The Fields (20 page)

The next two months are the best in my life. Really. Turns out that having half your family taken away from you and looking after your dying dad is a bit of a breeze after all. Sarah and Siobhan have got a deposit down within a week, and are out of the house before the fortnight is up. They share a tiny one-bedroom flat in a grim three-storey tip on Hamilton Street, just off the North Circular road. They say, on Sunday visits, that the move was the prod they needed to fulfil their futures as bright young independent women in an emerging Ireland. Within the month Sarah has a job as a cashier in Allied Irish Bank, while Siobhan is working in the men’s fashions section of Dunnes Stores.

The Monday-morning farewell with Fiona is pretty gruesome, everyone all weepy at the front door, as the taxi man puffs on his John Players and we get a taste of the real Ireland from hundreds of years ago when you were born to leave home before your time. She gives me the biggest goodbye of all the siblings and squeezes the feck out of me, telling me always to check under my bed for ghosts and ghoulies and to keep my precious Saidhbh safe from harm. I love that last bit, because it makes me forget about the hard and tight lump of sadness that’s stuck in my
throat and concentrate instead on the feeling of manliness glowing in my stomach.

Once the door shuts behind Fiona, Claire and Susan almost instantly go into seventh heaven mode. They each grab a room for themselves, and are happy, as per the new rules, to exchange a daily routine of washing up, hoovering, and even making a tray of brown scones, bran buns or German apple slices for the privilege. They can’t quite believe their luck, in fact, and they secretly treat Dad’s cancer as the best thing that ever happened to the family.

Me, I’m told to buckle down at school and am given a new roster of home duties that include lots of manly stuff, like using Dad’s prized hatchet to chop blocks of wood into kindling for the fire. Or filling the coal bucket up from the bunker out in the back garden. It’s mostly maintenance related stuff, and the central heating is the biggie. Dad himself makes a big deal of it, and shuffles down, grey scratchy style, and announces over sodden Weetabix that it’s time to teach me a few things about the house. ‘Because I won’t always be around, ye know.’ He says this last bit without a drop of feeling, like he’s reading from a manual underneath the table that gives you handy hints on what to say to your son when you’re going to die but don’t actually want to talk about it.

Sometimes, when he’s being like this, all deathy, but not, I want to run up to his face and scream, ‘Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer!’ a million times, just to see what he’d do. My top guess is that he’d stand up, reach for the cane in the corner of the kitchen, give me a belt on the backs of the legs, and then run into the sitting room, flop down on the couch, drape the
Irish Independent
over his face and fall asleep.

Although he pretty much stopped using the cane when the cancer came along. Fiona said it was because he was discovering his inner humanity, and the senselessness of violence, and how we
are all connected everywhere by love alone. But, looking at him wheezing through the kitchen, on his way upstairs to take another dose of secret pills from his sock drawer, you only got the feeling that he was too exhausted to cane anyone, but that the minute the strength returned to his arms he’d be back in action, whipping and thwacking with the best of them.

So, I learn lots of manly stuff, and I try my best to knuckle down at school – although there, I’m given special kid-glove treatment the minute they find out about Dad. Most of the students, except for Gary, stop talking to me, in case their dads get cancer too. While the teachers offer to let me have days, weeks and months off class, as long as I want. Fr Jason is especially good about it, and is forever cornering me in the yard, telling me about his brother who died of leukaemia when he was only a child, and how a tremendous calmness descended upon him a couple of weeks before he passed away, a knowingness and an understanding of the preciousness of every minute of life. Fr Jason says that his door, up there in the monastery, is always open if I need to drop by and talk over anything. My father or, well, you know yourself, anything.

The central heating, as it turns out, is dead easy, and I can do the whole job in under ten minutes. I use Dad’s smallest Phillips screwdriver to unscrew three tiny screws from the ignition casing, after which I slowly and gently remove the entire ignition housing unit from the body of the central heating boiler itself, then dip a paint brush in some white spirits, and finally clean the sparkplug free from heating soot, replace the unit, and the casting, and press ignition, and nine times out of ten the whole system fires into gear without a bother.

