by Roddy Doyle
—The keys.
—I don’t have them. I—
—For Christ’s sake! She slammed the gate. She grabbed it so she could slam it. When I’d opened the door she’d said,—Your mother.
I’d thought I was in for it. I’d been framed. She’d seen me buying something and she thought I was robbing it. The way I’d picked it up, it had looked like I was going to rob it.
I never robbed from that shop.
You only went to jail if you robbed more than ten shillings worth of stuff, at one time. People my age and Kevin’s didn’t go to jail when they were caught. They were sent to a home. You went to Artane if you were caught twice. They shaved your head there.
We had to stop running through the pipe; it was too far. It had gone up past my house, out of Barrytown. We took over the manholes. They stuck out of the ground, like small buildings. They’d become level with the ground when they were surrounded by cement; they’d become just parts of the path. We got Aidan and shoved him down the hole. He had to stay down there on the platform and we lobbed muck in. He could hide because the platform down there was much wider than the hole. If we lobbed the muck low it went through the hole at an angle and hit the platform walls and maybe Aidan. We surrounded him. If it had been me I’d have got down to the pipe and charged down to the next hole and climbed out before the others found out what I was doing. And I’d have pelted them and have used stones as well. Aidan was crying. We looked at Liam because he was his brother. Liam kept throwing the muck into the hole so, so did we.
The new road was straight now, all the way. The edges of Donnelly’s fields were chopped off and you could see all the farm because the hedges were gone; it was like Catherine’s dolls’ house with the door opened. You could see all the being-built houses on the other side of the fields. The farm was being surrounded. The cows were gone, to the new farm. Big lorries took them. The smell was a laugh. One of the cows skidded on the ramp getting up into the lorry. Donnelly hit it with his stick. Uncle Eddie was behind him. He had a stick as well. He hit the cow when Donnelly did. We could see the cows all packed in the lorries, trying to get their noses out between the bars.
Uncle Eddie went in one of the lorries beside the driver. He had his elbow sticking out the window. We waved at him, and cheered when the lorry full of cows went through the knocked-down gates of the farmhouse and turned left onto the new road. It was like Uncle Eddie was going away.
I saw him later, running down to the shops before they shut to get the Evening Press for Donnelly.
The old railway bridge wasn’t big enough any more for the road to get under it. They built a new one, made of huge slabs of concrete, right beside the old one. The road dipped down under the bridge so that big traffic, lorries and buses, could get under it. They cut away the land beside the road so the road could go further down. More concrete slabs stopped the cut-away land from falling onto the road. They said that two men were killed doing this work but we never saw anything. They were killed when some of Donnelly’s field fell on them, after it had been raining and the ground was loose and soggy. They drowned in muck.
I had a dream sometimes that made me wake up. I was eating something. It was dry and gritty and I couldn’t get it wet. It hurt my teeth; I couldn’t close my mouth and I wanted to shout for help and I couldn’t. And I woke up and my mouth was all dry, from being open. I wondered had I been shouting; I hoped I hadn’t but I wanted my ma to come in and ask me was I alright and sit on the bed.
They didn’t blow up the old bridge. We thought they’d have to, but they didn’t.
—If they blew it up they’d blow up the new one as well, said Liam.
—No, they wouldn’t; that’s stupid.
—They would so.
—How would they?
—The explosion.
—They have different explosions for different things, Ian McEvoy told him.
—How do you know, Fatso?
That was Kevin. Ian McEvoy wasn’t all that fat. He just had little diddies, like a woman’s. He never swam now, after we’d seen him.
—I just do, said Ian McEvoy.—They’re able to control the explosion.
We weren’t interested any more.
The old bridge was gone. They just knocked it down; took away the rocks and rubble in lorries. I missed it. It had been a great place for hiding under and shouting. It only fitted one car at a time. Da kept his hand on the horn right through it. The new bridge whistled when it was windy, but that was all.
He let us look in the window, but no further. Only a few got into the house. He pushed the couch away from the window so we could see it properly, his Scalextric. Alan Baxter was the only one in Barrytown that had it. He was a Protestant, a proddy, and he was older than us. He was the same age as Kevin’s brother. He went to secondary school and he played cricket; he had a real bat and the yokes for your legs. When they played rounders, the bigger boys, behind the shops, when he played he kept taking his jumper off and putting it back on again but he wasn’t any better of a player than the others. When he was fielding he put his hands on his knees and bent forward. He was a sap. But he had Scalextric.
It wasn’t as good as the ads, a track the same shape as a train-set track - two tracks joined together like an eight - and the cars never went too far without jamming. But it was brilliant. The controls looked great and easy. The blue car was much better than the red one. Terence Long had the red one; Alan Baxter had the blue. Our breathing and hand-prints were messing up the window. Terence Long—he was six foot one and still only fourteen—kept having to straighten up the red car; when it started a corner it got stuck. A few times it beat the corner and kept going. But the blue one was way ahead. Kevin’s brother picked up the red one and looked under it but Alan Baxter made him put it back. They were the only ones in the living room, Alan Baxter, Terence Long and Kevin’s brother. The rest of us - we were all much younger - had to watch outside. The worst was when it was dark. It really felt outside then. Kevin got in once, because of his brother. But I didn’t. I was the oldest in my family; I had nobody to get me through the door. They didn’t let Kevin do anything. They just let him watch.
