Only Patricia was allowed to pour him a glass of lager and, as she heard his key in the lock, she took the can from the fridge. In their neighbourhood, the McLaughlins were the only people with a fridge. Patricia took her father’s glass and tilted it the way that Brendan had taught her. The can had a picture on one side of a blonde woman in white underwear and a negligee.
Brendan closed the door, and George slipped his hands under the table and cast his eyes to the floor. The kitchen, which had been so noisy – Patricia bossing him, his mother frying and boiling and sighing, his brothers punching and scratching and shouting – was suddenly so silent that George could hear the bubbles burst in his father’s lager.
All the children sat; his mother wiped her hands on her apron. ‘When do you want it served up?’
‘When I’ve drunk this,’ said his father, throwing off his coat and winking at Patricia for the carefully poured beer.
George had never been winked at by his father, nor had he been aware of his father winking at his brothers. Patricia preened silently.
George loved his sister, second to his mother (he only loved his brothers a little, and his father not at all), but his sister’s callousness seemed to be directly related to affirmation from her father. George had noticed on more than one occasion that Patricia could be vicious for the sake of Brendan’s approval.
His father smoked and read the paper, and drank his beer in silence, and they all waited in silence for him. His father didn’t really read the paper; he merely glanced at it, hunting for stories on people he knew. When he was finished, he folded it and tossed it aside.
After the newspaper fell to the floor, the kitchen was filled by the scorching sound of his father’s last inhalation of a cigarette. The smoke appeared down his nose, like a dragon, and then he crushed the butt in the glass ashtray. There was half a glass of lager left, and Brendan sipped it.
George suddenly began to feel very itchy. His palms itched most and he remembered his mother telling him that wounds itch when they heal and that made sense after the belting, but then his back began to itch, and his scalp. It was not nits. One or two children at school had nits at the moment, but George’s mother insisted he, his brothers and sister were dooked and combed every Sunday. The itch was all his childish energy, trapped inside his still body.
George wriggled slightly to ease the itch, but then realised that his movement was gently rocking the table. Cutlery sounded off plates.
‘Would you sit still?’ said his father, putting his glass down, hard, on the table.
George nodded. His father rarely focused attention on him. He was five years younger than his sister Patricia and his place in the family was very much that of an afterthought.
‘Sit still, I said.’
George looked his father in the eye. He was not sure if he had ever done it before, and after this moment he would never do it again, but they looked across at each other, each at either end of the table, like two opponents.
Brendan left his half-glass of beer and stood up. The furniture in the room seemed to shrink before his height. It was as if even the chairs and the table were afraid of him. Every object in the room, even his mother and his brothers and his sister, became smaller, while Brendan’s presence swelled.
George tried to make himself smaller too, so that he couldn’t be seen. He put his hands between his knees and hunched his shoulders and looked at the placemat in front of him, which bore a picture of a primrose. He stared straight at the yellow flower, wishing that he were two-dimensional like the primrose, or indeed possessed no dimensions at all: invisible.
George felt his father’s vice-grip lock on to his shoulder, and turned to him only then.
‘I’m talking to you, sir.’
‘I’m being still,’ said George, his whole body wincing, aware of how weak he sounded.
‘Not still enough,’ said Brendan. His eyes were filled with that same watery rage as when he beat their mother. There was a sheen over his too-blue eyes, like the clear eyelid of a crocodile when it submerges its prey. George knew the look, but would always, for years to come, be unable to articulate it. There were times when the look in his father’s eyes changed and it meant murder.
‘It’s all right, love, he’s just had a hard day. He’ll stop his fidgeting,’ said his mother, sealing his fate.
George’s mother never spoke up for any of them, and George knew that the fact that she spoke up now meant that he was in for it, and probably she was too. It meant that his mother had calculated in her head the damage to him against the damage to herself. Her words were always meaningless: they were like spores of dandelions on a lawn. She had power in her nurturing, but her words were nothing at all.
‘Hard day?’ said Brendan hoarsely, gritting his teeth. Their father never raised his voice.
