Carry Me Down (18 page)

I see washing falling off the clotheslines people rig to their ground-floor balconies and, when the washing doesn’t fall, or get blown off by the wind, children steal it. The ground-floor flats are the ones nobody wants and nearly half are empty and boarded up.

A letter arrived yesterday announcing that I must go to Ballymun National School across the road. It will take me less than two minutes to walk there and I will probably be able to see Plunkett tower from the window of my classroom. I start tomorrow, and so this is my last free day. I get up late and go to the kitchen for breakfast. My mother is still sleeping but somebody has left two new exercise books on the table. I get a knife out of the drawer and cut squares out of the flock wallpaper in the gap between the cupboard and fridge and I use the wallpaper to cover the books. Then I see a note that has fallen from the table. It’s from my father and has five pounds Sellotaped to the back.

I walk across the road and down two blocks to the toy shop in the big shopping centre. I’ve never been in a toy shop so big, so bright. I look around for an hour before settling on a remote-control racing car called Johnny Speed, The Most Fantastic Racing Car Ever Made, by Topper Toys. I turn the box over and read every inch of it and I gaze for ages at the big colour photo on the cover.

The car is a bright red convertible Jaguar XKE and there’s a little cream-coloured plastic driver in the front seat and the car goes forward and reverse and the wheels can be steered so it also turns around. Nobody else will have one, and I can drive it around behind the flats and, if people stop to ask me about it, I can give them lessons. If I had the money I took from Granny I could also buy some of the accessories. I could buy a racing track, the pit-stop men in overall and caps, the grandstand for the spectators and the man who holds the black and white finish flag.

I get enough change to buy batteries, a Mars bar and a bottle of Fanta and I sit for a while on a big bench in the warm shopping centre and read the instructions. When I’m sure I understand how the car works, I take it and the control box out of the foam compartments and do my first test-run on the shiny, flat floor of the shopping centre.

The car works and it’s fast! Two ladies come and stand by me and watch. There’s a cord connecting the control box to the Jaguar but it’s thirty feet long, so the car can go quite far.

‘Isn’t it magic?’ says one of the ladies.

‘It’s grand,’ I say. ‘I just got it for my birthday.’

‘Happy birthday.’

‘What a lovely present.’

‘Thanks, I love it,’ I say.

‘Ta-ta, now,’ says one lady.

‘We’ve got more shopping to do,’ says the other, and off they go.

I wish other people would watch. I make the Jaguar go around the bench. The cord gets caught, but I unravel it and try again. The second time, I get it just right.

I walk back to the flats.

The boys in the gang are huddled in a pack near the lift.
I decide to take the stairs. If any of them speak to me, I’ll pause before I answer, and take deep breaths so that I don’t sound nervous.

As I reach the landing of the first floor one of the gang members comes running up behind me. I keep walking along the balcony, but he catches up.

‘Get out of the feckin’ way!’ he says.

I’m not in his way so I stay to the left of the stairs and keep walking.

‘I said get out of the feckin’ way!’ he shouts.

I keep walking up to the second floor and then turn right, pretending that I live on this floor. The rest of the gang has come up behind me.

I stop and turn around. I will put on a Dublin accent. ‘Howya? I’ve just moved here from Gorey.’

‘I’ll show you Gorey,’ says the tallest one, and then I count them: there are only five, not the dozen or more I’ve imagined.

‘How old are ya?’ one of them asks.

‘Eleven,’ I say.

‘So, why aren’t you at school?’ asks the boy from the stairs, who has one blue eye and one hazel eye.

Now we’re all standing on the balcony outside number 29. I hope that if anything happens the people inside will hear us.

‘I didn’t feel like going,’ I say. ‘What about youse?’

They tell me they didn’t feel like going to school either. I wonder how they can get away with such a thing, but I don’t ask. They all look about thirteen or fourteen. None is as tall as I am and I’m not as scared of being beaten as I was, but I’d still prefer it if they let me alone so I could go home with my new car.

‘What’s in the big bag?’ asks the tallest boy, whose hair is blond at the top, with small greasy tails hanging out the back.

‘Shopping,’ I say.

‘Doesn’t look like shopping.’

‘Looks like a colourful box.’

I move back a little so that I’m against the balcony wall and realise I’m only making them more curious.

‘It’s a remote-controlled car,’ I say.

‘Give it here,’ says the boy with different coloured eyes.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘But let me get it started first. I’ll do a demo for you.’

I take the car out of its box, and try to make sure they don’t see my hands shaking. I put the batteries in and think about what I’m going to do. I make the car drive along the balcony, all the way to the other end, and make it turn around when it reaches the stairs. They watch.

