M. Hyland - Carry Me Down

I know exactly how I want my trip to turn out. First of all, it will be Mammy and me, and I want us to sit together on a jumbo jet, and to see the Horseshoe Falls, the biggest falls, from the window of the aeroplane before we land at the airport at Niagara. And I want to take a photograph of the two of us in the cockpit with the pilot and the co-pilot.

I want us to get drenched from the spray of the falls and then to get dry — it will be summer — on our walk up Clifton Hill to the fun-fair, where there are rides and, most importantly of all, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.

I check my watch at half nine and my father’s still not home. I go to the living room and ask my grandmother where he is. She tells me he’s staying overnight in Wexford. He had to see his old boss about a favour. I fall asleep with a brochure from Ripley’s Museum under my pillow.

My friend Brendan comes to the cottage in the morning an hour earlier than he is due. He’s always early, as though he wants to catch people doing something they shouldn’t be doing. He comes to my bedroom window while I’m getting dressed and taps on the glass. ‘Helloooooo,’ he says, in his mock farmer’s voice. ‘I’ve sold nine cows this very day.’

‘Hellooooo,’ I shout back. ‘Nine is better than eight, they say.’

‘Front or back?’ he asks.

‘Through the chimney, for all I care.’

There’s a front door and a back door and both are always open.

‘Right, so,’ he says.

He presses his mouth and nose flat against the window and licks the glass. Brendan is shorter than I am, but bigger and wider. Stronger, too. He has a habit of hunching over, his head and neck forward and low, so that he looks like he’s trying to balance something on his back.

He comes to my room and we sit and talk on the floor for a little while. I don’t sit on the bed with him. I only sit on the bed with my mother. I wonder should I show him the money, but decide I shouldn’t. What if he wanted to spend some of it? What if he told one of his sisters?

We are on our way out to the field across from the cottage, when Granny stops us as we pass through the kitchen. ‘Brendan!’ she says. ‘You must stop and talk a while.’

‘OK, Mrs Egan,’ he says.

* * *

My grandmother often dresses from top to bottom in one colour and today she is wearing a yellow shirt, a yellow skirt and yellow high-heeled shoes. Even her big eyes look yellow. She offers to make Brendan some boiled eggs and, as she boils the eggs and makes the toast, Brendan tells her that rowdy twin girls were over at his house playing with his sisters before he left, and that he couldn’t wait to get away from them.

‘Which twin girls?’ asks my grandmother.

‘Bernice Boyd and her sister Bernadette,’ says Brendan. ‘They brought a birthday card and a cake for my sister.’

‘It would pay your sister to be careful with that card. Maybe give it a wipe with a damp cloth before she fondles it again.’

‘You can’t catch germs from a birthday card,’ I say.

‘The rabies,’ says my grandmother, her voice loud, bits of spit falling out of her slackened mouth. ‘You could end up with the rabies. That whole family is frothing at the mouth because of the rabies.’

I want to leave the room when my grandmother talks this way, but the eggs are ready.

‘Here you are,’ she says.

The eggs are not boiled long enough and are too runny to eat. The white is the worst part: a raw, clear liquid. The yolk doesn’t look as awful as the raw egg white.

‘You have these,’ I say to her. ‘I’m not so hungry.’

My grandmother uses a knife to break the cap off her egg and the egg white spills over the side of the shell and onto the plate. Instead of using a spoon or a piece of bread to wipe up the mess, she lifts the eggcup to her face and licks the egg from the side of the broken shell. And then she lifts the plate from the table, tilts it to her mouth, and licks some more until there is no egg left. She eats as though she thinks chewing will get in the way of her food, as though she wants all food to be slippery. If a fish came to the table, this is how it would eat.

* * *

I don’t understand how such a neat and proper person can eat like this and make such a mess, always a sticky trail of food and dribble behind her. I get bad-tempered with her for being disgusting and a bad temper makes me short of breath. But she took us in when we had no money and tells us that this is our cottage; our home. And she sings fighting songs when she’s in the bath and she plays Scrabble with me and she taught me how to play backgammon and poker and she doesn’t let me win.

I grab hold of Brendan’s jacket and drag him from the kitchen.

‘We’ve got to go,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘if you really have to,’ and there’s nothing I can do to make her feel less sad about being left alone again.

We kick the football for hours and end up in the field about a mile away, half way between the cottage and our school. It’s almost dark and getting hard to see the ball. I sit on my haunches to rest for a minute and Brendan sits on the ball.

‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘when we start the sixth class, eight months from now, some of the girls will be wearing brassières.’

He bounces up and down on the football.

I stand and kick hard at the ball under him. ‘I’ll be in the Guinness Book of Records by then.’

‘What?’

‘I’m writing to them in a few days, before school starts.’

‘Why would the Guinness Book of Records put you in?’

‘I can’t say yet, but I’ll tell you once I get a letter back from them. It has to be a secret for a while.’

‘Stop kicking the ball! Who am I going to tell?’

‘It’s just that the thing I’m going to get in for is kind of unusual.’

He gets up from the ball and pushes his chest out and I push mine out, too. It’s a game we play when we’re having a disagreement. I say ‘so’ and he says ‘so’ and we push each other around for a while.

‘So?’

‘So?’

‘So?’

He falls back and I charge him.

‘So?’

He charges at me. I lose my balance and fall. From the ground I say, ‘So?’

And he laughs at me. ‘It’s five now. I have to be going.’

‘How do you know it’s five when you haven’t even a watch on?’ I ask.

‘I saw yours a while ago and it was after three.’

I look at my watch and it is only a minute from five o’clock. ‘It’s not yet five,’ I say.

‘Bet you it is.’

I would usually start another fight here, for the fun of it, but I want to go back to my room.

‘See you at horrible school on Monday.’

‘See you,’ says Brendan, as he picks up the ball. ‘And don’t forget to tell the cows on the way back that grass is bad for them.’

‘Bye,’ I say.

He begins to walk backwards and so do I. We look at each other too long; not sure whether to nod or smile and we end up making odd faces that embarrass the both of us. I turn away and walk home as fast as I can.

I go the usual way, down the long fir-tree lane way and then across the fields to Granny’s cottage. In the last field there’s a narrow path that I follow every day after school, where the earth is trodden flat and the grass doesn’t grow. This is a path I’ve made and it bends three times in the middle like a snake.

At the edge of the field, to the north of our cottage and not far from the road, there’s a doll stuck in a tree and I can’t pass it without looking up.

She is wedged tight in the crook of two branches, about ten feet up, and out of reach; she has been there for years, ever since I started at the Gorey National School. Her dress is faded and some of the skin on her hands and arms is black, as though she has frostbite.