Alphonse - a Hallowe'en treatAlphonse - a Hallowe'en treat

From Bangers 'n' Mash:

30 Oct 1995

Here's a little something I wrote recently while I was in a Hallowe'en-y sorta mood.

Please have a safe and happy Hallowe'en, and remember to leave a light on out back so I don't stumble on my way in. I am very cold, darling, and I must move carefully because parts of me keep falling off. My big floppy shoes are awkward, but I will try not to let my rubber nose squeak as I slip into bed next to your warm, slumbering form.

Eternally Yours,
Bangers 'n' Mash

A L P H O N S E
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a hallowe'en treat

Alphonse did not look much different at 13 than he had as a newborn child. Certainly, he had grown somewhat bigger, but his transparent skin was pale and laced with capillaries. His face was like a bowl of skim milk with red and purple threads floating just under the surface. His head seemed disproportionately large, tenuously held on the narrow tube of his torso by the delicate stalk of his neck. Thin, pale, blonde hair hung in a weary nimbus about the bulb of his head; no matter how long it grew, it seemed not to grow down far enough on his scalp. When it reached a certain length, it resembled a shaggy blonde skullcap.

Alphonse had a short, pushed-up nose that made him appear as though he were eternally pressing his face against a plate-glass window. And, indeed, he did spend a great deal of time with his face pressed against the living-room window after school, watching the other children playing in the street. He had long ago learned that attempts to join in the games of stickball led to sudden, sharp pain and dull, lingering humiliation. Comfortable with isolation, he contented himself by sitting at his window on the world, watching and listening, tossing a baseball from hand to hand and listening to his mother shuttling back and forth in the kitchen, preparing supper.

At supper, Alphonse tore the meat with his small teeth and listened vaguely to his father's conversation about his day at the plant. His father liked to talk about what he had done to the men who worked under him, and what he could do to them if he really wanted. Alphonse's mother always smiled nervously when father talked that way, quietly spooning more casserole onto father's plate. Her thin hands were constantly in motion, cooking, cleaning, serving food, or wringing themselves in her bony lap, fighting one another like animals.

Alphonse did not court his father's attention, and was fortunate enough to rarely earn it. On the occasions when father acknowledged Alphonse's presence, he would scowl and gesture at his own dark, bushy hair, at mother's dark hair, and then wave a hand in Alphonse's pale face. "Bastard," he would spit, and sometimes "Changeling," scowling and glaring at mother as if challenging her to contradict him. In mother's lap the animals would be fighting something awful, and her face would be lowered and pinched. On most nights this was as far as it went, but sometimes father's arm would swing in a great arc over the dishes and cutlery, and the back of his hairy hand would smash into Alphonse's mouth, making him see stars.

Alphonse's favourite time of the day was after supper, when his father went out with friends and mother made her phone calls. Alphonse would go to his room, finish his homework, and turn on his radio. He loved to imagine the musicians in the orchestra, how they were dressed in fine clothes and how they held their bright instruments. He often read library books while he listened to the radio, lying on his stomach on the plaid blanket on his bed and flipping page after page in the medical texts he loved. The medical books were kept in the adult section at the library, so Alphonse had to sneak them out under his jacket; this was no mean feat, as many of the books were almost as wide as his narrow chest. Whether by luck or skill, however, he had never been caught, and had managed to read them all. Nowadays he liked to rotate between his favourites, carefully replacing the books on the library shelf when he was done with them. It never occurred to him that he might simply keep the books he brought home; he felt that simply borrowing them against the rules was bad enough.

As he lay on his stomach he gazed avidly at the illustrations of kidneys and hearts and lungs and intestines, of fetuses in the womb, wrapped in their delicate membranes and hanging inverted, plump white bats shrouded in paper-thin wings; as he looked at pictures of skulls with their lunchbox-lids flipped open and their eyelids peeled back like the skins of ripe fruit, he felt a strange thrill that was only partly the sheer excitement of reading forbidden material. Alphonse was truly fascinated by the workings of the human body, and he felt an almost voyeuristic excitement when he looked at, say, an illustration of a skeleton. With its skin and muscle cut and pulled off, the naked bones seemed brazen and lewd; with its demure clothing of flesh stripped, the skeleton could no longer flirt and tease coquettishly, but must hold still and allow itself to be probed and examined. Alphonse examined the pictures closely, sometimes circling his fingers around his own wrist and imagining the radius and ulna, what they might look like and feel like if nude.

