M. Hyland - Carry Me Down

My mother sits next to me.

‘Where’s Da gone?’ I ask.

‘To see a man about a dog,’ she says.

‘Why won’t you tell me what’s happening?’

‘When your father gets home.’

‘We have to go back to Gorey,’ I say. ‘You have to help with the summer pantomime. You haven’t finished making the puppets.’

‘We’ll see,’ she says and, because I hate the expression unless it’s used as part of our game, I hate her for using it.

We sit in silence.

Aunty Evelyn moves quickly while she cooks, and seems nervous. She’s not normally a nervous person. She knocks a cup from the dresser and then a vase from the sideboard and catches both before they hit the floor; she moves very quickly for a woman with a body like Alfred Hitchcock’s.

‘Reflexes!’ she shouts.

‘Oh dear,’ says my mother, laughing in an odd way and putting her hands over her face.

While we eat, the conversation is about weather, weddings and christenings. I don’t speak. I get bored and go into the living room and watch TV. It is raining hard outside and the room is dark. But watching the television in the middle of day isn’t as much fun as it should be. I try to force myself to enjoy it but I think of Mr Roche and how I’d like to see him and how I was looking forward to sitting his first test and passing with flying colours.

I scratch at the scab on my head and stop when it bleeds.

It is nearly four o’clock when my father comes home. He smells of aftershave.

‘Your mother and I have to go out again. We’ve a few things to do,’ he says. ‘Keep yourself busy for a few more hours.’

‘But I’m bored. Can’t I come?’

‘Not this time,’ says my mother. ‘Read a book, or watch the television.’

My father throws a Mars bar at me but I don’t have time to catch it. It lands on the carpet about a foot away from me. I stare at it and he stares at it too. I’m not going to pick it up. ‘But where are you going?’ I ask.

‘To see a man about a dog,’ says my father.

My mother winks at me.

‘A different man about a different dog,’ she says, but I don’t want to join in with her joking.

* * *

When they leave I go back down to the bookshop to be with Aunty Evelyn. I sit on a chair behind the counter with her. She seems happy to have me with her and she offers me a bag of peanuts. The peanuts make me think of the zoo. I wonder if she might take me. Liam says it’s about fifteen minutes by bus. I wonder if anybody has ever helped an animal escape.

‘Could you take me to the zoo?’ I ask.

‘Not now,’ she says, without even thinking about it. ‘Maybe you’d like to go next door for a while.’

‘Why?’

‘I need to do something in private, that’s why.’

I walk down to the greasy spoon and go inside. The walls are covered in striped paper, red and yellow, and the radio is turned up loud. It is crowded with old men and old ladies and a few young women near the front with prams. Nearly everybody is facing the front, as though they are on a train. The tables are covered in plastic yellow cloths and every table has a bottle of HP and Worcestershire sauce. The smell of chips and sausages is a good smell and I feel hungry. I want to look at the red plastic menu book on the table near the door, but then I’d have to buy something even if I changed my mind.

The woman at the till looks at me and, even though she doesn’t speak or ask me anything, I say, ‘I’m just looking for my parents.’

‘Have you lost them, love?’

‘No. Thanks anyway. I’m going now.’

I don’t understand why I feel nervous.

I go into the grocery shop next door and as I walk in the bell rings.

Maureen, the old woman who works behind the counter, remembers me from the last time I visited. She comes rushing over. ‘John!’ she cries. ‘How you’ve grown! To the size of a man. Quite amazing.’

She grabs hold of my right arm. ‘And the manly muscles on you, too!’

I pull my arm away.

‘Come sit with me and help me put the stickers on.’

I sit with her and put stickers on tiny cubes of beef and chicken stock. Maureen takes the cubes out of the bigger packets and sells them individually, even though on the box it says, ‘Not for Individual Sale’.

‘So, what brings you all the way to Dublin, John?’

‘We just came because we wanted to come.’

‘Oh yes.’ She peels a sticker from the back of her wrinkled hand and puts it on a cube of stock. ‘Were you tired of the country air?’

‘Yes. Sick of it. Sick of the cows and the mud.’

For four days, my mother and father are out during the day, and don’t come back until it’s dark. I am left alone. Liam goes to school in the afternoon and I watch television or read the Guinness Book of Records .

I read and make notes about Jean François Gravelet, alias Blondin the Great, who crossed Niagara Falls on a three-inch rope in 1855. When Liam is at school I clear a space and make a three-inch strip with packing tape stretching from one wall to the other. I walk along it with my arms held out and I try to imagine being 160 feet in the air without a safety harness.

I can’t get my feet to stay inside the three-inch boundary. I don’t see how it can be done. But when I look more closely at the photo of Blondin, I notice for the first time that his feet are not straight; to walk the tightrope he has to flatten his slippered feet and keep them side-on to the rope. The more I think about it, the more puzzled I am. I will ask Aunty Evelyn to get me a book about Blondin and the other tightrope walkers.

At night, my mother and father go downstairs to the basement to talk and to make phone calls. My mother tells me that my father is looking for work, and they are both looking for a place for us to live.

When I ask why we can’t live in the cottage with Granny, she says, ‘Maybe later. We’ll be living in Dublin for a while.’ And when I ask if I can ring Granny on the phone in the kitchen, she says, ‘Yes, but maybe later. Just leave it be for a few more days.’

It’s our seventh night in Dublin. I’m in Liam’s bedroom, trying to see if there’s a way I can play Cluedo by myself. My father comes in and sits down on the end of the sagging bed.

‘Howya?’ he says in a mock Dublin accent.

‘All right,’ I say as I put my Swiss-army knife down on the board where he can see it.

‘I was wondering if we could ring Granny? Maybe we could do it now?’

He takes a deep breath. ‘Not just now, John. But soon. I promise we’ll do it soon.’

I look at the Cluedo board and at the pictures of the rope and candlestick. I want to know if Crito is all right and I want to know whether The Gol of Seil is safe and my money, too. I want to know whether the Guinness Book has written.

‘Don’t be so sad,’ he says. ‘Why not treat this as a holiday? An adventure?’

I stare at him until he looks away. I stare at him as though his face is a playing card or a photograph, or a piece of graffiti on the wall; something not real or human.

He stands up. ‘Don’t look at me like I just kicked you in the head,’ he says. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

‘But when are we going home?’

‘We are home,’ he says.

‘But Mam says we have to live in a flat.’

‘Don’t sulk. There’s nothing to be sulky about. Think of all the poor children who have nothing. No flat to live in and no shoes on their feet.’

‘Like the ones in Africa?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’d rather not,’ I say and I take the weapon card with the picture of the rope on it and show it to him.

He stares at it. ‘And what does this mean?’

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Do you want to play a game?’