Ronan sighed, because the subject was always sensitive. Theoretically there were supposed to have been brothers and sisters. “I wanted a football team,” his Da said sometimes, ever so wistfully, when he thought no one was listening (especially Mam). “Well, a five-a-side team, anyway…” The right-hand upstairs bedroom and the other back bedroom had been intended to contain at least another Nolan each.
Instead Ronan was in one, and the other back bedroom contained mostly junk and boxes and old furniture that his Mam was always meaning to get rid of—there was talk of turning it into a sewing room, or a reading room, or a den, or something like that: but it never happened. And the front right bedroom contained neither brothers or sisters, but Gran.
Is it Gran today, Ronan thought, or Nana? You never knew which of them she wanted you to call her, and somehow you always got it wrong. Ronan had long since come to suspect that she complained about this only for entertainment’s sake, and he didn’t often call her on it, because there wasn’t a lot of entertainment in life for her these days to begin with.
Until a couple of years ago she’d always lived in her own little house up north of Dublin, in Skerries by the ocean. For the very young Ronan that place had been a kind of distant magical paradise where you could run around in the back yard and not worry about messing up the flower beds because the garden was halfway to wilderness and Nana didn’t care: a place where when you came inside there was always fresh hot soda bread with sweet butter and Nan’s own special marmalade that she made from the bitter Spanish oranges out of the can. His Mam still told everybody who’d listen the embarrassing story about how once when they were near Nana’s house and couldn’t stop in because Nana’d had some kind of Women’s Institute meeting come up, Ronan had burst into tears of sheer heartbreak right there in the car. Even now he blushed at the thought of it. Well, I was maybe three! But that house had been special, and Nan had been its heart, and Ronan had thought things would be that way forever.
Then a while after her seventieth birthday, almost as if someone had thrown some kind of switch, Nana had started to “slow down.” At least that was what the family called it. It wasn’t as if she was moving all that fast to begin with, by the time Ronan was old enough to start noticing things. She’d always had trouble with her knees and her hips, and her constant mutterings of “Where ya runnin to, ya wee smidgeon, wait for me now, how’m I supposed to keep up with you…” had been part of the soundtrack of his life since he was six.
But gradually there came a time when keeping up wasn’t even slightly on the menu any more: when Ronan learned at eight or nine that running away from Gran and getting her to chase him had stopped being so much fun, because again and again he had to circle back to her; that no matter what he did, Nana started tiring out faster and faster. And then there was no more walking for her, but mostly sitting, and very soon after that, mostly lying down because she said she felt so tired. And the stairway in her little house couldn’t be fitted for one of those chair-lifts that take you up the stairs (and though Ronan’s house could, it was expensive and his Da was still trying to figure out how they could afford it).
And suddenly the house in Skerries was being emptied out and most of the furniture sold off. The rest was put in storage, and the house was listed with an estate agent to sell. Ronan could still feel the echoes of the sick clench of his gut when he saw the FOR SALE sign hanging on its pole at the end of Nana’s walk. Elsewhere in the little street the world seemed to be going on as usual—cars driving, people walking, everything perfectly normal. But to Ronan it had felt as if a world was ending.
Standing there in the hall in front of her closed door, Ronan suddenly realized he’d been there, unmoving, lost in the past, for at least a couple of minutes. He sighed and opened the door.
The head of the bed was up against the front window, which had its blinds pulled down this morning so the sun (if any) wouldn’t come blasting in and overheat the place. The bed’s brass-railed headboard was almost obscured by a triple pile of pillows. Against them Ronan’s Nana was leaning back in her little pink bedjacket, her sunken eyes closed, her sharp little face relaxed, her soft curly white hair looking almost more pink than silver in this light (an illusion helped by the room’s pink wallpaper).
