The Thing About December (16 page)

Good man, Johnsey, begod. It sure was better than
I’ll have to ask!

THERE’S A POEM
a fella wrote about how he’d see old men who reminded him of how his father looked when he died. He said

Johnsey learnt that whole poem off by heart in school. Now he only remembered that first verse. August is the very start of autumn. Some things ripen in August, having drunk the sunshine all summer. Other things start to die and fall away to nothing. You’d always start to feel the nip in the air in August. You’d be scalded red at a match and by the time you arrived home that evening the sun would have tired from the fight and would have let the cold, white moon chase it back behind the hills. The sun does be weaker in August, watery, not able to keep a whole day warm.

Daddy died in August. All that last summer, while all about him grew and bloomed, Daddy shrank and slowly died. He fell in love with death, like your man’s father.

MUMBLY DAVE
arrived on the first day of August, and everything changed. Johnsey spotted him coming from the haggard wall. He came in the gate nearly sideways, revving like a madman and his tyres screeching their protest at his showing off, in one of them cars that used to make Daddy shout Look at that feckin YAHOO when they went flying up the road past the gate. Johnsey’s heart cartwheeled in his chest. Imagine feeling such joy at the sight of a fat little
plámáser
! Mumbly Dave hugged Johnsey, like one of them Mafia lads. It felt like falling into a pile of hay that was warmed by the sun after a long day’s labour. He drew back fast for fear Mumbly Dave would sense his enjoyment and think he was a queer. Mumbly Dave was talking away ninety. No change there. He had a fine mouth of permanent falsies, so gone was the Mumbly and all that was left was Dave. He spun full circle for fear he wouldn’t see something and next thing he was gone, darting through the gap between the slatted house and the workshop into the big yard on his short legs before Johnsey could protest.

Johnsey didn’t like the big yard; it was too full of nothing now where once it was a place of running muck and beasts passing on their way to the parlour and Daddy’s
hups
and
shcoo-ons
and the smell of shit and diesel fumes. But now that Mumbly Dave had planted himself in the middle of it, it seemed more alive again, less like one of them ghost towns you’d see on a Western and more like a place that could be woken out of its sleep and put to use again.

Mumbly Dave read Johnsey over leaving Daddy’s Land Rover and Mother’s Fiesta to crumble and rot, and promised to get them
going. He marvelled at the size of the hay barn and guessed you could ram twenty apartments into it.
Ha?
Course you could. No Jaysus bother, boy. He darted in and out of the outhouses, jabbering away all the time, for all the world like one of them chubby monkeys that swing around the trees below in Fota Island.

By Jaysus, youssir, I’ll tell you one thing, you’re the talk of the village below. There’s some maintains you’re after
twenty million
for this place! You’re dead fuckin right, youssir.
Twenty
 … 
Jaysus
 … 
million
. Dave paused to shake his head and whistle. And you know what? You’re dead fuckin right! Woo-hoo, boy! Them fuckin McDermotts and the Collinses and their big leader Herbie Grogan and the rest of the con-fuckin-sortium as they call themselves, you have ’em quare fuckin
rattled
, boy!

It didn’t seem fair to knock the wind out of his sails. Just by doing nothing, too afraid nearly to venture past the gate, save for first Mass on Sundays, he had the village below in uproar. Signs on he’d been getting quare looks above at the church and along the road home. He’d thought it was to do with the beating but now it seemed it was more to do with him being a money-hungry blackguard and trying to fleece all them hard-working business men and they only trying to give jobs to people and make the world a better place. He seemed to have made Mumbly Dave happy at least. He thought of Paddy Rourke and his wife the time of the wild calf and how Paddy was condemned as a man who’d beat up a woman. Mother was right. People will think and say and believe what pleases them. The truth is what’s shouted loudest and by the most. What about it? Let them all off to hell. That’s what Daddy would have said.

