‘Right, so,’ he says. ‘But it’s bad manners to run in a house that doesn’t belong to you.’
‘Sorry,’ I say.
In the car, my mother turns to me. ‘Well, what did you think?’
‘It was great,’ I say. ‘I’m going to live in a mansion one day. Maybe I’ll live in that one.’
‘Maybe you will,’ she says, but I don’t think she believes me.
I am serious. As soon as I say the words I know that they will help what I say become true, so I say them again.
‘I will live in a mansion,’ I say. ‘I know it. I’ll be famous and I’ll be rich. I won’t be any ordinary person. I’ll do something great. I know it.’
We pull into the driveway of Keating’s grocery shop and my mother turns the engine off. I look out through the windscreen. ‘I love you,’ I say.
She takes my hand and what she says next surprises me. ‘Words are not deeds, son. Your mother needs to be held sometimes.’
We hug for longer than usual and, when we stop, she is crying.
‘That feels nice,’ she says in a voice that sounds softer through her tears.
It takes her a long time to speak again but then she laughs and points at a car pulling into the driveway and I think she must be crying because she’s happy.
‘Look, that man’s driving a cardiac,’ she says.
I know because of her laughter that she has made the mistake on purpose, and it is my job to figure it out. This is another game we play.
‘A Cadillac,’ I say. ‘Not a cardiac!’
‘You’re right,’ she says.
When we get home, there’s a chocolate cake that Granny has made, fresh out of the cooker. I take a big slice and go to my room to eat it. When I’m finished, I decide to find my grandmother and bring her a piece of cake with a cup of tea. I knock on her bedroom door, but she doesn’t answer. I go in anyway.
She’s asleep on the bed, on her back, with only underpants on. She has a bar heater pointed at her feet, and her clothes are in a pile on the floor. This is the first time I’ve seen a naked body and it’s not like looking at a person at all.
Her hand is resting on her stomach, which is larger and rounder than I thought it would be. Her breasts hang down under her armpits like two bags of water, with blue and red veins, and dark brown taps stuck in the middle.
On her bedside table, there is a full cup of milky tea and a small white plate with two thick slices of brown bread with jam smeared on them.
I stare at her body for a while and then I shut the door and go back to the kitchen. My father is making a pot of tea.
‘I went to the mansion today,’ I say.
‘Did you?’ he says. ‘Was it nice?’
‘It was better than nice,’ I say. ‘It has hundreds of rooms.’
I want to show him the stationmaster, but I do not know how he will react to thievery.
‘I saw a model village,’ I say.
‘Did you?’ he says.
He walks past me to get to the fridge and puts his hand on my back. I am not sure if he is being affectionate or is trying to move me out of the way.
‘The gardener let us in,’ I say.
‘Good for him,’ says my father, as he gets a bottle of milk from the fridge.
‘Yeah,’ I say to his back. ‘Good for him.’
‘Anything else to report?’
‘I saw a model village of a French town, with a train with a balcony going to Pigalle.’
‘Stupid boy. There are no above-ground trains to Pigalle. Underground Metro trains, yes. Above-ground trains, no.’
My hands are in fists and my legs are shaking and all because of the hatred I have towards him now and, although he is holding the bottle of milk, and I have nothing in my hands, it is as though I am holding the bottle. I open my hands and can feel it: the coldness of the glass, the weight of it, and I feel my grip loosening on the bottle, and I feel the bottle slip through my fingers.
I hear the bottle smashing against the floor, and see the milk spreading over the slates and into the cracks between them, but when I look at my father, he is holding the bottle firmly.
He pours the milk into a white jug.
I look at him, as he stands by the range. I stare at his back and I gesture with my hands as though I am punching him in the head. He does not move. He must know what I am doing, but he does not turn to look at me. I stop the punching gestures.
His hands are steady; mine are shaking.
* * *
I go to my room and spend the night trying to find all of my plastic toy soldiers. I know that I’ve nearly two hundred of them and they are always turning up inside socks and under the settee. I don’t play with them any more, but I want to know where they are.
I think my father scatters them, stomps on them, breaks their plastic stands off. When I ask if he has seen them, he tells me they are missing in action, or that they have gone AWOL. I used to think AWOL meant that my soldiers had gone over a wall.
When they are lost, lost at war, I imagine them buried alive in the trenches, and I sometimes lie awake at night and worry for them.
I want my soldiers not to be crushed beneath the settee or fall out of the window, in the same way that I want the doll in the tree to be comfortable when she sits between the branches; face forward, legs neat, arms relaxed.
I should keep the soldiers in their box where they’d be warmer and happier: boxes like bed-houses.
7
It is raining hard this morning and I run with wellingtons on my feet and my anorak pulled over my head. Granny offered to drive me but I want to go by myself and I don’t want to be seen kissing her goodbye at the school gate. I cross four fields and two roads and I meet Brendan at the corner near our school and together we cross the road to begin our first day back in the fifth class.
‘Hi there,’ says Brendan in a fake American accent.
‘Howdy,’ I say in a Southern drawl.
‘What a horrible boring day this will be.’
‘I wonder what Miss Collins got for Christmas?’ I ask.
‘A cane made of foam or rubber, I hope,’ says Brendan.
‘But have you noticed that she doesn’t use it as much as she used to?’
‘On you, maybe. She’s afraid of you ’cause you’re twice her height.’
The bell rings and we go in. I open my schoolbag and put the current edition of the Guinness Book in my desk, along with my dictionary.
Our school is a small school run by the nuns; a convent school, with four classes of no more than twelve pupils each. Classes one and two and classes three and four are shared. But the pupils in the fifth and sixth classes have rooms to themselves.
I sit at the back and my desk is near one of two small windows along the left wall. I can see the playing field, the road, and the nuns as they pass by on their way to mass. Sister Ursula, who teaches first and second class, always looks in at us on her way to mass and she waves at us with her Bible. None of the others looks in.
During our first lesson, Brendan takes a pair of thick-rimmed bifocals out of his bag, puts them on and claims he is going blind. Miss Collins moves him from the middle of the room and sits him in the front row. I’m sure the glasses are plastic and that Brendan wants to sit up the front because it is close to the only heater in our cold, concrete-floor classroom. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me about this blindness lark. I’ll give him the chance and the time to tell me and if he doesn’t … well, I’ll find out anyway.
It is break-time and still raining heavily. Brendan and I sit on the bench that runs along the corridor under the coat racks outside our classroom, and the coats hanging on the hooks above our heads drip rain from this morning’s walk to school.
Brendan picks a scab off his knee and puts it in his pocket.