The Fields (18 page)

And who
did
tell you about the book? she says, out of the blue, still chuckling as she hits me with it. It was feckin Fr O’Culigeen, I say, laughing my Stag-addled head off, thinking that this is the best bit of the joke so far. Saidhbh stops laughing immediately and says O’Culigeen’s name again, with a mixture
of disbelief and disgust. The joke is over, but I try to make light. Yeah, I say, the mad ole fecker. I tell her that he had it floating around in the sacristy and I thought I’d check it out. I’m trying to be casual, but everything about Saidhbh changes before my eyes. She starts acting like I’m the enemy, and goes dead quiet, and retreats into her own head. She barely says a word for the next ten minutes, and instead just toys nervously with the neck of her Stag bottle. I’m thinking that this is our very first lovers’ tiff, and I start to stand up and suggest that maybe we should be heading back, when Saidhbh suddenly, as quickly as she left, returns to normal. She half trips me up, pulls me to the ground and says, ‘Come here, ye madser!’ Naturally, we start shifting again.

Later, on the way down the dirt track, Saidhbh apologises for being a bit weird back there, and tries to explain, saying that O’Culigeen, since the day he arrived in Kilcuman, has been the Donohue family confessor and a bit of a favourite with her mam, and that she just can’t imagine what a straight-up soul like that, a man of God, is doing with such a filthy book. We walk along in silence for a while, with me saying absolutely nothing, but thinking everything, and not knowing how I could start, what I could say, even if I wanted to say it. Saidhbh breaks the stand-off with a squeeze of the hand, a peck on the lips and a solemn order to forget about it.

It’s also around this time, just over a month later, in fact, that Dad’s tiredness disease gets a name. And the name is cancer. Which isn’t as bad as it sounds. For a start, me and Saidhbh are going through a belter of a time ourselves, first love and all that. An unstoppable honeymoon period of passion and abandon that coincides neatly with a first hint of spring in the mid-March breeze. Which takes a certain amount of edge off the blow from Dad’s news. In fact, it probably sandwiches us even closer into one inseparable super-romantic unit, slammed together for hours in clingy hot hugs of unspeakable sadness, mixed with slow and slightly mournful shifting.

And Dad, fair dues to him, plays down the whole cancer thing like it’s just a very very long and serious life-threatening cold. He doesn’t even use the word ‘cancer’. Ingeniously, he calls it, ‘my neck thing’ – which is where the cancer started. Fiona tells me at night, during the first week, from underneath my bed, that it’s called lymphoma, and that he’ll most likely be dead by the end of the decade, and certainly won’t get to see the 1990s in. She’s brilliant like that, Fiona. No bullshit. Straight down the middle, but with loads of tears on top. I can hear that she’s gagging thickly on her own throat pain as she’s whispering up through the mattress.

They don’t know where it came from, but Dad suspects it might be because of the new microwave. Mam was one of the first women in the street to get a microwave, and for weeks all the neighbouring mams, including Maura ‘tumble-drier-eat-your-heart-out’ Connell, used to file in and watch cold coffee go scalding hot, and frozen rolls go squishy in an instant ping. No one could believe it, and everyone kept eating lots of unnecessary rubbish just to be able to say that they knew exactly what food that had been super-heated in fifteen seconds tastes like. But on the days when
Benny Hill
wasn’t on TV, Dad was a documentary man. And it wasn’t long before he learnt about the possible dangers from cheap Chinese microwave ovens, and what could happen to the human body if the microwaves accidentally escaped and started cooking you from the inside out.

So when the relatives visit, and he comes downstairs for a few brief moments in his scratchy grey dressing gown, with his hair all squashed to the side and his face ghostly and puffed, like he’s been sleeping for ten weeks in a row, but in the bowels of hell instead of on a bed, his voice drops to a whisper and he half covers his mouth – as if he doesn’t want to offend the oven itself – and announces that he blames the microwave. I blame the microwave myself, he says. He also whispers this because he doesn’t want Mam to hear, because in some ways he’s worried that this is like blaming her too. The microwave is her one beloved gadget, purchased after yet another failed family meeting, and designed to lighten the workload involved in looking after us lot of savages. She never tires of getting frozen scones from the deep freeze and popping them in the microwave for ten seconds and then announcing to anyone in the vicinity, whether they’ve heard it a million times or not, ‘Would you look at that!’

