A Slanting of the Sun

by Donal Ryan

  And just as I kind of knew would happen without knowing I knew, Daddy went apeshit and tried to bust in through the glass of the hatch and the two lads high-tailed it and glass smashed and the shades came in all yellow and blue and when I chanced a look out of one eye they were all lying on the floor except for one shade who was standing up looking down and Daddy was roaring from underneath the small mountain of arms and legs that he was going killing every fuckin Curley there ever was. The lady with the look of Mary Margaret put her hand over mine and drew me away towards the door and we stood outside it while they held Daddy down by an arm or a leg each which was easy enough do as he had come back to himself a bit and he was going to be careful not to make his record stretch down too much farther than his two arms.

  Come on, the lady said. Come on with me. She told the spare prick of a shade who did all the looking and none of the holding down of Daddy that she was with me. Daddy was cuffed and quietened and he was saying Okay, okay, go handy, I swear I’ll go and leave this place in peace and I’ll pay for the broke window and all and I’m sorry for the trouble and all and if you’ll let me go now there’ll be no more trouble from me, I swear on the dead Martins. Them shades to a man knew who was the dead Martins. Still and all they carried him off away to the paddy-wagon.

  Sometimes I look at Daddy, at his side or his back or his face, and I love him so much that it feels like he’s a prize I won for doing something brilliant, better than anyone else. There’s no way in hell you’re ever going to hear them words out of my mouth, though. Thinking them kinds of words is enough. God hears all and knows all, and not all things need saying. I hated seeing him being dragged and he all upset, but he isn’t stupid, and I knew he’d behave himself once the explosion was over. The shades probably would even deliver him home to our house or back to Curley’s yard for his lorry and Mam would meet him at the door with a slap and a kiss.

  The lady’s car smelt plasticky and new. Janey Mac, she said. That was scary, wasn’t it? Are you okay, love? Fear of me, I told her. She asked did I want a sweet and then something remembered itself in my head, something about strangers and sweets and never never getting into a car with a person not known to you. But she was pretty and she smelt so nice and even the shade with his hands hanging had only nodded and smiled at her as she’d walked me out past the trouble with my hand in hers. She was looking at me and smiling and she admired my Converses and I admired her hair and she asked where I lived and I told her Annaholty and she looked a bit confused and said What, in a house? And I said What the fuck else would I live in? and straight away put my hand over my mouth and asked God to forgive me for cursing, but only in my mind. Do you not live in a … have you ever lived in a … A what? I was right interested now. I’d never met a mad person before, only Daddy when trouble come round, but that’s a different sort of mad.

  A caravan.

  I thought of the fire-barrel in the back yard that Daddy would set ablaze the very odd night and him and his pals would stand around it and talk and shout and laugh and curse at the sky if a helicopter passed. A campfire is legit, I heard a man say once, so they can fuck off. Part of culture and custom. It’s rubbish fires is illegal. And how the fuck would they know the difference? another man said, from away up there? And the first man was lepping at his own thickness and the other man’s smartness but was trying not to show it while his comrades laughed and laughed. And Daddy done his best to keep peace around the barrel, saying Jimmy’s right, campfires is grand, and they know by the size and the smoke and the ring of men around it standing that it’s not rubbish is being burnt but wood. Them lads have special cameras to see what’s far away, even through the dark of night. My daddy don’t drink no more and so his temper doesn’t leave him as quick and he’ll only square up to a man he thinks can match him and only if that man has done him wrong. Like the lad in Curleys with his credit note. So he’s a great one now for keeping peace between people. That’s kind of his job, I think.

  I thought Travellers as a rule lived in caravans, the lady said.

  I heard loads of things, true and untrue, said for certain about me since that day, and never a trace of doubt in the sayers’ voices, but said in a way that made you know the person saying it believed something about you even though they had no right in all the world to that belief. But that first time pierced me sharpest and so deep. I’d never heard words said like that before. Words that took my sameness away, and left me kind of sorry to be me.

