– It’s my fault! It’s my fault!
– Ah, it’s not.
– It is!
They filled the car and headed straight to Wacker’s. Did George ever go to work back then? His memory is clogged with cars, years, full of happy and unhappy children. Shouting at traffic lights, trying to distract the kids, getting them to sing along to the Pretenders’ Greatest Hits, the Eurythmics’ Greatest Hits, the Pogues’ Greatest Hits. We had five million hogs and six million dogs, and seven million barrels of porr-horter. Sandra held Ben’s hand and walked him around the pet shop, looking at his eyes. She kept him well away from the guinea pigs. She bent his head over a bucket of rabbits.
– Breathe.
– Mammy, I am breathing. I have to.
– Let’s see you.
George watched Sandra examining Ben’s eyes, face. He was keeping the others outside, at the door, so they couldn’t gang up on Ben if he failed the test and they had to go home empty-handed. But he could tell, Ben was grand. They’d be bringing home a rabbit.
They brought home three, and the dog ate one of them. He didn’t eat the rabbit, exactly. He perforated the spleen and left it on the back step. The rabbit looked perfect, and even more dead because of that.
Suffer, your man Krugman said, when he was asked how Ireland should deal with the next ten years. Well, this is George, suffering.
Those years, when the mortgage was new and money was scarce, when the country seemed to be taking off, waking up or something, when the future was a long, simple thing, a beach. When he could hold Sandra and tell her they’d be fine, she’d be fine. The first miscarriage, her father’s death, his own scare – he’d never doubted that they’d be grand.
He stands outside the pub, away from the windows – he doesn’t want Ben looking out and seeing him there. He isn’t even sure if Ben is on today, or on the early shift.
Gone. That certainty. It wasn’t arrogance. Maybe it was – he doesn’t know. It doesn’t feel like a sin or a crime. He exploited no one; he invested in nothing. He has one mortgage, one credit card. One mortgage, no job. Seven years left on the mortgage and no prospect of a fuckin’ job. He’ll be near retirement age by the time they … he gets through the lost decade. He’ll have nothing to retire from and the dog he’s tying to the bike rack will be dead. And there won’t be another dog. This one here is the last animal.
The girls found the rabbit on the back step and they went hysterical – everyone went hysterical. No one blamed the dog. It was his instinct, his nature. So George couldn’t get rid of him. But then he bit Ben’s best friend, and fuck nature; he was gone, down to the vet, put out of George’s misery.
– It’s for the best.
Goofy was the dog’s name. Simon was the friend’s. Simon was fine but the dog was a bastard. Refused to be trained. Stared back at George as it cocked its leg against the fridge and pissed on it. A bastard. And George hid it, the fact that their dog was a bad-minded fucker, the fact that maybe his family had created this monster. He got up before the rest of them every morning and mopped the shit and piss off the kitchen floor before they woke, had the place clean and smelling of pine when they came in for their Coco Pops and Alpen. When Goofy took a chunk out of Simon – when George heard about it, when Sandra phoned him at work, as he ran out to the car – he actually felt so relieved that guilt never got a look in. Two stitches for Simon, death to Goofy. A good bottle of Rioja for Simon’s parents.
He didn’t have to bury Goofy, or the unfortunate twit that came after him, Simba. George reversed over Simba – heard the yelp, felt the bump – jumped out of the car and, again, felt relief when he saw that it wasn’t a child that had gone under the wheel. He looked around; he was on his own. He grabbed Simba’s collar and hauled him to the front gate. He looked onto the road, thanked God that he lived in a cul-de-sac, and dragged Simba out to the road. Then he went in and told them the bad news; some bollix had run over Simba. And felt proud of himself as he wiped tears and promised ice cream and prawn crackers. He never told anyone what had actually happened and had never felt a bit of guilt about the cover-up. Although the oul’ one across the road looked at him like he was a war criminal and he wondered if she’d been looking out her window when he’d dragged Exhibit A down the drive. But he didn’t care that much, and, anyway, she was dead now too. There’s a gang of Poles renting that house now – or, there was. It’s been quiet over there for a while, and he wonders if they’ve left, moved on. There are stories of cars abandoned in the airport car park; the place is supposed to be stuffed with them.
