Donal Ryan - The Thing About December

DADDY WOULD ALWAYS do the second cut of silage in June. You’d hear the tractor abroad in the long acre as you trudged off in the morning. The big schools inside in town would be closed but you’d still have a month to go. A month ! The sun would never hang on that long. The summer would be gone before you were released from the misery of listening to the whoops and cries of the free from the dark, sweaty inside of the small-windowed classroom. How did Sir stay going? Surely he was as jealous as they were of the wild emptiness of school-less days.

Cast nare a clout till May is out. June and July, swim till you die. That’s something Daddy used say at the beginning of June always. Shut up with that auld eejiting, Mother would say. Have you your bikini ready, Sally? Daddy would say back, and he’d wink over at Johnsey, and Mother would go red and try not to let him see how she was smiling behind her mask of temper.

His you-ree-tra had gotten infected. That was the thing inside his mickey. Bacteria had somehow found its way along the cat eater. Cat ate her. Cat et ur. Whatever the hell that yoke was called, it was quare handy when a man wasn’t fully mobile but for a finish was proving to be a source of awful trouble. All he knew was he was only able to stay awake for minutes at a time and every time he came around he was frozen with the cold but someone would say he was very hot and he would try to say he wasn’t, he was perished, but he’d slip away again into a world of crazy dreams. He saw Mother and Daddy and the two of them were below at the bottom of a beautiful garden and he wanted to go down to them to ask how they were and was it nice being dead and he wanted to tell them how his life was like an empty bottle of red sauce, there was nothing in it and no point to it and you could stick your knife right in and root around forever but all you’d get was a small bit but never enough to make you happy and for feck’s sake why wouldn’t Mother buy a new bottle of sauce when the old one was finished, she’d never leave Daddy without his brown sauce, he’d be giving out stink saying Any brown sauce, Sally, because he nearly always called her Sally and he was the only one who ever did.

There was a big yoke beside him now and it frightened the life out of him the first time he saw it and there were two bags hanging off it with tubes coming out of him and the tubes were stuck in his arm. The first time he saw it, it looked like a big alien robot with bug eyes and he thought it was a dream and he tried to pull the wires out of his arms but an angel was beside him and there was bright light all around her and she told him it was a drip and it was putting medicine in him and he’d be fine and the angel had a lovely voice, just like the Lovely Voice and the angel was the Lovely Voice, of course, it made sense now, he wasn’t dead and in heaven or hell or purgatory so, but this couldn’t be far off heaven, floating about like this and seeing lovely angels with golden hair.

HE WAS panned out after it. Jaysus you got an awful dose, youssir, Mumbly Dave told him, and you only days from getting out of here, you misfortune. It was hard to stay awake. The infection had left him very weak. He’d have to stay on another while. Misfortune? It was a huge stroke of luck. The Lovely Voice was now a lovely face and lovely hands and a lovely light-blue uniform that he thought would be white but then he realized he had kind of been imagining them ones that do be in the ads in the back of the Sunday World unknown to himself, dressed up as nurses, and the ad says things like Sexy nurses on the line, waiting to give you your medicine and there’s a big long phone number and you can see nearly all their boobs and a bit of their knickers under their short white skirts and wasn’t he an awful pervert to have been imagining the Lovely Voice in that way without even knowing he was doing it? If only she knew, she wouldn’t be as gentle and kind to him and she wouldn’t be in and out to check on him even when she wasn’t really meant to be.

Siobhán, her name was. Imagine that, all these weeks, and he hadn’t known. Siobhán . It was soft. It was easy, saying it. You could whisper it and it was like a breath, or a sigh. It was the most beautiful name. It nearly tasted sweet in his mouth.

Siobhán gave him great hop again now and seemed to have forgotten all about Mumbly Dave. She felt a bit responsible for his infection — she had been meant to be taking out that yoke every so often and changing it and watching for badness starting but she couldn’t be remembering everything all the time, there wasn’t half enough staff here, anyway, and if that fat cow of a sister asks make sure and tell her she was forever pulling and dragging and checking that all was well with cat eaters and cat ate hers and what have you. She was awfully sorry; he could see that clearly.

He would tell any lie for her but it wasn’t really a sinful lie. It would be like telling the English officer that the boys had been tucked up in bed all night long when they’d really been abroad around the countryside shooting Black and Tans — it was a lie, but neither God nor man could ever hold it against you.

SIOBHÁN SAID the old ward sister was an awful wagon, and a few of the other nurses were pure sly and were terrible licks and they’d stab you in the back as quick as look at you. They wouldn’t do half the work she would do, but yet would be forever watching her and reporting back to Sister, and she knew why — it was because they were all the one with the nurse she was filling in for who was out on maternity leave and they wouldn’t let her be seen to be as good as their friend. Mother would have called the likes of them poisonous bitches . Johnsey told Siobhán that, and she laughed. Then she did something you would as a rule only see happening in a soppy film: she put her hand on the side of his face and smiled down at him and he chanced looking straight into her eyes and it looked like fondness he saw there or maybe something beyond fondness; maybe she saw him in a way that no one else saw him — after all she could only judge him on what she had seen since he was carried in by the ambulance.

Maybe she had more regard for him than other girls would have because she had never seen him walking watery-eyed up through the village with Eugene Penrose pelting stones or scrunched-up cans at him or seen him getting kicked around the school bus or being set fire to and having his fiver swiped off of him on the way to the only disco he ever nearly went to. All she knew of him was that four yahoos had attacked him and he was in bits but never gave out and that he was a grand quiet chap who took his medicine and didn’t moan or groan like some lads did. Hadn’t she told him he was a great patient? Probably she would sooner a fella like Mumbly Dave, even though he was a handy-sized baldy lad with a belly like a beach ball. Mumbly Dave never stopped talking. Maybe she saw Johnsey as being a bit like Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood never said too much but bejaysus he sure was cool. James Bond wouldn’t be the chattiest, either, but girls were forever trying to get off with him.

And besides saying he was a great patient, which was not a thing you could go around boasting about because as far as he could see being a patient only involved lying down, she had paid him four compliments. He remembered her exact words and the way her voice sounded as she said them. They were the only compliments he had ever gotten from a girl who was not either related to him, in the ICA or Mrs Unthank. The first was about a week after he was brought in, when he was still very woozy and they were pumping him with stuff to stop pain. He distinctly remembered her saying he had lovely long eyelashes, just after Doctor Frostyballs had done his daily check and she was gently replacing his bandages. Then not long after that she was helping him to sit up and she was making a meal of it and he was starting to feel embarrassed when she said Oh you’re a big lad, and he’d thought she meant he was fat. Then she stood away a bit and he got the feeling she was looking at him. He felt his face burning and that’s when she delivered her second compliment: she said he was very well built. Very well built . Now! And she’d know, too, being in a line of work where she’d get to see an assortment of bodies and body parts. The third compliment had come just a few days ago, the day after his bandages had been removed. She had said You know you have the loveliest blue eyes. The loveliest blue eyes. Imagine that.