by M. J. Hyland
We used to live in a two-bedroom flat that had pale green walls and smelt of mould and mouse urine. But when my father lost his job, my mother’s pay wasn’t enough for the rent and so, a few months later, my grandmother invited us to live with her.
My grandfather owned a jewellery shop and left it to Granny in his will. He died when I was seven and Granny sold the shop and all the jewellery in it. As far as my father is concerned, some of the money from the sale of the jewellery shop should be his.
‘Tickle, tickle, tickle,’ she says, as she lunges at me, putting her cold fingers under my right armpit, digging her nails in.
‘I know where you’re ticklish,’ she says. ‘I know where! Under there!’
I thrash and move away. I want her to tickle me but I know it will start out feeling good and end up feeling bad.
The more I move away, the more she digs under my armpits. We don’t speak and I pretend to laugh, pretend to be enjoying myself, and the silence during these episodes makes them stranger, as though we both know I’m pretending.
She stops.
‘Can I’ve some sweets now?’ I ask.
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Please?’ I say. Before my grandmother has time to answer, my mother throws the bedroom door open so hard that it hits the wall. Perhaps she didn’t mean it.
Her face is flushed, down to her neck, and her eyes are wide and blue. She looks nicest when she comes home from working on her puppet shows, and I know that she will never get too old or ugly and will never look like Granny.
When my mother speaks I look at her mouth which looks like a pretty mouth should. When an ugly person speaks, their lips move like a gash cut into dough covering a dark hole. I often stare at faces to see whether the mouth is pretty and looks like a mouth should, or whether it is ugly and looks like a crooked gash that opens and closes.
‘John, it’s time for tea,’ says my mother.
I put my half-eaten banana under my pillow. I don’t like to eat bananas in front of people.
‘You can bring your banana with you if you’d like.’
My mother refers to my banana as though it were a pet.
‘That’s OK,’ I say. ‘I’ll eat it later.’
‘Suit yourself,’ she says.
We sit at the kitchen table and eat cream of chicken soup. Granny’s handbag is on the kitchen floor by the door and her coat is on the back of her chair. When she comes back from Dublin, she usually asks me to take her coat and bag to her room and she usually gives me a sweet when I come back with her slippers. Something is different today.
She drops her shoes to the floor and the smell of nylon and sweat climbs up the table and into my chicken soup. I watch her while she eats and her eating habits make me feel sick. My father is nearly as bad. Compared to my mother they are like wild dogs and the sounds they make fill the kitchen, like urinating fills a bathroom, and I want to block my ears. Their spoons clank against their bowls, their tongues slop in their mouths, and it is impossible to think of anything else.
When we have finished our soup, my grandmother goes to the dresser and comes back with six cream buns and a piece of wedding cake. The cake is covered in marzipan icing and smells awful, like fresh paint. I put two buns onto a plate and stand up from the table. I want to eat in my room. But my father puts his leg out in front of me so that I can’t leave.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he says, with anger that is too sudden, too ready; as though he has been saving it up from Sunday.
A pain, not quite sharp, but not dull either, darts up from my bladder and rushes to my throat. ‘Nowhere,’ I say, and sit back down.
‘Well, then,’ says my father to my grandmother, ‘did you have a good time in Dublin?’
My grandmother’s lipstick has smeared onto a bun and she has cream on her nose. Her mouth is full of sodden bread, jam and cream, but she doesn’t bother to swallow the wet mess before she speaks.
‘It was great. After the races I went to Evelyn’s shop and I sat myself down by her fire for a while.’
Evelyn is my mother’s older sister.
My father and grandmother talk for a while, and my mother and I watch them, waiting for something to happen. There is often a row when my father and grandmother are at the table together.
After drinking tea, my grandmother has a glass of sherry, and her shoulders drop under the pleasure of it. Her head lolls, her eyes close and, finally, her head falls forward. My father moves his chair, and the scraping wakes her. She looks at him, startled.
