Creature of the Night (11 page)

I had to wait for an hour in Limerick and it was after
eleven when I got off the bus in Ennis. There was no way
I was going to thumb home in the dark. Our village was
twenty kilometres out the road towards the coast and
you wouldn't know what kind of redneck weirdos you'd
get out there. And there was no way I was going to walk
it, either.

I went into the centre of town and opened a taxi
door. I told him where I was going and asked him how
much. He just looked at me and said nothing. I turned
on the charm.

'It's OK. My ma was supposed to collect me but the
car broke down. She said to get a taxi and she'll pay you
when we get there.'

'All right,' he said. 'But it'll cost forty euro.'

'That's OK,' I said, and jumped in.

When we got to the house the taxi driver followed
me in. My ma heard us and came out of the sitting room.

'You owe him forty quid,' I told her, and ran up to
my room, and listened to the argument from there. She
didn't have forty euro. She never gave me permission.
He didn't care if it was all she had for the week. He
wasn't taking No for an answer.

I heard her spill out the contents of her purse on the
table and, for some reason, the sound gave me a little
pain under my ribs.

'There's fifteen,' she said. Coins slid and chinked.
'Twenty. Twenty-three. That's all I've got. I'll have to
give you the rest some other time.'

'I'll be back for it,' he said.

The front door slammed and then the taxi door, and
the angry motor revved into the distance. I thought my
ma would come up and I braced myself for a row.

But she didn't. I had to listen to her crying instead.
I hated her for it. She did it on purpose, I knew, just to
get at me.

The next morning, while we were waiting on the dew, PJ
drove me and Coley into town with the small trailer
attached to the back of the car. We went into a builders'
supply yard and loaded up the trailer with unplaned
timber, corrugated iron, drainage pipes and about a ton
of cement.

'It's for a shed,' Coley told me. 'For my weanlings.'

'What's a weanling?' I said.

He laughed. 'A very small cow,' he said.

The rest of the day we were bringing in bales. My
shoulder was miles better but it wasn't up to throwing
bales up on to the big flat-bed trailer, so PJ showed me
how to stack them so they wouldn't fall off and I did that
job instead.

I was glad I did. Coley and his da were the strongest
fellas I'd ever seen. We loaded the trailer six or seven
bales high, and when we got near the top they had to
throw them up higher than their heads. Higher even than
their arms could stretch. I could never have done that.
Some of those bales were still a bit damp and they
weighed half a ton, but they kept on tossing them up to
me like they were empty cardboard boxes.

PJ drove back to the yard and me and Coley rode
back on the top of the load. It kept swaying all over the
place with all the bumps and potholes on the road.

'I hope you stacked them properly,' Coley said.

'Course I did,' I said.

Suddenly he jumped and sprawled full length and
clawed at the bales for a hand-hold. Without thinking I
grabbed his shirt at the shoulder, convinced that he was
falling. But he was laughing, just messing. I wanted to hit
him for making a fool of me, but he didn't even realize. He
just kept laughing. He thought he was great. He didn't
even notice that I didn't think he was funny at all.

In the hayshed we had to stack the bales up even
higher. We did it in stages as each load came in, and left
steps up all the way so they could climb up to throw the
bales to the top. Even so, there were times when they
had to use pitchforks to get the bales up to me. By the
middle of the afternoon I was done in and my hands
were all blistered and skinned from the string. PJ lent me
leather gloves but it was already too late. I wanted to
chuck it in and tell them to stuff their fucking bales, but
I couldn't do it. They were like two machines, their
muscles like big pistons. I couldn't cry off, even when my
shoulder started paining me again. It would have made
me look like a big girl's blouse.

So I gritted my teeth and kept going, and my blisters
burst inside my gloves and my shoulder went through
pain and out the other side, and I got some kind of weird
second wind, almost like being stoned, so I worked in a
hazy, dreamy space. One by one we gathered the loads
from the fields and one by one we stacked them in the
shed, and there were times, during all that, when I felt
like I was a machine, too.

But when we finally finished and I took off the
gloves PJ said, 'Mother of God. Look at the state of his
hands!'

He made me wash them in warm, salty water, and
then he gave me twenty euro and said, 'You're a great
lad, God bless you. But you should have said something
sooner.'

I walked back down home with Coley, swinging my
raw fingers in the breeze.

