by Sheila Agnew
‘Sure,’ replied Scott.
‘Guys, talking of rats, I was nearly on the team that did the animation for the Ratatouille movie,’ said Ray.
We all stared at him.
‘That’s cool, Ray,’ said Scott.
Ray smiled and gave Kylie and me a disk, which he explained had more examples of his work.
‘Thank you,’ we said in unison.
As we drove up Third Avenue, I asked, ‘Scott, could I please have a pot-bellied pig for my birthday next February, or for Christmas, that’s even sooner?’
‘You can take some time to think about it,’ I suggested generously.
Scott snorted.
‘I don’t need time, thanks. NO WAY to a pig. We don’t have the outdoor space and anyway, aren’t you going back to Ireland in September? So you won’t be here to take care of him.’
‘Yes, of course I’m going back,’ I said.
Scott didn’t look upset at all.
‘Oh, I didn’t know you were going back to Ireland,’ said Kylie. ‘That stinks!’
At least someone would miss me, I thought sulkily.
Chapter 8
The rest of the week dragged. Every day it got hotter and more humid. Frank said to me, ‘You wait until August, Irish. Then you’ll see what sticky heat is like.’
On Friday, Kylie called to say that she and her mom had plans to stay with family at their summer home in the Berkshires for the weekend. The Berkshires are mountains about a four-hour drive away. Kylie’s grandparents’ house is on a wooded hill above a big lake where Kylie swims and goes boating with her cousins. It sounded like a lot of fun.
On Saturday, I had a Big Fight with Scott. We were stocking up the dog and cat food on the shelves downstairs late in the afternoon. The AC wasn’t working properly and it was way too hot and I missed Ireland and I missed Mum. Scott kept trying to tease me out of my grumpy mood, which only made me grumpier.
Then he got all quiet and said softly, ‘I know you are missing your mom a lot. I miss her too.’
I flipped out.
‘You don’t know anything. For starters, I’m not missing MOM a lot. She wasn’t my MOM. I’m from Ireland; we don’t say ‘MOM’ there. That’s a dumb word for dumb Americans. And, what are you talking about? You COULDN’T possibly be missing her. You hardly ever saw her. She didn’t even know you anymore.’
I threw down the can of Paul Newman’s dog food and climbed the spiral staircase to the apartment; half-walked, half-ran into my room and banged the door shut very hard. I threw the stupid Lisa Simpson cover off my bed and just lay on top of the sheets.
Ben started crying outside the door, a very irritating, high-pitched, whining, ‘ooooh’ ‘oooh’ ‘oooh’. I had to get up to let him in. He jumped up on the bed and rolled over with his four paws waving in the air, waiting for a belly rub. Ben can be a bit self-absorbed. I rubbed his belly and he licked my hand and then my face. His tongue is harsh and he definitely doesn’t have the best-smelling breath in the world.
I felt sorry for myself for being an orphan, although technically I may not be an orphan at all. It’s a bit complicated, but basically Mum fell madly in love with an Irish guy, the lead guitarist in a band from Galway in the West of Ireland. At that time, Mum was in her first year of drama school in New York City. When she saw my dad strutting his stuff in the Mercury Lounge, a bar in the East Village, it was love at first guitar chord. My dad was not a rich, famous rock star, although when I was little, I sometimes pretended he was.
My parents were both eighteen when they met. Mum dropped drama school and left all her friends and family in America to follow my dad back to Ireland. They lived together for a few months in a grotty bedsit in Ranelagh in Dublin. When Mum got pregnant with me, my dad couldn’t handle it. He jumped ship and went to Australia, we think, and Mum never heard from him again. Janet sometimes said that, with his kind of character, we were probably lucky my dad didn’t hang around. Mum never answered. She never said a bad word about my dad. She didn’t go back to America. She believed my dad would come back one day. I did not – except when I was very little.
Mum became an actress, mainly in the theatre, but now and again TV work cropped up. My favourite commercial was the one for cottage cheese. I mean, Mum was good in it; cottage cheese is disgusting.