‘What happened to your beard?’ she asks, as though waking from a dream.
My mother and I laugh.
‘I want to know what happened to my son’s face,’ she says. ‘He’s gone all soft and naked.’
She has hardly finished speaking when her eyes close and her head folds into her chest.
‘Wake up!’ my father shouts. ‘The table is not a bed.’
She opens her eyes. ‘It’s my house and I’ll sleep in the cupboard under the stairs if I want to.’
I wonder where Crito is and start calling for her. ‘Puss, puss, puss. Heeeeeere Crito! Heeeeeere Crito!’
My father frowns at me, gets up, and leaves the kitchen without speaking.
Whenever my grandmother wins more than fifty pounds at the races, she takes me to Butlins holiday camp or to a circus if there’s one near by. At Butlins last year there was an exhibition called Amazing Wonders of the World.
There were pictures of giants and midgets, of a man with no arms who played the piano with his feet, and of Siamese twins, who faced away from each other while they kissed their boyfriends.
My grandmother and I sat in the front row and watched a film of a man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and a re-enactment of Harry Houdini escaping from a straitjacket and chains. Houdini’s real name was Ehrich Weiss. He was born in 1874 and died in 1926.
My Aunty Evelyn has been to Niagara Falls. When she came home she said, ‘I’ve got quite a tan on me.’ But she was fatter than she was before she left, and nobody was looking at her tan. My mother says Aunty Evelyn is digging a grave with her teeth.
I look forward to seeing Aunty Evelyn because she tells me stories from that trip. She tells me about the town, with its big hill, called Clifton Hill, lined with museums and fun parlours; houses of oddities, miracles, neon lights and astonishing amusements. She says that the city by Niagara Falls is our way of competing with nature. ‘The natural freak of gigantic falls, and the human freak-show. It’s all there at Niagara.’
It occurs to me that I could get to Niagara sooner if only my grandmother would help.
‘Did you win?’ I ask as I tap her on the arm. She wakes. ‘Well? Did you win anything at the races?’
‘Not this time,’ she says. ‘But winning isn’t everything.’
‘So you won no races?’ I say.
‘No,’ she says. ‘But I enjoyed myself.’
I feel dizzy, suddenly, as though I have lost my balance. ‘Did you really not win any money?’ I ask.
‘Sure, didn’t I tell you already?’ she says. ‘I didn’t win a penny.’
I look down at the table.
‘I’ll make some more tea,’ says my mother. ‘Take Granny’s coat and bag and put them in her room.’
I take my grandmother’s coat and bag to her bedroom. Being inside her big bedroom is like being in another house, or in a chalet, like the one we stayed in at Butlins. I put her bag on the bed and open it.
Her purse is bursting with wads of money. I check the door and then I start counting the money by sorting the notes. Fifty, twenty, and five-pound notes in piles. Some of the notes are scrunched, a few are torn. I count once, and then count again, my heart pounding, shaking in my chest.
I’m going to be sick. I rush out to the bathroom, run the cold water tap, and I put my head over the toilet. It comes like last time, a rush of yellow liquid. I get most of the sick into the toilet and mop the rest up with t
oilet paper. My mouth tastes of bitter orange juice.
I go past the kitchen and look in. Granny is drinking tea and talking to my mother. I return to her bedroom and look at the money: seven hundred and forty-five pounds! I ask God to keep Granny in the kitchen so I won’t be caught and my hands shake as I take some of the money for myself. I put it in my pocket, but I am not a thief. This is the proof I need that I have not imagined these riches and that I have not imagined her lies.
I go to my room and don’t leave it again for the rest of the day. I can’t let anybody see my shaking hands. I put my chest of drawers in front of my door and count the money again. I have taken ninety pounds. I sort the notes into small bundles. Three twenties, two tens and two fives. I will keep the money under my mattress and decide what to do with it later.
