Carry Me Down

by M. J. Hyland

  ‘I don’t know, but I’d give anything.’

  I wait for her to take two sleeping pills and, when she lies down on her side, I lie down too, and stroke her back.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘It soothes me to have you here. Maybe I’ll sleep now.’

  I leave her and go to the living room. I want to be calm, but I don’t know how. I sit, then stand again. I fidget and pace. I try to sit but I can’t. At three o’clock I go back to her, to see if she is sleeping. But she doesn’t sleep. She is sitting up, fiddling with the seam of her torn nightdress.

  ‘Come and sit with me,’ she says. ‘I feel shattered. I’m in pieces.’

  She lies on her back. I get on the bed and lie next to her. She is quiet and her breathing is soft. I take her resting hands and fold them across her chest and I look at her. She is still and peaceful now. But I know she’ll soon wake.

  I climb on top of her. My legs straddle her stomach and hips and I want to stay here and look down at her calm face, but she moves and groans.

  To stop her moving, I take the pillow and put it over her face and then I lay down on her, on top of the pillow, and I make myself heavy. When she stops moving, I put my head on the pillow. We are both sleepy now.

  Suddenly she kicks. She kicks against me and her arms fly at my face. I am surprised by her violence, surprised by her strength. The pillow muffles her cries and moans but still I wish the radio could be turned on to drown out the awful noise.

  With all my strength, I press down hard on the pillow and I hold her arms down with my hands and fight against her kicking. When, at last, she stops struggling, I take myself off her body and look at her: She is calmer again; she is prettier.

  I get up off the bed. It is over.

  * * *

  But my feet are cold. Why are they so cold? I need socks. Something to keep them warm. Why are they so cold? What is wrong with my feet? I go to the drawer to find some socks. I must think about what I will do next, but my feet are so cold. I search in the drawers for warm socks. I cannot think.

  I hear a rattle, a scraping noise, a faint but constant sound, somebody outside running a coin along the wall? I stop still and now I hear it, louder and clearer, the sound is in the bedroom. I close the drawer and as I straighten to stand I realise she is coughing.

  I turn to face her. Her eyes are open and her hands are on her neck. I watch until she stops spluttering. I watch until she looks at me.

  ‘Mammy?’

  She lifts herself from the bed, puts her feet over the side, and stands, her arms held out, her hands up as though to stop me coming towards her.

  ‘Did you try to smother me?’ Her voice is uncaring, calm. ‘Is that what you tried to do?’

  ‘No, Mammy. You just went to sleep. You had a nightmare.’

  She doesn’t look at me, takes her dressing gown from the back of the chair and leaves; out to the hallway.

  I follow her.

  ‘Get out of my sight,’ she says.

  She walks into the living room and I follow her.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she says, her hands held out in front of her breasts.

  ‘But why? What’s wrong?’

  I move towards her, but she backs away and stands hunched in the corner.

  ‘Holy Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.’

  ‘Why are you praying?’

  ‘Because my son tried to smother his mother. Oh, God. Smother his mother! Smother his own mother!’

  ‘You said you wanted to sleep.’

  ‘I didn’t say I wanted to die. You could have killed me.’

  ‘But you didn’t die. I love you, Mammy. Won’t you stop crying?’

  I move towards her and she backs away.

  ‘But I didn’t,’ I say. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Get out of my sight!’ she shouts.

  I go to my room and lie on my bed and listen to my mother on the telephone to the Gardai.

  She gives our address. She repeats it three times and then she says, ‘I think my son tried to murder me in the bed.’

  34

  My mother walks into the living room with two guards; a man with red hair and a short female guard with a big nose. They’re both shorter than I am and they look at me but say nothing. I want them to go. I walk to the front door and open it. This is not their home and they should not be so casual about coming here.

  ‘The front door’s open,’ I shout. ‘You can go now.’

  But nobody comes.

