Carry Me Down (9 page)

It is Saturday morning, the first day of the Easter school holiday, and my father comes into the kitchen while I’m having breakfast. ‘Hello,’ I say.

‘Morning,’ he says.

He’s wearing a white shirt and blue jacket and stinks of aftershave. His beard is gone again and I hope he doesn’t let it grow back. He takes my plate from the table then comes over to where I am standing, near the cooker, and holds it out under my nose. ‘Don’t you eat your crusts now?’ he asks in a whisper, as though he doesn’t want eavesdroppers to hear.

‘I don’t like them,’ I say.

‘Don’t be so feckin’ daft,’ he says. ‘The crusts are bread just like the rest of the bread.’

He speaks in an angry rush and the plate tilts in his hands. The crusts are at the edge, ready to fall off.

‘No they’re not,’ I say. ‘Crusts are chewier and harder.’

He hands the plate to me and speaks in a normal, slower voice. ‘Eat your crusts,’ he says. ‘Bread doesn’t grow on trees, and wasting food is a sin.’

‘They hurt my teeth,’ I say. I take the plate and put it on the table but he pushes it into my hands.

‘Eat them, you big eejit, or I’ll ram them down your throat.’

I eat the crusts while he watches. He stands by the cooker with
his arms folded. I look up at him when I’ve finished. He smiles without showing his teeth, a tired, cold smile.

‘You see,’ he says. ‘They won’t kill you.’

My mother comes in to get her handbag: she is getting ready to go to the grocery shop in Gorey town, where she now works three mornings a week. She wears her pink coat over a yellow apron.

‘Why don’t you come with me?’ she says. ‘You can spend the morning in the shop and afterwards you can have a bag of sweets to take home.’

‘I’d rather stay here,’ I say. I want to read my new book about lying.

‘Go with her,’ says my father. ‘You’ve hardly left the house lately.’

When we are near the junction, and we should take the right-hand turn, my mother goes left and she says, ‘We need to see Dr Ryan. Just for a minute.’

‘Why?’

‘You need a check-up.’

‘What for?’

‘You’re getting very big.’

‘Is that why you don’t touch me any more?’

‘I do touch you.’

‘Not as much.’

She puts her hands over her face and rubs her forehead with her fingers. ‘You’re not a little boy now.’

‘So? You’re tall and Da’s tall. I’m just like you.’

‘You’re only eleven and you’re nearly six feet tall and your voice is getting deeper.’

‘I’m twelve in July,’ I say.

‘Why don’t we just call into Dr Ryan’s and see what he has to say?’

‘Unless you are going to get me an operation to stop me growing, I’m not seeing any doctors.’

‘There’s no need for an operation.’

‘Then I don’t need to see the doctor. I’m not sick.’

‘I didn’t say that you were sick.’

I hit the dashboard with my open hand. I don’t understand why I didn’t detect the lie when she first told it at home. Why didn’t I know she was lying when she told me she was taking me to spend the day in the shop with her?

‘If anybody’s sick it’s you,’ I say.

She looks at me, to see what I’m going to do. I put my hands under my legs and she looks back at the road. But I can tell she is nervous: she touches her face and swallows too much.

‘What does that mean?’ she asks, at last.

‘You told me I was going to the shop with you. You lied. You tricked me into coming with you.’

‘We’re still going to the shop, so I wasn’t lying. We’re just seeing Dr Ryan first.’

‘If you make me see Dr Ryan now I’ll never trust you again.’

I say this in a voice I’ve never used before, a voice that’s just a little way away from a punch or a kick. My hands are balled up when I say it, and I feel strong. I mean what I say.

‘I don’t see why you’re so upset about this,’ she says, about to cry.

‘It’s very important to be honest,’ I say, almost whispering now and short of breath. ‘You’re a mother. Mothers shouldn’t lie. I don’t want you to ever lie.’

She says nothing.

‘Other people can lie if they want,’ I say. ‘But not you.’

She frowns at me but seems not to be on the brink of tears now. I wonder why she has stopped herself from crying and whether I could still make her cry if I wanted to. ‘Besides,’ I say. ‘It’s a sin to lie.’

She looks at me, calm, as though I have said nothing at all and she turns the car around. We go back to the junction and she makes the turn that takes us to Gorey town. We are going to the shop after all.

‘Are you quite finished now?’ she asks, with the voice she uses on my uncles.

‘Yes.’

I sit in a chair behind the counter next to my mother, listening as she talks to customers about crops, sicknesses and babies.

A woman comes in and says, ‘Helen, we all thought you’d join the Legion of Mary this year!’ and my mother says, ‘How I’d love to, if I only had the time.’

