by M. J. Hyland
We walk between all of them, and all over the brick walls are stains of darker grey, like weeping sores. The only colour comes from peeling green paint on windowsills, and black and red graffiti on the ground-floor walls. The concrete balconies are strung across with damp washing, and the long corridors and stairwells are full of the broken things that people have thrown away.
There are no trees, and only one narrow stretch of grass at the back of the flats. Along the edge of the grass, a tall barbed-wire fence separates the flats from the council houses in the blocks behind.
There are so many people making so much noise, more noise than I have ever known, and people everywhere with plastic bags of shopping, up and down the dark passageways or on the darkened stairs.
‘Everybody here is ugly compared to Mammy,’ I say.
She stops walking. ‘That’s not a very charitable thing to say.’
My father keeps walking and, when he is a few feet ahead of us, he stops and looks back at her. ‘You’re right, John. Your mother is very beautiful. She makes them all look ugly.’
She puts her head down and we keep walking. We walk across the car park towards the school, which my father wants me to see, and we pass a pub. The smell of frying chips makes my mouth water. ‘I’m starving to death,’ I say.
‘Hold your horses,’ says my father. ‘Let’s finish looking.’
‘No,’ says my mother. ‘We need to eat.’
We go into The Slipper, which is one of three pubs within two minutes of the towers. It is noisy inside, with music and men and women talking, and the walls are covered with pictures of aeroplanes. I ask my father how many engines a Jumbo 747 has and he says, ‘Enough,’ and we laugh with him.
25
Our first day is spent putting things in drawers and cupboards and deciding where the furniture should go. The second day we shop for groceries. We must buy everything from scratch; salt and pepper and custard powder and semolina; saucepans, lightbulbs, batteries and tools for repairing some of the broken things people have given us.
In the supermarket my father drops a bottle of tomato sauce on the floor and it breaks; some of the sauce splashes onto my mother’s white trousers.
‘Michael!’ she shouts. ‘If I didn’t know better I’d say you did that on purpose.’
‘Well,’ says my father as he walks away from the smashed bottle, ‘you don’t know better, and that’s no surprise to anybody.’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that!’ she shouts at him, not bothered at all that two old women by the frozen food section are staring at her.
‘I’ll talk as I want to talk,’ says my father.
My mother folds her arms across her chest and looks squarely at him. ‘I’m at the end of my rope, Michael, and it wasn’t a long piece of rope to start with. So I’d be grateful if you’d find a damp cloth to wipe this mess off my britches.’
My father smiles at her then, a warm smile, and she smiles back at him as though all is forgiven. I don’t know why she does this. What is it that passes between them? What way of knowing each other do they have? Why does my mother look at him so warmly?
My father goes away in search of a damp cloth, and when he comes back to clean her trousers, she is no longer cross with him. They kiss on the lips for a long time and then we pay for our groceries.
On the morning of our third day in Ballymun, I wake with a sore tooth. The pain is very bad and it pierces like cut glass into the left side of my jaw every time I take a breath.
My mother tells me to get dressed. ‘Let’s get you to the dentist,’ she says. ‘I’ll take you to the community centre.’
The community centre is around the corner, next door to the shopping centre. We walk through the arcade with its walls painted with blue and red stripes. It is bright and clean and, compared to the flats where there is no sun, no light, not inside or between them or behind them or within a hundred feet of them, the shopping centre is like another country. Even though my tooth beats at me, I feel like I’ve gone on holiday. Inside the shopping centre, there is light and the good smell of doughnuts from the bakery.
Inside the community centre, there’s a doctor, a dentist, and a chemist, and the waiting room is full of people reading magazines.
My mother tells the woman at the desk that I am in agony and we wait for only five minutes.
The dentist’s name is Dr O’Connor. He is tall, with broad shoulders, and wears a dark suit with a red handkerchief sticking out of his top pocket.
I tell him about my tooth and he takes a look in my mouth with a stick that has a mirror on its end. Then, without warning, he pulls my lip down and sticks a needle in my gum.
‘That will stop the pain. Now, relax here in the chair a minute while I pull this tooth out,’ he says.
There is a big painting on his ceiling that I look at while he is removing my tooth. He tells me the painting is by Bruegel. I will remember. I memorise the faces of the peasants, women and children dressed in brown, picking potatoes in the snow. No gloves or hats or scarves.
‘There’s no point staring at a white ceiling,’ says Dr O’Connor. ‘Better to see somebody worse off than you are.’
‘I didn’t feel a thing,’ I say when he has finished, and he shakes my hand and smiles at me for a long time.
‘Good lad. I was worried you might need an extra shot.’
I like him and I wonder what I would be like if I had a different father.
At home, I lie on the couch. My mother is busy in the kitchen. I don’t know where my father is.
As soon as I can eat again, my mother makes a fry-up with mushrooms and sausages and we eat while we listen to the radio turned up loud enough to cover the sound of slamming doors and an argument in the neighbouring flat.
At half four my father walks in. ‘I start work in two days,’ he says.
My mother pats him on the arm, and he looks at her hand.
‘I’m not dying,’ he says. ‘It’s not all over yet.’
