Long Story Short

by Siobhán Parkinson

  “You can wear your hood up,” I said. “If you keep close to me, no one will see.”

  Even though it had been days now since she’d got that blow, her face was still an awful color. In fact, the bruise looked bigger and darker than it had at first, and it was shiny.

  “It’s haunted,” she said.

  I laughed. “Why would it be haunted?”

  “Because,” said Julie flatly.

  She always says that when she doesn’t know what else to say, but she says it with great conviction. You’d nearly think she’d said something sensible.

  “Listen,” I said. “Remember Gramma’s steak and kidney pies?”

  “Yeah,” said Julie with sudden enthusiasm. She loves her grub.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few of those still in her freezer.”

  “We can’t steal stuff out of Gramma’s freezer!” Julie sounded shocked.

  “It wouldn’t be stealing. She made them for us. And they don’t belong to anyone anymore, right?”

  That started Julie sniveling, but I ignored her. I didn’t have time for arguments or emotional scenes.

  “Come on, now, Julie,” I said. “Chop, chop. Go and choose a book, and then we’re off. And a teddy.”

  Julie slipped obediently from her chair and padded off to her room.

  “Make it a good book,” I called up the stairs after her.

  “Don’t shout!” she said, appearing at the top of the stairs with a book under one arm and a teddy under the other and her finger to her lips. “You’ll wake Ma.”

  She came down the stairs in that little-girl way that she should have grown out of by now, and she pushed her stuff into the top of her rucksack.

  “I’m too big for teddies,” she assured me.

  “Then why did you bring one?”

  “Because you said, Jonathan,” she answered, all sweet reason.

  “Oh, yeah. Right. I’m the boss, then?”

  “Not of the family,” she said. “And not of me. Only of this trip.”

  Trip. She made it sound like a holiday.

  I made Julie put on her warmest coat, but it didn’t have a hood, so she had to take it off and put on a hoodie underneath. Then we wriggled our arms through our rucksack straps and hauled them onto our backs. I wound two scarves around Julie’s neck. I had no idea how cold we were going to be, but I knew it wasn’t going to be picnic weather out there anyway.

  * * *

  JULIE WAS RIGHT in a way. It was kinda spooky going into Gramma’s. We hadn’t been there since the day of the funeral. It was freezing. Cold as the grave, I remember thinking. Not a good thought under the circumstances.

  There was only one steak and kidney pie and it wasn’t cooked, so we had to defrost it first and then cook it. The electricity was still on, luckily, so we microwove it—another Gramma word—and then baked it in the oven. Gramma always had this theory that if the oven is on, the kitchen is warm, but her kitchen was still freezing even while the pie was cooking. Maybe it had got so cold you couldn’t warm it up with just the oven being on.

  The smell was fantastic though. I had a hard time keeping Julie from eating it all up on the spot. She’d been living on potatoes and apples for too long.

  “That’s tonight’s dinner,” I explained. “If you eat it now, you will still be hungry at dinnertime. So best to hang on. Have a slice of bread.”

  There was bread in the freezer too, which we toasted to make it edible. And I found two loaves of her special banana cake with walnuts and ginger, which I wrapped in tea towels and packed for later, but the bread we laid into immediately.

  I went rummaging through her stuff then, opening drawers and presses, not looking for anything in particular, but just in case there was something useful. I found a few coins, and her travel pass. I didn’t think that’d be much good to us, neither of us looked like Lulu Kinahan, aged seventy-nine.

  “I remember this!” Julie called, holding up a purple velvet hat with a feather. “And this!” she added, waving a game of Monopoly in the air. “Can we play, Jonathan?”

  “Not now, Julie,” I said. If there is one thing I hate more than Happy Families, it’s Monopoly. “Listen now, I need you to be a brave girl. I have to go to the post office to get out the money in my savings book, and I want you to stay here and keep as quiet as a mouse. Can you manage that?”

  I thought she might start whining again about the house being haunted, but she must have got over that.

