The Fields (4 page)

Fiona told me all about periods and sex. I think it was coz she
was always leaving her maxipads around and she was sick of saying that they were just girls’ stuff, like they were part of her make-up kit. One morning, out of the blue, in the week after Jack the kitten died, she asks me did I know what a Fuck was. I said it was the same as a bastard and a bender, then she laughed and told me all about intercourse and periods. I was only a little fella at the time and most of the boys in school didn’t have a clue what fucking was and had never heard of periods, so if I was ever feeling mean I’d say to Fiona that I was going to tell Mam that she told me about sex, meaning that she told me about sex when I was way too young to know. Fiona would go all whiny and grab me by the arm and say, Please, please don’t, I’ll be killed! When she had begged enough, I’d say that she was off the hook, just this once. She’d sigh and flop back down on the fancy paisley rug. Thing was, we both knew that I wasn’t going to tell Mam, but it was good fun pretending.

Sharing with Fiona is all hunky-dory, but ever since the Mozzo turnip incident and the whole pillow-fucking thing, Dad keeps saying that they’re going to have to get me out of that bedroom soon. He says that it’s because I’m going to become all hairy and manly and he doesn’t want me to get any funny ideas about my own sister. I hate it when he says that at the table, coz I’m surrounded by sisters. And I don’t know where he thinks he’s going to put me? He talks about moving Fiona in with Sarah and Siobhan, but all three of them just scream No Way! And that makes Claire and Susan immediately add their own scream of, Don’t even think of shifting us! It’s a big problem and it makes me feel like I’m a werewolf. Like I’m going to be lying there in bed, chatting away to Fiona about the knacker-drinkers in the park and the next thing I’m going to go all hairy and attack her to death.

And the way Dad says it too: Getting any funny ideas. With
his hands folded in front of his mouth and his moustache scratching against his crossed thumbs. And the look in his eyes, like the night he made Mam stitch my initials into all my underpants before I went to summer camp. He wouldn’t tell me why, just gritted his teeth, gave me a filthy look and said that there were some odd folks out in the world today, and that no one could steal my underpants if I had my initials on them, as if having initials meant that your jocks were fitted with burglar alarms. He looks at me the same way when he’s warning me about my sisters. It like he’s saying, If you want to get your hands on these girls you’ll have to come through me first! I feel like telling him to get Mam to put some initials on the girls, and that’ll keep them safe from harm.

He’s never been this bad with me before. Even when I accidentally knocked Susan out with the thick wooden rolling pin, or when I was caught nicking three plastic rulers from Deveny’s, or when I called Old Mrs Dolan a ‘Fucker’ for scaring us out of her garden, or even when I got all D’s in my summer report. But now it’s different. He can fly off the handle at the slightest thing. Just looking at me can set him going. Like when Deirdre Brown from work came for dinner last Sunday. Mam had spent all morning doing the chicken in a brand-new roasty way that she got from the papers, which meant cooking it upside down without any tinfoil, then turning it over at the last minute. Mam had to check it the whole time – open the oven, take it out, prod it, pour the juices over it, and slip it back in. And each time she took it out she told the whole house how it was getting drier and smaller by the minute and how this new fancy fella in the papers didn’t have a clue about anything to do with cooking. Eventually, just as Deirdre Brown arrived, the chicken pops out like a tiny cremated pigeon, and Mam has to scrape all the meat she can on to a single dinner plate and pass it round us in a dead embarrassing silence. Deirdre Brown makes a joke about me being a growing boy so,
to keep the chat going and to show her that she’s dead right and that I’m growing like a monster a minute, I take loads of meat and pile it high on my plate, next to the potatoes. I dip a piece of breast meat into the gravy and pop it into my mouth with my fingers, but before I even have a single chew done there’s a massive bang on the table. It’s Dad’s fist. And when I look up at him he’s glaring at me, like he wants to run me through with a fork. ‘Disgusting,’ he says, hissing through his teeth.

