by Donal Ryan
By three o’clock there were nine searchers. A sudden solidarity blossomed in the neighbourhood. Friendly enquiries as to what’s been lost led to sympathetic small-talk, offers of assistance and tea, anecdotes of ancient losses and miraculous finds: watches, wallets, lockets, twenty-pound notes; lifetimes of misplaced things that all made their ways back. No one dwelt too much on the things they never saw again or the dark, iron-grilled storm-drains that line our road or the magpies that patrol the hedges and the carpets of grass.
Lord, wasn’t it a great idea? My father kind of claimed it as his own. We couldn’t keep the shop stocked. He’d call in at least once most weeks and smile at my customers. He searched, often vainly, for common ground. The rugby, the horses, the football. He’d wink over at me. Sure I’d sell snow to Eskimos, son. He’d stand in behind the counter and offer advice. Oh, that’s a right yoke. That’s a great choice. I have one of them at home myself. What about a case for it? Here, I’ll throw it in. And he’d summon Mikhail to ring up the sale, tersely instructing him to apply arbitrary discounts. Mikhail would complain to me. He makes these things up half of the time, you know. He does not know the things about photography he say he knows. He gives away the profit margin with the free stuff. Free! Ah Dad, I’d say jokily, come out from behind the counter. You’re upsetting Mikhail. Dad would harrumph and regard Mikhail darkly. Watch that fella, son, I’m telling you. Them lads are only ever out for themselves as a rule. Don’t worry, Dad, I’d say. Come on and we have a small one in the snug. And Mikhail would come and they’d make it up and Dad would call him Mickey and tell him he was a grand lad and punch him lightly on the arm.
Amber joined the search. The unfriending was pushed away for a while. Who’s this lovely-looking girl, now, Paddy wanted to know. I didn’t know we had a … whatdoyoucallum … supermodel in the neighbourhood! And Amber smiled and Paddy laughed loudly and repeated his joke a few times. God aye, ya. A supermodel, begor. Paddy is kind and avuncular, the type of man who can say these things about a sixteen-year-old without sounding inappropriate. The neighbours laughed as they searched and Amber blushed and smiled and fixed her eyes to the ground.
I thought I was tough. I thought I was knock-hardened, world-wise, astute. I supplied a hotel with thirty-three grand’s worth of video and hi-fi equipment. I smiled to myself as I tucked a jocular note into the envelope with the invoice. To Steve, their financial controller. Sound man, Steve. This order would be the saving of us. I went through seven or eight compliment slips in an effort to look casual. It had to be clear but slightly scrawled; professional but a bit throwaway, like I posted invoices this size every day. I was so proud of that invoice. I thought about leaving a copy of it magnetized to my fridge for the next time my parents called. I wrote something about golf and drinks and God knows what. I spent long pleasant minutes thinking how best to sign it off. Yours. Regards. Best. I settled on Thanks. Again. I considered for a minute slipping a sweetener in with it. A crisp folded fifty, for good luck. Then decided it would be crass. Best to treat him to lunch, or dinner and drinks. I thought about how I’d fill a wicker hamper as a Christmas box for my new best customers. My new friends. I thought about the power of networking.
Paddy became the foreman of the search. We’re at nothing, lads, just milling around like this. We need to divide the road into sections. Now, Deirdre love, tell us again where you definitely remember walking. Right, right, okay, look, I’ll assign a section so to everyone and no one is to step outside their section till we’ve it found. Any cars that come to the entrance we’ll tell them park up and walk. Now, there’s another thing, we’ll have to check the treads of the tyres of any cars that drove up since it was lost. And nearly everyone automatically obeyed, glad that someone was taking charge. A teenage boy sloped away with a regretful look back at Amber.
