I’ve noticed that when somebody lies it is almost as though something passes across their face, like a cloud; as though they fade from view slightly, become less real, less like the person you are used to seeing. It is hard to say exactly what it is that happens. But whatever it is, I can see it.
At the end of the day, my teacher tells the class that next week at school there’ll be a delousing. All of us will line up (boys and girls in separate rooms) with only our underpants on and get sprayed with the stuff that kills lice and nits, and we’ll be checked for ringworm too.
After school, I have an hour and a half before I’m due to meet the gang, in which time I have to get the sink I promised them. After walking around the new estate for half an hour, I decide that I won’t meet them. I don’t care about them.
I walk through the dark streets around Ballymun, past the tenements with green doors and small windows, and I walk by smouldering bonfires in the fields, the charred remains of mattresses and prams, and I memorise the names of the streets and car registration plates. A group of friends is not as important to me as my gift.
I go home and make a ham sandwich. My father isn’t home and, although it’s not yet dark, my mother is asleep. I don’t wake her. I eat half of the ham sandwich, put my pyjamas on and then get into bed. I read the section about prison escapees in the Guinness Book. I like the sound of James Kelly, who escaped from Broadmoor on 28th January, 1888, by using a key he made from a corset spring. Kelly spent thirty-nine years a free man, in Paris, New York, and at sea. In 1927 he returned to Broadmoor and asked to serve the remainder of the sentence he had been given for murdering his wife.
I think about how to attract the attention of the Guinness Book. Maybe this time I should send them a tape recording of an experiment. I could do the experiment with my mother. Perhaps they have written to me, and the letter is waiting for me in Gorey. After an hour of contemplation, I can’t stand the quietness any longer. I tap my mother on the arm to wake her.
‘I’m asleep,’ she says. ‘Get back over to your side of the bed. You’re crushing me.’
‘How will I get my post?’ I ask.
‘What post?’ she says, covering a yawn with the back of her hand.
‘I’m waiting for a letter from the Guinness Book of Records,’ I say.
‘What letter?’
‘I told you already. I wrote to them about my gift for detecting lies.’
She sits up and puts a pillow behind her head. ‘Make me a cup of tea and then tell me about it again.’
I make a pot of tea and bring it in to her on a tray with a packet of Digestives.
I sit on the end of the bed and tell her. She won’t forget again.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘But do you not think that these lies are harmless? Can’t you see them for what they are? They’re white lies. Your father was just embarrassed to admit that the cards were bought in a batch on the cheap. And Granny lied because sometimes it isn’t polite to talk about money. Besides, money is a sticky topic at the moment.’
It isn’t polite to talk about money? She is telling the truth but I hate that this is what she believes and I hate it even more that she sounds like a robot. Only her lips move, the rest of her face is stiff.
‘I don’t care why they lied!’ I shout. ‘Don’t you get the point of this? I have a gift.’
The bed shakes and the ham sandwich slides off the plate; the bread and ham fall apart, and the ham sticks to the eiderdown.
‘John, there’s no need to shout. I think perhaps you are just more perceptive than most boys of your age, and that’s a good thing, a really excellent thing. But maybe you should keep this in perspective. There’s no point being a bull in a china shop, is there?’
I jump up from the bed and go to the bedside table so that I’m nearer to her.
‘Do you think I should stop, and be like everybody else?’
I pick up a book and wave it around as I shout at her. I wish I had something else in my hand, but there’s nothing else I can hold, and nothing that will calm me. I feel empty and want things to hold and touch. I also want something in my mouth.
‘Do you want me to pretend I don’t have a gift?’
She sits up and puts her arms around her knees. ‘Calm down.’
‘No,’ I shout. ‘You’re a dumb fool. Dumb, dumb, dumb!’
‘Please calm down. You don’t have to shout at me. I’m not deaf.’ She is nervous.
I want to know why she doesn’t take me seriously, but I won’t talk any more. She will see for herself.
I go to the door. ‘I’m going to watch television.’
‘What about me?’ she asks. ‘Have you practised on me?’
‘Yes. You turn red even when you tell white lies.’
‘Is that so, Sergeant Egan?’
If I don’t calm my body down, if I don’t stop my body from being angry, I’ll do something bad. I have to stop and be calm. I swallow and try to smile.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you.’
‘Come here,’ she says and I go to her.
She pinches my cheek.
As I kiss her, I notice a hole in the elbow of her nightdress and another larger hole under her armpit. I can see her skin and part of her breast under the hole. I look away.
‘I could become famous,’ I say.
My voice is like my da’s and I wonder if this seems strange to her. I wonder what it will be like when my voice deepens still more. When my father speaks and I speak, it will be like the same person speaking.
‘You could,’ she says flatly.
‘I’ll make enough money so we can go to Niagara Falls together,’ I say.