Saidhbh is dead impressed with my new role as man about the house and, as a joke but not really, she sings the pop song ‘So Macho’ whenever I come to her with grease on my knuckles or stories of how Dad put his stainless-steel vice-grips in my hand
and made me slide under the car and change the oil. She sings it sometimes right into my ear, when we’re spooning in bed together, up in her room, or my room, and messing about in the quiet mid-morning after having real-life honest-to-goodness sex.

Yes, things go completely mental in the physical stakes with me and Saidhbh. Once I’m free from O’Culigeen’s grip it’s all systems go. It’s only a matter of days, in fact, after Mam’s made the call to O’Culigeen, announcing my retirement – she said that O’Culigeen was furious, and tried every ruse in the book to keep me in the job, even offered to pay me, and at the last minute insisted, fruitlessly, that he be given a chance to say goodbye – that me and Saidhbh actually start using tongues during shifting.

It’s amazing how quickly it gets out of hand. It’s tongues one night. Down to pants the next. And before we know it, we’re both bunking off school, waiting till our respective houses are empty, then sneaking in upstairs, pulling the curtains closed and having complete and uninhibited nudey-nudey action. It’s totally brilliant, like a combination of playing doctors and nurses, and feeling like you’re exploding with excitement from the inside out, and then, occasionally, just very occasionally, feeling like you’re going to burst out crying and be physically sick with sadness as you look at the other one and realise that you can’t actually melt into them and become one big huggy-kissy-weepy bed-bound beast.

And we do everything too. Saidhbh can’t believe it, and neither can I. She says the whole time that she’s definitely going to hell for this, and she sometimes says it like she really believes it too, but that only adds to the atmos. In the thick of it, she sometimes whispers out quiet little prayers of mercy, like ‘Lord have mercy on my soul’ or ‘God forgive my heathen actions,’ but it doesn’t actually stop us doing what we’re doing.

She says that the priests in Kilcuman church and the nuns at Coláiste Mhuire ni Bheatha would collectively string her up if they knew what she was doing. And she can’t believe how
quickly we’ve gone, in a matter of weeks, from breathy shifting to the works. And we didn’t have lessons or anything. She goes on top, or I go on top, or she goes on top again. And we just get on with it. Like naturals. Our favourite, which is a bit of a cogger from the films, especially
An Officer and a Gentleman
, which we watched together on UTV’s Friday Night at the Movies, is where we don’t stop staring at each other as we’re doing it. Right from the beginning to the end. Real slow-like, and just staring. Eyeball to eyeball. Which makes us giggle like mad at first, and then pull our heads in even closer, clunking our foreheads together, as if we’re trying again, hopelessly, to become the one big huggy-kissy-weepy beast. We usually end that one with loads of groaning and ooh-ing and aahh-ing.

We’re pretty good at controlling the noises, though. We even do it while Dad is in the house. In the mornings he’s normally knocked out in bed on cancer medicine, and so doesn’t really have a chance to hear anything, even though we do it in total silence. But just in case, when we sneak upstairs and into my bedroom and we put a load of school books on the floor in the unlikely event of him waking and shuffling towards the room to see who’s there – at which point we plan to leap out of bed, fling open the curtains, rip on some trousers and tops, and assume the manner of two very curious if slightly sweaty students.

We don’t go in for the kinky stuff, though. We tried once. Saidhbh asked me if we should try doggie doggie, and I said why not. But it was all too weird in the end. We couldn’t do our eyeball thing in any decent form, although Saidhbh did try twisting her head backwards, and I managed to lean myself forward and clunk her forehead once before she spasmed away from me with the pain of all that heavy twisting. Otherwise the whole thing gave me creepy flashbacks to O’Culigeen, and his teeth gnashing, and his grippy hands and his curses and his hate, which killed the mood in the mickey department and sent me flying
down on to the bed beside Saidhbh for some old-fashioned cuddles and kisses.

