by William Wall
Me: Dad?
Dad: Well, they won’t be getting any planning permission.
Me: Dad, what did you do? What did you do, Dad?
Dad: Never mind. But I’ll tell you one thing for nothing: Kelleher is screwed.
Now I was scared. I don’t know what my dad does. But he did other things before.
There was a sign by the side of the road that said No Trespassers. He pulled the car in beside it. There was a hole in the fence.
Stay there, he said to me.
He went through the hole in the fence as fast as a fox but the sleeve of his jacket caught in it. He worked it loose. About four cars went past while he was doing it. Then he walked out into the middle of the field. It took about a minute. It was a very big field. There were seven cows on the far side. They watched him. In the middle of the field he stopped. He had his back turned to me. I saw him doing something. And then I saw what he was doing. MY DAD WAS FUCKING PISSING IN A FIELD. Like we didn’t have a toilet in our house. He stood the way men do, like slightly hunched but slightly leaning back. I could see it. It was a cold bright day and there was steam in the air in front of him. Then he did the flick flick thing and zipped up. Then he turned around. He looked happy idk I hardly ever see my dad happy. He was just grinning all over his face like a child. He got back out through the fence again and looked up and down the road. Then he got in.
What was that about, Dad?
I needed to go, he said.
And there was me thinking: That’s a flood plain. When they build on that they’ll make the river flooding worse. The houses on the edge will need to be built up. The service roads will flood. What kind of a fucking country do we live in idk.
Dad, whatever you did to Dan Kelleher, is it going to be trouble?
He’ll never even know what hit him.
But the other guys in the syndicate thingy.…
He shrugged. He pulled out onto the road and we moved on again.
At a snail’s pace. A random car passed us out, blowing the horn. My dad gave them the finger. He was laughing. He looked at me and winked. Look at that fucking sign, he said, how did they get planning for that?
He was pointing to a new billboard that said, What think ye of Jesus? Whose son is he?
I don’t know about the planning permission, but I think those signs are for weirdos and creepers. Like these guys actually imagine that real people think about things like that. Like I don’t even know what it means. Like were Joseph and Mary his folks or was it God? Well, definitely Mary, everybody is agreed on that. But maybe it was the postman and the God thing is all my arse? Well, that’s what I think anyway. If they had postmen. Or a passing centurion or one of those Good Samaritans you hear about. What about them? They can’t all have been good.
My dad hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand.
I pissed on the bastards, he said, I pissed on them.
30
So my brother crashed my mam’s car and it was a total write-off. He got out and walked away. Not a scratch on him. My mam said he was lucky and a car was only a car. I saw her hug him so hard I thought she would stop his heart. My mam really loves my brother. I would have killed her there and then with a kitchen knife except for my brother Tony. I am crazy about him. I even know which knife I would use. It would be the one with a serrated edge on both sides.
They weren’t worrying about the insurance. My mam was trying to work out how not to tell Dad. She would say she traded it in. She was getting a new one. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the histories my family dreamt up, the one about my mam trading in her precious Audi was the crappiest. I knew my dad would not swallow it for a second. He would go ballistic.
And I was thinking, I almost lost my big brother. I was sad. Really sad. I felt like I was looking at a ghost. Like he was already dead and his body was in a field surrounded by broken bits of himself and my mam’s Audi. And if nobody found him he would turn into a bundle of bones like Lucy and in a couple of million years some scientist would wonder if he was related to the high metal content in the soil. We studied Lucy when I was doing Biology. There was a bite mark on her pelvis. We had a good teacher then but she left. Someone buried Lucy three point two million years ago give or take and my guess is that she died the hard way and whoever buried her was broken-hearted. I have the feeling she was my age. I saw her bones on Wikipedia. It was sad.
And then my dad came home for his lunch and the freaking started. He already knew the whole story because one of his pals in the guards called him. My dad keeps the local guards sweet. He almost hit my brother. Then he almost hit my mam. They were screaming. It was Mam and my brother against my dad. And my mam screaming, Calm down, you’ll have a fucking heart attack! All the usual stuff. And the price of the car. And the insurance wouldn’t cover it. And my brother is a useless git. And the guards said there were no brake marks. I went to my room.
There were no brake marks on the road. I knew what was going on.
I know what a dysfunctional family is. I googled it. Fifteen signs you come from a dysfunctional family. Thirty-two ways you know you grew up in a dysfunctional family. What makes a functional family vs dysfunctional. Surviving dysfunctional families. I have twelve of the fifteen signs. I didn’t even look at the thirty-two. I don’t know, do people in families like mine ever actually kill each other? Like my dad could kill my brother. He hates him. I could kill my mam. My dad could kill my mam. Everything in our family is a secret until it’s too late. My brother even tried to kill himself. That’s what the no brake marks means. You see it on the news. The guards said there was No Evidence Of Braking at the scene. Suicide among young men is on the rise since The Crash. Nobody knows why. FFS. I hate my family. It Is The Worst. Every time. Every time I want to scream. I can feel something screaming inside me.
