Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

She talked more but I didn’t really listen, wanting to know had I gone to see Finding Nemo , and I only nodded, and she drove me back the road to our house and every car that came against us I felt like the people was all looking at me and I felt open on the two sides of me, and like I shouldn’t be in that car at all, so I sort of hugged myself to tighten myself into as small a size as I could. I asked her drop me at the end of our road and I jumped out of her car without barely saying bye and ran up to Mammy to tell her about Daddy and the Curleys and the shades, but never breathed a word about the lady, because there was no words to say what happened, only a feeling I couldn’t even name.

Even though I’ve grown since then and will for a good few years to come, until I’m eighteen or nineteen, I’ll never again walk as tall as I did before that day. Before that lady looked at me, and divided and shrunk me, and wiped me off of herself, without even knowing she was doing it. And she never thinking for a second she was anything but kind.

The ways of some things are set, like the courses of rivers or the greenness of grass, or the trouble that follows my daddy, or the hard light of knowing in people’s eyes.

THE SKY THE day we shot the boy was clear and blue. I remember seeing before I took aim at his heart a swallow dipping and rising low along the treeline before disappearing into the flashes. There was no stir from the grass or the leaves nor any rustle from the undergrowth. The boy’s screams tormented no creatures only ourselves. The gag we had on him wasn’t worth tuppence. John P was there, of course, and Pat Devine, and the two Brien Cutters and Martin Guiney. It was Pat brought the rifles and the ammunition and the one magazine of blank rounds and it was Martin stowed the fired rifles in plastic sheeting inside a weighted burlap sack and rowed out solo a good ways and dropped the whole lot into the black hole in Youghal Bay. The two Brien Cutters took care of the wooden post. I don’t know exactly how, nor did I ever want to.

A strange thing happened in here the other day. Not that death is any stranger in this place. There was a couple over there in front of the big picture window, sitting facing one another, playing ball. Your man the physio had them given exercises to do, something like the ones he had myself and John P doing there a few months ago when John P had more of his reason. I was watching away and next thing didn’t your man drop the ball and the two of them sat looking down at it and I was thinking Will I go over in the hell and give them a dig-out not to have them sitting there looking so sadly at one another when all of a shot your man put out his hand and she grabbed it and he sort of yanked her over onto his lap and I saw then that he was crying like a child and he put his two arms tight around her middle and they were cheek to cheek for a little while, a few moments just, and she went as limp as a rag-doll in his arms and I knew then that she had died. Just like that, imagine. It was a lovely thing, really. He cradled her head with his good hand and kissed her on her cheek before they carried her away from him and then he sat there in silence a while, just looking out at the rosebushes. I think I knew him once, out in the world. I think he was a decent man.

We’re not in command of ourselves any more. John P wet himself a small while ago and the boy that’s meant to be keeping an eye on us was too busy scratching himself to notice. John P said nothing, only tried and tried to get up. But there’s a belt clamped firm around his middle today to anchor him, because he wandered yesterday and got into terrible mischief, and they’re afraid of their lives he might do himself an injury. The poor misfortune had his beige slacks on; otherwise no one might have noticed. I watched the darkening as it bloomed outwards from his middle and sprouted tendrils down his legs. He knew it was happening and hadn’t power enough to stem the flow. We locked eyes for a moment or two. I’ll never in what’s left of my days forget the look upon his face. Are you all right, John P, I whispered, but all he heard was silence, all he saw was my hand raised uselessly and the opening and closing of my dry old mouth.

The carer as he’s called copped on for a finish what was after happening to John P. He was so vexed-looking I was certain sure he was going to start beating him. He cursed in some foreign language and balled his hands into fists and stood glowering down at my oldest friend and I’d bet what bit of life I’ve left he was imagining himself wringing poor John P’s dear old neck.

Nappies. Nappies for you from now on, my friend. Look at you. Look at you. And John P looked sorrowfully down at himself and back up at the boy and over at me and what was there to say but sorry.

Some days I watch John P foostering about, looking for his glasses or what have you, and as a rule I’ll see the thing he’s looking for, knocked from the arm of his chair by his elbow onto the ground, and I’ll see him getting more and more frustrated with his fruitless search, and the glasses or the book or whatever it is will be lying by his foot, and I feel a hotness rising in my mind and it’s all I can do at those times not to go over and grab him by the wrist and twist it until it’s on the point of snapping but I never would, I only sit here instead and say inside in my head For God’s sake, John P, for God’s sake, John P, until he sees at last the missing thing and goes about retrieving it, a process every bit as tortuous as the search. I never would, I’m nearly sure. But one day he was rubbing his wrist and looking at me and there was fear and something like reproach in his watery eyes, I think, and I wonder did I do him an injury unknown to myself. Is that a thing that’s capable of happening? I wouldn’t have thought so, before the start of this retreat of reason.

It was the bones of a year after the terrible thing happened to his only daughter before any of us laid eyes on John P. And when we did we got an awful hop. The flesh was gone from him and all that was left was skin stretched tightly over bone. I watched as people forced themselves to talk to him in the parish hall and the hurling field and out at the golf club and around the town in all the places he had always been seen and known well and greeted with real warmth and affection, and they suppressing the urge to recoil from him, and their voices pitched at an unnatural frequency in forced good humour and a little quaver in their words giving away their discomfort, saying things like, Begodden John P you’re looking well, you’re looking fit and healthy, how are they all at home, how’s … And they’d leave the enquiry hanging unfinished, expecting John P to pick up its loose end and tie it in a tight knot and close it off swiftly and fully but he only stood there and the stare of him was terrifying, truth be told, his eyes seeming to have increased in size as the rest of him had shrunk, and to have been filled with a wild kind of grief. In those first few months after his return from exile he only shuffled and shrugged and mumbled and whenever he turned his cadaverous face to me I nearly cried, so sorry was I for my dear friend, for the year he was after having, for the way I had left him above in isolation with his silent wife and his savaged daughter, afraid to return after that terrible solitary meeting shortly after it all happened, not knowing words to say to them or even what way to look at them.

When Jim Gildea told us the boy was getting out, six years before the end of the sentence passed that mad day inside in the court in Limerick, he couldn’t meet John P’s eyes; it was as though he had assumed upon himself a vicarious responsibility for the failings of the system that employed him. Good behaviour, Jim almost whispered. John P set his face and thanked Jim and said Oh Lord God, and made a show of shaking his head and revealed nothing of the fact that we already knew, we’d been contacted weeks before by the brother of a man in the know in an office of a section of a department up the country. We had plans made, and contingencies, and the tools procured to carry out the sentence we had passed in absentia on the boy. Nothing in Jim Gildea’s demeanour suggested he suspected the convening of our kangaroo court; he put his hand on John P’s shoulder and promised that if that boy returned to this area he wouldn’t have a moment’s peace, that he, Jim, would haunt him and hound him. And how likely is it he’ll show his face around here? Very likely, we knew, and Jim knew it, too, but he was doing his damnedest to balm the bite of his news, to salve the wound he thought he had inflicted. We all knew of the boy, and of his mother and father, and of theirs before them, even. He had a gaggle of sisters and brothers, some flung to the four winds and some still local, and a clatter of cousins and clan all along the far end of the Ashdown Road. They all came out of the Villas, in the heart of our parish and separate from us.