It’s during one of these sessions, in mid May, just after ten in the morning, when Mam’s doing the weekly shop in Quinnsworth’s, and the girls are at school and Dad is passed out asleep, that I first tell Saidhbh I love her. I kind of get all upset, nearly crying and everything, and tell her that there is something welling up inside me that I just have to get out or else I’ll be sick all over her. She beams excitedly, because she has an idea of what’s coming, and then I pull her close to me under the
Sesame Street
covers, stare at my parked Porsche poster and say the words, ‘I love you.’

Funny thing is, I don’t know at all how the words make her feel, but it’s the most amazing thing on the planet to say them myself. Like fireworks going off in my mouth and depth charges in my soul as the words come out. Saidhbh doesn’t say ‘I love you’ back. Which is cool. And at that moment I know that we’ll have a whole lifetime left together when we’re married for her to tell me that, and besides it was about what needed to come out of me, not what I needed to hear. She does, though, go all coy, and pulls the sheets up to her eyes, so that Ernie’s chin is just poking out under her nose, turning her face into half-woman, half-muppet, and tells me that she has something to say too. Go on! I say, a bit nervously, hoping that she’s not going to say she’s expecting a baby, although she has totally got that sorted and says that she can tell exactly when she’s in the danger zone by the pain she gets in her side and will be able to keep us safe from babies for years to come. What she does say, however, is that I’m the first person ever to have sex with her. This seems to be a huge deal for her. Bigger than it is for me. She says that she knows what people say about her, that she’s kind of mad, and half-nun, half-whore. But the last bit isn’t true, and up until now, she’s been all nun in that department.

I ask her about Mozzo, and remind her of all the groping that I saw at her family hoolie. She says that it was nothing, and that Mozzo was always trying it, but never even got beyond her underwear in those days. Not like you, sending me straight to hell, ye dirty madser, she says, reaching down and giving my mickey a right yank, and in a way that’s supposed to be funny but is actually a bit painful. At which point she cuddles even closer and goes, casual as anything, And you? I should feckin hope that I’m your first! And then she laughs at the very thought of anything else.

Now, maybe I’m still a bit sore from the yanked mickey, or maybe the way she giggles, like I’m the baby and she’s the mother, just rubs me the wrong way, but I think of her question, then I think of O’Culigeen, and I go and say the words, ‘You were. Kind of.’

Kind of?!!!!!! Bam! She’s out of the bed like a bullet and reefing up her jeans, face flushed, eyelids instantly brimming with tears. What the feck do you mean, Kind of!!!??? I tell her to be quiet, because her screaming is going to break through the cancer medication, and Dad’ll be in here in seconds! Kind of!!! She says it again, this time followed by the chant of ‘Who was she? Who was she?’ I start pulling on my trousers too, as I realise that she’s actually having a full-blown fit, and is moments away from storming out of the house.

Her last words, as she slams the front door, and as Dad eventually stirs in his bed, are, ‘And you can forget about the fecking Debs!’

The Debs is the highlight of the school term, of the school calendar, and of the school social scene. In fact, it’s the highlight of just anything that happens in school, from the first nervous steps you take through the front gates with your mam in hand to the final walkout from the final exam. It’s the climax, in other words, of the whole life that you have lived, and the person that you have been, while you were there, under that roof and inside those gates. And it takes the form of a big dance at the end of the last summer term, a bit like the American Prom, only with extra doses of booze and vomiting, that symbolises the end of your life as a young childish student with no cares in the world and the beginning of your adult existence as someone who drinks too much and feels slightly sick all the time.

