M. Hyland - Carry Me Down

I make myself stay awake and when it is midnight I leave the bedroom and go in search of my father. He’s not in the bedroom. He’s in the living room sitting up on the settee watching the television.

‘You’re up late,’ he says.

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Did you have a nighthorse?’

I laugh. ‘No, just wide awake.’

‘Sit with me and watch this.’

‘But there’s nothing on.’

The television finishes at midnight with the Angelus bells.

‘I know. But staring at the blank screen helps me to think. Besides, Crito likes looking at her reflection in the black glass.’

I jump up from the settee. I can’t believe it. ‘Crito? Is Crito here? Did somebody bring her?’

‘No, sit down. Crito’s not here.’

‘Then why did you talk about her as though she was here?’

‘I imagine she is,’ he says. ‘Here. Watch.’

My father begins to stroke the air between us, soft, curved, cat-size strokes, as though Crito were sitting here. Then he taps his leg as though to invite her onto his lap. He says ‘Ooph’ when she jumps on and then he continues to stroke her back, this time, longer, flatter strokes.

‘You see, it’s as though she was here.’

I swallow twice, until my throat is dry again and look at the curtains.

‘That’s really mad, Da. I didn’t know you were such a lunatic.’

‘You should go back to bed. You don’t want to fall asleep at school.’

I stand up. ‘I haven’t even started school yet. Mammy’s trying to get me out of having to go to the Ballymun school.’

My mother wants to find me a place in a good convent school, like the one near Aunty Evelyn’s bookshop, which is surrounded by a high brick wall, and has a grotto and a statue of the Virgin Mary and a holy water font in the front garden.

‘Yes, of course. Still, you need your sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘G’night, Da.’

‘G’night, John.’

He kisses me on the hand for a joke and I laugh.

* * *

We have been in Ballymun for nearly two weeks, and I want to go to school. I want to make new friends and I’m tired of wandering around the flats. I’ve read all my books and I’ve nothing to put in my new Gol of Seil and I’ve even made a new puppet stage out of an apple box for my mother. There’s nothing else to do, so I walk up to the top of all seven towers and when I’m tired of walking up and down the stairs, I watch Ballymun life from the window, or lie on my mother’s bed and read. The bedroom we share is better now that she has used leftover wallpaper to cover the tinted brown mirrors.

In three days I see four ambulances and eight Garda cars. Sometimes the injured person is in the back of the ambulance with the person who has hurt them. Sometimes women hurt men, sometimes women hurt each other, and sometimes drunk men hurt women after long bouts of screaming, but the women scream more than the men.

I see an unconscious woman on a stretcher being put inside an ambulance. The way the doors open, and the ambulance officer in a white coat adjusts the stretcher to make it straight before he slides it in, looks just like a chef putting food on a tray into a cooker.

I see washing falling off the clotheslines people rig to their ground-floor balconies and, when the washing doesn’t fall, or get blown off by the wind, children steal it. The ground-floor flats are the ones nobody wants and nearly half are empty and boarded up.

A letter arrived yesterday announcing that I must go to Ballymun National School across the road. It will take me less than two minutes to walk there and I will probably be able to see Plunkett tower from the window of my classroom. I start tomorrow, and so this is my last free day. I get up late and go to the kitchen for breakfast. My mother is still sleeping but somebody has left two new exercise books on the table. I get a knife out of the drawer and cut squares out of the flock wallpaper in the gap between the cupboard and fridge and I use the wallpaper to cover the books. Then I see a note that has fallen from the table. It’s from my father and has five pounds Sellotaped to the back.

Dear son ,

Have a great first day tomorrow. And here’s some money to buy yourself a present. I hope this will make things up to you a bit .

Love, Da .

I walk across the road and down two blocks to the toy shop in the big shopping centre. I’ve never been in a toy shop so big, so bright. I look around for an hour before settling on a remote-control racing car called Johnny Speed, The Most Fantastic Racing Car Ever Made, by Topper Toys. I turn the box over and read every inch of it and I gaze for ages at the big colour photo on the cover.

The car is a bright red convertible Jaguar XKE and there’s a little cream-coloured plastic driver in the front seat and the car goes forward and reverse and the wheels can be steered so it also turns around. Nobody else will have one, and I can drive it around behind the flats and, if people stop to ask me about it, I can give them lessons. If I had the money I took from Granny I could also buy some of the accessories. I could buy a racing track, the pit-stop men in overall and caps, the grandstand for the spectators and the man who holds the black and white finish flag.

I get enough change to buy batteries, a Mars bar and a bottle of Fanta and I sit for a while on a big bench in the warm shopping centre and read the instructions. When I’m sure I understand how the car works, I take it and the control box out of the foam compartments and do my first test-run on the shiny, flat floor of the shopping centre.

The car works and it’s fast! Two ladies come and stand by me and watch. There’s a cord connecting the control box to the Jaguar but it’s thirty feet long, so the car can go quite far.

‘Isn’t it magic?’ says one of the ladies.

‘It’s grand,’ I say. ‘I just got it for my birthday.’

‘Happy birthday.’

‘What a lovely present.’

‘Thanks, I love it,’ I say.

‘Ta-ta, now,’ says one lady.

‘We’ve got more shopping to do,’ says the other, and off they go.

I wish other people would watch. I make the Jaguar go around the bench. The cord gets caught, but I unravel it and try again. The second time, I get it just right.

I walk back to the flats.

The boys in the gang are huddled in a pack near the lift. I decide to take the stairs. If any of them speak to me, I’ll pause before I answer, and take deep breaths so that I don’t sound nervous.

As I reach the landing of the first floor one of the gang members comes running up behind me. I keep walking along the balcony, but he catches up.

‘Get out of the feckin’ way!’ he says.

I’m not in his way so I stay to the left of the stairs and keep walking.

‘I said get out of the feckin’ way!’ he shouts.

I keep walking up to the second floor and then turn right, pretending that I live on this floor. The rest of the gang has come up behind me.

I stop and turn around. I will put on a Dublin accent. ‘Howya? I’ve just moved here from Gorey.’

‘I’ll show you Gorey,’ says the tallest one, and then I count them: there are only five, not the dozen or more I’ve imagined.

‘How old are ya?’ one of them asks.

‘Eleven,’ I say.

‘So, why aren’t you at school?’ asks the boy from the stairs, who has one blue eye and one hazel eye.

Now we’re all standing on the balcony outside number 29. I hope that if anything happens the people inside will hear us.

‘I didn’t feel like going,’ I say. ‘What about youse?’

They tell me they didn’t feel like going to school either. I wonder how they can get away with such a thing, but I don’t ask. They all look about thirteen or fourteen. None is as tall as I am and I’m not as scared of being beaten as I was, but I’d still prefer it if they let me alone so I could go home with my new car.