He took up the position like a sentry, without speaking.
‘Don’t you move.’
I plunged into the shroud of mist, in a panic now, to get someone, anyone, to come and take the whole of the burden off me. As I reached the first van, I began to scream.
The sun came out not long after that and the mist rolled back across the flat sea to the horizon. I couldn’t escape until late in the afternoon. I had to talk to half the world, but in the end, when it had all stopped, I did go out.
The site had the smell of everybody’s tea frying and the kids were sitting in the mud and sun.
The beach was empty, except for some boys a long way off playing cricket, tiny figures on the flat sand. The sea was very quiet, shifting about gently inside itself and creaming at the edge.
I walked and walked and then sat down on some rocks. The seaweed was as green as emeralds, and smelled of fish.
I didn’t think about Rosa. I didn’t need to. She was there. If I had reached out I could have touched her.
There was one thing I felt bad about. One thing I should have done and that was to have put her wig on for her. People should not have seen her bald like that. I felt I had let her down. Rosa had always had a dignity about her.
I looked along the pale sand. The cricketing boys had gone. This was my place, the only one I had now, and when we moved on, I would not have this calm, secret beach either, until we came back next year.
There was a rock pool behind my foot with a tiny crab sitting in the sand at the bottom. I could see every mark on it through the clear water. I bent down and touched it with my finger and it shrugged itself back at once under the sand and went still.
The sea made its soft sound, turning over and over.
‘Hoooo-ee-oo.’
I knew he had stayed guard at the bottom of Rosa’s van steps. Johnny Mahoney had told me so. He had done as I had told him, though I could scarcely believe I had ordered him in such a way, but after that I didn’t know where he had gone.
‘Hoooo-eee-oo.’
The sun had gone off the beach now. I couldn’t tell whether he was on the cliff paths above, or behind some of the rocks, he was so clever with his voice.
‘Hooo-eee-ooo.’
I began to walk back quickly, though whether I was walking away from Little Midge or towards him I had no way of telling. I thought of what Johnny Mahoney had said. ‘Just ask the Boss.’
The cliff path was a long way off. I had walked further than I realised along the beach, further than I had ever gone before.
‘Hooo-eee-ooo.’
‘Rosa,’ I said out loud.
I remembered what they always said in the stories about the old days and the big cats.
‘Never turn your back,’ was the rule, ‘and never run.’
So I didn’t run, only walked fast.
‘Rosa.’
When I saw the perimeter fence at the edge of the site I started sobbing. My side stabbed where I had pulled a muscle climbing in such a panic up the cliff path. The horses and ponies were whinnying and the dogs were barking. I heard a couple of drum rolls. All the usual racket. I had never been glad of it before.
I didn’t want to go past Rosa’s van but to avoid it I would have to walk halfway round the site and all the energy and strength had gone out of me like sand out of a timer. Besides, I had to face it so it might as well be now.
And then I saw Little Midge. He was sitting, hunched up on the bottom step of Rosa’s van, his big head bent forward into his chest. I stopped dead. He looked as if he had been there for hours. Perhaps all day. Perhaps ever since I had ordered him to stay and not move, in the sea mist of that early morning.
I went nearer, and he heard or sensed me, and looked. I didn’t say anything and nor did he, but I saw that he was crying. His old man’s face was wet and his eyes were red. He looked like a sad, very old baby. His nose was running and he wiped it on his coat sleeve.
I didn’t understand, and then I felt suddenly sick and giddy, so that I would have fainted if I hadn’t sat down on the steps of the van next to him. I took some breaths. The world righted itself.
Little Midge smelled of tobacco and musty clothes. I sat there next to him for ages while he went on crying, but I couldn’t stand him wiping his nose on his sleeve so in the end I gave him my handkerchief and he used that.
The racket went on all around us. Kids and dogs and drums and horses and van doors opening and shutting. It seemed to have nothing to do with us. We were cut off from it all, sitting on the steps of Rosa’s van, having a queer, unspeaking need for one another.
The punishment
The punishment
‘Goddit,’ Deano said. ‘We’ll shoot the crucifix.’
They froze as stiff as the plaster saints then and the silence was terrible, as they pictured it in their minds.
‘Goddit,’ and he banged his fist hard against the breakwater behind them. But he had scared himself as well, they knew that, with the enormity of the idea and that it had come out of him.
The tide was out and there was the usual mean wind.
They looked at the lime-green seaweed smeared over the rocks and the rusty railing sticking out of its sheared-off concrete slab, like a broken bone out of an arm, at the dull sky and the dull sea – anywhere but at each other as what Deano had said sank down into the part of them so deep it might never be reached.
They were already old men, it seemed, by the time Mick bent forward to pick up a pebble and chucked it away from him. The sound when it fell was hardly anything and it made them start as if they were already there and had done the thing, heard the crack of the shot, the church door slam, a sudden voice.
It woke them up though.
‘We could,’ Deano said, as if they had been shouting him down. ‘Simple.’
Mick picked up another pebble. They were only here for him, they were all trying to think of what to do, for him, and because of Charlie, but he was the most fearful of them, that was understood. On the other hand, Charlie had been his brother.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘You know.’
