by Susan Stairs
Shayne grinned up in my direction and I slunk even further back into the shadows. Then he bounced out the front door, and in the silence of the hall we heard his pounding feet echo around the cul-de-sac.
‘I . . . I’ll go and get something to clean up this mess,’ Bridie said, all flustered, clumsily attempting to slop dollops of broken meringue and cream onto the plate.
‘It’s fine, Bridie,’ Mam snapped. ‘You go on home. There’s obviously been enough action here for one day.’ She glared at Dad like the whole thing was his fault. He rolled his eyes and mumbled something under his breath. We were in for it.
As silently as I could, I tip-toed back across the landing into Mam and Dad’s room and hopped into their bed, snuggling down under the cold sheets and pulling the layers of blankets in around my body. I lay in the centre, my head in the dip between their pillows, listening to the sound of Kev’s breathing. I strained to hear what was happening downstairs but there weren’t even any muffled murmurings. It seemed as if nothing was being said at all. After a few minutes, Mel and Sandra were marched upstairs. I heard the light being flicked on in our bedroom.
‘Where’s Ruth?’ Mam asked. Her voice had a don’t-mess-with-me sound.
Sandra mumbled something about me putting Kev to bed. I started to breathe as deeply as I could and curled myself into a tight ball. When Mam came into the room, she didn’t even call me; she was fully convinced I was fast asleep. I heard her walking over to Kev’s cot to check on him, then she switched on the lamp and began to get undressed. It was only about half past nine, much earlier than she usually went to bed on a Saturday. I reckoned she must’ve been really mad.
Dad came upstairs and into the room. I heard him undo the buckle of his belt, whip it angrily from the loops of his trousers and toss it on the chair in the corner. He pulled off his shoes and kicked them under the bed where they clunked against the cardboard box of photographs that had been shoved there when we first arrived in Hillcourt Rise. He was saying nothing, but making so much noise that you’d have to have been deaf not to figure out he was angry.
‘Don’t be so childish,’ Mam said in a loud whisper. ‘You’ve no one to blame but yourself.’
I didn’t understand. For what? For the crushed meringues and the fact that Shayne was in our hall when they arrived home?
‘What did I do?’ Dad wanted to know.
I shifted a little in the bed, aware that people are never completely still when they’re asleep.
‘Sshh,’ Mam said. ‘You’ll wake them both.’ There was a pause, then she said, ‘And you know right well what you did.’
‘Jesus, woman! This is shaggin’ ridiculous.’
‘Eyes out on stalks. I’m surprised you didn’t spill your pint down your front. It’s no wonder that paint job took the length it did.’
The hangers in the wardrobe rattled as Dad hung up his jacket. Mam sat down on the bed and felt for her nightdress under the pillow.
‘Lift Ruth into her own bed,’ she ordered. ‘And be careful not to wake her.’
Dad did as he was told. I felt the cold air on my body when he pulled down the blankets. He slid one hand under my knees and the other under my back, heaving me up and into his arms. I made sure to flop my limbs like a rag doll. I did deadweight really well; no one would’ve suspected I was wide-awake. I could smell the awful stench of The Ramblers from his hair.
‘I didn’t know where to look, Rose,’ he whispered. ‘Sure no one could help it, the way she was dressed.’
‘Undressed, you mean.’ She rustled about in the dressing table drawer. ‘If it was someone attractive, I might even understand. But Liz Lawless?’ If Dad felt my body stiffen, he didn’t seem to notice. ‘And then we come home to find that brat of hers in the house!’
Dad carried me into my room. He laid me in my bed where I kept up the pretence that I was asleep, ignoring Sandra as she whispered my name through the darkness at regular intervals for at least five minutes. Not long after, Kev woke up again and screamed for what must have been two full hours.
The next morning, we got ready for mass in silence. Mam said she was too tired to go because she’d been up half the night with Kev. But there’d been plenty of other occasions when it had been hard to get Kev to sleep and still she went to mass. I said nothing to the others, but I knew it was partly because she was mad at Dad for looking at Liz Lawless in The Ramblers.