I took my brother’s razor blades out of the drawer and sat on the bed. Like cutting yourself was meant to shut things out. I googled it. All you can think about is the pain. I took a blade out. I thought the first thing I should do is disinfect it. Like even skin has bacteria. I could still here the screaming. I heard my mam telling my dad to get the fuck out of her life. I undid my jeans and rolled them down. I pressed the blade against the soft part of my thigh, on the inside. I thought, Some day some guy is going to fall in love with me and when we’re in bed he’s going to look at my legs and say, what are these scars? Then someone would know what kind of a shit life I’m living right now. I pressed the blade but I couldn’t make myself cut. I didn’t have the guts. I put the blade back in the pack. I heard the door slamming downstairs and I heard my brother go to his room. The shouting was still happening. I went downstairs and called The Dog and we went out for a walk. Not to Regan’s Glen. A normal day in my house.
31
Me and The Dog walking along the road. A car stopped and the window rolled down. It was the Bowles guy.
Hello, he said.
Hiya.
Need a lift?
Like, no?
Nice dog. What’s his name?
The Dog.
Yes?
That’s his name. The Dog. He belongs to my brother. If he was mine I’d call him Stupid.
The Bowles guy laughed.
That’s a good one.
Thanks.
I just stopped to say you owe me for my recycling bin, you and your friend.
I blushed. I will never marry anybody because I Blush like literally All The Time. I go completely red. I looked into the car. The housekeeper was in there too. If I ever commit a crime I will confess everything the minute the cop says anything you say may be taken down and used against you in a court of law. Or whatever the Irish guards say. I just can’t be arsed lying.
How did you know it was us?
We were watching you for ten minutes, weren’t we, Grace?
We were sat there splitting our sides, Grace said.
Why didn’t you stop us?
Too much fun. But when you broke the bloody window! We di
dn’t know how to turn off the alarm. You got us into trouble. We don’t want the police, do we, Grace?
Grace: Certainly not, Tom.
Tom: So, the thing is, you have to pay for the bin and the broken window.
Grace: And the call-out for the alarm.
Tom: Yeah, the call-out for the alarm. See, we didn’t know how to reset it. We had to get a nice man to fix it.
He was a nice man, Grace said.
A big old grey-back crow pitched on the road in front of the car. There was something dead that I couldn’t quite make out, a rabbit maybe. The crow looked like an old man throwing his weight around but not very sure of himself. Like a man ordering pints in a pub for people he didn’t like. I was nervous. I’m never sure whether big people are joking or not. Like, I thought the Bowles guy was joking me. If he wasn’t, I was in big trouble. I could get money for things from my dad and my mam but no way could I say I need to pay for the bin I set fire to up in Ballyshane.
I said, My dad hates you.
That changed his tune. He looked at Grace and Grace bent down so she could see out the window better.
Who is your dad, little girl? she said softly.
I shook my head. He wanted Ballyshane, but you got it. He thinks the house belongs to us.
Are you the local IRA or something? Grace said and the two of them laughed. They laughed like crazy. Then they drove away.
32
And we had Joe Daly in to fix something with the gutters. They were clogged or they were leaking idk there was damp on the wall and ceiling of my parent’s bedroom and the en suite. And Joe said that there was work going on in Ballyshane, he was talking to one of the lads, and they were replacing some of the windows and they were putting in all timber-weighted sashes. They were getting them made in England. Proper conservation-grade stuff. It would be a beautiful job. And I could see my dad thinking he wouldn’t have been able to afford to do that. Our windows were plastic Senator windows but when I looked out I didn’t hear classical music like in the ad. I just heard nothing. Like we live in the country. Nothing really happens most of the time. And anyway, they’re double-glazed and argon gas.
Joe Daly always talks to me like I’m out clubbing every night.
Who’s the latest lucky man, Suzy?
There’s no lucky man.
I hear you were in Qubin’s on Saturday night. Great craic in Qubin’s.
I was never in Qubin’s, Joe.
Hoho now, that’s not what I hear. Sure the lads are flocking after you, girl. That’s what I hear anyway. And why wouldn’t they?
I wanted to find a rusty knife and gut him slowly.
33
My fucking life. I swear.
What happened was my brother was out with friends. It is one of life’s mysteries how he passes exams, he totally prefers the pub. And someone said, Here’s to poor old Nigger. And my brother left. It was a pub somewhere in Darkest Ireland, not near his uni. Probably Keniry’s because that’s where they drink. It’s like an old man’s pub. And a couple of the boys went after him because they knew. But he was running and they didn’t realise at first. They thought he just went outside. When they saw him running through the car park they started to run too. He got to the car. They didn’t get there in time. He drove away. They told me he had hash but there might have been something else too. They always had hash. That was about nine and the accident happened at four a.m. Where did the lost hours go? The boys didn’t know. Tosser Kennedy said to me: We’re worried about him, Suzy, like it was bad enough with Nigger, but your bro? I asked him what he meant. He said my brother was depressed. I didn’t say he’d be the odd one out in our family if he wasn’t.
