White Lies (7 page)

OD

When you think things can't get any worse, that's when you can be sure they will. Call it OD's Law if you like – disaster plus X (the unknown, the future, the next minute) equals double disaster. That afternoon, as I left Jimmy in his fantasy world where money didn't matter, I was lower than zero. Then I shot down the minus scale.

I was at the gate before I copped Seanie's puke-green Popemobile parked near Beano's house. I couldn't make sense of the scene. It was like seeing a hearse outside a disco or something off-the-wall like that. Seanie wasn't looking in my direction but staring worriedly at the passenger seat. Next thing I saw Nance's head appear. I didn't wait to see her face. I staggered back towards the house like I was going home after a night at the Galtee Lounge. I went out the back way by the lane behind our house.

My heart was banging out a mad beat somewhere be tween reggae, rap and house. The lyrics went something like ‘It doesn't matter' or ‘So what', but they didn't fit the rhythm. At the same time, someone must have been stick ing pins into a little effigy of me because my knee was peppered with stinging jabs.

Blaming Seanie came easily. If he hadn't moved in so quickly, maybe we would have got over this little glitch. All the way back to the site I was struggling between being tempted to give him a hiding and telling myself to get on with my life. Which wasn't much of a choice, given the lousy life I had.

Call it a life? What was I? A drop-out, a boozer at seventeen, half-crippled, a few weeks left before I was back on the dole permanently – terminally. I pushed in the gate of the park, my mind hovering somewhere between lashing out and letting it all just die.

Snipe wasn't waiting for me, in spite of the fact that it was well after three. I passed in front of the cabin and he was so engrossed on the telephone that he didn't even look up at me. Getting a late bet on, I guessed. I headed over towards the rockery. Then I saw the two surveyors: one was looking into a thing like a camera on a tripod and taking notes; the other one, standing a little way off, stood holding a long white stick marked off like a ruler.

I drifted over to where the lads were looking busy shifting wheelbarrow-loads of pebbles from one spot to another and then back again.

‘What's going on?' I asked, but no one seemed to know.

It didn't feel right but I didn't know why. I knew next to nothing about building and all that stuff, but I knew there was something dodgy about surveying a site when the job was nearly finished. And why would you want to survey an amenity park anyway?

For whatever reason, paranoia or just wanting a blow-up, I marched over to the cabin. Snipe was off the phone and in such a state he was almost bouncing up and down on his seat.

‘What do you want?' he rasped.

‘Don't tell me,' I sniggered. ‘You lost a fiver on the twothirty at Ketterick.'

‘Beat it, OD.'

I sat on his desk just to send his blood pressure up a few notches. He was too interested in watching the surveyors outside to make his usual protest.

‘I was wondering what those fellows were doing out there,' I said.

‘You were wondering, were you?' he said, but he still seemed distracted. ‘The Boy Wonder.'

He looked at the site plan on his desk and rubbed his chin roughly with his hand.

‘We messed it up, did we?' I asked.

‘Clear off, OD.'

‘It's only a bloody park. What does it matter if we screwed it up a bit?'

‘We didn't … I didn't screw it up. Everything was done by the book. Everything, down to the last pebble.'

‘So what's the problem?'

‘The problem is no one will tell me what the problem is. Now get back to work. I've some more calls to make.'

I was at the door before I remembered Beano. It wasn't a good time to ask and I was going to leave it until he called after me.

‘And Ryan?'

‘Yeah?'

‘Stay away from our house … you and that young one of yours.'

‘Nance?' I asked, genuinely puzzled.

‘The black one. Just call her off, right?'

He made ‘black' sound like a four-letter word. I went back to the desk, but this time I circled around to his side.

‘Nance is not my “young one”. But I'm warning you, don't talk about her like that.'

He was getting nervous but putting a brave face on it.

‘I said she's black and black she is. What's your problem, son, are you colour-blind or what?'

‘No, I'm not. I can see you're a little pink man.'

He shifted his weight on the chair and I could see he was thinking about having a go at me. I egged him on.

‘And I'll call to Beano any time I feel like it,' I said. ‘He's my friend.'

He shot up and grabbed my shirt-front. Before I knew it I was pinned up against the wall. I had to push hard three or four times to get him off me.

