by Donal Ryan
HE TOOK Johnsey’s hand in both of his and started speeching out of him without preamble. Like Paddy Rourke, except while Paddy’s speech was about how Johnsey should shoot Eugene Penrose and the yahoos, this speech was about how Johnsey should sell the land, without delay, to a consortium of mainly locals who had progress and employment at their heart. Surely Jackie had told him all about it; it was going on years, this planning for the land bank, sure wasn’t Jackie as much a driving force behind the whole idea as anyone, sure hadn’t he lobbied for the rezoning, and now that the planners had seen sense all that was left was for a deal to be done with regard to the sale of the land and plans could be submitted for the redevelopment and work could begin almost immediately. Wasn’t it a heartbreaking thought that Jackie, Lord have mercy on him, wouldn’t see his plans come to fruition? But wouldn’t he be happy that the council inside had saw sense at last and his son and his son’s children please God could prosper because of him?
This man who had hardly looked in Johnsey’s direction below in the village in twenty-four years was now grasping his hand the very same way people did at Mother and Daddy’s funerals and was smiling with his lips peeled back from his teeth and gums like a German Shepherd and breathing hot words all over him.
Herbert Grogan said You know I was a great friend to your father, Johnsey. Everyone knows that. I had great regard for him, and he for me. He was no daw, Johnsey. He could see past his own nose, not like some. There’s fellas going to sleep poor tonight, Johnsey, that’ll wake up tomorrow millionaires. Cattle that was eating ordinary grass yesterday is shitting gold today. This all happens, Johnsey, without any effort on the part of them fellas. They were up early milking and foddering all their lives and doing the same few auld jobs day in, day out, with no thought beyond going to the mart and buying and selling a few beasts and waiting to see what would they be handed in the line of a grant from Europe or what have you. All the effort and fightin and pullin and draggin and Jaysus hardship that makes all them magical millions appear for them fellas is done by the likes of me. Feckin eejits that we are, we can see potential, po-tential, Johnsey, in them miserable wet fields where neither beast nor man ever really thrived, for something great that’ll benefit all and give jobs and security and happiness. That’s all we want to do, Johnsey, is give jobs and better this community and build for the future. Some says we’re mad. More says we’re visionaries. More again calls us crooks and says we’re only in it for all we can get for ourselves! Lookit, John, I don’t give one shite what any of them says about me, there’s as many auld begrudgers around here that wants to see no one have anything only themselves as there always was – the same auld crowd that used sell their neighbours to the English long ago. Let them off to hell, Johnsey, they’ll die bitter and there’ll be no tears shed for them.
ISN’T IT a fright to God to say a man could end up being a bar to progress and could deny jobs to half the village and wealth to all just by being alive and that the low esteem he was held in by his fellow man could be further reduced by matters in which he had no hand, act nor part? Doesn’t that just bate all? Seemingly the whole village was all of a sudden looking out of their mouths at him to know what would he do about selling the land to this consortium of bigshots so they may get on with their plans for houses, shops, a school, new roads and what have you. And none of it for profit – all them great men wants is to give employment, according to Herbert Grogan. The Creamers and the McDermotts and Paddy Rourke had apparently all already entered into agreement-in-principle with regard to their share of this famous land deal. Johnsey wished Paddy had explained more to him about this business instead of telling him he was a meely-mawly and urging him to do impossible violence.
The box in Daddy’s office seemed like a pathetic thing now. All of Mother and Daddy’s work, the foddering and milking and calving and lambing and shearing and up and down and over and back to mart and abattoir and co-op and all of Mother’s saving up and putting away and rows with Daddy over having notions and throwing money around and all of Daddy’s long, hard, slogged-out days of laying blocks and they may as well have sat on their arses and drew the dole and watched television all their lives because the few quid that would be the realization of them bits of paper in Daddy’s box would be like pebbles inside in a quarry when compared to the sort of money the bigshots wanted to pay for the land.
Johnsey thought again of Our Lord after his forty lonesome days and nights and he famished and parched in the desert and the devil creeping around with offers of thirst quenched and hunger sated and all the riches of the world. And all Jesus wanted to do was tramp the road with his pals and tell all about His Father. It must have been great until them bitter Pharisees told on Him and the Romans got thick. It must have been brilliant having all those friends and magical powers to feed the multitudes and make wine from water and the dead arise and appear to many. What had he? A farm of land already usurped and about to be grabbed away for good and covered over with concrete and no pals to speak of and barely power enough to turn on the washing machine.
That Grogan man was finished talking. Now he was looking at Johnsey with his bottom lip shoving his top lip up towards his pointy nose like one of those men who don’t roar and shout at matches, only watch quietly with their arms crossed. Was he waiting for Johnsey to say something? At least he wouldn’t say I’ll have to ask this time. Should he invite him in? A vampire has to be invited in; otherwise they can’t cross your threshold.
Johnsey told Herbert Grogan he was going to talk to his accountant and thanked him for calling up and backed up the yard towards the front door with one hand reaching behind to guide him in. Once he had the door closed he stood still a while and waited for the sound of retreating footsteps and an engine starting outside the gate and when these sounds came he could breathe again and wonder where he came up with I’m going to talk to my accountant!
