Taken Away (2 page)

‘A little bit, darlin'. We need to hurry. Ups-a-daisy now. Up we go.'

Ma knew. I could tell by the way she herded Nan past Dad and didn't look back down the hall. Dom ran ahead. He already had the hall door open and was standing in the porch, his hand on the porch door latch, when Dad roared, ‘STOP!'

We all froze. Dad held his hand out, as if to keep us all from moving. He wasn't a broad man, but he seem to fill the entire hall right then, a living barrier between us and whatever lay hidden in the kitchen. ‘Dom,' he said, ‘don't open that door yet! It's very important. Let everyone into the porch
first
.
Then
shut the hall door behind you, and
then
open the porch door. Have you got that?'

Dom nodded, his brown eyes huge. Ma hustled Nan in beside him and they all stood crammed together in the porch, staring back at Dad. Nan began querulously looking for her handbag, and Ma hung onto her without speaking, her eyes glued to Dad as if afraid he'd disappear. I could smell the smoke now. I could actually hear the flames. Somewhere behind my dad, something huge was on fire. Dad pinned me down with the same look he'd just given Dom, and it hit me how serious this all was.

Our house was on fire. It was on
fire
.

‘Patrick,' said Dad, ‘shut that porch door after everyone's outside.
It's very important.
I'm going upstairs for your sister and I don't give a shite what happens when I'm up there, you are
not
to let your ma or Dom or your nan back into this house. Do you understand?'

My eyes slid past him, and I nearly fell over with shock at the sight of the kitchen door. The cheap wood was glowing, its paint all bubbled up and hissing. Black fingers of smoke were twisting through the gaps of the doorjamb, reaching for the ceiling and spreading up the walls. I opened my mouth to yell, but before I could make a sound Dad had shoved me into the overcrowded porch and slammed the hall door in my face. I was left staring at my own reflection in the glass.

Nan was demanding to be released from this telephone box, and Ma yelled at Dom to open the porch door. He did, and they all tumbled out into the coal-fire smell of the suburban night, leaving a cold space whistling at my back. I stayed where I was while Ma ran screaming to the Reid's, four doors up, who had the only telephone in the road. Dom was left to corral Nan, who was trying to wander down the street to catch a bus to Galway.

I could see Dad through the rippled orange glass of the hall-door panels, lashing it up the stairs to Dee's room. I stared through the glass, willing him to come back down the stairs, Dee in his arms. I could still see that kitchen door as if it were right there in front of me. The brief glance I'd had of it had been enough to lodge every detail in my mind.

I heard Dad come barrelling down the stairs, saw his wobbly shape through the orange glass, and recognised the pink bundle in his arms as my sister. As he was hitting the hall carpet, I realised I hadn't done my job. The porch door was still gaping open, and the old man was reaching for the doorhandle.

Dad. No.

My heart stuttered in my chest. I opened my mouth to warn him and lifted my hand to close the door. All late. Too late. But Jesus, Dad paused, his hand on the latch, his head bowed against the glass as if listening to the outside air. I heard him, muffled: ‘Pat?'

The world slammed back full-colour, and me standing there with my mouth open. ‘Hang on, Dad! Hang on.' I slammed the porch door shut with a force that would have earned me a clatter round the ear at any other time, and my dad almost instantly banged open the hall door. His face was pulled down in a frightened mask, the skin under his eyes stretched thin and whiter than milk. The hall behind him was perfectly normal, apart from the huge black ball of smoke that filled the far end of it. It had rolled up the walls and was spread in a rippling fan across the ceiling, and through the smoke an eye, an evil eye, pulsed hot and red at the entrance to our kitchen. Flames were shimmering across the surface of the door, a simmering wash of heat.

At the threshold of the porch, my dad turned and looked back. Outlined against the flames and smoke, he was like some medieval hero – like something bigger than just my dad. For a moment he glared at the fire: man to dragon, mortal to elemental. Then he slammed the hall door, pushed out of the porch and shoved me ahead of him into the night.