  The lady put the back of her hand against my cheek where a tear I hadn’t felt coming suddenly was and then the palm of that hand on my head and I seen her look down at her hand for just a taste of a second and a flash of something like worry visited her face and disappeared again as quick. Then she rubbed the two sides of that hand against the edge of her seat and she didn’t know I seen her do it because I know in my heart and soul she didn’t even know she was doing it.

  She talked more but I didn’t really listen, wanting to know had I gone to see Finding Nemo, and I only nodded, and she drove me back the road to our house and every car that came against us I felt like the people was all looking at me and I felt open on the two sides of me, and like I shouldn’t be in that car at all, so I sort of hugged myself to tighten myself into as small a size as I could. I asked her drop me at the end of our road and I jumped out of her car without barely saying bye and ran up to Mammy to tell her about Daddy and the Curleys and the shades, but never breathed a word about the lady, because there was no words to say what happened, only a feeling I couldn’t even name.

  Even though I’ve grown since then and will for a good few years to come, until I’m eighteen or nineteen, I’ll never again walk as tall as I did before that day. Before that lady looked at me, and divided and shrunk me, and wiped me off of herself, without even knowing she was doing it. And she never thinking for a second she was anything but kind.

  The ways of some things are set, like the courses of rivers or the greenness of grass, or the trouble that follows my daddy, or the hard light of knowing in people’s eyes.

  The Squad

  THE SKY THE day we shot the boy was clear and blue. I remember seeing before I took aim at his heart a swallow dipping and rising low along the treeline before disappearing into the flashes. There was no stir from the grass or the leaves nor any rustle from the undergrowth. The boy’s screams tormented no creatures only ourselves. The gag we had on him wasn’t worth tuppence. John P was there, of course, and Pat Devine, and the two Brien Cutters and Martin Guiney. It was Pat brought the rifles and the ammunition and the one magazine of blank rounds and it was Martin stowed the fired rifles in plastic sheeting inside a weighted burlap sack and rowed out solo a good ways and dropped the whole lot into the black hole in Youghal Bay. The two Brien Cutters took care of the wooden post. I don’t know exactly how, nor did I ever want to.

  A strange thing happened in here the other day. Not that death is any stranger in this place. There was a couple over there in front of the big picture window, sitting facing one another, playing ball. Your man the physio had them given exercises to do, something like the ones he had myself and John P doing there a few months ago when John P had more of his reason. I was watching away and next thing didn’t your man drop the ball and the two of them sat looking down at it and I was thinking Will I go over in the hell and give them a dig-out not to have them sitting there looking so sadly at one another when all of a shot your man put out his hand and she grabbed it and he sort of yanked her over onto his lap and I saw then that he was crying like a child and he put his two arms tight around her middle and they were cheek to cheek for a little while, a few moments just, and she went as limp as a rag-doll in his arms and I knew then that she had died. Just like that, imagine. It was a lovely thing, really. He cradled her head with his good hand and kissed her on her cheek before they carried her away from him and then he sat there in silence a while, just looking out at the rosebushes. I think I knew him once, out in the world. I think he was a decent ma
n.

  We’re not in command of ourselves any more. John P wet himself a small while ago and the boy that’s meant to be keeping an eye on us was too busy scratching himself to notice. John P said nothing, only tried and tried to get up. But there’s a belt clamped firm around his middle today to anchor him, because he wandered yesterday and got into terrible mischief, and they’re afraid of their lives he might do himself an injury. The poor misfortune had his beige slacks on; otherwise no one might have noticed. I watched the darkening as it bloomed outwards from his middle and sprouted tendrils down his legs. He knew it was happening and hadn’t power enough to stem the flow. We locked eyes for a moment or two. I’ll never in what’s left of my days forget the look upon his face. Are you all right, John P, I whispered, but all he heard was silence, all he saw was my hand raised uselessly and the opening and closing of my dry old mouth.

