The Fields (6 page)

And every night before she goes to bed, Mam says a prayer to the glowing, bleeding, burning heart and asks it to help her not to drink.

Mam says that she has been blessed with faith. She believes. Believes in everything. Heaven, Hell, Limbo, God, Angels, Spirits, Pixies, Banshees, Leprechauns. The whole kit and caboodle, as Dad would say. He says that country people are really wild pagans who got converted to Catholics and pretend to be civilised but are pagans underneath it all. He says that he’s a Dub, true and true, and that makes him more sophisticated and civilised and less likely to believe in all that stuff.

In what stuff? Mam says, getting a little angry.

All them special tribes of spirits and spooks that look after your special causes, he answers, not so sure of himself now. Instead of just the one God Almighty who looks down from heaven and cares for us all.

He says this last bit with a smile, as if he’s trying to please her, showing her that he knows what’s what when it comes to God in heaven. But the way he says it makes you think that he’s not convinced about that either.

Mam wanted me to be a Pioneer too, but Dad told her to let me enjoy a decent pint when the law says it’s time. To make her
happy I took The Pledge, which is like being a mini-Pioneer. It’s like a licence-not-to-drink that runs out when you’re sixteen, but I break it the whole time when I sneak little slugs of booze from half-empty party glasses making their way into the sink.

After two cans of HCL the atmosphere down by the fire is brilliant. Mozzo, me and Saidhbh are in our own little gang talking about everything – about school and about our mams – while the four lads are playing dares, seeing who can walk over the fire slowest without burning their balls on the flames. When I tilt my head to the side the whole of the pitch seems to zoom in the opposite direction, and if I give it a little shake the world goes all blurry. Mozzo’s talking about his dad, telling the story of how he smashed the neighbour’s window and threw the bag of fish guts inside. Only this time he’s adding extra details, saying that him and his mam were standing out in the street in their pyjamas and bare feet at the time, and that they were both crying and holding on to each other for dear life, and shouting and screaming, begging his dad to stop and come inside so they could have tea together by the fire and chat about the day and be a real family for once. We go quiet for a second, the three of us, and then Saidhbh says that there’s loads of people in school that she’d love to cover in fish guts. We all start to giggle, and then we laugh out loud. Me and Mozzo look over at Saidhbh like she’s all our mothers and more wrapped up into one lovely girl.

I say to Mozzo, Ah sure that’s nothing, and then I start to tell him about the time Dad came home drunk from The Downs with Mam and couldn’t get into the house. It was one night in winter, the girls were all out and Mam and Dad had just nipped over the pub for a quickie with the Connells, leaving me in charge, totally on my own. Mam had warned me to keep all the doors locked because there was an escaped loony from Kilcuman
Central Mental about. There must have been a lot of breakouts from the Central Mental because she said that a lot, any time they left us home alone, even if Siobhan or Sarah was in charge, there was always a loony on the loose. But I wasn’t going to take any chances coz I was the only one in our family who overheard Dad talking on the phone about a Kilcuman mentaller he met on his business rounds to the Hospital. This particular fella was a shy country boy who was always reading about ghosts and vampires and the devil and stuff, and who used to make some spare change by babysitting for this really nice respectable family down the road. And then one night, while he’s babysitting, he just flips out and performs a black pagan Mass, which is the opposite of a Catholic Mass, and sacrifices the family baby by stabbing it to death on an altar he’s made from an old Subbuteo table.

Saidhbh goes, Jesus, that’s disgusting! and turns her head further into Mozzo’s chest. He rubs her head like a dad, smiles and tells me to go on.

So anyway, I’ve got the doors locked good and tight, I’ve finished watching
The Greatest American Hero
and I’m actually getting sleepy. The thing about being allowed stay up as late as you want is that it sounds much more fun than it is. I was wrecked. So I go to bed, and I’m not even ten minutes asleep when I …

Come on, lads, we’re going to kick some fucking queer arse!

