Jim Gildea the sergeant told Mary his wife who told everyone else that the townie lad had shat all over himself. The spread wasn’t as wild as Paddy had planned for Johnsey with the duck shot, so Eugene Penrose took the whole blast. And while Eugene lay bleeding and screaming, the brave boy with the birds on his neck shat and pissed all over himself and cried like a little girl and for a finish one of the ambulance lads had to give him an injection to make him stop being such a stones.
Johnsey kept thinking about Eugene, lying on the road with the blood pumping out of him and his leg in bits. And then he’d think of Eugene when he was only a small boy in primary school, when they’d all been pals. The thoughts tormented him. Did Paddy shoot Eugene for him? Was it because Paddy had thought him too weak to take his own vengeance? Then he’d think of Paddy and all the times he’d patted him on the head with his big huge hand and smiled fondly at him when he was a child and how he used to think Paddy was like a mountain, dark and unmovable and eternal. But it turns out Paddy was like one of them mountains out foreign that are the same for years, and everyone thinks it’s the finest, and they live along the side of it in green pastures as happy as Larry, and then all of a sudden one day the quiet mountain blows its top and explodes into the sky and pukes melted rocks all over itself and destroys anyone who can’t run fast enough to the lowlands and finally the mountain destroys itself.
MUMBLY DAVE said there was more excitement in the village in the last few months than there was in a hundred years. If they won the county final, there wouldn’t be as much of a hullabaloo. And it all boiled down to Johnsey Cunliffe. He was some troublemaker! What was he going to do next? Start a riot? Sure, he was fit for anything! Auld Peg-Leg Penrose is quare sorry he crossed you now, I’d say!
Sometimes if you’re worried about a thing, it’s great to have someone making a joke about it. Like when the curly fella in the newspaper said all them things about him, and Mumbly Dave gave that whole evening saying about how they should take the Land Rover to Dublin and wait for him outside his poncey office and they’d lamp the know-it-all arse off of him with hurleys and make him squeal like a fuckin cut pig. Johnsey nearly wet himself laughing the way Mumbly Dave described that, and all the laughing about it made it feel like the whole thing was only a joke and not really real. But Johnsey couldn’t bear to listen to Mumbly Dave joking about Eugene Penrose and his leg. How’s it he couldn’t explain that to Mumbly Dave? How could he, when he couldn’t explain it to himself?
Siobhán said when you lose a limb you end up with too much blood. That can cause awful trouble for your heart because there does be too much pressure. That makes sense if you think about it — there aren’t as many places for the blood to go. How is it though a human body knows how to make food into shite and drink into pee and a yoke you can’t even see into a baby and your brain can do forty million things a minute according to that auld science teacher inside in the Tech and still it can’t figure out it needs less blood if there’s a bit chopped off of it? Worse again, Siobhán said sometimes people feel an itch where their leg or arm used to be, a phantom itch, like a ghost back to haunt them, and that itch can drive them right around the bend, because you can’t scratch what’s not really there. He remembered the itch under his cast inside in hospital and how that used drive him demented until Siobhán brought him in a knitting needle to poke down it for sweet relief and she told him not to let Sister or any of the other fatarses see him with it on account of they weren’t meant to let people do that. He wondered had Eugene felt the phantom itch yet.
AUNTY THERESA dragged poor Nonie and Frank up to the house not long after Paddy was buried. She wanted to know was he having an auction or what in the name of God was going to happen, and did he know that the rezoning wouldn’t last forever, the farm would be only allowed to be a farm again before long and the show would be over, and that nephew of Paddy Rourke’s from England wouldn’t be too happy with him for devaluing his inheritance with his quare notions and did he know there was such a thing as compulsory purchase orders and they’d soon get sick of him inside in the council and they’d make him sell and their idea of what’s the going rate mightn’t tally with what Master Johnsey Cunliffe had inside in his head and wasn’t it a fright to God to say herself and Frank had to scrimp and scrape all their lives to get Susan and Small Frank through university and here was he sitting on several fortunes and acting like he was too good for them and Small Frank solid choked with asthma and he never lifting his nose from his books so that he may make something of his life and here was he going around making a show of them all with that waster of the Cullenses and he the talk of the whole country and poor Sarah hadn’t a penny spare her whole life she didn’t put into the Credit Union for him and now he wouldn’t even look at his own aunty and she all that was left on this earth of his mother and why in the name of Jaysus would he not answer the phone?
Nonie said Ah now, ah now, but Theresa ignored her and Johnsey wondered had Theresa forgotten how Nonie was Mother’s sister as well, and did she want him to sell the farm so he could give money to Susan and Small Frank who never once looked at him on the school bus and never once said a word when he was being tormented, only sat there smirking? Uncle Frank wanted to know was he doing a line with that little blonde nurse and he smiled and winked at Johnsey and Theresa told him shut his stupid face and she started mar dhea crying out of her with her hand on her forehead and Nonie went Ah now, again, and Frank threw his eyes towards heaven and looked fidgety and embarrassed and Johnsey remembered Daddy once saying how that poor fucker Frank made a hard bed for himself when he decided to take the free house and the big dowry and Mother said how dare he, her father paid no dowry to any man, Frank was picked from a long line of fine suitors, and Daddy looked at Johnsey and covered one side of his mouth and said you should have seen that line, Johnsey — a fairy, a blind man, a fella in his nineties, and Frank!
IT WAS GRAND having Siobhán calling up all the same. You couldn’t be giving the whole day to thinking about Paddy and Eugene and Theresa and people’s expectations of you when you had to think about her calling up.
The next time she called after the time she showed up by surprise, they weren’t even there. They’d been inside in the city, looking at hookers. Mumbly Dave had promised Johnsey he’d take him in to this street where they do be and he could have a look at his future wife ha ha ha! The hookers were quare-looking; a little fat lady who looked like a wan you’d see above at Mass only you could see half of her white belly because her top was too short and didn’t meet the top of her skirt. And there was a wan whose cheekbones looked like they could cut you. She was wearing a shiny tracksuit and her eyes looked dead. There was a skinny man with a thin moustache standing beside her who Mumbly Dave said was a woman and Johnsey couldn’t believe it until he looked for a bit longer and then he could see that it really was a woman and Mumbly Dave said she was a mad bull-dyke pimp and Johnsey didn’t know what them words meant but said nothing and Mumbly Dave said she’d cut your mickey off if you tried to get smart with her or the hookers, and while they were staring at her she clocked them and started walking towards Mumbly Dave’s car and she had the head of a wan that’d take a bite out of you and eat you without salt and Mumbly Dave stalled the car in a panic and just as she got to them he got it going and she swung her foot at the car as they drove off and the hooker with the dead eyes only barely moved her head as they passed.