The Fields (2 page)

I have known Mozzo for only two months and already we are best friends. His hair is long, jet black and deliberately messy, he has a tiny hint of a greasy moustache on his pale upper lip, and he’s the first person I tell about Helen Macdowell. He sits on my bed with his legs crossed and his shiny thirty-two-hole docs tucked neatly under each thigh. He rocks back’n’forth, picks at his faded red Iron Maiden T-shirt and says Fuckin Jaysus! out loud when I describe the moment of impact. He’s so impressed that I tell him again, straight away, only this time I add a little extra gore, just to see his eyes pop even more. I tell him the sound the ball made when it hit her mouth.

THWACKRUNCH!

I describe little splatlets of blood flying off into the air from her burst lips. I describe her head shooting back on her neck like a boxer’s punchball. And I describe the blood. Buckets of it. Everywhere.

Mozzo’s impressed. He rocks back’n’forth at the top of the bed, right under the poster of a parked Porsche, doors open.

Fuckin hell, Finno! he says, over and over again. Fuckin hell, Finno, that’s mad!

My Toshiba boombox plays Survivor at full volume. I am pleased.

Mozzo’s normally the one telling the stories. He’s good at it too. His dad was a fisherman who worked out of Dublin port and used to fish at night, and take drugs during the day. He beat Mozzo’s mam, Janet, at least once a week and then left her to raise Mozzo alone. But before he left he did loads of things that Mozzo turned into great stories. Like the time he came in pissed from work and held a knife to Janet’s throat. How does it feel, wagon? he said. How does it feel?

Or the time he set himself on fire in front of the telly and didn’t even notice because he was too far gone on booze and drugs. Mad. Or the time he threw a gas cylinder through the neighbour’s front window because they complained about the smell coming off his fish van.

I’ll give ye fish, ye stuck-up bastards! he said, and then he threw a big black plastic bag of fish guts through the hole where the window used to be. Mozzo said it was mad. The police came and everything, and they had to move houses in the end.

Mozzo’s real name is Declan Morrissey, but even his mam calls him Mozzo. Fellas like him are always called something-o. There’s loads of them down in the Villas. And they all know each other. Micko, Macko, Johnno, Backo, Stapo, Ryano, Freyno, Gavvo, Devo, Rocko, Knocko, Dicko, Mallo, Heno, Feno, Hylo and so on. The first thing that Mozzo said when he met me was, Howsigoing, Finno? It was a good start.

When Mozzo moved into The Rise my mam said that I should be friendly to him because he hadn’t had all the luck that I had.

What luck? I asked her.

He has no feckin father! she answered.

I shrugged, and agreed that she was right. My father has a big thick brown moustache, laughs a lot, and is always called A
Right Charmer by everyone who meets him. He makes money selling office equipment and he’s genius at his job.

He could sell sand to the Arabs.

That’s what everyone says about him. In fact, when the Shilawehs moved into the Villas, Maura Connell winked at him and told him that this was his chance to sell sand to the Arabs. He winked back at her, told her not to be so stupid, that they weren’t Arabs, they were coloureds.

I have five sisters, all older than me. And no brothers. My father jokes that he wouldn’t stop trying till he got a boy. And usually, depending on who’s around, he’ll then say, But I settled for Jim instead!

Then everyone laughs and says to my face that my dad’s a wild card. Mam then grabs me, rubs my hair and says, Leave the poor creature alone!

Mozzo’s still reeling from the excitement of the Helen MacDowell story. He’s still rocking back’n’forth, but now he’s nodding his head too. He looks up at my boombox, tells me that Survivor’s fuckin shite and that I should listen to some real fuckin music! He points to his T-shirt when he says this. Then he continues nodding, like he’s thinking about something interesting inside. Eventually, he spits it out.

Let’s do it, Finno, he says. Let’s do a fuckin Helen Macker on it!

I’m confused.

I’ve seen it in a flick once, he says. We’ll get a big fuckin melon, stick it on a fuckin pole and take fuckin potshots at it with the fuckin hockey gear. First shot to hit, splat goes the melon! Be fuckin mad!

Mozzo says fuckin the whole time, more than any friend I’ve ever had. More than Gary anyway.

Until Mozzo arrived on The Rise, Gary Connell was my number one buddy. His dad’s a pilot for Aer Lingus and is always bringing him the latest electronic gadgets from America. Gary is an only child and a Protestant to boot, and, so my mam says, his parents have loads of money to spend on him because they don’t have to be dividing it up among six hungry children. Nearly every day that Gary walks down The Rise he has a new gadget. Pocket space invaders cum leather wallet. Baseball-cap radio with joke drinking straw. Joke windscreen-wiper sunglasses. Sweat-band with built-in digital watch. Transistor-radio tankard.

