by Donal Ryan
Tommy was up on eighty, I’d say, though he never spoke of his age. He was sprightly and lean, and he had most of his hair, and he kept it carefully combed, and he tried never to show me his pain, but I felt it. And he told me things in fits and starts, across an ancient table, in the kitchen of the cottage his grandfather built.
He was an only child, an exotic thing in the time of his youth, a thing to be speculated about, suspicious of. His parents hadn’t met before their wedding day. It had all been arranged as a favour. A man met his father the evening before he got married, as he wheeled his bicycle up the long hill on his way home from town, a borrowed suit folded on his carrier.
You’re getting wed tomorrow, I hear?
I am.
Who is she?
I don’t know. They calls her Lorrie.
They stayed married for fifty years and died not a week apart. But that story did the rounds for generations. They calls her Lorrie, men would say, stretching out his mother’s name, and they’d roar with laughter. Tommy would overhear the telling of it the odd time and his insides would burn and the backs of his eyes would prickle and he’d picture his mother and father and their quiet fondness, their easy love for one another. Was it an accident, he wondered, how they loved one another? Or was it God put them together, or whatever power is there behind the blueness of the sky and the blankness of eternity? Signs on there’s plenty talk of mysteries in the church.
He was sent to board with the Christian Brothers. His father could just about manage the fees. There was no talk in the gospels about Jesus Christ beating children with sticks. There’s talk of a devil, though, and he crossed paths with him more than once. There was one man used to rock back on his heels to get the full of the weight of his body into the swing of his leather strap and when he was doing it there was a light blazed in his eyes that was something beyond anger. Something not fully human. They sent the worst of them away off to the missions. Men that’d break bones with hurleys and have parents up in arms. Brothers that weren’t circumspect enough about the subjects of their ministrations. A solicitor’s son had a rib broke one time and the nephew of a monsignor had strips of flesh lifted from the palms of his hands. Men that would behave that way to the children of quality were a danger and were sent away to hot places to see would the heat sap some of their fury. Fire, though, could hardly be expected to tame the devil.
His mother used to tell him a story he loved about an aunt of hers who refused one day to stand aside at a stile for Earl Monroe and his squire, as they processed down from their estate to the village. I’ll stand aside for Our Lord, if our paths ever meet, she told them, and was fired the next day from her job in the big house. She only laughed into their faces, and went to America, and married a man who organized boxing matches, and she helped him, and took over from him when he died, and became rich, and ended up a kind of an aristocrat herself.
He’d had a friend he called Moon. They’d fallen out in their boyhood and never fully made up. Moon wouldn’t step in here to this house the way you do, he told me, and sit down there and drink a sup of tea. Moon was from big land, from a swanky crowd. I often met Moon on the road at the cross before Tommy’s. He’d lay a cold eye on me as he passed on his bicycle, straight-backed and stately, and the odd day Tommy would be keeping an eye out for me from his garden gate and I’d hear them exchange terse comments on the weather. And Tommy would show me caricatures he’d drawn of Moon with a steady and skilful hand and he’d say, Look how stupid Moon looks in this picture. Have you ever seen anyone the like of Moon? And I’d allow that I hadn’t, and he’d shake his head in mock sadness and crumple his picture and fling it into the grate. For fear at all, he’d say, and nod towards the door and wink at me.
When the Griffins were all gone, his neighbours one time on the far side from me, their house and bit of land fell to a cousin from town who set it and sold the cottage to a quare crowd. Jehovah’s Witnesses. They came to his door one time and frightened him with their litany of certitudes. The things that were going to happen him, and not one thing he could do to save himself unless he was born again. Lord God, he said to them. Bad enough to have been born the once. But he hadn’t the heart to run them all the same.
There was a woman he’d have liked to marry but he knew no way to cover the ground between them and nor did she.
