Lamb (12 page)

‘It's smashin'.'

‘It hasn't even started yet,' roared Michael. The crowd chanted and sang incessantly and deafeningly, holding up red and white scarves and banners.

It was then that Michael noticed the crowd to his right. They were in their late teens. Most of them had their heads shaved so closely that their hair was only a shadow. They wore blue denim waistcoats with no shirts so that their arms and chests were bare. They were shouting at the field as if in intense and uncontrolled anger. Oathing and making obscene gestures. One of them openly pissed into a beer can, splashing those around him, and hurled it into the crowd. They all had their scarves tied to their wrists. Owen watched them.

‘I'd like to see Brother Ben belt some of those bastards.'

‘He'd have a job,' agreed Michael.

The group was pushing and shoving to clear a space for themselves and those around them were standing back, pretending not to notice them. Michael watched them out of the corner of his eye as the game started. He knew that Owen was doing the same, the way he was twisting on the bar. Then the boy turned and said,

‘I think we could see better from down there.'

Michael agreed with him and they moved away from the group, down nearer the field.

‘A bit to the left in case that gang throws anything more,' said Michael. This time it was Owen who led, squirming his way into the wall. He got a place and Michael stood behind him, his hands on his shoulders.

Then suddenly the boy went stiff. Michael felt the change in him beneath his hands, the rigidity. He leaned down to be on a level with his face. He shouted into his face.

‘Are you all right?'

The boy was staring forward, his eyes wide, his jaw dropping slowly open.

‘Oh Jesus, Owen, not here.'

The boy's body began to jerk and his head flicked back as if his neck was broken. His arms threshed and trembled, but the press of the crowd held him up. A young lad next to him elbowed him shouting,

‘'Ere, whatcha doin', mate?'

Still the boy was jerking and threshing, his eyes rolled back up into his head so that only the whites showed. Michael pinioned his arms and as best he could crushed the boy up against the wall to stop him kicking.

‘Help me, will you? He's having a fit,' screamed Michael. Above the noise of the crowd Michael could hear the sickening noise in Owen's throat. His fear was that he would swallow his tongue or bite it off.

‘Get a doctor,' yelled Michael.

‘No chance, mate.' The young lad had become concerned, seeing the colour of Owen's face, like blue wax. ‘Get'm on to the park.' The lad helped Michael heave Owen into the air. Other hands came to steady the boy's twitching body. He fell on the other side of the parapet wall and, for a terrible instant, looked to Michael like a fish as he arched and flapped on the track.

‘Oh Jesus,' he cried into himself. ‘Help him. Help him.'

The lad made joined hands for Michael to step up and climb the wall. Owen's fish-gawping mouth was open and there was foam and spit around it. Michael sat on his legs and searched his pockets for something to put between his gnashing teeth. He found a pencil but could not get the teeth open. He was afraid of being bitten, of losing his fingers. The boy snapped again and he got the pencil in. He was making a high-pitched whine now. The pencil shattered between his teeth. Michael got most of it out, lead and painted wood, snatching at it. A lollipop stick lay by Owen's head, and fumbling and praying and cursing, Michael wrapped his handkerchief around it and inserted it between the boy's teeth. The arms were still quivering and waving. It was as if thousands of volts were being passed through his body. A line of faces on a level with the track watched, stunned. The crowd swayed and roared and chanted at the game.

To Michael it seemed like hours before anyone came to help him. An ambulance man came running, clutching his bag to his side, and knelt down beside them. He quickly bound the boy's ankles together and his arms to his sides. Another ambulance man followed with a stretcher.

‘I'm his father,' shouted Michael into the ambulance man's ear. He walked with them round the pitch to the tunnel, his eyes fixed on the blue-white face of the boy bobbing on the stretcher. His hand was poised over the stretcher, keeping him from falling off when his back arched and he squirmed from side to side.

As he walked he frantically tried to remember the name he had used in the hotel. There would be doctors, statements, maybe even hospital. There would be policemen. At the first hotel he had used Abraham, but over the second name he had a mental block. He must remember it. Would they phone the hotel to check? Once the police heard his accent, would it spark something off about a man and a missing boy?

Then from nowhere the name came. O'Leary. That was it. He felt calmer. In the sick room beneath the main stand Michael and the ambulance men sat and watched the fit subside. Gradually the boy quietened, the intensity went out of his movements until eventually he lay still. Above them they could hear the crowd, muted like the rising and falling of the sea. The boy opened his eyes and he looked around, confused as to why he should be lying in this place.

‘It's O.K. Lie still. You've had an attack,' said Michael. He began untying the bandages at his sides. The ambulance men received another call. They were left alone in the room together.

‘How do you feel?' Michael asked.

‘O.K.,' said Owen.

‘Do you think you could walk?'

The boy nodded and tried to get to his feet. Michael steadied him with his hand.

‘I think we'd better get out of here before they start asking a lot of questions. Can you walk?'

‘Yeah. Can we go back up to the game?'

‘We're going straight back to the hotel and you're going to your bed. Don't be so stupid, Owney.'

In the corridor on the way out there was a small riot. Two policemen were dragging a youth who was shouting and struggling. One of the policemen had a hatchet in his hand and the youth's face was covered in blood. He was screaming like a woman. Michael and Owen pressed themselves up against the wall to let them pass.

‘How the hell do we get out of here?' asked Michael. Two more policemen stood outside a room, their arms folded. Michael went up to one of them.

‘The boy here has been very sick,' he said. He put his arm round his shoulders. ‘How can we get out of here?'

The policeman was sympathetic and led them through corridors to the exit.

‘It's like a maze,' said Michael. He thanked the policeman and they found a taxi easily because the game was still only in its first half.