Later that afternoon, after we’d given up hope of going for a Sunday drive, Mam began her sewing and Dad fell asleep behind The Sunday Independent. I watched part of a Western on telly with the others. There didn’t seem to be any Indians in it at all, and I was rarely interested in the cowboys, except maybe Blue Boy from The High Chaparral. So I left them to it and went to get Kev from his cot when he woke from his afternoon sleep. He was round about three months old now and beginning to be a bit more fun. He loved being played with so I brought him downstairs to the kitchen and slid up and down on the lino with him in my arms. He seemed to like that for a while but soon grew bored and began to whimper. I tried to make him smile, wriggling my fingers to tickle him as I held his firm and chubby body. He just stared at me with his glassy eyes and dribbled down the front of his baby-gro.
It was a dull and dreary day outside, and inside it wasn’t much brighter. I wished something would happen that might cheer everyone up and make Mam and Dad start talking again. I thought about doing something bad so that they’d have to discuss my punishment with each other, and then maybe they’d forget about the night before. But then I realized that not only might it bring Mam and Dad together, it could have a similar effect on Mel and Sandra. They adored watching me get into trouble and I wasn’t in the mood for their gloating.
I started to make funny faces at Kev. He gurgled and cooed and his cheeks grew round and fat and then he showed off his toothless gums.
He was smiling! For the very first time!
I held his head close to my neck, twirling around and around the room. Everything spun past in a blur of colour and light and though Kev was enjoying it, I soon got dizzy and had to stop. I flopped down at the table and the onions and pots on the wallpaper danced in front of my eyes. Then I wondered if the man was watching me and I had to turn away. But Kev kept looking at the wall. His eyes got that intense look, the one where it seemed he was staring at something that nobody else could see. Then he started to cry.
I took him into the sitting room, announcing that he’d smiled his first smile. Mam took him in her arms and gave him a cuddle. Dad reached over and rubbed her shoulder. She didn’t look at him, but I could tell she wasn’t that angry with him any more. Mel found the news far from interesting, just uttering a quiet ‘Oh’ before turning back to the telly. Sandra said with a sulk that she didn’t believe me; she thought Kev was far too young to be smiling. But Mam said she wasn’t surprised, and that she had a feeling Kev was one of those babies that was in a hurry to do everything in life as quickly as possible.
EIGHT
Shayne took charge of preparations for the Hallowe’en bonfire in Hillcourt Rise. From early October, he seemed to be in full control of the operation, organizing the collection of wood and stashing it away in piles in the side passage of his house. He did allow David to help, but no one else got a look in. Mel tried his best to get involved but, to be fair, he wasn’t really up to the job. His previous experience seemed a little pathetic compared to the celebration that Shayne appeared to have in mind. Back in our old house, getting ready for Hallowe’en usually meant making toffee apples, carving a lantern from the biggest turnip Mam could find in the vegetable shop, and whacking the daylights out of a hairy coconut with a hammer so we could taste the dribble of milk we found inside. In Hillcourt Rise, Hallowe’en was all about the bonfire on the green.
In the weeks leading up to the big night, we began to see Shayne and David loitering outside the Vaughans’ house each evening after school, waiting for Valerie’s dad to arrive home in his van. Paddy Vaughan had easy acce
ss to heaps of discarded timber in the builders’ suppliers and was more than happy to add off-cuts to the stash pile that the boys had started to assemble. We soon learned that there’d been a bonfire on the green every Hallowe’en since the estate was built. The first year was, we were told, as much about getting rid of rubbish left behind by the builders as it was about celebrating the night of the living dead. By the time we came along, it had become a huge community event. With each fresh delivery from Paddy Vaughan’s van, the excitement increased. Shayne took possession of the wood with a seriousness that was almost comical, cradling the lengths as though they were precious gold bars. He’d run his fingers along them and when he was satisfied that each piece met his standard, he’d hand it on to David who carried it over his shoulder to the pile.
