Better To Be Late

Sitting in the cafe where they'd agreed to meet, she checks her watch and sees the bruise around her wrist. He's late. If he's not here by ten past, she'll leave. She lifts her coffee to her lips and notices her hand is trembling. Relax, she tells herself, glancing around at friendly faces. He can't do anything here.

When he walks in, he's smiling the smile that tricked her all those years ago, and for just a split second she's reminded of the man she married.

As he sits, she sees he's chewing gum. So he's tense; he'd chew gum after the beatings. 'You wind me up,' he'd say as she checked to see if he'd knocked out any teeth. 'You push me to it.'

'I'm sorry,' he says now, not meeting her eye. 'I'm sorry about it all. I was angry and I took it out on you.'

'But it's not the first time.'

'I lost my job,' he spits. 'I've been stressed out. How do you think that made me feel?'

She clenches her jaw. 'I don't care,' she says. 'I can't care.'

'But I love you.'

She wants to lift off her jumper to show him the patches of bruises. 'This isn't love,' she wants to scream. 'How can it be?'

Though she doesn't, of course. Instead she stands, catching sight of the taxi she'd ordered pulling up outside.

He grips her wrist. 'I can change. Let me try.'

'No, you can't,' she says, the control in her hands for once. 'It's too late.'

And with that she leaves. She may not know where she's going, but anywhere is better than where she's been.

It's taken time to get this far, but, as her father always said, 'Better to be late than to be dead on time.'

The Devils Within

The devil is in us all, but we choose to lock him away. Silencing him, we ignore his cruel, whispered words. Day in, day out, he lies dormant, waiting. Biding his time. Just waiting.

It was a night in December that it happened. I was in the front room reading the newspaper, the fire crackling before me, smoke billowing up the chimney. Everything was as it was supposed to be.

Susan was on her way back from her shift at the hospital. I glanced at the time – nine o’clock. She was later than usual, but, on her request, I didn’t call.

‘Sure, I like having a coffee and chat at the end of a shift,’ she said last time I rang, shooing me off the phone. ‘Don’t you worry so much.’

That night though, when it got to half-past nine, I tried her mobile phone. But it went straight to voicemail and so I left a message, a sleepy, ‘Where are you? I love you.’

Now that I know why she was late, the thought of what she was going through at that moment turns and turns my stomach.

Because twenty minutes later, she stumbled into the house, her eyes black, her wrists blue. She fell to her knees, then her side. As she curled into a ball, she let out a low animal groan. The sound of pain.

I knew what had happened. Of course I knew. And so I said nothing as I wrapped my arms around her and felt her tense at my touch.

‘Who was it?’ I asked finally. ‘Who did it? Susan, come on, tell me. Who was it? Who was it?’

I wanted to shake her until the answer fell from her mouth, but she was crying for so long she had no breath for words.

‘Seamus O’Connolly,’ she said at last, after it felt a lifetime had passed between us. ‘He followed me past the church. He dragged me down-,’

And then she jerked from my embrace and was sick on the floor, the crucifix of her necklace swinging in front of her eyes.

It’s a small town, Kiltimagh, and I knew Seamus O’Connolly from church. He's only about nineteen; morose and acts as if the world is against him. His parents, Sheelagh and Michael, have go to mass every week. And he’d come with them until recently.

I walked to their house the next morning and they met me with warm smiles, offers of tea and cake. But I refused, asked if Seamus was home.

‘He is indeed, Andrew,’ they said, unquestioning, and called up the stairs.

He appeared: tired, bloodshot eyes.

‘Will you come for a walk with me, Seamus?’ I asked, and I could see from the way he stared at the ground that he knew that I knew.

The devil was in me that morning. It was through his eyes that I watched Seamus drown.

And now, eight months later, Susan’s stomach is still swelling. Another devil within.

Out of Time

As X sits in the waiting area, other people walk around him, talking into hologram headsets, visions of friends before them. Chat, chat, chat.

'I'm so busy,' says one woman. 'I haven't even had chance to inject my food for the last week. I know, I know. I know!'

When his number is called, X steps onto the conveyor belt and is taken to the chrome counter that's cool to the touch.

‘Yeah?’ the server asks.

Customer service has long since died.

‘I want a new heart,’ he says. ‘And new lungs. I'm getting breathless all the time. Can I book a facelift here too?'

The server sighs. ‘Yeah, but you’ll have to wait till next week for the heart. And the right lung. Limited stock. Anything else?’

‘I need some time. Maybe forty years, or fifty. Let's say fifty.’

The server laughs. ‘Seriously?’

X nods. 'What’s the joke?'

‘Didn’t you hear? We ran out of time six months ago.’

‘You don’t have any more?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Where did it all go?’

‘Some corporate companies took a whole load.' The server tries to repress a smile. ‘And we get staff discount, so-,’

‘But what’s the use in having health if I don’t have any time?’

The server taps into his computer. ‘When did you last top up?’

‘On time?’

‘Yep.’

He thinks for a moment. Was it last year? 2093? Or the year before? ‘Christmas 2092,’ he says. ‘I had a voucher. From an aunt.’

The server whistles. ‘Sorry, can’t get you time. If you’d said Easter 2107, we could have given you two days. Don't know if you remember, but we ran the ‘Bring Back The Dead’ promotion.’ He shrugs. ‘Got to honour any purchases made. The manager's majorly pissed. You still want the facelift?’

X thinks. He’s never thought of this before, has he? He’s never imagined he could run out of time. It’s always been something there’s been plenty of, something, like everything, that he could buy when it ran out.

‘But no one told me,’ he says, hearing a childish whine in his tone. ‘I haven’t done half the things I wanted.’

The server glances at the screen. ‘You’ve still got five years left.’

‘That’s not long.’

‘Well, you know the rules. Standard top-up every three months. Really, I could report you to the G.’ He hands him a receipt and glances over X's shoulder at the hordes of people in the waiting area. ‘Look, you want the face-lift or not? I got a ton of people to see.’