by Donal Ryan
The black lad is a gas man, alright. As fond as fuck of ones with big arses. No shortage of them around here. He does be in his element here the weekend nights, throwing his eye around the whole night long. He must go home and flog the log off of himself. I’m a kind of fond of the black lad now all the same. He makes a bags of things regularly still, but he’s generally sorry and willing to make amends. A rake more of them arrived in here one evening. He was up in an awful heap when he seen them swinging in. Happy, like, and nervous, kind of. Said they were his brothers. But most likely any of them that comes out of the same patch of jungle is called brother. They were all after getting handed student visas and they were as high as kites. Tickets to ride. They were high-fiving my fella and lepping and yoo-hooing out of them in Swahili or some fuckin thing till oul Mossy come out from his crypt and rolled back in the red carpet fair lively. Them lads are nearly as bad as tinkers, he whispered to me, once you give them a welcome the first time they’ll have you plagued for evermore. One of them boys around the place is plenty, Mossy says. Looks good, like. The brightness of the smiles of them, you wouldn’t believe.
Thinking about that day in her house, though, thinking about it, the oul lad was a funny fish too. I was so happy to be talking shite to him about the Premiership, about which I know everything, and relieved, that I never noticed one or two things properly till after. And you can’t trust the remembering of a thing. That’s why them airy-fairy cunts say you must live in the moment: it’s the only thing that’s real. Once a thing passes into history it can be twisted any which way, turned around and upside down. But there was a couple of things, for sure. He must have known I smoked: I seen him clocking the browny-yellow stain along my left index finger before my arse-cheeks landed on their rock-hard couch. But still and all he never asked me had I a mouth on me when he drew his Bensons from his pants pocket. And he got quiet all of a shot once he’d established I was a Penrose. Oh, he says, from the Villas? Ya, you cunt, I felt like saying, from the cunting Villas, what about it? But I said fuck-all only That’s right, ya, and I sank back into the old shame that shames me for feeling it. She gave me the road not long after. Off to college, she was. Wouldn’t be fair on you, she said.
She made me tall, for two and a half months. I could look any man in the eye. I was king cock. Every prick was jealous of me. I bought her a ring and all, real emerald, off some fuckin hippie at a stall in Galway. She was mad for it. Told me she loved it. Wouldn’t even wear it for fear she’d lose it. I got wicked with her a couple of times and put my hand tight on her throat just the once. I seen a mark on her one time that was after all of a sudden appearing and was certain sure it was a love bite. She made out some cunt kicked her on the tit by accident in the pool. He shouldn’t of been near enough to your tit to kick it, I told her. I got wicked as fuck. That was the time I caught her by the throat. The fear in her eyes, the look on her lovely face. I’ll never in all my days forgive myself.
I cried like a child when she gave me the road. Please, please, don’t do this to me. I fuckin begged her. Fuck it anyway, why did I beg? Why in the Jaysus did I cry? Water, bridge, milk, spilt, brokest hearts do be soonest mended. Or some shite. One summer of shifting and riding is all it was. Not even. I was her taste of badness, her little summer work experience, ticked off her list of things to do and have done to her. Like the fuckin chickenpox, she’d only suffer it once.
There was a blemish on the inside of her leg. About the size of a euro. I kissed it one time, and told her it was beautiful. I named it and all, like it was an island I had discovered, a new country. I won’t say what I named it. Oh, that’s lovely, she told me.
Aisling, her name is.
It means dream. A thing that goes on inside in your head.
A fuckin dream, a dream of fucking.
Maybe that’s all it fuckin was.
That’s all any of us can do, is dream, and then wake up and face into what’s real. The torn things and the slow wait. I’ll burn my lip on the last drag of this fag and fuck the remains of it into the bucket. And I’ll go back in behind the bar to see what kind of havoc the black lad has wreaked in my absence. And I’ll tighten myself a bit and wait.
