Long Story Short

by Siobhán Parkinson

  “Yeah, but not on your frame,” I said.

  “Course I have,” he said.

  I couldn’t remember a single time he’d done that, but he was a grownup and I was a kid, so I said, “Okay.”

  The bus driver took one look at us and threw his eyes up.

  A black lady that was waiting at the bus stop with us took the suitcase for me, so I could concentrate on Granda. I’ll never forget it. I had to take the frame from him and put it on the bus and then come back for him. He started yelling at me that I shouldn’t have taken the frame, and he made me go back for it. So I had to walk down the aisle of the bus again and retrieve the frame from the luggage compartment, where I’d just managed to squeeze it in, and bring it to the door of the bus, and of course he couldn’t lever himself up with it, he couldn’t reach it from the pavement, so then he started shouting at me to take the bloody frame away.

  I was fit to be tied and dead embarrassed too; we were holding everyone up. I wanted to yell at him that that’s what I had done in the first place, that I’d been right and he’d been wrong, but Granda was never wrong. Never.

  So I went back through the bus again with the frame and stuck it into the luggage space under the steps, and then I came back to the door and somehow I managed to haul Granda on. A man got out of his seat and helped me to maneuver Granda into it.

  “Thank you,” I kept saying, first to the man who had given up his seat to Granda, and then to the black woman who was bringing up the rear with the suitcase.

  Granda didn’t say thank you to anyone. He just gave this important-looking little wave, like the pope.

  There was no room for the suitcase in the luggage area because the frame was in it, stuck at an awkward angle with its little rubber feet in the air. Also, the long handle for rolling the suitcase with had stuck, which made it even more awkward to manage. The woman was still hanging on to it.

  “Would any of yous be thinking of paying yiser fares?” the bus driver yelled at us down the bus.

  “I haven’t paid a fare for twenty years,” Granda shouted back at him.

  “Yeah, you look it an’ all,” said the driver. “But the boy has to pay.”

  “He’s with me,” said Granda grandly.

  “He still has to pay.”

  I was scarlet by this time. I just wanted to disappear.

  I stood up and leaned over the suitcase handle, which was at about nose height for me, and I thrust a hot little bundle of coins into the black lady’s hand.

  “Would you pay my fare for me?” I said.

  “Where you going, lad?” she said.

  “I dunno,” I said. “Where are we going, Granda?”

  “Kingsbridge,” said Granda.

  “Never heard of it,” said the bus driver.

  “Are you Polish or what?” asked my grandfather.

  “From Roscommon,” said the driver. But he wasn’t. You could tell by the accent, he was from Ballyfermot or somewhere. He was kidding.

  “Jeez-uss!” said Granda. “If it isn’t foreigners, it’s bleedin’ boggers.”

  I elbowed him and tried to make a gesture to say the kind lady that had helped with the suitcase was foreign and not to be so rude, but he didn’t care.

  “He means Heuston Station,” said an ol’ one. “I agree witcha,” she said, turning to Granda. “I never can remember either. I always have to stop and think which station is which. They had a right not to change them.”

  “They did that in 1966,” muttered another ol’ one. “It’s time you got used to it.”

  I couldn’t get my head around the idea of 1966. That’s the last century. It’s, like, decades ago, lifetimes back. I was trying to subtract 1966 from the year we were in, and I couldn’t manage it.

  “Is this bus ever going to move?” a woman asked. “Some of us have work to go to.”

  She didn’t look as if she was going to work. She was all dolled up as if she was going to a party. Maybe she was a model or something.

  “I’m not going to Heuston,” said the driver. “I’ll take yiz into town. Yous can get a Luas from there.”

  “A tram, he means,” Granda said to the ol’ one who’d explained about Kingsbridge. “God, wouldn’t you just wish they’d leave the bloody language alone and not be monkeying about with the names of everything? It’s disgraceful what’s going on.”

  “It’s true for you,” said the ol’ one, delighted to have met an old codger as bad as herself.

