Long Story Short (11 page)

I'd give him sad, I would, if I met him.

Oh, sweet Jesus, is it ever going to let up?

I told Kate all that the next afternoon, when I saw her. She said, Yeah, you're right, I never liked Antonio, bit of a moaner. Spoiled.

I like her attitude.

All the same.

“What about that Paudge?” I said. “He's trying to get you to winkle stuff out of me, isn't he? That's why you're here.”

“It is not,” she said. “Listen, Jonathan, I am on your side. I don't owe Paudge anything. Don't get me wrong, I think he's okay, it's just…”

“I liked him too, until he started accusing me of murder,” I said. “You'd be amazed how a little thing like that changes the way you feel about a person.”

Kate threw back her head and gave this long laugh. Her throat was all exposed and creamy. There's something very
healthy
about this person. I can't put my finger on it.

“Jonathan, your sense of humor will save you.”

“Oh?” I said. “Not Shakespeare?”

“Shakespeare's dead,” she said, “like a lot of people in your story. Now, listen. First off, I want to say, I am very sorry about your mam.”

The lights started going on and off in my head again.

“Don't!” I said. “Don't call her that. That's what I called her when I was a little boy. I don't want to think about that.”

Mam, Mam, help! I'm falling! I'm falling, Mam!

That was me, on my first bicycle, terrified. Ma was running along beside me, shouting, “You're all right, you're all right, keep looking ahead, concentrate, pedal, Jonathan,
pedal
. If you keep pedaling, you won't fall off. Pedal like crazy, Jono, pedal, pedal, pedal!”

But I kept looking back, to check that she was still holding on to the saddle, and every time I turned my head I lost my balance and she righted the handlebars with her other hand, and she screamed, “Don't, Jonathan. Just look ahead and pedal like the bejaysus.”

But I didn't trust her, and in the end, one of my twistings-around knocked me so far off my center of gravity that I came down with a bang. I hurt the side of my face, I scraped my shins, and I caught my foot in the spokes and sprained a toe. I sat there crying in the middle of the bicycle—it seemed to be lying all around me—and I yelled at her, “It's all your fault, it's all your fault.”

She pulled the bicycle up and wheeled it away. She left me in a huddled heap, crying and shouting and hurting.

“I couldn't stand the noise,” she explained afterwards. “I couldn't take the yells and shouts. And you were blaming me, it wasn't fair.”

Of course it wasn't fair. But I was bloody six years old.

“Sorry,” said Kate, about using that word,
mam
. “I won't. What I want to say is, I know this is very tough for you, but we have to face up to it all if we are to make any progress here. Okay? You with me?”

God, she was going all social-workery again on me. But what choice did I have? She was the only person I could talk to.

I looked out the window. There was some kind of a five-on-five thing going on in the garden. And on the windowsill was this blade I'd found in a cabinet in the bathroom of that hamburger place we'd gone to, me and Kate and Paudge. God knows how it got there. It was weird, finding a thing like that, so weird, I had to take it. It was like a gift, I thought. So I'd wrapped it up in toilet paper, layers and layers, and I'd put it in my pocket and then I'd walked very stiffly for the rest of the day, in case it worked its way out of the toilet paper and started to do damage.

Once I got it here, I put it on the windowsill in the sitting room, just at the end, where it was hidden by the curtains. I wasn't so stupid as to put it in my own room. Nobody had noticed it was there. It made me feel sort of powerful or something. And then of course when I'd looked, two of my fingertips were scored and had tiny arcs of red. When I saw that, they started to sting.

“I have to see Julie,” I said then. “Why won't they let me see her? Where is she anyway? Is she still in Galway? Still with Da?”

“No,” said Kate. “He … eh, well, he turned her over to the social services.”

“What!” My mouth was dry, my heart was pounding in my ears. After all the trouble I'd gone to to make sure Julie wouldn't get taken into care! Handing her over to bloody Da, the last person in the world I'd want to have her—second last, I mean.

“The social services, you know? We look after kids if their families can't.”

“But Da is her family, and he can. That's why…”

Kate shook her head. “He doesn't see it that way,” she said. “He thinks … well, he says she's not his daughter, and he couldn't be responsible for her.”

“Not his daughter? What's that supposed to mean?”

“I couldn't tell you, Jonathan. Maybe he thought your mother…”

“But he adored Julie,” I said. “He worshipped the ground she stood on.”

“He walked out on her all the same,” she said.

“So—where is Julie now?”

“We found a foster family for her.”

Julie in a foster family. Me not able to see her. How the hell had I let it happen? I covered my face. I didn't want Kate to see what was in my eyes.

“It's here in Dublin,” she was saying, “and it's not far from where you both live … eh … lived. She can go to the same school, which is good.”

“She hated that school.” My voice sounded like a mouse you'd squeezed under a door. “They bullied her.”

I thought she'd ignore that, but she didn't. She wrote it down. “Right. We'll look into that, Jonathan, definitely. See if we can flush that out, but continuity is always good, you know.”

“What about me? I'm continuity, I'm the best continuity she's got! She needs to be with me,” I said.

“Well…” said Kate, “yes, but—you're not an adult, Jonathan, and … well, you're
here
.”

She looked around her. It's nice, this place. There's a flat-screen telly, and my mobile was sitting on a coffee table, charging. I was planning to phone Annie later. I hadn't been able to charge my phone for days.

But I saw her point. I couldn't bring Julie here. It wasn't a place for little kids.

“They're lovely people, I promise you that,” she said. “They've fostered lots of children. She will be happy there.”

“Happy! She doesn't need a foster family. She's got me.”

“I don't mean happy in that sense. I just mean she will settle, in time.”

“In time! You can't be planning to
leave
her there! This is just a temporary arrangement, isn't it, until the guards have finished questioning me. Then I can go home, right?”

