by Donal Ryan
There was a red metal heart, spinning in the breeze in the centre of the low front gate. The hinge was loose but rusty, it squeaked and creaked but still allowed that little heart to spin. It reminded me of my palpitations. I drew a kick at it as I passed in. I pushed the front door; it was solid and heavy. I pushed again and it opened. He was expecting his son. I didn’t know until then that I had a length of timber in my hand, I swear on my life. He was standing inside in the dark kitchen, in that crooked-legged, bent-back way that some auld boys have of standing, like they don’t know whether to take a step forward or fall down on their arse. He looked at the timber and then up at me, and he laughed. His laugh reminded me of my own father, the time I came home with my eyebrow split and my collarbone broke after we lost to Roscrea in the under-sixteen championship. My father looked at me that day and my face streaked with blood and muck and tears and he laughed that same shrill laugh and he told me I was nothing but a useless cunt.
Are you going robbing me? Bobby Mahon’s father wanted to know. He was pure matter of fact about it. He asked the question the very same way you might ask a lad is he going making a mug of tea. You’re a fine boy, he said. And he laughed again. His laugh made my eardrums vibrate, the way a child’s cry would. Go on away, you prick, there’s fuck all to rob here. Unless you like cornflakes: I have rakes of them. Is that what you’re at? Robbing cornflakes off of old men? Then he smiled at me and his eyes shone and in a soft voice he said you’re nothing but a useless cunt, and I nearly fell backwards, back out the kitchen door. Did he really say it, or did I imagine it? You’re nothing but a useless cunt, he said. Or did he? I’ll never know now. He started laughing again, and my eardrums vibrated again, and my eyes went a kind of blurry. I took two or three steps forward and I saw him bracing himself and he spat sideways and looked straight into my eyes just before I lamped him as hard as I could into the fucking bald old poll.
GOD HELP ME, I thought I was killing my own father, just for them two or three seconds, just for that time that’ll be the rest of time for me, I swear to almighty God. I killed Bobby Mahon’s father, a man I’d never before in my life laid eyes on and I’m lying here ever since, curled up like an unborn child, with my murdering hands between my knees and my guilty heart pounding, pounding, pounding in my ears.
Mags
I OFTEN WATCH Dad feeding those chickens. He has pure fools made out of them. They go crazy when they see him coming; they know well he’ll have a fistful of caterpillars for them. They flap up and down and nearly fly over the wire. Dad stands with his back to the house, facing the chicken run, talking to them. I’d love to know what he says. I’ve often thought to try and sneak out along behind him and listen, but I know I’d only embarrass him. He’d turn around and catch me creeping along his carpet of grass and he’d jump and be embarrassed and I’d laugh like an idiot and he wouldn’t know what to say to me and I’d ask was he having a nice chat with the chickens and he’d just mumble something back at me and we’d have to walk back into the house together and every step would be a torment to him. If I stand at the kitchen window and just look out at him, I can imagine that if I went out to him that he’d be delighted to see me and he’d put his arm around me and we’d look at the chickens and he’d tell me about how Henrietta is a real old bossy-boots and how she bullies the rest of the fatsos around the place and how he spotted an old sneak of a fox the evening before, looking in over the stile behind the workshop. The way he talks to Eamonn and my niece and nephew.
A CHILD went missing a few days ago from a crèche inside in town. The little boy’s mother is living out here, in one of the houses in Pokey’s famous nearly empty estate. Mam says Dad is taking it awfully hard, as though he’s responsible by proxy for the girl living out here and having her child in a crèche inside in town because she has to work so hard to pay her huge big mortgage. And what about Bobby Mahon, killing his father! Well, he’s supposed to have, anyway. That girl whose child was taken from the crèche is a blow-in, Mam says. Blow-in. That phrase is used so derisively. As if to say it’s a failing to not have been born and bred here, to have settled in a place outside of the place of your birth. Mam doesn’t mean anything bad by it, though. It’s hard to shake your prejudices, I know. The guards are all over the place; it’s putting everyone on edge. Someone just pulled up outside that crèche and drove away with the little boy. There was a Montessori teacher with the children at the time, and four or five qualified childminders in a room next door. The Montessori teacher was taken in and questioned. He’s at least guilty of criminal negligence. It doesn’t seem natural for a young man to be a Montessori teacher. Jesus, imagine if Ger heard me saying that! Prejudice, how are you.
