For the remainder of our primary schooling, we travelled together on the bus and remained side by side throughout the day. No longer did Éamon worry about the bullying of the schoolyard or the ridicule on the street. Although I was shy, I was never bullied. I’m not sure why, but maybe I carried some shadow of the incident with McCusker and the cliff, and bullies gave me distance. Or it may be like Éamon says: that I seem to be able to defuse a difficulty before the difficulty has time to form in others’ minds. I don’t know about that.
The primary-school bully was Tom Kinch, a big, unintelligent boy who only saw things in the immediate and the simple. Kinch’s principal torture was to grab a boy’s head under one of his big arms and knock the top of the trapped boy’s head with his knuckles. I had just started at the school, and Kinch failed to notice the alliance of Éamon and the new boy. He failed to value the weight of our friendship; he did not know of the bravery of boys bonded. As we stood together in the morning line, Kinch — coming from behind — grabbed us both and held each of us by the head, crossing his forearms to rap each of us with his knuckles. The rest of the class laughed. The hurt was in the humiliation, and it was then that a silent oath was shared, a vow born of neither but of the union. We held back as the class removed their coats in the small cloakroom and filed into the classroom. Kinch was directing abuse from the rear of the line. Kinch was big, but Ruán had taught Éamon how to handle livestock, and he hit Kinch hard and drove the breath from his body. Kinch was smashed into the corner. He was trapped as I approached, and I saw he carried the same surprised look as McCusker had on the cliff height. And in his surprise I saw again the same confusion and fear. I was learning the power of those three weapons: surprise, confusion, and fear. I was learning that if a boy can bring those three into battle, he can beat anyone. I drove my arm through the face of Kinch. The class was seated and ready when the teacher noticed one missing. He found Kinch in the cloakroom with blood falling from his broken nose and running down over his mouth. I watched that bully glance back as the teacher led him past the open door. Kinch was afraid.
When we graduated to secondary school we formed new friendships with Conor Rafferty and Frank Boyle. And it was together as this group of four that we explored life further: the familiar worlds of school, sport, and adventure, and the fresh worlds of music, philosophy, poetry, and girls. I told them that, as fate would have it, we were meant for one apiece: Frank for the music, Conor for the big questions, Éamon for the poetry, and me for the girls. Those were just the hands we were dealt, I told them, and it was up to each of us to make the best job of it.
Éamon was fifteen when Ruán and Claire died. She died in September as the ash tree faded to a pale yellow, and Ruán followed in October as the leaves fell. It was typical of Ruán that he allowed Claire to pass first and then did not keep her waiting. At the funeral masses, all gave thanks for the long and happy existence they had both enjoyed and for the joy to have had them in our lives. Éamon didn’t want to know any of it; he didn’t want to give thanks. He had wanted them to live forever.
Éamon always knew that his future was certain and that it was in the police force. As he reached his mid-teens, however, he remained short, and everyone knew that he was never going to grow to the height required. And so the promises and expectations were dropped. Although the blow came slowly, it was crushing, and Éamon, his lifetime in preparation and certainty, was thrown on to unstable ground. Annie, seeing opportunity in a crisis, took the notion that Éamon’s future could lie elsewhere in the law. In her dreams, she now saw him not in the dark uniform of a policeman but in the finely cut suit of a solicitor, with cuff-links and a pressed collar. She saw an office and a practice in town, a brass plaque at the door. She saw trips home to advise on serious matters. Perhaps he’d become a barrister? Perhaps a judge? And those dreams became plans. And those plans became expectations.
