by Donal Ryan
She knows Australian accents well. That’s how she was able easily to rule out the therapist being from there, even before she asked him. Several times she had visits from grandchildren. Backpacking, they said they were. Around the world. She didn’t know how it was done. One lad came a couple of years ago and he stayed a fortnight or so, a fine tall lad, and he went off down the town one night and didn’t come home until the sun was up and when he did she was asleep in the kitchen chair waiting for him, because she’d been terrified something had happened to him, and she read him the Riot Act there in the kitchen and he’d said, Chill out, Gran, chill out, and still for all his smartness he’d looked sheepish and he’d told her he was sorry, he hadn’t realized she’d be so worried, and he said he’d walked a sheila home who lived out in the boondocks; that was his way of saying out in the countryside and she’d had to stop herself laughing at the sound of it, the way he wouldn’t know she wasn’t really as cross as she made out, only so relieved to see him, and he’d gotten kind of lost on his way back, and she’d said, Lord bless us, Sheila who? And he’d laughed at her and she’d laughed at herself, and they were very pally after that once he’d explained himself a bit and promised not to be gallivanting down around the town until all hours. He’d shown her his computer thing, a tablet he called it, and a thing you could press on to go into pictures of people, and he showed her all sorts of people and children and babies and they were all relations of her but she couldn’t hold them in a line in her head in a million years, and he came to a photograph of a big round man with a baldy head and bright-coloured shorts standing holding a fish out beside him that was nearly the length of himself, and he’d said Grandad caught that in the Worra Worra or somewhere with a funny name like that, a river she presumed, and she’d gotten a terrible shock at the realization that the old man in the picture was her son and that this tall boy who was a half a step or less from manhood wasn’t her grandchild at all but her great-grandchild.
The same lad sent her a package the next Christmas. There was a box in it with an apple on the front of it with a bite taken out of it. There was a machine in the box the very same as the one he’d shown her all the pictures on. There was a card with a kitten on the front of it in a Santy hat and inside was written, Stay in touch, G-Gran, love you, Mark. And she’d puzzled at the extra G for ages before she’d arrived at the answer: Great-Gran. And she’d laughed, and she remembered his voice well, deep but not long broken, and she could hear her saying it in her mind, and she’d held the card to her lips and to her chest for a minute and her eyes were filled with tears and she was surprised at herself, to be getting so foolish over a boy she hardly knew, who’d breezed in hardly announced and eaten her out of house and home and breezed back out a fortnight later, and whom she’d never see again. Her next-door neighbour helped her set it up. He said she could hop on his broadband: he had a booster, he’d give her the key. It’d cost him nothing because his wife eye was paid for by his work and he had unlimited download. She knew what none of that meant or where his wife’s eye came into it and why his work should be paying for it; maybe she was having an operation on her eye, but she seemed very young for cataracts, but all his kind, confusing talk amounted to her being able to go onto the internet and he showed her what to press on and what to type in to see the pictures of her son Maurice and his Australian wife and their children and grandchildren, and they all had their own separate places, pages, the neighbour called them, with all their own photos and bits and pieces of writing, and jokes, and some of the jokes were very funny and some of them were very rude but funny still, and some days whole hours passed, and whole mornings and afternoons, and she’d suddenly realize the day was gone and she hadn’t a hand’s turn done and she was stiff from her toes to her elbows from sitting looking at the screen and her eyes were sore from the brightness of it.
The African lad is standing now and he has a hand lightly on her arm and he’s telling her they’ll move across to the bed and she can lie down while he does her leg, and he helps her up and across from the chair, though she knows she’d be perfectly capable of making it across on her own, but his hand is firm and gentle on her arm and his voice is low and soothing and he seems to make no sharp sounds, to have no way about him that isn’t gentle, and the bed is a narrow mattress with a gleaming white sheet tight across it and no yield in it, and she closes her eyes while he rubs and softly kneads at her muscles, and teases the stiffness out from her joints, and she imagines herself reaching up and closing her hand on the collar of his shirt and pulling him down onto her and the feeling of his lips on hers, of his body on top of hers, and she laughs suddenly at the thought of it, at what he’d think of her if he knew what was in her mind, and he says, Sorry, Mrs Coyne, am I tickling you? And the way he says you is so lovely, lilted and drawn out, and there’s a funny slant to his smile and a gleam in his blue eyes and she’s certain sure for a moment that he knows, he knows exactly what has been going on inside her old head.
She used to type things into Google now and then. One day she typed in HEAVEN. She saw pictures of angels and crosses and clouds and rays of light shining down from blue skies. It was there, so. The way she’d imagined it. Another day she typed in WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE. You will return to dust, the internet said. And it said, As soon as you die, every muscle in your body relaxes. And it said plenty of other things too but she hadn’t the heart for them, all the voices, and she’d noticed people cursed at one another a lot on the internet, if you looked down into the discussions people had that were below nearly every story you read. You can send them a friend request, you know, her neighbour said. So they’ll know you’re there, your grandchildren and everyone. And you’ll be able to have conversations with them and all their pictures and stories will show up in a list automatically when you log in. Arra, that’s the last thing they’d want, she said. To know there’s an oul one watching them from half a world away. And she’d dropped the tablet on the floor one day and the screen of it had shattered and broke, and she hadn’t ever gotten it fixed. She wasn’t sure was it even still in her boxes of things that were piled neatly beside her dresser in her room at the home. Maybe she’d root it out and ask the lad of the Shanleys to take it away somewhere and get it fixed, and she’d have one last look at them all. All those strangers who had her blood in their veins.