‘Give us a cigarette,’ I say. ‘I’ll show youse something.’

The boy with greasy tails gives me a cigarette, which I put in the passenger seat of the car, and then, from about ten feet away, I drive the car over to him.

‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘I’m after having my fags delivered!’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Fuck.’

I wish I hadn’t said it. They stare at me and then tell me to go down the other end of the balcony. I take the cigarette out of the car and put it in my pocket and make sure they see.

They call me back.

‘Wanna join?’ asks the boy with tails.

‘OK,’ I say.

‘But you have to give us your car,’ says the shorter boy. ‘For keeps. It’ll be instead of the membership fee.’

I crouch down to put my new car back in its box. I try to stay calm and I stall a while by making the batteries fall out, so there’s time to stop myself from crying. I swallow a few times before I look up.

‘Does your gang have a name?’ I ask.

‘Yeah,’ says the one leaning against the balcony wall with a smoke behind his ear, ‘we’re called The Fangs.’

They all laugh and I laugh too, even though I know they are laughing at me: they are not called The Fangs. I give them my new car and we shake hands.

They tell me their names. The leaders are Mark, the tallest one with the greasy tails, and Colman, the one with the different coloured eyes.

‘One more thing,’ says Mark, ‘you gotta do a job before you are a fully fledged member.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve gotta go to the new housing estate and bring us back a brand new sink.’

‘Yeah,’ says Colman. ‘And by five o’clock tomorrow.’

They ask me to swear that if I am ever caught doing anything I’ll say I don’t know them, and they promise that they’ll say they don’t know me.

‘Sure,’ I say and we shake hands again.

My hand is no damper than their hands.

They ask me which tower I live in and the number of my flat. I tell them the tower, but give them the number of Mrs McGahern’s flat. I should have given them a random number from a different floor.

‘But you better not come around,’ I say. ‘Me mam’s deaf and blind and she gets very upset with surprises.’

I am getting better at lying. My face doesn’t feel hot and my body doesn’t shake. I am steadier on my feet and stronger. Mark tells me about how the building sites work. First the surveyors come and then trenches are laid and then the concrete is poured into the trenches.

‘Has anybody ever got stuck in the wet concrete?’ I ask.

They laugh and pass looks. ‘We better leave you to it,’ says Colman and, at his signal, they all turn and walk away.

A few minutes later Mark comes back. ‘Better not forget,’ he says. ‘See you at five tomorrow at the bottom of the stairs.’

My brand new car is in its box under his armpit.

I’m not afraid of them. I’m only afraid that they’ll humiliate me. I will do what I’ve agreed to do. I will steal a sink from an empty house that doesn’t belong to anybody.

I go across the road to the new housing estate, and after the workmen have gone, I walk along the half-finished walls for a while. When I’m ready, I go to the back of one of the new houses and climb through a window wet with white paint, which I get on my trousers and hands. The fresh paint smells like marzipan and so I breathe through my mouth to stop it getting into my head.

I go into the living room and sit on the soft, new carpet. There’s so much clean, spare room. I lie on my back and roll around for a while. I take off my trousers to see what the carpet feels like against my bare legs and then I take my underpants off to see what the new carpet feels like on my bum.

I get dressed and go to the bathroom and sit on the new floor and play with the tap fittings, which are in the shape of dolphins. It’s a nice, big house. I’d like to live in a house that hasn’t been used.

I pull at the sink, but it’s fixed to the wall with bolts. I leave. It’s getting dark and walking though the trenches is like being in a maze. I write in the wet concrete, and break a piece of string that builders have set to mark where the rooms of the new house are going to be. All the time I half hope the gang is watching me.

I fantasise about living in one of these new houses, bigger and cleaner than our flat, with bigger windows. And they have stairs. I miss the stairs in my grandmother’s cottage that led up to the bedroom where my mother and father slept.

It’s nearly six o’clock and I haven’t found a sink. I’m hungry and tired and so I go home. I’ll get the sink tomorrow.

My mother is in the kitchen. She sits on the floor, her legs crossed, her arms on her knees. There are bits of broken plate on the floor. She looks as though she’s been crying; strands of wet hair stick to her face.

‘What happened?’ I ask.

She looks me up and down. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You’ve got paint all over your trousers.’

I want to tell her. I want to tell her everything, about the new houses and the gang, but not now. I want to know why she’s been crying.

‘I was just helping to paint a wall downstairs. With some people from the community centre.’