I OBSESS about the moment that I knew Dad was gone from me, where that delicate balance between love and shame tipped in favour of shame. I was working for a charity that sunk artesian wells in developing countries stricken by drought. We built the wells and instructed people in the construction process. I loved it. I still love it. I was home for a weekend and Mam had invited their best friends for dinner. I knew she wanted them to hear about my work; she was so proud of me. I’d graduated with a first and was working as an engineer and was helping people. And because I’d worked in Africa, it was almost as if I was on the missions. Mam never mentioned or seemed to notice the steady seeping away of my femininity. She always seemed interested in what I was saying. She smiled at me and nodded in agreement while I galloped around the kitchen on my hobby horses: Palestine, global warming, oil-motivated wars, child soldiers. She seemed to really like Ger; I presumed she knew; I was impressed by her forbearance, her acceptance. I kind of thought Dad was the same, just less obviously so.
Then, at the infamous dinner that weekend nearly three years ago, while I talked about the potential for wiping out cancer using viruses that can be modified to locate and destroy cancer cells, Dad started to tut-tut and roll his eyes up to heaven. I thought he was tutting about the pharmaceutical giants that I was blaming for curtailing research into virus-cures. I was mostly quoting Ger. Thank God she wasn’t there. Man has such huge potential, I was saying. Man holds the key to the wiping out of disease, in his enquiring mind and insatiable appetite for knowledge, man has …
And all of a sudden, in front of Doctor Roche and his big fat wife Kathleen, and Pat Hourigan and Dorothy with her shrieking tipsy laugh, and the Crawfords who Dad always did business with for years and years and Uncle Dicky and Auntie Pam and my halfwit cousin Richard, and Mam, and Eamonn, and Eamonn’s lovely wife, and Pokey with his little sly smirks and constant aura of having been hard done by, in front of all of them, Dad looked straight at me, and put down his wine glass, and said, in a voice that I hardly recognized, louder than he’d ever used at the dinner table: Man is it? Man is great, is he? You’re all about man all of a sudden, aren’t you? I thought your crowd was always down on man.
Your crowd? He meant lesbians, I knew. I felt this strange fuzziness in my stomach, and a tightening in my throat, and my mouth became instantly dry. I said that I meant man as in humanity. My words sounded whining and tiny and pathetic in my ears, like little fists banging on a stout, bolted door. I felt dizzy, the sickening vertigo that a sudden shock can bring. I felt like running away and vomiting and curling into as small a ball as possible and crying for days. I felt a sudden longing for my childhood bed and my battered, one-eyed Teddy and for Daddy to come wordlessly in and kiss me on the forehead and brush my hair back with his rough, lovely hand. I knew then that he didn’t accept me as I was, he wasn’t the man I’d thought, he wasn’t able to cast away the sting of stigma like an annoying thistle from his vegetable garden the way I’d imagined him doing. The other people at the table were all looking at their plates. Dorothy shrieked once and whimpered twice and slurped stupidly from her empty wine glass. Let me top you up, Dad said to her, in a normal, ordinary voice. The spell of mortification was broken. I ran from the room and nobody followed me, and I got my coat and drove away and didn’t come back fo
r nearly a year.
IT TOOK ME AGES to understand what happened on the Horrible Sunday. Ger’s objectivity helped. She said parents have a vision for their children and their disappointment when that vision isn’t realized can manifest itself in anger. And it can be far worse when a child seems to be fulfilling their hopes, and then all of a sudden, as they see it, they veer off course. Is discovering your sexuality really veering off course? It is when the parents’ vision is centred on marriage and grandchildren and what they would see as convention and normality, Ger said. And safety. Leaving the herd isn’t safe. You’re the loose gazelle that the lion will chase. A child putting themselves in danger, physically or emotionally, can trigger a reaction in a parent that comes out as anger directed at the child, but is really their anguish and worry, verbalized in an inappropriate or awkward way. But the things Dad said, and the way he said them, were so scarily unlike him, so cutting, so cruel. That’s just the way he was reared, Ger reckons. She says people’s thoughts, when their upbringing is mired in dogma, aren’t really their own. Their opinions are twisted, not reflective of what’s in their souls; their words are delivered obliquely, like light being refracted through water – you can’t see their real feelings, just as you can’t see the true position of an immersed object.