A month after I posted the invoice I stood smiling a little nervously at the shop door, watching the postman and his bicycle process down the street. He had nothing for me but a salute and a cool breeze as he pedalled past. I wasn’t worried. No one paid exactly on time. Well, I did, but I was a bit obsessive that way. At the next month’s end I sent a second invoice. Ten days. A slightly less light-hearted note. A wastepaper basket full of crumpled compliment slips. Another week passed before I heard the union rep on the radio. Staff shocked. No warning. No notice. Doors locked. Wedding deposits should be claimed in writing. The creditors’ meeting was held in a GAA clubhouse on the windy end of a narrow peninsula in south Kerry. A right stroke that was. Real toughness. I got lost and missed most of it. Steve wasn’t at the meeting. Distance to Empty: 23 miles, my dashboard told me as I pulled out of the potholed car-park. It was nearly sixty miles to home. I pulled into a lay-by and found seven-forty in change beneath the seats and nearly cried with relief. My hands shook as I counted it out in the petrol station.
The neighbour, Deirdre, drafted in her mother-in-law to watch her five-year-old and her six-month-old. The older woman stood at the front door for most of the evening surveying the search. Whenever I looked in her direction she smiled and nodded her thanks. Her son was half a world away and her grandson was swaddled in her arms against the chill of evening. She was weighed down with sadness and worry and love. I knelt down to peer along the ground beneath a car that had been checked a dozen times already and groaned as I straightened. She beckoned me to the doorway where she stood. You’d want to mind your back. And then she leaned forward, raising the child almost to her cheek as she did so, and whispered conspiratorially: It’s gone, I’d say. Poor Deirdre, it won’t be found now. Someone has it taken, surely. Ye may give it up and go in out of the cold. And you’d want to mind your back.
I stood in my father’s garden a few hours ago beneath a branch heavy with pink-white blossoms. How’re things, son? Grand. You’re kept going? I am. Good, begod. And he smiled and sighed and put a hand to the tree’s gnarled trunk to steady himself. The sky was suddenly black with crows. Dad? Are you okay? I’m fine. There they are, look. Going home. The same time every single evening. Lord save us aren’t they a sight? The ring in my jeans pocket must have been sitting on an artery; I could feel my pulse beneath it.
It’s only a ring. There’s a stand in the shopping centre beneath a golden cardboard euro sign manned by a smiling youth with a knot in his tie like a fist. I’ll go in when it’s quiet, in the early morning maybe, and he’ll turn the ring into a small pile of cash. That’ll keep us in gas and electricity and groceries for a few months.
The shadow still moves outside. A prayer to Saint Anthony drifts through my open window on a gentle breeze. The world is filled with unwelcome words.
Grace
THERE WERE TWO boys sitting in the centre of the bus this morning. The only empty seats were across from and in front of them. Their fellow travellers in silent concord had quarantined them. The one on the outside was wan and shaven-headed. His leg was extended across the aisle, blocking it. He did not move as I approached, only held my eyes with his and smiled. His smile was twisted and wet, and brought a memory to me of the dogs that would stalk one another about the township, some days in uneasy league with one another and other days in ragged battle. His trousers had stripes that, when I looked more closely, revealed themselves to be tiny shadow-women, sitting back-to-back, in a line along the length of his leg. I smiled at the sight of them, and laughed when I saw that the ends of these trousers were tucked inside white socks. His foot was splayed outwards in a dirty training shoe. The fuck, he said, in a questioning way, half turning towards his friend, widening his eyes in mock wonderment. The fuck? And I knew then that these boys were going to try to hurt me in some way, that they would be allowed to do so by the others on the bus, and I wondered again how there could be pleasure in the causing of sadness in others, how a healthy young man in a country of such fertile soil could choose to expend his precious energy in such a wretched pursuit.
A woman I work with says all the time that she is afraid of her life. I laughed when I first heard
this. Afraid of your life? You should be more afraid of your death, I said, and thought that she would laugh. But she didn’t smile or give any sign that she had heard me as she went on moving dust from place to place with a feathery stick and explained that she was afraid of her life she’d be caught working. She is not supposed to work, as I am not. She claims to have nothing in order to claim money from the government. I claim to stay all day in the reception centre while I wait for my application for asylum to be processed, a grey building of four hollow floors, but in truth I could not stay alone there. I’d do this job for nothing, just to be away from that place, busy, moving. I’m afraid of my life, Grace; she says to me, I’m afraid of my Jaysus life. And I laugh softly to myself and tell her not to worry, not to worry, as we work on into the darkness.