‘You filled him with drink, you gurrier,' he shouted. ‘Do that again and you're dead meat!'

I might have laid into him then but I knew he was right. I was so sick with myself I found myself muttering an apology to Snipe. Truly, I was out of control.

‘I'm … I'm sorry about that … I … shouldn't have …'

He was even more taken aback than I was. He fixed his rugby tie and straightened out the sleeves of his jacket.

‘No point in being sorry now, boy, the damage is done.'

I got myself out of there before I lost my head completely.

There was only an hour left before clocking-out time but the minutes were like centuries. I found a huge rock we'd discarded from the rockery and grabbed a lump hammer. Disregarding the strange looks from the lads and Johnny Regan's wash-eyed leer, I smashed it to pieces and buried the pieces in the earth with my hammering.

At home, three-quarters of an hour later, I was sure I'd calmed down. I left Jimmy alone about the trumpet money and, for a change, I made the tea – not that there was anything very complicated about buttering some bread, which was all we ever had in the house those days. I went to the local chippers and Jimmy dined at home – on take-aways. The only food smell in our house was from vinegary chips and I hadn't noticed the absence of that smell at the time. If I had, I'd probably have put it down to the overwhelming mock-lavender odour which he was adding to every day on his daily round of household chores.

I was so calm that I actually asked him if the bleeding in his gums had eased. He was glad I asked.

‘No problem, OD. We're on the ball, boy, on the ball.'

He was laying on the cheerfulness a bit thick and I was afraid that, by going on about the money earlier, I'd put him off the whole ‘comeback' idea. I wasn't able to say it but I did want him to succeed. If I'd been half-decent about it, I'd have tried to give him a boost. Which, of course, I didn't. Instead, I went up to my room and got back into Dylan Thomas and followed him around the pubs and publishers of London. My hero was on his way to fame and alcoholism. Which, back then, seemed better than the ano nymity and alcoholism that was Jimmy's lot – and mine.

At around seven, I got my gear together and left the house to go training. Even after Mahoney took over the team I still got a buzz from jogging, sprinting, practising set-pieces and all the general messing and craic of those Tuesday and Thursday nights. Now, the thought of doing in my knee altogether in a kickabout or something had spoiled all that for me. Each session was just another stage in the obstacle course my life had turned into.

Still, I knew I had to show up. Mahoney was a stickler for playing only those fellows who trained. On the previous Saturday he'd been in a foul mood even before the Cashel match. So there was no question of even trying to make excuses. I had to go.

All went well for a while. We did our laps and exercises under the two floodlights I'd actually helped Mahoney to put up. When he'd said I was good at that kind of stuff, he hadn't made it sound even remotely like a compliment. He'd made a lot of changes in the way we trained and played, and our results proved him right. I had to give him credit for that much. He'd played in the League of Ireland with Bohemians back in the early 70s and he knew what he was about. We'd been second to bottom the year before; we were now second from the top.

The going was tough, and I was being as careful as I could without letting it show too much. Which was fine until the seven-a-side started. Usually Seanie and me were put on the same team and we rarely lost. When Mahoney landed us on opposite sides I despised him enough to believe he knew I had it in for Seanie. It felt like a trap.

I was getting nowhere up front. The service was lousy and even if it hadn't been, I was being way too cagey. At the other end, Seanie was knocking them in for sport. Bad loser that I was, I started slagging off some of our defenders and got the usual answer: ‘Shut your face and get some goals!' I started coming back towards the halfway line trying to pick up some ball, and the closer I got to Seanie, the more I was tempted to do him.

Finally, my chance came. He was gliding in from the left and pushed the ball too far in front of him. I slid in with the good leg and took him from the knees down. He stayed down, clutching his shin, and I looked around instinctively for Mahoney. No sign of him. I'd been lucky – for a change. From behind me, I heard a voice mutter, ‘There's no call for that, OD. He's our best player.'

I whipped around to see who'd said it but quickly decided I'd made a big enough ass of myself already. Seanie got to his feet with blood showing through his otherwise perfectly white socks. It didn't seem like some big showdown any more. The fight was gone out of me.