They told me this on the Saturday after the accident, they came over to my house to play Minecraft with my brother and while they were waiting for him they told me the whole story. Engineers love Minecraft, in my humble opinion they are the most boring in the world, worse than medicine. So my brother left the pub about nine and at four a.m. he drove through a fence on a bend in the road and fell down into a field and the car rolled over twice and when it stopped he got out and walked home and went to bed. What did he do in the meantime and where did he go? Someone said they thought he spent a couple of hours driving around, diffing and doing donuts. It’s possible. My brother is a maniac. But I don’t think it’s what he did. Like I should ask him, but we don’t talk a lot. Nobody in my family talks. We are secret agents.
So I asked Tosser. He said he already asked him: Like, where did you go, Tony? And my brother goes, None of your fucking business, Tosser.
And that was that.
Subtle, I said, you really applied psychology to that one.
He laughed, Guess why they call me Tosser?
Tosser is all right but he’s a certified knobhead. Once he used to have a rear-wheel drive Beamer and he used to go diffing and stuff. When we’d see a set of donuts somewhere on the road my brother would say, Tosser was on the rantan last night. Everybody said Tosser was a knobhead and would end up dead, but he just grew out of it. He was one hundred per cent langer until he was about eighteen. My mam used to hate him but now she is all right about him. But Tosser is actually a softie, I don’t know what kind of an engineer he’ll make. Like you’re supposed to be all logic and calculation and hard. He is into the environment too. I said, You’re in the wrong business, Tosser, you’re going to spend your life destroying environments! He thought that was hilarious.
I guess I’m sort of a mascot for my brother’s friends. It’s hard to get taken seriously.
And then I found out that my mam wanted my brother to get counselling and my dad said that was just shit and counselling was a waste of money, counsellors were all nuts themselves, that’s how they get into it, they should be called coinsellers because they were coining it, he should get into the business himself. And my mam said she was worried and the accident didn’t sound right, like what was he doing on that road anyway? And my dad said he needed a kick up the arse and he had half a mind to give it to him. I could hear them arguing in the kitchen when I was in the downstairs toilet. I wanted to hit my head off the sink. I even put my hands over my ears, but I needed to get dressed up again.
34
When my grandad died there was a dispute about where he was to be buried. He was supposed to be buried in the same grave as my granny, who I never met. Her side of the family owned graves. My dad said no way was he burying Grandad there unless he had control of the grave. Like you have title deeds to a grave. They said no. My dad said the grave was shit, they needed a new stone, the old stone was full and it was basically a crap stone and no way was he burying his dad in someone else’s grave. They said no. My dad always gets his way. So there only was like three days. That’s how long they keep a dead body for. There’s church stuff et cetera. So my dad bought a new grave and got it dug up. They say open and close a grave, like it’s a door. He told my mam it was just a move in the negotiations. Like he had this six-foot hole in the graveyard waiting for my grandad and it was a move? They said he was going against his own mother’s dying wish, and his father’s dying wish and nearly everybody’s dying wish. So the morning of the funeral came and there was this big standoff in our kitchen. Their side and our side. I thought the kitchen was a bad place for it because of The Availability Of Knives. In the end he won. He already had the deed of conveyance, all they had to do was Sign On The Line. So my dad added to his property portfolio and my grandad got buried with his one true love. And her side of the family never talked to us again.
My mam came up and told me to stop moping in my room.
You spend your life in here, she said. Get out and get some fresh air. Fresh air is good for you.
Like my mam never goes outside unless it is to get into her car. Even when she exercises, which starts every January and ends in March, she goes to the gym. The gym is in a hotel and she drives into the underground car park and takes the lift. I don’t think she ever breathes un-air-conditioned air except a
t home, like office (aircon) => car (aircon) => lift (aircon) => gym (aircon). Like I googled it and there was a study which showed that the air in gyms contains unacceptable levels of dust, formaldehyde and CO2 and the levels were higher than most legal standards of air quality indoors. I’m waiting for my mam to get a respiratory disease which is linked to formaldehyde. I googled that too. She would be the fittest person in the world to die because she couldn’t breathe. Of natural causes anyway.
Her company had a cyber attack. She said someone was trying to steal their intellectual property. Like, Hello, Mam, what’s intellectual about property? They were freaking about it and her job was to calm them down.
I texted Serena and told her about the Bowles guy stopping. I said we were in trouble. Serena texted back: b4 I tell u anything u need to promes not to tell a sole ☺.
Serena is shit at English and even shitter at text. I texted back: WTF are u talking about?
She replied, SHOUTY CAPS MUCH.
I just sent her a smiley face.
The phone rang immediately. It was her.
Serena: I know where your brother was.
Me: I don’t want to know.
Serena: (Silence).
Me: Is that what you called me for?
Serena: (obviously pissed at me) I thought you wanted to know?
Me: Like if you’re calling to tell me it must be bad news.
Serena: And I have a contact on alt.com. He’s twenty-five and he’s into the same kinks as me exactly and he’s really good-looking he sent me his pic and we’re going to meet up when he comes down which he does because he’s a salesman.
Me: Jesus wept. Have you nothing at all between your ears?
Serena: He goes up to Ballyshane.
Me: The fucking salesman?