Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“Who else do you like?” I asked, to break the silence.

“Nirvana, Pearl Jam, that kind of thing,” she said.

“You might like Oasis,” I said. “Take the CD with you. You can borrow it.”

“Is that your favorite?” she asked.

“Nah, Radiohead is what’s happening at the moment,” I said.

“Can I listen?” she asked.

I put on OK Computer, which had just been released that week. After only a few tracks I could tell that Kit loved it. I was pleased. She’d already called me an old geezer once and I wanted her to think I wasn’t completely unhip. I brought a couple of Sams from the fridge. We drank, listened to a bit of the record, and watched the rain. Kit found herself edging towards me on the rattan sofa, realized what she was doing, stopped herself, shifted away. She made an obvious play of looking at her watch.

“Oh, we better head up to the bar,” she said.

I pulled on a pair of socks and grabbed my Stanley boots. After Samantha’s foot stab, I found that I felt safer in shoes with steel toe caps even despite the god-awful heat. Kit watched me pull the boot on over my plastic left foot.

“What happened to your foot?” she asked. “I noticed when you were wearing that skirt that you have a pro, pro, what’s it called?”

“Prosthesis,” I said unself-consciously. I was used to it by now. I didn’t even think about it anymore.

“Prosthesis. That’s a good word. What happened to you?” she asked, her face radiating concern and curiosity.

I smiled at her.

“Motorcycle accident when I was nineteen. I was going way too fast, I fell off, the bike came down on top of me, my left foot went into one of the wheels. It was my fault, I was speeding, the road was slick, and no one else was involved,” I said.

A nice wee invention with just a little bit of gore and not one-tenth as bad as the real story, of horror piled upon horror down in the gothic badlands south of the border.

“Does it hurt?” Kit asked.

“Now, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“No, it doesn’t hurt.”

“You moved pretty good down there on the beach, with your sword and all, I wouldn’t have known otherwise.”

“I can run on it too; I can pretty much do everything except swimming. I can’t get the hang of swimming.”

“You could just use your arms,” Kit said helpfully.

“I know. It’s not that, it’s just, well, I don’t know what it is.”

“I’ll take you swimming with me, you can use the surfboard to keep you afloat. It’ll be easy.”

“You surf?”

“Of course. You?”

“No.”

“You can learn. I’ll teach you. We’ll get you over this swimming thing and I’ll teach you to surf. Your foot might make it a little harder but I’m a good teacher and the break on Plum Island is pretty easy.”

I wanted to change the subject because I didn’t want the focus to be on me and my bloody handicaps.

“You look nice,” I said. “You did something to your hair.”

She blushed again. She wasn’t used to compliments. The atmosphere of the Sons of Cuchulainn was probably one of matey blokishness, and that pleased me too. It would give me an angle.

“Yeah, got it cut, less of a bob, more of a pageboy,” she explained.

“I don’t know what that means, but it looks good,” I said.

“I got rid of the hairspray, too. It was too 80s, too glam, too New Wave.”

I nodded to show that I got her pop culture references.

“Too much of a fire hazard as well. One loose cigarette and you would have been up like Michael Jackson.”

She looked puzzled.

“What do you mean?

“Michael Jackson set his hair on fire during a Pepsi commercial. Remember?”

“That must have been before my time,” she said, again making me feel like an old git. I was too ticked off to think of a response.

“Anyway, Sean, I’m glad you’ve changed out of your centurion uniform, you look much better,” she said.

“Thanks. But tell me again why precisely I have to dress up for your father?” I asked.

“Because, Sean, my father is, like, a very wealthy man who runs a construction company and can get you a job which would not involve you having to wear a ridiculous costume and fight some English dude for a pittance.”

“How do you know it’s a pittance? And how do you know that I would want to work for your da?”

“Simon said you were getting like six dollars an hour,” she said.

“How much your da pay?”

“Twelve skilled, nine nonskilled. Really, like, twelve if you’re Irish, nine if you’re Mexican or Portuguese,” she said.

I looked at her to see if she was joking or being sarcastic, but apparently not. Her dad was an institutionalized racist and she wasn’t that concerned about it.

“And it wouldn’t look good if I was to say, ‘Dad, here’s this Irish guy you might want to hire,’ and you come in looking like Julius Caesar,” she said.

I stroked my chin, nodded.

“Kit. Why do you want to help me?” I asked.

“’Cos you tried to save my life, ’cos you’re Irish, ’cos you look like a total idiot in that Roman getup. I wouldn’t wish your job on my worst enemy,” she said.

“Not Romans, Greeks and Trojans,” I said.

“What?”

“We were supposed to be Greeks and Trojans. You know, hence the bronze sword, rather than iron; they really paid attention to detail.”

Kit looked at me skeptically. Biting into her lip in a way that was completely captivating. She had no idea what it was doing to me. I had no idea what she was doing to me and since she was doing it so effectively I hadn’t even put up any defenses until it was too late. She was across the moat and over the wall and I had left the keep doors open for her too.

“Well,” she whispered huffily, “I didn’t know you were, like, so enthusiastic about it. If this is what you want to do all summer, I won’t try to help.”

“No, no, I’ll meet your da,” I said, smiling as if I were making a concession.

“Good,” she said, pleased with herself.

It was completely dark outside now and the rain was ending. Kit stood. She looked at me with a little impatience.

“We should head up. Jackie will be wondering where I am. You don’t mind meeting everyone, do you?”

“No, who’s everyone?”

“Touched, Sonia, Jackie.”

“Touched is?”

“My dad’s old friend from Ireland.”

“I take it that’s a nickname, right?”

“Yeah, supposedly because he’s crazy, but he seems ok to me.”

“Sonia is your stepmom, right?”

“Yeah. My mom’s dead. Well, technically she was my adopted mom but you know what I mean,” Kit said.

“Yeah, you told me that. You said that your real mom is still alive somewhere?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you ever-”

She put her hand up to cut me off.

I stopped speaking.

She closed her eyes and when she opened them she looked pissed off.

“Sean. There’s one ground rule with me. You can ask me anything, talk about anything, but just don’t ask if I ever want to meet my real mom or dad someday. Everybody always asks that and it’s really irritating. My dad is my dad and he’s a great man and as you saw yourself a brave man, too. And my mom was my mom, too. And that’s it. I don’t know who my real mother or father were and I don’t care. My real dad is Gerry. End of story.”

Kit looked flustered. She’d said all this to stop me digging a potential hole for myself and, if truth be told, I probably would have asked her if she’d ever considered looking for her “real” mom or dad someday. Clearly, many people had made that gaffe in the past and she didn’t want me to be one of them.