The Thing About December Read online

  As bad as it would be to have dealings with the devil, how much could it jeopardize his immortal soul to just know if there was a way of making Eugene Penrose leave him alone for once? He had even been at Daddy’s funeral. He shook Johnsey’s hand at the removal and his hand was limp and sweaty. He just smirked at Johnsey and said nothing. His father followed behind, red-faced with small, darting eyes. Daddy used to give that man work, years ago. But Daddy would never have a man feeling beholden. Fair was fair. The likes of the Patsy Penroses of this world, though, you could give them your last penny and they’d come back for your purse. And while they were drinking the wages you gave them, they’d be cursing you to your neighbours.

  DADDY HAD BEEN riddled by all accounts. Johnsey had heard one of the ICA biddies saying it in the front room. When he went in with the stomach pains last winter, they opened him up, took one look and closed him again. Sent him straight home. Nothing they could do. He was riddled, the auld crathur. He. Was. RIDDLED.

  You could be riddled with bullets if you were in a Western. An old chair could be riddled with woodworm. And you could be riddled with cancer. If you were riddled, you could put your head between your legs and kiss your arse goodbye. Johnsey imagined Daddy’s insides, black and full of holes. He had smelt Daddy’s breath towards the end – it was like rot. Daddy was like a chestnut someone had opened. A conker that was peeled, it looked fine and hard for a while but then got hollow and dried out and shrivelled up and dead-looking.

  If Johnsey started to think about that in the co-op, say, or in the bakery, when there were people around, he would feel a pain in the bottom of his throat and he would not be able to swallow his own spit. He would as a rule be able to stop the tears from falling, by blinking like a madman and breathing in deeply and holding his breath, but that discipline had taken a good few weeks to master after Daddy died. If he was on his own, walking the quiet road home or above in his room, he would often not notice his tears until he felt them puddling at his chin. He wished he could be hard and closed in like some men seemed to be. He remembered Raphael Clancy when his young lad got caught in a drive shaft and killed – he stood above in the church like a thing made of rock, he was ghostly white and had no words for anyone, but no womanly tears or sobbing either. You wouldn’t see big hard men like him stumbling along the road weeping, or standing at his father’s deathbed keening like a banshee.

  This couldn’t be kept up, though, this way he had of seeing only blackness lately. How could a man’s life just be made up of sadness over his dead father and worry over his shrinking mother and fear over his childhood enemy jumping out at him from behind the stupid IRA memorial every evening? Mother was shrinking too. She had gone from fully upright two years ago to a small bit stooped over just after Daddy died to a little hunched-over thing, like a question mark, wrapped in sorrow and silence. She used to be all movement and talk and baking and crossness, you often could hardly see her for the cloud of flour around her or the speed she was moving at, nor hardly hear for her giving out and laughing and stories about this one saying this and that one wearing that and the other one after being seen again inside in town with that fella from the Silvermines who left his wife. It wasn’t until Daddy was buried, when the house was at last empty of people who came full of condolences and left full of sandwiches, apple tart, tea and drink that Mother at last came to a dead stop. Now she only moved slowly and with no great purpose, her eyes were cast down at the ground as a rule, and she rarely went farther than the graveyard above on the Height where Daddy lay.

  Sympathy doesn’t last forever. Like a pebble thrown in a river, it’s a splash and a ripple and gone. He had often overheard Mother and the biddies discussing wans whose husbands had died. Yerra, she’d want to be getting over it now, they’d say, it’s been a year and she still going around with a long face like the weight of the feckin world is on her. Once there was a Christmas between the death and the present you had no right to be olla-goaning any more. Sympathy, it seemed, began to run out of steam after a few months and expired completely within a year. She has the Christmas over her now she’ll be grand, they’d say, as if it was a hard and fast rule, like not eating for the hour before Communion. Imagine what they were saying about her! Signs on the confabs that used to be held regularly in Mother’s kitchen no longer took place. They were clucking and tutting in some other kitchen now, and Mother was the auld quare wan who’d want to be getting over it.

