by John Larkin
‘And here’s the wee fella,’ she says. ‘Are you feeling poorly, my love?’
‘He’s fine,’ says Dad. ‘Got a bit of a sniffle, that’s all. Nothing fatal.’
Aunt Mary takes my stuff and Dad ruffles my hair. ‘Behave yourself,’ he says. He then winks at the Wicked Witch of the Western Suburbs. ‘Both of you.’
‘Ah, Shaun, get away with you, you big tease.’
When Dad leaves, Aunt Mary tells me that we’re going to have a grand time. We’re going to have lots of ‘crack’ (which is Irish for ‘fun’ – I hope). She’s going to be doing some baking and if I’m a good boy she’ll let me stir the mixture and if I’m a really good boy she’ll let me lick the bowl afterwards. She’s in a happy mood, for now. I just hope it stays that way. It’s when she goes for that bottle under the sink that she turns into the Witch. I swear if there were an instruction manual for Aunt Mary, it would say, ‘Instant psycho – just add alcohol’.
She sets me up at the kitchen table so that I can draw and read while she gets the cake and scone mixture ready. She leans over me as I try to keep myself busy and off her radar. ‘What are you drawing there?’ She examines my picture a little closer. ‘What’s that big fella with all them legs doing on that boat?’
‘They’re not legs, they’re tentacles. It’s a giant octopus. And he’s taking over the ship.’
‘There’s no such thing as giant octopuses.’ Even though it’s only around nine in the morning, I can tell from her fumes that she’s been under the sink already.
And like an idiot I decide to go all David Attenborough on her. ‘There might be. In the really deep parts of the ocean. Where no one has ventured yet.’ I actually use the word ‘ventured’.
Big mistake. I look at Aunt Mary. She sees the fear in my eyes as I see the fire in hers.
‘So you think you know more than me, you little smart alec?’
‘No, Aunt Mary. I’m sorry.’
‘You know I used to be a school teacher. Back in Ireland.’
‘Yes.’
‘You think you know more than a qualified school teacher, do you?’
‘No, Aunt Mary.’
‘That’s your mother coming out in you, so it is,’ she hisses. ‘Thinks she’s such a big shot, that one, in her fancy black robes and ridiculous wig. Correct me again, young man, and I’ll wash your filthy mouth out with soap.’ She grabs the back of my hair. ‘You got that?’
‘Yes, Aunt Mary. I won’t do it again.’ And right now I hate my stupid father. Him and his psycho aunt. Why doesn’t anyone believe me?
After that, we retreat to our corners for a while. She busies herself baking while I carry on drawing – though I reduce the size of the attacking octopus significantly. It’s no longer a serious threat to the sailors; it’s more something to have a bit of a laugh at and poke with a stick. Despite my concession, there’s to be no mixing or bowl licking for me. Not now that I’ve had the audacity to suggest that there might be larger than usual molluscs lurking in the depths of the ocean somewhere.
Aunt Mary is still coming to terms with the latter part of the twentieth century so she doesn’t have a DVD player. It’s lucky she even has electricity. Deciding to give me a reprieve from her death stares, she relocates me to the ‘sitting room’ and puts on an old Wallace & Gromit video, which, apart from a few episodes of Pingu and Spot the Dog, are all she has for when Kate and I visit.
When Wallace forgets the crackers to take up to the cheese moon, I try to stifle my laughter with a pillow in case I’m laughing the wrong way. I’m mid-snort when Aunt Mary summons me into the kitchen.
‘Declan! I called you.’
I leap up and hit stop on the video player, which is so old it has a wood-grain finish. I race into the kitchen just as she’s putting the bottle back beneath the sink.
‘Yes, Aunt Mary.’
‘Ah. There you are. Good boy.’ She ties up a plastic bag and hands it to me. ‘Be a love and bring this out to the bin for me.’
I take the rubbish bag from her and walk out through the laundry towards the backyard and realise that I’m in serious trouble. Aunt Mary owns three dogs: an Irish wolfhound, a Jack Russell and something that looks like a cross between a goat and a weasel. And like the dogs themselves, Aunt Mary isn’t exactly the cleanest person in the world. It’s not so much that her backyard has a bit of dog poo in it, more that her dog poo has a bit of backyard in it.
