Long Story Short

by Siobhán Parkinson

  I remember when I was littler, when Da first left and before Gramma realized what was going on here, Ma used to forget to get the dole money. She’d just sleep through until I came home from school and it was too late and then there’d be nothing to eat.

  I started acting up at school then on dole days, so that they’d have to send me home. One day I pretended I was choking and the teacher had to do a thing called the Hindenburg Maneuver, only it’s not Hindenburg exactly, which basically means beating you up until you stop. And then they didn’t even send me home, just made me lie down for a little while. That was the worst day of my life, lying on a little pullout sofa thing in the secretary’s office looking at those horrible ceiling tiles with all the holes in them—they look sort of medical or something—and wishing I could just go home and get Ma up. But they wouldn’t let me go home, they said there might be something stuck in my soft guts (I thought that’s what they said, but it was esophagus, I know that now) and it would be dangerous to send me home.

  So the next week I wet myself, and would you believe it? they just gave me clean things to wear. That was when I realized that no matter how miserable I made myself at school, they weren’t going to send me home. And I did not like sitting around all day in somebody else’s underpants. So I started really acting out then, rampaging around the classroom, spitting and shrieking and pulling people’s hair. I thought, They’ll definitely send me home now, maybe they’ll even expel me, but they just put me in a quiet room and got this counselor person to come and talk to me, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want anyone finding out anything about me or my family, so I pretended I had a speech defect—you know, like when you can’t talk properly.

  In the end, I worked out a much simpler method. You mess about in class, you talk, you are disruptive, but not so bad they think you need counseling, just so bad they think your behavior is terrible, so then they take you to the principal’s office and they ring your mother, to embarrass you, I suppose.

  And then there’s this long, long, long wait until eventually Ma answers the phone, and you are imagining her rolling out of bed, cursing, and tumbling down the stairs in her pajamas and still cursing.

  There’d be all this hugger-muggering when she answered, and then I’d say, “Can I talk to her for a minute please?” so they’d give me the phone, and I’d cup my hand over the mouthpiece and whisper, “Ma, you need to go and get the stuff, you know?” like a person in a gangster movie talking about drugs or guns or something, and she would giggle and say, “I’m just on my way, guv’ner.”

  At least she used to giggle at first, she thought it was a gas the way I would get them to ring up, but after a while she started getting belligerent about it and then she would snarl into the phone and make all these threats and ask me who did I think I was telling her what to do? I’d be standing there in the principal’s office with my finger stuck over the place on the receiver where the voice comes out, in case anyone heard the stuff she was yelling at me. It was like a kind of verbal vomit: it stank and you couldn’t make it stop.

  Then I got a mobile phone and it was a whole lot easier, especially when I started at secondary school, where you can nip out between classes to make a phone call. Life is much better as you get older. The younger you are, the harder it is. Secondary school is much better than primary school for other reasons too. You are not stuck in a classroom with one adult all day long. Even if you don’t like one class, you can always look forward to the next one. Lots of things like that. And they leave you alone more. They don’t seem to feel they have to monitor every thought you have.

  5

  After three days the bottle of Calpol was nearly empty and Julie’s face was still livid. The girl who walked into doors.

  They rang from her school to know where she was. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. I was so concerned about spinning my own school a yarn and texting Annie and all that I’d forgotten Julie would need an excuse too.

  “Eh—she’s got the—the whatchamacallit, the winter vomiting bug,” I said.

  Not the optimum answer, but all I could come up with on the spot. She’d been out three days. It would be stretching it a bit to keep her at home much longer with a thing like that. I should have invented some really long illness for her, to give her time for her face to heal. Scarlet fever or mumps or something. Measles. I could check the Internet, if only I could get out to the library, but Julie wouldn’t stay in the house on her own with Ma, and I couldn’t risk taking her with me. I could always ring Annie and ask her to check it for me, but then I’d have to explain it all to her, and she … well, it’s not that I couldn’t trust her, but it wouldn’t be fair to land all this stuff on her. It was too late now anyway, since I’d mentioned the vomiting thing.

