Beneath the Earth (12 page)

‘Come on, Daniel,' she said, bored now. There was something in her expression that suggested she'd rather be up there in Kildare Street lobbing grenades at the Minister for Finance than down here in the arsehole of nowhere talking to a famous slut's twin brother.

‘It's Danny,' I said. ‘I don't like Daniel.'

‘Do you know how many hits the video has received now?'

‘A fair few, I'd say.'

‘Over two million worldwide.'

‘There's a lot of sickos out there,' I said.

‘Are you ashamed of your sister?' she asked, switching on the empathy. She must have thought I was an awful fool. ‘She's your twin sister, isn't she? Do you feel embarrassed by her? Would you say that you couldn't stand to look at her right now?' I might have answered, only then she said this: ‘Is Lizzie the reason your father left home?'

‘Shut up, you old wagon,' I said, leaping at her, and she jumped back in fright. The photographer grabbed me and put an arm around my waist to still me. You can leave that there if you like, I thought.

‘Take it easy, Danny,' he said and, Christ, I felt an urge to just let my body relax back into his and fall asleep. I didn't though. I have self-control. Which is more than I can say for my twin sister. Who is officially a slut.

‘You're very angry, aren't you, Danny?' asked the blonde, putting her tape recorder back in her bag, but I didn't have time to answer for just at that moment the front door flew open and Mam stormed out to drag me back inside the house before I could say another word.

‘Do
not
speak to those people,' she said, wagging a finger in my face. ‘They're low-lifes, every one of them. Bottom feeders. And they'll destroy us if you give them half a chance.'

I shrugged and went upstairs. I had a desperate urge to play with Mussolini, our dog, only Mussolini was dead a year already so there was no chance of that happening. So I got into bed and had a wank over the photographer instead.

Lizzie laughed at me when I told her I was gay. She literally started laughing like I'd made some great joke.

This was about four months after Dad left and she was sitting in her room listening to some old shite on her CD player and crying. I could hear her through the walls but no matter how hard I banged, she wouldn't turn the music down or put an end to the waterworks. So I went in without knocking and there she was, sitting on the bed like a Buddha in cheap make-up, looking through old photo albums like she was in a film or something. Pictures of the four of us from years ago, when Lizzie and I were just kids. Holidays over in West Cork. The time we went to Leisureland in Galway and I fell off the slide and hit my head. Mam and Dad at the school sports day.

‘Can you keep it down in here, do you think?' I asked, and she looked up at me with pure hatred in her eyes. She'd changed a lot since Dad skipped out. She'd got a tattoo on her ankle, started drinking and staying out late. Getting off with lads. Not officially a slut yet but getting there.

‘You keep it down,' she said, putting the album aside and scrolling through the messages on her phone instead. ‘You're such a prick, you know that?' she said after a bit. ‘There's something wrong with you in your head.'

‘There's something wrong with you in your head,' I repeated, mimicking her.

‘Oh, stop it.'

‘Oh, stop it.'

‘Jesus, it's like talking to a child.'

‘Jesus, it's like talking to a child.'

And then she took a paperweight off her bedside table, a big glass heavy yoke that she'd won in some stupid essay competition a couple of years before and flung it at my head. Had it hit me, I'd have been out for the count, for that thing was a weapon of mass destruction. As it was, it just grazed me, stinging my left ear as it sailed past and crashed into her wardrobe. But it gave me a terrible fright all the same. Even Lizzie looked a bit alarmed by this sudden act of violence.

I sat on the ground and put my head in my hands. I needed a moment to compose myself. I was the victim of an attempted murder. And all because I'd asked her to turn the music down.

‘What's the matter with you now?' she asked, the smallest amount of concern seeping into her voice. I'd say she felt a bit relieved that she'd missed me. She might have been up on manslaughter charges. ‘Danny, are you all right? It didn't even touch you.'

Out of the blue, the tears came. They were as big a shock to me as they were to her. And the fact that I was crying made me cry even more because I was so surprised by the whole thing.

