Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

She told her three children they were having porridge. The youngest wanted to know why she’d bought Coco Pops if they weren’t allowed to eat them. They were snuck into my trolley, she told him, and it won’t be let happen again. You can have porridge with honey in it or you can go to school hungry. She leant and kissed the top of his sulky head and he winced and rubbed his hand along his crown. Ugh, Mamm- y . Her eldest boy had a hurley on his lap and he and his father were inspecting a crack along its bas, their foreheads almost touching. Her daughter was wearing makeup on her eyes and a skim of lipstick; her skirt was too far above her knees but she was wearing thick tights and it didn’t seem worth the row. Her daughter had her iPhone in one hand and a slice of toast in the other and she was scrolling slowly with her thumb and chewing rhythmically, her eyes fixed to the little screen, the light of it reflected in them. The rain was gone and the wind had lost heart. A rainbow rose from behind the distant hills and arched across a sky of baby blue.

Her husband took the hurley and left it leaning against the back door, the way he’d remember to bring it as he passed out to his car. Jimmy Ryan will hoop that no bother, he told the boy. You can probably collect it on the way back from college. I’ll text you and let you know. Sound, Dad. Her husband always had a redness in his cheeks in the mornings, and his thick hair clumped boyishly. He always showered and dressed after his breakfast, because he said he didn’t like to go to work with a smell of food off him. He always took off his pyjamas and put on shorts and a T-shirt before he came downstairs, though, and a pair of flip-flops. He only ever got cross these mornings over those flip-flops. Where the fuck are my flip-flops? Pounding up- and downstairs, in and out of rooms. And the girl would roll her eyes and the boys would giggle and skit and she’d tell him to mind his language and they were in whatever corner he’d kicked them into the day before and she had more to be doing than minding his blessed flip-flops. A fifty-year-old man that can’t mind one pair of flip-flops. I’m forty-nine. Not for long more, she’d say teasing, but she’d smile her best smile at him, because she knew it bothered him, the thought of turning fifty.

He was a buildings manager at a commercial complex. He worried non-stop. About cracks in plaster, moss in gutters, overloaded circuits, rising damp, descending wires. He found it hard to delegate. He had people under him but you wouldn’t think it. You’d think he alone was holding up every building inside in that blessed complex, like Atlas holding up the world. She worried about him, the redness in his handsome face, the deepening creases at the sides of his eyes, the shots of blood in the whites of them; it couldn’t be good for a man his age. Fretting about bricks and mortar. Those buildings would be standing a long time after him. At least he always slept well. Sleep is important. Her own eyes felt a bit gritty. The hours she’d lost to the moaning wind.

The youngest lad wouldn’t give her a kiss at the school gate any more. He was nearly out of the car before it was fully stopped. First year in secondary was tricky. She wouldn’t force the issue or embarrass him opposite his pals. But still it stung a little each morning. It pained her, the leaving go of that part of their relationship. The kisses would come back, she knew, when he was older, but they’d be manly, dutiful, perfunctory. The eldest was starting to do that now: he’d kissed her on the cheek last summer before going off on a holiday with his hurling team. She’d heard one of the other lads saying something like Ooh, did you give your mammy a kiss ? And he’d said something back like, I did, ya. Will I give yours a kiss as well? And that quietened the smart-arse, and she felt a burning pride in her son, and tears pinpricked the backs of her eyes. He was so like his father. He was already so much a man.

Her daughter had a boyfriend. A lad from town. Sixteen was too young for seriousness, but it was there. It was hard to talk to her. It was hard to think of her being pressured, feeling obliged, giving herself away too early, letting herself be used and cast away, letting her little heart get smashed to smithereens. There was no avoiding that pain, it seemed, no way of protecting her from it. Her daughter’s world seemed compressed sometimes into the screen of that telephone; all of her tides turned at the pull of its gravity, her whole existence seemed wedded to it. She’d told her daughter to bring the boyfriend out home, but she hadn’t yet. She was desperate for a proper look at him, to listen to his voice, to know if he was respectable, or respectful at least.

She stopped on the way back from town at the church. The car-park was low, surfaced in gravel; loughs of water lay along it. Rain often opened holes in the soft ground of it that would lie in wait for car-wheels beneath the treacherous puddles. She tutted and parked on the kerb, at the side of the main road, annoyed. Because the funds were there for the tarmacking, they’d been raised and left as yet unused. She’d helped with the fundraising herself, months ago, pushing alms envelopes through letterboxes, selling books of tickets for raffles and lines for a sponsored fun-run. And her car was just out of tax, and she didn’t want any nosy-parkers scanning her expired disc and thinking things that weren’t true. She nearly drove away again, but she thought of a debt she owed to Saint Anthony from the previous week when the miraculous medal her grandmother had given her had gone missing. She’d promised to light candles, two euros a go, and the number of promised candles had increased from five to ten before she’d found the medal, sitting dusted with flour in the bowl of the weighing scales. She had the coins in her bag and the debt was being called in, softly but insistently, a whispered voice at the back of her mind.

She should have gone to the gym. She was after missing her spin class two weeks in a row. But the instructor had changed and she wasn’t as happy with the new lad. He was very young-looking and his shout was a bit too screechy. And they’d upped the price to twelve euros for the hour from ten for those that hadn’t paid the lot up front. All the smart ones paid in the one go, or the ones with the biggest arses anyway. They thought that’d surely force them into going every week, the idea of not getting what they’d paid for. She resolved to walk the block before work, once she had the vegetables done and the meat left out for the dinner, and the note of instructions for her husband written out and left stuck to the fridge. She settled her debt and said a few prayers and sat for a while not thinking of anything, her eyes focused on Our Lord in his agony. She was roused from her gentle reverie by a movement from the front pew; an old one making shapes to leave. She left herself before she was sucked into anything, gossip or small-talk, or the feeling of being judged, somehow, or of being made to feel unentitled to the company of Christ.

She peeled potatoes and chopped carrots and parsnips and left them in saucepans of water on the hob, ready. She took a sirloin joint from the fridge and dressed it in a casserole dish with onions and apple slices and covered it and slid it back into the fridge. She wrote on the back of an ESB envelope:

1. Turn on oven to 180. 2. When red light goes off put in meat from fridge. It should take two hours. 3. Drain off juice and mix with OXO cube and water for gravy. 4. Turn spuds and vegetables on about 20 mins b4 meat cooked.

He knew what to do but still she always left the note, fastened to the fridge door with a magnet in the shape of the Eiffel Tower that the eldest boy had brought back from a school tour for her. She put on her tracksuit and walked the block fast, watching the hedgerows and gardens and greens for her lark, her little man. There was no sight of him, but she heard him again, thrilling, chirruping, pleading for love. She was flushed returning, her calves ached a little, but she felt good. Her morning had gone well and she had a bit of time left before her two to ten shift, so she could go easy with her shower, and she sang as she climbed the stairs, and thought of the weekend away she was going to surprise her husband with for his fiftieth, and the things she could do to take his mind off the march of his years.