Beneath the Earth (15 page)

He thought of goose now and roast potatoes. Parsnips, Brussels sprouts and pheasant. Mince pies, brandy butter and bread sauce. Mother asking for more wine and telling them the story of how, when she was a girl, her brother's friend had taken her on the bar of his bicycle to the church for Christmas morning Mass, a scandal from which it had taken her months to recover. Father, when he was still alive, toasting the King. The time Jane had choked on a turkey bone. The morning Joseph threw a tantrum when he finished opening his presents. Were they thinking of him now, he wondered.

Ahead of him, voices. His rifle raised again. He paused and listened, wary of German accents, harsh words, guttural sounds formed at the back of the throat. Would it be so bad to be taken prisoner? Or to be shot? He'd seen it happen so many times and it was usually over in a moment or two. It was hard to imagine that you'd feel any pain. He'd prefer it in the chest though, if it came to it. He didn't like the idea of his head being split in two. He felt uncertain which way to go; the trees were surrounding him, claustrophobic now. He marched through; he would take his chances.

McGregor, with a red hat on his head. A Santa hat. How on earth had he found this? Oakley, not crying for once, sitting still and staring into the distance. Summerfield handing around pieces of marzipan, a Christmas treat.

‘Anything to report, Hawke?' asked the sergeant, and he shook his head. He'd doubled back on himself. He looked down at his boots; they had betrayed him. What year was coming up? This couldn't go on much longer, could it? It was getting ridiculous, the whole thing.

‘Thought you'd done a bunk when we couldn't find you,' said the sergeant.

‘Me, sir? No, sir.'

‘Only joking, Hawke. Don't take everything so seriously. Have a piece of marzipan, why don't you? Summerfield, come over here and give Hawke a piece of marzipan. My mother used to make it every Christmas Eve, you know. Filled the house with the smell of it. Wonderful memories.'

Hawke took a piece and chewed on it, the flavour of almond and honey sweetening his saliva. He stepped down into the trench and continued along into one of the empty foxholes, placing his rifle beside him and leaning into the wall, closing his eyes. Sounds in the distance, across the fields, beyond the stepladders and the barbed wire, the divots and the bloodied mud. Boots dancing on the duckboards. The shelling starting, the guns firing. The noise of the men as they fell down into their lines. Christmas Eve and no rest for the wicked. He grabbed his rifle again and settled the Brodie on his head. He needed to be at ladder five. No time to waste. Rockets exploded in the sky above him, one of the greatest free light shows on earth. Better here than in a forest all alone, he decided, as he put his boot on the rung and climbed up, not hesitating as he threw himself over, stood up straight and started to charge.

It's a beautiful sight, he thought, as the land lit up before him like an entrance to another world. You don't see things like this at home.

His name was Tadhg Muldowney and he had a reputation in the town for rebelliousness. There were so many rumours going around about him that it was hard to believe they could all be true. Some said that he had been the cause of his father's heart attack after being caught by the police selling marijuana to seminarians at Clonliffe College. Others that he had been cast in a Hollywood film and would be leaving town soon to begin a new life of movie stardom. The most recent was that he'd mitched school one day to go up to Dublin and while he was there he'd picked up a prostitute off the streets and taken her to the Harcourt Hotel for an afternoon's debauchery. A pal of mine, a lad named William Wilson who wore a boot with a raised heel to balance out his uneven legs, told me that Tadhg was such an animal in the scratcher that the girl had been writing to him ever since and wanted him to marry her.

‘He'd never give her his address,' I said, for I didn't want to believe this story, which seemed to diminish Tadhg a little in my mind. ‘And sure why would Tadhg Muldowney ever have to pay for it anyway? He's a really good-looking guy.'

‘Listen to you, ya big puff,' said William, punching me in the arm, and I blushed scarlet as I told him to fuck off, for I realized that it would only take a few more throwaway comments like this to give myself away.

‘I didn't say
I
thought he was good-looking,' I told him, feeling the rush of blood along my neck moving through my cheeks and up my ears. ‘But that's what all the girls say.'