  “Oh,” said the person who’d rung. I forget who it was, if I’d ever heard. “That’s too bad. Is she nearly better?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a bad case.” Inspiration hit me. “She got dehydrated. They had to put her on a drip. She was in hospital overnight. Terrible it was.”

  I was dead proud of that little detail. Mr. O’Connell is always telling us to put in “telling detail.” It convinces your reader, he says. And he was right. Your woman at the other end of the phone swallowed my story, hook, line, and sinker. Maybe the ideal reader is a fish after all.

  “Dear me,” said the voice. “Could I speak to your mother?”

  “She’s sick too,” I said. “We’ve all had it. She can’t come to the phone.”

  “Dear, oh dear,” said the voice again. “And how about you, are you okay?”

  “Walking wounded,” I said with a short laugh, to show I was putting on a brave face.

  “Is there anything we can do? Could I drop over some soup or something?”

  “No, no,” I said, “my grandmother…”

  “I thought she’d passed away?”

  “The other one,” I muttered, wishing to God I could just hang up.

  “Oh, well, that’s good. You mind yourself, now, young man. Jonathan, isn’t it? Give Julie our best regards. Tell her we all miss her. I’ll ring again in a day or two if she doesn’t show up.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And sorry for not ringing.”

  After I’d hung up, I realized my hands were shaking.

  I’d really messed up. I should have said she’d had a fall or something, brazened it out from the start. It was going to be ages before she was fit to be seen, and I couldn’t see how I could keep her under wraps for much longer. And now I’d invented an illness, multiplied by three, a hospital stay and a living grandmother. Keep it simple, they say, if you must lie. Great advice, but not that easy to follow.

  I was going to have to go back to school myself pretty swiftish too, or the home-school liaison officer would be on my case. She’s all right, actually, old Ma Leary, but I don’t want anyone, even a very nice person, coming nosing in here and saying Julie has to go off to some foster home or something. Whatever happens, I thought, I have to keep Julie with me. I wasn’t going to let anyone get their paws on her. She was mine. But how the hell was I going to do that?

  I was sitting there on the sofa, trying to think it all through, when this peep-peep sound came from under a magazine on the coffee table. Peep-peep it went again.

  I lifted the magazine, and there was Julie’s mobile phone under it. I hate that thing. I don’t think eight-year-olds should have mobiles, if you ask me. They should be tumbling with puppies and climbing trees, not playing Pac-Man on pink phones. Call me old-fashioned, but there it is.

  Idly, I opened the message. I don’t know what possessed me. I never open people’s mail or anything. I think I did it automatically. I was sitting with a phone in my hand and the message icon is showing, so I just opened it without thinking. This was the message that some monster kid had sent to Julie:

  hey jool we no yer mas a alco wer gonna get u when u cum bak 2 skool u scum

  I sat there with the stupid phone in m
y hand, and all I could think was, She’s only eight, she’s only eight. Who under God could do this to an eight-year-old child? Scum!

  I could hardly breathe, I was so angry. I jabbed frantically to delete the horrible message, muttering, “Scum yourself, you sorry little bitch.” The only person who could send a message like that to an eight-year-old, I thought, was another eight-year-old, and I was pretty sure it was that awful Danielle creature she hangs out with. I know her brother, he’s a pukeball. For two pins I’d have gone around to their rotten little prissy house with its brick drive and its flowery curtains matching in all the windows and knocked her smirky little self-satisfied head off.

  I could hear the toilet flushing upstairs. That was Julie. I forgot to say Ma had been out all that evening.

  I turned the phone off. I didn’t want it ringing or beeping. Maybe Julie would think she’d lost it. I put it in my pocket. I could hear her coming down the stairs now. She always comes down the way little kids do. First one foot on the step, then the other, then the first foot on the next step, and so on, planting two feet on each step before the next one. She’s big enough to come down the proper way. I think she just does it because she likes it. She sings as she comes downstairs, some song about coming downstairs.