I open the laundry door and try to plan a route through the teetering, festering and steaming piles of dog crap, all of which are in various stages of decay and stench. This tiptoeing might have worked had it not been for the half-starved demented hounds leaping up at me and the rubbish bag like dolphins after a fish at Sea World, which wasn’t something that I’d factored into my trip across the yard.
When I arrive at the bin, one of the dogs, the wolfhound I think, knocks me off balance and I stumble awkwardly. I only just manage to retain my footing by steadying myself on the wheelie bin, blissfully unaware that I’ve stepped backwards into a dog turd of such dimensions and freshness that every fly within a ten-kilometre radius is currently inbound to worship its very wonder.
Aunt Mary notices, though. Boy does she notice.
Task complete, I wander back into the kitchen, determined to stay in Aunt Mary’s good books by asking if there are any other jobs that need doing. I am completely oblivious to the faeces trail that I’m leaving in my wake, like some sort of urban Hansel and Gretel.
Aunt Mary turns to look at me. She sees my turd track and practically spontaneously combusts.
A rational person would have said something like, ‘Declan. Don’t move. You’ve accidentally walked some dog poo through the house. Stay there while I help take your shoes off and then we’ll get it all cleaned up.’
The thing is, if she’d said that she would probably still be alive. It’s funny how these things work. Your life changes with the toss of a coin, the smear of some dog shit. But Aunt Mary wasn’t a rational person. She was a raving lunatic into whose care I should never have been trusted.
‘Will you look at the feckin mess you’re leaving, you useless little gobshite?’
I’ll tell you another thing that a rational person doesn’t do. When your psycho aunt comes running at you clutching a rolling pin, a rational person doesn’t just stand there and see what the psycho aunt might do with the rolling pin. A rational person goes into flight-or-fight mode. And when your attacker is a half-pissed, completely insane psycho with a hair-trigger temper who’s armed with a heavy wooden rolling pin that she’s waving about like a marauding Viking wielding an axe, then fight doesn’t come into it either. You take flight. Even if the route of your flight takes you across said half-pissed, completely insane psycho’s brand-new recently laid cream-coloured carpet.
By the time she finishes chasing me and my poo-coated shoes through the house and has cornered me in the bathroom, her new carpet looks more like the pattern was taken from a zebra.
She grabs me by the hair and holds me down, raising the rolling pin above her head as I close my eyes. She only hits me once. That’s all she needs. We both hear the bone snap.
She covers my screams with her hand and carries me from the bathroom and lays me gently on the sofa. She doesn’t seem to care about the crap on the carpet anymore, or that I’m now getting it on the sofa with the hand-knitted white (though not-so-white-anymore) doilies.
‘You just rest there, love,’ she says. ‘I’ll get you some ice and a couple of aspirin. You’ll be right as rain.’
I curl up in a ball as she disappears into the kitchen and returns with the pills and a glass of water.
‘Right so. Sit up and take these.’ I do as I’m told, swigging the pills down with the water. ‘Now let’s put a little ice on this arm of yours.’ As soon as she touches my arm, the jolt of pain is so excruciating that I immediately vomit the pills back up.
‘Stop that, you disgusting boy.’ She clips me over the back of my head and
then hugs me by way of an apology, but this hurts my arm even more and I scream out in agony.
She covers me with a blanket and I spend the rest of the day drifting in and out of consciousness. At one point I stir in my delirium where I see narwhals in the hallway and hear Aunt Mary talking on the kitchen phone. I think she’s speaking to Mum.
‘Ah, we’re having a grand old time. Making scones and cakes. He’s a great little helper, so he is.’
‘Mum!’ I call out from the sitting room. But I’m too weak from the pain and vomiting. She can’t hear me. ‘Mummy.’
Aunt Mary hears me and closes the kitchen door.
When I wake up it’s after six o’clock and dark. Mum and Dad both work late so it’s not surprising no one’s picked me up yet. Aunt Mary is wandering around the house muttering and mumbling incoherently. She’s also drinking something from a bottle. Not the one under the sink with the clear liquid. This stuff is brown.
