‘Well? Do you? Feel more like a man?’
‘Stop saying that,’ he warns, his fist pressing up into my chin. ‘That dumb kid is out there walking the streets, probably peddling his old man’s shit when he should be in prison.’ His voice is breaking up. He pulls away from me. ‘He should know what it’s like to be locked up …’
He’s walking around in a crazy circle, his eyes somehow finding enough light to glisten with in this dark.
‘And what it’s like to spend two years inside and never have one, not even one visitor.’ I’m already freezing out here, but the chill that hits me now goes way deeper. Where’s all this detail coming from? ‘And coming out those prison gates and no one there to meet him and nothing but a plastic bag with a few clothes and a certificate for some prison art competition and a bundle of comics. And the first job you get, they fire you when they find out you’ve done time and …’
A bundle of comics? The only part of me I can move is my lips and that takes some effort.
‘Are you talking about … is this Dad you’re talking about? In prison?’
‘I should’ve told Mam before now,’ Sean says. ‘Told the both of you. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘Told us what?’
His back is to the wall. He slides slowly down until he’s on his haunches and bent double. He wipes his eyes with a careless hand, looks up at me. I want to sit too, but I’m pure riveted to the spot.
‘The night before the accident Dad told me he’d been in jail,’ he says. ‘He was sixteen. Two years he got for breaking a beer bottle over a guy’s skull.’
I can almost hear the white noise of the frost going about its work among the leaves of grass. I imagine standing here so long that the frost will cover my shoes.
‘He used to sneak out from the Home where he lived and go to this, like, punk club. One night he meets this girl and they get on right well. When she asks him where he lives, he decides, you know, upfront is best. So he tells her he lives in a foster home, which she seems to be OK with, and they arrange to meet the following week. She never shows up, but her ex does, along with five of his mates.’
‘Where did all this happen?’ I have a thousand questions, but this is the first one I can get my tongue around.
‘North London was all he said. I was in such a state of shock I didn’t think to ask what club it was, who was playing, where the foster home was. How dumb am I?’
‘So they came after him? And?’
‘Dad’s out behind the club waiting for her. He told me there was this long redbrick wall with Palais de Dance written across it, that he’d never forget. How ironic is that?’ Sean says, shaking his head. ‘And these guys, they come along chanting this punk song at him, ‘Borstal Breakout’ – borstal is like a prison for young –’
‘I know what a borstal is.’
He looks at me like he doesn’t understand how I could be angry with him. Because Dad chose to tell you, dumbo. And I don’t know which is worse: the pain of hearing this story or the pain of Dad’s having told Sean and not me.
‘Then they jump Dad and start doing him over. Dad breaks away. The bottle’s on the ground and he grabs it when one of the guys pulls a knife and he splits him open, cracks his skull.’
From out front, the noise of shuffled pebbles reaches us. The Ice Queen leaving, I suppose. A light comes on in the kitchen. Mam passes by the window up there and I step closer to the back wall so she won’t see me. Sean’s looking up at her too.
‘I only kept it to myself because Dad asked me to,’ he says. ‘He wanted her to hear it from him. I kept thinking, When he’s himself again he’ll tell her.’
‘He should’ve been honest with her from the start,’ I say. ‘She’d have understood.’
I sit on the window sill outside the basement room. There’s no light from in there. Above us, the sky’s busy shunting clouds along. The world never stops. No matter how exhausted you feel, it keeps dragging you on and on and there’s no rest. Not for the wicked, not for anyone. Right, Dad?
‘He was afraid is all,’ Sean says. ‘First time he opens up to anyone, it ends in a scrap that puts him in jail. And remember what Mam’s first job was? When they met up? Working with battered wives. She’d have been well impressed, wouldn’t she?’
He’s right, I suppose, but there’s still a lot of missing pieces here.
‘So he changed his name because he had trouble getting work?’
‘He changed his name?’ Sean says and I realize Mam hasn’t told him yet. I’m glad. Now he knows what it feels like to be left out. He gets to his feet. No threats now, no hovering over me with his fist.