‘What work?’ I ask. ‘Have you got into Trinity?’
‘No. I’ve got a scholarship in a metalworks factory.’
‘But will you still sit the exams at Trinity?’ I ask.
‘Not just now,’ he says. ‘Right now I have to win some bread.’
‘What?’ I say.
‘Oh, figure it out,’ he says, ‘and while you’re at it, go to the shop and get some milk and a pack of purple Silk Cut.’
‘How much money will you get paid every week?’ I ask.
‘Go and get the fags and I might tell you when you come back.’
I stand up and, as though my mother can read my mind, she says, ‘Why don’t we go into town tomorrow? Let’s be tourists for a day.’
My father takes my mother’s hands and kisses each in turn, then gives them back to her as though they were something he had on loan and, as she returns her hands to her apron pockets, I notice that they are shaking.
I go to the shop to buy my father’s cigarettes and when I come back the lift has broken again. I take the stairs that smell of urine.
The sun is out over Dublin and it is warm. My father is wearing sunglasses that make him look like a car windscreen and my mother is wearing a knee-length pink dress and white boots. They look like movie stars again.
We walk slowly along the wide footpaths of O’Connell Street to Grafton Street, which curves and ends at Stephen’s Green and the Dandelion market. The streets are busy with people shopping and eating and there are hundreds of buses, one behind the other, like tin elephants, with dozens of small eyes inside, each one keeping watch on the world.
There are people wearing good clothes getting in and out of taxis and people with suitcases coming and going from hotel foyers. Everybody is busy with something to do.
We eat lunch in Bewley’s and afterwards we walk through Stephen’s Green. We stop for ice-cream, which we eat while we watch the ducks being fed by little children. When it’s dark we walk back along Grafton Street. The round
streetlamps glow white like pickled onions and as we pass Moore Street we step over gutters running with soapy water used to wash away the vegetable scraps from today’s market. I wish that we could live here, in town, near these lamps and the people singing for money in the street.
I hold my mother’s hand and my father whistles as we walk once again to the top of O’Connell Street. We pass by the cinema and I stop. ‘Can we see a film? Can we see what’s showing?’
My father shrugs. ‘I see no reason why we shouldn’t.’
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is showing, but children under sixteen are not supposed to go in.
‘Just walk in behind me,’ says my father. ‘Just walk in.’
My mother agrees. We get our tickets and give them to the usher and although the screening started twelve minutes ago I sit between my mother and father in the seventh row from the front and it’s the best film I’ve ever seen.
After the film, we eat fish and chips on a bench inside the grounds of Trinity College. Although it is dark and cooler now, there are students sitting on their coats on the lawn or walking and riding bicycles along the paths paved with cobblestones.
Even though they are strangers to him, my father smiles at the students as they come and go. His head turns to watch them as they come down the stairs near our seat, as they come in and out of the door behind us, and as they take their bicycles and head for the street. Then he looks up at the lighted rooms and nods his head.
‘You’ll be here one day,’ I say.
‘That’s the strong hope,’ he says.
My mother kisses him on the cheek and holds his hand.
‘Fish and chips are good,’ I say, ‘but the smell is better. I wish you could eat the smell.’
They laugh.
‘Time to go home,’ says my mother and as she stands she tries to pull me up with her. But I’m far too heavy for her and she stumbles. I catch her before she falls.
My father laughs. ‘Strange pair,’ he says.
We are sitting on the upper deck of the bus on the way home. Four drunk men get on and they shout as they come up the stairs. I turn in my seat to watch them. They can barely walk. They holler and swear and sing and bash against the seats and, as they pass us on their way to the front, one of them drops a glass on the floor. My mother brushes her leg clean of the spray of liquid but says nothing.
The men sit in the row in front of us and for a while they talk about their night. Then one of them turns to look at us. He stares too long at my mother. My father folds his arms across his chest and his knee jumps up and down.
My mother stands and so do I.
‘What’s this?’ says the drunk. ‘A family of giants? And look here. A very pretty giantess’
My father stands and a second drunk says, ‘Going off for a game of basketball, are ye? What’s your team called? The beanstalks?’
‘Come on,’ says my father. ‘We’re going downstairs.’
He pushes me in the back as we walk and tells me to hurry. We go down and sit near the driver, who turns to us. ‘A bit rowdy up there. It’s the same every night.’
We nod and agree and he smiles at us in the rear-vision. Even though the drunks are upstairs, the smell of alcohol is so strong it is as though the men have leaked whiskey and beer from their skin, leaked onto the floor.
Without any warning, my father hits me hard across the back of my head.
‘For feck’s sake!’ he shouts. ‘Stop scratching your head.’
‘Sorry,’ I say, but I’m not. The drunks have made him angry, not me. My mother looks out the window. If my father was not with us, she would tend to me or at the very least say something. But she shakes her head as though to say, ‘How stupid.’ But who does she disapprove of – him or me?
It’s our second Saturday in Ballymun; more than a week here now and I’m returning from the shops with two bottles of milk, a pound of sugar and two pans of bread.
