The Thing About December (7 page)

Ten years later, that same lad, Mikey Kennedy from Gurtabogle, flew off to Australia and went missing out there and was never seen again.

TIME DRIPS BY
. It never flies, really. Time only ever flies in the last few minutes of a match when the team you’re rooting for are a point behind. And that’s reversed if they’re a point ahead.
A townie lad in school once told how if you tied a lad up so he couldn’t move and dripped water on his head, for a finish he’d go mad and each drip would feel to him like a hammer blow. The Chinese used to do it to their enemies long ago. Johnsey only half believed it then but he fully believed it now. He could feel each second drip from the clock above the press and splash down on his head. You had to trick your mind sometimes, to distract it from the drips, or they’d become hammer blows and you’d end up like one of them Chinese lads. You could pretend you were Nicky English scoring before him in ’89 if you were abroad in the yard beating a
sliotar
off of a wall. You could pretend to be heading off on a trip across America in your shining Ford Mustang if you were farting about up and down the yard in Mother’s old Fiesta. You could imagine you were a secret agent, deep undercover, disguised as a mysterious young bachelor, living alone and awaiting further instructions from HQ.

If you were feeling especially lonesome, and just sitting in the kitchen, say, and you let it out through the gate because you weren’t concentrating properly on keeping a rein on it, your mind could have a fine old wander about for itself. If it got too much leeway, it could start trying to point things out that you could otherwise kind of gloss over or shove away into the dark spaces. It could start calculating the amount of time you spent on your own now that Daddy
and
Mother were gone, and the time to come to be spent alone if you lived a full life. Three score and ten, you were allowed by God. You could go a good bit over that, even. Daddy hadn’t gotten his allotted time at all. The likes of poor Dwyer and that young lad of the Clancys got nowhere near it. It could remind you of how it had seemed life was only temporarily suspended when Mother was alive and would maybe get underway again in some shape or form as soon as the dark weather brightened, but now it seemed to be at a full stop. It
could start adding up the number of lunches and dinners the Unthanks had given you, and you never once put your hand into your pocket, except to have a secret scratch of your balls. It could start reminding you about all the different ways in which you didn’t match or measure up to the other fellas your age: you had nare a woman, nor a hope in hell of getting one; your only friends were two elderly people you had only inherited as friends; you’d been terrorized by a little prick called Eugene Penrose since you were a child; you couldn’t walk home through the village without shitting in your pants in fear of him. You were not able to hold a normal conversation, your mind would remind you. Nobody wanted to talk to you, anyway. People that did, it was only because they felt they had to. It could remind you that you were a useless, orphaned spastic. It could make the deep pool in the river or the crossbeam in the slatted house seem like sweet salvation from the miserable torment of just being.

Your mind could become separated from you altogether. Johnsey was starting to see this now. You could end up abroad in the yard, chasing it around like a madman if you were not careful. It could become free from you quite easily and fly off down its own path. There were a few evenings where he had sat watching television and had all of a shot realized he had been just sitting there, and there was nothing only blankness about him; he hadn’t been asleep or awake, he couldn’t remember what he had been looking at on the telly, and once there was a long line of dribble hanging from his chin.

ON THE WAY HOME
from the mart Daddy often used tell him about some of the old boys they had met that day who lived alone in the real and true back of beyond, their little cottages stuck to the side of the mountain and not a soul coming near them from
one end of the year to the next. They’d slosh around in shite up to their knees in Wellington boots that had holes in them; they’d be black with the dirt always and would only have the one pants for weekdays and one for Sundays and their weekday pants would be ready to walk off them and away down the boreen. They’d have a name for each beast in their herd. They’d be right fond of those beasts. That was the way for many a small farmer who never married. Often you’d have two old brothers farming the same land and living like two old smelly peas in a half-destroyed pod of a house. Or you might have an auld wan that had never married and she would serve as a wife to her bachelor brother. Not in
every
way, surely. Quare things went on, though; he knew this from things he overheard.