Stronger than usual for some reason, today, what hit Ronan right away when he opened the door was the smell. It wasn’t anything like the smells he’d associated with her a forever ago, not the aroma of fresh soda bread or the scorched-cottony scent of tea-towels hanging drying on the handle of the kitchen stove or the scent of lavender in bowls—real lavender it had been, too, from Nan’s wild straggly garden, not some plug-in air freshener. But instead, mostly drowning out the tea-toast-and-boiled-egg scent from his Mam bringing her up her breakfast, there was now that plasticky medication-bottle smell and the sharp wintergreen scent of the salve the carer used on her joints; the smell of personal hygiene that wasn’t exactly as great as it once had been because the shower was out of the question for Nan more than a few times a week now. And under it all, the smell of age, and helplessness. It embarrassed Ronan, and it embarrassed him that it embarrassed him. The smell made him want to close the door and get away, and it shamed him that he wanted to.
And here she was looking at him with her little bird-face but still not quite registering that he was here, half dozing. “Lying down beside her breakfast,” she called it. And me standing here like a stump.
“Hey Gran…”
One eye opened and took him in. “I’m your Nana, ye wee dote,” she said. “Chislers these days, they got no memories, it’s them computers’ fault, they do all the remembering for ye…”
He rolled his eyes… but memory was an issue Ronan wasn’t going to get into with his Nan. Hers came and went, but when it was in place it was like a razor. And ‘wee dote?’ He could’ve laughed out loud. He was finally getting some height on him, after what seemed endless long years of waiting, and he found it hard to care about his Mam’s complaints about the way he was going through clothes. I was the same size forever, he thought, it shouldn’t matter if now I’m going through a few in a hurry…
He sat down on the bed beside his Nan. “Yeah, all my phone’s fault,” Ronan said. “Who are you again?”
She opened the other eye and gave him a look that suggested It was a bad move to give her sass so early in the morning, even after she’d had her breakfast. “Somebody who still knows where your bum is to swat it.”
Ronan snickered at her. “Gotta catch me first, Nana.”
“Not a long way to go to do that.” She yawned at him. He was relieved to see she’d left her dentures in after breakfast. “You sleep all right, smidgeon?”
This was the first of the usual questions. There was a series of them, and his Nan wouldn’t be satisfied until they were all answered. “Pretty good, Nan,” Ronan said. “Didn’t hear anything.” This was normally her first concern. After decades of the peace and quiet of her tiny street in Skerries, where the only sounds to be heard were seabird-cries and the wind and the train going by and the faint hiss of the waves a quarter mile away, to Nana the outer fringe of Bray apparently sounded like one great big factory or building site.
“I heard the ambulance people go by…”
Ronan shook his head. “Missed that.” The double glazing in the house was pretty good at cutting back on the noise, and anyway one more ambulance heading up the main road toward the nearby hospital wouldn’t register for him.
“Nobody we know, probably…”
“Probably not.” To Nana when she was in Skerries, any police car or ambulance or fire engine had been seen only secondarily as a sign of trouble and primarily as a cause and opportunity for gossip. In a town then still so small, everybody had known everybody and nobody’s troubles remained their own for more than a matter of minutes. But here, in a town as big as Bray, it wasn’t like that. People living just two streets away from you might be strangers. Another thing that bothers her. The world here’
s just too big…
Nana closed her eyes and breathed out, a sort of resigned sigh. Ronan just sat still and waited. Nana faded in and out, some mornings; the smartest thing was to let her fade back in again at her own speed. If you tried to rush her, the results could be erratic, or comical, or just embarrassing, and you never knew which you were going to get.
“When will Marjorie be here?”
Another of the expected questions. “Two, Nan.” Theoretically. The carer’s schedule seemed to change without reason and sometimes without warning, which was hard on Nan. Having things be pretty much the same from day to day was important for her, and sometimes when Ronan saw her he just wanted to say Can you fecking get a grip and be here when you should?
Except it wouldn’t be fair, and his Mam would yell at him, and Da would give him that scowling disappointed look. Which Ronan couldn’t bear, because though sometimes he knew what it was about, there were other times—more of them, to be honest—when he had no clear idea of what he’d done to disappoint his Da now. Most of the time he was apparently supposed to read Da’s mind and figure out what it was, because explanations weren’t usually forthcoming.
