LIAM'S TAG
Tobie Willis

Liam’s tag is green, white, black edged. Cubes and interlocking cuboids flash-painted six feet from raging metal.

Liam can put up with hurricane, wind so strong it would take him with it to hell. It will, soon. He will die as sure as he started dying sixty years ago in his first tight and bloody journey to birth.

When we die, do we not drown? Do our lungs not slowly fill with unshed tears? That is why he does this. He does not want to drown. When his time comes does he want to fade, gently, be floated out on some chemical bed? No. He will not go like that. Not without dignity, please. Not without colour.

Liam can put up with thunder. He no longer hears some higher notes, screams. His head is full of the growl of oncoming masses, the shriek of metal on metal, air pushing at his ears, bearing down, tight and tunnelled again. He may lean back, away, but look…if he held out his hand it would be splintered like so much bark in a shredder.

Liam can put up with pain, some. The pain of seeing others turn away. The pain of looking back. The unbearable pain of lights going out. Would he put up with the pain of a slim teenage girl holding his flaccid penis between her thumb and forefinger, the pain of no reaction? Not even…God Almighty, if he squeezes his eyelids tight shut, the tears come.

He can put up with voices louder than his who will cover him over, heaping words like black sticky earth, suffocating him in slick rubber sheeting, drowning him in the pungent gloss of oil…but he can overpaint them. For now, he will. You wait.

That is why Liam does this; distils some sliver of green, of white, sharp…, edges it in black, marries cubes, cuboids…forces a 3-D spectrum. His tag. A footprint in permafrost, this “no one comes here” No Man’s Land of infrastructure wasteland. He overpaints with words that which will in their turn be overpainted.

Liam overpainted them telling him as a boy, “You are not good enough.” He overpainted them telling him, a young man trying to stand tall, “You are still not good enough.” He overpainted his first fumbled couplings, his first earnings. His endless yearnings, black on black on black. A woman he wanted so much he would have burned in hell for her, day on night on day…overpainted. Lesser women, always looking for the first…and dark lovemaking (the little death, the practice session…it is true, Liam is St Sebastian pincushioned with arrows…) overpainted.

He overpainted his progeny, one after the other. The “You are not good enoughs” of his own past becoming theirs. Son on son on son, growing taller, learning to fear, leaving.

Life was not enough for Liam. Day on day of shallows when he wanted Niagras. Day on day of routine when he wanted broken glass under his nails rather than a soft landing bouncing him towards death.

Christ. Is it a sin to look back and hate? If you cannot love, is it a sin to hate? He doesn’t think so. Sin would be sinking into a safety zone of liking…some compromise world, some middle way. Look—just there, half tunnels brick-carved by Victorians, no wind is there, no hurricane, no thunder…no pain. Just the blurred clatterthunder of trains, removed, split, where he cannot reach them.

Liam will stay here until these bricks are covered with his name. He will stay here until he has dripped out every last bloody memory on these walls. He will stay here, leaning out, playing chicken as the steel rails converge as near as dammit at his own vanishing point, and howling Boeotian monsters careen past, too dull to wander even for a second beyond their prison route.

And, finished, he will wait open-armed for the final chest-crushing blow that will catapult him past the soft beds, the pap of nursery food in homes for men like he would have become. He will fly past the commodes, that young slim-waisted girl unthinkingly rolling him, wasted, between her fingers.

~

These bricks may soak up his name. Liam may be overpainted. But he will always be there underneath, as long as this wall stands.

© Tobie Willis

Tobie Willis is the pen name of journalist Vanessa Gebbie. Her short fiction has appeared in Aesthetica, Cadenza, Momaya Press Review, QWF, Rhapsoidia, Buzzwords Online, Birmingham Words and many others. Her stories have won, been placed, or shortlisted in many competitions including Asham Award, Fish Publishing, Momaya, Seventh Quark, Good Housekeeping. She teaches CW at a drugs rehabilitation centre.

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