He sold his trumpet and drank the money in a week. It was forty-five pounds, I still remember that. He gave Mam a fiver. I got a pound. He borrowed it back from me at the end of the week and I never heard a word about it again.
The truth was, he was finished long before his friend died. He’d got this gum disease and the few teeth he had left had to be taken out. You can’t blow a trumpet without teeth, so he got a false set. They worked all right for a while, but in the end he couldn’t put up with the pain of the plastic, or whatever it is, clamped to his raw gums – so he told us, anyway. I reckon it was true, because the day he sold the trumpet, he took out the false teeth and left them out. It made him look even older than before.
That was when Mam gave up on him. I wasn’t able to say it before she left, but I knew she’d tried her best. She even got odd jobs to pay for the extras I needed at school. There was never a word of thanks. Not from him. Not from me. So maybe I didn’t deserve to be warned. But she’d gone through the hard bit, the deciding to go; surely saying goodbye to me wouldn’t have killed her? Then again, I should have known. The night before she went she talked to me about him for the first and last time. I mean really talked about him. Not ripping him apart, as she had every right to do, but about how they met and how good the early days were.
It was during his New Mexicanos days. He was already thirty but he didn’t look it. She was seventeen. It was her first dance. My old man comes to the mike to do a vocal. An old Elvis song, she said: ‘The Wonder of You’. When she started humming it softly I didn’t know where to look, but I listened. It was as close to her as I ever got in those last days.
She was a million miles away, then, from the screaming arguments and that horrible night when they actually came to blows. I don’t know who hit who first but, though I was twelve years old, I wet the bed that night. I wouldn’t let either of them change the sheets. I did it myself and for a week after. This was one part of that ugly story of my childhood I held back from Nance. It just wouldn’t come out. If it had, maybe Nance would have understood how I could never hit her, not in a million years.
All that stuff was far from my mind as I watched Mam that night. There were no tears. She wasn’t like that happy girl any more but she didn’t seem bitter either. That was when I should have known.
‘Before he got to the end of the song,’ she said, ‘I was … well, I was head over heels. I thought he was the most fantastic looking fellow I’d ever seen. He looked like you do now.’
I thought I’d break up when I heard that, but I held it in. I was good at that, holding stuff in. Which I don’t recommend, because when that stuff spills out you’re into disaster territory, believe me.
On the night of our celebrations after the St. Peter’s game I was still holding it all in. Just about.
Beano walked me home from the Galtee Lounge, ready to catch me if I fell and persuading me not to call up to Nance’s house. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. I thought I was being perfectly reasonable. If it wasn’t for him I’d have dug myself into twice as many holes as I’ve done in my time.
Beano was eighteen and we’d been best friends for going on nine years. He was small for his age and he was an albino – white hair, chalk-white skin and red-tinged eyes. We’d met up in third class in primary school. He’d already stayed back a year because he couldn’t keep up. We got as far as fifth class together and then he was kept back again – and again. He finished primary when he was fourteen and gave it up as a bad job. We stayed friends through all this, and for years I was his protector – until he had to become mine.
Beano’s father is Snipe Doyle, who was foreman at the FÁS Scheme when we built the town park. He didn’t like me. Which is putting it mildly. Then again, he didn’t like anyone very much – not even Beano. If there was some messy, back-breaking job at the site that no-one fancied doing, chances were me and Beano got it. Beano would go all silent when I’d bring this up. No matter what Snipe did or said to him, he hadn’t a bad word to say about his old man.
That Sunday night, Beano finally got me to the front gate of my house. Then he had to put up with a poetry recitation. I’d just learned off Dylan Thomas’s ‘The Force That through the Green Fuse’. I hadn’t much of an idea of what it was about, but the words sounded so good, they wouldn’t leave me alone. It was like there was this language that said everything about life and if you tried hard enough you could understand it and begin to see through the clouds of crap all around you.
