The Thing About December

by Donal Ryan

  Begod Packie Collins wasn’t long about replacing you! That feckin Polish lad was in like a fly on shit; I’ll tell you one thing, you can’t turn your back on those boys, they’d take the eye out of your head, I can’t wait till this swelling goes down and I can open my feckin eyes, I’d say that nurse one with the nice voice is flaking, hoo hoo, hey youssir, I said I can’t wait till this swelling goes down and I can open my feckin eyes, I’d say that nurse wan is flaking, I can’t wait to get a good look at her, whoo boy I could sure do with a ride, ha ha ha, sure she sounds like she’s gorgeous but we have to be prepared for an awful shock, she could have a face like a bag of hammers, ha ha ha, sure any port in a storm, maybe we’re as well off if she’s a right manky-looking yoke, not to be lying here with two horns on us every time she walks in, hey, how does that work with these tubes in our mickeys, anyway? Have you a tube in your mickey too? Isn’t that an awful liberty? I don’t know about you, boss, but them nurses can take as many liberties as they want with my mickey, ha ha ha ha ha!

  MUMBLY DAVE made the Lovely Voice laugh. That was the thing about Mumbly Dave that really tormented Johnsey. How well he had to go and fall off his ladder and break his stupid face. How well he couldn’t have broken his neck instead. How well they couldn’t have left that old clamp on him another while. He was full of old sugary shite, that Mumbly Dave. Sure, he was a gas character. Ha ha fucking ha. How could he have a new joke or bit of smartness ready every single time the Lovely Voice came near them? You’d be heartsick, pretending to laugh. If he didn’t hear a laugh out of you, he’d say the same stupid thing over again, only louder. He’d wear you out, so he would. If this was the alternative to loneliness, he’d sooner be lonesome forever. People could be quare hard work. He’d never known that before.

  Another thing about Mumbly Dave was he kept farting. Johnsey had a pain in his stomach most days from trying not to let off. He had his arsecheeks clamped shut half the time. It had gotten to the stage where the farts didn’t even bother trying to escape any more; they got as far as his hole and turned back. Then they’d be all knocking around his insides and fighting with each other for space. It couldn’t be good for a man having all this pressure building up inside. Anything was better than filling a room with fumes, though, and having the Lovely Voice or one of the other nurses walking into a stinking cloud. Mumbly Dave thought it was the height of craic. He’d let rip day and night and then for devilment he’d put the blame on Johnsey. Once or twice his great big smelly farts coincided with the Lovely Voice entering their room and just as she did the rotten fucker’d say Jaysus, Johnsey, you’re a bad yoke, would you not try and hold it in and a lady in the room and then he’d mar dhea apologize on Johnsey’s behalf, the dirty, rotten bastard! The Lovely Voice would laugh and say Don’t worry, I’ve smelt worse, and there was nothing you could say then; you couldn’t be denying the fart and sounding like a young fella in primary school. Then after she was gone Mumbly Dave would be woohoo-ing and laughing away to himself and saying Jaysus, youssir, I caught you a beaut, and all you could do was lie there and imagine yourself sneaking over to his bed in the night and ramming a stolen fork into his mouth with all your strength. That’d soften his cough.

  Some days the Lovely Voice would come in and close the door to the corridor and sit down and she’d tell them Say nothing, Sister is on the warpath, I’m safe in here with the blindman buffs, God I’m knackered; so boys, any news? And Mumbly Dave would be out with something smart straight away like asking was she out the night before and was she up late or what and the two of them would take off laughing and it felt like they were ganging up on him and he hated Mumbly Dave more than he’d ever hated Eugene Penrose or Dermot McDermott or Packie Collins or the townie lad who’d kicked his face in or any of the cool lads who’d mocked him in school. Why did Mumbly Dave have to come along and wipe his eye? The Lovely Voice was his bit of pleasure; she used to have private jokes with him, it wasn’t fair that the first proper woman to ever whisper in Johnsey’s ear and send a bolt of electricity down his neck and along his arms and into his balls and down his legs as far as his toes was now being taken over by a big, fat, stupid bullshitter.

