White Lies

by Mark O'Sullivan

  I was holding the sleeve of her neat white blouse, not just holding it but grabbing a fistful of it.

  ‘Nance,’ she said softly, ‘I’m not your mother. I might have been. In fact, you could say I nearly was. But it wasn’t to be.’

  The answer was too complicated and too sinceresounding to be untrue. Or else she was a very good actress.

  ‘I was engaged to Tom,’ she said. ‘Christmas Eve 1978, to be precise. Three months later he and May married.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘What have they told you?’ she asked.

  I gave her the old story about the crash and their adopting me. As I did, she nodded as if to confirm every detail. Then I told her about the photo, about her holding me in it and about the man standing behind her.

  ‘Chris,’ she said.

  ‘My father?’

  I hadn’t expected him to have an English-sounding name. She hesitated and finally nodded.

  ‘Chris Mburu. His people were Samburu, from up north originally, but they’d been in Nairobi for years,’ she ex plained slowly, as if not yet sure whether she should be telling me all this. ‘He was a nice guy. Very bright, laid-back. A teacher too, but not in our school.’

  Heather began to chew her fingernails. Her face, which had been so open, suddenly seemed to cloud over.

  ‘Look, I shouldn’t even have told you about Chris,’ she said. ‘It’s not my place to. You really have to talk to them.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Nance, I have every reason to dislike Tom and May after … you know … but I don’t. I can see they should have told you about all this but it’s not easy for them.’

  ‘And what about me? Do you think it’s easy for me?’ I cried. ‘Please, tell me who my mother is … or was … or whatever. There was another woman in that photo. Is that … was that her?’

  Heather bit her nails anxiously and her eyes avoided mine.

  ‘She was an American. They were just passing through, she and her boyfriend. We didn’t really know them, Nance, we didn’t want to. They were a bad lot.’

  I could see that she was more than uncomfortable talking about the American couple; she was actually afraid, really afraid.

  ‘Talk to Tom and May, Nance. Let them finish the story. That’s how it should be,’ she said. ‘I hate to sound like the old voice of experience but if you don’t you’ll live to regret it. I know this because I’ve drifted away from my own family. It wasn’t all my fault but I might have stopped the drift if I’d only swallowed my pride.’

  I told her that I’d talked to her sister, and about the sense of disapproval I’d heard in Celia’s voice, and how I felt that it had something to do with me.

  ‘Nance, my sister is one of those wickedly pious types and my mistake, as she would see it, was to marry unwisely – in her terms, that is.’

  She sat perfectly still and spoke without emotion.

  ‘After Kenya, I went to Saudi Arabia, but it’s no place for a woman to live, believe me. The veils are bad enough but they won’t even let you drive a car, can you believe it! I stuck it out for two years and went down to Tanzania. That’s where I met John Duffy. Father John Duffy.’

  I was tumbling to her real ‘mistake’.

  ‘We fell in love. He left the priesthood and we moved to Zimbabwe. We came back to Ireland in ’84 and my family have never spoken to me since. Don’t let that happen to you, Nance.’

  ‘So you’re not going to tell me about these Americans?’ She dragged herself away from her own painful memo ries and took my hand.

  ‘I can’t. All I can say is that there was a crash, Nance. I’m sorry … They’ll tell you the rest. Only ask. Do ask.’

  My chair scraped along the timber floor and I got to my feet somehow or other. ‘I finish at one,’ she said. ‘We could have lunch.’

  ‘We have to be back home early,’ I told her. I couldn’t stay angry with her for only telling me some of the truth. ‘Seanie has a game. He drove me down here.’

  ‘Your boyfriend?’

  ‘My friend,’ I said.

  She came to the staff door with me. When I opened it she saw Seanie at the other end of the room.

  ‘Nice-looking fellow,’ she declared.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Will you call again?’ she asked. ‘Tell me how it worked out?’

  I nodded, but I didn’t think I would.

