by Roddy Doyle
—In the car.
She didn’t lose her temper. I stopped waiting. I went into the kitchen. If you held an envelope over the steam coming out of a kettle you could open it, and close it again without anyone knowing. I needed a chair to plug in the kettle. I checked to make sure that there was enough water in it, over the element. I didn’t just lift it up and weigh it; I took the lid off and looked in. I got off the chair and put it back. I didn’t need the chair any more.
I went back to the living room. Sinbad still wanted the sleigh.
—He should bring you what you want, he said.
—He does, love, said my ma.
—Then-
—But he doesn’t want you to be disappointed, she said.—He wants to give the children presents that they’ll be able to play with all the time.
Her voice hadn’t changed; she wasn’t going to bully him.
I went back to the kitchen. I took my letter out of the envelope and put it on the table, well away from the round wet mark that the milk bottle had left. I licked the gummy part of the flap and stuck it down. I pressed hard. The steam was coming out of the kettle spout now. I waited. I wanted the gum to be dry. More steam; it was singing out now. I held the envelope enough into the steam so I wouldn’t scald my fingers. It was too close; the envelope was getting wet. I raised my hand. I brought the envelope over and across the steam. Not for too long; the envelope was beginning to droop, like it was going asleep. I got the chair and pulled the plug out and put it back right beside the tea caddy where it had been before I’d plugged it in. There were Japanese birds on the caddy with their tails all tied together and in their mouths. The envelope was soggy, a bit. I brought it out into the back garden. I got my thumb nail in under the flap. A little bit lifted. I held it up. It had worked. I pressed the gum bit. It was still sticky. It worked. I went back in; it was cold and windy and getting dark. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, only when it was windy as well. I put my letter back in the envelope.
Sinbad was finishing his letter.
-L.e.g.o., my ma was spelling it for him.
He was no good at joining the letters. She let me put his letter into the envelope. I folded it separate and slid it in beside mine.
When my da came home from work he stuck the letter up the chimney. He was crouched over; he was making sure we couldn’t see properly.
—Did you get that letter, Santa?
He yelled it up the chimney.
—Yes, indeed, he said in a deep voice that was supposed to be Santy’s.
I looked at Sinbad. He believed it was Santy talking. He looked at my ma. I didn’t.
—Will you be able to manage all those presents? my da yelled up the chimney.
—We’ll see, he said back.—Most of them. Bye bye now. I’ve other houses to visit. Bye bye.
—Say bye bye to Santa, lads, said my ma.
Sinbad said bye bye and I had to as well. My da got back from the chimney so we could say it properly.
My hot water bottle was red, Manchester United’s colour. Sinbad’s was green. I loved the smell off the bottle. I put hot water in it and emptied it and smelled it; I put my nose to the hole, nearly in it. Lovely. You didn’t just fill it with water—my ma showed me; you had to lie the bottle on its side and slowly pour the water in or else air got trapped and the rubber rotted and burst. I jumped on Sinbad’s bottle. Nothing happened. I didn’t do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen.
Liam and Aidan’s house was darker than ours, the inside. That was because of the sun, not because it was scruffy dirty. It wasn’t dirty, the way a lot of people said it was; it was just that all the chairs and things were bursting and falling apart. Messing on the sofa was great because it was full of hollows, and nobody ever told us to get off it. We got up on the arm, onto the back and jumped. Two of us would get onto the back and have a duel.
I liked their house. It was better for playing in. All the doors were open; there was nowhere we couldn’t go into. Once, we were playing hide and seek and Mister O’Connell came into the kitchen and opened the press beside the cooker and I was in there. He took out a bag of biscuits and then he closed the door real quietly; he said nothing. Then he opened the door again and whispered did I want a biscuit.
They were broken biscuits, a brown bag of them; there was nothing wrong with them except that they were broken. My ma never bought them.
