The Story of Before (5 page)

‘What the hell is that?’ Mel asked as he and Sandra burst back into the kitchen.

‘Nothing. Just a picture,’ I told him.

‘I don’t like the look of him,’ Sandra said. ‘He’s sort of . . . weird.’

‘Good job he’s going to be papered over,’ Mel said with a laugh. He waved the scraper in the air out of Sandra’s reach and tried to smooth down the cow’s lick in
his hair with the other. He was obsessed with flattening it. He spent ages every morning trying to beat it down, trying everything he could lay his hands on in the bathroom, even toothpaste. But
nothing ever worked.

‘Maybe you should ask Dad for some of that paste when he mixes it,’ Sandra jeered at him. ‘It might work on your stupid cow’s lick.’

‘Take the bloody scraper if you want,’ he said, throwing it across the floor.

‘It’s OK,’ she sniffed, plunging her sponge into the bucket. ‘I think I prefer the soaking anyway.’

Mel picked up the scraper again and raised it over her head, his face scrunched up like a walnut. I’d seen that look before.

And it hadn’t ended well.

‘
Stop
!’ I shouted. ‘Or I’ll tell Dad you said “bloody”.’

He gave me a glare and got back to the job without a word. But I ended up doing most of the work. I could feel the eyes of the man on me the whole time, so I worked extra fast to get away from
his stare.

Mam came home with Kevin three days later. Dad hadn’t allowed us to go in and see her in the hospital. He said she didn’t need us lot on top of her so Auntie Cissy
had come to mind us when he went in to visit. The first thing Mam said when she walked in the door was, ‘Would you look at the state of Ruth’s hair! It’s a disgrace!’

It was true. The plaits she’d insisted on doing the morning we moved were still there – just about. Ribbonless, the straggly ends matted and stuck with stuff they’d dangled in
throughout the last few days: butter, tomato sauce, wallpaper paste. ‘Did no one think to give it a brush?’ she asked. ‘Not even you, Cissy? What must the neighbours
think?’

Auntie Cissy looked at me with her shark eyes. ‘Sorry, Rose,’ she answered, in her robot voice. Cissy was Dad’s older sister. She wasn’t a very good minder. Of course,
the others loved her; she let them do whatever they wanted, while she sat at the kitchen table repeatedly tucking her lank hair behind her ears, reading Sherlock Holmes books she borrowed from the
library. Cissy was married to Uncle Frank, but they had no children. I used to think it was just as well, as she would’ve made a terrible mother. She hardly even looked at Kev.

We, on the other hand, couldn’t contain our excitement, and pushed each other out of the way as we tried to get the best view of the latest addition to the family. He was tiny, with
wrinkled fingers and puffy eyes, and thick black hair like Dad’s. We stroked his cheeks and held his hands and laughed when he yawned, showing off his tiny pink tongue. There was a fight
about which one of us should be allowed to hold him first and Mam raised her eyes, saying she wondered when the novelty would wear off.

‘Probably when his nappy needs changing,’ Dad said.

In the days and weeks that followed, I often awakened to the sound of screeching at six o’clock in the morning. Even though she was breastfeeding, Mam got up out of bed and brought Kev
downstairs. She liked to sit in her bright, clean kitchen, surrounded by all her brand-new appliances. She’d pestered Dad for a pop-up toaster and a shiny electric kettle, the kind that
turned itself off when the water was boiled. They took pride of place on the white worktop and she polished them every day. I often examined my reflection in the silver surface of the toaster. She
said she loved the new wallpaper with its smooth, washable pattern of golden onions and copper pots. I’d been relieved when Dad had papered over the man in the tree. But I never forgot he was
there. I felt his eyes on me whenever I sat at the table. It was like he’d followed me all the way from the park to Hillcourt Rise.

Mam would let me hold Kev while she made tea and toast. I’d try and shush him, rocking him in my arms and sliding my stockinged feet across the lino. Then she’d sit down at the
formica table, using her free hand to eat and drink while her other arm held Kev as he hungrily sucked away. I’d sit on the chair opposite, with my chin in my hands, watching the new addition
to our family and trying to remember what it had been like without him. I couldn’t. It was if he’d always been there.