‘Martin was trying to sort out some insurance stuff and they copped that Dad’s birth cert was faked.’
‘But if we tell Mam, maybe –’
‘No,’ I say. My mind clears. I know what we have to do. Not do, more like. ‘We don’t tell Mam. Martin says the insurance money won’t be paid over even if we find his real identity. And, think about it, Dad’s already attacked Argos and clocked Brian. And if the psychiatrist at the rehab centre finds out about this, what’s he going to think except that Dad’s got form? And where will that lead? To Dad landing in some kind of institution or whatever? We can’t let that happen.’
‘I suppose,’ Sean says. ‘Still doesn’t feel right, though.’
Next door, Argos lets rip a few barks. I hear the scrape of his metal feeding bowl along stone paving, the murmur of Mrs Casey’s voice.
‘Nothing feels right any more,’ I tell Sean.
18
‘They say that men find it difficult if not impossible to carry out more than one task at the same time. That may be true. But the sad fact is that in musical theatre, it’s true of both sexes. The better singers can’t act. The better actors can’t sing.’
Miss O’Neill leans against the piano at the foot of the assembly hall stage as she delivers more or less the same speech she gave last year and the year before. There’s a lightness about her movements today and her tone is brighter. It’s like she’s acting out the life she really wants to have, rather than the one she’s stuck with.
‘We’ve got more time than usual to prepare this year so, for the first few sessions, we’ll concentrate on the acting. What we’re aiming for is to become the part. And we’ll start with some role-reversal exercises.’ We did these last year too. They didn’t work out very well. She claps her hands. Wake the dead that clap would and I quake inside. Today is not a good day. ‘Michael, Marie and Jill, let’s be having you.’
There’s the usual embarrassed shuffle to the front, the standing around gaping at the floor and trying to work up the nerve to follow Miss O’Neill’s directions. As I watch them play the part of parents who’ve discovered their daughter’s going out with some waster, the bad feeling that was there when I woke this morning invades me again. A tightness in my stomach, an aching in my lower back. It’s like I’m waiting between a roll of thunder and the lightning to come.
I keep asking myself what I’m doing here, what right I have to be singing and dancing? And why did I take the main role Miss O’Neill offered in the first place? But I know why. I’ve been mooching around in a kind of silent rage because Dad is happy and, once more, his happiness is not of my making and I’m not even included in it.
‘We’ve got Jimmy a place at the Head-Up Day Services Centre,’ Mam announced a few weeks ago.
‘The what?’ I said.
‘The Head-Up Centre,’ she explained. ‘You know? That prefab building behind the old dance hall on Rock Street. A few hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays is all.’
I didn’t know of it and I didn’t like the sound of it. I was the little girl of that long-ago Christmas again, not seeing what was under my nose. I mean I’ve been up and down that street thousands of times. How can I not have spotted a sign or something? Or maybe there isn’t one. Maybe they prefer to hide all these
brain-injured people away.
‘Doing what?’ I asked.
The coffee mugs she scrubbed had been ringed with stains for years. Now it seemed like the most important thing in the world for her to clean them.
‘Oh, there’s … there’s relaxation exercises and, you know, help with social interaction and … The thing is they’ve got no official funding so they’re pretty limited in what they can do until they raise more money. They run that charity shop on the Long Mall.’
I’ve actually been in that shop a couple of times and never knew what charity it supported. All I remember of it is the smell of stale clothes and a small Asian woman reading a book behind the counter and Jill going, ‘These could be dead people’s clothes!’ Fast fashion is more her style.
‘Fiona thinks he’s ready for it.’
I was drying the plates she’d washed. I wanted to fling the one I’d taken from her across the kitchen. Instead, I fired off another empty round at Miss Understanding.
‘She won’t be happy until Dad’s locked up somewhere,’ I said.
