White Lies (8 page)

For some reason, OD's name leapt into my mind.

‘Told who what?' I asked suspiciously.

‘Dad. I told him I was doing medicine,' he said. ‘And I told him … some other things … about myself.'

I was really happy for him, and I felt I'd done something to repay his concern for me.

‘That's brilliant,' I said. ‘How did he take it?'

‘I don't think he likes me very much any more.'

He went quiet for a while. Then he pushed a tape into the deck. The car exploded into a cacophony of unmistakably African music. A driving rhythm, big drum beats with a bass line that sent shivers through me.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘It's from Kenya,' he explained. ‘I bought it last year in Dublin.'

I lost myself in the hypnotic beat, wondering why it had never occurred to me to seek out the music of my native country. We listened to it over and over and Seanie drummed on the steering wheel, enthusiastically familiar with every turn of the rhythm.

The school in Sherrivy, fifteen miles outside Galway city, was one of those old grey stone-built ones; it had long windows and a little stone plaque with the year ‘1908' chiselled into it. My stomach was suddenly unspeakably empty. That's how I imagine real starvation: an emptiness that is so hopeless it no longer wants to be filled.

‘I can't go in,' I said. I didn't even pull away when Seanie took my hand.

‘I'll go,' he said.

He was in and out of the school in less than five minutes. He slumped into the driver's seat. I panicked.

‘She doesn't want to see me!' I cried.

‘Nance, there's a Miss Kelly in there but it's not Heather, it's Helen.'

‘I'm sorry,' I muttered in desolation. ‘It was a terrible line, I …'

‘The thing is, though, she knew Heather about ten years ago.'

I was coasting upwards again.

‘Heather left teaching,' he told me. ‘She's a librarian now. Somewhere in the Midlands.'

If this was a search for a needle in a haystack, the haystack was getting bigger. But again, Seanie reassured me. Helen Kelly was going to ring around and ask about Heather. She had his number.

‘This is crazy, Seanie,' I said. ‘You have more important things on your mind. Let's just leave it.'

‘I'd do anything for you, Nance,' he said. ‘You're … you're a good friend.' He spoke as if he'd never had a friend before, good or bad. But I wasn't a good friend. I was still holding back. I couldn't even bring myself to tell him about Michael Carroll's call. I had to have that secret, any secret, to prove there was an impassable distance between us.

All the way home, we played the Kenyan music. Most of the time I was trying to figure out what I'd say to him when we reached town. I was very close to telling him I didn't want to see him any more but, in the end, I wasn't able to. All I said was, ‘You shouldn't bother with me. I'm not worth it.'

‘Don't be silly,' he said. He pulled out the tape, put it in its case and handed it to me.

‘I can't take it,' I said.

‘Please, Nance.'

I couldn't refuse. I leaned towards him and kissed him on the cheek. He looked at me – as if he knew it was the wrong kind of kiss – the way Christ looked at Judas, I suppose.

I'd told Tom and May we were going up to the university in Galway, that Seanie was meeting someone in the medical faculty there. Tom thought it would be a good break for me now that I'd started studying again. May had said nothing. We really were miles apart by then. When I got home they'd both gone out. I rang Celia Kelly – my aunt.

It soon became clear to me that Celia didn't like her sister very much. Her tone was dismissive, and she didn't even bother to ask who I was.

‘I haven't seen or heard from Heather,' she declared in a grand accent, ‘since she came back from Africa.'

The words, ‘Heather' and ‘Africa', she spoke with equal distaste. Then she hung up – just like that. I was stunned. Heather, she seemed to imply, had gone astray in Africa. I was the result of that going astray, and to be thought of like that enraged me. I wanted to ring that woman back and tell her what I thought of her, but Tom came back and, without knowing it, saved me from myself. I even managed to swap some small talk with him. For all his faults, he didn't look on me in that sickening way.

Right through the next week, Seanie was on for ringing Helen Kelly in Sherrivy to see if she'd come up with anything. I argued against it, inventing all kinds of reasons, but the real reason was obvious even to him, I suppose. Pain. The pain of drawing nearer to Heather was like flying into the sun; it was blinding me, burning me up.

And every night of that week, that dream came back to haunt me. The dark hideaway, the raised voices, the big bang that left me writhing in sweat and afraid to go back to sleep.

