The Speckled People (17 page)

Even at breakfast around the table, it was hard not to think about the
leithreas
. It was Sunday and my father came down all ready for Mass in his best suit. Nobody said a word. Franz was trying not to laugh and had a very cross face with his mouth closed right. We knew my father couldn’t be really angry because all the people in the house would be watching him. Every time I looked at Franz I couldn’t stop myself from making a snort with my nose, until my father looked at me with hard eyes and my mother told us it was not nice to laugh at people’s misfortune.

‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘Because your father made such a good speech last night … and then he fell into the toilet.’

That was the end of it and everyone was silent again, until my mother’s face went completely red. I saw her shoulders starting to shake and then she made a big snort with her nose, too, and suddenly had to run upstairs. We were left at the table with my father looking at us. We were afraid to laugh any more and everything was so quiet in the house, until my father spoke up at last to
make conversation. There was a sign near the door with a well-known phrase in Irish that said:
níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin
: there’s no fireside like your own fireside. So my father turned it around and tried to make a joke of it.
Níl aon tóin tinn mar do thóin tinn féin
, he said, which meant that there’s no sore backside like your own sore backside.

Then everybody in the house suddenly laughed out loud at that. Even though it was an old joke that everybody had heard a hundred times before, they still thought it was the funniest thing they ever heard in their whole lives. My mother came back down again and said the best thing is to laugh at yourself before anyone else does. My father says that if you laugh against yourself the whole world will laugh with you, and if you laugh at other people, you laugh alone. But my father is not good at laughing at himself. And he never laughs at other people either. He’s much better at making a sacrifice. After Mass, we met the dictionary man and all his friends again outside the church. My father was afraid that he would be famous all over Connemara for falling into the
leithreas
rather than for his speech. But there was no mention of it and everything was forgotten, because there were too many other things to remember and Irish people don’t say everything that’s inside their heads.

We were going back home to Dublin the next day, so my mother asked us what we wanted to do most on the last day. We went back to the sea and played with the lion tails and then up the hill behind the house to be the last people to look out over the sea to the Aran Islands. We sat on the grass with the sheep all around us, waiting for the sun to go down. We looked out along the coast where the sea was just mixed in with the land, with inlets and islands and peninsulas as far as you could see. The sun went down
and An Cheathrú Rua was even redder than it ever was before. My father said it was time to go, but my mother said we would wait until the very last minute, until it was completely dark, until all the colour had disappeared and there was nothing left except the lights in the houses and the smaller twinkling lights further away along the coast that told you where the land was.

Nobody was sad to go home the next day because my mother said we would remember this place for ever. Nobody was sad because my father said we would be coming back again soon. Nothing would change, he promised, not one rock, not even one stone wall. We would come back and see that everything was still there in the same place as it was before. Nothing was going to be in the past.

That summer the garden was full of flowers. There was so much fruit, too, raspberries and blackcurrants and plums, that my mother started making jam again. And there were so many tomatoes in the greenhouse that we had to give lots of them away to the neighbours. There were flowers on the table every day and my father said we should keep bees. He started buying books on beekeeping and said it would make sense to put a few hives on the roof of the breakfast room where they could fly straight out to collect the honey and pollinate the fruit trees.

The same things were forbidden in our house as always. There was a song on the radio that said we had all the time in the world in the deepest voice in the world. My mother liked the song too, but only when my father was out at work. Ita started saying ‘good morning’ to all the people on the street, and when there was nobody else to say good morning to, she said it to the lamp-posts and the gates, all day until she was back in the kitchen saying ‘good morning’ to the cooker and the washing machine as well. My father said the rules had to be obeyed even though she was still a baby. So then there was trouble because Ita went on hunger strike and wouldn’t eat or speak any more, and my father had to hold her head with one hand and try to force her mouth open to push the spoon in with the other. All the
time she was shaking her head and I thought it was funny because Ita was winning. But my mother didn’t want us to see what would happen next, so she closed the doors and brought us outside and told us to run down to the shop to buy ice cream until it was over and Ita stopped crying.

My father said he couldn’t understand why the stick wasn’t working any more. He said he was doing his best. Everything was for us. He made the trolleys, he made a wooden see-saw, he was even building a real puppet theatre, and if we kept on breaking the rules he would have to find new ways of punishing us that would hurt more. Sometimes I tried to punish Franz and Maria to see if they would feel pain, so my father said anything I would do to them he would give me back a hundred times, and I said anything he would do to me I would give back to Franz and Maria a hundred times, until nobody could feel any more pain. He brought me upstairs and we kneeled down again to pray in front of Our Lady that he was doing the right thing. But that didn’t work so he had a better idea, something that would make me ashamed. He confiscated the braces on my lederhosen and I had to go down to the barber to get my hair cut, holding my trousers up with my hands in my pockets.

