(Boy) Walks Forth
The places to visit that day are the warzone of tar, the shallows of leeches, and the cavern of spare parts. One hour in the warzone and it reeks from you for a week. It is a strengthening, thrilling smell. The lads scale the wall and get the cranks going. They find cut pieces and drag them on the timbers, scraping up a good ooze. Nice to smear and stretch. Someone bangs the metal rods, but not so loud as to attract attention. When they put a match close to smeared bits of paper the flame jumps the empty space and creeps to a glow of orange. A thick black streak races upwards. One good stack of papers and the flames would catch, the whole place turn to a hellish inferno. But what madman would want to do that? They would never do that, they always stamp the flame underfoot when it gets too big. Let it swell out for five seconds then a quick stamping of feet. It never gets out of control.
Yet the man in overalls roars at them and comes clattering down the metal steps. They retreat over the wall, spilling into the laneway, and leg it for the open end where traffic flies by. The man in overalls takes his time loosening the long bolts, dragging open the tall doors. They boom with a sound for the world. He stands and faces them, a quiet appraisal that unsettles the boys. They feel they should keep running. Then some previously unknown rule is violated as the man draws back his arm and launches a missile towards them, a large hexagonal wheel nut they follow with their eyes. They scatter like ragged pigeons.
The shallows of leeches are where you cross the river. There are concrete walls both sides, and the concrete extends under the water too, until it gets covered by a spongy mass of weed. He takes off his shoes and socks. Up on the banks you can see the glisten of broken glass, but down in the water it is hidden. Maybe there is none there at all. The shock of cold water on his feet always catches his breath. He grits his teeth like someone about to hit a punch. His pale feet shine from under the water. Little fish dart about. It would be nice if they swarmed over his feet but they never do that. There are other kids with a net on a stick that they swish through the water. Swish, they go, and peer at the weed inside. He watches them dip and drag, but can't see if they catch anything. He doesn't know these boys and shies away from approaching them. He hangs around the grass bank letting his feet dry, watching.
"Givvus a go," he asks them at last. "No," one of them says.
This shocks Cyril. Someone no older than himself speaking in this way, like an adult stating the self-evident.
"Go on, givvus a go," he pesters them the length of the bank, until they reach where the grass verge narrowed and changed to a strip of gravel. "No," they said each time, quietly, as though he were asking just to annoy them.
"Is that all you can say?" He turned from them with finality. They move on, still fishing, or pretending to fish, and he is on his own.
Feet can slip on the slimy bottom. The current could catch his legs, topple him, sweep him down to the rapids. Wiped away, swept away like a leaf. Floating on the crest, thrashing his arms and legs.
The water is not really dangerous, he knows. It reaches to his knee in the deepest parts. The current can seem fast and rough in the shallows where it tumbles over rocks. But it's not dangerous. His legs are cold now and the thrill has gone.
He has never seen the leeches. Blood-sucking worms, that's what they say. He cannot doubt that they are real, and yet he finds the idea too fanciful. Leeches, he screamed and gripped his foot in mock terror to watch the girls run. It was a good joke to try once or twice anyway.
There's no time that day for the cavern of spare parts. It is getting dark and cold. Even the seagulls squabble and cry for food. There is no-one left in the park, and the scent of coal-smoke grits the air.
He could hear the voices stabbing at each other as he turned the corner; short staccato bursts were exchanged. It might go on like that for a long time with no escalation, a sound as corrosive as a drilling machine in the warzone of tar. He could crouch and listen to until all he could hear would be the rhythm, and not bother about the sense, and it was like a car engine that grinds and fails to fully start, a car that you are waiting for to leave. His heart beats as though a knot was being tightened around it.
It is a strange thrill to hide in the front garden. He was inside the gate and yet a stranger. If a neighbour saw him all he had to do was stand straight and smile, at once an intruder no longer. The black slate roofs were slick with rain. He could walk away again, but there would be nobody playing football at the triangle, nobody in the lane.
Control is maintained in the voices. He could always recognise the overload coming from afar: the energy building up in steps, a crescendo with steps marked by for jaysus sake and waste of space.
He releases the hacking device. Chop chop it goes, it's arms jab fast and smartly. Chop chop, and his father snorts and shakes his head. It is uncomfortable for him to stay in the house. Time to leave, time to go. The persistent micro-blows are urging him towards the door. He does not know why he feels so flustered. The device has no power to force, but it will not let up. It is free of Cyril now; once released he cannot rein it in.
Bewildered, itched with impatience, the father flings some last words out. There follows that most welcome sound: the rattle of keys, a drawer opening and closing. Footsteps up the hallway, the front door opening. The engine spurts instantly into power and the van pulls away.