Heno is leaping up and down like a madman, with Macko, Hylo and Stapo behind him, zipping up their bombers, doing shadow kicks and boxes, looking like they’re ready for some serious action. Heno is spitting and raging, and he tells Mozzo that tonight’s the fuckin night, that he’s had enough fuckin messing about, and now they’re definitely going to fuckin do it. Right fuckin now! He kicks the air to make his point. Mozzo stands straight up and says dead serious that he’ll drop Saidhbh home and then he’ll follow them on. I stop telling my story and
gradually wobble to my feet. I ask Mozzo what’s up. He says nothing, but Saidhbh takes me aside to explain.

She says that there’s two fellas on motorbikes hanging out in the school grounds at The Sorrows, right at the back near the long grass and the canal. According to Heno, they’re both queers who wear leather motorcycle gear and sit in the bushes every night waiting for youngfellas to pass. They then leap out of the grass, still in their gear, with their helmets on, drag the youngfella inside, rip off his cacks, play with his mickey, and then speed off again on their motorbikes. Saidhbh says that the lads are going to wait for them to come and then kick the living shit out of their queer arses, especially Heno, coz his younger brother, Basho, came home three weeks ago with no cacks on and wouldn’t say anything to anyone about how he lost them except that he lost them in The Sorrows. But Heno knows it’s the gay bikers that did it.

After Saidhbh’s explanation, Mozzo turns to me, still dead seriously, and asks, You in? I tell him that I’d love to help him kick the queers to shit, but I’m already really late and will be lucky if I’m ever allowed out again. Mozzo grunts and turns to leave with Saidhbh. Before she goes she lays her gorgeous hand on my wrist and says that her dad’s having a big hoolie tomorrow night to celebrate the last free day before school starts. She says that I should come. Mozzo agrees. They both say it’ll be brilliant, with loads of booze, and they’ll tell me then how the queer-bashing went.

Twenty minutes of painfully uncoordinated on-again-off-again pedal-slipping zigzagging later, I wheel my lemon yellow hand-me-down bike casually through the garage door. Dad is there, bent over Siobhan’s brand-new racer trying to fix the timing on her shimano gears. It’s late, and he’s wheezing and sighing to himself, more tired than ever. There’s sweat on his forehead, and I’m guessing that it takes every bit of strength he has in his body
not to just collapse over the upturned bike and fall fast asleep on the dirty concrete floor in front of him.

I pass him and say, really gently, Night night. Straight away he sniffs the air and barks, Have you been boozing?!

I ignore him and march quickly into the kitchen, right over to the press where Mam keeps the biscuits. Dad follows.

I’m asking you a question, have you been out boozing like a common tramp?

Still silent, I bend down, pull out the biscuit tin and shove a handful of jammy dodgers into my mouth, hoping to disguise any booze fumes with the thick wheaty smell of biscuit juice. It’s at this point that I answer. It’s the best excuse I can think of, but it’s totally thick. I say that I’ve been down with Saidhbh Donohue and I’ve been drinking Cidona fizzy apple drink all night. I say this because Dad always says that Cidona smells like booze whenever we drink it, and then he makes jokes about rearing a whole family of underage alkies.

Either he believes me or he’s just too tired to take it any further, but Dad nods, grunts, and then shuffles with another wheeze and a sigh back out to the garage to fix Siobhan’s bike, like a man going to the gallows.

It begins with the thum thum thum of
Hooked on Classics
. It’s Dad’s favourite record and it has all the best classical songs ever made squashed together on to one big song that’s got this thum thum thum drumbeat banging through it. And every Sunday, after Mam, Dad, me, Claire and Susan get home from Mass, Dad slaps it on at full volume. Then, usually after about ten minutes, either Sarah or Siobhan, who’ve both been out at Blinkers nightclub in Leopardstown till really late the night before, start banging down on the floor coz their bedroom is right above the sitting room where the stereo lives. Fiona’s also been out at Blinkers, but she never bangs down even though she can hear it too. If things are really bad, sometimes Sarah will come charging down the stairs in the old skanky T-shirt she wears to bed and with Sudocrem all over her forehead and around her chin to stop spots growing. And, like a mad Comanche in warpaint, she’ll stand inside the sitting-room door and demand that Dad turns his
Hooked on Classics
down. She’ll never actually go as far as the stereo, coz she knows that would be breaking the rules, but she’ll stand and holler from the door all the same.