He pats the dog. She’s a tiny little thing, smaller still on a windy day when her fur is beaten back against her.
– Twenty minutes, he says.
He’s actually talking to the dog, out on the street. He’s losing it.
He straightens up. He looks down at the dog. He can’t leave it here. It’ll be stolen, the leash will loosen – she’ll run out on the street. He can’t do it.
He pushes open the pub door. He was right – it’s quiet. It’s empty. There’s no one behind the bar. He waits – he doesn’t step in. He wants to keep an eye on the dog. Then there’s a white shirt in the gloom, and he can make out the face. It’s Ben, his son.
– Da?
– Ben.
– Are you all right?
– I’m grand. I’ve the dog outside –
– Bring her in.
– I don’t want to get you in trouble.
He shouldn’t have said that – it sounds wrong. Like he’s trivialising Ben – his job.
– It’s cool, says Ben. I can say it’s your guide dog.
He’s come out from behind the bar. He’s twenty-two but he’s still the lanky lad he suddenly became six years ago.
– I’ll get her, he says.
He passes George, and comes back quickly holding the dog like a baby.
– She had a crap earlier, George tells him.
– That’s good, says Ben. So did I.
He puts the dog down, ties the leash to one of the tall stool legs.
– You sit there, he says. So she can’t pull it down on herself.
– Grand.
George sits. Then he stands, takes off his jacket – it’s too hot for a jacket; he shouldn’t have brought it. He sits again.
– Quiet, he says.
– Yeah.
– Is that the recession?
– Not really, says Ben. It’s always quiet this time. What’ll yeh have?
– What’s the coffee like?
– Don’t do it.
– No coffee?
– No. Nothing that needs a kettle.
– I’ll chance a pint.
He watches Ben putting the glass under the tap, holding the glass at the right angle. He’s never seen him at work before and knows that he’d be just as relaxed if the place was packed, the air full of shouts for drink.
– Everything okay, Da?
– Grand, yeah. Not a bother.
– How’s Ma?
– Grand, says George. Great. Remember the rabbits?
– The rabbits?
– The hutch. Goofy killed one of them. Remember?
– Yeah.
He puts the glass back under the tap. He tops up the pint. He pushes a beer mat in front of George. He puts the pint on top of it.
– Lovely.
George gets a tenner out of his pocket, hands it out to Ben.
– There you go.
Ben takes it. He turns round to the till, opens it, puts in the tenner, takes out George’s change. He puts it beside George’s pint.
– Thanks, says George. There were three rabbits, am I right?
– Yeah, says Ben. Not for long, but.
– What were they called?
– Liza, Breezy and Doughnut.
– And Goofy ate Breezy.
– Liza, says Ben. Why?
– Nothing, really, says George. Nothing important. It just came into my head.
&nbs
p; The pint’s ready. He hasn’t had a pint in a good while. He tastes it.
– Grand.
– Good.
– Good pint.
– Thanks.
– Do you like the work?
– It’s all right, says Ben. Yeah. Yeah, I like it.
– Good, says George. That’s good.
He hears the door open behind him. He looks down at the dog. She stays still.
– Good dog.
Ben goes down the bar, to meet whoever’s just come in.
George loves the dog. Absolutely loves it. She’s a cavalier. A King Charles spaniel, white and brown. George loves picking her up, putting her on his shoulder. He knows what he’s at, making her one of the kids. But she’s only a dog, and she’s doomed. George watched a documentary on Sky: Bred to Die. About pedigree dogs. And there was one of his, a cavalier, sitting on the lap of a good-looking woman in a white coat, a vet or a scientist. And she starts explaining that the dog’s brain is too big – It’s like a size 10 foot shoved into a size 6 shoe. The breeders have been playing God, mating fathers and mothers to their sons and daughters, siblings to siblings, just so they’ll look good – consistent – in the shows. Pugs’ eyes fall out of their heads, bulldogs can no longer mate, Pekingese have lungs that wouldn’t keep a fly in the air. And his dog has a brain that’s being shoved out of her head, down onto her spine.
