The Story of Before (19 page)

He was standing on the tea-chest, puffing on a cigarette and blowing clouds of the horrible, stinking smoke out the window. I coughed loudly and he turned around.

‘Needed a fag,’ he said when he saw me. ‘Want a pull?’

‘No thanks, I’m OK,’ I said, walking into the room. ‘You didn’t answer when I knocked.’

‘Didn’t hear ye, did I? Me head was stuck out the fuckin’ window.’ He frowned but then gave me a false grin, showing his neat white teeth. ‘Watchin’ Goggin, I
was.’

‘Bridie, you mean? What’s she doing?’

‘Jump up and have a look.’

I put a foot on the chest and held onto the window frame to haul myself up. I stood beside him, trying not to touch him. It was difficult.

‘She’s having a chat, that’s all,’ I said when I looked out. I could see Bridie at the Farrell’s gate talking to Geraldine.

‘With Ma Walton, though. Gettin’ all the scandal.’

‘I think she got most of it already. She wasn’t too pleased when she heard what I said about David.’

‘Thinks the sun shines outta his arse, so she does.’

‘It’s not her fault, really. David has most people fooled. Everyone thinks he’s a saint. She was disgusted when David’s mam told her I said he’d done it on purpose.
She’s not half as friendly with me as she was before.’

‘Tut tut. Poor Goggin.’ He blew a long plume of smoke in the air. ‘Oh, oh, Ruth dear! How could you!’ he mimicked her.

We watched her, so far away she was like a doll version of herself, patting her hair and glancing over at our house, her head leaned in close to Geraldine’s. Shayne sucked the end of his
cigarette and stubbed it out on a roof tile. He flicked the butt with his finger and it bounced down along the slope, disappearing over the edge.

Far below I saw Tracey, lying flat on her back with Fiona sitting on her chest, slapping her big sister’s face. Things had been frosty between herself and Sandra since that night in
O’Deas’. She’d lapped up the cream of the gossip then turned her back on her like a cat because of what I’d said about David. In the last few days, she’d made a
display of the friendship she shared with Valerie, laughing and joking loudly with her when she knew Sandra was watching. I’d seen them both, linking arms and throwing nasty looks over their
shoulders in an attempt to highlight the bond they’d formed long before Sandra had arrived on the scene. And whenever the twins were allowed out, Tracey marched over, grabbing their hands and
making sure they stuck to her until they were called back in. During the past week, their mother had taken to rationing their time out on the green, watching them from her front door until she was
sure Tracey had gathered them close, as if she was afraid Sandra or I might contaminate them.

The sun beat down on the roof and I could almost smell the heat that rose up from it. I noticed how a thin layer of vivid green moss covered the slates, except for a long strip that ran from the
window down to the edge of the roof.

‘Isn’t that weird?’ I said. ‘The way there’s moss everywhere but there?’

Shayne grinned and scratched his head. ‘That’s where I piss out me window in the night. Too lazy to go down to the jacks. Piss must be fuckin’ poison, so it must.’

He didn’t seem embarrassed telling me. It was almost a boast. I pictured him in my head, standing at the open window in the moonlight, his piss spurting out and dribbling down into the
gutter.

We watched Bridie tottering home and Geraldine gathering a few Farrells in for their tea. Then David appeared. He stood at the edge of the green, looking like Action Man from so far away, and
gave a signal to the twins, who immediately ran over to his side. Then I saw Sandra coming back from the village with Kev, the pram handle hung with bags of shopping. I had to squint, but I could
tell David didn’t take his eyes off them till they turned into the cul-de-sac.

‘Look at O’Dea down there,’ Shayne said. ‘Thinks he’s fuckin’ great, so he does, with his stupid ma and da and his poxy piano.’

He swung to the floor in one swift jump, his feet landing steady and sure. I took my time climbing down and stood awkwardly beside him in the cramped space. He kicked at a worn patch in the
carpet and I could feel the walls of the room sort of closing in around us. It seemed smaller than the last time I’d been there. Then I realized why.

‘You got a new record player,’ I said, looking over at the huge wooden cabinet that was taking up most of the space along the wall opposite the bed.

‘A radiogram,’ he corrected me. ‘Me ma let me have it after me uncle Vic brought her over a new one.’ He lifted the lid on one side. ‘Took hours to get it up here.
Fuckin’ weight of it.’

