Carry Me Down

by M. J. Hyland

  ‘Stop kicking the ball! Who am I going to tell?’

  ‘It’s just that the thing I’m going to get in for is kind of unusual.’

  He gets up from the ball and pushes his chest out and I push mine out, too. It’s a game we play when we’re having a disagreement. I say ‘so’ and he says ‘so’ and we push each other around for a while.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So?’

  He falls back and I charge him.

  ‘So?’

  He charges at me. I lose my balance and fall. From the ground I say, ‘So?’

  And he laughs at me. ‘It’s five now. I have to be going.’

  ‘How do you know it’s five when you haven’t even a watch on?’ I ask.

  ‘I saw yours a while ago and it was after three.’

  I look at my watch and it is only a minute from five o’clock. ‘It’s not yet five,’ I say.

  ‘Bet you it is.’

  I would usually start another fight here, for the fun of it, but I want to go back to my room.

  ‘See you at horrible school on Monday.’

  ‘See you,’ says Brendan, as he picks up the ball. ‘And don’t forget to tell the cows on the way back that grass is bad for them.’

  ‘Bye,’ I say.

  He begins to walk backwards and so do I. We look at each other too long; not sure whether to nod or smile and we end up making odd faces that embarrass the both of us. I turn away and walk home as fast as I can.

  I go the usual way, down the long fir-tree lane way and then across the fields to Granny’s cottage. In the last field there’s a narrow path that I follow every day after school, where the earth is trodden flat and the grass doesn’t grow. This is a path I’ve made and it bends three times in the middle like a snake.

  At the edge of the field, to the north of our cottage and not far from the road, there’s a doll stuck in a tree and I can’t pass it without looking up.

  She is wedged tight in the crook of two branches, about ten feet up, and out of reach; she has been there for years, ever since I started at the Gorey National School. Her dress is faded and some of the skin on her hands and arms is black, as though she has frostbite.

  In winter I turn away from her as soon as I’ve checked that she’s still there, but in summer, when it’s not so dark in the afternoon, I feel sorry for her and want to pull her down. Some summer evenings, on the way home from school, I promise her that I will climb up the tree and take her down, but, as soon as I’ve had something to eat and drink, I forget her.

  If not for Crito sitting on the kitchen table and purring, the cottage would be empty and silent. There are no lights on and the radio is switched off. Perhaps my grandmother is at bingo or the shops and my father is still in Wexford. Maybe my mother is at rehearsal for the summer pantomime. I sit down at the table and put Crito on my lap. I will think while I wait for somebody to come home.

  My mother makes puppets but says she isn’t good enough to be a puppeteer. ‘I’ll leave that to the experts,’ she says. ‘I’m no performer.’

  But I know she is wrong. After last year’s pantomime, when most people had left the theatre and the lights and heaters had been turned off, a little girl cried for the puppets to come back. The little girl’s mammy lost her patience and said, ‘I’m going now,’ and left the little girl alone to howl, ‘Where’s The Wolf? Where’s Chicken Licken?’

  My mother showed the girl that the puppets are not real by making Chicken Licken speak like The Wolf and making The Wolf speak like Chicken Licken. When the girl cried more, my mother knelt down and put her hands around the little girl’s ribs. ‘Be quiet now,’ she said. ‘The puppets have gone to sleep.’

  The girl continued to cry until my mother kissed her hair. I walked towards them and my mother took her hands away from the little girl’s chest. ‘Leave us, John. Go and wait in the car,’ she said. She gave me the keys, but I didn’t go to the car. I went into the church hall’s kitchen and watched through the window to make sure nothing else happened.

  And that’s how I know she is a better puppeteer than she says she is.

  I make myself some toast with blackberry jam and go into the living room. And I see that my father has been home all this time. He is sitting in silence, on the end of the settee nearest to the open fire, reading Five Great Philosophers since Plato. He’s wearing slacks and a green jumper with a hole near his neck. There’s dark stubble on his chin.

  ‘Hello, Da,’ I say.

  ‘Hello, son,’ he says.

  ‘Do you have that present for me?’ I ask.

  ‘What present?’

  ‘The one you promised.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I couldn’t get it yet. I’ll get it tomorrow. It’ll be an even bigger surprise.’

  ‘But you said.’

  ‘Amorphous perversity,’ says my father ‘That’s what you have: the childhood belief that you can have, and should have, everything.’

  I turn on the television and sit at the other end of the settee with my toast and, after ten minutes or so of watching Doctor Who, I feel cold. I get up to move the coals in the fire with the poker.

  When I sit back down, he says, ‘Hello, son,’ as though he has forgotten that we have already started a conversation. ‘Good day with Brendan?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘All right.’

  I take a few bites of toast but my tongue feels paralysed. ‘Da? When you’ve got your degree in criminology, do you want to help catch criminals?’

  He takes a deep breath and puts the book on his lap. I can tell that he wants to talk today. I pull my legs up onto the settee and move in close to him so that my knee touches his leg.

  ‘Not especially,’ he says. ‘I want to understand them. You’ve heard the expression “prevention is better than cure”?’

