Antarctica (9 page)

They stand under the Ferris wheel, sipping beer from plastic cups. The seats are full of people spinning slowly round. Roslin is sick to her stomach just watching them.

‘So you wanna go on that wheel?’ she says.

‘Damn straight. I’ll get us tickets.’

‘I ain’t going,’ she says, shaking her head.

‘What you mean you ain’t going?’

‘You want me to sing it for you? I’d swallow raw eggs sooner than get up on that thing.’

‘Aw, come on. We’ll get good and scared.’

‘You go.’

‘You’s coming with me.’

‘No I ain’t.’

‘Well, if you ain’t going, I ain’t going neither.’

They stroll around the field some more, Roslin’s heels sinking in the grass. There are booths with candy and ice-cream, stalls jammed full of people putting their money down on their lucky numbers for the fortune wheel, throwing darts, trying to get plastic rings over junk toys. Little fake horses making it to the finish post. There’s a claw machine with its limp metal claw hanging down over all the plastic junk. They eye a stuffed seal nosing up over the giraffes, put all their quarters in and keep watching that claw drop, but it just slides across those toys every time like its battery’s going dead.

‘Damn!’

‘Not to worry. Ain’t the fish we’re after,’ Guthrie says as he puts his last quarter in and watches the claw dip down and rise up, empty.

The waltzer, a big, orange pot with seats, scrambles the riders, their pale faces whizzing past, screaming.

‘You wanna take a turn on there?’ he says.

‘Uh-uh. I’d just puke up my crawfish.’

One bottle-fishing stall is for the over-twenty-ones, has bottles of liquor lined up on a table fenced off with rope. The poles holding the rope up are beginning to droop. They take a turn fishing for bottles at three bucks a turn. He eyes up a bottle of bourbon, thinking it might come in handy later on, but the cap is smooth, nothing to catch on to and the ring at the end of the pole fits tight, so he’d need a real steady hand. The guy on the end with the big buckle on his pants wins every time, so the guy who runs the stall tells him to shove off, says he has enough liquor to throw a party.

They watch riders coming down the slide. A yellow, plastic shoot that dips like a waist in the middle. Must be over a hundred feet long. People are climbing up the steps on the other side and sliding right down to the bottom like crazy on a piece of sack.
MONSTER SLIDE
, the sign at the bottom reads,
RIDE IF YOU DARE.

‘Let’s get on that thing!’ Guthrie says.

‘Uh-uh.’

‘Aw, come on. Don’t you wanna go on one of these things? We can’t come all the way down here and just do nothing. Show some backbone!’

‘No way.’

‘Life needs a little risk, Roslin,’ he says. ‘We can go down together. I won’t let nothing happen you.’

She looks up at the people sliding down. Screaming kids, couples, old guys with the waistbands high over their bellies, out for a good time.

‘It’s awful high.’

He coaxes her up there. He takes her hand and they drain their beers and dump the cups on the grass. The ticket guy on the ground has a bored New York accent. He takes the money and hands over the sacks. They get in line at the foot of the narrow stairs, a steel ladder with railings on one side that go way the hell up. They rise slowly, up and up like ants along the staircase. Roslin won’t look down. The speakers from the field below send up the voice of Elvis Presley singing ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, his long, soft ‘o’s drifting up through the dark. Guthrie looks at the people on the ground, running around like insects. And then a young woman’s voice further up is saying, ‘Let me by! Let me pass! ’Scuse me!’ and she’s wriggling down between the riders.

‘She lost her nerve,’ the guy behind them says when she passes. ‘But she sure is cute.’

Someone on the ground lets a balloon loose, and it sails right up close to the railings. Guthrie leans over to grab it, but it’s too far out.

‘Don’t lean out like that,’ she says. ‘You scare me.’ The fear in her eyes is real.

‘This thing’s sound as a rock, see,’ Guthrie says, and jumps on the step. The whole staircase wobbles like a snake’s back.

‘Uh-huh. I’m going back down. Right now.’ She turns and looks down at the line of people jammed in tight between the railings. The incline was gradual, their progress slow, but they’re right up there. She shudders and grips the railings, shaky.

Guthrie puts his arm around her. He tries to guess her age, but she’s the type where you never know. Forty? Forty-five?

‘Don’t think about it, honey. Just keep going. You’re safe with me.’ He smiles. He likes this lady from the personals. He feels drunk and optimistic all of a sudden.

They can see the man at the top now, timing the shoot, pushing their backs with his strong, automatic hand, people disappearing over the edge.

Chuck Berry comes on the speakers singing ‘You Never Can Tell’.

‘That’s our song!’

They’d sung it twice on the journey.

‘Oooh baby!’

