Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

It was raining and she was standing by the pier of their gate wearing a mackintosh with a see-through hood pulled up over a headscarf like an oul one, waiting for a lift to town I suppose. I was shocked to see her there and slowed and stopped without thinking and wound the window down, and when I looked out and up into the rain where she stood I hadn’t a word in me that was ever known and she was just as silent and her mouth shaped itself as if to speak and her green eyes widened a little bit and as mad and unexpected a thing as it was it didn’t seem one bit wrong when she walked around to the passenger side. She gave a glance back to the house the way you might expect to see something or someone that might stop her or call her back to herself. But there was no one or what empty space was there didn’t have enough pull on her, and she gave her head a small shake and sat in beside me and I saw she was wearing red shoes with a bit of heel and a skirt that was shorter than her loosely buttoned raincoat and she smelt like rain and cold air and perfume and soap and some other thing that made my heart beat like a madman at the wall of a padded cell. Drive out as far as the Lookout, she said, and I parked there on the hillside above the lake and we sat and looked across at the Clare Hills and the darkness falling across them. And all she said was Were you going too fast? And I said I was. And I tried not to move or make a sound as I cried and she put her hand on top of mine for the first time and something rose up inside in me, like bubbles in a bottle that was hard shook and opened too fast.

There was a prison officer who trained the Roscrea minors and he used to work in the aluminium factory with my father years ago. He was in charge of maintenance in the prison. He’d give me jobs to do during the day, scraping paint or sweeping or picking up papers, or if he’d a complicated job going on he’d leave me in my cell and say Tip away there at your oul books like a good lad. He stayed back my first night in even though he was finished his shift and brought me over to the games room and came in with me and asked did I want to play a game of pool and he pointed at a few quare hawks and said Look after this boy for me, all right? And I could hardly breathe for fear when he went away. But those lads were sound enough and I soon learned to look mostly at the floor and to stay out of things.

I told her these stories over a good few drives, about the courthouse steps and what it was like in prison, and she listened without saying anything. She hadn’t known the things that had happened, or even that her brother had been home. She’d been taking things the doctor gave her to stop her going mad and they’d made her lose herself for a good long while. I told her about the watery food, the hospital smell in the corridor, the wicked-looking fucker two cells down with the scar diagonal across his face, from his chin through his lips, along his nose as far as his forehead. Even on his eyelid it was. He screamed some nights and cried like a child and three or four screws would walk him away down to the infirmary with a blanket around his shoulders. She said How did his eye survive? I didn’t know. I didn’t ask him. It must have been closed tight when the knife went along it. I told her about the nights spent lying there in the half-light in a bunk bed underneath a man who wouldn’t pay his television licence and farted and snorted all night and loved being in prison.

I sit there and she sits there and she puts her hand on mine and sometimes it feels cold if she’s been waiting for me too long. She said once, You know the way Our Lord suffered His Passion and the flesh flayed from Him? Well, that’s the kind of pain I wish I felt and not this … this … And she had no name for it nor has she still. There’s no words, I suppose. There’s definitely none in my head, anyway. Some evenings she says nothing at all and I sit and look out through the windscreen at the lines of rain or at the sunlight that gets stuck on the smears on the glass that I keep meaning to wipe off. But her hand is always on mine and it’s always warm after a minute or two and feels like it’s a part of me.

She says things sometimes out of the silence suddenly, words on their own that make no sense, and then silence again. Sometimes she picks the words up again, like she’s after thinking for a while about the idea that the first words represented. The heat, she said one day. Then nothing for miles. You have double it now, maybe. And Bonny has none. I can feel it off of you. Maybe it’s the way you were given hers to carry. Maybe, maybe. I can feel it off you, coming from the bones of your hand, even when your hand is cold. It goes into me.

And that’s all she ever said about heat. She says things now and again out of the blue that sound like questions but I can tell those days from the tone of her and the way her head is angled away from me that she’s not asking anything of me. She mightn’t even know she’s talking out loud. I wonder what you know about me, she said one day. I wonder what Bonny had you told. Did ye talk at all to one another, I don’t know. Ye were always very quiet above in her bedroom. How long were ye doing a line?

And I nearly answered her that it had been eleven and a bit months and she’d been impatient for it to be twelve and she’d wanted a Claddagh ring for our one-year, she’d had it picked out and all below in Fitzgibbon’s Jewellers, but she started again talking just as I opened my mouth, saying Oh ya, sure didn’t ye start going out shortly after her debs? How’s it you didn’t take her to her debs, I wonder. And she’s wondering still because I offered no answer and nor do I think was one expected of me.

She’s all I think about, all I have in my head, all day, every day. I count down the hours and minutes and seconds until I can ask for a lend of the car and lie that I’m only going for a spin or to meet the lads or to give someone a lift to training. I have a picture of her right thigh burnt into the inside of my eyes and the black tights on it and her skirt riding up along it as she sits in without a word and I feel shame at the ache in myself, I pray to God sometimes to take away the hardness, the wrongness. Sometimes we have miles driven before she speaks, if she speaks at all, or we’re parked up in Castlelough looking out at the lake and the dark hills or we’re in the car park of the shopping centre in Limerick or out at the Clare Glens surrounded by trees and the singing of birds. I think about her eyes and the greenness of them and her lips, swollen like they were stung by a bee. How she looks like she’s crying even when she’s not. About the straightness of the line the tears make slowly on her cheek, always that. About the feel of her hand on mine, the warmth of the blood pulsing through it.

Girls and their mothers are either the best of friends or else they can’t bear one another as a rule, she told me. It’s always either one or the other, there’s no middle ground between the women. Not like the men, the way they can rub along with each other, never falling out nor being too wrapped in one another. It’s all or nothing. She was only nineteen when Bonny was born. Bonny was two years younger than me. That mad bint we had for religion inside in the Brothers. She said something one day I often think of now. Mankind will evolve to the point of something. Something. Something. Apotheosis. Until then we’re driven chiefly by animal wants. Is that all I am, an animal? Imagine doing these things and feeling nothing only worry about the day that’s surely coming when I’ll no longer be able to do these things. Sit in a car beside her, touching lightly off her, filling up with some pain that’s the sweetest thing I ever felt. A still, silent animal, waiting.

I never know until I see her standing still against the high wall at the unseen end of the old mill out past Ballinaclough Cross whether she’ll be there or not. Some days she is and more she isn’t. And I think I’ll have someday to explain to someone somewhere how I could live with it, the awful wrongness of it all, the terrible, unforgivable joy I felt each time I saw her waiting there. And Bonny dead, lovely, lovely Bonny, her daughter, and I having killed her, and I hardly remembering her face any more. I’m going to scald for an eternity in hell and I don’t care.