The Thing About December (17 page)
Read The Thing About December Online
Authors: Donal Ryan
Minutes later when Mumbly Dave arrived, Johnsey was still in the yard and he took a while explaining to Mumbly Dave what had happened because he was shaking a small bit even though it was fine and warm and he felt like crying but he wasn’t sure why and Mumbly Dave told him not to worry about them pricks to hell and slapped his hand against Johnsey’s back as they walked up the yard, and isn’t it great to have a pal to put his hand on your back and tell you not to worry?
THE NEXT SUNDAY
, before Johnsey had even got out of bed to get dressed for Mass, he heard Mumbly Dave’s trumpet exhaust blowing down the Dark Road towards the house. He burst in the front door past Johnsey and landed in to the kitchen with his face shining red, waving a newspaper. Johnsey felt a burning in his stomach as Mumbly Dave placed the paper on the kitchen table like a priest laying the chalice with the host on the altar and Mumbly Dave was opening the pages slowly and shaking his head and saying
Youssir
… wait … till … you … fucking … see …
this
!
There were three huge black words across the top of the page: LAND OF GREED. Below that there were loads more words, smaller than those, but still bigger than the normal-sized words that filled the rest of the two pages:
This is the young bachelor from rural Tipperary whose obscene demands are threatening to derail plans to transform the fortunes of an entire community.
And beside that writing was a fuzzy picture of a fella with two red cheeks and his mouth half open and one eye half closed and a cross look on his puss and feck it all to hell, it was
himself
. He looked at Mumbly Dave, and the prick was so excited he was nearly mounting the kitchen table. Aboy Johnsey, aboy Johnsey, you fuckin legend, he kept saying over and over again.
The rest of the words told about how
this young bachelor, who has turned a deaf ear to his neighbours’ appeals for sanity in his approach to the brokering of a massive property deal, was left the land by his late parents and has shown little interest in working the land, choosing instead to lease the farm to neighbours and live a life of luxury in the period farmhouse that his late parents spent tens of thousands of pounds renovating. Since being assaulted by a group of unemployed locals, angry at his cavalier attitude to their futures, he has become a virtual recluse, issuing his crazed demands through a firm of city accountants. One local, who asked not to be named, had this to say: ‘No one would condone what happened [to Cunliffe] but you can see why the likes of them lads would be angry. He’s above sitting pretty, he can’t lose, and he could give the rest of his life living in the lap of luxury either way. No one hereabouts knows where this greedy streak comes from. His father and mother was the salt of the earth, God rest them. God alone knows how someone from such good, decent stock could turn out that way.’
Then, at the bottom, it said
See Analysis
, page 34. It was hard to find page 34 with shaky, sweaty hands. Page 34 had a picture of a curly-haired fella with roundy glasses and fat cheeks and a right scowl on his puss and his arms folded as much as to say nothing gets past me, boy, I’ll sort ye all out. Johnsey didn’t like the look of him one bit. And the fat-cheeked curly lad wasn’t too impressed with Johnsey either. Below his picture, he had written a fine big spiel.
Mumbly Dave took the paper off of Johnsey and cleared his throat
mar dhea
he was a right important lad about to make a speech. Then he read out the curly fella’s words in a posh accent and sure, listening to him, you wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Mumbly Dave read:
Many things have happened to our little Republic in recent times that we’d scarcely have believed possible just a few short years ago. We have become the world’s biggest producer of impotency medicine, of all things. Our products are in demand the world over. We have become a hub of global finance. We have become a renowned centre of technology and innovation.
We have seen a meteoric rise in the level of degrees, masters and doctoral graduates from our colleges and universities. We have become a net contributor to the European Union. Inward migration has far outstripped emigration. We have next to no unemployment. The only ones lingering on benefits are the terminally lazy, the old and the ill.
These are all good, good things.
But many things have happened that dim this glowing light of dynamism and prosperity and threaten to extinguish it completely.
