by Donal Ryan
There was a doctor who was a specialist in eyes. He came in most days for a look under his bandages and he’d let a hmm or two out of him and he’d go away again about his business. He sounded foreign. His name was Doctor Fostiwaw or Fastibaw or something quare like that. One day, the Lovely Voice told Johnsey that she just called him Doctor Frostyballs and he laughed so much he could feel his cat eater nearly slipping out. A real card, Daddy would have called her. What would he do when he could see again? When his eyes were right and there were no more worries about his swelled head or his bruised kidneys or his cracked arm, he’d surely be given the road. He wouldn’t be left malinger in this bed, that was for sure. And there’d be no Lovely Voice breezing in and out of the rooms of his cold old house.
PACKIE COLLINS came in to inspect the patient in his bed and Johnsey imagined him with his face scrunched and his nose all wrinkled up and he looking down through it like a fella would look at something that was stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He wanted to know what in the Jaysus was he at, fighting on the street like that? Johnsey didn’t answer him. He there and then made a decision: he would never again darken the co-op door. He’d minded his little job long enough. That must be the secret to making decisions – don’t think about them beforehand, just do whatever makes you feel most like a proper man. Like Daddy in the mart deciding on a beast or your man in ER deciding to leap up on the operating table and ram his hand down a lad’s throat to save his life.
Packie said he’d had to get a little lad in to give him a digout. Things was gone fierce busy. There was going to be a lot of building starting up around and the co-op yard was going to be a sort of a staging area for the builders. A little foreign lad, he is. A good little worker now, mind you. Packie must have gotten over the powerful aversion he had to foreigners. Johnsey said You may hold on to him for good, Packie, I won’t be back to you any more, and the minute he had the words said he started to disbelieve that he had really said them; he listened for an echo of them in his brain and waited to feel them settling back down on his face like the fine mist you’d feel off of that waterfall beside the hotel where Mother’s cousin got married that time when he was a small boy. He started to think he hadn’t said them at all when Packie said Well! Well, well, well. Well, that’s the solid Jaysus finest! Oh begod, don’t worry at all! Sure I was only being foolish thinking Master Cunliffe would appreciate my holding his post open while he recovered from his injuries!
It was easier be brave when you couldn’t see your bravery’s result. You could probably punch a lad in the face a lot quicker if you hadn’t to see his eyes while you did it. He could hear Packie take a step back. He was taken aback. That wasn’t just a saying, then. He’d be below in the co-op afterwards reading Johnsey to all who’d listen. He’d label him a blackguard and an ingrate and he’d have a wounded puss on him, but inwardly he’d be rejoicing. You hadn’t to pay foreigners as much – everyone knew that. Packie said Well, well a few more times, and then he was gone.
Well, well.
Good luck so. You auld bollix.
AUNTY THERESA paraded in at three- or four-day intervals, giving out stink to all before her. She dragged her husband in with her half the time and poor little mousy Aunty Nonie the spinster the other half. Daddy used to call Frank that poor fucker and Mother would let on to be insulted on Theresa’s behalf but she’d smile in spite of herself. Daddy used to say about Aunty Theresa that you had to have a business in town and a farm outside town before she’d look at you. There wasn’t many measured up to Theresa’s test of respectability. Even Our Lord Himself had only the carpentry business and no land. Signs on the only ones who’d be pals with Him when He walked this earth were the fishermen and prostitutes and lepers. The likes of Johnsey and his terrible predicaments were sent as a trial for poor Theresa. It was a penance for the few old sins she’d committed, to have a nephew like Johnsey making a solid show of her by getting into such common scrapes. God knows they weren’t much to write home about, them few auld sins she committed that were being held against her still, but some are given a bigger burden than others and all we can do is suffer on and not give out.
