‘Has anybody ever got stuck in the wet concrete?’ I ask.
They laugh and pass looks. ‘We better leave you to it,’ says Colman and, at his signal, they all turn and walk away.
A few minutes later Mark comes back. ‘Better not forget,’ he says. ‘See you at five tomorrow at the bottom of the stairs.’
My brand new car is in its box under his armpit.
I’m not afraid of them. I’m only afraid that they’ll humiliate me. I will do what I’ve agreed to do. I will steal a sink from an empty house that doesn’t belong to anybody.
I go across the road to the new housing estate, and after the workmen have gone, I walk along the half-finished walls for a while. When I’m ready, I go to the back of one of the new houses and climb through a window wet with white paint, which I get on my trousers and hands. The fresh paint smells like marzipan and so I breathe through my mouth to stop it getting into my head.
I go into the living room and sit on the soft, new carpet. There’s so much clean, spare room. I lie on my back and roll around for a while. I take off my trousers to see what the carpet feels like against my bare legs and then I take my underpants off to see what the new carpet feels like on my bum.
I get dressed and go to the bathroom and sit on the new floor and play with the tap fittings, which are in the shape of dolphins. It’s a nice, big house. I’d like to live in a house that hasn’t been used.
I pull at the sink, but it’s fixed to the wall with bolts. I leave. It’s getting dark and walking though the trenches is like being in a maze. I write in the wet concrete, and break a piece of string that builders have set to mark where the rooms of the new house are going to be. All the time I half hope the gang is watching me.
I fantasise about living in one of these new houses, bigger and cleaner than our flat, with bigger windows. And they have stairs. I miss the stairs in my grandmother’s cottage that led up to the bedroom where my mother and father slept.
It’s nearly six o’clock and I haven’t found a sink. I’m hungry and tired and so I go home. I’ll get the sink tomorrow.
My mother is in the kitchen. She sits on the floor, her legs crossed, her arms on her knees. There are bits of broken plate on the floor. She looks as though she’s been crying; strands of wet hair stick to her face.
‘What happened?’ I ask.
She looks me up and down. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’ve got paint all over your trousers.’
I want to tell her. I want to tell her everything, about the new houses and the gang, but not now. I want to know why she’s been crying.
‘I was just helping to paint a wall downstairs. With some people from the community centre.’
‘You should soak your clothes.’
‘But why are you sitting on the floor? Why’ve you been crying?’
‘Sit and I’ll tell you,’ she says.
Although she probably means for me to sit at the table, I move some bits of broken plate and sit on the floor.
‘I was squeezing a lemon and it was so dry I felt like I’d just finished strangling somebody trying to get the little bit of juice out of it.’
I look carefully at her eyes, and she looks away.
‘I was furious at nothing. Furious at this tiny thing. I picked up a plate your father left on the sideboard this morning and threw it against the wall.’
‘Do you want me to do anything? Do you want me to help?’
She holds my hand. ‘Yes, you can help. You can study hard, pass your Leaving with flying colours, become a dentist or a pilot or something useful, marry a woman who has a brain and have at least four children. And sing “Auld Lang Syne” at my funeral.’
‘But I can’t sing,’ I say.
‘Play it on a record then,’ she says.
‘The record player wouldn’t fit in the coffin.’
And then we are silent until she says, ‘I love you more than I should. No matter what you do, I’ll love you and that’s something you’ll never understand.’
‘Yes I will,’ I say. I fold myself over and rest my head in her lap.
‘Get up, John. I’m going to get into bed. I’m very tired.’
‘Again? You’re always tired and sleepy.’
She yawns as she stands and I watch her go.
27
It’s my first day at the Ballymun National School. My mother comes with me to the zebra crossing and points at the grey school building. We are only fifty feet from home. ‘There it is,’ she says, smiling, and waving her long, thin arm.
This gesture of hers, pointing to the concrete building as though it were splendid, reminds me of the day we visited the big house in Gorey together.
‘I could’ve found it myself,’ I say.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘But I wanted to see you off.’
‘OK, then. Bye-bye.’
Suddenly, her face collapses, as though she is crying dry, and she leaves me without saying goodbye. I cross the road.
The teacher makes me stand at the front of the class while she introduces me.
‘This is the new boy I told you about yesterday. His name is John Egan and he’s moved to Dublin all the way from Gorey. I hope you’ll make him feel very welcome.’
‘Good-morn-ing-John-E-gan,’ they say flatly and in unison.
I don’t say anything. I want to, but since I can’t think of anything good to say I don’t speak at all. I look at them and let them look back at me.
The class is bigger than my class in Gorey and, while the teacher tells them where Gorey is, I count them: ten girls and seven boys. There’s an empty seat in the middle row and the desk it sits behind has been scrubbed clean of graffiti.
I take my seat and spend the first few lessons of the day as though half awake. There is a small window to look out of but the room is too hot. My new teacher is a short, fat woman, with the cropped brown hair of a man. She wears glasses and whenever she asks a question she takes them off and dangles them in her fat hand.
The only pleasure I get from being in her class is catching her in lies. She comes to our desks and looks over our exercise books. When she lies to a pupil her voice lowers.
She tells the slow boy with the desk next to mine — who has obvious mistakes all through his work — that he is ‘doing a splendid job’, and her voice is so low it is barely audible.
At break-time, three crates containing small bottles of milk and a crate of jam sandwiches are delivered to our classroom. The milk is warm and the jam in the sandwiches is dry and crispy. I stay in the classroom and read.
At lunch I look for somebody to sit with and I see two boys, both of whom wear glasses, sitting under a classroom window, their heads lowered, their faces in their food. I sit down next to them. ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’
They move over even though there’s plenty of space, and after I sit they put their sandwiches down on their laps and wipe their hands clean on their trousers. They must be short, because they have to crane their necks to look up at me.
I ask them about school and what they did for the Easter holidays. I easily catch one of the boys telling a lie. He says he went to London at Easter and that his father took him for a drive in his uncle’s red MG. He says they went seventy miles per hour and his mother’s hat came flying off. He wasn’t lying about being in London, or the sports car, but he was lying about his mother. Either she wasn’t in the car or she was and she wasn’t wearing a hat.
I remember what one of the books said. ‘One of the hardest parts of lie detection is when only a part of a statement contains the lie. It can be very difficult to separate the lie from the truthful part of the sentence.’