The Thing About December

by Donal Ryan

  IF SIOBHÁN WANTED to arrange something, like coming back to Johnsey’s house without Mumbly Dave, and if she was going having a drink, and if she was worried about how the roads were crawling with guards lately, and if she lived miles and miles away, and if she was a saucy strap of a lady like Mumbly Dave said, then she could very easily have it in her mind to stay over in Johnsey’s house for the whole night and God alone knows what else she might have inside in her mind. Imagine what Mumbly Dave would say if he knew about the thing with his mickey! It’s possible for a thing to give you half of a horn and make you feel sick with worry at the same time just by thinking about it. What would Mother and Daddy think if Johnsey let sin happen under their roof? What would the spirits of his ancestors say to each other? The IRA great-uncles would probably be egging him on, seeing as they had to swear to God never to go near a woman the rest of their born days after they joined the priesthood. Daddy would probably say Well … good … man … Johnsey … begod. And Mother would slap him and tell him he was a fright to be praising the boy for being dirty and making a solid fool of himself.

  He probably was going to make a fool of himself, in fairness. It was one thing to give every minute of the day thinking about how much you love a person and to have fine romantic thoughts when all you have to do is lie down like an old sheepdog and listen to their voice and sneak the odd look at them while they’re foostering about with tablets and drips and sheets and what have you. It’s another story to have to actually do things like give them something to eat and drink and decide how close beside them to sit and try to think of things to say and then to organize the words properly so that they come out through your mouth in the proper order and at a manageable speed. How is it you can’t be given warning of things that’s going to happen, like the newspaper bollix and the Unthanks being in the consortium and Siobhán arriving and making him sweat with delight and fear and desire and shame at allowing his friend to be hurt? How is it you can have no say in what happens you? Probably because he’d choose for nothing to ever happen him and he’d live out his days behind the window, looking out, wondering.

  MUMBLY DAVE said if a woman wants you she’ll ride you into submission. That’s how women gets their way, apparently. Balls full, brain empty. Balls empty, you don’t give a shite, anyway. But if you’re going to be led around by your lad, it may as well be a flaker like Siobhán doing the leading. Johnsey didn’t like that kind of talk about Siobhán. How would Mumbly Dave know anything about anything? All them auld stories about all the sex he’d had and all the other brilliant things he’d done were just made up. He was only raging that Siobhán had called to Johnsey and not down to the house Mumbly Dave lived in with his two brothers who he doesn’t bother with on account of they’re a pair of pricks and his father who goes every day to the pub and the bookies and pisses away what money he gets from the dole and what he can scrounge off of people and what Mumbly Dave’s wrinkled, scrunched-up mother gets for cleaning the school and the few bits of offices below in the village belonging to the bigshots.

  Isn’t it a solid fright to say a man can have such mean auld thoughts about his only pal? He’d want to have a word with himself, in all fairness. How’s it he couldn’t keep a howlt on his own badness? He was turning into an awful bad yoke.

  October

  THE MILKING WOULD BE getting light by October. You might be down to the one milking a day by then. Daddy wouldn’t take his ease, though. He might do a third cut of silage, or he’d tighten up around the place in preparation for the winter, or he’d be still going off doing block-laying jobs. The cattle would go back in to the slatted house to shelter from the cold, and they wouldn’t settle for ages but Mother would look in and say Ah, the auld dotes, come on now, auld dotes, curl up and be warm, and it was hard to believe when she talked like that to the cows that she had a tongue on her that could cut a man right in two.

  Daddy used to love Halloween. He’d put tenpences into flour inside in a big pan and you had to try and get them out with your teeth, and if you did you could keep them. And he’d hang an apple off of a piece of string at the back kitchen door and you had to try and take a bite out of it with your hands tied behind your back and everyone would be roaring laughing. And he’d take Johnsey out around the yard and they’d both wear scary masks and Mother would let on to be frightened of them when they came to the kitchen window and Daddy would point up at the sky and say There’s the witches, Johnsey! This is the only night they’re allowed fly around on their broomsticks!