Aunty Theresa said he had their hearts broke. They expected him every Sunday but he was below with them Unthanks constantly. He hardly looked at them above at Mass! He was all that was left of their lovely Sarah and now look at the cut of him! Uncle Frank or Aunty Nonie would tell her whisht but you couldn’t whisht that one up. It was just too much; it was too much to bear, all this constant heartache. One evening she was in full flow about how awful it was about Johnsey fighting with bowsies and what have you and in walked Doctor Frostyballs and she all of a sudden sounded like one of those horsy Protestant ones whose lips don’t fit down fully over their big front teeth who come in to the co-op for feed now and again. She said Hellooo Dawk-tur, but old Frostyballs only gave his usual few hmms and shagged off fine and quick. He hadn’t time for mad Irish aunties to be wedging their tongues up his hole. Aunty Theresa said he’d be a very high caste now, you know, in India.
He would I suppose, said poor old Frank.
THERE WAS only one other bed in the room. It was a semi-private room. He was in the VHI, and he hadn’t even known it. That meant you got special treatment because some crowd above in Dublin or somewhere would foot the bill. You would get the best of stuff. Imagine that: his mother still had to sort things out for him and she dead and gone. She wouldn’t have liked him to be in a big old ward, anyway; you wouldn’t know what kind of quare-hawks would be in it, Mother would have said.
One time, when Daddy was bad, he’d been rushed in and given new blood and afterwards they’d wheeled him into a big ward full of auld fellas so they could keep an eye on him. Mother and Johnsey were left stay with him for fear he’d die without company, and a nurse pulled a plastic curtain around them. There was no room available, only the big old ward, stinking of old men and piss and shit and whatever dark medicines were used to try to hold Death at bay. Daddy was dead to the world, drugged to the solid eyeballs. Halfway through the night an auld fella took a figary and leapt out of his bed and threw their curtain back and stood there looking in at the three of them and he without a tooth that was ever known and his bit of white hair standing straight up on his head and shining eyes on him like a greyhound inside in a trap and his old wrinkly mickey peeping out through his pyjamas. Mother hopped out of her chair and made a grab for the old rogue but he sidestepped her and he was gone in between the wall and the side of Daddy’s bed and next thing wasn’t he going at Daddy’s face and Mother was trying to drag him off and a nurse and an orderly ran in and got him back into his own bed and they strapped him to it for a finish and through the whole thing Johnsey had just sat there like an imbecile, looking out of his mouth.
Some help you were, Mother said.
It turned out the old boy was gone mad for the want of a drink. He had never gone a day without a few glasses of stout and a whiskey chaser or two, maybe. That was enough to send a man mad for the want of it, if that man had given fifty years without going without.
A PROCESSION OF roommates were wheeled in and deposited in the other bed in Johnsey’s semi-private room. None of them went at him like that old campaigner had gone at Daddy, thanks be to God. He saw none of them; he only got a few blurred seconds of sight in the evenings when Doctor Frostyballs was lifting his bandages and doing his hmm-ing. All you could make out in those few seconds were a pair of brown eyes and a hairy brown nose. He wished the Lovely Voice could do the bandages so he could see her eyes and nose instead. Doctor Frostyballs’s touch was gentle. His hmms sounded kind. Johnsey felt a bit guilty for the jokes about him he shared with the Lovely Voice. Well, he listened and laughed anyway. He was a willing accomplice. Sometimes after he was gone she’d arrive on and start taking him off in a foreign accent and it was funnier than Brendan Grace. She would stand at the head of his bed to carry on her blackguarding. He could smell her: roses and medicine.
She’d say: I am rea
ding your chart now. Hmm … yes … hmm … I am seeing that you are not responding to my very brilliant doctoring … hmm … It seems to me as though there is only one course of action left open to us, young mister blind fellow … hmm … and that is to amputate your face! And he’d say how that’d be no harm, anyway, and she’d say Aw, you have a lovely face.
They must train them to tell lads things like that who are in bits inside in bed to make them feel better. She was fair handy at it, though. You could nearly let yourself think she really thought you had a lovely face. Imagine his old puss after getting kicked to bits, as if it wasn’t offensive enough to start out with. She was probably hardened to ugliness, having to look at old wrinkly arses and bedpans full of shite for a living.