Éamon was a good student, but he was not brilliant, and he had to work hard on his schoolwork. I never had to do that. But we never cared about who got what in test results; there was never a competition between us. This wasn’t so with Annie. She surveyed all of Éamon’s results with the meticulous scrutiny of a beggar counting his coins, and after every careful reading she asked him the same question: ‘And what did Donnelly get?’ Such behaviour is an act of cruelty; parents can be bastards sometimes. But Éamon kept working. And as the exams got tougher, Éamon worked harder. He still does. His release is me. My job is to be dependable, solid, and happy. I tell Éamon not to worry about things that don’t matter, and Éamon says that for me that must include nearly everything. I try to persuade Éamon to go easy. ‘Does it really matter?’ I ask him. If the answer is yes, I assure him that a solution will be found. If the answer is no, I take Éamon by the shoulder and say, ‘Well, we won’t give a flying flute about that then.’ And that is that; we move on to the next thing, the matter resolved. But it never really is resolved, not really, and from me Éamon has never learned that which he wishes for most. And try as I do try to teach, there are things in life that cannot be taught, and for those without the preconstruction, cannot be learned. What Éamon wishes for most is my certainty about my place on the Earth.
We climb the garden wall, and from there we pull ourselves onto the flat felt-rolled roof of a single-storey extension. Éamon takes a pack of Carroll’s No. 1 from his shirt pocket and we take one each, smoking in silence, sitting on the warm felt, leaning against the side wall of the house. We don’t speak, and allow our silent gaze to follow pedestrians and traffic on the street below. I rest an arm on my friend’s shoulder.
‘Do you ever wonder what it’s all about, Éamon? I mean, gravity, electro-magnetism, strong and weak forces, anti-matter, dark matter, dark energy, and all that mathematic conjecture are very reasonable, but, when you think about it, the whole construction is just things whizzing around other things. You see, these quarks and particles and protons and neutrons and electrons and neutrinos all whiz around each other to make atoms, and atoms get together to make molecules. And from that, well, it all gets big, and we get gas and solids and rock and planets and stars. And they are all surrounded by other whizzing things. And on it goes, with things whizzing around other things to make solar systems, star clusters, galaxies, galaxy clusters, super clusters, filaments, on and on with mad stuff altogether, on and on and on, well past the other side of the impossible. The stuff you see through one of those big telescopes is beauty mixed with a spoon of madness. You’d need a degree in complexity just to put a handle on it. And who’s to say there aren’t countless universes out there? But, I mean, once you get into the multiplicity of universes and dimensions, and how that all might look, well, it’s very difficult to get some sort of a shape on; it’s all very difficult to get it into some sort of a bundle so you can carry it in your head. And even if you could gather it all together, even if you could know it and understand it, it still wouldn’t explain it all, it still wouldn’t explain us.’
‘God, would you look at that?’ Éamon says, as a girl passes below.
‘The belle Lucy Lennon,’ I comment, blowing smoke high into the evening air. ‘A very fine particle indeed.’
‘I wouldn’t mind whizzing around that thing.’
‘Good man, Gaughran,’ I tell him. ‘Now you have it.’
‘I’m telling you, Johnny, that arse has me tortured. I think about it morning, noon, and night.’
‘You could ask her out.’
‘What? God-sakes, Johnny. Would you feck off?’
After the smoke, we climb down from the roof. I fix the Dunn & Co, tidy the scarf, and mount the bicycle.
‘Right, the snooker hall at half-eight,’ I say, and Éamon sees me off with a flick of his head.
As I cycle, I am thinking again of things whizzing around other things, and I think that people, too, behave in that whizzing-around fashion: families, gangs, groups, organisations, societies, reli
gions, nations, federations. It’s all the same thing, isn’t it? We love a bit of a get-together. We love belonging to an ‘us’. It’s only the peculiar who step out from the whole thing.
Bob cycles alongside, sitting straight and unhurried in the green overalls, with the red rag hanging loosely by his side. There’s a touch of joy about the shape of him on the bicycle. Isn’t this what it’s all about? he says.
Reading for Rosie
I AM IN THE LIBRARY. IT’S NOT A GREAT LIBRARY, IT’S TOO SMALL, AND I cannot wait for the new one to open. But I love it anyway, and I am thinking and wondering why anyone with time on their hands wouldn’t spend it in a library. I have never understood how anyone could ever be bored with all the books in the world that need reading.
