For Paula

By Ted Crowley

Though far in distance and time from the trenches of Flanders and without a reflective backwards glance to Paula’s tragic family history, on a recent disco night in Squires, Paula and her five best friends, all girls, attended. Even though they were hardened disco-goers, they dolled themselves up, as if it had been their first madly exciting night out or as if each of them had been held in solitary confinement for hundreds of years. From various homes, other than their own homes, the six of them, like a pack of female wolves on the prowl, emerged so scantily clad that even boys incapable of imagining girls without seeing them in the flesh, were at no disadvantage in harvesting the fruits of their lustful glances; through idle, lynx-like eyes. 

On thin white under-developed legs, under bare thighs, showing a feast of feminine flesh below high hems and above block-heeled boots, the girls staggered towards the disco queue, throwing come-hither smirks at the boys and the bouncers. Six further feasts of female flesh were offered, between the low tops of their denim skirts and the high bottoms of their meager tops, so that no youth wishing to feast on female flesh went to bed hungry that night. Their facial makeups, their hair-dos and their general carry on left nobody, least of all the boys, doubting that the girls were out to enjoy themselves and given a modicum of luck, their usual luck, which was no luck at all, a good time could be had by all. As they joined the queue, Paula screamed in an near hysterical outburst, "Hello! Really? Who cares? Sooner or later it happens to everybody. A baby’s no big deal. Mummy will take care of it and isn’t Mandy so lucky to have her little Mandy to return to, after she’s found herself in Bangkok."

Over a stretch-limo, delivering debutantes to the discos, over the beer barrels and over the security razor-wired wall of the yard beside Squires, where the barreled booze is stacked high, Paula spotted Dickey Cockburn slouching away from Squires. Leaping from her place in the queue and tripping over empty bottles and barrels, she climbed onto a dirty barbecue stove and shouted, "Mammy’s boy! Mammy’s boy! Must go home, must we?"

On hearing her, Dickey, skint and already fairly well oiled, lowered his head and pushed his penniless hands deeper down into his empty pockets. While still heading off, on what might have been heavy cast iron legs, he did not look around until he heard Paula calling again, "Look Dickey! Turn around! All your birthdays coming together."

Turning, Dickey saw Paula raising her top and wobbling her ample bare breasts from side to side. As if they were blast furnaces, the iron melted from Dickey’s legs. Fleet footed, he hopped around the limo, skipped towards the wall and bounded directly towards Paula. When his hand reached up, she slapped it on the wrist and chided him with, "Now, do we want to go home to mammy?" 

Dickey spent the evening in Squires disco with Paula. While neither of them could dance, they got on well enough until the drink and the tablets detached them from their senses and their feet and until Paula spotted Dickey pawing Lucy, her youngest best friend. This led to a brief tactical separation. But when Paula’s tactic looked like backfiring, to entice Dickey back, Paula flashed her breasts again. The Australian bouncer, known to them as G’di, noticed her, and bounced the pair of them were out of Squires for the night.

Squires Hotel is poised high above long and low finger-like headlands and islands, beautiful islands! stretching far out to sea. In Squires, overlooking it all, its old residents in candlelight, elderly colonial elephants returned home at last to die in luxury, in days of yore, following delightful dinners, retired to the verandas, taking the bracing evening airs, savoring hand-warmed French brandies to moisten and enliven the exquisite flavor and aroma of Cuban hand-rolled cigars, enjoyed a wonderful seascape, especially when red sails were caught in the sunset or when the rising moon dappled the surface of the sea with pearls of moonlight, displaying them before carelessly tossing them away, only to replace them in abundance, as if pearls cost nothing. Oft on a stilly night, that sublime seascape was sharply, pleasantly and strangely contrasted with the darkly silhouetted cliffs and the foothills of the distant mountains coming down to the sea, as if they also wished to bath in candlelight or in the sea, so magically enriched by the romantic handiwork of a rising harvest moon. 

A narrow roadway, a low dome-topped wall and a particularly high section of crumbly cliff, its top lip hidden beneath a foot-deceiving, wind-curled, curl of long sea grass and stringy weeds, separates Squires Hotel from the sea; far, far beneath it. Nowadays, a rotten, unpainted, vandalized and dilapidated park seat, a relic of the same old decency and better days at Squires, is often soiled by sick youngsters, thrown across it, vomiting their guts up into the dog pooh marmaladed dock leaves that thrive beneath its dirty slats. 

