“So, I want you to go up that drive now and knock on the door, and ask Da to mind you. I can’t go in with you, Julie, but I’ll be all right, and I’ll send you a postcard in a few days. Okay?”
Julie’s little two-tone face was streaming with rainwater. Or tears. She looked up at me, and she whispered, “No, Jono. No. You have to come too.”
“I can’t, Julie,” I said. “It’s complicated. Don’t do as I do. Do as I say. Right?”
She gave a little shadow of a laugh. “Gramma,” she said.
“Yeah. She always gave good advice. Off with you now, and don’t look back. I promise about the postcard.”
She nodded and took a step towards the door.
She turned then and said, “Wait a minute. I have to give you something.”
She wriggled her rucksack off her back and opened it.
“Here, you hold these,” she said, thrusting handfuls of clothes, worn and clean all mixed up together, into my arms.
At last she came up with what she was looking for. It was a hardback book with an uninteresting red cover.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s your book,” she said. “’Member when you sent me to get a book and a teddy. Well, I got the teddy, right, ’cos you said, which was good, even though I don’t do teddies anymore, ’cos that’s where I got the name, right? An’ I got one of your books instead, ’cos you’re a better reader than me. Right?”
In the middle of it all, I had to smile. Either she was taking me off, sending me up, or she had picked up that “Right?” thing from me.
“Right,” I agreed.
The book looked vaguely familiar, but at the same time not the kind of book I would be reading.
I opened it at the title page. “The Merchant of Venice,” I read. “By William Shakespeare. This isn’t mine,” I said.
“Well, it was on your desk.”
Then I remembered. Mr. O’Connell had given it to me. Said we’d be starting it soon and I might like to take a look over it ahead of the posse. “Steal a march,” was how he put it. He has this weird idea I’m good at English.
“Well, that’s great, thanks, Julie,” I said, and I leafed forward in the book to the first page of the play.
“‘In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,’” I read.
Huh! I thought. I could give him a few reasons.
“Is it a good one?” Julie asked anxiously.
I looked at her wet little figure standing there in the rain, her hair streaming and her mouth open on a rosy space with a gappy fringe of white teeth.
“The best book in the world,” I said.
“You’re only saying that,” she said with a squirm, but I could see she was delighted.
“No, it is, really it is,” I said, and I kissed the top of her head. Wet lemons.
Then she heaved the sodden rucksack onto her back again, and she took a step towards the house.
“Don’t look back,” I whispered. “Just keep going. And remember, you don’t know where I am. Right?”
She stopped in her tracks.
“Go on,” I urged her, and she did.
I waited no more than a couple of seconds, just long enough to see the door opening and Julie disappearing into the square of light.
Then I turned and ran and ran and ran into the rain, which was driving down now like chips of ice. I had no idea what kind of reception she got. They’d have to take her in, I thought. They’d have to. She’s only eight. And the guards are there.
PART II
9
“So that’s your story, and you’re sticking to it?”
Paudge Rooney stared into Jonathan Kinahan’s eyes.
“No,” said the boy.
Rooney sighed and licked his pencil.
“Hmmm, here we go again,” he said, pulling his notebook towards him. “So what happened?”
“I already told you,” said Jonathan.
“But you just said you wanted to change your story.”
“I never.”
“So that’s your story, and you’re sticking to it. That’s what I said, and you said no.”
“Yes.”
“Yes you said no, or yes you are sticking to it?”
“Yes I said no.”
“So you want to change your story?”
“No.”
“Jesus Christ, boy!”
Rooney’s meaty fist thudded on the table between them. Jonathan jumped.
“Easy, Paudge.”
It was the voice of the young woman they had assigned to protect Jonathan’s interests during the questioning. A solicitor, maybe, or a social worker. They’d probably said, but he hadn’t been listening. He didn’t care.
He turned to look at her now. She was dark and stocky, and her hair shone as it slipped forward when she spoke. She wore a ring on her middle finger, with a huge mauve stone.
“Is that real?” Jonathan asked, laying a finger on the stone.
“Well, it’s not imaginary,” she said with a smile. Her chin jutted a little, but you didn’t notice that so much when she smiled.
“He’s running rings around me, Kate,” said Paudge, shaking his head.
“What I mean is…” said Jonathan, turning back to Rooney.
“Aha!” said Rooney, sitting up straight, all business.
“What I mean is, That’s your story, and you’re sticking to it means I’m lying, but I’m not lying.”
“It doesn’t mean you’re lying.”
“That’s the implication,” said Jonathan evenly.
“Holy mother of God!” said Rooney, and he pulled his hair—he had a good thatch of it, like straw—with both hands.
Oh, lordy me, I can’t keep this up. I thought the third person might make it all seem more real somehow, but it’s hard work writing about yourself as if you are not yourself. You can’t tell about what you are thinking, and that’s really the whole point, isn’t it? That’s one for Mr. O’Connell. Must ask him what he makes of that, only of course I won’t be seeing him again. Not now. That’s kinda sad. I liked him. But I’ve gone beyond all that now.
What happens to you if you have gone beyond school at fourteen?
