by Peter Murphy
Town. She always called Kilcody a town.
‘You were knocking around with that young Corboy.’
She turned, and her face looked drawn and puffy-eyed.
‘You were smoking.’
I didn’t reply, just stood radiating guilt. She pulled a chair out, sat at the table and plucked a Silk Cut Light from its packet. Her latest brand. Pregnant women’s fags, she called them. She tore off the filter and screwed it into the holder.
‘These fecken things.’
Here comes the sermon, I thought. The gospel according to Mrs Nagle, regarding the injurious effects of tobacco smoking. How it causes diseases of the vital organs, heartburn, nausea, belching, diarrhoea, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, oppression of the chest and back pain. How it can incur drowsiness, paralysis, unnatural sleep and bad dreams.
But she didn’t say anything, just smoked the cigarette down to the writing while I waited, not knowing whether to go on up to my room or stay put.
At last she squished the fag butt into the seashell on the table. She took a match and poked it into the holder, moving it clockwise. When she took the match out, the tip was smeared with what looked like black earwax.
‘See that?’ she said. ‘That’s tar. Smoke enough fags, that’s what your lungs fill up with.’
She placed the soiled match in the ashtray.
‘They’ll kill you, son. Give ’em up while you can. Do you hear me talking to you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good. Go on.’
I mounted the stairs.
‘And son.’
‘What?’
She was staring off into middle distance, face unreadable, smoke around her head like some dissipating halo.
‘Stay away from that Jamey Corboy.’
The last week of school, Jamey invited me around to his house to have a look at his books and maybe borrow a couple. There was no answer when I knocked the front door, so I pushed open the letterbox and peered inside.
‘Hullo?’
A woman appeared in the hall, widescreened by the rectangular flap. She was pretty in a brittle sort of way, bottle-blond hair secured by a banana clip in a high ponytail that pulled the skin so tight it could’ve been a facelift.
‘Hello there,’ she said as she opened the door, willowy and clean in a pale blue summer dress. She looked me up and down with cat-green eyes. I cleared my throat and tried to look as harmless as possible. Parents are easily fooled. All you need are manners.
‘I’m John,’ I said. ‘A friend of Jamey’s.’
My voice had gone up a semitone of its own accord.
‘Ah, yes.’ Her eyes twinkled a bit. ‘Come in. I’m Deirdre. Dee for short.’
Deirdre—Dee—spoke over her shoulder as I wiped my feet on the doormat.
‘I’m glad Jamey’s made a friend here,’ she said. ‘I was worried he’d never settle in.’
She called up the stairs and turned and put her hand on my arm.
‘I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name already. You must think I’m awful rude.’
‘John.’
‘Of course.’
A door opened upstairs, you could hear what sounded like cartoon music for the insane, screeching and caterwauling, and Jamey came down the steps two at a time.
‘Hey worm-boy,’ he said loudly.
Dee’s brow wrinkled at the nickname. She released her grip on my arm and rubbed her forehead lightly as if to smooth the creases. She was about to say something, thought the better of it, gave her head a little twitch, like whatever had occurred to her was a midge that needed shaking off.
‘‘Scuse me,’ she said, moving towards the kitchen. ‘I’ve dinner on.’
Jamey was in his stocking feet. He looked at my runners.
‘Did she not ask you to take your shoes off?’
‘No.’
He exhaled through his nose.
Their kitchen was bright and airy. The counter gleamed and all the appliances looked shiny and new. It didn’t smell like my house. It smelled of no smell at all, anodyne.
Jamey spooned instant coffee into a couple of mugs, poured the milk and stirred it all into a paste before adding boiling water from the kettle. His mother bustled about collecting keys and things.
‘I have to pick up your brother,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
She gave Jamey a look as she hurried out. ‘Try to keep the noise down.’
There was a constant push and pull going on between Jamey and his mother, an undertow. I noticed it even that first day. The things they said to each other were like the tips of jagged ice floes, only a fraction of the true mass apparent.