One day, below in the co-op, shortly after Packie had taken him on as a
general assistant
, he had heard a big, red-faced lady talking to two men who were so interested in what she was saying, they were bent nearly double to get their hairy old ears closer to her flapping mouth. It seemed the guards had taken a man called Formley from some quare townland in the back of beyonds Johnsey hadn’t heard of away from his farm and family. His children had been
put into care
. The same family were not sorry to see him go, by the red-faced lady’s account. His wife was dead but years. He had a daughter and two sons. She had been expecting, the daughter, and she only sixteen. The father was either her own father or one of the brothers. This man Formley had taken care of this bit of trouble, with a rope and a broken broom handle. The girl’s insides were ripped to shreds. Her wounds got infected, her blood turned bad, and she was near to death when the guards arrived. Her child was found wrapped in a sheet on the ground near the septic tank. The guards were only called because the man had drank what whiskey was in it after his little operation and went mad about the place and fired off
his shotgun and his youngest lad made a dash for the house of a neighbour who had summoned help.

They were the bits Johnsey had heard. Putting those bits together in a way that made sense was impossible. Were they all going at her, her father who was given the job by God of protecting her from harm, and her brothers as well? The whole rest of that day, that girl’s suffering rested heavily in the centre of his mind. For a finish, he felt a sort of a weakness from thinking about it, a sickness in his stomach and a woozy feeling in his head, and he had to sit down on a pile of fertilizer bags and try and collect himself before Packie spotted him. Imagine, that jagged, broken broom handle entering her and piercing a little unborn baby and yanking it out, dead and bloody into this world.

Probably it would have been a monster anyway, the red-faced lady said. A
monster
? Surely be to God nothing with a baby’s pure, unblemished soul could be a monster? But there was something about that in Johnsey’s mind, something about fathers and daughters and brothers and sisters riding each other.
Incest
, it was called. If they made a baby it could be a retarded freak or have two heads or worse. But then, Adam and Eve’s children must have done something like that to make the human race grow, and then it must have happened again when only Noah and his family were spared from the Great Flood. Or did God let Noah’s sons’ wives live too? Even then, there would have been first cousins riding. And Johnsey had heard that used as an explanation for more serious cases of gamminess or spastication: Yerra sure, weren’t his parents first cousins?

FOR A MAN
to be lonely, Johnsey knew, he did not need to be alone. People often took his hand and shook it and held on to it in the co-op, and stood reminiscing about one or both of his
parents while his face burned and his other hand searched vainly for somewhere to put itself. You could be lonely even then, with a person actually standing right there in front of you, clutching your hand, saying things to you. A couple of days, it seemed there was a
queue
of such people. Some of them had been at the funeral but thought it would be nice to have another go at shaking his hand and telling him he was after getting an awful time of it, and he was to call up any time, any time at all, they were
always
at home. Their door was
always
open. He’d like to see their faces if he actually strolled in through their door. Hello! Here I am, as invited! I’ll ate me dinner now and have a cut of tart after it and a couple of bottles of stout and maybe have a good feel of that young lady over there, is that yer
daughter
, bejaysus she’s a fine girl now, and I’ll be on my way again! Woo-hoo!

They’d have a hairy conniption if he as much as set foot in their yards. Why did people go around saying things they didn’t mean?

THERE WAS
an old fella, his name was Quigley, used to live away over the road and down past the small bridge and on past the weir, over towards the stud farm owned by the Black Protestant Shires. The Shires had
old
money. That was more valuable than new money. This old fella had a small bit of land tucked up to the side of the Shires’s walled-off ranch. He was a wild-looking man, with great clumps of hair sticking out from the side of his head and from under his cap. He wore a greatcoat tied with baling twine all year round, and Wellington boots coated with slime that he fermented all over his yard. On purpose, just to spite the Proddies, Daddy used to say, good Catholic shite. When Johnsey was small that man of the Quigleys would cycle on up the road past their gate, and he’d always have a big cheery wave,
and he’d go all the way out as far as Clonvourneen. Every single evening without fail, come rain, hail, sunshine or storm, he’d make that trip. He’d pedal his old creaky, squeaky, rusty pushbike all those miles out and all those hard miles home to visit an old uncle of his who was being subvented in the nursing home out there. He’d sit beyond with him and they’d have a chat and a brandy and he’d fix his old uncle up for the night and see that he was comfortable. Daddy said he was only doing it so that when the old uncle died, he’d leave him everything. For a finish, after all the thousands of miles cycled, and all the elements braved, the man died before his uncle. The fucker outlasted him.