At nine o’clock, my mother comes to my bedroom to say good-night.
‘How is Lord Muck?’ she asks.
‘Good.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Thinking.’
‘You do an awful lot of thinking. Be careful you don’t turn into a hermit.’
I don’t know why somebody spending their time thinking would surprise anybody. There are thousands of things to think about. When it comes to thinking, life is like a giant amusement park. When you walk into the park, you should want to go on all the rides.
I’d tell her this but she might think I’m being funny and laugh and I’m not in the mood for laughing.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’ll stop now. Can you stay with me for a while?’
She closes the door and sits on my bed.
‘Can you rub my feet?’ I ask.
‘You’ll have to get them out from under the covers.’
She massages my feet and I look at her.
‘You seem sad,’ she says.
‘Because Da is a liar,’ I say. ‘That’s why I was sick on the floor.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ She lets go of my feet.
‘I said Da is a liar.’
‘What do you mean your father is a liar?’
I want to tell her that Granny is also a liar, but then she will know that I looked in her purse and might suspect me.
‘He’s a liar and I have proof. I vomited because he lied to me. He lied about not feeling sad.’
‘You vomited at the sight of the dead kittens.’
I sit up. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I vomited because I knew he lied. If I tell you how, will you promise not to tell Da?’
‘Go ahead and tell me.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise. Tell me.’
‘Swear you won’t tell?’
‘I swear it. Now tell me.’
‘I’ve suspected Da was a liar before. Sometimes he promises to do things and I know he’ll break his promise. Sometimes he says he’ll be home for tea and I know he won’t. I’ve suspected him for ages. I just needed proof. Now I have the proof because I vomited. I know that Da’s a liar.’
‘That’s nonsense. You were sick because you were upset. Your father is not a liar.’
‘It was more than being sick. I saw the expression on his face change when he told the lie and I heard the change in his voice and I saw his hands shake.’
She stands up and goes to the door without looking back at me.
‘You’re tired and upset,’ she says. ‘Go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘But …’
She has gone.
I look in the Guinness Book of Records to see whether there’s anybody who has a gift for lie detection. There’s nobody. I will write and tell them that I can detect lies. If they decide to test me and I pass the test, I might get in the book, not for breaking a record (like eating the most hard-boiled eggs, or having the longest moustache), but for doing an astonishing thing.
Perhaps, I should also write to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum. They might be interested in me. There’s a photograph of Robert Leroy Ripley over my bedhead. He stands with his arm around the shoulder of a man called El Fusilado, ‘The Executed One’, who faced the firing squad and lived. El Fusilado’s face is full of bullet holes, but he smiles, happy to be with Ripley. At the very least, I will make enough money from my gift to pay for a trip to Niagara Falls.
I listen out for my father and wonder if he will come to my room with my present when he gets home. I get my shoebox from under my bed and look at the postcards and brochures Aunty Evelyn sent to me from Niagara.
I know exactly how I want my trip to turn out. First of all, it will be Mammy and me, and I want us to sit together on a jumbo jet, and to see the Horseshoe Falls, the biggest falls, from the window of the aeroplane before we land at the airport at Niagara. And I want to take a photograph of the two of us in the cockpit with the pilot and the co-pilot.
I want us to get drenched from the spray of the falls and then to get dry – it will be summer – on our walk up Clifton Hill to the fun-fair, where there are rides and, most importantly of all, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.
I check my watch at half nine and my father’s still not home. I go to the living room and ask my grandmother where he is. She tells me he’s staying overnight in Wexford. He had to see his old boss about a favour. I fall asleep with a brochure from Ripley’s Museum under my pillow.
4
My friend Brendan comes to the cottage in the morning an hour earlier than he is due. He’s always early, as though he wants to catch people doing something they shouldn’t be doing. He comes to my bedroom window while I’m getting dressed and taps on the glass. ‘Helloooooo,’ he says, in his mock farmer’s voice. ‘I’ve sold nine cows this very day.’