Good man, Johnsey, begod. It sure was better than I’ll have to ask!
August
THERE’S A POEM a fella wrote about how he’d see old men who reminded him of how his father looked when he died. He said
Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
Johnsey learnt that whole poem off by heart in school. Now he only remembered that first verse. August is the very start of autumn. Some things ripen in August, having drunk the sunshine all summer. Other things start to die and fall away to nothing. You’d always start to feel the nip in the air in August. You’d be scalded red at a match and by the time you arrived home that evening the sun would have tired from the fight and would have let the cold, white moon chase it back behind the hills. The sun does be weaker in August, watery, not able to keep a whole day warm.
Daddy died in August. All that last summer, while all about him grew and bloomed, Daddy shrank and slowly died. He fell in love with death, like your man’s father.
MUMBLY DAVE arrived on the first day of August, and everything changed. Johnsey spotted him coming from the haggard wall. He came in the gate nearly sideways, revving like a madman and his tyres screeching their protest at his showing off, in one of them cars that used to make Daddy shout Look at that feckin YAHOO when they went flying up the road past the gate. Johnsey’s heart cartwheeled in his chest. Imagine feeling such joy at the sight of a fat little plámáser! Mumbly Dave hugged Johnsey, like one of them Mafia lads. It felt like falling into a pile of hay that was warmed by the sun after a long day’s labour. He drew back fast for fear Mumbly Dave would sense his enjoyment and think he was a queer. Mumbly Dave was talking away ninety. No change there. He had a fine mouth of permanent falsies, so gone was the Mumbly and all that was left was Dave. He spun full circle for fear he wouldn’t see something and next thing he was gone, darting through the gap between the slatted house and the workshop into the big yard on his short legs before Johnsey could protest.
Johnsey di
dn’t like the big yard; it was too full of nothing now where once it was a place of running muck and beasts passing on their way to the parlour and Daddy’s hups and shcoo-ons and the smell of shit and diesel fumes. But now that Mumbly Dave had planted himself in the middle of it, it seemed more alive again, less like one of them ghost towns you’d see on a Western and more like a place that could be woken out of its sleep and put to use again.
Mumbly Dave read Johnsey over leaving Daddy’s Land Rover and Mother’s Fiesta to crumble and rot, and promised to get them going. He marvelled at the size of the hay barn and guessed you could ram twenty apartments into it. Ha? Course you could. No Jaysus bother, boy. He darted in and out of the outhouses, jabbering away all the time, for all the world like one of them chubby monkeys that swing around the trees below in Fota Island.
By Jaysus, youssir, I’ll tell you one thing, you’re the talk of the village below. There’s some maintains you’re after twenty million for this place! You’re dead fuckin right, youssir. Twenty … Jaysus … million. Dave paused to shake his head and whistle. And you know what? You’re dead fuckin right! Woo-hoo, boy! Them fuckin McDermotts and the Collinses and their big leader Herbie Grogan and the rest of the con-fuckin-sortium as they call themselves, you have ’em quare fuckin rattled, boy!
It didn’t seem fair to knock the wind out of his sails. Just by doing nothing, too afraid nearly to venture past the gate, save for first Mass on Sundays, he had the village below in uproar. Signs on he’d been getting quare looks above at the church and along the road home. He’d thought it was to do with the beating but now it seemed it was more to do with him being a money-hungry blackguard and trying to fleece all them hard-working business men and they only trying to give jobs to people and make the world a better place. He seemed to have made Mumbly Dave happy at least. He thought of Paddy Rourke and his wife the time of the wild calf and how Paddy was condemned as a man who’d beat up a woman. Mother was right. People will think and say and believe what pleases them. The truth is what’s shouted loudest and by the most. What about it? Let them all off to hell. That’s what Daddy would have said.
Johnsey told Mumbly Dave all about Herbert Grogan and his big auld spiel and how he’d told lies about Daddy having planned all along to sell the land and how it was Daddy tried to get the land rezoned originally and all about Dermot McDermott trying to trick him into selling the land to them because they were mar dhea after getting a bigger milk quota and wanted to be sure of the land, and Mumbly Dave shook his head and spat like Paddy Rourke and said how them Grogans would buy you and sell you and they’d tell you black was white and that McDermott was only a bollix anyway, and his people were pure grabbers, sure the whole place knew that.
Mumbly Dave wanted to know how’s it they was never friends years ago? Johnsey ventured that they went to separate schools and were a good few years apart, anyway. Mumbly Dave allowed that this was so, and said he was forever forgetting that Johnsey was only twenty-four. Johnsey never heard talk of friendship before between two men. He wondered had Daddy and Jimmy Unthank and Paddy Rourke ever declared themselves to be friends, or was their bond left go unmentioned, unmolested by words? Johnsey got the impression that Mumbly Dave could talk himself into things and out of things until the cows came home and none of his declarations of friendship or enmity would carry much weight when all was said and done. But still and all, for days like this, when that auld clock inside was ticking and tocking its cruel beat and a man had little to do besides look in over the haggard wall and wonder how a universe so packed with stuff could have left a space this empty, Mumbly Dave’s declarations of fondness and friendship, weighty or not, were as welcome as the sun when there was hay waiting to be saved or turf to be footed.