Ma raced screaming out of the dark and grabbed Dad and Dee in a death-grip. Dee woke up and started bawling, and Ma took her in her arms, gabbling about fire brigades and phone calls while Dad pushed all of us out onto the path. Mr and Mrs Reid and their gang of girls came crowding down the road from their house, goggle-eyed and excited, as if expecting to see all of us standing in flames in the front garden. They stopped in a confused little huddle at the gate and we all stood staring at the house.

‘Looks okay, Dave.' Mr Reid sounded defensive, probably beginning to suspect some kind of joke.

‘Jaysus, it's bleedin' freezin'.' That was Naomi Reid's harsh nasal whine.

‘Shurrup, Naomi, right?' Maureen's equally grating reply.

‘
You
shurrup.'

‘No,
you.
'

‘Both of youse shurrup.' Sharon, skinniest and scariest of them all.

The Reid girls in all their ladylike glory.

Dom was herding Nan back up the road, and I was just beginning to think we'd all imagined it when the glass in our front door suddenly got a whole lot brighter.

‘Jesus,' said Dad.

The sitting room, where we'd only just been eating chips and watching telly, was hidden behind heavy curtains. For a moment we could see no difference there. But gradually a steady, cheerful glow began to suffuse the window, as though a great big fire was burning in a great big hearth. There was no such thing as a great big hearth in these houses, no sir, just crappy, asthma-inducing central heating. I watched the jolly, orange warmth seep through the thick material of the curtains, and I imagined the dragon in there, lapping at our furniture with its seething tongue.

A thread of illumination ran along the hem of the curtain. At first it was just a thin, creeping embroidery of gold – and then
whoosh
, a window of naked flame. Just like that. One minute an innocent curtain, the next a roiling, smoke-laden landscape of fire filling the window of our front room.

The upstairs windows began to light up. First Dee's room. Then ours.

Ours.

I imagined Dom's desk. His drawings curling up and blackening – page after page of his comic books, his hard-won paintbrushes, his pencils. I imagined my notebooks, my copybooks full of short stories, my novel. All those handwritten pages being eaten one at a time, crisping, blackening, curling away from each other, the words scorching and rising up in soot, never to be read again.

We were losing it all.

My eyes were burning, but I couldn't blink. Looking up at our window, I could see the corner of our bunk bed. As I watched, the top mattress – Dom's mattress – began to smoke, and the wall behind it lit up in dancing light. I saw our Horslips poster, its edges starting to smoulder. Then suddenly it ignited, drifting up in great curls of flame. It floated away from the wall, dissolving into orange butterflies and black feathers.

‘Jesus,' said Dad again.

We could hear it now – the dragon – roaring its way through the house, eating, eating its way through our house, and leaving us nothing.

I looked over at Dom, my mirror, my reflection, my identical twin. He had sat Nan down on the garden wall and was standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders. His eyes were fixed on our bedroom window, his face a blank slate of shock.

‘Dom,' I said.

He looked over to me at once. I wanted to say,
Our stuff, Dom.
All our stuff.
But, as usual, I couldn't find the words. I remember his big eyes glittering then, and the beginning of realisation creeping into his expression. He looked down at his hand and took something out of his pocket. It was his purple marker. He held it up to me, a rueful expression on his face, and shrugged as if to say,
Oh well. We've got this.

A fecking purple marker.

‘I'll have butter, but no jam,' murmured Nan, complacently settling herself down to watch the show. Ma sat down beside her, Dee already asleep again in her arms.

Something huge burst inside the house with a cartoon-like
POP
.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' said Dad. He backed up to sit beside Ma, and took her hand.

Mr and Mrs Reid and the girls were a row of gaping mouths and shining eyes behind them. Dom swung his legs over the wall, and I went over and sat by his side. Far away, the first wails of the fire engines could be heard threading their way towards us. And as we waited, we watched, our faces all lit up with fire, as the dragon finished its complete and terminal consumption of our home.