  And you could nearly see the witches, soaring around the moon, and hear them cackling, and the fear would feel lovely in your spine. And he’d make a big huge pantomime out of the cutting and eating of the barmbrack with the ring in it, saying the one to find the ring would have a long life and eternal luck, and it was always Johnsey that found it, and Johnsey could never know how Daddy made sure it was always him found it, but daddies know magic tricks that they’re taught when their children are born and Johnsey wondered would he ever know them tricks.

  PADDY ROURKE shot Eugene Penrose in October. Then he went home and swallowed all his tablets together. He was on rakes of yokes for his heart and his bones and his liver and God only knows what else. Minnie Wiley found him in his bedroom. Minnie the Mouth, people called her. She used give Paddy a hand a few days a week to tighten up the place and do a few jobs, so she had her own key.

  Men like Paddy should die noble deaths, like them Spartan fellas that fought the million Persians and saved the whole western world, or else they should live in health and happiness well beyond a hundred, and die in big, huge, comfortable beds, surrounded by crying women and strong, admiring men, looking at the ground to hide their tears and telling each other handed-down stories of feats of strength and bravery beyond words. But Paddy died alone in his cold old house, in a room that smelt like piss, with his pyjamas half off of him, covered in vomit.

  EUGENE PENROSE had to have his left leg amputated. That means cut clean off. Paddy didn’t go with the duck shot for a finish – he gave Eugene a barrel of heavy lead. The Unthanks beat Mumbly Dave up to the house to tell Johnsey about it. No one knew about poor Paddy at that stage; Minnie the Mouth hadn’t yet found him in his stinking deathbed and run to tell every yapping auld biddy in the village about it. Mumbly Dave said later wasn’t it a grand excuse for them two to stick their noses back in? Did he ask to know how is it they never told him they were in league with Herbie Grogan? Did he ask to know how was it they had the neck to face in to the hospital all them times to sit and bullshit about how great it was that all this building was to be starting up mar dhea they was only ordinary punters when all along they had every penny they had, and them two had a fair whack of shaggin pennies, have no fear, they had their Communion money, you can be guaranteed, stuck in with the rest of the bigshots that was trying to grab his land off of him? Johnsey knew Mumbly Dave was only put out he wasn’t the one to tell Johnsey about Paddy shooting Eugene Penrose, but did he have to be so disrespectful? Johnsey still loved the Unthanks no matter what. Their shame pained him. What about it if they gave Herbert Grogan a few pound to invest for them? How’s it he couldn’t find words to comfort them?

  Eugene was left bleeding on the hard ground in front of the pump for a good long while before help arrived. Mumbly Dave said he was nearly bled out before they scraped him up off of the road and put him into the ambulance and took him in to the hospital for the Paki doctors to sew him back together. Except they didn’t – them boys’d sooner go chop-chop any day, Mumbly Dave said. They no like a sew, that for auld women. One leg plenty leg enough for bowsie white man. He only sit on hole watching telly, anyway. Johnsey didn’t think that was how the Paki doctors talked. Doctor Frostyballs didn’t, but he was Indian. Was it the same thing? God only knows. All them lads are much of a muchness, in fairness.

  Eugene shouldn’t have moved his headquarters from the IRA memorial. At least up there someone might have seen what was after happening and rang the ambulance
quicker. No one knew it was Paddy did the shooting until the guards put the serial number from his gun into their computer and up popped Paddy’s licence. The rat-faced townie lad who had kicked Johnsey in the head told the guards it was an auld boy did it, he stopped his car in the middle of the road and he put on his hazard lights, and he had white hair and mad eyes and he looked like the devil, and he walked around to the passenger side, and he waved on a couple of cars who had to go around him, and he took his time, and he took his shot, and Eugene went down screaming, and then he threw the gun in over the wall of the empty yard and got back into his auld Jetta and turned it around and fucked off back the way he came.

  Jim Gildea the sergeant told Mary his wife who told everyone else that the townie lad had shat all over himself. The spread wasn’t as wild as Paddy had planned for Johnsey with the duck shot, so Eugene Penrose took the whole blast. And while Eugene lay bleeding and screaming, the brave boy with the birds on his neck shat and pissed all over himself and cried like a little girl and for a finish one of the ambulance lads had to give him an injection to make him stop being such a stones.