‘Jesus, Danny,' she said. ‘I'm sorry. I'm just so angry with you for what you did. You've never even apologized. You've never even admitted your part in it.'

‘I didn't do anything,' I said, between sobs.

‘Well what's wrong with you then? Stop crying, for fuck's sake!'

‘I'm gay,' I told her, and, for all the tears, I felt a sudden rush of relief at saying the words out loud. I'd said them to myself hundreds of times over the last few years, almost always in disbelief, but here they were now, out in the world, setting off on their own adventures. ‘I'm one of them homosexuals,' I said again, looking up at her.

‘You are not,' she said.

‘I am.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘One hundred per cent,' I told her.

And that's when she started laughing. Maybe she was laughing because I wasn't going to tell Mam that she'd tried to murder me with a paperweight, or maybe she was laughing because now she had something she could hold over me. She tried to stop but the more she tried, the more she laughed. I stared at her, torn between humiliation, anger and confusion.

‘What are you laughing at?' I asked finally.

‘What do you think I'm laughing at? I'm laughing at you.'

I frowned. ‘But why?'

‘Because you're gay,' she said. ‘It's funny.'

‘Why is it funny?'

‘Hold on there,' she said, turning away and picking up her phone again and starting to tap away at it.

‘What are you doing?' I asked.

‘Telling Rachel.'

Rachel was her friend. An awful dog of a girl who'd been lurking round our house for years and who always looked at me like I was a bad smell in human form. I caught her once trying on my sister's underwear when Lizzie was in the shower and she'd made me swear not to tell. She said she'd blow me if I didn't and kill me if I did. I said no thanks to both offers but never said a word about it to anyone anyway.

‘Don't!' I roared, grabbing the phone off her. ‘Give me that.'

‘Too late,' she said, smiling.

I stared at the screen. The message was green; it was sent.
Danny's gay
, it said.
He just told me.
‘Why would you do that?' I asked, looking across at her in bewilderment. ‘Why would you do that to me?'

She shrugged. ‘I told you,' she said. ‘It's funny.'

‘How is it funny?'

‘Oh sorry, Danny,' she said, sitting back and smiling sweetly at me. ‘You don't think it's funny when people text other people's secrets to each other? I thought you did.'

I had nothing to say to that and couldn't think what else to do. I just stood up and left, went back to my own room and sat on the bed and thought about Josephine Smiley and what she'd do if Joseph Smiley told her he was gay. She'd probably stop riding him, for starters.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It was worse. That Rachel lezzer forwarded Lizzie's text to everyone in our class, who in turn forwarded it to everyone in our school, who in turn forwarded it to everyone in the county. A part of me didn't care. Better out than in, as they say. But still and all, I thought it was a nasty thing to do and I couldn't make sense of it. First she tries to murder me, then she tells the world my deep, dark secret. And does anyone tell her off for it? Do they fuck. All right, she'd got it into her head that I was a bad lad and had told Mam all about Dad when I should have kept my mouth shut but none of that was my fault and even if it was, to do something like that in retaliation? It was beyond the beyonds.

In fairness to Lizzie, she seemed a little remorseful the next morning but she didn't apologize. She said nothing to me over breakfast but she kept looking over as I ate my corn flakes and finally she turned her phone off because it was practically dancing off the table with all the texts she was getting. And then later, she watched as all the lads made a laugh of me in school and she didn't open her mouth once to defend me. Normally I wouldn't care about something like that since I can give back as good as I get, but it isn't easy when you've got fifteen boys jeering you and another hundred out there in the corridors making kissy faces as you walk past.

Joseph Smiley came over and put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I hear you're a homosexual, Danny. Is that right? Are you a homosexual? Are you not worried about your eternal soul?' and I didn't have an answer for him. He was hardly in a position to have a go at me with all the things he was doing with his own sister.

Someone stuck a picture of Justin Bieber on my locker with the words ‘Danny loves Justin' written across it in pink highlighter and it took me three gos to get it down as there was so much Sellotape all over it. As if I'd love that jumped-up skinny minger anyway with the big wrinkly forehead on him.

