by M. J. Hyland
I don’t go back to his office.
At home, I go to the kitchen and find my mother there, with a book on her lap and Crito by her feet.
‘Mammy, Mr Donnelly made me come to his office and he talked to me about my height and all.’
She nods and moves her chair out from the table. ‘Sorry, John. I meant to tell you.’
‘Meant to tell me what?’
I stand next to her and fold my arms across my chest.
‘I asked him to have a word with you. He rang to ask me how you were getting on and one thing led to another.’
‘Why would you do that? I don’t even need help and it’s none of his business!’
Without meaning to, without knowing, without planning to, I have moved forward and my legs are pressed hard against my mother’s chair and I am looming over her. She looks up into my face and I can see my reflection in her eyes.
‘There’s no need to suffocate me,’ she says, her voice weak and small.
I move away and stand by my usual chair and feel its wooden back under my hands. I’m shaking and my teeth scrape together.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘But I don’t know why you made me talk to him. He offended me and treated me like a circus freak and looked me up and down.’
She smiles. ‘He does the same to me and sometimes he even licks his chops. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have suggested it. I’m sorry.’
‘But why did you think he should talk to me? Do you think something is wrong with me?’
‘At the time, it seemed a harmless enough idea. I wondered if you might like a good heart-to-heart with a grown man about the things you’re going through. Early adolescence can be a difficult time.’
‘Isn’t that what Da’s for?’
‘Yes, he’s here for that, too. But I worry you won’t talk to your da even if you need to’
‘I will if I want to.’
I go to my room and half an hour later she comes and asks whether I’m in the mood for a puppet show before tea and she gets her finger puppets and puts on a small show. Afterwards, she dances and she sings and moves around my room as though she is alone, nobody watching. But I’m watching and the way she moves reminds me of something I saw in a film once: a beautiful lady alone at night in a swimming pool with blue lights in the water.
A week later, on the way home from school, I stop on my path, about two hundred feet before the doll in the tree. There’s a cow, asleep or dying, lying across my path. I kneel down and look at her. She is still breathing and her eyes are closed.
I hear hooves stomping further out in the field and there is a cow, alone, running. It runs as fast as I’ve ever seen a cow run, and then it stops near the boundary fence. I look down at the dying cow and then I hear the hooves again; the same cow is sprinting back to the place it took off from and, when it stops, it looks at me.
I don’t know what I should do with the sick cow whose breathing is shallow and pained. I stand and walk around her, to get a better view of her whole body, to see if there are any wounds or if she is pregnant. I prod her stomach with my boot. The sprinting cow is no longer watching me and I feel freer; I can do what I think is best. But I don’t know what that should be.
I kneel again and look at her. If she is dying and if she’s in pain, then the vet will probably put her to sleep. I don’t want to leave her here on my path to die. I take my anorak off and put it over her face. She doesn’t react. I will need to sit on her to put her to sleep. But I can’t do that. I move my anorak across her face to make sure the lining, which is made of wool, is not touching her eyes, in case it sticks to her.
I sit facing the sprinting cow but it has decided to eat grass instead of looking at me. I sit for a while and the dying cow does nothing. I say, ‘It’ll be all right soon. You’ll be asleep soon.’ I don’t know what to say, but not talking to her seems rude.
I’ll go now. I’m very cold and the icy wind is pushing its way up under my jumper. I’m hungry, too. Later the farmer will find her and he can take her out of my path and bury her, if she dies. I take my coat from her face and say, ‘Goodbye.’
I leave for school early the next morning and walk quickly in case the cow is lying across my path, but when I get there she is gone, and there is no sign of her. I should have counted the herd last night so that I could know if any were missing. I look towards the boundary fence at the cows huddled together but none of them looks back. It is as though nothing at all has happened. But something has happened. I have a pain in my stomach, down low, and it’s a feeling almost like an emotion but I don’t know which kind, which one.