  JOHNSEY AND MUMBLY DAVE got their eyes back on the same day. Mumbly Dave woke up that morning and said Bejaysus you’re uglier than I thought you’d be, hey I said you’re even uglier than I thought you’d be, hey, hey, youssir, you’re a sight for sore eyes, ha ha ha ha ha, and Johnsey could only lie there and look blindly in the direction of the guffawing donkey and think this is the end of it now, he’ll take one look at her and fall in love with her and he’ll carry her off like Richard Gere in that film where he’s in the navy or something and he has a big fight with a black lad and takes off on a motorbike and into the factory where the good-looking wan is working and he’ll pick her up like that in his arms and carry her off and all the other nurses and doctors and the few patients around the corridor will stop what they’re doing and laugh and clap and cheer and Johnsey will be left here alone with the cranky old ward sister and his langer stuck to the side of his leg and his big baby tears queuing up behind his bandages.

  Your swelling is gone right down, that’s the anti-inflammatory, it takes the swelling right down, isn’t it lucky you’re on my ward; I give out all the best drugs, ha ha ha. Then Mumbly Dave, her new pet. Ha ha ha you’re a gas ticket, bejaysus, I’ll tell you one thing, though, the swelling is gone from my face but tis starting somewhere else ever since you walked in, ha ha ha. Then the Lovely Voice: You dirty fecker, ha ha ha, and she mar dhea giving out to him. He had some neck, that Mumbly Dave, he had some front, that fella, with that dirty talk out of him, and she laughing back at him, and wouldn’t you think she’d tell him call a halt to the smut now, but thick ignorant fuckers always get ahead in life, Daddy always said that, and he was right. Then she was saying As for you, your bandages will come off today for good according to your chart, unless Doctor Frostyballs changes his mind, and he realized she was talking to him and he said Oh, oh, right, cripes that’s great, and she was gone in a sweet breeze and there was no big laugh and joke for him the way there had been for Mumbly Dave.

  I’ll tell you one thing, youssir, she lives up to her voice, she’s a fine thing, a bit over-endowed in the arse area but sure that’s part of being Irish, ha ha ha! You’ll see for yourself later on, anyway. Isn’t that gas we’re both finished with blindness on the same day? We were brothers in blindness there for a good while. It’s grand, though, having a comrade like yourself. Whisht, here she’s back, here she is, hello my flower, what have you for us? When are you taking off Johnsey-Come-Lately’s bandages? It’s lousy me being the only one having to put up with looking at a horrible mug all day, lucky you’re in and out to relieve the horror for me, ha ha, wait till he has a look at me he’ll want them bandages put back on quick smart, ha ha ha, make sure you’re here when Doctor Frostyballs does the big reveal or he’ll fall away in a faint, ha ha ha, like a baby chick thinks the first thing it sees is his mother, he’ll be going for a suck off Doctor Frostyball’s boob, ha ha ha, hey, youssir, did you hear that, I said …

  BEING BLIND wasn’t so bad. When you knew it wasn’t forever, especially. If it was for good, and you weren’t bedbound, it would for sure be a bit awkward. But there was comfort in that darkness; you could let things carry on around you and there was no need to be thinking should I do this or go there or say that. All that business with the land now being part of a very valuable land bank, as the Unthanks said Martin Doherty the auctioneer called it the other day in the bakery, could be safely ignored while a man was blind and bedbound. The only anchor to this comfort he would have left once he had the full use of his eyes back would be the tube up his mickey, which would be surely yanked out once he was capable of jumping out of bed and making a piss by himself. Imagine your life being that much of a ball of shite that getting kicked to bits and going blind was the best thing that had ever happened you.

  A different lady took away the cat eater. She
called it a cat ate her. Maybe it had a different name because it was finished its job now. They had quare names for lots of yokes in hospitals, anyway. It didn’t hurt coming out but it was sure as hell hurting now. It was after leaving an awful burning behind. She had tut-tutted a few times and held his mickey in her hand for a while longer than seemed strictly necessary. Then she tut-tutted again and asked him had he any pain and he said No, because it wasn’t paining him too bad at that stage and he didn’t want to be giving out about nothing. Then Doctor Frostyballs came in and took away his eye bandages. His head felt wrong without them. The world looked wrong. He had imagined the room as a mini version of the ward they put Daddy in the night of the madman, but it was way newer-looking than that; if you took away the bits of machines beside the beds it could be a hotel room like the one he and Mother and Daddy had stayed in one time they had stayed above in Dublin after the All-Ireland and Daddy had got a bit merry and Mother had gave out but laughed at him too and a rake of people were in the bar of the hotel and they all sang ‘Sliabh na mBan’ and Mother had sat him up on her lap and she sang too and he had tried to sing it but he only knew the one or two lines and she had her arms tight around him and was rocking side to side with the rest and it was the best feeling he ever had before or since.

