Crippling self-consciousness at what your parents think of you is one thing; being even more preoccupied at what everyone else thinks of you is another. It took all my youth, and a tragically large part of afterwards, to stop spending ridiculously large amounts of time obsessed with what others might think of me.
A little bit of that is required to stop a person turning into a monster; too much testifies to obsession, and the ridiculous conceit that the world is as fascinated with you as you are.
So, note to thirteen-year-old self: relax. You might be tall, thin, built like a jockey’s whip and in possession of a fresh, wispy “Ronnie” that really should feel a blade sometime soon, but you’re not the only one like that. You might also find it daunting to initiate conversations with people you don’t know, but that doesn’t make you unique either. The idea of being the centre of attention is enough to make you want to puke, which contradicts an underlying suspicion that you know all the answers and need just a little encouragement to share them with everyone. But that contradiction isn’t unheard of either.
Because here’s the thing: anyone more interested in you than they are in themselves has bigger problems than coping with the yin-yang of insecurity and arrogance. And it’s an unfortunate reality that in those rare cases when you’re being considered at all, most people lean towards thinking the worst anyway, for the simple reason that they want to.
Anyway, enough theory, you say – gimme something practical, about stuff that really matters, like girls.
That’s a toughie. Girls are different, simple as that. But not that different. Talk mightn’t be your strong point but, if a girl actually speaks to you, that is not your cue to start desperately searching for a James Bond-type witty reply. Believe me, that is not your ace-in-the-hole.
So chat normally – or as normally as you can manage. Because here’s the reality: when it comes to the sex-thing, or the kissy-thing, or the quick-fumble-at-the-back-of-the-sheds thing, it is always the girl who decides. There ain’t a man alive whose slick patter has persuaded a woman to do something she doesn’t want to – ever. And that includes you.
So, nothing fancy. Chat – if you can. But don’t try too hard. Just remember the more you open your mouth, the more chance there is for putting your foot in it. Girls have a wonderful capacity for persuading themselves. You can only get in the way. Allow her to project all sorts of wonderfulness onto you.
A great way of helping that process along is a musical instrument: guitar is your safest bet. Tuba-players aren’t famous for getting action. But chicks love guitars. And if you can play, and sing, then you will be a perfect blank screen for all kinds of projectors. So, start now, and persist, because you have no natural aptitude for music and waiting until adulthood will only mean failure. Believe me.
Now, when it comes to trying, actually do try a bit; and not just when it comes to the books. No one expects 100mph all the time but a gentle chugging fifty or sixty will do nicely. You’d be amazed what it might achieve. If nothing else, it will avoid the pitiful “if only” stuff that will beerily crop up years later.
You weren’t too shabby a footballer at thirteen and beyond. And that was despite a horror of appearing to try at all. Throwing Jimmy Barry Murphy shapes was all very well but JBM managed to combine looking cool as hell on a field with actual effectiveness. Trying to be too-cool-for-school actually took far more energy than a bit of running around would have, and might have produced results that would have discouraged making for the sporting exit gates at the first available opportunity.
But that was all part of the self-consciousness thing. Like on the bus back from a schools match and everyone started singing that “We’ve got Johnny Smith, No. 1 . . . We’ve got the best team in the land” song: the sickening anxiety at the idea of the back of the bus getting to No. 10 and going “Who the hell is No. 10?” would have made you reach for the emergency cord if it had been a train. But they did know you. There wasn’t much enthusiasm for their lazy-ass No. 10, but they did know you.
And if they hadn’t, then so what? Embarrassment eventually goes away, honestly. It might not be fair that it comes back so readily, but that’s another thing: forget fair, it doesn’t exist. That isn’t a cue to throw your hands up to heaven, just a reality it’s best to square up to as quickly as possible. It’s an unfair world but since it’s the only one we’ve got, relish the struggle for what it is. And never resort to the most useless word in the language: should.
Instead face up to what is: and the most important “is” from that wringer of a day long ago came at the end. I was starting to doze off, when Dad knocked on the door, sat on the side of the bed and lightly squeezed my arm to end the pretence of sleep. All he said was, “Not to worry, Chief – we’ll sort out something.” Then he produced a packet of crisps and we shared them.