‘The worst thing we could think of, you said, except for killing someone, and it’s the worst thing.’
‘Something might happen.’
‘Yea, we’d shoot it and it’d smash to bits.’
It was Sluggy who said the obvious. Sluggy who scarcely spoke, because of the hole in the roof of his mouth that made him sound like an idiot, which he definitely was not.
‘No gun.’ It came out differently but they never had any trouble understanding him.
‘Catapult then.’
‘Yea, well.’
But Mick knew when to give in. ‘It wouldn’t make any noise.’ They looked at him. He had given permission. They would do it. He would.
The mean wind blew little pins of rain that stung their faces. Far down the beach, the tide turned.
They got up and went slowly back, not speaking, kicking at the shingle, and the lumps of sand and marran grass beside the path.
‘See yer.’
‘See yer,’ at the usual corner. Only nothing was usual or ever would be again, whether they did it or not. But they would do it. It was as if it had already happened and become a fact, in his life, his past, history, not just a might, and in the future.
‘Goddit.’
There was a great hollow, like one of the caves at low tide. It seemed to be just at the back of Mick’s mind or behind his head. He dared not look into it. He had to. It had begun to grow from the bubble that had formed there the moment Deano had said it. ‘We’ll shoot the crucifix.’ And Mick had known at once that they would.
Everything filled it as it grew, it became crowded with thickening, shifting shapes. Hellfire, though, strangely, there were no flames. A stench, of sulphur and incense. Mary and the saints. The plaster statues weeping paint blood and the red holes on the plaster feet, the open, wounded heart. His own white shirt and bla
ck bow tie on elastic and the mesh of marks on his knees from pressing into the altar carpet at his First Communion. His mother’s face behind the short black veil. Father O’Connell’s mumbling voice on the other side of the confessional box. Angels. Words.
‘Who made you?’
‘God made me.’
‘Why did God make you?’
‘God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world and to be happy with him for ever in the next.’
He was walking faster and faster, banging his feet hard onto the pavement as he went up the steep hill towards the Bracken, working himself up into a boiling of fear. But more than the fear ever could be was the anger that filled up the black cave, blotting out everything else there and growing until he thought his head would burst.
The way it happened might have been expected. Charlie’s mouth had always got the better of him; none of them could have counted the number of times one of the fathers had said, ‘Your tongue will be the death of you, Charlie Coghlan,’ though never thinking it could actually come true. There were just the kept-behinds, the raw knuckles from the ruler and burning red legs from the strap, and he never learned, never thought before he came out with something, nor ever seemed to put the cause and the punishment together to make two. Mick had given up on him long before.
It had been quick.
‘Twenty-seven point four multiplied by nine.’ The yellow-stained forefinger had stabbed at Charlie, who was silent, slumped down in his seat. The priest had come round. Mick, in the desk behind, caught the swish of the black habit.
‘Twenty-seven point four by nine.’ He had taken hold of Charlie’s ear hard between the yellowed fingers. He had long fingernails, which Mick thought a man should not have.
‘Geddoff, bugger you.’ Charlie had wrenched his head away and Mick’s heart had stopped like a lift with the ropes severed. Then the classroom exploded.
After the beating, the punishment had gone on for the rest of the week. Every night, he was kept in and on the Friday longer than ever. Mick waited more than an hour before going to find him.
The school joined up to the presbytery, with gardens in between crossed by paths where the priests walked, holding the black book up to their faces saying the office. At the back was the kitchen garden, the sheds, the sagging wire netting around the chicken house.
‘Uh.’
‘I’m looking for my brother.’
‘Uh.’
The fat bald brother who kept the bees and potatoes and hens was toothless and deaf, more difficult to understand even than Sluggy. He knew what Mick wanted though, always knew.
Mick followed him. Once he turned and his white moon face held a terrible sadness. He knew why in the shed. The brother had piled up crates to sit Charlie down on, and another for him to rest his foot. The foot was red, the whole of it, and on the floor were a wet scarlet sock and plimsoll. Charlie had his arms tight round his chest, as if to hold himself together, and he was rocking to and fro and making an odd little mewling noise.
‘Uh.’
The fork had gone right through his foot. The brother had pulled it out and brought him in from where Charlie had been digging, put him here and fetched a bucket of water.
‘I didn’t know,’ Mick said. ‘How could I?’
Charlie went on holding himself together, rocking to and fro, to and fro, inside the sour-smelling chicken shed, with the slats of dusty light falling onto his hands and the egg crates and the scarlet sock and plimsoll.
It had taken Mick more than an hour to get him home somehow, and Charlie another four days to die, in terror and maddening fever from the poison that blackened his foot, blowing it up to three times its size, then racing up through him like the tide, drowning him.
Mick had gone in to see him and his face had been odd, twisted out of shape and bloated, like the corpses of the fish left rotting at low tide. It wasn’t Charlie’s face.
Their mother sat sponging him, dipping her left hand into the enamel bowl of Holy Water and letting it trickle over his forehead and cheeks and run down into his neck.