When the woman leaves, my mother tells me that the Legion of Mary is a useless waste of time: a pack of housewives with nothing better to do than complain and gossip and defame their husbands.

I will eat soon and the shelves are packed with tins and boxes of food, and there are dozens of different kinds of sweets under the glass counter.

And then something happens to make my mood brighter still.

Just before it’s time to close up, a salesman comes in wearing a black suit. My mother tells him she has no need for any more biscuits.

‘Are you sure now? Do you not want to discuss it with the manager?’ he says.

‘I am the manager,’ says my mother. ‘And I’m sure.’

He looks at the shelves, makes some notes on his clipboard and says, ‘I think you have a short supply of biscuits here. There are some good ones new on the market.’

My mother lifts the hatch and comes out from behind the
counter. She stands close to the salesman. ‘I appreciate the time you’ve taken,’ she says, ‘but I don’t need any more biscuits.’

‘All right, so,’ says the salesman.

My mother puts her hand on his back. Her hand is covered in flour and on his dark suit she leaves the imprint of a perfect white hand, smaller than hers, like the hand of a toddler.

She watches the salesman leave the shop, then she opens the door and stands on the pavement to look at him as he disappears down the crowded street. ‘Bye now!’ she says.

The door closes and the little bell rings. I leap to my feet. ‘You left your handprint on his back,’ I say.

‘I know,’ says my mother. ‘And I’ll never forget the pleasure it gave me.’

I give her a hug, as if we are celebrating some great news. She laughs and squeezes me tight. When she lets go, she kisses me on the cheek and smiles.

She sings as we drive home, and when we turn at the junction she asks me if I would like to come for a walk on Courtown beach and I say yes. This means another half an hour in the car with her on the way there and another hour on the way home.

I eat my sweets as we walk down by the shore. In summer the sand is yellow and the water is blue. Today the sand is not so yellow but bright still, and the water is not so blue but the waves still crash and make white foam and there’s the smell of salt and seaweed, and behind us the dunes are covered in green shrubs and the shrubs look woolly.

Then it rains, it rains hard, but she keeps walking as though she doesn’t notice.

‘Mam! The rain!’ I say, excited by the change in the air, its thinness and the strange smell of metal.

‘Never mind the rain,’ she says.

She holds her face up to the rain and catches the drops in her mouth. I do the same and we laugh as she takes my hand and we walk in the rain with our heads up, while other people rush to the shelter of their cars. It isn’t cold, and once I am completely wet, the rain feels as warm as a blanket.

We arrive home drenched and my shoes and socks squelch as I walk up the drive. My father is sitting at the kitchen table eating soup and my mother goes to the end of the table and stands next to him.

‘Look at your wife,’ she says. ‘Drenched from head to foot.’

My father smiles without showing his teeth. ‘Like a drowned rat,’ he says.

‘How many rats do you know that collect shells?’ my mother asks, as she empties the shells from her coat pocket onto the kitchen table.

My father smiles again and holds one of the shells to his ear. ‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Michael Egan speaking. No, the old bat’s not here. She’s at bingo.’

My mother laughs and seems happy. She tells him the story of the salesman in the dark suit with the flour handprint on his back.

They laugh so much that my mother has to lean against the sink and wipe the tears from her red eyes.

They laugh so much, and for so long, that the joke must have gone beyond what I understand, and I wish I knew what it was. If I ask them what has made them laugh so much, my father would probably lie so that he could keep me from knowing too much about him, too much about what it’s like to be him. My mother would probably tell me most of the reason for the laughing, and leave out the complicated parts. She would lie, I think, to make the talk easier and more pleasant, to stop the talk becoming too serious.

‘It’s not that funny,’ I say. ‘Why are you laughing so much?’

At last my mother stops laughing enough to speak. ‘We’re laughing this much because a long time ago, before you were born, I did a very similar thing to your Uncle Tony before we all went out to a wedding.’

My father shakes his head, his eyes still full of water from laughing. ‘And he deserved it.’

‘Why?’ I ask.

They look at each other before my mother answers. ‘Because he was rude to me and I took offence. You can ask what he said to me till you’re blue in the face, but I won’t tell you.’

I don’t need to know. What’s important is that they’ve been honest; the both of them, honest.

‘I’m going to watch TV now,’ I say and I leave the kitchen with two jam and shortbread biscuits.

An hour later, I go back to the kitchen. It is getting dark and we have just turned on all the lights when my grandmother comes home.

She takes her coat off and drapes it over the back of the chair nearest the range. It’s a new fur coat, brown, with black cuffs. My father looks at her, shakes his head, and leaves. She sits down and eats her soup using pieces of bread to soak it up and she keeps her head so close to the bowl that her hair is splashed with soup.