Paula and Dickey staggered to the vomiting seat. When peeing took on a greater urgency than vomiting, they helped each other and fell over the low dome-topped wall. As Paula soiled herself, she vomited. While Dickey peed against the wall, Paula, behind him, crawled towards the cliff edge. Pulling down her denim skirt and her panties together, down and sideways, because she could no longer stand, she went from crawling to crouching, with her right foot resting on the overhanging, foot-deceiving, wind-curled, curl of cliff-top long sea grass and stringy weeds. Thus, compromised by drink, drugs and her garments, like fetters around her ankles, she began to see lights, the stars and the moon, rotating about her. 

She saw, going fast and ever faster, trails of swirling lights chasing each other like fireflies, but silently, ever so silently, within a weird world devoid of music, within a silent disco of glowing orbs and arcs, like loosely curled hair; all alight and flaming bright. 

Feet first, then head first, she free-fell fifty feet. A rock protruding from the cliff bounced her clear and doused her weird disco lights; within her mind’s eyes. Then, she fell one-hundred feet, to the sound of a baritone being choked, that rose to the ear-splitting scream of an hysterical but virtuous woman being raped in a dark alleyway; within her mind’s ears. 

Her skull-crushing encounter with the rough-cast concrete sea wall plunged her into the velvety blackness and the utter silence of the grave. Through a pile of stacked lobster pots, she slid onto the slimy sea-swept rocks and into a heaving mound of rotting seaweed, inhabited by green and brown finger, feet and face feeding crabs: squint-eyed, their hungry mouths slyly masked by grotesque pincer claws, crawling sideways in hordes, to their hot dinner; served. 

The Airedale dog, Bruno Browne, the direct descendent of lion killers on the Masai Mara, his pedigree only once adulterated by the blood of a sheepdog, the walker of an early morning riser, bearing the same surname, was alerted by Barbie’s barking, as she barked like crazy on the beach. Bruno Browne, having taken the fast cliff path down, his usual route, stopped, snarled through bared fangs and barked, as his tail sought refuge between his sheepdog’s hind legs. Apart from Barbie, Bruno Brown was the first to see the mutilated body of a young woman, almost naked, within a shroud of seaweed, that rose and fell with the waves. 

Barbie, Paula’s little terrier bitch and a deadly ratter, had chased through the town, as if she had heard Paula pleadings to her, while Dickey Cockburn slept in a bed of nettles at the rear of Cox’s mini-market. Later, he remembered nothing; not even Paula’s name. 

Amazingly, a young doctor in pajamas, under a yellow-orange policeman’s waterproof jacket and in coastguard officer’s waders, pronounced Paula to be still alive, even though he could tell that practically every bone in her body was broken and anybody could have seen the multiple fractures to her scalped skull, where blood and gray matter oozed through her seaweed entwined hair. "Yeah!" the doctor said to a policeman, as they both stood clear of the rescue helicopter’s spray, "no harm in making preliminary inquiries, Bob, she could have been pushed."

On the third day following her fall, Paula died of her own accord. Her sudden death saved her mother from pulling a plug or throwing a switch. Paula’s mother was, as she had always been, incapable of making decisions, no matter how trivial they were. Between deep comas, sometimes, Paula was brightly coherent. Unlike Dickey Cockburn, she remembered quite a lot, including the swirling lights, the dark baritone sound and the woman screaming, the velvety blackness and the utter silence of the grave and being rocked to sleep by Barbie in the soothing cradle of the sea. Moments before she died, she whispered to her mother, "Barbie sang me lovely lullabies as she rocked me to sleep with her little paws and please, mum, could Barbie come with me on my long journey?"

Grieving and emotionally torn to pieces by guilt and regrets, too late to rectify, Paula’s mother nodded to everything people said to her, while deciding nothing. She allowed Paula’s remains to be taken to a funeral parlor, briefly to a church and quickly to a crematorium. She left the funeral arrangements to Paula’s five best friends. Almost incoherently, over and over again, she kept on saying, "Paula’s best friends will know what to do, they’re so cool, such lovely girls, such great friends to Paula, they’d do anything for Paula, they’ll know what to do. Amn’t I right?" And thus, she raved on, until new and ever stronger tranquilizers and bottles of whiskey lacing countless cups of coffee, knocked her out, on the night that Paula gave up the ghost. Then as always, Paula was as motherless, as she had been, fatherless.