Mam says that I’ve to be patient with Dad these days because he’s so tired. She says that providing for six children and a wife with a keen eye for the fashions has taken it out of him. He sleeps any chance he can, anywhere he can, and it’s never enough. Even on Dun Laoghaire walks, he’ll stay in the car and have a nap, while we race to the pier and jump on to the big brassy cannon. Or when we go to Silver Strand in Wicklow, he’ll lie down on the red check rug and spend the whole day asleep, and miss the rounders, and the swimming and the moat-digging on the sand. He’ll just about rouse himself for cheese-and-tomato sangers, crisps and Lilt before another doze. He’s even been to the doctor, but all they say is that he’s a ‘tough old Dub’, and is working all the hours that God has given him. Which means that he’s entitled to forty winks every now and then. Case closed.

Usually Mam breaks up the room-swap discussion by talking about the meal.

Lovely bit of pork, isn’t it, folks?

Everyone, all seven of us, including Dad, nod and grunt and say, Yes, lovely.

Mam then says that Tom the Butcher’s getting married.

Dad says, To who?

Mam says, To Moira Ni Kennedy’s young one.

Then Sarah dramatically flicks her silky hair out of her eyes and goes, all shocked, Julie Kennedy?

Mam goes, Yes.

Then Sarah goes, Jesus, she was in my year in The Sorrows!

And then they’re all at it, full pelt. Five sisters and Mam, bashing away, covering the Kennedy clan, the wedding dress, the extended families, the connections to who and who, where they met and who they know in common and why they ended up with each other. Sometimes, when it’s going really loud, and they’re all talking together, me and Dad look at each other and, joking, roll our eyes to heaven. It makes me feel brilliant, coz it’s like we’re part of a secret club. Like when we watch
Benny Hill
together and nearly wet ourselves with the laughing, especially in the one where he has the magic remote control, and can make the world stop and start at will, and keeps stopping it just so he can whip off nurses’ skirts and things. Or like the times when I was younger and me and Dad would go for long beach walks on holiday in Cork. And I’d be his best boy, asking him loads of questions about science and about the universe, volcanoes, earthquakes and sharks, strictly natural history stuff, and he’d be able to answer them all, no matter how tricky they were.

Me: Are there killer sharks in Ireland?

Dad: No, only basking sharks and they don’t kill people.

Me: Where are they?

Dad: Way out to sea, way beyond Galway Bay.

Me: Are they big?

Dad: Yes, around thirty feet long.

Me: How long is that?

Dad: As long as a small bus.

Me: Why don’t they eat people?

Dad: Because they can only eat little fish.

Me: Why don’t they eat bigger fish?

Dad: Because they have a tiny hole in their throats, and they swim around all day with their mouths open, straining all the little fish out of the water.

Me: So, if you were swimming in the water in Galway and a basking shark came by with his mouth wide open could you get swallowed up?

Dad: No, he’d probably choke on you before he swallowed you properly.

Me: But he’d kill you doing it?

Dad: Probably.

Me: I knew it.

The ban on Mozzo is strictly enforced by Mam and Maura Connell. They both tell him, in no uncertain terms, that me and Gary are not coming out to play whenever he calls. They confer with each other on the phone and say things like, I’ve a good mind to go round there and plant her, meaning Mozzo’s mam Janet, with the bill, only I know she couldn’t pay it. Little cheeky pup, meaning Mozzo.

Mozzo soon gets the point, and stops calling. Me and Gary become best friends again and spend the rest of the summer cycling around on our bikes, spitting off the overpass on the Oakfield dual carriageway and watching the sweaty Sorrows hockey matches with the lads every Friday. But now, because of Helen Macdowell, the girls wear big thick gumshields, making them all look like Rocky. Shitty-Pants Sweeny, named after the day he came out with a big shite bulging out of the back of his pants, says it doesn’t matter, as long as they still wear the short skirts he’ll keep watching them play. No one says anything about Helen Macdowell, although Gary’s mam heard that she’d gone mad and had to leave the country to try and start her life all over again, but this time as a scarface instead of the pretty one that everyone fancies.