After playing Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, she had a major part in a TV crime series, set in Putney in London. She played an American forensic investigator named Carolyn Morrison, who always wore tiny miniskirts regardless of the weather. She helped the main character, Detective Grenfell, as he tried to solve a serial murder case. However, the murderer strangled Mum in the toilet of a pub. This took place in the last episode of the first season, right after Detective Grenfell realised he had fallen in love with her. It was a real shame because we had been hoping very hard that Mum would be kept on for another season.
After being unnecessarily killed off, Mum performed in quite a few plays in Dublin, Belfast, London and Edinburgh and also in lots of small, dead, miserable towns up and down the coast of England. Once, she had a part for nine weeks in a farce in Paris and we had a brilliant time except for the fact that she never got paid for the last three weeks. The following winter, we were stuck in the Isle of Man for a month, a crushingly boring experience for both of us.
However, about two years ago, when I had just turned ten, Mum decided to settle down and stay put in Dublin. I suspect that she did this for my sake because I hated changing schools so often. When you are the new kid, everyone stares at you and asks loads of questions. The first question they always ask is, ‘Where are you from?’ But when I answered, ‘Dublin’ they usually made fun of me and said I didn’t sound like I was from Dublin at all and I wasn’t really Irish. Birmingham was the worst. On my first day, a girl called Vivienne, with dyed plum hair, said that I was a mongrel. I told her that was fine with me so long as I didn’t have plum hair. Now, after over two years straight of living in Dublin, I am no longer from nowhere. I am Irish. I can even speak Irish pretty well, although it’s not nearly my best subject.
Mum worked as the front-of-house manager at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. That job sounds a good bit grander than it actually was. But it was fun to hang around the theatre in the evenings. An actor called Brendan Byrne was in a play last year, called The Playboy of the Western World. When the run finished, Mr Byrne called me into his dressing room and presented me with a gigantic, unbelievably soft, pale blue elephant, which I christened Ellie. I was too old for a toy like that but it was really great of him.
I wasn’t massively sorry when the play finished because Mum had developed a bit of a crush on him. I knew she definitely had a crush because she kept forgetting to put the meat in the spaghetti bolognaise, that kind of thing. I wished she were here now, cooking spaghetti and forgetting the mince or brushing the knots out of my hair, which she did most mornings, and we chatted away the whole time. She used to come up with these fun ways to spend Mondays, which were her days off and, sometimes, she even let me miss school so we could go on adventures together. ‘Misadventures,’ Janet called them.
I thought about Mum’s funeral. The wake took place in Mum’s friend David’s house in Drumcondra because our flat on North Great George’s Street was way too small. David inherited the house on Griffith Avenue from his parents. It is a beautiful wide road lined with trees. David’s house is very large and grand and elegant, with bay windows and Victorian antique furniture and Persian rugs.
The entire theatre community in Dublin turned out and loads of artsy types from London as well and there were three Scots in their kilts and knee-high socks who did a play with Mum at the Edinburgh festival a few years ago. All day long, people kissed me and shook my hand and patted my hair and offered me toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and olives and smoked salmon on brown bread and miniature Mars bars and cans of Coke. I must have drunk about five cans of Coke that day.
All of the kids from my class
at school came, wearing their school uniforms even though it was Saturday. John Donaghy came up to me and touched me on my right elbow and said, ‘Sorry about your mum,’ in a low voice. That was probably the only time I was not interested in seeing him, so I just said, ‘That’s ok, thanks’. He stood beside me awkwardly for a few minutes and then he left, taking a can of Coke and two bags of salt and vinegar Tayto crisps from the kitchen counter with him.
Mrs Scanlon turned up, looking a bit lost and wearing wide black trousers instead of her usual gypsy skirt, but I ducked behind people or furniture whenever I noticed her searching for me.
There was a lot of talking going on, either whispering very loudly (that’s called a stage whisper), or speaking in fake cheerful voices, or else they were crying. But my eyes were dry and itchy all day. I wore a new dress from Brown Thomas’s – navy with polka dots, accessorised with scratchy, bright red wool tights. Mum hated black. Scott wore a very sharp, black Hugo Boss suit with a thin black tie and he hung out beside me most of the time, but we hardly talked at all.