It happens in snazzy and not so snazzy hotel bars all over the country, and Fiona says that it’s like a mass disease where for one night only the entire nation covers its eyes and sticks its fingers in its ears, and pretends that there’s nothing odd at all about tens of thousands of seventeen-year-old darlings hitting the hard stuff till the wee hours, and mostly ending up in broken bedraggled heaps, with clothes torn and stained, faces smudged and stomachs turned inside out on the pavement before them.

It’s a release, isn’t it? Mam says to Gary’s mam, when they’re chatting over soggy bickies, and talking about Seamus Kennedy’s Debs, and how he got his nose broken down in the docks when he tried to get an early morning chaser from a tough city boozer while still in his monkey suit. He was with his Debs herself, Fianna Malarky – because you call the girl and the dance the same thing. She was standing by his side in a purple chiffon dress, and the bar owners, dead scuzzy Dubs, allowed her to come in but not him, and then they knocked him about, left him unconscious down a side street when he called them knackers.

Gary’s mam agrees that it’s a great big release for the children of the nation, and their one chance to get whatever it is they’ve had knocking around inside them for thirteen school years out of their systems via a pre-dance drinks, a sit-down meal, a jazz-band performance and an after-band disco followed by an early morning fry up and a shame-faced taxi-trip home.

The subject is foremost on Mam and Gary’s mam’s minds because of me. Everyone knows I’m going to Saidhbh’s Debs, which is a huge thing, especially because I’m way underage, and because it’s the only piece of good news to ping through the front door of our house in months. Saidhbh, of course, had to ask Mam’s permission to take me, and it was a big scene, with Susan and Claire banished upstairs, while Saidhbh and Mam waited by the fire for Dad to appear and nod his bleary-eyed approval too. Saidhbh and Mam then half hugged each other, like they’d agreed on the wedding date and everything, and then Mam let Saidhbh run up to my room and tell me the good news – this was all, of course, before the big bust-up over me not being technically a virgin.

The word gets out in school too, courtesy of Gary. And before long it’s Debs this, and Debs that, and everyone calling me Finno the Madser for being the first fourteen-year-old bender ever in the
history of the school to get to go to a real live Debs, and with a girl too. Gary tells me that some of the teachers have said that it’s a disgrace, but that they understand why I’m allowed go, considering my dad’s dying and everything.

Naturally, I’m absolutely bricking it, in case Saidhbh has really called it off. I won’t know where to start with the explanations. Tell Mam first and hope it spreads out from there, via the coffee-morning mams’ information service. And then how to face everyone, and take their triple and quadruple doses of pity, knowing that I’m the only guy in the country for whom not a single sliver of life ever goes right. And so, out of a combination of worry, loneliness and just the sheer gut-wrenching agony of being on the other end of Saidhbh’s huff, I send her this huge mad letter – written in biro on jotter paper, with spirally doodles all round the edges, and done right through the night, that says everything about how much I love her, and how afraid I am to lose her, and how I held back on the virgin thingy because I was unsure of what sort of man she wanted, and wasn’t sure if I could be that man, or if I was even a man to begin with. You know? I write. ‘So Macho’, and all that.

I stick it through her letter box, with an ‘eyes-only’ stamp on it, from one of Gary’s gadget collections, at seven in the morning, under the pretext of nipping out for an early morning jog, because I’m allegedly trying to get fit for the Big Day. Although Mam gives me a dead confused look when I arrive back in my black-and-red tracksuit, as if wondering what exactly I plan to do on my Debs that will require tip-top physical fitness. I tell her all the fellas are doing it, just so we’ll lose a few pounds and look our best in a monkey suit, and she seems satisfied enough.

Either way, the letter does the job, and Saidhbh arrives later that morning, just after Mam dropped Claire and Susan to The Sorrows, full of huggy-huggy sadness and a renewed belief that we are the one couple on the planet who are destined to be together
for ever. There is only one thing, however, she says. And that’s the sex. She thinks we were wrong to get going on it so quickly, and considering my age and everything, she wants us to stop it. She’s even contemplating going down to the church and begging for a clean slate in confession, from the PP himself, Fr O’Culigeen.