During class, I sit forward in my seat and lean on my desk, my chin on my hand. My bladder is full and I’ve been hanging on since before breakfast, and now it is nearly midday. I want to see how long I can hold on, how much I can make my body follow my orders. I like the sensation, the stinging and the pressure. I hang on until five minutes before the bell and then I realise I’ve waited too long. I jog my leg up and down as fast as I can but my piss is about to come out even though I’ve told it not to, even though I’ve tried to make it wait.
I put my hand up, but something goes wrong. My bladder opens without me telling it to. It feels good, briefly, to let go, and I tell myself that letting out this trickle of urine is deliberate, that I can stop the rest.
But I can’t stem the flow. Hot urine floods my trousers and spreads around my backside. The backs of my legs are saturated too, and I am sitting in a warm puddle.
I want to put my hand up and ask to be excused for the toilet, but it is compulsory to ask in Irish. I wait until I have the words clear.
‘An bhfuil cead agam dul amach, más é do thoil é?’
‘Can’t you wait?’ says Miss Collins, who faces the blackboard and keeps her back to the class and doesn’t even know who is asking.
‘No, miss,’ I say. ‘I need to go to the toilet now.’ She pretends not to hear me because this time I’ve used English instead of Irish.
I must keep the urine a secret, but I don’t know how, since it runs down my legs and into my socks and shoes. ‘Please, miss,’ I say. ‘May I be excused?’
Miss Collins turns from the blackboard. ‘John, can you not wait till lunch?’
I stand, and the urine sloshes underfoot and the smell rises up to meet me.
‘No, miss. I need to go now.’
The slope of the floor carries a small trickle of urine towards the front of the room.
Miss Collins doesn’t notice the piss heading towards the blackboard, nor the stench, but Jimmy the red-headed boy with the desk in front of mine notices.
‘Oh, miss!’ he cries. ‘John’s wet himself.’
Everybody turns to see what I have done.
I have my hand in the air, as though waving at a bus that has already sped past. Miss Collins walks towards me with her mouth open, showing her underbite and the stained and crooked teeth of an old dog.
‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘You’ll need to see Sister Bernadette about getting something to clean yourself up.’
Sister Bernadette will take me to the district nurse’s room, which is in the convent next door. I don’t want to go there.
I run from the classroom, down the corridor, past the coat rack, past the other classrooms and out the front door and I keep running until I get to the laneway and the darkness and privacy and stillness of the fir trees, and then my skin begins to sting from my wet trousers rubbing together and chafing my legs.
I want to get into my pyjamas and I want to get into bed and destroy time. I want to sleep, then wake to the smell of tea and sausages, to find that what has happened has been erased.
I don’t think I can ever go back to school.
I sneak through the back door and tiptoe to my room. I take my wet trousers off and change into clean, dry ones. I go to the bathroom, run a sink full of hot water, and scrub my trousers clean.
My mother is coming down the stairs. ‘Hello?’ she calls.
‘Hello,’
I say.
She comes into the bathroom. ‘What are you doing home?’
I felt sick, I tell her, and Miss Collins has sent me home.
She asks me why the school didn’t call. ‘I would have come and got you.’
When I lie, I feel heavier and when I try to move it is as though my legs are filled with hot water. The lie moves through every part of my body, like sickness.
They rang twice, I say, but there was no answer. I use fewer words, just in case they get stuck in my throat, besides, my voice is tighter, almost squeaky. She asks me why I’m washing my clothes and I tell her I vomited on them.
‘Again?’ she says. ‘More lying?’
‘I wasn’t lying.’
‘I didn’t say you were. You jumped to that conclusion all by yourself.’
She smiles now and I wonder if I have been caught out.
‘Oh,’ I say.
She holds my hand up and feels my palm. I’m not sweating, if that’s what she’s checking for. Most people sweat when they lie. But I don’t.
‘Smiling stops the gag reflex,’ she says. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Da already told me that.’
