by Anna Smith
They told me that the Nazi had gone, that he had just disappeared off the face of the earth the day that Tony died and nobody could understand why. I decided not to tell them everything I knew until I had spoken to Kevin.
‘When is Kevin going now?’ I asked.
‘Four weeks on Monday,’ Mum said.
‘What day is it now?’ I had no idea how long I had been out of the world.
‘Saturday,’ Dad said, and we all laughed.
*
I was feeling stronger every day, and now that the sun was out I was determined to go outside and see Jamie and Dan. Mum nagged me all the way and had me wrapped up in a sweatshirt even though it was a warm afternoon. I protested, and as soon as I was out of sight I took it off and tied it around my waist.
Dan and Jamie were kicking a ball off the fence at the end of our street, and they turned around when I whistled. They smiled and came running towards me. For a minute I thought they were going to hug me, but they stopped just short of me and Dan gave me a playful punch.
‘Christ, Kath, you look skinny,’ Dan said, looking me up and down.
‘Yeah. Like half starved. You all right?’ Jamie said.
‘Yeah, fine. I had pleurisy. It’s some disease in your lungs. Jesus, I couldn’t breathe or nothing,’ I said, quite proud that I had been sicker than they had ever been.
‘Aye,’ Dan said. ‘We heard you nearly died.’
‘I did,’ I said, slightly pleased at the attention.
Automatically we walked out towards the edge of the village and sat on the grass where the old railway track used to be. Dan lay back in the long grass and closed his eyes. Jamie stood over him, tickling his face with a piece of dry grass until he got up and grabbed him. The two of them rolled around the ground, Jamie getting the better of Dan, sitting astride him and holding his arms up with his knees, then tickling under his arms until Dan screamed for mercy. Nothing had changed, it seemed. But it had.
After a while they stopped and we sat on the grass staring at the cars on the road below.
‘You miss him, don’t you, Kath? Even more than us,’ Jamie said. I nodded, holding back tears.
‘It’s not fair,’ Dan said. ‘How is it that somebody like Tony dies and other people, people like Father Flynn, get to live? Why does God do that?’
‘My mum says God’s got a funny way of working,’ Jamie said.
‘Yeah … I don’t know why it happened,’ I said. ‘I mean, it shouldn’t have happened. Can you remember? Tony was going to come down. He was going to be all right … then he slipped. Jesus, it was terrible. I keep seeing it.’ I closed my eyes, seeing Tony’s face as he lay on the ground.
‘Aye,’ Jamie said, staring into middle distance. ‘It was terrible. I keep having nightmares.’
‘Me too,’ Dan said.
‘Do you know my da’s away?’ Jamie asked, looking pleased.
I told him my mum had told me and that I knew about his mum’s face. He said he blamed himself for running away and that if he had been there he might have been able to protect her. But he might have got hit as well.
‘Did you hear about the Nazi?’ Dan said. I nodded.
‘He ran away the very day Tony died. When Tony’s mum got home from the hospital, he was gone. All his clothes and everything,’ Jamie said.
‘What about the money? And the passport and stuff?’ I said.
‘Your Kevin gave it to Tony’s mum and told her everything. He told us she said good riddance to him and she’s got all the money. I think there’s thousands. It was in Tony’s bag and Kevin took it after he fell,’ Jamie said.
‘Did you hear about Miss Grant?’ he added.
‘No … What about her?’ It had seemed such a long time ago since Miss Grant was in my life.
‘They took her away,’ Dan said. ‘She’s away to the mental ward.’
‘What? You’re kidding.’ I couldn’t believe it.
‘Yeah! It’s true, Kath. Remember when we saw her stealing in the shop? Well, the cops caught her a few weeks later and it turned out she’d been doing it for ages. My ma said she’s had a breakdown. When they took her away she was singing hymns at the top of her voice. She’s off her rocker.’ Jamie almost whispered the last words, conscious that his own mother had been so close to breaking point.
‘My God!’ I said, trying to imagine Miss Grant being carted off to the mental ward. But I didn’t feel sorry for her. There was a slight pang of guilt when I recalled how distraught she looked that day we stole her clothes, and how sad she seemed the day she got stood up. Then I remembered the look on Tony’s face the day she beat him up in front of the whole class. To hell with her, I thought, then immediately asked God to forgive me.
We sat for a while in silence, all of us remembering those days when we ran away. Our great adventure. I wished we hadn’t gone, then Tony would still be alive. I tried not to think about it.
‘I’m going home,’ I said. ‘I feel tired … The doctor says I’ve got to rest.’ I didn’t want to be around them any more. I just wanted to go home and close my eyes and remember Tony.