When they got back to the hotel Michael undressed the boy. He stood limp and tired, almost unaware of what was happening. Between the sheets he fell into a deep peaceful sleep. Michael sat on his own bed looking at him. During the fit the boy had become someone else, animal-like almost. The image of the fish was the one that stood out in his mind. Flapping and vibrating in the dust of a pier. He knew from experience that the boy would sleep like this for many hours. He could be left without Michael having to worry about him.

In the Home there had been a medical orderly who had looked after Owen when he had had a fit, but now Michael had the sole responsibility. He needed to find out more about the disease, but he could not risk going to a doctor. He remembered a bookshop several streets away and decided to go along and see if he could find anything.

Being Saturday afternoon, the street was crowded. He looked at the faces as they jostled past him. He found himself in the strange position of wanting to see someone he knew. For days the fear had been with him of bumping into an acquaintance from home, but now it no longer existed. He searched the faces knowing he would see no one – millions of them, bespectacled, balding, sullen, worn, all of them faintly resembling people he had once met, so that he was always on the verge of a greeting or a nod. If he had seen someone, he had no doubt that he would have ducked away, but he could not rid himself of the longing. He wondered if this was homesickness.

In the bookshop Michael did not know where to begin to look. He had never been a great reader. He found a small medical section but could see nothing on epilepsy. In another section he saw an encyclopaedia and looked it up under E. The book was heavy and he laid it on a bench and read the article through, but it didn't tell him much that he didn't already know, describing epilepsy in terms of an electrical brainstorm. One thing that he hadn't known made him smile because it was such a coincidence. He read, ‘A typical symptom associated with epilepsy is the fugue. The sufferer may leave home, travel for several days or weeks without seeming to have full realization of what he is doing. Although not fully conscious, he is able to abide by the rules of society, e.g. respecting traffic regulations.' He closed the book and muttered, ‘The fugue, how are you?'

The waitress remarked on the boy's absence and Michael explained to her that he had been sick and was now sleeping. He arranged for some food to be sent up to Owen when he awoke.

Eating by himself he found an odd experience. He missed the boy sitting opposite him. Even though they only said one or two words to each other during a meal, he missed that too. He ate looking around him, conscious of the irritating squeak and scrape of his knife and fork on the matt pottery plate. The rain had come on and was gusting against the large picture window looking on to the garden. Outside the trees threshed and single summer leaves spiralled into the air.

What disturbed him most about eating on his own was the way his mind kept running away with him. Mentally he kept pulling on the reins and saying Whoa! every time he thought about what they were going to do. His mind shied away from the fence of the future. Their money was steadily draining away. What happened when it finished? Could he get a job somewhere as a joiner? Buy a flat, settle down with the boy, call him his son? The possibility of adoption frightened him, not because of its commitment, but because they would be bound to be found out.

He wished he had bought a paper to occupy him. He read the menu over once again.

Fresh garden peas. His mind relaxed into the past again. Brother Benedict had put him in charge of the kitchen garden at the Home and he had loved every minute of it. Preparing the ground with sweat, the feel of the hard dried peas as he dropped them into the trench, some of them shaped like green cubes, the spears of them bursting through into the air, the weeding and training upward on dead twigs and finally the eating. Cracking open the hollow pods and letting six fat peas run down his hand into his mouth as he stood waist-high among the rows. If the joinery didn't work out he could get a job in market gardening, maybe. Owen could go to school. He liked the idea of the comprehensive schools here. But again, would there be any papers needed? Interviews, lies. ‘What school was he at before?' A lie. ‘We'll write off then for some details. What's the address?' Forget it. He was back on the same track again.

He looked around the room. A man was wiping his mouth with a paper napkin but there was ice-cream on his lapel. A woman with winged glasses sat alone chewing furiously and politely, her lips pulled tight, her cheeks bulging.

The brassicas. He had liked the brassicas the best. The most difficult to grow but they had the highest rewards. Their big, purple and blue veined leaves, the yellow-white florets of the cauliflower, cracking the leaves over to keep the heads white. Watering the cabbages, leathery, the water remaining in single droplets, glittering and rattling with a hollow sound. Diamonds. Like diamonds, the way it remained in the nooks and crannies of the leaves afterwards. It was Owen's word. He had made the comparison one day when he had helped him with the watering. Michael had always found him so willing. If only he could be like that with other people, with strangers. His stubbornness and lack of respect for others would get them into trouble. In a school he would be in trouble within a week and the headmaster would . . .

Michael banged down his coffee cup too loudly and some people turned to look at him. He left the dining room and went quickly up the stairs to look in again on Owen. He hoped the boy would be awake, but when he opened the door he heard his deep even breathing.

He took a book off the shelf and stretched out on his own bed. He tried to concentrate but found himself reading the first paragraph again and again. The sound of the wind buffeting the window and booming in the chimney distracted him. Small rattles of soot fell behind the hardboard of the blocked-off fireplace. He threw the book away and turned on the transistor very low. He placed it by his ear on the bedside table. It was nice background music, swinging from one tune to another without any warning.

Michael must have fallen asleep because when he opened his eyes it was getting dark. He immediately looked over at Owen's bed. He switched on the bedside lamp and the boy stirred. He opened his eyes and ran his bitten fingernails through his hair in a mock scratch.

‘Hiya,' he said.

‘How do you feel?'

‘O.K. Bit weak.'

Michael helped him up in the bed and make a back for him out of two pillows. He had often done this for his mother, folding one pillow double and slanting the other against it. The boy lay back limply. His face looked washed and clean.

‘Where's the music?' he asked. Michael indicated the transistor.

‘Boy, were you in some state today.'

‘Was I bad?'

‘It's as bad as I've seen you. The only thing was you didn't wet yourself this time.'

‘Thank God.'

‘You don't remember any of it?'