‘Hellooooo,’ I shout back. ‘Nine is better than eight, they say.’
‘Front or back?’ he asks.
‘Through the chimney, for all I care.’
There’s a front door and a back door and both are always open.
‘Right, so,’ he says.
He presses his mouth and nose flat against the window and licks the glass. Brendan is shorter than I am, but bigger and wider. Stronger, too. He has a habit of hunching over, his head and neck forward and low, so that he looks like he’s trying to balance something on his back.
He comes to my room and we sit and talk on the floor for a little while. I don’t sit on the bed with him. I only sit on the bed with my mother. I wonder should I show him the money, but decide I shouldn’t. What if he wanted to spend some of it? What if he told one of his sisters?
We are on our way out to the field across from the cottage, when Granny stops us as we pass through the kitchen. ‘Brendan!’ she says. ‘You must stop and talk a while.’
‘OK, Mrs Egan,’ he says.
* * *
My grandmother often dresses from top to bottom in one colour and today she is wearing a yellow shirt, a yellow skirt and yellow high-heeled shoes. Even her big eyes look yellow. She offers to make Brendan some boiled eggs and, as she boils the eggs and makes the toast, Brendan tells her that rowdy twin girls were over at his house playing with his sisters before he left, and that he couldn’t wait to get away from them.
‘Which twin girls?’ asks my grandmother.
‘Bernice Boyd and her sister Bernadette,’ says Brendan. ‘They brought a birthday card and a cake for my sister.’
‘It would pay your sister to be careful with that card. Maybe give it a wipe with a damp cloth before she fondles it again.’
‘You can’t catch germs from a birthday card,’ I say.
‘The rabies,’ says my grandmother, her voice loud, bits of spit falling out of her slackened mouth. ‘You could end up with the rabies. That whole family is frothing at the mouth because of the rabies.’
I want to leave the room when my grandmother talks this way, but the eggs are ready.
‘Here you are,’ she says.
The eggs are not boiled long enough and are too runny to eat. The white is the worst part: a raw, clear liquid. The yolk doesn’t look as awful as the ra
w egg white.
‘You have these,’ I say to her. ‘I’m not so hungry.’
My grandmother uses a knife to break the cap off her egg and the egg white spills over the side of the shell and onto the plate. Instead of using a spoon or a piece of bread to wipe up the mess, she lifts the eggcup to her face and licks the egg from the side of the broken shell. And then she lifts the plate from the table, tilts it to her mouth, and licks some more until there is no egg left. She eats as though she thinks chewing will get in the way of her food, as though she wants all food to be slippery. If a fish came to the table, this is how it would eat.
* * *
I don’t understand how such a neat and proper person can eat like this and make such a mess, always a sticky trail of food and dribble behind her. I get bad-tempered with her for being disgusting and a bad temper makes me short of breath. But she took us in when we had no money and tells us that this is our cottage; our home. And she sings fighting songs when she’s in the bath and she plays Scrabble with me and she taught me how to play backgammon and poker and she doesn’t let me win.
I grab hold of Brendan’s jacket and drag him from the kitchen.
‘We’ve got to go,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘if you really have to,’ and there’s nothing I can do to make her feel less sad about being left alone again.
We kick the football for hours and end up in the field about a mile away, half way between the cottage and our school. It’s almost dark and getting hard to see the ball. I sit on my haunches to rest for a minute and Brendan sits on the ball.
‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘when we start the sixth class, eight months from now, some of the girls will be wearing brassières.’
He bounces up and down on the football.
I stand and kick hard at the ball under him. ‘I’ll be in the Guinness Book of Records by then.’
‘What?’
‘I’m writing to them in a few days, before school starts.’
‘Why would the Guinness Book of Records put you in?’
‘I can’t say yet, but I’ll tell you once I get a letter back from them. It has to be a secret for a while.’