Some of the drama students from Trinity College who knew Mum because she occasionally taught them, set up a small stage made out of banana crates and performed a few scenes between Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing because that was Mum’s favourite play. Although the students were funny, especially Aileen, who played Beatrice, nobody laughed except for a tall, skinny man with a horrible, wispy goatee that nobody knew. I think all the normal people felt uncomfortable about laughing at a funeral, so the play flopped. The students should have performed a tragedy.
Some singing and music started up after the play – traditional, sad, Irish ballads about hungry children and fishermen lost at sea, lonely emigrants in Boston, writing letters to their families left behind, and failed but glorious rebellions against the English. Janet has a beautiful, sweet voice. People say it is like an Irish linnet, which may or may not be true. I don’t know because I’ve never heard an Irish linnet and I bet they haven’t either.
As the music started to wind down, David clapped his hands for silence. He fiddled with the iPod docking station for a moment, while we all waited. Then the opening guitar chords of Haunted by Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor filled the room. The song lasted nearly four minutes and it was the only time during that day that I didn’t feel like a dinosaur fossil enclosed in a glacier of ice for millions and millions of years. Mum loved that song so much. We sang it all the time, and I mean ALL THE TIME. Nearly everyone joined in singing the chorus and we butchered it but we didn’t care. When we finished singing, the atmosphere in the house seemed lighter, almost giddy. I wished Mum could have been there. She loved a party.
I felt Ben prodding me with his right paw, demanding attention, and memories of the funeral vanished. I didn’t feel angry anymore, but I started to feel slightly sick in my stomach about being mean to Scott. I was tired of thinking. I wish there was a course of antibiotics you could take to stop THINKING, not forever, of course, but just to have a break once in a while. I also began to get hungry and started fantasising about the leftover pizza in the refrigerator. But I felt weird about going out to the kitchen. I had a terrible feeling that I had acted like a whiny brat. It was not a comfortable feeling.
When it had turned completely dark outside and I could no longer hear the sounds of the visitors leaving the History Museum, Scott knocked on my door and said, ‘Can I come in, Evie?’
I said, ‘Ok, sure!’ but it didn’t come out as clearly and casually as I had meant it to.
Scott walked in and pushed Ben over a little so he had room to sit beside me on the bed.
‘Evie,’ he began, ‘if there is anything I could change, it would have been, I mean, I wish I had spent so much more time with you and your mom. Damn it, sorry, I mean your mum. I wish I had been there for you guys. I should have been there.’
I felt even guiltier. When you have behaved badly but the person you were mean to is all nice and gentle, it makes you feel a lot worse. Scott continued, running his hand quickly through his hair so that it stood on the top of his head in spikes, ‘I am clueless about all this. I don’t know anything about kids. I’m screwing it all up.’
‘No, no, you’re not!’ I said quickly. ‘You do know about kids. You were a kid once. And Joanna said only last week that you are still just a big kid.’
I realised immediately that I had been tactless so I rushed ahead.
‘I am very, very sorry for calling you a dumb American. You are not a dumb American. You’re just American.’
And he said, ‘Thank you, I think.’
Ben crawled up between us.
‘What about if we try and figure things out together as we go along? What do you say?’ said Scott.
‘Ok, sure, we can do that. Easy peasy!’ I said.
Neither of us said anything more for a few minutes. But it was not a strained silence. There was no tension at all. We both just kept stroking Ben and scratching his ears and he was enjoying the attention enormously.
Eventually, Scott said, ‘I know you know this, but it is ok to cry sometimes. Crying does not make you a crybaby. Look at Ben, he cries all the time.’
I lost my ability to cry when Mum died, which is bizarre because I was often in floods of tears before over stupid little things. I cried up a storm when Mum wouldn’t let me spend the bank holiday Easter weekend with my friend Deirdre and her family at her grandfather’s house on the Aran Islands. Now, my eyes often get sore and itchy, but no water comes out. I didn’t want to say anything to Scott about my inability to cry. I had a sneaky suspicion that he might not like me. I mean, what kind of weird kid does not cry when their mother dies?