  I go back to the living room and watch my mother. She stands behind the female guard as though for protection and wipes her nose with the pink handkerchief I gave her last Christmas. There is another knock at the door. My mother goes to answer it and I am left alone with the guards.

  Nobody speaks and I am annoyed when the female guard looks at the photo on the mantelpiece of me making my first Holy Communion: I’m holding the white prayerbook against my leg and I’m not ready for the camera.

  My mother is at the front door, crying and telling somebody what happened.

  A man in his early twenties comes in, with his hand on my mother’s shoulder. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘You must be John Egan. My name’s Kevin McDonald. I’m a social worker.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, looking at my mother while she wipes her eyes with the handkerchief.

  I don’t feel anything except tired, and annoyed with having strangers in my house.

  ‘I’m going to take you into another room for a while,’ says the social worker. He wears an earring and he has a tattoo of a bluebird on his neck. ‘Shall we go to your bedroom?’ he asks.

  He reaches out to put his hand on my arm.

  ‘You don’t have to touch me,’ I say.

  We go to my room and he sits cross-legged on my bedroom floor.

  ‘Your mother has made it very nice in here,’ he says. ‘These flats can be awful depressing.’

  I lie on my bed and stare up at the ceiling and listen to the ambulance siren outside.

  After a few minutes there’s another knock on the door. I can hear the voices of the ambulance men and my mother who says, ‘I’m feeling fine now, thank you.’

  One of the ambulance men tells her that they should examine her nevertheless, and she says, ‘I don’t want to waste your time. There’s no need to fuss.’

  I stand up and move towards the door. I want to talk to her.

  ‘You need to stay in here,’ says the social worker.

  ‘I want to talk to her.’

  ‘You can talk to me if you want,’ he says.

  ‘Aren’t the guards going to get a statement or something?’ I say. ‘Aren’t they going to question me and make a tape recording?’

  ‘Yes, that will happen later, but we can talk for a while first, if you like.’

  ‘Will they fingerprint me?’

  ‘Don’t worry yourself about that now. Why don’t we talk for a while? Hmmm?’

  ‘But what if I tell you something, and then I tell them something different? What then?’

  ‘What you say to me will be off the record.’

  ‘That’s a bit stupid. I think I’d rather just be quiet,’ I say.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  After a few minutes, I feel like I wouldn’t mind talking, but the more I think about what I want to say, the less I’m able to get things clear, and then I become confused about what happened, and then I can’t say it at all and it gets so that I wonder if I’ll ever speak again.

  The female guard knocks on my door. She smiles at me, as though she likes me all of a sudden. ‘We’ve finished talking to your mammy and we’re ready for you now,’ she says. ‘In the kitchen.’

  I go to the kitchen and my mother waits in the living room, which seems strange. Since she’ll be able to hear everything we say, she might as well come into the kitchen and sit with us.

  ‘Would you like something to drink?’ asks the social worker.
<
br />   ‘No, thanks. There’s nothing but water anyway. There isn’t even any milk. Not that I’d want milk anyway. I’d only want Fanta.’

  They look at me and nobody speaks for a minute.

  ‘How old are you, John?’ asks the female guard with the big nose.

  ‘Eleven,’ I say. ‘Twelve in July.’

  ‘You look quite a bit older,’ says the guard.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you want to tell us what happened?’

  ‘Hasn’t she already told you?’

  The guards look at each other and it seems they don’t believe what they’ve been told. The female guard shrugs and the male guard shakes his head at her as though to tell her to keep her gestures to herself.

  ‘Yes, but don’t you want to tell your side of the story?’ says the male guard.

  ‘There’s only one side,’ I say.

  ‘Did you try to help your mother to get to sleep by putting a pillow over her head?’ asks the female guard.

  ‘I helped her.’

  ‘Yes, but how?’

  ‘Didn’t she already tell you?’

  ‘Yes, but why don’t you tell us? We’re here now.’