  The woman who’d mentioned 1966 threw her eyes up, and I could hear her thinking, Get a life, though she didn’t say it.

  The black woman paid the fare and brought me my ticket and change, where I was still trapped on my seat behind the jammed handle of the suitcase. She gave me an encouraging little wink, but I didn’t feel very encouraged.

  I can’t remember how we got off, but we had no trouble with the Luas. I remember thinking they should manufacture more buses the same as the Luases with nice flat floors. Some of them are like that, but you can’t count on it.

  We queued up for ages at the ticket window at the train station. It must have been rush hour or something, because the station was full of people and the queues snaked nearly out as far as the platform from the window where they sell the tickets.

  Granda had an old person’s travel pass, but he still needed a ticket, and he needed to have a row with them too about my ticket. He wasn’t planning to pay for it. He was entitled to bring a companion on his pass, he said, and I was his companion.

  I said I thought the companion had to be over sixteen. That was why I’d had to pay on the bus.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I never heard such nonsense. I blame the government.”

  He was right there, I suppose.

  “I don’t think I could pass for sixteen,” I said.

  “Don’t be absurd, boy,” he said. “Of course you can’t, you are only a runt of a child. But I’ll have it out with them. Just you wait and see. I have no intention of paying a fare for a babe in arms.”

  “I’m not a babe in arms,” I pointed out.

  He scowled and said, “You know what I mean.” But I didn’t.

  Anyway, it never came to that, because when we finally got to the top of the queue it turned out that Granda had brought Gramma’s travel pass by mistake, and they wouldn’t give him a ticket on it.

  The ticket seller was a fat bloke with a pasty face. He looked like one of Gramma’s cakes of soda bread before she put it in the oven. He had glasses that looked too big for his face, and he wore a creased-looking shirt in a pale color. He had a tie, but he’d left his collar open and the tie was knotted in the wrong place.

  “But would you take a look at me!” Granda barked. “What age do you think I am?”

  “I am sure you are a great age, sir,” said the ticket seller pleasantly, pushing his glasses up his greasy nose with a fat forefinger, “but I doubt if you are Lulu Kinahan.”

  That was Gramma’s name.

  “It is irrelevant who I am. I am clearly of advanced years; therefore I am entitled to free travel, and I demand free travel.”

  “You are only entitled to free travel with a travel pass, sir,” said the ticket man. He was still quite calm.

  “And what do you call this?” Granda waved the pass at the window behind which the ticket man sat.

  The ticket man actually smiled. “I call that somebody else’s travel pass, sir,” he said.

  “And do you mean to tell me you are not going to give me a ticket on a technicality like that, you young pup, you?”

  He didn’t look young to me, but I suppose these things are relative.

  “I don’t think personation is a technicality,” said the ticket man, beginning to lose his sense of humor, and his “sir,” now I come to think of it.

  “Personation?” Granda was rigid with indignation. “I am not impersonating anyone!”

  “Well, you are trying to use someone else’s travel pass,” said the ticket man. “That’s
illegal. Next!”

  He called the last word out loud, summoning the next person in the queue to come forward to buy their ticket.

  “It’s a bloody disgrace,” my grandfather said, sagging over his frame and shaking his head. He should have been in a wheelchair, but you couldn’t tell him anything.

  All I could think of was the journey home we were going to have to make with the frame and the suitcase on the Luas and the bus, and the reception we were going to get when we arrived. I knew we weren’t going anywhere now. Even if Granda had the money to pay for our train tickets, there was no way he was going to do it.

  I was right. There was merry hell to pay when we got home. Gramma was beside herself. I never did work out whether it was because she thought she’d never see her grandson again or her travel pass. It certainly had nothing to do with never seeing Granda again, that’s for sure.

  That kinda put me off running away from home, I have to admit. Actually, I didn’t think Granda came into this story at all, but there you go, you never know how things are all connected, do you?