So blaming the microwave is like blaming Mam, and even Dad isn’t thick enough to do that out loud. But still he has his theory. When he walks through the kitchen after that he kind of half
ducks when he passes the microwave. Just in case it’s still spewing out cancer-causing rays that might start cooking his few remaining healthy cells. Mam knows how he feels about the microwave, and she should get rid of it. But she doesn’t. Sometimes when I look at her, flitting about in front of it, pressing all the buttons, listening to the beeps and needlessly defrosting baguettes and bridge rolls, I get a funny feeling that, on some deep and dark level, she’s siding with the microwave instead of with Dad. Or that she’s happy to swap the former for the latter. If it was a big Hollywood movie she’d be a woman having a love affair with the very robot assassin who tried to kill her husband. Or maybe, on the same deep and dark level, unaware at best, she bought the microwave precisely to kill him. Fr Jason says that in the quantum world intention is everything, and that the bad feelings you have towards someone are easily translated into real-life physical events.

He says that in all the big quantum mechanical experiments that they do in science labs it’s the thoughts of the scientists that actually affect the outcome of the experiments. Just by expecting a result you find it. And so, if Mam was furious with Dad for being a ghostly passenger in the house, who drifts in each day and falls asleep under his paper, it was only a matter of time before her angry thoughts, with the help of a few stray microwaves, turned into actual cancer in Dad.

Dad, of course, doesn’t tell us, the kids, what’s happening inside of his body. And we’re not even sure what details exactly Mam knows. She cries a lot, at unexpected moments. She’ll suddenly stroke me on the face, burst out crying, and say, ‘He just looks so weak!’ meaning Dad, but staring at me.

Dad himself embraces his neck thing by disappearing off to the hospital and out of our lives for a full three weeks. During this time the house is strangely calm, and punctuated only by brief bursts of
Hart to Hart
on TV, and Mam’s occasional sobs.
I spend most of the time in the downstairs cloakroom, with the light off, on the phone to Saidhbh. I don’t know why I turn the light off, it just makes it more magical that way. We started doing phone chats with me in the hall but it never worked, and she just got annoyed with me being all stiff and worrying that the girls were listening to my love talk. So I quickly changed positions, and dragged the phone, flex and all, into the understairs cloakroom with the coats and the old wellies, hats and scarves and tennis rackets. I sit on the hard cover of the sewing machine and talk lovey stuff to Saidhbh and tell her about life in the house without Dad, and how I miss her arms around me. She, in turn, tells me how boring it is to be studying for your Leaving Cert, and how much extra pressure is placed upon her, being the daughter of a mega-teacher. It’s got to be As or nothing. Especially in Irish.

Naturally, the girls find out about Saidhbh and me during these three weeks, and thus, so does Mam. It turns out to be the best timing in the world because everyone’s so concerned about Dad dying that they think the idea of me having a girlfriend who’s old enough to finish her Leaving Cert and get a job, a husband and have babies, isn’t that troubling at all. Mam is more confused than gutted, like she’s been tricked by Saidhbh all along. And the girls go mental the day they find out – not from me, but from Julie Kennedy, whose brother is in the same class as Eaghdheanaghdh at Coláiste Mhuire ni Bheatha, and who tells Sarah all about how things are getting hot and heavy between me and Saidhbh. Sarah is practically drenched with sweat when she gets in the door, from the run home, and bursts in on the funereal atmosphere with the news that Saidhbh Donohue is now my girlfriend. Mam does her confused face, and the rest of the sisters go all squeally and chatty among themselves. Susan and Claire immediately fling themselves at Mam and say that it’s not fair, because they were told they couldn’t
have boyfriends until they were at least seventeen, and how come I’m allowed to have one at fourteen. Especially when Saidhbh is seventeen! Sarah, noticing Mam’s quiet distress, tells the girls to shut up, and that they’re just jealous because no fellas are interested in being their boyfriends yet. She doesn’t, however, let Saidhbh off the hook either, and instead makes repeated eeuuch faces to Siobhan and says that she always knew there was something odd about that girl, the cradle-snatcher. Fiona, meanwhile, simply sticks her head into the kitchen from the TV room, grinning from ear to ear, and gives me a big bold wink. And then she disappears back inside to complete her session with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers.

I visit Dad only once during the three weeks. It’s the rule. He’s left strict orders for us not to be brought in to see him in such a state, but Mam sneaks us in nonetheless when he’s out for the count just to, well, show us the body. He’s not much to look at, with his mouth hanging dry, wide open, his moustache all grey and patchy, and tubes coming out of both arms. Mam actually says, There’s your father, when she shuffles us inside, as if we wouldn’t know which one of the blue-skinned cadavers we belonged to. Fiona says later that Mam was doing this for herself more than for us. Because she couldn’t carry the burden alone of seeing him every day like this, and so bringing us all in was a way of making it normal for her.

The house, as I say, is dead quiet during this time. Some neighbours drop by to give Mam hugs and say that it must be awful having a hubby as poorly as Dad. They occasionally come in for coffees and biscuits, but you can tell that they’re going through the motions. The chat too is a bit serious and quiet, and no mention at all of the gruesome war stories that normally keep them afloat. Not a fatal accident, a drowning or a decapitation among them. It seems that when death is staring you in the face, it’s the last thing you want to talk about.