‘You should soak your clothes.’

‘But why are you sitting on the floor? Why’ve you been crying?’

‘Sit and I’ll tell you,’ she says.

Although she probably means for me to sit at the table, I move some bits of broken plate and sit on the floor.

‘I was squeezing a lemon and it was so dry I felt like I’d just finished strangling somebody trying to get the little bit of juice out of it.’

I look carefully at her eyes, and she looks away.

‘I was furious at nothing. Furious at this tiny thing. I picked up a plate your father left on the sideboard this morning and threw it against the wall.’

‘Do you want me to do anything? Do you want me to help?’

She holds my hand. ‘Yes, you can help. You can study hard, pass your Leaving with flying colours, become a dentist or a pilot
or something useful, marry a woman who has a brain and have at least four children. And sing “Auld Lang Syne” at my funeral.’

‘But I can’t sing,’ I say.

‘Play it on a record then,’ she says.

‘The record player wouldn’t fit in the coffin.’

And then we are silent until she says, ‘I love you more than I should. No matter what you do, I’ll love you and that’s something you’ll never understand.’

‘Yes I will,’ I say. I fold myself over and rest my head in her lap.

‘Get up, John. I’m going to get into bed. I’m very tired.’

‘Again? You’re always tired and sleepy.’

She yawns as she stands and I watch her go.

It’s my first day at the Ballymun National School. My mother comes with me to the zebra crossing and points at the grey school building. We are only fifty feet from home. ‘There it is,’ she says, smiling, and waving her long, thin arm.

This gesture of hers, pointing to the concrete building as though it were splendid, reminds me of the day we visited the big house in Gorey together.

‘I could’ve found it myself,’ I say.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘But I wanted to see you off.’

‘OK, then. Bye-bye.’

Suddenly, her face collapses, as though she is crying dry, and she leaves me without saying goodbye. I cross the road.

The teacher makes me stand at the front of the class while she introduces me.

‘This is the new boy I told you about yesterday. His name is John Egan and he’s moved to Dublin all the way from Gorey. I hope you’ll make him feel very welcome.’

‘Good-morn-ing-John-E-gan,’ they say flatly and in unison.

I don’t say anything. I want to, but since I can’t think of anything good to say I don’t speak at all. I look at them and let them look back at me.

The class is bigger than my class in Gorey and, while the teacher
tells them where Gorey is, I count them: ten girls and seven boys. There’s an empty seat in the middle row and the desk it sits behind has been scrubbed clean of graffiti.

I take my seat and spend the first few lessons of the day as though half awake. There is a small window to look out of but the room is too hot. My new teacher is a short, fat woman, with the cropped brown hair of a man. She wears glasses and whenever she asks a question she takes them off and dangles them in her fat hand.

The only pleasure I get from being in her class is catching her in lies. She comes to our desks and looks over our exercise books. When she lies to a pupil her voice lowers.

She tells the slow boy with the desk next to mine – who has obvious mistakes all through his work – that he is ‘doing a splendid job’, and her voice is so low it is barely audible.

At break-time, three crates containing small bottles of milk and a crate of jam sandwiches are delivered to our classroom. The milk is warm and the jam in the sandwiches is dry and crispy. I stay in the classroom and read.

At lunch I look for somebody to sit with and I see two boys, both of whom wear glasses, sitting under a classroom window, their heads lowered, their faces in their food. I sit down next to them. ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’

They move over even though there’s plenty of space, and after I sit they put their sandwiches down on their laps and wipe their hands clean on their trousers. They must be short, because they have to crane their necks to look up at me.

I ask them about school and what they did for the Easter holidays. I easily catch one of the boys telling a lie. He says he went to London at Easter and that his father took him for a drive in his uncle’s red MG. He says they went seventy miles per hour and his mother’s hat came flying off. He wasn’t lying about being in London, or the sports car, but he was lying about his mother.
Either she wasn’t in the car or she was and she wasn’t wearing a hat.

I remember what one of the books said. ‘One of the hardest parts of lie detection is when only a part of a statement contains the lie. It can be very difficult to separate the lie from the truthful part of the sentence.’

I’ve noticed that when somebody lies it is almost as though something passes across their face, like a cloud; as though they fade from view slightly, become less real, less like the person you are used to seeing. It is hard to say exactly what it is that happens. But whatever it is, I can see it.

At the end of the day, my teacher tells the class that next week at school there’ll be a delousing. All of us will line up (boys and girls in separate rooms) with only our underpants on and get sprayed with the stuff that kills lice and nits, and we’ll be checked for ringworm too.

