Mascot

By Jay J Jones

"Unputdownable! - it thunders along from page one to the very last." Witty, gritty and dark humoured... perfect for fans of Fight Club and Tarantino. Drug dealers are everywhere, selling drugs to our children. The police can't control them, so who can? Since losing his wife and drug addict son in an unsolved hit and run, advertising guru, Jay Jones, is determined to find their killer. Battling addiction, he joins Alcoholics Anonymous where he forms a support group with Mascot, an eccentric dwarf with a dark secret. Encouraged by Alcoholics Anonymous to find a greater purpose, Jay attempts to redeem his son's bleak legacy, but it's only a matter of time before his son's past drags him into the brutal world of drug gangs and teenage trafficking.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jay J Jones
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393197751

Book preview

Chapter 1 – The Back Story

Here he is again. Angry Anderson. Boiling with rage and spitting hatred through his gravestone teeth whilst stabbing a very arthritic finger at the burned remains of my family home.

He says, My house has devalued by thirteen percent because of that shit hole!

As I’m switching my gaze between his bulging frog eyes and the clumps of butter under his long fingernails, I’m hoping by some stroke of luck he’ll have a colossal embolism and drop dead on what he calls the verge the council haven’t cut for months.

My former family home is located - or squats like a shitting hulk according to Angry Anderson - on the apex of a crescent lined with modern detached houses. Tall trees cast shadows over the neighbour’s pristine gardens and gleaming new cars with personalised plates. Unlike Angry Anderson, some of the neighbours don’t object to the ruins because they loved Marg and Danny, whilst the Angry Anderson lot loathe it because they love The Daily Mail and rising house prices over goddamn everything.

The roof of the house is missing. The soot black walls are ragged topped like a castle ruin. If you stand opposite the house, you’ll see a path snaking to the left towards the back garden taking my wheelchair tracks with it. The path leads under the dummy tree - where bawling kids sacrifice their dummies to fairies who take them to other fictitious kids - and onwards towards the shrines in the back garden built with scorched bricks. Surrounding the shrines is a meadow of swaying wildflowers I scatter planted with fistfuls of seeds. The largest shrine is the one I built for Danny and Marg. On it are Danny’s charred football boots, some metal coat buttons from Marg’s coat and candles poetically weeping streaks of melted wax. The candles aren’t a religious statement or anything ridiculous like that. I just like the calming light they cast, like the thousands of silver lights filling the trees. I can’t stand this place being any darker than it needs to be.

Surrounding Danny and Marg’s shrine are smaller shrines, built by other parents whose child is dead or missing.

If you follow my wheelchair tracks around the house, you’ll come to the charred remains of the garage. Inside is my 1970’s Volkswagen Beetle. It used to be glistening black, now it’s rusty with tape and ragged plastic bags for windows. The tyres and seats melted in the fire, along with the dream of giving it to Danny. So did the steering wheel and dashboard, leaving rusty wireframes and clumps of ugly bubbled plastic. I’m sitting on the driver’s seat on a pile of old blankets. The sun is shining on me as I write this in what Black Rose calls my cathartic notebook.

I often sit here and allow the past to take me. I float in the air above the house where Danny’s bedroom used to be. I’m sneaking into his room when he’s a baby, checking to see if he’s still breathing. I’m sitting on his bedroom floor building a Scalextric track. We’re wrestling. We’re laughing. I’m sitting on a ridiculously small child’s chair and helping him with his homework. I’m lying on his bed reading him his favourite story. I’m painting a Spiderman mural on his wall. In the hallway below, I’m coming in from the cold and he’s running towards me with open arms calling, ‘Daddy.’ I’m in the kitchen. I’m dancing with Marg on Christmas Eve. We’re making love on the kitchen table and then laughing about it whilst dining there with friends. We’re marking Danny’s height on the doorframe; those precious years went by so fast. Marg’s telling me off for not repairing the cracked windowpane - the one an intruder could so easily slip their hand through, open the back door and take Danny in the night. Marg and I are sitting at the table with our heads in our hands. We’re arguing. I’m putting bars over Danny’s windows to protect him. I’m searching for him. I’m finding the phone down the side of the bed and listening to the gunshot. I’m jolting at the sickening memory of the murders. I’m sitting there alone, drinking myself stupid night after night, earning my stripes as a beaten alcoholic.

People come from afar to visit the house. A news reporter said it’s kind of sacred, like a church; a place where parents can feel a part of something or find momentary refuge from the feeling of crushing grief or wondering what happened to their missing child.

There are rules you must obey if you want to visit 33, Mason Crescent. I painted them on the blistered front door.

