The Thing About December (12 page)

I’ll tell you one thing, youssir, she lives up to her voice, she’s a fine thing, a bit over-endowed in the arse area but sure that’s part of being Irish, ha ha ha! You’ll see for yourself later on, anyway. Isn’t that gas we’re both finished with blindness on the same day? We were brothers in blindness there for a good while. It’s grand, though, having a comrade like yourself. Whisht, here she’s back, here she is, hello my flower, what have you for us? When are you taking off Johnsey-Come-Lately’s bandages? It’s lousy me being the only one having to put up with looking at a horrible mug all day, lucky you’re in and out to relieve the horror for me, ha ha, wait till
he
has a look at
me
he’ll want them bandages put back
on quick smart, ha ha ha, make sure you’re here when Doctor Frostyballs does the big reveal or he’ll fall away in a faint, ha ha ha, like a baby chick thinks the first thing it sees is his mother, he’ll be going for a suck off Doctor Frostyball’s boob, ha ha ha, hey, youssir, did you hear that, I said …

BEING BLIND
wasn’t so bad. When you knew it wasn’t forever, especially. If it was for good, and you weren’t bedbound, it would for sure be a bit awkward. But there was comfort in that darkness; you could let things carry on around you and there was no need to be thinking should I do this or go there or say that. All that business with the land now being
part of a very valuable land bank
, as the Unthanks said Martin Doherty the auctioneer called it the other day in the bakery, could be safely ignored while a man was blind and bedbound. The only anchor to this comfort he would have left once he had the full use of his eyes back would be the tube up his mickey, which would be surely yanked out once he was capable of jumping out of bed and making a piss by himself. Imagine your life being that much of a ball of shite that getting kicked to bits and going blind was the best thing that had ever happened you.

A different lady took away the cat eater. She called it a
cat ate her
. Maybe it had a different name because it was finished its job now. They had quare names for lots of yokes in hospitals, anyway. It didn’t hurt coming out but it was sure as hell hurting now. It was after leaving an awful burning behind. She had tut-tutted a few times and held his mickey in her hand for a while longer than seemed strictly necessary. Then she tut-tutted again and asked him had he any pain and he said No, because it wasn’t paining him too bad at that stage and he didn’t want to be giving out about nothing. Then Doctor Frostyballs came in and
took away his eye bandages. His head felt wrong without them. The world looked wrong. He had imagined the room as a mini version of the ward they put Daddy in the night of the madman, but it was way newer-looking than that; if you took away the bits of machines beside the beds it could be a hotel room like the one he and Mother and Daddy had stayed in one time they had stayed above in Dublin after the All-Ireland and Daddy had got a bit merry and Mother had gave out but laughed at him too and a rake of people were in the bar of the hotel and they all sang ‘Sliabh na mBan’ and Mother had sat him up on her lap and she sang too and he had tried to sing it but he only knew the one or two lines and she had her arms tight around him and was rocking side to side with the rest and it was the best feeling he ever had before or since.

DOCTOR FROSTYBALLS
had brought a girl with him and she stood there smiling and took the bandages in a silver bowl and handed him a small bottle and he dripped a few drops into Johnsey’s eyes and said Yes, it’s good, things will be blurry for a while more, your pupils will be
di-lay-ted
for one hour then no more problem, you will see things floating in front of your eye,
that
will be forever, you will get used to them, if you see
flashes
you come right back to me. Then Doctor Frostyballs and the smiling girl went off about their business and all that was left was a load of blurred shapes and he lay back and tried to sleep and enjoy his last few unseeing moments before the world was back around him, clear as day and waiting for him to do something or say something for himself.

But the throbbing in his mickey kept him awake. He opened his eyes and sat up and made a tent out of the blankets that were over that area so nothing would touch off it. Something wasn’t
right with it. He could see grand again now. He chanced a look over at the quare fella and there he was, grinning back to his two ears, nothing like he had imagined: a small, baldy lad with eyes that looked like they had twinkly stars in them and big fat lips and the lips looked like they were bursted in the middle and his whole face was black and blue and yellow like a bad spud you’d dig up and throw away and his arm was in a sling and his leg was up in a bigger sling that hung from what looked like a miniature crane and he nearly said Where’s Dave until the little baldy lad started talking and he knew for sure.

