Notes from a Coma (2 page)

It could go on all night. He could sit there teasing out every detail of it, hearing it for the umpteenth time and still, after all these years, bewildered by it.

“And what was the asking price, Anthony, what was the reserve? Was it stamped across my forehead or was there a little tag dangling from my toe?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“So what was your opening bid? I’d say you came in low—low and hard. You wouldn’t want to show your hand too early. Eight hundred pounds, was that it? Not much more surely?”

“Go to bed, JJ, this isn’t the time.”

“Did you spit on your hand to seal the deal, like a proper cattle jobber.”

“It wasn’t like that and you know it.”

“Of course it wasn’t like that but it’s the truth, isn’t it? And a seller’s market too, wasn’t it? They couldn’t keep up with demand. All of us there up on top of one another in our slatted house.”

“It wasn’t a slatted house, JJ, it was an orphanage. Christ, you know all this, I’ve told you a hundred times. Why do you have to keep going over it?”

“It’s a story, Anthony, a bedtime story. Tell me about the wicked witch. We wouldn’t want to forget her. Tell me again about the wicked witch.”

I’d go along with him from here. He’d be so far into it the best thing was to get through it as quickly as possible and try to get to bed.

“Her name was Dragana, wasn’t that it?”

“Yes, JJ, her name was Dragana.”

“And she had a pair of arms on her like a butcher and a hooked nose with a wart on it. Her broomstick stood in the corner.”

“Whatever you say, JJ.”

This was where he’d start laughing, leaning forward in his chair, his favourite part.

“But you took no shite from her, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, JJ, I put manners on her.”

“Witch or no witch you let her know who’s boss.”

“Yes, JJ, I sorted her.”

“You haggled with her, wasn’t that what you did?”

“Yes, JJ, I haggled with her.”

He’d be bent over laughing now, laughing or crying I could never tell from the tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Haggled with her,” he’d gasp, nearly choking. “This is the bit that kills me. You actually haggled her down to two thousand dollars.” The mug of tea or soup would be slopping down the side of the chair. “The going rate for a healthy child was two and a half thousand dollars but you haggled her down to two thousand.”

“Yes, JJ, I haggled her.”

“And shook hands on two thousand.”

“Yes.”

Some nights it might end here, the worst of it over, but most nights he’d want to take it through to the bitter end.

“It could have been a lot worse though, couldn’t it? You could have used the old barter system.”

“Yes, JJ, something.”

“No, not just something. Tell the story right, don’t be trying to get away from it. Cigarettes and televisions, those were the things, weren’t they? Explain the cigarettes to me again.”

There was no way out now—I’d have to see it through to the end.

“The place was in turmoil, JJ, the economy was a shambles and the currency was virtually worthless. The gold standard was a packet of cigarettes. A packet of Kent cigarettes traded at two dollars.”

“So you could have had me for a thousand packs of cigarettes.”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“I don’t want to put it that way but that’s the way it was, wasn’t it?”

This was where he’d sink back in his chair with that look on his face. This was where he’d start talking to himself.

“And no one thought it was strange. No one said stall the ball, this isn’t right. You can’t put your hand down in your hip pocket and hand over a wad of notes for a child. That day is gone. No one saw anything wrong with it?”

“You don’t know what it was like. The chaos, the violence, the conditions in those orphanages. You were lucky, JJ.”

I remember the first time I said that to him, the look on his face. Like I’d scalded him or struck him with the back of my hand. I thought he was going to hit me. But he just slumped back in his chair and looked into his mug.

“I’m going to bed, JJ. You have to be up for work.”

“I’ll have a last fag, I’ll go then. Goodnight.”

“Don’t stay up all night.”

But of course he would. I’d find him in the morning slumped back on that chair you’re in now with an ashtray of butts on the floor beside him. He’d have stayed up all night smoking and mulling things over. About him being lucky and the haggling and about what he called his life as a consumer durable.

He looked anything but durable the first time I saw him. Lying in a crib he was with six others, them all up on top of one another like a litter of bonamhs only not half as clean. Like the rest of them he was scalded in his own water and looking out between the bars of the crib with the biggest
pair of eyes you’ve ever seen on a child. They were that big I thought they’d jump out of his head and roll across the floor to my feet. And if there was any colour to them I couldn’t tell what it was from the bad light in the room. Black as coal they were and probably just as hard, I remember thinking. But that was just a trick of the light. I now know JJ’s eyes are a kind of deep ruby red, the colour of strong tea without milk. It’s not the type of colour that shows itself. You have to look hard to find it.