  “I have savings too,” she said. “My Communion money.”

  I wished she’d thought of that before we left home, but I didn’t fancy going back to pick up her post office book, so I said, “You hold on to that, Julie. You’ll need it when you get married.”

  I was only joking about getting married, but she nodded and said, “Oh, yeah. For my veil, right?”

  “For sure,” I said. “Who would you like to marry?”

  “You,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I’ll be married already,” I said. “Who else? A prince?”

  “No. A daddy.”

  “I see,” I said.

  I had forty-seven quid in the post office. I’d been saving for an iPod, like, forever. By the time I’d got enough money, they would be out of date, so I didn’t really mind taking it out to fund our “trip,” as Julie called it.

  While I was out of the house, I sent a long text to Annie. She’d rung me the previous night, and when I saw her name coming up on the screen, I left the phone down on my bed and let it ring and ring and ring. But I couldn’t just ignore her. First of all, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and secondly, if I started acting strange, she’d probably start getting suspicious. So I sent her a long funny text about nothing much, and I never said a word about what was going on. That’d buy me a day or two anyway, I thought, and just then I couldn’t think ahead in blocks of time any longer than twenty-four hours.

  “Can we go to Daddy’s house?” Julie asked when I got back with the moola.

  “No,” I said. “That would be the last place we should go.”

  Because of course it was the first place they’d go to find us.

  “I want to go to Daddy’s,” she whined.

  She didn’t really. She wanted to go to the daddy she had made up for herself, not the da we really had, because the da we really had was someone else’s daddy now. He wouldn’t be one bit pleased to see his other children. That was us, the other children, which is weird, because we were there first, but somehow, that’s how it had turned out.

  “I love Daddy,” Julie said, though I knew she couldn’t possibly remember him, not really. She might have a few vague impressions, but that was the height of it.

  “Hmmm,” I said. “You know, that’s not a good idea, Julie. We need to keep away from Da, because that’s where they’ll think we’ve gone.”

  “So what?” she said. “Doesn’t matter if they find us, does it? Not if we are with Daddy. We can tell them Ma hit me, so we had to leave, and that’ll be okay, won’t it, ’cos you’re not supposed to hit your children, are you?”

  I wished it was as simple as she thought.

  I was packing the banana cakes and the rest of the bread into my rucksack, along with the pie, which was still hot.

  “Well,” I said, “tell you what. We’ll start out in the general direction of where Da lives. We’ll go to Galway. And we can decide later if we want to actually hook up with him. We might be happy enough on our own. We mightn’t want to be bothered with him. Not if we are getting on fine and all.”

  That really was weird logic. I was thinking as straight as I could, but maybe that was not all that very straight. But it seemed to appeal to her. I think it was the idea that we could decide. We didn’t have to do anything unless we wanted to.

  “Fuck it and see?” she said.

  I was shocked. No, really. She’s only a kid. What kind of sluts was she hanging about with? That bloody Danielle Butler and her rotten little cronies.

&n
bsp; Then I got it, and I laughed.

  “Suck it, Julie. Like a lollipop, you suck it to see if you like it. That’s what it means.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “same difference.”

  7

  It would have been nice to go by train, but I knew the bus was a lot cheaper, so we set off for Busaras, which, by the way, has to be the draftiest place in Ireland. I mean, if you design a place with five thousand doors, and they are all open, it is going to be bloody cold, isn’t it? Like the Snow Queen’s palace in the fairy tale, only it is the not-so-pretty version.

  You would be amazed at some of the people who travel by bus. They look as if they need a decent pair of shoes, and their suitcases are tied up with blue twine (why would anyone invent twine that is blue?), and they talk without opening their mouths. The blokes that sell the tickets in Busaras don’t understand them. They look blank when addressed in Closed Mouth, and they shake their heads and push their hats back, but it never seems to occur to them to say, Would you ever open your mouth there, sonny, and I might have some chance of understanding you?

