Long Story Short (2 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

I knew what she wished because I wished it too. We wished we could go to Gramma's.

2

“Jono?”

I woke up out of a dream of snakes, with my breath stuck in my neck. I was never so glad to wake up, but still, it was half past four in the morning.

“For the love of God, Julie,” I hissed. “It's the middle of the night. What do you want? You haven't…?”

She's not a bed wetter, Julie, not really, but she has the odd lapse when Ma gets extra ratty.

“No,” she said, and stamped her bare foot, all indignation.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “So what is it? Nightmare?”

“No. Let me into your bed, I'm freezing.”

“Julie,” I said. “I can't do that.”

“Why not?”

“It's not right. We're too old for that sort of thing.”

“I am only eight.”

“Yes, but I'm a big boy now. Boys and girls … brothers and sisters … don't…”

“That's just stupid,” she said, and she climbed in at the foot of my bed, since I wouldn't let her in at the top, and put her two icy feet on my calves.

I closed my eyes.

“Jono,” she said, “I have an idea.”

“Hmmm?” I said, turning over. I didn't want to encourage her.

“Let's run away.”

“Go back to your own bed, Julie.”

“Why don't we run away?”

“Because … oh, Julie, don't be silly.”

“I'm not. I was reading this book and these children ran off to an island and they made cocoa and they weaved baskets for raspberries. They had a cow.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Sounds dead practical. And it's
wove
.”

She giggled and wriggled her feet in under my legs. “Wove!” she said. “Wove, wove, wove.” She made it sound like a ridiculous word. “Oh wove, wovie, wove, wove-a-doodle, wivvy-wove-wovie.”

“Shut up. Go back to bed. Your feet are warm now, if you run they won't have time to get cold again.”

“My face hurts,” she said in a whiny voice. “It's weally sohe, Jonathan.”

She used not to be able to pronounce the letter
R
, and she still does it when she's looking for sympathy.

With a sigh, I turned on the bedside lamp. Her face was pale and blotched. I thought I could see the bruised part throbbing, but that might have been a trick of the light.

“I'll get you some medicine,” I said.

I pushed my legs out of the bed and padded to the bathroom in the dim light that we left on overnight on the landing because Julie is scared of the dark.

I looked in the bathroom cabinet. None of the Calpol stuff Ma gives her when she's sick.

I fingered a packet of painkillers and pressed one tablet out of its blister. I snapped it in half and sloshed some tap water into a glass.

I wondered if it was okay to give a child even half a tablet. I couldn't read the instructions in the semi-darkness, but I felt reluctant to turn on the bathroom light. I think I thought that if I kept the lights off, then Ma wouldn't wake up. Which made no sense, because her bedroom door was closed. I just felt safer in the yellowy night-light.

I went back into my room, but Julie'd fallen asleep, so I didn't have to poison her after all with the quarter dose of pain medicine.

I left the door to my room half open and went and slept in her bed. It was all rumpled and uncomfortable, and it smelled of her little-girl strawberry smell, and the duvet was too thin. No wonder she was cold.

3

One time when I was not much older than Julie is now, I ran away. Not all by myself. Me and Granda, see, we went off together.

It was his idea. He was a madman, now I come to think of it, but when you are only a kid, you don't notice that kind of thing, do you? You just think adults are all much the same and know stuff you don't know. It doesn't occur to you that some of them might be loo-lah.

He was a right one, was Granda. He'd got this idea they were trying to kill him, and the only one he could trust was me. So one day, when Gramma was out shopping and I was in their house for some reason—I can't remember why—he made me put his things in a wheely suitcase. I remember what I packed. A bottle of whiskey wrapped in a bath towel, a deck of cards, a small radio, his very worst pair of slippers that he wasn't allowed to wear at home, and a handful of assorted clothes that he just pitched out of a drawer and into the suitcase. He never thought of clothes for me, nor did I.