Our cabinet pays itself more than any other government in the western world. Our public service is growing day by day into a vast, uncontrollable beast, accountable to nobody but its own self-interested self. Home ownership is fast becoming an unattainable dream for many of our young people. The exchequer boasts a surplus of billions, yet just three days ago a man finished his life in a manner devoid of dignity on a trolley in the A and E Department of an Irish hospital because there was no bed for him to lie in and not enough staff to look after him properly.
And now we learn that one of our fellow citizens, a native of a quiet, unremarkable rural parish just like any other, a
man who has no reason to think himself special or beyond the exigencies of common decency, has informed his neighbours, the people among whom he has lived for his twenty-four years, that if they are to improve their lives and house their children and secure the future of their little hinterland, they must first pay him this incredible figure: TWENTY MILLION.
Take a moment to digest that figure, my friends. And ask yourself this: If an ordinary, ostensibly decent Irish man is capable of such gross indecency, of such staggering greed, of such arrogance, ask yourselves, fellow Irish men and women, what next? What will we learn next about ourselves and what we’re capable of?
Dear God, what next?
That cross newspaper fella had an awful set on him, it seemed. And he was even calling on God to back him up, as much as to say Johnsey was in league with the devil or something. He wasn’t full sure what
arrogance
was, or
ostensibly
, and nor was Mumbly Dave, but he didn’t think it was anything complimentary. Words were always going to be his enemies, it seemed. You could make anything sound true. A thing that’s written down in black-and-white printed words on paper always looks true. He nearly believed
himself
to be a rotten yoke at this stage. Why would anyone doubt them little black words? Wasn’t the Bible full of the same little black words, and there was plenty would die before doubting their trueness? You couldn’t go around doubting the word of God, but God didn’t write it down, for He was above words. You wouldn’t catch God putting his photo above a big old newspaper article to convince people of who was good and who was bad. Even so, a lie in print looks truer than the truth sounds from the mouth of a fool. His best bet was to do nothing, Mumbly Dave advised. Johnsey agreed. He could see how any words he might be able to stutter out in his own defence would
only lead to more words in reprisal from them that has far more beautiful control of words and can make them do their will.
Mumbly Dave was gone from his high to being vexed and upset. We is
pals
, Johnsey, d’you know what I mean? There’s no few auld fields nor no fat fucker’s opinion above in Dublin who doesn’t know fuck all about notten goin to change that. We was through the mill together, boy. You made me welcome in your home. We know each other. I’ll tell you wan thing, boy, they can all go way and
shite
for themselves. Hey youssir, why should you give wan sugar what that crowd says or does?
Mumbly Dave had tears in his eyes. Then he came around and started to make jokes about the whole thing and Johnsey’s shaky feeling started to go away.
THE TRUTH WAS
a quare thing, anyway, that was plain to see. It could shift beneath you like a hillock that looked firm but was really just grass on wet muck. There was a fella on
The Late Late Show
one time who looked like the devil with his auld eyebrows pointing up at the edges towards heaven as if to mock it and he maintained there was no God and that was the truth. He was an
eighty-ist
. They are people that don’t believe in belief. Mother had gone mad and said wasn’t it a fright they’d give over people’s licence-fee money to put that fella on the television but Daddy only shook his head and said Yerra, Sally, the devil will forever be trying that auld trick.
The trick Daddy meant was to convince people there was only this earthly world and no other, that we all came about by chance and would one day be dust and no more. That way the devil would rule the world: by tricking man into thinking
he
could rule the world and there would be neither judgment nor eternal damnation. Man would sully his soul, believing his soul
not to exist. God had a plan for each and every one of us, Daddy declared, and the likes of that long-faced Englishman on the telly had given themselves over to the service of the devil.
That
was the truth.
What if Daddy’s truth and the long-faced Englishman’s truth met each other halfway, Johnsey wondered? What if there
was
a God, not one who bothered to make plans for people, but who had washed His hands of Man after He fashioned him in His own likeness? The Englishman’s story seemed unlikely; there
had
to be a God. Who would have made everything otherwise? But it seemed just as unlikely that this God who was the creator of all things, every winking star and grain of sand and blade of grass, was still going about attending to each person and listening to every stupid thought they had. You had to just believe and think no more about it. But the thing was, that crafty-looking Englishman put them words together so nice, he’d nearly have you doubting Our Lord. Imagine that! The likes of Johnsey, who could barely get a sentence out without his face going on fire and his brain downing tools in protest hadn’t much hope against people whose talent lay in arranging words in an order that made them into a solid wall that could never be scaled by contradiction.
