She is wedged tight in the crook of two branches, about ten feet up, and out of reach; she has been there for years, ever since I started at the Gorey National School. Her dress is faded and some of the skin on her hands and arms is black, as though she has frostbite.
In winter I turn away from her as soon as I’ve checked that she’s still there, but in summer, when it’s not so dark in the afternoon, I feel sorry for her and want to pull her down. Some summer evenings, on the way home from school, I promise her that I will climb up the tree and take her down, but, as soon as I’ve had something to eat and drink, I forget her.
If not for Crito sitting on the kitchen table and purring, the cottage would be empty and silent. There are no lights on and the radio is switched off. Perhaps my grandmother is at bingo or the shops and my father is still in Wexford. Maybe my mother is at rehearsal for the summer pantomime. I sit down at the table and put Crito on my lap. I will think while I wait for somebody to come home.
My mother makes puppets but says she isn’t good enough to be a puppeteer. ‘I’ll leave that to the experts,’ she says. ‘I’m no performer.’
But I know she is wrong. After last year’s pantomime, when most people had left the theatre and the lights and heaters had been turned off, a little girl cried for the puppets to come back. The little girl’s mammy lost her patience and said, ‘I’m going now,’ and left the little girl alone to howl, ‘Where’s The Wolf? Where’s Chicken Licken?’
My mother showed the girl that the puppets are not real by making Chicken Licken speak like The Wolf and making The Wolf speak like Chicken Licken. When the girl cried more, my mother knelt down and put her hands around the little girl’s ribs. ‘Be quiet now,’ she said. ‘The puppets have gone to sleep.’
The girl continued to cry until my mother kissed her hair. I walked towards them and my mother took her hands away from the little girl’s chest. ‘Leave us, John. Go and wait in the car,’ she said. She gave me the keys, but I didn’t go to the car. I went into the church hall’s kitchen and watched through the window to make sure nothing else happened.
And that’s how I know she is a better puppeteer than she says she is.
I make myself some toast with blackberry jam and go into the living room. And I see that my father has been home all this time. He is sitting in silence, on the end of the settee nearest to the open fire, reading Five Great Philosophers since Plato. He’s wearing slacks and a green jumper with a hole near his neck. There’s dark stubble on his chin.
‘Hello, Da,’ I say.
‘Hello, son,’ he says.
‘Do you have that present for me?’ I ask.
‘What present?’
‘The one you promised.’
‘Oh, yes. I couldn’t get it yet. I’ll get it tomorrow. It’ll be an even bigger surprise.’
‘But you said.’
‘Amorphous perversity,’ says my father ‘That’s what you have: the childhood belief that you can have, and should have, everything.’
I turn on the television and sit at the other end of the settee with my toast and, after ten minutes or so of watching Doctor Who, I feel cold. I get up to move the coals in the fire with the poker.
When I sit back down, he says, ‘Hello, son,’ as though he has forgotten that we have already started a conversation. ‘Good day with Brendan?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘All right.’
I take a few bites of toast but my tongue feels paralysed. ‘Da? When you’ve got your degree in criminology, do you want to help catch criminals?’
He takes a deep breath and puts the book on his lap. I can tell that he wants to talk today. I pull my legs up onto the settee and move in close to him so that my knee touches his leg.
‘Not especially,’ he says. ‘I want to understand them. You’ve heard the expression “prevention is better than cure”?’
‘But you and Uncle Jack and Uncle Tony talk about criminals deserving everything they get. You said they should be strung up.’
My father senses that I have caught him out. He closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them, as though to start again.
‘Sometimes it’s almost impossible to know what somebody really thinks from what they say. People are very hard to know. What I really think is much more complicated. What I really think is that only a monster could hang a man. And the men who stop the death penalty in America will be amongst the greatest that ever lived.’
He looks at me to see if I can follow. I can. Better than he realises.
‘And talk,’ he continues, ‘and words used in conversation, when people are trying to amuse each other and pass the time and swab the sore of boredom or loneliness … Well, these words are probably the worst way to judge somebody and the kind of talk you hear most of the time between your uncles and me, well, it’s a kind of reflex, like when I tap your knee and your leg shoots up.’
Then, without another word, he returns to his book. I want to keep talking and he shouldn’t stop this way.
‘But do you mean that you’d not want to punish criminals. Even the really bad ones? What if one of them killed Mam?’
‘They should be punished,’ he says as he rubs his face, ‘within reason. But maybe we should know why they commit their crimes in the first place.’
I move closer to him on the settee; I can feel the warmth from his body. ‘But what if somebody knew that the criminal was lying? What if somebody was a lie detector?’
‘That’s a daft question.’
I get a sudden, unexpected and scalding pain, like rope-burn in my stomach. I move a piece of toast around on the plate and look at him again.
‘But,’ I say, ‘I want to know what should happen when you know for certain that a criminal is lying.’
‘Are you talking about polygraphs? Lie detection machines?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
‘But some people are very good liars.’
‘What if there was a person who was like a human lie detector, who could tell when somebody was lying?’
He frowns. ‘I don’t think there’s such a person.’
I sit up straighter and smile. It seems that my mother has kept her word and he knows nothing.
‘What if there was?’
‘Well, he’d have to prove it to me. But he’d probably be a crank, like one of the freaks in your books.’
I peel a crust off my toast and throw it into the fire and say no more. One by one I tear the rest of the crusts off and throw them into the fire.
‘It’s a bad habit to throw good bread away like that.’
I stand up. ‘I’m not very hungry,’ I say. ‘I’m going to my room.’
But I don’t. I go out the front door. Even though it’s cold and wet and dark, I sit on my jacket on the small lawn by the gravel driveway and pull the grass out in clumps. I watch the cars go by, and the cows in the field across the road; the cows that come to the fence in groups of two or more, as though they think somebody will free them.
I wave at these cows sometimes, and go over to them and give them the grass I have pulled from the lawn. I like pulling at the grass, I like the sound of the tearing, the tidy, ripping sound.
I hear my mother and grandmother arriving home, but I don’t go out to them. I stay in my room and read.
It is late, but my mother hasn’t come to my room to say good-night. I go to the bathroom and find her. She’s wearing her nightie, hunched over the sink, brushing her teeth. I stand in the doorway and look at her. She stands straighter when she realises I’m watching her.
‘Mmm?’ she says, the toothpaste on her lips and chin, ‘what do you want?’
‘Nothing,’ I say.