Donal Ryan: The Thing About December

Love , she called him. But sure, in all fairness, that auld wan that used come around with the breakfasts and the lunches and the dinners inside in the hospital used call everyone love. She even called Doctor Frostyballs it one day. She banged her trolley into the backs of his legs as he stood beside Johnsey’s bed and said Oh sorry, looove, and she winked at Johnsey as much as to say she wasn’t sorry at all, really, and Doctor Frostyballs only looked at her down his brown nose and barely moved for her. All them townie wans calls everyone love. But Siobhán wasn’t exactly a townie wan; she came from a big house out towards Clonbrien that Mumbly Dave showed him one day and he’d felt like a right sneak going out there at all to stare in through a row of trees at Siobhán’s home but he couldn’t stop himself imagining her bed inside in that big house, covered in the smell of her, and all her girly things lying around, and drawers full of mysterious, delicate, frilly things! Would he ever see that room for real? What would he even do in there, besides creep around like a sneak? It’d be like putting a shit in a perfume bottle, leaving the likes of him in there.

Mumbly Dave said he’d head away and leave them at it but Siobhán said they weren’t at anything, he had an awful cheek, but Mumbly Dave didn’t laugh, only stood at the door with a puss on him. She told him he couldn’t be going down around the village when all the peasants were so riled up — they’d be out around the place with torches and pitchforks next! But Mumbly Dave said he wasn’t afraid of the Penroses or anyone else, and he was used to ignoramuses giving him abuse, sure you had to grow a thick skin to be pals with that fella, and he cocked his thumb towards Johnsey and it was only then that Johnsey realized how easy it had been for him to sit up here like a gom, waiting to be entertained and carted around the country and told stories and shown hookers and saved from misery, and not once did he say thanks to Mumbly Dave for anything or even offer him a few bob for petrol for his yahoo car. He said Please don’t go ’way, Dave, and Mumbly Dave looked a bit embarrassed but he said Grand so, and he sat back down near the window like a soldier on guard duty and Siobhán stayed running her hand through Johnsey’s hair and once or twice she kissed his shoulder and the awful heaviness he’d had in his stomach since the Unthanks left with their tears began to lighten and Mumbly Dave started telling about the smell off of Pissypants Patsy Penrose’s underarms and how he thought there was creatures living under there as yet unknown to science.

SIOBHÁN SAID no more about him becoming an island of grass nor gave any opinion about the land again, only called in as usual and ate her quare sandwiches and Mumbly Dave started to stay when she called and that bit of crossness that had been between them for a while melted away like spring hailstones in the yard. Johnsey stopped feeling that stupid jealousy like he owned her and even when one day she leaned right over to get her fags out of her handbag and Mumbly Dave made a shape like he was mar dhea going to slap her arse, and he winked over at Johnsey with that old wicked smirk, he was able to smile back and laugh so that Siobhán straightened up and caught him and said What are you laughing at, and she swung around and caught Mumbly Dave smirking out of him and she knew well he was at devilment and she called him an ignorant bogtrotter and he called her a snobby auld bitch and Johnsey wondered how was it he couldn’t say them things like Mumbly Dave and make Siobhán open her eyes wide and cover her mouth as if to say she couldn’t believe her ears and laugh and slap him on the arm and just be easy and funny and normal. Why was he such an oddball?

WHO’S TO SAY a man and a woman has to do certain things in a particular order? Do you have to first meet and then go around together for a while and hold hands and kiss and then get engaged and get married and build a house and have children and live out your days as snug as bugs? Sure that’s nearly all done away with now, surely, that holy sequence that meant you were respectable and doing things right opposite the neighbours and God. People have unconventional relationships these days. You’d hear talk on the radio about men marrying men and women marrying women and men and women not marrying each other at all, only living together in the one house and sure what about it? Our Lord surely had bigger fish to fry these days besides going around worrying about who was doing what in bed with who, what with all them madmen going around trying to kill everyone in His name.

There was no point in thinking too much about Siobhán or what she wanted, or if she wanted anything other than someone to listen to her giving out while she ate her sandwiches. If something is meant to be, it’s meant to be. Is that really true, though? If it is, couldn’t you do anything you wanted and never be held accountable? You’d just say Jaysus sorry about that, but it was meant to be, don’t you know we’re all slaves to fortune? Like them Punch and Judy puppets that used be pucking the heads off of each other inside in their little tent in Dromineer on summer Sundays. A fella with ropey hair and a girl with long dark hair and blackness in her eyes and sandals on her feet controlled them and if you saw her before the show all you could think about was her, unseen inside in that little tent and the darkness and the beauty and the mystery of her. And no matter how you screamed and roared at the puppets to watch out, the same thing would happen every single time. The ropey-hair fella and the dark girl controlled everything, like two gods, and they wouldn’t be swayed from their course by a flock of screeching children.

MUMBLY DAVE started to do a line with a girl from the city. Woo hoo, boy, I’ll be right for the Christmas, lads! This wan is mad for me! Siobhán would smile at him and look at Johnsey and roll her eyes to heaven and Mumbly Dave would be hunched over his mobile and he’d be click-click-clicking away ninety and smiling to himself and he’d laugh now and again, high and giggly, like a woman. He’d met this wan while he was doing a bit of tiling inside in a school. She was a teacher , imagine! He had to be quare careful about the nixers these days, auld Timmy Shake Hands was mad trying to catch him out. Wouldn’t you think the prick would leave it go; it wasn’t out of his pocket the claim was coming. It was the insurance company would be paying out. What odds to Timmy, in all fairness? The bitter auld bollix.

Siobhán kept asking when would they get to meet her, this big love of Dave’s? Was she one of these smart city ones that think they’ll spontaneously combust if they come too far out from town? What does she teach, anyway? Braille? And Johnsey was glad that he got it straight away — she was saying your wan must be blind to like Mumbly Dave — but Mumbly Dave had to think about it for a few seconds, and he spent the few seconds looking out of his mouth at Siobhán and then said Oh ya, ha ha ha. But there was no laughter in his eyes, and Johnsey was pure-solid ashamed for egging her on inside in his head to make little of Mumbly Dave. What kind of a fella wants his friend’s feelings to be hurt?

MUMBLY DAVE loved him. He knew it before Siobhán said it, but didn’t know he knew it. How’s it he couldn’t live up to it? It’s an awful burden, being loved. Even by a little fat man. Imagine if Siobhán loved him. He’d never cope with that. That was a worry to join the rest of his worries inside in the room in his brain where he tried to keep them all together with the door locked on them. It was no good, though, they squeezed through the keyhole and flowed out through the jambs and took their shape again outside like the yoke in Terminator 2 that was made of liquid and could become anything it wanted and could sneak around the place letting on to be a puddle and all of a sudden it’d be running around stabbing people. Paddy Rourke was in that room, and Eugene Penrose and his stump and the Unthanks and Aunty Theresa and the newspaper people who thought he was a woeful bollix and the neighbours who thought he was a rotten greedy fecker and the whole village who blamed him for calling a halt to progress and Mother and Daddy, both dead and he never having done one thing his whole life they could boast about and it’d soon be Christmas and should he buy a present for Siobhán? And if he even managed to walk in the door of one of them girly shops inside in town and the girl asked him who was the present for, what would he say? A nurse who gave me a handjob one time and now comes to my house to eat sandwiches and give out?