What’s a lie, anyway? Do you have to know a thing to be not true, or just not care whether or not it’s true for the saying of it to be a lie, or are you telling lies if what you say is not true but you think it is? If that quare-looking curly lad in that paper really
believes
Johnsey to be an awful yoke that’s destroying the country, does that absolve him of the sin of lying? What would he say, Johnsey wondered, if he came to the house and gave a day gouging around with him and Mumbly Dave? Jaysus lads, I was wrong, sure he’s only a gom! He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow! The poor boy has his bit to eat and watches the telly and hangs around with a little fat fella and that’s all there is to the
story. He’s one of these people that things happen
to
, not one of them that makes things
happen
. Sorry about that, my mistake. All he is is a victim of circumstance!
FAMOUS
is a nice word. It glides out of your mouth. Like
Siobhán
. It’s a word for those that are known to all, like county hurlers and rock singers and big actors. You can be famous for a lot of different things. You can’t be famous for something bad, though. You can be known to all for that bad thing, but there’s a different word for that kind of fame. You wouldn’t call a fella a
famous
murderer or a
famous
rapist or what have you. Them fellas are called
notorious
. They haven’t fame; they have
notoriety
. That word doesn’t glide from your mouth. It bangs against your teeth and your tongue tries to tame it and still it sounds ugly, like the noise a creeping lizard might make, or a poison spider. Johnsey was
notorious
for his greed. And he nearly afraid to eat two Mars bars in a row for fear of committing the deadly sin of gluttony.
A lad whose face looked kind of familiar called up in one of them cars that women drive that look like bubbles with googly eyes and wanted to know would Johnsey give his side of the story, and he could be sure of fairness from his own local paper, and there’d be no opinion or twist put into it. Johnsey said he had neither side nor story, but your man wanted to know how was it he was attacked, what did he think his attackers’
motives
were and Johnsey said how the feck would he know and Mumbly Dave came out from the kitchen and ran your man and when he was gone he told Johnsey that fella had always been a little faggotyarse, and he forever camped inside in the courthouse waiting to see how many of his neighbours’ names he can destroy in that auld paper. Johnsey was as well off saying notten to them rats.
FOR THE FIRST TIME
since he was a small boy panned out with a burning sickness, Johnsey didn’t go to Mass by choice that Sunday. Now even God would fall out with him. What about it? The last thing Father Cotter would want, anyway, would be him swaggering up the churchyard, with his
notoriety
in tow, stealing Our Lord’s thunder, with the whole place gawking out of their mouths at him and small children checking his arse for a pointy tail.
The Unthanks didn’t say anything about the newspaper. That was the thing with the Unthanks: you could sit in their house for hours and barely two sentences might be said but it wouldn’t matter a damn. You didn’t have to feel any awkwardness at your lack of words in their presence. But just as he was making shapes to leave, Himself said Aren’t you as well off get out of that land to hell? And the sudden way he said it and the hint of temper in his voice shocked Johnsey and his brain was trying to grab at words and form them into a queue so that they’d come out his mouth in a proper order when Herself said It’ll only cause you trouble now forevermore. It’ll break your heart.
Johnsey had had a half an idea that the Unthanks would think it noble and brave of him to not sell the land on account of how Daddy gave his life to it, how he sweated over it and bled into it and killed himself trying to mind it and drag a living out of it, and his father before him did the same, and his father’s father. It was like Himself read his mind. He said Yerra, your heart’ll be scalded, Johnsey, with blackguards blackening you up and down the country and making up lies about you and it’s an awful shame something so good has to be taken over by them that only has their own gain in mind, but that’s the way the world is now – you have to leave businessmen off to build these things and let them make their fortunes to hell, and in the long run their greed benefits all.