‘People are either shouters or thumpers, one or the other,’ George’s mother had told him.
‘Hard day? What kind of hard day can you have when you’re seven?’
George was silent, staring at the primrose on his mat until it started to blur and morph into tumorous monsters.
‘I’m talking to you,’ said Brendan, pulling George to his feet by the shoulder of his jumper.
George stared straight ahead, at his father’s brown tie and cream shirt. He could feel every pore in his body: the roots of his hair, the soles of his feet.
Brendan lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘What kind of bad day did you have?’ He spoke leaning down so that he could look George in the face. George could smell aftershave on his father’s skin and lager on his breath.
‘He got belted,’ said Patricia.
If his brothers had spoken then, Brendan would certainly have slapped them because they were not being addressed, but Patricia had certain privileges.
‘What for?’ said Brendan, still addressing George, not Patricia, standing up but staring at George, his hands on his hips.
George took a deep breath. ‘Writing with my left hand.’
‘And were you?’
George panicked. ‘What?’
‘Were you writing with your left hand?’
‘Yes.’
George blinked in quick succession, expecting a blow. His father threw back his head and laughed. He laughed for a long time: long enough for Peter and Richard to start sniggering too. Suddenly, Brendan stopped laughing. As a conductor silences an orchestra, so Brendan silenced the room. No one wanted to be caught out laughing when he was not.
Brendan grabbed George’s sweater and shirt with two hands and lifted him off his feet. George closed his eyes.
Brendan set George down on the table, so that his brothers and sister were looking up at him. Stood on the table, he was almost eye to eye with Brendan, but George chose not to look him in the face. He stared at his father’s Adam’s apple instead. Brendan began to pace back and forth.
‘Only you could get belted for writing with the wrong hand. There’s a lot of good reasons to get belted at school, but that’s the most ridiculous I ever heard.’
George felt tears prick in his eyes but held his breath and forced them to bide their time. Even during the belting at school he had not cried, which was why Sister Agatha had been so harsh.
Brendan began to circle the table. ‘Which hand do you write with? Show me.’
George held up his left hand.
‘NO!’ Brendan shouted so loud that George almost fell off the table. ‘That’s the hand you did write with. What’s the hand you write with?’
George held up his right hand.
‘What’s the hand you did write with?’
Swallowing, George held up his left.
‘What hand is that?’
‘Left.’
‘Right.’
George bit his lip.
‘Show me the hand you write with?’
George took a breath, then held up his right hand.
‘Which hand is that?’
‘Right.’
‘Right.�
��
‘Show me the hand you did write with…’
George again raised his left hand.
‘What hand is that?’
Remembering the lesson from the last time, George answered, ‘Right?’
‘Wrong. What are you, an idiot? You think you have two right hands?’
George swallowed. ‘Left?’
‘Right!’
George began to cry. Brendan put a fist in front of his face. ‘No son of mine cries.’
George took a deep breath, wiped the tears from his cheeks and somehow managed to stand up straight.
‘Let’s start again.’
It continued, until the mince was cold on their plates, small globules of fat hardening on top of it. Richard actually fell asleep at the table, his cheek pressed against the placemat, his lips pursed like a fish and saliva drooling. His mother and sister were both crying silently.
‘Show me the hand you write with…’
George raised his right hand.
‘What hand is that?’
‘Right.’
‘Right.’
‘Show me the hand you did write with…’
George raised his left hand.
‘Which hand is that?’
‘Left, no right, right… no left.’
Finally, his father slapped him. He hit him with the back of his hand and sent him toppling off the table and on to the range, where he burned his newly belted left hand, if only for a second, before he fell to the floor.
As soon as he landed, Richard woke up and dragged his chair out, so that he could see him more clearly, on the floor.
George swallowed, holding his burned hand in the other. His mother was a white-faced statue, arms at her sides. His sister was holding her knife and fork in two hands as if she was bored and only wanted her dinner. His brothers were smirking.
