Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

Joanie came down about half eleven. There was a stink of drink off her. She was like a lunatic. Some fella did something to her but she wouldn’t say what. Tell me, Joanie, tell me, I kept saying to her. Fuck off, you virgin, she said back, what would you know? I never said I knew anything. After a while Joanie laughed a bit and sat clenching her Simon Cowell mug, her fingers twined tightly together, just below her chin. Steam swirled up and blurred her face. Oh, Ellie, she said in a whisper, and smiled at me.

Joanie started into the wine straight after breakfast. She was sloshed before three. I had it in my head to make a proper dinner for me and her and the lodger but then didn’t bother once she started into drinking. She put on tapes from the eighties full blast on her big silver time-warp hi-fi. I went down to the basement and looked into the chest freezer for a while at a sirloin joint and thought about defrosting it in the microwave. I could feel the lodger looking at me from the little sofa-bed in the basement bedroom and got cross all of a sudden over nothing. Fuck you, I said into the freezer. I turned and looked at her through the narrow doorway, sitting in the shadows, television light flickering in her eyes. She looked silently back at me. Make your own fucking dinner.

I CAME OVER about two years ago on the Recession Bus. It used to be called the Abortion Bus. Before that joke was thought of it was just called the Bus to London. For those that were desperate. Fifty-five euros. That’s some rob. I told your man in the ticket office I was a student. He asked to see my student ID. Show me your mickey and I’ll show you my ID, I told him. Fifty-five euros so, he said, and held out his ignorant hand. Here, go on; stick it up in your hole, I told him, as I flung five tenners and a fiver at him. The bus was full and stank of perfume and puke. They squeeze in extra rows of seats to that bus, I’d swear. I’m not tall at all and I was crippled after it. A one in front of me put her seat back to have a sleep. I leaned out over the top of her and said: Put your seat back up. She looked shocked up at me through two innocent blue eyes and said nothing. I kept looking down at her till she straightened. She started reading me in a whisper to her friend. I can hear you, I said, and she stopped.

After I arrived over I spent a good few nights in a doorway with my coat tight around me in front of a statue of a man on a horse. The horse was rearing and the man had a sword drawn. It was summer but still it was cold at night. I walked through the days up and down streets humming with people. Some places had queues that went for miles of people all wanting to see things. I saw a man with loads of different-coloured chalk one day, drawing a picture of Jesus on the footpath. People will walk on him, I said. He’s used to that, your man said, and turned back to his picture. I’d say he was a rare holy Joe. I got fed all those days in a redbrick house in a row of other redbrick houses across from a park. There were cobbles on the street outside that hurt my feet through my shoes. Those shoes were only summery things, as thin as tissue. The Salvation Army lived in that house. They ladled soup into white bowls and cut thin sandwiches into triangles and put them on white paper plates and left them out for the lines of ghosts.

All Joanie asked of me the day I sat beside her in the park across from the Salvation Army’s house was if I was pregnant. I told her no and asked her for the loan of a fag. She laughed and lit it for me. She told me she needed a girl to help her around the house. I told her no problem and we got three tubes and a bus to her house in Crouch End. A man ran shouting that day along the platform in the second tube station with no shirt or shoes on him. People plastered themselves against the wall as he swished past barefooted, chasing something invisible. The next day Joanie asked me would I mind hoovering her two front rooms and the hallways up- and downstairs. Then after a few weeks she asked me would I mind giving an old man a few slaps across the arse, and if I didn’t mind I could stay indefinitely and would need to pay no rent. I told her no problem but that I’d go no further than that. She showed me what to do the first day while the old man bent over the back of a leather chair with his white arse cocked up in the air waiting, his well-tailored trousers pulled down to his knees.

Look, a short throw of your wrist, try to get him evenly across both cheeks. Joanie blistered him with a long narrow switch and then handed it to me. The old man moaned while I reddened him. I skin him now twice monthly, and a handful of others. They normally fix up with Joanie, and never a geek out of them about it. I don’t know do they even get a horn.

MY FATHER RAN off when I was seven or eight with a lady two doors down who had boobs like beach balls with half the air gone out of them. She had yellow hair and black eyebrows. She always wore black leggings and was forever pulling her knickers out of the crack of her arse. She gave him the road before too long and took up with a black fella. My father gave himself over to drinking cider from plastic flagons in an archway off Catherine Street. His body is still there, swallowing cider, but his soul is long gone from him. That can happen to people, you know, without them even realizing it.

I made up my mind to bus it to London the day I looked up from the kitchen sink and saw through the window my brother folded against the back wall with his two arms wrapped around himself and his mouth open in the shape of a scream. He was dying of the pain inside in him. His eyes were closed tight but his face was washed with tears. He’s beautiful, my brother. All the things that happened him, that were done to him. He was crouched down there in a clump of weeds and high grass, keening like a banshee for the things that were taken from him, or never given him, or something, something. His good grey hoodie was stained and frayed at the elbows and his jeans were walking with the dirt. His white runners were turned black. I remember well the day he bought those jeans and runners to wear to his FAS course. He was as proud as anything. Four shades who’d been chasing him burst in through the back gate and grabbed a quarter of him each and lifted him stretched and screaming away.

I had to get my stuff and leave that day so that I’d never again have to bear helpless witness to such sorrow. Looking at my brother’s pain was like being stabbed and stabbed. My beautiful brother. I wonder how is he now. I wonder how the boy is he stabbed in the stomach the night before the morning he jumped the wall into our garden and crouched doubled over on himself in agony while I stood unseen at the kitchen window looking out at him, my heart shredding itself to ribbons. My mother reached for me that day and I pushed her backwards away from me. She landed sobbing on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor. The sight and the sound of her turned my stomach sick. Her sunken mouth and eyes, her sorrow for herself. You done that to him, Mammy, I said. Cathal, my Cathal, she bawled, reaching upwards for her fags. I walked on the splayed fingers of her other hand as I left.

Mammy took up with a good few yokes in the years after Daddy ran off. None of them was any great shakes, and one of them was the devil. I took Mammy’s children’s allowance book from her locker drawer the day I left and went to the post office. The girl at the counter didn’t even look up as she handed me over the notes. Then I walked out the short mile to the county home and sat beside the devil for a while in a ward that smelt of shit and soap. The devil hasn’t the use of himself any more; he was struck by a stroke a couple of years ago, the one favour God granted me.

I went to the kitchen and asked a girl there could I have a pot of tea. I told her I was okay for cups. And I walked back to the devil’s bedside and pulled back the covers of his bed and lowered his grey pyjama bottoms gently by the string and poured the tea carefully onto his wrinkly purple prick. His body kind of shuddered, his eyes bulged like a cartoon man’s, his mouth gaped so wide I thought the skin at either side of it would tear. His wild eyes turned to me and I smiled. Don’t tell anyone, sure you won’t? I whispered into his tufty ear. Be sure and keep this little secret the way Cathal and me always kept yours. I covered him up again and blessed myself and left. Thanks for that, I said to the girl in the kitchen as I handed her back the teapot. You’re welcome, sweetness, she said back.