I panic at this, and tell her not to be an eejit, and in a big rush of words I add that love is good and God is love and love is sex and sex is love and if love is good and God is good and sex is love then God is sex and sex is good is God. And that no priest is going to understand that unless they’ve had sex, or love, or both. And I add, just for good measure, that O’Culigeen is the last person on the planet who’s going to understand any of this, because he’s a lifeless old stiff, and not qualified to talk about anything other than the bible, the price of olive oil and prodigal fecking sons! She hugs me some more and tells me not to be such a blasphemous little hot-head, and that she can’t confess now, anyway, because O’Culigeen has had to go down to the bog on family business – a funeral of one of his brothers – and that she wouldn’t dream of confessing to anyone else but him.

In the meantime, though, she says, tweaking my nose, no sex for you.

We have sex three times in a row on the morning after the Debs, and it’s a hoot. Slap bang in the middle of the Donohues’ sitting-room floor. We’re both bleary and blotchy from the night before, Saidhbh in a great big purple dress with stiffened felt breast-plate and soft puffy shoulders, and me in the monkey suit and extragelled hair. We can see from the toilet mirrors in Abrakebabra on Dame Street that we look wrecked, and we’ve been drinking so much and dancing so much that we’re kind of just hovering in a shaky blur rather than walking or standing. Naturally, Saidhbh promised my mam that a drop of drink wouldn’t cross my lips all
night, considering my age. But that was scrapped the minute the taxi dropped us off into Jury’s car park in Ballsbridge, and we bashed around with a load of Saidhbh’s Mhuire ni Bheatha buddies who all had naggin bottles of spirits because the price of the drink inside was wicked. I took enough slugs to floor me in the first ten minutes, and then got chatting to some of the older Debs fellas, who were pretty decent, and elbowed me a lot and treated me like I was a mascot for the night – I always got first drinks at the table, and a big punch on the shoulder whenever I finished a pint. Saidhbh got them all calling me a madser, and before long I was one of the gang, boozing and joking and flicking peanuts at the bar girls with the best of them.

Saidhbh and me did snogging and sexy stuff in the loo during the jazz band. But I was basically numb from the eyelids down. One of the older fellas, Fergus, a big rugby type, came hammering on the cubicle door, saying that he needed to get in there with his mot, meaning his Debs, Barbara, and he kept yelling for whoever it was, meaning us, to get the feck out. But when Saidhbh told him to feck off with himself, and that this cubicle was booked for the long term, he leapt up on to the door frame and, staring down at me half undressed, and Saidhbh’s gear all hitched up to God knows where, he just burst out laughing and shouted out to everyone that the little madser was busy at work in the loo.

Naturally, we didn’t dream of coming back to mine in the morning. Mam would’ve been horrified to see the state of me, to smell me, and to know that all sorts of sacred trusts and truths had been broken during the night. And besides, it would’ve been too much for Dad, to briefly break the fog of drug-addled isolation at the crack of dawn, to find his only boy bleary-eyed and banjaxed to the world.

No, instead we crash into Donohue Towers at 8 a.m., just as Taighdhg and Sinead are on their way out the door, with
Eaghdheanaghdh following silently behind. They’re much cooler than my folks about booze, the Donohues. Especially coz their dad’s an alkie, and is hardly going to start lecturing them all on the evils of drink when he can barely get his brogues tied in the morning without a bracing shot of Jameson.

Saidhbh says that even if her dad was anti-booze, or if he became anti-booze overnight, like the way my mam did when she took the pledge, he wouldn’t do anything about us, because he was far too busy with all the political stuff to care about something as trivial as teenage boozing. Being a teacher means that he is practically running the country, and always at union meetings, and urging people to form community groups and strike and march and vote on this, that and the other. Which is part of the reason why his nerves are shot, because he’s so exhausted from trying to fix the country.