Jamey handed me a cup with a picture of Lady Di on it.
‘Come on up,’ he said, jerking his head.
Thick carpet muffled our footsteps on the stairs and landing. Their whole house looked like it had been serviced by one of those domestic robots you’d see in some futuristic film where a master computer wakes you up with chilled-out classical music, makes your morning coffee and puts water on for the shower. The walls had a fresh paint job and the laundry was stacked neatly in a hamper, no stray socks or shoes strewn about. I felt like a walking rubbish heap just being there.
Jamey pushed open his bedroom door with his foot, and I felt somehow reassured by the state of his room. It was even messier than my own. Piles of books and tapes were stacked in columns beside a stereo. The blinds were drawn and there was a glittery purple scarf draped on a lamp.
‘I like to keep it dark in here,’ Jamey said. ‘The summer doesn’t agree with my constitution.’
He set his cup on the windowsill beside his bed and waved a hand at a stack of old vinyl albums.
‘You’re the DJ.’
I didn’t recognize any of the names.
‘You pick something,’ I said. ‘I’m not much on music.’
That wasn’t exactly true. I listened to the radio all the time, but I was still a bit intimidated by Jamey. He had more albums than I’d ever seen.
He ran his thumb over the sleeves, selected a record and changed the music. Electronic sounds seemed to liquefy and run from the stereo’s speakers, a slippery, mercurial language I couldn’t grasp. He sat cross-legged on the floor and began to pass me books. A Season in Hell by Rimbaud. Dante’s Inferno. A broken-spined Les Fleurs du mal with hungry-looking orchids on the cover. I placed the books to one side.
‘Your mother wasn’t what I expected,’ I said. ‘I thought she’d be a bit more...’
‘What?’
‘Suspicious.’
Jamey laughed.
‘Dee likes to think the best about people. She’s funny that way.’
Jamey always referred to his parents by their first names. There was no way I could imagine calling my mother Lily.
‘A bit high-strung though. Spends more money on anti-bacterial wipes than she does on food. Maurice is just as bad. Typical dentist. Did you know that dentists have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession? I reckon it’s from looking in people’s filthy mouths all day long. All that bad breath and cruddy teeth would drive anyone to the brink.’
He waved a hand vaguely at the adjoining room.
‘You want to see his study. The walls are covered with these pictures of oral diseases, abscesses and ulcers and stuff. He used to be a boxer, can you believe that? Apparently he was pretty nifty with his fists when he was a kid. Some of the trainers even thought he could try out for the Olympic team, only he quit when he was about my age. Went from knocking people’s teeth out to putting them back in.’
He fell silent, and the music rose to fill the space.
‘Y’know, I think Dee might be cheating on him.’
The skin at the back of my neck prickled.
‘Really?’
He pursed his lips and slowly nodded.
‘Either she has, or she’s about to.’
Jamey put his back to the edge of the bed and pulled his knees up t
o his chin. For a moment all the self-assurance vanished.
‘A couple of months ago I was upstairs in Donahue’s,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s like this disco bar, they’ve an extension at the weekends. One night during the Easter holidays I went in there to see if there was anything stirring, you know, chick-wise.’
His voice wobbled and he had to clear his throat before going on.
‘Dee was, um...’
‘What?’
‘Dancing. In the middle of a crowd of blokes. And she was wearing this little black dress. Like a cocktail dress.’
I pictured Dee in a little black number. She was in pretty good shape.
‘Did anything happen?’
He sort of grimaced.
‘I didn’t hang around.’
We sat and listened to the music and drank our coffee. After a few minutes we felt the front door slam and heard stomping up the stairs.
‘Here comes his lordship,’ Jamey said. ‘We’ll get no peace now.’
The door burst open and his little brother barrelled in, a chubby moon-faced youngster with a thick mop of hair, huge eyes and an even bigger grin. He threw his arms around Jamey, who hugged him back.
‘Ollie,’ he said, ‘I want you to meet a friend of mine. This is John.’