  Two miles outside of Waterford, I turned the car radio off and told Seanie that I really appreciated what he’d done for me but that that was as far it went. There was no row, hardly even a breath of tension. After a while, he said, ‘You haven’t told me what happened in there.’

  He listened intently to every detail. When I’d finished he considered it all for a minute or two.

  ‘She’s dead right, you know,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to have it out with them. There’s no other way.’

  I couldn’t believe he was letting my treachery, my blatant using and discarding of him, pass. I wondered if I was capable of loving anyone any more.

  ‘I should have told you the truth about us earlier, Seanie. And not led you on. You deserve better.’

  ‘I deserve nothing,’ he half-whispered. ‘I’m not so good at telling the truth myself.’

  He didn’t take his eyes from the road.

  ‘I never … I never talked to Dad,’ he confessed. ‘All that crap about telling him what I really wanted to do was just … fantasy.’

  We kept quiet after that. The journey seemed to take an eternity. I felt desperately sorry for Seanie, but what could I do? We’d soon be going our separate ways and that was it. I tried to think of one last crumb of kindness, one last bit of encouragement I could offer him, but nothing came.

  At Cashel, he looked at his watch and cursed softly. He pressed the accelerator to the full and left his foot there.

  ‘Sorry, Nance,’ he said as we hit a pothole, ‘I can’t be late. We’re going to be a few short today as it is.’

  ‘Who’s out?’ I asked, not because I wanted to know but just to pass these last few minutes with him in something other than deathly silence.

  ‘Vincent Morrissey is injured,’ he explained, ‘and …’

  OD, I guessed from his hesitation. As if he knew I’d want to know why, he added, ‘His father isn’t well.’

  I was frightened for Jimmy but I couldn’t see that I could do anything for him.

  ‘Do you ever talk to OD these days?’ Seanie asked.

  ‘Seanie, that isn’t why I don’t want to …’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s just that he won’t listen to me and there’s something he should know … about the park … See, my father has plans to –’

  ‘I won’t be talking to him. So there’s no point in telling me this,’ I said impatiently.

  I had my own problems; I thought OD could deal with his. That’s how he had always wanted it to be, no matter how hard I tried to convince him otherwise. I pushed in the cassette on the tape deck. The Beautiful South, ‘I’ll Sail This Ship Alone’.

  OD

  Saturday morning. Grand opening of the new town park. ‘Grand’ wasn’t the word. It has one letter too many and the other four are the wrong ones. There was a daft-looking ribbon on the gate – not the new wooden gate, which never arrived, but the same old creaky metal thing that had been there on our first morning at the site. A platform and some chairs stood near the cabin. There was even a microphone and a dicky little speaker. Unfortunately, no-one showed up except Snipe and his crew. Not the Town Clerk, or the local TD, or even a photographer. Snipe was devastated. After an hour or so of hanging around, we were getting uneasy. Snipe looked like a statue made of wax – and the wax was melting. Even I was worried about the purple colour in his cheeks. We started drifting towards the gate eventually. There was nothing to wait for. We’d been paid off the evening before. Snipe was in the cabin, on the phone. It was a long conversation and it wasn’t going well for him.

  Johnny Reg
an was the first to reach the gate but Snipe looked up just before he scooted away.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere!’ he yelled, not even bothering to put his hand over the phone.

  Johnny gave him a two-fingered salute and left. All of the others followed except Beano and me. I only stayed for Beano’s sake, not wanting to leave him on his own. We sat down on the chairs at the little platform that was basically a few timber palettes thrown together. I thought about telling Beano about my poem, but he was so lost in himself I knew I wouldn’t get through to him. Every so often, a convulsive shiver would shake him and he’d clench his jaw in pain.

  ‘You want to get someone to look at that ankle, Beano,’ I said.

  ‘Naw, it’s fine.’

  I might as well have been talking to myself – it was like talking to those standing stones in the poem I’d thrown away. I looked around, trying to think of some way to cheer him up, and the microphone on its rickety stand gave me an idea. I got up and stood behind it. I found a switch on the side and gave it a try.

  ‘Testing one, two, three,’ I said. The screech of it nearly blew my ears off.