MUMBLY DAVE arrived towards the end of Johnsey’s third week as a blind invalid. He wasn’t quiet, but it was all the one – you couldn’t make out a word he was saying, only mumble, mumble, mumble. The Lovely Voice said he’d had a mother and a father of a fall off of a ladder and he’d landed on his face on a fence. His ribs were all broken like Johnsey’s, his teeth were nearly all gone and he had a broken arm like Johnsey. He had a broken leg, too. His face was swollen and smashed, and his eyes were closed tight from the swelling. They had had to put wire into his jaw to hold it together.
I have a fine pair on my hands now, the Lovely Voice said the first day Mumbly Dave was wheeled in. A fine pair of smashed bumpkins! You could be as bold as you wanted when you had a voice that could send the devil back to heaven. He wasn’t called Mumbly Dave straight away – it took the Lovely Voice nearly half a day to come up with that. Smashed bumpkins, two blind mice, thing one and thing two, she gave a whole morning in and out with a new title each time for the pair of them. Johnsey could hear his new compatriot forcing short gusts of air down through his nose each time she breezed through and dished out a little morsel; the painful laughter of a man who’s beaten and broken-ribbed. Johnsey wasn’t fond of this new development: he didn’t want to share the Lovely Voice’s attentions with this clumsy ladder-faller-offer. He wished they’d wheel him away again and bring back a silent geriatric.
He had felt like he was getting special treatment. It was out of pity, he knew, but she never made that obvious. You could fool yourself into believing you were the only one whose ear she whispered evil jokes into about the ward sister or the old boy in the other bed or Doctor Frostyballs or Aunty Theresa or whoever came within range of her wit. He didn’t want to have to share the Lovely Voice, especially not now that he was nearly finished on the painkillers and his eyes were healing up the finest and his bruised kidneys had come round a bit and he’d very soon be given the high road home. He could picture the newcomer: a big builder lad, probably, with muscles and blond hair and a jaw on him like Desperate Dan. Even with his broken face and nare a tooth that was known, that lad would most likely put Johnsey in the ha’ penny place.
THE UNTHANKS knew him well, of course. Ah, Dave, is it yourself, you got an awful hop, we nearly heard the bang below in the bakery, ha ha ha, is this fella looking after you, sure you’re both in the same boat, talk about the blind leading the blind, ha ha ha! Herself had to tell him be quiet and come away and leave the man alone. She had to take him in hand every now and again. Mumbly Dave didn’t seem to mind. His mumbles back to Himself sounded happy enough. Some people loved the bit of attention.
There was big news. The whole village had it. Herself had got it off the ICA. They had all rang her one by one, each thinking they would be first with the news. Himself had got it above at Mass that morning. Himself went every morning, to Mass. He went to confession too, at the required intervals. Religiously, he went. Was there any other way to go to confession? What did he tell the priest? Surely he had to make sins up. Wouldn’t that in itself be a sin, to be told at the next confession? A fine, eternal circle of sinning and contrition.
Mumbly Dave was doing awful mumbling beyond, as if to encourage the speedier telling of this big news. And the Lovely Voice would be on in a second as well; he could hear her abroad in the corridor, laughing as usual. You could easily judge the direction she was heading. She pushed a wave of fun and devilment before her and left a trail of it in her wake. She would hear the big news too, if the Unthanks ever got around to telling it.
The council inside in town had been to-ing and fro-ing and fighting and arguing for years and had finally made a big decision. A load of the land to the west of the village had been rezoned. That meant that instead of being simply fields of grass for tilling or grazing, the land the council had marked out with a red marker and put on display on a map for all to see inside in the civic offices was now land on which houses, shops, hotels and what have you could be built. That land included all of Daddy’s, and nearly all the Creamers’, and half of Paddy Rourke’s and a bit of the McDermotts’.
They were as excited as wasps around an open bottle of Fanta about this big news, so it seemed only polite to try to join in. He nodded a good few times and said Begod that’s great and Oh really and waved his good hand about a bit. He preferred when the Unthanks were their usual selves; this much talk out of them, and the two of them talking over each other, and the speed they were talking at – it wasn’t right somehow. It could make you feel a bit nervous, like if a grand, quiet old dog was asleep by the fire at your feet and all of a shot, for no reason you could fathom, leapt up and began barking and going mad about the place.