‘You could.’
She hasn’t eaten any biscuits, so I break one in half and hand it to her. She chews on it as though it is made of wood. I take another half and dip it in the tea. The biscuit is soft now and she eats it as though she has no teeth, her lips parting a small fraction and coming back together with a wet clicking noise.
‘How will you prove you have this gift?’ she asks, finally showing interest.
‘They’ll do experiments and conduct tests.’
She smiles. ‘And then they’ll pay you a fortune in gold and we’ll fly to America on first-class tickets.’
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
‘It’s a strange thing. A bit hard to take in, that’s all.’
She isn’t convinced; she thinks I am foolish. Well, then, it’s only a matter of time.
She’ll see.
I won’t live with things this way, they can’t stay as they are.
‘Let’s eat,’ is all she says.
I hate the way people can eat no matter what has happened.
We go to the kitchen and she makes chips and eggs and for a while we don’t speak, but it doesn’t matter. My father isn’t home and she doesn’t say anything about it. She tells me that she is going to do some volunteer work at the Ballymun National School. She is going to help deliver the milk, and make jam sandwiches. I tell her that the jam sandwiches today were too dry and she agrees to put more butter on them.
‘I’ll wave at you as I pass by your classroom,’ she says.
‘And I’ll wave back,’ I say.
We stop talking again. We eat our eggs and chips and listen to the radio and then we go in to the living room and sit down together on the settee. She keeps her arm around me while we eat our cake and watch a film, and the happiness I feel is odd and makes every part of me seem liquid.
When she kisses me on the cheek I say sorry three times because I called her dumb three times. She tells me I’m a good boy and not to worry.
‘I’m just upset,’ I say, ‘because we are underdogs now, and in Gorey we were over dogs.’
She laughs and doesn’t cover her face with her hands. This is good.
We wait for my father to get home, but he is late again, working, and he comes home when The Late Late Show is nearly finished.
He smiles when he sees us sitting together under the blanket on the settee. He messes my hair. ‘All right?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Cup of tea?’ says my mother.
‘I’ll get it myself,’ he says.
‘Hungry?’ she asks.
‘No, I had a steak sandwich in the cafeteria.’
I go to my room and get the new apple-box stage with the curtains drawn on the side.
When my father has settled down on the settee with his cup of tea, I stand in front of him. ‘Da? I’d like to put on a puppet show. It only takes about five minutes.’
He smiles. A happy mood tonight. ‘All right, son. Let’s see it.’
‘Youse have to turn off the television first.’
‘Don’t say youse,’ says my father. ‘It’s common.’
I set the stage up on the coffee table, cover my head with a black cloth and crouch down. ‘Welcome, lady and gentleman, to our special puppet show. It’s called Puppet Philosophers of the World.
‘One by one, you will meet four famous philosophers who are in disguise and you have to guess who they are. If you guess correctly, you get a piece of chocolate.’
I start with a hand puppet, a white sock with a face drawn on, wearing a toga. The sock puppet says to another sock puppet, ‘You smell. You’re annoying. You’re an eejit.’
I ask, ‘Can any member of the illustrious audience guess who this philosopher is?’
My father laughs and shouts. ‘I’ve got it! I’d recognise that fat sock-face anywhere!’
His voice is so loud it is as though he thinks I won’t be able to hear properly under the black cloth, or as though the puppets won’t understand.
‘It’s Socrates!’ he shouts.
‘A-ha,’ I say. ‘Very clever deduction: Sock-ra-tease.’
I do three more philosophers, including Plato; a cardboard toe playing with a soccer ball made out of a piece of cotton wool with a small stone inside it. My father gets two right and my mother gets one.
I am pleased and excited about the final philosopher I have prepared, and I got his name, like the others, from one of Da’s books.
The final philosopher in disguise is a Lego man holding a shovel. I make the Lego man perform a digging motion into a small pile of straw.
‘Who can guess the identity of this final philosopher?’ I ask.
There is no answer.
‘Do you need a hint?’ I ask. ‘He’s digging.’
Silence.
‘Come on, lady and gentleman!’ I say. ‘Can’t you figure it out? Just think. All the clues are here.’
‘We give up,’ says my mother. ‘Just tell us.’
‘No,’ I say, getting hot under the black cloth. ‘It’s not that hard! You have to think. Just think a bit longer. Just think!’
My father turns the television on.
‘Not yet,’ says my mother.
‘I’ve had enough thinking for one night,’ he says.
I come out from under my black cloth. ‘It was Heidegger,’ I say, as I kick the box across the room. ‘Hay digger.’
My father looks away from Gay Byrne’s face on the television, and smiles at me. ‘Very clever,’ he says. ‘You get the last piece of chocolate.’
I go to my room so they won’t see my disappointed face.