At the moment he’s knee-deep in ‘RA prisoner rights and the fallout from the Eighth Amendment, says Saidhbh. The first one is all about making sure the British Government don’t get the ‘RA boys beaten up in prison just because they ruined Christmas for everyone in London by blowing up the English version of Clerys. And the second one is about making sure that our country isn’t overrun with West Brit heathens who want to turn all our women into sluts and make them kill their unborn babies with broken vacuum cleaners and sledgehammers against their will. She says it’s dead important, and one of the biggest battles that the teachers have ever got involved with, and a chance to show the world that in Ireland we recognise that babies in the womb are just as important to us as adults on the street, or in the pub.

And she’s right. Because Taighdhg barely says a word to us as we stumble in his front door, looking like zombie tramps from a black-tie horror film. Instead it’s up to Sinead, who’s all dressed up in big earrings and bigger hair, in high-glam tour-guide style,
and busy trying to give Eaghdheanaghdh a side-parting with a bit of spit and the palm of her hand, to say that she hopes that we had a smashin time at the hoolie last night, and that there’s fresh Brennan’s in the bread bin for toast. The three of them bundle themselves past us through the door and into the car and, after some false spluttery starts and wheezy engine whines, scoot off noisily into the early morning work rush.

Saidhbh leads me inside, straight into the sitting room, where she lifts up all the fallen newspapers and makes a clean space in the centre of the floor, by the gas fire, and pushes the coffee table into the corner, right against the record player. We then, without a word, get stuck into each other, like animals. It’s completely mad, and if we hadn’t had our jumbo doners thirty minutes earlier in Abrakebabra, I’d say it was almost like we were devouring each other for once and for all. There was eatin and drinkin in it, as Mam says about the best soups she makes. Although I’m sure she’s never thinking about Dad’s mickey when she says that.

The session goes on for hours, upside down, back to front, inside out, and all around the garden. By the end of it we’re sprawled out across the carpet, laughing and panting and giggling and half crying at the sheer lunacy of two people being this happy, and sweaty and naked and slightly nauseous all at the same time.

I have a shower, and get back into my manky monkey suit, and tell her, joking yet testing the waters all the same, that she’s going to have to do some major confessing to O’Culigeen when he gets back from down the bog. She holds my face and kisses me tight, sticking her tongue, real tough like, right into my mouth and licking the roof like she’s proving that we’ve moved beyond sexy and can do things now like licking each other’s tonsils in a friendly way, and then she pulls back and says, eyes rolling, ‘You’re telling me!’

I skip on home up The Rise like a fella on fire with happiness. There’s no car on the slope, which means that Mam must already be up at Mass. Which is handy, and also means that I won’t have to do the big post-party chat until I’ve got my story good and straight, and have carefully removed all the forbidden bits about boozing and feeling and getting hot and heavy on the carpet down the road.

I swish through the garage doors, and have already got my hands on the Weetabix box when there’s a shocking rumble down the stairs and none other than Dad appears at the kitchen door with a mad look in his eyes, the last few clumps of hair on his head poking up with rage, and spitty fury firing out of his mouth. He calls me a corner boy, and wants to know who in blazes hell gave me permission to stay out all night? I tell him that it was the Debs, and that everyone stays out for the Debs, but he just shouts Debs Me Arse and lunges at me with his dressing gown trailing behind him. He says that although Mam may have been born yesterday down the bog somewhere, he’s a Dub and Dubs aren’t thick, and Dubs know exactly what I’ve been up to all night. He says, again, that he’s not thick and that just because he’s lying in bed upstairs every day doesn’t mean that he can’t hear me and Saidhbh doing ‘the filthy’ whenever we get the chance. He says he knows exactly what’s going on, and right now, this is the last straw. He says all this with his hands now holding the collar of my monkey suit. He stinks something awful. Like morning breath, pee, and a bit of death all mixed up.