White Lies (4 page)

OD

Beano and me were the last ones to leave the site that evening. We'd been given the job of locking away all the shovels and wheelbarrows and stuff, because Snipe was off early to the bookies. We were locking the main gate when Mick Moran drove up in his new silver Range Rover. Seanie was in the passenger seat.

Mick Moran was a big thick-set fellow with tight sandy hair cropped close to his head. On the coldest of days he wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the buttons open halfway down his hairy chest. He was so busy making money he didn't notice the weather. The window of the Range Rover slid down.

‘Hard at it, lads,' he said. ‘Is Mr. Doyle around?'

‘No,' I muttered, concentrating on holding the gate for Beano to fix the lock on.

Beano's hand was shaking too much to fit the key. People like Moran made him nervous. Which was bad news for Beano, because the world is full of Mick Morans.

‘He's … he's down with the Town Clerk … at the Council Offices,' he said, with all the certainty of a bad liar.

I let out a snigger and Moran gave me one of his hard-man looks. He got out of the Range Rover and came over to Beano.

‘You wouldn't mind opening the cabin for me, young lad, would you?' he asked pleasantly. ‘I need to check something there.'

‘We're closing up,' I told him. ‘You can talk to Mr. Doyle at the Council Offices.' Moran looked me up and down like I was a particularly awkward tree stump in the path of one of his JCBs.

‘I'm in a hurry,' he said and slid back the handle of the gate. ‘I won't keep ye long.'

Beano followed him into the site and I was left standing there staring at Seanie, who was stuck in one of his school-books. I'm sure he must have felt my eyes burning into him, because he seemed to be stuck on the same page for a long time. Then he looked up at me.

‘How's it going?' he said.

‘Could be worse.'

‘How's the knee?'

I felt a twinge and my stomach was suddenly empty, or full of something that shouldn't have been there. I moved towards the Range Rover.

‘There's nothing wrong with my knee,' I said.

‘I just thought … the way you were turning yesterday … it wasn't …'

‘My knee's perfect, Moran. And don't go mouthing off to Mahoney about it.'

Which was not very clever. If my knee was really all right then it wouldn't matter what he said to Mahoney. Besides, I'd never known him to speak to Mahoney except to answer a question.

Mick Moran and Beano were on their way back. I felt so stupid I had to offer an explanation.

‘You know how it is with me and Mahoney,' I said. ‘He's only waiting for the chance to drop me.'

‘Because of Nance?'

I didn't like the sound of Nance's name on Seanie's lips. ‘Listen, Seanie,' I said, ‘keep your nose where it belongs – stuck in your books.'

I felt Mick Moran's hand on my back and I dropped my shoulder to shrug it off. He looked from me to Seanie.

‘Is he getting at you, Seanie?' he asked, doing the old Clint Eastwood grinding of the jaw.

‘No.'

‘'Cause if he is, I'll go through him for a short cut.' Seanie didn't look happy. He started to answer but changed his mind and turned away. Mick Moran squared up to me.

‘Do you have a problem, son?' he demanded.

‘I wouldn't call it a problem,' I said. ‘I just don't like you, Moran.'

He snapped his fist out towards me but I didn't flinch. He held my shoulder in a grip that looked friendly but felt like a vice.

‘Son,' he said, ‘the feeling is mutual.'

He let go and piled heavily in behind the steering wheel. Beano had dropped the lock and was on his knees searching for the bundle of keys. Moran pulled away in the Range Rover.

‘He'll kill me,' Beano was moaning, but I wasn't listening.

My eyes were fixed on Moran's, which were glaring at me from the side mirror. I gave him the finger and the brakes screeched. I could see Seanie spin round to his old man, and after a few seconds they moved away again. Moran's hand came into view. He was returning my message.

When I turned around, Beano was fumbling with the gate again. I grabbed the keys from him and Beano laughed in his hurt, defensive way.

‘You'll get yourself creased one of these days, OD!'

‘Not before I crease someone else,' I said. ‘What was he at in there?'

‘Looking at the plans or something. I don't know.'