  ‘I helped her with a pillow.’

  ‘Did you want to hurt her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you think would happen when you put the pillow on her face?’

  ‘I thought she’d go to sleep.’

  ‘Didn’t you think that you might hurt her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you did,’ says the male guard. ‘You did hurt her. That’s what you did.’

  ‘No I didn’t. I just did what she wanted. She wasn’t the same any more. I just did what she said she wanted, to make things better for her.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You don’t understand anything. Why does nobody understand anything?’

  ‘If you explain, we might understand,’ says the social worker. ‘Why don’t you tell us? Help us understand.’

  ‘Waste of time,’ I say.

  They ask more of the same sort of questions, but when I refuse to say any more they leave me alone in the kitchen and go into the living room to talk to my mother.

  ‘Helen,’ says the female guard, ‘we need to take him with us now.’

  ‘Yes. Take him,’ she says. ‘I can’t stay here with that monster.’

  Monster? Monster? Who is she talking about? I knock a kitchen chair over and rush into the living room, but I stop near the end of the settee when the male guard moves towards me. I stand with my hands folded across my chest and look at her over the top of his head.

  ‘I only did what you wanted,’ I say. ‘It’s not my fault you changed your mind. Is it? It’s not my fault you changed your mind. You changed, not me.’

  She looks at the female guard. ‘Take him,’ she says.

  ‘Take me where?’

  ‘You’ll see when you get there,’ says the male guard.

  The social worker tells me to pack a bag with enough clothes for a week; some schoolbooks, a pen and something to play with.

  ‘Like what?’ I ask. ‘Like a football? Like what?’

  ‘Use your imagination,’ he says.

  The guards stay with my mother. The social worker and I leave the flat together and he doesn’t speak until the lift arrives. As we get in, he puts his hand on my back. I cover my mouth because of the stench of urine, but he seems not to mind.

  ‘Your mother is very upset,’ he says, ‘but she says she loves you still. You’re lucky for that. She’s a good woman.’

  I look at the graffiti on the wall – pigs are fucking animals – and I smile and pretend not to hear him. But, in some way, I’d like to show the graffiti to the social worker, and say, ‘This graffiti has a double meaning.’

  ‘I’ll be coming with you to the Children’s Court in the morning,’ he says. ‘The judge will decide what to do with you until the hearing.’

  ‘What’s a hearing? Is that like a trial?’

  ‘Maybe we should talk more when we get you to your room.’

  ‘You’re the one that mentioned the hearing. I didn’t even ask.’

  ‘That’s true. I did bring it up. I’m sorry.’

  The ambulance is parked downstairs outside the lift; one door is open, one closed. It says LANCE.

  The social worker’s car is blue and the smell inside is like the smell of new shoes.

  ‘Right, so,’ he says. ‘The place I’m taking you might seem a bit scary at first, but it’s not a bad place, and everybody there will want to look after you and see that you are all right. I know you must be feeling a bit overwhelmed after what’s happened and maybe it won’t sink in until later.’

  ‘I’m not a baby,’ I say. ‘You don’t have to talk to me like I’m a baby.’

  He shrugs and lets a truck overtake us.

  ‘Can I’ve a cigarette?’ I ask.

  ‘In the glovebox,’ he says.

  I root around and find a packet of Silk Cut. ‘Matches?’

  ‘Use the car lighter,’ he says.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I say.

  I’m having fun. I shouldn’t be having fun. I want to stay in this car; keep driving; take the car on a ferry across to France or England and drive all the way to Switzerland and go on a funicular, then drive to the airport and fly to America. Keep driving for the hell of it. It’s warm in the car and there’s a tape playing.

  ‘I suppose this is jazz,’ I say.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He nods, but doesn’t speak, and so we drive in silence while I smoke two cigarettes, lighting one from the other. As we get closer to the city I wind down the window and hang my head out like a dog does. I look out at the dark sky, and up at the fingernail moon, and I feel happy. When we turn into a big square near the statue of Parnell, I look at the lights in the windows of the big terrace houses and hope that I’ll be staying in one of them.