‘Sure you've never spoken to a girl in your life. Unless you're talking about your sister and everyone knows that sisters don't count.'

What age was I when all this happened? My father had been dead a year already and Kathleen was preparing for her Leaving Cert, so I suppose that puts me at around fifteen. A rotten age or a brilliant age, depending on your character.

One rumour about Tadhg that I knew to be true was that he had been discovered drunk inside the church grounds late one Saturday night and when Father Kilburn came out of the presbytery and found him pissing on the gravestones, he told him that if he didn't stop immediately he would go straight to his parents and tell them what a scoundrel they had for a son. Tadhg had simply turned around, his mickey in his hand, and asked him how anyone could stop the flow when it had already begun. He'd kept going and pissed right on the priest's shoes. There was war over it.

There were other things too. He'd introduced graffiti to the town and took great delight in taking aerosol cans out of his schoolbag and shaking them hard so the spring inside rattled like a cobra. There was something erotic – to me anyway – about the way he shook them. He'd fallen asleep in Mass and slipped off the bench, landing with a crash on the marble floor in the middle of the Hail Holy Queen and shouted
Fuck
out loud, the word roaring its way through the congregation and causing me to put a hand to my mouth to stifle my laughter. But it was the scooter that marked him out for pure danger, the little black Vespa that his uncle from America had bought him for Christmas and that he drove around town without a helmet, revving the engine so everyone noticed him, bipping the little horn every time a pretty girl crossed his path. No one had ever seen such a thing before and we were all envious.

Tadhg, like Kathleen, had two years on me but I plucked up the courage one day to ask him about the bike when I saw him leaning on it outside Crofty's Tea Shop, arms folded, wearing a pair of blue jeans with tears in the knees and a white T-shirt. All he needed was a black leather jacket and he would have been a ringer for your man out of
Grease
.

‘I'd say she fairly guzzles the old petrol, does she?' I asked him, a line I'd been practising for weeks, trying different inflections as I recorded the phrase into a Casio C-90 tape and played it back to myself over and over.

‘What's that?' he asked, turning to look at me as if he was surprised that someone so small and insignificant could speak at all.

‘The bike,' I said. ‘The Vespa. Does she cost a lot to run?'

‘She's not too bad,' he said, shrugging his shoulders and checking his watch. A crow landed on a nearby electricity pole and I watched Tadhg's pale-blue eyes as he stared at it, his head not turning away until the bird flew off again.

‘That's good,' I said, the stomach churning inside me. I got ready for the next part of my script, patting the pockets of my duffel coat and pulling a frustrated expression. This part I had practised in the mirror until I had it down. ‘Do you have a smoke on you at all?' I asked. ‘I'm only gasping.'

‘You're Kathleen Carson's little brother, aren't you?' he asked, turning back to me.

‘I'm her younger brother, yeah.'

‘What's your name?'

‘Seán.'

‘And you're a smoker, are you Seán?' he asked dubiously.

‘Trying not to be,' I said in a world-weary way. ‘Doing my best to cut down. Today's been a bitch though.'

He gave a small laugh and reached into his pocket, taking out a packet of Marlboro Lights and tossing them across to me. ‘Go ahead so,' he said. ‘But you didn't get it from me.'

I opened the pack and took one out, tapping the filter against the box like I'd seen the lads do on the television. Not an ounce of sense in my head.

‘You'll be needing a light there, will you Seán?' he asked.

I nodded and he handed me a lighter. I got the thing lit on the fourth attempt. I didn't cough though, for all of that. I held it down.

‘I'm saving up for one of them myself,' I said after a moment.

‘A lighter? They're cheap enough to be fair.'

‘A Vespa. I thought I might drive one over to Galway. The pubs there are meant to be great. There's loads of girls in them, like. And they're all mad for it.'

‘Mad for what?'

‘I dunno,' I said, kicking the stones at my feet. ‘That's just what I heard.'

His eyes narrowed as he stared at me; he was trying to figure me out I think, and then he raised a hand to greet someone. When I looked around, there was my sister Kathleen walking towards us, staring at me like I was something from a primordial swamp that had somehow managed to crawl out on to dry land to bother the locals.