Daddy always said that that man did what he did out of
avarice
, and Johnsey believed that then, because when Daddy said a thing it was invariably true. But now, Johnsey was not so sure. Maybe he did it to have somewhere warm to sit of an evening, with someone familiar to look at and be silent beside in comfort. Maybe he knew that was worth more than a farm of land or a big pile of second-hand money, covered in the dirty prints of other men’s hands.

DADDY WOULD LEAVE
the cattle out of the slatted house at the start of April. They’d think they were going to be milked and they’d queue up like fools at the milking-parlour door. Then Mother and Daddy and Johnsey would hunt them up the yard towards the long acre and they’d be looking back with their big scared eyes as much as to say Are ye sure? Are we
really
allowed out here? Mother would say Look at the auld eejits, go on, ye auld dotes, and the three of them would watch as one brave auld campaigner would mosey off in to the grass and the rest would get courage from her and follow on. Friesians are pure gentle auld crathurs. If they were Limousins, Daddy would say, they’d trample you to get to the field. They’d knock the feckin wall!

DERMOT
McDERMOTT
called up to the house at the start of that April. It was a Monday evening. Johnsey brought him in to the kitchen. When you came in through the front porch and
into the hall, you could turn left into the kitchen or right into the front room, the good room. There was no way that curly prick was tramping his dirty rotten boots in around Mother’s good room that she fussed over for so many years and was forever tightening up for fear anyone would call. He’d probably sneer to himself at the pinkness and frilliness of the cushions and the lacy yokes Mother put over the backs of the couch and armchairs. And the picture in pride of place on the wall above the fireplace of Daddy and Mother and Johnsey, taken when he was a small boy by a
professional
photographer inside in town, with his hair all combed back and his good-wear clothes on him. Dermot McDermott would probably have a great time describing it all to his bigshot people. But then, they’d probably all done their fair share of nosing about the place when Mother and Daddy died. They’d surely been in the stream of people that had flowed in and out to offer their condolences and pay their respects. Johnsey couldn’t properly remember; those two sets of days were like dreams you only have a half a hold of when you wake.

What kind of dealings would he be made part of? Would he have to make a decision or give permission for something or talk about the lease on the land or agree to a right of way or some such adult thing that Daddy or Paddy Rourke or even Mother would be able to sort out with a wave of a hand and a few small words? When they spoke that way the unaccustomed listener could go away thinking nothing much had been said, but in those brief conversations not a word was wasted, each utterance contained a world of meaning. Dermot McDermott had never said a
bad
word to Johnsey – he had never said many words to Johnsey at all – it was a way that he had of not looking at you, or looking around while he was talking to you, like you were not quite deserving of his attention, so he would examine the countryside all about until you were gone away and had stopped usurping his precious time.
At least he wouldn’t be bullshitting about calling up and calling down and doors being always open and other such lies people think are truths while they’re saying them.

This must be the way those fellas in wars felt before the little prick of an officer blew his old whistle and they had to climb up over the top of the trench and run at the enemy. Here was he feeling that same terrible fear over a
conversation
. The thought of talking to a fella his own age from over the road was the same as running towards a load of mad Germans who were firing machine guns at you! Imagine that. He’d have been shot as a coward for sure. Maybe running and firing a gun and trying to avoid being blown to bits were easier things than talking, though. It was surely less complicated. If you survived, you probably wouldn’t be lying awake that night thinking did I look like a spastic running through that field of barbed wire? Are all the other soldiers laughing at me?