  ‘We’re here,’ says the social worker.

  He points to a four-storey house with a blue front door, bars on the windows, and stone stairs leading down to a basement. There are lights on in all the windows and a Manchester United football jersey stuck to the inside of a window on the top floor.

  ‘Is this a boys’ home?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a boys’ home. Let’s get you inside and see if they have the bed ready yet.’

  There is a room for me at the end of the long, dark hallway. We come to a yellow door with a brass number 84 on it and we go inside. The social worker turns on the light, which flickers for a moment before working. It’s a small room, with a round yellow rug – the same yellow as the paint on the door – in the middle of the floor, a narrow bed that is low to the ground, and there are racing cars on the wallpaper. The bed doesn’t look big enough for me and, although I prefer to sleep flat on my back, I’ll probably have to curl my legs up during the night.

  ‘So, this will be your room for a few days,’ says the social worker. ‘Leave your bag in the cupboard and come with me to the interview room.’

  I sit on the tidy bed. It’s white, like a tablet, made tight, the sheets tucked in all the way under the thin mattress. There are three blankets in a neat pile on the end, orange, green and brown.

  ‘What for?’ I ask.

  ‘You’ll be interviewed by the housefather, just for a minute, and in the morning you’ll be back with the guards.’

  ‘I feel sick,’ I say.

  ‘That’s understandable,’ he says, as he fastens the button on his sleeve. ‘What’s happened is probably starting to sink in.’

  ‘No, it’s not. I just feel sick.’

  ‘All right, I’ll get you some aspirin, but we need to go. The housefather has got out of bed especially and we don’t want to keep him up all night.’

  ‘OK.’

  The two guards who came to our flat are in the interview room and they sit in chairs against the back wall. The social worker pulls a chair out f
rom the table and points at it. I sit at the table and then he disappears, or so I think, until I realise that he is standing behind me.

  The room has nothing in it except the table, four chairs, a heater and some toys for small children: rings that fit over plastic sticks, and plastic shapes that fit into plastic holes. Somebody has tried to force a triangle into a square hole.

  The housefather comes in. He is old and skinny, and he has messy black and grey hair. He sits opposite me at the table and holds a pen over a pad of writing paper.

  ‘Good evening, John,’ he says. ‘My name is Mr Keating.’

  ‘Hello,’ I say.

  He hands me a key and tells me it’s for the cupboard in my room. The key must be made of plastic: it weighs no more than a cube of sugar. There are chocolate biscuits on the table but I don’t want them. I feel hungry and full all at once, like there’s too much air in my stomach.

  Then we are silent and he looks at me. ‘You’re scratching your head quite a bit,’ he says. ‘Are you conscious of doing that?’

  I wasn’t, but there’s no way now to hide the blood on my fingers.

  ‘Does that not hurt? Does it not hurt to make your scalp bleed?’

  ‘Not really. I just scratch because it’s itchy.’

  ‘There are better ways to stop an itch.’

  I shrug.

  ‘Do you feel the pain now? In the place where your head is bleeding?’

  ‘No.’

  He looks over at the social worker. ‘Would you like me to get you a tissue or some cotton wool?’

  ‘No. It doesn’t matter.’

  More silence.

  ‘I hear you think of yourself as a bit of a lie detector? I hear you can tell when people are lying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know a little of that subject myself. Did you know that there are other people in the world who can do this?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve read about them.’ I tell him a little of what I’ve read about the wizards, how they score between ninety and one hundred per cent in tests.

  ‘Did you know that most lie detectors develop their super-sensitivity to emotion early in life? And this heightened sensitivity is often due to unusual childhood circumstances?’

  I enjoy being spoken to as though I am an intelligent adult, but I don’t get his point. ‘So?’ I say.