It was easier be brave when you couldn’t see your bravery’s result. You could probably punch a lad in the face a lot quicker if you hadn’t to see his eyes while you did it. He could hear Packie take a step back. He was taken aback. That wasn’t just a saying, then. He’d be below in the co-op afterwards reading Johnsey to all who’d listen. He’d label him a blackguard and an ingrate and he’d have a wounded puss on him, but inwardly he’d be rejoicing. You hadn’t to pay foreigners as much — everyone knew that. Packie said Well, well a few more times, and then he was gone.
Well, well.
Good luck so. You auld bollix.
AUNTY THERESA paraded in at three- or four-day intervals, giving out stink to all before her. She dragged her husband in with her half the time and poor little mousy Aunty Nonie the spinster the other half. Daddy used to call Frank that poor fucker and Mother would let on to be insulted on Theresa’s behalf but she’d smile in spite of herself. Daddy used to say about Aunty Theresa that you had to have a business in town and a farm outside town before she’d look at you. There wasn’t many measured up to Theresa’s test of respectability. Even Our Lord Himself had only the carpentry business and no land. Signs on the only ones who’d be pals with Him when He walked this earth were the fishermen and prostitutes and lepers. The likes of Johnsey and his terrible predicaments were sent as a trial for poor Theresa. It was a penance for the few old sins she’d committed, to have a nephew like Johnsey making a solid show of her by getting into such common scrapes. God knows they weren’t much to write home about, them few auld sins she committed that were being held against her still, but some are given a bigger burden than others and all we can do is suffer on and not give out.
Aunty Theresa said he had their hearts broke. They expected him every Sunday but he was below with them Unthanks constantly. He hardly looked at them above at Mass! He was all that was left of their lovely Sarah and now look at the cut of him! Uncle Frank or Aunty Nonie would tell her whisht but you couldn’t whisht that one up. It was just too much; it was too much to bear, all this constant heartache. One evening she was in full flow about how awful it was about Johnsey fighting with bowsies and what have you and in walked Doctor Frostyballs and she all of a sudden sounded like one of those horsy Protestant ones whose lips don’t fit down fully over their big front teeth who come in to the co-op for feed now and again. She said Hellooo Dawk-tur, but old Frostyballs only gave his usual few hmms and shagged off fine and quick. He hadn’t time for mad Irish aunties to be wedging their tongues up his hole. Aunty Theresa said he’d be a very high caste now, you know, in India.
He would I suppose, said poor old Frank.
THERE WAS only one other bed in the room. It was a semi-private room. He was in the VHI, and he hadn’t even known it. That meant you got special treatment because some crowd above in Dublin or somewhere would foot the bill. You would get the best of stuff. Imagine that: his mother still had to sort things out for him and she dead and gone. She wouldn’t have liked him to be in a big old ward, anyway; you wouldn’t know what kind of quare-hawks would be in it, Mother would have said.
One time, when Daddy was bad, he’d been rushed in and given new blood and afterwards they’d wheeled him into a big ward full of auld fellas so they could keep an eye on him. Mother and Johnsey were left stay with him for fear he’d die without company, and a nurse pulled a plastic curtain around them. There was no room available, only the big old ward, stinking of old men and piss and shit and whatever dark medicines were used to try to hold Death at bay. Daddy was dead to the world, drugged to the solid eyeballs. Halfway through the night an auld fella took a figary and leapt out of his bed and threw their curtain back and stood there looking in at the three of them and he without a tooth that was ever known and his bit of white hair standing straight up on his head and shining eyes on him like a greyhound inside in a trap and his old wrinkly mickey peeping out through his pyjamas. Mother hopped out of her chair and made a grab for the old rogue but he sidestepped her and he was gone in between the wall and the side of Daddy’s bed and next thing wasn’t he going at Daddy’s face and Mother was trying to drag him off and a nurse and an orderly ran in and got him back into his own bed and they strapped him to it for a finish and through the whole thing Johnsey had just sat there like an imbecile, looking out of his mouth.
Some help you were, Mother said.
It turned out the old boy was gone mad for the want of a drink. He had never gone a day without a few glasses of stout and a whiskey chaser or two, maybe. That was enough to send a man mad for the want of it, if that man had given fifty years without going without.
A PROCESSION OF roommates were wheeled in and deposited in the other bed in Johnsey’s semi-private room. None of them went at him like that old campaigner had gone at Daddy, thanks be to God. He saw none of them; he only got a few blurred seconds of sight in the evenings when Doctor Frostyballs was lifting his bandages and doing his hmm-ing. All you could make out in those few seconds were a pair of brown eyes and a hairy brown nose. He wished the Lovely Voice could do the bandages so he could see her eyes and nose instead. Doctor Frostyballs’s touch was gentle. His hmms sounded kind. Johnsey felt a bit guilty for the jokes about him he shared with the Lovely Voice. Well, he listened and laughed anyway. He was a willing accomplice. Sometimes after he was gone she’d arrive on and start taking him off in a foreign accent and it was funnier than Brendan Grace. She would stand at the head of his bed to carry on her blackguarding. He could smell her: roses and medicine.
She’d say: I am reading your chart now. Hmm … yes … hmm … I am seeing that you are not responding to my very brilliant doctoring … hmm … It seems to me as though there is only one course of action left open to us, young mister blind fellow … hmm … and that is to amputate your face! And he’d say how that’d be no harm, anyway, and she’d say Aw, you have a lovely face.
They must train them to tell lads things like that who are in bits inside in bed to make them feel better. She was fair handy at it, though. You could nearly let yourself think she really thought you had a lovely face. Imagine his old puss after getting kicked to bits, as if it wasn’t offensive enough to start out with. She was probably hardened to ugliness, having to look at old wrinkly arses and bedpans full of shite for a living.
MUMBLY DAVE arrived towards the end of Johnsey’s third week as a blind invalid. He wasn’t quiet, but it was all the one — you couldn’t make out a word he was saying, only mumble, mumble, mumble. The Lovely Voice said he’d had a mother and a father of a fall off of a ladder and he’d landed on his face on a fence. His ribs were all broken like Johnsey’s, his teeth were nearly all gone and he had a broken arm like Johnsey. He had a broken leg, too. His face was swollen and smashed, and his eyes were closed tight from the swelling. They had had to put wire into his jaw to hold it together.