Then, on the Friday, the big farce ended. Helen Kelly rang Seanie. Seanie rang me.

‘She's in Waterford!' he exclaimed. ‘In the City Library. I told you we'd find her!' He'd already rung the library and asked if she'd be working next morning. She would be.

‘I'll pick you up at nine,' he said. ‘Nance, are you still there?'

We spend weeks running and ringing around the country and all the time she's less than an hour's drive away.

‘Nance?'

‘Yeah, nine is grand,' I said. ‘And thanks, Seanie … for everything.'

‘You too.'

I put down the phone and I thought,
OD, why can't you be like Seanie?

OD

Things were going from bad to worse. It was like a poem of Yeats's we'd done in school once. ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.' And it wasn't only me and the Nance situation. It was Jimmy and Beano and my crocked-up knee and even the park, which shouldn't have mattered to me but did. More than I could have imagined.

With Jimmy, the falling apart was slow; but I was watching him more closely than ever before, so I noticed more. When the flights of fancy had come to him in the past, his mood would swing about all over the place. One minute he'd be on a high, next minute he'd be shouting and then he'd be mooching in a corner, his eyes spinning with beer.

These days there was no beer, no shouting, no highs. He just got lower and slower. Every movement was an effort. Sometimes, when he started to stir from his chair to make tea or something, it was like watching a trapeze-artist getting ready to jump; I was holding my breath waiting for him to fall or sink back. Slow as he got, he never did sink back. It might take him five minutes to get to his feet but he'd always succeed. Once in a while, I asked him what it was he wanted because the torture of watching him was too much.

When I saw the blood-stained tissues start to show up again, I couldn't take any more.

‘Take the shaggin' teeth out, will you,' I raged, ‘or go to the dentist.'

The look he gave me cut me in two. I don't think he meant it to. It was a look that said ‘Nothing can touch me any more', and it was very like a smile.

A few days later, I came in from work and found him standing in the middle of the floor like he hadn't a clue where he was. He swayed a bit, but there was no smell of alcohol – only that fake lavender I could smell even when I wasn't in the house. For the first time, I started to be afraid for him.

‘I'm a bit dizzy,' he tried to explain. ‘When you're sitting down a long time and you stand up it can happen. Did you know that?'

I sat him down and made him his lunch from the bread and corned beef I'd bought, but when I got home that evening he wasn't in the kitchen as he usually was. I went upstairs.

His door was closed but I knew he was in there. I was just about to drift back down to the kitchen with my Dylan Thomas book when I heard a kind of gasp from him. His bed was over by the window. On the windowsill, the sombrero quivered like a thing in pain, buffeted by the breeze coming in by the crack in the window pane. He was lying on the bed, bent double, with his arms clasped to his stomach.

I could barely get the words out.

‘What's wrong, Jimmy?'

‘The corned beef,' he moaned. ‘I think it was the corned beef.'

‘I had the same thing as you,' I protested, ‘and I'm OK.'

‘I didn't mean to blame you, OD. But that stuff never agreed with me. I should've said.'

‘Did you take anything for it?'

‘I'll be grand,' he muttered. ‘It passes.'

I went downstairs and tried to read my Dylan Thomas book. The words on the page weren't making any sense to me. Then I remembered what he'd just said: ‘It passes.' Which could only mean it had happened before.

Some instinct brought me out to the back of the house, where the black plastic rubbish bag was. Right there on the top were the two sandwiches I'd made him at lunchtime – not a nibble taken out of either one.

That sent my mind away on another of those mad, self-obsessed loops. Instead of confronting him, I got thick and started thinking that if that was all I got for worrying about him – he throws my sambos in the bin – I wasn't going to bother. Maybe I thought it was the withdrawal symptoms from packing in the drink or that his gums were acting up. Or maybe I never got beyond the point of feeling I was wasting my time trying to treat him right. One way or the other, I let it pass. Of all the mistakes I made in those days, that was probably the worst.

The truth is, I was more concerned about Beano. I hadn't seen him since that night in the Galtee Lounge, and as the days passed into weeks I was getting worried out of my skull. The thing was, he never stayed out of work. He could be asleep on his feet and he'd still clock in.

