Long Story Short

by Siobhán Parkinson

  “Yeah,” I said. “See ya.”

  I grabbed Julie by the hand, and we marched off.

  “I’ll tell you all about the Galapagos next time I see you,” he shouted after us. “Your little girl would like that.”

  “Would I?” said Julie to me. “What’s a galapago?”

  “I think it was a battle in the First World War,” I said. “I don’t think you’d be very interested.”

  After that we found the public library. It was great, lovely and warm and loads of books, and nice friendly librarians. I asked one of them about your man Sye-Eeed—it should be spelled Said, I found out, which is a bit hard to get your head around—and she said she thought I wouldn’t really like to read his stuff until I am older. I thought that probably meant it was full of sex and violence, but I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to be drawing attention.

  We stayed as long as we dared, and then we went to the cathedral, where they had some big prayer thing going on, with all candle lighting and flowers everywhere; it was very nice and quite warm and it smelled of candle grease and incense and carnations. Wouldn’t you hate to be a Protestant and have a church that smells of mold? Though in fairness, I was only ever in one, and maybe it was not typical. Maybe they have lovely ones too that smell of … oh, gardenias or lilacs or something. They haven’t got incense anyway. I know that. That’s a Catholic thing, it’s one of the differences, that and the rosary.

  “Let’s stay here tonight,” Julie whispered, which was exactly what I was thinking myself, so before the service was over we crept into a confession box and hid there, one on each side of the priest’s compartment, and we listened as the people streamed down the aisle, talking in Galway voices, saying musha and yerra, like in a play—it was very strange.

  I was terrified a priest would suddenly decide to hear confessions and we’d be discovered, but it didn’t happen, and in the end, the people all went out, and the place fell silent, except for this ticking sound that the central heating pipes made.

  And then the priest’s door did open after all, but instead of a priest getting in, to hear confessions, one got out. I nearly passed out with the shock of it. I could hear the soles of his shoes on the marble floor. What was he doing? Checking his pockets for something or picking his teeth? I stayed frozen inside my confession box, kneeling down—there isn’t any other way you can inhabit a confession box, especially not if you have a great big rucksack with you. Sitting is uncomfortable, and lying down is out of the question, unless you are about two feet tall.

  How could this man have been sitting within inches of my face for several minutes and not heard me breathing? How come I hadn’t heard him breathing? I imagined him sitting there with the two little shutters on either side of him closed, not realizing there was a boy on the other side of one of them, and a girl on the other side of the other one. Suppose I’d sneezed? Suppose I’d been chewing gum? He must have heard Julie breathing. She breathes with great gusto, if you know what I mean—as if she really enjoys it.

  But he didn’t appear to have noticed a thing. Maybe those shutters are soundproofed, or maybe he was deaf. Or asleep. He might have been asleep.

  I heard a tiny cough then, coming from Julie’s part of the confession box. It was so tiny I knew she had tried to muffle it, and I hoped the priest wouldn’t hear it. I sat very still, breathing through my ears, and waited to see if he would open her door to check. I could hear his feet still scuffing the floor just outside the confession box.

  Seconds passed, they felt like weeks, and then I heard the door of the priest’s compartment shutting with the soft knock of wood on wood, and the priest’s footsteps moved away up the aisle. A moment later, a far door opened and closed, and then silence fell.

  I crept out of my hiding place and opened Julie’s door. She had managed to crouch in the dark wardrobey space, with her knees drawn up to her nose.

  “Hello?” she said softly. “Jono?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “Did you tell that priest all your sins?”

  “Nah, I don’t commit sins,” she said, standing up and stepping out of the confession box.

  “Pride is a sin,” I said.

  “I’m not proud,” she said, quite sure of herself. “It was fluffy in there,” she added, blowing her nose. “And it smelled like the inside of a cutlery drawer. The kind in a sideboard, where you keep the best silver.”

  “Right,” I said, only half listening to her babbling, as I looked around. The church was very still and shadowy and it felt vast, but it wasn’t quite dark, because there were still candles lit, and a red lamp glowing at the altar, and it still had that heavenly kind of smell.

  “How did you manage to keep quiet?” I asked her then. “You must have been like a mouse in there, when he didn’t hear you.”

  “I fell asleep,” she said with a giggle. “I didn’t even snore, did I?”

  “Not even,” I said, my mind boggling at the thought of Julie asleep on the floor of the confessional and the priest asleep in his armchair just inches away from her. “You’re a topper. Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

  So we unpacked our sleeping bags and stretched out on a pew, toe to toe, and we both slept for hours and hours. The sleep of the blessed, I suppose you could call that.

  8

  “Would you think Mammy is worrying about us?” Julie asked the next day, as we were having our morning tea.

  “Nah,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “But we are her children,” said Julie. “She’d have to worry, Jonathan, wouldn’t she? We should have left her a note, said we were running away but we would be fine and she’s not to worry.”

  “There wouldn’t have been any point in that, Julie,” I said uneasily.

  “Let’s text her,” she suggested.

  I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be handing clues to the police on a plate.

  “I never thought of charging my phone in that cathedral,” I said, banging my forehead with the heel of my hand. “It’s all out of juice. What about yours?”