When me and Gary come back from our cycling trips we sit in my and Fiona’s room and listen to my boombox. There’s Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America’ or Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ if we’re in the mood for a bop. And we are. Gary’s great like that, he doesn’t laugh at your moves and I don’t laugh at his. I just press play and the two of us stand up on the fancy rug and go for it, doing our thing while the fella from Soft Cell with the broken nose and bright lipstick screams ‘Don’t touch me PLEASE, I cannot stand the way you TEASE!’ My moves are quite simple, I go from side to side, letting my head lead me each time, but when I’m totally relaxed I let my shoulders lead me too. My legs do their own thing. Gary’s moves are dead complicated. He dances exactly like they do on the telly. Just like the Soft Cell fella, he’s got all the hand moves, waves his arms about like he’s trying to fling some slime off them, and nods his head brilliantly while mouthing the words, pretending that he’s really on
Top of the Pops
, singing in front of everyone. You can tell he loves dancing, coz I’m always the one who has to call it quits.

If I want to slow the pace I slap on the tape of Foreigner, ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You’. It’s a real tape, one that I was given for Christmas, whereas Soft Cell and Kim Wilde are just songs that I taped off the Larry Gogan Top Twenty. I love taping things with my boombox. I sometimes tape films off the telly and listen to them when I’m lying in bed at night. Like
The Valley of Gwangi
. It’s brilliant when you’re under the covers and you’re really sleepy and suddenly you hear Gwangi screaming his head off. I know video recorders mean you can tape the picture as well, but the only person on The Rise who has one is Gerry Butler who works for RTE and he doesn’t have any kids. Mam can’t stand the way he dresses and is always saying, He’s a right queer fella, that Gerry!

She doesn’t mean to be saying out loud to all of us that Gerry Butler is a bender. But inside she secretly thinks that he is a
bender and so she’s trying to say something different to bender without realising that she’s actually saying that he is a bender. Coz between all the fellas in school, ‘queer’ is pretty much the same word as bender nowadays.

I once taped the thirty minutes of us all squashed around the table having Sunday dinner without anyone noticing. I was silent and a bit giggly, but it was brilliant getting Sarah saying that Dad was an Old Fogey, and Susan saying that Fiona was a bitch for nicking her gel, and Mam trying to get Dad to talk about the unemployment figures from the news. When I showed them all that I had been taping them they all screamed and went spare and then laughed loads when they listened to themselves back sounding all nasally and hollow. They said it was a great laugh, but any time I tried to do it after that they could spot it a mile away.

So, Foreigner’s singing about their imaginary girlfriend, and how she’s amazing at doing it, and how she’s so brilliant at everything that she doesn’t even exist. They go all woozy and sigh, ‘It’s more than a touch or a word can say, Only in dreams could it be this way,’ and me and Gary feel sad. We’re still breathing heavy from the dancing, but now we’re sitting on my bed underneath the big Porsche poster. The song is slow and sounds like the Foreigner boys are wishing their lives had turned out differently, and wishing that they actually had this girl in their arms instead of just dreaming about her. Me and Gary know all the words but we don’t sing them out loud. We hum along all the same.

Halfway through the second verse I notice that Gary has stopped humming. He’s frozen stiff, staring at the small straw bin beside Fiona’s make-up table where she’s dropped a maxi pad with blood on it and forgotten to cover it up with tissues, like she usually does. Gary’s seen Fiona’s maxi pads before, but always in packets, and never like this. He’s asked about them too, but I told him that they were make-up stuff for girls, for
wiping stuff. This is different. Gary is terrified of girls. He normally just lashes up the stairs to get to my room, and if Fiona is already in it he goes all red and doesn’t say a word until she leaves. He’s scared stiff of being left alone with Claire and Susan, and if he ever had to spend a minute with Sarah and Siobhan I think he’d faint.

I turn off Foreigner and I tell Gary about periods as best I can. He gets really upset when I tell him that all women have them, even his mam.

The summer bike route takes me and Gary out of The Rise and through the dark and bushy overhanging laneway that slopes steeply and for ever up towards Clannard Road. When we reach the top, after much hard-pushing, standing-up cycling, we always stop, catch our breaths, and stare down at the hazy grey hugeness of Dublin below, newly blanketed by all those shimmering twinkling house lights that’ve only just been switched on by tired parents who are looking sadly up at the sky and turning to each other and swearing, even in the midst of high summer, that they can sense the change in the evenings already, a slow drift from bright to dark blue, a hint of almost black.

