Alan McMonagle
Bleeding Boy
T
he summer my mother died Heff became my best friend. His name was Heffernan, that’s why he was called Heff. Heff could tell you what song was number one the week you were born and do the Rubik’s cube in fifty-three seconds. He had a pool table in his bedroom. He was tall and great at telling jokes. For much of that summer the last things I was in the mood for were jokes but when Heff told one I laughed. He played basketball too. That’s where we first met – at the courts.
A few weeks after becoming best friends we made a list each of our favourite women. After wading through photographs of pop singers and supermodels in magazines, after countless close studies of girls who bounced around our neighbourhood, we confined our selections to mothers living along our road. This was Heff’s idea. This was a list that hadn’t been made before, he said. In our friendship, as well as being the joke teller, he was the ideas man. Very quickly we both had a top five. We differed on numbers two, three and four, but we agreed on number one. Mrs. Cassidy.
Mrs. Cassidy was gorgeous. She was young for a mother, had brown hair that curved into her neck, her lips were moist and plump. She wore singlets with glittery writing and short denim skirts. She had a tattoo on her right shoulder.
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Her husband was a car salesman and looked like a toad. “What is she doing with him?” Heff demanded to know. The way he asked it I thought he wouldn’t sleep until he was given an answer that satisfied him. It was a question that had no answer and my friend agonized restlessly.
Shortly after I began calling for Heff, Mrs. Cassidy smiled at me when we passed each other in the street. It was a lovely smile, friendly and kind, and her lips pouted just before the smile, as though she was considering whether or not I deserved one. I wanted to stop and have a conversation with her. Get to know her a little better. See what sort of a personality she had. But I knew I would be tongue-tied.
I said nothing to Heff about my encounter. I wanted to keep the vision of that smile all for myself, and assemble an entire personality around it. Usually, if you said a girl had a good personality that was code for saying she looked like the back of a tractor. That was Heff’s phrase. He had one for every occasion. But after receiving that smile from Mrs Cassidy I knew the codebook could be torn up. Her smile, and the obvious things about her, made her the perfect woman. That was another thing Heff had going that summer. According to Heff, to be perfect a woman had to have three things. A good face. A good body. And a good personality. “He drives a hard bargain,” my father said when I told him Heff’s terms. “You haven’t seen Mrs Cassidy recently,” I whispered, which was true – that summer he had barely set foot outside the door of our house.