So Dad is drowning in prejudice, basically. Ger laughed at that. She thinks it’s hilarious that I always look for the bottom line, the succinct phrase to describe a situation. You should be a politician, she says, you love sound bites. I must get that from Dad, that impatience with the abstract, that inability to concentrate on something that bores me, the desire to have things clearly and neatly and safely defined and compartmentalized. An old lecturer once told me I tended towards being dangerously reductive. Dangerous! Ha. I feel anger at things that I see as wrong. Many hold opposing views to me. Is it so bad that Dad has a problem with same-sex relationships? I wonder if he’ll be more or less accepting now that the law has changed and Ger and I could, if we wished, give ourselves the same standing in law as heterosexual couples. I suspect that our nascent legitimacy will only entrench him further. I don’t care, though, if he can never feel the same pride in me that I know he used to. I just want him to remember how he loved me. I want him to know I’m still his little girl.
Jim
A MAD OLD biddy burst in here earlier on. How is it ye couldn’t have kept that dirty animal locked up besides leaving him out to terrorize the women of Ireland? And how is it at all ye can’t find that little boy that was took? A little boy from out around here, you know! He’s out there somewhere now; probably being fiddled with and having his picture took by perverts, if he’s even alive! And now that other filthy fucker is out around the place, and who’s to say he isn’t in cahoots with whoever whipped that little young fella from under the noses of them townies inside? Look at the timing of it! Oh Lord. Oh Lord spare us.
And then she gave a couple of minutes crying and hegging and catching her breath. First I thought she was on about Bobby Mahon, and then I remembered all the mad hullabaloo on the news about that fella of the Murphys getting released. Nobody wanted him to be left out, I told her, but the law is the law. He has his time served. Time, she roared. TIME? What about all them missing girls? Who’ll give them back their time? Yerra, there’s no evidence to say he had anything to do with any of that, and anyway he’ll be back down around Baltinglass or wherever he’s from, I told her, a hundred miles or more from here.
There was no consoling her, though, and no moving her from the station door. She stood roaring in at me at full pelt for a solid half an hour. She saw a fella that was the spit of him thumbing a lift out on the Esker Line. He had the very same cap on him the hoor was wearing when he sauntered out of jail. She’d swear her oath twas him. Oh Lord save us and guard us isn’t it a fright to God to say children can be stole and good men battered to death in their own kitchens and rapists freed in the same few days? And there’s talk now of the pension being cut! Isn’t it an offence to His eyes to have to watch while people is left without protection from penury or madmen? What’s after happening to the country at all? Then she started on about how she was going taking all her tablets together and going off to bed and not waking up any more and I nearly told her go on so, you’d be as well off, you mad bitch. Thank God I caught myself in time. I blame them bigmouths on the radio and the television for a lot of this hysteria that’s after overtaking people. They fatten on the fear of others, them bastards.
I HAVEN’T SLEPT in four days. I watch the shadows on the curtain cast by the light of the street lamp outside our house as the breeze strokes the branches of the elder. Sometimes the branches take the shape of a giant reaching claw. All I think about is that little boy, and where in the name of God he could be. I lie there under a sheet of sweat and wonder is there a sort of a balance, a symmetry that the universe must achieve, the way water must always find its level. I led my sister Bridie’s little lad into mortal danger years ago; I let him be washed off of a rock and swept away. I took my eyes off him for a second and he was gone. I should have thrown myself in after him besides standing on a rock, roaring out at the wild ocean. I should have carried him into Heaven. God only knows the dark, cold place his little body lies.