Paula’s five best friends decided to hold Paula’s funeral service in Squires disco. "We’ll have Dickey there, Paula’s Dickey, the pair of them together in Squires again, but out of that horrible box they’ve put her in, Paula seated in a big armchair, having a great time watching us enjoying ourselves, didn’t Paula love watching us enjoying ourselves, right Lucy?" they announced their decision in chorus, as if their combined brains amounted to one small brain that spoke through a single silly mouth. 

In turning down the only gig he ever turned down, the disco owner, to avoid the inevitable downer of a mournamental gig that could tarnish the glitzy image of his disco, by turning it into a loss-making shrine for teenagers, inadvertently, did the only decent thing he had ever done in his life. In panic, in utter panic, he recruited the services of, as he said, "A padre." This was how Father Tom deVoil, known to Paula’s generation as Sandeman Port, due to his old-fashioned clerical garb, came to pray over the pagan mortal remains of Paula. 

Father Tom deVoil is neither young nor cool. He is still a tough old man and a hardy old bird, as straight as the line joining the nape of a blackbirds neck with tip of its long tail and hardly shrunk by two inches from his youthful height of six foot six in his naval socks. Beneath the wide brim of his hat and his remaining few whisks of unkempt snow-white hair, a gravely sin-aware, age-hewn, gray-granite face proclaims the hell fire and brimstone, the flaming currency of his youth and the currency flaming from the mouths of missionaries, of whom he had been one, cauterizing the sin-tarnished souls of sinners, by warning them, that instead of being cast into hell’s fire for all eternity, they could get off more lightly in purgatory; while still suffering there for all eternity, less one final indivisible corpuscle of time, should they pay attention to his fiery words, before being summonsed to account for their stewardships, down here below in this vale of bitter tears. 

Paula’s five best friends brought Barbie to the church to bark her final farewells to Paula. Instead of allowing, "That dog," as he said, into his church, Father Tom obliged the dog-handling best friend to tie Barbie to the iron railings around the cold stone slab over Bishop Walsh’s tomb. 

As the bell tolled, the five best friends led the funeral procession up through the aisle, while Barbie, outside, still filled the church with her heart-rending crying, even though, eventually, an elderly church elder closed the church doors. Even after Father Tom had whispered to the undertaker and he had moved Barbie to the small iron Cross marking the paupers’ graves, Barbie could still be heard within the church; barking her head off. 

As if to compensate for any attenuation in Barbie’s grievings, the five best friends, together with droves of other best friends, who could not have known Paula from Eve, lamented, by bellowing-out their grief at the tops of their lusty voices. Soon enough, women’s even louder wailings swelled the girls’ ever mounting, ear drum and head splitting, vocal din. The organist, distracted and deafened by the noise, struck a final note, closed the cover down over his keyboard, leaned back on his music stool and closed his eyes, as if by so doing, he closed his ears as well. 

As the atmosphere within the church fouled, becoming stiflingly humid and hot and the noise level exceeded the threshold of pain, youngsters wandered out of their pews, milled around the coffin and straddled the altar rails, until that house of God’s replicated a badly run disco; without G’di to bounce them out.

To exhaust the bad air, the elderly church elder reopened the church doors. Barbie, having chewed through her strap, leaped through the widening gap between the doors and scampered towards Paula’s coffin. Not even young braves, well used to grounding fast little bitches, could have caught her as she leaped onto the coffin and sniffed, as if she had smelt a rat beneath. In the manner of a born ratter, with her sharp nails, she tore deep scratches into its cheaply veneered chipboard. Scratching, deeper and deeper, fore legs and hind legs working in synchronism, she levitated over the coffin and scattered the floral wreaths from Paula’s five best friends, until they fell, as Paula had fallen, into oblivion.