Brendan walked around the table and stood next to George. George sat on the floor, knees up to his chest, looking at the white bubble of skin on his purpled palm. The skin of his newly burned hand was tighter now, as if the palm was pulling the fingers in on itself. From his position on the floor, George could smell the leather of his father’s good shoes.
‘Get up.’
George got up and stood, arms at his sides, accepting his fate. He wondered if his mother would carry a bowl of bloody water from his room in the morning.
‘What you’ve proved,’ said Brendan, hands in his pockets, ‘is that you’re an idiot. You can’t write, you can barely read and you’re not ever likely to be able to write because you can’t even figure out what hand you’re supposed to write with. Right?’
George nodded.
‘Right?’
‘Right,’ George whispered.
‘The nun that belted you’s an idiot too, if she thinks there’s any point in trying to knock some sense into you. If I were her, I wouldn’t even bother.’
George nodded and turned for the door.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ said Brendan, taking off his tan jacket and putting it over the back of the chair.
George hesitated.
Brendan sat down, loosened his tie and downed the rest of his lager. ‘You’ll sit and eat your dinner.’
George turned and took his seat again at the table. He felt a strange itch near his temple and nudged it with his knuckle. When he lowered his hand there was blood. He had knocked his head when he fell on the range, but not noticed because of the burn. George sat with both hands under the table, each of them throbbing and feeling twice their normal size. He wondered how on earth he was supposed to hold a fork, in either his left or his right hand.
Brendan’s chair creaked as he sat down. He raised his fork to eat and the family also raised their cutlery. Brendan touched the food to his lips and then threw it down, the fork clattering against his plate.
‘What the hell is this? Are we animals, that we eat cold slops now?’
‘I’ll heat it up,’ said George’s mother, gathering in the plates, while Brendan narrowed his eyes and lit another cigarette.
The cigarette was finished before George wanted it to be. He smoked it down to the butt then tossed it into the brush. He turned to the car, expecting Moll to be asleep, but she was tossing and turning in the back seat, curled in a ball alternately on her left and right, then sitting up to smooth his jacket over her.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ he whispered to her, through the car window.
‘I’m too cold. I can’t get comfy.’
He opened the back door and rearranged everything, so that she was sleeping on half of the travelling rug with the other half pulled over her, and his jacket on top. After a few moments she said she was still cold.
‘You’ll be fine when we get you some new clothes tomorrow. I’ll buy really warm ones.’
‘My head’s cold too.’
He peered into the car at her; her shorn head was almost bald in places where he had cut too close to the scalp.
‘When I go to sleep I have my hot-water bottle,’ she said. ‘My mum wraps it in a towel.’
George sighed, closed the door and turned away from her. He placed another cigarette between his lips. Even though the windows were shut and the car doors were closed, he was still aware of her tossing and turning as he smoked. The car rocked gently against the base of his spine.
Finally, he opened the back door again.
‘What is it?’ he said, accidentally exhaling smoke into the car.
‘I’m cold.’
‘Still cold?’
She nodded, clutching her arms.
George turned his back on her. He pinched the cigarette between forefinger and thumb and took a long drag, before tossing it away. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, exhaling into the blue-black pine of the forest.
He leaned into the car, whipped the travelling rug from her, then climbed into the back beside her.
Her eyes were large shiny pebbles. Each time he looked at her, George could not fail to be disconcerted by her squint eye. It was as if she could see all sides of him, as if he were transparent.
He took the rug and wrapped it around her shoulders. ‘C’m’ere,’ he said, pulling her into him.
At first she was just leaning against him, but after a while she tired and shifted, so that he was cradling her, swaddled in her travelling rug, like a baby. ‘Are you warm now?’ he whispered to her, trying not to breathe in her face because he knew he would smell of cigarettes. Briefly, he remembered his mother kissing him good night, with the smell of the Woodbines on her lips and in her hair, and her soft whispered stories of a cottage by the sea.
‘Warm,’ she replied.
He could feel the weight of her in his arms. It was a precious weight. He pulled her tighter into him.
‘Will you read me a story?’
‘What do you mean?’
Redemption Road Page 18
