Dangerous Curves Ahead

I’m lying on the top bunk in the lad’s room staring out the window at the rain clattering down.  It’s been raining for days now, the dark-grey clouds up there like the ceiling just a few inches away from me pushing down.  There’s no going out to play in this weather.  This morning, dead-bored walking around in the rain with a busted umbrella, the Green was a swamp of cold-muddy puddles, the swimming pool overflowing its white-painted concrete sides; even the swimming pool’s barbed-fence to keep us young fellas outta was dripping raindrops. 

Anyways, I’m too old for playing up the Green. 

The ten and eleven-year-olds won’t let me join their soccer games, saying you either have to have two thirteen-year-olds, one for each team, or the thirteen-year-old has to be the ref. 

But reffing them young lads, with no whistle, is hard work.  The last time I ended up having to batter Johnny Walsh so I could let the other team take their penalty from where Johnny handballed to stop a goal.  With someone’s cousin from England lining up to take the penalty, his eyes so intent you’d think it was the FA Cup Final, bloody nosed Johnny slinks off home crying.  The penalty goes over the jumper-goalpost and now I’m fighting with the other team, when Luke’s mammy comes screaming outta their house with a wooden spoon waving up over her head, and her wanting to give me a battering.  I ran away to hide down the palm trees by the river so she couldn’t make a holy show of battering me in front of all the young lads. 

“I’m goan to go dowen an’ tell yer fadder!” she yells after me, the wooden spoon wagging above her head.  “He’ll settle ya, … ya, ya little pup, hittin’ my Johnny!”

The onliest thing worser than getting a battering from someone’s mammy up the Green is waiting for Da to come home and give me a battering.

             So, what do I care if the Green is flooded; what do I care if the whole world is flooded.

I turn over on my side and stare out the window at the rain pelting into the thick wall of pine trees that hides the Old Folks Homes they just built from our back garden.  Why don’t the old people want to see our back garden?  And why did they knock down the tree Plantation that useta be there just to build little houses for pensioners and then plant more trees to hide them houses from us.  I like being able to see out our window what the neighbours are doing.

Now, Da makes us close the cloudy-curtains that you can kinda-sorta see through from the inside but not from the outside at all.

“Them poor divils worked their whole lives an’ don’t need ta retire inta watchin’ ye four savages killin’ one another in here!” he says yanking the cloudy-curtains across  the window every day.

The four savages is me and me brothers.  I’m the youngest so I get the most killing of all; but I’m getting better every fight.   

Everything always changes, even when you especially don’t want nuthin to change.

Like them building the Old Folks Homes.  One day, I woke up to roaring chainsaws knocking down the Plantation pine trees as easy as we useta snap each other’s pencils in school.  After that the Plantation looked like a giant’s unshaved face until a yellow bulldozer pushed all the tree stumps away so it looked like a regular brown field.

Why do things have to change?

One time we even thought the Troubles from the North was coming down here, when some RUC men sneaked down from the North fishing for our salmon but the ‘RA found out and shot them; nearly kilt them!  

See, everyone around here is mad about fishing cause the rivers and lakes is bursting with salmon and trout and pike and even eels. 

I hate eels: They’re always squirming so it’s nearly impossible to be sure you have them kilt. 

People are weird.  Most of them says the fishermen coming to catch our fish is good cause they’re tourists, which means they’re richer than us and will spend their money on anything, even stoopid stuff.  But even Da, who was furious with the ‘RA for shooting the RUC men, and who’s a great fisherman himself, he caught four salmon one day and two on another day a week later, is never done complaining about “them bleddy Germans!  They’ll fish out every lake in t’country if the fools above in Dublin let them.” 

The Germans that Da complains about aren’t a bit like the German soldiers in Where Eagles Dare.  No, new Germans is either short, fat and pink, or tall, skinny and blond; they stay in hotels and guest houses with their fishing rods in special locked roof-racks on top of Mercedes estates; and they roar in German across Main Street to one another when they’re going to the pub after catching all our fish.

