Stories: All-New Tales

It was iron he was after. He decided that after he’d done a bit of Googling when he went back to work. It made sense; it was fresh air across his face. Something about the taste, even the look, of the cow’s deep red blood—it was metal, rusty. That was what he’d craved, the iron, the metal. He’d been looking pale; he’d been falling asleep in front of the telly, like an old man. Anaemia. Iron was all he needed. So he bought himself a carton of grapefruit juice—he knew the kids would never touch it—and he went into a chemist on his way home from work, for iron tablets. He regretted it when the woman behind the counter looked at him over her specs and asked him if they were for his wife.

-We share them, he said.

She wasn’t moving.

-I’d need to see a letter from your GP, she said.

-For iron?

-Yes.

He bought condoms and throat lozenges, and left. By the time he got home he knew his iron theory was shite and he’d pushed the grapefruit juice into a hedge, with the condoms. The kids were right; grapefruit juice was disgusting. There was nothing wrong with him, except he wanted to drink blood.

He had kids. That was the point. A boy and a girl. He had a family, a wife he loved, a job he tolerated. He worked in one of the banks, not high enough up to qualify for one of the mad bonuses they’d been handing out in the boom days, but high enough to have his family held hostage while he went to the bank with one of the bad guys and opened the safe—although that event had never occurred. The point was, he was normal. He was a forty-one-year-old heterosexual man who lived in Dublin and enjoyed the occasional pint with his friends—Guinness, loads of iron—played a game of indoor football once a week in a leaking school hall, had sex with his wife often enough to qualify as regularly, just about, and would like to have had sex with other women, many other women, but it was just a thought, never a real ambition or anything urgent or mad. He was normal.

He took a fillet steak into the gents’ toilet at work, demolished it, and tried to flush the plastic bag down the toilet. But it stayed there like a parachute, on top of the water. He fished it out and put it in his pocket. He checked his shirt and tie in the mirror, even though he’d been careful not to let himself get carried away as he went at the meat in the cubicle. He was clean, spotless, his normal self. He checked his teeth for strings of flesh, put his face right up to the mirror. He was grand. He went back to his desk and ate his lunch with his colleagues, a sandwich he’d made himself that morning, avocado and tomato—no recession in his fridge. He felt good, he felt great.

He was controlling it, feeding it. He was his own doctor, in very good hands. He’d soon be ironed up and back to his even more normal self.

So he was quite surprised when he went over the wall, even as he went over. What the fuck am I doing? He knew exactly what he was doing. He was going after the next-door neighbours’ recession hens. At three in the morning. He was going to bite the head off one of them. He’d seen the hens—he wasn’t sure if you called them hens or chickens—from one of the upstairs windows. He saw them every night when he was closing his daughter’s curtains, after he’d read to her. (See? He’s normal.) There were three of them, scrabbling around in the garden. He hated them, the whole idea of them. The world economy wobbled and the middle classes immediately started growing their own spuds and carrots, buying their own chickens, and denying they had property portfolios in Eastern Europe. And they stopped talking to him because he’d become the enemy, and evil, because he worked in a bank. The shiftless bitch next door could pretend she was busy all day looking after the hens. Well, she’d have one less to look after, because he was over the wall. He’d landed neatly and quietly—he was fit; he played football—and he was homing in on the hens.

He knew what he was up to. He was hoping a light would go on, upstairs—or better, downstairs—or next door, in his own house. Frighten the shite out of him, send him scrambling back over the wall. I was just looking to see if I could see the space shuttle. It’s supposed to be coming over Ireland tonight. He’d bluff his way out of it—Although it won’t be stopping—while his heart thumped away at his ribs. It would sort him out for another few days, a week; it would get him over the weekend.

But no light went on.

And the chickens cluck-clucked: We’re over here.