The truth is, I was more concerned about Beano. I hadn’t seen him since that night in the Galtee Lounge, and as the days passed into weeks I was getting worried out of my skull. The thing was, he never stayed out of work. He could be asleep on his feet and he’d still clock in.
Beano showed up, at last, on the Tuesday of our last week there. Everything was more or less finished. Snipe had brought in one of Mick Moran’s JCBs, just to be sure. I think he just wanted to get a few spins in it and show us how expert he was with the bucket. I wouldn’t have minded having a go myself but he wouldn’t hear of it.
The first thing I noticed about Beano was the limp. The second thing was that he was wearing a pair of boots two sizes too big for him. Snipe’s, no doubt. As soon as he came near me I saw how miserable he looked. So miserable, in fact, that I could almost have believed the story about the flu – if it hadn’t been for the limp.
His eyes, always red, were pools of blood. His white hair was flattened to his forehead with sweat. The circles under his eyes were like dark stains. I felt my bad knee wanting to give out under me.
‘What’s the story, morning glory,’ I said casually.
He gave me a Jack Nicholson grin, halfway between The Joker in Batman and Mac in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – after Mac had had the shock treatment in the asylum.
‘No story, OD,’ he said. ‘Only the flu.’
‘You got the flu in your ankle, did you?’
‘I fell out of the bed.’ He sounded like he was repeating something he’d learned by heart but didn’t really understand.
I brought him up behind the fountain and sat him down out of sight of Snipe’s cabin. When Johnny Regan made a move in our direction, I warned him off with a glare. He winked at Beano like they had some big secret going between them.
‘Beano? Did Regan give you some dope?’ He avoided my eyes. At least, I imagined he did. I couldn’t really tell. His eyes were all over the place. His lips twisted into a near-smile.
‘Lots of dope in our house, OD … more tablets than a chemist shop.’
I was terrified.
‘Did you take something?’ I asked. ‘Did you, Beano?’ ‘Naw … not a thing,’ he said, sticking out his chest, all macho. ‘“Tough it out, Beano.”’
‘Snipe said that, did he?’
Beano nodded. I told him if I saw him working that morning I’d carry him home over my shoulder, and went towards Snipe’s cabin. On the way, I collared Johnny. He backed off, but not before I warned him. ‘If I see you within an ass’s roar of Beano, I’ll break both your legs, Johnny. And that’s a promise.’
In the cabin, Snipe didn’t even bother to hide the racing page of The Sun.
‘Beano shouldn’t be at work,’ I told him. ‘He’s wrecked.’
To my surprise he didn’t leap over the desk at me.
‘We’re all wrecked,’ he said.
Then I heard the gate open outside. Those two surveyors were there with their equipment again.
‘What the hell are they up to?’ he asked himself, not me. ‘We’re on schedule, but no one seems to be interested any more. And they won’t tell me what these fellows are up to.’
Something stirred in the back of my dead brain. It didn’t make any particular sense to me but I said it anyway.
‘A couple of weeks back, Mick Moran came up here when we were locking up. He wanted to get in here to the cabin and …’
I was going to say Beano let him in.
‘… and I let him in.’
He looked at me like he was doing mental arithmetic – slowly. After a while, I could see he wasn’t getting the right answer – or, at least, not an answer he liked. He fixed his rugby tie and stood up.
‘Beat it, Ryan.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to see the Town Clerk,’ he said. ‘And if he won’t see me, I’ll kick his shaggin’ door down.’
Snipe used to be a scrum-half. That’s where he got his nickname. Sniping from behind the scrum. Which is exactly what he looked like he was doing as he rushed across the front of the park and out the gate.
I looked around the park and, for the first time, felt a real sense of pride in what we’d achieved there. A kind of glowing, uncomplicated feeling came over me. As I got down to work, I drifted away from reality like a child with a new toy. The toy – the illusion that these past few months had somehow been worthwhile – was all the reality I needed. But toys break. The more you play with them, the sooner they break. I think that’s why kids play with the boxes and leave the toys for looking at. Kids have more sense than we have.