And the South African boy is finished now and she feels so relaxed she wants just to lie there and sleep, and let him talk and talk beside her, and maybe he’d hold her hand awhile, but the orderlies are waiting at the door. And the boy is gone and one of the orderlies is wheeling her and the other one is walking beside the wheelchair and he’s carrying her walking frame, and she feels like telling them she could manage away grand on her own, if they’d only give her back her stick: she needed no walking frame and certainly needed no wheelchair to get out to the minibus; maybe they could give her a hand into it all right, the step was fairly high, but she supposes it was their policy to wheel people who were slow on their feet, for fear they’d fall and hurt themselves. Or maybe they were in a rush. People are forever rushing. Her mother used to say, I went down the boreen so fast I met myself coming back. And she always laughed at the idea of it, and she laughs now, at the memory of it, and one of the orderlies looks down at her and smiles and says, All right, love?
And there’s the boy of the Shanleys waiting and he has the bus pulled right up to the therapy-centre door and he has the two from the pool picked up already and she can hear that one of them is giving out about something like he forever was, and she resolves to give him a piece of her mind on the spin back to the home and to put him back in his box a bit, though she wouldn’t be too sour with him because you never know what sort of hardships people might have gone through in their lives, and the boy of the Shanleys is smiling at her as he reaches for her hand to help her onto the step at the side of the bus, and there was a ferocious sense of sadness off of that boy, always, and she dimly remembers something about his mother, about
something terrible happening to her before he was born, but the story is jumbled into a thousand others, and she watches him sometimes while she knits in the day room, and she feels a warm and foolish thrill when his face creases to laughter at the things she says sometimes, the few swipes and cuts she takes at the ones deaf and doting around her, and she feels like saying to him, Don’t worry, my dear, don’t be wasting your time worrying, the day is only a dream away that you’ll be sitting here where I am looking over at a boy like you and wondering how are you all of a sudden so old, where did all the years go, and he reminds her of her own son, how he was always worried about something, how he was never settled or easy in himself, how he and his father could never get on but were forever flinting and sparking off of each other and threatening to ignite and combust, and how Maurice had gone to Australia in a fit of crossness, and how his father had waited and waited for him to come back, and his heart solid broken, and he never had.
And she says to Lampy Shanley now, Have we to go to Milford or are we going straight home? And the boy of the Shanleys looks puzzled at her and says, Why would we go to Milford? And she says, Weren’t you to drop the man in the wheelchair at Milford? The man that was in the very back of the other bus? You’ll surely to God be collecting him? And she sees the blood drain from the boy’s face, and she sees his hands go the sides of his head, and she hears him say, Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ.
And Lampy Shanley’s grandfather is sitting in his shed with his Dimplex going full wallop against the marching cold, sucking his fag to the burned lip, resting his eye on the curve of a page-three girl. And his mother is sitting at her kitchen table with her right hand resting gently on the top of the left hand of her friend Farouk, and Farouk’s eyes are cast downwards as he speaks, and he’s telling her a story of a girl, who was captured by a king, who locked her in a tower. And Lampy is holding the thin warm hand of Mrs Coyne and the freezing air is still and the steam of her words is wisping gently heavenward and she’s standing on the hydraulic step now and she’s stopped moving and she’s looking at him, and a memory is forming itself clearly in Lampy’s mind, a recent memory of words spoken, an echo forming itself back into its original shape and volume, words spoken by a squat and harried nurse, while he was dreaming about Chloe or Eleanor or whether he should have a wank before he goes out tonight, words of admonishment to James Grogan, about the risk he was taking with people’s lives, with his reputation, with all their livelihoods, letting the young boy handle patients on his own, that the man in the wheelchair needed a nurse to accompany him, that the ramp itself was tricky to get right, that the view from the front of the bus was blocked by the bulkhead, that he could choke, or, or …
And Lampy Shanley’s grandfather’s phone buzzes in his pocket against his leg, and this happens so infrequently he starts violently forward and his heart hops and stutters in his chest and he pitches his fag butt away and he fumbles his answering and he cuts the call off instead but he knows how to ring back the last number that rang, just by pressing the green button twice, and it’s the boy, he knows, because a picture of the boy comes up on the screen whenever he rings him, a picture of him togged out and holding the north minor trophy, and he’s smiling in it, and he doesn’t know how it’s done, how the boy was able to arrange it so that picture appears on the front of the telephone each time he rings him, it’s great work so it is, and sometimes he sits where he’s sitting now for long minutes just looking at the photograph, and isn’t that the height of foolishness and the boy himself in the flesh just through the back door and inside in the house somewhere? And the boy is shouting something at him now, about Con Kelleher’s yard, about going there, about hurrying to fuck, about there being a man locked into the back of the new minibus, about him not knowing he was there, a man in a wheelchair, about Mickey Briars not knowing either, about Mickey Briars’s phone being off, about hurrying to fuck.