I have always read. Well, not always — I wasn’t born with a book or anything. But I learned young. Some people are born with a talent for things: some can pick out a tune and know it from hearing it once or twice; some have a voice for song; some can draw or paint or sculpt; some can write; and others can kick a football or swing a club or a bat with ease, grace, and accuracy. Me, I can read. It’s nothing to shout about, really. It’s not a spectator sport — it would be hard to sell tickets. And there are few prizes. But people do notice, and they use words like ‘avid’, ‘keen’, ‘learned’, and ‘precocious’. Being well read is universally approved as a good thing. I don’t remember how I got started; I guess I came to it myself. But I did have help and support, I do remember that, and that encouragement came from Granny Reynolds and Aunt Rosie.
Aunt Rosie, who’s dead now, was my mam’s sister, and she lived in Liverpool. She used to visit us for two weeks every summer, and every time she visited she brought a big bag of English sweets. English sweets are much the same as Irish sweets, and a child of any nation would find it difficult to see or taste a difference; but every year in advance of her arrival, Anna and I would think about those confections in blissful anticipation. For weeks we’d talk about what might be in Rosie’s bag, what our favourites were, and what swaps we were prepared to offer and what we were not. And when the day came and Aunt Rosie arrived, and the contents of that glorious bag were allocated among us, we savoured those English sweets as though they were rarities from some far-flung jungle, or delicacies from another world.
As well as sweets, Aunt Rosie brought laughter. For the two weeks she was home, the house was full of joy. Some people are like that: they find life funny, and life — appreciating the applause — seems to reward them with a gentle passage. ‘My Johnny’, she called me. I think she took a shine to me early on; she was always poking and tugging me. Or maybe it was because Granny was fond of me, and she was so fond of Granny, and the affection was just relayed across. I don’t know why these things happen — why some people take a shine to some people and not to others, and some get left out altogether. I wouldn’t have noticed it then. Stuff like that only registers later on.
Granny Reynolds often took care of me when I was small. We went through all the old stories together long before I went to school, and Aunt Rosie took great store in this. On every visit I had to read for her, and every time it was the same tales she wanted to hear: ‘Tír na nÓg’, ‘Cúchulainn and the Táin’, ‘The Children of Lir’, and ‘Fionn Mac Cumhaill’. I found ‘The Children of Lir’ sad, but Aunt Rosie loved it. She had one boy of her own, Donal, and two girls, and she was married to an Englishman — though she often said that she’d appreciate it if we kept that quiet, before she’d throw her head back and let out a big laugh. Donal is three years older than I am, and he got the Beano and the Tiger and Scorcher comics every week in Liverpool. The following week, when new issues were bought, Aunt Rosie would bundle those two comics and post them to me. From my sixth birthday, the bundle came every week; I thought it was sad that Donal never got to keep his comics, but I didn’t protest.
One day, when I was eleven, Aunt Rosie went into hospital and died, and the Beano and Tiger and Scorcher stopped coming. I thought it was an odd thing that she timed it like that — dying when I was just about to grow out of those comics. I never did get to thank her or Granny for giving me the gift of the habit of reading. With small kindnesses, people can make big differences for others without ever knowing it.
Anyway, I am dreaming of Aunt Rosie and English sweets and the Beano and Tiger and Scorcher when there is a touch to both arms. I step back from the shelves ready to apologise. It’s a bad habit, the pulling of books and reading a little whilst taking a few steps and then squeezing the books back into wrong places. But it isn’t library security; they haven’t got any, of course, but you can get insecure when surprised. Who it is, is Cora and Aisling.
‘Hi, handsome,’ Aisling says. ‘The how-to-handle-a-woman section is over there.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘But first I just need to catch up on the hydrodynamics of spherical imploding shock waves and a few other matters.’ Sometimes that reading by browsing can be fierce useful.