He read a thing in a book one time about a tribe in Africa who considered themselves the rightful owners of all the cattle in the world. He thought often about them: at the mart, in the meadow, foddering the cattle he was guardian not owner of in the unknowable minds of those lean, dark, nearly naked herders. He imagined himself going to where they lived, to their plain of sand-grass and prickly bushes, circled by jungles and low hills. What would they make of him, if he rose white-faced and wellington-booted out of the undergrowth into the light of their campfire? Would they laugh at him, or welcome him, thank him for fattening their Friesians half a world away, call him Brother? Would they kill him? There now would be a death. Speared, bleeding out beneath a white hot sun. Turned quickly to carrion, flesh torn from bone by savage jaws and scything beaks. His sun-bleached skull saved to adorn a secret temple wall. He’d melt back to molecules in the bellies of beasts and be spread with their spoor across the savannah, along their ancient trails.
He said, Wouldn’t that be a glorious exequy? And I was startled to quietness by the word, by his words, by the talk out of him. He said that they’d insist on burying him here, as of course they would, and incanting around his corpse, and a few words would be said beforehand and none of them truly meant, and neighbours would fidget and think about other things. And he’d only fill the bellies of worms, he’d only enrich the earth around his grave, in the hollow sunless corner of Kilscannell Cemetery where his mother and father were lowered down and covered over by silent men.
He kept a hawk once that he had found by a river on the edge of death. The wrist of its wing was too pronounced and there were balls of light shot in the mantle of it. He straightened and set the wrist of the hawk’s wing with an elastic band and a strip of cardboard and plucked the shot out with tweezers and fed it bits of raw chicken and sat still and silent for days and nights with the hawk perched on his hand. The arm of an old coat he’d fashioned and sewed and used on his hand in place of the leather glove used by professionals. He tamed it by instinct and by echoes of memories of things told to him in childhood; he knew to be still, to hood the bird between meals so it would associate the sight of him with food, to gradually show the bird the world, perched all the while on his hand. He flew the hawk free when it had the full of its health back and his heart thumped until it looped around against the sun and swooped back to him. It lived with him for seven years, in the back kitchen on a stout perch he’d made from boughs of oak where it would meet his eyes sometimes and hold them, and tell him in its dark silence all the things about the world that could be known by a bird of prey, and tell him that it loved him, pure and perfect. The hawk flew in one summer evening wet with blood, full of shotgun pellets, and died. It had come back to him to see could he save it again, and he couldn’t, and his breath went from him, and his reason for a time, and the world tilted a bit and never fully righted.
He couldn’t ever keep a pet again after that. A few oul tabbies mooched around the yard and the odd time he fed them scraps but they never belonged to him, he never loved them, nor they him. And the few cattle came and went and he never petted them the way some do.
Time occupied him. The notion of it being a thing. How was it? All that’s real is the present moment. What’s a moment? A thing infinitely divisible downwards. So the smallest part of a moment doesn’t exist. So a moment doesn’t exist. So time doesn’t exist, only as a trick the mind plays on itself to stop all things seeming to happen at once. These are the things an evening can hang on, that can give form to an hour of standing at the haggard gate, leaning, resting a foot on the second bar up, regarding thistles and bees and distant mountains with a level e
ye. The idea that everything has happened and nothing has happened yet, that existence is a singularity of infinite smallness, that Mammy and Daddy are still alive and were never born, that the hawk is out hunting and might come home yet.
The seeming uselessness of existing occurred often to him. The depth of the water at the bend of the river occurred often to him, where it seemed sometimes in flood to flow back on itself, to rage against its own rushing. The coils of rope in the loft of the barn, the discs of poison laid for rats. But yet each morning hope pealed from the eastern sky and rang all day in his ears, or for as much of each day as was needed.
Something will always come along, he said, to light the way a little bit. Moon, with his big roundy head up on him. The possibility that Moon might fall off of his bicycle. Ah boys. Or a book he hadn’t read. Or a story he hadn’t heard before. Or the shiver of a leaf, or a certain lay of light along the land. Or yourself, he said, and smiled at me, and looked away, and said no more about it.
