Long Story Short

by Siobhán Parkinson

  “Hmmm,” said Paudge.

  He read on for a moment, his lips moving silently.

  Then he looked up. “Well,” he said, “that’s fair enough, I suppose.”

  I put my head in my hands.

  Kate spoke then. “Jonathan,” she said, “I believe you.”

  “You keep out of it,” Paudge barked at her. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  Kate didn’t reply. She just swung on her chair and looked at him as if he was a very bad puppy who’d poohed on the floor.

  I swung back in my chair too, and I kicked the leg of the table. I may even have smirked a little.

  Then Rooney starts in at me again: “So maybe you didn’t actually kill your mother, Jonathan. I hope that’s true. But you left her to die, or you left her dead, and then you scarpered. Whatever way you look at it…”

  “I left her to sleep it off!” I hissed. “I left her to sleep it off hundreds of times before. How was I to know that this time…”

  “This time, she was conked out on the floor!” said Rooney.

  True. But even so …

  “She was snoring when I left the room,” I said.

  “Snoring? You never mentioned snoring before.”

  I ignored that part.

  “Dead people don’t snore,” I said. Well, that was obvious, but I needed him to make that link. “And I put a blanket over her,” I added. “What else was I supposed to do?”

  “Call an ambulance?” he suggested.

  “Just a minute,” I said, straightening up in my chair and staring into his face. “Your hypothesis…”

  He looked startled at that word. Maybe he didn’t understand it. That’s a bit mean of me. Okay, maybe he just didn’t expect me to know it.

  “Your hypothesis is that I’m lying, right? You think she was dead already. That I made the snoring up?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So now you want me to call an ambulance for a dead person? Well, you know what, they don’t do resurrection at any hospital around where I live. So why would I call an ambulance if she was dead?”

  Oh, God. I’d walked right into that one. I was arguing the wrong case.

  Now it was Paudge who smirked.

  “Exactly,” he said. “If I’m right, you didn’t call an ambulance because she was already dead, and you knew it. You just left her there and you scarpered.”

  “No. The reason I didn’t call an ambulance was that I never called an ambulance for her, not once in all the years since Da left, and on every other occasion that I didn’t call an ambulance for her, she woke up the following morning. Or afternoon. If I called an ambulance every time she passed out drunk…”

  “Except that this time,” he said, “(a) she was dead and (b) you left altogether. That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not a coincidence? No, it’s not. You left because you knew she was dead. Right?”

  “I mean, yes. It’s a coincidence.”

  “Well, which is it? A coincidence or not a coincidence?”

  I was confused. “How was I to know…?”

  “You didn’t think to look in on her in the morning, to see that she was all right?”

  What? My confusion lifted and anger raced through my veins. How come I was supposed to be responsible for her?

  “I never looked in on her in the mornings. I waited for her to surface.”

  What the hell did he know? All the times I’d put her to bed, taken her shoes off, made sure she had a glass of water and a basin for puking into. All the times I’d cleaned up her messes. All the times I’d covered for her. Ringing her up on dole day.

  “Bitch,” I muttered. (I’m not proud of that. I was under pressure.)

  “You left her to rot,” he said.

  I gasped. That was carrying literalism a bit too far.

  “For God’s sake, Paudge, ease up,” said Kate. “You’re bullying him.”

  You stupid old wagon, Ma, what did you need to go and die for?

  My chest was heaving with suppressed sobs.

  Paudge said nothing for a while. After a few minutes he said, “Right. We’ll leave it there for now. Would you like something to eat, Jonathan?”

  Food? My stomach was clenching with sobs, but even so, it did a little flip of excitement at the thought of food. Apart from the Penguin bar, I hadn’t eaten for hours.

  I blew my nose.

  “Not if it is any relation to the tea I got earlier,” I said. I have some self-respect.

  “Always the bitter word,” Paudge said. “But no. We could go to Max Snacks if you like.”

  He could do bad cop, good cop all by himself, this one.