Gary comes over with his mam, and we drift off upstairs and put on a bit of Bronski. Gary, like me, is a fan of Bronski Beat, and is quite happy to sit in silence and lip-synch to words about me and him fighting for our love without feeling a hint of embarrassment. We are back being best friends after Gary saved my life over the whole
Story of the Eye
thing. He was amazing. Cool as a cucumber when Mam marched me to his front door and asked to speak to him and Maura at the same time. When Mam turned to Gary and asked him about
The Story of the Eye
he didn’t even hesitate, or even look to me for hints. Simply stared back at her and said, half sheepishly for effect, that it was a book he had heard about from Mozzo. That sealed it, there and then. Mam and Maura looked at each other and said, together, That fella! And then Mam came in for coffee and I told Gary that he was, officially, my hero for ever.

Gary wants to know all about Saidhbh and everything we do, but it doesn’t feel right to give him all the gory details. Partly because, as Gary keeps reminding me, not many fellas my age have girlfriends, especially not seventeen-year-old school-leaver girlfriends, and partly because there aren’t really many grisly details to report. Me and Saidhbh are strictly shifting for the moment. We meet up every second night, for a spring evening stroll and a shift, even if it’s only for an hour in between her packed study units. Her study timetable has been devised by her father, who has broken up her entire non-school day into hefty and continuous revision chunks – with only brief breathers for food and fresh air. I fit into the fresh-air category. We meet down by The Sorrows’ canal, and we walk all the way to the college grounds in Belfield. On the walks Saidhbh will point out the different buildings on campus – the library, the students union, the bar – and imagine, and worry, and wonder about what it’s going to be like next year when she’s a proper adult student.

And even though her best and her favourite subject is art, she
is determined to go and study history, because her father says that it’s the easiest way to get into teaching, and because it’s good to know everything possible about what happened to the country you live in, and about the ins and outs of Ireland’s glorious past.

Sometimes I ask her, even though I know the answer, Yes, but what does she really want to do, underneath it all? Surely she wants to do art in real life, no? She says no, and adds that there’s no such job as art. And then she stares at me with a scrunched-up face that implies there is no other job on the planet that anyone can possibly do that isn’t teaching, so why did I ask the question? She calls me a madser and turns it round by tickling me in the ribs and asking me what I want to do when I grow up. She’s teasing me here, about being a baby who’s going out with a real woman, but I take the sting out of the tease by saying that when I grow up I want only one thing, and that’s to still be her boyfriend. She goes a bit gaspy on this, and pulls me close. We head to our usual spot, the tiny manicured copse in between the bar and the playing fields, and start, again, to shift like crazy.

So, yes, me and Saidhbh are strictly shifting for the moment. Or rather, I’m strictly shifting. It’s not that Saidhbh is trying stuff on left, right and centre, but any time she does, like the time she started to inch her tongue into my mouth, I go a bit mad and freeze up totally, and stop working my jaws and everything. I do the same thing if she starts running her hands down my sides towards my belt. I just freeze until she gets the point, and it’s back to stage one.

Saidhbh is brilliant about this, and she doesn’t seem to mind at all. The way I figure it is, after Mozzo’s roamin’ hands and rushin’ fingers, she’s probably thrilled to have in her arms a lover who’s a little less, well, keen. I’m not sure exactly why I can only do shifting and nothing else. I’m guessing it has something to do
with being a full-time altar-boy rape victim, but I’m hoping if I persist I’ll eventually loosen up in the sex department. In the meantime, as a couple, we are becoming magic at the actual shifting itself. Just the right amount of pressure, the lightest hint of saliva to ease the chafing, and a near-perfect rowing speed. We lie on the grass, anywhere we can, and we get down to it. Not a word between us. And sometimes as we’re doing it – open-close open-close open-close open-close – it’s like we reach this trance-like state of total oneness. After one of our sessions, a big one, a big forty-minuter, Saidhbh emerges with tears streaking down her face, saying that we had gone to truly deep places. She jokes that maybe it’s the lack of fresh oxygen getting into her lungs, but at times she feels like, right at the climax of the lip-lock, she is truly tripping into other dimensions. She says she sees colours, blues and purples mainly, oozing before her eyes, and her mind completely goes blank in love. She says that our shifting is the best secret that any couple have ever discovered and she understands why I never want to stop.

We do shifting in the field next to the Ballydown terrace houses, just before Saturday’s Mass. We must have some evidence of it still on our faces because when Saidhbh drops me down to the sacristy O’Culigeen goes completely mental.