  ‘But you and Uncle Jack and Uncle Tony talk about criminals deserving everything they get. You said they should be strung up.’

  My father senses that I have caught him out. He closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them, as though to start again.

  ‘Sometimes it’s almost impossible to know what somebody really thinks from what they say. People are very hard to know. What I really think is much more complicated. What I really think is that only a monster could hang a man. And the men who stop the death penalty in America will be amongst the greatest that ever lived.’

  He looks at me to see if I can follow. I can. Better than he realises.

  ‘And talk,’ he continues, ‘and words used in conversation, when people are trying to amuse each other and pass the time and swab the sore of boredom or loneliness … Well, these words are probably the worst way to judge somebody and the kind of talk you hear most of the time between your uncles and me, well, it’s a kind of reflex, like when I tap your knee and your leg shoots up.’

  Then, without another word, he returns to his book. I want to keep talking and he shouldn’t stop this way.

  ‘But do you mean that you’d not want to punish criminals. Even the really bad ones? What if one of them killed Mam?’

  ‘They should be punished,’ he says as he rubs his face, ‘within reason. But maybe we should know why they commit their crimes in the first place.’

  I move closer to him on the settee; I can feel the warmth from his body. ‘But what if somebody knew that the criminal was lying? What if somebody was a lie detector?’

  ‘That’s a daft question.’

  I get a sudden, unexpected and scalding pain, like rope-burn in my stomach. I move a piece of toast around on the plate and look at him again.

  ‘But,’ I say, ‘I want to know what should happen when you know for certain that a criminal is lying.’

  ‘Are you talking about polygraphs? Lie detection machines?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But some people are very good liars.’

  ‘What if there was a person who was like a human lie detector, who could tell when somebody was lying?’

  He fr
owns. ‘I don’t think there’s such a person.’

  I sit up straighter and smile. It seems that my mother has kept her word and he knows nothing.

  ‘What if there was?’

  ‘Well, he’d have to prove it to me. But he’d probably be a crank, like one of the freaks in your books.’

  I peel a crust off my toast and throw it into the fire and say no more. One by one I tear the rest of the crusts off and throw them into the fire.

  ‘It’s a bad habit to throw good bread away like that.’

  I stand up. ‘I’m not very hungry,’ I say. ‘I’m going to my room.’

  But I don’t. I go out the front door. Even though it’s cold and wet and dark, I sit on my jacket on the small lawn by the gravel driveway and pull the grass out in clumps. I watch the cars go by, and the cows in the field across the road; the cows that come to the fence in groups of two or more, as though they think somebody will free them.

  I wave at these cows sometimes, and go over to them and give them the grass I have pulled from the lawn. I like pulling at the grass, I like the sound of the tearing, the tidy, ripping sound.

  I hear my mother and grandmother arriving home, but I don’t go out to them. I stay in my room and read.

  It is late, but my mother hasn’t come to my room to say good-night. I go to the bathroom and find her. She’s wearing her nightie, hunched over the sink, brushing her teeth. I stand in the doorway and look at her. She stands straighter when she realises I’m watching her.

  ‘Mmm?’ she says, the toothpaste on her lips and chin, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  My mother finishes and, as she leaves the bathroom, she forgets to hand me my blue toothbrush.

  ‘Can I’ve a word with you?’ I ask.

  ‘A word?’ she says, as she smiles; some warmth at last.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Right now.’

  We go to my bedroom. I get in under the covers, and so does she. We lie on our backs, up close. Her arm is soft against mine, and before long we breathe together. Her long hair tickles my shoulder and her hand touches my thigh. I want to turn around to her, to have her face closer, but first I have to tell her.

  ‘Granny lied too.’

  She rests her head on her hand, and turns to face me.

  ‘That’s a very serious thing to say,’ she says.

  ‘Mammy, I know when people are lying. I feel sick and I know it.’ She looks hard at me for a good while and I try not to blink.

  ‘What lie did Granny tell?’

  I explain about the money, but I don’t say that I took any of it for myself. She sits up now, and doesn’t touch me any more. I close my eyes and wait for her to speak.

  ‘Did you take any money from Granny’s purse?’

  ‘No, Mammy. Of course not.’

  I stop breathing. My heart thumps so hard I can feel it in my ears. Even though I’m nervous I must pay careful attention to how I feel. It will be important for me to know what lying feels like and to record exactly what it does to my body. I don’t want to lie but if we talk about the money then we won’t talk about my gift. If I tell one truth then more important truths won’t come out.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  I can’t look at her when I tell this lie and I frown to make myself look bothered and a bit cross.

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ she says.

  Good to hear. That’s the same as saying that you know somebody is lying but you like to hear the lie because it makes you feel better than hearing the truth.

  ‘Good,’ I say.

  ‘What happens when somebody tells a lie?’ she asks.

  ‘I feel sick and my ears and neck burn and I notice every single thing that’s happening.’

  She stares at the carpet for a while. ‘I want you to promise you won’t say a word to your da or to Granny about this lying business.’

