“If we could avoid them, that would be great,” I say, trying not to blush.
“I have every faith in you. What constitutes a first?”
“Over seventy percent.”
“Sure you’re laughing so. You’ve been getting nineties in school,” he says.
“Yeah but that was kids’ stuff,” I say.
“It’s all kids’ stuff.”
“Yeah right.”
“I’m dead serious. If you can’t explain what you’re thinking about to a kid it’s not worth thinking about at all,” he says.
The kettle comes to the boil and spurts hot water out the top of its spout. I get a hot water bottle out of the press.
“What are you doing?” Billy asks.
I point at the roof of the caravan. “There’s a full moon tonight.”
“Oh.” He sighs. “I don’t feel like stargazing tonight.”
“OK,” I say, putting the hot water bottle back in.
“What are you doing now?” Billy asks.
“You said you didn’t feel like it.”
“Sure you can go up yourself,” he says. “You don’t need me to hold your hand.”
“Am I annoying you?” I ask.
“You’ve annoyed me every day of your life.”
“Thanks.” I flop down on his bed.
“Are you not making tea?” he asks.
“No, I wasn’t going to.”
I stare up at the ceiling.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” I ask.
“I’d love one.”
“Grand.” I drag myself off the bed and over to the kettle again.
“James pulled an inside-out calf today,” Billy says.
“How do you mean inside-out?”
“Well,” Billy puts his hands together, “everything that should have been on the inside”—he opens the palms of his hands like an open book—“was on the outside. It was like someone took a knife, cut open his stomach, and just hooshed all of his organs out of him. His four legs were stuck together like he was hanging up at an abattoir. When Jim-bob put his hand inside the mother’s hole to feel around for it, he could put his fingers between every one of its ribs. He was able to grab a hold of its heart and everything.”
“And the heart was beating?”
“Yeah. It was still alive inside the womb all right. Poor bastard. James called the vet. It was a C-section in the end.”
“And did it survive?”
“Have you ever seen an inside-out calf knocking around the place?”
I take the teabags out of the mugs and slingshot them into the bin. Billy takes even more milk than I do, in case it’s too hot. He blows his tea before taking a sip. He hates burning his tongue.
“That’s mad,” I say.
“Yeah, the vet said it’s the second case he has come across in twenty-five years. It’s not the strangest case of a cow calving I’ve ever come across though.”
“What was?”
“It was a cow that was pregnant with twins. I didn’t see the birth now.” He holds up his hands. “But I went in to check on her and she was after doing the business. Job done. There was one perfectly healthy calf beside her, which she was completely ignoring. Instead, she was licking this ball of gray-blue hair. It was like a burst football—no ears, no eyes, no head, no limbs, no defining features at all. And here was the cow, licking away at it.”
“Was it alive?”
Billy stares at me. “Have you ever seen a ball of fluff knocking around the place?”
“Sorry,” I say.
“It wasn’t alive but it had been alive inside the womb.”
“The same as the inside-out calf?”
“Yeah.”
“And the other twin calf was fine?” I ask.
“He was grand! Perfectly normal. Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt. But this other yoke scared the shite clean out of me.”
“It had no head at all?”
“None.”
“It must have had a heart though.”
“Yeah. It must have had, in order to develop and grow hair. But it made me think, what classifies something as a living thing? Like, was that ball of fur alive because it was able to live in the womb?”
“Did it dream?” I wonder aloud.
Billy leans back in his chair, crosses his legs, and exhales. “That’s a good one actually,” he says. “I wonder if it dreamed.”
Power Take-Off
I’m bopping along on the tractor spreading slurry. The seat is squeaking up and down on its springs and the arse of the tanker is shitting out the back. Then everything slows down and the dream chugs, like a bit of sleep gets stuck in the moving clogs. My head is still going ninety but the tractor isn’t sucking properly. And it’s like moving underwater trying to get out of the tractor to check on the vacuum pump.
As soon as I see the PTO shaft rotating, it speeds up again until everything is in fast-forward. I have always been terrified of PTO shafts. They scare the shite clean out of me. I’ve lost count of how many fellas I see at the mart, missing arms and legs after getting caught up in them. The pipe looks as innocent as a plastic yoke you get out of a Kinder egg whirring about, but if it sees so much as a loose thread of a shirt hanging out, it has you. The closest thing you will ever get to a black hole.
I’m checking the vacuum pump because the tractor isn’t sucking right. I’m bending down, when one of my earphones comes loose in my ear and as it’s falling, I stick my arm out to catch it and it has me—the machine judders, laughing, making a joke out of my skin and bones, swallowing more of me down its throat until—
* * *
Mam is calling me for dinner. I wake up in bed kicking my leg out as if to stop myself from falling. I take my head off my pillow and sleep slips out of my ear. She’s thick because the lads aren’t in from the yard. We presume Billy is still in bed, but it isn’t like James to be late for dinner. Mam peels his potatoes to have them ready for when he comes in, fussing over the way the food looks on the plate. She places it in the low-heat oven to keep it warm for him. Then she throws two unpeeled spuds onto Billy’s plate and covers it with cling-film for him to eat later.
