But someone would have to find him. And probably that would be the Unthanks. Johnsey couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting them like that. Himself was surely sixty-seven or eight and Herself was about the same. Would they be alive ten more years, or twenty? Wasn’t he just a hardship to those lovely people, treading his big dirty boots in through their bakery each day, looking for his lunch, and plonking his fat arse down in their kitchen and slobbering all over their table? And to make their penance harder, he was now helping himself to further charities in the dinner and Sunday-lunch department. Everyone in the village knew he was a fat eejit, he had never really hurled properly, girls looked like they pitied him or they joined in when lads laughed at him. There must have been a great mix-up somewhere along the line with these big plans that Father Cotter does be on about. Surely with the universe as big as it was, God could allow himself a slip-up here or there. There was hardly a deputation of angels banging on His door shouting Hey, God, you forgot to give a justification for Johnsey Cunliffe’s existence, he’s below scratching his hole like a fool, waiting for a reason not to do away with himself!
IT WOULD BE summer soon enough. The Unthanks always went somewhere thousands of miles away like Sligo or one of those quare counties for weeks on end to a niece who was married to a right bigshot by all accounts and they had a rake of kids and a huge big house. They would leave Kitty Whelan or Bridie Mac running the bakery. That would put paid to Johnsey’s lunchtimes of ease and luxury for a while. His loneliness then would be absolute. That meant complete, total.
Something had to give before summer. How would he manage being so lonesome and dealing with the types of situation that would require more spoken words and more complicated ways of stringing them together than he was capable of? Maybe he would take his holidays from the co-op at the same time as the Unthanks and close up the gate and the house and pull the blinds and the curtains and let on to be gone away himself? Sure, for all Packie Collins or any of his sneery relations knew, he was doing a strong line with a girl from the city and they were gone away sunning themselves out foreign. Or they were going to a ski resort! Imagine, there were fellas his age less than two miles away that had actually done that kind of thing! Headed off in a jet to a ski resort in some faraway country full of glamour with a girl and flew down snowy mountains and drank liquor with foreign names and rode the girl all night and come home engaged to be married and the whole place would talk about how brilliant it was and tell them they were great. Lads who had been in his class in school led that kind of a life. Imagine.
JOHNSEY WONDERED was there a way to get away from this earth cleanly, to just disappear one day and have no fuss about it nor hassle for anyone. A lad from above around Gurtabogle fecked off to Australia a few years ago and went missing out there and sure that was that, really. What was anyone going to do, go and turn every stone in Australia looking for him? Australia was so big it was a continent.
The same lad had been in Johnsey’s class in primary school. They went on a school tour once, as far as Lahinch. That time, they were all still pally enough. Eugene Penrose hadn’t yet decided to lash out against the world in general and Johnsey in particular. The Gurtabogle lad, Mikey Kennedy was his name, went out swimming with the rest. While they were all fooling near the water’s edge, splashing each other and throwing mud and running away screaming at the sight of a jellyfish, Kennedy started swimming, straight out from the shore. Sir and Miss had given strict instructions on the way down to the beach that everyone was to stay near them, and to only swim parallel to the shore. PARALLEL TO THE SHORE! Ye blackguards.
But Kennedy swam straight out and it was nearly too late before Miss spotted him and screeched at Sir who was chasing lads around with a jellyfish actually in his hand and he dropped the jellyfish and let a roar out of him that Kennedy was to get back this instant. Kennedy was a small black bobbing ball by then. You couldn’t see his arms any more, but they must have still been working hard because he was getting farther and farther away towards the horizon. He was swimming into the sun. Everyone stopped messing and shouting and stood with their hands shielding their eyes looking out towards the shiny horizon after little Mikey Kennedy and the only sound was Sir roaring for him to come back, come back, for God’s sake. Then a lifeguard dashed past and nearly knocked Sir over and Miss put her two hands over her face and said Sweet Jesus over and over again. Afterwards, Johnsey heard another lifeguard saying how it was lucky Sean had been on duty; he was a junior champion swimmer, the lad had got so far out it mightn’t have been as clean a rescue if anyone other than Sean had been there.
When Sean the Lifeguard made it back to the shallows and waded in to the shore with Kennedy in his big freckly arms, he flung him down on the sand and Kennedy just lay there crying. Sir asked him what in the fuck he meant by that stunt. Kennedy just said I don’t know, Sir, and kept on crying and coughing, and the whole class stood around him in an embarrassed circle and stared, as shocked at Sir’s fuck as at Kennedy’s near thing. Then Miss put a towel around his little shoulders and gave him a hug and a kiss and told him it was all right and more than one boy wished then that they’d been the one to strike out for the horizon.
Ten years later, that same lad, Mikey Kennedy from Gurtabogle, flew off to Australia and went missing out there and was never seen again.
TIME DRIPS BY. It never flies, really. Time only ever flies in the last few minutes of a match when the team you’re rooting for are a point behind. And that’s reversed if they’re a point ahead. A townie lad in school once told how if you tied a lad up so he couldn’t move and dripped water on his head, for a finish he’d go mad and each drip would feel to him like a hammer blow. The Chinese used to do it to their enemies long ago. Johnsey only half believed it then but he fully believed it now. He could feel each second drip from the clock above the press and splash down on his head. You had to trick your mind sometimes, to distract it from the drips, or they’d become hammer blows and you’d end up like one of them Chinese lads. You could pretend you were Nicky English scoring before him in ’89 if you were abroad in the yard beating a sliotar off of a wall. You could pretend to be heading off on a trip across America in your shining Ford Mustang if you were farting about up and down the yard in Mother’s old Fiesta. You could imagine you were a secret agent, deep undercover, disguised as a mysterious young bachelor, living alone and awaiting further instructions from HQ.
If you were feeling especially lonesome, and just sitting in the kitchen, say, and you let it out through the gate because you weren’t concentrating properly on keeping a rein on it, your mind could have a fine old wander about for itself. If it got too much leeway, it could start trying to point things out that you could otherwise kind of gloss over or shove away into the dark spaces. It could start calculating the amount of time you spent on your own now that Daddy and Mother were gone, and the time to come to be spent alone if you lived a full life. Three score and ten, you were allowed by God. You could go a good bit over that, even. Daddy hadn’t gotten his allotted time at all. The likes of poor Dwyer and that young lad of the Clancys got nowhere near it. It could remind you of how it had seemed life was only temporarily suspended when Mother was alive and would maybe get underway again in some shape or form as soon as the dark weather brightened, but now it seemed to be at a full stop. It could start adding up the number of lunches and dinners the Unthanks had given you, and you never once put your hand into your pocket, except to have a secret scratch of your balls. It could start reminding you about all the different ways in which you didn’t match or measure up to the other fellas your age: you had nare a woman, nor a hope in hell of getting one; your only friends were two elderly people you had only inherited as friends; you’d been terrorized by a little prick called Eugene Penrose since you were a child; you couldn’t walk home through the village without shitting in your pants in fear of him. You were not able to hold a normal conversation, your mind would remind you. Nobody wanted to talk to you, anyway. People that did, it was only because they felt they had to. It could remind you that you were a useless, orphaned spastic. It could make the deep pool in the river or the crossbeam in the slatted house seem like sweet salvation from the miserable torment of just being.