The Fields (25 page)

Deano is now officially Fiona’s boyfriend. The minute I see him, pacing by the Peugeot, just past the croissant stand, I nearly fall over my suitcase with the shock of it. He’s practically a hundred. Fiona knows this, and I think that’s why she was snappy with me in the station. She’s knows that I’m going to be like, What the effing hell is that ole grandpa doing with my sister?!!! And worse than that, he’s called Deano! And he works
for Aunty Grace! He offers to lift me and Saidhbh’s suitcase into the Peugeot’s boot but I tell him not to bother: in my head I imagine his back exploding with the effort of it all, like the cartoon robot guy on the telly health-information ad who instructs you on how to lift heavy things because otherwise it can-cause injury, can-cause injury, can-cause injury, can-cause injury.

He’s dressed in baggy trousers, like Fiona, only his are a bit manky dirty. And he’s wearing a white collarless shirt and a black waistcoat. He’s mostly bald but has scraped a load of white hair from around his ears into a ponytail at the back. And his face is all craggy, like he was crumpled up and left in space sleep for five hundred years and then finally unfolded only last week.

He’s very smiley all the same, and hugs me when he sees me, and looks at both me and Saidhbh together and smiles kindly and calls us poor children from the homeland. Fiona later tells me that Aunty Grace only hires Irish, because they’re brilliant workers, they’re great craic after hours, and they don’t phone you with death threats every time a bomb goes off, or throw rotten eggs and human shit at the front window of your business, or stop you on the street and tell you to fuck off back to Paddyland you piece of shit Irish bitch.

Aunty Grace’s house in the Queen’s park is much smaller than I imagined, and not actually in the Queen’s park. Instead, it turns out that we’ve been misunderstanding her for years and that the house is actually built in area of London that’s simply called Queen’s Park but is nowhere near the real Queen herself, which is not surprising, given the amount of rubbish on the roads and the hundreds of old drunken bent-over fellas with tangled beards and spitty coats stumbling around in the doorways. And that’s not the full of it either, because Fiona tells me later that Aunty Grace’s house, which is bang in the middle of a small narrow street called Glengall Road, is not even in the official Queen’s
Park area, and really belongs to the next-door neighbourhood, which is called Kilburn, and is where all the Paddies from all four corners of Ireland end up when they first come to London – and it must also be the place where they get the beards and spitty coats, and strict instructions to go and fall about in each other’s doorways.

Aunty Grace, though, is very concerned about making the right impression, and doesn’t want to be seen in the wider business community as any old immigrant just off the boat, so she puts Queen’s Park as her address, instead of Kilburn, and no one – not the water company or the electrics or the post office itself – has ever bothered to make her write the truth.

The house itself, unlike the one we always heard about in letters and in chat, is tiny, and squashed in between two other tiny houses on Glengall Road. It’s teatime when we arrive, and Aunty Grace greets us on the kerb, smiling but swinging a big bunch of keys, and making a point of telling us that she had to close up shop early for this, which is something that she hasn’t done since they blew up them horses in the bandstand. Her next-door neighbour, an old dear called Jackie, comes tootling out on to the street in slippers and housecoat the minute we arrive. She’s dead English, has orangey brown smoky fingers, a real deep husky voice, dyed yellow hair and thick milk-bottle glasses. It takes only two seconds to spot that she’s mad as a bag of hammers. She asks Aunty Grace if we’re from the CIA, and when Aunty Grace, dead patient like, says, no, we’re from Ireland, Jackie says that her parents once owned a castle in Ireland, near Galway, but that her brother-in-law, the bastard, cut her out of the will. She then says that any time she goes to Dublin she always gets free drinks in the pub, because she’s related to Daniel O’Connell, hero of the nation. She chats away like this, for another ten minutes before Aunty Grace nods and does a polite little laugh, and then tells Jackie to go back indoors before she catches her death. Jackie
tells us that she’s watching us, and warns us not to drink the water, because it’s filled with poison from a reactor-leak in the Brecon Beacons. Aunty Grace says that Jackie’s an old dote, and that the street here is a mixture of old eccentrics and new up-and-comers like herself.

