On the Floor (29 page)

‘She said I was a liar.' I looked down the line of my nose at Orla who sniffled, dabbed her nose with her hanky. Her mother ran a comforting hand over her head, arched her brows.

‘Geraldine,' my mother urged in a whisper.

‘Come along now,' Mrs Murphy's pitch rose in warning. But I was rising higher and higher, floating above them all. I was unreachable with my new-found disdain, up there in the thin air.

‘Well then,' the headmistress sighed, shook her head and stood up.

‘Do you want to stay and watch?' I snarled at Orla.

‘You will be QUIET,' Mrs Murphy rapped her knuckle on the desk. Orla was shepherded away bawling. My mother stared aghast at this daughter-turned-sinner and then backed out the door.

‘I have never had call to use this on any girl before,' the headmistress picked up her cane from the coat rack. ‘But you leave me no choice.' She looked grimly at the shiny bamboo. ‘Now hold out your hand.'

I did not flinch at the first stroke. She paused, checked my face for some sign of remorse but I held firm, waiting. Her lips tightened sourly and she whacked again, this time harder and I kept my head high and watched her closely and I knew that she hated what I had made her do – three – four – five – but I was stronger. Though I didn't know where all the cussedness came from, I had discovered a deep and velvet well of power.

Rex is whimper snoring, I pat him into stillness and Pie Man's red mountain stirs. ‘Why didn't you talk to your mum and dad? Surely someone would have—'

‘Sshh,' I tell him. ‘Don't interrupt.'

My father talked to me in the dining room that Saturday and told me to be a good girl and not to be getting in trouble at school. I told him they said I was a liar and a cheat. ‘Ah, well now,' he said. ‘Keep your head down, Geraldine, and just get on with your work. Take a leaf out of your brother's book,' he said, just like everyone else. My father didn't take girlfights seriously and anyway he was checking his watch, the three o'clock at Newmarket would be on telly soon.

I wanted to tell him I was afraid, that this thing with numbers felt like a birthmark, a deformity that singled me out. I wanted to tell him how the numbers followed me, how they hovered even on the edge of sleep. How they swirled across the wallpaper, wobbling and swooping into position. How I lay awake at night taking comfort in what I would later discover are called prime numbers, hunting them down like hidden treasure that you pick and weigh in your hand, testing their shape and properties, lining them up on my bookshelf atop the uneven sweep of volumes. 7 above
Black Beauty
, 29 above the
Children's Bible
, 73 above
Little Women
. Sometimes I paraded them in a ring on the floor of my bedroom and each time I found a new one I arranged a steeplechase of primes – the highest didn't always win. I wanted to tell my dad that sometimes I felt the numbers were choking me and that there might be something terribly wrong with me since I could not leave them alone, like a feverish compulsion to scratch at your skin till it bleeds.

But I didn't have words to describe it so I just promised to be a good girl and he patted me on the head and went into the kitchen. I eavesdropped on the staircase.

‘Sure isn't it great if she likes sums,' he said to my mother.

‘She was cheating, George, the teacher said so.'

Later my mother was doling out rashers and egg. ‘What are you looking at?' I said. Kieran raised a startled head. I offered her my most insolent glare.

‘That's enough out of you, madam. You'll get up to your room right now with no tea.'

I scraped back my chair.

‘I'm very disappointed in you. Your brother never got into trouble like this,' she called out as I slammed the door.

I stomped my protest upstairs and lay on my bed with the curtain billowing in the open window, the sound of summer evening football, the punishing chant of other children playing on the road until the day dissolved into a pale grass-scented evening, the downstairs mutter of adult TV and the clatter of washing up. I poked my head under the curtain and watch the girls play a last game of German jumps in the fading light. Áine Kenny stood with the coloured rubber bands twanging at her ankles. Last Sunday she sang a solo ‘Ave Maria' at Mass, her voice a startling sweet that had all the parents reeling in the pews. On Tuesday Emer walked on her points across the entrance hall, one chequered square at a time. All these girls could do the special things that girls do.

I heard the closing click of Kieran's bedroom door and then the music seeping through the wall. ‘It's not fair,' I said from the threshold while he lay reading on his bed, lost in his book, his favourite Russian stories tucked inside a tattered green hardback. But Kieran didn't hear, he was with Chekhov on the shores of the Black Sea or gazing at the chandeliers in St Petersburg. I flopped down on the floor, kicked the skirting boad. ‘I don't want to be different.'

‘So don't be,' he shrugged, turning the pages. ‘Just pretend.' I rolled over on my back and looked at him upside-down. His extra eight years put him in an unimaginable place. ‘Just keep your own secrets.' He smiled and considerered my upside-down face. He was pulling further
and further away from me and soon he would be gone. ‘Now be quiet and I'll read you this story.' And I knew it would be a sad one because Kieran was always reading sad stories. He read aloud to me in the watershed hours between school and teatime, even long after I was able to read myself. I can still see him sitting on the floor with the thick green book and Tchaikovsky on his cassette recorder. He picked stories that made us both cry, as if constant immersion in raw emotion and pathos was some sort of poultice that would keep us tender and vulnerable, so that everywhere you looked the world was flooded with casual injury. Scabbed horsehide and slinking dogs who bare their cringing teeth at a raised hand, Scott's ponies sinking up to their necks in the snow until the crack of a bullet laid their misery to rest in the Antarctic wasteland.

I used to lie on the bed digging my toes into the soft press of his pillow imagining the starving she-wolf lying in a bitter March snow, suckling the cubs who prodded her emaciated belly with their paws. And I cried, retreating to the numbers in my head, multiplying my way into the future in a hypnotic sequence of numbers that only got bigger, while Kieran sat motionless in the fading afternoon, the book open on his lap, a single tear rolling down his cheek.