'Does he pay you the same money?' I asked him.

'He doesn't pay me anything at all,' Coley said, 'but
he's buying me six weanlings when I get the shed built
and I'll make more out of them.'

'Very small cows,' I said. 'How can you make
money out of very small cows?'

'They'll grow,' he said. 'And they'll turn into very
big cows, God willing.'

My ma wasn't talking to me because of the taxi. It was
another of the ways she had of getting at me. But I could
always get around this one.

'Look at my hands,' I said.

She looked.

'It's from the bales,' I said. 'The inside of my gloves
was sticking to them. They took half my skin with them
when I pulled them off.'

She turned her back, putting dishes away. She'd
washed up for the second time.

'You owe Carmel a hundred euro,' I said.

Silence.

'Eighty euro for the money-lender and twenty euro
for my bus fare.'

'But I gave you your bus fare!' she said.

'I lost my ticket,' I said. 'I had to get another one.'

When she finished giving out to me about that, she
got annoyed with PJ instead because of the state of my
hands.

'He has no right to work you like that,' she said.
'You're not a donkey.'

'I know,' I said. 'It's not right.'

'And another thing,' she said. 'There's no cable for
the DVD player. I told him and he says it's probably
behind all that stuff under the stairs. He said not to
bother dragging it all out and that he'd bring me another
one, but he hasn't.'

'When did you ask him?' I said.

'Saturday.'

'Give him half a chance,' I said. 'It's only Monday.'

'I don't care for myself,' she said. 'But it's for
Dennis. He's missing all his favourite films.'

'Why don't you get him outside?' I said. 'Take him
for a walk or something.'

'I do,' she said. 'I take him down the shop with me
nearly every day.'

* * *

She wasn't so worried about the state of my hands
when she made me drag down the wet mattress an hour
or so later.

'It'll never dry up there,' she said, and she was right.
The whiff of it would make you want to throw up. We
hauled it down the stairs and out the back door and
draped it over an old wooden turf barrow we found in
the shed. Then she got the hose out and sprayed it down
until the water was running right through it and out the
bottom.

'It'll dry out in a couple of days in this weather,' she
said.

But when I looked at the sky I wasn't so sure. I
could already see a band of dark cloud beginning to
move in.

Something woke me. I thought it was something downstairs,
inside the house, but then I heard the biffing of
raindrops on the roof and I knew it was that. My first
thought was that we got the hay in just in time. It made
me laugh, and then I thought of Coley pretending to fall
off the hay wagon and that made me laugh again. The
stupid wanker.

And then I did hear something downstairs. Something
sliding on the table. Or maybe it was the dog,
knocking against the leg of it or something. I held my
breath. Was someone whispering? I couldn't tell with the
rain on the roof, and the run-off in the gutters was sort
of whispering as well.

My ma was sleeping on the sofa in the sitting room.
She said she wanted to because she liked the fire and she
could go asleep watching the telly. She quite often did
that anyway. But from in there she couldn't hear Dennis
if he got up. There were two doors and the end of the
porch between her and the kitchen.

The rain slackened off a bit. I could definitely hear
whispering now. A high little voice. Dennis? It sounded
too husky, like my ma when she'd been crying. Maybe it
was only her, down there with Dennis. Except my ma
never whispered.

There was another clunk. I leaned up on my elbows
and my bed creaked. The sounds downstairs stopped.

'Dennis?' I called out.

The dog flap rattled. I jumped out of bed and ran
down. I expected to find him outside again but he was in
the middle of the kitchen, watching me with a scared
look on his face.

'What you doing?' I asked him.

The little green bowl and a glass tumbler were out
on the table, both half filled with milk. There was a
Battenberg cake there as well with a few rough slices
hacked off it and all the little pink and yellow cake
squares picked out and piled up in a pyramid. Or not
all of them, maybe. There were some pink and yellow
crumbs on the table as well, soaking up spilled milk. I
looked at the little eejit standing there in his pyjamas.
He was terrified of me.

'Go to the toilet,' I told him. He ran in there and I
threw the milk in the sink and wiped up the mess. I
didn't know what to do with the cake. I ate a couple of
the pink squares but I was never much gone on sweet
things unless I was stoned, and I couldn't stand the
marzipan from the outside. None of us could. I don't
know why my ma bought that kind of cake. We always
threw half of it away, anyway.

