Laura Cooney

Content Warning

murder

There’s a mould stain on the ceiling that looks like Argentina. Billy has never been to Argentina. Billy has never left Bradford. 

He looks at the stain on the floor. It looks a little like the USA, the Florida nubbin created where matter has pooled into a rough concrete channel on the floor. 

He thinks it was made that time his dad and uncle Frank brought the big barrel from the yard and Billy wasn’t allowed to play Subbuteo down here for a week. He’d imagined that the barrel was filled with salt fish, or beer, like the ones he’d read about in his atlas of Europe. But when he turned 16, he became a man, came down for a beer and found that cement attached itself to metal the way it did to bricks.  

Billy sees countries in clouds, and still has a map of the world on his wall. Billy gets updates on his phone from British Airways, though he’s never been on a plane. 

He looks at his phone now. 

It’s not him, it never was. 

The message flashes and in the sudden illumination, Billy’s eyes express the word before he speaks it.

“Fuck,” 

Billy, hunkered on the floor can suddenly smell the week-old blood. With his head in his hands he bites his already ragged inner cheek. 

He knows now that he had always known it. 

Davie MacKinnon had never been his father.

Some stains are harder to wash off than others; oil, sweat, blood. 

“If you leave us, I won’t stop them coming after you.” 

That’s what he’d said, won’t, the poisonous and derelict thug Billy called dad for 26 years. 

He should’ve gone then and there. Left his ma, Nicole, Baby Sean. 

Now his ‘dad’s’ henchmen were at the door and Billy hadn’t been arsed to clean up. In all the years he’s done murdering, he’d never messed it up so badly. If only he’d known he was killing a mongrel, maybe it would’ve been cleaner.

The thugs at the door would go away, but they’d come back and it wouldn’t matter where Billy went then, the stain would be there. The stain would be everywhere. A poison, forever in his blood.
The way Billy sees it he can live, or he can die. Billy decides to be brave. Better late than never. 

He looks at America and picks up the phone again. 

He looks at Argentina and dials. 

While he speaks, he peers out of the tiny ground level window at the cloudless sky. Miles and miles of unreachable imagined ocean in front of him.

While he waits he accepts the furthest he’ll ever get from home now is Leeds Prison.

And while he stares at the tributaries of blue rivers that formed on his dead father’s face, he imagines himself on a skiff, gliding to the horizon. 

At least he’ll finally be free. 

Laura’s prompts were: A Basement, a Bad Guy Turned Good, and Poison

She said of the challenge: “I used poison metaphorically. Probably not ok, but this was the story that popped into my head and once that happens it’s a done deal. I liked the idea of Billy being trapped in the basement but I also liked the idea that his being trapped is the thing that would set him free. However, I wanted the end to be bittersweet. Bad guys turned good don’t always deserve a fairytale ending.

Laura Cooney is a writer from Edinburgh with work widely published in print and online; most recently in Roi Faineant Press, Northern Gravy, Punk Noir Press, Underbelly Lit, Spare Parts Lit and Five Minute Lit. Her second poetry chapbook; No Trauma/No Drama is coming courtesy of Backroom Poetry this Autumn. Find her on socials @lozzawriting and at http://www.lozzawriting.com.
When she’s not writing, she’ll be found with her daughters, as close to the sea as possible.