The Thing About December (24 page)

You’re a horrible jealous yoke. That’s all you are. You fairly latched on to Johnsey because you had no one else and he’s too nice to get rid of you. You’re a big, fat, friendless loser, Dave. That’s all you are. Why don’t you go back down to your council hovel and ride your sister or whatever it is ye do for fun down there? You
freak
.

Mumbly Dave had no answer. Or if he did, he hadn’t the stomach for the saying of it. He looked at Johnsey and there was a big fat tear rolling slowly down his cheek and it flung itself on to the floor and Johnsey turned his face away from Mumbly Dave and stared at the little star-shaped puddle that the tear made and when he looked up again, his friend was gone.

IT WAS
Minnie the Mouth who came to the door the next day to tell Johnsey the news. Sure, why wouldn’t it have been? She fattened on the telling of sorrowful tales, and everyone has to take their pleasure where they can. Minnie the Mouth said wasn’t he a pal of yours, that boy of the Cullenses? Her eyes were gleaming. Her cheeks were glowing red with excitement. She was trying to see past him to know who had he inside. Did you not hear the news? Well, I’m fierce sorry now to be the bearer of sorrow, but it looks like he was killed last night. Lord have mercy on him. Apparently he slid on black ice and hit that feckin auld dead elm at the bad bend over beyond near Pike’s Cross. In the small hours of this morning it was. Where the hell was he off to, I d’know? How well he had to hit the tree! By all accounts he was killed outright, at least there’s that, anyway. That boy always drove like the divil; I always maintained he was an accident waiting to happen. At least there was no one took with him! He was often up here with you, wasn’t he? Ye palled around a lot, didn’t ye? He thought the world of you, I’d say. I often heard him backing you up to the hilt and you getting read left, right and centre below in the village by them that knows notten. I seen ye knocking around together. That auld bad bend is a solid fright. Lord save us and guard us, isn’t it just a fright to God? They’ll surely straighten it now. Or drag out that auld tree out of it at least. The poor misfortune, how well he had to hit the tree.

THERE WAS
only three or four lumps of coal in the bucket by the fire, and nare a log. How’s it he never thought to fill the log box to the top and bring in a couple of buckets of coal while he was at it? Daddy always had a plot of turf in the bog out towards Cloughjordan. Your back’d be broke turning and footing and bagging and piling it on the trailer and dragging back all the miles
home with your wobbly load and then lugging the bags into the shed and emptying them and stacking the turf up nice, but it saved you burning too much coal when winter came. Coal goes in and gets red-hot real fast and burns itself out in no time. It’s brilliant while it lasts, but it never lasts long. Turf burns gentler and lasts longer. He’d ring your man in Clough in the spring and see about getting a plot again. How hard could it be? Surely be to God he could organize something as simple as that. He’d book the plot and your man would ring when the turf was cut and ready to be turned and he’d give it a few days and he’d foot it and Siobhán could give a hand if she wanted but she probably wouldn’t in fairness, young wans would hardly choose to give summer days to breaking their backs in the bog.

Siobhán kept saying Oh my
God
, oh my
God
, oh my
God
.

Yerra shut your face, he felt like telling her. Just shut your face. If you hadn’t made little of him none of it would have happened. He’d never say that out, though. You’re as well off keep your powder dry when you’re that cross, for fear you’d say things you can’t take back. Anyway, it was
he
was responsible. Women can’t help rising rows. He was here like a prick looking out of his mouth at Siobhán and grinning at her like a fool while she danced around the kitchen to the radio and drank vodka with Coca-Cola in it and smoked fag after fag and told him he was very
closed off
, he was very
mysterious
, he was very
deep
, not like them
dicks
inside in town. And he lapping it up like an auld hungry dog getting fed scraps while his only pal drove around the countryside in pure-solid temper and finished up making bits of himself.

Did it take him long to die? Was he panicking and shaking and trying to draw air into his bursted lungs? People always say people in accidents were killed outright, but you knew half the time that was only as comfort for them that’s left behind. How did
anyone ever know? Maybe Mumbly Dave sat strapped in to his yahoo car, still with all his senses while his insides bled, thinking about how Johnsey had let Siobhán say all them things and how his pal had turned his face away from him and never even tried to defend him or stop him from leaving.