Guthrie sings, doesn’t give a damn who’s there listening. Roslin looks at him, thinking about what’s to come, about her old man at home. A nice big shellfish, probably sniffing out the kitchen right now looking for his dinner, reading the note she left on the ice-box. Guthrie smiles as he sings, belting out the lyrics like he’s singing for his supper. That would make a nice change.

The fingertips on her shoulder feel like thimbles from all the work at the mill.

Either they are gonna do this thing or they aren’t, and
right now Roslin figures they are and he isn’t gonna pussyfoot around like some guys. What they want is right there on the surface. She will do this. She will go with this man in the blue shirt to some cheap motel where half the letters on the sign don’t light up any more and hope it’s the beginning of something. Jesus. Finally, after ten years, she’s getting what she wants, somebody who’ll make her feel like she’s alive again, like she’s somebody under her clothes. She won’t stay home any longer pretending, opening all those cans, hiding ’em in the trash.

She takes off Guthrie’s hat, puts it on her own head and runs the leather up under her chin. Guthrie laughs and feels the breeze lift what’s left of his hair. Roslin points to her head, and says, ‘’Fraid I got tired wearing the hat.’

‘You’re mighty sassy all of a sudden.’

They are almost there.

The woman before them is middle aged. The hand comes out and pushes just as she is hitching up her skirt and then she slides, screaming, down the shoot, her hair flying, and it’s their turn.

They put their sacks down one on top of the other. He sits down first.

‘You two going together?’ the hand says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, let the lady up front.’

She hooks the strap of her purse across her shoulder and gets in between his knees. His thighs clamp instantly to her sides.

‘Hold on!’

She looks down. It is even steeper than she imagined. When it happens, it happens fast. The hand doesn’t ask if they’re ready; it just gives them a push.

My father takes me places. He has artificial hips, so he needs me to open gates. To reach our house you must drive up a long lane through a wood, open two sets of gates and close them behind you so the sheep won’t escape to the road. I’m handy. I get out, open the gates, my father free-wheels the Volkswagen through, I close the gates behind him and hop back into the passenger seat. To save petrol he starts the car on the run, gathering speed on the slope before the road, and then we’re off to wherever my father is going on that particular day.

Sometimes it’s the scrapyard, where he’s looking for a spare part, or, scenting a bargain in some classified ad, we wind up in a farmer’s mucky field, pulling cabbage plants or picking seed potatoes in a dusty shed.
Sometimes
we drive to the forge, where I stare into the
water-barrel
, whose surface reflects patches of the milky skies that drift past, sluggish, until the blacksmith plunges the red-hot metal down and scorches away the clouds. On Saturdays my father goes to the mart and examines sheep in the pens, feeling their backbones, looking into their mouths. If he buys just a few sheep, he doesn’t bother going home for the trailer but puts them in the back of the car, and it is my job to sit between the front
seats to keep them there. They shit small pebbles and say baaaah, the Suffolks’ tongues dark as the raw liver we cook on Mondays. I keep them back until we get to whichever house Da stops at for a feed on the way home. Usually it’s Bridie Knox’s, because Bridie kills her own stock and there’s always meat. The handbrake doesn’t work, so when Da parks in her yard I get out and put the stone behind the wheel.

I am the girl of a thousand uses.

‘Be the holy, missus, what way are ya?’

‘Dan!’ Bridie says, like she didn’t hear the splutter of the car.

Bridie lives in a smoky little house without a husband, but she has sons who drive tractors around the fields. They’re small, deeply unattractive men who patch their wellingtons. Bridie wears red lipstick and face powder, but her hands are like a man’s hands. I think her head is wrong for her body, the way my dolls look when I swap their heads.

‘Have you aer a bit for the child, missus? She’s hungry at home,’ Da says, looking at me like I’m one of those African children we give up sugar for during Lent.

‘Ah now,’ says Bridie, smiling at his old joke. ‘That girl looks fed to me. Sit down there and I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘To tell you the truth, missus, I wouldn’t fall out with a drop of something. I’m after being in at the mart and the price of sheep is a holy scandal.’

He talks about sheep and cattle and the weather and how this little country of ours is in a woeful state while Bridie sets the table, puts out the Chef sauce and the Colman’s mustard and cuts big, thick slices off a flitch of beef or boiled ham. I sit by the window and keep an eye on the sheep who stare, bewildered, from the car. Da eats everything in sight while I build a little tower of
biscuits
and lick the chocolate off and give the rest to the sheepdog under the table.

When we get home, I find the fire shovel and collect the sheep-droppings from the car and roll barley on the loft.

‘Where did you go?’ Mammy asks.

I tell her all about our travels while we carry buckets of calf-nuts and beet-pulp across the yard. Da sits in under the shorthorn cow and milks her into a bucket. My brother sits in the sitting room beside the fire and pretends he’s studying. He will do the Inter-cert. next year. My brother is going to be somebody, so he doesn’t open gates or clean up shite or carry buckets. All he does is read and write and draw triangles with special pencils Da buys him for mechanical drawing. He is the brains in the family. He stays in there until he is called to dinner.

