M. Hyland - Carry Me Down

Please write back to me this time and I will arrange a demonstration for you either in Dublin or in London or wherever it suits you best. I will prove that I can detect lies with 100 % accuracy .

John Egan

Age 11

Gorey, Ireland

My mother comes into my room at teatime without knocking. ‘Why don’t you knock?’ I say. ‘Don’t I have any privacy?’

She laughs and sits on my bed. ‘Aren’t you a cheeky one? Maybe I did knock and your ears are too full of earwigs to hear.’

She rubs my leg as she speaks.

‘I hate talking about housework, but it’s high time you did some of your chores. Could you please do them without being reminded? You haven’t done the hoovering for a week and you haven’t dusted the mantelpiece either.’

‘Sorry.’

‘All right. You can eat, then. We’re having chops for tea and I’ve made some rhubarb and custard for dessert,’ she says.

And suddenly, even though I haven’t seen my father in two days, I am happy.

It’s Friday and I walk to school quickly and get there early so that I can watch Mr Roche prepare his classes at the teacher’s table. I watch him all morning. I like him very much and I especially like his voice.

But then, during second lesson, I realise that I have been holding on too long and I must go to the toilet. I can’t have another accident. I stand and put my hand up and ask to be excused.

Mr Roche comes straight over to me, takes my hand, and leads me into the corridor. I’m embarrassed to be led like this in front of my class, but he looks at me as we walk, and he smiles at me, as though leaving the classroom like this is normal, as though I am his friend.

In the corridor, he asks me to sit under the coat rack and I sit with my head under somebody’s duffel coat, holding on to my urine.

‘Keep it in,’ he says. ‘Just a minute longer.’

I manage to hold on. Then he takes me to the bathroom.

He waits for me and I wait for him to leave. But he stays by the door, looking all the while as I stand with my hand on my zipper.

‘I won’t bite,’ he says. ‘Go ahead.’

I turn away from him and open my fly. I urinate. So little comes out I worry that I’ll soon need to go again.

When I have finished I turn to look at him.

‘Good lad,’ he says.

I walk over to him and he pats me on the back.

‘You’re a good lad,’ he says. ‘You have a very nice way about you.’

I smile and he smiles back, and I feel all right, even when we return to class, and everybody is talking and laughing. But they’re not laughing at me. Kate is standing up next to the teacher’s desk, impersonating Mr Roche by speaking in a posh voice.

Mr Roche tells her to return to her desk and, as she walks away from him, he slaps her across the back of the head. ‘You cannot sell your phlegm and then ask for it back again,’ he says.

Nobody understands, but everybody laughs, because Kate is stunned and, for the first time since she came to our school she is silent. For the rest of the day Kate doesn’t move unless Mr Roche tells her to and even Brendan does not talk to her.

After school, when everybody has left the classroom, I go to Mr Roche’s desk. He looks up at me and smiles. He has straight, white teeth and deep laugh-lines around his mouth.

‘Mr Roche?’ I say. ‘I was wondering if you could help find me some books about lie detection from America?’

I am hoping that he’ll ask me why I’m interested in the subject, but instead he grabs my hand.

‘You’ve reminded me of something that’s been bothering me.’

‘What?’ I ask.

He stands up and walks to the window. ‘It makes my blood boil that this school has no library. Every school should have a library.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I say. ‘Yes, Mr Roche.’

‘No storybooks,’ he says, ‘means no reading stories.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I say.

‘No reading stories means no imagination. We all start life with an imagination, of course, but without stories to feed it the imagination, like a starved dog, dies.’

He stares out at the playing field. ‘And when a person doesn’t read and when a person has no imagination they are sure to end up with no inventiveness of mind and spend a life with nothing but hackneyed, worn-out things to say. A life of slogans, jargon and clichés.’

I nod.

‘A weak man repeats what he hears and makes himself dumb.’

‘I agree, sir.’

He walks away and then walks straight back to me to say, ‘And science and invention stem from the imagination.’

I’ve been searching for something to say, and now I’ve found it. ‘Einstein thought that, too,’ I say. I read this in the book my father left on the coffee table last week.

He looks up at me, excited. ‘You’re right, John Egan. You’re no fool. Full points for you.’

‘Thank you, Mr Roche.’

He comes to me and puts his hand on my arm. ‘And no imagination means the only life you can live is the one you’ve been given. And God knows, looking around here, I’d say some of you haven’t been given much of a life.’

I wonder if I should say something, but he walks to the blackboard without speaking.

I stare at his black hair and the way it slides smoothly over the shoulders of his jacket. He must be made at least partly of silk.

‘I’m sending you home at half two tomorrow,’ he says. ‘And on Monday morning there’ll be a surprise waiting.’

Does he mean a surprise for me, or for all?

‘Go home now,’ he says. ‘Your mammy is probably waiting.’

* * *

My father paces up and down in front of the fire while waiting for his tea. The way he walks is not at all like Mr Roche’s walk. He takes small jerky steps, while Mr Roche’s stride is longer, calmer. My father’s head is jumpy on his neck and shoulders.

‘Why are you walking up and down?’ I ask.

‘I’ve got restless legs,’ he says. ‘When I sit for too long they get ants in them.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know why. Maybe they’re the ants that fell out of my pants. They come at night too when I’m trying to get to sleep.’

He must be in a good mood to talk this way, playful like Mammy, the way he sometimes talks when he’s with her.

‘Do they keep you awake?’

‘Yes, and I have to kick my legs to shake them off.’

‘Is that why you sleep on the floor?’ I ask.

He stops pacing and stands in front of the television. I expect him to be angry, but he smiles.

‘I’ve slept on the floor once or twice but just so the ants don’t bother your mam.’

‘Is that why?’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the feckin’ apostles! Not the third degree again. Yes, son. I sleep on the floor to stop from bothering your poor mam so she can get a good night’s rest for work the next day. No other reason! Are you satisfied?’

I was worried that he would be silent, that he might stop telling me things because of my gift. But here he is talking and telling another lie. It took him longer than usual, but here it is. I am certain again. He is lying.

His voice is higher and tighter and his hands and arms are lifeless. My ears are hot, but that’s the only physical symptom I have. Lie detection is becoming easier.

‘Maybe you should kill one of the ants,’ I say ‘and then the rest would go to its funeral.’

He sits down next to me and looks at the television. Doctor Who has finished and the news is starting.

‘Good idea,’ he says. ‘You’re full of good ideas.’

‘I didn’t make that up,’ I say. ‘I heard it in a joke once.’

I tell my father the joke even though he’s watching the television. ‘A horrible witch captures an Irishman, an Englishman and a Scotsman and she makes them sleep in a bed of flesh-eating creatures. The Irishman has to sleep on a bed of fanged army ants. In the morning, the witch goes to the room where all three men have slept, expecting to find them dead, but the Irishman has survived. “Why have you survived?” asks the witch. “Because,” says the Irishman, “I killed one of the flesh-eating army ants and the rest of them went to his funeral.”’