Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

Mary Heffernan came and got me when I was eleven. Time for you, Heffer, I said. Heffer, I always called her. Cow wasn’t none too pleased. Called her it the whole time, every time I seen her. Ah, howya, Heffer, I’d go, and the odd time I’d throw in a moo or two for good measure. She dragged me down the concrete steps from the flats that first time, Da following behind, keening out of him, drink-breath wafting from him. Jaysus, Da, will you relax, I told him. Cop on to fuck, you’re not able to look after me. He was roaring how he loved me and I was all he had as Mary Heffernan strapped me into a booster seat in the back of her tiny car. HSE rules an all. I’m a tall girl now, leggy, but I wasn’t quite one point five metres that time. Rules is rules is rules.

My ma got deported before I could walk. Sometimes I think I remember her, but it’s probably just a dream I’m remembering, or a picture I have of her made of Da’s memories. I don’t know how she and my da made me. It must have been like a lioness getting mounted by a mangy oul tomcat. Loads a them wans done that, Da told me. Come over an rode the first poor bollix they seen. Trying to get up the pole to get a passport. But something went wrong with the plan, he said. He wasn’t ever great on specifics. They got some hop the day they come for her, he said, when they seen she was actually there, waiting for them! She told him don’t worry, she’d be back in a few weeks. Right in front of the coppers an all. They only rolled their eyes and asked did she need help with her bags. She spat on the ground at their feet and walked down all them steps with her suitcase balanced on her head, just to spite the fuckers. Lift wasn’t even busted that time. Elegance of her, Da would say, making the wavy shape of the outline of her in the air with his hands. Like a fucking queen. Like a fucking queen. Lord God, he fair loved her. He loved telling me that story. I took what I got.

I got put with a family in Blacksmith’s Walk, down at the shady end of the East Wall. I had it in my head I’d get a fucking Barbie if I got in with a real family for a while. I hadn’t bargained on how much I’d miss my da. Started crying for him an all, first night out. That crowd had only sons, two smelly yokes, looking at me with hungry eyes. Keep them boys away from me, I told the woman of the house once Heffer had fucked off to chew the cud somewhere. Her oul fella laughed and smiled at me kindly but she showed me no gentleness. Called me young lady the whole time. Any fuckin Barbies, missus? I asked her, through my tears. She had no way at all about her, that one. She wasn’t bad, I’d say, but she sure wasn’t good either. A big nothing, sucking the cash for giving hot meals and warm beds and cold shoulders to the children of people from a few cuts below her. Put her hand on me roughly once or twice. I legged it after less than a week. Them manky-looking small fellas gave me the creeps. Snotty and silent, they were. Animal eyes. Probably rapists by now.

I learnt all the streets’ twists and turns and sometimes when the cold stung me too much I’d turn myself in for a while. No house could hold me long. I first seen the house on a stint I done in the wild when I was fifteen. I had found Da that day, thrown down at the foot of the spire, nearly expired. I got all choked up over the bollix. There was a vulture or two circling, swooping, their shadows moving in and out around him. Someone got him on the junk, smacked him up, strung him out. He probably thought he had to. Probably apologized to the dealers for not getting on the hard stuff years ago, for never having given them a turn. I dragged him up the street as far as the Garden of Remembrance and plonked him on a bench and slapped him and kissed him and cried tears over him that stung my eyes coming out. And I left him there to burn in the afternoon sun, protected by a small army of Japaneses armed with cameras as big as their heads.

The house was only ever meant to be a temporary thing, a place to put my da a while, the way he’d be out of the eye-line of the vampires that wanted his dole money and whatever he made from the robbing and the welfare strokes in exchange for packets of dust that they hid in the cracks of themselves. There was a long narrow jungle to the back of it, grass the height of my chest, twisted crab-apple trees, giant rhubarbs, a tiny toilet in a broken shed that must have been for servants one time. There was running water, somehow, but no juice. Da came clean of the gear after a terrible fortnight of screaming and sweating and vomiting and had wits enough back to lift a car battery and a circuit breaker and a coil of wire and a few other bits, and we were able to listen to the radio and run a tiny fridge that was got from the Clarion Hotel. We had a camping stove and sleeping bags and some pots and pans and a knife and fork each and all that summer we were cosy and happy. That’s when I seen the story in the Herald about the tinkers.

The house was a three-storey redbrick island in a sea of grey concrete and wild grass. Boarded and crumbly but built for the centuries. There was nothing in front only road, and nothing behind only field that stretched away to a hump with a posh school beyond it. You could often hear roars and shouts of matches being played coming across the breeze. There was a petrol station with a shop to the left as you stood at the door, across a half-acre of scrub, and a pylon and a mast in a fenced-off square to the right. I often wondered was it healthy to be living in the shadow of that yoke. Then I’d think again about what healthy was, what good for you meant, what bad for you could mean. Da done a powerful job that late autumn, his crowning glory, the best thing he ever done. He dredged up his talent from where it had lain soaked in the dark inside of him and painted a mural on the downstairs walls of the inside of the house, of a line of children, dancing, running, happy, being led along a flower-strewn path towards a forest, by a tall, slender woman with a suitcase on the top of her head, and her arms out a bit from her sides, her long fingers beckoning to the children behind. Then he bust in one night to the shop and run a sealed wire out from it and along the back wall and through the scrub and into our house and we had proper power. And he sat at the end of that week of work in the glow of a bulb and the flickering television light, warmed by a three-bar heater and he smiled and looked along his line of painted children and up at his painted Amazonian love and said Now, sweetheart, didn’t I do something? And I kissed him on his rough forehead and said Yes, Da, you surely did.

A fella from the shop copped us. He spotted Da’s tidy drill-hole and the plastic-covered wire run out from it and followed it along the wall and the scrub and through our back fence and up the crab-apple forest to the back of our house. He burst in through the back door I had only barely barred. Da was out, doing a bit. He had a bulgy belly and bulgier eyes and wet lips. But still an all there was a kind of a pleasantness about him, or something. Jaysus, wha? I asked him. I’ll pay you for the juice, sir. He only stood looking, licking his tacher with a darting tongue. I read him like a fuckin book. The second time he come I recorded it on a digital camera Da picked up somewhere, perched and aimed on a high shelf, and the third time I played it back for him and he nearly shat himself. I have copies made of that, too, I told him, and he went from pink to white to purple and I thought he might fall away in a heap, dead. Ah here, I told him, go easy, just drop us in a bag of messages once a week and look after my da’s wire and we’ll all stay friends. And the years rolled on and bit by bit we lined our nest, my da and me.

I walked back up to Walter’s Lane last night, just for the one look, to see were they still there, or people like them at least, cousins or clansmen or something. There was houses there now, low affairs, chalets, I think they’re called. There was cars and vans, big ones. No sign of the king, or his band of followers. A dog stood sentry near the same gateway I looked in from twelve years ago. We won’t go as wild as them people did, Da and me. We’ll probably be in the papers the same way, the solicitor has me told, people do go mad for these rags-to-riches tales, these adverse possession stories, squatters getting given proper rights. The untitled, the unentitled, getting gave title. The poor becoming rich at the stroke of a pen, the fall of a judge’s hammer, because rules is rules is rules. Land is a finite resource, he says, and the courts abhor its waste. Da will be a king tomorrow, and I’ll be a princess, and we’ll take the boards from across the front door of our castle and we’ll sand it and paint it a deep royal blue.