Crouch End Introductions
I ATE A WHOLE half of a carrot cake last night. I felt funny after it, sugar-sick and weak. My head reeled a tiny bit. I stayed on the couch half asleep till nearly two. Joanie came in all talk from the pub and started wrecking my head so I went to bed. I had bad dreams: a huge dog outside, spiders and snakes inside; I was trapped on the landing, surrounded by barks and hisses and scuttling noises. I screamed in my sleep and woke with a long breath leaving me. I curled up again but couldn’t get sleep back. I smoked fags at the front door and watched the brightening of the sky.
Joanie came down about half eleven. There was a stink of drink off her. She was like a lunatic. Some fella did something to her but she wouldn’t say what. Tell me, Joanie, tell me, I kept saying to her. Fuck off, you virgin, she said back, what would you know? I never said I knew anything. After a while Joanie laughed a bit and sat clenching her Simon Cowell mug, her fingers twined tightly together, just below her chin. Steam swirled up and blurred her face. Oh, Ellie, she said in a whisper, and smiled at me.
Joanie started into the wine straight after breakfast. She was sloshed before three. I had it in my head to make a proper dinner for me and her and the lodger but then didn’t bother once she started into drinking. She put on tapes from the eighties full blast on her big silver time-warp hi-fi. I went down to the basement and looked into the chest freezer for a while at a sirloin joint and thought about defrosting it in the microwave. I could feel the lodger looking at me from the little sofa-bed in the basement bedroom and got cross all of a sudden over nothing. Fuck you, I said into the freezer. I turned and looked at her through the narrow doorway, sitting in the shadows, television light flickering in her eyes. She looked silently back at me. Make your own fucking dinner.
I CAME OVER about two years ago on the Recession Bus. It used to be called the Abortion Bus. Before that joke was thought of it was just called the Bus to London. For those that were desperate. Fifty-five euros. That’s some rob. I told your man in the ticket office I was a student. He asked to see my student ID. Show me your mickey and I’ll show you my ID, I told him. Fifty-five euros so, he said, and held out his ignorant hand. Here, go on; stick it up in your hole, I told him, as I flung five tenners and a fiver at him. The bus was full and stank of perfume and puke. They squeeze in extra rows of seats to that bus, I’d swear. I’m not tall at all and I was crippled after it. A one in front of me put her seat back to have a sleep. I leaned out over the top of her and said: Put your seat back up. She looked shocked up at me through two innocent blue eyes and said nothing. I kept looking down at her till she straightened. She started reading me in a whisper to her friend. I can hear you, I said, and she stopped.
After I arrived over I spent a good few nights in a doorway with my coat tight around me in front of a statue of a man on a horse. The horse was rearing and the man had a sword drawn. It was summer but still it was cold at night. I walked through the days up and down streets humming with people. Some places had queues that went for miles of people all wanting to see things. I saw a man with loads of different-coloured chalk one day, drawing a picture of Jesus on the footpath. People will walk on him, I said. He’s used to that, your man said, and turned back to his picture. I’d say he was a rare holy Joe. I got fed all those days in a redbrick house in a row of other redbrick houses across from a park. There were cobbles on the street outside that hurt my feet through my shoes. Those shoes were only summery things, as thin as tissue. The Salvation Army lived in that house. They ladled soup into white bowls and cut thin sandwiches into triangles and put them on white paper plates and left them out for the lines of ghosts.
All Joanie asked of me the day I sat beside her in the park across from the Salvation Army’s house was if I was pregnant. I told her no and asked her for the loan
of a fag. She laughed and lit it for me. She told me she needed a girl to help her around the house. I told her no problem and we got three tubes and a bus to her house in Crouch End. A man ran shouting that day along the platform in the second tube station with no shirt or shoes on him. People plastered themselves against the wall as he swished past barefooted, chasing something invisible. The next day Joanie asked me would I mind hoovering her two front rooms and the hallways up- and downstairs. Then after a few weeks she asked me would I mind giving an old man a few slaps across the arse, and if I didn’t mind I could stay indefinitely and would need to pay no rent. I told her no problem but that I’d go no further than that. She showed me what to do the first day while the old man bent over the back of a leather chair with his white arse cocked up in the air waiting, his well-tailored trousers pulled down to his knees.
