I laughed. ‘Oh, yeah. And he said, “You’re a dirty boy.”’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘But I’m not, am I?’
‘Clean as a whistle,’ she said.
In the long, narrow street where Aunty Evelyn lives there are no lights on in any of the houses and three men coming out of the hotel two doors down from the bookshop are singing.
I remember the street and Aunty Evelyn’s house from the time we came to stay when I was seven. But I don’t remember her house being painted dark red, like dried blood.
Aunty Evelyn takes hold of my hand. ‘Cheer up. You look like somebody just stole your brand new bicycle,’ she says.
‘Maybe they did,’ I say.
She pulls my hand. ‘Come and I’ll show you to your bed.’
On the way up the stairs she suddenly stops and looks over her shoulder at me. ‘You’ll share with your cousin Liam,’ she says. ‘He’s not in much of a talking mood at the moment, but he won’t bite.’
Liam is fifteen and, even though he’s my first cousin, I don’t know him very well.
‘I don’t care.’
We get to the third floor, the top floor, and turn left into a small, dark bedroom. Liam is lying on his back on his bed, with his hand down his loose tracksuit pants. His room smells like sour milk and his hair is dull yellow, like wet hay.
‘Howya,’ he says, without moving.
He doesn’t remove his hand from his pants and it rests there, doing nothing; keeping warm perhaps. The heating is off, and the house is icy cold.
‘Right, so,’ says Aunty Evelyn. ‘I’ll leave you two alone now. But don’t make too much noise. You’ll wake the twins.’
I put my case down next to Liam’s bed and since he doesn’t look at me, and doesn’t seem to want me in his room, I go back down the stairs to the bathroom on the first floor. There are spots of urine on the toilet seat and on the floor, and the bathroom smells like Crito’s box when her blanket hasn’t been changed for a long time. I stand over the toilet and stare into the water. There’s one pence in the bottom and a bronze stain around it. I take two pence from my pocket and, as I throw it in, I say, ‘Get me home to Gorey. Get me back there within one week. Please.’
I find my mother. She is in the only bedroom on the first floor, the same floor as the bathroom, living room and kitchen.
She is unpacking her case on the floor next to a single bed, which is covered in a yellow eiderdown. The only other thing in the small room is a small desk and a typewriter.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘Where will Da sleep?’
She looks up at me and smiles. ‘I’m busy this minute, John. Go back up and unpack your case.’
I go to Liam’s room and unpack. He doesn’t talk to me. He sits up in bed eating a packet of crisps. I have the five most recent editions of the Guinness Book and most of my clothes. When I’ve put my books and my clothes on top of Liam’s chest of drawers, I sit on the bed next to him and still he doesn’t speak.
Half an hour later my father comes in. ‘Come down to the kitchen for a chat.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I say.
‘You will,’ he says.
I follow him down the stairs to the first floor.
* * *
My mother makes a pot of tea and Aunty Evelyn wipes the placemats on the kitchen table with a smelly dishrag. The table is dirty and covered with schoolbooks, fish-and-chip wrappings, and milk bottles. I sit down and clear a space in front of me, knocking a pencil to the floor. I don’t pick it up.
‘You’re going to need to be patient,’ says my mother as she uses her hands to gather crumbs from the table.
‘Patient about what?’ I ask.
‘There’ll be lots of changes, and some of them will take time,’ she says, as she drains the last of the milk from a bottle.
‘What changes?’ I ask.
My father leans forward and reaches out for my hands. His hands are sweaty. ‘Such as where we’ll live,’ he says.
‘But can’t we go back? You said we were only staying for a while.’
‘We might be Dubliners from now on,’ says my mother.
‘Won’t that be good?’ says Aunty Evelyn.
I am angry and don’t know what to say or how to say it. What about the money and The Gol of Seil under the mattress?
‘What about Crito?’
‘OK,’ says my father. ‘That’s enough for now. Go up to bed and we’ll have porridge for breakfast tomorrow.’
‘What’s so good about porridge all of a sudden?’ I say.
My father stands up. ‘Porridge has always been good,’ he says.
Uncle Gerald is smiling at me but all I can see is Granny hitting Crito over the head with a shovel and saying, ‘You have too much dander.’
I go up to the third floor and sleep, head to toe, in the single bed, with Liam. He snores and gyrates in his sleep, as though he’s having a fit. I move to the edge of the bed but fall back to the deep sag in the middle of the old mattress and find myself up against Liam’s legs.
22
I wake early, before the streetlights have been turned off, and I think that Liam is also awake. I hear him say, ‘To the bearer,’ and ‘One million pounds.’
‘What?’ I say.
‘To the bearer. One million pounds,’ he says again, as clear as though he were awake.
He is sleeping on his back, with his mouth wide open. I want to put something in it, like the lightbulb that hangs from its broken socket above my head.
I get out of bed at half eight and go into the kitchen in my pyjamas. Nobody is there, but the lights are on. I don’t want to be alone.
I go down the stairs that lead to the bookshop in the basement. The staircase is dark. There are rats scratching behind the walls and they sound like the ones we had behind the walls in our old flat in Wexford. Sometimes, when we had been sitting in silence in the living room, one of the rats would come out onto the carpet in the middle of the room and look around, as quiet as a pillow, as though it were sightseeing. Then it would see or smell one of us and run back to the hole it had come from.
The rats always came out alone, never as a family, and there was one especially big brown rat with a long black tail. I decided he was the boss rat. After I saw him a few times I expected to see him all of the time. If I walked into the living room and saw something brown or black on the floor, out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was the rat, and I’d feel jumpy. I’d often think I’d seen that rat. My father said I had a rare case of rat psychosis. ‘You saw one rat in the middle of the floor,’ he said, ‘and now you think everything smaller than a shoe is a rat.’
A few weeks after my father said this the rats stopped scratching behind our living room wall.
I stand for a while and listen to the scratching and then kick the wall once before I open the back door that leads to the bookshop.
‘Morning,’ says Aunty Evelyn, who is standing on a short stepladder reaching up to some bookshelves.
My twin cousins, Celia and Kay, sit on the floor and look up at me. They are seven years old, but small for their age and, like their father, hardly ever speak. Instead of speaking, the twins look at people; fix their eyes and stare. No matter where you move to, their eyes are on you. But they don’t seem to see anything. They aren’t really watching, I don’t think, not properly watching. Their eyes move as though pulled by magnets, as though they have no choice.
‘Morning,’ I say as I sit down behind the counter. Aunty Evelyn climbs down from the ladder and sits next to me. She takes hold of my hands.
‘Where are they?’ I ask.
‘Who? Mammy and Daddy?’
‘Yes.’