  It’s funny how when you look back, you see the points where, if you’d acted differently, you might have changed things, and everything might have turned out different. I’m not saying it was my fault or anything, or that I should have gone along with Julie’s madcap idea and just stuck a few changes of underwear in a rucksack and legged it. You’d have had to be eight to think that was a good idea. Or seventy-eight. But if I had, then, who knows?

  4

  Julie couldn’t open her eye in the morning and her face was like a balloon on one side. I tried bathing it in cold water, but she kept screeching. I should have made ice overnight, but I didn’t think of it. I never expected it would be so bad. I scraped some snowy stuff from the inside of the freezer into a cereal bowl using a soupspoon, and then poured it into a sandwich bag. I gave it to her wrapped in a tea towel, and she hugged it carefully to her face.

  Ma slept through all this, as usual. She didn’t get up before noon any day. “I never drink until the afternoon,” she used to boast, and it was true, but she had sherry for breakfast all the same.

  Don’t get me wrong, Ma wasn’t always such a waste of space. I can remember a time before, when things were normal enough, and Da was home and we used to do family stuff like going to the zoo, that kinda shit. Good shit, you know. I remember Julie in her buggy and Da pushing it in the Phoenix Park and Ma with a flower in her hair and all laughing and stuff. I remember one night Da calling me in to look at Julie in her cot. She was asleep on her stomach with her bum in the air. Her diaper was making a little puffy bump under her pajamas, and her knees were bent so that her legs were nearly tucked under her.

  “Doesn’t she look like a turkey?” Da whispered. “All trussed up for the oven.”

  The two of us had a good laugh about that, and then Da kissed his fingers and touched them to Julie’s hair and she turned her head so that she was sleeping on the opposite cheek. You could see a big red patch where she’d been resting on it just a moment ago. We turned out the light then and left the room.

  I don’t know where Ma was that night, the night Da said Julie looked like a turkey. I’m not saying she wasn’t around much in those days, because she must have been. I’d have noticed if she wasn’t, but you don’t remember every single little thing, do you? You just remember these little scenes, like me and Da in Julie’s room, laughing at her asleep, only it wasn’t laughing at her really, it was laughing because we loved her, the two of us, and we were glad we had her. And yet I remember the running-away-with-Granda story pretty clearly. Memory is weird.

  I couldn’t think what I was going to do with Julie. There was no way she could go to school looking like that. There’d be a social worker on the doorstep by lunchtime. (Why do the social workers take the children away? Why don’t they take the parents? That’d be a much better idea. Residential care for troubled parents. That’s brilliant—I should enter it in the science fair.) But I couldn’t leave her at home either, with no one to look after her.

  “I’m hungry, Jonathan,” she whined.

  “Have an apple,” I said heartlessly, and she started wailing.

  “Oh, shut up and let me think,” I said.

  “I wish Gramma was here,” she sniffed.

  “If you had a tune for that, you could sing it,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, still holding the wet, cold tea towel to her face.

  “It means yeah, yeah,” I said.

  The only thing, I decided, was for me to skip school as well.

  I wasn’t going to just mitch off, though. They’d be on to me like a shot. And I couldn’t say I was sick. I’d done that the previous week, and there’s a limit to how often you can be sick without people getting suspicious. They are dead suspicious in my school. I don’t know what ever happened to trust.

  So I rang the school secretary and said I wouldn’t be in because my ma was sick and she was so bad I couldn’t leave her on her own. I hadn’t used that one before, because I don’t like to draw attention to Ma. I said she had the winter vomiting bug. I don’t know what that is exactly but it sounds awful and nobody wants to know you if you have come anywhere near it, so I reckoned I’d be good for a few days on that one. Also, it was true in a kind of way. It was winter and she had been vomiting.

  There was still no food in the house, only the apples, so I stole into Ma’s room and took a twenty-euro note out of her jeans pocket. I was amazed that she had it. If she’d had all that money, how come she’d only brought apples home for dinner? I knew how come, and for a moment I could feel the anger rising through my bloodstream, but I told myself, Don’t waste your energy, Jono.