The hot weather continued, and for our first few weeks in Hillcourt Rise, the days ran together, sticky and sweet, like a stream of warm custard poured from a jug. The others
each fell in love with someone different almost every day. I’d sit on the edge of the green, able to watch them both from a distance for the very first time. Mel showing off in front of the
girls and Sandra flirting with Shayne Lawless. When we’d lived on the South Circular, we’d always been on top of one another. If they were playing on the path outside our house, I was
only ever a few feet away, sitting on the front step or spying on them with my nose squashed up against the window of the front room. On the green of Hillcourt Rise, however, I found I could see
things in new and altogether more interesting ways.

The first person I got to know in Hillcourt Rise was Bridie Goggin. She lived next door in number forty-three. Her husband, Dick, had died suddenly from a ‘clot in the
brain’ about a year before we arrived. They had three teenagers when they made the move to Dublin from Naas, in County Kildare, so they weren’t the typical Hillcourt Rise family. And by
the time we came, their children had left home.

Bridie made it her business to welcome us to the neighbourhood, bringing a homemade Victoria sponge, oozing jam and cream, to our door the day we moved in. And when Mam came home with Kev, she
left a wicker basket of fruit, with a real pineapple and big, furry peaches. It only took a day or two before I’d wormed my way into Bridie’s house. I knew she’d like me; I was
quiet and wouldn’t interrupt the flow of her chatter. When things got too noisy in our house (as they often did) I’d slip in to Bridie’s, knowing there’d be a cushion under
my bum and a coconut macaroon in my mouth almost as soon as I walked in the door.

Dick Goggin had been a bank manager in the nearby village of Westgorman. From the crystal-framed photographs on Bridie’s glass-topped telephone table, I saw that he’d been a big
rhino of a man with a purple face and a halo of snow-white hair. Bridie was always re-arranging the photographs, glancing at herself in the hall mirror as she did so, patting her lacquered nest of
spun-gold hair and applying yet another coat of tangerine lipstick.

Her house was full of knick-knacks and boxes of stuff that she never used like china tea sets, fancy tablecloths and embroidered pillowcases. But for all their contents, the rooms seemed kind of
cold and empty. We often saw her at night through her windows, wandering about in her dressing gown, drawing the heavy curtains like some sort of sad old ghost. Arriving into mass on Sundays,
I’d scan the crowded church for her big fur hat and lead Mam to the pew behind her. While Father Feely’s bumblebee voice thrummed up through the dusty, dead air, I’d spend a happy
hour fiddling with the clawed paws and tail of Bridie’s fox fur stole.

One sluggish afternoon, not much more than a week after we’d moved in, Bridie asked me to help deadhead the roses in her front garden. The air that day was thick with a
kind of gluey heat that made me feel like I was wrapped in cling film. From the beginning, Bridie had made good use of me, securing my help with jobs around the house, in return for tasty delights
from her well-stocked kitchen cupboards. As she set about showing me how to snip off the withered roses and gather them into a pile, someone began rattling the gate to get our attention. I looked
up and saw Shayne Lawless, swinging something around that made a
whupp-whupp
noise as it slashed through the warm, hazy air. The neck of his pea green T-shirt was torn at the seam, as if
he’d wrenched himself away from someone’s tight grasp, and through the rip I could see the tanned skin of his chest and the flash of a silver St Christopher medal. His skin, hair and
eyes were a light, toffee brown colour and this, along with his jerking, puppet-like movements, made him look like a life-sized wooden Pinocchio.

Bridie walked over to the gate, pulling off her gardening gloves, finger by finger. ‘Stop that at once!’ she said. ‘You’ll have someone’s eye out!’

