Carry Me Down (20 page)

It’s the middle of the same night and my father stands by the bedroom door and whispers my name. I pretend not to hear him but he tiptoes over to the bed and shakes my shoulder. ‘Get up,’ he says. ‘And don’t wake your mother.’

He is wearing the same dirty yellow Aran jumper he has been wearing nearly every day since we moved to Ballymun.

‘I’m too sleepy.’

‘Get up,’ he says. ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

I put my dressing gown on and go with him into the small bedroom that used to be mine. The smell of the rubbish chute is strong, and it crunches and churns.

It’s 3.15 am and the clock on the wall beside the bed looks strange, with both hands together, back to back, thick and black.

He lies down and I sit at the end of the bed. The artery in his temple is pulsing in time with the clock; the blue worm throbs once every second. I turn away and hope that when I look back his fringe will have fallen down to cover him.

‘Are you properly awake?’ he asks.

‘I’m wide awake.’

‘Good, because you’ll need to concentrate.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve got to tell you to stop peeling all the wallpaper off. Your mother says you’ve been very bold.’

‘I haven’t been bold.’

‘Well, I hear you have and I’m the one who has to tell you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m your father.’

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Is that all?’

He puts his hands behind his head. ‘It’s late and your da’s a bit tipsy. Just felt like taking a look at his only child.’

The artery in his temple is pulsing faster. Two worm-pulses per second.

‘Where’ve you been?’ I ask.

‘Just went for a few pints after work down at the local pub.’

‘Who with?’

‘Some of my pals from work.’

He’s lying.

‘Where did you go?’ I ask.

‘The Terminal.’

‘How come you stayed so late?’ I ask.

‘We had a lot to talk about. The boss is getting on our goat. You’ve never met such an old fecker. Today he made us clean the kitchen; five men down on their hands and knees scrubbing.’

The sheer mental strain of having to fabricate is showing on his face.

‘So, how are you, fish-face?’ he asks.

‘Don’t call me fish-face.’

He is my father, and he should think I look well, even if I don’t.

‘You are a fish-face,’ he says, slurring fish and face together so that it comes out more like fliss-lace.

He puts his hand on my knee and I let him leave it there.

‘Sorry, fish-face, you don’t really look like a fish. It’s only ’cause you eat so many fish fingers that I call you that.’

‘You eat them, too,’ I say.

‘All right. Don’t get your knickers in a knot.’

We are quiet for a while. He closes his eyes and I stay where
I am sitting on the end of the bed. And then, as he moves his arm up over his head, I smell perfume.

‘Da? How come you’re always making fun of the blind women upstairs? Do you know them?’

‘No reason,’ he says. ‘I just like to make fun.’

‘But do you know them?’

‘No, why would I know them?’

His face is frozen, just as though paralysed. Now I will play the part of a detective. ‘Do you really not know them?’

‘No. I’ve seen them just as you have. But I don’t know them.’

‘Are the other flats here all the same as this one?’

‘Mrs McGahern’s is the same. So, I suppose they are all more or less the same. Just slightly smaller or larger.’

‘Have you ever been up to the thirteenth floor?’

He sits forward and reaches out to touch my face. ‘No, son. I’ve no reason to go up there.’

He never calls me son and he never touches my face.

‘Have you really never been up in their flat?’ I ask. ‘The flat of the three blind mice?’

‘Why do you keep on hounding me with these questions? Why these questions?’

‘You seem to know a lot about these women.’

He thinks now. He’s taking his time. ‘Well, the answer is no. I’ve no reason to go up there.’

He’s lying. I am certain he’s lying. He is getting ready to get up off the bed.

‘So you haven’t been upstairs?’

‘Yes, I’ve been up to Mark’s for a cup of tea after work. He’s on the fifteenth floor. So, yes, I have been upstairs.’

‘Can I ask you one more important question?’

‘Of course you can, son. You can ask me any damn thing you like.’

‘Have you ever done anything dirty with them?’

He stands up. He stands up right next to me and his legs are close to mine. His face is red and he is panting. I think he’s going to belt me. But I’m not afraid. I’m in the right, and he’s in the wrong. I know he’s been up there with those women. His lie has told me the truth.

