by Donal Ryan
And Lampy realized suddenly that James Grogan had stopped talking to him and was talking to one of the nurses who’d appeared beside him, a small round foreign lady who always seemed sad, and she was saying, It’s ridiculous, it’s ridiculous, and James Grogan was saying, Don’t worry about it, just do your own job and let others do theirs, and the foreign nurse, whose name he couldn’t think of though he knew it sounded Irish, Mary or Marie or Maria or something like that, walked away shaking her head, and Patsy Fox the handyman had brought the bus, all loaded up with oldies, around from the day-room door, and Patsy was getting out and he was winking at him and smirking behind James Grogan’s back and James Grogan was saying, Okay, Lampy, is that all clear? And Lampy said it was, no bother, sound out.
The snow had stopped and all the clouds had cleared and the pale gibbous moon looked wrong against the morning blue, like it wasn’t meant to be there, like a lad wandering home after a whole night on the beer, washed-out and dying sick. The temperature reading on the dash was zero. There was some kind of rambling chatter going on at the back of the bus and Mr Collins was near the front, leaning out from his seat, telling him about the time he’d been a bus driver in London. All the streets and roads he’d driven every day. All the routes he knew, and he wondered would he know them still. If he had a chance to go there ever again. Maybe he should have stayed beyond. He drove a bus here too, you know, for CIÉ. Until he retired. A gentler occupation this side of the water by far. Not as many darkies or thugs. We’ve our fair share all the same, though. And the woman next to Mr Collins shushed him and Mr Collins talked on regardless. And he was telling Lampy for the seventh or eighth time the one about when he was held up in Bethnal Green, how the fella held the cold blade to his face and made off with the cashbox but not his wallet; that was the time before there was a divide between the drivers and passengers, you know, and that was when he decided to come home and he was let combine his service in both places for the purposes of his pension, thank God, because only for that he’d be out on his ear, and did Lampy know bus drivers were paid less than bin-men in those days in London, but still all the same he wouldn’t change anything, not even the time he was held up, because that experience stood to him in later life, it galvanized him sort of, and Mr Collins was talking on and on but Lampy couldn’t hear him any more, and the reading on the speedometer rose by five and the reading on the outside temperature gauge dropped by one.
The road slopes down from Coolderry, winding and narrow, lined with sycamore trees. It was coated with fallen leaves turned to mush and hardened again by the frost. Lampy’s knuckles were whitening on the steering wheel. The road forks at the bottom of the slope and just before it, fifty yards from Con Kelleher’s house, the big Mercedes that Lampy’s employers were in hock up to their ear-holes for shimmied left and right, sending Lampy’s heart into a hammering spasm of ragged beats and thumping palpitations. He couldn’t think of a thing to do so he didn’t think at all, but his hands decided by themselves to hold fast to the wheel and his foot took it upon itself to ease off the throttle and gently onto the brake and as the bus slid past Con Kelleher’s high gate the traction control reined in the slide and the wayward tyres regained their grip on the cold road and the anti-lock brakes slowed the wagon to a gentle speed and the cheeks of Lampy’s bony arse unclenched themselves as his heart settled back into its normal, sinus rhythm.
And Mr Collins was saying, Oh, japers, japers cripes, you held her well, lad, begodden you did, and a shriller voice behind him was saying, Hey, hey, you driving, you with the big ears, are you trying to do away with us or what? And the dash suddenly lit, all the lights came on at once, for the battery and the oil and the ABS and the overheat warning and the handbrake warning and the seatbelt warning and the airbag warning, and a message was flashing in yellow, ECU ERROR, and then LIMP HOME MODE and the new Mercedes minibus, which had nearly killed James Grogan to buy, coughed softly and slowed itself to the pace of a brisk walk.
