I’ll tell you one thing, youssir, she lives up to her voice, she’s a fine thing, a bit over-endowed in the arse area but sure that’s part of being Irish, ha ha ha! You’ll see for yourself later on, anyway. Isn’t that gas we’re both finished with blindness on the same day? We were brothers in blindness there for a good while. It’s grand, though, having a comrade like yourself. Whisht, here she’s back, here she is, hello my flower, what have you for us? When are you taking off Johnsey-Come-Lately’s bandages? It’s lousy me being the only one having to put up with looking at a horrible mug all day, lucky you’re in and out to relieve the horror for me, ha ha, wait till he has a look at me he’ll want them bandages put back on quick smart, ha ha ha, make sure you’re here when Doctor Frostyballs does the big reveal or he’ll fall away in a faint, ha ha ha, like a baby chick thinks the first thing it sees is his mother, he’ll be going for a suck off Doctor Frostyball’s boob, ha ha ha, hey, youssir, did you hear that, I said …
BEING BLIND wasn’t so bad. When you knew it wasn’t forever, especially. If it was for good, and you weren’t bedbound, it would for sure be a bit awkward. But there was comfort in that darkness; you could let things carry on around you and there was no need to be thinking should I do this or go there or say that. All that business with the land now being part of a very valuable land bank, as the Unthanks said Martin Doherty the auctioneer called it the other day in the bakery, could be safely ignored while a man was blind and bedbound. The only anchor to this comfort he would have left once he had the full use of his eyes back would be the tube up his mickey, which would be surely yanked out once he was capable of jumping out of bed and making a piss by himself. Imagine your life being that much of a ball of shite that getting kicked to bits and going blind was the best thing that had ever happened you.
A different lady took away the cat eater. She called it a cat ate her. Maybe it had a different name because it was finished its job now. They had quare names for lots of yokes in hospitals, anyway. It didn’t hurt coming out but it was sure as hell hurting now. It was after leaving an awful burning behind. She had tut-tutted a few times and held his mickey in her hand for a while longer than seemed strictly necessary. Then she tut-tutted again and asked him had he any pain and he said No, because it wasn’t paining him too bad at that stage and he didn’t want to be giving out about nothing. Then Doctor Frostyballs came in and took away his eye bandages. His head felt wrong without them. The world looked wrong. He had imagined the room as a mini version of the ward they put Daddy in the night of the madman, but it was way newer-looking than that; if you took away the bits of machines beside the beds it could be a hotel room like the one he and Mother and Daddy had stayed in one time they had stayed above in Dublin after the All-Ireland and Daddy had got a bit merry and Mother had gave out but laughed at him too and a rake of people were in the bar of the hotel and they all sang ‘Sliabh na mBan’ and Mother had sat him up on her lap and she sang too and he had tried to sing it but he only knew the one or two lines and she had her arms tight around him and was rocking side to side with the rest and it was the best feeling he ever had before or since.
DOCTOR FROSTYBALLS had brought a girl with him and she stood there smiling and took the bandages in a silver bowl and handed him a small bottle and he dripped a few drops into Johnsey’s eyes and said Yes, it’s good, things will be blurry for a while more, your pupils will be di-lay-ted for one hour then no more problem, you will see things floating in front of your eye, that will be forever, you will get used to them, if you see flashes you come right back to me. Then Doctor Frostyballs and the smiling girl went off about their business and all that was left was a load of blurred shapes and he lay back and tried to sleep and enjoy his last few unseeing moments before the world was back around him, clear as day and waiting for him to do something or say something for himself.
But the throbbing in his mickey kept him awake. He opened his eyes and sat up and made a tent out of the blankets that were over that area so nothing would touch off it. Something wasn’t right with it. He could see grand again now. He chanced a look over at the quare fella and there he was, grinning back to his two ears, nothing like he had imagined: a small, baldy lad with eyes that looked like they had twinkly stars in them and big fat lips and the lips looked like they were bursted in the middle and his whole face was black and blue and yellow like a bad spud you’d dig up and throw away and his arm was in a sling and his leg was up in a bigger sling that hung from what looked like a miniature crane and he nearly said Where’s Dave until the little baldy lad started talking and he knew for sure.
Well hello there, youssir, did you decide to have a look at me at last, aren’t we a fine pair of crocks, well at least we can have a gander around for ourselves now, and a read of the paper and a look at the telly and a few of them nurses would cheer you right up, but a few more would frighten the life out of you, one of them has a tacher, and I’ll tell you one thing …
Then he was asking Johnsey was he all right and the room started to spin around and he got a feeling like the time he snuck two pint bottles of stout and a rusty old opener that no one would miss down to the willow tree one Christmas and drank the two of them off the head by himself and just before the stout and his dinner leapt back up from his stomach in an orange stream, the whole world had started to fly around in circles and all he could do was try to hang on and all he could do before the darkness came back was tell Mumbly Dave who wasn’t a fine cut of a fella at all that his mickey was in an awful way and should he tell someone?
June
DADDY WOULD ALWAYS do the second cut of silage in June. You’d hear the tractor abroad in the long acre as you trudged off in the morning. The big schools inside in town would be closed but you’d still have a month to go. A month! The sun would never hang on that long. The summer would be gone before you were released from the misery of listening to the whoops and cries of the free from the dark, sweaty inside of the small-windowed classroom. How did Sir stay going? Surely he was as jealous as they were of the wild emptiness of school-less days.
Cast nare a clout till May is out. June and July, swim till you die. That’s something Daddy used say at the beginning of June always. Shut up with that auld eejiting, Mother would say. Have you your bikini ready, Sally? Daddy would say back, and he’d wink over at Johnsey, and Mother would go red and try not to let him see how she was smiling behind her mask of temper.
His you-ree-tra had gotten infected. That was the thing inside his mickey. Bacteria had somehow found its way along the cat eater. Cat ate her. Cat et ur. Whatever the hell that yoke was called, it was quare handy when a man wasn’t fully mobile but for a finish was proving to be a source of awful trouble. All he knew was he was only able to stay awake for minutes at a time and every time he came around he was frozen with the cold but someone would say he was very hot and he would try to say he wasn’t, he was perished, but he’d slip away again into a world of crazy dreams. He saw Mother and Daddy and the two of them were below at the bottom of a beautiful garden and he wanted to go down to them to ask how they were and was it nice being dead and he wanted to tell them how his life was like an empty bottle of red sauce, there was nothing in it and no point to it and you could stick your knife right in and root around forever but all you’d get was a small bit but never enough to make you happy and for feck’s sake why wouldn’t Mother buy a new bottle of sauce when the old one was finished, she’d never leave Daddy without his brown sauce, he’d be giving out stink saying Any brown sauce, Sally, because he nearly always called her Sally and he was the only one who ever did.