by Donal Ryan
When Mother died, the Unthanks and his aunties and a small army of biddies had done everything. They had sorted out the business with the coroner and roared down the phone at people to know what was the delay in releasing the body and explained gently to him how things take longer when a person dies at home with no doctor present. They had cleaned the house from top to bottom and baked and made sandwiches and bought liquor and instructed the undertakers and sorted out Johnsey’s suit and tie and even polished his shoes for him. They had somehow managed to work out how everything would be paid for; there was a folder of pages and bank books and what have you in a box in the small room upstairs where Daddy used to curse over his accounts with his glasses sliding down his nose and they had tightened up that mess of documents and explained things to Johnsey and their explanations entered one ear and spilled out of the other, their passage unimpeded by any form of understanding.
He’d had to sign a few bits and pieces relating to God only knows what and he did so in his best handwriting, all joined up and slanted forward. They had said sure nobody could organize all these things on their own, a person needed time to come to terms with the shock, it was an awful burden of grief, losing both parents like that in such a short space of time. What they really meant was: Look, you’re a bit of a gom, so go on now and leave us to get on with the important business of burying your mother properly and sorting out her affairs for you. Okay? Good lad. Go off upstairs now and say a few prayers or pull yourself or do whatever the hell it is imbeciles do in the confines of their own bedrooms.
It wasn’t a terrible thing that people who were being kind sometimes couldn’t do it without making you feel like it was because you were a bit of a God-help-us. They wouldn’t mean it, but it would be obvious from their manner; the way they’d smile sadly and nod at you and then look away and smile sadly at someone else as much as to say Ah sure, the poor crathur, he hasn’t a clue or a hand to wipe his arse nor a dust of sense. Not the Unthanks, though. Definitely not. They made you feel like you were doing them a favour by letting them help you. Or Father Cotter, but then that was part of his covenant with God, to be kind to all without prejudice. Most people wanted something in return for their kind help, if only the sense of having given of themselves selflessly, that might make their bed feel softer or their sleep come easier, or the gates of heaven swing open faster when their time came. Johnsey could see it in the secret glances of the ICA biddies and the aunties and the few bigshot women who flocked and squawked and pecked about him at the time of his parents’ deaths. He’d have preferred them to stay away than to enter his house and act like they were abroad in Africa saving little black babies from starvation.
NOW THAT MOTHER wasn’t here to be hurt by him, wasn’t it just common sense that he should carry out his plans for the rope and the crossbeam in the slatted house? What in the name of God was the purpose of a great clumsy yoke who had relinquished his father’s land to the sneaky neighbours without argument and couldn’t really hold a conversation without feeling like he was going to burst into flames and who had nothing of any interest to say, anyway, because he had never been anywhere without his parents to mind him, who had never kissed a girl nor stood his ground to bullies nor drove a car past the gate?
He had gone as far as taking Daddy’s old rope from the back kitchen. He had thrown it over the crossbeam and climbed to the top bar of one of the pens and knotted it to the stout wood. He had made what looked like a noose, going by the Westerns. He had tested to see that it would tighten by grabbing the rope circle through which his head would go and yanking down hard. He thought it was the right length so if he dropped from the rail of the pen his neck would break from the drop and his feet wouldn’t touch the ground.
But someone would have to find him. And probably that would be the Unthanks. Johnsey couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting them like that. Himself was surely sixty-seven or eight and Herself was about the same. Would they be alive ten more years, or twenty? Wasn’t he just a hardship to those lovely people, treading his big dirty boots in through their bakery each day, looking for his lunch, and plonking his fat arse down in their kitchen and slobbering all over their table? And to make their penance harder, he was now helping himself to further charities in the dinner and Sunday-lunch department. Everyone in the village knew he was a fat eejit, he had never really hurled properly, girls looked like they pitied him or they joined in when lads laughed at him. There must have been a great mix-up somewhere along the line with these big plans that Father Cotter does be on about. Surely with the universe as big as it was, God could allow himself a slip-up here or there. There was hardly a deputation of angels banging on His door shouting Hey, God, you forgot to give a justification for Johnsey Cunliffe’s existence, he’s below scratching his hole like a fool, waiting for a reason not to do away with himself!
