Everyone thinks I’m gas, that I don’t give a shit about anything. I never told anyone about the blackness I feel sometimes, weighing me down and making me think things I don’t want to think. It was always there, but I never knew what it was until every prick started talking about depression and mental health and all that shite. I’m not a mentaller, like. I’m not. I just can’t see for the blackness sometimes. It’s always there, waiting for a chance to wrap itself around me. I often wonder why I was born at all, why my mother had to suffer to give me life, why my father bothered his bollocks with me, working his arse off to pay for things for me, everything I wanted, just about. I think of the ma and the da and how good they always were, and how they always encouraged me, even though it was pure obvious I was the waster in the family, and how they were so let down when I got Réaltín up the duff and they not even having met her and how they met her then and thought her shit was ice-cream, and they were nearly proud of me for a while, and they even thought I might marry her, and how they’re solid heartbroken now over never seeing the child and all. It’s all gone to shit. That’s all my doing, how they’re upset like that. Sometimes I feel short of breath and my heart pounds and I feel a whooshing in my ears and I double over and put my head in my hands and a few times lately my hands have been wet with tears when I’ve taken them away from my face. No fucker knows that, though, nor never will. I’ll be grand in a while. I have no right to feel like this.
I think of the young fella, little Dylan, and how gorgeous he is, and how I always go about things the wrong way with Réaltín and accidentally look at her tits and she ends up pissed off with me and I always react like a right stones. I can’t hold myself together at all, I gets pure wicked with her and tells her to fuck off and I can’t tell her properly how I want things to be because I can’t really think under pressure, when she’s standing there, waiting for me to be a proper man. When I found out the other week that Bobby was above doing jobs for her I flipped the lid altogether; like, why couldn’t she have asked me to do them jobs? But by then Bobby was after flipping his own lid and lamping his auld fella with a plank of wood across the poll. Instead of being reasonable and asking her what was the story, I charged up like a bull and started roaring out of me like a jackass and I frightened the young lad and her auld fella had to get thick with me and I took off over as far as Castlelough and sat on the low wall in front of the grass before the little pebble beach and looked out at the dark lake and thought about the bottomless hole that’s meant to be out there in the middle of it.
A FEW years ago, a load of women from the same village up above in the back of beyond drove their cars to Castlelough and parked up and walked out into the lake. One at a time, over a few winter months. Them women all had husbands and children and all. I remember laughing about them women at the time, making stupid jokes about how all the boys up that side must be no use in bed and how I’d have cheered them up in no time and ha ha ha. Jesus. I laughed and I felt sick. I knew the feeling that drew them down from the mountain to the low, dark lake. There’s a tug from that water. There’s an end in it, under those little waves. Drowning is easy, I’d say. You only have to breathe in a lungful of water and you’re gone, floating away to nothing. How come I can’t be like everyone thinks I am? I’d love to really be Seanie Shaper. I’d love to not be here again, sitting looking at the water.
Kate
ONE AWFUL THING that happened since the recession started was Dell closing. Like, it nearly finished us. They were bloody all Dell. Dad said a few times I had all my eggs in the one basket, but I only told him to shut up and mind his own business, laughing at his little worried face. It does be all scrunched up when he’s worried, the poor little pet. He was right to be worried, though — after Dell closed, I was paying more in wages than I was taking in for about three months — but I was never even close to giving in. You can’t give your time whingeing and blaming, you have to just fight back. I made up a load of flyers on the PC and went to every single door in every single estate on this side of town, and covered a big part of the rest of town as well. I went over as far as Castle-troy and Annacotty. Aren’t they only out the motorway now? I didn’t stop going for three weeks. My rates are the best anywhere. I promised to save people money. I prayed the HSE inspector didn’t call for the three weeks, because my child-to-minder ratio was a bit off while I wasn’t there. I made it back every day for the parents, though. I’m always there for hometime.
One good thing that happened since the recession started is people will work for less than the minimum wage. The minimum wage is a joke, like. Who has the right to tell me what to pay someone? Dad says there’s no such thing as a free market while crazy laws tether employers to big huge salaries for their staff. He says Ireland is regulated into the ground. Like, the red tape! You wouldn’t believe it. So I called all the girls into the kitchen one evening a few weeks ago and I told them straight out they’d all have to take a cut or I’d have to leave two of them go. Nuala, the little bitch, started straight away with the bullshit: You can’t actually, you’re right down to the lowest ratio as it is — we can’t even take our breaks! That one. She spends most of her day on a break. I’d have given her the road last year but I know well she’d have me up in front of the tribunal. So I said, actually Nuala, I’d have to bring in my sister and my mother to help for a while, and you don’t have to pay family members anything, so … And that shut her up.
THINGS ARE GOING great now again, thank God. This free childcare year is going to be the making of us. And better again, I got a Montessori teacher for feck-all — a fella walked in here with his CV and references who has a degree in childcare and a post-grad in Montessori teaching, with my ad in his hand. I know you’d never put a fella with that job, but he’s not very masculine; there’s a real soft look about him, and he has a lovely, gentle voice and nice blue eyes. Trevor, his name is. Imagine, I hadn’t even to pay to put an ad in the Limerick Leader. I decided to give my window-ad a week and it paid off. Once I have his references checked, I’ll let him start. He whispered to me that he wouldn’t expect minimum wage, he’d do anything to be working, he’d take seven euro an hour, cash. I could gross up his wages to look right. He knew the lingo and all. Jesus, he’s a godsend. To top it off, the Trevor fella arrived only two days after a girl called Réaltín called in with a lovely quiet child called Dylan. She’s working in a solicitor’s office inside in Henry Street. It’s a big firm, too, and she said there’s a couple more from there out on maternity leave. Having their firsts. She’ll recommend me, surely. The way things are going I’ll have to start refusing people again shortly.