Ronan sighed, annoyed with himself. Not like I’ve got the kind of problems some other kids at school have… He sat quiet and waited in some discomfort for Nan’s next question: “Did you look at the weather radar?” And that would be followed by “Can I sit outside today?” But his Gran just lay there with her eyes closed, the lids trembling a little as she breathed.
Ronan glanced at his phone and sighed. He had about ten minutes and then he needed to go. “I looked at the radar, Nan,” he said at last.
“It doesn’t look good.”
He opened his eyes a little at that. It was his own don’t-get-your-hopes-up phrasing for days when you could see the rain marching in across the island at you in broad bands. This morning the radar had looked pretty dodgy: patches of rain coming in from the west in unpredictable blobs and splotches, appearing out of nothing and then vanishing again before they hit the mountains between Dublin and the southwest. “Bubbling up,” RTÉ’s dark-haired chief forecaster-lady called it: the beginning of more summery weather patterns.
“No?” Ronan said, glancing around to see where the TV remote was. Sometimes she used it to pull up the text on one of the RTÉ channels, or the weather report on Sky, but he couldn’t see it anywhere. Might have got down in the covers again, he thought; she’s always losing it down there.
“I saw it,” she said. “Before the eggs.” Nan started fumbling around under the duvet. “He said it was going to get dark.”
He? Ronan thought. “Oh, wait, I know. The guy on the new channel.” TV3 had brought in a weatherman who was as jokey and casual as the RTÉ head weather lady was serious and on-message. The opinion around school was that he was also nowhere near as accurate, and spent way too much time on birthday wishes and people’s landscape photography. “Waste of air, that guy,” Ronan said. “You listen to him, you’ll bring your brolly on all the wrong days.”
“I don’t mind bringing my brolly all the time,” his Nan said, opening her eyes again and gazing over at the wall to her left as if there was anything there but a painted landscape of some mountains and an ancient framed print of the Savior in what Ronan’s Mam referred to as Exposed Sacred Heart mode. “Bernie said to me just the other day that we’re getting a lot more rain anyway because of the global warning.”
”Warming,” Ronan said, and then sighed, as his Nan’s best friend, her former next door neighbor Bernadette, had been dead for the past five years. “Ah well, no point in arguing with Auntie Bernie.” Especially when she’s in the churchyard and you’re away with the fairies. He got up and stretched. “Nan, got to go. You know where your button is?”
She pulled up the “panic button” she was wearing around her neck on its lanyard, giving Ronan a look that suggested she was considering turning him over her knee.
“Got your phone?”
She reached over to the bedside table, and with the air of someone being very purposefully kind to the mentally challenged, displayed to Ronan her special senior-phone-with-big-buttons.
“Got your book?”
Nana reached under the covers and produced the same copy of Gone with the Wind that she’d been reading for what seemed like the past year.
“Right. Mary next door’ll look in on you in a couple hours, same as always.” Their neighbor was a pensioner nearly Nan’s age, but a lot more spry and always willing to check up on her during the day. (“Boredom,” Ronan’s Mam said. “Nosiness,” said his Da. Ronan suspected they were both right.)
“Mary next door is a cow,” said Ronan’s Nana.
“And the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Ronan said, recognizing his Dad’s opinion coming from a different source than usual. He bent over his Nana and gave her a smooch. “You be good now.”
“Do I have a choice?” Nana said, for that moment in time sounding a lot less away-with-the-fairies and a lot more annoyed at life. “Take your brolly.”
“Yeah, yeah, the brolly,” said Ronan, more than ready to make his escape. “Will do.” Because who knows, maybe she did see something on telly. And being where we are, the odds are better than fifty-fifty that it’ll rain just to spite us.
***
From someplace else—somewhere distant in time and place, or very close, depending on where one was standing—a snicker.
Oh, really. Come on now.
What?
I saw what you did there, brother mine. Or what you thought you did and got away with.
What?
You’re all the time having these little deep-consciousness chats with him. Years, now, you’ve been at it. Well, two can play at that game. Can have been playing at it.