IT WOULD BE summer soon enough. The Unthanks always went somewhere thousands of miles away like Sligo or one of those quare counties for weeks on end to a niece who was married to a right bigshot by all accounts and they had a rake of kids and a huge big house. They would leave Kitty Whelan or Bridie Mac running the bakery. That would put paid to Johnsey’s lunchtimes of ease and luxury for a while. His loneliness then would be absolute. That meant complete, total.
Something had to give before summer. How would he manage being so lonesome and dealing with the types of situation that would require more spoken words and more complicated ways of stringing them together than he was capable of? Maybe he would take his holidays from the co-op at the same time as the Unthanks and close up the gate and the house and pull the blinds and the curtains and let on to be gone away himself? Sure, for all Packie Collins or any of his sneery relations knew, he was doing a strong line with a girl from the city and they were gone away sunning themselves out foreign. Or they were going to a ski resort! Imagine, there were fellas his age less than two miles away that had actually done that kind of thing! Headed off in a jet to a ski resort in some faraway country full of glamour with a girl and flew down snowy mountains and drank liquor with foreign names and rode the girl all night and come home engaged to be married and the whole place would talk about how brilliant it was and tell them they were great. Lads who had been in his class in school led that kind of a life. Imagine.
JOHNSEY WONDERED was there a way to get away from this earth cleanly, to just disappear one day and have no fuss about it nor hassle for anyone. A lad from above around Gurtabogle fecked off to Australia a few years ago and went missing out there and sure that was that, really. What was anyone going to do, go and turn every stone in Australia looking for him? Australia was so big it was a continent.
The same lad had been in Johnsey’s class in primary school. They went on a school tour once, as far as Lahinch. That time, they were all still pally enough. Eugene Penrose hadn’t yet decided to lash out against the world in general and Johnsey in particular. The Gurtabogle lad, Mikey Kennedy was his name, went out swimming with the rest. While they were all fooling near the water’s edge, splashing each other and throwing mud and running away screaming at the sight of a jellyfish, Kennedy started swimming, straight out from the shore. Sir and Miss had given strict instructions on the way down to the beach that everyone was to stay near them, and to only swim parallel to the shore. PARALLEL TO THE SHORE! Ye blackguards.
But Kennedy swam straight out and it was nearly too late before Miss spotted him and screeched at Sir who was chasing lads around with a jellyfish actually in his hand and he dropped the jellyfish and let a roar out of him that Kennedy was to get back this instant. Kennedy was a small black bobbing ball by then. You couldn’t see his arms any more, but they must have still been working hard because he was getting farther and farther away towards the horizon. He was swimming into the sun. Everyone stopped messing and shouting and stood with their hands shielding their eyes looking out towards the shiny horizon after little Mikey Kennedy and the only sound was Sir roaring for him to come back, come back, for God’s sake. T
hen a lifeguard dashed past and nearly knocked Sir over and Miss put her two hands over her face and said Sweet Jesus over and over again. Afterwards, Johnsey heard another lifeguard saying how it was lucky Sean had been on duty; he was a junior champion swimmer, the lad had got so far out it mightn’t have been as clean a rescue if anyone other than Sean had been there.
When Sean the Lifeguard made it back to the shallows and waded in to the shore with Kennedy in his big freckly arms, he flung him down on the sand and Kennedy just lay there crying. Sir asked him what in the fuck he meant by that stunt. Kennedy just said I don’t know, Sir, and kept on crying and coughing, and the whole class stood around him in an embarrassed circle and stared, as shocked at Sir’s fuck as at Kennedy’s near thing. Then Miss put a towel around his little shoulders and gave him a hug and a kiss and told him it was all right and more than one boy wished then that they’d been the one to strike out for the horizon.
Ten years later, that same lad, Mikey Kennedy from Gurtabogle, flew off to Australia and went missing out there and was never seen again.