The atmosphere around the tea table, once all the hellos-and-great-that-you’re-heres are done, is pretty rubbish, because everybody knows why we’re here and nobody’s allowed to say anything about it. We eat meals from amazing space-aged packets that come boiling hot, nuclear style, straight out of Aunty Grace’s massive cancer-making microwave. She jokes that she’s a working woman, with a business to run, and doesn’t have time to be doing all the fancy food, like Irish Stew and spaghetti bolognese, that Mam makes for us back home. And so we eat like astronauts, holding our white plastic trays in front of us, and dipping two slices of brown meat-like stuff from one wide shallow bath in the corner of the tray into another smaller yet deeper bath of brown sauce-like stuff at the centre, before topping it all off with some white mash-like stuff that lives in the biggest bath in the other corner.

Deano, who’s still with us at dinner time, and seems to be a bit of a permanent fixture at the house, jokes that this is exactly the sort of grub them boys ate when they went to the moon. And then he adds, If you believe that sort of thing. Fiona says, Here we go! just before Deano begins a brilliant explanation of why nobody has ever been to the moon and that it was all just a big joke played on the world by the Americans, to make us feel that they were masters of the universe. And then he says, But there is only one master of the universe, before looking directly over at me. I’m expecting him to say, God, or Jesus. But instead, he says, The Source, and claps his hand quietly in front of his smiling face as he does so. Fiona sighs again.

She tells me later, sitting on the edge of my bed at midnight,
that Deano’s a good sort, and really brilliant with her, but he sometimes gets carried away with all the hippie-dippie stuff. She says that he had no parents back in Ireland when he was young, was an unwanted baby, and has had an awful time, all his life, trying to find out who he is, and why he’s here on Earth. She says he’s brilliant at the guitar though, and is always the most popular fella at any party. And he’s magic at his job, which is sort of like a career guidance counsellor, a priest, and a head doctor all rolled into one. All the youngies who come over from Ireland, broke and banjaxed, make their way straight to Aunty Grace’s office, hoping for the best from a top-flight career as a note-taker, typer and occasional coffee maker. And while she does all the professional stuff, and gets them up to speed on their Pitman shorthand and words per minute, and pays for new haircuts and business suits, which means that she gets a nice chunk of their pay packet for her efforts, it’s Deano who does all the other stuff. Tells them that they’re special people inside, and unique, and that whatever they’re doing over here is part of their life’s journey, and not to be ashamed about leaving home but to look ahead at the opportunities that England has to offer. Fiona says that Deano’s taken lovely care of her, in the nicest way, since the day she arrived, as part of Aunty Grace’s emergency efforts to fix our family fast.

I sleep in Deano’s bed, which is in a spare room with a single giant framed Beatles poster called
Rubber Soul
on the wall, and a tiny window that looks out on to a back concrete courtyard filled with rubbish bins and old ladders. Saidhbh has to bunk in with Fiona. We didn’t ask or discuss it with anyone, it was just obvious that you wouldn’t want to be rubbing Aunty Grace’s nose in it, even though we haven’t bothered to tell anyone that me and Saidhbh are finished as boyfriend and girlfriend, and just in bender-friends mode for ever more. Deano tells me not to worry about him and his bed, because one of his friends from
‘Community’ has agreed to put him up for the night. I don’t ask, but he starts to tell me about Community anyway, saying that they’re a great bunch of punters, real searchers, every one of them. If it wasn’t for Community, he says, he’d be in rag order. Still, I say nothing. He begins the whole story of Community, and of how they bought the old church spot up in Islington, when Fiona stomps in and cuts him short, saying that it’s my bedtime, and that little boys need their beauty sleep. Deano calls me ‘Little Man’, and skulks out of the room, saying that he’ll go help Aunty Grace put the bins out.

We chat for a bit, me and Fiona. About home, about Dad, and about how mad everything’s got recently. And even though it’s just like old times, and all I’m missing is the parked Porsche poster on the wall above me, I’m pretty quiet for most of it, and don’t really have the stomach for it. Fiona, who’s still totally brilliant at looking straight into the heart of me, shuffles up closer on the covers and tells me not to worry about anything, and that everyone makes mistakes. She strokes the side of my head, around my ears, and calls me her little boy. I melt on the spot, and have to use superhuman strength to stop myself from wailing out loud and flinging my arms around her and asking her, please, right now, to take me home to Ireland and lock me up in my mam and dad’s house for ever and ever.

Instead, I tell her that I’m tired and just need some sleep. I roll away from her, towards the wall, and she nudges me sharply in the back. Oi! she says. Haven’t you forgotten something?

Oh, I say, and lean up to kiss her goodnight.

She flinches. Not me, ye eejit! What about her!

She tilts her head to one side, indicating the next-door bedroom. I stand up automatically, without much feeling, like a beedley-beedley robot, and plod across the room, out the door and rest against Saidhbh’s door jamb. I knock. No sound. I open the door.