1: NO religion! No god could be this cruel

2: Do not touch the shrines unless you’re a family member

3: NO alcohol or drugs

4: NO murder scene tourists

5: Bring your own loo roll

6: If you want tea, bring milk + teabags

As I sit here stroking the wild ginger cat who sleeps in the car - who I haven’t named because I’m useless with names since the fall - an old chap wearing an overcoat, tweed flat cap and very shiny shoes appears in the garden. For the next ten minutes or so I watch him chatting away to himself before the shrine of his missing son as he brushes away leaves from the weathered toy Dinky cars resting there. He does this every Friday morning. I think he said he used to be in the army; maybe it was the navy? You could probably set your watch by him. When he’s finished, he turns and nods at me before entering the remains of the kitchen that I covered with bright blue tarpaulin and secured in place with ropes bound around tree trunks. It’s not watertight but it keeps most of the rain out. The polished Italian white floor tiles are covered in muddy wheelchair tracks and the footprints of people traipsing in and out of the kitchen and toilet. If it gets wet, it becomes bloody lethal like a muddy ice rink. Marg would be furious if she could see the state of the place. And she’d hate the damp loo roll.

A few minutes later he shuffles slowly from the kitchen taking care not to spill our mugs of steaming tea. 

He says, Hello, Jay, with a voice that was probably once as strong as the tea he’s made. He reaches through the window void and places my mug on the dashboard. Then he rests against the side of the car making it groan on its supporting bricks. This makes my nerves jangle and it reminds me to take my Barker, which I do with a hot swig whilst watching dappled sunlight dance over the shrines.

His son went missing thirty-two years ago. I know this because I wrote it on the inside of my notebook. The police never found him; concluded he’d been abducted. I always remember this detail. I always remember the painful details. He drives here every Friday to visit his son’s shrine because Friday mornings are usually the quietest. When the weather’s fine, he stays until about 3pm when I leave to do the school run to pick up Little Marg. If it rains, we leave earlier because the air fills with the acrid aroma of burned timbers and ash. The smell is a lot fainter than it used to be but it’s still there, a sickening reminder of the fire. For now, the air is filled with the sweet scent of wildflowers and I feel calm.

When I met the man I’m drinking tea with, I found him standing motionless in the garden, staring at Danny’s and Marg’s shrine. He didn’t hear me approach because I can glide silently and quickly in my wheelchair like a legless panther.

Who the fuck are you? I demanded angrily. Get the fuck out my garden!

I startled him. I wanted to, the nosy codger. He shuffled around to face me. If you’ve ever been confronted by a pale-faced pensioner with blood-shot eyes and tears rolling down their paper-thin cheeks, you’ll know how instantly disarming it is.

I’m sorry, he said, holding out his shaking hand, which I could see was gripping an aged newspaper with an article about me and Mascot. I wanted to meet you...

Seeing the newspaper clipping sent my heart plummeting. I felt like shit. To compensate, I sat there like an impromptu open-air priest listening to his confession about how his son went missing, and how he’d never stopped searching for him. When he’d purged his heart-breaking account, in true gentleman style he apologised profusely for his intrusion, blew his nose on a perfectly folded hanky and left my nerves jangling like kittens playing in a bag of broken glass.

He’s a regular now. I suggested he build a shrine for his son here. It wasn’t an easy decision. I had to wrestle with the idea for some time before agreeing with myself and the shadow of the Wolf. We gathered bricks from the rubble together and he built it on the left-hand side of the garden under the oak tree Danny used to climb. He added his son’s toy cars and a photo of him, which has faded unlike his father’s memory of him.

The furthest anyone has travelled to visit the house is from Australia. I know it sounds far-fetched but it’s true. Alcoholic’s honour. I would say ex alcoholics honour but we’re never ex’s, are we? A couple travelled all the way from Brisbane because they saw a feature about Danny’s List and my house on some news channel. Their daughter’s shrine is a little further down the garden behind Sargent Major Cup of tea’s son’s shrine. She was an addict like Danny. It turned out the Aussie man was a white coat. He used to be a mechanic until he found his dead daughter sitting upright in her bedroom with a needle jabbed in her arm. Merry Fucking Christmas. They stayed for two weeks in a local B&B and visited most days. Brought biscuits too. Bonus.

For some reason, I felt comfortable with Aussie Man - just like I did when I first met the Mascot outside Alcoholics Anonymous - and perhaps because he lived on another continent, and I was in the mood, I found myself loose-lipped, rambling on about what happened to me.

You probably saw the news? I asked him rhetorically. How they portrayed us as pissed Robin Hoods?

He gave me the trademark, non-committal white coat nod.

I rattled on. Well, that part was true. I turned to the bottle after the funerals. The only way I could get through the day was drinking vodka and Oramorph cocktails. I got depressed and thought about killing myself on an hourly basis.

He said what Black Rose said. Anyone would under your circumstances.

I told him the problem was, at the time of Danny and Marg’s deaths the more I drank the more I lost touch with reality. I started talking to myself and my dark feelings manifested as a big black wolf pacing around my thoughts. The more I thought like this, the more alive the wolf became and the more scared I became of him, until I could see his bruised form watching me from the bushes in the garden at night as I drank. Before long, Wolf was there, drinking and smoking cigars next to me on the sofa like a dog from a C.M. Coolidge painting.

Wolf soon tired of my wallowing. Who can blame him? One afternoon whilst I was watching Jeremy Kyle on TV and balling my eyes out empathetically for a father that wasn’t allowed to see his son, he slammed down his whiskey glass and growled, Enough!