Late at night, after the books had been hidden under the bed, when his father had come home in a haze of alcohol and the bedsprings were creaking in his parents' room, Alphonse would lie awake and let his small hands roam over his own body. He felt his jawbone, larynx and collarbones; he climbed his way down the rungs of his ribs to the soft expanse of his belly, and tried to feel the shapes of his organs as he pressed his fingers into the yielding flesh. Putting his palms to his abdomen, he felt and listened attentively to the gurgle of his supper being digested. Moving a leg quietly under the bedclothes, he felt his thigh muscles flex and relax. He gently examined his penis and testicles, trying to identify all the structures and channels he had read about, then turned over and, wetting a finger with saliva, penetrated his anus to explore the soft, moist, inner landscape of his rectum. He often wished for a candle and a small mirror so that he might see the tight ring of muscle hidden in the cleft of his buttocks.

Alphonse liked to leave early for school, even before father rolled moaning from his hungover tangle of sheets. Taking a piece of fruit, some bread, and some cheese from the icebox for his breakfast, he would slip out the back door into the laneway and head off in the grey morning light. The air was still and cold in the early morning calm and a glistening layer of dew clung to the plants that thrust up from cracks in the concrete. Some of the houses had a light on in the back windows, yellow panes glowing in the slate-grey walls facing the laneway. Morning sounds came from the odd house here and there, but for the most part, the street was still asleep.

Alphonse's morning route wound in a serpentine path through the maze of alleys behind shops and restaurants, laundromats and theatres, houses, banks and offices. Even though the other students would only be blearily boarding the school bus by the time Alphonse arrived at the heavy oak double doors, he varied his route daily. He was always keenly aware that unpredictability was a virtue, that to be traced was to be caught, tossed about and pummelled.

Despite this anxiety, Alphonse enjoyed his morning walks, taking in the rich mosaic of doors, windows and overflowing garbage cans, the scaffolding and fire escapes, the laundry puffing damply in the breeze on lines strung between buildings, the barking of dogs as he passed their yards, and the jittery energy of squirrels and sparrows. Alphonse had a sharp sense of time, and knew just how long he could explore his backstreet world before he had to make a beeline for school. There was always something new to draw his attention in the alleys: bundles of misprinted Chinese menus, shards of deep blue glass, a forgotten wrench lying orangely in a pool of rusty water, boxes of old magazines, a dead kitten in a discarded toilet tank.

No matter which twisted path he took, he always made a habit of stopping behind one particular building not far from the school, a building with a door facing a small courtyard. There was always a tornado of gulls screeching and squabbling in a bickering vortex over the courtyard, and Alphonse's pulse would quicken as he approached, sighting the cloud of gulls from blocks away.

Peering around the corner into the open doorway in the courtyard, Alphonse watched every morning as a large man worked with a knife. The man was enormously fat, and wore a white, bloodstained apron over white pants and a red and white striped shirt. The shirt made his arms look like a pair of fat, swelling barber-poles. His head, arms and legs appeared to have been added to his vast chest and abdomen as an afterthought, merging into his great bulk like conical pipes into the bulging belly of a furnace. The man's plump hands moved deftly, trimming fat and connective tissue from a tray of organ meats and tossing the scraps into the courtyard where the gulls waged a noisy war for the tit-bits.

Finished trimming his meat, the fat man would wipe his hands and bald, perspiring head with a handkerchief, then carefully take a broad pork-pie straw had from a hook and set it on his head. Turning to a mirror that Alphonse could not see, the fat man would smile broadly, as if getting into character. The fat man had a great many large white teeth.

When the fat man disappeared into the depths of his shop, Alphonse would come around to the front of the building and look at the trays of meat in the window. On cold days, his breath would fog the glass as he stared at the kidneys, the liver, the hearts, the blood puddings and the yawning cavities of the poultry. Sometimes the fat man smiled at Alphonse. "Torson's Meats", read the lettering on the shop window. Alphonse would smile at Torson, then run to school before the other children could arrive and corner him.

One October morning when the pearl grey sky arched like a yawning cat over the deserted laneways, Alphonse ran through the river of skittering leaves with the wind at his back and a delicious chill in his bones. As he approached the back of Torson's shop, he wondered where the gulls were; the sky over the little courtyard was empty. The city winters never grew cold enough to drive the birds south. Surely the gulls had not migrated?