  DOCTOR FROSTYBALLS had brought a girl with him and she stood there smiling and took the bandages in a silver bowl and handed him a small bottle and he dripped a few drops into Johnsey’s eyes and said Yes, it’s good, things will be blurry for a while more, your pupils will be di-lay-ted for one hour then no more problem, you will see things floating in front of your eye, that will be forever, you will get used to them, if you see flashes you come right back to me. Then Doctor Frostyballs and the smiling girl went off about their business and all that was left was a load of blurred shapes and he lay back and tried to sleep and enjoy his last few unseeing moments before the world was back around him, clear as day and waiting for him to do something or say something for himself.

  But the throbbing in his mickey kept him awake. He opened his eyes and sat up and made a tent out of the blankets that were over that area so nothing would touch off it. Something wasn’t right with it. He could see grand again now. He chanced a look over at the quare fella and there he was, grinning back to his two ears, nothing like he had imagined: a small, baldy lad with eyes that looked like they had twinkly stars in them and big fat lips and the lips looked like they were bursted in the middle and his whole face was black and blue and yellow like a bad spud you’d dig up and throw away and his arm was in a sling and his leg was up in a bigger sling that hung from what looked like a miniature crane and he nearly said Where’s Dave until the little baldy lad started talking and he knew for sure.

  Well hello there, youssir, did you decide to have a look at me at last, aren’t we a fine pair of crocks, well at least we can have a gander around for ourselves now, and a read of the paper and a look at the telly and a few of them nurses would cheer you right up, but a few more would frighten the life out of you, one of them has a tacher, and I’ll tell you one thing …

  Then he was asking Johnsey was he all right and the room started to spin around and he got a feeling like the time he snuck two pint bottles of stout and a rusty old opener that no one would miss down to the willow tree one Christmas and drank the two of them off the head by himself and just before the stout and his dinner leapt back up from his stomach in an orange stream, the whole world had started to fly around in circles and all he could do was try to hang on and all he could do before the darkness came back was tell Mumbly Dave who wasn’t a fine cut of a fella at all that his mickey was in an awful way and should he tell someone?

  June

  DADDY WOULD ALWAYS do the second cut of silage in June. You’d hear the tractor abroad in the long acre as you trudged off in the morning. The big schools inside in town would be closed but you’d still have a month to go. A month! The sun would never hang on that long. The summer would be gone before you were released from the misery of listening to the whoops and cries of the free from the dark, sweaty inside of the small-windowed classroom. How did Sir stay going? Surely he was as jealous as they were of the wild emptiness of school-less days.

  Cast nare a clout till May is out. June and July, swim till you die. That’s something Daddy used say at the beginning of June always. Shut up with that auld eejiting, Mother would say. Have you your bikini ready, Sally? Daddy would say back, and he’d wink over at Johnsey, and Mother would go red and try not to let him see how she was smiling behind her mask of temper.

  His you-ree-tra had gotten infected. That was the thing inside his mickey. Bacteria had somehow found its way along the cat eater. Cat ate her. Cat et ur. Whatever the hell that yoke was called, it was quare handy when a man wasn’t fully mobile but for a finish was proving to be a source of awful trouble. All he knew was he was only able to stay awake for minutes at a time and every time he came around he was frozen with the cold but someone would say he was very hot and he would try to say he wasn’t, he was perished, but he’d slip away again into a world of crazy dreams. He saw Mother and Daddy and the two of them were below at the bottom of a beautiful garden and he wanted to go down to them to ask how they were and was it nice being dead and he wanted to tell them how his life was like an empty bottle of red sauce, there was nothing in it and no point to it and you could stick your knife right in and root around forever but all you’d get was a small bit but never enough to make you happy and for feck’s sake why wouldn’t Mother buy a new bottle of sauce when the old one was finished, she’d never leave Daddy without his brown sauce, he’d be giving out stink saying Any brown sauce, Sally, because he nearly always called her Sally and he was the only one who ever did.