So, I just said, ‘Yeah, I know. I’m ok. I don’t feel like blubbing right this minute.’
Scott patted me clumsily on my head like I was a pet, but I didn’t mind. We gave Ben a Scooby snack for being an empathy dog. Then we watched an episode of The Dog Whisperer by unanimous vote. Scott had to help Ben cast his vote because he tends to lift his left front paw for all choices when you ask him. I think that’s partly because he’s such an eager-to-please kind of dog.
Chapter 9
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in New York for over a month already. This morning, I went to Zabars to get some juicy bones for Ben. Zabars is a very cool delicatessen on Broadway, a few blocks from Scott’s apartment. They sell all kinds of delicious food but you have to cope with a horde of tiny, wrinkled old ladies that deliberately knock into your knees with their mini-trolleys. Scott says that Zabars should hand out shin guards when you walk in the door.
Joanna thinks Ben is named in honour of Benjamin Franklin and she teases Scott about that because we get so many dogs and cats in the clinic named after American Presidents. We treated three dogs called Lincoln last week and two cats called Obama the week before. Scott is crazy about Benjamin Franklin and he has a marble bust of him in his room. I asked Scott if he named Ben after his hero but he said, ‘absolutely not’, that he just named Ben ‘Ben’ because it is a strong, one-syllable word, which was easy for a puppy to get used to. Scott gave me a book about Benjamin Franklin. The more I learn about Benjamin Franklin, the less I think Ben was named after him. Benjamin Franklin was very smart. Even Scott concedes that Ben is not the brightest dog in the world, just bright enough. But, of course, we would never hurt Ben’s feelings by letting him hear that and we wouldn’t take kindly to someone else saying it either.
It was Eurdes’s day today. She’s from Brazil but she doesn’t speak Brazilian because Scott explained to me that there is no such language. She speaks Portuguese because, hundreds of years ago, the Portuguese invaded Brazil and stayed. They killed a lot of the native people in horrible ways. They brought European diseases with them that killed even more of the native people. Eurdes doesn’t seem interested in her country’s bloody past. This surprised me because in Ireland we are obsessed with our history, so much so that people try to change it all the time.
; Back in March, right before St Paddy’s Day, I found myself in serious trouble at school for throwing Andrew Toohey’s metal Batman pencil case at Cian Tiernan’s head. I completely lost the plot when Cian slagged off Michael Collins, who is my ‘Person I Most Admire’ (Not Including Blood Relatives). Michael Collins was a great leader in the Irish War of Independence. He’s practically the Irish George Washington, not that someone like Cian appreciates how great he was. He said that his dad said that Michael Collins was massively overrated. Not satisfied with slagging off my number one Irish patriot, Cian threw in a nasty dig at Mum as well, saying that his mum said my mum shouldn’t be collecting the Children’s Allowance because she was American and that meant I was American as well and we were sponging off the state. It was very unlucky that Andrew’s pencil case was right next to my hand, especially because most of the kids in my class had soft, plastic pencil cases. But anyway, it barely touched Cian, just grazed the side of his head. It wasn’t very manly of him to squeal on me. I was suspended for three days without even getting the opportunity to tell my side of the story. The principal, Mr Smyth, said that it did not matter what provocation I had received; violence could never be justified. I thought about telling him that violence against the Nazis was justified, but I knew that would be cheeky and I was in enough trouble already.
Both Mr and Mrs Tiernan turned up uninvited at our flat that night, which was very unpleasant because I hadn’t mentioned my suspension to Mum and I had binned the note from Mr Smyth that I was supposed to give to her. To be fair to me, I did that to try to avoid worrying her, which was working out well until the Tiernans ruined it.
Mrs Tiernan told Mum that I was a hooligan and that she had a good mind to have the police press charges because I belonged in Mountjoy Prison. Mr Tiernan looked very uncomfortable and sweaty and said that that was going too far. Way too far, in my opinion.