  The carer as he’s called copped on for a finish what was after happening to John P. He was so vexed-looking I was certain sure he was going to start beating him. He cursed in some foreign language and balled his hands into fists and stood glowering down at my oldest friend and I’d bet what bit of life I’ve left he was imagining himself wringing poor John P’s dear old neck.

  Nappies. Nappies for you from now on, my friend. Look at you. Look at you. And John P looked sorrowfully down at himself and back up at the boy and over at me and what was there to say but sorry.

  Some days I watch John P foostering about, looking for his glasses or what have you, and as a rule I’ll see the thing he’s looking for, knocked from the arm of his chair by his elbow onto the ground, and I’ll see him getting more and more frustrated with his fruitless search, and the glasses or the book or whatever it is will be lying by his foot, and I feel a hotness rising in my mind and it’s all I can do at those times not to go over and grab him by the wrist and twist it until it’s on the point of snapping but I never would, I only sit here instead and say inside in my head For God’s sake, John P, for God’s sake, John P, until he sees at last the missing thing and goes about retrieving it, a process every bit as tortuous as the search. I never would, I’m nearly sure. But one day he was rubbing his wrist and looking at me and there was fear and something like reproach in his watery eyes, I think, and I wonder did I do him an injury unknown to myself. Is that a thing that’s capable of happening? I wouldn’t have thought so, before the start of this retreat of reason.

  It was the bones of a year after the terrible thing happened to his only daughter before any of us laid eyes on John P. And when we did we got an awful hop. The flesh was gone from him and all that was left was skin stretched tightly over bone. I watched as people forced themselves to talk to him in the parish hall and the hurling field and out at the golf club and around the town in all the places he had always been seen and known well and greeted with real warmth and affection, and they suppressing the urge to recoil from him, and their voices pitched at an unnatural frequency in forced good humour and a little quaver in their words giving away their discomfort, saying things like, Begodden John P you’re looking well, you’re looking fit and healthy, how are they all at home, how’s … And they’d leave the enquiry hanging unfinished, expecting John P to pick up its loose end and tie it in a tight knot and close it off swiftly and fully but he only stood there and the stare of him was terrifying, truth be told, his eyes seeming to have increased in size as the rest of him had shrunk, and to have been filled with a wild kind of grief. In those first few months after his return from exile he only shuffled and shrugged and mumbled and whenever he turned his cadaverous face to me I nearly cried, so sorry was I for my dear friend, for the year he was after having, for the way I had left him above in isolation with his silent wife and his savaged daughter, afraid to return after that terrible solitary meeting shortly after it all happened, not knowing words to say to them or even what way to look at them.

  When Jim Gildea told us the boy was getting out, six years before the end of the sentence passed that mad day inside in the court in Limerick, he couldn’t meet John P’s eyes; it was as though he had assumed upon himself a vicarious responsibility for the failings of the system that employed him. Good behaviour, Jim almost whispered. John P set his face and thanked Jim and said Oh Lord God, and made a show of shaking his head and revealed nothing of the fact that we already knew, we’d been contacted weeks before by the brother of a man in the know in an office of a section of a department up the country. We had plans made, and contingencies, and the tools procured to carry out the sentence we had passed in absentia on the boy. Nothing in Jim Gildea’s demeanour suggested he suspected the convening of our kangaroo court; he put his hand on John P’s shoulder and promised that if that boy returned to this area he wouldn’t have a moment’s peace, that he, Jim, would haunt him and hound him. And how likely is it he’ll show his face around here? Very likely, we knew, and Jim knew it, too, but he was doing his damnedest to balm the bite of his news, to salve the wound he thought he had inflicted. We all knew of the boy, and of his mother and father, and of theirs before them, even. He had a gaggle of sisters and brothers, some flung to the four winds and some still local, and a clatter of cousins and clan all along the far end of the Ashdown Road. They all came out of the Villas, in the heart of our parish and separate from us.