If an alien scouting party landed in The Rise and saw Gary Connell marching down the street, with all his electronic blinking, tweeting, and bleating gadgets attached, I’m sure they’d scarper straight back to space, convinced they had met a super-advanced cyborg civilisation.

Mozzo likes hanging out with Gary, mostly because of Gary’s gadgets. Gary’s mam, Maura, hates Mozzo, mostly because Mozzo made Gary stick his mickey in between two pillows and hump away on it like it was a woman. Gary’s mam is very glamorous and always wears miniskirts, see-through blouses and lipstick indoors. Mozzo calls her a Fuckin Ride, even in front of Gary. Mozzo knows much more about girls than me and Gary. He’s always talking about fannies and arses and blowjobs and lickjobs and bumming and wanking.

Just had a great pull of me dick, I spunked everywhere! he’ll say as he walks into the room. He’ll grab his crotch and say, Fuckin lovely!

Me and Gary joke about our mickeys and our balls too. But mostly when Mozzo’s around. We go, Oh yeah, I’d definitely ride her! every time a girl walks by. And then we look at Mozzo to see if he agrees. Mostly though, he tells us that we haven’t got a hope in hell of getting any fanny until we stop looking and acting like two little benders.

So one day Mozzo and Gary are up in Gary’s room playing with his remote-control R2-D2 alarm clock and Mozzo says that he had the most amazing wank ever last night. He says that he put his mickey in between two pillows and banged away for hours, and it was just like the real thing, and he’d know about the real thing because he’d done it twice with his cousin at their Stephen’s Day party.

I’m tellin ya, he says to Gary, two pillows jammed together, fuckin hell, exactly like riding a real fuckin fanny! And then he says, You should fuckin try it!

Now Gary’s a little blond fella with lots of freckles and he doesn’t want to embarrass himself in front of Mozzo, so he says yeah, but insists that Mozzo leave the room while he’s riding the pillows.

Mozzo stands outside the door and has a good ole laugh to himself listening to Gary humping and bumping away on the pillows. But then Gary’s mam, Maura, comes up the stairs with a big pile of clothes for the hot press. She sees Mozzo standing outside the door and goes charging inside to find her little Gary, trousers down, having sexual intercourse with the bed linen. Gary’s mam is disgusted and kicks Mozzo out of the house. She then sits Gary down on the bed and tries to talk to him about what he was doing and how it could ruin him and ruin his experiences with girls in the future. Gary said to me that the whole thing was a big laugh, but his mam told my mam that Gary burst out crying and said that it was all Mozzo’s fault and that he never wanted any other girl but his own mam. Gary’s mam hugged him close to her blouse and told him that everything would be all right and that he was supposed to be feeling confused at his age and that he’d make some woman very happy some day as long as he stayed away from Mozzo.

My mam doesn’t hate Mozzo as much as Gary’s mam. She says that’s because Maura’s a Protestant and she’s a Catholic, and Protestants don’t have much time for people like Mozzo or Mozzo’s mam Janet. But my mam’s a Catholic and our Lord was a Catholic and he was always looking after those who were less fortunate than himself, so that’s why Mozzo needs our help. Mam then told me that if she ever caught me riding my pillows like Gary Connell she’d call the Parish Priest.

If there’s any trouble at home at all, Mam threatens to call the Parish Priest. It’s one of her rules.

Mozzo, Gary and me are out in the back garden, and we’ve Sellotaped a turnip to the Swingball post because we couldn’t find a watermelon in Mam’s veg basket. The turnip has been covered in a big red lipstick mouth to remind us of Helen Macdowell. My mam will later go spare when she finds her favourite lippy worn down to the base. Mozzo kisses the turnip for ages and calls it Helen Macker the Little Ride, and me and Gary laugh.

Gary has been told the Helen MacDowell story too so he’s all excited about the game Mozzo has in store for us, and is wearing his joke drinking-straw baseball cap especially for the occasion. Mozzo’s holding my sister Sarah’s hockey stick in his hand and he’s marching around the garden like he owns the place.