But I didn’t think that at the time. At the time, I thought, When this is all over, life might go back to normal. Not that it ever was normal to start with. I mean, normal, without “back to.”
Life could go normal, I thought, and I could worry about girls and acne and deodorant and, oh, going to Oxygen music festival and hanging about in front of the Central Bank and all that stuff that is supposed to preoccupy you when you are a teenager. It all seemed very distant somehow, from where I was sitting that day talking to Paudge and Kate, but I suppose I could learn. I am not averse to any of it really (that’s a Gramma word, as in I wouldn’t be averse to a slice of that cake, Jon). But I’m not averse to it, especially not the girls part. Birds, as Keith Butler would say.
There’s Annie, of course. I know I said she was my girlfriend, but that’s wishful thinking. I don’t think she fancies me really, she just likes me, which is totally different.
This Kate one, now, I thought, she’s not my type.
I didn’t know I had a type actually, but I suppose it’s like what people say about art, I don’t know much about it, but I know what I like. In this case, what I don’t like, and that’s this sort of duck shape, though I do remember thinking, I’d say she’s sound, as a person, I mean. And anyway, she’s, hey, twice my age for chrissake, what am I even thinking of, like she cares what I think of her. Does that make her old enough to be my mother?
That word birds to mean girls, where did it come from? Gramma used to go out of her tree (pun not intended, but I like it anyway) if anyone used that word, with that meaning. She couldn’t stand it. There’re much worse words, I told her, but she didn’t care, she just went spare when she heard birds. And the laugh of it is, she was just like a little sparrow herself, only a colorful one.
That eejit Keith Butler, h
e was talking about some bird one day, boasting about how … well, it doesn’t matter, boasting anyway, and someone said something about birds of a feather, or nesting or twittering or some damn thing about actual birds, as in garden birds, songbirds—they were being smart, like—and Turdface Butler, he thinks they don’t understand what he is talking about, and he says, No, no, not that kind of bird. I mean the two-legged variety. God, I nearly pissed myself laughing.
Mind you, it would be good if you could breed a four-legged turkey, for the Christmas market.
I have never seen anyone to suit their name so well as that Paudge guy. But to be fair he didn’t seem too bad, for a cop. I knew I was annoying the hell out of him, but he was not giving me grief, not really. He’s like the sort of bloke you’d like to have refereeing your matches, I thought, if you played sport. If anyone ever picked you for a team. If anyone thought you would ever be any good at anything.
Though maybe he was just playing good cop until the bad cop came. But I don’t think so.
“Right, then, Jonathan,” said Paudge, who is, as you know, on the pudgy side, which makes his name kind of amusing. If you can’t help smiling every time you think of someone’s name, it’s hard to really think badly of them. Even if they are interrogating you.
That was supposed to sound businesslike, that “Right, then, Jonathan,” so I sat up and looked serious. I wanted Paudge to be on my side. No, that’s not exactly it. What I wanted was for me to be on the same side as Paudge. Not quite the same thing.
“So would you like to explain to us how you got into this mess?” he said. “Start again. Pretend I lost you the last time.”
He did lose me the last time, the stupid old fart.
But like I said, he seemed a decent skin in his way, so I started to make a stab at explaining myself again.
“Which part of the mess would you like cleared up first?” I asked in a jocular voice, to set the tone, to show I’m not afraid, to invite his friendship. And also because I was not sure where to start. Plus I was not sure how much he knew.
“Well, I think you could begin by explaining why you left the scene,” he said.
“The scene? You make it sound like a film.” I snorted, to show this was a joke. “Cops and robbers.”
He was not amused.
“Well, I don’t like to call it the crime scene, Jonathan,” he said quietly, looking at me in this straight-talking, we’re-guys-who-trust-each-other kind of way. “I don’t want you to think I am jumping to any conclusions here.”
“Crime?” I said, trying to sound surprised. I hoped there wasn’t a wobble in my voice. I knew we had to get to this eventually, but that’s a big word, you know?
“Incident,” he amended.
That was more like it. I sat back in my chair and crossed one leg over the other.
He eyed me suspiciously. He didn’t like it when I seemed to be comfortable. I said nothing for the longest time. Kept him waiting.
In the end, I said, “My grandmother died.”
Everything changed.
I don’t know why.
Paudge jumped up and leaned over the table so that his face was within kissing distance of mine. I didn’t like that. His breath didn’t smell so very marvelous, for one thing. Close up, his face was kind of mealy, and the pores in his nose were black.
“Leave your feckin’ granny out of it,” he wheezed. “It’s not your granny we’re interested in here.”
Touchy, I thought. Or pretending to be?
You were right, Mr. O’Connell. Not a good place to start. Nobody seems to understand about Gramma dying, how that’s when it all went totally pear-shaped.
I never understood that expression. What’s wrong with pear-shaped? If you’re an apple or an orange, I suppose it would be bad, but for almost anything else in the world—frig it all, in the universe—what’s wrong with pear-shaped? It’s good for pears, and it’s good for aubergines, for vases, for decanters, for lightbulbs …
“Paudge!” said Kate, and she pulled him back by the cuff of his shirt. “Let him tell it his own way.”