On the way home I kept thinking of Nance. From the minute Seanie had mentioned her name I had known I should go and talk to her, tell her I was sorry for getting thick. I planned on getting changed quickly and heading over to her place straight away. It didn't work out like that.

As soon as I opened the front door, the smell of air-freshener hit me. Then I saw the hallway, tiles spick and span, nothing left around to clog up the place. The kitchen was spotless too, and in the fireplace no ashes sagged out from beneath the grate. Instead a few briquettes were formed neatly into a pyramid. At the base of this pyramid, like a garland of flowers, lay an assortment of crumpled-up strips of toilet paper. Each one was stained with blood. I heard Jimmy's footsteps moving back and forth in his bedroom directly above. I went slowly up the stairs, afraid of what I was going to find. It couldn't have been a shaving cut. There were too many of those blood-stained tissues for that.

His bedroom door was open. He was standing on a chair beside the wardrobe. In his hand was the wide-brimmed sombrero from his showband days. I couldn't see any blood on him.

He hadn't heard me come in and he tottered on the chair when he saw me. I rushed in and steadied him. The sombrero slipped sideways in his hand and I saw, but pretended not to, a crisp tenner inside it.

‘What are you doing?' I yelled. ‘You'll break your neck off that chair.'

He placed the sombrero carefully on top of the wardrobe and I helped him down. I hated touching him. I could feel his sweat on the purple nylon shirt he wore.

‘Some job,' he said. ‘What do you think?'

How long is this ‘comeback' going to last? was what I was thinking. Until the next binge? Until the latest pipe-dream comes crashing down around your ears?

‘Why did you let Nance do all this?' I shouted. ‘D'ye think all women are skivvies?'

He flicked the long hair back behind his ears. It was a habit that really bugged me; it was the kind of thing a young fellow did, not a decrepit, middle-aged has-been.

‘I didn't ask her to do it,' he said and took a piece of toilet paper from his pocket to wipe his mouth.

I saw the smudge of pink on the tissue before I noticed the teeth.

‘I'm giving the old teeth another shot,' he said. ‘So I can blow the trumpet, you know.'

I didn't really mean to laugh at him. It was a mixture of relief and pity that made me do it. Relief that the bloody tissues had been explained; pity at the pain in his raw gums. Of course, it didn't come out like that. He turned away and went back to filling a black plastic bag with old shoes and empty cigarette packets – and the old
Spotlight
magazines with their pictures of him as a young man. I nearly asked him not to throw them out, but I felt so miserable about breaking up in front of him that I retreated to the kitchen.

I sat watching the telly but I didn't turn up the sound. There was a music video on. A woman walked in slow motion away from the camera through a field of long grass. I wondered where Mam was now. London, Jimmy had told me the day after she left, but we had no address. She hadn't written. When I asked if she'd left a note, I knew by his unconvincing denial that she had. Not that it mattered. I wouldn't have been able to bring myself to read it anyway.

Every so often the picture on the telly would start to roll, as it had been doing for months. I'd never got around to fixing it though I was good at that kind of thing – electrics, machines. I just couldn't be bothered fixing anything in that house. It seemed to me that everything was meant to stay broken there.

After a few minutes, Jimmy arrived in the kitchen with the big plastic bag and lugged it out by the back door. Outside, he stacked it alongside five or six others. Back inside, he put on the kettle and waited for it to boil.

‘Did you throw out any of my gear?' I asked, spoiling for an argument.

‘It's all in a bag under the stairs,' he said. ‘You can sort it out yourself.'

‘Were you messing around in my room too?'

‘No.'

The Angelus came on the telly with a picture of a Navajo mother and child. I'd arranged to meet Beano at the snooker hall at half six, thinking I'd have cleared the air with Nance by then. That would take more than half an hour, so I decided to call up to her after I'd had my game of snooker.

Jimmy laid out the one good set of cups and saucers for the tea – which tasted a little better than usual and looked the right colour for a change. He wasn't eating anything, and the click of his false teeth against the rim of the cup was the only sound in the kitchen apart from the low buzz of the telly.

The sense of calm radiating from him amazed me. I knew he must be in agony but it was like he was in some dreamland, some Graceland of the soul, where pain didn't matter. He was far away, but not as far away as I supposed. Out of the blue, he said, ‘Why wasn't Nance in school today? Did she tell you?'

