Mooks

Half blind
I still go by Mooks – the name’s the only thing that didn’t change.
Shit got serious for me on a Thursday. I remember ‘cause I was on a mission to get cashed-up before the weekend. This was four years ago when I was 27.
Daylight savings had ended and it was bloody cold and dark in that park, you know that small one across from the Manningham Pub? That’s where I was texting this bastard who owes me money but had forgotten how to answer his bloody phone.
Out of nowhere a dwarf comes right up next to me. The smiling dwarf, I ended up calling him ‘cause I never found out his proper name. He took these glasses right off his face and says, “Hey, I saw you at the pub earlier. These might be yours, my friend?”
And that’s the first time I ever laid eyes on them glasses. Of this I’m sure.
Like I says, it’s dark but there’s these two streetlamps, one real close by, and I remember looking at the glasses in the dwarf’s stumpy little fingers. They ware real crap and worn. The frame fixed up on one side with a dirty old bandaid. I thought, what’s this shit then? Told him to piss off, of course.
See I was wearing my own glasses so obviously they weren’t mine. Dodgy bloody dwarf wanted to sidetrack me and swindle my stuff. I hadn’t decked such a small fella before but never say never.
Thinking back, I should’ve hugged the little man. He’s about as close to spiritual as I ever got. If you could call it that.
But I was a different lad then and almost all people made me sick to the guts. All the bullshit in the world... The anger boiled up in me as easy as getting the wrong look off a bloke. What others go for free, I had to snatch. But even my lawyer says to the court that I never hurt no one, just conducted a bit of harmless thievery and partook in the odd scuffle, if you know what I mean?
But I swear, I swear I never killed that actress.
After I threatened to pound the dwarf a foot shorter, I went back to the pub to polish off another six or so.
I gulped at my bourbon and watched this chick who looked like she’d just had a yelling match. Her cheeks were bright red – like full of that anger. I felt like biting her face, wrapping her so tight I’d feel her heartbeat. That’s the kind of weird shit I was thinking that night. I remember that.
The chick with the fiery cheeks was drinking spirits too. We’re both alone which sort of made us together. I wore my jeans with the ripped knees and that t-shirt with the tiger’s eye on the front. What she wore I don’t remember past them fiery cheeks.
She started the conversation but I touched her first, on the hip. It’s soft. Her body was real curvy.  That turned out to be the best toilet shag I ever had. Turned out she liked it rough too. We done it real passionate-like – hard to explain – like I wanted to get under her skin or some shit. Must’ve been real horny that night.
But afta’ I felt sick. Always hated them afta’.
I remember thinking... Who’s this bloody creature I’ve just rooted? What’s wrong with her face and those burning cheeks? I had to get out of there because she kept trying to touch me as if I was her boyfriend. I still hate clingy women. So I told her I’d be out there in a mo and made a fast one for the back door.
What if I’d run away with her, married her and lived un-fucking-happily ever after? Then I wouldn’t have been done with that murder. If I hadn’t snuck out the back and found that body then... then I’d still be wearing my other glasses.
The corpse was in the doorway. I tripped and fell right on it. That’s how the blood got on me, under my nails and all over my tiger eye t-shirt which the prosecutor kept holding up as if it proved something.
Turned out it was some famous actress. Someone raped and stabbed the girl to death. Everyone decided it was me that done it even before the bloody conviction and the media sharks fed off the story for weeks. Any dirt my so-called friends had on me appeared in the papers or on the telly. So what if I couldn’t hold a job? So what if the ex hated my guts? And where did they get that photo with my hair sticking up like a lunatic?
They put close ups of my face in the papers with headlines like, “Cruel killer pleads for mercy”.
I never plead for nothin’!
My lawyer talked about my troubled childhood even though I says to him to just focus on the fact I didn’t do it. I never done this.
Getting blamed for a murder, well... that just proved what I’d always been thinking. No one cares about the truth. I was so sick of the shit they spun about me I wished I’d killed someone like that prosecutor. But not the actress. Those picture of her they put up in court, sometimes it felt like she was looking at me, like she was my only friend in the world. Her pretty green eyes seemed to watch me, saying, “I know you never done nothing bad to me, sweetie”, that’s what I heard her saying. But it was cold comfort, if you’ll excuse the term.
One day, two of the media leeches, a journo with rat-eyes and this snapper hiding behind his equipment, well they went and ambushed me. Snuck round the back of the court and ran with camera flashing and questions firing as if I was Hitler himself.
The rage blew my brain like a hit of meth.
I escaped the cops and jumped the snapper, my hands still in cuffs. It felt damn good to head butt him, see the fear in his eyes. ‘Cause I was fucking scared. I’d always thought the world was against me. But now I knew it. By the time they pulled me off the glasses I wore were smashed up good. For the rest of the court case and the first few weeks of my jail stint I was half blind.
