Long Story Short (6 page)

“Oooh,” she said, but she didn't make any more objections to the tea.

We ran like frenzy up and down the beach to get warm before we went for our tea, but it didn't really work because our feet kept sinking in the sand and we couldn't get a good speed up. We just got sand in our shoes. It was a stupid idea to spend the night by the sea. Everyone knows it's the coldest place.

“We should've run on the footpath,” Julie said. “Now our feet will hurt because the sand will rub the skin off.”

“The prom, you call that path,” I said. “Here, gimme your socks, and I'll shake the sand out of them. We can't have your skin coming off.”

When she took her socks off, I could see she was right about her toes being so cold. They were like frozen peas that had seen a ghost. I rubbed her feet to get the blood flowing, and I blew on them to get the last of the sand off and to warm them up.

After we'd had a long cup of tea in a little café, we went into the city and we walked about all day. We saw the boat that goes out to the Aran Islands. They have planes these days, for people and the mail, but I suppose there are things that are still better taken over there on a boat. Like if you bought furniture or something.

“Can we go to the islands, Jono?” Julie pleaded. “Please?”

I knew she was thinking about the story of the kids who ran away to an island and had a cow. I wondered about that. Would cows be moved over there by boat? Or would they put them on the plane? Boat seemed more logical, but I had this image in my head of a cow being winched down from a helicopter. But maybe that was just from a movie, for dramatic effect, you know. I'd say they use the boat all right when they're not making a movie.

She couldn't understand why I said no, we couldn't go to the islands. We'd stick out like a sore thumb, I said. Before we knew where we were, we'd be all over the evening news.

“Why would we?” she asked. “We look normal, don't we?” She looked down at herself, as if to check.

She hadn't a clue. Can you imagine, two kids from Dublin with rucksacks and no visible means of support wandering around Inis Meáin in the middle of February? Gimme a break.

“Ah, but we don't speak very good Irish,” I said. “That'd be a dead giveaway.”

She bought that all right. She gave a little shrug and staggered along with her rucksack. She was beginning to figure out that running away isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Maybe she was even starting to think I'd been right to resist the idea for so long. But of course she wouldn't admit that. We were here now anyway.

I wondered what would have happened if me and Granda had made it onto the train that day, where we'd have ended up. I couldn't imagine him sleeping in a wind shelter, but I suppose he would have had some money. Not like us.

We bought some food for our lunch in a supermarket. Julie wanted a chicken sandwich, but it was four euros, and I said for that we could buy a whole loaf of bread plus some ham and cheese. She sulked for a while because she wanted the chicken sandwich, but, hey, I was in charge of the money, she didn't have a choice.

We found a place to sit in Eyre Square near this mad fountain they have, and I was just making these very artistic sandwiches with the bread and ham and cheese when this drunk came up and started talking to us. Maybe he wasn't really a drunk, but he had a bottle in his hand, and the smell off him was terrible. I tried to ignore him, but he wouldn't go away. He made a big point of telling us about what an intellectual he was, and how nobody ever believed that, just because he was homeless.

In the end, I gave him a sandwich, I thought it would shut him up. I figured he'd have to close his mouth to eat it. But he kept talking even with the food in his mouth.

“So what makes you think you're an intellectual, then?” I said.

I shouldn't have asked. I should have gone on saying nothing.

“I've read Edward Sye-Eeed,” he said. “And
Don Quixote
.”

“Uh-huh?” I said, not sounding very impressed, because I wasn't.

“In Spanish,” he said, as if that was the cherry on the cake. “I translated it actually, into a poem. In iambic pentameter.”

“Great,” I said sarcastically. “I'm very glad to hear it.”

“And the
Inferno
,” he said.

I rolled my eyes.

“That's a movie,” Julie said. “It's about a fire.”

“Nah, it's a poem about fourteenth-century Florentine politics,” he said.

Idiot. Everyone knows Florida hadn't even been discovered in the fourteenth century.

