Surge

by Frank McGuinness

  It’s getting late in the day, and we are waiting for Nog to come out of the toilet so’s we can get the show on the road. JJ and myself have found old wellies, and now we’re like navvies waiting for a pick, the tops of our boots turned down, like Nog. JJ, in his suit, looks like a construction boss and is getting on to Nog again. He shouts in at him. ‘Well, for feck’s sake. How much can a man piss?’

  ‘Will you hould your donkey out there. I was out of paper.’

  ‘And what did you use. Ya dirty—’

  ‘I’ve a stack of old Musical Expressos that I’m workin through …’

  ‘Ya feck, they’re mine.’

  Nog is out now, beaming.

  ‘Will ya feck off. I’ve other bog rolls, just couldn’t put my hands on em, and, when I did … let’s say they were damp. But I didn’t use your feckin old NMEs, haven’t a notion where they are.’

  ‘And you used damp bog roll?’

  ‘Yeh?’

  ‘You’re a feckin animal. What are yeh?’

  Nog is giddy now, laughing, and he grabs JJ into a headlock. JJ is scuffling about, banging Nog’s legs with a fist, laughing even louder. They bang on into the food safe, and the crib starts to rock. I grab at it and stop it falling. A shepherd tumbles out onto the stone floor and loses its head. The tiny sound of plaster snapping stills the commotion.

  ‘Ah, for feck’s sake, men.’

  Nog lets JJ out, and then his big black head pushes past me. He is looking into the crib, all concerned. His massive hands reach in, gently lifting the baby and taking an Old Holborn tin from under the straw. He leaves the baby back down and carries the tin, cupped in his hands, slowly to the table. His eyes, all soft, are on the tin, as he brings it into the last of the sunbeams from the back window. Rust marks streak the orange and white cover and the brassy box of the tin. He sets it down gently. It looks at home there on the faded pattern of the creamy oilcloth, among the egg stains and breadcrumbs. JJ has straightened himself and come around to look. We all lean in over the little tin. Nothing needs to be said. We’ve each of us perfected our silent prayer over the long years.

  Outside, the ground is saturated, but the air is crisp and the blue of the sky is paling; shortly, it will deepen into sunset. We leave the yard and fall into single file for the march up the hill to the graveyard. Nog leads, JJ in the middle with his sax case and me bringing up the rear. There are only a few houses on either side in the half mile up. It being Christmas Day, each is its own oasis of warmth and peace. This is the day when everyone is in. Even from the road you can feel the ease that has entered these simple cottages. Coloured lights sparkle: inside on trees and outside on eaves and walls and trees again. There is a glow from the TVs.

  There was never a television brought into our house, but we always had the best of fare at Christmas. Mama saw to that: good food, drink, when we were old enough, and reading and talk. Debate was what she lived for. Rights and wrongs. Ins and outs. So, no matter that our schooling ended early (only I finished secondary), we all three had gone into the world wisened up because of Mama. No doubt that each of us is thinking something like that as we go on up.

  ‘They’ll all be lookin at the three of us now. Pass no heed.’

  Nog is not meaning to be unfriendly; he is just minding our attempt at being, well, solemn. Yeh. I imagine there are signals of goodwill towards us from most of the families as we pass. Jim Sullivan is shaking his stick, like an irate priest, but it turns out he is only pointing out the black cow that has settled in his road field. Nog acknowledges this, and we keep on.

  ‘We’ll take her with us on the way down. She’s very close to droppin it. We’ll have another birthday.’

  The graveyard is down a short lane between two fields. It is set out beside the ruin of an old church, on a slope that looks into the valley. The hill behind affords some protection from the worst weather. This would have been the original settlement in these parts. Down below is a sort of scribbled landscape of wet fields, stone walls and briary ditches with a rise up the far side to the south, and, sure, eventually, if you keep going for thirty miles, there’d be the sea. We walk in through wild grasses studded with grey headstones. Over near a low wall of hairy stones there is a patch that looks like it has seen a scythe or a billhook.