  “Mine is lost,” she admitted.

  “You lost your phone?” I pretended to be surprised. “Where did you lose it?”

  “Jonathan!” she said with a giggle. “You know the answer to that.” She added, “It’s-a stu-pid ques-tion,” in a singsongy voice.

  Gramma always said that. If you knew where you’d lost it, she reasoned, then it wouldn’t be lost, would it?

  Julie turned her palms out flat and held them in front of her in the air like little seal flippers, and then she jiggled them up and down in unison rhythm. I know she gets that from watching cutesy kids on TV, but it made me laugh all the same.

  Then she said, “Okay, so in that case, let’s send her a postcard.”

  Resourceful child, our Julie.

  I couldn’t think of a good argument against that, and she kept on nagging about it, so in the end I let her get one, but I said she couldn’t have a card that mentioned Galway.

  “Ah,” she said, and she tapped the side of her nose, to show she understood my devious thinking. “Okay.”

  So she chose a Real Ireland one that showed a pub front. It could have been anywhere. Anywhere in Ireland, I mean, it couldn’t have been anywhere else.

  Julie wrote the card:

  Dear Mam

  Dont worry were allright.

  Love from your kidz

  Under that, she signed her name, making the dot over the i in Julie a little heart. Then she gave it to me to sign too, and she put a row of kisses on the bottom, under our names. They looked like tiny stitches.

  We went walking around after that, looking for the post office. We didn’t find the main one, but we went into this sweetshop on a corner to get a Twix (because there are two fingers, one for each of us), and they had a little post office counter in there, and luckily there was a cat. I knew Julie would not be able to resist that, so I said I’d queue up and get the stamp and she could play with the cat. As soon a
s I saw she was fully absorbed, I ducked out of the queue. I used the few minutes to send another text to Annie. Some nonsense about soccer. She likes soccer. I don’t. I really have to work at knowing the scores and all, so I can talk to her about it. It’s mad, ’cos usually it’s the girl that doesn’t like soccer. She supports Liverpool for some reason, and Shamrock Rovers.

  I put my phone away—it wasn’t out of juice as I’d said to Julie, but it was running very low by now—and then I called over to her and made a big show of dropping the postcard in the postbox, but I hadn’t written the address on it.

  As we came out of the shop, a Garda car pulled up beside us and the door swung open before the car had even come to a stop. The driver stuck his head out of the door and called, “Jonathan! Is that you?”

  I don’t know how I managed it, but I never flinched at the sound of my name, just went on walking. Luckily I was holding Julie’s hand, so I was able to give it a fierce squeeze to warn her not to give us away, and fair dues to her, she got the message immediately and she never as much as faltered, just went on skipping along beside me.

  The guard came after us and tapped me on the shoulder. “Jonathan?” he said.

  I turned around. “Hello, Guard,” I said cheerfully. “Are you talking to me?”

  “Ye-es,” he said, his eyes searching mine.

  “On’y I’m Paul,” I said, and I tried to make my voice country, or at least not Dublin. “I doan’t knoaw inny Jonithins.”

  The guard looked sideways at me, and then he squatted down to Julie.

  This is it, I thought. She’s sure to say the wrong thing, and we’ll be caught. My heart was doing jigs and reels inside my chest, and my mouth was dry.

  “Hiya, Julie,” he said.

  Julie stared at him for a moment, and then she looked up at me and said, “He thinks my name is Julie, Paul.”

  God, she was a star. She should be on the stage.

  She looked back at the guard and gave a gurgly little laugh, like Shirley Temple, and said, “My name is Arabella O’Brien.”

  Arabella! I nearly choked.

  “What happened to your face, Arabella?”

  Julie put her hand slantways across her mouth and said, confidential-like, “It was in a fight.”

  The guard tried to hide a smile. He stood up and brushed his hands together.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “I could have sworn…” Then he looked suspicious again. “Rucksacks?” he said. “It’s not holiday time.”

  “Schoolbags,” I said, and rolled my eyes to show I was not a happy—I was going to say not a happy camper, but I suppose I mean not a happy schoolboy. I was delighted that I’d used Julie’s schoolbag as a rucksack for her. It had these pen and pencil motifs on it, all very businesslike. My own rucksack was just ordinary, but lots of lads carry their school stuff in ordinary camping rucksacks if not in sports bags. “An’ yeah, we’re dead late,” I added. “Long story.”

  “I see,” said the guard, and for two awful seconds I thought he was going to ask to look in the rucksacks, but he didn’t. Instead he turned back to his car and opened the door. Just before he got in, he said, as casually as anything, “Where do you go to school?”

  The pavement seemed to fall away under my feet, like a down escalator. This was it. I’d walked us right into it.

  I looked over the guard’s head, over the top of his car, and I saw—I couldn’t believe it—a school! It looked like a primary school—a low building with a freshly tarmacked yard where they’d painted hopscotch on it, and high iron railings.

  So I pointed and said, “I’m just dropping Arabella into her school over there, and I go to Scoil Ehnnnnnnhhh.”