I couldn't wait to get away from him. He gave me the creeps. I was afraid I might turn into him, if we went on living like this on the streets. We'd start to smell soon, I thought. Maybe we should go back to Salthill and have a swim and wash our clothes in the sea. Not a very attractive prospect in an Irish winter, but if you start not washing, that's how you end up, and that was a worse thought than being cold and having salt-stiffened clothes.

I unpacked one of Gramma's banana cakes, and I gave him a hunk of it. Then I put away what was left of the bread and ham and cheese and I stood up and said firmly, “We have to go now.”

His mouth was full of the banana cake and he spat crumbs everywhere, but he insisted on saying, “I'm your man if you want any intellectual conversation. You'll find me here any time, day or night.”

“Yeah,” I said. “See ya.”

I grabbed Julie by the hand, and we marched off.

“I'll tell you all about the Galapagos next time I see you,” he shouted after us. “Your little girl would like that.”

“Would I?” said Julie to me. “What's a galapago?”

“I think it was a battle in the First World War,” I said. “I don't think you'd be very interested.”

After that we found the public library. It was great, lovely and warm and loads of books, and nice friendly librarians. I asked one of them about your man Sye-Eeed—it should be spelled
Said
, I found out, which is a bit hard to get your head around—and she said she thought I wouldn't really like to read his stuff until I am older. I thought that probably meant it was full of sex and violence, but I didn't argue. I didn't want to be drawing attention.

We stayed as long as we dared, and then we went to the cathedral, where they had some big prayer thing going on, with all candle lighting and flowers everywhere; it was very nice and quite warm and it smelled of candle grease and incense and carnations. Wouldn't you hate to be a Protestant and have a church that smells of mold? Though in fairness, I was only ever in one, and maybe it was not typical. Maybe they have lovely ones too that smell of … oh, gardenias or lilacs or something. They haven't got incense anyway. I know that. That's a Catholic thing, it's one of the differences, that and the rosary.

“Let's stay here tonight,” Julie whispered, which was exactly what I was thinking myself, so before the service was over we crept into a confession box and hid there, one on each side of the priest's compartment, and we listened as the people streamed down the aisle, talking in Galway voices, saying
musha
and
yerra
, like in a play—it was very strange.

I was terrified a priest would suddenly decide to hear confessions and we'd be discovered, but it didn't happen, and in the end, the people all went out, and the place fell silent, except for this ticking sound that the central heating pipes made.

And then the priest's door did open after all, but instead of a priest getting in, to hear confessions, one got
out
. I nearly passed out with the shock of it. I could hear the soles of his shoes on the marble floor. What was he doing? Checking his pockets for something or picking his teeth? I stayed frozen inside my confession box, kneeling down—there isn't any other way you can inhabit a confession box, especially not if you have a great big rucksack with you. Sitting is uncomfortable, and lying down is out of the question, unless you are about two feet tall.

How could this man have been sitting within inches of my face for several minutes and not heard me breathing? How come I hadn't heard
him
breathing? I imagined him sitting there with the two little shutters on either side of him closed, not realizing there was a boy on the other side of one of them, and a girl on the other side of the other one. Suppose I'd sneezed? Suppose I'd been chewing gum? He
must
have heard Julie breathing. She breathes with great gusto, if you know what I mean—as if she really enjoys it.

But he didn't appear to have noticed a thing. Maybe those shutters are soundproofed, or maybe he was deaf. Or asleep. He might have been asleep.

I heard a tiny cough then, coming from Julie's part of the confession box. It was so tiny I knew she had tried to muffle it, and I hoped the priest wouldn't hear it. I sat very still, breathing through my ears, and waited to see if he would open her door to check. I could hear his feet still scuffing the floor just outside the confession box.

Seconds passed, they felt like weeks, and then I heard the door of the priest's compartment shutting with the soft knock of wood on wood, and the priest's footsteps moved away up the aisle. A moment later, a far door opened and closed, and then silence fell.