Too embarrassed to say I hadn't even thought of asking, I shook my head. It wasn't very pleasant to be faced with my own blind stupidity. To have it pointed out to me by a high-plains drifter like Jimmy was even worse.

I let down my cup too sharply on its saucer and a little chip came off the base. Sorry, I said to myself. Sorry, Nance. At the same time I was answering myself. Too late now, OD, too bloody late for ‘sorry' now.

NANCE

It didn't seem like a coincidence to me when Seanie Moran came to our house that evening for a ‘grind' from Tom. When I heard the doorbell ringing I was certain it was OD, and I thought I'd better get to the door before he and Tom confronted each other. OD was sure to blame him for our break-up.

The frosty look I had prepared for OD unnerved Seanie as he stood in the open doorway. He shuffled his books from one hand to the other.

‘Is your father around?' he asked. ‘I'm taking economic history as an extra subject. Tom … Mr. Mahoney is going to help me out.'

I wasn't making a move; my mind was on that young Kenyan in the photo, wondering what he looked like now that he had been rescued in my mind from that car crash. Seanie was getting uneasy. He kept looking past me, hoping Tom would appear. ‘He said half past six. Maybe he forgot.'

‘No, he's here,' I said, at last. ‘I'll get him. Come in.'

I brought him into the study and went to fetch Tom. He was in the bath.

‘Five minutes,' he called, over the noise of the radio he always brought in there with him.

Downstairs again, I went to the study door and told Seanie.

‘Are you all right?' he asked. ‘I mean … you weren't in school today. I thought maybe you were sick or something.'

That he should have noticed I was out was surprising enough, but his breaking of the rule of silence he kept towards everyone in the class was even more so. Most of the fellows in our year didn't like Seanie, but there were a few girls who harboured not-so-secret longings for him. Like OD, I was inclined to believe he was a bit of a snob and maybe a bit weird too.

‘I'm fine,' I said, still holding on to the door handle.

‘You didn't miss anything much,' he said. Then racking his brain for something else to say, he added, ‘You'll be back tomorrow so, I suppose.'

For a moment I wondered if it was possible that the word was already out about my breaking up with OD and whether Seanie was making a ham-fisted play for me. Then I got suspicious. It seemed strange that Tom hadn't mentioned anything during the last few days about giving Seanie a grind. Besides, Tom never gave grinds. He was always too busy.

I sat down close to Seanie, but not too close, to have a good look at the textbook in his hand. It wasn't familiar. Maybe he really was doing economic history. But why? He wasn't likely to be scraping for points and economic history had nothing to do with medicine, which we all knew he was aiming for. He was big into the Red Cross and was already an instructor on their First Aid courses.

‘Why would a doctor want to know about economic history?' I asked casually.

I thought he was going to clam up then, because he suddenly looked so unhappy. When he spoke, his tone was dead flat.

‘I've changed my mind about medicine,' he shrugged, ‘I'm trying for accountancy.'

‘That's a bit drastic,' I said, ‘from medicine to accountancy?'

‘Dad's business is getting bigger,' he explained. ‘He's branching out into all kinds of things and he reckons I'll need to be an accountant to handle it.'

‘So it's his idea?'

‘No,' Seanie insisted. ‘Anyway, he built the business up for me. I can't just walk away from it, can I?'

It sounded more like a plea than a question. He seemed to want to tell me more but I felt I'd poked my nose in far enough already. I changed the subject.

‘And I thought you were here to talk me into going back to school,' I said. Then he turned the tables on me. ‘You weren't sick today, were you, Nance?'

‘No,' I said.

‘If there's anything I can do …' he began uncertainly, ‘I'd like to help you.'

‘I don't need any help.'

‘What I mean is, if it helped for you to talk about it, I'd be glad to listen,' he said. ‘I'm not saying I can sort anything out for you but …'

We could hear Tom coming down the stairs. I stood up and Seanie stared miserably at his economic history book, sorry he'd said anything.

At the door I almost bumped into Tom. I circled around him like he had the plague and the smile on his face sagged. He closed the door of the study with a bang and I went away to my bedroom.