Seeing that order had broken-down and on hearing the five best friends giggling hysterically through their wails at Barbie’s antics, Father Tom coughed loudly. They ignored him. Coughing again, louder still, he realized that coughs, no matter how loud, would go unheeded. Bending down, he picked up an altar bell and shook it so vigorously that it lost its tongue amongst the scattered wreaths. As a last resort, in his missioner’s voice, the old priest shouted, "In the name of God and all that’s holy..." 

Youngsters, who had never previously been stopped in their tracks nor corrected, displayed clinically recognizable symptoms of shock, warranting counseling, and thus, without counseling, they were grievously traumatized. On hearing Sandeman Port, as they knew him, they paused in their antics, moved backwards, shuffled less, got off the altar rails, shut their mouths, let go of their lovers’ sticky hands and sidled sideways, crab-like, towards their pews. 

"In the name of God and all that’s holy! Somebody! Anybody! Yes you! Get that dog out of here. Now!" demanded Father Tom deVoil in such a solidly, surely measured voice that it could have silenced the guns of warring armies in the heat of battle, concluded a bloody war and imposed an irrevocable peace; for all eternity. 

As the clop, clop sound of cool unlaced boots on the terrazzoed aisle grew fainter and Barbie’s muffled cries died away, a palpable silence descended. That silence was so profound, in contrast to the abominable noise, that the organist, over a pint of stout in Cox’s pub, was heard to say, "One could have heard an infant soul drop."

Seeing what he had seen and hearing what he had heard, Father Tom pushed his prayer book aside, because he knew that he would be departing radically from anything that had ever been written. While ever and always scrupulously careful to avoid committing the sin of blasphemy, he suspected that even the Mentor who had guided the Evangelist’s quills could have been hard pressed to foresee this congregation of his; a meager two-thousand years down mankind’s slippery slope, since His saintly scribes appended their final, Amen. 

Calmly, he spoke:

"That had to be some enchanted evening around Squires Hotel." 

But knowing that he would not be preaching calmly for long, he drew a whale’s breath, while measuring-out a telling pause; before half-thundering: 

"Some enchanted evening!" 

Then, that old master of vocal contrasts, recharged his lungs, both barrels, and fired them as a single volley into their disco deafened ears:

"Why? Why? Why? In the name of God and all that’s holy, why? Why was it necessary to murder our sister Paula? Yes! Yes! Yes! Our sister was murdered and I’ll tell you who murdered her. Yes! I’ll be telling you in no uncertain terms who pushed our sister over the brink and over that treacherous cliff and I’ll tell you why. They say, "Fools give you reasons, wise men never try." That’s fine by me! I’m content to be a fool in the service of God here on earth and in the salvation of souls for the next life. I’ll tell you why and I’ll give you reasons why. And what’s more, I’ll tell you, precisely, who murdered our sister Paula." 

Sensing that he stood on marble, a poor sounding board, the old priest took two paces forward onto the hollow-sounding wooden steps leading to the altar. On his marks, he banged the boards with his farmer’s boots and the youngsters, on recognizing a true performer, knew that they had never attended such a fab gig and that Sandeman Port, of all the old codgers they had ever made fun of, who had so often, in dark alleyways late at night, growled to them, "Get home! Do ye hear me? Home!" could have made it real big in show biz, as the lead vocalist fronting his own band, while doubling on percussion.

To the rhythmic accompaniment of his boot, shaking the ground like some distant but fast approaching cannonade, and when one foot tired, to equal effect, he pounded the boards with his other boot; boom! boom! boom! While bringing his thunder directly down onto their heads, within the high vaulted roof of his church, his chest heaved and his laser eyes flashed lightening, like the broad muzzles of naval guns, and thus, bringing himself to battle again, nurturing the souls and the mortal remains of gunners pulped amid their shell-shattered gun turrets, his mind flashed back to the days of his youth as a chaplain on His Majesty’s warships, in bloody sea battles. Boom! Boom! Boom! and their anguished cries for his soul soothing oils and his prayers under fire, their last post of Extreme Unction, before being tossed over the side; dead minced meat. 