We dash along Ash Lane, towards Kilcuman, past the twisty-turny pot hole assault course outside Kilcuman Tyres and past the cop-shop where we make ‘oink oink’ noises for all the pigs inside, but not too loud, in case there’s one of them outside crouched behind the back of his car, like he’s on a stake-out, and could leap up at any moment and arrest us for slagging off the guards. We take a right down the main street, break as many lights as we can, head back again towards The Rise but this time only skirting along its edge, by the Villas and the five-a-side pitch, and out again on to the Ballydown Road. From there it’s a lethal breakneck race through Belfield college grounds, blemming past the dog walkers and the strollers and the boozy students lying
locked out of their boxes on the short grass by the artificial lake. Then it’s up the Oakfield dual carriageway, past the front gates of our school, where we each hock back as much spit as we can muster and try to land a big stretchy greener on the front of the big wooden St Cormac’s crest. And, laughing our heads off, we then whore down the Dunbarton Road, and back to the finish line at Gary’s dad’s automatic garage door.

It’s an hour trip, all in, and it’s brilliant fun, dead exciting, especially when you’re head down, top speed, racing from light to light, seeing how many you can break without dying. Gary said his speedometer once showed that we were doing fifty miles an hour along the carriageway. I asked him to show me next time, but he says there’s no point coz he’d have to slow down then. Occasionally we get a shout from the Gardaí, who roll up beside us and tell us to cycle in single file, but most of the time we just love the thrill of weaving in and out of traffic, dodging articulated lorries, and avoiding a good squashing like June Shilaweh.

Gary has a racer and so do I. Only mine’s a yellow hand-me-down girl’s bike with the crossbar pointing downwards so they don’t get bashed in the fanny when they slip off the seat. It used to be Claire’s, then Susan’s, now it’s mine. Gary’s bike is brilliant, and his dad brought it over on the plane from the States. It has graphite wheel-rims and weighs a feather and is ten times better than mine and Gary knows this so he says that all bikes should be made like mine, with the crossbar pointing down so you don’t damage your balls. I say that I’d rather damage my balls than cycle around on this lemon-yellow piece of shit.

Race you! he says, and we head off again, this time in no particular direction, but with Gary hoping that by losing to me on purpose I won’t feel too bad about having such a crap bike.

And so it goes, all summer long, almost every night. We even go when it’s raining, but then we wear thick plastic wet-gear that makes you look like a bender and makes you sweat like a bastard
underneath. The only nights we don’t go out are when we have visitors or when Gary’s away on Freebies with his parents. Mam calls them Freebies because Gary’s dad gets them dead cheap for being a pilot. Mam says that they’re not like proper holidays that normal hard-working people go on. They’re just little freebie trips. And when she says it, she makes them sound like something you’d get on the back of the cornflakes box, or something you might leave in your jocks drawer and forget about. Although when Maura, Bill and Gary come home covered in tan, looking dead glamorous, I can tell she wouldn’t mind a few Freebies of her own, instead of one grey rainy bank holiday weekend trapped in a giant mobile home in West County Cork.

By late August, the nights are getting dark, and we’ve both got dynamo-powered lights that Gary’s dad got in America attached to the frames of our bikes. The dynamos rub off the tyres and make a funny whiny whirring noise as we bomb down the road, making it sound like we’re driving mini-motorbikes. We’re absolutely tearing along the main street at full speed, at least fifty, and the dynamo lights are shining so hard that I think my bulb’s going to blow. Gary’s got the advantage of having lights on his head too. He’s wearing a joke UFO headband that’s like a normal headband John McEnroe would wear playing tennis, only it has loads of lights in it that make it flash and sparkle like a UFO. If you blur your eyes a bit, it looks like Gary’s bike is cycling on its own and there’s a small UFO hovering above it, travelling at exactly the same speed down towards the Villas.

It’s Saturday night, and this is one of our last cycling trips before school starts again. We get as far as the five-a-side pitch when we see a group of lads all sprawled out behind the goals, some of them on the honkers, some of them standing, most of them lying around. They’ve got a tiny fire lighting in the middle
of them, and it’s hard to see their faces coz it’s already pretty dark and the fire is turning most of them into shadows. We decide to steer clear of the five-a-side pitch because we don’t want any trouble. But just as we’re about to turn off to make the desperate dash on to the Ballydown Road we hear a voice.

‘Finno! Oi, Finno! Finno, howsigoing??’