Suzy Suzy

by William Wall

  But the truth is we both envied Jason and Helen. Or at least we envied Helen. Neither of us had ever been kissed except by each other, which doesn’t count, it doesn’t even feel right because we both know boys are rough, especially if they haven’t shaved recently. Helen is a bitch. Like the minute Jason asked her out she tweeted it. It was like she won the lottery, the way people who win the lottery sometimes stop talking to their friends and family in case people ask them for money. And the first time they kissed – tweeted. He made her stop. She told Mary Doyle that he said he didn’t want his game all over Twitter. We all thought game was a shit thing to say. But she told Mary Doyle the first time they had sex and Mary Doyle told everyone even though she didn’t tweet it. And she also said they didn’t use protection and now everyone is wondering how long it will take Helen to get pregnant. And I think all of that is just so crap. It makes me sad af.

  9

  So my fake Facebook identity. I discovered that on my brother’s girlfriend’s timeline there was hate stuff about my brother. My brother is on Twitter but he’s not on Facebook. Well he was, but he got bullied so he came off it. The hate stuff was not from her, but from her friends. They were bitching about him. Like he’s always well turned out. He likes clothes. He dresses well. He’s not exactly metro, but he’s getting there. So this girl is like, He’s so faggy, he makes me sick. And another time, Why u going out with that faggot? And another time, Does he take pipe? Like I don’t even know what take pipe means but I think I do. I wrote back on the wall: Bitches you should mind your own business stuff ur hate messages up ur arses. I got unfriended so fast. And blocked. And that was the end of the surveillance of my brother’s girlfriend. But I found out about the girl who was doing the hate message stuff. She was some kind of a third cousin of my friend Serena. I’ve met some of Serena’s family and every single one of them is a religious creeper. Like once Serena and me turned up at a cousins’s house at tea-time and they were all kneeling down saying the rosary except for the grandmother or maybe the great-grandmother idk and it was just so weird. Like seriously creepy. I don’t know about this girl, but Serena told me she was a bitch. She was doing Dental. Serena said she should have been doing Mental. It’s hard to know if you can trust Serena on anything. But for a long time I was plotting some kind of retribution except I didn’t know what. Nobody does that to my brother.

  My brother is in Uni doing Elec Eng. Elec is short for electronic not electric. His mates Tosser Kennedy and John Brown are doing Civil. They make some kind of a team, probably the losing team. A team of hopeless cases. Going by their stories they spend most their time in Keniry’s pub worrying about where they can get the notes for the last lecture or whether the lecturer cba to put them online. I’m not looking forward to the day my dad finds out he’s doing Elec. My dad thinks he’s doing Real Eng, like he’ll be building houses that my dad will own.

  My dad doesn’t talk to my brother. For example, he can’t stand to be in the same room as him except to eat. This is like the most dangerous thing in the world to me. Like building your house on a volcano idk. It’s going to be terrible.

  But my brother goes out every morning just after me and he gets home usually late. And I don’t know what he does all day because he doesn’t seem to go to lectures.

  My mam loves my brother because he was the first.

  Or because he is a boy idk.

  She never even looks at me unless she has to. I’m invisible.

  Or I’m not invisible enough.

  One day Holly and me were walking on Inch strand. The tide was low and the sand was like a war zone, seaweed everywhere. There were birds idk maybe oystercatchers even though there’s no oysters that anybody ever noticed. And there was no one else there. And I said to Holly, I’m so unhappy, Holly.

  I never said that to anyone before. But Holly understood. She caught my hand and we just walked around the strand like that, holding hands, and it was like the most perfect moment of my life ever.