After a lot of persuasion, I dragged myself inside and found Jimmy sleeping on his grotty armchair in front of a fireplace full of dead ashes. His head was back, cushioned by his lank, shoulder-length hair. His toothless mouth was open. I sat in a chair opposite him and stared until he came to.
The last thing I expected was the wide grin he gave me when he woke. The offer to make me a cup of tea nearly knocked me flat. I didn’t answer him. He stood up and walked straight as a die to the kitchen sink to fill the kettle. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t drunk. In fact, it had been a few months since I’d actually seen him in that state. Then again, he was usually in bed by the time I got home, so that didn’t mean anything.
‘I heard you scored a right one today,’ he said, as he waited for the kettle to boil.
He never talked about football. I was sobering up fast.
‘How come you weren’t out tonight?’ I asked. ‘Spent it all last night, I suppose.’
He shook his head and that dumb smile appeared again. I took it personally.
‘What’s the stupid grin for? You think I’m funny when I’m drunk, you should see yourself.’
‘I have, OD, I have.’
The tea was weak and soapy like it always was in our house. I drank it anyway. I needed an excuse to stay up and find out what was going on. Eventually, he came out with it.
‘I was down town after dinner and I met a fellow I haven’t seen for years,’ he began. I stared at the white, powdery rim of lime at the top of my cup. His saintly smile was getting to me.
‘This bloody big green BMW pulls up beside me and I’m thinking this has to be somebody I owe money to. Then he stops and jumps out, brown as a berry from the sun. Tommy Halferty, the drummer from the New Mexicanos. Beats me how he recognised me but, anyway, he tells me he’s in the pub business now. Two pubs in Cork and another called The Green Castanets in the Costa Del Sol!’
‘You’re emigrating,’ I said cruelly. I don’t think he even heard me.
‘The showbands are back in business, he tells me. All the old crew are out of retirement and packing them in in these pubs. He says, “Jimmy boy, get that trumpet out, you were the best.” He says, “If it wasn’t for the discos you’d be driving this car, Jimmy.”’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and I wasn’t impressed – but he wasn’t finished yet.
‘He says, “Jimmy boy, brass is back, brass is back!” The brass section in the bands, you see, OD. The trombone, the trumpet. See what I’m getting at?’
Mam and me had heard all about comebacks before. The only difference this time was that he was sober when he talked about it. It didn’t make it any more real.
‘I’m going to give it a shot, OD,’ he said. ‘I’m buying a trumpet.’
‘With what?’ I sneered. ‘I’m not paying for your pipe dreams. So don’t even ask.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ he answered quietly. ‘It’s all down to me now, OD.’
I went and washed my cup. He didn’t plead for some encouragement like in the old days. He just looked into those ashes. As I left to go to bed, he leaned forward and, picking up the poker, filtered the ashes down through the fire grate.
‘Brass is back,’ he repeated over and over. ‘Brass is back.’
NANCE
The fire brigade had left when Tom and May got home. I’d managed to tidy up the place and our perfect house still looked like it was ready for some photographer to take snaps for one of those glossy ‘Homes’ magazines
. I told them about the chimney fire but not how it started.
‘What were you doing, Nance?’ was Tom’s first reaction. ‘The whole place might have gone up!’
May was calmer. Maybe she sensed something in the air beyond the acrid stench of soot. Tom walked around like a headless chicken. For some reason, that limp of his, from some long-ago accident, annoyed me intensely now.
‘Are you all right, Nance?’ May asked. ‘Tom didn’t mean …’
‘Me and my big fires,’ he said, trying to hide his embarrassment over his outburst. ‘I piled too much coal on before we went out.’
I was shaking. I needed to sit down, but not there and not with them.
‘It’s just shock,’ May said. ‘I’ll fill a hot water jar for you and …’
‘Shock,’ I muttered. ‘It’s shock all right.’
I left them standing there with their worried faces and went up to my bedroom. I locked the door. I got into bed and switched off the light, knowing I wouldn’t be able to read as I usually did before I slept. The dark was the same whether my eyes were open or shut. But dark as it was, I could still see the photo. I couldn’t figure out what to do next.