But he kicks the bedroom door instead of kicking me and I worry that he’ll wake Mammy. I expect him to storm out but he turns around to face me and stands with his hands dangling by his side as though waiting. I look at him and say nothing and he opens his mouth but makes no sound. He walks to the wall and back twice, head down.

‘I give up,’ he says. ‘I give up.’

And then, without another word, he leaves.

I get back into bed with my mother and pull myself up next to her body and lie close to her. Although I’d like to stay like this, and fall asleep with my chest against her warm back, I move away to my side of the double bed and that’s where I sleep.

At night, instead of watching television after school, I go outside. Every night, for five nights, I tell my mother that I’m going down to the basement to take a guitar class.

Instead of going to the basement, I walk upstairs to the flat above ours, where the three blind mice live. I loiter near their doorway and pace up and down the hall until after nine o’clock. When my father comes out, I’ll catch him.

But he doesn’t come out and I can’t hear him through the door. At ten o’clock I go back down the stairs to our flat.

On the fifth night, I decide to wait at the bottom of the stairs on the twelfth-floor balcony. I sit on the bottom step and look up. And when I see him, I can hardly believe it. He is coming down the stairs from the thirteenth floor, carrying the black bag he takes to work, wearing his ugly blue overalls.

‘Hello there,’ he says when he sees me, as though nothing at all is wrong with the world.

I grip the rail and stare up at him. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Not that it’s any of your business,’ he says, ‘but I’ve been up to Mark’s flat for a cup of tea.’

‘No you haven’t. I saw you coming down from the thirteenth floor.’

He pushes past me and his foot knocks my knee. ‘Your problem is that you see what you want to see.’

I wait until he has been inside for a while before I go in. I get to the bathroom just in time, and vomit until there’s nothing left. I haven’t been sick for a long time and his lie must be the worst kind to cause this reaction. My heart thuds with anger when I hear him in the kitchen, talking in a normal and innocent way with my mother.

It is teatime, the day after I caught my father coming down the stairs, and he hasn’t come home. I’m in the kitchen making semolina and my mother is at the table drying her hair with a hairdryer that has a tube connected to a plastic hat. She plugs the contraption in and the tube fills the plastic cap full of hot air until it expands like a balloon on her head.

‘What do you think of this?’ she asks. ‘What do you think about this old-fashioned hairdryer?’

‘I think it’s good,’ I say. ‘It has personality. Just like you.’

She laughs and takes the plastic cap off and puts it on her knees.

‘My mammy used this hairdryer once to dry a chicken. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘She kept chickens, and one day one of them fell in a big puddle of mud and she decided to wash him. She gave the chicken a bath
and then she brought him into the living room and used this gizmo to dry him off.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Wait there,’ she says.

She comes back a few minutes later with a black-and-white photo of a chicken inside this hairdryer with its head and beak sticking out.

‘So,’ she says, ‘that’s something else you can think about. You can add it to your amusement park.’

‘Thanks,’ I say.

‘Gimme a kiss,’ she says and, when I give her a kiss on the forehead, I feel like I’m her husband.

‘Mam? I have something really, really important to tell you.’

‘Stop scratching your head.’

‘Can I tell you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll wait till you’re ready and you’re listening properly.’

‘Tell me now. I’m listening properly.’

‘I think Da is doing something funny with them upstairs.’

‘For goodness’ sake!’

‘No, Mammy. Listen. I think you should know. Just listen to me for a minute.’

I tell her that Da came into the room at 3.15 am and that he was drunk, that he lied about where he’d been. I tell her that he’s been upstairs with them.

‘This is crazy business,’ she says. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m telling the truth.’

‘Not this time, you don’t. Your father would never do such a thing. Not ever. He might have fibbed about where he was, but I know this for sure: he wasn’t upstairs with those women.’

‘How can you not believe me? Why can’t you just listen?’

‘I don’t like this talk one bit.’

‘If you don’t believe me, why don’t you go up and talk to the
women yourself? Ask them if Da has been up there.’

She stands up. ‘I’ll do no such thing. And you should wash your mouth out.’