He dreamt often of the moment of his own death. He told me once in detail about one of those dreams, and he dipped his eyes in shyness at the end of his story and brought his cup halfway to his lips before putting it down again. His hand was shaking hard. Isn’t that a good one, he said. I bet you could make a right good story out of that. I bet you I could is right, I said, and smiled at him.
A pain came on him one day that rose and fell like a tidal river. He started to pass blood in the toilet and the sight of it frightened him so he stopped looking.
I saw Moon lingering by his fresh grave crying silently when all the others had gone back the road to the village to drink pints in respect and remembrance. He stood sentinel there until the sun was nearly set and I was passing back and said, Come on, Moon, I’ll drop you home.
I’d been given a key and told to take a keepsake from the cottage by the cousin who fell in for Tommy’s share of this earth, after the once-over was done. I asked Moon would he come in with me. He nodded. All he’d needed all the years was an invitation.
We opened the closet beside his bed and were caught beneath an avalanche of books.
We looked at pictures he’d drawn of birds, and a painting he’d made of a hawk on a perch, with eyes of black darkness.
We read a letter he’d written to God, thanking Him for all the saving beauty in the world.
Trouble
THE WAYS OF some things are set like the blueness of the sky. The day I learnt that started with a hunt for a coil pack for the Vectra that wasn’t even needed for a finish. Daddy priced one new and it was poison dear so he told your man go shite. Then he rang his cousin in Long Pavement to know had he one, and he hadn’t, and Daddy rang around a few more lads he knew that had bits of scrappers lying around for breaking and there wasn’t a coil pack to be got, so for a finish he gave in and rang Curley’s even though he can’t bear them. He said to your man on the phone If I give you a hundred euros for it and it turns out not to be what’s wrong, will you take it back off of me? And your man said on the phone he would. Come on, daughter, he said to me over his shoulder as he swung into the cab of his lorry. Come with me for the spin. And of course the Vectra still wouldn’t start even with the coil pack that was got from Curley’s.
The Curleys have acre upon acre of scrappers. I’d love a day let free in there. There’s no way in, though, bar through the front office. They have the whole place walled off like Limerick prison for fear people would be lifting stuff. They have forklifts and all in there, for piling cars on top of one another. They have a fleet of breakdown lorries and a transporter. There’s a million cars in there. Daddy says God be with the days a man could give a wander about with his wrench set and get what he wanted and pay the man and go way. Besides sitting on a plastic chair in a waiting room like a man waiting for a doctor. Reception area me hole, Daddy says. It’s far from reception areas the Curleys were reared. I think he had run-ins with a Curley or two in the old days.
When we went back the second time that morning to Curley’s and Daddy gave his receipt in through the hatch and laid the coil pack down on the ledge in front of the hatch, I knew straight away there’d be trouble. I just had a feeling, a burning in my belly. Daddy was like a lunatic as it was because he had his hand skinned two or three times in the swapping in and out of coil packs and starters new and old and in-between and still the Vectra only coughing at him when he tried to get it going. Your man held up the receipt in front of him and his glasses was half the way down his nose and Daddy said, You’re doing great examinations of it, it’s not so long since you seed it last, only two or three cups of tea ago. Do you think, says your man slowly, smartly, that we dismantle cars here for the good of our health?
Well, if he did. Daddy backed back a step so he was only a kick of my leg from where I was sitting. I heard his breaths heave down his nose. Give me back ninety so, Daddy said in a low voice, real even, and we’ll call it quits. That’s a tenner clear for the minute it took your monkey outside to unscrew it. That’s six hundred fuckin euros an hour. Nice work if you can get it, pal. Your man still had his head leaned back and he was baldy on top and curly at the sides – was he a Curley, I wonder? A person’s name often describes them bang-on – and his glasses were still half the way down his snout but he was examining Daddy now instead of the receipt and he said, How’s about we give you a credit note? And Daddy did his closed-mouth no-smile nose-breath laugh that he does at the start of trouble always and said, How’s about you keep your word, or ninety per cent of it? And your man said No. And Daddy said, Okay, how’s about I drag you out here over that counter and wipe that fuckin floor with you, and he pointed behind him at the floor, and the woman that was waiting for a catalytic converter for a 206 turned round for a look and her eyes were a kind of wide and it was then that I saw that she kind of had the look of Mary Margaret my sister I love the bones of who’s gotten married and gone to England and I haven’t her seen for a long time.
