How To Be Deep

Today I wandered deep into the city and found myself out in some of the wee paths near Sailortown, that's a part of town that they're really just waiting to bulldoze. It makes me sad to be there. I went over to the Tomb St carpark and found some street kids (street-wise not tramps). I asked them if any of them knew The Unicorn Girl and if they could tell me where she lived. I told them I'd hang out on the corner of her street at the cool phonebox calling up her cell phone and waiting. I'd let it ring for ages and if it went to answerphone I'd call her back and tell her that I've a bottle of raspberry wine that I can't drink on my own so if she could just call me back I'll wait here by the phone.

They didn't say anything for ages until one of them said they didn't know her number but that I'd just broke their ideas of derilict romanticism that they find in American soft-alt-rock lyrics.

I told them to party down and go fuck themselves.

They said that they knew her and that they thought she wasn't so keen on people like me. I asked them what they meant and they said that she was trying to get rid of that dick Clarence Pishflap who hung around her like a bad smell with a bad smell and that me and all that crackhead scruffbag gang was something she wanted to move away from. They said that she used to hang out with them all the time but that now it's only really twice a week. They said that soon she was going to start dressing sharper and drinking in fancy winebars and not in some shitty street carpark and that if I wanted to get with her I could sharpen myself up and meet her somewhere nice. But not here, here I was just going to the top of the list of things she wants to leave behind her when she starts a new phase of her life.

I told the guy he was seriously fucking deep, and he said that deep is one thing but holes in your shoes is another.

Pain

At the back of the carpark on Tomb St where sk8rkids huff paintball pellets and drink Solschenizyn (brown lemonade, schnapps and a dash of Fanta), was Rock and Roll Stephen, the Unicorn Girl and Clarence Pishflap.

"This isn't your usual place," I said to them. "Your gang don't roam here, what's the story?"
Clarence Pishflap spat and said to the Unicorn Girl that my mate Fabian Wildman was the one who broke her friend Betty Blue's heart.
The Unicorn Girl looked at me and said that I should maybe leave because she won't speak to friends who hurt other friends.
I told her I hadn't seen Fabian Wildman in ages and that I was a free man and could go round Belfast wherever I wanted.
Clarence Pishflap said that him and the Unicorn Girl were off and they left, Rock and Roll Stephen looked sad so I offered him some pink Champaigne.

He blew air out his flapping lips and said that he didn't need to teeth to tell me that Clarence was putting moves on the Unicorn Girl and that I was out of the picture.

I told him I hadn't seen or even thought about the Unicorn Girl in months and that my neighbours wore leotards all day long, and sometimes so did I.

"I know," he said sadly, and I remembered how he lost his teeth.

We sat in silence and I fell asleep, when I woke up he wasn't there. It was only me.