After school, I have an hour and a half before I’m due to meet the gang, in which time I have to get the sink I promised them. After walking around the new estate for half an hour, I decide that I won’t meet them. I don’t care about them.

I walk through the dark streets around Ballymun, past the tenements with green doors and small windows, and I walk by smouldering bonfires in the fields, the charred remains of mattresses and prams, and I memorise the names of the streets and car registration plates. A group of friends is not as important to me as my gift.

I go home and make a ham sandwich. My father isn’t home and, although it’s not yet dark, my mother is asleep. I don’t wake her. I eat half of the ham sandwich, put my pyjamas on and then get
into bed. I read the section about prison escapees in the
Guinness
Book
. I like the sound of James Kelly, who escaped from Broadmoor on 28th January, 1888, by using a key he made from a corset spring. Kelly spent thirty-nine years a free man, in Paris, New York, and at sea. In 1927 he returned to Broadmoor and asked to serve the remainder of the sentence he had been given for murdering his wife.

I think about how to attract the attention of the
Guinness
Book
. Maybe this time I should send them a tape recording of an experiment. I could do the experiment with my mother. Perhaps they have written to me, and the letter is waiting for me in Gorey. After an hour of contemplation, I can’t stand the quietness any longer. I tap my mother on the arm to wake her.

‘I’m asleep,’ she says. ‘Get back over to your side of the bed. You’re crushing me.’

‘How will I get my post?’ I ask.

‘What post?’ she says, covering a yawn with the back of her hand.

‘I’m waiting for a letter from the
Guinness Book of Records
,’ I say.

‘What letter?’

‘I told you already. I wrote to them about my gift for detecting lies.’

She sits up and puts a pillow behind her head. ‘Make me a cup of tea and then tell me about it again.’

I make a pot of tea and bring it in to her on a tray with a packet of Digestives.

I sit on the end of the bed and tell her. She won’t forget again.

‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘But do you not think that these lies are harmless? Can’t you see them for what they are? They’re white lies. Your father was just embarrassed to admit that the cards were bought in a batch on the cheap. And Granny lied because some
times it isn’t polite to talk about money. Besides, money is a sticky topic at the moment.’

It isn’t polite to talk about money?
She is telling the truth but I hate that this is what she believes and I hate it even more that she sounds like a robot. Only her lips move, the rest of her face is stiff.

‘I don’t care why they lied!’ I shout. ‘Don’t you get the point of this? I have a gift.’

The bed shakes and the ham sandwich slides off the plate; the bread and ham fall apart, and the ham sticks to the eiderdown.

‘John, there’s no need to shout. I think perhaps you are just more perceptive than most boys of your age, and that’s a good thing, a really excellent thing. But maybe you should keep this in perspective. There’s no point being a bull in a china shop, is there?’

I jump up from the bed and go to the bedside table so that I’m nearer to her.

‘Do you think I should stop, and be like everybody else?’

I pick up a book and wave it around as I shout at her. I wish I had something else in my hand, but there’s nothing else I can hold, and nothing that will calm me. I feel empty and want things to hold and touch. I also want something in my mouth.

‘Do you want me to pretend I don’t have a gift?’

She sits up and puts her arms around her knees. ‘Calm down.’

‘No,’ I shout. ‘You’re a dumb fool. Dumb, dumb, dumb!’

‘Please calm down. You don’t have to shout at me. I’m not deaf.’ She is nervous.

I want to know why she doesn’t take me seriously, but I won’t talk any more. She will see for herself.

I go to the door. ‘I’m going to watch television.’

‘What about me?’ she asks. ‘Have you practised on me?’

‘Yes. You turn red even when you tell white lies.’

‘Is that so, Sergeant Egan?’

If I don’t calm my body down, if I don’t stop my body from being angry, I’ll do something bad. I have to stop and be calm. I swallow and try to smile.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you.’

‘Come here,’ she says and I go to her.

She pinches my cheek.

As I kiss her, I notice a hole in the elbow of her nightdress and another larger hole under her armpit. I can see her skin and part of her breast under the hole. I look away.

‘I could become famous,’ I say.

My voice is like my da’s and I wonder if this seems strange to her. I wonder what it will be like when my voice deepens still more. When my father speaks and I speak, it will be like the same person speaking.

‘You could,’ she says flatly.

‘I’ll make enough money so we can go to Niagara Falls together,’ I say.

‘You could.’

She hasn’t eaten any biscuits, so I break one in half and hand it to her. She chews on it as though it is made of wood. I take another half and dip it in the tea. The biscuit is soft now and she eats it as though she has no teeth, her lips parting a small fraction and coming back together with a wet clicking noise.