He’d lain in his bed chancing the odd look over at Siobhán who snored like them auld fellas that used be in Daddy’s ward inside in the hospital. She never even went near his mickey. He’d seen her in her knickers, though, at least, as she hopped into the bed. They were light blue with white frilly bits at the edges. She’d kissed him once on the lips and said You’re
lovely
, forget about Dave, he’ll be grand, he has a hide like a rhino, and she smelt like fags and liquor and perfume and she turned away and fell asleep and she took all the duvet and most of the mattress and he lay there like a gom with his arse hanging out over the edge of the bed, trying to keep his horn from poking into her. And at some stage while he was doing that, imagine, Mumbly Dave met his lonely death.

NOT LONG AFTER
Siobhán had left, Dermot McDermott had come to the door. Johnsey spotted him over the haggard wall from the room above, where he’d been smelling Siobhán off of a pillow and starting to get sorry about leaving her go like that, in a wicked temper with tears in her eyes. He’d told her he’d sooner be on his own and when she went to give him a hug he’d pulled back from her and she said Oh right, be that way, so.
I’ll
miss him too, you know. You will in your arse, he thought. Or did he say that out loud? It was hard to know. Whichever, she’d fecked off, in a right auld strop for herself.

Johnsey had the Winchester down from the attic before Dermot McDermott made it across the yard and up to the front
door. It felt cool to touch and its heaviness was like an anchor. It fit lovely in to his shoulder, like it was made especially for him. He hadn’t picked it up since that February day long ago. When he got as far as the kitchen, Dermot McDermott was looking in the window with his hands cupped around his eyes. There was an envelope or something in one of his hands. Johnsey stayed by the door where he couldn’t be seen. Dermot McDermott walked back along the yard and looked up at the gap between the slatted house and the near shed out to the big yard. Then he started back towards the house. Johnsey drew the sight on him, so that his curly, cute hoor’s head sat bobbing on the bead, getting bigger and bigger as he progressed towards the window.

Johnsey felt the power of death over life, just like your man in that song about the fella that accidentally on purpose killed the lone rider. How a thing as small as a tightening in a muscle in your finger can do a thing so big! He’d never do it, though. But it was no harm to have a weapon close at hand in this day and age. It’s funny how he’d never thought of keeping it close before. Maybe a shock like he’d gotten brings clarity to the mind. If them boys that went at Paddy that time ever rolled into the yard, or if them ratty-faced lads from the newspapers ever came back around the place, or any of the Penroses, he’d lose valuable minutes running upstairs and foostering about with the attic door and putting in the cartridges. Best to keep it downstairs for good.

NOW THERE WAS
a quare fella abroad at the gate and every now and again he’d lean in around so Johnsey was able to just about see him and he’d roar into a bullhorn. He sounded like the same lad who’d rang his mobile earlier. How had they his number? When it had rang, he’d thought it was Mumbly Dave. Imagine if it was! Well, youssir, bejaysus it’s grand up here, your
father said to tell you stop acting the bollix and put away his gun before you hurt yourself. And your mother says You’re a dirty scut for letting that little strap sleep inside in your bed with you. Your mother says she’s an awful trollop, that lady! Not
my
words! Don’t worry, youssir, it wasn’t your fault. Once that wan got her claws in I was back to having notten, anyway. Hadn’t we some craic, though, for a while? Don’t worry, boy, no one blames you for notten. All you are is a victim of circumstance.

But it was a lad he didn’t know and he had one of them quare accents and he was talking all friendly but the way his words were coming out put Johnsey in mind of a fella in one of them plays they put on sometimes inside in town in the Scouts’ hall, like the words was all wrote down by someone else and learnt off by heart but the sayer of the words was meant to convince the hearer of them that they were his own, and for a finish he must have gotten sick of getting back nothing only silence and he said I’m going to pass the phone now to someone who’s worried about you and just wants to see that you’re okay. Okay? Okay.