I thought about Seanie and how he'd opened up so unexpectedly; how, unlike OD, he'd sensed I was in some kind of trouble. I thought about my reasons for disliking him and realised they were all second-hand – and came from OD. How many more of my opinions, I wondered, were really OD's? Even the notion of leaving school was a copycat one – even if, for the moment, I couldn't see an alternative. Now that I'd broken off with OD, I'd have to think for myself. That couldn't be bad. The thought made me feel better.

In the sitting room downstairs, I found May doing one of her water-colours at the long oval table. The smell of the paint reminded me of better times, when there were no big complications in my life and I could marvel at her talent for getting a tree or a sky just right. Now, I didn't even bother to look at her picture. I switched on the telly to watch
Home and Away,
knowing she didn't approve and willing her, for once, to say so. Tom was never slow to.

As she dabbed away carefully with her brushes I sneaked sideways glances at her. With her jet-black hair and olive skin she looked more Italian or Spanish than Irish. I realised what a strange threesome we made, posing as the ideal family. Tom, the perfect caricature of a redheaded, brown-eyed Irishman; his Mediterranean wife; his daughter, darker still.

What, I wondered, did people make of us? Did they make jokes or swap snide, sarcastic comments? Because I'd never bothered about what people thought of me before, these questions – the very fact that they came up – were a terrible shock to my system. I felt like my whole world was narrowing down and I was becoming more and more isolated – an alien within an alien family.

I realised, too, that my isolation had begun long before I found the photo. In fact, it had begun around the time I took up with OD. Up to then I had two really close friends: Siobhan Dudley and Kelly Esmonde. Of the two, I was closest to Siobhan who was a year older than me and was now in Edinburgh University. That wouldn't have been so bad, but her parents had moved to Scotland too when her father got a new job over there.

Kelly Esmonde was a classmate. From the start she warned me about OD, and OD must have known because he worked hard on turning me against her. I let the friendship slip away. I suppose I thought that having OD was enough. It wasn't. Now I had no one, and trying to make up with Kelly would have been like admitting defeat. The truth was that the nearest thing to a friend I'd had since I met OD was May. But that only made the big deception even harder to take. Just as I was telling myself that this was my chance to talk, it occurred to me that it was her chance too and that she wasn't even trying – so why should I?

Outside in the hallway, Tom was seeing Seanie to the door. Their lowered voices made me feel paranoid. When he came into the room I turned up the volume on the remote.

‘What was all that in aid of?' he asked.

‘All what?' May said, looking up from her work.

He stepped around my chair and stood between me and
Home and Away.

‘Nance,' he demanded, ‘why did you do that to me? In front of young Moran!'

‘I did nothing.'

‘You walked around me as if I was some kind of child-beater.'

May put down her paintbrush and came over to take the remote from the arm of my chair. She switched off the telly and sat on the chair next to mine.

‘We have to talk, Nance,' she said. ‘Tell us what's on your mind … please.'

I was watching Tom and I could see he was near to cracking. I wanted to push him over the edge.

‘Why did you bring Seanie Moran up here this evening?'

He looked at May in confusion. She was lost too. Or else they were acting well.

‘He was supposed to get around me about going back, wasn't he?' I said, even though I didn't believe that any more – it was just a stick to beat him with.

Easing himself back into a chair, he looked at me like he was having trouble focusing his eyes.

‘What kind of father do you think I am?' he said. ‘Is this all I get for …' I got to my feet quickly.

‘For what?' I cried. ‘For saving a black baby from the jungle?'

May tried to touch me but I wouldn't let her.

‘I'm not a baby any more,' I told them both. Something about them keeping me in the dark almost slipped out, but I held my tongue.

‘Is it one of the staff?' Tom asked desperately. ‘Or one of the other kids?'

‘I'm not a kid.'

‘We can't talk sense,' May said, ‘if you won't tell us the truth.'

‘Exactly!' I said.

I don't know if you can really feel these things in the air or whether you just imagine you do, but I'm sure I felt the sinking in their stomachs. The very room seemed to be sinking. I rushed to the door, knowing I had to escape before we all went down together.