‘Go down and tell Seamus his dinner is on the table,’ Da says.

I have to take off my wellingtons before I go down.

‘Come up and get it, you lazy fucker,’ I say.

‘I’ll tell,’ he says.

‘You won’t,’ I say, and go back up to the kitchen, where I spoon garden peas on to his plate because he won’t eat turnip or cabbage like the rest of us.

Evenings, I get my school-bag and do homework on the kitchen table while Ma watches the television we hire for winter. On Tuesdays she makes a big pot of tea before eight o’clock and sits at the range and glues
herself
to the programme where a man teaches a woman how to drive a car. How to change gears, to let the clutch out and give her the juice. Except for a rough woman up behind the hill who drives a tractor and a Protestant woman in the town, no woman we know drives. During the break her eyes leave the screen and travel with
longing
to the top shelf of the dresser, where she has hidden the spare key to the Volkswagen in the old cracked teapot. I am not supposed to know this. I sigh and
continue
tracing the course of the River Shannon through a piece of greaseproof paper.

On Christmas Eve I put up signs. I cut up a cardboard box and in red marker I write
THIS WAY SANTA
and arrows, pointing the way. I am always afraid he will get lost or not bother coming because the gates are too much trouble. I staple them on to the paling at the end of the lane and on the timber gates and one inside the door leading down to the parlour where the tree is. I put a glass of stout and a piece of cake on the coffee table for him and conclude that Santa must be drunk by Christmas morning.

Daddy takes his good hat out of the press and looks at himself in the mirror. It’s a fancy hat with a stiff feather stuck down in the brim. He tightens it well down on his head to hide his bald patch.

‘And where are you going on Christmas Eve?’ Mammy asks.

‘Going off to see a man about a pup,’ he says, and bangs the door.

I go to bed and have trouble sleeping. I am the only person in my class Santa Claus still visits. I know this because the master asked, ‘Who does Santa Claus still come to?’ and mine was the only hand raised. I’m different, but every year I feel there is a greater chance that he will not come, that I will become like the others.

I wake at dawn and Mammy is already lighting the fire, kneeling on the hearth, ripping up newspaper, smiling. There is a terrible moment when I think maybe Santa didn’t come because I said ‘Come and get it, you lazy fucker,’ but he does come. He leaves me the Tiny Tears doll I asked for, wrapped in the same wrapping paper we have, and I think how the postal system is like magic, how I can send a letter two days before Christmas and it reaches the North Pole overnight, even though it takes a week for a letter to reach England. Santa does not come to Seamus any more. I suspect he knows what Seamus is really doing all those evenings in the sitting room, reading
Hit ’n Run
magazines and drinking the red lemonade out of the sideboard, not using his brains at all.

Nobody’s up except Mammy and me. We are the early birds. We make tea, eat toast and chocolate fingers for breakfast. Then she puts on her best apron, the one with all the strawberries, and turns on the radio, chops onions and parsley while I grate a plain loaf into crumbs. We stuff the turkey and waltz around the kitchen. Seamus and Da come down and investigate the parcels under the tree. Seamus gets a dartboard for Christmas. He hangs it on the back door and himself and Da throw darts and chalk up scores while Mammy and me put on our anoraks and feed the pigs and cattle and sheep and let the hens out.

‘How come they do nothing?’ I ask her. I am reaching into warm straw, feeling for eggs. The hens lay less in winter.

‘They’re men,’ she says, as if this explains everything.

Because it is Christmas morning, I say nothing. I come inside and duck when a dart flies past my head.

‘Ha! Ha!’ says Seamus.

‘Bulls-eye,’ says Da.

On New Year’s Eve it snows. Snowflakes land and melt on the window ledges. It is the end of another year. I eat a bowl of sherry trifle for breakfast and fall asleep watching Lassie on TV. I play with my dolls after dinner but get fed up filling Tiny Tears with water and
squeezing
it out through the hole in her backside, so I take her head off, but her neck is too thick to fit into my other dolls’ bodies. I start playing darts with Seamus. He
chalks two marks on the lino, one for him and another, closer to the board, for me. When I get a treble nineteen, Seamus says, ‘Fluke.’

‘Eighty-seven,’ I say, totting up my score.

‘Fluke,’ he says.

‘You don’t know what fluke is,’ I say. ‘Fluke and worms. Look it up in the dictionary.’

‘Exactly,’ he says.

I am fed up being treated like a child. I wish I was big. I wish I could sit beside the fire and be called up to dinner and draw triangles, lick the nibs of special pencils, sit behind the wheel of a car and have someone open gates that I could drive through. Vrum! Vrum! I’d give her the holly, make a bumper-sticker that would read:
CAUTION, SHEEP
ON BOARD.