He leans down, picks up the dog. He can do it one-handed; she’s close to weightless.
Ben is back at the taps. Pulling a pint of Heineken for the chap at the other end of the bar.
The dog on George’s lap is a time bomb.
She’s going to start squealing, whimpering, some day. And that’ll be that.
He won’t get another one.
– Remember Simba?
Ben looks up from the glass.
– I do, yeah. Why?
– I hit him, says George.
– You never hit the dogs, Da.
Ben looks worried.
– No, says George. With the car.
– With the car?
– I reversed over him.
– Why?
– Not on purpose, says George. I was just parking.
Fair play to Ben, he fills the glass, brings it down to the punter, takes the money, does the lot without rushing or staring at George.
He’s back.
– Why didn’t you tell us?
– Well, says George. I don’t really know. Once I saw it wasn’t one of you I’d hit, I didn’t give much of a shite. And the chance was there, to drag him out to the road. And once I’d done that, I couldn’t drag him back – you know.
– Why now?
– Why tell you?
– Yeah.
– I don’t know. I was just thinking about it – I don’t know.
– It doesn’t matter.
– I know, says George. But it would have, then. When you were all small.
– No, says Ben. It would’ve been all right.
– Do you reckon?
Ben looks down the bar.
– Listen, he says. We all knew we had a great da.
George can’t say anything.
His heart is too big for him, like the dog’s brain. The blood’s rushing up to his eyes and his mouth. Him and the dog, they’ll both explode together.
Absence
Christine Dwyer Hickey
THE FIRST THING HE NOTICES is the silence. He’s in the back of a cab, a few minutes out of Dublin Airport, on a motorway he doesn’t recall; cars to the left and right of him, drivers stiff as dummies inside. And he thinks of the Mumbai expressway; day after day, people hanging out of windows, exchanging complaints or pleading with the sky. The outrage of honking horns. And the way, for all the complaining and head-cracking noise, there is a sense of something being celebrated.
Frank had known not to expect an Indian highway – youngfellas piled on motorbikes and leathery-faced old men wobbling along with the luggage on top of buses – but what he hadn’t expected was this. This emptiness.
He has the feeling they may be going in the wrong direction and, when a sign comes up for Ballymun, wonders if the driver could have misheard him. Frank thinks about asking, but doesn’t want to be the first one to break their silence. At the airport there had been a moment while lifting the luggage in, when a word might have been enough to start up a conversation. But a look had passed between them for a few tired seconds, and somewhere inside that look they’d agreed to leave each other alone.
He’d been expecting the descent through Drumcondra anyhow. Had it all in his head how it would be. The escort of trees on both sides, the black spill of shadow on the road between. There would be the ribbed underbelly of the railway bridge and then, where the light took a sudden lift, a farrago of shop and pub signs running down into Dorset Street. He’d been half looking forward to playing a game of Spot the Changes with himself.
A memory comes into his head then: a day from his childhood, upstairs on the bus with Ma. They were on the way to the airport, not flying anywhere of course, just one of those outings she used to devise as a way to keep them ‘off the road’ during school holidays. They’d spend the day out there, hanging around, gawking. At the slant of planes through the big observation lounge windows. Or the big destination board blinking out names of places that vaguely recalled half-heeded geography lessons. Or outside the café drooling over the menu where one day when Susan had demanded to know why they couldn’t just go in, Miriam had primly explained, ‘because it’s only for fancy people.’
Miriam loved the fancy people – passengers with hair-dos and matching clothes. Johnny had no time for them; too showy off, he said, flapping their airline tickets all over the place, like they thought they were it. And because Johnny had felt that way, Susan and Frank had too. In any case, they preferred to look at the pilots and air hostesses who really were it, striding through the terminal, mysterious bags slung over their shoulders, urgent matters on their minds. Not a hair out of place as Ma always felt the need to say.