‘Must be good to have it, though,’ I said, sitting down on his bed.

‘Fuckin’ magic.’

He selected an LP and slipped it out of its sleeve. Lifting the lid, he raised the arm and placed the record onto the turntable. ‘Wait til ye hear this. It’s me favourite.’ He
carefully dropped the needle then sat down beside me. The words burst into the room. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It was one of my favourites too. It’d been number one for weeks.
I’d watched Queen loads of times on
Top of the Pops
. Dad said they all looked like girls with their long hair and sparkly outfits and it was the biggest load of wailing he’d ever
heard in his life. But I thought it was the best song ever. Shane had a poster of Freddie Mercury on the wall beside his bed. There was no sign of the photo of his uncle Joe though; it wasn’t
stuck to his headboard any more. And he seemed to have forgotten all about the snake tongue. At least, he never mentioned it.

He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, mouthing the words. His chest rose as he breathed in before each line and I looked along the length of his body. He wore a washed-out, red T-shirt
with yellow stripes on the sleeves, and a pair of faded jeans, the same ones he’d had on the night he stayed in our house. But the patches Mam had sewn were gone. He’d unpicked every
single thread. I was wearing my brand-new Wranglers, my very first pair of real jeans. They’d cost four pounds, something Mam kept reminding me of every time I wore them, which was
practically every day now. But they were too clean and new and although I felt bad for Mam that Shayne had unpicked all her work, I sort of understood why he’d done it.

The scar under his chin shone in the sunlight that flooded the room. I leaned in closer to get a better look. ‘How . . . how did you get that scar?’

‘Dunno,’ he said, his eyes still closed. ‘Me ma says the devil gave me a kick when I was born.’

It sounded like something Liz would say all right.

‘So you’ve had it a long time?’

‘Long as I can remember, anyways.’

‘Did she . . . did she ever say anything else? About the day you were born, I mean?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know . . . anything.’

‘She says I nearly killed her, I was such a fuckin’ lump. And I came out legs first. Says I couldn’t even get that right.’

‘But, you know, does she ever say anything about . . . well, your dad or anything?’

He opened his eyes and reached his arms behind his head ‘Nah. Nothin’.’

‘Didn’t you ever ask?’

‘Nah. Never.’

‘Never ever?’

‘I said no, didn’t I?’ he snapped.

‘So . . . you don’t know who your dad is?’

‘Nope. Don’t care either.’

‘What about your uncle Joe? Did you ever . . . think it could be him?’

‘Look, I don’t care who me fuckin’ da is, OK? Maybe it’s him, maybe it isn’t. Whoever it is, he doesn’t care about me so why should I care about
him?’

I sucked the last bit of flavour from my gum. I was aching to tell him what I knew about David. I hadn’t breathed a word. Even when Sandra and I had been talking in bed about some girl
from the village who was only seventeen and who everyone knew had got herself into trouble, and who tried to hide it by wearing a huge woolly poncho all the time. ‘She’ll have to give
it up for adoption,’ Sandra had whispered. ‘That’s what Tracey says.’ She’d also reluctantly told me I’d been right – Geraldine was indeed expecting
Farrell number eight.

I took a deep breath. ‘David doesn’t know who his dad is either.’

He squinted at me. ‘Huh?’

‘He’s . . . well . . . he’s adopted. His mam and dad, they’re not his real parents.’

He sat up slowly, pushing the hair out of his eyes. ‘Who told ye that?’

I told him how I knew. He sank back down on the bed, stretching his arms above his head. ‘Yeah, well, I knew that anyways.’

‘You did?’

‘Yeah. It’s no big deal.’

‘Oh. I wasn’t sure if he knew.’

‘O’Dea? Ah yeah, sure you’d have to know somethin’ like that, wouldn’t ye?’

‘It’s just he never said, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, well, he doesn’t like talkin’ about it.’

‘I thought, you know, the way he’s always going on about his mam and dad, giving out about them. If he knew they weren’t his real parents, surely he’d have
said?’

‘Nah.’ He picked at one of the holes in his jeans.

If David knew he’d spent the first year of his life in an orphanage, he must’ve wondered about it. What it’d been like. He had no one to ask. No one who could tell him when
he’d first smiled. When he’d crawled. And all the funny little things babies do. He had to be curious. Maybe that explained why he’d taken Kev from outside Mealy’s. And the
more I thought about it, the more it made sense that it was David who’d got into our house to watch him asleep in his cot. But whether he was curious or not, it was still all very creepy.

