The doors of the van slammed with a loud bang and I coughed a loud cough. Daddy stirred his back against the pillows and said how it must be a package of some sort, but for the life of him he couldn’t imagine who would be sending a package.
I don’t know, Daddy, I said.
He asked me to help run his fingers over his face, so I lifted his hand up. We started first on the neck, then the cheeks, the sideburns, down to his chin, and then I helped him touch the little hollow between his chin and his mouth.
You missed a part, he said to me.
Will I shave it?
No, run downstairs, he said, see about that package.
I bolted down. Mammy was still in the courtyard when I got outside. She had tucked the money away in her apron. The van was gone. My brothers opened the window upstairs and they were roaring down, but I didn’t hear what they were saying.
Mammy, I said.
Aye?
He thinks there’s a package.
Mammy went across the yard, taking small steps through the puddles.
I looked at the oak trees behind the mill. They were going mad in the wind. The trunks were big and solid and fat, but the branches were slapping each other around like people.
HUNGER STRIKE
THE BOY WATCHED from the headland above the town. He saw the old couple as they took the yellow kayak out from the house. They shunted it with difficulty to their shoulders and carried it toward the pier.
The old woman walked at the rear. The man was slightly bent, but he was still a good foot taller than she. She held the boat as high above her head as she could, but still it sloped down toward her. Their faces were lost beneath shadow as they shuffled down the tarmac road. Between them, resting on either shoulder, were the paddles. As they walked, the man and woman seemed like some strange and lovely insect. When they got to the edge of the pier they shucked the yellow kayak from their shoulders and busied themselves with getting it to water.
It was low tide, so they used long ropes to drop the boat from the pier. It landed with hardly a ripple. They stood talking a moment and the sunlight shone through their clothes, giving darkness to the shape of their bodies.
She was rake-thin and the old man carried a paunch.
The old man made a gesture toward the sea and then turned and held on to the rungs as he climbed down the pier’s rusted ladder. Even in his slowness he was fluid. He planted himself firmly in the kayak and placed the paddle across the center to stop the boat from rocking. The woman followed down the ladder tentatively. A breeze caught her dress and the old man touched her on the back of her legs. She turned and seemed to let out a small laugh as he guided her from the ladder into the double well of the boat. When she placed her foot down, the kayak hiccuped in the water.
They wore no life jackets but the man fumbled with a spray skirt, adjusting it tightly to the lip of the well. He nudged his paddle against the wall of the pier and the boat began to move out into the harbor. His paddle hit the water, sending out ripples that had long faded before she too reached out and struck, now in unison with him.
The kayak glided out and the boy’s eyes followed them all the way until they turned and moved south along the headland, a bright yellow speck on the gray cloth of the sea.
* * *
SO THIS, THEN, was the Galway town where his mother had once spent her summers: sunlight, steeples, green postboxes, the stark applause of seagulls, the mountains stretching in the distance like a gift of simplicity.
* * *
THE BOY PULLED on an extra shirt — it had once been his father’s — and inside there was still room for a whole boy more. He rolled the sleeves high on his forearms and crumpled the collar so that it wouldn’t look ironed. Across the caravan his mother was still sleeping. Her chest rose and fell. Her hair had fallen over her face and some of the strands had taken on the rhythm of her breathing, lifting and falling. The boy stepped across the linoleum floor with his shoes in his hands and he opened the door quickly to stop it from creaking.
Outside, the last spits of rain had just died on the wind.
On the cinder block doorstep he put on his shoes and looked out at the sea. The gray horizon bled into the gray sky so that he could not tell where the sky began and the sea finished. Only a single fishing boat broke the expanse.
Moving away from the caravan, he kicked at a few stray stones. He wore black drainpipes hitched high on his hips, exposing white socks and black shoes. The boy had not polished his shoes since he bought them and they were scuffed now like dark ice.
He followed the track that meandered muddily down the slope, steadying himself on tree branches until he reached the main road into town. It was still narrower than most other roads he had ever known. In Derry he had never been allowed to wander, but his mother said this town was safe, she knew all its nooks and crannies, it was a harmless place.
The rain had ripened the roadside grass and the boy reached the graveyard, where someone had placed a small china Virgin near a headstone. He wandered through the cemetery, patting his shirt pocket where he had a near-empty box of cigarettes stolen from his mother’s handbag. Hunching under his jacket, he lit a cigarette and then spat near a crucifix. He felt a sudden shame rise to his cheeks, but he spat again at another gravestone and walked on. He was thirteen years old and it was the fourth cigarette of his life. It tasted cruel and lovely and it made his head spin. He smoked it down to the filter, put it between his thumb and forefinger, then flicked it high out over the stone wall of the graveyard. It fizzled red through the air and the suggestion of it remained on his tongue like morning breath as he walked around the graveyard, past all the curious wreaths and statues and carvings. He looked at the names and dates on the stones, many of which were covered now with long grasses and lichen.
At one of the stones he saw an empty pint glass with lipstick on the rim and, when he looked closely, he saw that it belonged to the grave of a young man not much older than himself.
Tough shite, he said to the stone.
He turned and hopped the stile in the wall, rejoining the road toward town. The road had no markings but he balanced along an imaginary white line that twisted and curved around the corners, switchbacking once so he thought he might come around and meet himself.
A car passed him and beeped and the boy wasn’t sure if it was a greeting or a warning. He waved back weakly and stuck to the grass verge as the road cantered down the hillside into the town. He stopped and looked at the sign that gave the name of the town in two languages — he could not make the connection between them, the English being one word, the Irish being two. He tried to juggle the words into each other but they would not fit.
A few men stood brooding and malignant outside a pub at the bottom of the hill. The boy nodded at them but they didn’t gesture back.
How’re you? he said to nobody, under his breath.
Oh, flying.
And yourself?
Sound enough.
He thought to himself that he wore a shirt of aloneness and he liked this idea; he pulled it around himself as he walked for hours past quiet shops, beyond a boarded-up blacksmith’s, along a row of lime-colored bungalows, through a barren football field, over the high wall of a handball alley, then back to town, where he came to a small amusement arcade full of rude and tinny noise.
This is a stickup, he said to a machine.
He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket without removing the pack — the way his uncle might once have done — and he played a single video game with the unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. It bobbed up and down as he cursed the spaceships on the machine. On one of his fingers he had, months ago, begun to tattoo a single word but had stopped when he wasn’t quite sure what the word should be. All that appeared now was a single straight line where he had stuck a hot needle into his forefinger and smudged blue ink on it.