“James milked on his own this morning,” Mam informs me, sitting down to her dinner. “He didn’t want to wake you.”
I take a sip of milk. “It isn’t my fault that Billy sleeps in.”
She shrugs and continues to mash carrots into her potatoes. “I’m just saying.”
I look down at the food that she has laid out for me—it’s not as pretty as James’s plate but not as slapdash as Billy’s.
The way it’s arranged seems familiar, perfect even, like there are just the right amount of peas and carrots gathered in congregation beside the potato. I’m sure I have seen that exact piece of salmon before. I’ve slipped into an uncomfortable déjà vu.
It’s like looking at a rerun of something on the telly except that I am in the telly—I am the telly and I’m watching the screen through my own eyes.
As if on cue, there is a bang at the back door and I watch from inside myself as I get up from the chair to meet a winded Billy in the hall, gasping, shouting that James is after having an accident. His arm got caught in a PTO shaft. He tells us to ring an ambulance and Mam rushes to the phone shouting, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Billy runs back out to the field clutching a bunch of tea towels.
I don’t move anywhere. I know what happened. I’m just after waking up from it.
* * *
Billy says that sometimes, if you look at a star directly it can disappear. Peripheral vision is best for looking into the far distance. If I try to look at the dream directly it disappears. It’s only when I’m not threatening it that it comes nearer, flirting at the edges of my mind. I think in circles to lure it in.
I circle around the dream looking for the missing pieces, but I don’t know where I end and James begins. James shouted for help, but the only person who was close enough to hear him was Billy, who was asleep
in the caravan. By the time Billy woke up, James had lost too much blood.
* * *
Maybe I could have saved him, if I had paid attention to that dream.
The Wake
We don’t know if we’re welcome at the wake but we decide to go anyway, for James. I get ready too quickly and wander around the house looking for jobs to do. I clean the kitchen and the sitting room—bring out the bins, sweep, hoover, polish the mantelpiece and inside and outside the glass cabinets. It’s only when Mam emerges from the steam of the bathroom with her hair wrapped in a towel that I decide to wash my hair too.
I turn the handle as hot as it can go and scrub my skin clean. I grab a razor and shave under my arms and my legs. I hesitate before bringing it between my legs and shaving there too.
After the shower, I change into my outfit and go check on Mam. She is genuflecting in front of the mirror on the low windowsill beside her bed. She leans into her reflection with a pair of tweezers and tries to get at a stray hair at the tail of her left eyebrow. She keeps misjudging the root so she prunes around it, shedding the bulk of the thick hedge that frames the left side of her face. The tweezers plow up the hairs and nip at her flesh, leaving a trail of pink furrows on her new patch of forehead. Her eyes water and pinpricks of blood appear.
“Mam?”
She jumps. “I didn’t know you were there.”
“I can do your makeup if you like?”
“Only if you want to.”
“Yeah, I got ready too early,” I say, even though we are already late. “It will give me something to do.”
She surrenders the tweezers. I kneel down beside her and survey the damage. Her eyebrows look like mistakes a child has drawn and is beginning to rub out. I spit on a ball of cotton wool and get her to hold it above her eye to stop the bleeding.
Mam has emptied her wardrobe onto her bed. I survey the different outfits she has. A white cotton T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, a man’s white shirt and gray cardigan, or her red knitted jumper, James’s favorite. He calls it the red geansaí.
I dollop moisturizer onto her forehead, cheeks, and the tip of her nose—it’s cold, like yogurt on my fingers.
“Plenty of concealer under my eyes, please,” Mam says.
“Yep.” I dab the creamy paste onto the shadows. “Do you want to chance mascara?”
“Do I want to look human? Yes please.”
“I’m just saying, you’ve no waterproof—”
“Debbie, put the mascara on. I’ll be fine. I have tissues.”
Mam’s eyes are mostly brown, but there is a crack in her left eye and half of it is light blue, as though she has another person inside her trying to break through.
“Look up for me.” The mascara wand latches onto her lashes and works its magic.
“Lipstick?”
“There’s a boring pink one in here, that’ll do.”
“Nearly there,” I say, taking a pencil and drawing back on the rest of her left eyebrow.
“Can we have a drink before we go?” Mam asks in a small voice.
“Of course.”
“It doesn’t feel like he’s gone yet,” she says.
“I know.”
Our eyes lock. Now is the time to tell her about the dream. But I don’t.
* * *
James’s wake takes place in his mother’s pub exactly a month after his twenty-fifth birthday. We dodge the women going around trying to alleviate the mood with their offers of tea and paper plates of biscuits. The place is filling up. I spot Billy on his stool at the bar and drag Mam over to him.
“Where is he?” I ask.
Billy nods toward the fish tank that separates the pool table from the rest of the place. “Whatever bright spark agreed to put the coffin on the pool table needs to be shot.”
“Are you for real?”
“Shirley wanted him there apparently.”
“Shirley doesn’t know what she wants. She’s still in shock.”
“How’s?” He tilts his head toward Mam, who is still holding my hand. The fingers of her free hand are tangled in a mesh of hair that she is pulling across her face.