  EUGENE PENROSE and his little band were nowhere to be seen on the way home. Johnsey’s heart lightened. There was a nip, but it was still lovely and sunny. The sun had something in it that cheered you up. That was a true thing, not something makey-up. Daddy used to read science magazines sometimes. Mother often said he could have been anything he had such a brain. But only bigshots could afford to send their children off to the university in those days. Anyway, his parents had needed him at home. How, Johnsey wondered, did a man like that manage to have such a dud of a son? Miss Malone had taught them all about sexual reproduction in secondary school. Men shot billions of sperms into women. One sperm swam up the whole way to the egg. How in the name of God had Johnsey managed to win that swimming race? All those other sperms must have been quare gammy. How many billions of sperms had Johnsey shot into tissues and flushed down the jacks? Were they all tiny little half-humans? Surely you could end up in hell for such unbridled slaughter.

  When Johnsey turned in the gate, a lone magpie stood in the middle of the yard, eyeballing him. Johnsey searched in vain for a second that would bring him joy, then waved away the lone magpie’s cargo of bad luck. The magpie shook his head and hopped away. He didn’t even fly away. Even the birds of the sky knew he was harmless.

  Mother was not in the kitchen. And she had no dinner left for Johnsey. One time it was all he could do to finish the dinners Mother gave him: cuts of beef or lamb drowned in gravy the way he loved it, creamy mash, turnip and carrot bound together with butter and salt, fresh tart or crumble with custard for afters. Or salty bacon and curly cabbage with creamy dollops of white sauce – his favourite and Daddy’s too. Johnsey had never known a day without any dinner cooked until now. The quality had been in decline since Daddy died, fair enough, but a complete lack of any dinner was never before countenanced. A fist of worry clenched Johnsey’s gut. The house felt cold, wrong.

  HE FOUND Mother lying in the front room. She had on her green dress that she often wore to Mass. One of her legs was straight and one was bent at the knee, as if for modesty’s sake. Her arms were out from her sides like Christ on the Cross. Her head was turned to the side. She was looking at something under the couch, it seemed, and she was surprised by whatever it was, because her mouth was open like an O and her lips had turned blue from the excitement. If Mother had wanted to lie down, why had she not lain on the couch or gone upstairs to bed? Mother. Get up. Mother. His mouth was opening but no sound was coming out. Like in a dream where dark shapes are coming at you and your legs won’t move and you try to scream but you can’t.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, Father Cotter told him he had been very calm throughout his ordeal. He had been sitting on the floor looking down at his mother when the ambulance came. He’d had one of her hands in his. He had closed her eyes. He had answered all of their questions. She had been dead for at least five hours, the doctor said.

  March

  CHRIST, there’s a great stretch in the evenings. March already, imagine! March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Bejaysus, the year is pure-solid flying. The worst of the cold is gone, anyway, thanks be to God.

  Daddy would make these same observations every year at the start of March. He would also give his predictions for the weather to come. The quantity and location of slugs and beetles and other creepy-crawlies; the hop of a cock robin; the zigzag of rabbits and foxes across fields; the colour of the evening shadow cast by the Arra Mountains on the fields that cuddled up to their feet; the early or late departure or return of migrating birds and the height of their fli
ght: all of these things and more spoke to Daddy of the temperament of the coming season in a secret language of signs and signals.

  Yerra stop spoutin’, Mother would tell him, and roll her eyes towards heaven. But then you would hear her repeating Daddy’s predictions word for word to her friends the ICA biddies while they drank tea and ate currant cake and clucked in the kitchen and they’d Ooh and Ah in wonder at Daddy’s knowledge and skill and nod to each other knowingly and say Now! How’s it them feckers in the Met Office and all their smartness couldn’t tell us that?