Shayne continued, right in front of her face, creating a sort of current that lifted the curls off his grimy forehead every few seconds.‘Yer brother around?’ he asked me, his gaze
unconnected with mine. His right hand hung lazily over the top of Bridie’s gate and I noticed lines of black dirt under his fingernails. He was about average size for a twelve-year-old, but
could’ve passed for any age between ten and fourteen. It was as if various parts of him were growing at different speeds: his nose was still snub and babyish, while his eyes were sunken and
grey-rimmed, like they belonged to an old man.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s gone to get the messages for my mam. But my sister’ll be out when she’s finished the ironing.’ I immediately regretted the amount of
detail I gave him.

‘Wooo-oooh,’ he sang. ‘Where’d ye live before? Walnut Grove?’

Little House on the Prairie
was one of my favourite programmes and I fancied myself as something of a Laura Ingalls: kind of thoughtful and smart, with my hair in plaits and a closer
relationship with my father than my brother and sister. So I didn’t take kindly to his scorn. I moved closer, planning to say something sarcastic, but all I could do was stare. He tilted back
his head and smiled knowingly at me, showing surprisingly even white teeth, and an inch-long raised scar, like a glistening worm, on the underside of his chin. My nose picked up his scent: a mix of
wet earth, cigarette smoke and strawberry bubble gum.

‘Off you go,’ Bridie said, shooing him away. ‘Go on. Away with you! And give that here, whatever it is.’

Shayne smiled and let his plaything slip out of his fingers. Then he laughed as it sailed over the gate and through the air, landing with a thump on Bridie’s huge, batch-loaf bosoms.
Terror spread across her face when she looked down. Lying between her bosoms was a snake. She was hysterical.

‘Ruth! Help me!’ she screamed, fluffing at the snake with her raw-sausage fingers. But her actions only made it slither underneath the front of her peacock-patterned dress. Shayne
made a run for it. ‘Come back you!’ she called, her eyes filling with tears.

But he was already belting up towards the green. Bridie pulled out the front of her dress like a tent and did a little dance on the driveway, causing the snake to slip down past her stomach and
thighs before bouncing out from between her mottled legs onto the warm, sticky tarmac. Holding a hand to her chest, she bent to have a look. ‘Oh dear God!’ she whispered breathily.
‘Is it dead?
Ruth
!
Tell me
! Is it dead?’

I bent down to inspect it. The snake was over a foot long, yellowish-green, with a white criss-cross pattern all down its back. Its head and tail curled in opposite directions and out of its
mouth lolled a blood red, forked tongue. It was clearly a rubber reptile, and not a very realistic one when I looked at it closely. But Bridie didn’t have her glasses on and she found it
difficult to see details without them. I tipped it with my toe, making it spring forward half an inch. Bridie jumped.

‘Get rid of it! We have to get rid of it!’

‘It’s OK,’ I said flatly. ‘It’s just rubber.’

If Bridie had been a shade more clever, she might’ve detected my disappointment. Not because the snake was rubber, but because I’d told her. If I’d let on it was real, I could
have been the hero and had the run of the biscuit tin for weeks. All those coconut macaroons . . .

‘
Rubber
? You mean it’s not real?’ She shook a shiver out of her body. ‘Well of all the . . .’

I picked up the snake and tossed it onto the soft heap of dead roses, where it sank into the ragged petals like a corpse in a satin-lined coffin.

‘I need to go in for a sit-down, dear. I feel a bit faint,’ said Bridie with a whimper. ‘Let run wild, he is. Mother takes no notice. No notice whatsoever. And her clicking
around in her high-heeled boots.’

Shayne Lawless was such a pig. How could Sandra like him? And I didn’t care for the sound of his mother either. Mothers weren’t supposed to wear high-heeled boots. They were for
teenagers, or Elton John, or the girls who danced on
Top of the Pops
every Thursday night – people who wanted to be noticed. Sandra would probably wear high-heeled boots when she was
older. For the moment, she had to content herself with doing cartwheels in front of Shayne Lawless every day on the green. Even when she was wearing a dress.

Bridie went inside. I got down on my hunkers and lifted the snake up by its tail. Laying it out on the grass, I pinched its silly-looking tongue between my thumb and forefinger and carefully
snipped it off with the sharpened blades of the clippers Bridie called her ‘secateurs’.