  In his cabin, Snipe was gesticulating madly at me to leave it alone.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I continued regardless, ‘now comes the moment you’ve all been waiting for here at the Academy Awards. Hold on a minute now and let me open the envelope for the nominees in the Best Actor category.’

  While I pulled out the stub of an old cinema ticket from my cord jacket I sneaked a glance at Beano. He was getting interested.

  ‘Here we go,’ I announced. ‘First, there’s Johnny Regan – for impersonating a human being.’

  Beano grinned and clapped softly and I was away.

  ‘Mr. Mick Moran for his starring role in The Turd. Seanie Moran for Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.’

  Beano was getting enthusiastic. I was getting bitter. I had to cool it down.

  ‘And last, but not least, Jack Nicholson in Farce at the Park,’ I declared, ‘And the winner is … is … Jack Nicholson! Come on up here, Jack!’

  Beano looked towards the cabin and thought about it. He got up slowly and came towards me. He wasn’t smiling any more. He leaned in to the microphone and staring across at his father – who was still stuck on the phone and past caring about our antics – he said, ‘I have no one to thank.’

  Then he walked away. He was out the gate before I got over the shock. I went to follow him, but as I passed the cabin I heard a noise like a chair or something being knocked over. First thing that came to my head was that Snipe had had a heart attack. I moved to the door and pushed it in.

  The place was wrecked inside. The desk had been upended; plans, old copies of The Sun, paper clips, biros were strewn around all over the ground. Snipe himself stood at the back wall, tearing posters down and crumpling up every bit of paper he could lay his hands on.

  ‘What’s all this in aid of?’

  He spun around, holding a fistful of paper like it was a grenade with the pin pulled out.

  ‘Get out,’ he yelled.

  ‘You’re wrecking the place because they wouldn’t take your photo?’

  ‘They made fools of us, OD,’ he said in utter desolation. ‘They treated us like dirt.’

  ‘They? Who do you mean?’

  He sat down on the upended desk. His rugby tie was all over the place but he didn’t seem to care.

  ‘This must be some kind of record,’ he said. ‘A town park that opens and closes on the same day.’

  ‘You mean … they’re not going to use the park … after all our …’

  ‘They sold it. While we were slogging away here, they sold it to Mick Moran for a private housing estate. Some bastards, what, OD?’

  ‘The surveyors …’

  He nodded. The penny was beginning to drop with me. He picked himself up and went past me. The way he straggled out to the gate, he must have felt like he did in his last game of rugby.

  ‘Will I lock it up?’ I called after him.

  ‘I don’t care if you blow it up,’ he shouted. He kicked the gate for good measure as he left the site.

  I searched among the debris for the keys. I was on automatic, not letting myself think about the futility of it all. Under a pile of wasted betting slips I found not one, but two bunches of keys.

  The first bunch was familiar, since I’d so often locked up the cabin and gate. The second had one of those key-rings with a family crest on it. The family name was Moran. I looked out at the JCB over near the gate. I put the keys in my pocket and thought, You’ll never see these again, Moran. Then I went home to get my gear together for the afternoon match. The second last of the season.

  Jimmy was in bed when I got to the house. He never got up in the mornings now so that was no surprise. I’d left my boots in a plastic bag with the mud still stuck to them. I scraped off the sludge into the bag and threw it on the fire grate. Only then did I notice that the ashes had been cleared out – and my poem, on its brown envelope, with them. I didn’t care. It was only crap anyway.

  I realised that Jimmy must have been up earlier after all. I was going to bring a cup of tea up to him but then I got thick over him throwing out the poem. Which was brilliant logic – I thought it was rubbish but I resented him treating it as rubbish.

  The Farce in the Park was followed that afternoon by The Farce in the Dressing-Room. Mahoney never showed up. Which was like the universe being turned on its head. Mahoney didn’t do things like that. He bawled us out for doing things like that, for God’s sake.