All I knew was that I wouldn’t be going into school the next day. Even as I was thinking this, I could see I was putting my whole future at risk, just like OD. I found myself blaming him for what I’d done with my books and notes. I couldn’t see a way back for myself, and I began to convince myself that I didn’t care. All the plans that I’d made – to go to college, become an engineer, see the world – lost their attraction for me.
I didn’t want tomorrow to come, but it came anyway. I had to get up early to avoid getting my usual lift into school with Tom.
May did her best to smooth over the ruffles in the sparse conversation, but the sooty stink of the kitchen was like a bad memory. Even if I hadn’t yet worked out what I’d do for the day, at least I wasn’t shivering any more. May missed the teapot with the water from the kettle but she laughed it off. I pretended not to notice.
‘Are you not waiting for a lift?’ she asked as I threw on my blazer and grabbed my bag, packed with two old telephone directories and a few ancient Bunty and Judy annuals I’d dug out from somewhere.
‘I feel like walking,’ I told her and headed out the back door, pretending not to hear Tom calling from his bedroom window.
Down at Blackcastle Bridge I turned left through the car park and went behind the swimming pool and along the river bank. The bag was heavier than usual so I dumped the annuals in some bushes. The grass on the river’s edge was damp so I sat on my bag watching the ducks mess about in their little watery world, nothing to worry them except where the next bite of food was coming from.
I kept telling myself not to look at my watch and I kept looking at it. Nine, quarter past, twenty past, twenty-two minutes past. The breeze along the river was making me shiver again, and I got up and walked for a bit, but the riverside walk came to a sudden stop in a jungle of nettles and I turned back. When I reached my bag I was so frustrated I took aim and kicked it into the water. It went down quicker than I expected and I left it there. I’d just thought of somewhere to hide for a while.
Why I decided to call up to OD’s house is a mystery to me. I knew he wouldn’t be there, and even if he was I had no intention of talking to him, especially about my book-burning efforts. And Jimmy, though I’d always got on fine with him, wasn’t exactly the first one you’d think of bringing your troubles to.
OD had never come out straight with it but I knew he was using the old ‘like father, like son’ excuse for his own failures. Jimmy was a soft target and I didn’t like that. Maybe that was the reason we got on.
Avoiding the Square, where May worked part-time in a health-food shop, I made my way to De Valera Park. OD’s house was in the middle of a terrace of eight. It stood out because the neighbouring houses were newly painted and had neat front gardens. Of the three glass panes in OD’s front door, the top one was cracked, the second one replaced with plywood and only the bottom one was intact. There was no bell any more. The two wires that used to connect it were twisted upwards like a snake’s tongue. On the little unpainted strip where the door knocker used to be, OD had written in a small, tidy hand a Neil Young song title – ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’.
I tapped on the good pane of glass and heard Jimmy shuffling into the hallway. He was having trouble with the door and I waited, wishing I hadn’t come, to be sucked into that desolate dump of a house.
If he was surprised to see me, it didn’t show. The surprise was all mine. In one hand he held a filthy piece of cloth that used to be a tea towel, in the other was an even filthier nailbrush. Behind him, the post at the end of the stairway was empty of its usual pile of coats. The floor of the hallway had been swept clean of all the dried clay from OD’s football boots and all the other dirt that a sweeping brush could shift. There was no clutter of football bags or boots or sweaty gear.
And then I looked at Jimmy’s mouth. He had teeth. I’d never seen him with teeth before.
‘Well, Nance,’ he said, turning red as the words came out in a lispy whistle. ‘He’s not here, girl.’
I asked him if I could come in, trying to sound casual, trying not to stare at his mouth. It wasn’t easy, not when he dabbed the corner of his mouth with that dirty tea towel.
‘Sure,’ he said and, as if he owed me an explanation, added, ‘I was just tidying up a bit.’