Upstairs on the bus – three kids kneeling up looking out the long back window. Ma sitting on the small seat behind. In the reflection of the glass her head sort of see-through like a ghost’s. He’d kept turning around to check she was still there, with a solid head and real brown hair on top of it. Her hands were in their usual position – right one for smoking, left one for her kids: to stop a fall or wipe a nose or give a slap, depending. He’d been holding onto the picnic, the handles of two plastic bags double-looped around his wrist. Minding it, and making a big deal out of minding it too, because the last time when Susan had been in charge she’d left the bag at the bus stop. A low throb in his wrist, he’d the handles wound that tight and the farty smell of egg sandwiches along with the fumes of the bus making him feel sick and hungry all at once.
In the memory he doesn’t see Susan, and this bothers Frank now as it bothered him then. That was the thing about his big sister; it was a relief when she wasn’t with them, riling Ma up and agitating the atmosphere with her general carry-on. Yet he still always felt the lack of her. She was being punished most likely, left behind with one of the tougher aunties or locked into the boxroom for the day. Punished by exclusion. Because, as Ma would often say, ‘slapping Susan was a complete waste of time.’ Not that it ever stopped her.
And that’s it – the memory. No beginning, no end, meaning little or nothing. Yet it still manages to catch him by the throat.
Frank leans forward, ‘Actually, that was Ballyfermot I wanted, not Ballymun,’ he says.
‘Yeah, I know.’ The taximan grunts.
The first Dublin accent he’s heard, apart from his own, in nearly twenty years – and that’s about all he is getting of it.
*
The roadsign for Ballyfermot gives him a start, like spotting the name of someone he once knew well in a newspaper headline. A few minutes later they are passing through the suburb of Palmerstown, and Frank is struck by the overa
ll beigeness; houses, walls, people, their faces.
At Cherry Orchard Hospital, the traffic tapers to a crawl. The hospital to the right, solid and bleak as ever, and, still firmly in place, the laundry chimney that had been his view and constant companion during his three months there when he was a kid. He can feel Da now. Trying to get into his head, shoulder up against it, pushing.
They draw up alongside the hospital gate, walls curving into the entrance, and it comes back to Frank, the lurch of the ambulance that night, the pause and stutter of the siren as if it had forgotten the words to its song. And him coming out of his delirium just long enough to see snowflakes turning against the black glass of the ambulance window and wondering how come he was sweating so much when outside it was cold enough for snow. He had asked where they were and when the ambulance man said Cherry Orchard he’d thought it the loveliest name he’d ever heard.
The taximan tuts at the traffic then switches on the radio. A voice comes out talking about money. Another voice over a phone line, shaking with nerves or possibly rage. The taximan reaches out and switches the silence back on.
Frank remembers now the sound of the ambulance doors whacking back and the sensation of being hoisted up and lifted out into the darkness and the cooling air. And looking up into the muddle of snow he had got it into his head it was cherry blossom falling down on him.
He must have been ranting about it all during the illness anyhow, because after he got better Da bought him a book of the Chekhov play. He was a fourteen-year-old youngfella who fancied himself as a bit of a brain, mainly because that’s what everyone kept telling him. Yet he couldn’t get beyond the first few pages of what seemed to him a boring old story about moany-arsed people with oddly spelt names. He’d kept turning back to Da’s inscription – To Francis, my namesake, who, unlike the author, got out alive. With fondness, Frank Senior – and trying to understand at the time, what the hell did it mean or why – why would his Da write to him like that? Like he was a grown-up, like they were strangers?
The taxi begins to move again; the cars break away from each other, and Ballyfermot comes into view. Frank looks out the window. As far as he can see, nothing much has changed, apart from one modern-looking lump of a building further down the road. It looks like the same old, bland, old, Ballyer that it always was. Rows of concrete grey shops under a dirty dishcloth sky. Even the weather is utterly familiar: stagnant and damp. The threat of rain that might or might not bother to fall.
New Irish Short Stories Page 8