  There was a big yoke beside him now and it frightened the life out of him the first time he saw it and there were two bags hanging off it with tubes coming out of him and the tubes were stuck in his arm. The first time he saw it, it looked like a big alien robot with bug eyes and he thought it was a dream and he tried to pull the wires out of his arms but an angel was beside him and there was bright light all around her and she told him it was a drip and it was putting medicine in him and he’d be fine and the angel had a lovely voice, just like the Lovely Voice and the angel was the Lovely Voice, of course, it made sense now, he wasn’t dead and in heaven or hell or purgatory so, but this couldn’t be far off heaven, floating about like this and seeing lovely angels with golden hair.

  HE WAS panned out after it. Jaysus you got an awful dose, youssir, Mumbly Dave told him, and you only days from getting out of here, you misfortune. It was hard to stay awake. The infection had left him very weak. He’d have to stay on another while. Misfortune? It was a huge stroke of luck. The Lovely Voice was now a lovely face and lovely hands and a lovely light-blue uniform that he thought would be white but then he realized he had kind of been imagining them ones that do be in the ads in the back of the Sunday World unknown to himself, dressed up as nurses, and the ad says things like Sexy nurses on the line, waiting to give you your medicine and there’s a big long phone number and you can see nearly all their boobs and a bit of their knickers under their short white skirts and wasn’t he an awful pervert to have been imagining the Lovely Voice in that way without even knowing he was doing it? If only she knew, she wouldn’t be as gentle and kind to him and she wouldn’t be in and out to check on him even when she wasn’t really meant to be.

  Siobhán, her name was. Imagine that, all these weeks, and he hadn’t known. Siobhán. It was soft. It was easy, saying it. You could whisper it and it was like a breath, or a sigh. It was the most beautiful name. It nearly tasted sweet in his mouth.

  Siobhán gave him great hop again now and seemed to have forgotten all about Mumbly Dave. She felt a bit responsible for his infection – she had been meant to be taking out that yoke every so often and changing it and watching for badness starting but she couldn’t be remembering everything all the time, there wasn’t half enough staff here, an
yway, and if that fat cow of a sister asks make sure and tell her she was forever pulling and dragging and checking that all was well with cat eaters and cat ate hers and what have you. She was awfully sorry; he could see that clearly.

  He would tell any lie for her but it wasn’t really a sinful lie. It would be like telling the English officer that the boys had been tucked up in bed all night long when they’d really been abroad around the countryside shooting Black and Tans – it was a lie, but neither God nor man could ever hold it against you.

  SIOBHÁN SAID the old ward sister was an awful wagon, and a few of the other nurses were pure sly and were terrible licks and they’d stab you in the back as quick as look at you. They wouldn’t do half the work she would do, but yet would be forever watching her and reporting back to Sister, and she knew why – it was because they were all the one with the nurse she was filling in for who was out on maternity leave and they wouldn’t let her be seen to be as good as their friend. Mother would have called the likes of them poisonous bitches. Johnsey told Siobhán that, and she laughed. Then she did something you would as a rule only see happening in a soppy film: she put her hand on the side of his face and smiled down at him and he chanced looking straight into her eyes and it looked like fondness he saw there or maybe something beyond fondness; maybe she saw him in a way that no one else saw him – after all she could only judge him on what she had seen since he was carried in by the ambulance.

  Maybe she had more regard for him than other girls would have because she had never seen him walking watery-eyed up through the village with Eugene Penrose pelting stones or scrunched-up cans at him or seen him getting kicked around the school bus or being set fire to and having his fiver swiped off of him on the way to the only disco he ever nearly went to. All she knew of him was that four yahoos had attacked him and he was in bits but never gave out and that he was a grand quiet chap who took his medicine and didn’t moan or groan like some lads did. Hadn’t she told him he was a great patient? Probably she would sooner a fella like Mumbly Dave, even though he was a handy-sized baldy lad with a belly like a beach ball. Mumbly Dave never stopped talking. Maybe she saw Johnsey as being a bit like Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood never said too much but bejaysus he sure was cool. James Bond wouldn’t be the chattiest, either, but girls were forever trying to get off with him.