As Alphonse drew closer, he heard the angry croaks and shrieks of gulls at war, and rounded the corner to see a rolling snowdrift of wings and bodies packed in a tight mass at the back door of the shop. Torson was nowhere to be seen, and the birds in the centre of the flock were darting their heads at something sitting on the door's threshold. One of the birds tossed its head with something slick and reddish brown held in its beak. Before it could swallow the morsel, another bird had snatched it away. Whether it was from tearing at the meat or from tearing at each other, the gulls closest to the centre were spattered with blood, giving the flock the appearance of a handkerchief that had been held to a bloody nose.

Fascinated, Alphonse moved closer. Without really thinking it through, he grabbed a broom leaning near the door and began to swing the business end wildly back and forth, scything through the mass of birds, sweeping their feet out from under them and raising clouds of bloody feathers. Just then, Torson appeared in the doorway brandishing another broom. He began to swing it up and down, beating at the largest birds in the centre of the fray. Alphonse stopped and watched Torson. In his white, bloodstained apron and red striped shirt, Torson looked like the biggest gull of them all, fighting off the other white, blood-flecked birds for possession of the tray of organs. The flock scattered.

As the courtyard cleared in a rustle and thump of wings, one bold gull darted forward and grabbed the edge of the metal tray, actually pulling it off the doorstep with a loud clatter. Torson brought the broom down with all his might, crushing the animal's neck and head against the lip of the tray as the gull tried to grab the meat.

Torson dropped the broom and stood panting, wiping his face with his hanky. "I was only gone for a second," he said. "The telephone rang." He prodded the fallen meat with the end of his broom and sighed. Alphonse knelt and looked at the meat. He flipped over a torn hunk of liver with his fingers. "That's where the gallbladder goes," he said in a soft voice, looking up at Torson.

Torson gave the boy a strange look, taking in the pale skin and the thin blonde hair that barely covered his scalp. The boy was stooping by the tray, touching the cold organs with an air of... what? Curiosity? Reverence?

"Listen," said Torson. The boy stood up. "That phone call... what's your name, anyways?"

"Alphonse, sir."

"Listen, Alphonse, that was a call from my hired help. The boy is playing sick again. Have you ever had a job?"

Alphonse hesitated, then shook his head slowly, not believing what he was hearing.

"Do you go to school?" asked Torson, setting his hands on his hips as though standing in judgement.

Alphonse thought about school, about standing in front of the big oak doors, shifting from foot to foot as if he needed to pee, desperately waiting for the sour-faced custodian to let him in before the other children could arrive and catch him on the hard concrete steps. He thought about the blows that inevitably came his way whenever the teachers' backs were turned. He thought about the dry smells of chalk and foolscap, about the sinking feeling in his stomach when the bell rang and he was pushed out into the playground with the other children. He thought about the smells of urine and disinfectant in the echoing tile washrooms, about the cold whoosh of the urinals automatically flushing while strong hands pressed him up against the wall...

"I don't have to," answered Alphonse. "I don't have to go to school."

***

The next few weeks were a giddy rush of excitement for Alphonse. In the mornings he actually skipped as he made his way through the maze of alleys to Torson's butcher shop. He would still stop and poke around if something particularly interesting caught his eye, but generally he went straight to work.

At work, Alphonse slung his schoolbag on a hook - he had to maintain, to his parents, the pretense of attending school - and donned his very own white apron and straw hat. The job of trimming the organ meats and feeding the gulls was now his, and he wielded the big knife like a professional. In the mornings, he would attend to the slow but steady trickle of customers as Torson ground cubes of meat into hamburger, stuffed his own spicy sausages and sliced thick prime rib. "My associate will take care of you," Torson would grin broadly to the customers, gesturing at Alphonse. Alphonse would wrap the cuts of meat neatly in wax paper and tie the packages with string, then beam at the clients as he worked the jangling cash register.

At lunchtime, Torson would hang a "closed" sign in the window, and he and Alphonse would retreat upstairs to Torson's apartment for delicious stews, soups, meat pies, sausages and steaks with baked potatoes, macaroni salads, and, inevitably, a strudel for dessert. Alphonse was acquiring a taste for black coffee with his strudel. He was also putting on a fair bit of weight, looking healthier and less anaemic.

At his parents' supper table, father would note the changes in his strange son. "Hmph," he would grunt, and turn his attention back to his plate. Mother would tentatively slip Alphonse a second helping, noting with some surprise the way he cleaned his plate with gusto.