  10

  My brother. Sometimes I think I love him more than anyone and sometimes I hate him. Like when I was sick once he sat with me all night. When I woke up in the morning he was there asleep in a chair. And another time he told me how lonely he was. Aw. And then there was the time that I told him I was depressed and he came out of his bedroom and handed me a pack of razor blades. It took me a while to work out what they were for. I looked it up on the net. Some of those blogs are terrible. They made me sad. Then another time when we were at the beach he took our dog out into the water and held him by the tail so he couldn’t swim for shore. Then he started to push him down. I didn’t realise what was happening. He was laughing. When I saw what he was doing I told my mam and she just laughed. My brother can do anything and she never says a word to him. I said, He’ll die, Mam, The Dog is going to drown. Don’t be stupid, she said, it’s his dog, he’s not going to hurt him. And there’s another thing. When he got The Dog everybody had an idea what to call him but my brother said, His name is The Dog. Then the time he discovered superglue. He tried to superglue a butterfly’s wing to the bulb of his reading light but the superglue burned through the wing so you had a butterfly with a hole in its wing trying to fly. And another time he superglued the locks in one of his teacher’s cars. Like the teacher was a wanker but that must have cost him a fortune. My brother thought it was completely funny. And then another time there was snow and my bus didn’t turn up and I was on my own at the bus stop and it was getting dark and he walked three miles through the snow with a warm coat and a pair of boots and waited with me until my mam got out of work. I would have frozen to death and got frostbite but for him. He got his driving licence at eighteen on the first attempt and after that he often came to pick me up from school on really bad days. But I put a stop to it because of this one time. He was like doing a hundred in a sixty zone. When I asked him to slow down he started to swing the wheel. Every time we passed another car he swung the wheel towards it and straightened out at the last second. People were blowing horns. Like he could have killed us and half a dozen other people. I’m surprised nobody sent for the guards, but maybe people recognised my mam’s car. It’s an Audi A5 Sportback. While we’re dodging killing people, he decided to tell a joke. Like the joke is: This German car salesman gets his wife to have sex with four springs under her and blowing on a duck caller, and when she asks him why, he says he was at a sales conference and they were all talking about this brilliant four-sprung-duck technique.

  I figured it must be an engineering thing.

  But by the end of it we were up to a hundred and twenty coming into a bad bend. We got around it all right. I felt the blood going cold in my face. I nearly fainted. I was convinced he was trying to commit suicide.

  Then another time my mam sent him to pick me up from Holly’s house one night and he had a bottle of vodka and he wanted me to drink. I said no, vodka is ew. So he started swigging it instead. Like driving me home at midnight on a wet night. When we got home I said, Tony, I will never get into a car with you again and if Mam sends you tell her I won’t go with you, because if you come and collect me I’ll fucking walk home, get it? I slammed the door. The light came on in my parents’ bedroom and when I was going upstairs my dad came out. What’s up, Suzy? Did I hear you two fighting? Just ask Tony, I said. But he didn’t. He went back to bed. My father never does anything like that. If something needs to be faced, Mam faces it, but she will be ballistic before she even starts, so Dad doesn’t tell her stuff.

  So it was Tony who first spoke to the English guy and found out his name was Tom Bowles.

  He was meant to be a writer but I googled him and there is no writer called Tom Bowles. At least there is a newspaper reporter from America who got fired for clapping at Daytona. I don’t know what Daytona is. I know I could google it, but seriously, life is too short. Then there is someone called Tom Parker Bowles who is a relative of the Queen of England and came out in support of gay marriage. Bollocks to the anti-gay marriage rabble,
he said. I didn’t know that’s how you spelled bollocks, it’s not in the Fallons Spelling Book. Anyway, as Holly said, you can be in favour of gay marriage and still be a useless parasite, c’est la vie, baby. Sometimes Holly says, C’est la vie, baby, and I always think it’s something from a film but not one I’ve ever seen. So if this Tom Bowles was a writer and he was rich enough to buy Ballyshane for like Monopoly Money, what did he write? Google knows everything. Of course he might just be a crap writer that even Google never heard of but who won the EuroMillions lottery. My brother met him in some pub in town, he said. But I say that is crap because whatever pub my brother goes to, a rich English writer named Tom Bowles is not going to be there.

  I said, Describe him.

  He said, Small and thin, like tiny almost a midget. He’s completely fucking ancient. I would say he’s eighty.