Beano showed up, at last, on the Tuesday of our last week there. Everything was more or less finished. Snipe had brought in one of Mick Moran's JCBs, just to be sure. I think he just wanted to get a few spins in it and show us how expert he was with the bucket. I wouldn't have minded having a go myself but he wouldn't hear of it.

The first thing I noticed about Beano was the limp. The second thing was that he was wearing a pair of boots two sizes too big for him. Snipe's, no doubt. As soon as he came near me I saw how miserable he looked. So miserable, in fact, that I could almost have believed the story about the flu – if it hadn't been for the limp.

His eyes, always red, were pools of blood. His white hair was flattened to his forehead with sweat. The circles under his eyes were like dark stains. I felt my bad knee wanting to give out under me.

‘What's the story, morning glory,' I said casually.

He gave me a Jack Nicholson grin, halfway between The Joker in
Batman
and Mac in
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
– after Mac had had the shock treatment in the asylum.

‘No story, OD,' he said. ‘Only the flu.'

‘You got the flu in your ankle, did you?'

‘I fell out of the bed.' He sounded like he was repeating something he'd learned by heart but didn't really understand.

I brought him up behind the fountain and sat him down out of sight of Snipe's cabin. When Johnny Regan made a move in our direction, I warned him off with a glare. He winked at Beano like they had some big secret going between them.

‘Beano? Did Regan give you some dope?' He avoided my eyes. At least, I imagined he did. I couldn't really tell. His eyes were all over the place. His lips twisted into a near-smile.

‘Lots of dope in our house, OD … more tablets than a chemist shop.'

I was terrified.

‘Did you take something?' I asked. ‘Did you, Beano?' ‘Naw … not a thing,' he said, sticking out his chest, all macho. ‘“Tough it out, Beano.”'

‘Snipe said that, did he?'

Beano nodded. I told him if I saw him working that morning I'd carry him home over my shoulder, and went towards Snipe's cabin. On the way, I collared Johnny. He backed off, but not before I warned him. ‘If I see you within an ass's roar of Beano, I'll break both your legs, Johnny. And that's a promise.'

In the cabin, Snipe didn't even bother to hide the racing page of
The Sun
.

‘Beano shouldn't be at work,' I told him. ‘He's wrecked.'

To my surprise he didn't leap over the desk at me.

‘We're all wrecked,' he said.

Then I heard the gate open outside. Those two surveyors were there with their equipment again.

‘What the hell are they up to?' he asked himself, not me. ‘We're on schedule, but no one seems to be interested any more. And they won't tell me what these fellows are up to.'

Something stirred in the back of my dead brain. It didn't make any particular sense to me but I said it anyway.

‘A couple of weeks back, Mick Moran came up here when we were locking up. He wanted to get in here to the cabin and …'

I was going to say Beano let him in.

‘… and I let him in.'

He looked at me like he was doing mental arithmetic – slowly. After a while, I could see he wasn't getting the right answer – or, at least, not an answer he liked. He fixed his rugby tie and stood up.

‘Beat it, Ryan.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘I'm going to see the Town Clerk,' he said. ‘And if he won't see me, I'll kick his shaggin' door down.'

Snipe used to be a scrum-half. That's where he got his nickname. Sniping from behind the scrum. Which is exactly what he looked like he was doing as he rushed across the front of the park and out the gate.

I looked around the park and, for the first time, felt a real sense of pride in what we'd achieved there. A kind of glowing, uncomplicated feeling came over me. As I got down to work, I drifted away from reality like a child with a new toy. The toy – the illusion that these past few months had somehow been worthwhile – was all the reality I needed. But toys break. The more you play with them, the sooner they break. I think that's why kids play with the boxes and leave the toys for looking at. Kids have more sense than we have.

During the afternoon, the knee started bothering me. I knew I wasn't going to be able for training, but how was I going to get out of it? The pressure was on our team at this stage. We were slipping and my form was rotten – as was Seanie's. We were out of the cup and the previous week we'd scraped a draw with the bottom team, Hibs. Luckily for us, St. Peter's were having a bad run too and we were one point ahead with two games to play. The other teams were managing to take enough points from each other to leave the title race between St. Peter's and us. I had no choice: I had to go training.