Because as a parent now myself, I know all that anger was only fear. Any idea your child might be vulnerable is appalling. He wasn’t yelling at you – well, maybe a little – but really the yelling was a primal roar at a world that can be desperately tough even at the best of times. It was a roar from a gut knotted with the perpetual stress of worrying about your child. A different kind of worry, an admirable one, the sort of worry that makes you ready to fight the world if your kid is so much as looked at crooked. It’s the worry I have for my kids now. It’s also a reminder that someone else feels the same depth of love for me that I have for my own children.
You have to have kids of your own to fully get that. And when mine come to me at thirteen with similar news, I will absolutely go “tonto” too, forgetting everything and fearing everything. Because get this, Thirteen, worry never goes away.
You just get something more worthwhile to worry about, eventually, if you’re lucky. And you are.
Brian O’Connor is the award-winning racing correspondent and sports columnist for the Irish Times. He has written three novels, Bloodline, Threaten to Win and In the Picture as well as a number of non-fiction books. Originally from County Cork, he now lives in County Wicklow. He is married to author Niamh O’Connor.
Story 36: The Day Things Changed
Niamh O’Connor
It is 1979. I am Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz racing through the lanes of our estate on my chopper. A trick-or-treat bag of loot is hanging from the handlebars, and the Scarecrow – my brother Spud – is straddling the crossbar. Toto – Granny’s Jack Russell – sticks his head out the top button of my coat, his bum secured by my coat’s belt. We’ve covered Birches, Cherry Blossoms and Beeches, and have only the cul-de-sacs, Laurels and Fir Trees, to go before we dump the fruit, and head home with what’s left: Sherbet, Cola Bottles, Flogs, and a packet of Rancheros.
Suddenly at the turn in the lane, I see our neighbour, Sinéad Roche, coming straight for us, a witch on boot-skates. I brake and stop.
Sinéad’s got her mam’s handbag over her shoulder like she has to go to the shops for bread or milk, only Sinéad never runs out of bread or milk, because she is an only child.
‘Only children’ collect fancy paper, which is paper with pictures on it, and is too good to write on, so Sinéad keeps hers in an empty biscuit tin, and I wish I was an only child with a whole box of biscuits in front of me that don’t have to be stuffed in my mouth in case my brothers, AJ and Spud and Eskie, get them before me. I tried to save some fancy paper once that I scabbed off Sinéad with a horse’s head on it, but Mam wrote “washing-up liquid, soap, cooking oil, veg, sliced pan, mince and eggs” over the eyes and ears.
Sinéad skids over to the handlebars and halts, using her stoppers, and “You have to go straight home,” she says, and “Eskie’s in an ambulance.”
I know I will never be friends with her again, because of the way she says it, like her knowing before me is more important than just telling me what happened.
But I kind of guess what’s wrong anyway, because yesterday me and Eskie were watching “Spidahman, Spidahman, does whatever a spidah can”, when the TV went all wonky
and all you could see was fuzzy snow hopping all over the place. And Eskie kept staring at it and not getting bored, and his eyes didn’t even blink, like he was asleep with his eyes open. I laughed, but Mam got scared.
When we get to Sinéad’s house, her mother fries guggies for us and says, “Eskie had a turn. Does Spud eat eggs at home?” And I answer, “What, are you thick? Everyone knows he doesn’t eat anything except crisps.” No, I don’t. I say, “Yes,” just to see what will happen and she gives him a slap across the back of his head and tells him to “Eat up,” and he lays his shoe right into my shin under the table, the shitehawk. I have to bite my own tongue to stop telling Sinéad’s mam the white of her eggs looks like snots and Mam never hits us.
I didn’t ask her what a turn was, but when Eskie came home from hospital I saw one. I heard Mam upstairs kind of screaming for Dad to come, and he goes belting down the stairs, and Eskie is lying on the floor shaking like mad, and his eyes are going mental and his lip is pumping blood from where he banged it off the door when the turn took him, and Dad comes back up the stairs with the spoon for eating boiled eggs with St Patrick on it. Mam shouts to get her rosary beads off the locker, and Dad shoves me out of the way when I give them to her, even though I’m trying to see how much of St Patrick’s hat is sticking out of Eskie’s mouth to stop him swallowing his tongue.
