The Thing About December (15 page)

He turned away again and swatted the air once with his hand as he walked as much as to say to hell with this, you’re only a gom, I’m wasting precious time trying to talk sense to you. With a hawk and a spit he was through the gap and gone. Johnsey felt like running after him and grabbing his arm and imploring him to stay a while, to at least drink a mug of tea and maybe tell more about the plans for shooting yahoos and clearing McDermotts and maybe he’d explain the secret of filling lonesome days for years on end and Johnsey could in return reveal his secret about Siobhán and surely Paddy Rourke would think more highly of him if he knew he’d had relations with a beautiful nurse and he might take back some of what he said about Johnsey being like a meely-mawly of a calf. But he knew further talk would only make him feel more foolish. Better to accept that men like Paddy started conversations, had them and ended them with no need of input from the likes of Johnsey Cunliffe, the disgraceful end to a long line of great men. Men like Paddy said their piece and shagged off and wouldn’t countenance backchat.

Johnsey longed for Siobhán and Mumbly Dave. He wondered if he fell and split himself open would he land back inside in his grand semi-private room and would she be there to receive him and would Mumbly Dave still be inside, bullshitting out of him and smiling and laughing non-stop and slagging the nurses and being forward and annoying and forcing people against their will to like him? More likely he’d be consigned to the mental ward if he kept up this auld cribbing and moping about the place.

The morning sun was fairly beaming down and all the trees were heavy with green and there was a haze of flies and bugs and butterflies about the land and all he could do was think about how some lives are full to bursting with people and work and sport and children and fun and his own was all empty spaces where those things ought rightly to be, were he the kind of a man that could close his fist around opportunity and keep a tight howlt of it rather than shrinking from it and hiding inside in his parents’ house nearly too scared to even peep out for fear of failure and ridicule. Why couldn’t he have been born with a full quota of manliness?

HE WAITED
until Paddy’s words settled softly on the cracked ground and the air was again still. There was a coldness around the door of the slatted house, despite the sun’s best efforts. The door let out a sigh as he pushed it inwards, as if giving out about his return. He stood in the opening with the sun warming his back and the darkness inside cold on his face. He remembered how he had tried to work out how best to fasten a rope to the crossbeam, how to get himself up to the required height, how to fashion a noose properly, whether it would be best to jump outwards a little off the edge of the enclosure or just drop his whole weight straight down. He remembered thinking first about
Mother and then about the Unthanks and even about the aunties and the biddies and how it would upset them in different ways; some would be truly sad and more would be embarrassed, and once or twice he pictured Eugene Penrose and the yahoos and how they’d be smirking about the village as he was waked and letting on to be reverent and full of sorrow as they sniggered with their heads bowed and they crossing themselves as his little cortège passed on its way to the Height and no one who walked behind the hearse would realize he was being mocked even as he was being carried to his place of rest, in between Mother and Daddy in the warm earth.

He backed out into the sun, away from the sharp, cold stink. He resolved there and then that there would be no further considerations of mortal sin in the slatted house. He decided to go upstairs and look in the famous box of papers in Daddy’s office. That’d give things to think about besides them old black notions surfacing and whether or not he’d ever clap eyes on Siobhán again let alone feel her lovely soft fingers gripping him and whether he really wanted to go to a pub with Mumbly Dave, it would surely only lead to more embarrassment and situations he would be unable to fit himself into and it was all the one anyway, that fella had no notion of calling up for him no more than the man in the moon.

Dermot McDermott was doing the second cut of silage abroad. Johnsey could hear the big John Deere beyond, roaring over and back across the river field, Daddy’s favourite field of all. He wouldn’t have cut silage in it and upset the lives of the creatures of the riverbank; he always had the few dull acres down towards the village set aside for silage. No sign of that shagger back looking to buy the land; he knew he was caught out in a lie about milk quotas and what have you. The McDermotts knew all about this rezoning business long before Johnsey and had planned to
pull an awful stroke. Let them, to hell. Money is their god, Daddy would have said, and they may as well enjoy it now. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. That was one of Daddy’s excuses for his lack of cuteness. Them McDermotts would manage it, though. They’d stand above at the Pearly Gates and bamboozle Saint Peter with their wounded faces and assertions of righteousness, the same way they do be cocked up above in Mass directly in Father Cotter’s view, looking like the church was built around them. He headed for the front door and the famous box of papers with the whooping cough of the John Deere being rammed into gear in pure crossness grinding against his eardrums.