And it was Himself and he sounded slower and quieter than normal and he asked Johnsey how was he and Johnsey felt that old painful hardness in his throat the very same as if there was a stone in there, dry and unmoving, blocking the words from coming out, and Himself was still talking and he was telling Johnsey how it was a fright altogether the way they weren’t being left in to see him on account of there was police here to beat the band and you wouldn’t see a squad from one end of the year to the next besides Jim Gildea in his auld crock of a Renault van and where was this lot when poor Paddy Rourke was getting bate up? And you yourself nearly killed stone dead below in the middle of the village? And now it seemed they was all in the one place together and they all to a man had the same sort of an auld notion that he was up to devilment inside in the house with
Jackie’s shotgun and did you ever hear the bate of it? Lord God. And Himself laughed and it was a hoarse and whispery thing and maybe not really a laugh at all.

And Johnsey pressed the red button on the phone and it said
call ended
and he could breathe again.

He sat on the easy chair on the far side of the fireplace from the yard window with Daddy’s Winchester cradled in his lap like a man might cradle a small child and his left hand lay on top of his right hand on top of the butt and the barrels rested in the crook of his left arm and it was a kind of a comforting thing to be sitting there with that cold weight on him and it was fine and dark at that end of the room where the weak winter light never reached and he wondered what would it be like to pull the soft darkness around him like a blanket and disappear into it.

IT HAD BEEN
only a bare few minutes after Dermot McDermott had copped on that there was a gun pointing at his forehead and nearly fell backwards onto his arse with the fright and run off across towards the haggard wall that the lad with the bullhorn had showed up, and lights were flickering, blue and white and orange, and he felt a kind of a pride that he had known to keep himself towards the back of the kitchen where no one would really be able to see him if he kept still enough, but in such a way that he’d be able to squint out now and again to see could he see the Unthanks or the Penroses or Aunty Theresa, who’d no doubt be shaking her head in disbelief at the show he was making of them all, or poor Nonie who’d be clinging on to Frank in fear and confusion, or any face he might know, but there was nothing and nobody to be seen now when he lifted his head but still and all he could feel the weight of them outside the gate and behind the wall, and the mass of them and the density of
them, like all things in the universe had, according to that auld science teacher, except the thoughts inside in your head, but that was dead wrong, anyway, because all the minds of them people outside the gate and behind the wall were trained on him now and he could feel the heaviness of their thoughts on him and it was pounding on his head, the pain of the weight of it all.

He imagined Dermot McDermott rubbing his grabbing hands together across the haggard and beyond the trees and over the far side of the river field and laughing with his people about the mad lunatic over beyond and he playing inside in the kitchen with his father’s gun, and then going off licking to Jim Gildea below, delighted to be blackening the bad yoke who wouldn’t hand over his land. But Johnsey knew he’d shited himself when he’d seen the two black eyes staring at him, with nothing but death inside in them, and that was all that mattered.

THE HEEDLESS CLOCK
tick-tocked away for itself, minding nothing only its own maddening business. He sat up a bit in the chair, slowly, slowly, and raised his head and squinted his eyes again and he knew there was still more out there, the lad with the bullhorn was there the whole time and he pouring the odd few grinding, buzzing words into it for himself, and fellas in dark-blue helmets with little stubby guns like toys were chancing the odd dart across the gateway, holding big huge screens like shields beside themselves while they scuttled. Shields, imagine! Did they think he was going to start firing arrows at them? He’d have to go out and clear them to hell. They had the wrong end of the stick got altogether. He was some show! As if he wasn’t enough of a show already, in all fairness.

The mobile phone screamed again. He jumped and the gunbutt
bucked in his lap and the barrels went from the crook of his arm to the bend of his shoulder blade almost of their own accord, as if they had taken fright and were looking to him for comfort.

When his heart had settled a bit he reached across to the edge of the table for the blasted phone and it was all he could do to press the little green button with his auld awkward thumb and it was Himself again, and he was all talk now, the very same way he’d be on a rainy lunchtime inside in the bakery, and he was asking Johnsey to know how was he now and would he put away that auld gun before he did himself an injury and come away out in the name of God and go easy now, go easy, and they’d see about a bit of lamb for the dinner and Herself was there alongside him still and she was up to ninety worrying about him and she’d gave the whole morning making tarts with the last of the apples they’d collected only a few weeks ago, remember? And he had the finest of cream whipped and all and left in a bowl inside in the fridge, all ready to go for the afters.