Some of the boys in school had mothers that worked in Cadbury’s. Mine or Kevin’s didn’t and Aidan and Liam’s ma was dead. Ian McEvoy’s ma did; not all year, before Easter and Christmas. Sometimes Ian McEvoy had an Easter egg for his lunch; the chocolate was perfect, just the egg was the wrong shape. My ma said that Missis McEvoy only worked in Cadbury’s because she had to.
I didn’t understand.
—Your daddy has a better job than Ian’s daddy, she said. Then she said,—Don’t say anything to Ian, sure you won’t.
The McEvoys lived on our road.
—My da has a better job than yours!
—He does not!
—He does so.
—He doesn’t.
—He does.
—Prove it.
—Your ma only works in Cadbury’s because she has to! He didn’t know what I meant. I didn’t either, not really.
—Because she has to! Because she has to!
I gave him a shove. He shoved me back. I held onto the curtain with one of my hands and pushed him hard with the other one. One leg slipped off the back off the sofa and he fell. I won. I slid down into the sofa.
—Champi-on! Champi-on! Champi-on!
I liked sitting in the hollow, just back away from where the shape of the spring was. The material was great; it was like the designs had been left alone and the rest of the material had been cut with a little lawn mower. The designs, flowers, felt like stiff grass or the back of my head after I got a haircut. The material didn’t have any colour but when the light was on you could see that the flowers used to be coloured. We all sat in it when we watched the television; there was loads of room and brilliant fights. Mister O’Connell never told us to get out or stay quiet.
The kitchen table was the same as ours but that was all. They had all different chairs; ours were all the same, wood with a red seat. Once when I called for Liam they were having their tea when I knocked on the kitchen door. Mister O’Connell shouted for me to come in. He was sitting at the side of the table, where me and Sinbad sat, not the end where my da sat. Aidan was sitting there. He got up and put on the kettle and he sat down again where my ma always sat.
I didn’t like that.
He made the breakfasts and dinners and everything, Mister O‘Connell did. They had crisps every lunch; all I ever had was sandwiches. I hardly ever ate them. I put them in the shelf under my desk; banana, ham, cheese, jam. Sometimes I ate one of them but I shoved the rest under the desk. I knew when it was getting too full in there when I saw the inkwell beginning to bob, being lifted by the pile of sandwiches underneath it. I waited till Henno had gone out—he was always going out; he said he knew what we got up to when his back was turned so not to try anything, and we kind of believed him—and I got the bin from beside his desk and brought it down to my desk. I unloaded the packs of sandwiches. Everyone watched. Some of the sandwiches were in tinfoil, but the ones that weren’t, that were just in plastic bags or the cover of the pan, they were brilliant, especially the ones near the back. Stuff was growing all over them, green and blue and yellow. Kevin dared James O’Keefe to eat one of them but he wouldn’t.
—Chicken.
—You eat one.
—Got you first.
—I’ll eat one if you eat one.
-Chicken.
I squeezed a tinfoil pack and it piled into one end and began to break through the foil. It was like in a film. Everyone wanted to look. Dermot Kelly fell off his desk and his head hit the seat. I got the bin back up to Henno’s desk before he started screaming.
The bi
n was one of those straw ones, and it was full of old sandwiches. The smell of them crept through the room and got stronger and stronger, and it was only eleven o’clock in the morning: three hours to go.
Mister O’Connell made brilliant dinners. Chips and burgers; he didn’t make them, he brought them home. All the way from town in the train, cos there was no chipper in Barrytown then.
—God love them, said my ma when my da told her about the smell of chips and vinegar that Mister O’Connell had brought with him onto the train.
He made them mash. He shovelled out the middle of the mountain till it was like a volcano and then he dropped in a big lump of butter, and covered it up. He did that to every plate. He made them rasher sandwiches. He gave them a can of Ambrosia Creamed Rice each and he let them eat it out of the can. They never got salad.
