Long Story Short (10 page)

“Probably?”

“Yeah, I must have, because I don't remember Ma falling.”

“But she did fall?”

“She must have, because when I woke up she was lying there beside me. She must have pitched forward. Yeah, because she was lying half on her stomach, half on her side.”

There was a long silence.

“I'm not sure I believe that, Jonathan,” said Paudge at last.

I looked up at him. “But it's the truth,” I said. “That's what happened.”

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.

“You are saying that you never touched her?”

“As you said, I did literally touch her.”

“But you did not push her or trip her or fight with her?”

“No.”

“So what makes you think she fell, then?”

“Well, she hardly lay down on the floor beside me because she was sleepy.”

“Or concerned about you?”

Huh!

“I suppose I stepped back when she pushed me, and that made her lose her footing. She would have fallen forward, wouldn't she?”

“You're sure of that, Jonathan? Think very carefully now, before you answer me.”

“Sure of what? I'm not sure. I didn't see her fall, I had passed out.”

“But you're sure you never touched her—except to try to move her to the stairs?”

“Yes.”

“Right. I see.” Rooney closed his notebook and then he closed his eyes. He rubbed them with his hairy fists, and then he opened them again and said, “Well, in that case, can you explain the fact that the forensics people found strands of your mother's hair in your room?”

What was he getting at
now
?

“Well, we lived in the same house,” I said. “She came into my room sometimes, she was my
mother
. Sometimes she even brought me clean sheets.”

She hadn't done that for about six months, but this fat fecker didn't need to know that.

He looked at his notebook.

“Yeah,” he said, “in the sheets, that's where the hairs were.”

My heart started to hammer. I could hear it in my head, like a highwayman coming pounding over the hills.

“What are you getting at?” I whispered. “What are you suggesting?”

“Nothing, Jonathan,” he said. “I'm only asking. But, look, the report says the hairs had roots. We're not talking about hairs that just got shed. We're talking about hairs that got pulled out of her head. Now, that doesn't look so great, does it?”

I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes.

“Listen, Jonathan.” I could hear his voice, even though my eyes were closed. Wouldn't it be good if you could close your ears too? Earlids. “It looks as if there was a fight, and if there was, the best thing you can do would be to own up to it.”

I went on leaning back in my chair, with my eyes still closed, and still I said nothing.

“If you had been scrapping with your mother,” he droned on, “you might have pulled her hair, you know? And you might have had hairs of hers wound around your fingers. That'd explain it. Were you scrapping with her?”

I opened my eyes.

“Scrapping? With my
mother
? Of course I wasn't. Are you mad?”

Paudge sighed. “I'm not mad,” he said. “I'm just telling you what the evidence is.”

“Yeah, you said … in my bed!” I felt sick.

He said nothing.

I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and tried again to remember. I'd put all this out of my head, and now I had to make an effort to get hold of it.

“As I fell…” I said, opening my eyes again, “I think possibly I might have grabbed her hair.”

“Right,” said Paudge. “So you never laid a hand on her, but you did catch her by the elbow, and now it seems you also pulled her hair. I thought you said there was no question of a scrap.”

“No!” I yelled at him. “I wouldn't hit my own mother, for the love of God. I pulled
at
her hair, I mean. Not that I pulled it.”

“That's a very subtle distinction,” said Paudge.

“What I mean is,” I said, “that as I fell … I … well, maybe I clutched for something to hang on to, to stop myself from falling, the way you do when you're losing your balance.”

“You mean, you pulled her down with you, right?”

“Wrong. If I grasped her hair—well, that could happen. Her hair is long, you know. Was.” My voice broke on the last word, but I pulled myself together and continued. “I don't remember, but I did try—I mean, I think I would have tried … to reach for something to hang on to. So maybe I did grab her hair as I fell. It's natural to do that.”

“Hmmm,” said Paudge.

He read on for a moment, his lips moving silently.

Then he looked up. “Well,” he said, “that's fair enough, I suppose.”

I put my head in my hands.

Kate spoke then. “Jonathan,” she said, “I believe you.”

“You keep out of it,” Paudge barked at her. “It's got nothing to do with you.”

Kate didn't reply. She just swung on her chair and looked at him as if he was a very bad puppy who'd poohed on the floor.

I swung back in my chair too, and I kicked the leg of the table. I may even have smirked a little.

Then Rooney starts in at me again: “So maybe you didn't actually kill your mother, Jonathan. I hope that's true. But you left her to die, or you left her dead, and then you scarpered. Whatever way you look at it…”

“I left her to sleep it off!” I hissed. “I left her to sleep it off hundreds of times before. How was I to know that this time…”

“This time, she was conked out on the floor!” said Rooney.

True. But even so …

“She was snoring when I left the room,” I said.

“Snoring? You never mentioned snoring before.”

I ignored that part.

“Dead people don't snore,” I said. Well, that was obvious, but I needed him to make that link. “And I put a blanket over her,” I added. “What else was I supposed to do?”

“Call an ambulance?” he suggested.

“Just a minute,” I said, straightening up in my chair and staring into his face. “Your hypothesis…”

He looked startled at that word. Maybe he didn't understand it. That's a bit mean of me. Okay, maybe he just didn't expect me to know it.

“Your hypothesis is that I'm lying, right? You think she was dead already. That I made the snoring up?”

“Maybe.”

“So now you want me to call an ambulance for a dead person? Well, you know what, they don't do resurrection at any hospital around where I live. So why would I call an ambulance if she was dead?”

Oh, God. I'd walked right into that one. I was arguing the wrong case.

Now it was Paudge who smirked.

“Exactly,” he said. “If I'm right, you didn't call an ambulance because she was already dead, and you knew it. You just left her there and you scarpered.”