Without drifting, either to port or to starboard, from his thoughts, he resumed:

"The precious bastion of a woman’s virtue is never forged from torpedo-proof battleship twelve-inch hardened steel armor. Instead, women are frail vessels, to be nurtured through love, as young women should to be loved. Freighters, frigates, fortresses and battleships, let alone the dubious strengths of young women are never impregnable, especially if rendered soft by prolonged bombardment, softened up and rendering frail, liable to show the white flag, to surrender, after a constant bombardment of titillation, titillating fashions, filthy magazines, television, computers, blatant sexual permissiveness, unrestrained lust, neglectful parents, the pubs, the off-licences that serve teenagers, binge drinking, drug pushers, drugs, rampant commercialism, blatant greed and the merciless exploitation of them, putting too much money into immature hands, mobile phones with shocking pictures on them, discos, night-clubs and the vagabonds who run them, who shamefacedly insist that their loathsome trade protects our gullible youngsters from debauchery, by brazenly saying, "Left to themselves, without discos, youngsters would copulate like animals on the beaches, in dark alleyways and in public parks.""

While taking a handkerchief from the sleeve of his vestment, the old priest paused again, so that those who had heard things they had never previously heard, had plenty of time to digest his unpalatable words. Blowing his nose repeatedly, as loudly as a whale blowing on surfacing, having told them, he told them again and, for the third time, he blasted them, straight between the eyes, before ploughing on, at full speed ahead, with:

"Greed, greed, greed, it was greed that murdered our sister Paula. Greed for this that and the other, the greed of having everything and of wanting more: boyfriends, spouses, partners, a house or half the house, a fancy car, a baby, a good soft job, entertainment, money, more money, it was greed that murdered our sister Paula, it was rampant commercial greed and the making of more and more money out of our youngsters, through drink, drugs, sex and the vilest of vile entertainments that murdered Paula." 

Having paused again, in an almost inaudible throw-away line and tone of voice, he slapped them on their faces with, "You’ve all gone to the dogs!"

On returning his handkerchief to the sleeve of his vestment, Father Tom resumed in a prayerful, God fearing, respectful, tone of voice:

"May the Lord in His Infinite Mercy grant eternal rest to the immortal soul of our sister Paula and bring her to ever lasting life in the Kingdom of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ - Amen!" 

Paula’s mother turned to her social worker seated beside her and whispered into her minder’s unsociable ear, "Wasn’t that lovely, such a nice man, and to think that he remembered Barbie when he spoke so kindly of dogs." Here Paula’s mother paused to allow the social worker to respond. On hearing no response, whatsoever, she continued, "Don’t you think Barbie should be cremated with Paula, wouldn’t she love to be with Paula and wouldn’t Paula love to have Barbie with her? I’ll ask Paula’s five best friends or maybe you’ll do me a big favor and talk to the man in the bowler hat and the long black coat?" 

"No!" responded the social worker, and as it turned out, within a month, due to her incessant barking and gross neglect, Barbie was taken into care and destroyed, painlessly, by lethal injection.

But even thunder, like eaten bread, is soon forgotten and the soul can be as starved as the body in the absence of regular sustenance. After that funeral night of drunken "mourners" imbibing Paula’s father’s gargle in Squires Hotel, people went their separate ways, to grieve or not to grieve, each in his or her own way. Apart from the best friends, a silence, probably born of shame, erased Paula’s name from circulation, other than on the self-righteous tongues of gossips, prattling that Paula’s fate could not possibly befall their own daughters. Others, awoken again in the small hours by rowdy scenes on disco nights, closed their windows tightly and returned to their warm beds; so as not to know for whom the next bell tolled. 

Following a brief lull in their brisk trades, while, for a time, some parents did what parents are duty bound to do, Squires sprang back from its own brink, even though Paula did not spring back from her brink, due to their brisk trades. Soon enough, in that sad town, it was as if the plague had returned; a black plague of youngsters out of control, abandoned by parents who had had great fun conceiving them, only to abandon the fruits of their youthful frolics to having great fun, procreating unwanted, untimely, unplanned, uncared-for and unloved children, to be, once again, in the next generation, the victims of exploitation, drink, drugs, unbridled sex and the night-clubs.

Hazel Spratts, Jenny’s mother - Jenny being one of Paula’s best friends - heard her brand new ringing tone, leaned drowsily over the side of her bed, rooted in her handbag, pressed the green "Go" button and muttered, sleepily, "Hello!"

"Hazel! Urgent! Catch up with you in Squires? Soon as you can!"