*
On the way back I stood outside his house, looking up at the window, hoping to see some sign of life, some sign that this was Tony’s house where we used to sit together and watch television on rainy afternoons and his mum would bring us orange squash and biscuits. But now there was nothing. The house looked dark from the outside and the grass was overgrown and neglected. I was about to walk away when I saw the face at the window. It was Tony’s mum. She stood looking at me, hesitant at first, then she came right to the front of the window so I could see her. She waved me in. I stood for a moment wondering if I should just walk away, but my feet made me go up the path and the door opened as I climbed the steps.
Inside the house was dark and silent, eerie. Tony’s mum stood in the hall before me, her face older now somehow and tired. Dark shadows smudged under her eyes and her neck looked scrawny. She tried to smile, but her face was sad.
‘Hello, Kath.’ Her voice sounded strangled. ‘How are you? I heard you were far through.’
‘I … I’m OK now, thanks … I’m fine really. Er … how are you?’ I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to go home. I wanted to run upstairs just to make sure Tony wasn’t in his bedroom.
She turned her back to me and opened the fridge, pouring a glass of milk. Then she took some biscuits out of the tin and put them on a plate. She walked past me in the hallway.
‘Come on in. Have a glass of milk and a biscuit. You like that, don’t you?’ she said, as I walked behind her into the living room.
The room that had been filled with our laughter as we fought over games and played football while she wasn’t in now seemed desolate. I sat on a chair by the window, with my feet dangling below me. She put the milk and biscuits down beside me and I smiled a thank you. I wasn’t hungry, but I took a biscuit and nibbled it half-heartedly. The clock on the sideboard ticked. I had never noticed it before, but in the awkward silence it ticked and ticked like some kind of constant background throb to the aching sadness. She sat down on the chair by the fire and crossed her long legs. I thought about her with Slippy Tits McCartney and I felt sorry for her.
I couldn’t bear the silence. Finally she spoke. Her eyes were warm and soft and full of understanding.
‘You miss him, don’t you?’ she whispered.
I nodded. It was all I could do. I felt tears coming to my eyes and I swallowed hard.
‘Me too,’ she said, biting her lip.
We sat there in the darkness of the sad room, the clock ticking on. I felt tears spill out of my eyes and run down my cheeks. She looked up at me through tears, sniffing them back. She shook her head and the tears just flowed. There were no words.
I wiped my face with my hands and sniffed. She was sobbing. I didn’t know what to say or do. I wanted out of this awful, lonely house to run a million miles away and be some place where you didn’t always feel sad. To be some place where e
verybody you loved stayed with you for ever and nobody went away and left you crying on your own.
She was sobbing and I couldn’t stop her. I got off the chair and slipped out of the room, leaving her behind with her sorrow, and angry and sad that I couldn’t help her. I closed the front door softly and wiped my eyes as I walked into the bright afternoon sunshine.
Chapter Twenty-two
The morning finally came. I had been dreading it every day and counting the hours. But now, as I lay in bed, it was really happening. Kevin was leaving us. I could hear him buzzing around his bedroom, singing and moving his bags. The radio was blaring downstairs. I cheered myself up with the thought that after we saw Kevin off at the train station, we were going straight to meet Ann Marie. She was coming back from Donegal and it was going to be brilliant to see her. But I wondered what she would be like. I wondered how she would be feeling, having had to give her baby away, then coming back home and trying to pretend that everything was going to be fine. I had spent the last two days getting everything ready in her room to welcome her back home. I hoped she wouldn’t be too sad.
I dragged myself out of bed and got dressed. I passed Kevin in the hallway, and he smiled at me.
‘Hiya … This is it, the big day,’ he said, ruffling my hair.
‘I know,’ I said, trying to smile. I walked off downstairs.
Mum’s eyes were red from crying half the night. I had lain awake listening to her sobbing and hearing Dad’s soothing words as he tried to comfort her.
We all sat around the table for breakfast, Kevin wolfing down his food like it was the last he would ever see.
‘You’ll need to work eighteen hours a day to feed yourself, the way you eat,’ Dad said, just beating Kevin to the last piece of bread.
‘I’m a growing boy,’ Kevin said, finishing off his tea and getting up from the table.
Mum and Dad looked at each other, then away. They both looked at me.
‘I wish he wasn’t going,’ I said, suddenly, surprised that I wasn’t able to stop myself.
‘Sure it’ll be fine,’ Mum said. ‘Anyway, Ann Marie will be home today so the house won’t be empty. We’ll all be together. It won’t be so bad, you’ll see.’
‘I wish he wasn’t going too, Kath,’ Dad said. Mum looked at him, surprised. ‘But I know deep down that it’s for the best. He’s a great laddie, our Kevin. And he’ll make something of himself. Not like me. We’ll be proud of him, Kath, and you’ll even go and visit him some day.’ Dad said it as if he meant it. He had been different towards Kevin after they had the big fight in the house, and the night of his party I had never seen them so close.
