Uncle Jack has bits of beard on his cheeks and he’s shy and often has a frog in his throat; the words get stuck and he is sometimes unable to speak at all. But he must have had a few drinks that night because he seemed happy. He gave me a quid, and asked me about school.
I talked to him for a while and he said, ‘Talking to you is like watching a ventriloquist’s dummy with the ventriloquist nowhere to be found.’
Later, when I put the quid he gave me in my piggy bank, I wished I hadn’t talked to him at all. Talking to somebody who’s drunk is like talking to an animal.
My mother wipes the windscreen while we wait at the corner for some children to cross the road. When she’s finished wiping, she turns to me. ‘If you ever want to talk to Dr Ryan or Miss Collins, let me know. Your father and I love you very much.’
‘OK,’ I say, wondering if there’s anybody crossing the road who can read lips.
‘Darling boy. Will you talk to Miss Collins if you need to? If there’s any trouble?’
‘I already have,’ I say. ‘Everything is fine.’
I haven’t talked to Miss Collins about my height or my voice. I want to get on; that’s all I want to do.
We drive down the dip in the road and enter the small and busy town where we shop for my new trousers. When we have finished in the shop, I go to the library around the corner, while my mother goes to the chemist. I borrow a book about lie detection and the librarian helps me to order another book from the Wexford library, which is much bigger. I tell her I’ll pick it up on my way home from school next week.
3
It is Tuesday, late afternoon and I am sitting on my bed eating a banana and reading a book when her car pulls into the gravel driveway. My granny is home from Dublin.
I get up from my bed and listen at the door. She is on the front doorstep, talking to Joseph, whose caravan is parked with five others by the side of the road, two miles from here. He must have been waiting for Granny to come back. She gives him some money and he says, ‘Thank you, Mrs Egan. You’re my truest friend. Would you have an apple for Neddy?’
Neddy is Joseph’s piebald horse, who stares at me and snorts whenever I see him. My granny goes to the kitchen, gets an apple and gives it to Neddy.
‘You’re a fine horse,’ she says.
She closes the front door and I go back to my bed where I listen as she goes to her bedroom and then to the kitchen before she makes her way to me. I wish she would leave me alone. When she comes to my room, I often want to pull a blanket over my head, hoping that I might create a blackout and wake when she’s gone.
‘I’m back,’ she says as she barges into my room and looks me up and down with the big, gaping eyes of a deep-sea fish.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Did you miss me?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Did you have a good time at the races?’
‘Oh, yes. And I saw your Aunty Evelyn in Dublin, too.’
‘That’s grand.’
‘Will I tell you a story, about a mouse in Gorey? Will I begin it? That’s all that’s in it.’
I hate this riddle. ‘Go away,’ I want to say, but I can’t. This is her cottage and I prefer living here. When she sits on my bed, and grabs hold of my hand, I don’t stop her.
We used to live in a two-bedroom flat that had pale green walls and smelt of mould and mouse urine. But when my father lost his job, my mother’s pay wasn’t enough for the rent and so, a few months later, my grandmother invited us to live with her.
My grandfather owned a jewellery shop and left it to Granny in his will. He died when I was seven and Granny sold the shop and all the jewellery in it. As far as my father is concerned, some of the money from the sale of the jewellery shop should be his.
‘Tickle, tickle, tickle,’ she says, as she lunges at me, putting her cold fingers under my right armpit, digging her nails in.
‘I know where you’re ticklish,’ she says. ‘I know where! Under there!’
I thrash and move away. I want her to tickle me but I know it will start out feeling good and end up feeling bad.
The more I move away, the more she digs under my armpits. We don’t speak and I pretend to laugh, pretend to be enjoying myself, and the silence during these episodes makes them stranger, as though we both know I’m pretending.
She stops.
‘Can I’ve some sweets now?’ I ask.
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Please?’ I say. Before my grandmother has time to answer, my mother throws the bedroom door open so hard that it hits the wall. Perhaps she didn’t mean it.
Her face is flushed, down to her neck, and her eyes are wide and blue. She looks nicest when she comes home from working on her puppet shows, and I know that she will never get too old or ugly and will never look like Granny.
When my mother speaks I look at her mouth which looks like a pretty mouth should. When an ugly person speaks, their lips move like a gash cut into dough covering a dark hole. I often stare at faces to see whether the mouth is pretty and looks like a mouth should, or whether it is ugly and looks like a crooked gash that opens and closes.
‘John, it’s time for tea,’ says my mother.
I put my half-eaten banana under my pillow. I don’t like to eat bananas in front of people.
‘You can bring your banana with you if you’d like.’
My mother refers to my banana as though it were a pet.
‘That’s OK,’ I say. ‘I’ll eat it later.’
‘Suit yourself,’ she says.
We sit at the kitchen table and eat cream of chicken soup. Granny’s handbag is on the kitchen floor by the door and her coat is on the back of her chair. When she comes back from Dublin, she usually asks me to take her coat and bag to her room and she usually gives me a sweet when I come back with her slippers. Something is different today.
She drops her shoes to the floor and the smell of nylon and sweat climbs up the table and into my chicken soup. I watch her while she eats and her eating habits make me feel sick. My father is nearly as bad. Compared to my mother they are like wild dogs and the sounds they make fill the kitchen, like urinating fills a bathroom, and I want to block my ears. Their spoons clank against their bowls, their tongues slop in their mouths, and it is impossible to think of anything else.
When we have finished our soup, my grandmother goes to the dresser and comes back with six cream buns and a piece of wedding cake. The cake is covered in marzipan icing and smells awful, like fresh paint. I put two buns onto a plate and stand up from the table. I want to eat in my room. But my father puts his leg out in front of me so that I can’t leave.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he says, with anger that is too sudden, too ready; as though he has been saving it up from Sunday.
A pain, not quite sharp, but not dull either, darts up from my bladder and rushes to my throat. ‘Nowhere,’ I say, and sit back down.
‘Well, then,’ says my father to my grandmother, ‘did you have a good time in Dublin?’
My grandmother’s lipstick has smeared onto a bun and she has cream on her nose. Her mouth is full of sodden bread, jam and cream, but she doesn’t bother to swallow the wet mess before she speaks.
‘It was great. After the races I went to Evelyn’s shop and I sat myself down by her fire for a while.’
Evelyn is my mother’s older sister.
My father and grandmother talk for a while, and my mother and I watch them, waiting for something to happen. There is often a row when my father and grandmother are at the table together.