by Diane Duane
Only the steep stuff stays clean, Ronan thought as he made his way down along the street full of parked cars, listening to the traffic getting louder as he got close to the intersection. Anything we can build on… gets built on. “So annoying…”
It was just one more of the ways it had occurred to him, lately, that life sucked. Or more to the point, that it had probably always sucked, and he was just now getting around to noticing it. How did I never notice? I’m the noticing kind, usually.
“Trouble is, you get used to it,” he muttered as he got to the intersection and hit the button for the traffic light. “The suck level goes up real gradually and you stop noticing…”
The light’s change-timer sat there ticking quietly to itself. Ronan glanced around him, a reflex: sometimes he forgot to check if anyone was near enough to hear him muttering to himself. But he was safely alone. Traffic ran back and forth in front of him, oblivious to one dark-haired kid in school uniform identical to those of a few hundred more a quarter mile down the road and on the other side.
The light changed and he sighed and headed across, paying the waiting cars no more attention than he had to—right then, not being overheard was more of an issue. Ronan had, so everybody told him, been a late talker, and then for a long time a very quiet child, to the point where they had him tested to make sure he was all right. Ronan couldn’t remember any of this. And indeed he found the description pretty strange, because for as long as he’d been aware of himself, it seemed, he’d always talked to himself a lot.
While still very young he’d often wondered if other people had what he’d had when he was little—a sense that somehow or other, there was always somebody listening. This wasn’t a feeling that had ever bothered him… just a sense that he was somehow being paid attention to even when no one was around. It was more reassuring than anything else, and meant that even when he acted a little strange and other kids left him alone, he was never specifically lonely. Or not that lonely. Feeling lonely turned out to be a reaction he had to be educated into, from books and TV and movies and other kids talking about it… when they ever did. He learned over time that loneliness wasn’t something that anyone he knew would readily admit to.
As he got older, Ronan kept to himself any thoughts about his relationship with whatever he sometimes thought was listening to him. After all, it never said anything back, even when he was feeling most listened to. He noticed also that these “most listened to” feelings never came to him while anyone else was there, so he had come to consider them as extremely private.
This was just as well, since Ronan learned from indulging unusually expansive moods once or twice that telling people anything about the Listener was usually a stepping stone to getting called crazy or beat up—right up there with his Mam’s opinion that he was eventually Meant For Great Things. That declaration he’d once made the mistake of sharing with “friends” when he was very young, and had been laughed at and sneered at for months. So Ronan had learned to keep his own counsel not only about his Mam’s opinions, and his talking to the silences, but (gradually) about most of the other things that crossed his mind. As Ronan got older it seemed to him that just to make sure he didn’t say anything that was going to get him in trouble, he spent more time talking to himself than to other people--
“Awright Ro!”
With a few exceptions, he thought as he turned. “Awright Pidge,” Ronan said, as the tall lean gingery owner of the voice fell in beside him from behind. Pidge lived up in the Newcourt Road estate a little closer to Bray Head, and most mornings he had a game of trying to sneak up behind Ronan unseen. He was normally about as successful at this as he was at being called by his real name, Ronald, by anybody but one of their teachers. “Nice try…”
“Slow day,” Pidge said. “How’s your Nan?”
“Worried about the weather,” Ronan said as the two of them fell into step. “Your mam better?”
Pidge shrugged. “Not coughing so much anyway,” he said, unzipping his dark blue parka. This was new and too big for him—a desperate attempt by Pidge’s Da, on their last clothes-shopping trip, to keep up with Pidge’s own growth spurt. It was also heavy enough to keep him safe from temperatures in the Arctic, which meant that at the moment Pidge was always overheated whenever it was zipped up (meaning, in front of his mam, always: she was terrified of winter diseases, and twice as much as usual right now since she had a cold). “Outa sight now, thank God, I’m dyin’ in here.” Pidge shrugged his backpack back far enough so that he could get a grip on the sides of the open coat and flap them back and forth to cool himself down.
“Mind you don’t take off,” Ronan said.
“If only. You see the travel show last night on One?”
Ronan had. “The beach,” he moaned, “oh God. What wouldn’t I give up to go someplace like that on hols.”
“Not just you.” The show in question had featured a visit to an island with the kind of caster-sugar-sand-and-sky-blue-water Caribbean beaches that normally featured in movies about three-digit spies. “Not much chance, though.” Pidge scowled.
Ronan nodded, making a sympathetic face. Pidge’s dad was newly unemployed, his job lost when the hard disk company up the road closed and all its jobs went to Malaysia or someplace out that way. Pidge’s mum used to stay home with his little sister, but now she did childcare three or four days a week and tended bar for two. So things were tight at the Culhanes’ place, and for the foreseeable future holidays were going to be something that happened to other people. “Gonna be hearing all about it at lunch from some people,” Ronan said.
“Bastards,” Pidge said cheerfully. “Feck ‘em. Life’s hard enough without their noise. And can any of them even swim?”