“That's the way they pack in the films,” he said. “Not if they are going on a holiday, then they pack normally. But if they are running away, they just open a drawer and dump stuff in a suitcase. I've always wanted to do that.”

“Why?” I wanted to know.

“It seems so glamorous,” he said.

Glamorous
was not a word that sprang to mind when I looked at Granda. He hadn't shaved for two days and the front of his shirt had got caught in the zip of his fly.

“Are we running away?” I asked.

“Course we are.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Ask me no questions…” he said.

He didn't finish the sentence, but I knew it went, “and I'll tell you no lies.” Even at ten, I knew this was a very unsatisfactory answer to a reasonable question.

We set off for the bus stop. First off, Granda said he'd just take his stick, he didn't want his walking frame, couldn't manage it with the suitcase anyway. But as soon as we were out of the cul-de-sac and onto the footpath of the main road, he decided he needed the frame after all.

“Sit there, young fella,” he said—he never called me by my name, sometimes I wonder if he even knew it, he just called me “young fella.” He used his stick to turn the suitcase on its side, and he poked me in the groin to make me sit.

I stumbled and fell backwards on top of the suitcase.

“I'll be back,” he said, and off he went, into the cul-de-sac again. I sat for ages on the suitcase and fended off what felt like dozens of nosy old women who wanted to know if I was going on my holidays or what?

At last I heard Granda coming, wheezing along, going shuffle-clunk, shuffle-clunk, on the frame.

“How are you going to get on the bus with that thing, Granda?” I asked when he came up to me.

He scowled, as if I'd asked a rude question.

“I've been on the bus dozens of times,” he said regally. “Dozens of times.”

“Yeah, but not on your frame,” I said.

“Course I have,” he said.

I couldn't remember a single time he'd done that, but he was a grownup and I was a kid, so I said, “Okay.”

The bus driver took one look at us and threw his eyes up.

A black lady that was waiting at the bus stop with us took the suitcase for me, so I could concentrate on Granda. I'll never forget it. I had to take the frame from him and put it on the bus and then come back for him. He started yelling at me that I shouldn't have taken the frame, and he made me go back for it. So I had to walk down the aisle of the bus again and retrieve the frame from the luggage compartment, where I'd just managed to squeeze it in, and bring it to the door of the bus, and of course he couldn't lever himself up with it, he couldn't reach it from the pavement, so then he started shouting at me to take the bloody frame away.

I was fit to be tied and dead embarrassed too; we were holding everyone up. I wanted to yell at him that that's what I had done in the first place, that I'd been right and he'd been wrong, but Granda was never wrong. Never.

So I went back through the bus again with the frame and stuck it into the luggage space under the steps, and then I came back to the door and somehow I managed to haul Granda on. A man got out of his seat and helped me to maneuver Granda into it.

“Thank you,” I kept saying, first to the man who had given up his seat to Granda, and then to the black woman who was bringing up the rear with the suitcase.

Granda didn't say thank you to anyone. He just gave this important-looking little wave, like the pope.

There was no room for the suitcase in the luggage area because the frame was in it, stuck at an awkward angle with its little rubber feet in the air. Also, the long handle for rolling the suitcase with had stuck, which made it even more awkward to manage. The woman was still hanging on to it.

“Would any of yous be thinking of paying yiser fares?” the bus driver yelled at us down the bus.

“I haven't paid a fare for twenty years,” Granda shouted back at him.

“Yeah, you look it an' all,” said the driver. “But the boy has to pay.”

“He's with me,” said Granda grandly.

“He still has to pay.”

I was scarlet by this time. I just wanted to disappear.

I stood up and leaned over the suitcase handle, which was at about nose height for me, and I thrust a hot little bundle of coins into the black lady's hand.

“Would you pay my fare for me?” I said.

“Where you going, lad?” she said.

“I dunno,” I said. “Where are we going, Granda?”

“Kingsbridge,” said Granda.

“Never heard of it,” said the bus driver.

“Are you Polish or what?” asked my grandfather.