The victory my father achieved in the village was of a particular type. I cannot remember at this remove the correct name for it. A priest told it to me who visited our school in the township after I had explained to the class how our family had come to leave the village of my birth. My sister scolded me for being so foolish, for being so free with truth. As though our story was some form of currency. The meaning of the word the white-haired priest put on Father’s victory was that more was lost in battle than was gained in victory. I wish I could remember that word.
My father refused to pay a tribute to the elders from our harvest. Let them raise their own, he yelled, and our neighbours clicked their tongues and sighed but stayed mostly silent. No one came to help with the saving of our crop. The rains came while we laboured and washed our wealth away. My father bellowed at the gushing sky as my mother stood silent behind him, wringing her hands. The elders decreed that we were to be shunned. So tall my father was as we began our journey to Kinshasa, so noble and unswerving as he led us through the centre of the village. No man dared impede him, or mock him to his face. The elders’ eyes followed him; they mourned their drowned tribute.
Shortly after I told that story in the school my father crossed me from the page in his heart that bore his children’s names. My fourteenth winter was spent in the house of my mother’s cousin, a shack of tin and discarded timber. My father left me there with instructions to him to see that I continued to attend the missionary school. He would pay him for my keep as soon as he found work. My mother’s cousin laughed as my parents left with my brothers and sisters strung in a sullen line behind them. A holy man came once to the house and remonstrated with my mother’s cousin. He was unmarried, living with a child not his. Stories were being told. People wouldn’t tolerate it. Who were the men that visited? What business had they at night in the house of a market trader? My mother’s cousin smoked in silence and looked into the distance over the holy man’s shoulder as he spoke on in urgent whispers. Now and then, to emphasize some point or other, the holy man would point from where he stood on the narrow stoop towards the sunless inside of our house where I sat unseen, watching and straining to hear. And when my mother’s cousin had smoked his cigarette to the butt he broke suddenly from his stillness and put his hands around the holy man’s throat and screamed that his business was no one’s concern but his and that if the holy man came again to his door he would surely kill him.
Days and nights coiled themselves together. My father did not return to pay my mother’s cousin for my keep. But he didn’t care; my visitors paid handsomely. Somewhere in the tangle of time, towards spring I think, a policeman came to the stoop. A truck idled on the road, waiting. My mother’s cousin raised himself slowly, his eyes wide with alarm. He hissed at me to stay behind the bead curtain. The policeman had a rifle strapped to him; he held it before him, lengthways across his chest, as though to show my mother’s cousin the bulk and the weight of it, as though to intimate the damage it could do to the flesh and the bones of his body. I allowed my heart to swell a little with hope. I watched through the beads as the policeman spoke in a flat tone, all the time with the rifle resting on his upturned hands and raised slightly out from him, like a man proffering an infant in church for blessing. But my heart shrank again as he hung his rifle from the nail on the back wall of my tiny room and turned smiling towards me, that familiar hunger lighting his eyes. I heard my mother’s cousin’s low laugh, the relief in it and the delighted amazement, and the noise of metal scraping on metal as he opened his moneybox.
I stayed in that house until the day my mother’s cousin stood burning on the street outside. A tyre had been placed over his head to rest on his broad shoulders and it was doused in petrol and set alight. His hands were tied high behind him. He spun in a small circle for a while. His screams were shrill, piercing; they pained me. The neighbours and the dogs stood still to watch. Some men grinned; others kicked dust into tiny plumes and looked at the ground or sky. Flames licked my mother’s cousin’s face and melted his eyes. He died on his knees, slumped to one side, his fleshless face melded with the livid wires that remained when the rubber had burnt away. The dogs nosed at him and shrank from the heat. They settled, slavering, to wait.