‘Well, he’s right. And you’d better get straight into bed if you’re sick.’
I sit on the bed and wait for her to come to see me for a chat, but she doesn’t. I hope she’ll go to the kitchen and make me a toasted ham sandwich or get me some biscuits and a cup of cocoa, but she doesn’t.
I listen to her go up the stairs to her bedroom, and then I hear my father.
They are talking in loud voices. Something falls on the floor, and then they are silent.
I lie under the covers for a while, and think of a funny thing to tell my mother. I wish that she’d come to me.
Please come, please come, please come.
She does not come.
I lie in bed but can’t read or sleep.
I talk to myself for an hour or so. I talk to myself in two voices, as though two people are having a conversation.
I talk about what has happened. I ask myself questions in one voice, and answer them in another, different voice. I talk about what I will do tomorrow.
I would rather die than let my father find out. I would rather die than go back to school.
I go into the bathroom and scrub my legs with a nailbrush and then I hang my trousers on the clotheshorse in the living room in front of the fire, and wish somebody would come and talk to me.
It is half two and nobody has visited me. I stop saying, please come.
10
In the morning I tell my mother that I’m too sick to go to school, but the phone rings during breakfast and I know I’ve been found out. She comes to my bedroom to tell me that it was Miss Collins.
‘She says I need to come in today. The district nurse is at the school and Miss Collins and Mr Donnelly would both like you to see her.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve been told what happened yesterday.’
‘Oh.’
‘You go to school now, and I’ll meet you outside the nurse’s office at eleven o’clock.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s where I’ve been told to take you.’
‘I won’t go to school.’
‘You must.’
‘Please don’t tell Da.’
‘No, I won’t. But I can’t promise he won’t find out for himself.’
I get dressed and go to the kitchen for some breakfast, but when I look at my half-eaten boiled egg, hatched and jagged in its eggcup, I can’t be bothered sticking another piece of toast into its yolk.
I get up from the table and walk to school but I don’t go to class. I wait around by the back of the shed and pace up and down and try to keep warm.
At five to eleven I go to the front door of the convent and ring the bell. Sister Ursula lets me in and then returns to her position behind the glass and grille. It’s dark and warm inside and two old women are told to sit in the corner and wait for the priest. I stand by the front door and they look at me as though I have stolen their place in the queue.
My mother comes in and we go through to the nurse’s office.
‘Don’t worry,’ says my mother. ‘It’ll be over in a minute.’
Sister Bernadette is waiting outside the nurse’s door. When she see us, she runs her hands along her rosary beads as though to get the dust off them, then she knocks and puts her head through the gap.
‘Nurse, I have John Egan and his mother here to see you.’
‘Tell them to come in,’ says the nurse, and Sister Bernadette leaves.
In the small, square room, which smells of laundry powder, there is a desk, a filing cabinet, and a gurney covered in a white sheet. I look at the gurney while my mother talks to the nurse. I try to work out how I might climb on, if I’m asked to.
I like the idea of lying on the white sheet and having my temperature taken. The retractable legs of the gurney are like the blades of my Swiss army knife, which can slide easily and neatly in and out of their home. I think about faking an illness; clutching my stomach and groaning, so that the nurse might ask me to lie down and cover me with the soft blue blanket that is folded at the gurney’s end.
‘I’m very surprised,’ says my mother. ‘He’s never done anything like this.’
The nurse looks at me as though I wet my pants on purpose. I want to tell her that I was conducting an experiment; that the wetting wasn’t the accident of a baby.
‘Is your boy enuretic?’ asks the nurse. ‘Is he a bed-wetter, Mrs Egan?’
‘No,’ says my mother.
I’ve been in the nurse’s room only once. When I first came to this school, a few days after our move from Wexford, I had nose-bleeds every day for a week. I was eight years old, and the nurse sat me down and told me to put my head back while she pinched the bridge of my nose to stop the bleeding.
