Born & Bred (19 page)

“Don’t worry. He’s cool.”

They all looked skeptically at Danny. “Are you sure?”

“I told you, he’s Martin Carroll’s nephew.”

“Oh!”

“C’mon, Danny,” Deirdre stood up and walked toward the path that led to the pond, looking back as she went. “Let’s go and leave these drug addicts in peace.”

“Don’t go too far,” her sister called after them as the others settled in behind a park bench where they couldn’t be seen by anyone passing by.

“Are they really going to smoke drugs?” Danny asked when they sat in the long grasses, side by side, by the rushy pond.

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“No. I smoke too.”

“Isn’t it bad for you?”

Deirdre laughed and nudged him with her shoulder. “Of course it isn’t. They just tell us that so we don’t try it.”

“Aren’t you afraid that it might make you addicted, and all.”

“No, Danny. That’s just another one of the lies they tell us.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but I think you have to find out for yourself.”

“Maybe I should try some then.”

“C’mon then,” she laughed and took a little joint from somewhere inside her shoulder bag; a red, leathery thing with Indian designs. She probably got it in the Dandelion. “Want some?” she almost winked as she sat behind the trunk of a large tree where no one else could see her.

He looked all around before he sat beside her.

***

He still thought about that day.

When they had finished, he just lay back on the ground and watched the clouds as he had never watched them before. He only had a few hits but it changed everything. The light was brighter and the shadows were darker and all that had seemed so straightforward was now honeycombed. Deirdre leaned over him and began to trace across his face with a brush from the long, bearded grass. Her hair dangled down, too, and tingled along his cheek. Her lips pouted a little and her eyes grew bigger as she looked deep inside of him. And he didn’t mind. Being so close to her made everything else fade away. His hatred began to splinter, breaking off and floating away. All the rumblings in his head hushed and held their breath as she lowered her head and kissed him on the lips.

He saw her again the next day, and the day after that. They went everywhere together and weren’t afraid to be seen down by the shops where everyone went to notice everyone else.

They toked a lot and talked about everything before rolling off into the long grasses where they could explore a little more. She let him touch her through her clothes, but only above the waist. She let him touch her breasts but he couldn’t get her to touch him. At least not for a while.

But he had fucked that up, too.

He almost laughed as he took another hit and decided to cut through the lane that ran behind her house. It was on his way home, but, since the night in the church, he had always gone around the long way.

When she left him, things just got worse and worse. That was when he decided to take Scully up on his offer. That was when he began to slide on the slope.

He was still crazy about her and wanted to stop and look toward her window, just in case she might be looking out. He’d do anything to get her back into his life—after he’d gotten all of his shit together.

But he didn’t look up. He’d heard that her father still wanted to beat the crap out of him, and now, with him being called in to speak with cops, and all, he’d want to fuckin’ kill him.

He almost wished that he could talk to his mother about it and see if there was any way, but she would only blab it all to her sisters and he had seen the way they were with Martin, always asking him things and making bawdy jokes. He wished he could talk to him. Martin always knew what to say.

CHAPTER 10

Martin lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. David lay across him, his brown skin in contrast with his own. They often joked about Martin’s whiteness when they lay in the sun for hours. David teased him, telling him he looked like a piece of white toast. They also joked about being refugees, having had to flee from the rigid righteousness of those who could never accept them for what they were.

“Queers,” they were called on the streets of Dublin, or “Nancy Boys” among the rugby crowds. Neither group tolerated human truth in the open, preferring instead to joke about it: “Did you hear about the two Irish queers, Michael Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzmichael? Or the Gay-Lick? Or a Pat-on-the-back?”

Martin never reacted. What was the point? They were all repressed one way or another. They sat in the pubs and the churches and pretended that none of it was happening; the wife-beating, the rape of children, and the steady line of young girls that were sent off to the abortion clinics of London.

Those who stood up and looked at it just grew bitter and angry to the point many of them simply left and never looked back. But they all carried wounds that could burst open from time to time. A dull aching accusation that all immigrants felt.

He was lucky. He loved David and the life they shared in Toronto. The city was shedding the vestiges of its staid orange past and was beginning to accept a more diverse future. He felt complete and accepted here, free of shadows and censure. He hadn’t wanted anything from there to spill over here, but he couldn’t ignore his sister’s plea for help. They were family after all, so he lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, remembering them through the soft veil of separation.

What happened to Jacinta stigmatized the whole family. They all acted like it hadn’t, but Martin knew. He had overheard the whispers: “The Carrolls, God love them, are more to be pitied than scorned.”

His parents knew what was being said but his sisters pretended they didn’t and made things even worse. They didn’t have conversations like normal people; they took captives and flailed away with litanies of all the harm the world had ever done to them.

David told him that he was being too hard on them, that he should be grateful that he still had family who talked with him. David had been disowned by his. They only kept in contact through his bank account. An allowance, if he stayed away.

But David didn’t know what the Carrolls were really like and probably never would. Martin had no intention of bringing him back there. Their relationship wouldn’t survive it. Martin wouldn’t survive it.

He had been young when Jacinta was committed, but he still remembered it. Mutterings at first as his parents talked in the little privacy they had. And when he intruded on it, hoping to hear something that might explain it all, they would switch moods in clumsy fumbling. “Poor Jacinta has been taken into the hospital, but don’t you worry your head about it, Martin. She’s just had a little bit of a breakdown. But you’ll see. She’ll be right as rain in no time.”

It was well meant but it left Martin with a mental picture he could never get rid of: of Jacinta, sitting on the cold steps of Saint Patrick’s, in the rain.

“We know what really happened,” his sisters told him later. “She and Jerry had a big fight and she attacked him, so his mother had her locked up so there would be no scandal, and all.”