Saidhbh is already in darkness. She’s lying, curled up, on a mattress on the floor next to Fiona’s bed. I flick on the sidelight on the chest of drawers and Saidhbh barks an annoyed, Jesus! My eyes dart around the room, from Fiona’s Duran Duran posters, to her neatly folded piles of Ton sur Ton sweatshirts, to her enormous collection of make-up bottles, powders and pads, and finally to her three neatly arranged and handmade Miss Piggy dollies that she brought with her from Ireland. I turn off the light again and kneel down beside Saidhbh. It’s like she’s dying, and I’m the one praying for God to take her soul swiftly and painlessly.

Big day tomorrow, eh? I say, finally.

She says nothing, but in the darkness snuffles quietly to herself.

I reach out to find her hand. It’s up around her mouth. My fingers are like spiders running up along her forearm and over her wrist. I’m expecting her to tell me to feck off, but she doesn’t. She opens out her own fingers and lets me slip mine in and squeeze. She squeezes back. Nothing happens for ages, and it would seem really calm if you were watching us from the outside, but inside I’m actually racking my brains for something to say. Something to make it better. A joke, maybe, about Deano or Jackie, or mad people in general. Or about what they’d say at home if they could see us now. About school, about the nuns, about Mary Davit or even about Fiona’s new hair, or Aunty Grace’s space dinners, anything to take away the dark thoughts of this thing we have to do in the morning. My brain tells me to go light, to go funny, but my body has other ideas. It sends up a wave of feeling, right from my stomach, that just lurches out from my throat and into the room.

I love you so much, I say to Saidhbh. And as I do I feel my eyes go stingy, my throat go supertight, and tiny little tears form right inside the nosey part of my lids, like I’ve just said the saddest thing that anyone has ever said in the history of the
universe or the multiverse, and of time, linear, non-linear and otherwise.

Saidhbh gives my hand another squeeze, and she whispers in the darkness those three little words that are everything to her, and bring her back to the safety of home in moments of fear and need.

God is good, she says. Yes. And then she repeats them. God is good.

I go to bed. I know, for sure, that we are truly fecked.

Saidhbh goes a bit nutty after the abortion. Although I say abortion, we never actually got through with the whole shebang. They were dead nice and everything in the centre. It was a huge old building with high ceilings and massive doors, from the times of Sherlock Holmes and the like, and with four floors all dedicated to abortions, right in the heart of London, just north of Oxford Circus. I know the name Oxford Circus well, and so does everyone in our family. It’s the name of the tube station that nearly swallowed up Sarah and Siobhan for good, when they were in London, as girls, on a holiday trip with Mam and Dad, while Fiona, Claire and Susan stayed home with Aunty Una. I wasn’t even born yet, but I’ve heard the story a million times: about how Mam and Dad got separated from six-year-old Sarah and Siobhan in Oxford Circus tube station, and how they ran up on to the street, sure that they’d never see their darling twins ever again, until the two girls suddenly popped up with guilty smiles on their faces at the other side of the crossroads completely. Mam and Dad screamed, Stay right there! And then they ran right across the busy intersection and slapped the hell out of the girls for giving them the worst fright in their lives. After that they went to Wendys for a burger.

It only takes us fifteen minutes to get into Oxford Circus from the Kilburn tube station, although Aunty Grace tries her best to persuade us to walk backwards away from Kilburn and leave from Queen’s Park station. She says that the platforms there are much cleaner and the trains that leave from there go much quicker. But Fiona makes rolly-eyes and shaky-head faces behind Aunty Grace’s back, so we go to Kilburn instead.

The journey in is pretty quiet, even though it’s slap bang in the middle of Tuesday morning rush hour. And me and Saidhbh, on a London tube train for the very first time in our lives, can’t quite believe how you can get so many people into such a small space and have them make so little noise. Just a couple of dry coughs, followed by the rattle-rattle of newspapers, punctuating nothing but the metal moan of the train rails. And nothing else. If you shut your eyes tight you’d swear you were all alone in a very hot and very empty carriage, instead of one that’s wall to wall with bodies and suits and skirts and jeans and jackets and bags. I’m guessing it’s because they’re all tired, and it’s first thing in the morning, and the last thing they want to be doing is getting ready for a big sweaty work-day in the heart of the London metropolis. But Fiona says later that it’s because they’re all English, and the English don’t talk to anyone they don’t know. And even when they do know you, she says, you’d be hard pushed to get some decent chat out of them, unless you’re all sitting around a big banquet table or at a posh dinner somewhere, and you’re elbow to elbow with Lord Whoo-Haw Ponkington Smythe, and he’s only talking to you because it would be dead embarrassing and against the rules not to, and the English never break the rules.