I must have a short tongue because there’s no way I can swallow mine, and I try all the time in bed even when I think I’m not trying, because it’s my new habit. My old one was bending my fingers back to see if I’m double-jointed.
When I get back out of bed to ask Dad to tuck me in so Jack Frost can’t get me, he says, “Get into the car” and “There’s nobody here to mind you” and “No, there isn’t time to go to Granny’s first,” or even to put my tracker on. Nobody hears me in the car when I say, “I can’t move my legs” in my Bionic Woman in-the-first-episode voice because my skin’s stuck to the car seats in my nightie. The pain makes a game of “Help, my legs are paralysed” though. After that, I have a game of stick my finger out the window because I have turned invisible. If you stick your head out Dad kills you, but he doesn’t know about my little finger, ha ha. Like the only way not to die of boredom when you’re in the yard before roll call is to squeeze your bum in and out. If you talk, or move, múinteoir gives you lines, but he can’t see who’s squeezing their bums at him. All of our class have dimpley bums from doing it after Nigel Doherty invented it. You nearly break your shite laughing if you see somebody else doing it before you think of it.
AJ doesn’t give out that he has to sit in the middle, with me and Spud at the window seats, because he wants to show off to Dad he knows the way to the hospital from getting his verruca cut off, and he leans between Mam and Dad and Eskie’s leg pointing in the air the same direction as St Patrick still stuck in his mouth.
When that game is over I play the toy ads so I don’t have to listen to Mam crying. You know when Christmas is coming because all the toy ads are on the telly. The best ones are the Incredible Hulk doll because you can turn him inside out and he’s not David Banner any more. Spud wants Buckaroo. You put all the things on the donkey’s back and he kicks them off and you lose. AJ wants a BMX bike because they are the best for wheelies. Eskie wants everything he sees. I want a magic kit. Mam always says we will get a surprise. Dear God, it will only be a surprise if it’s a magic kit.
AJ made me want it. He wrapped cling film around his finger and made a hole in a box of Cara to put his blue finger in. Then he opened the box and wiggled. “Abracadabra, hey presto, Geronimo, ladies and gentlemen, I give you a finger without a hand!” “Jesus,” Mam said the first time and her shoulders jumped. Dad killed him for emptying the matches and I think he put a cricket behind our fridge to hum every time we opened it to rob cling film. But it was worth getting into trouble. Like the time AJ invented a competition to see who could pick the biggest lump of rust off Dad’s Fiat 127 without it breaking. It could have been a photo finish with the bit I was getting over the tyre except Eskie ran inside and asked Dad did he want to play. Now AJ holds the world championship for getting a piece as big as his little finger off the boot and there’s no chance of a rematch.
Eskie ruins everything. His real name is Muirtey which is short for Martin, but the fur on his anorak hood makes him look like an Eskimo, Spud said, and it stuck, even though Mam goes mental if she hears us calling him that. Some nights when he thinks Jabbah the Hutt is under the bottom bunk, Mam lets him up the ladder in with me. If he puts his toe-jammy freezing feet near me I go “Eskie, Eskie, Eskie” a million times and he cries because he hates that name, and Mam has to take him in with her. Except for the time he stood on a rusty nail and was allowed to do anything he wanted like one of the Billy Barry kids on the Late Late Toy Show. He got my bunk to himself even after I offered to suck out the poison for a trade, but he wouldn’t let me and what did he do then only wet my bed, and Mam had to put a bin bag under him, and the noise drove me mental all night every time he moved, and I couldn’t even kick my own mattress from underneath.
And another reason I hate him is for always hanging around before I go up the hill in our estate for my Mount Everest game. Sometimes I have to climb that mountain without any brandy if there is an avalanche because of him. Every day, Dad drives down it after work at half five. So I climb Mount Everest to wait for him. When Dad sees me he pulls in and turns off the engine and lets me steer the car down the hill. Mam keeps telling him to be careful, but he says I help him save petrol. I love Dad. If Eskie ever tries to have a go at driving down the hill again I’ll burst him, because of all the petrol he is wasting making us go to the hospital.