Perhaps they can. Perhaps they have. Yet here we are, still! And if we have been playing at that game, as you put it, and this is the best you can do to keep from losing—
You know what I can’t bear?
Do enlighten me.
The smugness. You are so sure. You think that just because you picked what you think was the right side, you’re always going to—
It wasn’t a matter of thought, but of knowledge. Knowledge to which you were blind: self-blinded by your pride. And as for you trying to claim someone else’s smugness as being a problem for you—
Problem? It’s no problem! As you’ll soon find.
Oh, I see. You believe you’re about to inflict some kind of ‘worst-case’ event on him?
Him? As if I couldn’t, if I cared to.
As if you’d be spending so much thought on something you didn’t care about. On me, then?
Don’t flatter yourself.
Why should I when you’re doing it for me? Go right ahead. This should be amusing.
You— You actually think that—
I’m waiting.
A long, freighted pause. And then:
Not for very much longer.
***
Ronan grabbed the dark blue parka that went with his charcoal-gray school uniform and threw it over his clothes. Then, glancing at the umbrella stand by the front door, he snickered and said under his breath, “Yeah, yeah, take the brolly…” Out of it he grabbed one of his Mam’s half-size fold-up umbrellas and shoved it into the parka’s pocket. He bent down to pick up his school bag, the backpack that held his textbooks and notebooks, and paused by the door to pat himself down. Keys, phone, money… He was sorted. He glanced at his phone. Twenty minutes till his first class.
He headed out the front door, locked it behind him, and trotted down the front walk to the footpath. In front of Ronan traffic streamed back and forth, cars coming down from the motorway exit up the hill, making for the main road into Bray. He paused by the front gate to take a look at the sky, thinking of Nana saying It doesn’t look good.
Weird, he thought. The sky was clear: some high haze, nothing worse.
Ronan shrugged. It changes real quick sometimes, who k
nows… He glanced back at the house, having his usual early morning moment of Did I remember to shut the front blinds? His Mam was paranoid about that lately since there’d been a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood—hit-and-run thieves looking in people’s windows, seeing something they wanted, smashing their way in to take it.
But the blinds were shut. Don’t know why anybody would bother with us anyway, Ronan thought, turning his back on the place and heading down the road. It’s not like we’re rich; we’ve got nothing special, no fancy cars, no fancy stuff… Their house was like every other one in their block, a commonplace suburban neighborhood of stamped-out single-family houses: all with four bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, a living room and kitchen and dining room and a toilet downstairs, a front hall with a walk to the street’s sidewalk and a back patio from which you could hear everything else that was going on up and down the block… at least in the summertime, when doors and windows were open and people were outside trying to take advantage of what summer weather there was. If one family had a barbecue, every other family on the block could smell what they were having. “Togetherness,” his Mam called it, always sounding as if there were levels of together that were all right and levels she could have done without.
But then his Mam had been a country girl from outside Athy—she would laugh and tell people that the only reason she’d moved here was for the broadband—and Ronan’s Da had been born up in Clondalkin, west of Dublin, so that when he moved down here he thought this was the country.
Ronan snorted softly in the back of his throat as he got near the intersection between his road and the main road into Bray. Well, all right, you could see green space with no houses on it from here. Just look to the right and you were staring at the long green upslope of Bray Head, towering above the Irish Sea. But these days all the ground nearly to the foot of the Head had become suburban territory—rows and rows of houses. And while the higher parts of the Head were okay for climbing, when you did get up there mostly what you saw all around you, except for the sea, was suburbs. There was a brief spread of green farmland and forest on the southern side, but just a glance beyond it you started seeing the commuter belt that was swiftly spreading northward from Greystones. Only looking eastward past Delgany and the other townlands, getting increasingly built up, was there a view of more mountains. Off in the distance rose the sharp point of Sugarloaf, and closer than that the smaller hill, not quite a mountain, whose name Ronan could never remember so that he wound up calling it what his Gran did: “Shoogie.”