The Thing About December (3 page)

Johnsey knew his mother hadn’t bought his jumper in Penneys; she’d gone to a right expensive place in the city. He knew because he’d heard her telling Daddy it was an awful price and Daddy said Sure what about it and she said It’s true, what about it. Then he heard a rip and the two buttons on the shoulder of his jumper landed on the ground. He bent down to pick them up but the jumper-grabber behind still had a grip and there was another rip. Now the neck of his jumper felt too loose and it was slipping down over his shoulder and he wondered how would he explain to Mother and Daddy how his new jumper that was an awful price got destroyed.

Paddy Screwballs arrived and Johnsey’s torment, for the moment, was at an end. Surely to God he would be left alone on the bus, with an adult driving it. He sat at the very top, as close to the driver as possible. The other two harmless lads sat across from him. They looked a bit ashamed.

But his sanctuary was soon destroyed: Eugene Penrose landed down beside him, and put a big
mar dhea
friendly arm around his shoulders, and Johnsey had to shove in for him, and little ratty Mickey Farrell and the fair-haired lad landed in the seats behind him and when they started tormenting him again and trying to pull his jumper off of him, old Paddy Screwballs just turned a bit sideways and said Hey, go handy there, and sort of smiled and Johnsey could see he had only three teeth in the front of his stupid old head and he wheezed and coughed and so
did the bus and he rammed it in to gear and drove off.

Someone actually lit a fag towards the back of the bus! Even Eugene Penrose was a small bit surprised. But he wouldn’t be outdone in the badness stakes. He looked for a fag off of the lad smoking and came back with it lit and started to jab it in Johnsey’s face, making him hop the side of his head off the window of the bus every time he flinched. Yerra call a howlt, said Paddy Screwballs, and laughed and coughed. Johnsey could feel the heat of the top of the fag near his skin. He thought of Mother and Daddy asking how he got burned, who did it, and Daddy roaring off in the jeep to Eugene Penrose’s house and tackling Eugene Penrose’s father over it and there being a big fight and Eugene Penrose calling him
tell-tale-baby-fucker
all day Monday and probably kicking the shite out of him.

Instead of making a hole in Johnsey’s face, though, he made a hole in the new jumper. Right in the front, and the place where he touched the fag to the material actually went a bit on fire for a second and that got a great laugh altogether; there were screeches and whoops of delight and when Johnsey jumped up and was beating himself to put out the little flame his fiver escaped from the pocket of his new corduroy trousers and flew away on him and Eugene Penrose grabbed a hold of it and claimed the money as his own. Someone said Ah give it back to hell, but Eugene Penrose said What are you going to do about it? And that was that.

Johnsey imagined Mother in the shop buying him the new jumper, and probably asking the fella working there was it a
cool
jumper now and was it the type all the young lads wore, and his heart broke to think of her thinking so much of him and how happy she’d been over him heading off, all kitted out, like a normal fella.

When they finally arrived at the parish hall where the disco was being held, Johnsey slipped away from the queue. One of the other harmless lads asked where was he going. He didn’t answer.
He headed for the darkness at the back of the hall where there was a copse of thick-branched trees. He stayed there all night until the disco ended and he heard Paddy Screwballs grinding up the hill. He’d had to retreat further back into the shadows a couple of times because lads came out holding hands with girls and they were kissing each other in among the trees and Johnsey tried to hold his breath and be part of the darkness, because he could imagine if they saw him how the girl would scream and the fella would call him a pervert probably and give him a box.

He heard Bon Jovi singing ‘Living on a Prayer’, his favourite rock song, and everyone singing along with it, and the DJ was turning off the music at the chorus and it was just the boys and girls at the disco singing and they were nearly louder than the music had been. Then he heard the national anthem and after that they all spilled out and onto the bus. He never had to talk to any girls that night, nor never got to drink a Coca-Cola at the bar like a real man. He threw his burned jumper into the dark among the trees. No one looked at him on the way home, they were all roaring up and down the bus about who felt whose arse and who got a shift and one of the other spastics whispered Where were you all night? and he just told him fuck off.

DWYER HAD GIVEN
him a loan of the dirty magazine when they were pally, years ago. Johnsey had kept it for way longer than Dwyer had meant him to. For a finish, Dwyer had started to get a bit thick over it, but not too thick. A lad in Dwyer’s position couldn’t afford to be getting too antsy – his heart was in worse shape than his crooked leg by all accounts. He upped and died before Johnsey ever got to give him back his magazine. His heart just stopped beating one night while he was asleep.

His mother and father had been mad about him. Sure why
wouldn’t they have been mad about their little
crathur
, Mother said to Molly Kinsella the day Dwyer died and a few of the ICA biddies had gathered in Johnsey’s mother’s kitchen to pick at the tragedy like crows picking at a flungaway snack box. Molly Kinsella allowed that she supposed, throwing her old hairy eyebrows and her witchy chin towards heaven, as much as to say a lad like that couldn’t be loved the same as a lad that would be fine and tall and handsome, like Dermot McDermott, and out hurling and having young girls huddled in the bit of a stand mooning over him in little giggling bunches.

Johnsey saw Dermot McDermott kicking his own dog once, above near the Height where the McDermotts’ big farm met Daddy’s little one. Johnsey had been up foddering but he had left the tractor in the near field and walked a forkful up. He’d heard shouting, a girl’s voice calling someone a prick, but by the time Johnsey got a view across to the McDermotts’ top field, Dermot McDermott was alone with their old border collie. A collie was a dog that would love you without fail or compromise. Johnsey saw Dermot McDermott deliver a kick to that lovely old bitch’s flank that nearly toppled her and she limped off, crying. He pictured some young lady, after fighting with Dermot McDermott, and she storming off down past their house in a temper, and his people only laughing at her inside in the house as she ran through the yard and he only shaking his head and going on about his business with his big experimental crops that they do be all congratulating him over in the co-op and all questions and telling him he’s great. Was that the way with all men and women now?

Not with Mother and Daddy, they only had harsh words the odd time, and then only over silly things like muck getting dragged in through the house and even then Daddy could placate Mother by making her laugh and Johnsey would laugh too at Daddy’s clowning and letting on not to know anything about the
muck and pretending he was calling the guards because surely an intruder must be at large, and it seemed their world was nearly improved because of the fight. And the Unthanks, Himself and Herself as Mother and Daddy always called them, had a quiet way of moving about each other; you knew they were mad about each other just by the way they laughed at the things the other said and listened when the other was talking and called each other
love
the whole time.

But Johnsey had seen young couples outside Ciss Brien’s and they were certainly not nice to each other. One Friday evening, Johnsey had had to hang back at the pump before the corner because there was roaring and shouting going on just up the road and it made him nervous. A woman was shouting louder than he had ever heard at a fella – Johnsey tried not to listen, but the gist was that they had children and she was going away somewhere and he was meant to be minding the kids and he had promised and here he was drinking every penny he had and that was her money for the
hen
.

A hen? Johnsey couldn’t imagine this one buying a hen, with jeans that tight and heels that high. As he chanced walking past he saw her face clearly; it had black rivers running down it and your man was a fine fat lad like himself, but with a tattoo of a cross on his neck. Out from the city, like a lot were, rehoused by the County Council. The cross-tattoo lad was smoking his fag away and ignoring the woman in the tight jeans and for a finish she just stood there going You bastard, and when Johnsey walked past trying to be invisible she said What are you looking at, you spastic, in that singsong townie voice.

Johnsey felt aggrieved that she should know this about him. The cross-tattoo lad seemed glad she had a distraction from him. He’s only a retard, he declared. Johnsey picked up his pace. A
retard
. Ree-tard. Lovely, coming from a big fat lad with a cross
drawn on his neck that wouldn’t mind his own children, besides drinking all the money for the hen. Johnsey wouldn’t do that if he had a wife, even a wild-looking one with jeans stuck to her arse; he’d mind her and his children and bring all his wages home and do silly things to make them all laugh. Thinking of those jeans and the bit of pink frill he could see peeping over the top of them made Johnsey think of the magazine again. And what if one of those who had passed away was watching him and he inside in the jacks, interfering with himself? The dead are all around us, according to Father Cotter. They’re having a right old laugh at me, so.

Johnsey went down to the front room where Mother was watching the news and knitting something with no shape yet, and the big brown clock ticked and tocked the night slowly away. They’d hardly ever used the good room before Daddy died. If they were all watching telly, they’d sit on the long, battered green couch that was hidden away near the back kitchen, out of sight of visitors when not in use. Daddy would drag it into service and position it in front of the hearth, directed in by Mother like he was reversing a trailer in the yard, and Johnsey would sit in the middle between them and they’d look at a film or a comedy and Mother would make tea during one of the ad breaks and bring over tart and cream on a tray and you couldn’t get better than that. But now it was all the good room with Mother. That long, battered couch was covered in boxes and bits and bobs that had no business on a couch. It wouldn’t have been balanced right, anyway, without Daddy. There’d have been too much empty space on it, and that empty space would draw out your sadness like the vacuum cleaner draws out dust from behind the television: you’d have forgotten it was there until you went rooting around for it.

When bedtime came he was glad to say goodnight to Mother and retreat upstairs to think. A man couldn’t think about things
with his mother in the room – it was hard enough thinking of things to say to a woman who had hardly any words left for the world, only lonesome thoughts and muttered prayers.

The cross one in the tight jeans had looked a bit like the girls in Dwyer’s dirty magazine. Johnsey couldn’t believe they were fully real, them wans. How could a part of a woman look so strange, like an alien’s face, and yet make you not be able to stop looking at it?

JOHNSEY LIKED
thinking about the stories Daddy used tell him before he went to sleep. A rake of his great-uncles were priests in Scotland and America and Canada. They joined the priesthood and exiled themselves as penance for taking the lives of so many Black and Tans years ago during the War of Independence. Daddy’s father was only very young, the youngest of six boys and a girl, and he and his sister would be warming blocks all night and placing them in the lads’ empty beds, down low where their feet would be if they were not patrolling the countryside shooting Englishmen, so when they came home and tore their clothes off and jumped into their beds, their feet would warm quick enough so that if they were raided, their mother would shout Sure look, sir, feel those boys’ feet, they’ve been in their beds since sunset, for they’ve all to be up at cockcrow. And sure enough the rotten bastard would beat them from their beds with the butt of his dirty English gun and line them up for his inspection and they would act like they’d just been dragged from the deepest of sleep and their toes toasty, and that trick saved many a young rebel’s life.

The English officer would leave them their lives but before they went away he’d let the Black and Tan bastards loose about the place and they’d try to flush the Blessed Virgin down the toilet and they’d take the holy picture out to the yard and fling it on the
ground and piss all over Our Lord and God only knows what other depravities were visited upon holy things before finally the great-uncles won their war and John Bull and his savage legion fecked off home out of it. Johnsey thought of their bravery and boldness and wondered why had he not the same daring. Hadn’t he the same blood? Those great-uncles he never met would have no trouble talking up for theirselves or getting girls to do the things described in Dwyer’s American magazine. They’d beat the head off of the likes of Eugene Penrose for sport.

And what about Granddad? Sure didn’t he grow up just as brave, but by then the Free State had been established and the Irish had turned their guns on each other and then made up again, kind of, and his brothers had scattered to the four winds. He drove his motorbike across Lough Derg once, when the lake was iced over completely, from Youghal Quay the whole way across to County Clare, just to see could it be done without a fella falling through, and he made it clear across, where he drank a brandy and smoked a fag and doubtless talked to a load of Clare girls and turned around and flew it the whole way back and was hailed a hero. Maybe you had to have brothers to be brave; they would knock toughness into you. Granddad married a woman so beautiful that people – men
and
women – stood and stared at her with their mouths open, wondering could such a creature really be real. And Daddy was another hero, loved and feared in near equal measure by all who knew him. And what about Daddy’s brother, Uncle Michael, who was long dead and nearly never talked about? He fell off of scaffolding beyond in London and was killed and he only twenty-one. He was
beautiful
, Mother said once. That was a funny thing to say about a man. He could have charmed the birds right out of the trees, by all accounts.