  Anyway, we found the Galway bus and we got seats at the front, where you can see out the window. There wasn’t all that much to see for the first half of the journey, only scrubby fields that were very cold-looking and had sheep in them. I began to understand why sheep have so much wool. I’ve become a kind of expert on the cold lately.

  The bus stopped for a while near Athlone, and we had a picnic of steak and kidney pie. Julie persuaded me that it would be okay to eat it even though it wasn’t dinnertime yet. It was still slightly warm, she said, and it would be an awful waste to wait until it was cold. She was right. It tasted delicious. Good old Gramma. And then we had an orange each that I had bought in a little kiosk place in Busaras, because, unlike Ma, I know about the food pyramid and I didn’t want Julie getting rickets or scurvy or any of that kind of thing.

  The other passengers had mostly got off the bus when it stopped, to go to the john or buy drinks and chocolate bars, and they all turned up their noses in disgust when they went past us on their way back to their seats and got the smell of oranges. I don’t see why. I think it’s a nice smell, although maybe not so great on a bus. But just to be neighborly, I tucked the orange peel into a plastic bag and tied the top of it very tightly, so the orangey smell would be trapped inside. Very considerate of me, don’t you think? That’s me, all heart.

  It was evening by the time we arrived in Galway, and I hadn’t a clue what we should do next. We didn’t have enough money for a B&B, and we hadn’t thought to bring a tent, so we walked up and down the prom in Salthill a few times and pretended we were enjoying the sea air, but we were really freezing.

  When it got too dark for that, we found a kind of wind shelter. It was better than being out in the wind, but only just, because it was made completely of concrete, which is the coldest material known to man, if you ask me. But I didn’t say anything about the cold to Julie, and she didn’t say anything to me either, though I could see her shivering under her rucksack.

  We unpacked our sleeping bags, and I made Julie take off her coat and put on some more layers of clothes because I knew the cold of that concrete was going to seep into our bones. Then we got into our sleeping bags, and the two of us cuddled up together on the concrete bench and waited for the morning.

  Julie opened her eyes just before dawn, and she said, “Why did we run away?”

  “For fun,” I said.

  “Really?” she said sleepily. “Was that the reason?”

  I traced her bruise very gently with my thumb. The swelling had gone down a lot, but the color was still very dark.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I forgot. It’s because of my face, isn’t it?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  For the first time, it struck me that the cheekbone had probably been broken.

  She went back to sleep, and I held her for the longest time. Her hair smelled fruity, from some daft shampoo that she uses, which would be more appropriate poured over a dessert, I always think.

  “We need a cup of tea,” I said when she woke up again. “I mean, two cups of tea.”

  “I don’t drink tea,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

  “You do now,” I said, “because I can’t afford hot chocolate and you have to get something hot into you or you might get frostbite.”

  “Frostbite?” She wiggled her fingers speculatively, as if to check they were all intact. “Where? Where might I get frostbite? I can’t feel my toes. Is that it? I don’t think tea would be any good for your toes, would it?”

  “I suppose you could pour it over them, to defrost them, like,” I said, with a big grin to show I was only joking. You have to be clear about that kind of thing with Julie. Her sense of humor is a bit underdeveloped. I’d say living with Ma has stunted her in that department.

  “Oooh,” she said, but she didn’t make any more objections to the tea.

  We ran like frenzy up and down the beach to get warm before we went for our tea, but it didn’t really work because our feet kept sinking in the sand and we couldn’t get a good speed up. We just got sand in our shoes. It was a stupid idea to spend the night by the sea. Everyone knows it’s the coldest place.

  “We should’ve run on the footpath,” Julie said. “Now our feet will hurt because the sand will rub the skin off.”

  “The prom, you call that path,” I said. “Here, gimme your socks, and I’ll shake the sand out of them. We can’t have your skin coming off.”

  When she took her socks off, I could see she was right about her toes being so cold. They were like frozen peas that had seen a ghost. I rubbed her feet to get the blood flowing, and I blew on them to get the last of the sand off and to warm them up.