‘My arm hurts, Aunt Mary.’
‘“My arm hurts, Aunt Mary,”’ she mocks. She squeezes my cheeks which forces my mouth open. ‘Here. See if this deadens the pain. It certainly does wonders for me.’ She pours some of the brown liquid down my throat but it’s so disgusting that I immediately start choking and hoick it straight back up.
‘You dirty little fecker. That’s a bottle of Jameson’s you’re throwing up. Do you know how much that costs?’ She lays into me again but by this point I’m beyond caring. ‘This is all your fault. If you’d watched where you were stepping, none of this would have happened.’
‘Please, Aunt Mary. I’m sorry.’
‘No one will believe you fell over. No one will believe me. Just like back in Dublin. They didn’t believe me then, and they won’t now. You’ve ruined everything. I didn’t ask to look after you today, and now look where it’s got us.’ She sways for a moment, the drink throwing her off balance.
‘There’s only one thing for it, God forgive me.’
She scoops me up off the sofa and half-carries, half-drags me out to her car. She opens the door and more or less throws me in the back, covering me with a dirty old blanket. She climbs in the front and turns on the engine, which splutters to life.
‘Where are we going, Aunt Mary?’ I ask. ‘To the hospital?’
Her rosary beads clack through her fingers as her old Volkswagen coughs along the road. ‘We’re taking a little trip to the seaside, my darling. The air’ll do us good. Give us a chance to think.’ The click clack of her rosary beads continues all the way to the coast.
I don’t remember how we got over the fence. Maybe I fell asleep or passed out from the pain and Aunt Mary lifted me over. I hear the crash of the waves onto the rocks far below and smell the salt spray being whipped up by the thermals. A lone seagull cries overhead.
We’re standing on the edge but I feel safe because Aunt Mary is holding my hand firmly. My other arm – the broken one – hangs limply beside me like an empty shirtsleeve. It’s dark so I can’t see how far it is down to the ocean. To the rocks. A watery moon drifts in and out of the clouds.
‘Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death …’
‘Can I help you in some way?’
‘Stay back!’ snaps Aunt Mary at the kind-looking man who seems to have snapped her out of her trance. ‘Don’t come any closer.’
‘Would you like to come back to my house for a cup of tea? I just live over the road there.’
‘No one will believe me,’ says Aunt Mary. ‘They never do.’
‘I know it gets hard,’ says the man, ‘but there’s always hope.’
Aunt Mary grips my hand tighter and sways against the breeze. She’d emptied the rest of the bottle of brown stuff down her throat on the drive. ‘His mother’s a barrister. Know-it-all. She’ll have them throw the book at me.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘What’s it matter? He’s coming with me. He has to. I have to explain it to St Peter otherwise he’ll never let me in.’
‘You don’t need the young fella with you. God’s compassion is infinite.’ The man stops when he senses Aunt Mary hesitate. ‘C’mon, love. Give the young fella a chance. He’s hardly lived. Come and have that cup of tea. My wife’s made scones. Fresh out of the oven.’
‘I was making scones myself,’ says Aunt Mary.
‘And you will again, love. Everything will sort itself out.’
‘Not this time,’ she says. ‘Not this time.’
She squeezes my hand tighter and steps forward.
‘No!’ yells the man.
I look over at the man and then back down at my hand. Although I can still feel Aunt Mary’s fingers interlocked in mine, she’s no longer there.
‘Don’t move, young fella,’ says the man as he clambers over the fence. ‘Stay right where you are.’
The man edges cautiously towards me. I look down into the gloom, wondering where Aunt Mary has got to but there’s nothing but darkness and the distant crash of wave on rock.
‘Name’s Bill,’ says the man. ‘I’m very happy to meet you.’ He scoops me up in his strong arms and I bury my face in the nape of his neck, never wanting to leave.