‘Right,’ she says.
I turn to Cora, and she smiles that smile of hers — that smile that lifts the mood and air and light and weight of a whole day.
I smile, too, and reach for her and touch her. ‘All these books,’ I say, ‘and the two most beautiful women in the world. All we’re short of is a bag of toffee, and it’s pure heaven.’
‘A bag of toffee?’ Aisling says.
‘A bag of toffee,’ I repeat, and I reach out to Aisling, too, and so make us into some class of a daisy chain. ‘Did I tell you yet about Aunt Rosie?’
I get two shaking heads.
‘Well then,’ I say, ‘how about we get some books and I take you both to the Imperial for coffee? And then I’ll tell you about Aunt Rosie.’
Chips and eggs, and milk
IT IS A BRIGHT MAY EVENING, AND CORA AND I ARE TO MEET AT DUNNES Stores at seven. It is one month since we first met, and tonight we will go out early to celebrate. I watch for her as I pace around the wide pavement. She arrives smiling.
‘The Imperial for coffee, the Cooking Pot for drink, or the Roma for chips?’ I offer.
Cora chooses chips.
In the Roma, a middle-aged Italian woman is busy directing operations. She is short, and her dark head barely shows above a long serving-counter.
‘Does your mammy know you’re in there?’ I say to her as we pass. She ignores me as she takes an order slip from the serving girl and shouts an instruction into the kitchen.
Cora and I take an empty booth at the far end of the restaurant. As we settle on the bench seats, the waitress arrives with the order pad held and the pencil already moving.
‘What are we having?’ she asks, and Cora orders for us both — chips and fried eggs, and two large glasses of milk.
‘We should go down to Dublin for the day, sometime,’ Cora says. ‘We can meet up with Aisling.’
‘Yes,’ I answer. ‘We’ll go down on the train.’
Cora then goes into a long detail of what we will do in Dublin. Trinity College is first on her list, and then the National Gallery and some museums. I vote for cafés and bookshops, but she ignores me and continues her list-making. I don’t mind; it’s easy to listen to her speak.
The Dundalk accent is an odd thing on the ear. And like many Irish accents, it does have a peculiar attraction, though it would be hard to argue that there’s any kind of beauty about it. It has a flat delivery; it’s as if the language itself has been taken to a smith’s forge and had any unevenness beaten from it, as though elevation or depth were impurities. But though the accent is flat, you can’t really call it smooth. Each word is delivered separately — there’s none of the stringing together of the north or the south of the island — so that, though they are spoken separately, the words have a levelled sameness about them.
The flat language of the town is an added pounding on the flat language of the county. But there is another
voice here, too: the swinging northern accent of Armagh and Down. The county frontier is just a few miles from Dundalk, but the accent borders are much closer. The northern streets of the town are populated with northern voices, and conversations in town can carry one or both accents.
And there is another odd thing: not everyone in town has either accent. Some, by good fortune or accident, have avoided this fate. Most of these are women or girls; few men manage the escape. And like things disabused of some habit or torment, in the light of release they flower tall and bright. Those free from the local inheritance speak with some kind of purity, and every now and again I hear the notes of a harp plucked by the hand of child. This is the voice of Cora Flannery.
‘To us,’ I say, raising a toast with my high tumbler of milk.
‘To us,’ Cora toasts. ‘Forever.’
I think it’s mad the way Cora has slipped so quickly into ‘us’ as if we were some kind of preconstruction, prepared and awaiting assembly. I am convinced that Cora has already decided a future for us, that she fully expected our happening, and now that it has happened she has absorbed it as naturally as Ireland absorbs rain. I look to her pale face, and I know that in her beautiful head there are no doubts. But I know what I am. I know that what she sees is not true.
‘What are you thinking about, Johnny-boy?’ she asks, a chip held on her fork.
A Mad and Wonderful Thing Page 7