"Eleven?"

"Cheers Hazel!"

The five mothers of Paula’s five best friends, sat together in the public bar of Squires Hotel, tearful and heavily burdened with forebodings of sleepless nights to come, messy jars of baby food and ready-to-go soiled nappies; far from the Costa del Sol.

On ten mobile phones, five mothers talked to five daughters. Four of the girls were already pregnant, saying, "Should have told you, mum. Waiting to be sure. Wonderful news, mum! For Paula! Paula or Paul, doesn’t matter. So sad about Lucy, still trying. All our babies are for Paula. She’d have loved that. Isn’t that what best friends are for, mum? And won’t you help, mum, after the babies pop out, because we’ll be joining Mandy, finding ourselves in Bangkok?"

Gradually, the grannies-to-be ceased to be sad and weepy. Instead, they entered into raptures of sheer delight and became bookmakers, placing big bets amongst themselves and having had everything but love, they turned to craving, greedily, to have even more; to win and to be five proud grannies. Months later, to swap their progress reports, to revise the odds, taking bets off one girl and onto another and cheating each other, while bringing themselves up to date on the latest advances in jars of baby foods, ready-to-go nappies and pink knitting wool, they met again in Squires Hotel. As four of them celebrated over suitably small, but potent, celebratory drinks, Lucy’s mother, on the very brink of utter despair, drowned her sorrows in pints of porter. It did not help her to know that the odds on Lucy had dropped below 1,000:1, that the smart money had gone elsewhere and that no mother, apart from herself, was still backing Lucy.

Lucy was anemic, anorexic, half starved on takeaways and prepubescent, until Paula’s stable of teaser stallions hastened her tardy nubility. Soon then, she shed her virginity with three of them, taking turns, beneath a red garbage lorry parked overnight in Cox’s car park. Lucy’s initiation ceremony occurred in the presence of Paula and Paula’s best friends, watching her legs kicking while, looking sideways, she could see their block-heeled boots dancing around the stinking bin lorry and their hanging down hair and eyes, when they peeped between its wheels. Thus Lucy qualified herself into Paula’s select club of best friends, in the nick of time, only a few weeks before Paula’s death.

In fond memory of Paula and since Lucy’s baby would have been for Paula, the best friends selected Dickey Cockburn to impregnate Lucy, to avoid rows between themselves over more ground-moving boys, and since none of them lusted after Dickey Halfcock, as they had begun to call him. But having failed to fulfill his assignment, repeatedly, Lucy accused Dickey of impotency, sobbing and saying, "By a long chalk or a short chalk, you’re the worst screw I’ve ever had." And Dickey, knowing that Lucy should know, lowered his head, pushed his penniless hands down deeper into his empty pockets, closed his eyes and walked onto the foot-deceiving, wind-curled, curl of sea grass and stringy weeds, atop Paula’s high cliff, where the sea surges; far, far below. 

Lucy, distraught, over letting Paula and her best friends down and at being cast into a wintry Coventry by them and clean out of their club, for failing to become pregnant and for causing Dickey’s death, in her many hours of dire need, after she had spoken to every dog and devil, as a last resort, she turned to her mother for guidance.

That mother, also demented by similar problems of her own and that her daughter had let her down and out of the select club of excited grannies in waiting and that she would lose the fortune she had placed on Lucy, secretly visited Father Tom deVoil. She addressed him as Padre Port, but, knowing his nickname that generations of youngsters had shouted after him, he simply smiled to himself. Needless to say, Father Tom’s advice went down like a reinforced concrete duck’s feather and as water runs off the same bird’s back.

Undaunted, and still seeking the advice she wished to hear, Lucy’s mother took Lucy to a liberally minded gynecologist. But, for all his liberality of mind, he bounced them out of his clinic, just as G’di had bounced Paula and Dickey Cockburn out of Squires disco on Paula’s fateful night.

Meanwhile, as a background activity, Lucy tried and tried, again and again with different partners, while her mother did her level best to dispel Lucy’s despair with, "You’re so young Lucy, time’s on your side, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again and that’s how I got you, my darling!"

"And if not, mother?" begged Lucy.

"And if not, daughter: shuffle the pack and deal again, you never know your luck."