There wasn’t a whole lot of money in our house anymore — the old man had obviously paid to get the book published, and he never read from his notebook anymore. The silence at our dinner table doubled and redoubled itself. The idea of our trip to Mexico had vanished.
Mrs O’Leary still supported Mam. She still went to the pub as often as she could — slinking through the bar quickly with her head down as barstools shifted and swivelled, out to the back garden where the chickens were. There were probably jokes made — ‘There she goes, Mrs Public Hair,’ the rat-faced comedian might have said, ‘would ya look at the swish of her!’ I figure that much, because Mrs O’Leary banned him from the pub. Over the bar counter she declared with a flourish of a fleshy hand: ‘Leave her bloody well alone! I’d do it myself, go bloody starkers, only they’d laugh at me best and whistle for more.’
I continued to meet Mam at the pub after school, until one afternoon when birds were beating blackwinged against the sky and hay was on the wind and rain was dolloping through chestnut trees. I pulled the heavy door open, was met with curls of smoke. The man with the walrus moustache was sliding off his barstool, drunk. He looked at me as if surprised by my existence, curved his index finger towards me, ‘Come here a second, you,’ he said, ‘come here,’ leaning into me with a wink. His breath was stale with Woodbine, his eyes like apples just bitten into and discoloured, his moustache hairy over his teeth. He shifted himself on the barstool, looked around, reached forward, and out of his lunchbox on the counter, suddenly, like a rabbit pulled from a hat, came a picture of Mam which he held in the air and examined for a moment. He licked the hedge of Guinness off his moustache, rotated the photo between his fingers. He sighed, smiled at me, saying, ‘Look at this, look at this, would you have a look at this,’ and I looked, and she was there, staring out with sepia eyes from a bed overhung by a white mosquito net, beside an old lantern, beside a painting of flowers, beside a crack in the wall — Mexico — and the walrus man was twirling her in his fingers, incanting a low whistle over his lunchbox, and I stared at Mam, her breasts all soggy from lettuce and tomato sandwiches.
Mrs O’Leary broke out from the bar counter, a greyhound from a trap, slapped the man with the walrus moustache, slapped him twice, so hard that his head moved, a wooden doll, side to side, the sound of it around the bar, ‘Get the fucken bejesus outa here!’ she shouted, then blessed herself for the blasphemy. ‘Sorry, Father,’ she said to the ceiling. She gathered me to her immense chest, held me there, turned to Mam, who had come in from the yard, and said: ‘I suppose you’d be best off leaving the young fella at home.’
Mrs O’Leary wiped the topaz sleeves of her billowy dress across my face. She reached for a bottle of Guinness at the same time, took a slurp that dribbled down the front of her dress. Mam was fumbling at my anorak — trying to hold the steel teeth of the zip together to close it, hands shaking. Mam looked up and said sadly: ‘Yes, Alice, I suppose I should leave the child at home, should’t I?’
* * *
Geese out over the land, heading towards the sea. Long necks stretched, gunnelling their wings against the sky. They made a curious sound with their wings as they went overhead, like rifle fire. Spread their wings out to hover, settled down somewhere distant. Quite gorgeous.
I got up off the wall and went back to the house to make a pot of tea, then went down to the river to see if he was doing all right. By the time I got to the river some of the tea had spilled down on to the tray and soaked into one or two of the biscuits. I picked one up and ate it. It felt like a strange Sunday communion melting on my tongue. He was sleeping in the red and white lawn chair and the rods had fallen down by his feet. All the rubbish still lay unmoving in the water, the same piece of Styrofoam that was there last week, stuck in the reeds. I thought that maybe I should clean the river up for him before I leave tomorrow — but instead I just sat down and watched its colours change as clouds passed through the sky.
The old man was smacking his lips together — like Cici had once said, maybe he was eating his dreams.
But his breathing was somewhat irregular and I moved up close to him, felt his breath against my cheek to make sure he was all right. It came loud and patchy through his nostrils. For a moment I moved to wake him up, shake his shoulder, decided against it. I sat and sipped at the tea, ate a few more biscuits, had a bizarre and hopelessly ridiculous notion — maybe I would feed him a damp biscuit while he slept.
* * *
Mam started buttoning up everything very high, even when we went to the beach, especially when we went to the beach. A long stretch of clean yellow sand, edged by rocks, studded on the ten good days of summer with deckchairs and bathtowels and coloured balls floating on the air. Men with farmers’ tans shoved the top end of matches into the ground, exhaling smoke generously to the sky. Older boys stood with binoculars on the dunes, itchy with lust for the sight of a porpoise, or a ghost ship, or a drowning, or a daring bikini.
Along the hard edge of the beach a middle-aged gypsy whom I had seen in town was guiding a donkey. Beside him, on a motorbike, was Jimmy Donnelly from secondary school, older than me, going very slowly, no helmet on. Donnelly and the tinker nodded to one another, weaving in and out, hoof marks in a strange language amid the tyre tracks. A young girl stared at them, vanilla stream from an ice cream runnelling down the front of her chin. Dogs were unleashed and curious, and urinating by seaweed. A woman with toffee-coloured shoulders, wrapped in a towel, piled herself into a swimsuit, ballooning her breasts up with one hand. Mam sat on the blanket, wearing a white linen blouse buttoned up to the neck, a neck so thin and strained that when she took a cup of tea from the red flask and drank — sandflies jumping around on the rim of the cup — it looked as if it might be very painful to take it down, the striations furrowing down towards her bony chest. She rubbed cream on the smooth curve of her calf muscles where her skirt was hitched up, to the knee, never any further, not anymore.
The old man was walking along the strand in his poppy-red togs, his belly plopping out over the drawstring, lifting up a jellyfish with a small piece of driftwood, turning the bell-shaped body over and over, leaning down to stare at it, his stomach creasing. Mam took a kitchen knife, from the plastic bag because we couldn’t find the hamper in the morning — he had stood by the door, shouting ‘Are yez coming or what?’, her fumbling, ‘Of course we are coming,’ him ringing the doorbell over and over, ‘Well, so’s bloody Christmas!’ — and she held the knife and unscrewed the lid from the honey jar, smearing it very slowly, precisely, over some slices of bread. She smoothed it out to the edges as if everything somehow depended on it, long slow rolls of her hand, stopping only to whip the stalks of hair back from her eyes. She wiped her fingers on the edge of the blanket. The motorbike beeped and Donnelly raised his arm in a gesture of glory, left a plume of smoke around the donkey. But the wheel got stuck in the soft sand. He toppled, looked up ignominiously from the ground. The tinker, riding bareback, reared in laughter. Donnelly suddenly started laughing, too, and pushed the bike through heavy sand to the applause of some old ladies.
Donnelly and the gypsy started shouting, so that everyone looked up and listened, ‘Fivepence for a trot, ten for a canter, come and get it!’
I moved down to the hard edge of the strand. Donnelly’s companion smelled like campfire and cider. He held the rope in brown fingers, leaned across, eyes green as silage, looked at me and said, ‘Are ya right, so? Where’s your money?’ ‘I don’t have any money,’ I said. ‘Well, fuck off, so.’ Donnelly started whispering something in the tinker’s ear. The man whipped his head back with laughter. ‘Come here,’ he said to me, ‘d’ya want a go on the donkey?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Fair enough, get your old dear down here to give us a blowjob.’ ‘What?’ ‘Your old dear, she gives us a blowjob, we’ll give ya a trot.’ Donnelly began laughing. I edged away from the donkey, and the tinker started whispering something in the animal’s ear, giving it some form of benediction. Is that what he means? I thought. I was eleven years old.