Sinbad ate nothing. All he ever ate was bread and jam. My ma tried to make him eat his dinner; she said she wouldn’t let him leave the table till he was finished. My da lost his temper and shouted at him.
—Don’t shout at him, Paddy, my ma said to my da, not to us; we weren’t supposed to hear it.
—He’s provoking me, said my da.
—You’ll only make it worse, she said, louder now.
—You have him spoiled; that’s the problem.
He stood up.
—I’m going in now to read my paper. And if that plate isn’t empty when I come back I’ll let you have what for.
Sinbad was scrunched up in his chair looking at the plate, staring at the food to go away.
My ma went after my da to talk to him more. I helped Sinbad eat his dinner. He kept dropping it out of his mouth onto the plate and the table.
He made Sinbad sit there for an hour until he was ready to inspect the plate. It was empty; in me and in the bin.
—That’s more like it, said my da.
Sinbad went to bed.
He was like that, our da. He’d be mean now and again, really mean for no reason. He wouldn’t let us watch the television and the next minute he’d be sitting on the floor beside us watching it with us, never for long though. He was always busy. He said. But he mostly sat in his chair.
I polished everything in the house on Sunday mornings before we went to mass. My ma gave me a cloth, usually part of a pair of old pyjamas. I started upstairs in their bedroom. I polished the dressing table and straightened her brushes. I wiped the top of the headrest. There was always loads of dust up there. It always left a mark on the cloth. I wiped as much of the picture of Jesus with his heart showing as I could reach. Jesus had his head tilted sideways, a bit like a kitten. The picture had my ma and da’s names and the date they got married—the twenty-fifth of July, nineteen fifty-seven - and the dates of all our birthdays, except my youngest sister that my ma was only after having. The names were written in by Father Moloney. My name was the first; Patrick Joseph. Then my sister that had died; Angela Mary. She was dead before she came out of my ma. Then Sinbad; Francis David. Then my sister; Catherine Angela. There was a place left for my new sister. Her name was Deirdre. I was the oldest; the same name as my da. There was room for six more names. I wiped the stairs, all the way down, including the rails. I cleaned all the ornaments in the drawing room. I never broke anything. There was an old music box; you turned a key at the back and it played a song. There was a picture of sailors at the front. The felt material at the back was wearing away. It was my ma’s. I didn’t do the kitchen.
Aidan and Liam’s auntie, the one that lived in Raheny, she cleaned their house. Sometimes they stayed with her. She had three children but they were much older than Aidan and Liam. Her husband cut the grass for the Corporation. He did the verges on our road twice a year. He had a huge red nose like a sponge with little lumps growing all over it. Liam said it looked even better close up.
—Do you remember your ma? I asked him.
—Yeah.
—What?
He said nothing. He just breathed.
His auntie was nice. She walked from side to side. She said God the cold or God the heat, depending on what the weather was like. When she walked across the kitchen she went Tea tea tea tea tea. When she heard the Angelus at six o’clock she’d go into the television and all the way she’d be saying The News the News the News the News. She had big veins like roots curling up the side and the back of her legs. She made biscuits, huge big slabs; they were gorgeous, even when they were stale.
They had another auntie that wasn’t really their auntie. That was what Kevin told us anyway; he heard his ma and da talking about it. She was Mister O’Connell’s girlfriend, although she wasn’t a girl at all; she’d been a woman for ages. Her name was Margaret and Aidan liked her and Liam didn’t. She always gave them a packet of Clarnico Iced Caramels when she came to the house and she made sure that the white and pink ones were divided evenly between them, even though they tasted the same. She made stew and apple crumble. Liam said she farted once when he was sitting beside her, during The Fugitive.
—Ladies can’t fart.
—They can so.
—No, they can’t; prove it.
—My granny always farts, said Ian McEvoy.
—Old ones can; not young ones.
—Margaret’s old, said Liam.
—Beans beans good for the heart! The more you eat the more you fart!