Then your man said, Right, and disappeared, and Daddy stood looking in through the hatch your man had closed and bolted with his two hands hanging and they changing from fists to hands and back to fists in time with the ticking of the clock. Daddy swung round from the hatch. What says that? And he pointed at a sign beside the other hatch in the far wall. Garda … Traffic … Corpse, I read out. Core, the 206 woman said. Hah? I nearly said as she smiled at me, and I remembered just in time and said Pardon? She had the look of Mary Margaret, for sure and certain. What about the p and the s, I said to her. They’re silent, she told me. What’s the point of having them there, so, I said, and she nodded and kind of laughed. It’s a French word, she said. It means … and she wrinkled her eyes in thinking … branch. Like, they’re the branch of the Guards that deals with traffic. This is where towed-away cars are kept, until their owners pay their fines and collect them. Oh, I said, and stayed looking at her a bit too long but she didn’t see me, she was turned back around again to her magazine. Then I noticed how worried-looking Daddy was after getting. But he listened all the same to the woman explaining to me about the French p and s and he nodded at her, to say thanks, I’d say, for being so kind as to teach me something. Daddy’s mad for education for me, having had none of his own. Your man was gone a good long while. There was trouble on the way, I knew.
Daddy was in an awful predicament, I also knew. He wasn’t going leaving his ninety euros to the Curleys who he couldn’t bear. Your man had the coil pack took back from the ledge. Daddy was after threatening violence and there was a witness. Kind as she was, and as like Mary Margaret, she would hardly lie to the shades for us. Daddy has a record as long as his two arms from before he met Mammy and she made him promise to be good. He nearly always kept his promise and when he didn’t it was only because he was left with no choice. Trouble found him sometimes, no matter that he done his level best always to keep out of the path of it.
There was no knowing where your man was gone or what he was doing or who he was gone ringing. There was no knowing was there
shades in behind them doors, or if they were close by, bringing in clamped cars. Probably they’d have lads that weren’t shades doing that, though. But surely that hatch would be manned by shades, for the taking of the money and all off of people that was after getting towed. I knew Daddy would be having the exact same thoughts as me.
Your man arrived back and another lad with him, older and fatter and baldier with no curls. No refunds, he says, unless the part is faulty. This man said … Daddy started to say, pointing at the original fella, but the new lad cut him off, and said in a voice not far off a shout, and a little space between each word, He said he’d take it back. Ya, Daddy said, and nodded, and his shoulders relaxed a small bit. And he has it taken back, the new lad said, and he will give you a credit note in exchange, towards your next purchase. My next purchase? Daddy was all tensed up again, there was a redness rising up along his neck. My next purchase? Shur ye’ll hardly still be here when hell is froze over, will ye? Robbing stealing lying dirty cunts is all the Curleys ever was.
The curly lad and the fat lad only stood looking, and for a finish the fat lad said, I’ll be sure to pass on your feedback to them. And they both started laughing, horrible laughs, and the redness on Daddy’s neck darkened and the burning in my belly got more and worse, like a fire had turned to explosion, like a car that was after getting torched will burn and then blow. The lady with the look of Mary Margaret turned again and lifted up her magazine and showed me a picture of a huge big fat one lying on a couch with one big enormous leg stretched bare out from her along the couch and the other on the ground and underneath the picture it said BRITAIN’S FATTEST WOMAN LOOKING FOR LOVE. The lady was smiling and holding the magazine up beside her face the very same as if there was no trouble in that room, and looking straight at me in an expecting kind of way. What do you think of her? she asked, and laughed again. Her laugh was like a lovely engine tuned perfect and just ticking over, revved nice and gentle.
