Long Story Short (3 page)

He didn't look young to me, but I suppose these things are relative.

“I don't think personation is a technicality,” said the ticket man, beginning to lose his sense of humor, and his “sir,” now I come to think of it.

“Personation?” Granda was rigid with indignation. “I am not impersonating anyone!”

“Well, you are trying to use someone else's travel pass,” said the ticket man. “That's illegal. Next!”

He called the last word out loud, summoning the next person in the queue to come forward to buy their ticket.

“It's a bloody disgrace,” my grandfather said, sagging over his frame and shaking his head. He should have been in a wheelchair, but you couldn't tell him anything.

All I could think of was the journey home we were going to have to make with the frame and the suitcase on the Luas and the bus, and the reception we were going to get when we arrived. I knew we weren't going anywhere now. Even if Granda had the money to pay for our train tickets, there was no way he was going to do it.

I was right. There was merry hell to pay when we got home. Gramma was beside herself. I never did work out whether it was because she thought she'd never see her grandson again or her travel pass. It certainly had nothing to do with never seeing Granda again, that's for sure.

That kinda put me off running away from home, I have to admit. Actually, I didn't think Granda came into this story at all, but there you go, you never know how things are all connected, do you?

It's funny how when you look back, you see the points where, if you'd acted differently, you might have changed things, and everything might have turned out different. I'm not saying it was my fault or anything, or that I should have gone along with Julie's madcap idea and just stuck a few changes of underwear in a rucksack and legged it. You'd have had to be eight to think that was a good idea. Or seventy-eight. But if I
had
, then, who knows?

4

Julie couldn't open her eye in the morning and her face was like a balloon on one side. I tried bathing it in cold water, but she kept screeching. I should have made ice overnight, but I didn't think of it. I never expected it would be so bad. I scraped some snowy stuff from the inside of the freezer into a cereal bowl using a soupspoon, and then poured it into a sandwich bag. I gave it to her wrapped in a tea towel, and she hugged it carefully to her face.

Ma slept through all this, as usual. She didn't get up before noon any day. “I never drink until the afternoon,” she used to boast, and it was true, but she had sherry for breakfast all the same.

Don't get me wrong, Ma wasn't always such a waste of space. I can remember a time before, when things were normal enough, and Da was home and we used to do family stuff like going to the zoo, that kinda shit. Good shit, you know. I remember Julie in her buggy and Da pushing it in the Phoenix Park and Ma with a flower in her hair and all laughing and stuff. I remember one night Da calling me in to look at Julie in her cot. She was asleep on her stomach with her bum in the air. Her diaper was making a little puffy bump under her pajamas, and her knees were bent so that her legs were nearly tucked under her.

“Doesn't she look like a turkey?” Da whispered. “All trussed up for the oven.”

The two of us had a good laugh about that, and then Da kissed his fingers and touched them to Julie's hair and she turned her head so that she was sleeping on the opposite cheek. You could see a big red patch where she'd been resting on it just a moment ago. We turned out the light then and left the room.

I don't know where Ma was that night, the night Da said Julie looked like a turkey. I'm not saying she wasn't around much in those days, because she must have been. I'd have noticed if she wasn't, but you don't remember every single little thing, do you? You just remember these little scenes, like me and Da in Julie's room, laughing at her asleep, only it wasn't laughing
at
her really, it was laughing because we loved her, the two of us, and we were glad we had her. And yet I remember the running-away-with-Granda story pretty clearly. Memory is weird.

I couldn't think what I was going to do with Julie. There was no way she could go to school looking like that. There'd be a social worker on the doorstep by lunchtime. (Why do the social workers take the children away? Why don't they take the parents? That'd be a much better idea. Residential care for troubled parents. That's brilliant—I should enter it in the science fair.) But I couldn't leave her at home either, with no one to look after her.

“I'm hungry, Jonathan,” she whined.