As I get closer to our block, I see one of the Ballymun gangs at the bottom of our stairwell. They are teenage boys, a few years older than me. They lean against the wall and smoke; laughing and swearing and waiting for people to pass so that they can say something obscene. Even though none of the boys is as tall as me, I head for the lifts, in spite of the terrible smell, to avoid them.
I wait for the lift. I know the walls will be sprayed with vomit and urine. It is sometimes several days before the stinking mess is cleaned up with a bucket of water and mop or licked clean by dogs.
The urine is usually sprayed in the corners of the lift walls. It is thick and sticky, so it doesn’t travel very far. I have never before seen urine so orange, so sticky, so thick.
When the lift arrives, I pick the shopping up and get in. There is a girl in the lift, squatting on the floor as though she means to go to the toilet. She is my age, about eleven or twelve, and she looks up and smiles at me. I expect her to stand, pull up her pants, get out, but she stays where she is and continues to squat.
As we travel up to the twelfth floor, I look down at her white underpants, stained with brown marks, stretched around her bruised knees. I wonder if she’ll know that I have looked at the stains in her pants and I’m embarrassed; more embarrassed, I think, because she is not.
She smiles at me as she lifts herself up and presses the button, and I smile back. She runs from the lift on the eleventh floor, leaving behind a small black piece of shit.
My mother is in bed even though it is not yet night-time, not yet dark. She’s not asleep, but on her back, looking up at the ceiling. I stand by the door and tell her about the girl shitting in the lift.
‘What did she look like?’ she asks.
‘She had very white teeth,’ I say.
But perhaps I think her teeth were white because her lips were so red.
‘I see,’ says my mother, as she closes her eyes.
During tea, we hear the sewing machine upstairs. There are three young women who live in the flat directly above ours and one of them sometimes runs a sewing machine from five o’clock until after I go to bed.
My father laughs as he says, ‘Those three up there. They’re almost blind.’
‘Are they?’ asks my mother.
‘Yes, and they’re sisters. They can barely see past the end of their noses.’
‘But if they are nearly blind, how can they use a sewing machine?’ asks my mother.
‘That’s the one who can see the most,’ he says, ‘and she only sews tablecloths, which doesn’t take much skill.’
‘How do you know?’ I ask.
‘I work with a man who told me about them,’ he says. ‘They’re quite well known around here. Some say their parents were first cousins.’
‘How do they make their living if they’re blind and don’t have husbands?’ I ask.
‘How would I know?’ says my father. ‘How does any woman get on in this world that people allege belongs to men?’
My mother hits the side of her cup with a spoon and he clears his throat.
‘Only joking,’ he says. ‘Only joking.’
But later, when we hear them making noise, my father calls them ‘the three blind mice’ and he sings the nursery rhyme while looking up at the ceiling.
The next morning, as we are having breakfast, we hear the women above, and it sounds as though they are beating the floor with broomsticks.
‘Ah, the three blind mice walking about with their canes,’ says my father.
But I’m sure I saw them yesterday getting out of the lift. Three women in their early twenties, with long dark hair and dark eyes, and who reeked of strong perfume. I didn’t see them using canes or wearing dark glasses. They looked normal to me, and two of them were wearing high heels.
I frown. My mother stops eating.
‘They’re not legally blind,’ he says. ‘If they were legally blind they’d be in a home with spastics and seeing-eye dogs.’
It is the afternoon, and I am with my father. I see the three women again, near the st
airs outside our flat. We are painting our front door. I stand on the mat and help him by holding the tin of paint.
He stops painting and grabs my shoulder. ‘Three blind mice at twelve o’clock,’ he says.
‘What?’ I say.
‘Up ahead,’ he whispers, ‘three blind mice at the end of the hall.’
As my father whistles the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’, the women walk towards the stairs on the other side of the tower.
‘Let’s follow them,’ I say.
One of them hears me and turns. She doesn’t look annoyed; she looks amused, and she stops walking for a moment. I look at my father. He keeps on whistling and he stares at her until she turns and walks away with the others. He watches them until they are out of sight.
Aunty Evelyn comes to visit. She brings a box of cream cakes and a poster for the hallway wall.
She takes a close look at everything in the flat and, and when she has finished, she stands by my parents’ wedding photograph, which sits on the dresser near the kitchen door.
‘I see you brought the glamour of the past with you,’ she says.
‘Don’t you keep your wedding photo out?’ asks my mother.
‘Not at all. It’s too much like seeing a pair of ghosts.’
Aunty Evelyn puts her hands on her hips. She will not leave without a fight.
‘The wallpaper’s a lovely shade of pink and with those little bits of yellow and those … those sticking-out yokes.’
‘Stamens,’ I say. ‘They’re called stamens.’
We go into the kitchen and sit at the table with a pot of tea. My father has a book on his lap, The Science of Understanding the Depressive Mind. It looks like a prop there, nothing more than a place for him to rest his hands. I haven’t seen him read anything since we arrived.
My mother yawns and Aunty Evelyn goes on talking.
‘Did you hear that Dr Behan died last week? He’s gone to God. Oh, he always respected the modesty of his patients. He never saw a female patient under the age of sixteen without the company of the mother, and the same for the little boys.’
