Donal Ryan: The Thing About December

Not with Mother and Daddy, they only had harsh words the odd time, and then only over silly things like muck getting dragged in through the house and even then Daddy could placate Mother by making her laugh and Johnsey would laugh too at Daddy’s clowning and letting on not to know anything about the muck and pretending he was calling the guards because surely an intruder must be at large, and it seemed their world was nearly improved because of the fight. And the Unthanks, Himself and Herself as Mother and Daddy always called them, had a quiet way of moving about each other; you knew they were mad about each other just by the way they laughed at the things the other said and listened when the other was talking and called each other love the whole time.

But Johnsey had seen young couples outside Ciss Brien’s and they were certainly not nice to each other. One Friday evening, Johnsey had had to hang back at the pump before the corner because there was roaring and shouting going on just up the road and it made him nervous. A woman was shouting louder than he had ever heard at a fella — Johnsey tried not to listen, but the gist was that they had children and she was going away somewhere and he was meant to be minding the kids and he had promised and here he was drinking every penny he had and that was her money for the hen .

A hen? Johnsey couldn’t imagine this one buying a hen, with jeans that tight and heels that high. As he chanced walking past he saw her face clearly; it had black rivers running down it and your man was a fine fat lad like himself, but with a tattoo of a cross on his neck. Out from the city, like a lot were, rehoused by the County Council. The cross-tattoo lad was smoking his fag away and ignoring the woman in the tight jeans and for a finish she just stood there going You bastard, and when Johnsey walked past trying to be invisible she said What are you looking at, you spastic, in that singsong townie voice.

Johnsey felt aggrieved that she should know this about him. The cross-tattoo lad seemed glad she had a distraction from him. He’s only a retard, he declared. Johnsey picked up his pace. A retard . Ree-tard. Lovely, coming from a big fat lad with a cross drawn on his neck that wouldn’t mind his own children, besides drinking all the money for the hen. Johnsey wouldn’t do that if he had a wife, even a wild-looking one with jeans stuck to her arse; he’d mind her and his children and bring all his wages home and do silly things to make them all laugh. Thinking of those jeans and the bit of pink frill he could see peeping over the top of them made Johnsey think of the magazine again. And what if one of those who had passed away was watching him and he inside in the jacks, interfering with himself? The dead are all around us, according to Father Cotter. They’re having a right old laugh at me, so.

Johnsey went down to the front room where Mother was watching the news and knitting something with no shape yet, and the big brown clock ticked and tocked the night slowly away. They’d hardly ever used the good room before Daddy died. If they were all watching telly, they’d sit on the long, battered green couch that was hidden away near the back kitchen, out of sight of visitors when not in use. Daddy would drag it into service and position it in front of the hearth, directed in by Mother like he was reversing a trailer in the yard, and Johnsey would sit in the middle between them and they’d look at a film or a comedy and Mother would make tea during one of the ad breaks and bring over tart and cream on a tray and you couldn’t get better than that. But now it was all the good room with Mother. That long, battered couch was covered in boxes and bits and bobs that had no business on a couch. It wouldn’t have been balanced right, anyway, without Daddy. There’d have been too much empty space on it, and that empty space would draw out your sadness like the vacuum cleaner draws out dust from behind the television: you’d have forgotten it was there until you went rooting around for it.

When bedtime came he was glad to say goodnight to Mother and retreat upstairs to think. A man couldn’t think about things with his mother in the room — it was hard enough thinking of things to say to a woman who had hardly any words left for the world, only lonesome thoughts and muttered prayers.

The cross one in the tight jeans had looked a bit like the girls in Dwyer’s dirty magazine. Johnsey couldn’t believe they were fully real, them wans. How could a part of a woman look so strange, like an alien’s face, and yet make you not be able to stop looking at it?

JOHNSEY LIKED thinking about the stories Daddy used tell him before he went to sleep. A rake of his great-uncles were priests in Scotland and America and Canada. They joined the priesthood and exiled themselves as penance for taking the lives of so many Black and Tans years ago during the War of Independence. Daddy’s father was only very young, the youngest of six boys and a girl, and he and his sister would be warming blocks all night and placing them in the lads’ empty beds, down low where their feet would be if they were not patrolling the countryside shooting Englishmen, so when they came home and tore their clothes off and jumped into their beds, their feet would warm quick enough so that if they were raided, their mother would shout Sure look, sir, feel those boys’ feet, they’ve been in their beds since sunset, for they’ve all to be up at cockcrow. And sure enough the rotten bastard would beat them from their beds with the butt of his dirty English gun and line them up for his inspection and they would act like they’d just been dragged from the deepest of sleep and their toes toasty, and that trick saved many a young rebel’s life.

The English officer would leave them their lives but before they went away he’d let the Black and Tan bastards loose about the place and they’d try to flush the Blessed Virgin down the toilet and they’d take the holy picture out to the yard and fling it on the ground and piss all over Our Lord and God only knows what other depravities were visited upon holy things before finally the great-uncles won their war and John Bull and his savage legion fecked off home out of it. Johnsey thought of their bravery and boldness and wondered why had he not the same daring. Hadn’t he the same blood? Those great-uncles he never met would have no trouble talking up for theirselves or getting girls to do the things described in Dwyer’s American magazine. They’d beat the head off of the likes of Eugene Penrose for sport.

And what about Granddad? Sure didn’t he grow up just as brave, but by then the Free State had been established and the Irish had turned their guns on each other and then made up again, kind of, and his brothers had scattered to the four winds. He drove his motorbike across Lough Derg once, when the lake was iced over completely, from Youghal Quay the whole way across to County Clare, just to see could it be done without a fella falling through, and he made it clear across, where he drank a brandy and smoked a fag and doubtless talked to a load of Clare girls and turned around and flew it the whole way back and was hailed a hero. Maybe you had to have brothers to be brave; they would knock toughness into you. Granddad married a woman so beautiful that people — men and women — stood and stared at her with their mouths open, wondering could such a creature really be real. And Daddy was another hero, loved and feared in near equal measure by all who knew him. And what about Daddy’s brother, Uncle Michael, who was long dead and nearly never talked about? He fell off of scaffolding beyond in London and was killed and he only twenty-one. He was beautiful , Mother said once. That was a funny thing to say about a man. He could have charmed the birds right out of the trees, by all accounts.