‘Don’t be like that, Eala,’ she said. She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. A few drops of water fell on to her cheek. The tears she should be crying, but never does, Angie was telling me. ‘Look, our miserable health service has little or nothing to offer Jimmy. This Head-Up organization tries to fill some of the gaps and he needs what they have to offer. So do we.’
She went on, but I wasn’t listening. To me, all her talk sounded like excuses for seeing even less of him than she already did now that she was back at work. I might have gone ballistic, but I didn’t feel I had the right. What was I doing for Dad anyway? Nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to. Whenever he was near me, all I felt was resentment.
Sean was late in that night as usual. Half eleven or so. I don’t know where he goes or what he gets up to now that he doesn’t hang around with Brian any more. Why they’ve fallen out I have no idea. Maybe it’s just as well. At least Sean’s not drinking these times and I don’t see any sign that he’s doing hash either.
So. In he comes to the sitting room, misery written all over his face as usual. Mam, still in her happy-clappy mood, soon went fast-forward to the subject of Head-Up. How some woman called Foran started up the local centre two years ago after her son suffered a brain injury. How they’re slowly building up the services there. How this whole recession business is making it even more difficult to get government funds. I gave Sean one of those sneaky, I-told-you-so looks and he turned on Mam.
‘He’ll be sitting round a table with a bunch of spastics making baskets,’ he said. ‘What good will that do? You don’t want him here is all. Tuesday and Thursday, your days off work. That’s very handy for you, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t you dare call those people spastics,’ Mam fumed.
‘I just did.’
The first role-reversal exercise is falling apart from lack of inspiration. The parents and daughter are standing there saying nothing, avoiding eye contact with one another. And I’m thinking, This is the closest they’ve got to reality in the last ten minutes.
‘OK, then,’ Miss O’Neill says. ‘That was very good. Now, we’ll have Eala and …’ There’s giggling and hoarse laughs coming from behind me. Miss O’Neill does another of her thunderclaps and it drills into my brain. ‘… And Derek.’
She’s been caught between two minds over her choice of male lead. Benno Brophy or Derek Rice. Benno’s a quiet fellow. Minds his own business. Nice-looking and shy. My guess is he didn’t really want the part because he’s not keen on the limelight. Derek, on the other hand, is mad for it. He’s been doing dance, singing and acting classes since he could walk and talk. Last year when Brian got the main part ahead of him, Derek mysteriously came down with some virus and dropped out of the show. That’s Derek for you. Either he’s top dog or he doesn’t run.
I stand up and take my place alongside Miss O’Neill. One look at Derek’s face as he makes his way through the jumble of chairs and feet and I know he’s going to start messing.
‘Right,’ Miss O’Neill says. ‘Boy, girl. He hasn’t shown up for their date last night. She knows he was with someone else. That sort of thing. Eala, you’re the boy. And Derek, keep it clean, right?’
But he’s already doing this camp, gay thing behind her back. Hand on hip, limp wrist and fluttering eyebrows. I shouldn’t be surprised. His own brother Frankie, who’s gone to college in Dublin, is gay and while he still lived here in town, Derek was one of his main tormentors.
‘That’s so original, Derek,’ I mutter at him. Which only makes him ham it up some more.
‘Tone. It. Down. Derek,’ Miss O’Neill warns, frost at the edges of every word.
He does. But only a little. I’m fed up of his prancing around and lisping. Shut him up, Angie is telling me. Stick the knife in him and twist it. And I do.
‘Frankie’s not the only queen in your family, Derek. Singing lessons, dancing classes. All a bit gay, don’t you think? For a fellow, like?’
If he’s stunned, I’m dumbstruck. I’ve never said stuff like that before, never even thought that way. Jill is hiding her eyes, blushing for me. I don’t know what to do, what to say.
‘You’re some wagon, Eala,’ Derek says. Then he leers at me. ‘I owe you one, right?’
‘Thank you both for that little display of homophobia,’ Miss O’Neill says.