I faced Shayne. ‘What . . . what really happened that day? He did throw himself out of the tree deliberately, didn’t he? I mean, I was right about it, wasn’t I?’

He sighed and then he nodded, his face grim and pale.

‘Why didn’t you tell?’ I asked him. ‘And why do you even hang around with him?’

He chewed at his thumbnail, ripping off a length and biting it with his front teeth as we listened to the song filling the room.

‘He made me swear. Said he’d fuckin’ kill me if I told. That’s what he’s like. And I have to hang around with him. He makes me. I’m too scared not to.
He’s mental, so he is. But no one round here’d believe it.’

‘I do. I mean, I can see what he’s like. The very first day I saw him, I knew he was weird. I can sense stuff like that.’

‘He’s always been crazy.’

‘Like how?’

He thought for a second or two, looking up at the sky through the open window. ‘Well, one time, before youse came, we found a nest full of eggs in the bushes up near the church. I tried to
stop him but he . . . he tipped the eggs out. Stood on them all, so he did. There was . . . there was bird guts and stuff everywhere.’

I swallowed, trying not to feel sick. ‘That’s disgusting. How could someone
do
that?’ I imagined the mother returning to the empty nest, her babies stamped into the
ground, bits of broken shell all over the place. ‘I think . . . I think he got into our house on Christmas Eve. Someone got up our uncle Frank’s ladder and was in watching Kev. My dad
said it was you but . . .’

‘Me?
Me
?’ His face was scary. ‘What do ye think I am? Who does yer da think I am?’

‘I . . . I . . . Look, it wasn’t me who said it.’

He relaxed a bit. ‘Yeah, well, sounds like something O’Dea would do. He’s crazy enough.’

‘Do you think it’s something to do with, you know, being adopted and all?’

‘Dunno, do I? Don’t think he cares much.’

‘You mean he’s OK with it?’

‘Think so. I dunno who me da is and I’m not crazy, am I? And anyways, da’s aren’t all they’re made out to be, half the time.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, ye know, look at yers.’

I shifted myself around to look him in the eye. ‘Mine? My dad?’

‘Yeah. Yer da.’

‘What about him?’

He managed to push his finger through the hole he’d been picking at in his jeans and he scratched at the skin on his thigh.

‘Ye think he’s the best, don’t ye? Better than anyone else’s?’

‘He’s . . . he’s my dad.’

He looked at me, his eyes dancing all over my face. ‘So, I asked ye before . . . Would ye forgive yer da anythin’?’

Slow but sharp, like stars pushing through the black of the sky, a million fiery needles prickled deep down in my flesh.

‘You said you were only messing when you asked me that before,’ I said.

‘Well, I wasn’t.’

The song filtered from the radiogram, each word clear and perfect and familiar. His face seemed to soak up all the light in the room. All around him was dark and distant and not part of now. He
stared at me, hard and close and I knew he was going to tell me something bad. Tears rose in my eyes. I didn’t try and blink them away.

‘What
?
’
I whispered. ‘What is it that I need to forgive?’

‘He tried to kiss me ma.’

I shook my head and felt a tear spill down my cheek. My body was like a sponge in water: heavy and soaking and ready to sink. But I wasn’t shocked. How could that be? Was it that I knew
from the very first day Liz Lawless knocked on our door something like this was going to happen? Had I pushed it to the furthest part of my brain, hoping that if I didn’t think about it, it
wouldn’t really come about?

And was it that, in some terrible, roundabout way, I felt like I was partly to blame?

‘You’re lying,’ I said.

‘Swear to God. I wouldn’t make somethin’ like that up.’

‘When?’

‘Ages ago. When he was here paintin’.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw! That’s how.’

‘But maybe you’re making a mistake! Maybe it’s just what you think you saw?’

‘Look, don’t believe me if ye don’t want to. I don’t care.’

‘You said . . . you said he tried to kiss her. But did he actually . . . you know . . . do it?’

‘Just for a second. But only ’cos me ma said I was in the house. He must’ve been afraid I might see. He didn’t know I was on the stairs, watchin’ them.’

‘But how do you know it wasn’t all your mam’s idea? Maybe it was her who kissed him?’

‘It wasn’t. I saw what happened. Swear! Look, don’t be cryin’ over it. It’s OK.’