“He’s playing for time, Kate,” said Paudge wearily. “We’ll be here all night at this rate.”
I nearly felt sorry for him, there. He’s not naturally a patient type, I feel.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Kate. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Paudge sighed and sat back in his chair.
“Well, home would be nice,” he muttered.
Yeah, I thought. Home would be fabulous actually.
“And before midnight would be smashing.”
“Could we have some more comfortable chairs?” I asked.
The chairs were those black plastic ones with a long slit of a hole at the bottom, where the back meets the seat. When we were kids, once we were at a concert and they had these chairs, and Keith Butler said the hole was for farting through, because if you farted into that kind of rigid plastic, there would be an explosion, and for the whole concert I kept trying to line my arse up with the hole in case I felt the need to fart. It didn’t really work, but it was more interesting than the concert.
Paudge sighed an exasperated sigh. “No,” he said. “If you don’t like the chairs, you can tell us your story quickly and clearly and then maybe you can go somewhere where the furnishings are more to your taste.”
“It was you I was thinking of,” I said. I could see how the chair buckled every time he moved, straining to contain his fat backside.
“Don’t worry about me. Tell me about your sister.”
That was the first inkling I had that they’d been talking to someone else from my family. Probably my da.
“Her name is Julie,” I said.
“Yes. We know that.”
“She’s eight years old and she hurts easy,” I said.
“Jonathan,” said Paudge between clenched teeth, “stoppit now.”
“What?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay,” said Paudge, and he creaked back in his bending chair. “Okay, we’ll let that go for now. Go on.”
I had no idea what had happened once I’d delivered Julie to Da’s front door in Galway, but the cops were there anyway, and they’d obviously had a word with her. She’s a great kid, but she doesn’t really have all that much cop-on. (Another bloody pun. I’m feeling very punny tonight.) The Arabella O’Brien moment was just a fluke.
So I said, “I brought her to Da. I thought she’d be safer with him.”
“Than with you,” said Paudge, nodding.
“No!”
He looked up and raised his eyebrows. They were fair and bushy, like false eyebrows that you’d buy in a joke shop, only bleached.
“Well, yeah,” I said, “but only because I couldn’t look after her anymore. I’d run out of cash. And she was so cold, you know?”
“Ah, the cash,” said Paudge. “Now that you mention it…”
“That’s not important,” I muttered.
“You think it’s not important that you held up a petrol station and terrorized a poor young girl and got away with three hundred euros?”
Okay, okay, so I had done that. That was why the police had nobbled me—presumably. The Galway police, I mean. We were back in Dublin now. I think the lads in Galway didn’t know what to make of me, so they put me in a squad car, and that’s how I landed under the care of one Paudge Rooney.
“I didn’t get away with it,” I muttered. “And I didn’t hold anyone up. I just told the girl to give me the money, and she did.”
“You threatened her!”
“I did not. I just pointed a carrot at her.”
As soon as the carrot came into it, Kate started to laugh, but she didn’t want Paudge to notice, so she clamped her mouth tight and the laughter all came snorting down her nose like an avalanche. Her whole body went into spasms. Her boobs were bouncing off the table, where she’d rested them. I hadn’t noticed her boobs that much before; enormous they w
ere, how could I have missed them?
Paudge turned to glare at her.
“Thanks, missus,” he snapped at her.
Kate’s boobs just went on bouncing on the table. I had to look away. I could feel my stomach muscles dancing with laughter under my belt, and I concentrated very hard on keeping a straight face. Hysteria, I suppose.
“I didn’t hurt the young one,” I said after a moment.
“No,” conceded the guard, “you didn’t actually physically hurt her. But the poor girl is in a terrible state. Post-traumatic stress syndrome. They sent a report up from Galway.”
“That was nice of them,” I said sarcastically. But I was thinking, That’s what soldiers get that have been in a war. I couldn’t imagine that even a very sensitive girl would take being held up with a carrot all that seriously. But I pulled a grave face for Paudge’s sake. I didn’t want him to think I was heartless. Which, by the way, I totally am not. Ideally, I would not have done it, but I was desperate. I mean, I knew they had video cameras and everything, I knew I’d probably get caught, but I still had to do it, I couldn’t last another half hour without something to eat and without going somewhere warm.
“I’m sorry about the girl,” I said, and I meant it. “I’ll send her a card.”
“You will not, you blackguard,” said the guard, and the fist came down again on the table.
“Right, so,” I said. “I won’t.”
“I think,” said Kate, “it’s time we all had a cup of tea.”
She tapped the face of her watch and made some sort of a signal to Paudge, who sighed and shut his notebook.
10
You’d never think it would work. I didn’t really think so myself. I did need the money, I was serious about getting it, but the carrot part was just a bit of a lark.
I’d been walking around all night in the rain after I’d dropped Julie, stopping in doorways, dodging cop cars, moving, moving, trying to keep awake, starving.
I thought morning would never come, though what good morning was going to do, I didn’t know.
It did come in the end, of course, and the shops started opening up, and still I was walking, walking, no plans, no idea what I was going to do next.
Long Story Short Page 6