Pie Man breathes the noisy labour of the obese. There is a sprinkling of powdery white across the red mountain of his sweatshirt, rising and falling like some great dormant rumbling, molten lumps on the verge of sudden ignition.

‘So I took Kieran's advice,' I tell him. ‘I took my secret underground, thinking maybe darkness would stunt its growth.'

‘You mean you pretended?'

‘Though sometimes I really couldn't hold it in.'

Maths class aged twelve and the intolerable discomfort of an error transcribed by the teacher from the textbook onto the board. That's wrong, Miss. Seeing the mistake before knowing why or how – the shape,
something wrong with the shape. The class gawped and sniggered while the teacher stood beached in a shaft of sunlight, before packing my impertinence off to the headmistress and I wrestled with the urge to beat her brains out with the wooden edge of the chalk duster. My erratic test results fitted the profiler of a cheat and teachers issued occasional warnings. I was sullen and unresponsive. But the nuns didn't worry themselves about underperforming girls since there was an endless supply of average men who would provide for them. I was alone since no one could follow me into that other-worldly space. On the other side of a blackboard or at the end of an equation hovered a universe vast and unknowable, like the frozen steppes where a sled would whoosh me away to a place of no return. And that's how it would be, there would be nothing for me to be except different.

‘Your brother gave you the wrong advice,' says Pie Man softly. The red mountain rises and falls. ‘You should ask him what he thinks now.'

‘I can't.'

‘You could try,' he says coaxingly, gently, as you would encourage a small child.

‘Kieran's gone.'

Darkness has fallen. And I am being dragged now back into a past I'm supposed to have shed. The whole point of leaving is that you don't take the shit with you, but there it is seeping under the door like floodwater.

‘Tell me what happened,' says Pie Man. ‘Finish the story.' And it seems that is all the prompting I need. But I don't have much to remember: I was so young and everything is wearing out. There was the sandpit in the back garden where Kieran used to cover my legs completely and then tickle me. Oh, everyone loved him, the boy with chestnut hair and ocean eyes. All the mothers on the road used to say he had eyelashes like Tony Curtis in
Spartacus
and I'd see his name tucked inside the scrawled hearts on the back door of the girls' toilets at
school. Sometimes on my way home, he'd cycle past me with a bunch of friends, making a whooping noises and doing wheelies, ties streaming from their necks. Kieran lagged behind, a back-pedal distance between him and the others, looking round at me with a secret smile, though he never stopped, never broke ranks.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, my mum shrieked the day he strolled through the front door brandishing his Leaving Cert results, an excess of As, my mother screeching he'd be getting into Med then. Kieran stalled in a threshold shrug, his accommodating grin and the lack of an alternative suggestion, unable to resist the grinding force of academic success, my mum racing out onto the road to tell the neighbours about the fledgling doctor, the first generation of university material.

A week into his first term, I came in from school to find her standing by the sink, tears rolling down her cheeks, saying it broke her heart to see the Weetabix packet lasting three days now he wasn't having all this meals at home.

I remember the first time he came home late, I was lying in bed imagining him crumpled in a gutter with his brains spilling out all over the road, clutching the crushed bike as the tail lights of a drunk driver faded away into the night. Then I heard the slam of the back door and my mother tiptoeing down the stairs, Did you have a nice time? she said, while Kieran puked his guts out in the toilet. She let him miss Mass the next morning and lie in till noon, cooked a big fry to help him get his strength back.
He's only pissed you know, Mum, he's not sick
, I said as she handed me the tray.
Wash your mouth out, miss. Your brother is studying day and night and he needs to let off a bit of steam. You could take a leaf out of his book, I'm telling you
.

Strange books everywhere, littering all the rooms with their anatomical detail, red and blue cross-sections of skinless body parts, skeletal quizzes at the breakfast table, the curved shelf in his bedroom collapsing under the weight of future responsibilities. But Kieran didn't talk anymore. There were unfamiliar voices on the phone. And he'd stopped reading to me. Floated past on the stairs like I was invisible.
There would be a ring at the doorbell and he would disappear for a whole night and come back thinner. He was leaving us for another world. Once I sneaked into his room, crouched down by his shelf of spine-crinkled Russians and slowly, methodically tore the first eighteen pages of
The Idiot
in half, the satisfying thrill of injury, the dust-sweet smell of tattered yellow pages, their transparent flimsiness, such a tenuous link with immortality. Hurting is a very easy thing to do.

And then I was eleven, nearly twelve, walking home from school. I stopped in our front garden, there was a dead sparrow on the grass, I can still remember the grey underside of its wing, the way it was so small, the way the feathers looked, the raindrop lightness shattered by a broken wing, but the image doesn't hold. What I hear instead is my mother screaming and me running inside and upstairs where Dad was splitting open the bedroom with an axe.
Hurry George Hurry Oh God George
, my Mum's jabber,
God help us
, hack hack, the wood splintering a jagged opening, Dad's hand shoving through, the click of the key,
Mum, I'm scared
, my hands pawing at her back,
Oh George
, and the door burst open onto a fallen chair, a shoeless dangle, the trouserless legs below the naked body of the mangled face that filled the space where the light should be. The shape, the body, a swinging carcass.

Kieran Molloy
Beloved son of George and Patricia
Brother of Geraldine
Taken to God March 2nd 1979

Later, a lifetime later, after the front door had finally closed on the procession of priest and doctor and neighbours, we were left alone with our horror.
Why'd he do it?
I tugged at Dad's sleeve and when he didn't answer I kept repeating the question, louder, louder.
You must know, you must know why
, but he didn't even move, I thumped his back and Dad led me from the kitchen, hugged me limply and then shook my shoulders,
Geraldine, shush now, shush, don't be upsetting your mother
.