White Lies

by Mark O'Sullivan

  Then the strangest thing happened. I said to myself, The phone is going to ring – and it did. I had no idea who it might be, but it didn’t matter; I had to get to it first and speak to someone, anyone. Not about my shocking discovery but about anything, something ordinary that could make me believe that life could be normal again in some way.

  Only when I reached the phone did it occur to me how late it must be. Tom hadn’t appeared and I guessed he’d gone out to escape this place. I wondered if this was Heather Kelly ringing to find out if things had worked out. I let the phone ring a bit longer, hoping it would just stop – the feeling of wanting to talk had gone. The longer it went on, the more urgent the ringing seemed to get. I picked up the phone.

  ‘Nance, it’s me. Seanie.’

  His voice was quiet, even but insistent. The last thing I needed was complications and I was just about to say so.

  ‘Nance, I got a call from OD. He’s at the railway station. He thinks he might have killed Snipe.’

  The first foolish thought I had was that OD hadn’t rung me. Then the word ‘killed’ hit me. I wanted to scream ‘No!’

  ‘Will you come to the station with me?’ he asked.

  OD had always been so near the edge, I shouldn’t have been so shocked. Had I pushed him over the edge with that slap in the face? Please, I thought, don’t let it be my fault. Please, don’t let it be true that Snipe is dead.

  ‘Look, Nance, I have to go. Every second counts. Are you coming or not?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. I’ll come.’

  The line went dead. I put the phone down. I grabbed a coat and scarf. I went out the back door so May wouldn’t hear the front door close. If it even mattered to her any more. I’d almost turned the corner into the drive when I saw Tom lying on one of the white plastic garden chairs out in the middle of the back lawn. I moved across the wet grass towards him.

  In spite of the cold, he’d fallen asleep. I supposed that he hadn’t slept for such a long time that the weight of tired ness had brought him down. I slipped off my coat and placed it lightly over him. When I turned to take a last look at him, I saw that it was May’s coat I’d put on without knowing. Her scarf too. I left the scarf on. I needed it.

  Back in the house, I got myself another jacket, one of my own cord ones. When I reached the front gate, Seanie was pulling up in the Morris Minor. All I could think of to say was, ‘Why did he ring you, Seanie?’

  ‘I don’t know, Nance,’ he said. ‘I can’t figure it out. But he sounded bad, really bad. I just hope he’s still … he’s still there when we …’

  I knew what he was saying and I thought angrily, it would be just like OD to act the dumb martyr and wait for the train on the tracks and not think what that might do to the rest of us.

  It didn’t take long for us to reach the railway station. I can’t say I was afraid, at least not for myself. I was too numb.

  OD sat stiffly upright on a bench at the station platform, like a blind man who’s got day and night confused and waits for a train that will never come. I was sure he hadn’t seen us through his trance, but when we got to within a few feet of him, I knew that his eyes had followed us all the way down the platform. He lowered them then.

  Of the three of us only Seanie could think clearly enough to speak.

  ‘Where’s Snipe?’ he asked OD.

  ‘In the alley opposite our house.’

  ‘Come on then, we’d better hurry,’ Seanie said. OD still hadn’t looked up from the brick-paved platform.

  ‘You go,’ OD said. ‘I’m waiting for the train.’ Seeing that old melodramatic self-pity in him again, I exploded.

  ‘You’ve never faced up to anything in your life, OD,’ I snapped. ‘Why start now? Come on, Seanie.’

  But Seanie wasn’t following orders. He took hold of OD’s arm and lifted him from the bench. OD stared at him and I waited for a fight to break out.

  ‘I can’t walk,’ OD said helplessly. ‘My knee’s gone.’

  ‘You got as far as here, OD,’ Seanie told him. “You can walk to the car.’

  Seanie turned away and went past me. OD followed him, dragging his bad leg like a punishment. I followed OD and we piled into the Morris Minor – OD in the back, on his own.