My heart was in my mouth. I could hardly bring myself to go on asking questions, in case the answer was unbearable. But not to know was even more unbearable.

“I could move?” I said again. “Back home? When this is all over, this nonsense about Ma. You know I didn't do it. She just fell over.”

“Come on, Jonathan, tell me the story.”

I shuffled my feet. I didn't want to talk about “the story.” I wanted to talk about Julie.

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“I don't really want to
know
,” she said. “It's more that I think it would be good for you to
tell
me.”

I considered this for a while. It was a fine line, but I think I got it.

“I've told you,” I said. “You heard me telling Paudge.”

“What you said to Paudge doesn't count. I want to hear the whole story, your way.”

I sighed again. “My grandmother died,” I said.

I watched her face.

She nodded. “Uh-huh?” she said.

She didn't say it was the wrong place to start.

And so I told her what had gone on since Gramma died, and about the apples and the bruise and mitching off school and then how we'd left and all that went on, up to the moment I left Julie outside Da's house, and I ran off into the cold, wet night.

When I finished, my throat was sore from talking, and my jaw was clicking with exhaustion. Kate was biting her lips.

“God,” she whispered, “you poor kid!”

I looked at her and I shrugged.

“So that's why you ran away, because you couldn't cover up about Julie any longer?”

“Yeah, mostly,” I said.

“Nothing to do with your mother not waking up one morning?”

And that finally started me off crying. I stuck my knuckles into the corners of my eyes, but I couldn't stop the tears.

“In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,” I said, when I'd had a good weep and was wiping my eyes.

“I could make a stab at it,” she said. She was wiping her own eyes.

“Okay,” she said then. “Tear-fest over.”

“Julie?” I said.

She must have heard the desperation in my voice, because she patted the back of my hand and said, “Tomorrow, Jonathan. I'll be talking to some people, your case will be up for discussion, and I give you my word of honor that I will do my level best to … well, to make sure you're both looked after in the best possible way.”

What was
that
supposed to mean? Sweet feck all, as far as I could see.

“There's only one possible way,” I said. “She belongs to me—with me, I mean. I brought her
up
—well, me and my gramma, we did it together. I am the only one who … They can't take her away from me. She
needs
me.”

Then an awful thought struck me. “Is it because I gave her over to Da? Is that why they think I can't look after her, that I don't want to? I thought … I mean, I did it for the best. I thought she'd be better off. I didn't
want
to, but I thought he loved her.”

“That was the bravest thing, Jonathan,” she said very softly.

I looked up at her. I was sorry I'd thought those things about her looking like a duck.

“Yeah,” I said.

I wanted to howl. But I just sat with my head down. I suppose you could say I'm not really a howler.

She said, “Tomorrow, Jonathan. I'll see you tomorrow.”

14

We went on this holiday when Julie was a baby.

This particular holiday was different because we went to France, and we hired a car at the airport and drove off to this really cool campsite place with a pool and a place for barbecues and entertainment for the little kids and everything. It was a great holiday. There was soccer in the afternoons for the older kids, like me. Julie used to come and watch. She was only a toddler, but she sat patiently on the sideline and pointed at me every time anyone came by. I used to like soccer in those days, before I discovered I was no good at it.

I never remember Ma and Da so happy. There were babysitters, so they could go out in the evenings. When I say a campsite, we weren't in a tent, more a kind of mobile home. Only it wasn't mobile, it was up on bricks. I don't know why they call it mobile when it is immobile. Anyway, the babysitters would come and sit in the tiny living room and watch TV and Julie and I could stay up as late as we wanted to, and Ma and Da would go to the nearest town to one of the restaurants and eat fish. They never ate fish at home, but they said this was different. Maybe foreign fish taste better, I dunno.

We didn't speak any French, and the people running the campsite had desperate English. They thought they spoke English. They opened their mouths and these sounds came out, but they had nothing to do with any English words I ever heard. They would wave their arms a lot, though, and we more or less got the gist of what they wanted to say, because after all, what does a campsite person want to say except park your car over there or there won't be any hot water for showers until after six, and really, you can either work that out, or you can manage without knowing it.

The pool was really great. There was a small pool for the little kiddies like Julie, where they could waddle around in their diapers and splash their feet. And there was the shallow end of the big pool where the older kids could swim, and the parents used the deep end. They looked weird with their swimming caps on, you couldn't recognize people at all, they didn't look like themselves. One day I was watching Ma and Da swimming and splashing each other and roaring with laughter and then Da got out of the pool, and it wasn't Da at all, it was some bloke from Wexford that Ma and Da had met in the supermarket a day or two before.

On the last day of the holidays, we packed up the car with all the luggage to drive back to the airport, but our flight wasn't until evening, so we thought we'd have a last swim before leaving. Da had all the stuff for the airport in this little waterproof bag, like a toilet bag or something, the passports and the tickets and so on. Ma told him to put the car keys in there too, so all the important things would be in the same place.

Da put the little bag down on the ground beside this sun-lounger he was lolling on. Every two minutes, he shook the contents of the bag out as if to check something, it made him nervous having it all together and no place to keep it, as the mobile home had been handed over to the campsite people to clean it for the new family.

Anyway, we all had a swim, and then we had a picnic by the pool, and we got dressed behind the car for going to the airport. All except Da. He was still in his swimsuit. He didn't want to leave.

Ma said, “I wish you had left the car doors open, hon, it'll be like an oven in there, the children will roast.”

“Nag, nag,” said Da, gulping back a can of something fizzy. “We can open the windows as we drive, it will cool down fast.”

Ma shrugged and went on pulling up Julie's socks. When she had the baby ready, she put her hand out and said to Da, “Okay, gimme the keys, and I'll strap this one into her car seat while you get dressed.”