God knows where this child is too, and I wish God would tell me. I wish I could sleep and dream of where he is and wake and go and lead him by his little hand back into his mother’s arms.
I’ve been on the search party every day. The forensics lads put us into a line and tell us to link arms and take slow steps, looking down, looking left and right. Each person has his own arc, but they should overlap. We’ve covered every bit of ground in twenty square miles. But he was taken in a car. He could be anywhere. Now I’m told stay put in the village, the village needs an operational hub. A pure public relations stunt is all that is. Young Sean Shanahan is little Dylan’s father. It was the end of the first day before anyone knew that. Everyone thought that girl was a blow-in, no one knew she had such a solid link to the place. Not that it’d make any odds or anything. Young Shanahan is tearing around the place like a madman. He roared in the window of the squad car at Philly that we were only a pack of wasters. Philly said the tears had tracks made down his face the very same as scars made by a knife. The child’s mother was with him, pulling him back by the arm and telling him calm down. She’s a tough yoke, that lady. Réaltín, her name is. That’s a lovely name. I’d have given my daughter a name like that if we’d had one, if the universe hadn’t to have its symmetry. Her father is a grand man as well, he’s as pale as a ghost going around, but he’s been going non-stop since the first hour. He’s being pragmatic and realistic and hopeful, just the way you have to try and get people to be in these situations. That’s what the Civil Defence boys say anyway. He was an accountant I think. He’s not losing it the way young Shanahan is. Young Shanahan now would want to catch a hold of himself.
It doesn’t seem right to even be in a bed these days, not to mind sleeping. Since midsummer things are gone pure haywire. I wouldn’t have said Bobby Mahon killed his father any more than the man in the moon. But he rang me that day and asked me in a soft, flat voice to come down to the house and when I got there he was standing in the kitchen, looking down at his father in a puddle of blood with a piece of timber in his hand that was wet with red. When I asked him was it he did it, he told me he didn’t know. He didn’t know, you know. He didn’t say another word, only sat inside in the interview room inside in Henry Street as pale as a ghost and as silent as the grave. And the whole place has it he was doing a line behind his wife’s back with the mother of the girl whose child is gone missing. I said to Mary it’s the very same as something you’d see happening in one of them programmes on the television. Mary says I’m raving through my arse saying young Mahon didn’t do away with his father. I can see her point of view. But I know in my heart and soul he didn’t do it. I wish I knew how I knew, and then I might be able to figure out what really happened. I wish Bobby would snap o
ut of this waking coma he’s after falling into and start talking properly. Josie Burke put up his bail. Josie might get sense out of him.
YOUNG TIMMY HANRAHAN walked in here not long after the mad roaring biddy. He looked at me out of his mouth for at least a half a minute while a tide of red rose in his face. He scratched himself a couple of times before he spoke. Finally, he said he heard a lad saying awful quare things on a mobile phone the day before at the very back of the search-party meeting where he thought he couldn’t be heard and he was on about going to jail for twenty years and he asked the person on the other end to know had he been watching the fucking telly and did he realize how many was looking for clues about the child and what have you and isn’t that fierce funny auld talk, Timmy wanted to know.
Timmy described the boy he’d heard talking on the phone and I felt a kind of a burning in the pit of my stomach. There’s one twitchy-looking little fucker does be around every day, mooching around the edge of the tape and trying to talk to the forensics boys. He was in a few of the parties that went in around the forestry over around Pallas where a car was seen like the one described by the children that were looking out the window that day. I might be clutching at straws now, but I have another strong feeling, the very same as I have the feeling about Bobby Mahon not having killed his father. I have a feeling that that twitchy prick and the Montessori teacher are kind of, I don’t know even how to put it – the same, sort of, like they’re the same type of a fella, kind of brainy and a bit odd and outside of things, even when they’re in the middle of goings on. Who ever heard of a young lad doing that job, anyway? Your lady that owns the crèche says she had him checked out and all before he started, but there’s no record on the PULSE of any check being done. She’s a quare hawk, that one; you wouldn’t know what to make of her. She’s finished in the childminding business anyway, that’s for sure.