Johnsey told Mumbly Dave all about Herbert Grogan and his big auld spiel and how he’d told lies about Daddy having planned all along to sell the land and how it was Daddy tried to get the land rezoned originally and all about Dermot McDermott trying
to trick him into selling the land to them because they were
mar dhea
after getting a bigger milk quota and wanted to be
sure of the land
, and Mumbly Dave shook his head and spat like Paddy Rourke and said how them Grogans would buy you and sell you and they’d tell you black was white and that McDermott was only a bollix anyway, and his people were pure grabbers, sure the whole place knew that.

Mumbly Dave wanted to know how’s it they was never friends years ago? Johnsey ventured that they went to separate schools and were a good few years apart, anyway. Mumbly Dave allowed that this was so, and said he was forever forgetting that Johnsey was only twenty-four. Johnsey never heard talk of friendship before between two men. He wondered had Daddy and Jimmy Unthank and Paddy Rourke ever declared themselves to be friends, or was their bond left go unmentioned, unmolested by words? Johnsey got the impression that Mumbly Dave could talk himself into things and out of things until the cows came home and none of his declarations of friendship or enmity would carry much weight when all was said and done. But still and all, for days like this, when that auld clock inside was ticking and tocking its cruel beat and a man had little to do besides look in over the haggard wall and wonder how a universe so packed with stuff could have left a space this empty, Mumbly Dave’s declarations of fondness and friendship, weighty or not, were as welcome as the sun when there was hay waiting to be saved or turf to be footed.

FOR A FINISH
, Mumbly Dave called up nearly every day that August. The days he didn’t call stretched out their legs and took their own sweet, maddening time in passing. Those days, he looked at the telly and the telly looked back and outside the milky
sun shone down on a world that seemed to be going to waste when there was no Mumbly Dave to go out into it with. The days he did call galloped past, because that’s the way time is – it’s not a
constant
either, like that science teacher said. Going to town in Mumbly Dave’s car to look at wans in miniskirts or walking down the Callows and firing stones into the river like bould children or sitting around the kitchen looking out at the rain and drinking a few cans of Harp with Mumbly Dave talking and talking and talking all the time – doing these things made time speed up so you’d barely be finished laughing at Mumbly Dave’s slagging of a wan’s fat arse or some fella’s gimpy walk or a young fella with the head dyed off of himself or whatever new tall tale he had to tell and you’d look at your watch and you’d realize you were going to miss
Home and Away
and you didn’t even care.

Mumbly Dave was going to claim a fine whack of money off of Timmy Shaughnessy who everyone called Timmy Shake Hands on account of how he’d always greet you with a handshake. Timmy owned the stand on which he’d placed his ladder, which had then collapsed and spilled ladder and Dave onto the hard ground and his fall only broken by the edge of a wall and the ladder was the finest but you know yourself how
I
fared out, wasn’t I in smithereens? And Timmy Shake Hands could claim recompense from the council who owned the house the gutters of which he was cleaning and sure they could claim from the Board of Works who had ordered that the house be tidied up in the first place and the house should have been knocked long ago anyway and wasn’t that what insurance was for, to compensate a man for his pain and suffering? And that solicitor lady was taking no prisoners, that was for sure. She was a fine thing too, bejaysus.

Mumbly Dave had the world of stories about things he’d done and seen and places he’d been and women he’d gotten off with. He’d shifted every girl who was roughly his age in the parish
and most of the girls in surrounding parishes. He was solid
red
from riding. He’d even point at wans inside in
town
and claim to have gotten a shag off of them! Besides making himself out to be a great lover of women, Mumbly Dave was forever telling stories about
the lads
. Me and the lads, one time, we went away to Cork for the weekend. Jaysus youssir, twas some craic. Me and one of the lads took two cracking women home one time and one a them turned out to be an awful lunatic and she went for your man with a broken wine glass, twas a solid scream! Me and the lads used be forever fighting with them townies inside in the nightclub and one night I was cornered by three of the bowsie fuckers and I was on my own on account the lads had all gone away early but I nutted one prick in the snout and lamped another in the balls full force and the third bollix turned and ran and I didn’t even bother chasing him, only stopped a cab, and there was a wan waiting for a cab as well and we said Feck it to hell, we’ll share, and I ended up shifting the face off of her in the back of the cab and as I was paying your man he just looked at me and shook his head and he just said
Legend
.