Kevin’s brother got into big trouble once. His name was Martin. He was five years older than us and what he did was, he went to the toilet down a bit of hosepipe through Missis Kilmartin’s car window and he got caught because Terence Long blabbed to his ma because he’d been the one holding the hose and he was afraid he’d get blamed for going to the toilet as well. Terence Long’s ma told Kevin and Martin’s ma.
—Terence Long Terence Long - Has a mickey three foot long -
He tried to get Kevin’s brother and them to call him Terry or Ter but everybody still called him Terence, especially his ma.
—Terence Long Terence Long—
Wears no socks—
What a pong—
He wore sandals in the summer, big ones like priests’, and no socks. Kevin’s da killed Martin and he made him wash Missis Kilmartin’s car seat with everyone watching. He was crying. Missis Kilmartin didn’t come out. She sent Eric out with the car keys. He was her son and he was mental.
Martin smoked and he was leaving school after the Inter. He drank Coca-Cola with aspirins in it and got sick. He mitched all the time, all day down at the seafront even in the winter. He was an altar boy. But he got thrown out for painting white stripes on his black runners. He got Sinbad - him and Terence Long and even Alan Baxter - and they painted the other lens of his glasses black. They made him walk home wearing the glasses, right up to our house, with a stick they’d painted white. Ma did nothing about it; she sang to Sinbad while he was crying -
—I TOLD MY BROTHER SEAMUS
I’D GO OFF AND BE RIGHT FAMOUS -
—and when he was finished she went into the garage and got a bottle of spirits and started to clean his lens and she showed him how to do it. I said I’d help him but he wouldn’t let me. Da laughed; he was home late and Sinbad was in bed, but I wasn’t. He
laughed. So did I. He said that Sinbad would be doing things like that when he was Kevin’s brother’s age. Then he got annoyed because the plate covering the plate that his dinner was on was stuck because the gravy had hardened to it in the cooker. Ma sent me to bed.
Martin wore longers in the summer. He always had his hands in his pockets. He had a comb. I thought he was brilliant. Kevin did too but he hated him as well.
He got Missis Kilmartin back. He gave Eric Kilmartin a box in the face and Eric couldn’t tell who’d done it cos he couldn’t talk properly; he could only make noises.
Martin and them built huts. We did too, from the stuff we got off the building sites - it was one of the first things we did when the summer was coming—but theirs were better, miles better than our ones. There was a field behind the newest of our type of houses - not the one behind the shops —and that was where most of the huts got built. It was full of hills like dunes, only made of muck instead of sand. It used to be part of a farm but that was years before. The wreck of the farmhouse was at the edge of the field. The walls weren’t bricks; they were made of light brown mud full of gravel and bigger stones. They were dead easy to demolish. I found a piece of cup in the nettles against the wall. I took it home and I washed it. I showed it to my da and he said it was probably worth a fortune but he wouldn’t buy it off me. He told me to put it in a safe place. It had flowers on it, two full ones and a half one. I lost it.
This field looked like they had started to get it ready for building on but they’d stopped. There was a wide trench, wider than a lane, down the middle and other trenches grown over. Some of the fields hadn’t been touched. Da said that the building had been stopped because they’d had to wait till the mains pipes were down and finished, with water in them.
I ran through the untouched part of the field - for no reason, just running - and the grass was great, up to way over my knees. I had to lift my legs out of it, like in water. It was the type of grass that could cut you sometimes. It had tops like wheat. I brought loads of it home to my ma once but she said you couldn’t make bread out of it. I said she could but she said you couldn‘t, you just couldn’t, it was a pity. My feet made swoosh noises going through the grass and then there was another noise, one in front of me. And the grass moved. I stopped, and a long bird flew out of the grass. And stayed low, flew out in front of me. I could feel its wings beating. It was a pheasant. I turned back.
Kevin’s brother built his huts in the hills. They dug long holes; they got lends of their das’ spades. Terence Long had his own one; he got it for his birthday. They divided the hole into segments, rooms. They covered the hole with planks. They sometimes got hay out of Donnelly’s barn. That was the basement.
When I came out of a hut my hair was full of clay and muck. I could make my hair stand up.
The rest of the hut was made of mostly sods. Wherever you went in Barrytown you found places where sods had been cut out, even in front gardens; patches of bare earth, all straight lined. Kevin’s brother was able to get the spade through the grass into the earth with no effort. I loved the watery crunch of the blade going through the mesh of roots. Terence Long stood up on the spade and rocked, and got down and moved the spade and did it again. They piled the sods like thin bricks and pushed them down. They became a solid wall but they could be pushed over easily. But if you did that you got killed; Kevin’s brother always found out who’d done it. There were more walls inside the main walls, rooms again, planks on top, and a plastic sheet and more sods for the roof. From not too far away the hut was like a square hillock. It didn’t look built, not until you were up to it.
Worms came out of the sods.