TIME DRIPS BY. It never flies, really. Time only ever flies in the last few minutes of a match when the team you’re rooting for are a point behind. And that’s reversed if they’re a point ahead. A townie lad in school once told how if you tied a lad up so he couldn’t move and dripped water on his head, for a finish he’d go mad and each drip would feel to him like a hammer blow. The Chinese used to do it to their enemies long ago. Johnsey only half believed it then but he fully believed it now. He could feel each second drip from the clock above the press and splash down on his head. You had to trick your mind sometimes, to distract it from the drips, or they’d become hammer blows and you’d end up like one of them Chinese lads. You could pretend you were Nicky English scoring before him in ’89 if you were abroad in the yard beating a sliotar off of a wall. You could pretend to be heading off on a trip across America in your shining Ford Mustang if you were farting about up and down the yard in Mother’s old Fiesta. You could imagine you were a secret agent, deep undercover, disguised as a mysterious young bachelor, living alone and awaiting further instructions from HQ.
If you were feeling especially lonesome, and just sitting in the kitchen, say, and you let it out through the gate because you weren’t concentrating properly on keeping a rein on it, your mind could have a fine old wander about for itself. If it got too much leeway, it could start trying to point things out that you could otherwise kind of gloss over or shove away into the dark spaces. It could start calculating the amount of time you spent on your own now that Daddy and Mother were gone, and the time to come to be spent alone if you lived a full life. Three score and ten, you were allowed by God. You could go a good bit over that, even. Daddy hadn’t gotten his allotted time at all. The likes of poor Dwyer and that young lad of the Clancys got nowhere near it. It could remind you of how it had seemed life was only temporarily suspended when Mother was alive and would maybe get underway again in some shape or form as soon as the dark weather brightened, but now it seemed to be at a full stop. It could start adding up the number of lunches and dinners the Unthanks had given you, and you never once put your hand into your pocket, except to have a secret scratch of your balls. It could start reminding you about all the different ways in which you didn’t match or measure up to the other fellas your age: you had nare a woman, nor a hope in hell of getting one; your only friends were two elderly people you had only inherited as friends; you’d been terrorized by a little prick called Eugene Penrose since you were a child; you couldn’t walk home through the village without shitting in your pants in fear of him. You were not able to hold a normal conversation, your mind would remind you. Nobody wanted to talk to you, anyway. People that did, it was only because they felt they had to. It could remind you that you were a useless, orphaned spastic. It could make the deep pool in the river or the crossbeam in the slatted house seem like sweet salvation from the miserable torment of just being.
Your mind could become separated from you altogether. Johnsey was starting to see this now. You could end up abroad in the yard, chasing it around like a madman if you were not careful. It could become free from you quite easily and fly off down its own path. There were a few evenings where he had sat watching television and had all of a shot realized he had been just sitting there, and there was nothing only blankness about him; he hadn’t been asleep or awake, he couldn’t remember what he had been looking at on the telly, and once there was a long line of dribble hanging from his chin.
ON THE WAY HOME from the mart Daddy often used tell him about some of the old boys they had met that day who lived alone in the real and true back of beyond, their little cottages stuck to the side of the mountain and not a soul coming near them from one end of the year to the next. They’d slosh around in shite up to their knees in Wellington boots that had holes in them; they’d be black with the dirt always and would only have the one pants for weekdays and one for Sundays and their weekday pants would be ready to walk off them and away down the boreen. They’d have a name for each beast in their herd. They’d be right fond of those beasts. That was the way for many a small farmer who never married. Often you’d have two old brothers farming the same land and living like two old smelly peas in a half-destroyed pod of a house. Or you might have an auld wan that had never married and she would serve as a wife to her bachelor brother. Not in every way, surely. Quare things went on, though; he knew this from things he overheard.