Standing there looking at him I thought the room was full of wasps; there was this buzzing noise everywhere. But it couldn’t be wasps. This was the middle of March, there was eight inches of snow outside on the ground—not even that demented city could have wasps and snow at the same time. And then I knew. They were grinding their teeth. The kids, every one of them, grinding their teeth down to the gums and making this buzzing noise that was filling the room. Sitting on their behinds, sprawled across each other, lying on their backs, every one of them working their jaws from side to side, chewing nothing but cold fresh air.
^†

So there I was pacing the room with my hands clasped
behind my back, trying to look like I knew what I was doing, peering into the cribs like a cattle jobber looking at weanlings. But what did I know about finding a child—a forty-three-year-old bachelor from the west of Ireland with neither niece nor nephew? I hadn’t a clue where to start looking …

I took a few more turns round the room peering into the other cribs, not wanting to rush things nor give anything away. At the back of the room, just inside the door, there stood a woman with her arms folded across her chest like a bouncer. JJ calls her Dragana but I can never remember hearing her name. Like the hooked nose and the broomstick it was one of those details he made up. But he was right about the arms. She was built like a wrestler, her coat looked like it was going to come apart at the shoulders. This was a woman you didn’t want to mess with. This was her orphanage and these were her kids. If any of them were leaving the room it would only be through her. She was the one who would fix up the paperwork and exit visas. She was the one who would take a percentage of whatever money changed hands.

I didn’t want her forcing my hand so I just kept walking
round the room. But those eyes kept turning me round and drawing me back to that little face pressed between the bars. He was wearing these big pyjamas with the leg ends frayed from dragging through the dampness and filth in the bottom of the crib. And if there was any colour or pattern on them under that filth I couldn’t make it out. But there was this look on his face, a look I’ve never seen on any child or adult before or since. It was like he was saying to me, “I’m the child you’ve come for, forget the rest. I’m the one you’ve come for.” He wasn’t saying he was any better or stronger or healthier than any of the others. All he was saying was that he was the one. And he was right; he was the one I had come for. I could have gone round that room a hundred times and looked in a thousand other cribs throughout the city and I knew I would have ended up back at that same spot looking down at that child with those black eyes and those filthy pyjamas. This was my child, big eyes, white knuckles and everything. We just stared at each other and there might as well have been just the two of us in that room. If there was a
specific moment when our lives came together this was it. Something clicked between us. I felt like putting my hand out and introducing myself, saying, hello, my name is Anthony O’Malley from Louisburgh in the west of Ireland. You probably haven’t heard of the place but in a few days when everything is sorted I’m taking you out of here and you and me are going to have a long and happy life together. But of course I didn’t. Things were strange enough without me talking to a child who couldn’t understand one word I was saying. And then for one moment I had the feeling there was something wrong with him. He was sitting stock-still, not the tiniest movement out of him. For some reason I thought there might be something wrong with his head, his sight or his hearing or something. But it wasn’t that. I waved my hand in front of his face and his eyes followed it over and back. I shouted softly beside his ear and he started sideways. But there was still this stillness about him … The boss woman, Dragana, came up behind me and began telling me something. I didn’t hear her. It had dawned on me why he was so still; he was the only one in the crib not grinding his teeth.

The boss woman was pulling on my sleeve and talking
away. She was telling me something, the child’s name, I think. But she didn’t have to tell me. I knew his name, I’d known it from the moment I’d first set eyes on him. His name was John Joe O’Malley and I was going to call him JJ.

It took four days to round up the paperwork: medical certs, exit visa and so on. They were the longest four days of my life. At first I thought it would be a simple job of handing over the money and walking out of there with him in my arms and getting a plane home. That’s how much I knew.

