M. Hyland - Carry Me Down

I go to the door. ‘I’m going to watch television.’

‘What about me?’ she asks. ‘Have you practised on me?’

‘Yes. You turn red even when you tell white lies.’

‘Is that so, Sergeant Egan?’

If I don’t calm my body down, if I don’t stop my body from being angry, I’ll do something bad. I have to stop and be calm. I swallow and try to smile.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you.’

‘Come here,’ she says and I go to her.

She pinches my cheek.

As I kiss her, I notice a hole in the elbow of her nightdress and another larger hole under her armpit. I can see her skin and part of her breast under the hole. I look away.

‘I could become famous,’ I say.

My voice is like my da’s and I wonder if this seems strange to her. I wonder what it will be like when my voice deepens still more. When my father speaks and I speak, it will be like the same person speaking.

‘You could,’ she says flatly.

‘I’ll make enough money so we can go to Niagara Falls together,’ I say.

‘You could.’

She hasn’t eaten any biscuits, so I break one in half and hand it to her. She chews on it as though it is made of wood. I take another half and dip it in the tea. The biscuit is soft now and she eats it as though she has no teeth, her lips parting a small fraction and coming back together with a wet clicking noise.

‘How will you prove you have this gift?’ she asks, finally showing interest.

‘They’ll do experiments and conduct tests.’

She smiles. ‘And then they’ll pay you a fortune in gold and we’ll fly to America on first-class tickets.’

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘It’s a strange thing. A bit hard to take in, that’s all.’

She isn’t convinced; she thinks I am foolish. Well, then, it’s only a matter of time.

She’ll see.

I won’t live with things this way, they can’t stay as they are.

‘Let’s eat,’ is all she says.

I hate the way people can eat no matter what has happened.

We go to the kitchen and she makes chips and eggs and for a while we don’t speak, but it doesn’t matter. My father isn’t home and she doesn’t say anything about it. She tells me that she is going to do some volunteer work at the Ballymun National School. She is going to help deliver the milk, and make jam sandwiches. I tell her that the jam sandwiches today were too dry and she agrees to put more butter on them.

‘I’ll wave at you as I pass by your classroom,’ she says.

‘And I’ll wave back,’ I say.

We stop talking again. We eat our eggs and chips and listen to the radio and then we go in to the living room and sit down together on the settee. She keeps her arm around me while we eat our cake and watch a film, and the happiness I feel is odd and makes every part of me seem liquid.

When she kisses me on the cheek I say sorry three times because I called her dumb three times. She tells me I’m a good boy and not to worry.

‘I’m just upset,’ I say, ‘because we are underdogs now, and in Gorey we were over dogs.’

She laughs and doesn’t cover her face with her hands. This is good.

We wait for my father to get home, but he is late again, working, and he comes home when The Late Late Show is nearly finished.

He smiles when he sees us sitting together under the blanket on the settee. He messes my hair. ‘All right?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Cup of tea?’ says my mother.

‘I’ll get it myself,’ he says.

‘Hungry?’ she asks.

‘No, I had a steak sandwich in the cafeteria.’

I go to my room and get the new apple-box stage with the curtains drawn on the side.

When my father has settled down on the settee with his cup of tea, I stand in front of him. ‘Da? I’d like to put on a puppet show. It only takes about five minutes.’

He smiles. A happy mood tonight. ‘All right, son. Let’s see it.’

‘Youse have to turn off the television first.’

‘Don’t say youse,’ says my father. ‘It’s common.’

I set the stage up on the coffee table, cover my head with a black cloth and crouch down. ‘Welcome, lady and gentleman, to our special puppet show. It’s called Puppet Philosophers of the World.

‘One by one, you will meet four famous philosophers who are in disguise and you have to guess who they are. If you guess correctly, you get a piece of chocolate.’

I start with a hand puppet, a white sock with a face drawn on, wearing a toga. The sock puppet says to another sock puppet, ‘You smell. You’re annoying. You’re an eejit.’

I ask, ‘Can any member of the illustrious audience guess who this philosopher is?’

My father laughs and shouts. ‘I’ve got it! I’d recognise that fat sock-face anywhere!’

His voice is so loud it is as though he thinks I won’t be able to hear properly under the black cloth, or as though the puppets won’t understand.

‘It’s Socrates!’ he shouts.

‘A-ha,’ I say. ‘Very clever deduction: Sock-ra-tease.’

I do three more philosophers, including Plato; a cardboard toe playing with a soccer ball made out of a piece of cotton wool with a small stone inside it. My father gets two right and my mother gets one.

I am pleased and excited about the final philosopher I have prepared, and I got his name, like the others, from one of Da’s books.

The final philosopher in disguise is a Lego man holding a shovel. I make the Lego man perform a digging motion into a small pile of straw.

‘Who can guess the identity of this final philosopher?’ I ask.

There is no answer.

‘Do you need a hint?’ I ask. ‘He’s digging.’

Silence.

‘Come on, lady and gentleman!’ I say. ‘Can’t you figure it out? Just think. All the clues are here.’

‘We give up,’ says my mother. ‘Just tell us.’

‘No,’ I say, getting hot under the black cloth. ‘It’s not that hard! You have to think. Just think a bit longer. Just think!’

My father turns the television on.

‘Not yet,’ says my mother.

‘I’ve had enough thinking for one night,’ he says.

I come out from under my black cloth. ‘It was Heidegger,’ I say, as I kick the box across the room. ‘Hay digger.’

My father looks away from Gay Byrne’s face on the television, and smiles at me. ‘Very clever,’ he says. ‘You get the last piece of chocolate.’

I go to my room so they won’t see my disappointed face.

After school the next day, I see the gang at the base of the stairs. They are huddled together, rummaging through a shopping trolley full of somebody’s groceries.

I turn back and walk around the block a few times and, when I return, they have gone.

My mother is sitting in the living room darning socks, and she is wearing one of her good dresses, the pink and black dress she wore to mass on Easter Sunday. She looks beautiful, darning and listening to the radio.

I say hello and then go to the bedroom, where I lie on my stomach. I need to think about the gang and what I’ll do next.

At teatime, she comes in to ask me what I’m doing. I tell her I’m thinking about some of the things I’ve read in The Guinness Book of Records .

She puts her long hair into a ponytail. ‘It’s time for tea.’

‘Can I stay here? I’m not hungry.’

‘If you want.’

She leaves and I scratch my head, the same place I always scratch. But I have gone too far again and there’s blood on my fingers. I wipe the blood away on my trousers. I go on thinking and scratching and then I close my eyes.

My mother comes back a few minutes later with a ham sandwich and sits on the end of the bed. ‘Here, you have to eat something.’