Well hello there, youssir, did you decide to have a look at me at last, aren’t we a fine pair of crocks, well at least we can have a gander around for ourselves now, and a read of the paper and a look at the telly and a few of them nurses would cheer you right up, but a few more would frighten the life out of you, one of them has a
tacher
, and I’ll tell you one thing …

Then he was asking Johnsey was he all right and the room started to spin around and he got a feeling like the time he snuck two pint bottles of stout and a rusty old opener that no one would miss down to the willow tree one Christmas and drank the two of them off the head by himself and just before the stout and his dinner leapt back up from his stomach in an orange stream, the whole world had started to fly around in circles and all he could do was try to hang on and all he could do before the darkness came back was tell Mumbly Dave who wasn’t a fine cut of a fella at all that his mickey was in an awful way and should he tell someone?

DADDY WOULD ALWAYS
do the second cut of silage in June. You’d hear the tractor abroad in the long acre as you trudged off in the morning. The big schools inside in town would be closed but you’d still have a month to go. A
month
! The sun would never hang on that long. The summer would be gone before you were released from the misery of listening to the whoops and cries of the free from the dark, sweaty inside of the small-windowed classroom. How did Sir stay going? Surely he was as jealous as they were of the wild emptiness of school-less days.

Cast nare a clout till May is out. June and July, swim till you die. That’s something Daddy used say at the beginning of June always. Shut up with that auld eejiting, Mother would say. Have you your bikini ready, Sally? Daddy would say back, and he’d wink over at Johnsey, and Mother would go red and try not to let him see how she was smiling behind her mask of temper.

His
you-ree-tra
had gotten infected. That was the thing inside his mickey.
Bacteria
had somehow found its way along the cat eater. Cat ate her. Cat et ur. Whatever the hell that yoke was called, it was quare handy when a man wasn’t fully mobile but for a finish was proving to be a source of awful trouble. All he knew was he was only able to stay awake for minutes at a time and every time he came around he was frozen with the cold but someone would say he was very hot and he would try to say he wasn’t, he was perished, but he’d slip away again into a world of crazy dreams. He saw Mother and Daddy and the two of them were below at the bottom of a beautiful garden and he wanted to go down to them to ask how they were and was it nice being dead and he wanted to tell them how his life was like an empty bottle of red sauce, there was nothing in it and no point to it and you could stick your knife right in and root around forever but all you’d get was a small bit but never enough to make you happy and for feck’s sake why wouldn’t Mother buy a new bottle of sauce when the old one was finished, she’d never leave Daddy without his
brown
sauce, he’d be giving out stink saying Any brown sauce, Sally, because he nearly always called her Sally and he was the only one who ever did.

There was a big yoke beside him now and it frightened the life out of him the first time he saw it and there were two bags hanging off it with tubes coming out of him and the tubes were stuck in his arm. The first time he saw it, it looked like a big alien robot with bug eyes and he thought it was a dream and he tried to pull the wires out of his arms but an angel was beside him and there was bright light all around her and she told him it was a drip and it was putting medicine in him and he’d be fine and the angel had a lovely voice, just like the Lovely Voice and the angel
was
the Lovely Voice, of course, it made sense now, he wasn’t dead and in heaven or hell or purgatory so, but this couldn’t be
far off heaven, floating about like this and seeing lovely angels with golden hair.

HE WAS
panned out after it. Jaysus you got an awful dose, youssir, Mumbly Dave told him, and you only days from getting out of here, you misfortune. It was hard to stay awake. The infection had left him very weak. He’d have to stay on another while. Misfortune? It was a huge stroke of luck. The Lovely Voice was now a lovely face and lovely hands and a lovely light-blue uniform that he thought would be white but then he realized he had kind of been imagining them ones that do be in the ads in the back of the
Sunday World
unknown to himself, dressed up as nurses, and the ad says things like
Sexy nurses on the line, waiting to give you your medicine
and there’s a big long phone number and you can see nearly all their boobs and a bit of their knickers under their short white skirts and wasn’t he an awful pervert to have been imagining the Lovely Voice in that way without even knowing he was doing it? If only she knew, she wouldn’t be as gentle and kind to him and she wouldn’t be in and out to check on him even when she wasn’t really meant to be.