I walked from the township alone. What worse could happen? Perhaps I hoped I’d be killed. I walked south, away from people. I took a lift in a lorry with a flat bed. Glory, Glory, it said along the wooden side, in white letters. A dove was painted crudely beside the words. I jumped from the flat bed at the edge of a town that had hanging above it a dark cloud, obscuring the sun. The driver pointed towards a mottled window with a door beside it, half opened on a room of shadows. A large woman sat behind a desk. I laughed at the sight of her; it seemed as though the desk grew outwards from her midriff. She appraised me coldly and nodded at an empty chair. Every morning for four years I reported to this fat lady and was told where to go to work. Some days I worked in a factory where plastic delights for children and idiots were pressed from foul gum in great machines, the parts of which could be arranged and rearranged again to make a million shapes. My hands were quick and slender; I was able easily to move the template’s edges along routes commanded by a line of red light. Other days I worked in houses, cleaning and caring for white infants whose mothers shopped or talked on telephones. I slept at night in a narrow bed in a long dormitory of other girls and women that stretched like a stem from the back of the fat lady’s office. I dreamt often of my family and the village and knew I would see neither again. I dreamt of my father’s drowned crop, being rinsed from this earth by the bleeding sky.
I rose one morning and ran, across the world. When I first felt Ireland beneath my feet I was relieved, and tired, and cold. I tasted salt in the wind. The man I work for came to the reception centre in a white van. He sat in it with the engine running and looked towards the main entrance. As people walked from the doors he said English? You speak English? And some of those who did agreed to go with him in the van each night to clean offices and factories. He said, slowly: You’ll never be asked, but if you are, say you’re an EU citizen. Act offended. If you’re asked for proof, say: Do you carry proof of your citizenship? That’ll fuckin bamboozle them! Then say fuck-all else, only that you’re self-employed. All right? Contractors, that’s what you all are.
One summer evening he brought me to a house on a narrow street at the end of which there was a small stone church and a graveyard. What do you think of this, Grace? We were at the door of the house. Leave your bucket of tricks there, Grace, you need do no cleaning here tonight. I only want to show you it. Show me what? The house, of course, he said, and laughed, and looked at me. His eyes reminded me of the dogs in the township as they waited for my mother’s cousin’s body to cool. Would you like to live in this house some day? He gestured about him with his hand, an arcing flourish. He drew out his vowels, like a man whose brain was damaged. He was trying to make me believe him foolish, harmless. There was a garden at the rear of the house, connected to the front by a narrow walkway lined with flowers. The sun pooled on the grass; small white flowers danced in it. Dark evergreens guarded the back wall. I imagined myself for foolish seconds sitting there, unseen, at peace. He ges
tured again, his hand sweeping out from his chest, like a circus ringmaster. He watched me closely. I thought of Satan, drawing Christ’s eyes to the glistening world beneath them, promising, offering to contract. I would live there, and he would have a key. There’d be no peace.
My employer’s wife died yesterday. I see him now, standing near the supermarket counter. He has a box of bottles in the crook of his arm. I buy fruit and bread here, humming as I move slowly along the aisles. He is smiling at a well-dressed lady who holds his outstretched hand in both of hers. God rest her, God rest her, the lady is saying. If there’s anything we can do for you, anything at all.
She was ill for a long time. He often stood and spoke of her, watching while I worked my way around the empty offices. He’d have a new mop-head to deliver to me, or a bottle of some spray or bleach, as a pretence. It’s terrible hard, so it is. Terrible hard to see her that way. Oh, Lord God. My heart is weary, Grace. Go easy, Grace, take your break. Come sit in the van a while. And he’d sit and talk again about the little house and tell me it was mine for only a tiny rent, we could work something out, as soon as I was regularized. Won’t it be lovely, Grace?
And he believes in his soul, I think, that it would be lovely. That he would visit at his will and I would smile at him and surrender to him. Just as those boys on the bus this morning thought that I would surrender to their dirty shoes kicking against the back of my seat and their hissed words of spite, their phones descending from above me, flashing and clicking as they stole images of me, to their thin guffaws. I stand still, hidden from his view. He’s smiling at the lady; he leaves his hand in hers. His eyes have a light in them, a glint, not of tears but of triumph. This is his victory, he thinks, his time to reap. He’s not thinking of the rain.
