Donal Ryan - The Thing About December

Daddy used to love Halloween. He’d put tenpences into flour inside in a big pan and you had to try and get them out with your teeth, and if you did you could keep them. And he’d hang an apple off of a piece of string at the back kitchen door and you had to try and take a bite out of it with your hands tied behind your back and everyone would be roaring laughing. And he’d take Johnsey out around the yard and they’d both wear scary masks and Mother would let on to be frightened of them when they came to the kitchen window and Daddy would point up at the sky and say There’s the witches, Johnsey! This is the only night they’re allowed fly around on their broomsticks!

And you could nearly see the witches, soaring around the moon, and hear them cackling, and the fear would feel lovely in your spine. And he’d make a big huge pantomime out of the cutting and eating of the barmbrack with the ring in it, saying the one to find the ring would have a long life and eternal luck, and it was always Johnsey that found it, and Johnsey could never know how Daddy made sure it was always him found it, but daddies know magic tricks that they’re taught when their children are born and Johnsey wondered would he ever know them tricks.

PADDY ROURKE shot Eugene Penrose in October. Then he went home and swallowed all his tablets together. He was on rakes of yokes for his heart and his bones and his liver and God only knows what else. Minnie Wiley found him in his bedroom. Minnie the Mouth, people called her. She used give Paddy a hand a few days a week to tighten up the place and do a few jobs, so she had her own key.

Men like Paddy should die noble deaths, like them Spartan fellas that fought the million Persians and saved the whole western world, or else they should live in health and happiness well beyond a hundred, and die in big, huge, comfortable beds, surrounded by crying women and strong, admiring men, looking at the ground to hide their tears and telling each other handed-down stories of feats of strength and bravery beyond words. But Paddy died alone in his cold old house, in a room that smelt like piss, with his pyjamas half off of him, covered in vomit.

EUGENE PENROSE had to have his left leg amputated. That means cut clean off. Paddy didn’t go with the duck shot for a finish — he gave Eugene a barrel of heavy lead. The Unthanks beat Mumbly Dave up to the house to tell Johnsey about it. No one knew about poor Paddy at that stage; Minnie the Mouth hadn’t yet found him in his stinking deathbed and run to tell every yapping auld biddy in the village about it. Mumbly Dave said later wasn’t it a grand excuse for them two to stick their noses back in? Did he ask to know how is it they never told him they were in league with Herbie Grogan? Did he ask to know how was it they had the neck to face in to the hospital all them times to sit and bullshit about how great it was that all this building was to be starting up mar dhea they was only ordinary punters when all along they had every penny they had, and them two had a fair whack of shaggin pennies, have no fear, they had their Communion money, you can be guaranteed, stuck in with the rest of the bigshots that was trying to grab his land off of him? Johnsey knew Mumbly Dave was only put out he wasn’t the one to tell Johnsey about Paddy shooting Eugene Penrose, but did he have to be so disrespectful? Johnsey still loved the Unthanks no matter what. Their shame pained him. What about it if they gave Herbert Grogan a few pound to invest for them? How’s it he couldn’t find words to comfort them?

Eugene was left bleeding on the hard ground in front of the pump for a good long while before help arrived. Mumbly Dave said he was nearly bled out before they scraped him up off of the road and put him into the ambulance and took him in to the hospital for the Paki doctors to sew him back together. Except they didn’t — them boys’d sooner go chop-chop any day, Mumbly Dave said. They no like a sew, that for auld women. One leg plenty leg enough for bowsie white man. He only sit on hole watching telly, anyway. Johnsey didn’t think that was how the Paki doctors talked. Doctor Frostyballs didn’t, but he was Indian. Was it the same thing? God only knows. All them lads are much of a muchness, in fairness.

Eugene shouldn’t have moved his headquarters from the IRA memorial. At least up there someone might have seen what was after happening and rang the ambulance quicker. No one knew it was Paddy did the shooting until the guards put the serial number from his gun into their computer and up popped Paddy’s licence. The rat-faced townie lad who had kicked Johnsey in the head told the guards it was an auld boy did it, he stopped his car in the middle of the road and he put on his hazard lights, and he had white hair and mad eyes and he looked like the devil, and he walked around to the passenger side, and he waved on a couple of cars who had to go around him, and he took his time, and he took his shot, and Eugene went down screaming, and then he threw the gun in over the wall of the empty yard and got back into his auld Jetta and turned it around and fucked off back the way he came.

Jim Gildea the sergeant told Mary his wife who told everyone else that the townie lad had shat all over himself. The spread wasn’t as wild as Paddy had planned for Johnsey with the duck shot, so Eugene Penrose took the whole blast. And while Eugene lay bleeding and screaming, the brave boy with the birds on his neck shat and pissed all over himself and cried like a little girl and for a finish one of the ambulance lads had to give him an injection to make him stop being such a stones.

Johnsey kept thinking about Eugene, lying on the road with the blood pumping out of him and his leg in bits. And then he’d think of Eugene when he was only a small boy in primary school, when they’d all been pals. The thoughts tormented him. Did Paddy shoot Eugene for him ? Was it because Paddy had thought him too weak to take his own vengeance? Then he’d think of Paddy and all the times he’d patted him on the head with his big huge hand and smiled fondly at him when he was a child and how he used to think Paddy was like a mountain, dark and unmovable and eternal. But it turns out Paddy was like one of them mountains out foreign that are the same for years, and everyone thinks it’s the finest, and they live along the side of it in green pastures as happy as Larry, and then all of a sudden one day the quiet mountain blows its top and explodes into the sky and pukes melted rocks all over itself and destroys anyone who can’t run fast enough to the lowlands and finally the mountain destroys itself.

MUMBLY DAVE said there was more excitement in the village in the last few months than there was in a hundred years. If they won the county final, there wouldn’t be as much of a hullabaloo. And it all boiled down to Johnsey Cunliffe. He was some troublemaker! What was he going to do next? Start a riot? Sure, he was fit for anything! Auld Peg-Leg Penrose is quare sorry he crossed you now, I’d say!

Sometimes if you’re worried about a thing, it’s great to have someone making a joke about it. Like when the curly fella in the newspaper said all them things about him, and Mumbly Dave gave that whole evening saying about how they should take the Land Rover to Dublin and wait for him outside his poncey office and they’d lamp the know-it-all arse off of him with hurleys and make him squeal like a fuckin cut pig. Johnsey nearly wet himself laughing the way Mumbly Dave described that, and all the laughing about it made it feel like the whole thing was only a joke and not really real. But Johnsey couldn’t bear to listen to Mumbly Dave joking about Eugene Penrose and his leg. How’s it he couldn’t explain that to Mumbly Dave? How could he, when he couldn’t explain it to himself?