Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

He couldn’t ever keep a pet again after that. A few oul tabbies mooched around the yard and the odd time he fed them scraps but they never belonged to him, he never loved them, nor they him. And the few cattle came and went and he never petted them the way some do.

Time occupied him. The notion of it being a thing. How was it? All that’s real is the present moment. What’s a moment? A thing infinitely divisible downwards. So the smallest part of a moment doesn’t exist. So a moment doesn’t exist. So time doesn’t exist, only as a trick the mind plays on itself to stop all things seeming to happen at once. These are the things an evening can hang on, that can give form to an hour of standing at the haggard gate, leaning, resting a foot on the second bar up, regarding thistles and bees and distant mountains with a level eye. The idea that everything has happened and nothing has happened yet, that existence is a singularity of infinite smallness, that Mammy and Daddy are still alive and were never born, that the hawk is out hunting and might come home yet.

The seeming uselessness of existing occurred often to him. The depth of the water at the bend of the river occurred often to him, where it seemed sometimes in flood to flow back on itself, to rage against its own rushing. The coils of rope in the loft of the barn, the discs of poison laid for rats. But yet each morning hope pealed from the eastern sky and rang all day in his ears, or for as much of each day as was needed.

Something will always come along, he said, to light the way a little bit. Moon, with his big roundy head up on him. The possibility that Moon might fall off of his bicycle. Ah boys. Or a book he hadn’t read. Or a story he hadn’t heard before. Or the shiver of a leaf, or a certain lay of light along the land. Or yourself, he said, and smiled at me, and looked away, and said no more about it.

He dreamt often of the moment of his own death. He told me once in detail about one of those dreams, and he dipped his eyes in shyness at the end of his story and brought his cup halfway to his lips before putting it down again. His hand was shaking hard. Isn’t that a good one, he said. I bet you could make a right good story out of that. I bet you I could is right, I said, and smiled at him.

A pain came on him one day that rose and fell like a tidal river. He started to pass blood in the toilet and the sight of it frightened him so he stopped looking.

I saw Moon lingering by his fresh grave crying silently when all the others had gone back the road to the village to drink pints in respect and remembrance. He stood sentinel there until the sun was nearly set and I was passing back and said, Come on, Moon, I’ll drop you home.

I’d been given a key and told to take a keepsake from the cottage by the cousin who fell in for Tommy’s share of this earth, after the once-over was done. I asked Moon would he come in with me. He nodded. All he’d needed all the years was an invitation.

We opened the closet beside his bed and were caught beneath an avalanche of books.

We looked at pictures he’d drawn of birds, and a painting he’d made of a hawk on a perch, with eyes of black darkness.

We read a letter he’d written to God, thanking Him for all the saving beauty in the world.

THE WAYS OF some things are set like the blueness of the sky. The day I learnt that started with a hunt for a coil pack for the Vectra that wasn’t even needed for a finish. Daddy priced one new and it was poison dear so he told your man go shite. Then he rang his cousin in Long Pavement to know had he one, and he hadn’t, and Daddy rang around a few more lads he knew that had bits of scrappers lying around for breaking and there wasn’t a coil pack to be got, so for a finish he gave in and rang Curley’s even though he can’t bear them. He said to your man on the phone If I give you a hundred euros for it and it turns out not to be what’s wrong, will you take it back off of me? And your man said on the phone he would. Come on, daughter, he said to me over his shoulder as he swung into the cab of his lorry. Come with me for the spin. And of course the Vectra still wouldn’t start even with the coil pack that was got from Curley’s.

The Curleys have acre upon acre of scrappers. I’d love a day let free in there. There’s no way in, though, bar through the front office. They have the whole place walled off like Limerick prison for fear people would be lifting stuff. They have forklifts and all in there, for piling cars on top of one another. They have a fleet of breakdown lorries and a transporter. There’s a million cars in there. Daddy says God be with the days a man could give a wander about with his wrench set and get what he wanted and pay the man and go way. Besides sitting on a plastic chair in a waiting room like a man waiting for a doctor. Reception area me hole, Daddy says. It’s far from reception areas the Curleys were reared. I think he had run-ins with a Curley or two in the old days.

When we went back the second time that morning to Curley’s and Daddy gave his receipt in through the hatch and laid the coil pack down on the ledge in front of the hatch, I knew straight away there’d be trouble. I just had a feeling, a burning in my belly. Daddy was like a lunatic as it was because he had his hand skinned two or three times in the swapping in and out of coil packs and starters new and old and in-between and still the Vectra only coughing at him when he tried to get it going. Your man held up the receipt in front of him and his glasses was half the way down his nose and Daddy said, You’re doing great examinations of it, it’s not so long since you seed it last, only two or three cups of tea ago. Do you think, says your man slowly, smartly, that we dismantle cars here for the good of our health?

Well, if he did. Daddy backed back a step so he was only a kick of my leg from where I was sitting. I heard his breaths heave down his nose. Give me back ninety so, Daddy said in a low voice, real even, and we’ll call it quits. That’s a tenner clear for the minute it took your monkey outside to unscrew it. That’s six hundred fuckin euros an hour. Nice work if you can get it, pal. Your man still had his head leaned back and he was baldy on top and curly at the sides – was he a Curley, I wonder? A person’s name often describes them bang-on – and his glasses were still half the way down his snout but he was examining Daddy now instead of the receipt and he said, How’s about we give you a credit note? And Daddy did his closed-mouth no-smile nose-breath laugh that he does at the start of trouble always and said, How’s about you keep your word, or ninety per cent of it? And your man said No. And Daddy said, Okay, how’s about I drag you out here over that counter and wipe that fuckin floor with you, and he pointed behind him at the floor, and the woman that was waiting for a catalytic converter for a 206 turned round for a look and her eyes were a kind of wide and it was then that I saw that she kind of had the look of Mary Margaret my sister I love the bones of who’s gotten married and gone to England and I haven’t her seen for a long time.

Then your man said, Right, and disappeared, and Daddy stood looking in through the hatch your man had closed and bolted with his two hands hanging and they changing from fists to hands and back to fists in time with the ticking of the clock. Daddy swung round from the hatch. What says that? And he pointed at a sign beside the other hatch in the far wall. Garda … Traffic … Corpse, I read out. Core , the 206 woman said. Hah? I nearly said as she smiled at me, and I remembered just in time and said Pardon? She had the look of Mary Margaret, for sure and certain. What about the p and the s , I said to her. They’re silent, she told me. What’s the point of having them there, so, I said, and she nodded and kind of laughed. It’s a French word, she said. It means … and she wrinkled her eyes in thinking … branch. Like, they’re the branch of the Guards that deals with traffic. This is where towed-away cars are kept, until their owners pay their fines and collect them. Oh, I said, and stayed looking at her a bit too long but she didn’t see me, she was turned back around again to her magazine. Then I noticed how worried-looking Daddy was after getting. But he listened all the same to the woman explaining to me about the French p and s and he nodded at her, to say thanks, I’d say, for being so kind as to teach me something. Daddy’s mad for education for me, having had none of his own. Your man was gone a good long while. There was trouble on the way, I knew.