Dad just sits there, half-reclined on the couch behind his
Sunday Independent
, and grumbles to himself. Says that if they
wanted sleep the girls shouldn’t have been out carousing with boys till four in the morning. It’s like the
Hooked on Classics
is his way of getting back at them for being girls. Or for being girls who are messing about with boys.

Sarah mutters Nazi under her breath and charges back upstairs. Dad doesn’t do anything because he doesn’t mind being called a Nazi because he thinks that in the war they were wrong and they were mad and evil, but the Nazis were respected and that’s all he wants. In fact, he wants respect so much that it’s become one of his trademark jokes – every year we ask him what he wants for his birthday and every year he says, Just a bit of respect. But he says it in a soft, smiley way.

Mam shouts up after Sarah that it’s time she was getting up anyway and that dinner’s almost ready, and that Sarah is to tell that rip, meaning Fiona, to come down immediately! Sarah snaps back, Jeeeeeesus!

Sarah and Siobhan have both got Leaving Certs and they do job interviews every week with different firms, but haven’t got anything proper yet, except for some part-time work in Dad’s office. Now that they’re becoming real women they either love Mam or they hate her. They sit on her bed late at night with the door closed, and have private chats for hours about fellas and things and who fancies who and what that bitch called this bitch and so on. Or else they just walk in the garage door, see her there, up to her elbows at the sink, and hate her on the spot. One time when Sarah shouted out that Mam was such an old cow, Mam responded by saying this little poem that she has memorised off by heart. It goes,
As you are now, so once I was. As I am now, so you will be
. Mam always says that she was thick in school and that she never did Irish and never got further than her Inter Cert, but when she wants to she can really pull it out of the bag.

The kitchen’s getting busy. Mam has thrown off her glamorous church outfit and is down to a tracksuit top and jeans while
quickly making a melon-balls starter by scraping a butter-ball scooper through a melon. When she says the words, ‘melonballs’, Mam adds the phrase, ‘saving your presence’, which means that she doesn’t want you to think of the rudeness in the word ‘balls’ when she says it. But by saying it she actually does, so it’s a joke. Claire and Susan are both in stiff Sunday-best blouses and pleated skirts. Their hair-dos are neatly pulled back from their faces with metal clips and they’re sitting on opposite sides of the table annoying each other.

Claire is trying to make origami animals out of the eight paper napkins on the table. Susan is picking at the folds in her skirt and in a big huffy mood because she wasn’t allowed to go and stay at the Joyces last night. The Joyces are posh family friends with a giant house in Ballinteer. Claire slept over there last night in the same room as Brenda Joyce and she keeps talking about how they played dares and Girl’s World all night and it’s driving Susan mad. Susan’s also annoyed because Claire wore her favourite luminous deely boppers, the ones that she’d been saving up for some night when she’s actually asked to go somewhere, anywhere.

Eventually, after about twenty minutes of
Hooked on Classics
, stair-thumping, shouting and pan-bashing, Sarah, Siobhan and Fiona come trudging down to the table. Even though it’s only Sunday lunchtime, and not a disco, Sarah’s hair is filled with mousse and gone all curly and she’s wearing a denim miniskirt and a wrap-around top with no bra. Siobhan’s wearing a second-hand black silk blouse, black drainpipes and cowboy boots, and Fiona’s in a baggy grey tracksuit, with a thin blue scarf on her head that makes her look like a pirate but is used to flatten down the bits of red hair that got badly stuck up during the night’s short kip.

The kitchen table has two foldable wings on either side, so normally it looks like it can hold about six of us, but when you
flip out both wings it can hold the full eight at a squeeze. Sarah and Siobhan sit at the far end, near the door – this is useful for Sarah, so she can call Dad a senile old twit during the meal and dash straight up to her room before he gets a chance to squeeze out of his seat. Dad and Susan sit with their backs to the radiator. This is good for Susan, because it makes her feel like Dad’s special girl. Mam sits opposite Dad and Susan, with her back to the kitchen presses and with Claire on her right-hand side. And me and Fiona sit opposite Sarah and Siobhan, with our backs to the big kitchen window, the one that Gary smashed with the hockey ball.