  As Seanie drove us to De Valera Park, OD told us calmly, with no hint of justifying his savagery, why he’d beaten up Snipe. If Seanie and I had been his trial jury, OD would have got off. Even as I thought this, I knew it meant I was accepting something I never imagined I could accept. That violence isn’t always unjustifiable. It was a frightening and dangerous conclusion and OD himself couldn’t agree with it.

  ‘It was wrong, full stop,’ he said. ‘And it gets worse … what I did to Jimmy.’

  I thought nothing he could say would shock me, until he told us about stealing Jimmy’s money and about that awful bloom of red in the glass of water. The jury was out again on OD.

  We got to the entrance of the alleyway. As Seanie opened the driver’s door, OD said to me, not seeming to care that Seanie could hear, ‘You’ll hate me now. You’ll always hate me once you’ve seen what I did.’

  Seanie helped OD out of the car and we passed from the yellow light of the street to the near-darkness of the alleyway.

  ‘Give him a hand, Nance,’ Seanie said. ‘I’ll go up ahead.’

  I put my arm around OD’s waist and felt him trembling. How many times had we stood in that alleyway, holding each other? How could we ever have imagined as we kissed that it would come to this?

  ‘He’s behind Donovans’,’ OD called in a stifled whisper after Seanie.

  I knew Donovans’ back wall because we’d often had a laugh over the message sprayed in pink lettering there. ‘Jim Donovan is a dennsser, Sined Larry Donovan.’ It didn’t seem very funny any more.

  Seanie moved forward beyond the turn in the alley and OD faltered so that I had to make a greater effort to hold on to him. It was already a big effort because somehow I felt it wasn’t OD I was holding.

  Seanie was back in seconds flat.

  ‘He’s not there,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  OD pulled away from me and stared in disbelief along the alleyway.

  ‘They’ve already found him, the guards,’ he cried. ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘If they found him and he was … if it was serious, the place would be cordoned off,’ Seanie said. ‘He must have made it home. Or someone else found him.’

  ‘Beano!’ OD and I said at the same time.

  All at once the tautness in OD, the clenched fists, the grinding jaws, relaxed. He looked like the OD I preferred to remember, the one I imagined had gone forever: easy in himself, that cool trace of smiling optimism back in place.

  ‘I’m going over to Snipe’s to see if he’s all right,’ he said. ‘Then I’m giving myself up. It’s what I have to do, isn’t it, Nance? Isn’t it, Seanie?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Seanie agreed. ‘But I don’t have the right to say.’

  ‘You didn’t, Seanie, but you do now,’ OD said. ‘Will you do me one last favour? Bring me to the barracks after I talk to Beano?’

  ‘Sure.’

  We helped him across the street and down towards Snipe’s house. My arm was still around his waist and he felt warmer, softer. When I had to let him go at the gate, I thought I was going to fold up. I thought of Jimmy and saved myself.

  ‘What about Jimmy?’ I asked.

  ‘Jimmy’s better off without me,’ OD answered. ‘Will you help him get his trumpet, Nance? Make sure he gets it, won’t you?’

  ‘Course I will,’ I said, though it was clear to me that if OD was sent to prison, there would be no trumpet. Jimmy was never buying the trumpet for himself. He was doing it for OD, to prove there was a way back no matter how far you’d fallen.

  ‘That letter you sent me,’ OD said. ‘You never told me what you had to sort out. Not that I had the cop-on to ask. Did you sort it out?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I had to admit. But
he had enough to feel bad about, why burden him with more? ‘We’ll talk about it … later.’

  He leaned against the pier of the gate to get the weight off his leg and drew me towards him slowly, afraid I’d resist.

  ‘I hope there’s time to talk,’ he said and kissed my forehead lightly.

  I noticed a light come on behind closed curtains in an upstairs room of the house. I was certain it was Snipe’s shadow I saw move across behind it, but I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t want to raise OD’s hopes. The monster in him still haunted me and I couldn’t respond to his kiss. I knew he understood. He smiled sadly. He looked from me to Seanie and back again.

  ‘Nance, you two should … you’d be good for each other.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, OD,’ Seanie said. ‘She never stopped going out with you.’