Anyway, this apparently was the best thing that could ever happen to any small village, according to everyone bar the few usual moaners who’d object to their nose to spite their face. It would be a new lease of life for the place. Even those who had been gone but years might reconsider their positions in life and return, if there was something to return to in the line of a job doing all this building and what have you. Sure hadn’t a pile of young lads only left recently, sure they’d turn the planes around if they heard this news. They’d nearly jump overboard off of the boat and swim back. There had been fierce speculation for the last few months, but it was as though people were afraid to jinx it by saying it out as a certainty. Once it’s used right, now, that’s the important thing. People will have to keep a close eye on applications going in and protest if they think something is going to go up that will do more harm than good – the likes of discos or fast-food shops or what have you, with any luck they will be excluded from the plans.
PACKIE COLLINS’S yard and it full to bursting with blocks and timber and bags of cement. Dermot McDermott’s offer to buy the land. Eugene Penrose’s talk of Johnsey’s millions. They had all been a mile and a half ahead of the Unthanks. Mother had always maintained that the auld sneaky ones always had news before anybody. Some, the cuter ones, would keep it to themselves and more would go around telling all they knew to anyone who’d listen. They’d spread news that wasn’t even news yet. If there was nothing to tell, they’d make something up.
Like the time years ago the whole place had it that Paddy Rourke had belted the head off of Kathleen and she only after getting a black eye from a rejected calf she was bottle-feeding who butted her by accident. Once a thing was said, it could never be unsaid. Paddy was blackened after that in many minds. Some people believed what they were told regardless of who it was doing the telling and wouldn’t be waiting around for hard evidence. The Unthanks weren’t that way; this was officially true and therefore could be discussed as fact. You couldn’t be ruining it for them by telling them that it didn’t matter one shite if Our Lord Himself wanted to buy land off of Johnsey to build houses and hotels and shops on – Johnsey’s land did not belong to Johnsey – it was not his to sell or to allow people to build things upon.
MUMBLY DAVE was more inclined to talk properly after a few days. They put a hinge in that auld wire in his jaw and gave him a new mouth of temporary false teeth in case the world missed something important out of him. After a small bit of practice, the mumbling was replaced by a non-stop flow of words. Johnsey had envied him his wired-shut jaw; there was
no pressure on a man with a wired-shut jaw to be saying things to people. How well it was his eyes had been broken and not his jaw. Then he could see the owner of the Lovely Voice instead of just imagining her and he wouldn’t have to be trying to think of things to say back to her. Not even being kicked in the head could go right for him.
Mumbly Dave felt no such pressure in the talking department. In fact, talking seemed to be his way of releasing pressure. It was as though thousands of words were squashed up together inside in his head and couldn’t wait to rush out of his mouth like a crowd out of the tunnel under the stand below in Semple Stadium after a Munster final. He thought it was a great big laugh that neither of them could see a screed in front of them. Mumbly Dave would say, I used to see no evil, speak no evil, now I only see no evil, ha ha ha! Hey, did you hear that, youssir, I said I used to …
He was all talk about the big news about the rezoning of the land. He wanted to know how many brown envelopes Johnsey had left inside in the civic offices, hoo hoo hoo. He wanted to know was Johnsey related to Oliver Cunliffe beyond in Latteragh, Oh are you not and Oh sure your father was Jackie, I knew him, he used to hurl with my father, sure they played Junior B until they were gone fifty, ha ha ha, they were tough yokes, Oh that was your mother so who died not long ago, sorry for your trouble, go on anyway, how much did you leave inside with that shower of crooks?
Was it you got the hiding off of Eugene Penrose and that fella from town and those other two apes? Penrose got an awful fright, you know. He nearly shat himself apparently, when your man went to town on you. He doesn’t know who he’s mixing with, there. That lad is deadly dangerous. He’s a pure knacker. He wore a pool cue off of one of the Comerfords and you know how tough them boyos are. Penrose is like a child with a new toy whenever a bigger knacker than him turns up. Do you work below in the co-op? Oh ya, I was thinking. You get dog’s abuse there some days off of Penrose. I seen him at it a few times. And the other two fools with him. If Penrose opened his mouth you’d see their four cod eyes looking out at you, they’re so far up his hole.