  I sat for a long time in the sitting room, with that phone in my pocket lying like a bar of venom against my thigh. What the hell was I going to do?

  After I’d packed Julie off to bed, I sent a text message to that filthy little turd, Danielle Butler. I got the number off Julie’s phone, but I sent it from my own phone. This is what I wrote (and by the way, I use predictive text, none of that lazy old B4 rubbish for me):

  If you lay a hand on my sister, you little bitch, I will personally come and beat you till you are black and blue and your teeth rattle in your poxy little head. Scum yourself. I know where you live. JK

  I had no intention of doing anything to her, I wouldn’t hurt a fly, and she is only eight, but I needed her to feel how scary it is when someone sends you a message like that. Poxy little cow.

  Then I sat for ages in the dark, with my head in a swirl. My thoughts were spinning round and round, like clothes in a washing machine. Bruising, I thought. Alcoholic. Social worker. Foster care. Scum. School. Measles. Cow. Mobile phone. Danielle.

  Then the thoughts started to swirl faster. We were in the spin cycle now. Foster bruise. Social school. The sleeves were wrapping themselves around the collars, the washing ball had worked its way into a pocket, a glove fingered the toe of a sock. Scum school. Alco social. Danielle. Foster phone. Bruise cow.

  I was drifting into sleep.

  You probably think I hate Ma, but I didn’t hate her. I didn’t have the energy for hatred, and anyway I was too busy trying to keep everything together for Julie. But that’s not why I don’t hate her.

  She’s my mother.

  I heard a woman in a supermarket once telling the checkout person she was buying the food for her mother’s funeral. “Ah, God,” said the checkout girl. “I’m sorry to hear that. You only have one mother, isn’t that the way?”

  That is the way. You don’t get to pick your parents, but once you’re landed with them, that’s it. And there’s no good in hating them, it only leads to awfulness.

  Mind you, the awfulness happens anyway, all by itself. You don’t need to do a thing.

  In some ways my da was worse. I mean, he never hit us or anything, but by God he ruled our house with an iron fist all the same. We couldn’t get to do stuff, just normal stuff, like play soccer or take a part in the school play or join the Boy Scouts. I mean, yeah, in theory we could. There wasn’t a rule against it or anything. That’d be easier, like the Mormon kid we had in my class for a while, he couldn’t do stuff because his family had these rules. But rules you can handle, even shitty ones like that. It’s when you think there’s no problem, and you sign up for something and you come home and you tell them, all excited, that you’ve been picked to play soccer for the school or you’ve been put on the quiz team or whatever, and everyone’s thrilled for you, and beaming, and banging you on the back, and then suddenly you do something you didn’t even know was wrong, like you leave a door open or you drop your socks into the linen basket without turning them the right way out, and wham! No soccer practice, or quiz team, or Boy Scouts meeting, or rehearsals for you, my boy, you’ve got to learn to behave. In the end, you get the message and you just don’t sign up for anything, see, because no matter what it is, you are going to end up not being allowed to take part.

  I never understood why. It was just always like that. You accepted it, or you didn’t, and in the end, you worked out that accepting it was much the easier option.

  Ma had learned that ages ago. She’d learned to keep her trap shut. But the thing is, she ended up not even trying to protect us. We had to stand up to Da or we had to give in to him. She just didn’t get involved anymore.