Mick had stood twisting the loose door handle about. Neither of them had looked at him.
Later that day, a Sister of Mercy had come, a crow flapping slowly up the stairs, and Mick had sat with his back against the banister hearing the soft murmur of the prayers, the voices going up and down in rhythm and the click of the rosary.
He had closed his eyes then, dropped his head and prayed with a raging passion he had never even known the shadow of before. ‘Make him not die. Make him not die. Make him not die.’
He knew it was not a proper prayer, like the prayers being recited by his mother and the Sister of Mercy, it was more, far more.
‘Make him not die.’
But Charlie had. The hatred and rage in Mick’s heart were terrifying and which was the strongest, towards God, or himself, or the priest with the yellow forefinger, he could not have said.
The others had caught the rage from him. They were like brothers anyway, and now even more so – but impotent, somehow, until Deano had said that.
‘Goddit. We’ll shoot the crucifix.’
Two days later he went to Deano’s house, at the other end of the Bracken, which was just a block of five dirty white houses joined together and set down as if they had been dropped out of the sky from nowhere, and around them was only scrub and an old square of hardcore where there had once been Nissen huts.
The back door of Deano’s was open and the smell met you with the flies. He was used to it, though it still always choked him. They left raw meat in slabs on the floor for the dogs and open tins of sardines with forks stuck in.
‘Hiya.’
No one turned round. The little dark room was full of them, and all the same, with skinny dirty necks and skinny long arms.
On the plastic tablecloth they’d rigged up a cross of broken sticks punched into a lump of putty. The real crucifix was on the mantelpiece between two candlesticks and a bunch of plastic flowers.
Mick watched. Norrie held the catapult up quite high, squinting down his nose. He had a cigarette stuck to his lower lip.
‘Pow.’
But the stone skidded onto the floor.
‘Give it here.’
At the end of an hour they were good, but Mick was best and couldn’t miss. They drifted out of the house and sat on the back step, except Norrie, who posed by the fence, eyes half-closed against his cigarette smoke. ‘Can’t miss.’
They looked at Mick.
‘No,’ he said.
‘You got to.’
‘It was Deano’s idea.’
They didn’t bother to answer. The words about Charlie being his brother just hung like Norrie’s smoke on the air. The vengeance was his, by rights.
Norrie flicked his stub into the pile of broken bicycles. ‘Right.’
Mick was almost out of the gate before Deano said, ‘Saturday night. Eleven o’clock.’ He hardly raised his voice but Mick was so strung up he’d have heard a whisper half a mile away.
The bad thing was he couldn’t say any prayers about it, so there was no help from anywhere. After Charlie, he knew that prayers might not work, but they’d still seemed possible and now they were not.
He avoided the others and didn’t go near the breakwater, or to the other end of the Bracken.
Once his mother said, ‘Haven’t you got more to do than hang about here?’ in the old way, and the next second he saw the flicker over her face, the wish that she could bite back what she’d said. After Charlie she had sworn never again to say it, never to push him out of the house, never give him another tongue-lashing.
After Charlie, like everything. But it couldn’t have lasted and he was relieved because it felt normal again.
She had opened her purse. ‘Take it. Buy some chips. Go to the Amusements. Why not?’ She held out the guilt offering. He hated to look into her face, still shocked that eyes could change so completely, still appalled by the sadness.
/> He took the coin. He should have kissed her and could not.
They were allowed anywhere except for Fun Land, which was not in the open, but down steep steps underground, a place like a cave, smelling of damp. You didn’t know who might be hanging about down there and the air was bad, she said, and neither he nor Charlie had ever minded being forbidden to go, afraid of the look of it, opening at their feet like the mouth of hell, with orange and green sulphur lights and awful, echoing, shrieking voices.
But now he went straight there without hesitating or letting himself think or imagine, ran down the steps and paid to go through the turnstile.
And it was hell, as he had known it would be, and beckoning and exciting and terrifying as hell must be. The noise of the dodgem cars bounced off the walls and the electricity at the tips of their trailing poles fizzed and sparked.
He could hear the shots and went straight for them. No one else was at the stand. The line of ducks bobbed along past him and round the back and came bobbing round again, and each time he took aim he had only to think of Charlie and his swollen bruise-coloured face, or the scarlet sock and plimsoll shining wet on the shed floor.
The ghost train screamed and howled behind its shocking hoardings and the laugh of the maniac policeman rang in his head, and he was in hell and triumphant, he could not miss. Crack. Could not. Crack. Crack. Crack.
The electric-blue nylon rabbit was huge and burned his fingers, he could scarcely hold it to run up the steps and across the Bay Road, and throw it over the railing into the sea. The tide was high, and turning.
‘Can’t miss.’
All he had to do was think of Charlie.
‘Can’t miss.’
Which was the worst of it now, that he could not, and was damned because of it.
He ran home to exhaust himself and not be able to think, but it was all there waiting for him at the bottom of the steps into the darkness of sleep, the open mouth of hell and the spit and hiss and the screaming. There was a grinning clown’s head on a turntable, with wide-parted scarlet lips between which you threw plastic balls.