The abortion people are totally different, and dead friendly. And they even have a special Irish woman to deal with all the girls from the homeland who come over in the family way. And she’s called Noreen and has super-short hair, like Fiona’s, and is probably one of the friendliest people you’re ever likely to meet
in an abortion clinic. The others are nice too, but they mostly stare down at forms, and run through really embarrassing questions about how many sexual partners have you had, and at what age did you have your first sexual partner, and is this the father? The woman who says that has blonde hair, and amazing
Top of the Pops
-style make-up, dead glam, but when I say Yes to that question, she kind of looks at me from above the clipboard with an awkward smile that seems to say, I wasn’t talking to you, baby-maker!

Most of Noreen’s questions, however, are all about back home, and who knows, and what help have we had, and do we have tickets, or enough money to get back over the Irish Sea. She gives Saidhbh a full glass of water when her lips start wobbling after looking at the leaflet that shows an artist’s impression of the Y-shaped abortion seat with the stirrups up in the air and a cartoon doctor kneeling dangerously close to a cartoon woman’s cartoon fanny. And then she tells Saidhbh that she’s going to be a grand girl now as she leads her by the hand into the abortion room. Me and Saidhbh don’t say anything to each other at this stage. We don’t even look at each other. I was going to say, Good luck now with it all, but that feels a bit thick. And Saidhbh seems to have gone into such a mad trance-like state that anything other than actually putting one foot in front of the other and even tually pushing herself up into a half-seated position in the dangerous man-made stirrupy contraption is totally out of the question. She disappears behind the abortion doors, with no sign yet of the doctor and his tools, cartoon or otherwise.

I’m waiting outside in the holding room – the only fella, surrounded by four nervous-looking women – reading my
Peig
notes, hoping to get back on track with some super-early swotting for the next school year, when she comes out, sooner than expected, literally ten minutes after going in, with all her paperwork half scrunched up in her hands, a funny stare on her face,
and Noreen clinging on to her arm. Noreen glares at me when I stand up. She says nothing, but just shakes her head and shuts her eyes at the same time, as if to say that it’s a sad thing that Saidhbh has come all this way from Ireland, only to fail the Oxford Circus abortion experience. She slides Saidhbh towards me, like she’s handling an ancient Chinese vase, and I receive her gently, using the same under-arm grip as I shuffle her out of the reception room and out into the daylight, through the massive wooden doors of Abortion Towers.

We celebrate the no-abortion in a flash Mexican restaurant called Border Town in Oxford Circus, with a late breakfast of chips and chicken fajitas. I’ve never had fajitas before, and my eyes nearly pop out of my head when I see them sizzling and smoking towards me through the restaurant, swooping down like an Airfix spaceship from telly’s
Flash Gordon
, leaving a vapour trail of thick black cloud as it goes. My fajitas are being carried on a black iron skillet and small wooden holding tray by a very relaxed waiter who looks like he’s done this a million times before, so isn’t bothered at all by the impressive special effects set-piece at the end of his wrist.

Saidhbh’s cousin had fajitas once before, on holiday in Benidorm, which is why she made me order them. They come with their own round box of pancakes, and Saidhbh has to show me how to eat them, rolled up with red and green sauces poured down the middle, on either side of the chicken strips. It’s a complicated process, and Saidhbh gets a bit of a kick out of teaching me to eat and calling me a dummy at the same time. It’s fun enough, in fact, for us both to forget, even for a few minutes, where we’ve just been, and for us both to feel like we’re in the most strange and faraway place on Earth, and eating the craziest smokiest sparkiest food imaginable. I even decide then and there that when I’m old enough to work I’m going to come back
to England and ask Aunty Grace to do her best, and to use all her work connections in her contacts book to get me a job in Border Town in Oxford Circus.

