Carry Me Down (4 page)

I want us to get drenched from the spray of the falls and then to get dry – it will be summer – on our walk up Clifton Hill to the fun-fair, where there are rides and, most importantly of all, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.

I check my watch at half nine and my father’s still not home. I go to the living room and ask my grandmother where he is. She tells me he’s staying overnight in Wexford. He had to see his old boss about a favour. I fall asleep with a brochure from Ripley’s Museum under my pillow.

My friend Brendan comes to the cottage in the morning an hour earlier than he is due. He’s always early, as though he wants to catch people doing something they shouldn’t be doing. He comes to my bedroom window while I’m getting dressed and taps on the glass. ‘Helloooooo,’ he says, in his mock farmer’s voice. ‘I’ve sold nine cows this very day.’

‘Hellooooo,’ I shout back. ‘Nine is better than eight, they say.’

‘Front or back?’ he asks.

‘Through the chimney, for all I care.’

There’s a front door and a back door and both are always open.

‘Right, so,’ he says.

He presses his mouth and nose flat against the window and licks the glass. Brendan is shorter than I am, but bigger and wider. Stronger, too. He has a habit of hunching over, his head and neck forward and low, so that he looks like he’s trying to balance something on his back.

He comes to my room and we sit and talk on the floor for a little while. I don’t sit on the bed with him. I only sit on the bed with my mother. I wonder should I show him the money, but decide I shouldn’t. What if he wanted to spend some of it? What if he told one of his sisters?

We are on our way out to the field across from the cottage, when Granny stops us as we pass through the kitchen. ‘Brendan!’ she says. ‘You must stop and talk a while.’

‘OK, Mrs Egan,’ he says.

* * *

My grandmother often dresses from top to bottom in one colour and today she is wearing a yellow shirt, a yellow skirt and yellow high-heeled shoes. Even her big eyes look yellow. She offers to make Brendan some boiled eggs and, as she boils the eggs and makes the toast, Brendan tells her that rowdy twin girls were over at his house playing with his sisters before he left, and that he couldn’t wait to get away from them.

‘Which twin girls?’ asks my grandmother.

‘Bernice Boyd and her sister Bernadette,’ says Brendan. ‘They brought a birthday card and a cake for my sister.’

‘It would pay your sister to be careful with that card. Maybe give it a wipe with a damp cloth before she fondles it again.’

‘You can’t catch germs from a birthday card,’ I say.

‘The rabies,’ says my grandmother, her voice loud, bits of spit falling out of her slackened mouth. ‘You could end up with the rabies. That whole family is frothing at the mouth because of the rabies.’

I want to leave the room when my grandmother talks this way, but the eggs are ready.

‘Here you are,’ she says.

The eggs are not boiled long enough and are too runny to eat. The white is the worst part: a raw, clear liquid. The yolk doesn’t look as awful as the raw egg white.

‘You have these,’ I say to her. ‘I’m not so hungry.’

My grandmother uses a knife to break the cap off her egg and the egg white spills over the side of the shell and onto the plate. Instead of using a spoon or a piece of bread to wipe up the mess, she lifts the eggcup to her face and licks the egg from the side of the broken shell. And then she lifts the plate from the table, tilts it to her mouth, and licks some more until there is no egg left. She eats as though she thinks chewing will get in the way of her food, as though she wants all food to be slippery. If a fish came to the table, this is how it would eat.

* * *

I don’t understand how such a neat and proper person can eat like this and make such a mess, always a sticky trail of food and dribble behind her. I get bad-tempered with her for being disgusting and a bad temper makes me short of breath. But she took us in when we had no money and tells us that this is our cottage; our home. And she sings fighting songs when she’s in the bath and she plays Scrabble with me and she taught me how to play backgammon and poker and she doesn’t let me win.

I grab hold of Brendan’s jacket and drag him from the kitchen.

‘We’ve got to go,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘if you really have to,’ and there’s nothing I can do to make her feel less sad about being left alone again.

We kick the football for hours and end up in the field about a mile away, half way between the cottage and our school. It’s almost dark and getting hard to see the ball. I sit on my haunches to rest for a minute and Brendan sits on the ball.

‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘when we start the sixth class, eight months from now, some of the girls will be wearing brassières.’

He bounces up and down on the football.

I stand and kick hard at the ball under him. ‘I’ll be in the
Guinness Book of Records
by then.’

‘What?’

‘I’m writing to them in a few days, before school starts.’

‘Why would the
Guinness Book of Records
put you in?’

‘I can’t say yet, but I’ll tell you once I get a letter back from them. It has to be a secret for a while.’

‘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 frowns. ‘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.