Now that I had chosen JJ I itched to get out of that city. I wanted to take him away from that orphanage, away from the filth and the dampness and the paint peeling off the walls and the smell of detergent that would choke you. I was so worried someone might come and lift him out from under my nose that I spent every minute of those four days standing over him and talking to him, just getting used to him. When I saw him a couple of days later he’d been taken from his crib and was sitting by himself in a separate cot at the back of the room. He was wearing a new pair of pyjamas and there were clean sheets under him. For the first time I had a clear view of him and I hardly recognised him with all the dirt stripped off him. His eyes were still dark but his skin was several shades lighter and I knew straight away that this was one thing that would set him apart when I got him home. Of course what I couldn’t see then were all the other things that would make life so awkward for him, all the grief and misery which has him lying out there today on that ship with pipes draining and
feeding him.
^‡
All I saw that day was a little boy who needed love and attention, a thin hardy boy with eyes round from hunger, eyes balanced over those high cheekbones like two marbles.

We got back to Ireland on the twenty-second of March, flew into Shannon at two o’clock in the afternoon and I was never so happy to see rain in all my life. One hundred and fifty pounds it cost to get a taxi from Shannon to the door here, 130 miles the driver told me. It was half six when I brought JJ O’Malley through the back door of the old house and he must have felt right at home the minute he got inside. You have to remember this is the old house I’m talking about—bad roof and damp walls and draughts coming in under the doors rattling the window frames. I stood there in the middle of the floor with him in my arms watching our breath cloud up in front of us and it was as cold as a grave.

We were in about an hour, the fire down and me feeding him a bowl of soup on my knee when the knock came to the door. I knew before it swung open who it was; he’d have seen the light in the window.

“Frank,” I called, without getting up, “come in.”

He was in the middle of the floor before he noticed JJ.
You could see him nearly take a step backwards. I never let on.

“Take a seat, Frank,” I said. “Push out the door.”

Frank swung a chair out from under the table and sat down. I was pretending to fuss with JJ but what I was really doing was trying to put myself in Frank’s place and figure out what he might be thinking. We go back a long way, Frank and myself; neighbours and school together since we were kids and a long spell in London in the seventies and eighties. There’s not a lot we don’t know about each other but I could tell that evening I had him fairly flummoxed.

“You were gone a few days,” he said, not taking his eyes off JJ.

“A few days,” I said. “Out foreign.”

“Out foreign?”

“Out foreign.”

He wasn’t happy. He tried another tack.

“I thought there might be something wrong.”

He was still staring at JJ. He told me afterwards it was as much as he could do to stop himself from reaching out with his hand to touch him and make sure he was real. Leaning out on his elbows he was, staring at him. I turned JJ round to face him.

“Say hello to your new neighbour, JJ. Frank, this is my son, this is JJ O’Malley.”

I held out JJ and Frank drew back in his chair.

“Anthony …?” He had his hand out, pointing. “Anthony … how, where …?”

I could barely keep from laughing.

“I bought him,” I said casually.

“Christ!”

“Two thousand dollars, give or take a few pounds, import duties and all the rest.”

“For God’s sake, Anthony!”

“What?” I said, playing the innocent. “You don’t think it was a fair price. I thought it was a fair price.”

You could see the colour rising in Frank’s face. Go to the dresser, I said, and get the bottle. He poured two stiff ones and drew in his chair. It was my turn to start talking and now that it was I didn’t know where to start. The more I thought about it the more I realised that some stories are so daft it makes no difference where you start telling them. You might as well start at the end as at the beginning because one part is as far from making sense as the next. But I had to start somewhere so I just took it out of face. I told him how, after the cattle had been taken away, I’d had a lot of thinking to do. Six months before I could stock up again, what was I to do in the meantime? Night after night in front
of the fire thinking and mulling things over, looking at the telly and trying to make sense of things. I told him how I’d seen the coverage of all those revolutions and those orphanages and how I’d got the idea of going abroad and getting a child of my own. Money wasn’t a problem, I had my own house—what else would I do with it all? So I told him about the trip to that bitter city and all the days spent traipsing from one orphanage to the next with no clue what I was looking for. And then I told him how I found JJ and the wicked witch and about the haggling as well. No more than JJ years later, Frank could hardly believe it either, you could see it in his face. But I wasn’t ashamed of it. I wasn’t ashamed of it then nor am I now and that is something I cannot explain. He was quiet for a while after that and then he shook his head.