  “You’re joking!” I said, and suddenly I felt I was going to cry. I’ve never found the thought of hamburgers moving before, but for some reason, at that point it seemed like the kindest treat, and I was overwhelmed by it.

  “No,” he said, hitching up his belt as he stood up from his chair. “I think we can rise to an ol’ hamburger. If you’re interested.”

  That is how I found myself eating a double-decker and chips in a brightly lit yellow-furnished cube of glass with a fat plod and a nice lady with a bad figure, and with unshed tears pricking at my eyelids.

  Christ, it’s a long, long way from there to here.

  12

  They’d found a place for me in some kind of home for delinquents, they told me over the Big Burgers. They didn’t use that word, but I knew what they meant. It’s just outside Dublin, lots of fresh air, they said. I was never a big one for the fresh air, and frankly I’d got more than enough of it over those few days in Galway to last me a lifetime. I’ll be crippled with arthritis by the time I’m fifty after all the soakings I got.

  Gramma always said she felt sorry for delinquents. She said, I bet they’ve had a horrible life. I bet something went terrible wrong in their family.

  I never thought I would be one myself.

  It was the carrot job that did it. I don’t really think they can be serious about me killing Ma, but they’ll have no trouble nailing me for the carrot.

  It’s kind of weird, but even when you know someone is dead, you sometimes have this sort of conviction that it hasn’t really happened, and if you do the right thing then they will somehow be undead, and it’ll all come right. The only problem is to know what that right thing is.

  I was still in that phase. I suppose it’s shock or something. I had this mad sort of idea that if I behaved myself properly with this Paudge, then it’d be okay, Ma wouldn’t be dead after all. It bothered me, though, that I’d done the carrot job. I had this eerie feeling that this was at the nub of the problem.

  Paudge had me worried there for a while, about the hairs. I was even beginning to think myself that maybe I’d done it. By accident. But I didn’t. I need to believe that.

  I finished my hamburger and licked my fingers. Then I wiped them with the little piece of tissue they give you, and I wiped my mouth too. I folded the tissue up and tucked it into the cardboard box they put those stupid skinny chips in.

  “All right,” I said, meaning about what they were calling my placement, as if I was a chess piece that they had found a perfect move for. The fight had gone out of me.

  “Can I see Julie soon?” I asked.

  Paudge looked at Kate. Evidently she was the one they had decided was going to do the dirty work.

  “Not just for the moment, Jonathan,” she said softly. “But she’s okay. She’s well, and she’s safe. You don’t need to worry about her.”

  “Why can’t I see her?” I asked. “Is it my da? Is he the problem?”

  They didn’t answer.

  “Well, look,” I said. “Tell yous what. You ask Julie if she’d like to see me, and you’ll see. Her and me … well, I’ll put it like this, we’re very good mates. Look, she brought this book for me to read,” and I pulled The Merchant of Venice from my rucksack. “We were running away from home, right, and she thought I m
ight just like a spot of Shakespeare to keep me entertained. She’s a howl, she is.”

  “Have you read it?” Kate asked. She was changing the subject, I knew.

  “Of course I haven’t read it,” I said. “I don’t speak Shakespeare. That’s the whole point. That’s why it’s such a hoot that she brought it.”

  “It’s a good story. You might like it.”

  Dream on. I didn’t actually say it, but I raised my eyebrows so she knew what I meant.

  These social worker types, like teachers they are. Think they can save you with Shakespeare. It’s kind of sad, really. They can’t know much about reality.

  13

  ANTONIO:

  In sooth, I know not why I am so sad;

  It wearies me; you say it wearies you;

  But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

  What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,

  I am to learn.

  Yeah, well, it’s the only book I’ve got, right?