Paddy, for his part, seemed just as excited about the plans, saluting the boys as he swung into his driveway each evening, and tugging thoughtfully at his curly red beard while they studied the contents of his van. When they’d carried away their haul, he’d chuckle to himself and lay his huge hands across his fat stomach. I was surprised at first that Mr and Mrs O’Dea let David be part of the preparations at all. But I think they were happy enough to allow him tiny slivers of ‘freedom’ as long as it didn’t interfere with his piano practice.
Bridie referred to David as ‘that lovely O’Dea boy’. She couldn’t understand why he hung around with Shayne.
‘It’s his poor parents I feel sorry for,’ she said to me one afternoon.
We were in her kitchen, making a Hallowe’en brack. Shop-bought ones, she said, were full of nasty ingredients and tasted like damp cardboard. I wondered how she knew what damp cardboard tasted like, but I didn’t ask. She’d answered the door to Pat, the vegetable man, and while she was paying him what she owed, she’d spied David trailing behind Shayne, carrying piles of timber across the green. She chattered away while I busied myself choosing from the selection of gaudy rings she kept in a black velvet purse. Picking out the ring for the brack was an important job. After I’d tried them all on, I settled on one with a large emerald stone and an adjustable gold band, wrapped it tightly in a square of greaseproof paper, and popped it into the bowl of doughy mixture.
Bridie scampered over, her feet bulging out of the orange sling-backs she’d insisted on squeezing on as soon as she’d heard the doorbell ring. ‘My Dick said they had a child prodigy on their hands the very first time he heard him practising his Chopsticks,’ she said. ‘A child prodigy. And look at him now. Under the thumb of that Lawless gurrier. And him trying to corrupt your brother too,’ she said, taking the butter wrapper and rubbing it vigorously over the inside of the cake tin. ‘All that upset, landing in that Saturday night.’ She set the tin down. ‘There now, that’s ready for you.’
She eyed me closely, breathing heavily as I slopped the mixture into the tin in two big mounds. The flesh-coloured lumps looked just like Liz Lawless’s bosoms. I took the wooden spoon and bashed them flat.
‘And tell me, has your daddy finished painting their kitchen?’
‘I . . . I think so.’
‘Well, at least that’s something. The less contact there the better.’
The night before Hallowe’en, Mam had the dinner almost ready when she discovered we’d no brown sauce.
‘I’ll walk to the shop with Kev and get some HP,’ I said, knowing Dad couldn’t eat shepherd’s pie without it.
‘Would you, love?’ She took her purse from behind the kettle and handed me a folded pound note.
‘And can I get my mask?’ I asked. The others had already got theirs and had been teasing me that there’d be none left in Mealy’s if I didn’t hurry up.
‘’Course you can. Here, take this in case you haven’t enough,’ she said, handing me a fifty pence piece.
It was cold outside and I made sure Kev was tucked up snug and warm under the pram cover. In the middle of the green the bonfire was already taking shape. Small sticks and old chair legs leaned against each other in a sort of tepee shape. Larger pieces lay waiting to be broken up and added to the pile: a three-legged coffee table; a small yellow-painted chest of drawers; a black leather armchair with curly springs and clouds of orange sponge bursting through its split seat cushion. And then there were the various lengths and chunks of splintered planks and odd-shaped bits of board that Paddy had donated. There hadn’t been any rain for days and all the timber was dry as bone. It was going to be a huge blaze.
As I came up out of the cul-de-sac I could see, on the far side of the green, Shayne and David sitting on Vaughans’ wall, waiting for Paddy to come home. I knew they saw me but they didn’t let on, and when I was almost at the lane, I looked back to see them nudging each other, clearly finding something very funny.
Mealy’s Mini Market was about five minutes’ walk from our house. Just before the hill down to the village, a lane led into both Churchview Park – a semi-circle of bay-windowed, detached bungalows with huge front gardens, built a few years before Hillcourt Rise – and Cherrywood – a brand-new, sprawling estate of yellow-bricked houses. At the end of the lane, to the right, stood the shops. As well as Mealy’s, there was Boylan’s Butchers and Sheila’s Fashions. Boylan’s window display was always the same: kidneys and sausages in silver dishes decorated with bits of plastic parsley and fake tomatoes. Bridie said Sheila Dowd was stretching it when she used the word ‘fashions’ to describe her shop, but she still bought the odd hideous dress there. Most of the clothes Sheila stocked were years old and none of us would’ve been seen dead wearing them. The window was permanently covered with yellow cellophane to stop the clothes on display from fading, and the two models behind the glass looked like crazy mental patients, with their badly fitting bowl-cut wigs and limbs twisted in towards their bodies.