The next time I saw the dwarf he was sitting across from me in the prison visiting room. He was offering me the glasses from the park. There was still a bandaid holding it together. Prison’s a place where a bloke needs extra eyes and I’d been walking around scared out of my wits that I wouldn’t see a knife coming. So I was pretty happy to see the smiling dwarf this time.
“Who are you? Why are you helping me?” I says.
“You should have taken them last time but it’s not too late. I choose you. Here,” he says.
He left without another word. When I put them on, that’s when it began. Everyone was a child.
“Take me to the nurse!” I says at the tiny guards. I’d lost the plot.  But she was just a kid too. An excited little girl who says she wants to be a doctor when she grows up.
Everyone acted like it’s natural that I was suddenly the only adult in the joint. When I put on them glasses the jail-cruds became kids, pathetic little children. And my rage turned into something else.
At first I says, no way am I wearing those freakin’ glasses. That shit was weirder than I could handle. But after a while I realised them kids were waiting for me. When I put on the glasses kids came to find me, ask me questions like how much longer they’d be locked up for? They’d tell me what they wanted to be when they grew up, ‘bout their favourite pet or a “awesome thunderstorm” they’d once seen.
When I put on those glasses the guards went from ordering us about to joining in the games of snap or playing all happy on their mobile phones. I could‘ve got away then. But something stopped me.
There was this nine-year-old with cuts and burns that I could see all over him when the light shone just right. He had a bad stutter problem too.
Then there was the chatter box kid who liked to show off about far he could spit. One day he told me all about how his mum and dad disappeared. They just didn’t pick him up from school one day. He sat at the gate until the “moon was as big as a pumpkin”, and his tummy was growling with hunger. But they never came. And he never saws his old folks again. That kid liked to draw pictures of me. In them I was always smiling. I’d never thought of myself that way.
As a grownup that kid was locked up for burning down a hostel he thought was full of backpackers. But they were mostly at the pub down the road and no one was killed so he went down for attempted murder. His skin was covered in devil tatts and he was a filthy individual no wanted to share a cell with. Made me wonder what changes a person. Made me talk nicer to the man ‘cause he’s once a good kid. Maybe that good was still in him somewhere. I’d never thought about people being good and needing help before. I’d never thought of helping.
There was this other kid with freckles who cried when I told him I could see the ciggy burns on his arms sometimes. He was a klepto – stole a ton of my stuff. But I saw what it was all about. So I let him rob me during the day. Then at night I’d go get my stuff back while he slept. After a while he started calming down, even held my hand when we walked in the yard.
The one I never forgot was a bloke called Brava. He was easily the meanest guy in the joint. The story goes that Brava killed an off-duty cop who tried to stop him bashing his girlfriend. He looked like a tattooed tree trunk with eyes like a mad man; hard, empty of feeling and scheming, always plotting to steal someone’s smokes or bash their face in. But with the glasses on, he was a four-year-old kid curled up on his bed crying. His name was Trevor then. Little Trevor had blond curls and skin like the fresh milk we drank on this farm I worked at once. A real cute looking kid. But he never stopped crying and no one came to check why. One day, when I was sick of the noise, I went in there. Trevor started screaming, “No, no, no.”
I saw he must’ve been visited at night so I just sat in the doorway and waited.
“You can’t keep carrying on like that, you’ll give yourself a headache good and proper,” I says to him.
“Fuck you,” says Trevor.
“Now, now, you’re treating me like the enemy and you don’t even knows me,” I says.
The kid’s face was red and angry but the body shook like a jackhammer. “Here, you want one?” I offered a ciggy.
He shook his head even though with the glasses off, Brava’s never without a smoke dangling from his gob.
It took months for the kid to stop screaming when he saw me. “You’re different to mummy’s boyfriends,” he says. “I’m going to kill mummy one day.”
I felt real angry when he says that. They’d really done over poor Trevor.
It took three years before they found out who killed that actress. Of course he’d killed some other chick by then. “Deepest apologies for wrongly convicting you,” says a letter from the government, but it still took a week to let me out. Usually this would make me mad. But I didn’t mind.
I went up to Brava and took the glasses right off my face. I says, “I think you might be needing these, mate?” Brava’s face got real red and angry and he told me to piss off, that he didn’t need glasses. He could see just fine, he says. So I says he could have my radio if he’d just put them on for a mo. I was sure he was gonna deck me and take the radio as well but for some reason he did it. He put them on.
Nothing  was different.
He acted normal.
But after he took them off, Brava says, “I didn’t know that happened to you, mate. It happened to me too. As a kid it happened to me too.”
And even though I didn’t know what Brava was talking about ‘cause I can hardly remember my childhood, I could see some feeling had come into his eyes. So I told him about the smiling dwarf. I says, “If that dwarf ever comes for those glasses, you tell him cheers from me. Tell him I says sorry for how I spoke the first time I seen him. Make sure you tell him that from me.”