Then came a delivery of bags of cement. The cement had to be placed in dryness for fear that it would start to set. Johnsey could hardly believe the massive, dead weight of the bags. He had pains in his legs and arms after it. His back was okay, though; Packie had insisted on showing him a video one time about how to lift heavy things without blackguarding your spine. You had to put all the weight on your legs and hold the burden in close to your body.
EUGENE PENROSE and the dole boys were lying in wait at the pump that day. They had set up a new camp, it seemed, closer again to the co-op so that they would not have to wait as long in the evenings for him. It must be thirsty work, tormenting your fellow man: they were all drinking cans of Harp. Johnsey wondered what it would be like to give a whole day drinking cans of Harp. Would it be great craic? It must be great sport being on the dole because Eugene and his pals were always laughing. There was a new lad with them today — he was a townie, Johnsey could see: he had his tracksuit pants tucked into his socks. Those townie boys always did that. You would see gangs of them inside around the market if you travelled in with Daddy, all with their tracksuit legs inside in their socks. Maybe it was so their tracksuit legs wouldn’t get caught in anything when they were running away from the guards.
Eugene Penrose said Here’s auld Cutehole Cunliffe with his big farm of land worth millions and a grand job as well and the whole fuckin parish on the dole. See this fella, lads? He has millions, boys, and he goes in every day to the co-op to be a fuckin gimp for Packie Collins!
The townie boy was harder-looking than the other three. He had one of them sharp, ratty faces that a lot of townie boys had, and there were three blue birds tattooed on his neck. They were flying up towards his ear. His head was skinned. He was looking at Johnsey and smiling madly like a child would look at an animal in the zoo that he’d never seen before. He had to look at his new friends to be sure that they were seeing the same thing; that he was really real, this fat, soft-looking farmer’s son, who had just bowled up the road to provide him with sport.
Johnsey didn’t think the whole parish was on the dole. Plenty of lads had trades, more had jobs inside in town, and plenty more had fecked off altogether and were professional people above in Dublin and other big places. It was the lads that had run straight from the school gate to the meat-factory door that were all on the dole now. The likes of that place was never going to last, Daddy said. You could only rely on them Arabs for so long to want all that beef, and there were rakes of countries queuing up to sell it to them cheaper.
Eugene Penrose said When you get all them millions for that farm above, you’ll still be below getting rode up the hole by Packie Collins, I suppose.
Why did he keep on about these millions? Daddy always said the farm was worth feck all. Fellas who weren’t from land, of course, would always be going around saying every farmer was a millionaire. Mother had often said that. Eugene Penrose was standing in front of Johnsey now, and his breath was warm and stale on his face. Johnsey could see little red lines zigzagging across his eyes. He was breathing hard through his nose and his watery snout was quivering like that of a young bull. Johnsey half-expected him to start raking the ground with his foot.
He was moving closer so that their noses would soon be nearly touching and Johnsey could feel that familiar lightness between his legs. Dwyer said once it was nature’s way of minding a man’s goolies — that lightening, crawling feeling was your balls retreating upwards for shelter from violence, so that if a fella drew a kick at you you’d still be able to perform with your wife and so the survival of mankind was assured. Lads were forever getting lamped in the balls millions of years ago by all accounts, so nature had to try and do something about it for fear there wouldn’t be a sperm left that could swim straight. Eugene Penrose was saying Won’t you? Ha? Auld cutehole farmer.
His face was kind of twisted, his lips were pulled back from his teeth and his eyebrows had arranged themselves in a V shape that made his eyes look even madder. He was wicked-looking. Why was it Johnsey always had to get the brunt of this wickedness?
Some fellas, if confronted with the likes of Eugene Penrose’s big auld snotty beak, would draw back their arm and swing a fist into his puss so fast he’d be out for the count before he knew what had hit him. Or they’d butt him right on the snout with their foreheads. He’d seen a lad one time, a lad younger than Johnsey himself, pulling the helmet off of one of the Toom boys during a hurling match and boxing the face off of him. Johnsey had never been able to draw a kick or a swipe. There was something always stopped him. Probably it was that big yellow streak that had somehow, against all the grains of nature and breeding, found its way into his soul. What power did a yellow streak have? It could paralyse a man’s arm and leg and though his head would tell him lash out, that streak of yellow would make him cringe and draw inwards and turn into a hedgehog, a little shivering ball in front of the wheels of a car.
Eugene Penrose was saying Look at the cut of you, you fat fool. What do you be at above on that farm, anyway? Do you get your hole off a different sheep every night? The townie boy hooted. The trick was to just keep trying to walk to his left or right and if he pushed you back to just kind of lean against the push so that you kept making forward progress, and eventually, with the help of God, he’d tire of the game and you’d get past him. Today he was pushing harder, though, and with the third push Johnsey was knocked to the ground. The wind was knocked out of him. His legs had lost any will to help him out. He looked up the road; there was nobody. He looked to his left; the dole boys were putting their cans down on the wall around the pump. He knew they were going to give him a hiding.
He could tell the two with Eugene Penrose weren’t as interested in this carry on as their leader, but they would go through with it out of fear of him. The townie was a different story. He was smiling ear to ear and laughing in a screechy, high-pitched way and was clearly planning on planting one of his dirty runners in some part of Johnsey’s body. Tackies them boys call them. All he could do now was curl up in a ball and cover his head as best he could. The last time something like this had happened to him was shortly after the meat factory had closed down and Eugene Penrose had kicked him in the stomach one day so hard he couldn’t breathe for ages and after he stood up he felt so weak he nearly fell again and he got sick on the side of the road just before he reached home. When he went inside, Mother told him he was white as a ghost. He said he wasn’t feeling great and she ran him a bath and gave him soup and said if he was the same in the morning she would ring Packie Collins for him and tell him he was sick and would not be coming to work. The memory of Mother’s tenderness tore at his soul.
WHEN JOHNSEY WAS small he’d had the same dream over and over again for one whole summer. It was the summer that Bonesy Donnell died and his sawmill was closed up and locked. Bonesy had always frightened children, not on purpose, but just by being humped and crooked and having arms that were longer than was natural and hands that had thick hair on the backs of them and a kind of a mad smile that made his kindness seem more like a desire to eat you without salt. A few nights Daddy had had to come in to him, and once he lifted him gently from his bed and carried him down the hallway to their room and Mother kissed him and tucked him in between them for the night. That only happened the once, though, that he could remember.