He took me for a stroll to the bridge.

There, with a nod of his head, he ordered, Over you go, Jay. Go on and it’ll all be over.

So not wanting to argue with such a beast, I clutched my wedding ring and let go.

Chapter 2 - Nurse

I don't remember slamming into the ice cream van passing under the bridge. Witnesses said it was loud like a bomb exploding. And I don't remember screaming at the paramedic, 'My legs don't work,’ when I regained consciousness for a moment amongst the boxes of bloody ice cream cones that kindly scooped me into their arms and saved my life.

When I regained consciousness, my wife, Marg, was sitting beside my hospital bed. She was stroking my hand and telling me, Everything is going to be alright.

Although everything wasn’t alright. It wasn’t her voice, she sounded like Bob Marley gargling sand. My son, Danny, was facing the window at the end of my bed and tugging on a cord attached to lopsided Venetian blinds. He looked as though he was trying to fix them quickly before anyone saw him. I could tell by his height he was younger than when he died, around eleven years of age. And he was a beautiful healthy boy, not skeletal thin. The blinds whooshed open. Light burst in. My hospital bed shot forward and ploughed them down. I screamed, waking me fully.

My life support system ping-ping-pinged to the rhythm of my pounding heart. My head ached as though it was cast from ice cold iron. My face was swollen, forcing my eyes closed. I peeled my dry tongue from the roof of my mouth and pushed it into the bloody gaps where my teeth had been. With a little effort I could just about see out of my left eye. My right arm was constricted in jolly pink plaster and my left arm bandaged tightly from wrist to elbow. My left thumb was missing; the stump concealed by bandages. Both of my legs were missing from mid-thigh down. Bandages concealed the stumps.

I started to sob and screamed, I’ve just bought new Nikes!

Welcome to my morphine-soaked world.

If the new leg arrangement wasn’t bad enough, a catheter snaked into the end of my manhood, force-feeding it wide open like an arm-wrestling champion fisting a baby’s nostril. Welcome to the world of pissing like a sprinkler. I’m no longer the piss champion. I’ll never hit the ceiling of the boys bogs at school again.

My rattled brain connected the memory of hitting the roof with a youthful jet of pee to Danny wearing his school uniform, to identifying him in the morgue and the white sheet being pulled over his face for the last time. I clenched my fists and squeezed my eye closed to try and shut out the unbearable reality; my boy was gone. I loathed myself for still being there. Still there to experience the bright sunshine burning angry-red in my eyelids. Still there to listen to the birds chirping merrily outside as though they were auditioning for a god damn Disney cartoon. Still there to hear devils laughing outside my hospital room window. I resented the world for continuing without Danny and Marg; how it skipped from one second to the next oblivious to my crushing loss.

Wolf whispered in my ear. There’s no running from it.

I peeled open my eye to see him shaking his head disapprovingly. He flicked a cruel glance at my stumps. You’ve made a right fucking mess of yourself.

It was you, you cunt! I shouted. You told me to jump!

A hazy silhouette appeared next to me. Hands touched me. The muffled voice of young woman soothed me. I would later learn this was a nurse I would nickname Nurse - I know, very imaginative, eh?

Let me go, I said and lost consciousness.

When I woke, Marg and Danny were there again, igniting a smile, sending bolts of burning pain through my broken jaw. Marg was different this time. Terrifying. Her face was flesh, bone, wires, yellow plastic and black and white checked stickers - the kind you see stuck to the temples of crash test dummies as they are about to be slammed into by a car. Her hair was a woven tangle of multi-coloured wire. Engine oil oozed down her face. For some reason, actually, the reason being morphine, I tried to make her laugh; bring the goodness back. She had the best laugh. Apart from being beautiful and kind and bright and witty, her laugh was the best. When I heard her laugh for the first time, I was sitting in a bar and her siren stole me. When I saw her I fell in love instantly. Cynics who say you can’t fall in love instantly have never experienced it. In a way, I feel sorry for them.

I said to her, Have you done something with your hair?

She laughed, causing her plastic jaw to click awkwardly like a cheap ventriloquist’s dummy. Wolf paced at my bedside growling with agitation. Danny was standing at the window with his back to me again, messing around with the tangled blinds, a silhouette without detail.

Turn around Danny, I said.

I’d intended for my tone to be gentle and encouraging but it poured out desperately.

Leave him alone! hissed crash test Marg, her flesh eyeballs rolling in their gaping plastic sockets. Don’t you shout at him! You’ll scare him away again!

Undeterred, I pleaded. I want to see his face.

Danny ignored me.

Come on Danny, I said. Turn around son. Please.

No! screamed Marg, startling me.

Danny pulled on the cord attached to the blinds. Daylight burst in, encasing him for a moment like an angel, and they were gone. In the real world, a horseshoe of white coats surrounded my bed. I wanted to roll over and hide but I couldn’t roll over and hide. I wanted to run out of the hospital and dive off the bridge. I closed my eyes in a futile attempt to shut it all out.

Wolf snarled, There’s nowhere to hide in here or out there.

I gritted my remaining teeth against