“No. The reason I didn't call an ambulance was that I never called an ambulance for her, not once in all the years since Da left, and on every other occasion that I didn't call an ambulance for her, she woke up the following morning. Or afternoon. If I called an ambulance every time she passed out drunk…”

“Except that this time,” he said, “(a) she was dead and (b) you left altogether. That's a bit of a coincidence, isn't it?”

“No.”

“It's not a coincidence? No, it's not. You left because you knew she was dead. Right?”

“I mean, yes. It's a coincidence.”

“Well, which is it? A coincidence or not a coincidence?”

I was confused. “How was I to know…?”

“You didn't think to look in on her in the morning, to see that she was all right?”

What?
My confusion lifted and anger raced through my veins. How come
I
was supposed to be responsible for
her
?

“I
never
looked in on her in the mornings. I waited for her to surface.”

What the hell did he know? All the times I'd put her to bed, taken her shoes off, made sure she had a glass of water and a basin for puking into. All the times I'd cleaned up her messes. All the times I'd covered for her. Ringing her up on dole day.

“Bitch,” I muttered. (I'm not proud of that. I was under pressure.)

“You left her to
rot
,” he said.

I gasped. That was carrying literalism a bit too far.

“For God's sake, Paudge, ease up,” said Kate. “You're bullying him.”

Y
ou stupid old wagon, Ma, what did you need to go and die for?

My chest was heaving with suppressed sobs.

Paudge said nothing for a while. After a few minutes he said, “Right. We'll leave it there for now. Would you like something to eat, Jonathan?”

Food? My stomach was clenching with sobs, but even so, it did a little flip of excitement at the thought of food. Apart from the Penguin bar, I hadn't eaten for hours.

I blew my nose.

“Not if it is any relation to the tea I got earlier,” I said. I have some self-respect.

“Always the bitter word,” Paudge said. “But no. We could go to Max Snacks if you like.”

He could do bad cop, good cop all by himself, this one.

“You're joking!” I said, and suddenly I felt I was going to cry. I've never found the thought of hamburgers moving before, but for some reason, at that point it seemed like the kindest treat, and I was overwhelmed by it.

“No,” he said, hitching up his belt as he stood up from his chair. “I think we can rise to an ol' hamburger. If you're interested.”

That is how I found myself eating a double-decker and chips in a brightly lit yellow-furnished cube of glass with a fat plod and a nice lady with a bad figure, and with unshed tears pricking at my eyelids.

Christ, it's a long, long way from there to here.

12

They'd found a place for me in some kind of home for delinquents, they told me over the Big Burgers. They didn't use that word, but I knew what they meant. It's just outside Dublin, lots of fresh air, they said. I was never a big one for the fresh air, and frankly I'd got more than enough of it over those few days in Galway to last me a lifetime. I'll be crippled with arthritis by the time I'm fifty after all the soakings I got.

Gramma always said she felt sorry for delinquents. She said,
I bet they've had a horrible life. I bet something went terrible wrong in their family.

I never thought I would be one myself.

It was the carrot job that did it. I don't really think they can be serious about me killing Ma, but they'll have no trouble nailing me for the carrot.

It's kind of weird, but even when you know someone is dead, you sometimes have this sort of conviction that it hasn't really happened, and if you do the right thing then they will somehow be undead, and it'll all come right. The only problem is to know what that right thing is.

I was still in that phase. I suppose it's shock or something. I had this mad sort of idea that if I behaved myself properly with this Paudge, then it'd be okay, Ma wouldn't be dead after all. It bothered me, though, that I'd done the carrot job. I had this eerie feeling that this was at the nub of the problem.

Paudge had me worried there for a while, about the hairs. I was even beginning to think myself that maybe I'd done it. By accident. But I didn't. I need to believe that.

I finished my hamburger and licked my fingers. Then I wiped them with the little piece of tissue they give you, and I wiped my mouth too. I folded the tissue up and tucked it into the cardboard box they put those stupid skinny chips in.

“All right,” I said, meaning about what they were calling my
placement
, as if I was a chess piece that they had found a perfect move for. The fight had gone out of me.

“Can I see Julie soon?” I asked.

Paudge looked at Kate. Evidently she was the one they had decided was going to do the dirty work.

“Not just for the moment, Jonathan,” she said softly. “But she's okay. She's well, and she's safe. You don't need to worry about her.”

“Why can't I see her?” I asked. “Is it my da? Is he the problem?”

They didn't answer.

“Well, look,” I said. “Tell yous what. You ask Julie if she'd like to see me, and you'll see. Her and me … well, I'll put it like this, we're very good mates. Look, she brought this book for me to read,” and I pulled
The Merchant of Venice
from my rucksack. “We were running away from home, right, and
she
thought I might just like a spot of
Shakespeare
to keep me entertained. She's a howl, she is.”

“Have you read it?” Kate asked. She was changing the subject, I knew.

“Of course I haven't read it,” I said. “I don't speak Shakespeare. That's the whole point. That's why it's such a hoot that she brought it.”

“It's a good story. You might like it.”

Dream on.
I didn't actually say it, but I raised my eyebrows so she knew what I meant.

These social worker types, like teachers they are. Think they can save you with Shakespeare. It's kind of sad, really. They can't know much about reality.

13

A
NTONIO:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad;

It wearies me; you say it wearies you;

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,

I am to learn.

Yeah, well, it's the only book I've
got
, right?

So, good for old Antonio. He's sad and he doesn't know why. That's a bit of a luxury, that kind of sadness, if you ask me—and even if you don't. It has no cause. It's just a kind of
mood
. Maybe he was a teenager. I doubt if his grandmother has died, his mother has managed to annihilate herself, his father has run off with a young one, he's not allowed to see his little sister, and he's in danger of getting a criminal record because of a kind of overambitious prank with a carrot, or possibly for murder.