During the afternoon, the knee started bothering me. I knew I wasn’t going to be able for training, but how was I going to get out of it? The pressure was on our team at this stage. We were slipping and my form was rotten – as was Seanie’s. We were out of the cup and the previous week we’d scraped a draw with the bottom team, Hibs. Luckily for us, St. Peter’s were having a bad run too and we were one point ahead with two games to play. The other teams were managing to take enough points from each other to leave the title race between St. Peter’s and us. I had no choice: I had to go training.
I was hoping Seanie wouldn’t be there but he was. He nodded at me as I came into the dressing room. I turned away. Mahoney was there too, pulling on his old Bohs jersey. It still fitted him. I was looking at the big number ten when the sickening inspiration came to me.
‘I can’t train tonight,’ I told Mahoney.
‘Are you injured or what?’
‘No, Jimmy is sick … I’ve to get the doctor … I was going to wait until after training but I … I don’t think I should.’
By now, I was telling myself to shut up, that it was bad enough to use Jimmy without making a song and dance of it. But the trick, the lousy trick, worked wonders. Mahoney hadn’t been so nice to me since I was one of his school ‘hopefuls’.
‘I’ll give you a lift, OD,’ he said. ‘Which doctor is it?’
‘It’s all right. He’s only up the road. Dr. Corbett.’
‘Are you sure? I can throw off the boots, no problem.’
‘Thanks all the same,’ I said and got myself out of the sock-smelly atmosphere as fast as I could.
Needless to say, I didn’t go near Dr. Corbett’s. I didn’t go home either. I went to the Galtee Lounge. Mahoney sent a message through one of the lads not to bother about training on Thursday and not to worry about my place on the team. I did anyway.
The following Saturday, he did actually pick me. I played well and we won. I didn’t score myself, but Seanie and me worked up a chance for one of the other lads to score. For a while, we thought Seanie wasn’t going to show up for that match. When he hurried into the dressing-room with five minutes to go, Mahoney gave him the kind of hassle he usually reserved for me. Something to do with Nance, I guessed, but I didn’t let myself think about it.
Meanwhile, I was beginning to suspect that Jimmy was on the verge of giving up. There was a terrible stillness about him, broken only by the occasional opening and closing of his hands as he sat in his battered old armchair.
‘Why do you keep doing that?’ I asked eventually.
‘Pins and needles,’ he said. ‘I have them in my feet too.’
‘Can’t you go out for a walk or something?’
‘I went for a walk … the other day.’
I thought he was trying to be smart until he stirred himself in his chair and leaned forward shakily. Then I knew he was leading up to something.
‘Yeah, I went for a walk … I called down to the Sound Centre.’
‘For what?’
‘I told Murray I had … well, a good few quid put together and would he give me the trumpet and I’d hand over the rest in a few weeks.’
I pictured him pleading with Murray and my stomach turned.
‘“No way,” he says. The little bastard.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that.’
The little-boy eyes, among th
e wrinkles and the broken veins, had tears in them.
‘I just wanted to get started,’ he said.
I thought I knew better. ‘You just wanted to get finished. You want out of that dumb dream, and now you can blame Murray.’
Because he didn’t answer, I thought I was right.
After that, I took every chance to dig the knife in deeper. All he had to do was move a finger and I was on him. Not a day went by but I reminded him of his failures over the years. I even talked about what he’d done to Mam. Before that, I hadn’t been able to mention her name to him. I did it now because every night, when I’d stopped mulling over all my other troubles, the same question kept coming back to me. ‘Why couldn’t she just write?’ I didn’t even want her back any more. I only wanted to know she was all right.
Nothing I could say provoked him, and that left me even more convinced that it was all over for him – yet again.