FOR A FINISH, Mumbly Dave called up nearly every day that August. The days he didn’t call stretched out their legs and took their own sweet, maddening time in passing. Those days, he looked at the telly and the telly looked back and outside the milky sun shone down on a world that seemed to be going to waste when there was no Mumbly Dave to go out into it with. The days he did call galloped past, because that’s the way time is – it’s not a constant either, like that science teacher said. Going to town in Mumbly Dave’s car to look at wans in miniskirts or walking down the Callows and firing stones into the river like bould children or sitting around the kitchen looking out at the rain and drinking a few cans of Harp with Mumbly Dave talking and talking and talking all the time – doing these things made time speed up so you’d barely be finished laughing at Mumbly Dave’s slagging of a wan’s fat arse or some fella’s gimpy walk or a young fella with the head dyed off of himself or whatever new tall tale he had to tell and you’d look at your watch and you’d realize you were going to miss Home and Away and you didn’t even care.
Mumbly Dave was going to claim a fine whack of money off of Timmy Shaughnessy who everyone called Timmy Shake Hands on account of how he’d always greet you with a handshake. Timmy owned the stand on which he’d placed his ladder, which had then collapsed and spilled ladder and Dave onto the hard ground and his fall only broken by the edge of a wall and the ladder was the finest but you know yourself how I fared out, wasn’t I in smithereens? And Timmy Shake Hands could claim recompense from the council who owned the house the gutters of which he was cleaning and sure they could claim from the Board of Works who had ordered that the house be tidied up in the first place and the house should have been knocked long ago anyway and wasn’t that what insurance was for, to compensate a man for his pain and suffering? And that solicitor lady was taking no prisoners, that was for sure. She was a fine thing too, bejaysus.
Mumbly Dave had the world of stories about things he’d done and seen and places he’d been and women he’d gotten off with. He’d shifted every girl who was roughly his age in the parish and most of the girls in surrounding parishes. He was solid red from riding. He’d even point at wans inside in town and claim to have gotten a shag off of them! Besides making himself out to be a great lover of women, Mumbly Dave was forever telling stories about the lads. Me and the lads, one time, we went away to Cork for the weekend. Jaysus youssir, twas some craic. Me and one of the lads took two cracking women home one time and one a them turned out to be an awful lunatic and she went for your man with a broken wine glass, twas a solid scream! Me and the lads used be forever fighting with them townies inside in the nightclub and one night I was cornered by three of the bowsie fuckers and I was on my own on account the lads had all gone away early but I nutted one prick in the snout and lamped another in the balls full force and the third bollix turned and ran and I didn’t even bother chasing him, only stopped a cab, and there was a wan waiting for a cab as well and we said Feck it to hell, we’ll share, and I ended up shifting the face off of her in the back of the cab and as I was paying your man he just looked at me and shook his head and he just said Legend.
Johnsey never saw any of these lads, though, nor heard their names. When Mumbly Dave blew his horn and saluted fellas along the road with the back of his hand flat against his windscreen, they as a rule returned his friendliness with a bare raised finger or nod of the head or not at all. And Mumbly Dave never made good on his promise to bring Johnsey for a few pints. Sure what harm? A few tall tales never hurt anyone, and he had survived grand so far without going to pubs. Mother often said someone she enjoyed was a tonic. Like that person was good for her. Now he knew what she meant.
THE PHONE HOPPED most days, and when he answered it people wanted to ask him questions and tell him things and talk about auctions and commission and what he wanted to do and for a finish he found a volume yoke on the bottom of the phone and he turned it down to the last and that was an end to the torture of having to mumble half-truths to strangers and hang the phone up on them. But that was only like when that little Dutch fella stuck his finger in the hole in the dam – he could feel the pressure building up in the silent phone of all the unanswered calls and all the people wanting to talk to him and ask him things an
d tell him how much he could make and what an opportunity he’d been handed and after a few days he could hardly walk past the hall table where the phone sat without feeling like it was going to go BANG and burst all over him and drown him in angry voices and big urgent words.
After a few visits, Mumbly Dave took to walking straight in, without knocking on door or window. The first time he did it, he stood in the doorway of the kitchen looking in at Johnsey and Johnsey looked back at him from the table where he was eating a cut of toast and having a sup of tea and Mumbly Dave asked him had he a problem mar dhea he was going to fight with Johnsey and Johnsey tried to stop himself laughing and told him he had some neck sauntering in like he owned the place and Mumbly Dave said he was very sorry, it was just that Sir Godfrey Blueballs the Butler seemed to be indisposed today, otherwise he’d have announced his arrival, you bollix, and they both started laughing and sure what about it if he walked straight in, you’d hear him coming from the far end of the village in his yahoo car, anyway.