I can’t stand to watch.

‘I have a toothache,’ I say, and I leave. This lie causes no reaction, perhaps because I am walking when I say it. I’ll make a note of this in The Gol of Seil.

It is Easter Sunday and after mass we all go into the living room. I sit by my grandmother’s feet and laugh when she falls asleep and begins to snore. My mother holds my hand and smiles at me as I open my presents and Easter eggs. I am anxious, as I always am on holidays because of my father’s habit of promising gifts, and forgetting them. No matter what he gives me, it never makes up for the promised gifts never delivered. I keep my father’s Easter card till last; it has one pound Sellotaped inside. ‘Thanks, Da,’ I say.

I smile at my mother. ‘Could we have some of that chocolate cake now?’ I ask.

‘Of course, I’ll finish putting the icing on.’

She leaves and, since Granny is sleeping, I am as good as alone in the room with my father.

I take the card in my hand and turn it over a few times. I make sure my father is watching me. This card, like all the others I can remember, is worn and faded, and has the same picture of a boy playing with his puppy, and the inscription:
For a Wonderful Son, This
Holy Easter
. My Birthday and Christmas Cards are almost identical:
For a Wonderful Son, This Birthday or This Holy Communion or This
Christmas
. There is dirty dust around the clean square where the price sticker would have been.

It occurs to me that all my cards are from the same batch; perhaps from a box of a hundred or more, purchased wholesale when I was born. He might as well give me the same card each year, ask for it back, and re-use it.

I look at him, sitting in his armchair, legs crossed, his short dressing gown loosely tied with the cord that dangles between his hairless knees. I stand directly in front of him so that he must look up at me.

‘When I was six,’ I say, in my surest voice, ‘you must have bought a box of a million identical cards with the same stupid picture on them!’

He looks at me blankly; a complete lack of interest. But I stand my ground and don’t speak to fill the silence. ‘Show me that card,’ he says.

He grabs the card, then shoves it back in my hand. ‘There’s nothing wrong with this card,’ he says. ‘It’s brand new.’

I throw the card into the fire.

He watches the card burn in the orange and pink flames but does not speak. His hands and face are stiff: he is nervous. I wonder whether my mother has told him about my gift. I’ll soon find out.

‘You are cold-blooded and selfish,’ I say. ‘And I’m eleven now. Not two.’

He gets up and we are almost standing chest to chest, but I will not move.

‘How dare you!’ he says, without moving aside. ‘I bought that card yesterday afternoon. That’s a brand new card.’

‘Did you? Did you buy this card yesterday?’

‘What do you mean,
did you
?’

‘It looks like all the others you’ve given me, and it’s faded and old-looking. Well, Da?’

He walks towards the door, reaches out for the handle, and misses it. ‘I’m not hanging around for this rubbish.’

‘But did you, Da? Did you really buy the card yesterday?’

His hand finds the door handle. ‘Of course I did.’

‘When did you leave the house? What shop did you go to?’

‘How many times do you want me to repeat myself? I bought that card in Gorey yesterday.’

There it is: he can’t have gone to Gorey yesterday unless he took Granny’s car. But I don’t need to interrogate him about this. He is lying. My ears are hot and my stomach churns.

‘But which shop?’ I ask. ‘And how did you get there? By magic carpet?’

‘You suspicious little bastard,’ he says. ‘Go to your room!’

My grandmother wakes up and seems to know there has been trouble. I stare at my father and refuse to go. I know he would hit me if I was not so big. But I don’t know how to finish what I’ve started.

I go to my bedroom.

I leave my door open, to listen out. I expect to hear my father telling my mother what has happened, but instead there is a brief silence followed by singing: my mother and father and grandmother singing along to one of my father’s favourite records, and probably eating my piece of cake. Nobody comes to get me and I talk to myself and read The Gol of Seil to stop myself from feeling lonely. I lie on my bed for a few minutes but know I must go back or lose this Easter Sunday for good.

I go back into the living room and sit on the rug in front of the fireplace. I look at my father. He sits cross-legged in his armchair with a cup of tea in one hand and a slice of cake in the other.

‘Those African Watutsi can jump very high,’ I say. ‘Why don’t they compete in the high jump at the limpics?’

He does not look at me. ‘It’s Olympics,’ he says to my mother, with a fat grin. ‘O-limpic. Not limpics. Limpics are for spastics.’

My mistake was a deliberate one, but he laughs and turns the joke against me.

‘
Limp
-ics! Get it!’

He stamps his foot and they all laugh and I laugh with them because it is one of the worst things to be in a room full of people and not laughing when everybody else is.