‘Can we talk, OD?'

That was the last thing I expected Seanie to say.

‘About what?' I said ‘You want some tips on how to handle Nance?'

‘You've got it all wrong about me and Nance,' he insisted. ‘Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about. It's about that job in the park … You're wasting your time there.'

‘It's none of your business what I do with my time.'

‘Get yourself out of it before it's too late, OD.'

I was so hyped up I wasn't even beginning to ask myself the right questions. Like: why the sudden interest in my future? Any fool could have added this one and one and one and got three. Moran's visit to the park when he knew well Snipe wouldn't be there; Snipe's concern over the two surveyors; Seanie's big hint. Any fool but me.

NANCE

What happened over the next few weeks I can only describe as a kind of stop-go roller-coaster ride. I'd get to the crest of a climb, whoosh downwards, and then it would turn into a freeze-frame. Nothing would happen for days and then I'd be flying again. And all the time there was this feeling of excited panic, but not the happy carnival kind. At home, the atmosphere was becoming unbearable. At first, it seemed as if Tom and May had separately agreed that he was to blame. May told me again and again that Tom had never meant to make me feel I had to live up to some impossibly high standard he'd set for me. She said this so often I began to wonder if it was herself and not me she was trying to persuade.

‘Don't be afraid to tell the truth,' she'd say. ‘Tom will understand.'

Tom said something very similar, but he was somehow half-hearted about it. He seemed just to be going through the motions.

‘I'm prepared to admit I put pressure on you, Nance, but I didn't mean to,' he'd say. ‘If we could just talk about it … '

Slowly, however, a change came about in both of them. As they seemed to drift further away from each other this strategy of theirs came apart. May withdrew from me altogether and barely spoke to me at all. She threw herself completely into her painting and jewellery-making.

In a funny way, Tom was closer to me during those weeks. But it was the kind of closeness I didn't want. It was like having a kid brother who's constantly hanging onto you when you just want to be left alone. If May had stopped trying, Tom was trying too hard.

He began to encourage me to go to the pictures, even to discos, sometimes even on week nights. This wasn't his usual style. He'd never objected to me going out but there had often been an air of disapproval as he handed over the money for these things in the past. Maybe it had something to do with OD and Seanie, but now it was a fiver and all smiles. I refused all the offers, and finally I told him to leave me alone. He didn't lose the rag over it. I suppose he was too devastated.

‘I've failed you, Nance,' he said. ‘I've failed you.'

If my intention had been to bring him to his knees then I'd succeeded. Instead of feeling any remorse I just got more angry. It was an anger that came out in petty ways – door-slamming, silly disagreements over trifles. In the end, my anger was matched not by Tom but by May.

Tom had made his speciality, lasagne, for dinner. I pushed my plate away, telling them spitefully I didn't want to get BSE from the mince in it. Of course, I knew he always used minced lamb, which was supposed to be safe, but BSE was the last thing on my mind.

May had been sprinkling salt on her plate and she slammed the salt cellar down on the table. It was one of those little glass ones; as a child, I'd decorated it with tiny shells from a play set I'd got for Christmas. The little shapes which were once so beautiful to me and which had survived the years fell away and skittered around the table. She didn't speak until the last one stopped rocking back and forth and our eyes met.

She was a decibel away from screaming when the words finally broke through.

‘We've taken all we can of this, Nance,' she said. ‘We've tried to be reasonable but you treat us like dirt. You think you can get away with bloody murder, with carrying on like a – '

‘May …' Tom said, trying to stop the flow. She silenced him with a look that was very close to hate.

‘It has to be said. You're destroying us, Nance, you're –'

‘May,' he pleaded, ‘don't do this. Don't blame her.'

They'd turned on each other quite openly now and I couldn't bear it. I shouted, ‘Stop it! I'm back at school! What more do you want?'

They fell silent and, standing there, I realised the terrible power I had over them. It was a power much greater than any they'd ever had over me. It was a power I didn't want to have, but there was nothing I could do about it.

I couldn't bring myself to release them from their pain. I couldn't trust them with the truth because I couldn't be sure they wouldn't warn Heather Kelly off once they knew I wanted to meet her.