THAT BOX HAD
nothing in it only confusion. Bits of letters and yokes from banks and insurance companies with big words and lists of figures and two Credit Union books, one with his name in it and one with Mother’s and Daddy’s names together. God only knows how a fella would go about converting these things into cash-money. He had a card and four numbers Mother had made him remember and he was able to use that at the hole-in-the-wall below in the village to take out money that Packie Collins had put into his account every week, but he had rarely bothered before Mother died and now he only used about thirty or forty quid a week for the few bits to have in the house, like milk and ham and biscuits and them frozen yokes that was easy do in the microwave.

Now that he had given himself the road out of his bit of a job, Packie’s money would sooner or later run out. He’d have to make proper shapes at them auld bits of paper then. There was a button you could press that said
balance enquiry
on the hole-in-the-wall. He’d have to see about pressing it one of the days. Feck it to hell, this auld box was too much trouble. He had a right
to listen months ago when these things were being explained besides sitting there like a gom and wondering how long would it be before he could stop nodding and saying Oh right, grand.

He walked down as far as his own room for a look out of the window at the yard. It was hard not to look out and harder again not to expect to see Daddy swinging in on his bicycle or Mother chugging through the gate in the Fiesta, barely clearing the piers. One of them teachers inside in the Tech had explained one time what
seeing
really was. He’d thought about it a lot when he was blind. When you look at a thing, the light of the sun bounces off of that thing and into your eye and a message is sent from your
retina
on along up the
optic nerve
to your brain, which then tells you what it is you’re seeing by forming a picture for you. So you don’t really see a thing as it is, only your brain’s version of what it is. Johnsey learnt all that stuff off by heart and wrote it out in an exam one time and still only got a D. D for dunce. He’d memorized the seeing stuff so well he’d left no room for the other bits. What about it, it was all the one now. His detached retina was attached again and it was working away the solid finest and it was now sending light up along that old optic nerve to his bit of a brain which was showing him a picture of a person in rolled-up shirt sleeves and important-looking trousers and a fine, shiny, bald spot coming in along the yard. It was that man of the Grogans who owned the shop and the undertakers and what have you below in the village that used to grig Mother something awful. Oh Lord, what now?

HE TOOK
Johnsey’s hand in both of his and started speeching out of him without preamble. Like Paddy Rourke, except while Paddy’s speech was about how Johnsey should shoot Eugene Penrose and the yahoos, this speech was about how Johnsey
should sell the land, without delay, to a consortium of mainly locals who had progress and employment at their heart. Surely Jackie had told him all about it; it was going on years, this planning for the
land bank
, sure wasn’t Jackie as much a driving force behind the whole idea as anyone, sure hadn’t he
lobbied
for the rezoning, and now that the planners had seen sense all that was left was for a deal to be done with regard to the sale of the land and plans could be submitted for the
redevelopment
and work could begin almost immediately. Wasn’t it a heartbreaking thought that Jackie, Lord have mercy on him, wouldn’t see his plans come to fruition? But wouldn’t he be happy that the council inside had saw sense at last and his son and his son’s children please God could prosper because of him?

This man who had hardly looked in Johnsey’s direction below in the village in twenty-four years was now grasping his hand the very same way people did at Mother and Daddy’s funerals and was smiling with his lips peeled back from his teeth and gums like a German Shepherd and breathing hot words all over him.