She’s disgusted with me. Not half as disgusted as I am with myself. I wish I could tell her about the glimpse I’ve had into Dad’s past, tell her how I’ve been shaking inside ever since that cold evening in the Bernabéu. But how could I even begin to?
‘OK, let’s leave it at that,’ she tells us. ‘Tomorrow evening we’ll try another role reversal. You lot can pretend to be adults for a change.’
‘What’ll you pretend to be, Miss O’Neill?’ Derek says.
‘I’ll have my brain removed overnight,’ she says as she rises stiffly from the piano stool below the stage like she’s nursing a dead leg. ‘And pretend to be you, Derek.’
He isn’t happy about that one, but he has more sense than to get thick. The main part is more important to him than his pride. We scatter. Jill catches up with me near the assembly hall door. We haven’t spoken for weeks. She’s not sure she wants to talk to me and I don’t make it any easier for her to decide. I say nothing. I keep walking. She’s got the part of Graziella, the leader of the Jet girls. It’s the kind of part Angie would prefer. A more streetwise edge to her. And I’m stupidly jealous. Out in the corridor, Derek and his pals are up ahead and he’s mouthing again.
‘O’Neill’s such a lezzy, I bet she’s into role reversals big time,’ he says.
The strangled laughter of his hormonally challenged pals echoes around the corridor. One of them hits another a friendly slap in the head and the whole mad gang of them go racing out the front door like dogs chasing a bone.
‘What a bunch of losers,’ Jill says.
At least she hasn’t started with the latest chapter of the Win-and-sprog story. In fact, now that I sneak a glance at her, I realize she’s not doing tragedy today. Contentment, more like. So much for missing little orphan Richard. I feel like bursting her bubble.
‘Maybe we’re all losers,’ I say.
‘It’s just a bit of craic,’ she says with a smile. ‘Win said this morning that the thing she misses most about school is being in the show every year.’
‘She’s back?’ I ask and I know I shouldn’t have.
We reach the double doors at the front of the school and I’m pushing at the handle, but it’s stuck. I get thick with myself. Jill steps in and opens the door. Inwards. Why am I getting all fussed up like this? Why does the night air make me so dizzy?
‘You won’t believe this, Eala,’ she says. ‘It’s like we live in a different house and it’s all down to Richard. Mam and Dad went up to Dublin and convinced Win to come home. Not o
nly that, but we’re going to take care of the baby while she’s in college this year.’
I don’t work too hard at being enthusiastic.
‘Great,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘And Dad is totally, like, beaming when he comes home from work and even if Richard is asleep in the sitting room, he has to go in and take a look.’
She sniffles. I pretend not to notice. Outside it’s bitterly cold as we walk out by the avenue towards the street. The trees are bare along both sides. In the darkness of evening, the branches are lit from below with floodlights and seem so fragile that you wonder if they’ll survive the frost. I’m shivering. Jill stops up, suddenly flustered.
‘I’ve to … I’ve to meet Benno down at the sports hall,’ she says and looks beyond me towards the school gates.
‘You’re with Benno? You never told –’
‘I texted you loads of times, but you didn’t bother to read them, obviously.’
I turn to see what’s bothering her over behind me. Under the light globes on the high piers of the school gates, Brian stands. Hands in pockets, his shoulders hunched, chin buried in the scarf round his neck. Great pose, Brian.
‘Are you going out with him?’ Jill asks.
‘No.’
‘Keep it that way, Eala; for your own sake, keep it that way.’
Jill hurries off down the path that leads to the sports hall.
‘Can we talk?’ Brian asks.
‘No,’ I say, but I don’t move and I don’t know why I don’t move.
‘We have to talk about Sean,’ he says.
19
This is starting to get ridiculous. We’re walking, what, ten minutes now and neither of us has said a word. We’re down by the river, which is a great idea if you want to acclimatize yourself for an Antarctic expedition, but not if you ever want to feel your fingers and toes again. The breeze blows into our faces. The water flows in the opposite direction and is so high it’s within inches of the riverbank.
My Dad Is Ten Years Old Page 11