He would never forget how she looked when he did get to see her. She was always pale but after a few weeks in the hospital she was pasty. Her hair was a tangled mess despite all the hours she had once spent brushing it.

Even after she had gotten out, she remained “that poor creature.” And the rest of them were forever branded “the crazy Carrolls.”

It used to get to him when he was younger. And, in his mid-teens, when he started to realize things about himself, things he couldn’t talk about with anybody, he started to look outside the little world around him. It was that or spend his whole life pretending. He toked up a lot back then, and it helped. He rarely drank so no one suspected and he was considered to be fine and upstanding and Martin was careful not to do anything to change that.

He took acid one summer and that changed everything. For the first time he saw himself, separate and apart, and knew he would have to go. That was when he used to tell people that he was going to go to New York.

During the last few years he lived in Dublin, he had spent his summers in London, running around with friends, looking for the person he wanted to be in the flashing lights and pounding beats of the clubs in the West End. It was so nice to get away to somewhere where he could really be himself and not be looking over his shoulder to see who was watching.

That’s where he met David. They were two frightened boys in a salacious world and clung to each so they would be left alone long enough to find themselves again, slowly. The first summer they fell in love and the second summer they became lovers. He didn’t tell anybody at home and that almost felt like shame. But how could he? They wouldn’t understand. And besides, he was trying to be there for his nephew.

But he wasn’t there when it really mattered. He knew Danny was smoking-up but he thought that was a good thing, a journey of spiritual enlightenment without a dark side. That’s why everybody was doing it—everybody that he knew. Just a bunch of heads going against the grain, escaping from the dreary priest-ridden, gossipy, brutal, in-denial existence all around them. They just needed a way out, but it had become seedy—buying and selling on street corners and in back alleys.

Still, it wasn’t all his fault—Jerry had barred him after the reading of the will. Not that he let that stop him, and he saw Jacinta whenever she met with their sisters. In the late summer of ’74, a few months after the bombing, they had arranged to meet in Davey Byrne’s.

He still remembered it. Everyone along the bar turned and looked back, frisking him with their eyes. It had almost become routine—checking on anyone that wasn’t familiar. He nodded to the barman in an effort to reassure them all and waved to his sisters who were sitting in the corner like a three-headed Gorgon, dressed in their tacky fineness with hair curled and nails freshly painted in case there were any men about.

He had given up trying to have any kind of influence on them even though they all admitted, and not so secretly resented, that he had a real style about him. He used to help pick out the gloves and the scarves that his mother got for Santa Claus to put under the tree. But he didn’t do that anymore. Now he was a bit embarrassed by them and their antics and constant need for reassurance.

They looked over at him and waved back, putting everybody along the bar at ease. But they also looked disappointed as they went back to lingering over their drinks. Jacinta was late and they probably had to make them last. Martin ordered his pint at the bar before joining them.

**

“Thanks very much for offering.”

“I barely have enough for my own.”

“And what about all the money you were making over in London—if that’s what you were doing there?”

Martin ignored the jibe and sipped his lager. “That money has to get me through the next year.”

“It’s well for you, playing schoolboy at your age while the rest of us have to go out to work—if there was any work.”

“You had the same choice as me.”

“Will you listen to him—getting awful high and mighty like he’s so much better than the rest of us?”

“All I’m just saying is that any one of you could have done the same.”

That made them stop and think for a moment, but not for long. “We’re just not the learning type,” they laughed in chorus as they had done so often before. “And where’s all that education going to get you? There’s no jobs around here, anyway.”

“That’s why I’m going to go to Canada.” He had started the application process and had been assured that he would meet the requirements after he graduated. People like him were very welcome in Canada.

“Canada? What on Earth would make you want to go there?”

Love
, Martin thought to himself but hid his smile as he took another swig on his pint.

“What happened to New York? Wouldn’t they let you in there?”

“And we were all looking forward to visiting New York. What’s there to do in Canada?”

“I don’t know—it could be all right. We could go riding with the Mounties.”

They all laughed and sipped their drinks, still careful to make them last. Jacinta was almost half an hour late.

**

She’d had to wait to get Jerry out of the house.

He had promised to get up early and look for work, but, just like every other time, it didn’t happen. And when he did get up, he coughed up a storm in the bathroom, cursing and swearing between bouts. She waited patiently in the kitchen knowing he was going nowhere again that day.

She wanted to have a word with Danny, too. He’d been out ‘til after midnight and she had no idea where he’d been. She was beginning to worry that he might have been taking drugs.

At least he’d passed his Inter. She was very proud of that and couldn’t wait to tell her sisters. None of them had made it that far and they’d all be jealous.

“Any chance of a cup of tea there, Jass?”

She got up from the kitchen table without complaint and filled the kettle. She couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him. He looked terrible. His eyes were sinking into his face and he hadn’t shaved in a few days. “I hope you’re going to clean yourself up a bit before you go out looking for work?”

“I’m not up for it today, Jass. I’m not feeling too good.” He held his head in his hands. “But I’ll do it tomorrow,” he added when her face clouded over. “I promise.”

“What’s wrong with you now?”

“I think I’m getting depression.”

Jacinta turned to make the tea—and to hide her contempt.
Depression? What does he know about depression?

“Here,” she slid the cup under his downcast face. “Get that into you and you’ll feel a whole lot better in no time at all.”

“Tea? Do you really think that it’s going to fix what’s wrong with me? I think I need to go and see the doctor and get some pills. What do you think? Do you think that would help?”

What would help you would be if you got up off your arse and got a job,
but she said something else: “Pills? I suppose you could try them.”