“Have an apple,” I said heartlessly, and she started wailing.

“Oh, shut up and let me think,” I said.

“I wish Gramma was here,” she sniffed.

“If you had a tune for that, you could sing it,” I said.

“What does that mean?” she asked, still holding the wet, cold tea towel to her face.

“It means yeah, yeah,” I said.

The only thing, I decided, was for me to skip school as well.

I wasn't going to just mitch off, though. They'd be on to me like a shot. And I couldn't say I was sick. I'd done that the previous week, and there's a limit to how often you can be sick without people getting suspicious. They are dead suspicious in my school. I don't know what ever happened to trust.

So I rang the school secretary and said I wouldn't be in because my ma was sick and she was so bad I couldn't leave her on her own. I hadn't used that one before, because I don't like to draw attention to Ma. I said she had the winter vomiting bug. I don't know what that is exactly but it sounds awful and nobody wants to know you if you have come anywhere near it, so I reckoned I'd be good for a few days on that one. Also, it was true in a kind of way. It was winter and she had been vomiting.

There was still no food in the house, only the apples, so I stole into Ma's room and took a twenty-euro note out of her jeans pocket. I was amazed that she had it. If she'd had all that money, how come she'd only brought apples home for dinner? I
knew
how come, and for a moment I could feel the anger rising through my bloodstream, but I told myself,
Don't waste your energy, Jono.

I was tempted to blow it all on Coco Pops and Mars bars, but I was very responsible. I bought brown bread and milk and some of those yogurt drinks. Also some Calpol. You would not believe what that stuff costs.

“What did you get?” Julie asked when I came back from the store.

“Bread,” I said. “We're having apple sandwiches for breakfast.”

“Apple sandwiches?” She sounded dubious.

“Yeah, it's what they eat in all the best houses,” I said.

“Do they really?” she asked.

“Well, only on the mornings when they have apples left over from dinner the day before,” I said.

“I see,” she said solemnly.

Kids don't get jokes. I kinda like that about Julie, the way she is so thick about jokes, but sometimes you could do with a bit of audience appreciation, know what I mean?

The apple sandwiches weren't half bad, but I was afraid it would hurt Julie's face to chew. She ate it all up, though, and drank some milk. I felt ridiculously proud of her. Or maybe of myself.

*   *   *

I
HAVE
this girlfriend. Sort of. Well, we like each other, but we're not exactly going out together.

Anyway, me and Annie—her name is Annie, did I say that before?—we just phone each other in the evenings, and we have a lot of laughs, but when we actually meet, we're a bit shy with each other. Or I am anyway. Her brother Jamie is my best friend at school, even though he's a year ahead of me. It's because they used to live next door to us. She has the shiniest hair you ever saw, and her face is wide open. She plays the clarinet. Isn't that something? The
clarinet
. She says she's going to join the army band when she's older. I said that means she has to be a soldier, but she just shrugs at that. She doesn't really see beyond this idea of herself with sparkly bits marching around tooting on her clarinet, the mad eejit.

She's in my year at school, only in a different class, because her surname starts with
W.
So she wouldn't necessarily notice if I wasn't at school, but I sent her a text anyway. I didn't say too much, just said I'd be out for a while. She's cool. She won't come running around with a thermometer or anything. But I wouldn't just say nothing, or then she really might come around, to see if we're all right. She worries about Julie, I think.

Julie was hanging in there, though. All she wanted now was to watch something on the telly, but of course, as usual, there was nothing on. I can hear Gramma saying, in her prissy way that was supposed to be funny,
Actually, there is a whole lot of stuff on the telly. There is nothing that anyone with an IQ above that of an undereducated wood louse would care to watch, but that is another matter.