And Lampy Shanley’s grandfather and Lampy Shanley’s mother and her friend Farouk are at the back door of a nearly-new Mercedes minibus and Con Kelleher is opening the door and the glass is tinted in the back and at the sides, and the bulkhead is high and that’s why Con Kelleher didn’t see the man, how was he to know, fuck it, fuck it, Jesus, what a mess, and the door is open now and there’s a wheelchair, facing towards them, secured against a high bulkhead, its wheels locked, and it’s empty.
And there’s a man kneeling on the floor beside the empty wheelchair, and he’s pitched forward and his head is bowed, and he’s resting his hands on the seat next to the wheelchair, the seat where a nurse or a care assistant should have been sitting when the bus had left the care home earlier that frosty day, and the fingers of his hands are clamped together, and his aspect is that of a man giving his confession, a penitent, a seeker of forgiveness, and Florence Shanley doesn’t recognize this man, he’s had two strokes and twenty years have passed since they lay together, and his eyes are closed and what can be seen of his face is white and his lips are blue and he’s been dead at least an hour.
And Farouk Alahad pauses before the kneeling man before he puts his fingers to the spot above his clavicle where his pulse would be most easily detectable, so he can say for certain that he’s dead, and he can give a time in his statement, and he can give true evidence that he checked the man’s vital signs, though it was obvious that he was frozen and could not be alive. And for a moment he envies the dead man his easy end. Below a certain threshold of temperature the brain inverts the sensation of cold and a body feels warmth and a strange comfort as its energy dissipates. That’s why men lie down in snow and die. And then he feels a hand in his, and the hand is warm, and he feels through her palm the pulse of her pounding heart.
And Lampy Shanley parks the bus at the gate of Con Kelleher’s yard. And Mr Collins says, I’ll come with you, lad. And Lampy says, No, stay here. And Mrs Coyne puts her hand on Mr Collins’s arm and draws him gently back into his seat and she says, Leave him at it, Tom, you’ll only make it worse for him by going with him. And Lampy sees Con Kelleher a hundred yards up the road, bent in the window of a squad car, and Con sees him and raises his hand in salute.
And Lampy gets to where his grandfather is, and his mother, and her friend from work, whose name he can’t remember, a foreign fella who drives an old shiteheap of a Merc, and he sees that his mother and the foreign fella are holding hands and he’s happy for his mother, and he thinks of the slagging he’s going to get at training; then he remembers he doesn’t hurl any more, and the ambulance people are there already, and everyone now is still and they’re all looking at him, and he knows then that the man is dead, and he sees that the body is shrouded, and the air is still but for the clouded breath of the people standing there, and Lampy feels the cold suddenly, down into the centre of himself, and a weakness in his legs so that he can hardly stand up, and just as he begins to fall his grandfather’s arms are around him, and his arms are still strong, and he’s holding his grandson tight, and he’s saying, My boy, my boy, my boy.
Acknowledgements
Thanks:
To the people who read my books; to Brian Langan, Eoin McHugh, Fiona Murphy, Larry Finlay, Bill Scott-Kerr, Helen Edwards, Patsy Irwin, Sophie Christopher, Hazel Orme and everyone at Doubleday Ireland, Penguin Random House Ireland and Transworld UK; to Antony Farrell and everyone at The Lilliput Press; to Kathryn Court, Victoria Savanh, Christopher Smith and everyone at Penguin US; to Marianne Gunn O’Connor; to Joseph O’Connor, Tom Lodge, Claire Ryan, Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, Giles Foden, Julian Gough, Mary O’Malley and my colleagues, friends and students at the University of Limerick; to Billy Keane, Alan Hayes and all the offerers of kindness and support I’ve met along the way; to Garry Browne, Conor Cremin, Brian Treacy and all my neglected friends; to Ethel Hartnett, for the laughs; to Betty Sheehan and all the in-laws, out-laws, nearly-cousins, proper cousins and might-be cousins who help to make this life so rich; to my wonderful parents, Anne and Donie Ryan; to Mary, Christopher, Daniel, John, Lindsey, Aoibhinn a
nd all my family near and far; to Thomas and Lucy, the brilliant lights of my life; and to Anne Marie, my true love, who made this book and all my books.
About the Author
Donal Ryan is from Nenagh in County Tipperary. His first three novels, The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December and All We Shall Know, and his short-story collection A Slanting of the Sun, have all been published to major acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was recently voted ‘Irish Book of the Decade’. A former civil servant, Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.
Also by Donal Ryan
The Spinning Heart
The Thing About December
All We Shall Know
A Slanting of the Sun: Stories
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS