The Thing About December (10 page)

There was a May altar abroad in the corridor outside his room. The Lovely Voice told him about it. If you
saw
the one that put it up, you know, and she decorating Our Lady’s feet with daffodils as much as to say there’s a pair of us in it! She’ll be looking for a halo of her own next. Silly slapper!

SOME THINGS IS
easy do, when you have no choice in the world but to do them. Like shiteing into a bedpan, in front of a nurse. Or having bits of you felt and examined and talked about by doctors in quare words that don’t sound like normal English. Thinking about it, it seemed as though it was always that way. It’s easy have things happen to you. All you have to do is exist. Making things happen back is the hard thing. Like words: they’re grand to listen to from other people, and when they’re words spoken by the Lovely Voice they’re like a 99 with a flake in the middle of summer, but it’s fair harder to try to arrange them for yourself. There’s no pleasure in listening to yourself, that’s for sure, only hardship in the knowing of your own stupidity.

The faithful Unthanks came nearly every day to see him. Himself would shuffle around the bed and Herself would tell him sit down and he would huff through his nose like he was annoyed. She would say to Johnsey You poor pet, and Himself would huff again as if in agreement. One day, when he was gone to the jacks or the shop or somewhere, she leaned in closer to Johnsey’s face so that he could smell perfume and bread and Mass off of her and she said Himself never stops talking about it, you know, you getting bet up like that. It’s after upsetting him more than anything ever upset him before in all our lives.

All Johnsey could do was nod.

She said he charged off bald-headed over to the Ashdown Road like a bull, and into the Villas, that first night you were here in the hospital, and he nearly went in the front window of the Penroses’s house and there was four or five of them there, you know, but he saw no fear he was so cross and he effed and blinded and cursed every one of them and told young Penrose if he so much as looked at you sideways ever again it’d be the last thing he ever did, but that crowd only laughed at him.

There was a stinging behind the bandages. Salt on his wounds.
Himself came back and she leaned away again. He was huffing more now, after the stairs.

Will you eat a Twix, Johnsey?

I will. Thanks.

A Twix was easy ate.

THE GUARDS
had come, of course. A fella with a beard in a shirt and tie – a
detective
no less – and a skinny lad in a uniform, the Lovely Voice had told him. That was shortly after he had come round. They had asked him what happened and he had told them he didn’t remember too much except the bit of pushing and shoving and he was knocked and a fella he didn’t know with birds on his neck had taken an awful dislike to him, it seemed. The guards laughed a bit at that. They told him don’t worry, they’d come back when he had his sight back and he could look at a photo and
formally identify
the bird-neck lad, but he had been questioned already and so had his three mates and they had been told in no uncertain terms that they were to stay local. Johnsey told the guards he’d rather they fucked off to be honest and they laughed again and Johnsey nearly felt good about himself for a second or two.

There was a doctor who was a specialist in eyes. He came in most days for a look under his bandages and he’d let a
hmm
or two out of him and he’d go away again about his business. He sounded foreign. His name was Doctor
Fostiwaw
or
Fastibaw
or something quare like that. One day, the Lovely Voice told Johnsey that she just called him Doctor
Frostyballs
and he laughed so much he could feel his cat eater nearly slipping out. A real card, Daddy would have called her. What would he do when he could see again? When his eyes were right and there were no more worries about his swelled head or his bruised kidneys or his
cracked arm, he’d surely be given the road. He wouldn’t be left malinger in this bed, that was for sure. And there’d be no Lovely Voice breezing in and out of the rooms of his cold old house.

PACKIE COLLINS
came in to inspect the patient in his bed and Johnsey imagined him with his face scrunched and his nose all wrinkled up and he looking down through it like a fella would look at something that was stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He wanted to know what in the Jaysus was he at, fighting on the street like that? Johnsey didn’t answer him. He there and then made a decision: he would never again darken the co-op door. He’d minded his little job long enough. That must be the secret to making decisions – don’t think about them beforehand, just do whatever makes you feel most like a proper man. Like Daddy in the mart deciding on a beast or your man in
ER
deciding to leap up on the operating table and ram his hand down a lad’s throat to save his life.

Packie said he’d had to get a little lad in to give him a digout. Things was gone fierce busy. There was going to be a lot of building starting up around and the co-op yard was going to be a sort of a
staging area
for the builders. A little foreign lad, he is. A good little worker now, mind you. Packie must have gotten over the powerful aversion he had to foreigners. Johnsey said You may hold on to him for good, Packie, I won’t be back to you any more, and the minute he had the words said he started to disbelieve that he had really said them; he listened for an echo of them in his brain and waited to feel them settling back down on his face like the fine mist you’d feel off of that waterfall beside the hotel where Mother’s cousin got married that time when he was a small boy. He started to think he hadn’t said them at all when Packie said Well! Well, well, well. Well, that’s the solid Jaysus
finest! Oh begod, don’t worry at all! Sure I was only being foolish thinking Master Cunliffe would appreciate my holding his post open while he recovered from his injuries!

It was easier be brave when you couldn’t see your bravery’s result. You could probably punch a lad in the face a lot quicker if you hadn’t to see his eyes while you did it. He could hear Packie take a step back. He was
taken aback
. That wasn’t just a saying, then. He’d be below in the co-op afterwards reading Johnsey to all who’d listen. He’d label him a blackguard and an ingrate and he’d have a wounded puss on him, but inwardly he’d be rejoicing. You hadn’t to pay foreigners as much – everyone knew that. Packie said Well, well a few more times, and then he was gone.

Well, well.

Good luck so. You auld bollix.

AUNTY THERESA
paraded in at three- or four-day intervals, giving out stink to all before her. She dragged her husband in with her half the time and poor little mousy Aunty Nonie the spinster the other half. Daddy used to call Frank
that poor fucker
and Mother would let on to be insulted on Theresa’s behalf but she’d smile in spite of herself. Daddy used to say about Aunty Theresa that you had to have a business in town and a farm outside town before she’d look at you. There wasn’t many measured up to Theresa’s test of respectability. Even Our Lord Himself had only the carpentry business and no land. Signs on the only ones who’d be pals with Him when He walked this earth were the fishermen and prostitutes and lepers. The likes of Johnsey and his terrible predicaments were sent as a trial for poor Theresa. It was a penance for the few old sins she’d committed, to have a nephew like Johnsey making a solid show of her by getting into such common scrapes. God knows they weren’t much to write
home about, them few auld sins she committed that were being held against her still, but some are given a bigger burden than others and all we can do is suffer on and not give out.

Aunty Theresa said he had their hearts broke. They expected him every Sunday but he was below with them Unthanks constantly. He hardly looked at them above at Mass! He was all that was left of their lovely Sarah and
now
look at the cut of him! Uncle Frank or Aunty Nonie would tell her
whisht
but you couldn’t whisht that one up. It was just too much; it was
too much to bear
, all this constant heartache. One evening she was in full flow about how awful it was about Johnsey fighting with bowsies and what have you and in walked Doctor Frostyballs and she all of a sudden sounded like one of those horsy Protestant ones whose lips don’t fit down fully over their big front teeth who come in to the co-op for feed now and again. She said Hellooo Dawk-tur, but old Frostyballs only gave his usual few
hmms
and shagged off fine and quick. He hadn’t time for mad Irish aunties to be wedging their tongues up his hole. Aunty Theresa said he’d be a very high
caste
now, you know, in India.

He would I suppose, said poor old Frank.

THERE WAS
only one other bed in the room. It was a
semi-private
room. He was in the VHI, and he hadn’t even known it. That meant you got special treatment because some crowd above in Dublin or somewhere would foot the bill. You would get the best of stuff. Imagine that: his mother still had to sort things out for him and she dead and gone. She wouldn’t have liked him to be in a big old ward, anyway; you wouldn’t know what kind of quare-hawks would be in it, Mother would have said.

