THE DAY OF MOUSTACHES
A photo of a man and woman, laminated against expensive off-white card: Frank and Maureen, surrounded by their relatives. They squint at the camera and smile. August, 1984. Bright, clean skin. New haircuts. A sunny day.
Something dark is looming over the picture, though – not a rain cloud but a big black permanent marker pen. Its thick nib hovers above Maureen. It hovers there a long time. Then it touches against the paper, drawing a small and curling thing on her face. A moustache. The pen moves to Frank. It draws one on him, too. It goes round the relatives, impassively, moustaching each with a surgical precision.
The page is turned. Just him and Maureen, outside the church. On go the moustaches.
Maureen and her sisters. Moustache, moustache, moustache.
All the men. Moustaches.
Then the reception, in that hotel whose name he’s forgotten. He draws one on himself, one on Maureen, one on the waste-of-money cake she wouldn’t shut up about.
Frank closes the wedding album. He draws a moustache on its cover, over where it says ‘Our Special Day’ in sunken gold type. His trousers are round his ankles. He waddles to the middle of the room, kneels down, and draws a two-metre-long Salvador Dali moustache on the carpet. It looks good. So do the little bird-like ones he’s drawn all over the wallpaper.
Gone half four in the afternoon, and like most days Frank has gotten drunk, watched Countdown, and had a wank. But today is different, too: today is the Day of Moustaches, so for once Frank is feeling happy. Benevolent.
A moustache, he thinks, for everything.
Next he stands in front of the mirror, grinning at himself with yellow teeth and red, blistered gums. This is the best bit. He presses the pen against his curling upper lip, drawing a wide black arc high up onto his florid left cheek. The ink smells dangerous, acidy. He gives it a little spiral, at the end, for good measure. He does the same with his right side. Great. It is the finest moustache of them all.
Maybe it’s a disease, he thinks. The moustache disease. Moustaches formositas.
He feels fantastic.
In the kitchen there is nothing in the fridge except for a half can of gone-green baked beans and a stick of grey, fluffy celery. There is the rest of a pint of milk in there, too, from last week, which he pours in lumps on the floor and skates around in for a while in his bare feet. It goes in his trousers, soaking them. He’s singing to himself.
Frank waddles to the phone to dial a number.
It rings.
It rings.
It you have reached the automated answer phone of-s.
No second wank for Frank today, then.
So he pulls up his trousers, buckles them, and goes to the window. The sky is the colour of wet ash. It has veins of white in it. He can feel milk against his groin, cooling it. He tries to peer in the window of the house across the road. Where is everyone, he thinks.
They’re all somewhere else, Frank. They’re indoors, watching telly together, eating fish and chips, fucking, being in love.
Bollocks, thinks Frank. Moustaches to them.
A woman comes along, carrying shopping. She has grey hair, cropped sensibly, and a pale papery face. Her face is like the first sheet in a drawing book. She pauses on the pavement, directly in line with Frank-in-the-window, sets down her shopping, and rubs the red handle-marks on her palms. Frank has that marker in his hand. He brings it quickly to the window and dashes a little Hitler ‘tache directly in line with her upper lip. Oh, it is perfect, perfect. If only she’d stay there forever: rubbing her hands, with her bags on the pavement. But soon she’s picked them up off the floor, moved off down the street, and left the small rectangle of black hovering absently over number 33’s blue Vauxhall.
Moustaches to that, too, he thinks. Moustaches to everything.
Frank goes outside, stands in the street. It is spotting with rain. He’s looking up at his house with his hands on his hips. He is considering using that paint they’d bought to do up the bathroom with, to paint a massive aquamarine moustache gateway above the door. There’s a For Sale sign stuck in the front lawn. It would look good with a moustache drawn onto it. There is overgrown grass just waiting to have a moustache mown into it. Now if only he could somehow tattoo an indelible, piss-black moustache onto the sky, which they could see all the way from space …
When David started doing his paper-round, this is what his mum told him: Go slow. There’s no hurry. And be careful. If anyone tries to talk to you, or invite you in, just say no politely and ride away. Just ride straight home, okay? No one will be angry with you if you leave the rest of the papers. Okay, David? Just ride straight home.
David nodded, like a good little boy.
It is spotting with rain. David has his hood up. He is sticking a paper through the letterbox of number thirty, and a little dog in the porch is growling at him. The paper falls onto the mat. The dog leaps on it, shaking it in its mouth.
He picks up his bike and wheels it down the drive. A man is standing outside the house next door. That’s fine. Men stand outside their houses all the time. They wash cars and mow their gardens and say Good evening to him. And he says Good evening back, and nothing happens. David feels the man notice him. It should be fine but it isn’t.
Just go slow, and ride straight home, he thinks.
The man is smiling. The man is coming towards him. The man isn’t saying anything. He isn’t saying Good evening or inviting David in, but he has something in his hand and something drawn on his face. He isn’t wearing any shoes or socks. There are wet patches on his trousers. David’s knees feel weak and sick.
Mummy, something is going to happen.
He climbs onto his bike – slowly at first, carefully – as the man steps the chain link fence that separates the drives. And then David panics and slams his foot down hard on the pedal, wanting to ride straight home. Something clatters loose. The pedal judders beneath his foot. Shit. The chain.
David got this bike for Christmas. It has sixteen gears and those buffalo handlebars and a big black water bottle. It is a brilliant red, with flames up the crossbar. No one knows, but he calls it Firebird in his head. He calls it her. She is the best thing in the world, and now the man is almost upon him, grinning, yellow-toothed, as David drops Firebird, hearing her crash on the slabs, and turns to run in the direction of home.
He hears his trainers slap on the pavement and bounce off the houses.
It is like a dream.
He hears the man running behind him, too: wheezing, muttering something, and he feels a heavy hand on his shoulder. He feels fingers dig into his shoulder blade. He feels himself go over, tripping forwards and then his cheek slamming into the tarmac and stinging with grit. The hands of the man turn him roughly onto his back. David has started to cry. He wriggles. The man holds something sharp and black in his hand.
‘Keep still,’ he hisses, moving it towards David’s face.
CHRIS KILLEN – Born in 1981, and currently living in Manchester. He has just completed his first novel. For more information, please visit: www.thebirdroom.org.uk
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