  After we’d had a long cup of tea in a little café, we went into the city and we walked about all day. We saw the boat that goes out to the Aran Islands. They have planes these days, for people and the mail, but I suppose there are things that are still better taken over there on a boat. Like if you bought furniture or something.

  “Can we go to the islands, Jono?” Julie pleaded. “Please?”

  I knew she was thinking about the story of the kids who ran away to an island and had a cow. I wondered about that. Would cows be moved over there by boat? Or would they put them on the plane? Boat seemed more logical, but I had this image in my head of a cow being winched down from a helicopter. But maybe that was just from a movie, for dramatic effect, you know. I’d say they use the boat all right when they’re not making a movie.

  She couldn’t understand why I said no, we couldn’t go to the islands. We’d stick out like a sore thumb, I said. Before we knew where we were, we’d be all over the evening news.

  “Why would we?” she asked. “We look normal, don’t we?” She looked down at herself, as if to check.

  She hadn’t a clue. Can you imagine, two kids from Dublin with rucksacks and no visible means of support wandering around Inis Meáin in the middle of February? Gimme a break.

  “Ah, but we don’t speak very good Irish,” I said. “That’d be a dead giveaway.”

  She bought that all right. She gave a little shrug and staggered along with her rucksack. She was beginning to figure out that running away isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Maybe she was even starting to think I’d been right to resist the idea for so long. But of course she wouldn’t admit that. We were here now anyway.

  I wondered what would have happened if me and Granda had made it onto the train that day, where we’d have ended up. I couldn’t imagine him sleeping in a wind shelter, but I suppose he would have had some money. Not like us.

  We bought some food for our lunch in a supermarket. Julie wanted a chicken sandwich, but it was four euros, and I said for that we could buy a whole loaf of bread plus some ham and cheese. She sulked for a while because she wanted the chicken sandwich, but, hey, I was in charge of the money, she didn’t have a choice.

  We found a place to
sit in Eyre Square near this mad fountain they have, and I was just making these very artistic sandwiches with the bread and ham and cheese when this drunk came up and started talking to us. Maybe he wasn’t really a drunk, but he had a bottle in his hand, and the smell off him was terrible. I tried to ignore him, but he wouldn’t go away. He made a big point of telling us about what an intellectual he was, and how nobody ever believed that, just because he was homeless.

  In the end, I gave him a sandwich, I thought it would shut him up. I figured he’d have to close his mouth to eat it. But he kept talking even with the food in his mouth.

  “So what makes you think you’re an intellectual, then?” I said.

  I shouldn’t have asked. I should have gone on saying nothing.

  “I’ve read Edward Sye-Eeed,” he said. “And Don Quixote.”

  “Uh-huh?” I said, not sounding very impressed, because I wasn’t.

  “In Spanish,” he said, as if that was the cherry on the cake. “I translated it actually, into a poem. In iambic pentameter.”

  “Great,” I said sarcastically. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

  “And the Inferno,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “That’s a movie,” Julie said. “It’s about a fire.”

  “Nah, it’s a poem about fourteenth-century Florentine politics,” he said.

  Idiot. Everyone knows Florida hadn’t even been discovered in the fourteenth century.

  I couldn’t wait to get away from him. He gave me the creeps. I was afraid I might turn into him, if we went on living like this on the streets. We’d start to smell soon, I thought. Maybe we should go back to Salthill and have a swim and wash our clothes in the sea. Not a very attractive prospect in an Irish winter, but if you start not washing, that’s how you end up, and that was a worse thought than being cold and having salt-stiffened clothes.

  I unpacked one of Gramma’s banana cakes, and I gave him a hunk of it. Then I put away what was left of the bread and ham and cheese and I stood up and said firmly, “We have to go now.”

  His mouth was full of the banana cake and he spat crumbs everywhere, but he insisted on saying, “I’m your man if you want any intellectual conversation. You’ll find me here any time, day or night.”