The last time Mozzo was here it was my sister Fiona’s seventeenth birthday barbecue party. It was brilliant fun, thanks to Mozzo. When it started getting dark, he rounded up all the kids into three groups, called one of them The British, the other The Argentinians and the other The IRA. So the IRA and The Argentinians got together under Mozzo’s orders, and chased The British all around the apple trees shouting, Get out of the Falklands, Brits! Some of the parents thought this was very
funny, especially Saidhbh Donohue’s father, who always likes to sing songs and cry late at night about the times when our potatoes were rotten and the British were killing us all. After a few rounds of the apple trees, The IRA and The Argentinians cornered The British in the onion beds and started thumping them. My dad ran up the garden with a temper on him because loads of his onions were broken at the stalks and would therefore be tiny little malformed things when they were born instead of huge great tear-makers.

After rooting around in Sarah’s sports bag, joking about finding her knickers and wanking all over them, Mozzo produces a badly scuffed hockey ball. It’s a big heavy thing, like a perfectly round lump of concrete. He places the ball on the grass, ten feet in front of the Swingball post, facing up the garden, away from the house and towards the two apple trees. He turns to us and says that the first person to hit the turnip with a single shot wins the Mary Davit award for being a vicious bastard. Mozzo then strolls up to the ball, stands beside it, steadies himself, swings, shoots hard and clatters the turnip on the very first shot. Of course, nothing happens to the turnip. It doesn’t explode like Mozzo said he saw in the flick, but even so me and Gary cheer out loud. We can’t believe it. First shot and he gets it, one in a million. We look at each other and then over at Mozzo, who’s lapping the garden in triumph, his hair blown off his face, his loose red Iron Maiden T-shirt flowing behind him, and we think together that he’s brilliant.

It takes me and Gary ages to hit the turnip. I manage it after nearly twenty or so goes. Mozzo’s sitting on the grass at this stage, making comments about the state of our shots.

Swing, ye big fuckin girlies! he’s saying. Fuckin bufties, hit the fucker!

He says things like that right out loud after every shot, and
he’s starting to make Gary nervous. Gary still hasn’t hit the turnip, and in fact is getting worse instead of better with each swing. He’s even missing the ball altogether, taking big chunks of mucky-green earth out of Dad’s very carefully cut grass. Dad never wanted us to have Swingball in the first place, said it wears down the grass something rotten, but Mam made him put it up after they had a big fight one night about how Dad was becoming a real killjoy in his old age. It started out as a jokey one around the table, with a few chuckles and proddings from Mam, but it continued onwards, on through the night, up the stairs, and eventually behind closed bedroom doors, with voices raised, with tears, with everything. A real barnstormer.

Suddenly Mozzo says, Bollocks to this! He stands up with a big grin on his face, and says that he has a better plan, and that he’s raising the stakes goodo. He grabs the ball and stick from Gary, who’s nearly crying at this stage, and he walks round to the other side of the Swingball post, the side facing my mam’s kitchen window. He looks up and down the garden, then he places the ball on the ground, again about ten feet away from the post, and he twists the post around so that the turnip’s on this side. He hands the hockey stick to Gary and says, Try it now, ye big fuckin girl!

Gary refuses the stick. He says no way, because if he misses he’s going to smash my mam’s window. He even says fuckin this time.

No fuckin way!

But Mozzo’s having none of it. He’s teasing Gary, saying that he couldn’t hit the bog with his own piss, or his own shit for that matter. And that Gary’s bathroom floor must be covered in pools of piss and lumps of shit from all the times he’s missed the loo. I know I shouldn’t, but I’m laughing my head off picturing Gary slipping off the loo and pissing and shitting everywhere.

I can see Gary’s really upset now, and his chin is clenching up
all tight like your arse when you’re holding in a fart. Mozzo can see it too, so he goes all soft and puts his arm around Gary’s shoulder. He speaks to Gary like a dad, and says that there’s method to his madness and that the risk of smashing my mam’s kitchen window is called motivation. He says that Gary knows deep down inside that he’ll be in trouble if he hits my mam’s window, so there’s no way he’ll miss the turnip. Instead he’ll focus on it, swing back and hit it in one. Just like that. Gary looks like he’s feeling better after hearing this, and his chin relaxes a bit. Then Mozzo says, out of the blue, right into his face, Now go on and hit it, ye little pillow-fucker!

I burst out laughing at this, and so does Mozzo. We think it’s so funny that Gary must find it funny too. But he doesn’t. He just goes all red-faced and hits the hockey ball straight through my mam’s kitchen window. Everyone goes Fuckin Hell! out loud and Gary bursts out crying and runs off home, holding his drinking-straw baseball cap in his hand.