I protest and beg her to believe me.

She puts her head in her hands. ‘OK. You’ll go back to your own bed tonight. A boy as filthy as you can put up with a bit of stink from a rubbish chute.’

‘I’m not filthy. I’m the opposite! I know the truth!’

‘You weren’t filthy in Gorey, but you are some filthy now.’

I get my anorak and go downstairs.

I hope I might run into the gang. I don’t care now what happens, and I feel the urge for something to take the place of the trouble and drama I wanted but didn’t get with my mother. But I don’t see the gang, so I go alone to the new housing estate and walk around in the concrete trenches. There’s a small red wellington boot stuck in one of the newly laid cement slabs.

When I get home, my father is at the kitchen table with my mother, eating corned beef, carrots and mashed potatoes.

‘Yours is over there,’ says my mother.

My plate is being kept warm on top of a saucepan filled with hot water.

‘Where’ve you been?’ asks my father.

‘Just went down to the basement to see if there were any activities.’

‘And were there?’ asks my mother.

‘Only a bit of painting and little kids making stuff like snakes out of egg cartons.’

‘That’s funny,’ says my father. ‘I was down there not so long ago and it was closed for cleaning. There’s a sign on the door saying so.’

I’ve been caught but he lets me go.

‘Anyway, you’re a bit old to be making snakes,’ he says, smiling, and patting me on the hand.

‘I s’pose.’

‘Remember, Michael,’ says my mother, ‘how much John used to love those colour-by-number books? Oh, and Fuzzy Felt. Remember how he loved that?’

‘I didn’t love Fuzzy Felt,’ I say. ‘I hated it.’

They laugh.

‘I know what I liked and what I didn’t like. You must be confusing me with somebody else.’

They are still laughing, and my mother is trying to make me feel jolly by tickling me under the armpit.

‘Don’t!’ I say.

After what she has been told, I don’t understand her happy mood.

I leave as soon as I’ve cleared my plate and go into the living room to watch television. I have the volume on low so that I can still hear them talking.

They talk about the central heating, about the flat being too hot, the fact that the fridge always stinks, the cost of petrol, whether oil might run out one day, and the size of Phoenix Park; whether it is the biggest city park in the world.

I know it is. ‘What are we having for dessert?’ I call out.

‘Peanuts!’ shouts my father and they both laugh.

I go back into the kitchen. ‘I have to go to the dentist again next week,’ I say. ‘I have another sore tooth.’

I want his sympathy. But I won’t get it.

‘Jesus,’ says my father, ‘you’d be the only child on the face of the earth volunteering to go to the dentist.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I say. ‘I like the dentist.’

‘I think he likes Dr O’Connor because the man wears a fancy suit and speaks so nicely,’ says my mother. ‘He’s like a lawyer who gives advice to teeth.’

They laugh at my mother’s clever joke, and I pretend to laugh too. I will never be a person who is left out of things.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘A lawyer who gives advice to teeth and who makes you pay through the nose.’

My father grins and holds out his hand for me to shake it. I hold out my hand and we shake hands for a good while. It’s an odd thing, and I’ve not noticed it before, but he has skin as soft as my mother’s.

I go to the bedroom with its smell of rubbish and lie on the bed. On my stomach, on my side, on my back, it doesn’t go away. There’s a sad sickness in my stomach when I think of Brendan and I miss him and can’t stop myself from imagining him with Kate and laughing together, laughing at me, and I lie on my back and it’s the same thought over and over … in the darkness and the sadness with the blackness on my backness … in the darkness and the sadness with the blackness on my backness.

I turn over onto my stomach and my father knocks on the door. I tell him to come in and he sneaks in on tiptoe as though he is a cat burglar. He closes the door quietly behind him and sits on the end of the bed.

I close my schoolbook and sit up cross-legged.

He sits next to me, his legs over the side. ‘Hey, fish-face,’ he says. ‘We haven’t had a good chat for a while. How are you?’

‘What?’ I say. ‘But we talked in the middle of the night.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about that. I’d had a few drinks and you know how I am. I’m not an expert at drinking. I’m sorry I woke you. I shouldn’t have.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘I remembered your present this time.’