Kate O’Riordan - The Boy in the Moon

The thought occurred to him that the thing about being Irish was the measuring out your life in Christmases, Easters and slivers of August. It was the same for the immigrant and for those who waited at home. Around the end of November every year, the pull was at its strongest. By December, he would be filled with a quiet anticipation, coupled with an underlayer of dread – on parole and elated for Christmas, an alien again throughout January and February.

The phone rang. He lifted his other leg to study it. Julia was remonstrating with Sam as she ran from his room to answer the phone. Brian listened. It was Julia’s mother, Jennifer, another Darling. Calling to say goodbye and bon voyage and happy Christmas for the third time that day. He heard Julia impatiently say that she did not want to hear the weather forecast. Whatever horrors awaited them on the ferry would just have to be faced. Brian thought of cauliflowers.

Whenever he thought of Julia’s mother he thought of cauliflowers. It was her hair. White and permed into fat florets which framed her plump cushion of a face. Her eyes were blue and discontented, like her daughter’s. Richard, Julia’s father, was a tortoise – slow, unenthusiastic gait and elongated neck – ready for the guillotine from the birth. The skin on his face seemed to droop too under bristled black eyebrows. Most of the time, Brian could not make out his eyes, just two gleams of light beaming out hesitantly beneath their canopies. It was a habit of Brian’s, to make vegetables or animals of people. He had done so since childhood. Julia had begun as a cat and metamorphosed over the years into a pineapple, although she had had her moments of bovine splendour too. He stretched and listened to her trying to get Jennifer off the phone, knowing from the sound of her voice that she was still folding clothes against her chest with the receiver cradled between her head and shoulder. ‘We’ve managed to get to a phone on Christmas Day in the past, I don’t see why it should be a problem this year,’ Julia was saying. She stopped for a while and listened. ‘Jennifer, please stop fussing,’ she continued, addressing her mother by her Christian name, which meant that she was getting cross. Brian shifted up uneasily in the bath and watched the rivulets stream down the black dense hairs on his legs and forearms.

When he heard the click of the replaced receiver he placed both hands on either side of the bath as though he were just about to rise. But Julia was checking window locks downstairs, bolting the french doors to the garden, checking the various alarms while she cleared away any remaining debris from their dinner earlier. He could hear the musical clickety clack of her heels beating out across the tiled and wooden floors below. A swish of drapes closed, another, then another. Click clack back to the kitchen again.

He was in the main bathroom – he had thought she might need to use the en suite . But she would probably keep going for hours yet and shower just before bed, something he could never understand. More doors opened downstairs. The final final check. Julia, he thought, did not open doors so much as assault them. She wrenched handles and entered rooms with the door swinging on its hinges behind her, as if she expected resistance at every turn. She ran up and down stairs, one hand outstretched in vague deference to a banister rail she never touched. She reversed her car with a savagery that made him wince. And she pounced on ringing phones like a cheetah.

Sam wandered into the bathroom, scratching his head. He lifted the toilet seat and peed.

‘Sam,’ Brian said.

‘Dad,’ Sam said over his shoulder. He yawned.

‘It’s late. You should be asleep. We’ve a long day ahead of us tomorrow.’

‘I know. I had to make a pee.’

‘You packed all the toys you want to bring, then?’

‘Mum did it.’

‘So what did you choose in the end?’

‘Just the usual stuff.’

‘Books too?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did Mum find room for the spaceship in the end?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sure I could squeeze it into the boot somewhere.’

‘She says there’re too many bits. They’ll only get lost.’

‘She might be right.’

Sam yawned again. He was standing motionless, still holding his penis over the toilet bowl.

‘Sam? I think you’re finished …’

‘I know.’

‘Well, what’s keeping you then? Away with you to bed.’

‘I’m thinking of a poo.’

‘Have you got one?’

‘I’m thinking of it.’

‘Go and sit on our toilet.’

Sam shook a few last drops and flushed the toilet. ‘It’s gone back up,’ he said.

‘Hands,’ Brian said.

Sam gingerly dipped his hands into the bath-water suds. His father leaned across to kiss his cheek. Sam wiped the wet cheek with his pyjama sleeve. ‘Fly is a word without a vowel in it,’ he said.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I’m only saying.’

‘Bed. Now.’

‘Your willy looks all squishy.’ A final yawn and he was gone.

Brian looked down. He had not realized he had been in the bath that long. He sighed and lay back. Contemplated the knots and gnarls on his raised feet for a moment. Strange thing, the body. Lived in for a lifetime yet there were parts of it, the back of his head for instance, the middle of his back, his scalp, that he had never really seen except in an unsatisfactory fashion in the mirror. This was, of course, quite apart from all the internal bits. The ridiculousness of self was a thought that had often struck him, as a member of a large family, which in turn had led to the affirmation of self in the smallest and most curious of ways, like his pepper consumption. Even now, Brian could not eat his food unless it was practically concealed beneath a black frost of pepper. He wondered if Teresa, the youngest, still spat into her plate before she began to eat. Quite probably. They had all managed to devise ways to repel nimble, filching fingers from their dinner plates … Feet pounded the stairs, but they ravished the master bedroom. He was safe for a while yet. In the en-suite bathroom, Julia quickly shunted out of her clothes and stepped under the shower. She decided against washing her hair, it was too late. She turned the shower off and grabbed a towel, checking the cabinet above the sink as she dried herself for any last forgotten items. The ladyrazor. And an anti-cellulite cream, brown gunge caked around the stopper, which wouldn’t work now anyway even with a blessing from Rome.

She sucked her stomach in and turned sideways. Her breasts were still full enough, quite large and round with tight compact nipples. In the mirror, the left breast always looked larger but Brian pretended not to notice. She reached for the tweezers and plucked a couple of straying hairs around each nipple, then a couple more above her top lip. She lifted her eyebrows without raising her brow, to see what her eyes looked like without the sagging eyelid flaps. With everything sucked in, pulled up, and her eyes looking slightly surprised, she could see what she was like in her twenties. With a sigh, everything collapsed, thirty-eight again.

The skin was still good – cream with the odd curdle. Nothing special about the lips – they functioned; by contrast, the cheekbones were high and almost anachronistic. Blue eyes, just on the turn, a dulling around the cornea. Remortgaged blonde bob – a clone in the schoolyard and Sainsbury’s. She thought about Brian resplendent in his bubbles for the past two hours and waited for the little spring of irritation to well up, but it didn’t. Instead, something fell inside her, a weight, a charge, and she felt herself opening. It was strange how that could happen. Most of the time she felt irritated. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, her cervix would widen and she would feel confused.