One day, below in the co-op, shortly after Packie had taken him on as a general assistant, he had heard a big, red-faced lady talking to two men who were so interested in what she was saying, they were bent nearly double to get their hairy old ears closer to her flapping mouth. It seemed the guards had taken a man called Formley from some quare townland in the back of beyonds Johnsey hadn’t heard of away from his farm and family. His children had been put into care. The same family were not sorry to see him go, by the red-faced lady’s account. His wife was dead but years. He had a daughter and two sons. She had been expecting, the daughter, and she only sixteen. The father was either her own father or one of the brothers. This man Formley had taken care of this bit of trouble, with a rope and a broken broom handle. The girl’s insides were ripped to shreds. Her wounds got infected, her blood turned bad, and she was near to death when the guards arrived. Her child was found wrapped in a sheet on the ground near the septic tank. The guards were only called because the man had drank what whiskey was in it after his little operation and went mad about the place and fired off his shotgun and his youngest lad made a dash for the house of a neighbour who had summoned help.
They were the bits Johnsey had heard. Putting those bits together in a way that made sense was impossible. Were they all going at her, her father who was given the job by God of protecting her from harm, and her brothers as well? The whole rest of that day, that girl’s suffering rested heavily in the centre of his mind. For a finish, he felt a sort of a weakness from thinking about it, a sickness in his stomach and a woozy feeling in his head, and he had to sit down on a pile of fertilizer bags and try and collect himself before Packie spotted him. Imagine, that jagged, broken broom handle entering her and piercing a little unborn baby and yanking it out, dead and bloody into this world.
Probably it would have been a monster anyway, the red-faced lady said. A monster? Surely be to God nothing with a baby’s pure, unblemished soul could be a monster? But there was something about that in Johnsey’s mind, something about fathers and daughters and brothers and sisters riding each other. Incest, it was called. If they made a baby it could be a retarded freak or have two heads or worse. But then, Adam and Eve’s children must have done something like that to make the human race grow, and then it must have happened again when only Noah and his family were spared from the Great Flood. Or did God let Noah’s sons’ wives live too? Even then, there would have been first cousins riding. And Johnsey had heard that used as an explanation for more serious cases of gamminess or spasticati
on: Yerra sure, weren’t his parents first cousins?
FOR A MAN to be lonely, Johnsey knew, he did not need to be alone. People often took his hand and shook it and held on to it in the co-op, and stood reminiscing about one or both of his parents while his face burned and his other hand searched vainly for somewhere to put itself. You could be lonely even then, with a person actually standing right there in front of you, clutching your hand, saying things to you. A couple of days, it seemed there was a queue of such people. Some of them had been at the funeral but thought it would be nice to have another go at shaking his hand and telling him he was after getting an awful time of it, and he was to call up any time, any time at all, they were always at home. Their door was always open. He’d like to see their faces if he actually strolled in through their door. Hello! Here I am, as invited! I’ll ate me dinner now and have a cut of tart after it and a couple of bottles of stout and maybe have a good feel of that young lady over there, is that yer daughter, bejaysus she’s a fine girl now, and I’ll be on my way again! Woo-hoo!
They’d have a hairy conniption if he as much as set foot in their yards. Why did people go around saying things they didn’t mean?
THERE WAS an old fella, his name was Quigley, used to live away over the road and down past the small bridge and on past the weir, over towards the stud farm owned by the Black Protestant Shires. The Shires had old money. That was more valuable than new money. This old fella had a small bit of land tucked up to the side of the Shires’s walled-off ranch. He was a wild-looking man, with great clumps of hair sticking out from the side of his head and from under his cap. He wore a greatcoat tied with baling twine all year round, and Wellington boots coated with slime that he fermented all over his yard. On purpose, just to spite the Proddies, Daddy used to say, good Catholic shite. When Johnsey was small that man of the Quigleys would cycle on up the road past their gate, and he’d always have a big cheery wave, and he’d go all the way out as far as Clonvourneen. Every single evening without fail, come rain, hail, sunshine or storm, he’d make that trip. He’d pedal his old creaky, squeaky, rusty pushbike all those miles out and all those hard miles home to visit an old uncle of his who was being subvented in the nursing home out there. He’d sit beyond with him and they’d have a chat and a brandy and he’d fix his old uncle up for the night and see that he was comfortable. Daddy said he was only doing it so that when the old uncle died, he’d leave him everything. For a finish, after all the thousands of miles cycled, and all the elements braved, the man died before his uncle. The fucker outlasted him.