The boy stared at me, his belly bulging beneath a bright blue T-shirt with a yellow Superman insignia. His chin was shiny with dribble. He grabbed my sleeve and started to tug.
‘Cartoons,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
He tugged harder.
‘Cartooons.’
Jamey translated.
‘He wants us to watch television with him.’
He gently began to push his little brother out of the room.
‘Not now, Ollie. Me and John need to talk.’
‘Cartooons,’ the boy shouted.
‘I’ll watch them with you later,’ Jamey said firmly. ‘I promise.’
He shooed Ollie out onto the landing and shut the door.
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘What a live wire.’
There was a knock on the door. Jamey opened it, and his brother stood there with sorrowful spaniel eyes.
Jamey shook his head and grinned.
‘You just don’t know when to quit, do you?’
We went into Ollie’s room and sprawled among the heaped Beanie Babies and stuffed huskies and watched the cartoons on the portable television set, the boy hooting and clapping his hands. Jamey pulled a bag of appledrops from his pocket.
‘Give Ollie one of these,’ he said. ‘He’ll be your friend for life.’
I plucked out a sticky sweet and offered it to Ollie, who took it in his grubby fingers and mechanically popped it in his mouth, eyes glued to the screen. He laughed so hard at the sight of a school of dancing jellyfish that he started to wheeze and cough, then his eyes bulged and he clawed at his throat. I looked at Jamey, who was deeply absorbed in the cartoon.
‘Jamey,’ I said, ‘is he having a fit or something?’
He glanced at Ollie.
‘Shit!’
He grabbed his brother by the shoulders and began to shake him.
‘He’s choking!’
Ollie was making horrible gacking noises. Before I could think, I’d knocked Jamey aside and driven the heel of my hand under the boy’s breastbone, hard. Ollie pushed me off and tried to scramble away. I hit him again, harder this time, and an apple drop rocketed out of his mouth and smacked me in the forehead, and then he and Jamey were rolling around the floor laughing.
‘Gotcha!’ Ollie shouted, whooping and slapping his leg. ‘Gotcha!’
Warm relief flooded from the centre of my stomach and tingled outwards to my hands and feet. I should’ve been mad at them both, but I was just grateful that the drama was over.
‘Sorry, man,’ Jamey said, his whole body quaking with laughter. ‘It’s Ollie’s party piece.’
***
Siberia was our school nickname for Room 15, which wasn’t really a room but a shabby prefab in a state of disrepair bordering on collapse, so called because it was located so far from the main school building, and in the winter it was freezing. Only one of the radiators worked and there were holes punched clear through the walls in parts, leaking chalky innards.
But now it was a Friday afternoon in early summer and everyone was restless, couldn’t concentrate with the novelty heat and the promise of holidays just beyond our grasp like an idea that won’t materialise. The classroom floor was strewn with an obstacle course of kitbags and big sprawgy feet, the air salt-and-vinegared with sweat. Last class English, Miss Ross the replacement teacher for Mrs Lynch, who was pregnant again.
Miss Ross, first name Molly, very early twenties, was the closest thing to good-looking among the teachers, albeit with the faintest suggestion of whippet about the nose and mouth. An almost reverent silence descended when she turned to write on the blackboard in her immaculate script, a fairly nasty poem about some nymphette getting sexually assaulted by a dirty great swan. Her bum was truly mesmerising, packed into pants so tight you could almost make out the cleavage. Wedged into the desk in front of me, lanky Gabby Mahon tugged at the front of his pants and groaned like he’d eaten too many crab-apples.
Miss Ross finished the poem with a flourish, placed her stick of chalk on the ledge and turned to face the class. The disappearance of her bottom was somewhat compensated for by her blouse being undone to the third.
‘Now, boys,’ she said, clapping chalkdust from her palms, ‘I want you to take that down in your copies and learn the first two stanzas for Monday.’
Gabby Mahon emitted another pained sound. Miss Ross consulted the roll, still too new to have gotten the hang of our names.