  What did he say to you?

  He said, Can you get a drink here? The place was jointed. He just didn’t think he’d make it to the bar at his height.

  And you said?

  I said you could. I said I’d get one for him like the bar was six deep and he goes, Thank you so much, in a real English accent, you know what I mean, like totally Hugh Grant.

  Not Eastenders?

  So not Eastenders.

  I was pretty sure he was telling the truth but I can never really tell. People lie to me all the time. My friend Serena who I now get hate messages from once told me we were sisters forever. Then she went somewhere on her holidays, Fuerteventura I think, and she sent me selfies for a week, one every day at some beach or in a restaurant, and when she came back she hated me. That was over a year ago. We never go on holidays except to West Kerry Cottages for a week although once they told me we were going To Go To Rome But We Never. I even watched Gladiator on Netflix even though it’s total bullshit and I saw it before, that’s how much I believed in it.

  Once my brother’s phone ass-called me. I could hear club music in the background. Idk what kind of a club. I have never been inside one. My mam won’t let me. Neither has Holly. We are probably the last girls in our class to do it. I just hope it’s worth waiting for.

  I often get ass-calls from him. Another time I could hear shooting. I guessed it was a computer game but it sounded real. And another time there was no talking but I knew he was drunk. I don’t know how I knew that. It was about four in the afternoon. The strange thing about families are there are too many things you can’t say. You would think that you could say anything to your family, but you can’t. And sometimes people tell you something and it’s Too Much Information. Like sometimes you don’t need to know. So I suppose that means that I don’t want people to tell me things either. So I’m like halfway between withholding information and calling a press conference.

  And why do I know he’s ass-calling me? Maybe he calls and doesn’t want to say anything, maybe he just wants to hear a human voice. Or maybe he can’t say.

  11

  My brother had a friend called John Brown who was actually brown. His grandfather was French and he married an Algerian woman. Like his father came from Algeria. He was an aircraft engineer, but he died in a tragic and ironic accident with a Flymo lawnmower. He got electrocuted. Some people call John Nigger Brown but I hate that kind of racist shit. John Brown is so sweet. Whenever he comes to see my brother he Talks To Me For Five Minutes. When I was thirteen I was in love with John Brown but then he got a girlfriend and I decided that I couldn’t be in love with him because it would be like home-breaking. Not many big boys will talk to a girl for five minutes. He would come into my house and see me sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework and he’d come over and sit beside me.

  What are you working on?

  Sums.

  This was in Primary when we said Sums instead of Maths. I would be like doing long division or something. Our teacher hated calculators. She said, You can’t use a calculator when you’re buying three ice-creams and three cokes and you’ll never know if you got the right change. Yeah, well, I can add in my head and you don’t need long division to work out the cost of three ice-creams and three cokes. But anyway, she had a point. Just, most of the people in my class used calculators at home anyway, their parents didn’t care. Holly used one. She was useless where calculations were concerned, although she was pretty good at estimating, which we were supposed to do too but I couldn’t be arsed. I’d just put down the right answer and then write down a wrong answer that was close enough.

  He goes, Oh, long division. Serious stuff.

  Like he went to college to do Engineering. And even then he was top of his class for Maths. He used to do my brother’s homework. So I knew he was just being nice to me, and when people are nice to me I nearly always cry. Like I cry at the IKEA ad, the one where all the clothes fly through the little boy’s bedroom window and land all folded in the IKEA storage modules? As soon as I see the little boy standing at the window looking out I cry. So then it was, What’s wrong? Is everything OK?

  Sometimes he’d give me a big hug. Aw.