I never wanted to go to bed before, but I do in the car park of the hospital. I could put the pillow over my head and Mam wouldn’t be making that noise. She would be singing, “Dona, Dona, Dona, Dona” about the calf on a wagon bound for market and the swallow flying freely in the sky above him and the winds laughing with all their might.We all have our own lullaby. Mam would never sing yours to someone else. They can listen in their room but it’s not for them. The same as when she was pregnant she ate different things for all of us: tongue for AJ, coal and firelighters for Spud, Brussels sprouts for me, and Turkish Delights for Eskie.
Even though we are here now, Mam keeps crying, and would she ever stop, but she won’t, and she won’t give Eskie to Dad or the doctors and nurses either. Eskie is as blue as AJ’s magic finger, but Mam is blaming the tinfoil, not the cling film. “He got too hot when I made him be the Tin Man,” she says. She wrapped his arms and legs in tin foil, and me and Spud kept picking the bits of chewing-gum cheese left over from Dad’s lunches out of it, before we went off on the chopper to do the roads.
“Dona, dona, dona, dona,” is the bit where the moo-cow is crying for its mam. Baby birds shoved out by an orphan cuckoo cry too on the way down. Tadpoles are the shape of tears, but nobody can tell me if they cried in the Hoover. I took them home for the summer holidays, but Eskie kept looking at them, and I don’t know if he did it on purpose, but he knocked the bowl over. First he pretended he didn’t know, but “Confess, confess, confess,” said Spud and got him in a headlock and he did. Their legs were supposed to grow in our house and not in the Hoover which Dad wouldn’t empty because Mam hadn’t lost any jewellery. I forgot to claim Eskie for it, and now I’m never going to get a chance because he’s probably dead.
OurfatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethynamethykingdomcomethywillbedoneonearthasitisinheavengiveusthisdayourdailybreadandforgiveusourtresspassesasweforgivethosewhotrespassagainstusandleadusnotintotemptationbutdeliverusfromevilifSantagivesmeamagickitIwilldoanythingyouwantamen.
Niamh O’Connor is the true-crime editor of the Sunday World newspaper and the author of the true-crime books The Black Widow, Cracking Crime and Blood Ties. She has written four novels in the Jo Birmingham series: If I Never See You Again, Taken, Too Close For Comfort and Blink. She is married to author and Irish Times racing correspondent,
Brian O’Connor, and they have three children.
Story 37: The Frog Prince
Fintan O’Higgins
My life was blighted by my erotic fixation on a seven-year-old girl.
I was seven too, and although I had never heard the word “erotic” I knew one thing: I wanted, above everything else in life, to kiss this child. Alison was pretty and blonde and smiled a lot. I think even at the time I knew there was no really deep spiritual bond between us, but I wanted there to be. I wanted to smell her hair and hold her hand. I wanted her physically, and even if I didn’t know what I would do with her physically if I had her, I did know that it involved kissing. Kissing, getting married and living happily ever after were things which seemed inextricable to me as a seven-year-old and such was the overpowering strength of my feelings for Alison, they seemed also to be destined by Fate. That she and I would kiss, marry and live happily ever after was one of those happy inevitabilities. It was exciting to have a destiny, to have the progress of my life and love written in the stars. I was quite sure that this destiny would be fulfilled because it was inconceivable to me that it should not, the Universe being fair-minded and benign.
The certainty of our fairytale ending did not, however, bring with it peace of mind. I walked through those days when I was in First Class in a state of dizzy agitation. A giddy excitement stirred up my whole body. I was dazed by love; I was overwhelmed with it; I was drowning in the stuff. Days were measured by time spent with her; I gauged distance by how far away she was. I made excuses to talk to her, deliberately breaking the nib of my pencil so I could borrow her pink see-through sharpener with the sparkles and hearts. I hung my coat on the hook beside hers and lingered while she hung up her jacket so I could brush her grey-jumpered elbow with my own and catch, briefly and maddeningly, the scent of her blonde hair. We sometimes played together in the yard, apart from the others, and more than once during these games she caught me looking at her, waiting for her to smile in recognition of our shared love and destiny. She never did, though, and I had to admit to being disappointed by her failure to acknowledge our mutual passion, which I assumed was too enormous and important to require words to communicate itself.
If I Was a Child Again Page 21