‘Gabriel Mahon,’ she said, ‘would you stand up and read the first eight lines aloud please?’
Gabby stood, in a hoop with the blueballs, squinted at the blackboard and tried to speak. His face went pale and his eyes rolled up until you could see only whites and he took faint and had to be helped out into the bright sunlight of the yard.
And we all envied him something rotten.
The Junior Cert should have kept Jamey out of action for at least a couple of weeks, but he was one of those people who get away without doing a thing, who just cram at the last minute and sail through the papers with an ease that makes the rest of us spit nails.
A couple of days after the exams had started I was passing the café with the sign on the door advertising cut-rate long-distance calls. I saw him sitting at a table by the window. He was hunched over a Moleskine notebook, the Ballo Valley Sentinel and a mug of coffee set to one side, schoolbag at his feet. His granny glasses were perched on the end of his beaky nose and he was writing furiously, filling the page with reams of tiny spidery writing. Plus, he was wearing—get this—a suit. No secondhand double-breasted job with shabby cuffs and flared trousers either, but a proper three-piece, tailored to fit. He looked good. Jamey had a relationship with clothes I could never hope to emulate, seemed to apply the same set of aesthetics to them as he did to books or music. Me, I just wore whatever my mother picked up in the sales.
He spotted me watching and beckoned me inside. The coffee machine behind the counter hissed.
‘How’s the worm-boy,’ he said, almost shouting over the din.
To be honest, the worm-boy stuff was getting a bit old. He must’ve sensed my irritation because that was the last time I heard it.
‘You want something to drink?’
I shook my head and took a seat. He spread the Sentinel on the table, tapped the bottom of the front page.
‘Have a look at this,’ he said as he rose from his chair.
I read the article while he ordered a refill.
Local Asylum Seeker Disappears
After Attack
by Jason Davin, Staff Reporter
Concerns were expressed at the sudden disappearance last week of Jude Udechukwu, a 20-year-old non-national whose last known address was at 14 Raffe
rty Street. Mr Udechukwu, The Sentinel understands, was retained in an ‘off the books’ capacity at a local garage. It is believed that the night before his disappearance, he was involved in an altercation with a number of locals and failed to report for work the next morning. The following day, a work colleague contacted Mr Udechukwu’s landlord, Mr Thos Rackard. On gaining entry to his flat, they found that many of his personal effects were missing. ‘It was odd,’ Mr Rackard told The Sentinel. ‘If he was planning on doing a runner, you’d think he would’ve wanted his deposit back. It’s not like I was planning to keep it.’
At the time of going to press, local Gardai said they were awaiting further developments before considering mounting a search for the missing man.
‘Funny how they call ’em non-nationals,’ Jamey said, placing the fresh cup beside the old one. ‘Like they were all born out of thin air. You ask me, he probably got fed up and buggered off back to Africa.’
Seconds later he said, ‘Have you seen the new shop beside Fernie’s?’
I hadn’t.
‘Aw, man. You should check it out. It’s full of mad African stuff. Weird food and ornaments.’
He looked out the window of the café and said, almost to himself: ‘This is one weirdo little village. I tell you, when I get out of this place, I’m gonna write a book about it that’ll turn your hair white.’
‘I am only escaped to tell thee,’ I said.
Jamey’s eyebrows arched.
‘What’s that?’
It was something my mother was in the habit of saying, in the important tone of voice she reserved for quotations. I repeated it and Jamey nodded.
‘Why did you move up here anyway?’ I said.
‘Ollie. The special school is much better than the one in Ballo. Smaller classes.’
‘Why is he in a special school? He seems fine to me.’
‘I know. The kid’s sharper than I am. It’s one of Dee’s ... things. She seems to think he needs special attention. Whatever. I didn’t mind moving. Ballo was boring, man. Nothing but housing estates.’
He caught sight of something over my shoulder. His face froze and he spoke in a low voice, barely moving his lips.