Coming From Nothing by Matthew McKeever

Author:Matthew McKeever [McKeever, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-620-9
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2018-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

8

—Fucking selfish pricks is what the problem is.

—Who?

—People.

—Ah c’mon, you can’t expect them, we’re all broke like.

—I have two hundred Facebook friends, you have the same, Danielle has the same, fucking Rupert has near a thousand. Sixty euro. C’mon like. Selfish pricks.

—It’s really sweet that you’re doing it for him. You’ve done your best. And like, it’s not nothing.

—It’ll get him what? One doctor’s appointment. Or dentist appointment, I guess. Do you know, what he’s in for? Like what’s wrong with him?

Sara shrugged.

—You’ve never asked him?

—Sure you know yourself he barely talks, poor guy. I think he must be in constant pain with his teeth. Feel so sorry for him.

—Aye, but what good is feeling sorry for him? Does no good.

—Well, you can help in other ways than the Gofundme. We were going to go visit him next Sunday. Come with us. Then we can go for dinner afterward, my ma won’t mind looking after Curtis a couple of hours.

That was exactly what he didn’t want to do. It’s very hard to visit someone whom you can’t look at. And he couldn’t look at Mal. He felt it must surely be evident, his discomfort, and how must that make him feel, to have someone avoiding eye contact like that? Better it was to hide in the corner on his computer, help him as he knows how.

But evidently he didn’t know how to help. He had set up the Gofundme and tried to promote it, but so far it had been doing extremely poorly. It was just so frustrating. If every social media contact which they shared were to donate one euro that would be close to two grand, and it would cost the people nothing. But people just didn’t give a fuck.

—Fucking … fuckers.

It was dark outside, and smelled of coffee. Naturally, because it was late afternoon in winter and they were in a coffee shop. Already evening traffic on College Green was busy, students were streaming out of Trinity and Christmas lights were tracing the shape of a tree before it.

Jules was tautly caffeinated, feeling tense and full of gloom, having spent the afternoon going from coffee shop to coffee shop, buying coffee out of obligation, filling in applications for jobs he probably wouldn’t get, refreshing the Gofundme, and hating humanity. Then Sara had texted him unexpectedly looking to meet up and he couldn’t think of a reason to put her off again.

Things had kind of fizzled since the booty call manqué/intergenerational lunch. Sara’s schedule again became packed, and they reacted in seemingly opposing ways to this. Her interest was dulled in no way by the fact they couldn’t get together: she texted him every day, even as his replies became more spread apart and less conversation-continuing, pressing forward, dropping some quite major hints that she would like to get a couple of cheap Ryanair tickets one weekend and visit Rome, where she had friends and visits regularly.

Jules felt hemmed in by this, that he seemed somehow to have

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