I went to my room and took out my European history book with its fresh, pulpy smell and its stamp on the cover: specimen copy. All my books were specimen copies now.

The strange thing was that I had got back to studying again. Somehow, I found it calmed my mind down, especially when the disappointments came during the search for Heather. It also kept me from thinking about OD and comparing him to Seanie. These comparisons only led to more guilt – the guilt of stringing Seanie along when I knew I'd never feel for him what I felt for OD. What made the guilt so unbearable was the fact that Seanie was such a nice fellow; he would have done anything for me and he never looked for – well, any reward, of any kind. He just wasn't like that. Maybe it just comes down to the simple, unpleasant fact that, in many ways, ‘nice' is plain boring. When I think of all the assumptions I made about him back then, it almost makes me laugh – at myself.

The story of our search for Heather Kelly is as chaotic and farcical as everything else that was happening at the time. It began, as we'd planned, with Seanie's phone call to the old priest, Father O'Brien, on the Wednesday he was to be back from his reunion in England.

For some reason, Seanie hadn't called up to see me on his way back from training on the Tuesday evening. I wondered if he was having second thoughts about helping me. But next day, he was all apologies and said he'd be ringing Father O'Brien at seven. At five past seven I was waiting beside the phone at home and hoping Tom or May wouldn't find me hovering there or hear what was going on. I had to wait five minutes but it seemed like five hours. I picked up the phone before the second ring.

‘Seanie?'

‘Well, I got him, all right,' he said.

‘And?'

‘He was a bit confused. He seemed to think Tom was married to Heather Kelly,' Seanie explained. ‘Maybe I mixed him up at the start. When I mentioned May he remembered.'

‘Does he know where Heather is?'

‘No, but he's sure her father had a chemist shop in Limerick. In the city, he thought.'

I was getting shaky now. I couldn't think what to say. It seemed, for a moment, that it was going to be easy. Too easy.

‘The thing is, I looked up the phone book,' Seanie said, ‘and there's no Kelly's Chemists in Limerick.'

I was plunging down again after the small, fearful high.

‘Unless,' he suggested, ‘they sold up. We could go over to Limerick on Saturday morning and ask around. Some of the other chemists might remember.'

I couldn't release Seanie just yet. How could I get to Limerick except in his green Morris Minor? So early on Saturday morning we were on our way. Seanie had to be back for a cup match at half past two.

That morning he really opened up to me about his future. He was having doubts about doing accountancy and he talked passionately about how he'd always wanted to do medicine. Unfortunately, I was totally tensed up, though I did try to encourage him.

When he got more specific about why he wanted to be a doctor, I blew a fuse.

‘What I'd like to do is work in the Third World,' he said. ‘I want to help –'

‘The little niggers,' I snapped, angry that Seanie was turning out to be another of those interfering do-gooders and suspecting that his helping me, this lost black soul, was a kind of try-out for the real thing.

‘Nance, it has nothing to do with their … their colour.'

‘I'm just nervous,' I told him. I wished he'd change the subject but he needed to put the record straight.

‘Dad says that famines and all that, they're a natural way of controlling the population,' he explained. ‘But I can't understand how you can be happy when other people are starving and dying for want of clean water and simple medicines. It doesn't make sense to me.'

The strange tag, the ‘Third World' – so weird, so science fiction-like – only served to deepen the sense that, somehow, I didn't belong. My life here was the same as everyone else's: same school, same hang-outs, same day-to-day routine. But in the end, had I more in common with the people of that other world? Would life be better there for me? Simpler, maybe more harsh, but the life I was meant to live? There were no easy answers to these questions. No black and white answers, I thought, and couldn't even raise a smile at my own joke.

We'd reached the outskirts of Limerick by now. In the silence filled only by the low hum of an Oasis tape, I looked for the name ‘Kelly' over shop doors and tried to forget what I'd said.

Finally, he said, almost in a whisper, ‘Maybe you're right, maybe I should stick to accountancy.'

‘Do what you want to do, Seanie,' I said. ‘Forget about your father – and me.'

‘I can't do that.'

I didn't ask whether he meant he couldn't forget his father or me.

