Shift by Mia Gallagher

Author:Mia Gallagher [Mia Gallagher]
Language: ita
Format: epub
Publisher: New Island Books
Published: 2018-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

Headhunter

The room smells of disinfectant and urine and, underneath that, something else. Semen, thinks Sonia. The walls are a grimy institutional yellow, even yellower in the light of the overhead fluorescent. The first time she visited, the tiled floor was stained dark brown and had to be scrubbed. She couldn’t help thinking of shit.

Tinny rave music pumps from a cheap black player. Crap, cheesy beats under an insincere honeyed vocal. The Bear likes it, though, and if the Bear likes it, it stays.

He’s kneeling on the floor in front of Sonia, hard at work. His enormous shoulders pull at the cloth of his sodden tee-shirt. Stretch and strain, ole man river. When he lifts his head, sweat glistens on his waxy forehead and catches in the scar which maims the left side of his face, carving through the eye socket like an ugly white worm. His black hair – a hedgehog crop, baby soft but bristly – glitters.

From where Sonia is sitting, his back looks like the hull of a sailboat. Two convex swells of muscle and bone, separated by a deep gully of spine. His legs, tensed and crouching, are immense tree trunks ending in huge trainers. His forearms swoop like lengths of turned wood, the muscles flexing as his wide hands squeeze paint out of tubes.

Despite his bulk, there’s very little fat on the Bear. A tower of strength, thinks Sonia. A pillar of the community. Not the community at large, by any stretch of the imagination, but here, inside, he’s a pillar, a tower, a myth of his own making.

He is sweating again. Probably the drugs. Maybe illness. Or it could be a problem with the heating. It’s an unspoken mantra in here, in these classes anyway: keep an open mind. Though with everyone saying how innocent they are, one’s mind can be easily unopened. It never takes long for the Bear’s tee-shirt to soak, the drops to glisten on his hedgehog hair. He wipes them away, over and over, but it’s no use. It starts again and soon he’s drenched. Drips bead his eyelashes, trickle into the corner of his mouth. He is sweating so much Sonia can taste it.

They usually start with tea, scalding hot, served in melting white corrugated plastic beakers. They sit on hard grey chairs and balance the beakers on whatever surface they can find: chair-arms, windowsills, shelves. Sonia’s chair is uncomfortable, grating against her bum. His is barely able to hold his weight.

He always brings sweets, mints or chocolates. ‘Bear’s a demon for the sweets,’ says his mate. The Bear agrees with a smile, showing in all their glory his black and missing teeth.

Once tea is served, they talk.

He spent most of the first visit quizzing Sonia. He had to check her out, be sure it was okay to spend an hour of his precious time with her. She has realised that in here, time is still precious, even though there’s lots of it, ticking away like a deathwatch beetle. He asked where she lived.

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