Herbert Grogan said You know I was a great friend to your father, Johnsey. Everyone knows that. I had great regard for him, and he for me. He was no daw, Johnsey. He could see past his own nose, not like some. There’s fellas going to sleep poor tonight, Johnsey, that’ll wake up tomorrow millionaires. Cattle that was eating ordinary grass yesterday is shitting gold today. This all happens, Johnsey, without any effort on the part of them fellas. They were up early milking and foddering all their lives and doing the same few auld jobs day in, day out, with no thought beyond going to the mart and buying and selling a few beasts and waiting to see what would they be handed in the line of a grant from Europe or what have you. All the effort and fightin and pullin and draggin and Jaysus hardship that makes all them magical millions appear for them fellas is done by the likes of
me. Feckin eejits that we are, we can see potential, po
-tential
, Johnsey, in them miserable wet fields where neither beast nor man ever really thrived, for something great that’ll benefit all and give jobs and security and happiness. That’s all we want to do, Johnsey, is give jobs and better this community and build for the future. Some says we’re mad. More says we’re
visionaries
. More again calls us crooks and says we’re only in it for all we can get for ourselves! Lookit, John, I don’t give one shite what any of them says about me, there’s as many auld begrudgers around here that wants to see no one have anything only themselves as there always was – the same auld crowd that used sell their neighbours to the English long ago. Let them off to hell, Johnsey, they’ll die bitter and there’ll be no tears shed for them.

ISN’T IT
a fright to God to say a man could end up being a bar to progress and could deny jobs to half the village and wealth to all just by being alive and that the low esteem he was held in by his fellow man could be further reduced by matters in which he had no hand, act nor part? Doesn’t that just bate all? Seemingly the whole village was all of a sudden looking out of their mouths at him to know what would he do about selling the land to this
consortium
of bigshots so they may get on with their plans for houses, shops, a school, new roads and what have you. And none of it for profit – all them great men wants is to
give employment
, according to Herbert Grogan. The Creamers and the McDermotts and Paddy Rourke had apparently all already entered into
agreement-in-principle
with regard to their share of this famous land deal. Johnsey wished Paddy had explained more to him about this business instead of telling him he was a meely-mawly and urging him to do impossible violence.

The box in Daddy’s office seemed like a pathetic thing now.
All of Mother and Daddy’s work, the foddering and milking and calving and lambing and shearing and up and down and over and back to mart and abattoir and co-op and all of Mother’s saving up and putting away and rows with Daddy over having notions and throwing money around and all of Daddy’s long, hard, slogged-out days of laying blocks and they may as well have sat on their arses and drew the dole and watched television all their lives because the few quid that would be the realization of them bits of paper in Daddy’s box would be like pebbles inside in a quarry when compared to the sort of money the bigshots wanted to pay for the land.

Johnsey thought again of Our Lord after his forty lonesome days and nights and he famished and parched in the desert and the devil creeping around with offers of thirst quenched and hunger sated and all the riches of the world. And all Jesus wanted to do was tramp the road with his pals and tell all about His Father. It must have been great until them bitter Pharisees told on Him and the Romans got thick. It must have been brilliant having all those friends
and
magical powers to feed the multitudes and make wine from water and the dead arise and appear to many. What had he? A farm of land already usurped and about to be grabbed away for good and covered over with concrete and no pals to speak of and barely power enough to turn on the washing machine.

That Grogan man was finished talking. Now he was looking at Johnsey with his bottom lip shoving his top lip up towards his pointy nose like one of those men who don’t roar and shout at matches, only watch quietly with their arms crossed. Was he waiting for Johnsey to say something? At least he wouldn’t say
I’ll have to ask
this time. Should he invite him in? A vampire has to be invited in; otherwise they can’t cross your threshold.

Johnsey told Herbert Grogan he was going to talk to his accountant and thanked him for calling up and backed up the
yard towards the front door with one hand reaching behind to guide him in. Once he had the door closed he stood still a while and waited for the sound of retreating footsteps and an engine starting outside the gate and when these sounds came he could breathe again and wonder where he came up with
I’m going to talk to my accountant!