But no one ever thought RUC men would be sneaking down here for our fish; not with the batterings they’re always giving Catholics.  And no know for sure thought our ‘RA men would shoot guns.  

But they both done what no one here never even thought could be done. 

The pretend-fisher-RUC-men got shot going home as they drove round the corner at the Gaiety Ballroom back the Westport Road by pretend-farmers- ‘RA-men.  

No one died, but Castlebar hospital was on the News; looking not a bit like itself atallatall, but like as if it ‘twas another hospital somewhere up the country.   

That’s the problem.

People, even hospitals, is always pretending they’re someone else. 

Animals never pretend.  

Like birds, they’re the animals we know the best.  Birds just do the same thing all the time: Singing, eating, shitting, and fluttering away when you make them scared.

That’s all birds do, whether they’re the wild sparrows and starlings in the back yard, or the budgies and canaries that Da breeds in the garage.  I don’t know why Da breeds all them bright coloured birds except that he done it when he was a child and probly he likes slobbering with building and fixing cages.  He built all the cages he traps the budgies and canaries in by himself.  The cages are big-long plywood boxes with wire fronts.  Then with a fierce skinny bit of plywood, he can separate the long cage into smaller individual cages for the bird-parents to make baby birds.   

Da decides which two bird-parents will make babies together based on their colours.  Breeding budgies is all about getting good colours and breeding canaries is getting good singers.  Even though you can teach budgies to talk, they’re just repeating sounds they hear, and so no one really buys them for the talking.  The budgie we keep in the kitchen, the first one we ever had, Rory was the name we gave him, never learned to talk, but he could imitate the knocker on the front door.  You’d be sitting watching telly and think there was someone at the door. 

It's weird cause me and Davy really tried hard to teach Rory to talk.  We were just little then, maybe eight or nine.  But he wouldn’t say back any of the words I kept repeating to him.  Davy made me say “Up the Gunners” cause he’s an Arsenal fan, and actually that did sound better than “Up Leeds” who I support.  After a few days of trying to teach Rory to talk, I got tired of him not saying any words and stuck our real-looking German Luger toy gun in through the bars of the cage.

“Svay ‘Up zee Gunners’ you shvine-hunt or I vill shoooot yours stoo…pid head off!” I yelled in my best evil German-soldier accent.

Ma burst outta the scullery with the wooden spoon and battered me ‘til the back of me legs was red with wooden spoon wallops and me face drenched with tears.  She took the Luger and I didn’t see it for weeks.

Da said the reason Rory never talked was that Auntie bought a glugger.   

“Ah, in this world if you want sumptin done proper, ya hafta do it yerself,” he sighed, staring into the cage at Rory.  “If he’s like them other fellas from up t’North, he’ll never talk, but hopefully he’ll be gud for wan thing anyway!”

 See, Auntie bought Rory for us in a pet shop above in Enniskillen.  I mean you can’t just get budgies anywhere: You have to go to a special pet shop.  The nearest pet shop to us that sells budgies is all the way in Dublin. 

There’s a bad pet shop in Galway that sells hamsters who die in their sleep a few weeks after you bring them home.  After the second time that happened, the pet shop fella wouldn’t even talk to Da about getting his money back, cause he said we must be feeding the hamster wrong – even though it ‘twas from him we bought the food.  On that drive back to Castlebar, and us hamster-less now, Da done a fierce pile of teeth-gritting and head-shaking.  

Auntie crosses over the Border every day to go to her job as a science teacher in Enniskillen and Da says that cause up the North is kinda-sorta like being in England; they have everything good that you can’t get easily in Ireland.  

As soon as she brought Rory home to Granny’s big house in Dowra, Auntie got scared she’d kill him, cause she didn’t know how to take care of budgies atallatallatall.  At least not like Da does, fussing with them, giving them cuttlefish bones for their beaks and gravel for their gizzards: It’s fierce tricky, they’re not like hens that just live.  

Auntie could probly take care of hens.  People out the country can always take care of hens.  Wan time I seen Auntie kill a hen with her just gloved hands on a special killing stone at the side of the house.  Some fella who Granny taught way-way back when all good things useta happen and she was the teacher in Dowra school, came into Dowra for the August fair and gave Granny an alive hen as a gift.   