We made booby traps all around our hut. We buried open paint cans and hid them with grass. If your foot went through the grass into the can usually nothing happened except you fell over. But if you were running your leg could be broken. It was easy to imagine. We buried one with the paint still in it but no one stood in it. We got a milk bottle and broke it. We put the biggest bits of glass standing up in a can right in front of the hut door.
—What if one of us puts our foot in it?
The traps were supposed to be for the enemy.
—We won’t, said Kevin.—We know where it is, stupid.
—Liam doesn’t.
Liam was at his auntie’s.
—Liam’s not in our gang.
I hadn’t known that - Liam had been playing with us the day before - but I didn’t say anything.
We sharpened sticks and stuck them in the ground pointing out towards where the enemy would be sneaking up from. We kept the sticks low. If the enemy was creeping along he’d get a pointy stick in the face.
Ian McEvoy ran into a trip wire and he had to go to hospital for stitches.
—His foot was hanging off him.
It was real wire, not string like we usually used. We didn’t know who’d set it up. It was tied between two trees in the field behind the shops. There was no hut near it. We didn’t build huts in that field; it was too flat. They’d been playing relievio, Ian McEvoy and them, in front of the shops and when Kilmartin’s hall door opened Ian McEvoy had thought that it was Missis Kilmartin going to yell at them to go away and he’d run into the field and the trip wire. The wire was a mystery.
—Fellas from the Corpo houses did it.
There were six new families living in the first row of finished Corporation houses. Their gardens were full of hardened half-bags of cement and smashed bricks. Some of the children were the same age as us but that didn’t mean that they could hang around with us.
—Slum scum.
My ma hit me when I said that. She never hit me usually but she did then. She smacked behind my head.
—Never say that again.
—I didn’t make it up, I told her.
—Just never say it again, she said.—It’s a terrible thing to say.
I didn’t even know what it really meant. I knew that the slums were in town.
The road with the six Corporation houses wasn’t joined to any other road. It ended just before the first house. There was a turn-off for the new road off our road, just past the beginning of Donnelly’s first field, but it only went in a few feet, then stopped. Our pitch was on the bit of field between the two roads. We only had one goal. We used jumpers at the other end for the other goal. We usually played three-and-in. You only needed one goal. It was easy to score, especially on the left side cos there was a hill there and you could get the ball way over the keeper’s head, but it was always crowded. There were no teams in three-and-in; it was every man for himself. Twenty players meant twenty teams. Sometimes there were more than twenty players. There were only ever three or four of us really playing, trying to score goals. The rest, mostly little kids smaller than Sinbad, just ran around after the ball but never tried to get it; they just followed it, laughing, especially when they all had to turn back the way they’d come. Elbowing and pushing kids out of the way was allowed. When I had the ball I’d go so there were some kids between me and the nearest real player, Kevin or Liam or Ian McEvoy or one of them. The kids would run beside me, so no one could get at me, like in a film I saw where John Wayne got away from the baddies by riding in the middle of a stampede, low down, hanging on to the side of his horse. Then when he was safe he hooshed himself back up properly into the saddle and looked back to where he’d just come from and grinned and rode on. The only thing about three-and-in, the only bad thing, was that when you won, when you’d scored three goals, you had to go in goal. I was a better player than Kevin but I stopped trying after two goals. I hated being in goal. Aidan was the best player, way easily - he was a brilliant dribbler - but he was still picked last or second-last when we were playing five-a-side; no one wanted him. He was the only one who played for a real club, Raheny Under Elevens, even though he wasn’t even nine.
—Your uncle’s the manager.
—He isn’t, said Liam.
—What is he?
—He isn’t anythi
ng. He just watches.
Aidan had a blue jersey with a real number, a stitched one, on it; number II.
—I’m a winger, he said.
—So what?
It was a real heavy jersey, a real jersey. He didn’t tuck it in. You couldn’t see his nicks.
He was good in goal as well.
Five-a-side games never finished. The team playing into the jumper goal end were always winning.
—Charlton to Best—Great goal!
—It wasn’t a goal! It went over the jumper, it hit the bar.
—It hit the inside of the jumper.
—Yeah; in-off.
—No way.
—Yeah way.
—I’m not playing then.
—Good.
Sometimes we played when we were eating our lunch. I’d scored two goals already. I hit an easy shot for Ian McEvoy to save. He put his sandwich down on the jumper and the ball bounced past him. I’d scored; I’d won. I was in goal now.
—You did that on purpose.
I pushed Ian McEvoy.
—I did not, you.
He pushed me back.
—You just wanted to get out of goal.
I didn’t push him this time. I was thinking of kicking him.
—He should stay in goal for that, I said.
—No way.
—You have to try and save them.
—I’ll go in.
It was one of the boys from the Corporation houses. He was standing behind the jumpers goal.
—I’ll go in, I said.
He was younger than me, and smaller. Safe smaller; he’d never be able to kill me, even if he was a brilliant fighter.
I pushed him away from the goal.
—This is our field, I said.
I’d pushed him hard. He was by himself. He was surprised. He nearly fell over. He slid on the wet grass.