Because I swallowed some blood, I felt sick, and when I told her she gave me a brown kidney dish to vomit into. I tried but nothing came out. After my failed attempts to vomit, she said, ‘Be careful not to cry wolf too often, little boy.’
Now, as then, she smiles weakly and rocks her head from side to side, as though she has just stood out of the bath and is trying to drain the water from her ears.
I want to leave. I want to go home. ‘My bladder burst,’ I say. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘I don’t understand,’ says my mother.
The nurse suggests possible causes – nervousness, anxiety, trouble at home – and my mother denies each one. I begin to feel ashamed.
The nurse blames the fact that I’m an only child. She asks my mother if perhaps I am lonely.
‘He is not lonely,’ says my mother. ‘He has the company of his parents and his grandmother who love him very much.’
‘And my cat,’ I say.
The nurse ignores me and holds out a piece of paper for my mother to take. My mother looks at the piece of paper but doesn’t take it.
‘You should read this,’ says the nurse. ‘And maybe John should take the day off today. He can start again on Monday.’
But then it occurs to me: taking the day off school is a terrible idea. It would give my classmates more time to think up torments. I should go back in and behave as though nothing has happened, as though I don’t care. Even better, I will make it not exist. I will act. It won’t have happened.
‘I want to go to class today,’ I say.
The nurse tucks her chin into the folds of fat in her neck. I look past her and out the window. Joseph the Tinker is walking his piebald horse across the field. I want to wave, but he probably wouldn’t see me.
‘It’s up to you, Mrs Egan. He’s your boy.’
The break-time bell rings and my mother reaches out for my hand but I don’t let her hold it.
‘Are you sure you want to go back today?’
‘Yes. I’m sure.’
We stand to leave and the nurse follows us out. ‘Mrs Egan,’ says the nurse, holdi
ng the same piece of paper, ‘you’ve forgotten this.’
My mother shakes her head. ‘We won’t need it,’ she says, ‘Sister … I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten your name.’
My mother has met the nurse before but she forgets names deliberately. It’s her way of making unpleasant people feel inferior.
The nurse looks at me as though it is my fault. ‘My name’s Sister Carmel,’ she says.
My mother takes my hand and we walk down the corridor to classroom 5G.
I look up at her when we are outside the door. My classmates are standing behind their desks: it must be a spelling test, and I would like to win it. ‘Why am I an only child?’ I ask.
‘You ask me that every time somebody else talks about it.’
‘I want to know again.’
‘You’re an only child because I wanted you to be the only one. Is that all right with you?’
I wait for her to say more, but she turns and walks down the corridor without saying goodbye, without kissing me.
As soon as I sit at my desk, the whispering and laughing begins. Mandy, the girl on my right, sings, ‘Wee, wee, wee, all the way home’ and the boy on my left joins in. I look at Mandy until she stops, and the boy stops soon after. Jimmy, the redhead, puts a ruler against the crotch of his pants and makes a pissing sound. I look away. Miss Collins doesn’t call on me during lessons and Brendan doesn’t turn in his desk to make funny faces or pass signals.
When my classmates tease me and whisper things against me, I use a new trick. When Miss Collins speaks, I repeat what she has said three times in my mind. When she says ‘The Tuskar Rock is a dangerous low-lying rock six nautical miles north east of Carnsore Point on the south east of Ireland and the lighthouse was lit for the first time on the 4th June 1815’, I say the same thing in my head three times and promise I will never forget it.
I know I haven’t the brain of a scholar and that, if I did, a good memory would come naturally. But I can make myself clever. There’s no reason whatsoever why not. So I practise. When I read a sentence in a book, I read every sentence three times, close my eyes after each one, and repeat the sentence in my mind. This trick is not only good for my brain, it helps me to ignore the whispering and teasing, and it helps me not to think bad thoughts. The more I do it, the more I begin to see that it will help me with other things too. If I am going to do important things, and become a great person, then having a good memory is sure to come in handy.