shush myself
As I clambered back then in the distant direction of the dorm
I took my green shirt off and put that in my jacket pocket
But the flash of it still showed like a fox’s tail
A mark for these dogs
I guess
Because
As I wendled my way
To the door through secreted thickets
Fist clenched in my pocket
And wincing like vinegar had been poured upon my eyeballs
Thinking like a burglar yet forgetting the code
One of the rugby guys spotted and stopped me
As I stepped out onto the well lit path
He saw my green tail
I had no way out
“It’s you,” he said
So I offered myself in subjugation
And he smacked me a quick one on the cheekbone
I had one or two back then
My false gold front tooth flew lazily in a loop
From my face into the air then down to the dark undergrowth
“We’re even!” he said as he ran off
He didn’t even see it
He was crying
I guess because he knew this thing about retribution
Never holding substance
And I had pushed him to do a duty
Jules let me in on her way out again
“You look a mess,” she said
“I don’t like you anymore.”
I bound my fingers together with plasters
And slept in her chair
Her dormitory friends
They were nice guys
Sent out a search party
And mailed my tooth back to me weeks later
“Dear Murphy, here is your tooth, Good luck!
We hope you can use it. “
I couldn’t use it
It didn’t fit
I took it to the dentist and he said as much
He kept it to use again
It’s not worth anything anyway
I think of nutty Walter Huston dancing
In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Sometimes
And that makes me smile gappily
Memories are like that
Sometimes
It’s better to lose everything but those
That's a story I have not heard from you. You had a complex childhood