  So he did well in school. He got Engineering. He came second in his class. He got a girlfriend – a new one in college. I met her. I knew as soon as I saw her that she was crazy about him. She was a keeper. They were like night and day. He was tall and well-built and as brown as some kind of really nice old wood. She was tiny, blonde, small in every way, as pale as snow. They were like a couple from a book, or from an old story. He was the exact opposite of my brother who couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed three days a week, who never went to a lecture if he knew someone who would give him the notes or if he knew they’d be online in time. John Brown went to every lecture. Sometimes when we talked he told me about brilliant engineering projects he had studied, like bridges, or skyscrapers built on rafts so they could stand up in sand, or the Thames flood barrier. All sorts of things. The one that really got him going was the Large Hadron Collider. He told me all about it and when they started it up he was all excitement. He showed me a YouTube video about it. What Is The LHC And How Does It Work? I remember things, but not everything. The protons are accelerated to ninety-nine per cent of the speed of light. Giga electron volts. All that shit. But I didn’t understand what they were talking about.

  I remember once he was in our kitchen and he grabbed me and made me look at a tree and there was this huge crow perched on the outside of a branch and the branch was bending so much we thought he’d fall off, and then the crow started to shuffle sideways step by step until he got into a strong part of the branch. We were laughing our asses off.

  That crow gets Euler–Bernoulli Theory, he said. Yay for plastic bending!

  Engineers! Like the branch wasn’t even plastic. And who the fuck are Oiler and Bernoulli? But my brother never talked about this stuff. I know programming languages and microchips are not exactly hot, but yeah. I saw one of his textbooks once. Introduction to Digital Systems: Modelling, Synthesis, and Simulation Using VHDL. Now that’s definitely catchier than Pride and Prejudice. And it cost a hundred and thirty-five euro. It was a laugh a minute: the present states are the outputs of flip-flops. Therefore to use J-K flip-flops to implement sequential circuits, inputs J and K must be determined from the output states of the J-K flip-flop. So that’s OK. Next time I go to the pool I’ll remember to bring J and K.

  I hate the way my brother’s friends talk to each other. They call each other things. Cunt. Knobhead. Dick. Wanker. Knob-jockey. Gay. They don’t even think about what it means. Like sometimes I think it’s their way of saying they love each other. If boys love each other idk. Maybe. History does not record.

  One time him and my brother took me on a trip to see a new bridge somewhere. It was perf. I got to sit where I could look at John’s neck. He had like a totally flawless neck. It was a pale brown colour and had no lines. The hair was trimmed exactly right and it was as black as coal and tightly curled. He never shaved it. He wasn’t the shaved-head kind of guy. My brother’s neck was the exact opposite. It was grey because he ne
ver washed it only rinsed himself in the shower. It had pimples, like totally gross pimples. His hair was always sticking up. The necks of his collars always had Blood Spots, oml. I never wanted to look at my brother’s neck. John Brown was excited because this was the bridge with the Longest Single Span in Ireland, like totally a Cable-Stayed Bridge, with a tower of A Hundred And Twelve Metres! Like it was completed NEARLY A YEAR EARLY!!!! Imagine the excitement! He was practically having an engineering orgasm every five minutes in the passenger seat in front of me. It was one small step for mankind to imagine what he’d be like having a human one. I almost had one myself watching him.

  We drove east for nearly two hours and it was morning and the sun was in the side window all day. And at some point I fell asleep as you do. Faintly in my sleep I heard my brother say, She’s out cold. And John Brown said, She’s so cute when she’s asleep. I wanted to wake up and say, WHAT ABOUT WHEN I’M AWAKE FFS??!!?? And my brother said, That’s about the only time she’s cute. And they laughed. And I knew they were being OK about me and I just went deep. I woke up about twenty minutes later and they were talking about something else.

  John Brown said, I don’t know.

  My brother said, Come on, Nigger, it’s mad like.

  I have exams in a couple of weeks.

  It’s always work with you for fuck’s sake. Man, get a life.

  Faith would kill me.

  Fuck Faith. She’s never going to know.

  So at that point I guessed that we were approaching something that always upsets me – the Moment Of Embarrassing Revelation. And I did what I always do. I fucked up. I sat up suddenly and said, Where are we, guys?

  My brother gave me a hard look in the rear-view mirror. It was maybe a bit like a retina scan.

  How long are you awake?

  I rubbed my eyes to make it realistic and said, I just woke up. What’s up?