  He wasn’t angry. He was like the old Seanie we knew from school, stating facts in a detached, unemotional way.

  ‘Tell him, Nance,’ he went on. ‘You know it’s true. And that’s fine with me because …’

  OD was looking bewildered – looking like I felt.

  ‘I can’t … after everything you did for me,’ I said. ‘I know you wanted to go out with me and I threw it all back in your face.’

  OD was like a spectator at a tennis match. He turned to Seanie.

  ‘I never wanted to go out with you, Nance,’ Seanie said. ‘I tried to explain it once but …’

  Two words from Seanie, more like a sigh of relief, and we were left breathless.

  ‘I’m gay.’

  He smiled. I thought he was going to laugh.

  ‘I never told anyone before.’

  ‘But you play football … you’re …’ OD stammered.

  ‘I wouldn’t be the first queer to play football, OD.’

  I felt cheated in some stupid way, embarrassed at the presumptions I’d made about him and me. But I was impressed too, by his honesty, his courage.

  ‘So, what was all that stuff about between us?’ I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I needed a friend. You needed a friend.’ He turned to OD. ‘Look, you’d better go in. We’ll wait in the car … That is, if you don’t mind, Nance.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.

  We walked back to the car as OD hobbled in along the path to the house. I told Seanie who my mother was. I thought he deserved to know, and I knew my secret was safe with him. He was used to secrets.

  He said, ‘Nance, let’s make a pact.’

  I agreed. He was going to go to his parents and talk. I was going to go to May. And listen.

  OD

  How could I have expected that Beano wouldn’t have changed towards me? As he came through the hallway, I still clung to that foolish hope. One look into those angry eyes rubbished all hope. Of course, I knew he would never understand why I’d hammered his father; but it was worse than that. He had seen through my guise of friendship and recognised it for what it was. Pity, the worst form of charity.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Leave us alone.’

  ‘I was so mad over what he did to you, Beano. I know it’s no excuse but – ’

  ‘You beat up my father because you hate everyone, ’cause you think it’s all their fault you ended up a nobody. Like me.’

  ‘You’re not – ’

  ‘I don’t need you to tell me what I am,’ he shouted into the night. ‘You’re not my friend, you never were. You thought you were some kind of babysitter or something. Well, I don’t need no babysitter.’

  There was no Jack Nicholson, no mixed-up, borrowed lines. This was the real Beano. A total stranger to me.

  ‘Is he all right?’ I asked. ‘Your old … your father?’

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Beano said. ‘You’re not half as tough as you think you are.’

  ‘I know, Beano, but Seanie is with me. If there’s any cuts or anything, he could fix him up.’

  ‘Clear off, the lot of you,’ he said, getting agitated again. ‘We don’t need anyone. We stick together. Us Doyles.’

  The light from the bare bulb in the hallway shone through his wild, white, wispy hair. It was like a halo above his unearthly face. Glowing before me, this strange, unforgiving angel answered my miserable protests with a cruel clarity.

  ‘But you can’t let him do these things to you.’

  ‘I have a choice, do I?’ he said. ‘You see how people look at me, how they try to make a feck of me. Did you ever see me with a girl, did you? What girl would bother with a little scut like me? I have no one, only my father and Mammy. All the rest of ye, ye’ll go yer own way. That leaves me … and them. They’re all I have.’

  ‘I’m giving myself up, Beano,’ I said, trying to be a hero, making the big sacrifice for him, for my friend. ‘I’m going down to the barracks now.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time,’ he told me. ‘My father fell on the way home from the pub, that’s all. Right there at the gate. I saw him falling ’cause I was waiting here at the door for him.’

  ‘Beano! He told you to say this just to protect himself.’

  ‘Naw, I saw it with my own eyes.’

  ‘Beano, I won’t let you do this,’ I said. ‘I’m going to the guards and telling them the truth about me and about what Snipe did to you.’

  ‘I made all that up … after you gave me the drugs, OD. That’s what I’ll tell the guards if you grass on my father.’