She fell asleep once in their house. Liam thought she was falling against him - they were watching the television - but she was only leaning. She snored. Mister O’Connell held her nose and she snorted and stopped.
During the holidays, after Christmas Day, Liam and Aidan went to Raheny to their real auntie’s and we didn’t see them for ages. It was because Margaret had moved into the house with Mister O’Connell. They had an empty bedroom in their house. Their house was the exact same shape as ours; Liam and Aidan had the same bedroom and they’d no sisters so there was one room left over. She was in that one.
—No, she isn’t, said Kevin.
Liam and Aidan’s auntie, the real one, had taken them away. She’d gone to their house in the middle of the night. She had a letter from the Guards saying that she could take them, because Margaret was staying in the house and she shouldn’t have been. That was what we all heard. I made up a bit; she’d put Liam and Aidan into the back of their uncle’s Corporation lorry. It was great hearing that after I’d thought it up. I believed the rest of it though.
Their uncle had given us a go on the back of the lorry once. But he made us get off because we kept standing up and he said it was dangerous and he wasn’t insured if one of us fell off and smacked our heads off the road.
We walked to Raheny. It took a long time because there was no one looking after the E.S.B. pylon depot so we climbed in and had a mess. There were all pyramids of poles in there, for the wires, and a smell of tar. We tried to break the lock of the shed but we couldn’t. We didn’t really want to break it; we were just pretending we did, me and Kevin. We were going to Liam and Aidan’s auntie’s.
We got there. She lived in one of the cottages near the police station.
—Are Liam and Aidan coming out? I asked.
She’d answered the door.
—They’re out already, she said.—So they are. Down at the pond. They’re breaking the ice for the ducks.
We went up to St Anne’s. They weren’t at the pond. They were up in a tree. Liam was way up it, up where the wood was bendy; he was shaking it like mad. Aidan couldn’t get up as far as him.
—Hey! said Kevin.
Liam kept swinging the tree.
—Hey!
Liam stopped.
They didn’t come down. We didn’t go up.
—Why are you living with your auntie and not your da? Kevin said.
They said nothing.
—Why are yeh?
We left, across the gaelic pitch. I turned. I could hardly see them in the tree. They were waiting for us not to be there. I looked for stones. There weren’t any.
—We know why!
>
I said it as well.
—We know why!
—Brendan Brendan look at me! I have got a hairy gee!
Mister O’Connell’s name was Brendan.
—Brendan Brendan look at me! I have got a hairy gee!
—Mind you, I heard my da saying to my ma,—when was the last time we heard him howling at the moon?
Margaret was coming up from the shops. We were waiting, behind Kevin’s hedge. We heard her steps; we could see the colour of her coat, bits of it through the hedge.
—Brendan Brendan look at me! I have got a hairy gee! Brendan Brendan look at me! I have got a hairy gee!
I wanted a drink of water. I didn’t want it from the bathroom. I wanted it from the kitchen. It was dark on the landing after the night-light in the bedroom. I felt for the stairs.
I was down three steps before I heard them. People were talking, kind of shouting. I stopped. It was cold.
In the kitchen, that was where they were. Burglars. I’d get my da. He was in bed.
But the television was on.
I sat down for a bit. It was cold.
The television was on; that meant my ma and da weren’t in bed. They were still downstairs. It wasn’t burglars in the kitchen.
The kitchen door wasn’t closed; the light from there was cutting across the stairs just below me. I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
—Stop.
I only whispered it.
For a while I thought it was only Da, shouting in the way people did when they were trying not to, but sometimes forgot; a bit like screamed whispers.
My teeth chattered. I let them. I liked it when they did that.
But Ma was shouting as well. I could feel Da’s voice but I could only hear hers. They were having another of their fights.
—What about you!?
She said that, the only thing I could hear properly.
I did it again.
—Stop.
There was a gap. It had worked; I’d forced them to stop. Da came out and went in to the television. I knew the weight of his steps and the time between them, then I saw him.