  I was tempted to blow it all on Coco Pops and Mars bars, but I was very responsible. I bought brown bread and milk and some of those yogurt drinks. Also some Calpol. You would not believe what that stuff costs.

  “What did you get?” Julie asked when I came back from the store.

  “Bread,” I said. “We’re having apple sandwiches for breakfast.”

  “Apple sandwiches?” She sounded dubious.

  “Yeah, it’s what they eat in all the best houses,” I said.

  “Do they really?” she asked.

  “Well, only on the mornings when they have apples left over from dinner the day before,” I said.

  “I see,” she said solemnly.

  Kids don’t get jokes. I kinda like that about Julie, the way she is so thick about jokes, but sometimes you could do with a bit of audience appreciation, know what I mean?

  The apple sandwiches weren’t half bad, but I was afraid it would hurt Julie’s face to chew. She ate it all up, though, and drank some milk. I felt ridiculously proud of her. Or maybe of myself.

  * * *

  I HAVE this girlfriend. Sort of. Well, we like each other, but we’re not exactly going out together.

  Anyway, me and Annie—her name is Annie, did I say that before?—we just phone each other in the evenings, and we have a lot of laughs, but when we actually meet, we’re a bit shy with each other. Or I am anyway. Her brother Jamie is my best friend at school, even though he’s a year ahead of me. It’s because they used to live next door to us. She has the shiniest hair you ever saw, and her face is wide open. She plays the clarinet. Isn’t that something? The clarinet. She says she’s going to join the army band when she’s older. I said that means she has to be a soldier, but she just shrugs at that. She doesn’t really see beyond this idea of herself with sparkly bits marching around tooting on her clarinet, the mad eejit.

  She’s in my year at school, only in a different class, because her surname starts with W. So she wouldn’t necessarily notice if I wasn’t at school, but I sent her a text anyway. I didn’t say too much, just said I’d be out for a while. She’s cool. She won’t come running around with a thermometer or anything. But I wouldn’t just say nothing, or then she really might come around, to see if we’re all right. She worries about Julie, I think.


  Julie was hanging in there, though. All she wanted now was to watch something on the telly, but of course, as usual, there was nothing on. I can hear Gramma saying, in her prissy way that was supposed to be funny, Actually, there is a whole lot of stuff on the telly. There is nothing that anyone with an IQ above that of an undereducated wood louse would care to watch, but that is another matter.

  She talked like that, she really did. She was sound, Gramma. I was cracking up laughing to myself just thinking about her. She used to wear these mad clothes, all too big for her because she was so skinny, and all clashing colors. She did it on purpose to be eccentric. I think if you are really eccentric you don’t do it on purpose, but Gramma made a kind of hobby out of it. Lulu Fortycoats the neighbors called her. That was partly because her maiden name was Fortescue, which they thought was a bit uppity and needed taking down a peg. That’s what Gramma said anyway. I think it’s a nice name.

  Well, to cut a long story short, because this is supposed to be some kind of a story even though it is true, we muddled through like that for a day or two, eating apple sandwiches and potatoes. I forgot to mention the potatoes. I bought them in the evening, with what was left of the money and a few coins I found down the back of the sofa, and we had them mashed with curry powder. You’d be amazed how far a bag of potatoes can take you. That’s why there’s never been an apple famine—potatoes are something you can’t live without.

  It was like a kind of daft holiday. We pretended we were just having a good time, and we tried not to think about all the stuff. Ma kept out of our way—tell the truth, I think she was a bit embarrassed about hitting Julie—so we could do more or less what we liked. We ate our potatoes in the sitting room because the kitchen was too cold, and Ma had worked out some way of tapping into the electricity so that you didn’t have to pay for the electric fire. I’m sure it was dangerous and I know it was illegal, but at least we didn’t freeze.

  The day after that was dole day, so I got Ma out of bed and brushed her down and sent her off to collect the check. I know I am making it sound as if she was in bed for two days solid, which is not true, but I am just moving along here.