As bad as it would be to have dealings with the devil, how much could it jeopardize his immortal soul to just know if there was a way of making Eugene Penrose leave him alone for once? He had even been at Daddy’s funeral. He shook Johnsey’s hand at the removal and his hand was limp and sweaty. He just smirked at Johnsey and said nothing. His father followed behind, red-faced with small, darting eyes. Daddy used to give that man work, years ago. But Daddy would never have a man feeling beholden. Fair was fair. The likes of the Patsy Penroses of this world, though, you could give them your last penny and they’d come back for your purse. And while they were drinking the wages you gave them, they’d be cursing you to your neighbours.
DADDY HAD BEEN riddled by all accounts. Johnsey had heard one of the ICA biddies saying it in the front room. When he went in with the stomach pains last winter, they opened him up, took one look and closed him again. Sent him straight home. Nothing they could do. He was riddled, the auld crathur. He. Was. RIDDLED.
You could be riddled with bullets if you were in a Western. An old chair could be riddled with woodworm. And you could be riddled with cancer. If you were riddled, you could put your head between your legs and kiss your arse goodbye. Johnsey imagined Daddy’s insides, black and full of holes. He had smelt Daddy’s breath towards the end — it was like rot. Daddy was like a chestnut someone had opened. A conker that was peeled, it looked fine and hard for a while but then got hollow and dried out and shrivelled up and dead-looking.
If Johnsey started to think about that in the co-op, say, or in the bakery, when there were people around, he would feel a pain in the bottom of his throat and he would not be able to swallow his own spit. He would as a rule be able to stop the tears from falling, by blinking like a madman and breathing in deeply and holding his breath, but that discipline had taken a good few weeks to master after Daddy died. If he was on his own, walking the quiet road home or above in his room, he would often not notice his tears until he felt them puddling at his chin. He wished he could be hard and closed in like some men seemed to be. He remembered Raphael Clancy when his young lad got caught in a drive shaft and killed — he stood above in the church like a thing made of rock, he was ghostly white and had no words for anyone, but no womanly tears or sobbing either. You wouldn’t see big hard men like him stumbling along the road weeping, or standing at his father’s deathbed keening like a banshee.
This couldn’t be kept up, though, this way he had of seeing only blackness lately. How could a man’s life just be made up of sadness over his dead father and worry over his shrinking mother and fear over his childhood enemy jumping out at him from behind the stupid IRA memorial every evening? Mother was shrinking too. She had gone from fully upright two years ago to a small bit stooped over just after Daddy died to a little hunched-over thing, like a question mark, wrapped in sorrow and silence. She used to be all movement and talk and baking and crossness, you often could hardly see her for the cloud of flour around her or the speed she was moving at, nor hardly hear for her giving out and laughing and stories about this one saying this and that one wearing that and the other one after being seen again inside in town with that fella from the Silvermines who left his wife. It wasn’t until Daddy was buried, when the house was at last empty of people who came full of condolences and left full of sandwiches, apple tart, tea and drink that Mother at last came to a dead stop. Now she only moved slowly and with no great purpose, her eyes were cast down at the ground as a rule, and she rarely went farther than the graveyard above on the Height where Daddy lay.
Sympathy doesn’t last forever. Like a pebble thrown in a river, it’s a splash and a ripple and gone. He had often overheard Mother and the biddies discussing wans whose husbands had died. Yerra, she’d want to be getting over it now, they’d say, it’s been a year and she still going around with a long face like the weight of the feckin world is on her. Once there was a Christmas between the death and the present you had no right to be olla-goaning any more. Sympathy, it seemed, began to run out of steam after a few months and expired completely within a year. She has the Christmas over her now she’ll be grand, they’d say, as if it was a hard and fast rule, like not eating for the hour before Communion. Imagine what they were saying about her! Signs on the confabs that used to be held regularly in Mother’s kitchen no longer took place. They were clucking and tutting in some other kitchen now, and Mother was the auld quare wan who’d want to be getting over it.
EUGENE PENROSE and his little band were nowhere to be seen on the way home. Johnsey’s heart lightened. There was a nip, but it was still lovely and sunny. The sun had something in it that cheered you up. That was a true thing, not something makey-up. Daddy used to read science magazines sometimes. Mother often said he could have been anything he had such a brain. But only bigshots could afford to send their children off to the university in those days. Anyway, his parents had needed him at home. How, Johnsey wondered, did a man like that manage to have such a dud of a son? Miss Malone had taught them all about sexual reproduction in secondary school. Men shot billions of sperms into women. One sperm swam up the whole way to the egg. How in the name of God had Johnsey managed to win that swimming race? All those other sperms must have been quare gammy. How many billions of sperms had Johnsey shot into tissues and flushed down the jacks? Were they all tiny little half-humans? Surely you could end up in hell for such unbridled slaughter.
When Johnsey turned in the gate, a lone magpie stood in the middle of the yard, eyeballing him. Johnsey searched in vain for a second that would bring him joy, then waved away the lone magpie’s cargo of bad luck. The magpie shook his head and hopped away. He didn’t even fly away. Even the birds of the sky knew he was harmless.
Mother was not in the kitchen. And she had no dinner left for Johnsey. One time it was all he could do to finish the dinners Mother gave him: cuts of beef or lamb drowned in gravy the way he loved it, creamy mash, turnip and carrot bound together with butter and salt, fresh tart or crumble with custard for afters. Or salty bacon and curly cabbage with creamy dollops of white sauce — his favourite and Daddy’s too. Johnsey had never known a day without any dinner cooked until now. The quality had been in decline since Daddy died, fair enough, but a complete lack of any dinner was never before countenanced. A fist of worry clenched Johnsey’s gut. The house felt cold, wrong.
HE FOUND Mother lying in the front room. She had on her green dress that she often wore to Mass. One of her legs was straight and one was bent at the knee, as if for modesty’s sake. Her arms were out from her sides like Christ on the Cross. Her head was turned to the side. She was looking at something under the couch, it seemed, and she was surprised by whatever it was, because her mouth was open like an O and her lips had turned blue from the excitement. If Mother had wanted to lie down, why had she not lain on the couch or gone upstairs to bed? Mother. Get up. Mother. His mouth was opening but no sound was coming out. Like in a dream where dark shapes are coming at you and your legs won’t move and you try to scream but you can’t.