  ‘I came up last week and cleaned it up a tad. There should be an old spade there in along the wall.’

  Making myself useful, I go over and find it, a cold, damp inanimate thing. I look to Nog, and he is gesturing towards two rocks that form a crevice.

  ‘If we make a bit of a hole there it should do the trick. What do ye think?’

  JJ shrugs his frame.

  ‘That looks like the job.’

  I start to root out some weeds and chop into a few sods to create a place. When I start digging brown soil, I get a weird feeling that I am disturbing something different. It’s the way the clay is crumbly and dry, despite all the rain.

  ‘She’s a well drained site here. That’s the way they picked em.’

  Nog takes out the tin and is wrapping it in a plastic bag he has brought. JJ is unpacking his sax case and taking out a little tin too. Feck. He hands it to Nog.

  ‘Here, put these in too. I’m not great any more for the comfort and … well, you know …’

  I stop digging and lean the spade against the stone wall. I reach into my coat pocket and draw out my own little tin. I offer it to Nog. ‘Like I said, set the alarm off at security … better …’

  Now we are operating in silence again as Nog is wrapping the three tins together. His head is down, but I can tell he is in difficulty. We all are. I carry on and finish the spadework while JJ clips the sax around his neck. This is it so. The hole is a foot down and neat in against the rocks. Nog looks at us as much to say, who’s going to do this. JJ and I gesture to him to get on with it. He kneels down and carefully places the package into the ground. He takes clay between his fingers and sprinkles it down and then stands up with a sigh, or a sob. We copy the business with the clay and then we all stand tight together, heads bowed, and quiet. Once again, nothing needs to be said. Like I said, we’ve each of us our own prayer.

  The evening sun is now sitting down beyond the hill. JJ’s sax is a tin-opener on the silence. He is playing the opening bars of the dance tune ‘The Hucklebuck’. Mama’s favourite. Maybe that’s why the father fucked off. The notes swell and fly out from the hillside. Back in the stillness, we shuffle into our own private places. Like three ancient birds, we perch for an age, our feathers tucked in and each possessed of a withered stare.

  On the way down, we carefully drive the black cow and see her into the outhouse with the straw bed. We have a meal of corned beef and potatoes and open a bottle of whiskey. I bring out a tube of wasabi paste which I have brought over. JJ grabs it and throws it over to Nog when I try to get it back. They toss it between them, with me as pig in the middle, and it is a bit of gas until Nog tosses it in the fire. That stops the play. There is a long silence in which I try not to sulk. Nog finds a way to apologise. After that the talk is light, like, I suppose, we’ve almost done enough being brothers … sons … for one day. Maybe we are relieved and can start to let our years catch up. JJ glues the head back on the shepherd and spends a while staring into the crib. I sit on the crate over by the fire and start to doze. Nog is at the table with his book.

  JJ is first to speak. ‘So that’s that so. I don’t think I’ll come next year. It’s done. Put me on the headstone.’

  ‘Me too. It’s a fair old trek from over the water. And, as you say, it’s done.’

  Nog closes over his book, and he looks from one of us to the other.

  ‘Did you pair talk about bringin your, you know, tins, together so?’

  JJ and myself had not. JJ is looking over at me.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’ve brought mine over with me every year.’

  ‘Me too. Mama – the tin – has always been in my sax case.’

  Nog is open-mouth
ed. ‘Well, what the … feckin brillant … what was all that about?’

  Indeed, no one had ever said. I’d no idea JJ had done that. All minds working, but not together. Nog is up between us and looking agitated.

  JJ again. ‘As far as I was concerned it was your move. You had the home ashes somewhere. Not that either of us had any idea where you had them … till today, that is. It was always up to you to make the move. I was happy enough to wait. I was always bringing Mama home.’

  ‘Same as that. Sure we all knew they’d have to go together, sometime, when we were ready. When you were ready.’