What’s going on? Hey, Big Ears, what’s going on? Come on in the name of God or we’ll miss our hydrotherapy. I better not miss my hydrotherapy over your fooling. And Mr Collins turned to his comrade and told him to be quiet, to shut up in the name of God, it was hardly the boy’s fault there was something gone wrong with the bus. You couldn’t trust these modern yokes. Too many faldidles and fiddly bits. Microchips. Whatever the blazes they are. Yokes designed to go wrong. Give me a Bedford 240 any day. An engine and wheels and a seat. What more could you need? And someone else was saying, I’ll need to go to the toilet soon, and someone else was saying, Ah, now, he hasn’t big ears at all, but he has a fine size of a head, he has the biggest head I’ve ever seen anyway, and that’s for sure, and someone else was saying, Margaret, Margaret, will you go out as far as the slatted house and see did I leave my stick inside the door of it?
Mr Collins was up from his seat and standing crooked at his elbow now and he was squinting at the instruments, and he was reading the message there slowly, loudly: Limp … home … mode, it says. Begod we’ll be a fair old while limping home at this rate, you’re as well off park her up to Hell. And Lampy could hear a hubbub behind him of grainy voices Chinese-whispering Mr Collins’s words: Limp home mode, what’s that? Limp home mode, the yoke says. Who has to limp home? I’m limping nowhere only in as far as the pool. Hye, Bighead, who has to limp home? And some of them were laughing, and someone, Mrs Coyne, he was fairly sure, was saying, Ah, whisht now, don’t be tormenting the boy, he has enough on his plate without you giving off and carrying on like bold children. And Mr Collins was saying, Go easy, now, lad, take her handy, watch the temperature gauge for fear she’d be overheating, you could blow the head gasket very easy, handy now, handy.
The heater was still working, thank God, but he turned it down because beads of sweat had started to form along his forehead. He felt embarrassed, and he wasn’t sure why. He knew he should be turning around and saying something to the oldies, telling them it was grand, they’d get there, not to be worrying, but he couldn’t get the words straight in his head. The throttle wouldn’t respond at all, except when he lifted off: the bus would slow then to a crawl. Con Kelleher’s yard was a small bit back along the road. Con wouldn’t be there at this time on a Friday but Lampy knew he could swing around at the old creamery and leave the bus back at Con’s and he could ring Mickey Briars to tear up to the home and get the old bus and bring it down here to him and he could transfer the oldies quick enough, he thought, there was no bad cases on the bus, and they could, all going well, be back on the road within twenty minutes, if Mickey didn’t act the prick.
He reached into his pocket for his phone and someone said, Oh, begod, look out, he has the phone out, and Mr Collins was saying, Be careful now you don’t meet a squad, they’ll pull you for that as quick as look at you, and Lampy suppressed a savage urge to scream, SHUT THE FUCK UP at him, JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP, WILL YOU, and Mickey Briars’s phone was ringing and ringing and ringing and Mickey wasn’t answering and Lampy wondered what in the name of God he could be doing to say he couldn’t answer his phone, and Lampy imagined Mickey holding his ringing phone out from himself and squinting down at it and seeing his name on the screen and taking his time answering out of some sort of spite, or cuteness, or unwillingness to seem like he was idle or some weird old-fella thing that mad bastards like Mickey and his grandfather would have in their heads. And finally Mickey answered and Lampy asked him would he get the old bus and bring it down to where he was, and he explained to Mickey what had happened, and Mickey said, I’ve a pint drank but I’ll be okay, you’re an awful man, how’s it you couldn’t drive it without breaking it? And Lampy breathed deep and clenched his fist and held himself level and forced himself to play along and he said, Ah, sure, you know me, and Mickey said he’d run up and get the old bus and he’d be down straight away and all they’d have to do would be transfer everybody over and if the Grogans didn’t spot him he’d tell them nothing unless he had to, because they had an awful hab
it of apportioning blame to people even when there was no blame owed to anyone and they’d hardly be there anyway at this time on a Friday and it was a shame now he was going to miss the models on the Afternoon Show but how’s ever, you can’t have it every way and hold tight now and I’ll be down pronto.