‘How will you prove you have this gift?’ she asks, finally showing interest.

‘They’ll do experiments and conduct tests.’

She smiles. ‘And then they’ll pay you a fortune in gold and we’ll fly to America on first-class tickets.’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘It’s a strange thing. A bit hard to take in, that’s all.’

She isn’t convinced; she thinks I am foolish. Well, then, it’s only a matter of time.

She’ll see.

I won’t live with things this way, they can’t stay as they are.

‘Let’s eat,’ is all she says.

I hate the way people can eat no matter what has happened.

We go to the kitchen and she makes chips and eggs and for a while we don’t speak, but it doesn’t matter. My father isn’t home and she doesn’t say anything about it. She tells me that she is going to do some volunteer work at the Ballymun National School. She is going to help deliver the milk, and make jam sandwiches. I tell her that the jam sandwiches today were too dry and she agrees to put more butter on them.

‘I’ll wave at you as I pass by your classroom,’ she says.

‘And I’ll wave back,’ I say.

We stop talking again. We eat our eggs and chips and listen to the radio and then we go in to the living room and sit down together on the settee. She keeps her arm around me while we eat our cake and watch a film, and the happiness I feel is odd and makes every part of me seem liquid.

When she kisses me on the cheek I say sorry three times because I called her dumb three times. She tells me I’m a good boy and not to worry.

‘I’m just upset,’ I say, ‘because we are underdogs now, and in Gorey we were over dogs.’

She laughs and doesn’t cover her face with her hands. This is good.

We wait for my father to get home, but he is late again, working, and he comes home when
The Late Late Show
is nearly finished.

He smiles when he sees us sitting together under the blanket on the settee. He messes my hair. ‘All right?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Cup of tea?’ says my mother.

‘I’ll get it myself,’ he says.

‘Hungry?’ she asks.

‘No, I had a steak sandwich in the cafeteria.’

I go to my room and get the new apple-box stage with the curtains drawn on the side.

When my father has settled down on the settee with his cup of tea, I stand in front of him. ‘Da? I’d like to put on a puppet show. It only takes about five minutes.’

He smiles. A happy mood tonight. ‘All right, son. Let’s see it.’

‘Youse have to turn off the television first.’

‘Don’t say youse,’ says my father. ‘It’s common.’

I set the stage up on the coffee table, cover my head with a black cloth and crouch down. ‘Welcome, lady and gentleman, to our special puppet show. It’s called Puppet Philosophers of the World.

‘One by one, you will meet four famous philosophers who are in disguise and you have to guess who they are. If you guess correctly, you get a piece of chocolate.’

I start with a hand puppet, a white sock with a face drawn on, wearing a toga. The sock puppet says to another sock puppet, ‘You smell. You’re annoying. You’re an eejit.’

I ask, ‘Can any member of the illustrious audience guess who this philosopher is?’

My father laughs and shouts. ‘I’ve got it! I’d recognise that fat sock-face anywhere!’

His voice is so loud it is as though he thinks I won’t be able to hear properly under the black cloth, or as though the puppets won’t understand.

‘It’s Socrates!’ he shouts.

‘A-ha,’ I say. ‘Very clever deduction: Sock-ra-tease.’

I do three more philosophers, including Plato; a cardboard toe playing with a soccer ball made out of a piece of cotton wool
with a small stone inside it. My father gets two right and my mother gets one.

I am pleased and excited about the final philosopher I have prepared, and I got his name, like the others, from one of Da’s books.

The final philosopher in disguise is a Lego man holding a shovel. I make the Lego man perform a digging motion into a small pile of straw.

‘Who can guess the identity of this final philosopher?’ I ask.

There is no answer.

‘Do you need a hint?’ I ask. ‘He’s digging.’

Silence.

‘Come on, lady and gentleman!’ I say. ‘Can’t you figure it out? Just think. All the clues are here.’

‘We give up,’ says my mother. ‘Just tell us.’

‘No,’ I say, getting hot under the black cloth. ‘It’s not that hard! You have to think. Just think a bit longer. Just think!’

My father turns the television on.

‘Not yet,’ says my mother.

‘I’ve had enough thinking for one night,’ he says.

I come out from under my black cloth. ‘It was Heidegger,’ I say, as I kick the box across the room. ‘Hay digger.’

My father looks away from Gay Byrne’s face on the television, and smiles at me. ‘Very clever,’ he says. ‘You get the last piece of chocolate.’