  Johnsey kept thinking about Eugene, lying on the road with the blood pumping out of him and his leg in bits. And then he’d think of Eugene when he was only a small boy in primary school, when they’d all been pals. The thoughts tormented him. Did Paddy shoot Eugene for him? Was it because Paddy had thought him too weak to take his own vengeance? Then he’d think of Paddy and all the times he’d patted him on the head with his big huge hand and smiled fondly at him when he was a child and how he used to think Paddy was like a mountain, dark and unmovable and eternal. But it turns out Paddy was like one of them mountains out foreign that are the same for years, and everyone thinks it’s the finest, and they live along the side of it in green pastures as happy as Larry, and then all of a sudden one day the quiet mountain blows its top and explodes into the sky and pukes melted rocks all over itself and destroys anyone who can’t run fast enough to the lowlands and finally the mountain destroys itself.

  MUMBLY DAVE said there was more excitement in the village in the last few months than there was in a hundred years. If they won the county final, there wouldn’t be as much of a hullabaloo. And it all boiled down to Johnsey Cunliffe. He was some troublemaker! What was he going to do next? Start a riot? Sure, he was fit for anything! Auld Peg-Leg Penrose is quare sorry he crossed you now, I’d say!

  Sometimes if you’re worried about a thing, it’s great to have someone making a joke about it. Like when the curly fella in the newspaper said all them things about him, and Mumbly Dave gave that whole evening saying about how they should take the Land Rover to Dublin and wait for him outside his poncey office and they’d lamp the know-it-all arse off of him with hurleys and make him squeal like a fuckin cut pig. Johnsey nearly wet himself laughing the way Mumbly Dave described that, and all the laughing about it made it feel like the whole thing was only a joke and not really real. But Johnsey couldn’t bear to listen to Mumbly Dave joking about Eugene Penrose and his leg. How’s it he couldn’t explain that to Mumbly Dave? How could he, when he couldn’t explain it to himself?

  Siobhán said when you lose a limb you end up with too much blood. That can cause awful trouble for your heart because there does be too much pressure. That makes sense if you think about it – there aren’t as many places for the blood to go. How is it though a human body knows how to make food into shite and drink into pee and a yoke you can’t even see into a baby and your brain can do forty million things a minute according to that auld science teacher inside in the Tech and still it can’t figure out it needs less blood if there’s a bit chopped off of it? Worse again, Siobhán said sometimes people feel an itch where their leg or arm used to be, a phantom itch, like a ghost back to haunt them, and that itch can drive them right around the bend, because you can’t scratch what’s not really there. He remembered the itch under his cast inside in hospital and how that used drive him demented until Siobhán brought him in a knitting needle to poke down it for sweet relief and she told him not to let Sister or any of the other fatarses see him with it on account of they weren’t meant to let people do that. He wondered had Eugene felt the phantom itch yet.

  AUNTY THERESA dragged poor Nonie and Frank up to the house not long after Paddy was buried. She wanted to know was he having an auction or what in the name of God was going to happen, and did he know that the rezoning wouldn’t last forever, the farm would be only allowed to be a farm again before long and the show would be over, and that nephew of Paddy Rourke’s from England wouldn’t be too happy with him for devaluing his inheritance with his quare notions and did he know there was such a thing as compulsory purchase orders and they’d soon get sick of him inside in the council and they’d make him sell and their idea of what’s the going rate mightn’t tally with what Master Johnsey Cunliffe had inside in his head and wasn’t it a fright to God to say herself and Frank had to scrimp and scrape all their lives to get Susan and Small Frank through university and here was he sitting on several fortunes and acting like he was too good for them and Small Frank solid choked with asthma and he never lifting his nose from his books so that he may make something of his life and here was he going around making a show of them all with that waster of the Cullenses and he the talk of the whole country and poor Sarah hadn’t a penny spare her whole life she didn’t put into the Credit Union for him and now he wouldn’t even look at his own aunty and she all that was left on this earth of his mother and why in the name of Jaysus would he not answer the phone?

