I need him to say a bit more before I can know if he’s lying. I wasn’t paying enough attention. Maybe he has passed his exam.
‘Why?’ I ask.
He comes forward with his arms outstretched, with the intention of putting his hands on my shoulders. I move away from him and he puts his hands on his hips, as though this is where he has always meant his hands to be.
‘Why are we going so suddenly?’ I ask.
‘I’ll tell you in the car.’
My stomach drops. What about my money and The Gol of Seil?
I stand up close to him and look him in the eyes. ‘But Da, is Crito coming? Can I go and get her? She’s probably on my bed. I’ll go and get her.’
I start walking but he grabs my arm. ‘Stop worrying about that stupid cat and get in the car,’ he says.
‘You’re hurting me. Let go.’
He lets go and I step away from him. I move back, back towards the door, towards Crito and my money.
My mother comes forward, her arms outstretched. ‘I’m sorry, darling. But we need to go before it gets dark. And you can’t stay.’
‘What about my Guinness books?’
‘We’ve packed five of them. That’s all you’ll need. Please get in the car.’
‘Which five?’
‘Get in the car,’ says my father.
We travel a few miles in silence and then my father asks my mother to light a cigarette for him. She takes a few puffs before she hands it to him. He holds the cigarette between his thumb and index finger and sucks on the filter until it is flattened and wet.
‘But are we staying with Aunty Evelyn and Uncle Gerald?’ I ask.
My mother turns in her seat to look at me and as she turns she reaches out and puts her hand on my knee. ‘Yes, for a few days.’
‘Why?’ I ask.
My father slows the car and speaks in a low voice. There is a lorry behind us and I can barely hear him. ‘I’m going to tell you why but you must promise not to hound me for more information.’
‘I promise.’
‘There’s been a bit of trouble with your grandmother and she’s asked us to leave.’
‘Just for a while,’ says my mother.
‘What kind of trouble?’ I ask.
My father swerves the car and almost takes us into a ditch. The lorry blows its horn as it passes, and the driver looks at us.
‘I’ll only say this once,’ says my father. ‘Right?’
He throws his cigarette out the window without extinguishing it.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Right then,’ he says, ‘I’ve had a bit of a falling out with my mother and until things are patched up, we’ll be living in Dublin. You won’t ask what the falling out is over, and I won’t tell you.’
‘Is it because of money?’
My father pulls over to the side of the road and begins to shout; a kind of screaming, so loud it’s hard to hear what he’s saying. He is screaming at me, I think, but he looks at my mother. And then he leans his head against the steering wheel and he cries. At least, it sounds like crying, but I can’t see his face.
‘Why can’t I just live?’ he says. ‘That’s all I want. Why can’t I be allowed to live?’
And he says this, and words like this, over and over — sometimes loud, sometimes quiet — while my mother tries to calm him by putting her hand on his arm.
‘Will I drive?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says, his voice hoarse and tired. ‘I’ll drive.’
And we drive without another word.
We drive slowly through rain on dark country roads. When we stop in towns at traffic lights I look into the other cars and notice that, even when the person I am staring at can’t see me, they often sense that I am staring and they look around. Each time somebody looks at me, I turn away, embarrassed. I would like to be able to keep on looking and to smile at these people, but this is difficult to do. I wonder what it is that makes the other person know they are being watched. Perhaps it has something to do with my gift.
After an hour of driving I start to feel cold in the back of the car. ‘I’m cold,’ I say.
‘OK,’ says my mother. ‘We’ll stop and get the picnic blanket out of the trunk.’
‘Not yet,’ says my father.
It is pitch dark when we stop for our tea in a hotel just beyond the Wicklow mountains. My father chooses a table near the back corner. I can’t look at him. I concentrate on looking around.
The hotel smells of beer and chips. The tables are covered in white cloths, and the heavy cutlery is neatly lined up. The glasses are turned over and the salt-and-pepper shakers are full. The lamps make it feel as though it is late at night. There is a packet of Tayto crisps in the middle of the floor, but nobody picks it up. Eventually, an old man kicks the packet, and the crisps fall out and become sharp crumbs on the carpet.
There’s a noisy little girl playing with the front door. She runs in and out, and when she leaves the door open the people at the end of the bar complain about the draught. Each time the door is left open, the little girl’s brother gets up and closes it. Nobody asks him to; he just does it, and he leaves his meal to go cold on the table.
I pay attention to all the details: what the little girl is wearing, and the colour of her hair; what the people say when they shout out for her to close the door and what the people do with their hands when they are shouting at her. I decide that for the rest of our journey I will test myself to see how much of the hotel I can remember.
After we’ve eaten, my father talks to the barman about Dublin, and my mother points to a map on the wall to show me where we have travelled from.
‘I know where we’ve come from,’ I say, ‘and I know where Dublin is.’
‘Of course you do,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d remember. It’s a long time since you’ve been.’
My mother gets the rug out of the trunk and, before we drive away, I try my best to curl up in the back seat, but I don’t fit, and my knees hit my father’s seat. I sit up instead with my back against the passenger door.
My mother puts the rug over me and tucks it in around my arms. My father looks at me in the rear-mirror, bites his lip, and starts the engine.
‘We need to go,’ he says.
My mother gets in the passenger seat and does not speak to him again.
I can’t sleep. I wonder what will happen to me now, where I will go to school and whether I’ll ever see Mr Roche or Brendan or Crito again. I wonder whether the stolen money will be found. ‘Then what?’ I ask my mother. ‘Will Granny come and visit us?’
‘No questions, John. Not yet.’
‘But what will happen? What about school?’
‘We’ll see,’ she says.
I stop asking questions and fall asleep in the back seat of the car. I don’t wake again until we arrive in Dublin and reach the gates of Phoenix Park.
My father says, ‘There’s a lion in the zoo in that park.’
‘And tigers and an elephant,’ says my mother.
I’d like to go to the zoo. I want to see a tiger. I read once about a Siberian tiger that escaped from his cage and ran amok in a city until he was shot in the hind leg with a tranquilliser. I want to look at the cages in the Dublin zoo and see what would be involved in getting out. I think Houdini once escaped from a monkey cage in a zoo. I hope they have packed the edition that has that story in it.
Aunty Evelyn greets us at the door of her three-storey terrace house, which is above the basement bookshop that she manages. She is wearing a big black coat over her nightdress and Uncle Gerald stands behind her and says nothing. He rarely speaks and it is easy to forget he is there. He once came to visit us in Gorey with Aunty Evelyn and the next day I asked my mother, ‘Why doesn’t Uncle Gerald ever come to visit?’
My mother laughed. ‘He was here yesterday,’ she said. ‘You told him that awful knock-knock joke. Knock Knock. Who’s there? I diddup? I diddup who?’