Johnsey never saw any of these lads, though, nor heard their names. When Mumbly Dave blew his horn and saluted fellas along the road with the back of his hand flat against his windscreen, they as a rule returned his friendliness with a bare raised finger or nod of the head or not at all. And Mumbly Dave never made good on his promise to bring Johnsey for a few pints. Sure what harm? A few tall tales never hurt anyone, and he had survived grand so far without going to pubs. Mother often said someone she enjoyed was a
tonic
. Like that person was good for her. Now he knew what she meant.

THE PHONE HOPPED
most days, and when he answered it people wanted to ask him questions and tell him things and talk about auctions and commission and what he wanted to do and for a finish he found a volume yoke on the bottom of the phone and he turned it down to the last and that was an end to the torture of having to mumble half-truths to strangers and hang the phone up on them. But that was only like when that little Dutch fella stuck his finger in the hole in the dam – he could feel the pressure building up in the silent phone of all the unanswered calls and all the people wanting to talk to him and ask him things and tell him how much he could make and what an opportunity he’d been handed and after a few days he could hardly walk past the hall table where the phone sat without feeling like it was going to go BANG and burst all over him and drown him in angry voices and big urgent words.

After a few visits, Mumbly Dave took to walking straight in, without knocking on door or window. The first time he did it, he stood in the doorway of the kitchen looking in at Johnsey and Johnsey looked back at him from the table where he was eating a cut of toast and having a sup of tea and Mumbly Dave asked him had he a problem
mar dhea
he was going to fight with Johnsey and Johnsey tried to stop himself laughing and told him he had some neck sauntering in like he owned the place and Mumbly Dave said he was very sorry, it was just that Sir Godfrey Blueballs the Butler seemed to be indisposed today, otherwise he’d have announced his arrival, you bollix, and they both started laughing and sure what about it if he walked straight in, you’d hear him coming from the far end of the village in his yahoo car, anyway.

That’s how Johnsey got caught with the newspaper fella. It was getting on towards half-eleven one day, the time Mumbly Dave normally arrived and they’d drink a mug of tea and eat a Mikado or a cut of tart if the Unthanks had been up before,
planning whether they’d have a city day, a video day, a cans-of-Harp day or a do-nothing day. The doorbell rang and Johnsey roared Come in, it’s open, and just as he was wondering why the Jaysus Mumbly Dave had reverted to doorbell-ringing, a right-looking quare-hawk presented himself at the kitchen door and smirked and said Mister Cunliffe I presume, like that fella that went looking for the other fella in the jungle, in one of those accents like you hear now and again if you’ve the car window down and it’s lunchtime in the city and there’s young lads passing the car from the posh school, Mount Something. The quare-hawk said he worked for a newspaper and he had a square yoke with his picture on it and small writing and he wanted to know could he ask Johnsey a few questions about his part in the local land deal and Johnsey felt that tightness in his stomach and lightness in his balls that he’d hoped he’d never feel again, and he wasn’t even sure why. He said No, you can’t, I thought you were someone else, that’s why I said to come in, you’ll have to go, and the posh-accent lad said Oh right, no problem, so I’ll just put
no comment
will I, because everyone else around here has a comment about
you
, and the way he said
you
it sounded like he couldn’t stand Johnsey and thought he was better than him. He had the head of a right dipstick, Daddy would have said.

The quare-hawk was backing along the hall and Johnsey was walking towards him and he kept talking all the time, asking was it true that Johnsey wanted twenty million for the land and was he aware that the planning authority had given provisional approval to plans by a local development company that were contingent on the sale and did he feel he could just name his price because of this and did he have any feelings of guilt? And just as he backed through the door and into the yard, another lad, with a spotty, sneaky face, walked out from behind the jeep that must have free-wheeled into the yard because Johnsey hadn’t
heard it coming, and he took Johnsey’s photo with a camera that looked more like a machine gun. And then they were in the jeep, and the posh lad stuck his arm out and there was a little card on the end of it and Johnsey took it off him and the posh lad said If you change your mind about making a comment, give me a
coal
, and they were gone. Give him a coal? Oh, ya, a
call
.