THE OLD BIDDIES' PLACE

EVERY YEAR WE
went to Skerries on holidays. For a whole month, sometimes longer, my ma and her sisters, Pet and Breda, would rent two old houses next to the fairground's hurdy-gurdies and we'd move down there, lock, stock and barrel. We'd spend a chaotic four weeks at the heart of those two huge families, roaming Skerries with our close-knit pack of cousins, invincible, wild and free. It was heaven.

Usually we drove down in blazing sunshine. The car windows would be open, our hair fluttering, the air vivid with fresh grass and diesel fumes and the crusty-bright smell of the sea. We'd swig Cidona from the bottle. Ma would pass back bags of iced caramels and Emerald toffees. Dom would sing. We'd all sing.

Us kids'd be stuffed into the back seat along with too many bags and blankets and all sorts of crap at our feet, and we'd always arrive squashed and sweaty. A tide of cousins would screech towards us across the sand-filled gardens of the adjoining houses – the swing chairs and bumper-cars and penny arcades a multicoloured, noisy blur behind them – and we'd laugh as we tumbled from the car.

This time was very different.

It rained the whole way there, and the car was a steaming, claustrophobic headache. There was no warm burr of conversation from the front seats. Ma sat silently smoking, staring out the front window. Dad just drove. They'd been quiet like that since the day before, and I was beginning to get a familiar knot in my stomach about them. I told myself it was just that they were tired. Ma's brothers and sisters had done their best for us; they'd opened their arms wide and taken us in without a word. But their families were big, their houses were tiny, and we'd spent nearly a week shunting between them, sleeping on floors, crammed into narrow shared beds. We were all wrecked for want of a good night's sleep.

I shifted about a bit in the back seat, trying to get some room without waking Dee. She was sprawled between me and Dom, her feet on my lap, her head on his knee. Dom was looking out the window at the driving rain, humming to himself and absently stroking her silky hair. It looked light as feathers between his fingers, curling and dropping, curling and dropping around the ragged tops of his fingernails. He had been the usual soul of patience as she garbled her nonsense at him. He'd tolerated her tugging at his face with her fat little hands, and let her ‘comb' his hair. He'd even taken her games of I-spy seriously, despite her thinking every word started with ‘M' and none of us understanding half of what she said. When she'd tired of him, she'd flopped onto her back and shoved her pink sock-clad feet in my face.

‘'Mell, Pap,' she'd ordered. ‘'Mell my pongy feets.'

I'd sniffed and gone ‘Paaawww!' as though they stank like old cheese. This kept her in giggles until she'd subsided into a doze, and then – thank God – a full, boneless, drooling sleep.

I watched the movement of Dom's fingers slow until his hand came to a standstill on Dee's head. His chin began to drop forward onto his chest. I turned my attention to the rain-soaked road, and listened to the silence crackle between our parents.

WE CAME UP
the main street of Skerries with the sky pressing down on the houses and the rain pummelling all the colour from the air. As we turned up a side street and onto the deserted beachfront, Dom and Dee were still unconscious. I was limp and heavy from the long drive, my head bobbling against the window. When we pulled up to the garden gate, I no more wanted to move than I wanted to eat my own hair.

Dad switched off the engine and sat there a moment, his hands clenched around the steering wheel. Ma said nothing. The rain hammered the roof of the car.

‘I'll go in to the old biddies and get the keys,' said Dad.

Ma didn't answer him.

He sighed. There was a blast of cold as he got out of the car, then the abrupt slamming of the door. Ma sat like a stone in the front seat as he walked away. Dom and Dee's sleeping breaths filled the silence between us, and I assumed Ma thought I was asleep, too. She stabbed out her fag. As Dad ducked under the apple trees and disappeared up the side alley that led to the old biddies' house, I was shocked to hear her mutter, ‘Fuck you, Finnerty.'