Mrs Mealy was alone in the shop when I walked in, weighing quarters of bulls-eyes into brown paper bags. She was tiny; only her head and shoulders showed above the tiled counter. Her hair was screwed into such a tight bun that her eyebrows were pulled halfway up her forehead, making her look permanently surprised. A line of sharpened pencils sat in the top pocket of her pale blue shop coat, and along her lapels she kept a selection of brown and gold hairpins, each of which eventually ended up on her head at some stage throughout the day. Bridie said it was because a customer once found a hair in between their slices of cheddar cheese and Mrs Mealy never wanted to go through that sort of humiliation again, especially since it’d been someone from Churchview Park.
Kev had fallen asleep on the walk, so I’d left him in his pram outside the shop. It was far too much trouble to try and bump the wheels up the concrete step and force the door open with my bum. It wasn’t as if Mrs Mealy would be goo-ing and gaaing over him anyway. When I asked for the HP, she made a big deal of screwing the lid back on the jar of bulls-eyes. She huffed and puffed taking the bottle down and then walloped it onto the counter. And when I said I wanted to buy a mask, she tried to frown and muttered something about Mr Mealy hanging things up too high. She took a sweeping brush and, holding it like a sword, stabbed it up towards the row of masks hanging above her head. When she eventually managed to unhook the one I wanted, I was finally able to admire it close up. It was a devil’s face: deep, fiery red, with black-rimmed eyeholes and dark green lips.
After I paid, I shoved the HP in my coat pocket, hung the mask on my wrist and went back outside. Plumes of coal smoke puffed from the chimneys of Cherrywood and Churchview Park, the smell crawling up my nose and stinging the back of my throat. I passed the mountain of briquette bales, orange gas bottles and bundles of fire sticks that were piled up against the wall. The days were getting colder; it would soon be winter. It was almost dark already though it was barely half past five.
I blinked so I could adjust to the soft grey light outside after the blinding fluorescent tubes in the shop. I blinked again.
The pram was gone.
I stood looking at the spot where I’d left it, convinced my eyes were foggy and blurred from the
smoky air and it would reappear if I just kept staring.
But all I saw in front of me was an empty space.
I spun around. And around again. I opened my mouth then closed it. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t.
I pressed my face to Boylan’s window and peered inside. Only the butcher boy was there, wiping a bloody cloth over the chopping board. The lights were out in Sheila’s Fashions, the closed sign on the door.
I started to shake. I knew I had to run but I didn’t know where to. Which direction? What road?
I was still trying to decide when I realized I’d already taken off and my wobbly legs were carrying me back towards Hillcourt Rise.
My feet slapped hard against the concrete, pounding out his name in my head as I ran. Kev Kev Kev Kev. The lane seemed wider, darker; the walls loomed higher. I bolted straight down the middle, away from the deep banks of shadow that seeped out from either side.
Why would someone take him?
I could already see Mam’s face. I could hear her shouting. Don’t be ridiculous, Ruth. What do you mean he’s gone?
My chest heaved as I gulped cold air into my lungs and sprinted even faster. Kev Kev Kev Kev . . .
I burst out of the lane into Hillcourt Rise. I’d no idea what I was doing. Whoever had him could’ve gone through Churchview or Cherrywood. They could be anywhere. I could hear a voice in my head. A baby boy was taken from outside Mealy’s Mini Market, Kilgessin at about half past five this evening. I willed it to go away but it continued. Gardai would like to speak to anyone who was in the area at the time. Any information, however insignificant, could be vital to their investigations and will be . . .
I tried to think of Kev’s face, his laugh, his cry, anything to get the voice to go away. It couldn’t go as far as that, could it? Not the news. It wasn’t going to be on the news. It wasn’t real, was it?