Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

JOANIE RANG THE Chinese around seven. What will I get for the lodger? I told her I didn’t know. Oh, fuck a duck. I’ll just get three sweet and sours and three chips. The lodger poked a ratty nose through the basement door when she heard the telltale revving of the delivery scooter. I shoved a plastic box of sweet and sour chicken and a bag of chips at her. Then I felt kind of sorry and shouted down along the darkness for her to come and eat with us in the kitchen. Is okay, she shouted back up and I got suddenly cross again and slammed the basement door. Joanie spilt sauce all over her leg and she screeched in pain. I went to help her wipe it off and she grabbed my wrist and squeezed it hard. Get your fucking stinking Irish hands off me, you little bitch , she hissed at me. Fuck you, Joanie, I said back, and she slapped me hard underneath my eye. Her ring opened my skin. That’ll be the day that you fuck anything , Joanie said through her down-turned mouth before she started to shovel balls of battered chicken into it. I left her at it. X Factor was starting anyway.

Ellie, Ellie, I’m sorry, Joanie said as she splashed onto the couch beside me. You know, don’t you, that I love you, don’t you, my doll? And she stroked the side of my face with her soft hand before slumping snoring against me. I quenched her fag and prised her wineglass from her manicured fingers and arranged her more comfortably before moving to the armchair for Xtra Factor . I heard a series of soft creaks from the stairs and then the sound of the pipes clanking and groaning as the shower came on. I felt an urge to go to the kitchen and run the hot tap full bore to freeze her little arse but resisted it. That’d be horrible. I was fair tempted, though. One of the other lodgers months ago was tall and dark-skinned. I put a fresh dogshit from the path outside into her bed once while she showered; I scooped it up into a plastic bag and left it under her duvet, halfway down the mattress. Then I lay in bed and wondered why I’d done that. She never mentioned it. Her Paki came and took her the following week and left an envelope fat with cash for Joanie. I went and checked and the shit was as I’d left it. She must have seen it and slept on the floor.

The doorbell rang. I saw a hulking shape through the side blind of the bay window, hunched at the top step, as though poised for something. Joanie snorted and stirred. Whassa, whassa, she asked, lifting herself. Her skirt was riding up over her hips, her black knickers on show. They looked expensive. The shape outside was standing still, and some cold wind blew through me, and it brought a smell of ashes, a warning smell.

As Joanie wobbled around the room looking for her shoes I slipped upstairs and waited on the landing. Ellie, Ellie, answer the fackin door, she was screeching in her true Cockney, ANSWER THE FACKIN DOOR! The doorbell rang again and I heard her cursing and fumbling with the lock. ELLIE! All fackin right, will you just … and the hulking shape was in the hallway, and there was a violent shuffling, a muffled screaming, and there was a noise like a football being bounced hard on wet grass, over and over again. I stood by the banister, gripping the top rail, staring at the whiteness of my knuckles, and then at the wide-eyed lodger, haloed by steam in the bathroom door, a towel tight around her middle. Silence suddenly fell and after long empty seconds we heard the sound of a man crying softly. Oh, Mum, he sobbed. And the door clicked gently closed. There are only so many stories in the world.

I’ve left Joanie lying in the hallway for tonight. I only had one bare glance at her. She’s dead all right, because her glassy eyes are facing the foot of the stairs and her body is towards the front door. It’s black flagstone, thank God, easily cleaned. There isn’t much blood anyway. I wonder will the lodger help in the morning. If she doesn’t offer I won’t force her. That’d be lousy. She’ll have to give me a hand getting Joanie into the chest freezer, though. For all her minding of herself there’s a fair old heft to Joanie.

And soon the lodger’s Paki will come and leave a bulging envelope for the proprietress of the Crouch End Introductions Agency. But right now I have half of a carrot cake to eat and tomorrow there’s a freezer to be filled and a white and ancient arse to be whacked.

IT WAS JACK MATT-AND told us the story of what happened the night a girl from the Villas wiped eyes and broke hearts, bringing down the house as Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World . Jack Matt-And was there that night, at the back of the hall, swaying.

Jack Matt-And was so called because he’d start every sentence with And. He’d arrive in already drunk and he’d drink away steady and seem to get no drunker, but he’d sit at the end of the bar telling stories of other times he was drunk, in a soft chant that’d kind of lull you into listening. Like this he’d go:

And I was on Church Road. And I had only one shoe. And one leg of my pants was drowned wet. And my left eye was closed and wouldn’t open. And my mouth was scalded with pain. And the yard of the church was lit white by the moon. And the sapless old trees loomed along it. And Our Lord and His saints were asleep inside. And a man walking down towards the gate in a coat that was tied at the front and pinched inwards looked down at the ground and then up at the sky, and adjusted his path to avoid me. And I was prostrate like a penitent dog who was kicked from a house that he’d shat in. And the man hummed a tune through his thin bloodless lips so the air wouldn’t be still between us. And he could pretend this was something he saw every time he walked out through the moonlight.

HER REAL NAME now is only an echo of an echo in the town. That’s how hard the nickname fastened itself to her. Meryl. As in Streep. Her people were nothing to boast about. Her father was Paddy Screwballs, who was left go from the buses over something only whispered about. Something not known about so it by default became something terrible, and shameful. Sure it must have been. She had one brother a labourer, big-fisted and dark, and another brother who wasn’t all there who went down to Roscrea every day on the free bus to the funny farm, and a sister who was gone years, married to an English fella. Her mother was dead a good long while, from some unnamed thing only women get.

I gave the spaces between orders to looking at her. Go on away and pull yourself, Bofty told me one time. You’re no good to me with your balls bursting full. You’ll be spilling drink and giving out wrong change and making a pure solid hames of things. And he rested his belly on the draining-board of the glasses sink inside the bar and rested his eyes on Meryl. You always got the feeling she didn’t know how lovely she was. You always got the feeling she couldn’t feel you looking.

When you’re young and quiet and you move around softly and keep your eyes cast mostly down it’s easy to hear things. People forget you’re there, or forget you might hear, or don’t care if you hear. I was finished up with school and I hadn’t a great Leaving Cert got and my father was at me daily to go into the buildings, there was a power of money to be got in the buildings, there was lads hadn’t hands to wipe their arses clearing five or six hundred pounds a week. Imagine what the lads in the pantses and shirts and white helmets get! And they only required to stand around the place looking at bits of paper. But I liked the pub and the hum of talk and the safety of knowing where everything was and what everything did. And I liked the looks I got through windows opened by drink into the realness of people.

I often thought of a poem from school when she was in the bar. The one about the planter’s daughter. Men saw her, and drank deep, and were silent. Or sometimes they were the opposite of silent, but it amounted to the same thing: they dribbled and spat words everywhere, and tried to be funny, in a panic of desire. And when she wasn’t there, people talked about her, and I listened.