  LONELINESS COVERS the earth like a blanket. It flows in the stream down through the Callows to the lake. It’s in the muck in the yard and the briars in the haggard and the empty outbuildings are bursting with it. It runs down the walls inside of the house like tears and grows on the walls outside like a poisonous choking weed. It’s in the sky and the stones and the clouds and the grass. The air is thick with it: you breathe it into your lungs and you feel it might suffocate you. It runs into hollow places like rainwater. It settles on the grass and on trees and takes their shapes and all the earth is wet with it. It has a smell, like the inside of a saucepan: scraped metal, cold and sharp. When it hits you, it feels like a rap of a hurl across your knuckles on a frosty winter’s morning in PE: sharp, shocking pain, but inside you, so it can’t be seen and no one says sorry for causing it nor asks are you okay, and no kind teacher wants to look at it and tut-tut and tell you you’ll be grand, good lad.

  But you know if another man stood where you’re standing and looked at the same things he wouldn’t see it or feel it. He’d see that the fields are only wet with dew and the walls only running because the vents are blocked with dirt and grime and it’s Virginia creeper climbing the house that people used to stop to admire for its lovely, fiery colours on their passage up the yard towards the front door. So it only exists in your head. It only occupies a tiny space. Is it even an inch squared? Probably not. How big is a feeling? Not even as big as one of them atoms that the science teacher used to be on about. It’s nothing and everything at the same time.

  The world doesn’t change, nor any thing in it, when someone dies. The mountains keep their still strength, the sun its heat, the rain its wetness. Blackbirds still hop and flutter about the back lawn, fighting over worms. The cat still screeches and paws at the back window for her grub. Bees still dance about the flowers and the apple trees, always searching, searching. There’s an awful cruelty in the business of nature, in the brutal sameness of things. The sky was the same blue the day after Daddy died as it was the day before; the uncaring rain didn’t stop while they buried Mother, only bucketed ignorantly down and ran in muddy rivers from the Height to the road below.

  EUGENE PENROSE and the dole boys relented for a while. If they were at the pump or the memorial of an evening, they left him walk past unhindered. But he knew they’d soon tire of their nod to common decency and resume slagging and ciffling and tormenting him. Even Packie was tolerably nice to him for a few weeks. The Unthanks gave him a fine lunch every day in the bakery, and a few times Herself bent down and kissed him on top of his head while he was eating. Whenever she did, he felt like crying again. She gave him his dinner every day as well in her own kitchen for the first while, then after a week or so, when he was back working in the co-op, she gave him a plate of something every evening, wrapped in tinfoil to carry home and heat up in the microwave.

  Mother had nearly never used the microwave. It was a present from one of the aunties. Mother said the old witch was too scared to use it and so dumped it on her. She said it could give you any kind of disease, how would you know? She said some lady had stood in front of one while it was working and it fried her liver and she died in screaming agony. The first time Johnsey turned it on by himself, carefully following the instructions Himself had written on an envelope for him, he stood well clear. When it pinged to tell him it was finished, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Himself said if a microwave had fried someone’s liver, it was years and years ago, when they were invented first and no seals were put on them. Now, the microwaves could not escape. Johnsey wasn’t fully convinced. He always opened and shut the door fierce fast. He didn’t want runaway microwaves flying about the place and frying bits of him.

  The Unthanks had suggested he come down and stay with them. He couldn’t. It would be just too embarrassing. Among other mortifications, he would have to use their toilet. Imagine the two lovely gentle people trying to pretend they didn’t notice the terrible stink from the great ape they had invited into their home! It wouldn’t be fair on them. Probably, if he stayed there any length, he wouldn’t use the toilet at all. Like the time Daddy’s cousin from New Jersey in America and his scary blonde wife and their wild children had come to stay in the house when Johnsey was twelve. They were touring Europe, thank you very much (the cut of them, Mother said, that fella hadn’t a seat in his pants growing up and he going around now touring Europe for himself! I ask you. How’s it he wasn’t staying inside in town in the new hotel so, besides issuing himself an invitation to land his whole family on top of them if he was so swanky?), and they stayed a week and a bit and he never shat the whole time and was doubled up in agony for a finish. When they were safely gone and he finally went, his hole nearly burst open with the concrete block he had to force out through it.