  ‘Beano, please …’

  ‘Don’t bother calling up again, OD,’ he said as he closed the door. ‘You think this is all his idea, don’t you? Poor dumb Beano couldn’t work out a deal like this.’

  I backed away from the door. I was free again but it didn’t feel like that. I limped over towards the car, making myself suffer, banging my foot on to the ground to feel the slicing pain shudder through my knee. The pain didn’t hide the agony of what I was thinking.

  Would Jimmy reject me too? Would he ignore my apologies and excuses with the same bitter finality that Beano had shown? I thought I couldn’t go on. Surrender would have been easier.

  Seanie rolled down the window of the car. They were both peering out at me like I was a drowning man. I told them about Beano’s deal. After that there wasn’t much more to say. I was thinking about Jimmy and getting more and more afraid of facing him.

  ‘Will ye come up for a cup of tea or …?’ I asked.

  My voice cracked. Don’t break now, I screamed at myself. Then there was an answering echo. For once in your life, it said, be honest and take the hand they’re holding out to you.

  ‘I can’t go in to Jimmy on my own,’ I admitted. ‘Five minutes?’

  When we went inside, I was suddenly aware of the wad of notes deep in my pocket, digging into my thigh. I pulled it out and stared at the evidence of my awful crime. The notes fell open and what I saw made me want to throw up. Among the crisp fivers and tenners was the brown enve lope with my poem written on it. The pencil marks were already fading, but below the four lines Jimmy had scrawled, with a dodgy biro, my name and the date I’d written the poem.

  ‘What’s that?’ Nance asked. I tightened my grip around the envelope.

  ‘Something I wrote,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe he kept it. I threw it in the fireplace after I finished it. I thought he dumped it with the ashes.’

  ‘A poem?’

  ‘Yeah. He should’ve dumped it. It’s crap.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  I handed over the envelope and she read through my words a couple of times. Then, to my astonishment, she read the poem aloud. It seemed to become something new when she read it. I heard a music, a rhythm I didn’t realise was there.

  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.

  She made to give the tattered envelope back to me. ‘I don’t want the stupid thing,’ I said, although it wasn’t true.


  ‘It’s good, it really is,’ she told me.

  ‘It’s nothing but self-pity,’ I said. ‘Me, me, me.’

  ‘It’s about all of us,’ Seanie said. ‘I wish I could write like that.’

  Hope was pouring back in great waves and I started thinking, Yes, I can do this!

  Maybe I didn’t get it exactly right with that poem; but, in a way, it was right for when I wrote it. And if I could get that much right, what was to stop me getting the rest of my life right?

  ‘I’ll put on the kettle and tell Jimmy I’m back,’ I said. ‘Just wait ’til I get this over with, all right?’

  ‘I’ll make the tea,’ Nance said. ‘You go ahead.’

  In spite of the aching knee, my step was light on the stairs. I was like a child running to his father with some prize he’d just won. His door was still wide open from my earlier, hasty exit. His face was turned, as always, to the wall. He seemed so deep in sleep that I hesitated to wake him. Then I decided I had to: I knew he never wanted to wake up again, and I knew that was my fault.

  I shook his shoulder lightly.

  ‘Jimmy,’ I whispered, ‘I brought back the money. Everything’s sorted out, Jimmy.’

  I gave him time. I tried not to be angry, not to think that he was just pretending to be asleep to escape talking to me, but still he didn’t wake up. Then I leaned in over him to see if his eyelids were flickering. Soon as I saw how his jaw hung so slackly, I knew something was badly wrong. I took his head between my hands and moved it gently towards me. The unshaven cheeks were rough against my palms. A sound somewhere between a sigh and a moan escaped his lips. I let go of him and his head fell back on the pillow.

  When I tried to call out the first time, nothing came. I gasped for air. I turned for the door and my knee gave way. I hit the floor and dragged a scream from the pit of my stomach.

  ‘Nance! Seanie!’

  They found me crawling across the floor. Nance switched on the light and I was blinded for a moment. When I opened my eyes, Seanie was by Jimmy’s side. He raised Jimmy and I saw, in the brutal light, the face of an old, old man.