Siobhán, her name was. Imagine that, all these weeks, and he hadn’t known.
Siobhán
. It was soft. It was easy, saying it. You could whisper it and it was like a breath, or a sigh. It was the most beautiful name. It nearly tasted sweet in his mouth.

Siobhán gave him great hop again now and seemed to have forgotten all about Mumbly Dave. She felt a bit responsible for his infection – she had been meant to be taking out that yoke every so often and changing it and watching for badness starting but she couldn’t be remembering everything all the time, there wasn’t half enough staff here, anyway, and if that fat cow of a sister asks make sure and tell her she was forever pulling and dragging and
checking that all was well with cat eaters and cat ate hers and what have you. She was awfully sorry; he could see that clearly.

He would tell any lie for her but it wasn’t really a sinful lie. It would be like telling the English officer that the boys had been tucked up in bed all night long when they’d really been abroad around the countryside shooting Black and Tans – it was a lie, but neither God nor man could ever hold it against you.

SIOBHÁN SAID
the old ward sister was an awful wagon, and a few of the other nurses were pure sly and were terrible licks and they’d stab you in the back as quick as look at you. They wouldn’t do half the work she would do, but yet would be forever watching her and reporting back to Sister, and she knew why – it was because they were all the one with the nurse she was filling in for who was out on maternity leave and they wouldn’t let her be seen to be as good as their friend. Mother would have called the likes of them
poisonous bitches
. Johnsey told Siobhán that, and she laughed. Then she did something you would as a rule only see happening in a soppy film: she put her hand on the side of his face and smiled down at him and he chanced looking straight into her eyes and it looked like fondness he saw there or maybe something beyond fondness; maybe she saw him in a way that no one else saw him – after all she could only judge him on what she had seen since he was carried in by the ambulance.

Maybe she had more regard for him than other girls would have because she had never seen him walking watery-eyed up through the village with Eugene Penrose pelting stones or scrunched-up cans at him or seen him getting kicked around the school bus or being set fire to and having his fiver swiped off of him on the way to the only disco he ever nearly went to. All she knew of him was that four yahoos had attacked him and he was
in bits but never gave out and that he was a grand quiet chap who took his medicine and didn’t moan or groan like some lads did. Hadn’t she told him he was a great patient? Probably she would sooner a fella like Mumbly Dave, even though he was a handy-sized baldy lad with a belly like a beach ball. Mumbly Dave never stopped talking. Maybe she saw Johnsey as being a bit like Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood never said too much but bejaysus he sure was cool. James Bond wouldn’t be the chattiest, either, but girls were forever trying to get off with him.

And besides saying he was a great patient, which was not a thing you could go around boasting about because as far as he could see being a patient only involved lying down, she had paid him four compliments. He remembered her exact words and the way her voice sounded as she said them. They were the only compliments he had ever gotten from a girl who was not either related to him, in the ICA or Mrs Unthank. The first was about a week after he was brought in, when he was still very woozy and they were pumping him with stuff to stop pain. He distinctly remembered her saying he had lovely long eyelashes, just after Doctor Frostyballs had done his daily check and she was gently replacing his bandages. Then not long after that she was helping him to sit up and she was making a meal of it and he was starting to feel embarrassed when she said Oh you’re a big lad, and he’d thought she meant he was fat. Then she stood away a bit and he got the feeling she was looking at him. He felt his face burning and that’s when she delivered her second compliment: she said he was very well built.
Very well built
. Now! And she’d know, too, being in a line of work where she’d get to see an assortment of bodies and body parts. The third compliment had come just a few days ago, the day after his bandages had been removed. She had said You know you have the loveliest blue eyes. The loveliest blue eyes. Imagine that.