  Although she hasn’t told a lie, I know she doesn’t believe me and she’s mostly worried I’ll embarrass myself. She hasn’t asked enough questions and, if she believed me, she would be more curious. She’s normally a person who asks questions, one after another, and I always answer her questions.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘It’ll be our secret.’

  ‘Let’s not call it a secret. Let’s just … let’s call it our sleeping dog.’

  ‘What kind of dog?’

  ‘A red-snorer with long hairy legs that twitch while he’s sleeping.’

  She lies down again. We smile but I want more: I want her to hug me. I lift my arm and put it over her shoulder. She puts her arm around my waist. This hasn’t happened for quite a long time.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ she says. Once I have closed my eyes, she kisses me on the lips.

  ‘Keep your eyes closed,’ she says.

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  She runs her hand along my side, and feels my hip, but she stops suddenly, pats me twice, takes her hand back to herself. And then she is up, too fast, out of my warm bed.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she says.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  I sit up till late reading the library book, The Truth about Lie Detection, and with a new pen and a new exercise book I start writing about lies and the way people behave when they lie. I call the book The Gol of Seil and I write about my father’s lie and about my grandmother’s lie and then about my mother’s strange reaction to the truth.

  I wonder what will happen when people find out that I have this rare ability? Or when people realise they can’t deceive me? I’ll need to be careful. I’ll need to be very careful.

  5

  I get up early and climb the narrow stairs to my parents’ bedroom. My grandfather built this loft because he wanted a room away from the rest of the cottage where he could repair jewellery. It has two big windows and a low ceiling. Granny is the only one who doesn’t have to stoop when she goes through the door.

  The door is open just enough for me to see inside. My mother is asleep on her side with her foot poking out from under the eiderdown.

  My father is not in the bed. He is sleeping on a mattress on the floor under a brown blanket. He is awake, staring up at the ceiling, or perhaps he is asleep with his eyes open. I’m not sure which.

  I stand on my toes and stare for too long and he sees me. He must see me, his eyes meet my eyes, but no other part of his face moves. He does not speak or look like he wants to speak. He stares at me, a long and empty stare, and I still do not know if he is awake or asleep.

  ‘Why are you on the floor?’ I want to ask, and I would have asked this question last week, but now, somehow, I have lost my nerve, the way I do at school, and I walk backwards, feeling along the wall with my hands until I am out of his sight.

  The stairs are narrow and I go down sideways, holding tight to the rail.

  I make more noise in the kitchen than usual, and hope that my grandmother will hear me from her bedroom at the other end of the cottage. Before long, she comes in.

  ‘John!’ she says. ‘It’s half six in the morning.’

  ‘I was hungry.’

  ‘You little devil. I thought there was a bandit in the house. Come over here.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, but I don’t go to her.

  ‘Well, I’m awake now. How about you bring me some tea and sit with me a while?’

  I make toast and tea and bring it in to her bedroom.

  ‘If you’re cold,’ she says, ‘you can pop under the covers.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not cold.’

  I sit on the end of her bed and she eats her toast with her mouth wide open, the way she eats everything, as though she has the flu and cannot breathe through her nose.

  ‘Isn’t it funny,’ I say, ‘how when you have the flu you don’t have a flue to breathe through.’

  She pulls her chin in.

  ‘Like a flue in a chimney …’

  ‘Oh. I get it now. You’d need to be up nice and
early to keep up with you.’

  ‘But,’ I say, ‘it is early!’

  She smiles but the smile fades quickly and her ugly mouth turns down again. ‘You like living here with me, don’t you?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘It’s much better than before. I can walk on the path I’ve made through the fields to school and I don’t have to catch the bus.’

  ‘That’s grand,’ she says.

  We sit and eat our toast and do not speak.

  I finish my toast and she finishes hers. ‘Some more tea would be lovely now,’ she says.

  I fetch the tea and, when I bring it in, I leave the tray on her bed and remain standing.

  ‘Never stand when you can sit,’ she says.

  I sit.

  ‘Where’s your cup?’

  ‘I’m not having any.’

  I sit and watch.

  She slurps her tea and smiles at me. She sticks her tongue out to greet the cup before each sip and, after she sips the tea, she smiles at me.

  There is only her slurping, and so much silence between us that, when a lorry passes, I am grateful for the noise and the distraction. I look out the window and watch the lorry as it makes its way slowly down the small road that runs alongside the cottage.

  My grandmother drains her second cup and an embarrassing whiff of silage floats through the room.

  ‘What did you see when you went upstairs before?’ she asks.

  ‘I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Did you see your parents in the bed?’

  The smell of rotted animal manure or fermented hay has made itself at home in my grandmother’s bedroom and her question seems covered in dirt.

  ‘Yes. I saw them sleeping.’

  ‘Were they both sleeping? Sleeping together?’

  There is mucus welling in my throat, around the back of my mouth. ‘I saw Da sleeping on the floor,’ I say.

  ‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘His back is giving him trouble again. Like last year when he slept in the living room for a week. But leave him be. He hates to have sympathy for it. Do you understand me? Don’t talk to him about his back pain, or about his sleeping on the floor. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.