It seems that now is an opportune moment to remind us all that I’m actually dead. Aunt Mary didn’t drag me over the cliff and into oblivion with her that night. At the last second, her basic decency shone through. But maybe she was supposed to. Maybe I’d been on borrowed time since. I’m not a fatalist, but I suppose that when your time’s up, your time’s up. And my time finally ran out that day on the station when my depression and anxiety became too much. The weight too heavy.
That beautiful, healing evening with Lisa, and countless others just like it, would only have happened had I paused. But I didn’t pause. I carried it through and my timeline came to an abrupt stop. Everything else is just conjecture. A fragment. A taste of what might have been. That night with Lisa in Hong Kong, when we both shared our pain like two broken souls coming together and healing, would have been a memory burner, a near-perfect moment to talk about for the rest of our lives.
And there would have been others. In Hong Kong alone, Mum and Susanne would have become besties, leaving Lisa and I free to spend more time together. We would have caught the train out to Disneyland and another day we would have gone out to Ocean Park, riding the triple-loop dragon, which darts exhilaratingly out over Repulse Bay. We would have ridden the cable car back down and then jumped a bus to Stanley Markets and walked along the beach at sunset with our fingers interlocked, feeling the sand between our toes, and we would have danced cheek to cheek as a storm rolled in, using one earpiece each from Lisa’s iPod, and I would have promised to spend the rest of my life with her, or else searching for her if we ever became separated again, even though we both would undoubtedly know that our time together was drawing to a close.
Golden moments. Priceless moments. Deathbed moments. Moments to let you know that life is worth living and that you need to embrace all its joy, all its wonder, all its pain.
But in order to have those moments you have to work through the pain, find a way out of the darkness. You have to pause. You have to live.
It’s only now that I am dead that I truly understand it. Lisa wasn’t worth dying for. She was worth living for.
The intercom buzzes but I haven’t got a clue how to operate the thing.
‘Mum!’ I knock on the bathroom door. ‘Are you in the shower?’
‘I can’t hear you properly,’ she calls back. ‘I’m in the shower.’
‘Someone’s here but I don’t know how to let them in.’
‘Well, who is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look at the screen,’ she yells back through the steam.
‘Oh, right.’
The intercom buzzes again and I do as Mum instructs but reel back slightly. I don’t know what th
e hell is out there but it kind of looks like a whale rolling and sliming over a bunch of headstones. Headstones that are connected by wires …
‘Kate, you idiot. Don’t put your stupid mouth up to the camera.’
Kate laughs down the intercom. ‘Let us in, douche.’
‘Us?’
‘Dad’s coming up.’
I press the big silver button and downstairs the door buzzes open.
A couple of minutes later, Kate bustles in with her bags. Dad kind of hovers around behind her.
‘How was your weekend?’ I ask.
‘Cool,’ she says. ‘Went to the zoo.’
‘And they let you out again?’
‘Don’t, Declan,’ says Dad. ‘She had a nice time.’
‘Hello, Father,’ I reply, annoying him with my formality.
I look at Dad’s hair and try not to let him see me smirking. In all honesty it actually looks quite good. I just wonder if the horse misses it.
Mum emerges from the bathroom in her robe and with a towel wrapped around her head.
‘Hey, baby doll,’ says Mum, giving Kate a hug. ‘Shaun.’
‘Gabriella.’
It’s like a friggin roll call.
‘You’re back early,’ says Mum. ‘I thought you were dropping her this evening. That was the arrangement.’
‘Yeah, sorry,’ says Dad. ‘Slight change of plan. I have to fly to New York this evening.’
‘So you’re going?’ says Mum.
‘We’re going to look at apartments.’
‘“We’re”?’ says Mum, inviting the elephant into the room so that it can plonk itself on Dad’s face.
‘Yes,’ replies Dad, defiantly. ‘We.’
Here are three sure-fire signs that your father is having a midlife crisis:
1. He dumps his wife for a younger, blonder, dafter version, whose only qualification is an advanced degree in lip-gloss application.
2. He buys a red (seriously – red) convertible that actually complements the younger, blonder, dafter version’s lip-gloss.
3. He invests a small fortune in the sort of hair transplant that only talk-show hosts and international cricketers can carry off and even then, only just.