Seanie had a list of chemist shops and we decided to split up. I took the ones around the city centre and he drove away to cover the ones further out. It proved to be a long, frustrating morning. I'd more or less given up hope when, at ten to one, I found myself in one of those few chemist shops that hadn't been modernised.

The old floor tiles, with their emblem of a snake twined around a pestle, were faded from years of use. Behind the high, dark-timbered counter were banks of small, narrow drawers; each one had its ceramic label inscribed with a Latin name in slender black Gothic lettering. Among the garish boxes of headache tablets and sticky plasters stood an array of ancient medicine bottles of all sizes, colours and peculiar but somehow beautiful shapes.

The tinkling of a little bell over the door still filled the air as a tall, grey-haired old man with a slight stoop emerged from behind a timber partition at the counter.

When he asked if he could help me, I had a feeling straight off that I'd come to the right place. I felt like I needed some kind of explanation for wanting to find Heather, and a story came into my head right there on the spot. I was organising a 21st-wedding-anniversary party for my parents and I wanted to get all their old friends together for it. The man – Mr Carroll, ‘but call me Michael' – leaned on the counter and listened as I dressed up my lie with truths and half-truths. He must have wondered why I was talking so much. I was wondering the same thing myself.

‘We were great old friends, John Kelly and I,' he said when I finally paused for breath. ‘Isn't it terrible how people lose touch with each other?'

‘So you wouldn't know where he is now?' I asked despondently. ‘Or Heather?'

Whether he was trying to remember where the Kellys had moved to, or just recollecting the good old days when he and Heather's father were young men, I didn't know, but he took his time about answering.

‘It must be, what, a good twenty years since John left Limerick. You see, his wife, Nora – a lovely, lovely woman – well, she died and he was never the same after. He sold the business and went to live in Dublin and three years ago, or was it four, he moved to England, to Nottingham. His daughter lives there, you see.'

‘Heather?'

‘No, no, I'm confusing you now, I'm sorry.' Michael smiled. ‘There were two daughters. Celia was the older one and she married over there. As for Heather, the last I heard of her was that she was teaching somewhere outside Galway. That would have been after she came back from Africa in the early eighties, I think.'

‘But you wouldn't know exactly where?'

‘I'm afraid not, but I could find out. Sure, I'd have to, it's such a nice thing you're doing for your mother and father.'

I squirmed to think of how I'd lied to this decent man.

‘Would you leave a phone number?' he said. ‘I'll ring you if I come up with anything.'

I did. I thanked him and left with a sour taste in my mouth, but as I hurried back to meet Seanie at the car park, the self-disgust turned to anticipation. I was getting somewhere at last.

Over the next ten days we drew up another list, this time of schools in County Galway, and started to ring around. Lunch hour most days was spent dialling number after number. Then on the Friday of the week after Limerick, lightning struck – twice.

I'd tried two schools and punched in the number for another in the draughty, evil-smelling phone booth. This one was a national school in a place called Sherrivy. The line was very bad and to make things worse there were the screaming echoes of children's voices in the background.

‘Heather Kelly,' I repeated. The man's voice which answered sounded like it came from the bottom of a barrel.

‘Miss Kelly? I'll get her for you.'

I slammed down the phone, shaking with terror, and stupidly said ‘No!' when it was back in its cradle.

Seanie could see something was up from fifty yards away when I went in by the school gate. He tried not to run as he hurried towards me through the crowd returning to classes.

‘Sherrivy,' I said. ‘She's in a place called Sherrivy. I forgot to ask where exactly it is.'

‘We'll find it,' he said.

At eight o'clock that evening, Michael Carroll rang. He hadn't located Heather, he said, but he gave me her sister's phone number in Nottingham. I wrote it down, though it didn't seem to matter now. I thanked him again for taking the trouble.

‘I hope you find her for your parents' sake,' he said. ‘It would be a grand surprise for them.'

I said it would. When he rang off I went back up to my maths problems and lost myself in them. I didn't tell Seanie about the call.

On the following Wednesday we headed for Galway. He'd insisted, against all my protests, on taking a day off. We could have waited till the next week when we had a three-day break, but he wouldn't hear of it. As we pulled out of town, he said mysteriously, ‘I told him.'