Lamb (18 page)

‘With Benny?' The boy spewed the name out, making a fish mouth.

‘Is that the worst thing that could happen?'

‘You bet.'

‘I don't bet because I always lose,' said Michael and this time he did not laugh.

They crossed the border into Donegal. The boy became uneasy, fidgeting in his seat. Then he started to ask a question but choked it back.

‘What's up?' asked Michael.

‘Where are we heading?'

‘North.'

‘
Away
from the Home?'

‘Away from the Home,' said Michael firmly.

The boy relaxed and put his feet up on the dashboard.

‘Tonight,' said Michael, ‘we'll stay in a hotel somewhere and tomorrow we'll head north to the best beach I know – '

Owen.

Michael woke to the familiar depressing screech of gulls. Before his eyes had opened he knew it was the day. His tongue tasted of copper and he was unsure whether he had slept or not. The pillow was damp at his cheek. He must have slept, for his mouth had dribbled. He did not want to move, to do anything. His eye fixed itself on the plaster fleur-de-lis, out of which the light flex grew, without seeing it. His eye wandered its intricacies without knowing.
Petit mal.
He wondered if this was what it was like, to see, to hear and feel and taste and be incapable of the slightest motion of fingertip or eyelid or lip or tongue. To be at the same time unaware. Hopelessness had paralysed him. The inescapability of the
grand mal
that was to come had cut the nerves that controlled his extremities. He wondered where, all of a sudden, the bits of French had come from. Brother Benedict would have sneered that he was a man with one eye, a cyclops, would have sneered coward at him, would have called him a moral degenerate, with a dismissive and irritated wobble of the back of his hand.

Owen.

When the time came, would he have the strength? Was he capable of such an act? The love he had for the boy would see him through. He knew it. Each morning he was his first waking thought and each night he did not sleep because of him and every hour of the day was absorbed by him down to the creasing of his brow and the bitten half-moons of his fingernails.

He got out of bed and dressed quietly, putting on the T-shirt with Owen's picture on it. In the bathroom he washed his face but avoided looking at himself in the mirror.

Owen Kane.

Michael pulled the curtains and the sun struck hard and bright across the room, making Owen's eyes wince and retract almost beneath his brows. He muttered and turned his back to the light. Michael told him softly that it was time to get up, and turned to the window. The wasteland of Donegal, tweed green fading into brown, fading in the pale blue of the mountains, uninterrupted by trees of any sort. A place without shelter. He told the boy he would wait for him in the dining room.

They ate a breakfast of bacon, egg and sausage and fried soda bread. Although it was home-made food served by a family, different from anything they had eaten in England, Michael found it tasteless, requiring to be chewed too much before he could risk swallowing it. The previous night they had hunted for a hotel, but they were all booked up so they had to make do with a bed and breakfast place. Owen said that he preferred it to any hotel they had stayed in.

The owner's daughters served the breakfast, two lovely girls in bright dresses and aprons, about Owen's age. They were shy and smiling, bringing plates of cornflakes and toast, and when Michael said something in praise of them so that they could overhear it, they ran the last few steps out of the room, their pony-tails bouncing. When they had finished their meal and the girls had cleared the table with downcast eyes, the mother came in, her forearms bare and folded, to see if everything had been to their liking. The girls came to listen and look at the visitors from the shelter of their mother. Owen was embarrassed to be looked at so he asked Michael if he could go out and play, pointedly calling him Dad in front of the woman and her daughters.

Owen.

In Gaelic Owen meant lamb. Benedict had told him when he said that their stars were crossed.

Michael went up to their room and locked the door. Owen's tablets stood on a small table beside his bed. He opened the wardrobe, put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out the blue bottle of aspirin. He emptied Owen's tablets into the palm of his hand and counted them. He counted out the same number of aspirin and funnelled them, with his hand hinged, into the Epilim bottle. There was a fractional difference in size but it was almost impossible to notice. The Epilim tablets he threw down the sink, flushing them away with the straw-coloured Donegal tap water. After the fry he felt thirsty – as if he was going to be sick – and he took from the metal ring its cradled glass, filled it and drank, hoping the water would be a cure. As he drank his eyes came across himself in the mirror with his lower teeth bared, animal-like and distorted by the refraction of the glass. He spat the dregs into the washbasin and remained head down for some minutes.

