Donal Ryan - A Slanting of the Sun

Paddy became the foreman of the search. We’re at nothing, lads, just milling around like this. We need to divide the road into sections. Now, Deirdre love, tell us again where you definitely remember walking. Right, right, okay, look, I’ll assign a section so to everyone and no one is to step outside their section till we’ve it found. Any cars that come to the entrance we’ll tell them park up and walk. Now, there’s another thing, we’ll have to check the treads of the tyres of any cars that drove up since it was lost. And nearly everyone automatically obeyed, glad that someone was taking charge. A teenage boy sloped away with a regretful look back at Amber.

A month after I posted the invoice I stood smiling a little nervously at the shop door, watching the postman and his bicycle process down the street. He had nothing for me but a salute and a cool breeze as he pedalled past. I wasn’t worried. No one paid exactly on time. Well, I did, but I was a bit obsessive that way. At the next month’s end I sent a second invoice. Ten days. A slightly less light-hearted note. A wastepaper basket full of crumpled compliment slips. Another week passed before I heard the union rep on the radio. Staff shocked. No warning. No notice. Doors locked. Wedding deposits should be claimed in writing. The creditors’ meeting was held in a GAA clubhouse on the windy end of a narrow peninsula in south Kerry. A right stroke that was. Real toughness. I got lost and missed most of it. Steve wasn’t at the meeting. Distance to Empty: 23 miles, my dashboard told me as I pulled out of the potholed car-park. It was nearly sixty miles to home. I pulled into a lay-by and found seven-forty in change beneath the seats and nearly cried with relief. My hands shook as I counted it out in the petrol station.

The neighbour, Deirdre, drafted in her mother-in-law to watch her five-year-old and her six-month-old. The older woman stood at the front door for most of the evening surveying the search. Whenever I looked in her direction she smiled and nodded her thanks. Her son was half a world away and her grandson was swaddled in her arms against the chill of evening. She was weighed down with sadness and worry and love. I knelt down to peer along the ground beneath a car that had been checked a dozen times already and groaned as I straightened. She beckoned me to the doorway where she stood. You’d want to mind your back. And then she leaned forward, raising the child almost to her cheek as she did so, and whispered conspiratorially: It’s gone, I’d say. Poor Deirdre, it won’t be found now. Someone has it taken, surely. Ye may give it up and go in out of the cold. And you’d want to mind your back.

I stood in my father’s garden a few hours ago beneath a branch heavy with pink-white blossoms. How’re things, son? Grand. You’re kept going? I am. Good, begod. And he smiled and sighed and put a hand to the tree’s gnarled trunk to steady himself. The sky was suddenly black with crows. Dad? Are you okay? I’m fine. There they are, look. Going home. The same time every single evening. Lord save us aren’t they a sight? The ring in my jeans pocket must have been sitting on an artery; I could feel my pulse beneath it.

It’s only a ring. There’s a stand in the shopping centre beneath a golden cardboard euro sign manned by a smiling youth with a knot in his tie like a fist. I’ll go in when it’s quiet, in the early morning maybe, and he’ll turn the ring into a small pile of cash. That’ll keep us in gas and electricity and groceries for a few months.

The shadow still moves outside. A prayer to Saint Anthony drifts through my open window on a gentle breeze. The world is filled with unwelcome words.

THERE WERE TWO boys sitting in the centre of the bus this morning. The only empty seats were across from and in front of them. Their fellow travellers in silent concord had quarantined them. The one on the outside was wan and shaven-headed. His leg was extended across the aisle, blocking it. He did not move as I approached, only held my eyes with his and smiled. His smile was twisted and wet, and brought a memory to me of the dogs that would stalk one another about the township, some days in uneasy league with one another and other days in ragged battle. His trousers had stripes that, when I looked more closely, revealed themselves to be tiny shadow-women, sitting back-to-back, in a line along the length of his leg. I smiled at the sight of them, and laughed when I saw that the ends of these trousers were tucked inside white socks. His foot was splayed outwards in a dirty training shoe. The fuck, he said, in a questioning way, half turning towards his friend, widening his eyes in mock wonderment. The fuck ? And I knew then that these boys were going to try to hurt me in some way, that they would be allowed to do so by the others on the bus, and I wondered again how there could be pleasure in the causing of sadness in others, how a healthy young man in a country of such fertile soil could choose to expend his precious energy in such a wretched pursuit.

A woman I work with says all the time that she is afraid of her life. I laughed when I first heard this. Afraid of your life? You should be more afraid of your death, I said, and thought that she would laugh. But she didn’t smile or give any sign that she had heard me as she went on moving dust from place to place with a feathery stick and explained that she was afraid of her life she’d be caught working. She is not supposed to work, as I am not. She claims to have nothing in order to claim money from the government. I claim to stay all day in the reception centre while I wait for my application for asylum to be processed, a grey building of four hollow floors, but in truth I could not stay alone there. I’d do this job for nothing, just to be away from that place, busy, moving. I’m afraid of my life, Grace; she says to me, I’m afraid of my Jaysus life. And I laugh softly to myself and tell her not to worry, not to worry, as we work on into the darkness.

The victory my father achieved in the village was of a particular type. I cannot remember at this remove the correct name for it. A priest told it to me who visited our school in the township after I had explained to the class how our family had come to leave the village of my birth. My sister scolded me for being so foolish, for being so free with truth. As though our story was some form of currency. The meaning of the word the white-haired priest put on Father’s victory was that more was lost in battle than was gained in victory. I wish I could remember that word.

My father refused to pay a tribute to the elders from our harvest. Let them raise their own, he yelled, and our neighbours clicked their tongues and sighed but stayed mostly silent. No one came to help with the saving of our crop. The rains came while we laboured and washed our wealth away. My father bellowed at the gushing sky as my mother stood silent behind him, wringing her hands. The elders decreed that we were to be shunned. So tall my father was as we began our journey to Kinshasa, so noble and unswerving as he led us through the centre of the village. No man dared impede him, or mock him to his face. The elders’ eyes followed him; they mourned their drowned tribute.

Shortly after I told that story in the school my father crossed me from the page in his heart that bore his children’s names. My fourteenth winter was spent in the house of my mother’s cousin, a shack of tin and discarded timber. My father left me there with instructions to him to see that I continued to attend the missionary school. He would pay him for my keep as soon as he found work. My mother’s cousin laughed as my parents left with my brothers and sisters strung in a sullen line behind them. A holy man came once to the house and remonstrated with my mother’s cousin. He was unmarried, living with a child not his. Stories were being told. People wouldn’t tolerate it. Who were the men that visited? What business had they at night in the house of a market trader? My mother’s cousin smoked in silence and looked into the distance over the holy man’s shoulder as he spoke on in urgent whispers. Now and then, to emphasize some point or other, the holy man would point from where he stood on the narrow stoop towards the sunless inside of our house where I sat unseen, watching and straining to hear. And when my mother’s cousin had smoked his cigarette to the butt he broke suddenly from his stillness and put his hands around the holy man’s throat and screamed that his business was no one’s concern but his and that if the holy man came again to his door he would surely kill him.