  ‘Well, ye pair of feckers, and I was holdin out, I dunno, until today when … ah, feck it, I thought ye’d both lost yours, used them, whatever the feck. I wasn’t about to give mine up, but they were startin to freak me out.’

  And so it went, back and forward, and back again – sure, we were getting it all off our chests – until the cow called us out to welcome the new boy.

  Undocumented

  Mary Morrissy

  When the invitation to his brother Brian’s surprise fiftieth birthday party arrived, Shay was on the afternoon shift in the Maid of Erin on Bergen Street. Once an Irish pub with a definite sense of itself – brown interior, sawdust on the floor, evil-smelling toilets, sing-songs on a Friday night and a clientele of building-site Paddies – ‘The Maid’ had recently been made over, and, though the inside had been tarted up, the exterior remained the same. The haughty profile of Lady Lavery from the pre-decimal pound note was stencilled across the street window, although most of the current customers, new Irish and gentrified Brooklyn locals who came for the Guinness on tap and the back-room pool table, would probably not have been able to identify who she was.

  Although it was a letter from home, Shay didn’t recognise the writing because it was from Fiona, Brian’s wife. Fee was a frosty-permed control freak, who steered Brian through life with a nifty line in concealed sadism. If there was one thing Shay knew about his eldest brother – and he didn’t know much – it was that he hated surprises. But Fee had built a pyramid of them into the fiftieth celebrations: caterers, a marquee, a gathering of seventy friends from various eras of his brother’s life and, to top it all, a guest appearance by Shay.

  His first response was to throw the invite in the bin and return to work. A lone drinker – one of the old clientele – sat slumped at the bar. Shay took his irritation out on the counter, wiping it down with venom. What was Fee thinking about? He couldn’t go home on a whim; Fee should know that. Shay was undocumented, a J1 visa-holder gone rogue, illegal for twelve years. But even when he’d torn the invitation card in two and flung it in the bin, it tantalised him. Was this a way out?

  His girlfriend, Petra, had just informed him she was pregnant. She’d stopped taking the pill without telling him. He was furious. Petra was illegal too, so when she’d mentioned children before he’d always said ‘not before we get our papers’, knowing that was as unlikely as snow in June. He could see the trajectory Petra had in mind: ring on the finger, a house in the ’burbs. That was exactly what Shay wanted to avoid; he’d seen his brothers fall into that trap early – too early. Brian and Dec had gone into the family business, Starling and Sons, the hardware store his father had set up in the forties. His brothers had added two more shops to the original.

  ‘We’re expanding the empire!’ Brian had said to him, making it sound like the Crusades. ‘And you can be part of it.’

  A life trading in nuts and bolts, mixing paint and cutting keys; Shay knew he couldn’t stand it, and he wouldn’t be strong enough to hold out against it. That was why he’d stayed on in New York in August ’95, instead of going back for third-year business studies. He’d got as far as Departures at JFK when it came to him, his future all laid out. The family business, keeping the books for Starling and Sons and, in time, marriage, kids and the whole bit. If he was going to bail out, now was the time. So he walked out of the terminal, not even bothering to tell his college mates, and got on the subway back to the city. He felt a surge of power retracing his steps; he was in a place where no one could reach him.

  Within weeks he’d found a job serving behind the bar at the Maid, and here he was, twelve years on, a manager. He and Petra had got together at a millennium party in Queens, and their relationship had developed in a lazy, unplanned sort of way. She’d moved in because it was cheaper for her, and it meant a cleaner apartment for him. What made it hazardous – and almost like it wasn’t really happening – was that it was New York, and he was illegal. It could all disappear overnight in a puff of smoke, so it was a life without consequences. He hadn’t counted on Petra ruining it.

  ‘I not put life on hold,’ she had declared when she announced she was pregnant, ‘just for the papers.’ After all these years, Petra had an aversion to verbs, particularly the verb ‘to be’. All her conversations had a ‘you Tarzan, me Jane’ quality.