Alphonse took to visiting Torson's apartment above the shop after dinner. The fat man had a record player and a collection of Dixieland jazz music. Torson lived alone, had no family in the city, and welcomed Alphonse's visits. Sometimes he would pour them each a small glass of wine, saying "It won't do you any harm" as he set up the checker board. "It's good for the digestion," he would add, taking a sip and waiting for Alphonse to make the first move.

One evening a month and a half after he had begun working for Torson, Alphonse came home to find his mother and father sitting at the kitchen table. Father was clutching an empty beer bottle in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. Mother sat across from him, wringing her hands as tears rolled silently down her face. "Little bastard," said father, rising and unhooking his belt.

Mother screamed and cried, trying to restrain father as Alphonse cringed under the flurry of blows. "Little bastard, little bastard!" shouted father as he swung the belt buckle at Alphonse's quivering form again and again. "Little bastard, teach you to lie to me you little bastard!"

After father had exhausted his anger and gone out to the bar, Alphonse stood in the bathroom stripped to his underwear as mother wept and pressed a wet cloth to his bruises. "They came to the house this afternoon," she sobbed. "Some men came from the school board and gave us the letter. You have to go back to school."

Alphonse winced at her words and felt a pressure building in his throat. He began to whimper, hot tears pressed out of his closed eyes and spittle ran from his mouth. The whimper built up into an ear-piercing wail, and mother covered her ears and shrank back as Alphonse screamed and waved his hands wildly, flailing the air as though it were suddenly filled with wasps. Alphonse ran from the bathroom.

By the time mother got to the kitchen, the door hung open and Alphonse had disappeared into the night.

Alphonse's bare feet stung as they slapped the cold pavement and the chill air raised gooseflesh on his naked skin. Tears blurred his vision but his legs carried him unerringly to the door in the courtyard. His fists hammered at the door until a light flicked on and the door opened.

Alphonse fell into Torson's arms, sobbing. "What..?" Torson exclaimed, holding Alphonse's shuddering form in his plump hands. He took a clean apron from the wall and draped it around the trembling child, then gathered Alphonse in his arms and carried him upstairs.

Torson poured hot tea and brandy into a big mug and carried it to the sofa where Alphonse huddled in a blanket. He sat down. Alphonse took the hot drink and climbed into his lap. Torson did not have much of a lap to speak of. His enormous gut poured out over his thighs, covering his legs almost to his knees, but leaning back, he was able to provide a surface for Alphonse to curl up on. Alphonse sipped the hot, brandy-laced tea and pressed his head in between Torson's pendulous breasts.

As Torson held him and Alphonse gradually relaxed, the story came out. Disgusted by the beating Alphonse had received, Torson clutched the weeping boy to his body and took slugs from a bottle of brandy, shaking his head and grimacing. Eventually, he could tell by the child's deep, regular breathing that he was fast asleep. Torson put the child in his bed, settled down on the couch with his brandy and turned out the light, eventually falling drunkenly asleep himself.

When Alphonse woke with a start in the darkness, he sat up in fright and looked around wildly. All the shadowed forms were unfamiliar, The window was in the wrong place. Then, seeing Torson drunkenly slumped on the couch, his great belly and chest rising and falling with his breathing, Alphonse realized where he was and calmed down.

Quietly, Alphonse got up and padded downstairs in his bare feet. He walked around in the dark shop, touching the knives, the cleavers, the mallets and the steel trays. They couldn't take him away, this was where he belonged. Silently, he reached for the knives.

***

When Torson's shop did not open the next day, the patrolman walking the beat became curious. Peering in the shop window, he saw no motion. Walking around to the courtyard in the rear, he came upon a screeching flock of bloodstained gulls. The birds were pecking at a great mound of flesh that lay on the ground. Stifling a gag, the patrolman moved closer. Complaining bitterly, the gulls drew back far enough for him to see the lungs, the intestines, the heart and other organs that lay torn and picked apart on the cobblestone floor of the courtyard. Thick smears of blood led in a trail through the open door and up a flight of stairs.

Climbing the slippery, blood-slicked stairs, the patrolman found Torson sprawled on the couch and fell to his knees, retching. Blood had spread out in a wide pool across the floor. Torson's shirt was undone and a huge wound gaped from his sternum to his groin. Inside the fat man's eviscerated trunk, the body of a child nestled redly in a fetal position. Alphonse's glazed eyes stared blankly at the retching patrolman from within the carcass of the fat man. One of the boy's thin arms hung limply out of the obese cadaver's split belly; the slash in Alphonse's wrist still oozed blood.