He sat down on Owen's bed and tried to steady himself. He heard a fissling noise beneath him and wondered what it was. He stripped back the sheets and saw a large polythene bag laid flat between the sheet and the mattress. The boy must have got it out of the wardrobe. There were coathangers and polythene bags for dust covers lying at the bottom.

There was something about this, this finding what the boy had done without the presence of Owen himself to justify or explain it, that brought him to theverge of tears. A rearrangement of the world, however slight, which was Owen's idea. A mark which had come about unknown to Michael and which the boy did
not
want him to know of. Like coming across a site where a child had secretly played house and has had to leave it with pebbles outlining the walls, hearth, fireplace, flowers.

He knew he must not break. He left the polythene bag where it was and went downstairs, the tablets making a faint rattle in his pocket. The boy was playing outside on the gravel path, trying to lob stones into the mouth of a cement mixer at the side of the house. Every house in Donegal seemed to be adding an extension. Michael offered him the bottle and told him that he had forgotten to take his tablet. When he asked for water, Michael sent him to the kitchen. Owen was reluctant because of the girls. When they had booked into the house the woman had given them a cup of tea and a large wedge of chocolate cake. The girls had smiled through the serving hatch and Owen said that they looked as if they were on television.

The boy came out from the kitchen with a red face. Michael asked him which of them he wanted to marry and Owen tried to punch him, but Michael put his hand on the boy's head and kept him at arm's length so that he was flailing the air. Seeing he could not hit Michael, he stopped and did his cowboy walk to the bench seat at the front of the house and sat down. When Michael went to him he jumped up and said that he had to go upstairs for a minute and not to go away without him, that he had forgotten something. Michael wanted to say something about the girls making the beds but choked it back. This day should be without teasing, it must be different without seeming to be different.

He went and paid the bill and assured the woman that if they were ever back this way again, that this is where he would stay. The woman and the two girls came to the door to wave them off while the father, who had begun mixing cement, paused and took off his cap – a gesture which reminded Michael with a flutter of panic of a greeting reserved for passing funerals.

They drove north towards the Atlantic with the sun shining towards where they could see the taut line of its horizon cradled between two mountains. His hands were moist on the steering wheel so that he had to rub them on his trousers and his mouth was dry. He could think of nothing to say to the boy, and yet he wanted to say everything. For a ludicrous moment he thought he might get him to agree to the whole thing. He found himself looking in the mirror more often than usual to see if there was anyone following them but the road ribboned empty behind them into the distance. Since they had got into the car he had a strange feeling of being watched, of another presence and it wasn't a ghost feeling or a spied-upon feeling, just an aura that they were not alone.

They stopped in a village at the foot of the mountain to buy a picnic. The bed and breakfast had cost less than he expected so he had seven pounds left. He told the boy he could pick anything he liked and Owen chose a giant-size packet of marshmallows, some bananas and apples, an angel cake layered with three different colours of sponge and, as a concession to Michael's raised eyebrows and the constant reminders of what sweet things did to your teeth, a tin of sardines. Michael bought rolls and sliced ham, some cheese and a bottle of red wine. Then another bottle of red wine. He asked for a corkscrew and a knife, but when Owen reminded him that he still had his sheath knife, he put the knife back on the counter. He gathered the stuff in his arms and was moving towards the door when the boy whispered that he needed cigarettes and matches.