  I’d somehow remembered that a lot of the schools in Galway are Irish ones, with Scoil as part of their name. I met a lad from Galway last year, he told me that. And I gobbled the last word—the old Closed Mouth is great for that—so it might be nearly anything.

  The guard screwed up his face, but he must have thought I said something close enough to a real Galway school, because he got into the car and closed the door.

  “Right, so ye’d better get yeer skates on and hurry along,” he said through the window, which was fully rolled down.

  The car screeched away from the curb and Julie and I crossed the street, towards the school. When we got to the school gate we didn’t go in, though, we just kept on walking. After we’d gone about a hundred yards, Julie pulled on my hand like a bellpull. “Did you like my name?” she asked.

  I looked down at her. “Where did you get it out of?” I asked.

  “It’s my teddy’s name. Gramma called her that. Miss Arabella O’Brien. She christened her the day she gave her to me, when I was four.”

  “I didn’t know teddies could be girls.”

  “Well of course they can. Where do you think the baby bears come from?”

  I laughed. But I knew they were onto us. It was getting serious.

  We went wandering around for ages that day, not knowing where we were going or why, looking for somewhere warm, but everywhere was crowded in the city, and there was no place we could mingle in and not be noticed. And the money was beginning to get pretty low too. I don’t know where it went, but we were down to coins now.

  I desperately needed to think, but I couldn’t think and be with Julie. The two things don’t go together. I did have one thought, though. I thought: this could be it, so let’s just enjoy today, or what’s left of it. Wouldn’t you know it, as soon as you think you should be enjoying a day, it turns really horrible on you.

  That’s what happened. It started to rain. Just a fine mist at first, but it soaked our hair and shoulders, and I knew we couldn’t last the night out of doors. Julie started to cry with cold and exhaustion. She wanted to go back to the cathedral to sleep again that night, but I said no, that would be pushing our luck. What I really meant was, the guards were onto us, that priest probably heard us after all.

  I took her into a chipper and bought two singles of chips with the last of my money. It was lovely and warm in there, and we made the chips last as long as we could. When we finally had to leave the greasy comfort of the chipper, we stepped out into driving rain.

  “We have to go to Daddy’s house,” Julie moaned. “We have to. That’s why we came, Jonathan, isn’t it? Why are we walking around all the time, when Daddy lives here?”

  “Julie,” I said, and I was tucking her hair in between her clothes and her back, to keep it dry, “I don’t think we’d be welcome there.”

  “I don’t care about that,” she said. “I’m cold. I just want to be inside.”

  My heart was heavy, but I knew it was over. I’d done what I could, but we weren’t going to be able to live forever like babes in the woods. I had tried to fool myself, but part of me deep down must have known that it was impossible. Why else would we have come to this city, if not so that I could deliver Julie over to Da when the time came?

  “Have you got his address?” I asked her. I was just playing for time.

  “We could ask the guards where he lives,” said Julie. “They’ll know.”

  She was shivering and whimpering, and I put my arm around her.

  “Don’t be silly, Julie,” I said. “Remember that guard this morning? They’re looking for us. It’d be a bit of a giveaway if we waltzed into the station and asked them where Da lives.”

  She smiled. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “But why are they looking for us? We’re not crinimals.”

  “You’re not allowed to run away from home, you know,” I said.

  “Is it against the law?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Is it a sin?”

  “No, not that either, but they can’t let kids run around the streets with no one to look after them. There are people whose job it is to make sure they—we—are safe.”

  “Oh, well then, that’s good. Let’s find them and tell them we need to be safe.”

  “Only, there’s still the problem of your face,” I
said gently. “Your bruise, I mean.”

  “It’s dark,” she said. “They won’t notice.”

  “Sure thing,” I said, but I didn’t offer to go looking for the social services. “Only, they’re probably not at work now, those people. They’ll be at home, cooking rashers for their children and watching the telly.”

  “Rashers!” she whined. “So what are we going to do?”

  Reluctantly, I put my hand in my inside pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.

  “As it happens, I have Da’s address,” I said. “I found it in Gramma’s desk.”

  I moved under a streetlamp to read the address. It was in a place called Knocknacarra. I knew vaguely where that was because I’d seen a sign for it, out Salthill way.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and I took Julie’s wet little hand in mine and off we went in the direction of Salthill.

  We trudged along for ages in the icy rain, and I checked the address a few more times. The piece of paper was wet and the writing was smudgy, but I could still read it, and every time I looked it said the same thing. I don’t know why I kept rechecking it.

  We entered the housing development, and we wandered around parks and lanes and avenues and gardens, and in the end we found the crescent we were looking for. It was easy to find the right house because there was a blue light flashing in the driveway, whirling round and round on top of a Garda car.

  You took your time, I said to them in my own mind. Three days to track us down.

  “See that house, Julie?” I said, bending down to her level.

  She nodded.

  “That’s where Da lives. The guards are there, but that doesn’t matter now, because we’re not running away anymore, see?”

  She raised both eyebrows, but she didn’t argue.

  “Now, listen, I can’t go in with you. I don’t think Da wants to see me, right? But you are cold and wet and hungry, and you need to go in there and Da will look after you, because you are his little girl. Right?”

  She was listening, but she gave no indication.