Better Man

Oh Lord! So many years of his life he spent contorting his life around hers. So many! We used to wonder at just how he managed it so. Too many. He held her in that bed of hers when they were just seventeen. In that house on Devon Mews without heating they wore their clothes beneath the blankets and squeezed their bodies close together. I, the fool, had vomited in her bedroom sink and had had a crush on her. Of course! I was not alone. He made her his and he worked his shoe leather as he made the daily pilgrimage with her to the busstop where she’d get the 6:30 N16 out to Park Heights to submit to her daily toil. We all knew the gulit he felt that it was she and not he who worked that damn job. It was in him the pride that was vacant in us. We’d be asleep on her couch, or wherever we could find, and barely register the sounds of him working the tooster or the kettle’s crescendo. Me, I had a crush on her, and was envious of him. I’d wake at the sounds and eye, with lids closed, their early moring preparations. I wanted to see what it’d be like to have this girl I wanted, who he had, and what you do to prolong that. I made myself acquainted with their habits and juxtaposed what I would do with what he did. I always fancied I the better man, that I would do better things, more meaningful, find the love within the early morning preparing toast for her in the kitchenette of the crowded townhouse in small Galway City. But Lord! it wasn’t to be! And he, my friend, was that better man. Yet still he lost her so.