I was hoping Seanie wouldn't be there but he was. He nodded at me as I came into the dressing room. I turned away. Mahoney was there too, pulling on his old Bohs jersey. It still fitted him. I was looking at the big number ten when the sickening inspiration came to me.

‘I can't train tonight,' I told Mahoney.

‘Are you injured or what?'

‘No, Jimmy is sick … I've to get the doctor … I was going to wait until after training but I … I don't think I should.'

By now, I was telling myself to shut up, that it was bad enough to use Jimmy without making a song and dance of it. But the trick, the lousy trick, worked wonders. Mahoney hadn't been so nice to me since I was one of his school ‘hopefuls'.

‘I'll give you a lift, OD,' he said. ‘Which doctor is it?'

‘It's all right. He's only up the road. Dr. Corbett.'

‘Are you sure? I can throw off the boots, no problem.'

‘Thanks all the same,' I said and got myself out of the sock-smelly atmosphere as fast as I could.

Needless to say, I didn't go near Dr. Corbett's. I didn't go home either. I went to the Galtee Lounge. Mahoney sent a message through one of the lads not to bother about training on Thursday and not to worry about my place on the team. I did anyway.

The following Saturday, he did actually pick me. I played well and we won. I didn't score myself, but Seanie and me worked up a chance for one of the other lads to score. For a while, we thought Seanie wasn't going to show up for that match. When he hurried into the dressing-room with five minutes to go, Mahoney gave him the kind of hassle he usually reserved for me. Something to do with Nance, I guessed, but I didn't let myself think about it.

Meanwhile, I was beginning to suspect that Jimmy was on the verge of giving up. There was a terrible stillness about him, broken only by the occasional opening and closing of his hands as he sat in his battered old armchair.

‘Why do you keep doing that?' I asked eventually.

‘Pins and needles,' he said. ‘I have them in my feet too.'

‘Can't you go out for a walk or something?'

‘I went for a walk … the other day.'

I thought he was trying to be smart until he stirred himself in his chair and leaned forward shakily. Then I knew he was leading up to something.

‘Yeah, I went for a walk … I called down to the Sound Centre.'

‘For what?'

‘I told Murray I had … well, a good few quid put together and would he give me the trumpet and I'd hand over the rest in a few weeks.'

I pictured him pleading with Murray and my stomach turned.

‘“No way,” he says. The little bastard.'

‘You shouldn't have done that.'

The little-boy eyes, among the wrinkles and the broken veins, had tears in them.

‘I just wanted to get started,' he said.

I thought I knew better. ‘You just wanted to get finished. You want out of that dumb dream, and now you can blame Murray.'

Because he didn't answer, I thought I was right.

After that, I took every chance to dig the knife in deeper. All he had to do was move a finger and I was on him. Not a day went by but I reminded him of his failures over the years. I even talked about what he'd done to Mam. Before that, I hadn't been able to mention her name to him. I did it now because every night, when I'd stopped mulling over all my other troubles, the same question kept coming back to me. ‘Why couldn't she just write?' I didn't even want her back any more. I only wanted to know she was all right.

Nothing I could say provoked him, and that left me even more convinced that it was all over for him – yet again.

A week or so later, I sat in the kitchen alone. It was eleven o'clock on a Friday night. Tomorrow there'd be another game, another struggle to hide my injury from Mahoney. I'd fed the lads at the site some more lies about Jimmy's ‘illness' and hinted I mightn't make it for the game – all just to create some dumb impression when I did show up. I'd given the Galtee Lounge a miss because I needed to be as right as I could be for the game. I'd been down at the snooker hall with Beano earlier. He still hadn't come out of himself and I hadn't heard a Jack Nicholson line for so long I thought he must have switched heroes – or, maybe, given up on heroes for good.

I hadn't bothered to turn on the telly and I'd finished the Dylan Thomas book. My own hero, the poet, was dead, and I couldn't square the beauty and brilliance of what he wrote with the sordid end he came to in a New York hotel – not far from where another of my heroes, John Lennon, was shot.

I was sitting in Jimmy's chair and staring at the bottle on the mantelpiece. It was one of those outsize gin bottles and it had always stood in that spot since Jimmy won it in a pub raffle – and emptied every last drop of the gin, of course.