They travelled on roads cutting across the peat bogs, and tiny figures in white shirts leaned on their spades and took the opportunity for a rest, watching the red car crawl across the landscape. He felt small and ant-like shouldered by the mountains. He could see where he wanted to go between the blue hills, the cleft that would take him through, and yet he knew it would be a long time before he reached it. He saw themselves as if from above, inching across the land, following the dog-legged roads. A bird's-eye view. And yet he knew that this was not a true interpretation of what was happening, or of what was to happen. A bird's-eye view does not see the truth. He could explain if he had the words. Owen accused him of being quiet and he replied that he had not noticed.

They were now between tiny fields cleared of stones, which had been woven into the walls surrounding them. They came down a valley and turned a corner and saw the sea. Owen shouted with delight. It spread out before them blue-grey to its bar at the tight horizon. White breakers toppled and smashed themselves on to rocks by the road. Owen rolled down his window and sniffed the air and Michael told him that it was far better for him than smoking. He warned him not to get too excited, seeing the light in the boy's face. They came to a fork in the road and Michael hesitated, not clearly remembering the way. The signpost gave him no indication, only town names he vaguely recalled. He took the fork nearest the sea and after about two miles saw the domes of sandhills.

Michael parked the car and, laden with their picnic, they moved into the dunes overlooking the beach. The grass was sharp and spiky and Owen kept cursing as it penetrated the cloth of his jeans. They found the last dune before the flatness of the beach and lay down on its shoreward side. As Michael lay back on the dry soft sand the sun came out harshly bright but not warm. Owen, too, nuzzled into the sand, swiping his arms and legs up and down and indicating to Michael that he had made angels' wings. Michael told him to lie down and take it easy, but Owen was full of energy. He ran up the sand dunes, slowing half way up as the sand silted knee-deep, and after grunting his way to the top ran and jumped, ankles cocked, arms above his head, plummeting into the drift of sand some ten feet below. He squealed and whooped with the exhilaration of the fall. After he had done this about four times he came panting back to Michael and lay down beside him, his rib cage heaving. For a time the boy did not say anything, letting his breath return slowly to normal. Michael, his face to the sun, had his eyes closed and when he noticed the boy's silence he jerked his neck up and looked at him to see if he was all right. Then he asked him to tell him again about the feeling he got before one of his bad attacks but the boy refused. Michael was disappointed. He wanted to hear again the boy say that he experienced his weird happiness, wanted to hear him in his groping attempts to describe his ecstasy. He wanted to compare it to what was bound to happen if he did not do what he had planned. Brother Benedict's triumph, his punishments and victimization; the boy's mother weeping and drinking and hating, neither of them appreciating the goodness that was in the boy. Smothering. A life of misery, of frustration that led to inevitable crime and lovelessness, in his own, Michael's absence, stretched into the future. What he planned was for love; what he planned was a photograph, a capturing of the stillness of the moment of the boy's happiness. Irreversible and therefore eternal – if eternity existed. Fortunate in its timeliness. But the boy was silent and Michael deprived of his reassurance. A little rivulet of sand came streaming slowly down from the top of the dune, a dislodged trickle. Michael lowered his voice to a whisper and climbed to the top but he could see no one. The wind made a noise in his ears and when he put his head above the level of the dune the grasses whisked dryly. Owen came up and joined him and they stood together looking at the vast empty stretch of sand, stretching for about two miles, white flat sand fading into rocks at the far end. Except for themselves and a few gulls the beach was completely deserted.

Michael asked him if he would like a swim.

‘Oh, Mick, you beaut. Do you mean it?'

‘Why not? I'll go in with you, in case.'

‘Shit. No togs,' said Owen.

‘Go in your drawers. There's nobody about.'

They both stripped to their Y-fronts and ran, arching their feet against the hard ribbed sand near the water. Owen stopped at his ankles.

‘Jeeziz, it's freezing,' he yelled. Michael ploughed on out, then flung himself into the arch of an oncoming wave. He swam about for a bit, watching Owen. The boy was standing knee-deep, holding his elbows, his teeth chattering. Michael shouted to him but no amount of coaxing could get him deeper than his knees. The boy backed out and began sprinting across the shallow water parallel to the incoming waves. Michael went to him.