A week or so later, I sat in the kitchen alone. It was eleven o’clock on a Friday night. Tomorrow there’d be another game, another struggle to hide my injury from Mahoney. I’d fed the lads at the site some more lies about Jimmy’s ‘illness’ and hinted I mightn’t make it for the game – all just to create some dumb impression when I did show up. I’d given the Galtee Lounge a miss because I needed to be as right as I could be for the game. I’d been down at the snooker hall with Beano earlier. He still hadn’t come out of himself and I hadn’t heard a Jack Nicholson line for so long I thought he must have switched heroes – or, maybe, given up on heroes for good.
I hadn’t bothered to turn on the telly and I’d finished the Dylan Thomas book. My own hero, the poet, was dead, and I couldn’t square the beauty and brilliance of what he wrote with the sordid end he came to in a New York hotel – not far from where another of my heroes, John Lennon, was shot.
I was sitting in Jimmy’s chair and staring at the bottle on the mantelpiece. It was one of those outsize gin bottles and it had always stood in that spot since Jimmy won it in a pub raffle – and emptied every last drop of the gin, of course.
I hadn’t pulled the curtains or switched on the light; I sat, numb, in the gathering darkness. The street lamp outside threw its light on the big gin bottle, giving it a strange glow in the dead room. The long neck and the rounded shape below made it look like a tall, imposing figure. A man presiding, priest-like, at some ceremony or ritual. A druid, I thought.
On the mantelpiece, beside the bottle, I noticed a couple of empty matchboxes left there since Jimmy stopped tidying the place. Standing stones, some fallen, some still standing. A rush of nervous expectation went through me.
‘The Glass Druid,’ I said aloud, and almost looked around to make sure no one was there to hear me. I wasn’t exactly sure, but I thought the ‘Glass Druid’ was alcohol. Drinking was like joining hands with him.
‘Joining hands with the Glass Druid,’ I said to myself.
All around us, the standing stones appeared, statues that were half-living and half-dead. And then I saw their faces. Nance, Jimmy, Mam, Beano, even Seanie, even Mahoney – and me. The vision was as vivid and as unreal as any dream, but I was wide awake. I was more than wide awake. My mind was opening out as if, for once, I understood everything. None of these stone people could reach me and I couldn’t reach them. We were all alone no matter how close we got to someone else. But I was the only fool among them who thought the Glass Druid could help me.
Joining hands with the Glass Druid,
Calling to the standing stones,
The men and women who can’t speak to me;
Voices like mine, without sounds, without tones.
In the yellow sodium light from the street, I scrambled around the kitchen and found an envelope and a stub-nosed pencil. I wrote down the four lines. There wasn’t time to switch on the light, but I could just about make out the words on the brown paper. I read it through, ten, twenty times. I sat back. My first poem. I felt like I was glowing as brightly as the gin bottle.
I read the poem out loud once and then again. Suddenly, I realised why I was doing it. I wanted these words to be heard. I wanted to explain the mad logic of the thoughts behind them. And then, I knew it wasn’t just anybody I wanted to hear my poem. Only Nance.
I threw the envelope in among yesterday’s cold ashes in the fireplace and then I lost it completely. I cried like a blubbery baby. The hard man, poet, footballer, street-wit broke down some time around midnight, in a silent house somewhere in a universe whose desolate meaning had hit him right between the eyes like a backfiring rifle.
NANCE
As we crossed the wide, four-laned bridge into Waterford I wished that it was the only way into the city and that it had crashed into the river before we got there. Seanie’s Morris Minor moved slowly as the lights delayed the Sat urday morning traffic. A little slower and I might have jumped out and started back along the bridge.
Just like on our expedition to Limerick, Seanie had to be back for a match in the afternoon. He seemed as uptight as me and we didn’t talk a lot. If Seanie thought I needed quiet, he was wrong. It was the kind of situation when small talk, the weather, the Beautiful South tape he’d brought, even football might have delivered me from the confusion of questions that bothered me.
What was I going to say to Heather? Would she refuse to acknowledge me? Or would meeting her somehow leave me worse off than ever?
The Beautiful South were singing ‘Everybody’s Talking’ and that’s how it felt inside my head.
‘I like the tape,’ I said, drowning out the inner voices and wishing he’d brought something a little louder and looser – Blur, maybe, or The Prodigy.