“We had a bit to drink in the house,” I explain.
“That probably wasn’t the best idea.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m just saying, it probably isn’t the smartest—”
“You’re one to talk.”
That shuts him up.
“How is Shirley?” I ask.
“Well you can imagine . . .”
“I mean, what’s she like? To you, like?”
“Grand, I’ve already gone up and sympathized.”
“Do you think—” I stop and start again. “Do you think Shirley will go after you? For, you know.”
“That it happened on our farm? I wouldn’t think so. Although, I didn’t think she’d lay out her dead son on a pool table either. But it’s not me she has the problem with.”
“Do you think it’s all right for us to go up to him?”
Billy takes a moment. “Yeah, just. Look after her.”
“I’m trying.”
* * *
I walk toward the fish tank and feel Mam’s fingers tighten around mine. The water in the tank is inky blue and filled with a metropolis of plastic that looks like it was built from Lego. There used to be fish in it—a black and white angelfish called Guinness and a pair of goldfish called Gin and Tonic—but it was only a matter of time before people started pouring sups of their namesakes into the tank. The little bit of light that comes from the halogen fixtures at the corners of the tank makes electric veins in the water and pushes the blue beyond the glass so that it sometimes feels like drinking in an aquarium.
We join the line of people shuffling toward the casket. The pool table is covered with a white tablecloth. A little girl with a chocolate-smeared face emerges from underneath it and makes a cape out of it before tottering into the crowd waiting to pay their respects.
Shirley is standing beside the pool table at the top of the open casket, stroking her son’s hair. When people shake her hand, she looks pained as though they are bothering her. Her ex-husband isn’t at the coffin. I imagine that she has barred him from getting past the fish tank and he’s somewhere in the pub, demoted to the lower echelons of mourners along with the rest of us.
James’s coffin takes up most of the pool table. He is covered with a shroud from the chest down. They have dressed him in a suit with a white shirt and a black tie. One sleeve is empty from the accident. A lonely hand lies on his chest, a bunch of rosary beads tangled around the fingers. The club jersey is draped over the bottom of the coffin, along with a county medal and a Player of the Year trophy that he won at the dinner dance at Christmas.
I am at the top of the queue to say goodbye and I’m aware of how little time I have with him. I stroke his index finger with my own, from the tip of his nail to the knuckle. His skin feels cold and greasy, like the top of a mushroom. I want to lift up his eyelids to see the dead moons lying in their sockets. I wish that I could take off his clothes to examine the stump where his arm used to be. His neck is swollen and folded into rolls that remind me of the breadmen that I used to maul into existence with the leftover dough from Mam’s mixing bowl. It’s strange to think that James used to live inside this waxwork we are left with that nobody knows how to act around.
I go to shake Shirley’s hand and she pulls me into a hug. “Oh, honey bun.” That’s what she calls me—honey bun or chicken because she never remembers my name. “It’s OK, chick, I don’t blame you. I would never blame you,” she whispers into my ear.
“I’m sorry, Shirley.” I pull away and turn around to let Mam know that I’m still on her side, but she’s gone.
* * *
A shriek of feedback comes from the sound system that is set up in the corner of the bar. Father John bangs the microphone with the heel of his hand. He’s in no fit state to be leading the rosary. He loosens his collar with one finger and pu
ts his fist to his mouth to silence a burp.
A confused silence descends on the crowd as though we can’t decide if we are still afraid of the devil or just blessed with a polite, Irish tolerance for people talking shite. Father John closes his eyes and steadies the waves inside his head. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
“Amen.”
“We are gathered here to give comfort and support to the Cassidy family during this difficult time . . .”
The drone of Father John’s voice makes me scan the crowd, and sure enough, he comes into view like God has summoned him there in his GAA tracksuit. It’s nice to see him again. It’s nice to be seen by him.
I spot James’s younger brother, Mark, slipping out the side door and decide to follow him. I tell myself that I need the fresh air.
The cars are not so much parked as abandoned outside the pub. Compared to the streets of Dublin, our village is little more than an intersection of lost roads bumping into each other. Mark is sitting down on the gravel with his back against the wall, his shoulders hunched over, hugging his knees into his chest. I sit down beside him.
He takes a breath as if he has just come up from water. “Jaysis Debbie, I didn’t see you there. How’s the form?”
“Not so bad. Listen, I’m sorry—”
“Thanks.”
“There’s a good crowd here.”
“I wish they’d all fuck off to be honest,” he says. “Not you, I mean. Just—”
“I know.”
We sit in each other’s silences for a while.
I snap back into myself. Mark stubs out a cigarette on the gravel. I start to get up, but he puts his hand on my arm and I sit back down again. I let him kiss me. I focus on the mechanics of his mouth on mine. His tongue slides around and his chin tightens. Our lips smack together and he makes little slurping noises like a calf. I push myself into his mouth, wanting to suck the emptiness out of him, but he pulls away.
“Sorry,” I say. I can tell that he is disgusted with himself—disgusted with me. I pick myself up and try to brush the guilt off my jeans.
I bump into his girlfriend outside the toilets on my way back inside. “Sorry,” I say again.
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