And Mickey was as good as his word. Lampy barely had the big Merc with the tinted windows backed neatly into a bay beside Con Kelleher’s workshop and the keys left on the top of the back nearside tyre as per Mickey’s advice, and with Mickey’s promise to appraise Con of the situation, and everyone transferred over fine, and there wasn’t a whole lot of giving out, and sticks and handbags were easily found, and Mr Collins declared that he was much happier in the old van, it was a much better proposition by far, and he stood beside Mickey as he looked into the engine bay of the Mercedes and they shook their heads in mournful unison and Mickey said, God only knows, could be anything, they’ll have to get NASA to have a look at it, I’d say, or more likely they’ll let Con hit it with a hammer until it goes again out of pure fright, and Mr Collins laughed and shook his stick at the offending engine with its new-fangled notions and its lack of simple integrity, and Mickey gave Mr Collins a hand onto the side ramp of the Transit and he said he’d give Con a shout now this minute and there was no need to worry about one thing except making the rest of the drops and the Transit was the best of them all and it was half full of diesel and if he had his way they’d still use the Transit as the main wagon and off you go now, good lad, and don’t forget who gave you a dig-out, and tell your grandad I was asking for him and he still owes me a score. And Lampy drove on, faster now, relieved to be moving again, to be closer to having an empty bus for a while when he had Mr Collins and Mr Driscoll dropped to hydrotherapy and Mrs Bridges and Mrs Coyne dropped to physio and Mr and Mrs Chambers dropped to their daughter’s house where they had dinner every Friday and Mrs Chambers always cried as she got back onto the bus, saying, Why can’t we stay? Why can’t we stay?
There was a quiet time each evening in the house. Once dinner was ate and Pop was settled, tutting, at the stove. The crackling flames and the ticking clock, Mam’s rhythmic pounding of her dough, the darkening sky and the brightening moon, his heavy eyes. He would stretch along the couch and sometimes sleep. Lampy thought about the house now as he drove, about Pop and his mother and all the years that stretched into the distance ahead, formless and dull. Would he do this for ever? Drive buses and sit in day rooms and change sheets and talk to people while they wait to die? He felt like he’d stepped outside himself, somehow, replaced himself with this new incarnation, this strange, quiet man, this regretful person he didn’t really know. He should have stayed in college, even though he’d picked a course he shouldn’t have, civil engineering, because all the lads were doing it or something like it, and he’d given up on the idea of doing English or journalism, he’d never get the points no matter how many times he repeated, and he’d never told anyone about the things he really wanted to do.
Chloe wouldn’t have left him if he’d had a degree, a posh job, a whack of money every week. Or every month: the posher your job the less often you get paid. But he couldn’t manage the maths, and the assignments he submitted always came back with low grades and red biro marks all over them, and Cookie Ryan, whom he travelled in and out with, tried to give him a hand but the more he looked at things the less sense they made and he couldn’t believe the amount of effort it took to just get one thing straight in his head, and then there’d be another thing waiting to be understood, and the queue of things waiting to be learned seemed to stretch to infinity, and one day he told Cookie not to bother calling for him next day and he’d see him at training on Thursday. And now Cookie and a few more of the lads were close enough to having their degrees and being actual engineers, and some of the jokes they made when they were out he didn’t get, and he saw less and less of them as the months went by, and now he wasn’t hurling either and there was a kind of an embarrassment between him and Cian Delahunty because they’d never really patched it up and so it was left there, the bad feeling and awkwardness, and he couldn’t face it any more.
After Chloe broke it off, he applied for a job in a mine in Canada. It had seemed kind of heroic at the time, romantic almost; the hugeness of the idea of it blocked out the dull nausea Chloe’s loss had left him with, the weakening gnaw in the centre of him. Pop, though, had made it sound foolish, embarrassing. Going off down a mine in – where’s it again, the quare place? – northern Ontario? Jaysus. I could tip out as far as the quarry in Latteragh to see have they anything, wouldn’t that do you if you’re so intent on breaking rock? And Pop would poke a sod flame-ward and huff, and take off his reading glasses and put them back on, and make shapes to leave, and sit back down. And what could he do but look across at his red-faced grandfather, and up at the sorrowful eyes of Jesus and His bleeding Sacred Heart, and try to keep his patience while Pop raved on.
