Donal Ryan - The Thing About December

He backed out into the sun, away from the sharp, cold stink. He resolved there and then that there would be no further considerations of mortal sin in the slatted house. He decided to go upstairs and look in the famous box of papers in Daddy’s office. That’d give things to think about besides them old black notions surfacing and whether or not he’d ever clap eyes on Siobhán again let alone feel her lovely soft fingers gripping him and whether he really wanted to go to a pub with Mumbly Dave, it would surely only lead to more embarrassment and situations he would be unable to fit himself into and it was all the one anyway, that fella had no notion of calling up for him no more than the man in the moon.

Dermot McDermott was doing the second cut of silage abroad. Johnsey could hear the big John Deere beyond, roaring over and back across the river field, Daddy’s favourite field of all. He wouldn’t have cut silage in it and upset the lives of the creatures of the riverbank; he always had the few dull acres down towards the village set aside for silage. No sign of that shagger back looking to buy the land; he knew he was caught out in a lie about milk quotas and what have you. The McDermotts knew all about this rezoning business long before Johnsey and had planned to pull an awful stroke. Let them, to hell. Money is their god, Daddy would have said, and they may as well enjoy it now. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. That was one of Daddy’s excuses for his lack of cuteness. Them McDermotts would manage it, though. They’d stand above at the Pearly Gates and bamboozle Saint Peter with their wounded faces and assertions of righteousness, the same way they do be cocked up above in Mass directly in Father Cotter’s view, looking like the church was built around them. He headed for the front door and the famous box of papers with the whooping cough of the John Deere being rammed into gear in pure crossness grinding against his eardrums.

THAT BOX HAD nothing in it only confusion. Bits of letters and yokes from banks and insurance companies with big words and lists of figures and two Credit Union books, one with his name in it and one with Mother’s and Daddy’s names together. God only knows how a fella would go about converting these things into cash-money. He had a card and four numbers Mother had made him remember and he was able to use that at the hole-in-the-wall below in the village to take out money that Packie Collins had put into his account every week, but he had rarely bothered before Mother died and now he only used about thirty or forty quid a week for the few bits to have in the house, like milk and ham and biscuits and them frozen yokes that was easy do in the microwave.

Now that he had given himself the road out of his bit of a job, Packie’s money would sooner or later run out. He’d have to make proper shapes at them auld bits of paper then. There was a button you could press that said balance enquiry on the hole-in-the-wall. He’d have to see about pressing it one of the days. Feck it to hell, this auld box was too much trouble. He had a right to listen months ago when these things were being explained besides sitting there like a gom and wondering how long would it be before he could stop nodding and saying Oh right, grand.

He walked down as far as his own room for a look out of the window at the yard. It was hard not to look out and harder again not to expect to see Daddy swinging in on his bicycle or Mother chugging through the gate in the Fiesta, barely clearing the piers. One of them teachers inside in the Tech had explained one time what seeing really was. He’d thought about it a lot when he was blind. When you look at a thing, the light of the sun bounces off of that thing and into your eye and a message is sent from your retina on along up the optic nerve to your brain, which then tells you what it is you’re seeing by forming a picture for you. So you don’t really see a thing as it is, only your brain’s version of what it is. Johnsey learnt all that stuff off by heart and wrote it out in an exam one time and still only got a D. D for dunce. He’d memorized the seeing stuff so well he’d left no room for the other bits. What about it, it was all the one now. His detached retina was attached again and it was working away the solid finest and it was now sending light up along that old optic nerve to his bit of a brain which was showing him a picture of a person in rolled-up shirt sleeves and important-looking trousers and a fine, shiny, bald spot coming in along the yard. It was that man of the Grogans who owned the shop and the undertakers and what have you below in the village that used to grig Mother something awful. Oh Lord, what now?

HE TOOK Johnsey’s hand in both of his and started speeching out of him without preamble. Like Paddy Rourke, except while Paddy’s speech was about how Johnsey should shoot Eugene Penrose and the yahoos, this speech was about how Johnsey should sell the land, without delay, to a consortium of mainly locals who had progress and employment at their heart. Surely Jackie had told him all about it; it was going on years, this planning for the land bank , sure wasn’t Jackie as much a driving force behind the whole idea as anyone, sure hadn’t he lobbied for the rezoning, and now that the planners had seen sense all that was left was for a deal to be done with regard to the sale of the land and plans could be submitted for the redevelopment and work could begin almost immediately. Wasn’t it a heartbreaking thought that Jackie, Lord have mercy on him, wouldn’t see his plans come to fruition? But wouldn’t he be happy that the council inside had saw sense at last and his son and his son’s children please God could prosper because of him?

This man who had hardly looked in Johnsey’s direction below in the village in twenty-four years was now grasping his hand the very same way people did at Mother and Daddy’s funerals and was smiling with his lips peeled back from his teeth and gums like a German Shepherd and breathing hot words all over him.

Herbert Grogan said You know I was a great friend to your father, Johnsey. Everyone knows that. I had great regard for him, and he for me. He was no daw, Johnsey. He could see past his own nose, not like some. There’s fellas going to sleep poor tonight, Johnsey, that’ll wake up tomorrow millionaires. Cattle that was eating ordinary grass yesterday is shitting gold today. This all happens, Johnsey, without any effort on the part of them fellas. They were up early milking and foddering all their lives and doing the same few auld jobs day in, day out, with no thought beyond going to the mart and buying and selling a few beasts and waiting to see what would they be handed in the line of a grant from Europe or what have you. All the effort and fightin and pullin and draggin and Jaysus hardship that makes all them magical millions appear for them fellas is done by the likes of me. Feckin eejits that we are, we can see potential, po -tential , Johnsey, in them miserable wet fields where neither beast nor man ever really thrived, for something great that’ll benefit all and give jobs and security and happiness. That’s all we want to do, Johnsey, is give jobs and better this community and build for the future. Some says we’re mad. More says we’re visionaries . More again calls us crooks and says we’re only in it for all we can get for ourselves! Lookit, John, I don’t give one shite what any of them says about me, there’s as many auld begrudgers around here that wants to see no one have anything only themselves as there always was — the same auld crowd that used sell their neighbours to the English long ago. Let them off to hell, Johnsey, they’ll die bitter and there’ll be no tears shed for them.