  So, good for old Antonio. He’s sad and he doesn’t know why. That’s a bit of a luxury, that kind of sadness, if you ask me—and even if you don’t. It has no cause. It’s just a kind of mood. Maybe he was a teenager. I doubt if his grandmother has died, his mother has managed to annihilate herself, his father has run off with a young one, he’s not allowed to see his little sister, and he’s in danger of getting a criminal record because of a kind of overambitious prank with a carrot, or possibly for murder.

  I’d give him sad, I would, if I met him.

  Oh, sweet Jesus, is it ever going to let up?

  I told Kate all that the next afternoon, when I saw her. She said, Yeah, you’re right, I never liked Antonio, bit of a moaner. Spoiled.

  I like her attitude.

  All the same.

  “What about that Paudge?” I said. “He’s trying to get you to winkle stuff out of me, isn’t he? That’s why you’re here.”

  “It is not,” she said. “Listen, Jonathan, I am on your side. I don’t owe Paudge anything. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s okay, it’s just…”

  “I liked him too, until he started accusing me of murder,” I said. “You’d be amazed how a little thing like that changes the way you feel about a person.”

  Kate threw back her head and gave this long laugh. Her throat was all exposed and creamy. There’s something very healthy about this person. I can’t put my finger on it.

  “Jonathan, your sense of humor will save you.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Not Shakespeare?”

  “Shakespeare’s dead,” she said, “like a lot of people in your story. Now, listen. First off, I want to say, I am very sorry about your mam.”

  The lights started going on and off in my head again.

  “Don’t!” I said. “Don’t call her that. That’s what I called her when I was a little boy. I don’t want to think about that.”

  Mam, Mam, help! I’m falling! I’m falling, Mam!

  That was me, on my first bicycle, terrified. Ma was running along beside me, shouting, “You’re all right, you’re all right, keep looking ahead, concentrate, pedal, Jonathan, pedal. If you keep pedaling, you won’t fall off. Pedal like crazy, Jono, pedal, pedal, pedal!”

  But I kept looking back, to check that she was still holding on to the saddle, and every time I turned my head I lost my balance and she righted the handlebars with her other hand, and she screamed, “Don’t, Jonathan. Just look ahead and pedal like the bejaysus.”

  But I didn’t trust her, and in the end, one of my twistings-around knocked me so far off my center of gravity that I came down with a bang. I hurt the side of my face, I scraped my shins, and I caught my foot in the spokes and sprained a toe. I sat there crying in the middle of the bicycle—it seemed to be lying all around me—and I yelled at her, “It’s all your fault, it’s all your fault.”

  She pulled the bicycle up and wheeled it away. She left me in a huddled heap, crying and shouting and hurting.

  “I couldn’t stand the noise,” she explained afterwards. “I couldn’t take the yells and shouts. And you were blaming me, it wasn’t fair.”

  Of course it wasn’t fair. But I was bloody six years old.

  “Sorry,” said Kate, about using that word, mam. “I won’t. What I want to say is, I know this is very tough for you, but we have to face up to it all if we are to make any progress here. Okay? You with me?”

  God, she was going all social-workery again on me. But what choice did I have? She was the only person I could talk to.

  I looked out the window. There was some kind of a five-on-five thing going on in the garden. And on the windowsill was this blade I’d found in a cabinet in the bathroom of that hamburger place we’d gone to, me and Kate and Paudge. God knows how it got there. It was weird, finding a thing like that, so weird, I had to take it. It was like a gift, I thought. So I’d wrapped it up in toilet paper, layers and layers, and I’d put it in my pocket and then I’d walked very stiffly for the rest of the day, in case it worked its way out of the toilet paper and started to do damage.

  Once I got it here, I put it on the windowsill in the sitting room, just at the end, where it was hidden by the curtains. I wasn’t so stupid as to put it in my own room. Nobody had noticed it was there. It made me feel sort of powerful or something. And then of course when I’d looked, two of my fingertips were scored and had tiny arcs of red. When I saw that, they started to sting.

  “I have to see Julie,” I said then. “Why won’t they let me see her? Where is she anyway? Is she still in Galway? Still with Da?”