She talked like that, she really did. She was sound, Gramma. I was cracking up laughing to myself just thinking about her. She used to wear these mad clothes, all too big for her because she was so skinny, and all clashing colors. She did it on purpose to be eccentric. I think if you are really eccentric you don't do it on purpose, but Gramma made a kind of hobby out of it. Lulu Fortycoats the neighbors called her. That was partly because her maiden name was Fortescue, which they thought was a bit uppity and needed taking down a peg. That's what Gramma said anyway. I think it's a nice name.

Well, to cut a long story short, because this is supposed to be some kind of a story even though it is true, we muddled through like that for a day or two, eating apple sandwiches and potatoes. I forgot to mention the potatoes. I bought them in the evening, with what was left of the money and a few coins I found down the back of the sofa, and we had them mashed with curry powder. You'd be amazed how far a bag of potatoes can take you. That's why there's never been an apple famine—potatoes are something you can't live without.

It was like a kind of daft holiday. We pretended we were just having a good time, and we tried not to think about all the
stuff
. Ma kept out of our way—tell the truth, I think she was a bit embarrassed about hitting Julie—so we could do more or less what we liked. We ate our potatoes in the sitting room because the kitchen was too cold, and Ma had worked out some way of tapping into the electricity so that you didn't have to pay for the electric fire. I'm sure it was dangerous and I know it was illegal, but at least we didn't freeze.

The day after that was dole day, so I got Ma out of bed and brushed her down and sent her off to collect the check. I know I am making it sound as if she was in bed for two days solid, which is not true, but I am just moving along here.

I remember when I was littler, when Da first left and before Gramma realized what was going on here, Ma used to forget to get the dole money. She'd just sleep through until I came home from school and it was too late and then there'd be nothing to eat.

I started acting up at school then on dole days, so that they'd have to send me home. One day I pretended I was choking and the teacher had to do a thing called the Hindenburg Maneuver, only it's not Hindenburg exactly, which basically means beating you up until you stop. And then they didn't even send me home, just made me lie down for a little while. That was the worst day of my life, lying on a little pullout sofa thing in the secretary's office looking at those horrible ceiling tiles with all the holes in them—they look sort of medical or something—and wishing I could just go home and get Ma up. But they wouldn't let me go home, they said there might be something stuck in my soft guts (I thought that's what they said, but it was
esophagus
, I know that now) and it would be dangerous to send me home.

So the next week I wet myself, and would you believe it? they just gave me clean things to wear. That was when I realized that no matter how miserable I made myself at school, they weren't going to send me home. And I did not like sitting around all day in somebody else's underpants. So I started really acting out then, rampaging around the classroom, spitting and shrieking and pulling people's hair. I thought, They'll definitely send me home now, maybe they'll even expel me, but they just put me in a quiet room and got this counselor person to come and talk to me, but I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want anyone finding out anything about me or my family, so I pretended I had a speech defect—you know, like when you can't talk properly.

In the end, I worked out a much simpler method. You mess about in class, you talk, you are disruptive, but not so bad they think you need counseling, just so bad they think your behavior is terrible, so then they take you to the principal's office and they ring your mother, to embarrass you, I suppose.

And then there's this long, long, long wait until eventually Ma answers the phone, and you are imagining her rolling out of bed, cursing, and tumbling down the stairs in her pajamas and still cursing.

There'd be all this hugger-muggering when she answered, and then I'd say, “Can I talk to her for a minute please?” so they'd give me the phone, and I'd cup my hand over the mouthpiece and whisper, “Ma, you need to go and get the stuff, you know?” like a person in a gangster movie talking about drugs or guns or something, and she would giggle and say, “I'm just on my way, guv'ner.”

At least she used to giggle at first, she thought it was a gas the way I would get them to ring up, but after a while she started getting belligerent about it and then she would snarl into the phone and make all these threats and ask me who did I think I was telling her what to do? I'd be standing there in the principal's office with my finger stuck over the place on the receiver where the voice comes out, in case anyone heard the stuff she was yelling at me. It was like a kind of verbal vomit: it stank and you couldn't make it stop.