  ‘Well, you can have it on your own,’ he’d snapped at her.

  Petra’s lower lip wobbled. ‘From where you coming?’

  ‘I won’t have a gun put to my head,’ he said.

  ‘Too late to get rid of it,’ she said, stroking the little bump he’d foolishly thought was a charming mid-thirties roundness to her stick-thin figure.

  Well, two could play at that game. If he went home for his brother’s birthday, that would be it; he couldn’t get back. That’d show her! He felt the fiery excitement of an impulse decision. He phoned Fee and said, ‘I’ll be there!’

  The first surprise was at the airport. His middle brother, Dec, came to meet him and had a new woman in tow. She was a real looker – long chestnut hair with a fringe that grazed her eyebrows and a gorgeous figure – supple, sexy – sheathed in a leopard-print blouse and a black spandex miniskirt.

  ‘This is Colette,’ Dec said bashfully. ‘Meet the baby brother.’

  ‘Hi Shay! Heard a lot about you!’ She held out a hand with cherry-red nails.

  ‘And I’ve heard nothing about you,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dec said proudly.

  When Shay had left home, Dec had been married miserably to his childhood sweetheart, Marian. Their mother had died when he was five so Marian was the closest thing to maternal he knew. She’d practically lived with them in the flat over the shop, keeping an eye on all-comers in case Dec might stray. Which was never going to happen. Dec was big, lumbering, soft-hearted and loyal as a kicked dog.

  Five years ago, Marian had left Dec. There’d been no children; maybe that had been the problem, though Dec said simply that Marian had gone to ‘find herself’. He had come to visit Shay in Brooklyn after the break-up. He got sozzled in the Maid every night, and after Shay closed up he’d pour Dec into bed with promises that there were more fish in the sea. He didn’t believe it, though. Who else would have Dec, a forty-two-year-old bloke who smelled of timber and turps, who went to work in a mustard housecoat with the stub of a pencil behind his ear? But Shay had been wrong. This rockabilly chick Colette had nabbed Dec. She sat in the front of the car as they drove away from the airport, swatting her lovely mane over her shoulder and stroking the back of Dec’s bludgeoned-looking neck. She couldn’t be more than thirty, Shay guessed. Sitting in the back seat, he found himself watching her surreptitiously and thinking … what the fuck!

  ‘So, how did you two meet?’

  ‘The shop,’ Colette said. ‘I came in for thumbtacks and nailed this fella instead.’ She smiled indulgently and chucked Dec’s cheek. ‘No more bad boys for me!’

  *

  The party was not till the next day, so Shay stayed at Dec’s, a three-bed semi he’d shared with Marian. It had a large back garden where the marquee was already being put up. The caterers were arriving with crates of glasses and collapsible furniture. Shay fell into a drugged, jet-lagged slumber in the boxroom. When he awoke in the late afternoon, he hadn’t a clue where he was and had to whip back the curtains to ground himself once more – the white-and-blue-striped marquee was
now fully erected, and the lovely low golden sun of a suburban summer’s evening in Dublin brought him back to himself. He was home.

  The next day was all hubbub at Dec’s house. Brian’s twins, Claire and Amy, arrived to hang bunting and tinsel and, he suspected, to check out their Uncle Shay.

  ‘Dad’ll be stoked that you’re here,’ one of them said.

  Shay still couldn’t tell them apart. When he’d left, they’d been blonde, pigtailed kids just starting school. Now they were blonde pouty adults, Claire studying medicine in Trinity, Amy ‘doing fashion’, as she told Shay. They had inherited Brian’s looks, grey-eyed, rangy.

  ‘So what’s New York like?’ Amy asked.

  ‘I manage a bar in Brooklyn,’ he told her.

  ‘Cool,’ she said, without inflection.

  Later, Fee came to supervise the caterers. She brought a stack of large presents for Brian, wrapped in garish paper. She arranged them in a shrine in the living-room picture window. She seemed barely to notice Shay.