In the barber shop we sat on the wooden bench reading the comics. Most of them were torn and falling apart, but it was good to see them, even the ones I had read before. I didn’t like the comic called
Hotspur
as much as the
Dandy
, and I didn’t like it either when somebody was punished and put across the teacher’s knee. There were lots of other boys waiting and reading comics, too, but none of them noticed that I had no braces and couldn’t walk around without my hands in my pockets. The barber kept clicking the scissors all the time, even when he was not cutting hair,
and there was a huge pile of hair swept into one corner on the floor. We waited and read as many comics as we could and pretended that we were Irish and spoke English like everyone else, even though everybody could see that we were from a different country.

When we came out I tried to speak English to Franz but he was afraid. The barber, Mr Connolly, always gave every boy back a penny, so you could buy a toffee bar. But that day we put our pennies together, along with other pennies that Franz still had from Tante Lilly, and we bought a brand new comic called the
Beano
. We took turns reading it and spoke Irish to each other in between. My mother said it was good to buy something that lasts longer, not like a liquorice pipe that’s gone within minutes and can’t be remembered, but there would be trouble if we brought the
Beano
into the house. So we pretended it wasn’t our
Beano
and hid it in the hedges of Miss Hart’s garden.

At night I thought of Mr Connolly still clicking his fingers, even when he was having his tea and there were no scissors in his hand. I thought of all the hair mixed together in a large wig, like the mane of a buffalo. I thought of Mr McNally reading his paper with crooked glasses held up only by one stick over his right ear, and I thought of Mr Smyth from the vegetable shop getting undressed and going to bed with only one arm. Downstairs my father was building the puppet theatre and my mother was making the costumes and the curtains. Outside it was raining and I thought of the
Beano
getting wet and all the colours washing out.

After that, my mother said we were all starting to go crazy because one day I told Maria to climb up on the wall in the front garden and show her backside to the wind. She did it because she trusted everything I said, even things she
didn’t want to do, even things she knew were not right. I promised that we would do the same after her, but she had to go first because she was younger and everything in our house was always done from the youngest to the oldest. So Maria stood on the wall and laughed with her backside to the wind for everyone to see. Then one of the neighbours came over and told my mother it was not very nice to do that in front of Irish people, Catholic or Protestant. So we all had to stay inside for a day and my mother said we were living on our own imagination too long and we needed friends to play with.

My father said we could only play with children who could speak Irish. He contacted lots of people and first of all we played with a boy nearby whose name was Seán Harris, the son of a painter and decorator, but their Irish wasn’t good enough. Then one day my father brought us across the city on the bus to Finglas and we played with a boy called Naoise. Once or twice, children were brought over to our house by bus from other parts of the city, and there were some older boys who came to play in German but didn’t say much. They stood around looking at our things and not even playing with them, just eating the biscuits that my mother made. There were some boys from our school who came over, too, but even they thought it was stupid to play in Irish and didn’t want to come back again, even for the biscuits. You couldn’t be cowboys in Irish. You couldn’t sneak up behind somebody or tie somebody up to a chair in Irish. It was no fun dying in Irish. And it was just too stupid altogether to hide behind something and say ‘Uuuggh’ or ‘hands up’ in Irish, because there were some things you could only do in English, like fighting and killing Indians. My father was no good at making friends, so my mother took over and told us to join the
altar boys. But they only wanted to kill Germans, so we served Mass and just went home again.

One day I was playing with the umbrella in the hallway, trying to kill all the coats with one arm behind my back, and Franz was outside on the street with his scooter. He was listening to the trains pulling into the station, waiting for my father to come home. But then he saw some other boys playing on the street with sticks and guns. They ignored him and didn’t call him any names, so he stood there with one foot on and one foot off the scooter, looking at them from a distance, even though he couldn’t join in. They were cowboys fighting and killing Indians. Franz was pretending that his scooter was a horse and that he had a real gun in the side pocket of his lederhosen, until my father came around the corner with his limp and his briefcase swinging. Then Franz turned around and tried to scoot back to the house as fast as he could, but it was already too late. I heard the key in the door and I saw Franz coming in with nothing to say. I saw my father turning around to look at the boys on the street before he closed the door and put his briefcase down. My mother came to kiss him, but that didn’t stop him saying that Franz had to be punished for pretending to be with the other boys on the street.

‘Now why is that?’ my mother asked.

‘He was listening to them in English,’ my father said.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘Are you not taking this too far?’