I held a stringy piece of marzipan over the dog's
nose. It snapped and it was gone. I fed it the rest of the
messy stuff, and then Dennis came back in.

'What were you up to in here?' I said to him.

'She wanted her milk,' he said.

'Who did?'

'The little woman.'

I grabbed him roughly by the arms and bent down
to look him in the eye.

'Listen to me,' I hissed at him. 'I've had enough of
you and your little woman. When I go to bed I want to
sleep, right? I don't want to be woken up by your stupid
little tea parties. Got it?'

He nodded. His eyes were wide and frightened.
'Where's Mammy?' he said.

'She's asleep,' I said, 'and she's staying that way.'

I swung him up on to my hip, then I turned out the
light and carried him upstairs.

'I want Mammy,' he said. 'I want to go in Mammy's
bed.'

'She hasn't got a bed,' I said. 'You pissed in it,
remember?'

I dumped him in his own bed and pulled the duvet up
over him, then went back to my own room. Dennis
whinged to himself for a while, but he knew better than to
cry too loud. It was the same with me when I was little. My
ma hated being woken by crying. You had to wheedle your
way around her to get what you needed or else you would
go without. Crying only ever got you a slap.

He went quiet after a while but I still couldn't sleep.
I was listening and listening. But the rain had stopped
and the rats were asleep or out, and the countryside all
around was as silent as the grave.

It was raining again in the morning but it wasn't as bad
as it looked once I got out in it. It wasn't cold. Coley
came down on his bike and let me slow-pedal it back
while he walked along beside me.

'Why don't you get one?' he said.

'I will,' I said, 'if you leave it outside your house
some night.'

He laughed. 'No chance. That cost me three
hundred and fifty euro.'

'They saw you coming,' I said, looking down at it.
'Where did you get three hundred and fifty euro?'

'I got nearly two thousand,' he said. 'This Easter. I
sold my two best bullocks.'

'That must have been sore,' I said. 'Will they grow
back?'

The bullock jokes lasted all day while we worked
on Coley's shed. There were two of them, actually, built
side by side in a grassy hollow behind the main farm
buildings. They were in ruins – nothing left except for
broken walls and a few rotten roof beams.

'Do you know how to fix them?' I asked him.

'Not really,' he said. 'We'll have to make it up as we
go along.'

* * *

We started with the floor, which was a foot deep in
ancient manure. I said I wouldn't touch anything that
came out of the back end of a cow and Coley said he
couldn't make me and started shovelling on his own. But
the stuff was so old there was no smell off it any more.
It was just like black earth. I watched for a while to
make sure, then picked up another shovel and joined in.

Before we had the first load in the transport box all
the plasters I'd put on my fingers had come off. They
were cheap ones from the Two Euro shop that my ma
bought for Dennis because they had pictures of the
Simpsons on them. Completely useless. But the shovel
rubbed different parts of my hands from the bale strings
so I was able to keep going, and in the end the new
blisters I got that day caused me more problems than the
old ones.

When the transport box was full we got in the
tractor and took it over to old Mr Dooley's vegetable
garden. He was delighted when he seen what we had
for him.

'That's the best fertilizer in the world,' he said. 'I've
had my eye on that stuff for ten years. I thought I'd be
dead and buried before you got around to moving it.'

He walked ahead of the tractor and showed us
where to dump it.

'That's it!' he shouted, when Coley tipped up the
transport box and the black stuff came tumbling out.
'That's perfect. I'll have cabbages the size of beach balls
next year with that stuff.'

'God help us all,' said Coley, when we were driving
back to the sheds again. 'As if we didn't get enough
cabbage as it is.'

There wasn't much in the way of a floor in those old
sheds. The black stuff got grittier as we went down, that
was all. When we came to the bottom of the dividing wall
Coley said we'd gone far enough. We levelled off the floors
and hosed the walls, then went in for a cup of tea.

Afterwards I thought we'd be making concrete for
the floors but we were nowhere near that stage yet. We
had to dig drains first, from the middle of both floors all
the way across the grassy patch and down to the corner
where it met the top meadow. It was back-breaking
work with spades and picks and shovels. My new
blisters were swelling up and bursting on my hands.
Coley gave me better plasters but they wouldn't stay on
neither. I kept changing my grip on the tools but whenever
I did I just got a new blister in a new place.