They snickered together at the thought of some of the people in question—kids who came from more affluent families--floundering around in that sky-blue Caribbean and looking like right eedjits, since at the first meeting of their school’s new mandatory swimming class some of the potential offenders had looked like they should never go near any body of water deeper than a bath or at best a Jacuzzi. “You can just hear them,” Ronan said. “Murch’ll say that beaches are only for hooking up on. Shawny’ll start going on about unlimited rum drinks and O’Dorkley will tell us how all the babes are after his ‘definition.’”
“Wherever he’s keeping it. Sure he didn’t let us see any of it at the rec center…”
They turned the corner into Putland Road and headed along the pavement past the church near the corner and down toward the school gate, where cars were backed up two deep as people dropped off their kids. “Any thoughts about that maths test?” Pidge said under his breath as they went through the doors into the locker-lined front hall.
“Besides being doomed?” Ronan rolled his eyes
“Oh, come on, Smidge—”
“Shut it,” Ronan said without heat, and Pidge did. Ronan’s for-a-long-time-short stature had been the original cause of his Nana starting to call the two of them “the Pidge and the Smidge”, and it wasn’t a nickname Ronan wanted anyone at school to know… especially these days when he was finally getting some height on him and what some of the teachers still thought of as “the schoolyard rough and tumble” was finally on the wane. The visits to the Headmaster’s office, once a fixture in Ronan’s life, were becoming mercifully rare as the kids who’d been the most cruel to him either graduated or learned the error of their ways.
They made their way through the press of unloading students and the noise of slamming car doors and turned right through the gates into the long drive that led down to the school. Presentation wasn’t a huge place as schools went: one big building that was showing its age and was supposedly going to be torn down pretty soon—Ronan would believe that when he saw it, assuming it happened before he graduated—and three or four smaller temporary prefabs ones for the increasing number of classes that had overgrown the main building. Trees and some hedging were planted around the low outer walls to break the
view up toward the church and the main street in Bray, and ideally to soften the general look of the grounds. Not that it works… Ronan thought in some amusement as they came up to the school doors.
“Which lunch you in today?” Pidge said as they pushed through the doors and headed for their lockers.
“Uh, it’s Wednesday? Second.”
“One-thirty, then?” Pidge started fiddling with his lock, which always stuck; there was no point in waiting for him to sort it out.
“Yeah.” Ronan pushed him amiably in the shoulder and headed off for his own locker, wondering if his Nan might have been right about the weather and, if she was, whether he’d left a bigger umbrella in there.
***
The morning went by the way it usually did: history, science, math (Ronan kept quiet and attempted not to be called on all through that class, and to his astonishment succeeded), religious ed…
He sat through that class with the usual resignation. It would have been a dangerous opinion to have out loud—especially in front of any of the more conservative or gung-ho teachers—but Ronan wasn’t wild about religious ed. Oh, church was fine, it wasn’t as if he didn’t believe in the basics… mostly. But as he’d got older he’d started feeling as if there was something rigid and small and petty about a lot of what he was being taught, and if there was anything he really didn’t believe God was, it was petty. Or small. His science classes only reinforced that opinion.
His normal tendency to keep things to himself had so far protected Ronan from letting anything slip about this that could have gotten him into trouble. It was an annoyance that religious ed was compulsory—in fact, the only compulsory subject in the school’s curriculum—but he concentrated on just letting it pass over him. He wasn’t alone. There were plenty of others concentrating on just keeping their heads down and saying the words when called on, passing the tests and mumbling not too clearly when they were supposed to be praying.
Ronan was lucky in that there wasn’t a lot of pressure from his family at this end of things. The family went to Mass on days when everybody else went—the usual holy days of obligation—but besides that, it was pretty much considered optional. And yes, all right, his Mam had one of Nan’s glow-in-the-dark religious-retro Blessed Heart nightlights plugged into a socket in the living room, but that was about the size of it. At least the thing kept you from tripping over stuff in the dark. And there was the Brigid’s cross in the front hall over the door, four long arms and a central knot made of reeds woven together. His Da had picked that up from some tourist store up in Dublin. But at least everybody had one of those. It was the kind of thing you looked at without actually thinking about religion.
This was harder to do when you were actually stuck in the religious class, of course. Fortunately the class only happened a couple of times a week, and right now they were in a unit about the Gospels that was so dry and boring that even their teacher Miss Halloran had the grace to look embarrassed by it, and only laughed a little when she caught a couple of the kids in the back of the room falling asleep.
Ronan was going to be as glad to escape after that hour as anyone else. There had to be only so much time you could spend arguing about which of the four evangelists had been more accurate than the others. There was no telling how many people had rewritten what they’d written over the course of two thousand years. And sure it's supposed to be God that’s behind it all, Ronan thought, the writing and the rewriting too… but if that's true, then He's made an incredible mess.
Not just of that: of nearly everything.