My father shook his head. She tried everything she could to stop it. She tried to distract him by saying it was the feast of St Brigid and that the curtains were finished for the puppet theatre and that she got a letter from her sister Marianne. She tried to say that we should phone Onkel Ted and see what he would say. And when my father still shook his head
she tried to put her arm around Franz to stop him from feeling pain.

‘Not with violence,’ she begged him. ‘Please, not with violence.’

So instead, my father confiscated the scooter and carried it upstairs. That meant there were now two scooters in my father and mother’s bedroom. My scooter was there for days because I was listening to songs on the radio.

‘Two horses up there eating grass,’ she said to us afterwards.

I knew she was making a joke because there was no other way out of it. But I knew it wasn’t over with the scooters either and after dinner, when we were gone to bed already, my mother tried to get my father to put on some music and pour a glass of cognac. They were talking for a long time and he said he was not going to be tricked into changing his mind, because that was like going backwards and letting the strongest languages win over the weakest. She said that punishing the innocent and confiscating things was going backwards. Then she laughed and asked how anyone was going to be able to sleep with two horses in the bedroom. But he just got angry again and she asked him to go up and give us a sign that everything was still positive in our family. She wanted him to go up and kiss us on the forehead.

‘I love each one of you,’ he said, and I could smell the cognac on his breath. ‘You are like no other children in the world.’

And some time in the middle of the night, my mother got up and brought the scooters back down the stairs, one by one, because they were there in the hallway the next morning waiting for us. It didn’t mean everything was all
right again, but at least we had our horses back and soon we would be starting swimming lessons.

After that my mother kept asking people in the shops if there were any children that we could play with and one day she met Dr Sheehan and he had a boy called Noel who had red hair and glasses that were wrapped around his ears. So she brought us down to his house to play in a huge garden beside the church with bulldogs and apple trees. He was our friend and his house was the best place in the world to live. There were bicycles that we could ride around the path like a racetrack, and we could reach up from our saddles and pick apples from the trees above us any time. Sometimes the bell from the church rang and you could hear nothing at all except one of the dogs howling. One time Franz found a tap in the garden and drank some water, but then his mouth was full of earwigs and he thought he would die. And one time we found a wasps’ nest and started throwing stones at it until they got very angry. We played in English all day until Noel’s mother asked us to stay for tea. She had trouble with breathing and spoke very gently to say that she had phoned my mother. There was nothing my father could do to stop it. Even when we were walking up the road on our way home at the end of the day, Franz and me still kept talking English as far as we could, until the last lamp-post.

Then my father wanted to know if Noel could speak Irish. Before he could come and play in our house, he would have to sit an exam first in the front room. Next Saturday, my father asked him lots of questions in Irish, like what his name was and how old he was and what his father did for a living. We stood around watching and hoping that Noel could answer them, wishing that we could whisper and help him, but he knew no Irish at all. He just kept
smiling and blinking behind his glasses and repeating the only thing he remembered from school.

‘
Níl a fhios agam
,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

That was the oldest answer in Ireland and my father started shaking his head. It was not good enough, he kept saying. But then my mother had a great idea.

‘He wants to learn Irish,’ she said. ‘Dr Sheehan wants him to learn. It’s his only chance.’

My father looked very cross, but my mother kept trying. She said Noel was not so good at Irish
yet
, but he would soon become a native speaker if he was allowed to come to our house. And then who knows, maybe his family would then become a full-Irish fireside and maybe even Dr Sheehan would begin to speak Irish to his patients and then everybody in Dublin would love their own language. It would be a pity to miss this opportunity.

So then we had a friend for life. We learned swimming and diving and went down to the public baths every day for the whole summer. We saved up and bought goggles so that we could dive down underwater and have contests picking up pennies from the bottom of the pool. We would throw the penny into the deep end and watch it turning as it sank out of view. Then we dived down to reach it underwater, where there was no language only the humming bubbles all around. We timed each other to see who could stay down for the longest and I was nearly always the winner because I could stay under until my lungs were bursting, until I nearly died and had to come up for words. I was the champion at not breathing. Sometimes the three of us went down together and shook hands, and it looked like you could live down there, just sitting on the bottom of the pool signalling to each other. When we got out of the water, our knees were purple. We had purple hands and
purple lips and our teeth were chattering. Then it was time to go home and we bought chewing gum. Noel found there was still water in one ear and he had to lean over on one side to let it pour out like a jug. We were friends for life and walked home with our towels around our necks, slapping the swimming trunks against the walls and leaving wet marks behind, like signatures all the way home. Then we waited till we got to the last lamp-post before we stopped speaking English.