  Nonie said Ah now, ah now, but Theresa ignored her and Johnsey wondered had Theresa forgotten how Nonie was Mother’s sister as well, and did she want him to sell the farm so he could give money to Susan and Small Frank who never once looked at him on the school bus and never once said a word when he was being tormented, only sat there smirking? Uncle Frank wanted to know was he doing a line with that little blonde nurse and he smiled and winked at Johnsey and Theresa told him shut his stupid face and she started mar dhea crying out of her with her hand on her forehead and Nonie went Ah now, again, and Frank threw his eyes towards heaven and looked fidgety and embarrassed and Johnsey remembered Daddy once saying how that poor fucker Frank made a hard bed for himself when he decided to take the free house and the big dowry and Mother said how dare he, her father paid no dowry to any man, Frank was picked from a long line of fine suitors, and Daddy looked at Johnsey and covered one side of his mouth and said you should have seen that line, Johnsey – a fairy, a blind man, a fella in his nineties, and Frank!

  IT WAS GRAND having Siobhán calling up all the same. You couldn’t be giving the whole day to thinking about Paddy and Eugene and Theresa and people’s expectations of you when you had to think about her calling up.

  The next time she called after the time she showed up by surprise, they weren’t even there. They’d been inside in the city, looking at hookers. Mumbly Dave had promised Johnsey he’d take him in to this street where they do be and he could have a look at his future wife ha ha ha! The hookers were quare-looking; a little fat lady who looked like a wan you’d see above at Mass only you could see half of her white belly because her top was too short and didn’t meet the top of her skirt. And there was a wan whose cheekbones looked like they could cut you. She was wearing a shiny tracksuit and her eyes looked dead. There was a skinny man with a thin moustache standing beside her who Mumbly Dave said was a woman and Johnsey couldn’t believe it until he looked for a bit longer and then he could see that it really was a woman and Mumbly Dave said she was a mad bull-dyke pimp and Johnsey didn’t know what them words meant but said nothing and Mumbly Dave said she’d cut your mickey off if you tried to get smart with her or the hookers, and while they were staring at her she clocked them and started walking towards Mumbly Dave’s car and she had the head of a wan that’d take a bite out of you and eat you without salt and Mumbly Dave stalled the car in a panic and just as she got to them he got it going and she swung her foot at the car as th
ey drove off and the hooker with the dead eyes only barely moved her head as they passed.

  When they got back to the house, there were red words written on the kitchen window. Johnsey thought of them horror films he could only ever watch half of. Mumbly Dave told him it was lipstick. Lipstick, you dipstick! Ha ha ha! But Johnsey well knew Mumbly Dave was joking away his own hurt feelings. The words said:

  Hi J

  I called @ 6 but you must be off with your boyfriend

  Txt me l8r 087 7946509

  Siobhán xxx

  Mumbly Dave said Jay like he was disgusted and boyfriend like he was more disgusted again and when Johnsey chanced a sideways look at him, he was nearly sure he saw a glint of water in his eye, but Mumbly Dave just said it was unbelievable that a fella could have rides of nurses scrawling love messages on his kitchen window and he not even having a phone to text her with and he having been given her number twice now and he was starting to wonder had he even a mickey to ride her with and it was an unnatural waste! If it was him she was after, he’d have had her rode and given the road long ‘go but he had no farm of land ha ha ha and he’d want to be getting his finger out in the name of Jaysus. Johnsey couldn’t stop looking at the lipstick message. Three kisses. Mumbly Dave said they could also stand for triple x, as in porno, like. Johnsey wished he’d stop saying words like hole and porno in regards to Siobhán, but how do you tell someone something like that without them thinking you’re an awful holy Joe and an auld spoilsport and hurting them even further?

  The next day they went into the phone shop and a wan who Mumbly Dave said had flaking knockers on her sold him a mobile phone and he couldn’t tell what sort of knockers she had because he couldn’t look at her, but she smelled quare nice and she sounded lovely and he dropped his money on the floor when he went to pay her and Mumbly Dave said Watch him, he’s throwing it away, ha ha ha, signs on he can do it and he a feckin millionaire, ha ha ha, and Johnsey felt himself going from red to purple and he suddenly pictured himself smashing the new phone into Mumbly Dave’s face. How’s it he couldn’t just shut up and let him pay the girl besides trying to be smart the whole time and showing off and probably now the girl who smelled lovely would cop his face from the paper and think look at this greedy prick in buying phones and why is everything you do just so embarrassing and how is it he couldn’t control them awful thoughts? Did badness now have the run of his brain?