  “No,” said Kate. “He … eh, well, he turned her over to the social services.”

  “What!” My mouth was dry, my heart was pounding in my ears. After all the trouble I’d gone to to make sure Julie wouldn’t get taken into care! Handing her over to bloody Da, the last person in the world I’d want to have her—second last, I mean.

  “The social services, you know? We look after kids if their families can’t.”

  “But Da is her family, and he can. That’s why…”

  Kate shook her head. “He doesn’t see it that way,” she said. “He thinks … well, he says she’s not his daughter, and he couldn’t be responsible for her.”

  “Not his daughter? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, Jonathan. Maybe he thought your mother…”

  “But he adored Julie,” I said. “He worshipped the ground she stood on.”

  “He walked out on her all the same,” she said.

  “So—where is Julie now?”

  “We found a foster family for her.”

  Julie in a foster family. Me not able to see her. How the hell had I let it happen? I covered my face. I didn’t want Kate to see what was in my eyes.

  “It’s here in Dublin,” she was saying, “and it’s not far from where you both live … eh … lived. She can go to the same school, which is good.”

  “She hated that school.” My voice sounded like a mouse you’d squeezed under a door. “They bullied her.”

  I thought she’d ignore that, but she didn’t. She wrote it down. “Right. We’ll look into that, Jonathan, definitely. See if we can flush that out, but continuity is always good, you know.”

  “What about me? I’m continuity, I’m the best continuity she’s got! She needs to be with me,” I said.

  “Well…” said Kate, “yes, but—you’re not an adult, Jonathan, and … well, you’re here.”

  She looked around her. It’s nice, this place. There’s a flat-screen telly, and my mobile was sitting on a coffee table, charging. I was planning to phone Annie later. I hadn’t been able to charge my phone for days.

  But I saw her point. I couldn’t bring Julie here. It wasn’t a place for little kids.

  “They’re lovely people, I promise you that,” she said. “They’ve fostered lots of children. She will be happy there.”

  “Happy! She doesn’t need a foster family. She’s got me.”

  �
��I don’t mean happy in that sense. I just mean she will settle, in time.”

  “In time! You can’t be planning to leave her there! This is just a temporary arrangement, isn’t it, until the guards have finished questioning me. Then I can go home, right?”

  My heart was in my mouth. I could hardly bring myself to go on asking questions, in case the answer was unbearable. But not to know was even more unbearable.

  “I could move?” I said again. “Back home? When this is all over, this nonsense about Ma. You know I didn’t do it. She just fell over.”

  “Come on, Jonathan, tell me the story.”

  I shuffled my feet. I didn’t want to talk about “the story.” I wanted to talk about Julie.

  “Why do you want to know?” I asked.

  “I don’t really want to know,” she said. “It’s more that I think it would be good for you to tell me.”

  I considered this for a while. It was a fine line, but I think I got it.

  “I’ve told you,” I said. “You heard me telling Paudge.”

  “What you said to Paudge doesn’t count. I want to hear the whole story, your way.”

  I sighed again. “My grandmother died,” I said.

  I watched her face.

  She nodded. “Uh-huh?” she said.

  She didn’t say it was the wrong place to start.

  And so I told her what had gone on since Gramma died, and about the apples and the bruise and mitching off school and then how we’d left and all that went on, up to the moment I left Julie outside Da’s house, and I ran off into the cold, wet night.

  When I finished, my throat was sore from talking, and my jaw was clicking with exhaustion. Kate was biting her lips.

  “God,” she whispered, “you poor kid!”

  I looked at her and I shrugged.

  “So that’s why you ran away, because you couldn’t cover up about Julie any longer?”

  “Yeah, mostly,” I said.

  “Nothing to do with your mother not waking up one morning?”

  And that finally started me off crying. I stuck my knuckles into the corners of my eyes, but I couldn’t stop the tears.

  “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,” I said, when I’d had a good weep and was wiping my eyes.