When we got to the kitchen I saw what he was at with the nailbrush. The old scarred formica-topped table had been cleared, probably for the first time since his wife left. So far he’d got through about half of it, scrubbing off the sticky bits of gunge. On the dirty half was a pan of brown, sudsy water and beside it – a bar of soap!
I had no right to ask. He was the one who should have been asking questions about my being there, but that wasn’t Jimmy’s style. I asked anyway.
‘What’s all this about?’
He hesitated for a moment or two. I could see by the way he was grinding his false teeth that he was in pain and trying hard to overcome it. He cleared off a chair for me and I sat down.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ he said with a twisted smile. ‘It’s a long story.’
I let myself be carried along on the rising wave of optimism in his words. I was happy for Jimmy. For the first time in years, maybe for the first time ever, he had a plan. The false teeth were only the beginning.
‘You can’t blow a trumpet without them,’ he explained. ‘I have to get used to them again. No matter what it takes.’
Then the house. He was going to make it a decent place for them to live in and for people to visit.
‘There’s no need for all this mess,’ he said.
As soon as the house was in order he was going to organise a trumpet for himself. By now, I was so caught up in the whole thing that I was actually forgetting my own troubles, and I decided there and then I was going to help him. I looked around to see if there was any proper cleaning liquid and scrubs under the sink or anywhere else. There was nothing but empty polish tins, rags and an opened packet of washing powder hardened to a slab.
‘Have you any money?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I’m flush, but I need it for something else.’
‘This is a waste of time, Jimmy,’ I said, pointing at the nailbrush and the soap. He thought about it.
‘How much would all that washing-up gear set me back?’
‘You won’t have much change from a fiver.’
He went upstairs and was back down, smiling again, sooner than I expected. I noticed how he moved differently, more decisively, and that while he’d been upstairs he’d brushed his long stringy hair back from his forehead and over his ears. That was another first. I’d never seen him with his hair brushed. He had a fiver in his hand. ‘Are you sure you have time to do this with me?’
I knew he was asking what on earth I was doing there on a school day. I was writing out a list for him and I d
idn’t look up. I made a start on the place when he’d gone out to the shop and soon found myself taking out all my pent-up feelings on the dirt.
When Jimmy got back we really got down to it. At twelve we broke for tea. Jimmy said the tea had never tasted so good. I nodded in agreement, but it tasted soapy to me.
‘Jimmy?’ I asked. ‘Do you wash the cups with soap too?’
‘Yeah, I have the cleanest stomach in Ireland!’
We laughed, but when I think of those words now it makes me feel ill.
By quarter to one we’d transformed the kitchen, the small sitting room and the hall. We’d filled five big black plastic bags with rubbish and the fake lavender smell of air-freshener was, at last, beginning to win the battle with the odour of decay.
I was flattened and Jimmy was hardly able to stand, his knees were so sore from his efforts on the floors. But it only took one look at him, gazing around the place in wonder and disbelief, to feel it had been worthwhile.
‘Only for you, Nance,’ he said, ‘I’d still be scrubbing the table.’
In spite of my tiredness, I wanted a few more hours of unthinking labour. I was ready to attack the upstairs bedrooms.
‘No way,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve done enough. I’ll do the rest myself. I just needed someone to show me how to go about it.’
‘But I’m not doing anything else today,’ I pleaded.
Jimmy looked directly at me and I thought he was going to break the spell of this unexpectedly good morning.
‘Why don’t you go down and meet OD?’ he said. ‘He’ll be at Super Snax.’
Suddenly, I was close to telling him everything, but then he added, with a fierce but friendly urgency, ‘Nance, whatever’s bothering you, sort it out quick. Don’t let it wait. For God’s sake, don’t let it wait. This is what happens when you let it wait.’
He was talking about how the house was before we cleaned it up; he was talking about himself.
I went down to Super Snax to find OD and give him one last chance.
White Lies Page 2