The meal starts with Mam marching inside and turning off
Hooked on Classics
. Dad doesn’t make a sound about this. He just keeps his head slung low in his hands, staring down at the empty plate in front of him. He’s tired again. Super tired. It’s like all that heavy-duty paper-reading has taken it out of him completely. He wouldn’t dare argue with Mam about the music anyway, because her face is red and sweaty from preparing a meal for eight, and this gives her a licence to do just about anything she wants for the rest of the day.

Mam pours Dad a big glass of red wine, offers it to Sarah and Siobhan, who refuse, then gets us all to say the grace-before-meals. She does this by saying, Let’s say grace.

And, even though it’s as tired as old boots, every day without fail one of us will say out loud the word ‘Grace’ as a joke. No one laughs, it’s not supposed to be dead funny, but it’s just what you do.

This time I do it. I say, Grace! and Dad glares at me through his fingers. Mam leads the grace, which is a nice little prayer about blessing everyone around the table and blessing the food we’re about to eat and blessing, especially, the hands that made the food. When she says, ‘the hands that made the food’, someone usually points to her hands, or if say Claire has had a big
part in making the meal, like peeling the spuds, she’ll point to her own hands as well. After that, the melon balls, saving your presence, hit the table and we’re off!

Mam’s the first one in.

She says, Well, how was Blinkers?

Sarah and Siobhan can’t decide whether they’re in a love her or hate her mood so they just twiddle with bits of loose hair and mumble things like OK, ah, the usual.

Fiona nudges me and says she’s sure that Dave Gallagher wouldn’t call what he got last night a bit of the usual.

What’s that? snaps Sarah, glaring at Fiona.

Who’s Dave Gallagher? asks Mam.

Hello! sings Fiona, launching into a mock version of Lionel Richie’s hit song. She gets as far as the punchline, ‘Are you somewhere feeling Davy or is Davy feeling you?’ when Sarah cuts her short with loud sarcastic haw haw haws and everyone else has a giggle about ‘feeling’ except Dad who’s still got his head in his left hand while using the other one to scoop the melon balls into his mouth.

Everyone notices this, but no one comments. Instead Claire tells Sarah that she should’ve seen Brenda Joyce’s bedroom, that it was massive and had a whole make-up table just for Girl’s World. Susan picks at her hairclips and starts to whine and Mam tells Claire not to be rubbing it in. Claire tells Mam to ‘leave off’ and then looks over at Sarah for a reaction. Claire is always trying to impress Sarah. It’s like she wants to be Sarah when she grows up and have all the fellas getting a good feel out of her in Blinkers. When you think of it, it’s like Claire wants to be Sarah, and so does Siobhan. Susan wants to be Claire. But no one wants to be me and Fiona.

You obviously weren’t listening to young Fr O’Culigeen’s sermon then, Mam adds, looking at Claire.

No response.

Were you?

Was it something about love? chances Claire.

No, it was about honouring thy father and mother!

Holy God, says Sarah, sneering. Here we go again.

Oh, it’s well you may scoff, answers Mam, seeing as I can’t remember the last time you darkened the Parish doorstep.

I told you, says Sarah, head down, looking at Mam through her long black fringe, I go to Saturday evening Mass.

Psshhhhh, hisses Fiona.

Sometimes, adds Sarah.

Well, says Mam, young Fr O’Culigeen spoke eloquently and magnificently about juvenile crime and the savage breakdown of moral order, and how it stems from disregarding the Ten Commandments and especially not honouring thy father and mother!

A bit of respect! says Dad, piping up for the first time.

Glory be to the hokey, says Mam. And the dead arose and spoke to many!

Dad fakes a smile and we all giggle with relief. He’s back! I’m so relieved I do a bit from Jesus of Nazareth, and say, Arise, Lazarus!

Dad doesn’t think this is funny. He looks down at me and then says to the whole table, You know this one came in reeking of drink last night!