  I nearly didn’t make it myself. I don’t know if it was relief or defeat at being finished with the non-existent park, but when I sat down in front of the fireplace, I dropped off to sleep. I woke at ten to three. The match was starting at three. I got to the dressing room at five to and found Seanie handing out the jerseys. He’d got to number seven. The place went silent when I came in. Seanie looked at me like he’d seen a ghost.

  ‘There’s no sign of Tom,’ he said. ‘We had to pick the team ourselves.’

  ‘And I’m too late?’

  I looked around at the others but they pretended to be busy getting togged out. I turned to Seanie again.

  ‘So, I’m not in?’ I demanded to know.

  ‘I didn’t say that, OD.’

  Brian O’Toole, our centre-half, peered out from behind his scraggy red hair.

  ‘What do you expect? You weren’t here, right?’ I wasn’t getting any support and I made for the door. Then I heard Seanie’s voice, low but deliberate.

  ‘If OD is out,’ he said, ‘I’m out.’

  There was a general murmur of annoyance. Naturally, I thought they all had it in for me – until I realised they were looking at the fellow who’d been given my place, Sammy Dunne. Sammy was all right. I felt bad about depriving him of his chance to start a game for a change, and I took it out on Seanie.

  ‘I don’t need your sympathy, Seanie,’ I snapped. ‘Sammy should play. OK, Sammy?’

  Sammy shrugged. For him, football wasn’t the major deal it was for me.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘the number nine is yours. Put it on.’

  Seanie threw the jersey at me. I’d never seen him look angry before that day. I had more than enough anger to fling back at him.

  ‘Did you know about the park? About the houses your old man is putting up there?’

  ‘I tried to tell you but you wouldn’t listen.’

  I’d always had this sneaking suspicion that Seanie was afraid of me. Now I felt I’d been wrong.

  ‘You and your old man are chips off the same dirty block,’ I said. ‘Gangsters and thieves.’

  ‘I never did anything to you, OD.’

  ‘No? Does the name Nance ring a bell with you?’

  I was really making an ass of myself and in front of a spellbound audience.

  ‘I’m not going out with Nance and I never was,’ he said. ‘We’re friends, if that means anything to you.’

  He wasn’t lying,
I could tell. In fact, he looked like the one who’d had something stolen from him. Was it possible that Nance had handed Seanie off because she wanted to give me a second chance? Even if it was, the way back wouldn’t be easy. I’d have to change, and what did that mean? Going back to school? Giving up the drink? What else? Stop thinking about myself and all my own troubles?

  It was the first time I’d considered the idea of starting all over again. Maybe if the circumstances had been different I might have made a decision there and then. That would have saved me, and a lot of other people, a lot of hassle.

  I started the game badly and all through the first half I didn’t get any better. If Mahoney had been there I’d have been a goner. Seanie was having a bummer too. Just before half-time I missed a sitter. I got away from the sweeper and had only the keeper to beat. The bad knee had nothing to do with the way I fluffed it. The keeper couldn’t believe his luck when the ball rolled tamely into his arms.

  At half-time, we sat around in a circle complaining as usual about the referee and the bumpy pitch. When I heard Beano’s manic voice from somewhere in the distance, I was glad of the diversion and glad he’d shaken off that awful quietness that was so hard for me to deal with.

  ‘Move your goddamn butts!’ he yelped. I knew he was on some kind of high because this was Jack Nicholson belting out the orders in A Few Good Men.

  He came over and squatted beside me. His red eyes were gaping like he’d taken one of his mother’s uppers – or one of Johnny Regan’s. You could hear his whisper at the other end of the pitch. Seanie certainly heard it, because his head snapped away when I looked over at him.

  ‘Can you believe it, OD? That stuff about the houses in the park. My father just told me.’

  ‘Forget it, Beano,’ I said, loud enough for Seanie to pick up. ‘They’re real scum.’

  ‘No way will I forget it, OD,’ he said. ‘We can do something about it. I just had this incredible idea.’

  I got to my feet and pulled him away from the others, who were all listening in now.

  ‘Did you take something, Beano?’ I asked angrily.