  They’d come to the court to root for him and to jostle and swear in the foyer and profess their love for him and decry the terrible injustice that was being done and slag was said and lying bitch and one of them got wicked shirty and was dragged away kicking to a paddy-wagon and a cat was set among the pigeons then and a skirmish threatened to expand fully into battle and we formed a circle of decent men around John P and his wife and daughter and the guards in turn ringed us and we moved in unison to the courthouse gates and into the waiting years.

  That’s all long years ago and I wonder often how much of it does John P know still. There’s days he looks at me from the high-back chair beside me and it’s no bother to him to sit up in it and he has long since fallen back into his flesh, though he never regained his previous healthy portliness and pallor, and he still has mostly the full use of his legs, but that’s a small mercy, no mercy at all in truth, when his mind is in such retreat from him, and various of his other limbs and faculties and organs are only sporadically co-operative, and he bound in any case to his dayroom chair.

  John P and I were born in the same week into houses within crying distance of one another. He is my elder by three days. I’m your elder and your better, he often joked, though he deferred to me on most matters and looked up to me, I knew. Neither of us had brothers in family and so fastened ourselves harder I think into our brotherhood of friendship. When I was indentured inside in Stritch’s he was bereft for a time, having no one to knock about with in the gaps between chores, and he took to bringing himself on the twelve o’clock bus from Nenagh into the city the odd day the way he could meet me at the door of the converted townhouse on O’Connell Avenue as I left to have my lunch, and more than one day I cursed beneath my breath at the sight of him, grinning up at me from the foot of the steps, and the smell of muck and milking wafting sourly up at me. But I never gave vent to my annoyance and it always turned quickly to shame in myself, and I’d treat him to his lunch and a glass of lemonade, and I’d wonder at his lingering boyishness and the differences growing between us.

  These guilty feelings new and old melded themselves together in the wake of John P’s troubles and isolation and the rank stew of them turned to a horrible gnawing feeling, acidy in my stomach. I was forced for a finish to grant myself respite in the giving of audience to John P’s vengeful notions, to have a plan set for the inevitable day when the boy who raped his daughter almost to death would be freed from prison. If only I’d gone up weekly to see him, or fortnightly, or monthly even, for God’s sake, to stand in his yard and taste the air with him, to suffer the terrible silence of the kitchen where his wife and daughter were yoked and shackled by fear and sorrow and an imposturous shame, to
try to see could I stem the rising tide of his rage and encourage the ebbing of it, to instil in him the notion that on this temporal plane there would be no true justice, but that all of the inequities suffered by the just would be repaid in the infinity to come, that all deficits would be closed, and Our Lord would be the leveller, not us, not us men.

  John P was careful about who he spoke to of these things, that’s how I judged the seriousness of his intent. He drew around him a small group of men, all of us friends since childhood, all of us from the same townland, from nearly the same road: Pat Devine, the Brien Cutters, Martin Guiney and myself. John P’s air of sorrow and fearfulness washed away from him in the moments of his planning and delegation; he assumed a flinty aspect, his cheeks were bloodless except for a coin of redness at the centre of each one, he spoke in a flat and measured tone and stated clearly what he wished done. And John P of course expected me without question to be the leader of this small squad of men, and my first worry was without foundation in reason: that six seemed to me to be an unlucky number, and that we should be either five or seven. That was the first loose thread of that unravelling.

  We could all give a dozen reasons at least for doing it and none for not doing it. We met without John P, the five of us, and talked it in and out and around and kept coming back to the same thing: we’d all said we’d do it in those burning days after the crime and now John P was holding us to our words. If he ever shows his face. By Jesus. By Christ. We’ll shoot the cunt. We’ll bury him. We’ll finish the fucker. Threats made to empty air now had become covenants. It wasn’t just revenge. We had to think of all the other daughters of our parish. The mechanics of how it would be done came easily to us and were agreed upon without rancour or dissent. Three rounds each, one random magazine would be loaded only with blanks the way each man could console himself afterwards that it was he had the useless gun.