Page 35 of Rat Park
Flor’s face crumpled dramatically, his big eyes going even bigger, his bottom lip pouting out. “You think my legs are ugly?”
“I don’t think about your legs. Get in the freaking car,” Dominic said, opening his own door. Flor laughed.
Dominic tried to pretend he didn’t like Flor’s laugh more than he could ever like any part of his body.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dominic knew that as much as he tried to compartmentalise his past, letting it out only in therapy sessions and when it seeped out through the thinning of membrane that happened deep at night, he would not be able to escape it forever.
Of course, as was Dominic’s luck, Flor was there when his worlds collided, to bear witness to all the things Dominic had become so good at pretending he was not.
Dominic didn’t recognise him at first, his brain stuttering to reconcile the image from the past with the familiar context of the park at night, handing out paper bags filled with food with Flor at his elbow. Dominic turned and looked the man right in the eyes, his mind offering no memory until the man’s face transformed with recognition.
“Nickie,” he said, and the nickname was like an electric shock to his system.
“Sweep,” Dominic replied, feeling the smile freeze on his face. With a sinking stomach, he saw Flor pause and look at him from the corner of his eye.
“Nickie!” Sweep said again, looking him up and down. “Look at you, all grown up. I heard you were in prison,” he said, reaching out with a cold hand despite the warm air around him, wrapping the bony digits around Dominic’s wrist. Dominic tamped down the instinct to jerk away.
“Not for a while now,” Dominic replied. Sweep tilted his head slightly as if it didn’t make sense, the junkie he had known being free to roam, alive and looking well.
“Have you seen your mother?” Sweep asked. Dominic’s eyebrows twitched down.
“She knows I’m out,” Dominic replied simply.
Sweep nodded. “That’s good, that’s good,” he said, becoming distracted even as his eyes sharpened, his hand tightening slightly. “How ’bout helping a friend out, then? For old times’ sake,” Sweep said, although they both knew they had never been friends. They had barely known each other even when they lived in the same world, two passing ships in the night. Still, Dominic felt the pull of the debt he had accumulated in his other life, which he would never be able to pay, no matter how many ‘old friends’ he helped out.
Silently, Dominic took his wallet out of his pocket even though it was against the Brown Paper Bag Charity’s rules to give donations like this, setting up a dangerous precedent. Dominic wasn’t thinking about that, however. He wasn’t thinking about much at all, his mind having gone still and blank, his only goal to escape the moment he had so suddenly been trapped within.
Sweep released Dominic’s wrist and watched as Dominic pulled out all the bills tucked inside the fake leather, snatching the money out of Dominic’s hand almost as soon as it hit the open air. Dominic didn’t comment, slipping the wallet back into his pocket. He knew that type of desperate hunger intimately.
Sweep took hold of Dominic’s wrist again, stepping a little closer. He smelt like sweat and unwashed clothes. Another fragment from the past.
“Don’t you got anything else for me?” Sweep said lowly. Dominic stared back at him evenly.
“No.”
“Come on, share a little. You were always good for it. A little rock. You weren’t picky ’bout the way you got some. I can do the same for you,” Sweep cajoled. Dominic felt a shiver of repulsion go through him, a visceral echo from the past, of the desperate place in which Dominic had been willing to do anything for a score. He might have resisted in Juvie, but lines had blurred with time.
Dominic heard Flor shift beside him and tried to breathe through what Flor had just learnt.
“I don’t do that anymore, Sweep. I’m clean,” Dominic said quietly, even though he felt anything but.
Sweep looked at him intently, so close Dominic could feel his breath, before the man took a step back, his eyes clearing a little.
“You really got out, huh?” he said, softer now.
“Yeah,” Dominic replied, even if it felt like a lie.
The truth was that Dominic was the same as the man in front of him. The only difference between them that Dominic could see was the different chemicals in their blood.
Sweep nodded and released his wrist, but Dominic could still feel his cold touch there, underneath his skin.
Dominic didn’t know what happened next. He must have given out the rest of the bags, talked to the people he knew, maybe managed to ask about how they were doing. All he knew was that he didn’t look at Flor. He just put one foot in front of the other until they were in the car, pulling away once again into the night.
Images appeared before Dominic like etchings on a cave wall. Rough lines and impressions that nevertheless told a story. He remembered Alice, a girl he had known, who had been saving money to escape the town. One of the people she had been living with had invited Dominic over, and Dominic had crept into Alice’s room unnoticed and stolen half her money, even knowing what she was doing to get it, how it was eating away at her soul.
He remembered sitting at the kitchen table at Prince’s and watching his dad cut the drugs he was selling with laxative and not saying anything, despite knowing what that could do to an addict’s body, already wrung out and dehydrated from the drugs.
