I have a fine pair on my hands now, the Lovely Voice said the first day Mumbly Dave was wheeled in. A fine pair of smashed bumpkins! You could be as bold as you wanted when you had a voice that could send the devil back to heaven. He wasn’t called Mumbly Dave straight away — it took the Lovely Voice nearly half a day to come up with that. Smashed bumpkins, two blind mice, thing one and thing two, she gave a whole morning in and out with a new title each time for the pair of them. Johnsey could hear his new compatriot forcing short gusts of air down through his nose each time she breezed through and dished out a little morsel; the painful laughter of a man who’s beaten and broken-ribbed. Johnsey wasn’t fond of this new development: he didn’t want to share the Lovely Voice’s attentions with this clumsy ladder-faller-offer. He wished they’d wheel him away again and bring back a silent geriatric.
He had felt like he was getting special treatment. It was out of pity, he knew, but she never made that obvious. You could fool yourself into believing you were the only one whose ear she whispered evil jokes into about the ward sister or the old boy in the other bed or Doctor Frostyballs or Aunty Theresa or whoever came within range of her wit. He didn’t want to have to share the Lovely Voice, especially not now that he was nearly finished on the painkillers and his eyes were healing up the finest and his bruised kidneys had come round a bit and he’d very soon be given the high road home. He could picture the newcomer: a big builder lad, probably, with muscles and blond hair and a jaw on him like Desperate Dan. Even with his broken face and nare a tooth that was known, that lad would most likely put Johnsey in the ha’ penny place.
THE UNTHANKS knew him well, of course. Ah, Dave, is it yourself, you got an awful hop, we nearly heard the bang below in the bakery, ha ha ha, is this fella looking after you, sure you’re both in the same boat, talk about the blind leading the blind, ha ha ha! Herself had to tell him be quiet and come away and leave the man alone. She had to take him in hand every now and again. Mumbly Dave didn’t seem to mind. His mumbles back to Himself sounded happy enough. Some people loved the bit of attention.
There was big news. The whole village had it. Herself had got it off the ICA. They had all rang her one by one, each thinking they would be first with the news. Himself had got it above at Mass that morning. Himself went every morning, to Mass. He went to confession too, at the required intervals. Religiously, he went. Was there any other way to go to confession? What did he tell the priest? Surely he had to make sins up. Wouldn’t that in itself be a sin, to be told at the next confession? A fine, eternal circle of sinning and contrition.
Mumbly Dave was doing awful mumbling beyond, as if to encourage the speedier telling of this big news. And the Lovely Voice would be on in a second as well; he could hear her abroad in the corridor, laughing as usual. You could easily judge the direction she was heading. She pushed a wave of fun and devilment before her and left a trail of it in her wake. She would hear the big news too, if the Unthanks ever got around to telling it.
The council inside in town had been to-ing and fro-ing and fighting and arguing for years and had finally made a big decision. A load of the land to the west of the village had been rezoned. That meant that instead of being simply fields of grass for tilling or grazing, the land the council had marked out with a red marker and put on display on a map for all to see inside in the civic offices was now land on which houses, shops, hotels and what have you could be built. That land included all of Daddy’s, and nearly all the Creamers’, and half of Paddy Rourke’s and a bit of the McDermotts’.
They were as excited as wasps around an open bottle of Fanta about this big news, so it seemed only polite to try to join in. He nodded a good few times and said Begod that’s great and Oh really and waved his good hand about a bit. He preferred when the Unthanks were their usual selves; this much talk out of them, and the two of them talking over each other, and the speed they were talking at — it wasn’t right somehow. It could make you feel a bit nervous, like if a grand, quiet old dog was asleep by the fire at your feet and all of a shot, for no reason you could fathom, leapt up and began barking and going mad about the place.
Anyway, this apparently was the best thing that could ever happen to any small village, according to everyone bar the few usual moaners who’d object to their nose to spite their face. It would be a new lease of life for the place. Even those who had been gone but years might reconsider their positions in life and return, if there was something to return to in the line of a job doing all this building and what have you. Sure hadn’t a pile of young lads only left recently, sure they’d turn the planes around if they heard this news. They’d nearly jump overboard off of the boat and swim back. There had been fierce speculation for the last few months, but it was as though people were afraid to jinx it by saying it out as a certainty. Once it’s used right, now, that’s the important thing. People will have to keep a close eye on applications going in and protest if they think something is going to go up that will do more harm than good — the likes of discos or fast-food shops or what have you, with any luck they will be excluded from the plans.
PACKIE COLLINS’S yard and it full to bursting with blocks and timber and bags of cement. Dermot McDermott’s offer to buy the land. Eugene Penrose’s talk of Johnsey’s millions. They had all been a mile and a half ahead of the Unthanks. Mother had always maintained that the auld sneaky ones always had news before anybody. Some, the cuter ones, would keep it to themselves and more would go around telling all they knew to anyone who’d listen. They’d spread news that wasn’t even news yet. If there was nothing to tell, they’d make something up.
Like the time years ago the whole place had it that Paddy Rourke had belted the head off of Kathleen and she only after getting a black eye from a rejected calf she was bottle-feeding who butted her by accident. Once a thing was said, it could never be unsaid. Paddy was blackened after that in many minds. Some people believed what they were told regardless of who it was doing the telling and wouldn’t be waiting around for hard evidence. The Unthanks weren’t that way; this was officially true and therefore could be discussed as fact. You couldn’t be ruining it for them by telling them that it didn’t matter one shite if Our Lord Himself wanted to buy land off of Johnsey to build houses and hotels and shops on — Johnsey’s land did not belong to Johnsey — it was not his to sell or to allow people to build things upon.
MUMBLY DAVE was more inclined to talk properly after a few days. They put a hinge in that auld wire in his jaw and gave him a new mouth of temporary false teeth in case the world missed something important out of him. After a small bit of practice, the mumbling was replaced by a non-stop flow of words. Johnsey had envied him his wired-shut jaw; there was no pressure on a man with a wired-shut jaw to be saying things to people. How well it was his eyes had been broken and not his jaw. Then he could see the owner of the Lovely Voice instead of just imagining her and he wouldn’t have to be trying to think of things to say back to her. Not even being kicked in the head could go right for him.
Mumbly Dave felt no such pressure in the talking department. In fact, talking seemed to be his way of releasing pressure. It was as though thousands of words were squashed up together inside in his head and couldn’t wait to rush out of his mouth like a crowd out of the tunnel under the stand below in Semple Stadium after a Munster final. He thought it was a great big laugh that neither of them could see a screed in front of them. Mumbly Dave would say, I used to see no evil, speak no evil, now I only see no evil, ha ha ha! Hey, did you hear that, youssir, I said I used to …