  I had a birthday party once. I was seven, I think, and Da was away, so Ma said, Sure, you can have a party. It was just a normal party, with Jell-O—purple Jell-O—and ice cream and Pass the Parcel and those feathery things you blow, and everyone said it was the best party they had ever been to, real old-fashioned, with the sandwiches and everything, nobody ever had sandwiches at parties anymore. It was mostly Gramma who organized it, so I suppose that’s why it was so old-fashioned, because of course she was old, being a grandmother. I remember she wanted to make the sandwiches with brown bread, but Ma said the kids would never stand for that, so in the end she gave in and when the party started there were all these beautiful little triangular sandwiches, all white and gleaming, but when you picked one up, the bottom triangle of bread was brown, so she pulled a fast one and got at least half the amount of brown bread into the kids, and she made everyone finish the sandwiches before the fairy cakes came out, and then the purple Jell-O. It was the best day of my life, and Ma really enjoyed it too. Julie was in her high chair banging her spoon on the tray and singing Happy Burrday, Happy Burrday dear JonTHAN, and we were all having a riot, and this boy called Keith Butler was shooting lumps of Jell-O off his spoon and landing them on the wall. He was taking bets on which lump would slither to the floor first. Only then my da came home unexpectedly and opened the kitchen door and a wet gob of purple Jell-O landed right on his forehead and he let this bawl out of him, like a bull having its nose ring pulled, and children scattered, screaming, under the table, out the back door, one lad even climbed up on the sink, God knows why. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so scary.

  He didn’t do that rage thing all that often. Most of the time he was grand. Even good fun sometimes. And he adored Julie. He used to throw her up in the air to make her scream with laughter and then catch her and swing her and throw her up again, and Ma would be pleading with him to be careful, he’d make Julie sick, or he’d drop her and break her, and I’d be jumping up beside him and begging him to throw me up in the air too, but of course I was far too big for that. I don’t think he ever did it when I was small either.

  I have never been able to work out if Ma started drinking because Da left, or if Da left because Ma started drinking. But now I think maybe it was all more complicated than that.

  6

  Julie got a right surprise in the morning when she woke up to find me creeping about her bedroom.

  I’d tipped the books out of her schoolbag, and I was bundling clothes in.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  “Sssh,” I said. “Don’t want to wake Ma.”

  “Yes, but what are you doing?” This time she spoke in an even louder whisper.

  “Packing,” I said, and I held my hand out in front of me, palm side down, and lowered it repeatedly to indicate that she should bring the volume down.

  She sat up in bed and hugged herself.

  “But that’s my schoolbag,” she said. “And why are you patting the air like that?”

  “Well, you haven’t got another rucksack,” I said. “And keep it do
wn, will you?”

  “What about your rucksack?” she asked.

  “Packed already,” I said.

  “Jonathan! Are we…”

  “Yes,” I said. “You were right all along, Julie. I should have listened to you in the first place.”

  “Oh, wow!” she said, and leaped out of bed. She flung herself at me and threw her skinny little arms around my waist. “You are the best brother ever!”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “And you’re pretty cool too. Come on now, get dressed and eat up your brekkie, so I can pack the teethbreesh.”

  She giggled. That was Gramma’s word. She always said the plural of toothbrush should be teethbreesh. “In fact,” she would say, in this professorial way she had, “the singular should be teethbrush anyway. Except for persons unlucky enough to have only one tooth.”

  “Come on, Julie,” I said as she finished her breakfast. “Time to go.”

  I knew I had to get out of that house.

  She smiled at me, but her face had gone very white. The parts of it that were not purple, I mean. The enormity of it all had suddenly hit her, I suppose.

  “Where are we going to go?” she asked.

  I hadn’t a clue. I’d lain awake all night thinking about it, but I still hadn’t got past step one. Even the longest journey has to start with a single step, I said to myself. Isn’t that very wise of me, now? Actually, I read that somewhere. Probably on a calendar.

  “First, we’re going over to Gramma’s house,” I said.

  Actually, I wasn’t sure whose house it was now. Maybe the Corpo owned it. But I still had the key, and it’s only three weeks since she died. I couldn’t imagine that the Corpo would have moved in on it already, not with all the houses there are lying empty these days. The country is full of them. One more isn’t going to make all that difference.

  “We can’t go to Gramma’s,” Julie said, her eyes wide.