There was a knock at the door and I could hear Brendan O’Hanlon’s voice shouting.
‘G’day, Bruce,’ he said in an Australian accent.
He walked into the kitchen, smiling, with Dessie at his back.
‘How’re you all doing? All set?’ Brendan said, looking around. Dessie lifted a biscuit from the table.
‘As ready as we’ll ever be,’ Mum said, getting up and clearing the dishes away.
Kevin and Dessie dragged his bags out to the van and stuffed them in the back. The two of them were laughing and slapping each other on the shoulder. They were excited and happy and I wished I could be like them, but I was miserable as we all prepared to walk out of the house. Kevin came back in, walked into the living room and took one last look around. He stood, nodded his head and smiled.
‘Yeah … I’ll miss it. I know that much. Part of me misses it already.’ He threw his arms around Mum and squeezed her tightly. Dad put his hand on Kevin’s shoulder.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Don’t get all sloppy.’
Kevin had his arm around Mum’s shoulder as they walked down the path. She was sniffing, but laughing at the same time.
We all piled into the car and I remembered the morning we took Ann Marie to the bus stop. Why did it have to be like this? Why couldn’t everything just be as it was before?
At the train station in Sunnyside, people milled around, saying goodbyes and pushing bags on to the carriage. I watched a boy and girl kiss for ages and wondered when they would come up for air.
This was the train that would take Kevin and Dessie to Glasgow, then another train to London for the special flight to Australia that would be filled with people with great high hopes.
A whistle blew and a voice shouted, ‘All aboard.’ We all looked at each other. It was really happening. Kevin put his arms around me and hugged me so hard I thought I would faint.
‘Watch my pleurisy,’ I said, through tears.
He laughed, but his eyes were filled with tears too.
‘I’ll see your beautiful face every day in my head, Kath. Your crazy curls and your big questioning eyes. I’ll see them every day. And one day … one day … you’ll just be there right in front of me. I promise.’ Tears sprang out of his eyes.
Mum was already sobbing on Dad’s shoulder. Kevin put his arms around them both. Dad’s eyes were full of tears.
‘I’m sorry, son,’ he said to Kevin, his lip trembling. ‘I’m sorry for that night. And for all the nights and days I let you down. And I’m proud of you, pal. I always have been. I … I just don’t know how to say it, that’s all.’ Tears rolled down Dad’s face.
‘Aw, Da. Don’t … I am what you made me. You’ll be proud … honest. One day. Thanks, Da … Thanks for everything.’ They hugged. Dad stroked Kevin’s hair as they held each other.
Kevin turned to Mum. ‘I’ll change my pants every day,’ he laughed. ‘And I’ll miss you,’ he said. ‘More than you know. More than you’ll ever know.’ Mum dissolved into tears. ‘And if I ever meet a woman like you, Ma … I’ll marry her straight away.’ He laughed and wiped the tears from his cheeks.
‘C’mon,’ Dessie O’Hanlon said. His dad stood biting his lip. He was on his own now. His wife had died three years ago and now there was nobody.
Kevin ruffled my hair one last time and stepped off the platform and on to the train. The doors clunked shut one by one on every carriage and Kevin opened the window and stuck his head out. The train’s whistle blasted and the metal wheels screeched and started turning. The train slowly pulled away, and with it the picture I would carry with me for the rest of my life. Kevin’s eyes full of hope and excitement for this brave new world, yet his face wet with tears as he waved and waved until he was only a dot in the distance, still waving as he disappeared from view.
*
We walked out of the station and got into Brendan’s van. Nobody spoke a word.
‘Just let us out here,’ Mum said. ‘We’ll walk up the hill to the bus station and meet Ann Marie. She should be here any minute.’
Mum, Dad and I got out of the car and waved Brendan off. We hurried along the road towards the foot of the hill and I slipped my hand into my dad’s as we walked. He squeezed it and smiled down at me. I wondered if I would ever feel happy again, the way I used to, before Tony and before today.
Then somewhere on the brow of the hill I saw her. But it couldn’t be. We all saw her at the same time and we stopped in our tracks. We shaded our eyes from the sun with our hands to make sure that the figure coming into view was really her. There was no mistake. It was Ann Marie. And she was pushing a pram. I thought my heart was going to come right up and out of my mouth. Mum’s eyes were wide with shock. Dad’s mouth was half open. Ann Marie was waving furiously. She stopped at the top of the hill and waved both hands, just in case we weren’t sure if it was her. I broke free of my dad’s hand and ran towards her.
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