Look, a short throw of your wrist, try to get him evenly across both cheeks. Joanie blistered him with a long narrow switch and then handed it to me. The old man moaned while I reddened him. I skin him now twice monthly, and a handful of others. They normally fix up with Joanie, and never a geek out of them about it. I don’t know do they even get a horn.
MY FATHER RAN off when I was seven or eight with a lady two doors down who had boobs like beach balls with half the air gone out of them. She had yellow hair and black eyebrows. She always wore black leggings and was forever pulling her knickers out of the crack of her arse. She gave him the road before too long and took up with a black fella. My father gave himself over to drinking cider from plastic flagons in an archway off Catherine Street. His body is still there, swallowing cider, but his soul is long gone from him. That can happen to people, you know, without them even realizing it.
I made up my mind to bus it to London the day I looked up from the kitchen sink and saw through the window my brother folded against the back wall with his two arms wrapped around himself and his mouth open in the shape of a scream. He was dying of the pain inside in him. His eyes were closed tight but his face was washed with tears. He’s beautiful, my brother. All the things that happened him, that were done to him. He was crouched down there in a clump of weeds and high grass, keening like a banshee for the things that were taken from him, or never given him, or something, something. His good grey hoodie was stained and frayed at the elbows and his jeans were walking with the dirt. His white runners were turned black. I remember well the day he bought those jeans and runners to wear to his FAS course. He was as proud as anything. Four shades who’d been chasing him burst in through the back gate and grabbed a quarter of him each and lifted him stretched and screaming away.
I had to get my stuff and leave that day so that I’d never again have to bear helpless witness to such sorrow. Looking at my brother’s pain was like being stabbed and stabbed. My beautiful brother. I wonder how is he now. I wonder how the boy is he stabbed in the stomach the night before the morning he jumped the wall into our garden and crouched doubled over on himself in agony while I stood unseen at the kitchen window looking out at him, my heart shredding itself to ribbons. My mother reached for me that day and I pushed her backwards away from me. She landed sobbing on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor. The sight and the sound of her turned my stomach sick. Her sunken mouth and eyes, her sorrow for herself. You done that to him, Mammy, I said. Cathal, my Cathal, she bawled, reaching upwards for her fags. I walked on the splayed fingers of her other hand as I left.
Mammy took up with a good few yokes in the years after Daddy ran off. None of them was any great shakes, and one of them was the devil. I took Mammy’s children’s allowance book from her locker drawer the day I left and went to the post office. The girl at the counter didn’t even look up as she handed me over the notes. Then I walked out the short mile to the county home and sat beside the devil for a while in a ward that smelt of shit and soap. The devil hasn’t the use of himself any more; he was struck by a stroke a couple of years ago, the one favour God granted me.
I went to the kitchen and asked a girl there could I have a pot of tea. I told her I was okay for cups. And I walked back to the devil’s bedside and pulled back the covers of his bed and lowered his grey pyjama bottoms gently by the string and poured the tea carefully onto his wrinkly purple prick. His body kind of shuddered, his eyes bulged like a cartoon man’s, his mouth gaped so wide I thought the skin at either side of it would tear. His wild eyes turned to me and I smiled. Don’t tell anyone, sure you won’t? I whispered into his tufty ear. Be sure and keep this little secret the way Cathal and me always kept yours. I covered him up again and blessed myself and left. Thanks for that, I said to the girl in the kitchen as I handed her back the teapot. You’re welcome, sweetness, she said back.