One time, when Daddy was bad, he’d been rushed in and given new blood and afterwards they’d wheeled him into a big
ward full of auld fellas so they could keep an eye on him. Mother and Johnsey were left stay with him for fear he’d die without company, and a nurse pulled a plastic curtain around them. There was no room available, only the big old ward, stinking of old men and piss and shit and whatever dark medicines were used to try to hold Death at bay. Daddy was dead to the world, drugged to the solid eyeballs. Halfway through the night an auld fella took a figary and leapt out of his bed and threw their curtain back and stood there looking in at the three of them and he without a tooth that was ever known and his bit of white hair standing straight up on his head and shining eyes on him like a greyhound inside in a trap and his old wrinkly mickey peeping out through his pyjamas. Mother hopped out of her chair and made a grab for the old rogue but he sidestepped her and he was gone in between the wall and the side of Daddy’s bed and next thing wasn’t he going at Daddy’s face and Mother was trying to drag him off and a nurse and an orderly ran in and got him back into his own bed and they strapped him to it for a finish and through the whole thing Johnsey had just sat there like an imbecile, looking out of his mouth.

Some help you were, Mother said.

It turned out the old boy was gone mad for the want of a drink. He had never gone a day without a few glasses of stout and a whiskey chaser or two, maybe. That was enough to send a man mad for the want of it, if that man had given fifty years without going without.

A PROCESSION OF
roommates were wheeled in and deposited in the other bed in Johnsey’s
semi-private
room. None of them went at him like that old campaigner had gone at Daddy, thanks be to God. He saw none of them; he only got a few
blurred seconds of sight in the evenings when Doctor Frostyballs was lifting his bandages and doing his
hmm-
ing. All you could make out in those few seconds were a pair of brown eyes and a hairy brown nose. He wished the Lovely Voice could do the bandages so he could see
her
eyes and nose instead. Doctor Frostyballs’s touch was gentle. His
hmms
sounded kind. Johnsey felt a bit guilty for the jokes about him he shared with the Lovely Voice. Well, he listened and laughed anyway. He was a willing accomplice. Sometimes after he was gone she’d arrive on and start taking him off in a foreign accent and it was funnier than Brendan Grace. She would stand at the head of his bed to carry on her blackguarding. He could smell her: roses and medicine.

She’d say: I am reading your chart now. Hmm … yes … hmm … I am seeing that you are not responding to my very brilliant doctoring … hmm … It seems to me as though there is only one course of action left open to us, young mister blind fellow … hmm … and that is to amputate your face! And he’d say how that’d be no harm, anyway, and she’d say Aw, you have a
lovely
face.

They must train them to tell lads things like that who are in bits inside in bed to make them feel better. She was fair handy at it, though. You could nearly let yourself think she really thought you had a lovely face. Imagine his old puss after getting kicked to bits, as if it wasn’t offensive enough to start out with. She was probably hardened to ugliness, having to look at old wrinkly arses and bedpans full of shite for a living.

MUMBLY DAVE
arrived towards the end of Johnsey’s third week as a blind invalid. He wasn’t quiet, but it was all the one – you couldn’t make out a word he was saying, only mumble, mumble, mumble. The Lovely Voice said he’d had a mother and a father of a fall off of a ladder and he’d landed on his face on a fence. His
ribs were all broken like Johnsey’s, his teeth were nearly all gone and he had a broken arm like Johnsey. He had a broken leg, too. His face was swollen and smashed, and his eyes were closed tight from the swelling. They had had to put wire into his jaw to hold it together.

I have a fine pair on my hands now, the Lovely Voice said the first day Mumbly Dave was wheeled in. A fine pair of smashed bumpkins! You could be as bold as you wanted when you had a voice that could send the devil back to heaven. He wasn’t called Mumbly Dave straight away – it took the Lovely Voice nearly half a day to come up with that.
Smashed bumpkins, two blind mice, thing one and thing two
, she gave a whole morning in and out with a new title each time for the pair of them. Johnsey could hear his new compatriot forcing short gusts of air down through his nose each time she breezed through and dished out a little morsel; the painful laughter of a man who’s beaten and broken-ribbed. Johnsey wasn’t fond of this new development: he didn’t want to share the Lovely Voice’s attentions with this clumsy ladder-faller-offer. He wished they’d wheel him away again and bring back a silent geriatric.