There’s a moment of silence as everyone registers what Dad just said.

I stand up and start to clear the melon-ball dishes. As I do I say, It was Cidona! I was with Saidhbh Donohue!

Luckily, all the women around the table are far more interested in Saidhbh than they are in the reek of drink.

Saidhbh Donohue! gasps Sarah through a mouthful of mashed melon, as if I had just said I was out with Jane Fonda or Bo Derek.

Yeah, I say, trying to be casual, trying to aim the story away from the danger zones of Mozzo and HCL. Met her down the road with Gary and she just wanted a chat over some fizzies.

I hear she’s going out with Declan Morrissey now, says Susan, bluntly whacking my story into the red.

That little pup? says Mam, getting edgy on her own seat, What’s a smasher like her see in that savage? He wasn’t there last night, was he?

She’s not so great herself, says Claire, thankfully cutting in. Thinks she’s above us all, little snooty wagon. All those Mhuire ni Bheatha girls are the same. Little Irish princesses.

Pretty Irish Girls, says Susan, which is a coded way of saying PIGs.

I’ve heard her dad’s a right Provo, says Siobhan, adjusting the collar of her blouse and trying to stir things up.

That would be right, adds Dad, second comment of the day. Down at the British Embassy protesting about Bobby Sands whenever he gets the chance, with all his Provo buddies.

Jason Davit said that he runs a summer school in Galway, says Susan, where everyone does IRA target practice and learns how to make bombs.

Jason Davit’s a gobshite, says Fiona.

Fiona! snaps Mam.

All I’m saying, says Claire, like a real know-all, is that Saidhbh Donohue isn’t the little princess that everyone thinks she is!

Loverboy obviously does, says Sarah, smiling over at me, sensing a weakness.

They all start to sing, at the same time, the song about me and Saidhbh being up a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. I turn my back to them and scrub the melon-ball bowls in the sink, but I know my ears have gone as red as my cheeks, giving my feelings for Saidhbh away.

Mam’s confused, and sounds like she’s a bit hurt. She’s too old for you, pet!

And a Provo! adds Sarah, loving my pain.

And if you want to know, bursts in Claire excitedly, simply unable to contain herself, I’ve heard she’s on the pill!

What’s the pill? says Susan.

Mind your mouth! shouts Dad at Susan, his best girl, whose bottom lip immediately starts to wobble.

Sarah’ll tell you what the pill is, teases Fiona.

Sarah’s eyes pop, and she glares at Fiona.

Mam catches the glare and looks shocked.

Dad’s got his head back in his hands.

I feel that there’s no point in waiting for a better time to ask, and since we’re on the subject I say, Saidhbh has invited me to a party in the Donohues’ tonight, am I allowed to go?

There’s a joke that Dad tells a lot, when he’s being a wildcard, and stroking his moustache at the ladies. It’s about the Queen, and she’s touring a hospital in Dublin, and wants to see the baby ward. Now in this particular hospital the Protestant and the Catholic wards are separated. So the Queen visits the Catholic ward first. She walks up to a woman lying in bed with her baby and she says, and for this bit Dad puts on a deadly posh accent, And hew menny childreen does yew heeve et heme?

The woman in the bed says that she has six others at home, and the Queen, not shocked at all, says, Gewd Catholic femily.

The Queen then moves on to the Protestant ward. Again, she walks up to a woman, lying in bed with her baby and reading the
Irish Times
and she asks, And hew menny childreen does yew heeve et heme?

The Protestant woman says that she has three others waiting for her at home, and to this the Queen says, Randy Bitch!

Then everyone bursts out laughing, especially Dad, who thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world, and when he’s telling it with the Connells around, like at a party, he pretends that it
actually happened to Maura Connell and Mam, coz they’re Protestants and Catholics. And at the climax he says, Randy Bitch, Randy Bitch! How do you like that Maura, Randy Bitch?! Maura Connell then usually tells him to go away with himself, and that he’s an awful man. Mam’s always dead embarrassed coz she doesn’t like jokes about Catholics and Protestants in the first place, and especially not now with all the killings and things.