  Or, he could run up home. He still couldn’t imagine, though, being a guest in someone’s house, even the Unthanks who he had known and loved dearly since childhood. He would be a big, smelly, sweaty nuisance and they would hate the sight of him and want him to leave. Johnsey didn’t even know how they made themselves be so nice to him during his daily lunch.

  JOHNSEY HAD GOTTEN used to being sad after Daddy died. This extra sadness was just like taking more weight forking hay: you built it up gradually so that when your burden increased, your muscles were ready and you would not collapse under it. Mother had spent two and a bit years wrapped in a cloak of sadness, hardly talking and, he saw now, only waiting around until her time came to join Daddy. How could she have just upped and left him like that? Granted, he was no great prize of a chap; he had never given her any reason to be below in the Post Office boasting about him like some women who would talk out loud in the queue for fear anyone would not accidentally overhear about their sons who were doing Masterses, or just finishing their accountancy exams, or were abroad in Australia for a year, sure didn’t he deserve a bit of fun after studying so hard for years, blah de blah de blah.

  But he was surprised at Mother all the same. She had sure left him in the lurch. It felt like she had planned this behind his back, to go and meet Daddy and leave him on his own. Like all those muttered prayers were her talking to him under her breath all along, arranging her departure. Was he not even worth staying on this earth for? He felt a bit annoyed with Daddy too, truth be told. It was like he was in on it, somehow. Were the two of them watching over him at least, like Father Cotter told him? Sometimes he wished he could see their ghosts, but then he’d probably run away screaming if it actually happened. Or roar shouting at them for leaving him behind.

  That was something else about being totally alone that Johnsey knew he would not be able to stand for very long more: the feeling that he was not alone. The house creaked and moaned at night, as it always did, but before he used to always hear Mother’s breathing and sighs from down the hallway as well. The only feeling of real comfort he had in the two and a bit years of Mother living and Daddy dead were on nights when he was in bed before her and she was foostering about downstairs and praying (or talking to Daddy?) under her breath: the old house would carry her sounds down to his ear and he could drift away knowing she was at least there in body, and she might come round eventually and laugh again, or gossip, or give out at least. Now, every mouse-squeak became boot leather chafing against itself as someone crept along the hall towards his room; every clink or clunk or faint tinkle became an enemy arming himself, or a demon preparing to suck his life out through his mouth and c
arry away his soul to hell. These thoughts often became thoughts about the crossbeam in the slatted house and the rope on the hook in the back kitchen. How big of a sin could it really be to want to be with your mother and father in heaven? Why would God want him to persevere with this empty misery? Father Cotter says He has a plan for us all. Thanks, God, for the great plan.

  UP IN THE MORNING, cereal and toast, down to the village to work, lunch in the bakery, home past Eugene Penrose and his monkeys who were starting to settle back nicely into their old ways now, heat up dinner, television, into bed. Long nights trying to push black thoughts from his mind so he may sleep. Weekends were worse. He used to love them. He and Daddy would be out doing jobs all day Saturday; they’d go to a match most Sundays in summer and maybe go to the cinema in winter, or watch a film at home, or a soccer match on the television. The fire would always be roaring. Mother would always do a great spread on Sundays and she’d have baked on Saturday so there would be an array of desserts. Now Saturday was a day of sleeping until the middle of the day, waking up from savage dreams to a cold, dead house, trying to sort out laundry, going to the village for a burger and chips and hoping there’d be a dirty film on Channel 4 that night. Sunday was a day of going to early Mass and sitting there thinking blasphemous thoughts about God and his quare plans, eating his dinner with the Unthanks and feeling guiltier each time over abusing their hospitality by imposing his big, lummoxing self on their cosy Sabbath. And any evening, with no warning, Aunty Theresa might drag in with mousy Nonie and Theresa’s cross, bored husband Frank to tell him he’d have to start making plans and sort the house out and would they go up now and go through Sarah’s things and he would have to stutter and mumble his way into putting them off because if you let crows pick at your dead dog’s eyes you could no longer tell yourself he was only asleep.