“From Roscommon,” said the driver. But he wasn't. You could tell by the accent, he was from Ballyfermot or somewhere. He was kidding.

“Jeez-uss!” said Granda. “If it isn't foreigners, it's bleedin' boggers.”

I elbowed him and tried to make a gesture to say the kind lady that had helped with the suitcase was foreign and not to be so rude, but he didn't care.

“He means Heuston Station,” said an ol' one. “I agree witcha,” she said, turning to Granda. “I never can remember either. I always have to stop and think which station is which. They had a right not to change them.”

“They did that in 1966,” muttered another ol' one. “It's time you got used to it.”

I couldn't get my head around the idea of 1966. That's the last century. It's, like, decades ago, lifetimes back. I was trying to subtract 1966 from the year we were in, and I couldn't manage it.

“Is this bus ever going to move?” a woman asked. “Some of us have work to go to.”

She didn't look as if she was going to work. She was all dolled up as if she was going to a party. Maybe she was a model or something.

“I'm not going to Heuston,” said the driver. “I'll take yiz into town. Yous can get a Luas from there.”

“A tram, he means,” Granda said to the ol' one who'd explained about Kingsbridge. “God, wouldn't you just wish they'd leave the bloody language alone and not be monkeying about with the names of everything? It's disgraceful what's going on.”

“It's true for you,” said the ol' one, delighted to have met an old codger as bad as herself.

The woman who'd mentioned 1966 threw her eyes up, and I could hear her thinking,
Get a life
, though she didn't say it.

The black woman paid the fare and brought me my ticket and change, where I was still trapped on my seat behind the jammed handle of the suitcase. She gave me an encouraging little wink, but I didn't feel very encouraged.

I can't remember how we got off, but we had no trouble with the Luas. I remember thinking they should manufacture more buses the same as the Luases with nice flat floors. Some of them are like that, but you can't count on it.

We queued up for ages at the ticket window at the train station. It must have been rush hour or something, because the station was full of people and the queues snaked nearly out as far as the platform from the window where they sell the tickets.

Granda had an old person's travel pass, but he still needed a ticket, and he needed to have a row with them too about my ticket. He wasn't planning to pay for it. He was entitled to bring a companion on his pass, he said, and I was his companion.

I said I thought the companion had to be over sixteen. That was why I'd had to pay on the bus.

“That's ridiculous,” he said. “I never heard such nonsense. I blame the government.”

He was right there, I suppose.

“I don't think I could pass for sixteen,” I said.

“Don't be absurd, boy,” he said. “Of course you can't, you are only a runt of a child. But I'll have it out with them. Just you wait and see. I have no intention of paying a fare for a babe in arms.”

“I'm not a babe in arms,” I pointed out.

He scowled and said, “You know what I mean.” But I didn't.

Anyway, it never came to that, because when we finally got to the top of the queue it turned out that Granda had brought Gramma's travel pass by mistake, and they wouldn't give him a ticket on it.

The ticket seller was a fat bloke with a pasty face. He looked like one of Gramma's cakes of soda bread before she put it in the oven. He had glasses that looked too big for his face, and he wore a creased-looking shirt in a pale color. He had a tie, but he'd left his collar open and the tie was knotted in the wrong place.

“But would you take a look at me!” Granda barked. “What age do you think I am?”

“I am sure you are a great age, sir,” said the ticket seller pleasantly, pushing his glasses up his greasy nose with a fat forefinger, “but I doubt if you are Lulu Kinahan.”

That was Gramma's name.

“It is irrelevant who I am. I am clearly of advanced years; therefore I am entitled to free travel, and I demand free travel.”

“You are only entitled to free travel with a travel pass, sir,” said the ticket man. He was still quite calm.

“And what do you call this?” Granda waved the pass at the window behind which the ticket man sat.

The ticket man actually smiled. “I call that somebody else's travel pass, sir,” he said.

“And do you mean to tell me you are not going to give me a ticket on a technicality like that, you young pup, you?”