Liam Wilson was particularly nasty, which was a bit rich as I'd pegged him long ago as one of my lot, and he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew, which was what really drove him demented. We'd been at a party only a couple of months earlier and ended up sitting outside in the garden together, trying to smoke a cigarette and not doing a great job of it, when he leaned in a bit closer than was totally necessary and pressed his right leg against my left before saying ‘Christ, Danny, I've an awful horn on me right now, do you ever get that way?' And then he looked right at me and smiled, and I said nothing, just edged away, for I tell you this, I might have been desperate for a bit of boy-on-boy action but I'd have preferred to ride my pillow like I usually did of an evening than get anywhere near his skanky cock. The lad looked like Worzel Gummidge after a hard night out. So he went in for the kill, of course, and made sure that I was abused by everyone with a mouth on them.

But it all ended a few days later and I was left in peace. Tommy Devlin, class president, captain of the hurling team and the fittest thing this side of Calais, was away at his granny's funeral in Donegal when all the bullying was taking place and when he came back pretty much every lad in the room piled on top of him to tell him the news. He listened to them without saying a word before walking over to my desk and staring down at me with a baffled expression on his face.

‘Is this right what they're telling me, Danny?' he asked.

‘It is, I suppose,' I said.

‘Christ on a bike,' he said, shaking his head as he considered it. ‘You're some lad. But look, fair fucks to you all the same.' And then he shook my hand before walking away and that was the end of the matter, and I knew then that there wasn't a boy or girl in the school who would dare say a negative word to me ever again or they'd risk falling out of favour with himself. And of course I was head over heels for Tommy Devlin by lunchtime, but that's another story.

It was pretty rough there for a few days before it got better again and it was all Lizzie's fault. And I swore I'd get her too one of these fine days.

The first I knew about the woman from Waterford was a text message that she sent Dad on his birthday.
Thinking of you, xx
, it said. The contact name was listed only as ‘KM'. I racked my brain to think of any ‘KM' who my parents knew but could think of no one. And it was hardly likely to be Kylie Minogue sending the text. I suppose I shouldn't have read it but the phone was sitting right there on the kitchen table and there was no one else in the room. I thought it might be important and, if it was, then he'd want me to go upstairs and tell him.

Dad and I weren't talking that morning because we'd had a row the night before when he found out about a bit of mischief I'd been up to and he'd said that there wasn't much more that he was willing to put up with from me, that there were days when he wondered whether there was something wrong with me in the head.

Mam had been saying for ages that I needed to see a behavioural specialist but I'd said that if they so much as parked the car outside the local pharmacy while I was in the back seat that I would take a hatchet to my own skull. That rightly shut them up. But after this row I heard Dad telling Mam that they'd been hiding their heads in the sand for too long and it was time to take action.

‘I don't think he'll let us bring him,' Mam said.

‘He'll do what he's told,' said Dad. ‘I'll drag him there if I have to.'

‘Do you think it's our fault?' she asked, putting on the old whiny voice.

I could listen to no more, as I heard Lizzie's bedroom door open upstairs and if she caught me eavesdropping she'd land me in it. She'd done that sort of thing before.

I made a note of ‘KM''s number on my own phone before marking the text message as unread and later that day I phoned it from the payphone in the village. I had no plans for what I was going to say, I just wanted to know who ‘KM' was and whether or not I could use the intelligence I gathered against him in some way. It was a woman's voice that answered and she was all breathless, like she'd just got through seducing the milkman's son. I could picture her, all blowsy and red-haired with make-up all over her face and lipstick on her teeth. A fridgeful of chocolates and white wine.

‘Hello?' she said.

‘Hello,' I replied.

‘Who's this?'

‘Martin,' I said, lowering my voice and doing my best to give a good impression of my dad. It wasn't bad, if I say so myself. I covered the mouthpiece a little with one hand so my voice sounded a bit muffled.