Where did you even get this fuckin idea? It’s my own idea. I hadn’t to be given it. But one of the lads is going, Dean Kelly. Kelly? My arse. Quarehawks, that crowd. None of them ever even hurled. Plenty jobs here again now. Bobby Mahon is mad looking for lads to work for him. What’s taking you to the North Pole is beyond me. It’s nowhere near the North Pole. I want to see some of the world. World? Isn’t half the fuckin world after landing here? You’ve only to go down the town to see the whole world, these days. More in your line stay here and marry a girl and have proper Irish children before the foreign johnnies breed us out. Anyway, what’ll you see where you’re going only snow and Eskimos? There’ll be no Eskimos. There will, of course. You’ll be inside in an igloo with them. All them lads live in igloos. They have houses for the workers. They have. Houses made of snow. Igloos. And he breathed deep in and slowly out until his temper settled and they sat in silence while Mam moved around the rooms humming and Pop filled the empty space with jokes.
Hey, while we’re on the topic at all, what do you call a house made out of snow that has no toilet? An ig! And talking of snow, did I ever tell you about the poor old woman I came across lying down in the snow there last year? Well, I presume she was poor – she had only fifty-four cents in her purse! And he’d laugh hard, because Pop was priceless at times, and when he was on a roll of jokes the jokes were all that mattered, and Chloe and Ontario and everything else faded back to nothing for a while. Pop could make things up on the spot, yarns and slags and bits of rhymes that would have you hardly able to breathe from laughing. Like the day a few weeks ago he was washing the Civic in the front yard and Pop was tipping around out the back, straightening his bags of timber against the side of the shed and tying back the branches of the rosebushes to their trellises the way they’d be secured against the wind, and Pop had come around the front for some reason, and he’d noticed Pop had his waterproofs on backwards, and Pop had looked down at himself and then back up at Lampy and he’s started singing:
Me bollix is where me arse should be,
They made me back to front, you see,
Me bollix is where me arse should be,
They made me back to front!
And Lampy had had to stop what he was doing and put down his soft-bristled brush and try to hold himself upright, and Mrs Delaney from two doors down was standing looking over, scowling, and Pop waved at her, a real cheeky waggle-fingered wave, and he’d said, Helloooo, in a squeaky, mocking voice before continuing the song that he was composing right there where he stood in the wet yard:
I went to the doctor for to see
Could anything be done for me.
The doctor took one look at me,
Says he, You’re back to front!
I know, says I, sure tis plain to see
Me bollix is where me arse should be,
The doctor says, Well, I will be,
A crookedy-bollicky-cunt!
That’s what I am, says I to he,
And isn’t it a tragedy,
That there could be a man like meeeeeee,
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Whooooooose, bollix is back to front?
And Pop had really gone for it on the last two lines, running the notes up and up and on, like a mad whiskery opera singer, standing there in his backwards waterproof trousers and his wellingtons and his gardening gloves and his luminous walking coat, and Lampy had nearly puked from laughing.
He’d cancelled the whole Ontario thing the day he heard Pop talking to his mother about it from the hallway. Why does he think I killed myself buying out this house? Why I done three years extra abroad in the factory and my back broke? Lord, the money I gave the council just to say this place was ours, not to be always worried we’d be moved. And then having to pay myself for a front wall and a new roof when every other idler on the road got theirs for free. Why does he think I done that? The way there’d be something for him. Something he could say was his. A good start-off in life. There’s no one will hand him a house out foreign. They’ll use him to his bones then fuck him back and half his life gave down a hole. And something thrummed inside his head at Pop’s tinny voice, and his stomach churned and burned with anger and guilt.
