Donal Ryan - The Thing About December

But Kennedy swam straight out and it was nearly too late before Miss spotted him and screeched at Sir who was chasing lads around with a jellyfish actually in his hand and he dropped the jellyfish and let a roar out of him that Kennedy was to get back this instant . Kennedy was a small black bobbing ball by then. You couldn’t see his arms any more, but they must have still been working hard because he was getting farther and farther away towards the horizon. He was swimming into the sun. Everyone stopped messing and shouting and stood with their hands shielding their eyes looking out towards the shiny horizon after little Mikey Kennedy and the only sound was Sir roaring for him to come back, come back, for God’s sake. Then a lifeguard dashed past and nearly knocked Sir over and Miss put her two hands over her face and said Sweet Jesus over and over again. Afterwards, Johnsey heard another lifeguard saying how it was lucky Sean had been on duty; he was a junior champion swimmer, the lad had got so far out it mightn’t have been as clean a rescue if anyone other than Sean had been there.

When Sean the Lifeguard made it back to the shallows and waded in to the shore with Kennedy in his big freckly arms, he flung him down on the sand and Kennedy just lay there crying. Sir asked him what in the fuck he meant by that stunt. Kennedy just said I don’t know, Sir, and kept on crying and coughing, and the whole class stood around him in an embarrassed circle and stared, as shocked at Sir’s fuck as at Kennedy’s near thing. Then Miss put a towel around his little shoulders and gave him a hug and a kiss and told him it was all right and more than one boy wished then that they’d been the one to strike out for the horizon.

Ten years later, that same lad, Mikey Kennedy from Gurtabogle, flew off to Australia and went missing out there and was never seen again.

TIME DRIPS BY. It never flies, really. Time only ever flies in the last few minutes of a match when the team you’re rooting for are a point behind. And that’s reversed if they’re a point ahead. A townie lad in school once told how if you tied a lad up so he couldn’t move and dripped water on his head, for a finish he’d go mad and each drip would feel to him like a hammer blow. The Chinese used to do it to their enemies long ago. Johnsey only half believed it then but he fully believed it now. He could feel each second drip from the clock above the press and splash down on his head. You had to trick your mind sometimes, to distract it from the drips, or they’d become hammer blows and you’d end up like one of them Chinese lads. You could pretend you were Nicky English scoring before him in ’89 if you were abroad in the yard beating a sliotar off of a wall. You could pretend to be heading off on a trip across America in your shining Ford Mustang if you were farting about up and down the yard in Mother’s old Fiesta. You could imagine you were a secret agent, deep undercover, disguised as a mysterious young bachelor, living alone and awaiting further instructions from HQ.

If you were feeling especially lonesome, and just sitting in the kitchen, say, and you let it out through the gate because you weren’t concentrating properly on keeping a rein on it, your mind could have a fine old wander about for itself. If it got too much leeway, it could start trying to point things out that you could otherwise kind of gloss over or shove away into the dark spaces. It could start calculating the amount of time you spent on your own now that Daddy and Mother were gone, and the time to come to be spent alone if you lived a full life. Three score and ten, you were allowed by God. You could go a good bit over that, even. Daddy hadn’t gotten his allotted time at all. The likes of poor Dwyer and that young lad of the Clancys got nowhere near it. It could remind you of how it had seemed life was only temporarily suspended when Mother was alive and would maybe get underway again in some shape or form as soon as the dark weather brightened, but now it seemed to be at a full stop. It could start adding up the number of lunches and dinners the Unthanks had given you, and you never once put your hand into your pocket, except to have a secret scratch of your balls. It could start reminding you about all the different ways in which you didn’t match or measure up to the other fellas your age: you had nare a woman, nor a hope in hell of getting one; your only friends were two elderly people you had only inherited as friends; you’d been terrorized by a little prick called Eugene Penrose since you were a child; you couldn’t walk home through the village without shitting in your pants in fear of him. You were not able to hold a normal conversation, your mind would remind you. Nobody wanted to talk to you, anyway. People that did, it was only because they felt they had to. It could remind you that you were a useless, orphaned spastic. It could make the deep pool in the river or the crossbeam in the slatted house seem like sweet salvation from the miserable torment of just being.

Your mind could become separated from you altogether. Johnsey was starting to see this now. You could end up abroad in the yard, chasing it around like a madman if you were not careful. It could become free from you quite easily and fly off down its own path. There were a few evenings where he had sat watching television and had all of a shot realized he had been just sitting there, and there was nothing only blankness about him; he hadn’t been asleep or awake, he couldn’t remember what he had been looking at on the telly, and once there was a long line of dribble hanging from his chin.

ON THE WAY HOME from the mart Daddy often used tell him about some of the old boys they had met that day who lived alone in the real and true back of beyond, their little cottages stuck to the side of the mountain and not a soul coming near them from one end of the year to the next. They’d slosh around in shite up to their knees in Wellington boots that had holes in them; they’d be black with the dirt always and would only have the one pants for weekdays and one for Sundays and their weekday pants would be ready to walk off them and away down the boreen. They’d have a name for each beast in their herd. They’d be right fond of those beasts. That was the way for many a small farmer who never married. Often you’d have two old brothers farming the same land and living like two old smelly peas in a half-destroyed pod of a house. Or you might have an auld wan that had never married and she would serve as a wife to her bachelor brother. Not in every way, surely. Quare things went on, though; he knew this from things he overheard.

One day, below in the co-op, shortly after Packie had taken him on as a general assistant , he had heard a big, red-faced lady talking to two men who were so interested in what she was saying, they were bent nearly double to get their hairy old ears closer to her flapping mouth. It seemed the guards had taken a man called Formley from some quare townland in the back of beyonds Johnsey hadn’t heard of away from his farm and family. His children had been put into care . The same family were not sorry to see him go, by the red-faced lady’s account. His wife was dead but years. He had a daughter and two sons. She had been expecting, the daughter, and she only sixteen. The father was either her own father or one of the brothers. This man Formley had taken care of this bit of trouble, with a rope and a broken broom handle. The girl’s insides were ripped to shreds. Her wounds got infected, her blood turned bad, and she was near to death when the guards arrived. Her child was found wrapped in a sheet on the ground near the septic tank. The guards were only called because the man had drank what whiskey was in it after his little operation and went mad about the place and fired off his shotgun and his youngest lad made a dash for the house of a neighbour who had summoned help.