I crept out of my hiding place and opened Julie's door. She had managed to crouch in the dark wardrobey space, with her knees drawn up to her nose.

“Hello?” she said softly. “Jono?”

“Yeah, it's me,” I said. “Did you tell that priest all your sins?”

“Nah, I don't commit sins,” she said, standing up and stepping out of the confession box.

“Pride is a sin,” I said.

“I'm not proud,” she said, quite sure of herself. “It was fluffy in there,” she added, blowing her nose. “And it smelled like the inside of a cutlery drawer. The kind in a sideboard, where you keep the best silver.”

“Right,” I said, only half listening to her babbling, as I looked around. The church was very still and shadowy and it felt vast, but it wasn't quite dark, because there were still candles lit, and a red lamp glowing at the altar, and it still had that heavenly kind of smell.

“How did you manage to keep quiet?” I asked her then. “You must have been like a mouse in there, when he didn't hear you.”

“I fell asleep,” she said with a giggle. “I didn't even snore, did I?”

“Not even,” I said, my mind boggling at the thought of Julie asleep on the floor of the confessional and the priest asleep in his armchair just inches away from her. “You're a topper. Come on, let's get you to bed.”

So we unpacked our sleeping bags and stretched out on a pew, toe to toe, and we both slept for hours and hours. The sleep of the blessed, I suppose you could call that.

8

“Would you think Mammy is worrying about us?” Julie asked the next day, as we were having our morning tea.

“Nah,” I said. “I don't think so.”

“But we are her children,” said Julie. “She'd have to worry, Jonathan, wouldn't she? We should have left her a note, said we were running away but we would be fine and she's not to worry.”

“There wouldn't have been any point in that, Julie,” I said uneasily.

“Let's text her,” she suggested.

I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be handing clues to the police on a plate.

“I never thought of charging my phone in that cathedral,” I said, banging my forehead with the heel of my hand. “It's all out of juice. What about yours?”

“Mine is lost,” she admitted.

“You lost your phone?” I pretended to be surprised. “Where did you lose it?”

“Jonathan!” she said with a giggle. “You
know
the answer to that.” She added, “It's-a stu-pid ques-tion,” in a singsongy voice.

Gramma always said that. If you knew where you'd lost it, she reasoned, then it wouldn't be lost, would it?

Julie turned her palms out flat and held them in front of her in the air like little seal flippers, and then she jiggled them up and down in unison rhythm. I know she gets that from watching cutesy kids on TV, but it made me laugh all the same.

Then she said, “Okay, so in that case, let's send her a postcard.”

Resourceful child, our Julie.

I couldn't think of a good argument against that, and she kept on nagging about it, so in the end I let her get one, but I said she couldn't have a card that mentioned Galway.

“Ah,” she said, and she tapped the side of her nose, to show she understood my devious thinking. “Okay.”

So she chose a Real Ireland one that showed a pub front. It could have been anywhere. Anywhere in Ireland, I mean, it couldn't have been anywhere else.

Julie wrote the card:

Dear Mam

Dont worry were allright.

Love from your kidz

Under that, she signed her name, making the dot over the
i
in
Julie
a little heart. Then she gave it to me to sign too, and she put a row of kisses on the bottom, under our names. They looked like tiny stitches.

We went walking around after that, looking for the post office. We didn't find the main one, but we went into this sweetshop on a corner to get a Twix (because there are two fingers, one for each of us), and they had a little post office counter in there, and luckily there was a cat. I knew Julie would not be able to resist that, so I said I'd queue up and get the stamp and she could play with the cat. As soon as I saw she was fully absorbed, I ducked out of the queue. I used the few minutes to send another text to Annie. Some nonsense about soccer. She likes soccer. I don't. I really have to work at knowing the scores and all, so I can talk to her about it. It's mad, 'cos usually it's the girl that doesn't like soccer. She supports Liverpool for some reason, and Shamrock Rovers.