It was an uncomfortable thought, one that had been creeping in fairly often of late, and Ronan had no idea where exactly it was coming from. Maybe just all the stuff going on at home… His Da’s overdraft, Nana’s health, all the trouble that Mam had been having with one of her supervisors at work, some snooty guy at the hotel—they’d all been on Ronan’s mind, darkening the local emotional weather. And on top of that, there was also the news, which Ronan had never paid all that much attention to when he was younger, but which now was becoming more of an issue due to his history classes. Ireland as a country had been pretty well off for a while. But a few of the big Irish banks had got themselves in the same kind of trouble a lot of banks had got into across the Atlantic, and without much warning the country had sunk tens of billions of dollars into saving them. After the fact, people here were getting nervous as the national stock market tanked and the world’s financial agencies yanked Ireland’s good credit ratings. Now everybody here talked constantly about the businesses already going under as a result, and how the bad times were coming back—when if you wanted a job, you had to leave home for some other country.
And not just everybody else, Ronan thought. My time’s going to come. Not long now.
But the thought of leaving his family, being forced to emigrate, to become a foreigner in some strange land… Feck no, Ronan thought. This is the place for me.
Except what would happen when he couldn’t find work? He’d have to go on the dole, his folks would have to go on supporting him, times would get bad for all of them. And the family he loved would start coming apart under the stress, as he’d seen others do. And it’ll be my fault—
The sound of the kids around him packing up their books and starting to leave brought Ronan abruptly back to himself. Quietly he got up and did the same, trying to push the dark thoughts away. But they’ll be back. Sooner or later, they’re always back…
Lunch came right after religious ed, and Ronan went to it with relief, thinking about his Nan—despite his Mam having told him not to worry about her—and looking around for Pidge. But Pidge was nowhere to be found, and when Ronan texted him he didn’t get an answer back. As a result he was reduced to grabbing a lunch tray and eating by himself. Don’t want to inflict this mood on other human beings, Ronan thought, grumpy at the thought and grumpy about being grumpy.
The mood didn’t improve after he’d finished his chicken sandwiches and salad, either. Lunch might have dealt with his blood sugar to some extent, but the school had gone on a health kick lately and done away with all the minerals; so as much as Ronan wanted a cola, he wasn’t going to get one. And the Ballygowan water just wasn’t cutting it (they hadn’t even had the still water he preferred, only the sparkling, which had so much fizz in it that it gave him sneezing fits). So Ronan came rapidly, once more, to the conclusion that everything sucked. When will this day be over, he thought, dumping the recyclables off his tray into the green bin and stalking out of the cafeteria.
His next class wasn’t for half an hour yet—there was no way Ronan was going to linger over his lunch by himself till the end of the period, looking like some kind of lonely loser—so he wandered out into the grounds around back of the main building of the school. At a distance across the mostly-green lawn he could see some junior phys ed class out on the football pitch putting on two colors of pinnies, and some of the guys doing stretches before starting a rotating series of five-a-side matches. Not me today, he thought with grim satisfaction, thank you God for small mercies, because it was his present kind of mood that tempted him toward the kind of leg tackles that would certainly be deemed illegal. God, even football sucks today. Everything’s really bad, isn’t it?
“…it’s a rubbish beach,” he heard somebody saying, the voice coming from behind the ugly temp building squatting about halfway from the main building to the back of the school property, “anybody can go there. You want a proper posh beach, Aruba, that’s the place. They have these villas…”
Ronan rolled his eyes. Why me, he thought, why now, why couldn’t I have fifteen minutes of peace before what’s going to happen happens? But no, there was probably no avoiding that voice, or the person who owned it. He might as well face both of them head on.
Ronan walked on around behind the building. Back there on its blind, non-windowed side was a “dead spot” where the security cam stuck up under the building’s low roof had a perpetually loose wire from when someone bro
ught in to mend the guttering after a storm had cracked the camera wire’s cable guide. If you knew how, you could come around the corner of the building unseen and jiggle the cable guide enough for the wire to get messed up and the camera’s motor to fail. School being what it was, of course now everybody knew how; and people who absolutely couldn’t stand waiting for a smoke until school was out would come out here after one lunch break or another and sneak a quiet fag.
You don’t have to go back there, said a helpful part of his brain. But Yes you do, said a less helpful one, because somebody away back behind you probably already saw you walking this way. If you change your mind now, word’ll get around that you were avoiding whoever’s back here. And everyone’ll know who that is. So no point in it, none at all…
Ronan slowed and shook some of the tension out of his shoulders, then sloped on around toward the “dead” corner. “Great place,” that thin sharp voice was saying, “you’d feel right at home, Maurice, lots of your kind of people around, they bring you drinks and shit and fetch you towels and—”
The laughter that drowned the voice out wasn’t kindly, wasn’t funny. Ronan found himself getting hot under the collar, literally: flushed and sweaty with embarrassment and anger and the certainty of what was about to happen, because he wasn’t going to be able to let it pass. He knew perfectly well who the “towels” line had been meant for. Sure somebody has to stick up for him, Ronan thought, furious. It’s not like it’d be hard if more than one of them opened their fecking mouths and said ‘Enough!’ His mouth worked as if he wanted to spit. Except they won’t. Because they’re scared they’ll be the ones getting made fun of next.
