Donal Ryan - The Thing About December

The quare-hawk was backing along the hall and Johnsey was walking towards him and he kept talking all the time, asking was it true that Johnsey wanted twenty million for the land and was he aware that the planning authority had given provisional approval to plans by a local development company that were contingent on the sale and did he feel he could just name his price because of this and did he have any feelings of guilt? And just as he backed through the door and into the yard, another lad, with a spotty, sneaky face, walked out from behind the jeep that must have free-wheeled into the yard because Johnsey hadn’t heard it coming, and he took Johnsey’s photo with a camera that looked more like a machine gun. And then they were in the jeep, and the posh lad stuck his arm out and there was a little card on the end of it and Johnsey took it off him and the posh lad said If you change your mind about making a comment, give me a coal , and they were gone. Give him a coal? Oh, ya, a call .

Minutes later when Mumbly Dave arrived, Johnsey was still in the yard and he took a while explaining to Mumbly Dave what had happened because he was shaking a small bit even though it was fine and warm and he felt like crying but he wasn’t sure why and Mumbly Dave told him not to worry about them pricks to hell and slapped his hand against Johnsey’s back as they walked up the yard, and isn’t it great to have a pal to put his hand on your back and tell you not to worry?

THE NEXT SUNDAY, before Johnsey had even got out of bed to get dressed for Mass, he heard Mumbly Dave’s trumpet exhaust blowing down the Dark Road towards the house. He burst in the front door past Johnsey and landed in to the kitchen with his face shining red, waving a newspaper. Johnsey felt a burning in his stomach as Mumbly Dave placed the paper on the kitchen table like a priest laying the chalice with the host on the altar and Mumbly Dave was opening the pages slowly and shaking his head and saying Youssir … wait … till … you … fucking … see … this !

There were three huge black words across the top of the page: LAND OF GREED. Below that there were loads more words, smaller than those, but still bigger than the normal-sized words that filled the rest of the two pages:

This is the young bachelor from rural Tipperary whose obscene demands are threatening to derail plans to transform the fortunes of an entire community.

And beside that writing was a fuzzy picture of a fella with two red cheeks and his mouth half open and one eye half closed and a cross look on his puss and feck it all to hell, it was himself . He looked at Mumbly Dave, and the prick was so excited he was nearly mounting the kitchen table. Aboy Johnsey, aboy Johnsey, you fuckin legend, he kept saying over and over again.

The rest of the words told about how

this young bachelor, who has turned a deaf ear to his neighbours’ appeals for sanity in his approach to the brokering of a massive property deal, was left the land by his late parents and has shown little interest in working the land, choosing instead to lease the farm to neighbours and live a life of luxury in the period farmhouse that his late parents spent tens of thousands of pounds renovating. Since being assaulted by a group of unemployed locals, angry at his cavalier attitude to their futures, he has become a virtual recluse, issuing his crazed demands through a firm of city accountants. One local, who asked not to be named, had this to say: ‘No one would condone what happened [to Cunliffe] but you can see why the likes of them lads would be angry. He’s above sitting pretty, he can’t lose, and he could give the rest of his life living in the lap of luxury either way. No one hereabouts knows where this greedy streak comes from. His father and mother was the salt of the earth, God rest them. God alone knows how someone from such good, decent stock could turn out that way.’

Then, at the bottom, it said See Analysis , page 34. It was hard to find page 34 with shaky, sweaty hands. Page 34 had a picture of a curly-haired fella with roundy glasses and fat cheeks and a right scowl on his puss and his arms folded as much as to say nothing gets past me, boy, I’ll sort ye all out. Johnsey didn’t like the look of him one bit. And the fat-cheeked curly lad wasn’t too impressed with Johnsey either. Below his picture, he had written a fine big spiel. Mumbly Dave took the paper off of Johnsey and cleared his throat mar dhea he was a right important lad about to make a speech. Then he read out the curly fella’s words in a posh accent and sure, listening to him, you wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Mumbly Dave read:

Many things have happened to our little Republic in recent times that we’d scarcely have believed possible just a few short years ago. We have become the world’s biggest producer of impotency medicine, of all things. Our products are in demand the world over. We have become a hub of global finance. We have become a renowned centre of technology and innovation.

We have seen a meteoric rise in the level of degrees, masters and doctoral graduates from our colleges and universities. We have become a net contributor to the European Union. Inward migration has far outstripped emigration. We have next to no unemployment. The only ones lingering on benefits are the terminally lazy, the old and the ill.

These are all good, good things.

But many things have happened that dim this glowing light of dynamism and prosperity and threaten to extinguish it completely.

Our cabinet pays itself more than any other government in the western world. Our public service is growing day by day into a vast, uncontrollable beast, accountable to nobody but its own self-interested self. Home ownership is fast becoming an unattainable dream for many of our young people. The exchequer boasts a surplus of billions, yet just three days ago a man finished his life in a manner devoid of dignity on a trolley in the A and E Department of an Irish hospital because there was no bed for him to lie in and not enough staff to look after him properly.

And now we learn that one of our fellow citizens, a native of a quiet, unremarkable rural parish just like any other, a man who has no reason to think himself special or beyond the exigencies of common decency, has informed his neighbours, the people among whom he has lived for his twenty-four years, that if they are to improve their lives and house their children and secure the future of their little hinterland, they must first pay him this incredible figure: TWENTY MILLION.

Take a moment to digest that figure, my friends. And ask yourself this: If an ordinary, ostensibly decent Irish man is capable of such gross indecency, of such staggering greed, of such arrogance, ask yourselves, fellow Irish men and women, what next? What will we learn next about ourselves and what we’re capable of?

Dear God, what next?

That cross newspaper fella had an awful set on him, it seemed. And he was even calling on God to back him up, as much as to say Johnsey was in league with the devil or something. He wasn’t full sure what arrogance was, or ostensibly , and nor was Mumbly Dave, but he didn’t think it was anything complimentary. Words were always going to be his enemies, it seemed. You could make anything sound true. A thing that’s written down in black-and-white printed words on paper always looks true. He nearly believed himself to be a rotten yoke at this stage. Why would anyone doubt them little black words? Wasn’t the Bible full of the same little black words, and there was plenty would die before doubting their trueness? You couldn’t go around doubting the word of God, but God didn’t write it down, for He was above words. You wouldn’t catch God putting his photo above a big old newspaper article to convince people of who was good and who was bad. Even so, a lie in print looks truer than the truth sounds from the mouth of a fool. His best bet was to do nothing, Mumbly Dave advised. Johnsey agreed. He could see how any words he might be able to stutter out in his own defence would only lead to more words in reprisal from them that has far more beautiful control of words and can make them do their will.