That night we get dressed up. Mammy wears a dark-red dress, the colour of the shorthorn cow. Her skin is freckled like somebody dipped a toothbrush in paint and splattered her. She asks me to fasten the catch on her string of pearls. I used to stand on the bed doing this, but now I’m tall, the tallest girl in my class; the master measured us. Mammy is tall and thin, but the skin on her hands is hard. I wonder if someday she will look like Bridie Knox, become part man, part woman.

Da does not do himself up. I have never known him to take a bath or wash his hair; he just changes his hat and shoes. Now he clamps his good hat down on his head and puts his shoes on. They are big black shoes he bought when he sold the Suffolk ram. He has trouble
with the laces, as he finds it hard to stoop. Seamus wears a green jumper with elbow-patches, black trousers with legs like tubes and cowboy boots to make him taller.

‘You’ll trip up in your high heels,’ I say.

We get into the Volkswagen, me and Seamus in the back and Mammy and Da up front. Even though I washed the car out, I can smell sheep-shite, a faint,
pungent
odour that always drags us back to where we come from. I resent this deeply. Da turns on the windscreen wiper; there’s only one, and it screeches as it wipes the snow away. Crows rise from the trees, releasing shrill, hungry sounds. Because there are no doors in the back, it is Mammy who gets out to open the gates. I think she is beautiful with her pearls around her throat and her red skirt flaring out when she swings round. I wish my father would get out, that the snow would be falling on him, not on my mother in her good clothes. I’ve seen other fathers holding their wives’ coats, holding doors open, asking if they’d like anything at the shop, bringing home bars of chocolate and ripe pears even when they say no. But Da’s not like that.

Spellman Hall stands in the middle of a car park, an arch of bare, multi-coloured bulbs surrounding a crooked ‘Merry Christmas’ sign above the door. Inside is big as a warehouse with a slippy wooden floor and benches at the walls. Strange lights make every white garment dazzle. It’s amazing. I can see the newsagent’s bra through her blouse, fluff like snow on the auctioneer’s trousers. The accountant has a black eye and a jumper made of grey
and white wool diamonds. Overhead a globe of shattered mirror shimmers and spins slowly. At the top of the
ballroom
a Formica-topped table is stacked with bottles of lemonade and orange, custard-cream biscuits and cheese-and-onion Tayto. The butcher’s wife stands behind, handing out the straws and taking in the money. Several of the women I know from my trips around the country are there: Bridie with her haw-red lipstick; Sarah Combs, who only last week urged my father to have a glass of sherry and gave me stale cake while she took him into the sitting room to show him her new suite of
furniture
; Miss Emma Jenkins, who always makes a fry and drinks coffee instead of tea and never has a sweet thing in the house because of her gastric juices.

On the stage men in red blazers and candy-striped bow-ties play drums, guitars, blow horns, and The Nerves Moran is out front, singing ‘My Lovely Leitrim’. Mammy and I are first out on the floor for the cuckoo waltz, and when the music stops, she dances with
Seamus
. My father dances with the women from the roads. I wonder how he can dance like that and not open gates. Seamus jives with teenage girls he knows from the
vocational
school, hand up, arse out, and the girls spinning like blazes. Old men in their thirties ask me out.

‘Will ya chance a quickstep?’ they say. Or: ‘How’s about a half-set?’

They tell me I’m light on my feet.

‘Christ, you’re like a feather,’ they say, and put me through my paces.

In the Paul Jones the music stops and I get stuck with a farmer who smells sour like the whiskey we make sick lambs drink in springtime, but the young fella who hushes the cattle around the ring in the mart butts in and rescues me.

‘Don’t mind him,’ he says. ‘He thinks he’s the bee’s knees.’

He smells of ropes, new galvanise, Jeyes Fluid.

After the half-set I get thirsty and Mammy gives me a fifty-pence piece for lemonade and raffle tickets. A slow waltz begins and Da walks across to Sarah Combs, who rises from the bench and takes her jacket off. Her shoulders are bare; I can see the top of her breasts. Mammy is sitting with her handbag on her lap, watching. There is something sad about Mammy tonight; it is all around her like when a cow dies and the truck comes to take it away. Something I don’t fully understand is happening, as if a black cloud has drifted in and could burst and cause havoc. I go over and offer her my lemonade, but she just takes a little, dainty sip and thanks me. I give her half my raffle tickets, but she doesn’t care. My father has his arms around Sarah Combs, dancing slow like slowness is what he wants. Seamus is leaning against the far wall with his hands in his pockets, smiling down at the blonde who hogs the mirror in the Ladies.

‘Cut in on Da.’

‘What?’ he says.

‘Cut in on Da.’