Bully's Bunker

It was that Summer or the next that Bully threatens a solitary grammar school kid into drawing up an elaborate plan for an underground bunker linked by tunnelled entrances.

A plan that falls some way short of an incoherent vision of a subterranean world connected by a vast system of catacombs.

Bully shows his disappointment by smashing the clever kids’ spectacles.

At dawn, snotty-nosed spectres scythe through dew-soaked grass en route to Bully’s chosen location adjacent to an open brook strewn with old prams, used nappies, and rats. Conscripts work until dusk, pausing now and again to throw clods of earth into the trickling sewer.

On a nearby construction site, a teenage girl is crushed beneath the wheels of a giant pipe laying machine.

Once the unfortunate is disentangled from the metal monster, my mother lights a candle and credits divine intervention. “It’s a miracle she’s alive, she won’t have any kids, not after that. A blessing or a curse?”

A feral ferret face youth dares to question God’s intervention in the misadventure.

“It’s got nothing to do with him upstairs or the Catholics, soft mud saved her you daft Irish cow.”

She cuts a switch from a hedge.

“Dat cur, won’t sit down fora week after oime tru wit him.”

In a classic example of baseless belief encountering the hard realities of science and engineering, Bully ignores heretical warnings of flood, fire, and pestilence, rewarding my doom-laden prophecy with a punch on the nose.

The opening ceremony of Bully’s Bunker is marked with an invitation-only underground ‘sleep out.’

In the early hours, a silhouette in oversized steel toe capped boots its nose held together by plasters, emerges into a crystal moonlit night whispering a quiet prayer to the heavens.

“In this darkness of our fears hear a melody of birds.”

They ignored his warnings, mocked him for having holes in his shoes, shamed, and tormented him for dancing to ‘Crocodile Rock’ with his sister as they waged war.

Tonight, gorged on sweets and a party can of beer, they are at his mercy.

With leaden feet, he dances, leaping and jumping like Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev until the bunker’s roof creaks and groans for a terrifying eternity.

No one hears their screams.

Traversing deadened empty tracks under a freezing night sky full of the weight of the universe, he melts into an incomprehensible void.

His mother too poor to heat the house said. “If you sweat all summer when the green is laughing through the place, surely you can freeze a little in the winter.”

In the half-light, temporary but beautiful intricate patterns on a frosty window convince him there is a higher power in the universe.

We are no more than snowflakes.

He imagines her faux fur coat to be a sumptuous garment shielding his scrawny body from a damp mattress. With eyes wide shut he thinks about terror, beauty, grief, love, or what have you.

Outside, snow, twirling, swirling snow, parachuting snow, covering everything snow, even the hours of all things deserted.

Rushing snow resting on a bare kitchen floor.

An ill-fitting back door defying valiant attempts to ease it quietly closed.

A hardworking family man breaks magical early hours cycling precarious glass roads, the derelict and deserted morning trailing in his slipstream.

Eight miles later, a furnace foundry heat stokes memories of fried fish and johnnycakes in a paradise sunset. A far-off golden sand land where beautiful women brimming with youthful illusion watch rum young men play cricket, as money is won and lost on Kalooki.

Twelve hours of sweat and toil are bearable on payday, payday, when he gives her his wages and she says, “It’s spent before it’s earned.”

My father, my striving troubled father.

Memories disappear like tidewater.