On top of all that, we drink virgin pina coladas, which are like liquidised Bounty bars, and there’s music blaring, real country style, and there’s a blonde girl wandering around in denim shorts and a cut-off shirt that shows her tanned belly while her whole torso is wrapped in a Mexican bandit’s belt that’s full of little glasses where the bullets should be. She stops at every table and mostly talks to the men, offering them a drink from the two spirit bottles sitting in her hip holsters. A lot of them say no, and point to their watches, but two fellas in suits next to us take a shot each. The bandit girl clanks the glasses down on the table, then spins a bottle in each hand, real cowboy style, before splashing booze into the two tiny glasses and taking a pound each from the lads. She then spins round to us with a big gorgeous grin, and tells us that her name is Sandy. She turns her whole body towards Saidhbh and offers her a shot, winking towards me and saying that she’s sure that Saidhbh’s son, meaning me, won’t mind!

Saidhbh shrugs, a kind of what-else-have-I-got-to-lose shrug, but I take a risk and lean right over the smoking fajitas, put my hand on top of Sandy’s shot glass, and tell her that Saidhbh is expecting a baby. Sandy gives a little smile, which tells us that we are both creeps, and then she moves on. Saidhbh says nothing. She looks at me. Although I say, she looks at me, but it’s more kind of in my direction but not really focusing.

It takes the whole meal, right to the last fajita, and some shared bites of key lime pie, to get a few words out of her. I tell her that everything will be fine, and that once we get back home, and the folks have had a chance to get used to the news, it’ll be the best thing ever. She can still do her teacher training, and I can crack on with my schooling. And the baby will be the best thing that’s happened to both our families. It’ll make Saidhbh’s parents
slow down, and stop her dad doing so many marches and things. And it’ll probably bring my dad out of his cancer slump, and give him something to live for. He’ll be like, Damn this whole dying rubbish! And he’ll round up every healthy cell in his body and tell them that he’s not giving in, no, sir, not while there’s a grandchild on the way, and the prospect of new life, of rebirth, and of happiness everlasting.

Now, the truth is, sadly, that I don’t think, and I don’t feel, any of this. I am lying, because I am in cat-nurse mode. It’s the way you go when you’re faced with a fluffy Burmese kitten that could be about to die right there in your arms from crusty snot block and wheezy lung breaths, and all that you can do is focus every drop of your energies into cleaning out that snot with cotton buds, and softening those breaths with shower steam as quickly and carefully as possible. Because to do anything else, anything else at all, like even daring to think about how your swollen heart feels for this precious little love bundle before you, would simply destroy you right there on the spot – take the legs from under you with sadness, and leave you in a weeping paralytic puddle on the floor.

It’s been happening between me and Saidhbh, slowly but surely, ever since she found out that she was preggers. It’s a look in the eye. A word here. An expression there. The crusty snot and the wheezy breaths of the soul. And I am scared.

Saidhbh grunts at me after lunch, and tells me that she wants to go home. Although she gets the exact same upbeat lecture treatment from Deano after tea. He tells her that what she’s done is a truly magical thing, and that the step she has taken towards the universe in not killing her baby will mean that the universe will take two steps back towards her, to meet her and supply her emotional needs with everything she could possibly want. She is a good person, he tells her, over and over again. And the universe will reward her. He follows her around Aunty Grace’s house all
night, even when she’s packing our suitcase, whispering top tips into her ears, telling her that she should be taking folic acids for the baby, and not eating shellfish, but drinking a glass of Guinness a day for the iron.

He makes her lie down on the bed, in her pyjamas, and puts his hands over her womb. He’s not touching, just hovering. He says that he’s giving her a healing, and that it’s something that he’s learnt in Community, from a group of crack professionals called the School of Astral Sciences. It’s all natural, he says, and all about harnessing the existing auric energies of the cosmos. And so, after fifteen minutes of heavy breathing, during which time he says that he is grounding himself into the Earth and feeding off the energy in his Hara line, he tells her that the baby’s life force is enormous, and unstoppable, and has given him one of the largest Human Energy Field readings he’s ever experienced. Literally, his hands were being pressed back away from Saidhbh’s womb by the force of the tiny being inside. Our lives are about to change, he says, calling me into the room, while leaping excitedly up from his knees. Because this baby is the living manifestation of a benign and all-powerful universe, he says, reaching down and touching Saidhbh’s tummy properly now. This baby, he says, will not take no for an answer. Because this baby is life itself made flesh. It is life.

Saidhbh starts cramping in the small hours. The baby arrives in a tiny little globule of red-coloured mucus, by morning. She flushes it down the loo and stomps back into Fiona’s bedroom and slams the door behind her. She pushes Fiona’s wardrobe along the floor and in front of the door, sending a hundred make-up bottles tumbling to the ground in the process. She climbs back into bed without saying a word. We miss the train. And the ferry. And the rest of the summer in Ireland.