JOANIE RANG THE Chinese around seven. What will I get for the lodger? I told her I didn’t know. Oh, fuck a duck. I’ll just get three sweet and sours and three chips. The lodger poked a ratty nose through the basement door when she heard the telltale revving of the delivery scooter. I shoved a plastic box of sweet and sour chicken and a bag of chips at her. Then I felt kind of sorry and shouted down along the darkness for her to come and eat with us in the kitchen. Is okay, she shouted back up and I got suddenly cross again and slammed the basement door. Joanie spilt sauce all over her leg and she screeched in pain. I went to help her wipe it off and she grabbed my wrist and squeezed it hard. Get your fucking stinking Irish hands off me, you little bitch, she hissed at me. Fuck you, Joanie, I said back, and she slapped me hard underneath my eye. Her ring opened my skin. That’ll be the day that you fuck anything, Joanie said through her down-turned mouth before she started to shovel balls of battered chicken into it. I left her at it. X Factor was starting anyway.
Ellie, Ellie, I’m sorry, Joanie said as she splashed onto the couch beside me. You know, don’t you, that I love you, don’t you, my doll? And she stroked the side of my face with her soft hand before slumping snoring against me. I quenched her fag and prised her wineglass from her manicured fingers and arranged her more comfortably before moving to the armchair for Xtra Factor. I heard a series of soft creaks from the stairs and then the sound of the pipes clanking and groaning as the shower came on. I felt an urge to go to the kitchen and run the hot tap full bore to freeze her little arse but resisted it. That’d be horrible. I was fair tempted, though. One of the other lodgers months ago was tall and dark-skinned. I put a fresh dogshit from the path outside into her bed once while she showered; I scooped it up into a plastic bag and left it under her duvet, halfway down the mattress. Then I lay in bed and wondered why I’d done that. She never mentioned it. Her Paki came and took her the following week and left an envelope fat with cash for Joanie. I went and checked and the shit was as I’d left it. She must have seen it and slept on the floor.
The doorbell rang. I saw a hulking shape through the side blind of the bay window, hunched at the top step, as though poised for something. Joanie snorted and stirred. Whassa, whassa, she asked, lifting herself. Her skirt was riding up over her hips, her black knickers on show. They looked expensive. The shape outside was standing still, and some cold wind blew through me, and it brought a smell of ashes, a warning smell.
As Joanie wobbled around the room looking for her shoes I slipped upstairs and waited on the landing. Ellie, Ellie, answer the fackin door, she was screeching in her true Cockney, ANSWER THE FACKIN DOOR! The doorbell rang again and I heard her cursing and fumbling with the lock. ELLIE! All fackin right, will you just … and the hulking shape was in the hallway, and there was a violent shuffling, a muffled screaming, and there was a noise like a football being bounced hard on wet grass, over and over again. I stood by the banister, gripping the top rail, staring at the whiteness of my knuckles, and then at the wide-eyed lodger, haloed by steam in the bathroom door, a towel tight around her middle. Silence suddenly fell and after long empty seconds we heard the sound of a man crying softly. Oh, Mum, he sobbed. And the door clicked gently closed. There are only so many stories in the world.
I’ve left Joanie lying
in the hallway for tonight. I only had one bare glance at her. She’s dead all right, because her glassy eyes are facing the foot of the stairs and her body is towards the front door. It’s black flagstone, thank God, easily cleaned. There isn’t much blood anyway. I wonder will the lodger help in the morning. If she doesn’t offer I won’t force her. That’d be lousy. She’ll have to give me a hand getting Joanie into the chest freezer, though. For all her minding of herself there’s a fair old heft to Joanie.
And soon the lodger’s Paki will come and leave a bulging envelope for the proprietress of the Crouch End Introductions Agency. But right now I have half of a carrot cake to eat and tomorrow there’s a freezer to be filled and a white and ancient arse to be whacked.
Meryl
IT WAS JACK MATT-AND told us the story of what happened the night a girl from the Villas wiped eyes and broke hearts, bringing down the house as Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World. Jack Matt-And was there that night, at the back of the hall, swaying.
Jack Matt-And was so called because he’d start every sentence with And. He’d arrive in already drunk and he’d drink away steady and seem to get no drunker, but he’d sit at the end of the bar telling stories of other times he was drunk, in a soft chant that’d kind of lull you into listening. Like this he’d go:
