Beneath the Earth (11 page)

I only know one other set of twins, also brother and sister, but they're freaks, the pair of them. Their father runs the funeral parlour in town and I call them The Smileys on account of how they're always going around with big stupid grins on their faces, as if the world is a wonderful place and no one lies or cheats. They're the same age as Lizzie and me – sixteen – and all the lads in my class say they do it with each other because they hold hands when they're walking into school together and she looks a bit like a boy and he looks a bit like a girl. And I've seen them kissing too. On the cheek, now, not the lips, but still and all. I wouldn't kiss Lizzie if my life depended on it. I'd rather kiss my granny and my granny's dead.

I've known The Smileys all my life. Lizzie and I used to play with them when we were little kids, before we realized that they were freaks, and then we refused to go over there any more. Once, one of The Smileys – they're indistinguishable to me – asked could s/he see my mickey and I ran away and hid in a cardboard box and Lizzie had to come and get me to bring me home. Dad said I had to be nice to them because Daddy Smiley was his best friend but I said did it not look a bit mad that the only two sets of twins in town were going over to each other's houses all the time and Dad said that he'd never heard such nonsense in all his life and I was to stop calling them The Smileys anyway as it was rude.

But the thing I hated most about them was that whenever Lizzie and I were there, we got stuck playing games in the room above the funeral parlour with all the dead people staring up at us through the floorboards. I'm squeamish that way. I always closed my eyes when I was running up to the Smiley twins' bedroom but then Jimmy Halpin, who was a great pal of mine when we were eight, was laid out downstairs after he got a hit of his father's tractor and I made the mistake of going in to take a look at him in his box and passed out in fright. People always say that the dead look peaceful but Jimmy Halpin looked exactly like a lad who'd had a hit of his father's tractor. And seen it coming too. I'll never forget the expression on his face. The old rigor must have set in before they could tidy him up. Anyway, Lizzie had to come down then too and bring me outside, where she kept calling my name and shaking me till I woke up.

I thought Mammy and Daddy Smiley were a right pair of knobs for calling the twins Joseph and Josephine. At least our parents had the sense to give us completely different names. Joseph and Josephine always wore similar clothes when they were kids, masculine and feminine versions of the same outfit, although it was anyone's guess who would wear which one. And even now they seem to coordinate with each other every morning. I imagine them getting dressed for school, probably in the same room having climbed out of the bed together where they'd been kissing and doing it all night long, and Joseph saying, ‘Wear the blue skirt, Josephine, it'll go great with this gorgeous shirt that I'm wearing', and Josephine saying, ‘I will, Joseph, you sexy beast, now get over here till I molest you.' And then the pair of them going at it like hammer and tongs. The lad who sits next to me in class, Geoffrey Jones, who is a complete legend these days and a hero for a whole generation of Irish boys, says that he saw The Smileys doing it behind the pub one afternoon, over where they keep the recycled bottles in the big green skip, and I said I didn't believe that for a moment because there was no way that either Joseph or Josephine Smiley had any genitalia at all. For some reason he thought this was only riotous and he laughed till there were tears coming down his face and I felt as good about myself as I've ever felt in my life. They probably do have genitalia though. Everyone does, as far as I know.

Sometimes I think that I'm mean about The Smileys because they actually like each other and I'm just jealous. On account of how much Lizzie and I hate each other. Or rather how much she hates me, for personally I never had any great problem with her until after Dad left and she turned into a slut and started being nasty to me all the time, blaming me for everything that had happened when none of it was my fault, no matter what anyone says. She says I'm a selfish little bastard and that if I'd only kept my nose out, then Mam and Dad would still be together and how would I like it if someone took my mobile phone and started spreading all my secrets about. ‘Sure I don't have any secrets,' I told her, and she laughed like she knew every single one of them. Mam blames me too. She blames me even more than she blames Dad, which doesn't make any sense to me at all. That's why she sent me over to London that time. She says she'd rather have known nothing and have kept her family together, and I told her that if she wanted to live as an ignoramus, that was fine, but I wouldn't be a party to such witlessness. And then she looked like she wanted to hit me.

I haven't seen Dad much since he went. He blames me too. Everyone blames me, or so it seems. But at least they can turn their attentions to someone else now that Lizzie is the laughing stock of the whole country. They're even talking about her in America. I saw a piece about her on the
Huffington Post
. They'll probably find a way to blame me for that too.

The first day back at school was just as bad as I'd expected. There were two empty seats: Lizzie's, of course. And Geoffrey's. Tommy Devlin, who I love, was in his usual spot and he was the only one who didn't burst out laughing when I walked in. Even The Smileys started giggling, their faces pressed together, probably wondering whether they could get away with snogging the heads off each other in the middle of the classroom.

As it turned out, Geoffrey had been away from school all week, just like me. His parents had taken his phone away and they'd confiscated his computer, so no one had got anywhere near him to offer their congratulations.

A few of the lads did that cough-talk thing, where you bark into your hand and then mutter something like ‘Your sister's a whore' and then look all innocent afterwards as if they hadn't said a word. I'd expected that. I'd expected worse, to be honest. A lad who was always being bullied threw M&M's at my head, one by one. I'd say he was only happy that someone else was getting picked on instead of him. I'll get back at him when this is all over. Every time he threw one, I picked it up and ate it. In the end, I think I ate half his pack. So I got the last laugh there.

‘You've been off for the last week, Danny?' asked Benji Dunne, who sits in the seat in front of me and has terrible spots. ‘Were you helping out in the fields, was it? There's a terrible smell of hay off you.'

And then he started laughing and he high-fived the prick next to him, who said, ‘Good one, Benzer, good one', the big suck-up. I'll get him too. I'll get the both of them.

When Mr Hunter came in, he seemed surprised to find me sitting there and he started blushing. The poor fella is always blushing for no reason. That's why we call him Blusher. Poor old Blusher, he's harmless really and he's had it awful rough. His wife's dead, his son's an alcoholic and his dog's got cancer. Anyway, he took one look at me, the face went scarlet, and then he turned around to write some old nonsense on the board about William Wordsworth and the spontaneous overflow of blah blah blah. That's what he does whenever he starts blushing, because then he can turn his back on us and wait until the redness goes out of his cheeks. Only we're all on to that trick and Patsy Cole said, ‘Mr Hunter, look, I'm after cutting myself with my compass, there's blood everywhere!' Which meant that he had to turn around to take a look and everyone started laughing at the state of him. I didn't laugh. The poor man has an affliction and I'm not cruel in that way. Tommy Devlin didn't laugh either. Tommy Devlin would never laugh at another man's misfortune.

So anyway, Blusher's standing there and he looks like his head is going to explode and Patsy says it was all a mistake, sure he doesn't even own a compass, and then he asks Blusher what colour the traffic lights go when the cars are supposed to stop but before he could answer the door opened and in walked Geoffrey, a nervous smile on his face, and the place erupted in cheers. It was like in those gladiator films when the lads walk into the middle of that big round thing in Rome and everyone goes mental, even though they just want to see them suffer and have the heads eaten off them by lions.

‘Leg! Leg! Leg! Leg! Leg!' everyone shouted, banging their fists on their desks, and that doesn't look right when I write it down. They weren't saying
leg
as in the thing between your waist and your foot. They were saying
ledge
as in short-for-legend. Geoffrey, to be fair to him, looked a bit sheepish at first but then he grinned even wider and he even gave a sort of professional bow, like he'd just come out for his curtain call and was surprised to find that the audience had hung around this long instead of going off to the lobby for a drink. He strolled down to his usual seat, practically whistling in his nonchalance, but then stopped when he saw me sitting there and, to give the lad credit, he looked a bit ashamed of himself and turned around, hoping for another empty place, but the only spare one was Lizzie's and he could hardly sit there. He was a bit lost, poor fella. Did he think I was going to beat him up or something? Sure I haven't got a muscle anywhere on my body.

‘Geoffrey,' shouted Don Wichford, who's just a blowin as he only came over from Clare this last term so he shouldn't have been shouting at anyone until he'd earned his stripes. ‘You've got hay in your hair!'

‘You've got some in your arse too,' said Steven Crawley.

‘You've got some in your mickey,' roared Sharon Lewis, who had officially been a slut until about four weeks before, when she'd started going out with Graham Rushe and become respectable. Everyone broke their sides laughing when she said that and Geoffrey pretended to be embarrassed but I could see that he was eating it up. He didn't want to sit down in case they stopped.

None of this is really Geoffrey's fault but I'm going to get him one day too. And when I do, he won't see it coming.

Anyway, when Sharon made that crack about Geoffrey's mickey, Blusher went even more scarlet than before and I swear I thought he might have a heart attack or spontaneously combust.

‘Boys,' he said weakly. ‘Girls.' But that did no good. He'd have needed a whip to tame that room.

I read somewhere that you can get an operation for blushing. If I was him, that's what I'd do. I'd save up all my money and go on up to Dublin to see the top doctor and I would hand across every penny I owned and say, ‘Here, fix this for me like a good man.' I mean it's only chronic.

There was a right commotion going on at the house.

I was trotting along the road, feeling a little more relaxed with every step I put between me and the school, when I saw Mam charging out to the gate, dragging this blonde-haired piece by the arm and practically launching her into the street. The blonde was asking something, holding a tape recorder out in the air to catch the reply, while a young lad standing next to her was taking photographs. I heard the front door slam as Mam disappeared back inside and when the reporter turned and saw me coming towards her, she almost levitated off the ground with excitement.

‘You must be the brother,' she said, wielding her tape recorder at me like Harry Potter's wand.

‘Why must I?'

‘You look just like Lizzie.'

‘I look nothing like her,' I said, disgusted by the very idea.

‘You do so,' said the photographer. ‘She's a good-looking girl.'

I turned to stare at him and for once I was a bit lost for words. Did he mean that he thought I was a good-looking boy? No one had ever said such a thing to me before and it caught me off-guard. He was good-looking himself, with curly dark hair and a bit of stubble. Really white teeth too. He half-smiled at me and I felt my stomach tumble a bit. He was probably only about six or seven years older than me too. No harm in that.

‘Is it true that your sister has moved up to Dublin?' asked the blonde, and I turned back to her, trying to compose myself.

‘She's not in Dublin,' I said. ‘Sure Dublin wouldn't have her. She's gone to London.'

‘London, right,' she said, and I felt like a right eejit for allowing myself to get trapped like that. It was the oldest trick in the book. ‘And what's in London?'

‘Piccadilly Circus,' I said. ‘Big Ben. Prince Harry.'

A clicking sound to my left made me turn again and there was your man, snapping away as if his life depended on it. I gave him a big smile and he took the camera away from his eyes for a moment and stared at me with what I suppose you would call an interested glance. The perv.

‘My left side's better,' I said, turning around to prove my point. I would have preferred to say
take a picture, it'll last longer
, but sure he was already taking pictures, so the joke would have been lost entirely.

‘I meant who does she know in London?' asked the reporter. She'd had some work done on her forehead. There was something there that wasn't quite right. A bit too Nicole Kidman, if you know what I mean.

‘We have an auntie there,' I said.

‘Can you give me her name?'

I thought about it for a moment. My poor auntie had done nothing to deserve any of this, even if she had thrown me out the previous summer and called me a peculiar article. The last thing she needed was the tabloids landing on her doorstep. ‘I can't remember,' I said.

‘You can't remember your own aunt's name?'

‘I want to say …
Fidelma
?' I began, shrugging and smiling for the photographer, who sniggered, which practically did me in. My aunt's name isn't Fidelma at all, of course. As I've already told you, it's Dolly. Dolly Dunne.

‘Do you have her address?'

‘Do you really think I'd give that to you?' I asked.