His mind wasn’t on music.
‘Nance? About you and OD … about us … there’s something I want to clear up …’
‘We’ll talk about it later, OK? When this is over,’ I said – pleaded, really.
‘I just thought it might be better if I …’
‘Are you sure you know where the library is?’ I said, looking blindly ahead.
‘Yeah, I checked when I rang. We’ll talk on the way back, all right?’
I wished the library would come into view and I wished, at the same time, that it wouldn’t. Seanie, distracted by my evasions, turned down a one-way street and we both jumped a few inches from our seats as a bus sped towards us, blasting its horn and flashing its lights. If we were on edge before, we were doubly so after that. I managed to stop myself from bawling him off but I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold back for long. Seanie felt the same way, I suppose.
We pulled in at the library and Seanie let the clutch off before he’d got the car out of gear. It jerked forward within an inch of the red Mini in front. For some reason, I began to laugh. Seanie’s doom-laden features relaxed to a smile and finally to laughter as loud and panic-stricken as mine.
‘Do you want me to go in with you?’ he asked when we calmed down.
‘Yeah.’
When we reached the door leading to the main lending area, I said, ‘You go in first.’ I was using him as a shield to the end. I couldn’t help it.
He stepped inside and held the door for me. There were no more than a half-dozen people there, browsing among the shelves. Behind the desk at the far end, two women chatted. One was pale and dark-haired. The other one was Heather Kelly. From this distance, she’d changed very little since that photo had been taken all those years ago. Her hair was cut up shorter but that was the only difference. Even the smile was the same one that had burned itself on to my retina.
‘Don’t go outside, Seanie,’ I whispered as I passed beyond the threshold into the lending area, beyond the threshold from innocence to whatever lay on the other side. ‘Wait here, won’t you?’
‘Course I will. You’ll be fine.’
Then the long walk began. I struggled to focus on the woman who’d only just noticed me. In spite of my light-headedness, I saw more clearly with each advancing step the changes the years had made in her face. The strangest thought occu
rred to me – that it was my approach that was ageing her.
If she was in shock, she was hiding it well. She seemed quite calm. I got to the desk. Now that the big moment had come, my mouth went dry. I couldn’t even swallow.
Heather stood up and motioned me to follow her. I looked back at the door where Seanie was still waiting. I shrugged my shoulders, not knowing what to do. He gestured at me to go along with Heather, who by now had reached a door marked ‘Staff Only’ and was already halfway through.
When I got inside, she was spooning coffee into some mugs. One had a big red heart and announced boldly ‘I Luv U’; the other innocently declared ‘Forever Friends’.
‘Take a seat, Nance,’ she said. My heart skipped a beat.
‘Thanks,’ I said – or meant to; I’m not sure if the word came out.
This wasn’t going according to plan. If a stranger had walked in on us, they would never have guessed that this was the reunion of a mother and child after seventeen long years. I tried to bring some urgency into the situation.
‘How did you know who I was?’
‘Well, I can’t say you haven’t changed, can I?’ she smiled. ‘Maybe it’s just instinct.’ It was all too light-hearted and easy. She filled the mugs from the kettle and sat down next to me.
‘How are Tom and May?’ she asked pleasantly.
‘Grand. They’re grand,’ I said, more lost and confused with her every word.
‘You lose touch, you know. And life goes on, doesn’t it?’
I couldn’t keep dodging around the issue any longer.
‘Are you my mother?’
At last, I’d succeeded in shaking her. Now I was waiting for the big meltdown that was supposed to have happened five minutes before. Instead, I got a nuclear explosion, mushroom cloud, the whole works, that might have lifted me off my seat if my body hadn’t suddenly weighed a hundred tons.
‘Good God, Nance!’ she exclaimed. ‘What gave you that idea?’
‘Look,’ I said desperately, ‘I know you’re my mother. I know you’re lying to me. Please tell me the truth and I won’t bother you again. I just want to hear you say it, that you’re my mother.’
White Lies Page 9