'Don't you ever get them?' I said to Coley.

'I do,' he said. 'A few. In the spring. When I wake
up from hibernation.'

I kept asking myself why I was doing this. No one
was forcing me to do it. I could tell Coley to bullock off
with his meanlings and do it himself. There was nothing
in it for me. I didn't give a fuck about Swedish Lars or
his ma or their Skoda or anything. At least ten times that
day I decided I'd had enough and I was going home. I
never talked myself out of it or changed my mind, but
somehow I just didn't go.

It wasn't that I was mad about Coley or anything.
He was funny sometimes and he was easy-going but he
was nothing like the lads in Dublin. There was no edge
to him. No danger. He was wet. He did what his da did,
and his grandda. It wasn't because of him that I stayed.
I think it was just because there was something happening.
Even if it was only digging a drain or stacking bales
or shovelling shit, it was still something happening. At
home, nothing ever happened.

We were digging all morning, then after dinner we laid
the pipes, which didn't hurt my hands or my shoulder,
and then we filled in the channel again, which did. We
were just finishing up when PJ came home early from
work.

'Is that all you've got done?' he said.

I showed him my hands, and he said, 'Jesus, Mary
and Joseph. We'll have to get you a set of chain mail or
something.'

Then he reached into his pocket and sorted me out
another tenner.

'I know what this is,' I said. 'It's blood money.'

He laughed, and said to Coley, 'Go up, the two of
you, and count the cattle in the bog. And don't let him
touch anything.'

There were about five bikes in the shed. Coley took
out his own one, then pulled out two more before he
found one with air in the tyres. He still had to pump it
before I could use it. It was an old racer with thin tyres
and drop handlebars. When we went past the house PJ
came out again. He waved us down and we stopped.

'Is that Matty's bike?' he said to Coley.

'No,' said Coley. 'It's one Tom had.'

PJ turned to me. 'Give me back that tenner,' he
said.

'No way,' I said. 'You gave it to me. It's mine.'

He reached out his hand. 'Give it back.'

I felt in my pocket. I still had the twenty from
yesterday. I gave him back the tenner.

'Right,' he said. 'That bike is yours. You won't need
any more lifts up, now.'

'Thanks, Mr Dooley,' I said.

'Just don't try and ride it to Dublin, that's all,' he
said.

I stood up on the pedals and raced Coley along the
road. My bike was old and the gears were a bit out of
synch, but it was still a lot faster than his. I told him so
when he called me back to turn in the bog road. I'd
sailed straight past it.

'True for you,' he said. 'But you'll wish you had my
suspension when we go down here.'

I did, and there were more jokes about bullocks, but
I was happy as Larry with my bike. I'd had two bikes in
Dublin – one my ma bought me from the second-hand
shop and a newer one that I robbed. But some other
fucker robbed them both off me. It's not worth having a
bike in Dublin. There's no way you can keep them. They
always get robbed.

Their bog field was miles wide and it took us ages
to walk into all the corners and find all the cattle that
were supposed to be there. There were only about thirty
but they were split up into little groups and we couldn't
go home until we seen them all and made sure none of
them were sick or dead. I wouldn't know the difference
anyway. Coley said: 'You'll learn.'

I said, 'Bullocks I will.'

It was only about four o'clock when we got back
but PJ sent me home and told me to soak my hands
in vinegar and leave them uncovered overnight
and then to find some bandages or something for the
morning.

I left my bike in the front hall because none of the sheds
had locks on them and I was afraid someone would take
it. My ma said: 'Where did that come from?'

'PJ gave it to me,' I said.

'That was nice of him,' she said. 'Did you ask him
for the DVD cable?'

'No,' I said. 'Ask him yourself.'

There was loads of shopping on the kitchen table. A
big bag of dog food, and loads of nice things that we
didn't usually have. Orange juice and Crunchy Nut
Cornflakes and a big tin of Roses and four packets of
fags. My ma didn't say a thing when I put one of them
in my pocket.

'I thought you had no money,' I said. 'I thought
you gave it all to the taxi driver. Where did you get all
this?'

'The shop in the village,' she said. 'They let you put
it on the slate and pay at the end of the week.'