The hen was clucking and scratching within in the cardboard banana box Granny’s old student left it in; one wild black eye staring out through the holes the bananas do breath through as they’re coming in ships all the way from Africa to Bests Supermarket.  Auntie was furious with the fella for giving Granny an alive hen, cause she’d be the wan that’d have to kill it: There’s no way Granny would do any killing. 

All of a shot around six o’clock, Auntie pulles on her gardening gloves grabs the hen by the neck outta the banana box and tucks it in under her arm.  The squawking is sumptin ferocious: Wings clatter offa Auntie’s side: Four long-curly-nails scrape against her blue-flowery housecoat.  

With the hen making a holy terror in fright, Auntie rushes outta the house and up the side alley that leads to the old bicycle and bedrame graveyard behind Granny’s house.  There in the wall of the stairs that goes up to the back garden, where Grandad, who’s been dead since before I was even born, useta keep bees, have apple trees and grow potatoes, but now is just a heap of wildness, there’s this wan killing stone that sticks outta the wall by a bunch of inches. 

Auntie, her arms straight like they were made of wood, slaps the hen’s body against the killing stone; one wing gets pinned-flapping up against the wall; the other flailing against her housecoat; the hen’s long nails scratching and grabbing a hoult of Auntie’s housecoat, bunching up the blue-flowery nylon.

Auntie’s head and shoulders lurch forward and sumptin big happens. 

The nails keep grabbing the housecoat but the wings stop mid flap.

Auntie stays like that, even though I could tell, and me standing well back, that the hen had died.

“Get inta that house!” Auntie yelled, her face all scrunched up, when she turned and saw me watching.

“Wait, wait, bring out t’big knife, t’wan you’re not allowed to touch, wid t’black handle … an’ be careful or it’ll cut t’hand offa ya!”

She took the knife and went off into the garage, that useta be the stables for English policemen, cause once upon a time Granny’s house was an RIC barracks.

With Auntie afraid to keep the budgie, that Saturday we met her at the graveyard in Collooney.  We only meet there cause it’s kinda-sorta halfway between Castlebar and Dowra: I mean it’s not actually halfway, cause we have to drive a heap more miles to get there, but the road from Dowra to Collooney is so vomity that we call the graveyard halfway.  We had to stop coming home from Dowra that way cause we’d be twisting-turning on that road for half an hour, everyone ready to vomit and then you’d see the sign: “DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD!”

When I see that sign and realize there’s even worser twisty-turny-vomityiness coming, and heaps more forcing burny-stomach-water back down my throat, I just go ahead and puke.

Auntie was waiting for us in the gravelly-dandelioney car park outside the Collooney graveyard.  Sometimes we go playing hide and seek in the graveyard, but not if Granny’s there.  She thinks playing in a graveyard is a sin, but she thinks nearly everything we do is a sin.  Anyways, me and the lads, when we were littler, useta play war up in the Castlebar graveyard all the time and no one ever stopped us.  It’s actually a great place for war, cause from behind any gravestone you can be a deadly sniper.

When we saw Rory for the first time in a real birdcage in the boot of Auntie’s new royal-blue, Austin Morris, it was kinda weird.  He had the same wild eyes as the hen in the banana box.  He kept hopping from perch to perch, his yellowy-green wings starting to flap but never getting to a full flap.

Granny hadn’t come with Auntie, so me and Davey wanted to take Rory into the graveyard so he could be part of a quick game of war.  Da wouldn’t allow that atallatall, and anyways, there’s no sticks to use as guns near the Collooney graveyard.

Instead, we took Rory in his cage for a walk around the graveyard. 

Rory seemed to like that.  We’d never actually seen a budgie up close before; they’re just sorta small parrots. 

Here in the dreariness of Collooney graveyard’s splotchy-grey gravestones and dark green Yew trees, Rory’s bright-green yellowyness, bopping like crazy over and back between the two perches in the cage looked almost too alive.

Granny woulda ben furious!

To be continued …