‘What are you doing here?' she asked when she got closer. ‘And what's that in your mouth, a cigarette?'

‘I'm just talking,' I said. ‘And yeah. Ten out of ten for observation.' I looked at Tadhg, hoping he'd take my side and laugh, but his face was stony.

‘Did you give him that thing?' she asked, turning to him now.

‘He asked for it.'

‘And are you going to be there later when he's got his head stuck down the toilet, puking his guts up?'

Tadhg shrugged, as if he didn't much care.

‘Don't be such a buzzkill,' I said, a word I'd heard on
Fame
the week before and had been employing to good effect ever since. This time Tadhg did laugh and I felt the heart jump inside me in excitement.

‘Stop acting the big man,' said Kathleen, shaking her head. ‘And good luck getting the smell of smoke out of your duffel coat. Mam'll kill you when you get home.'

‘Shut up, you,' I said, wishing she'd just leave me alone and stop talking down to me. I'd been planning this conversation for so long and was heartsick that she was spoiling it on me. I still had at least four topics of conversation that I wanted to bring up: football, alcohol, my French teacher and the IRA. I had lines ready about all of them, each one more provocative than the last. The plan was that we'd strike up an easy friendship and I could ask him to take me for a spin on the Vespa and let me sit behind him as we drove out the back roads, the only chance I might ever get to wrap my arms around him.

‘You're lucky you don't have a brother,' said Kathleen to Tadhg, and I noticed his expression change a little, his eyes looking down at the ground, his confidence muted for a moment. I stared at her in horror, for did she not know that Tadhg
did
have a brother and that he'd been killed in a car crash a few years earlier? The story was that he'd been high at the time and was being chased by drug dealers for non-payment of his accounts. If she'd forgotten it, she made no sign of remembering now, for she showed no shame about what she'd just said. Tadhg gritted his teeth and I wondered whether, when I was his age, I would be able to grow that neat line of stubble that peeped out from his chin and whispered its way across his cheeks. He reached up to scratch it now with dirty fingernails and as he did so I saw the bicep curl on his arm, just below where the white cotton T-shirt ended, and the pale-blue vein that ran through it. How did he get it to stand out like that, I wondered. My arms were like twigs.

‘So are we going or what?' said Kathleen, and I turned to look at her in confusion.

‘Going where?' I asked, dragging my eyes away from him.

‘Not you,' she said.

‘Sure,' said Tadhg. ‘I'm here, amn't I? I've been waiting long enough.'

‘Right. Well come on so.'

She moved over to the Vespa and I realized with dismay that she and Tadhg had made a plan to go somewhere together, probably to the woods outside the town so they could go mad for each other without anyone seeing them.

‘You're not getting on that thing,' I said. ‘Are you?'

‘What's it to you if I am? Go along home and do your homework.'

‘Mam'll kill you.'

‘Then that'll be two deaths in the family today 'cos if you say a word to her I'll stick a bread knife through your ear.'

I opened my mouth, hoping to come up with a suitable response, but there was nothing there, and when she threw one leg over the back seat Tadhg slapped her arse gently and winked at her and she grinned back, no longer bothered by the fact that he had given me a cigarette, it seemed.

‘I'll tell,' I said, hoping to scare her away. It was me who was supposed to be climbing on the back of the Vespa, my face nuzzling into the back of Tadhg's head, not her.

‘Do what you like, you little shit,' said Kathleen. ‘Are we right, Tadhg?'

He stepped on now too and as he tossed his half-smoked cigarette into the bushes, something made me jump forward and grab the keys from his other hand. I took a step back and stared at my prize, as surprised as either of them by what I'd just done.

‘What the fuck?' asked Tadhg.

‘You can't go off with her,' I said. ‘She's my sister.'

‘Give me the keys, little boy,' he said with a sigh, as if this was simply too much drama for him at this time of the day, and those last two words stung through me.

‘I'm fifteen,' I said, clutching them tightly in my fist. ‘So don't call me that. And that thing is a death-trap, there's no way I'm letting you take my sister anywhere on it.'