The road has a hundred houses that are all variations on one pattern: two windows upstairs, one downstairs. His house however has a junkyard in the front garden. He emerges from behind a leaning sheet of plywood.
"It's me," he says through the letterbox. "Hey, it's only me." The bell doesn't work and it would be too strange to knock on your own front door. She has gone inside somewhere, perhaps she has flung herself out on the bed, her head pressed into a pillow. "Hey," he shouts, "Are you all right?" And then feels an odd, old tightness in his throat.
"Ma," he says. "Mammy, can you hear me? Mammy, I'm at the door." The word makes him want to cry, even though he hears her coming up the hallway and there is nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all.
Sweet Caroline, Ma sings. Sweet suffering Jaysus. Sweet is one of her favourite words. When she took out the mixing bowl there would be as much as he could eat of spotted currant cake for days. But now she boils and boils all day until the windows stream. Then there will be potatoes in their skins and pounded cabbage for dinner. Boiled bacon or boiled bones.
Your father loves potatoes and cabbage, so that's what we'll get, she says to him tearfully. This is a house of potato and cabbage from now on. It's good enough for you.
Thus began the era of boiling everything. It had been going on for some time now, and he often thought back to a previous era, when his mother had made desserts of rice pudding and prunes, there had been white bread and apricot jam. Now she was always tired, too tired to be cheerful. Do you want me to dance, she'd screech.
When Mrs. Renn calls the regime is suspended. The women put on make-up together and take out a tin of biscuits. Mrs. Renn brings cake: tipsy cake or ginger cake, Oxford lunch or brack.
"Look at the shine off your shiny black hair," she crows, and insists on combing it to one side till the white shows. She cups his face in her hands and smiles warmly, but when she brings him to the mirror and looks at his reflection her mouth forms an O and she gasps at the transformation.
Sometimes the mood continues a while after Mrs Renn has gone. He will leave the last biscuit on the plate. Sometimes it ends abruptly. "Damn your skin Cyril. You're your father's son."
Mrs. Renn doesn't know that Ma occasionally loses her mind. There are times when you have to shut off the words that Ma says because they don't make sense. She says he, Cyril, will betray her. She says he will turn to the bad and run wild.
That's not true. Ma doesn't know it, but he has banished evil from his soul. He is on the side of good. He has never had rage in him - does she not see that? When has he hurled and smashed, when has he raised his fist against another? When has he stolen? What person has he ever crushed?
Ma is confused. She treats him like someone else, like a boy who has already turned rotten. She is a weepy vortex, who wants to drag him into tears of repentance for all he has become. Sorrow for the world that will corrupt you. With Ma it is often a valley of tears and she must struggle daily to keep going.
Though when she and Mrs Renn are together they treat him as a different kind of boy again, as the boy who eats sticky sweet buns, that makes him happy. He is not really that boy either, the one who smiles when his hair is tousled and who licks the sugar off his fingers.
When it rains the water streams down so his fringe is smeared to his forehead. He gives his hair a flick, just so, like a horse. Or else he won't flick it, just to feel the water stream over his eyes. The rain stings like danger, but will do no harm. He holds forth an image of his forehead and fringe, breaching a way through the rain, his eyes narrowed to slits.
"Cyril Conroy, have you no coat?" The boys chuckle. He never has a coat, everyone knows that. But he is careful to give the right answers.
"I left it at home, it wasn't raining this morning," he says. Why would he need a coat? Cyril you're a hardy one, they all say.
Now he suffers the indignity of wearing his grey woollen coat every day so they won't think his parents are poor.
In the story the teacher tells there are two children who listen to their parents talking late at night. They crouch at the top bannister and listen. The voices tumble up from the kitchen below and they learn the Truth.
The children leave a trail of white breadcrumbs through the forest. The breadcrumbs glow in the moonlight. But in the city the street lights dazzle all night and the road home roars with traffic.
In the story there are two of them. That makes it different.
One night it's the warzone of tar. He collects oil in a shallow of metal and tears a wick from the pocket of his shirt. The flame rises with livid colours, then settles to a steady burn. The rain will not reach them under the tarred boards, he and his lamp. He curls around it, and the hot centre makes him more aware of the cold. The flame does not warm him; he doesn't need it for warmth. He doesn't need it at all. He learns to keep still. But after some time he gets up and stretches, hobbles the way home. How long a time? There was a milkman out, the sky was grey. The night feeling had passed.
The mind controls matter. The mind creates reality. That's what the programme on the television says. If belief is strong enough, matter can yield. Strange bubbles of music follow, and pictures of ancient tombs. The dead also can rise, that is the truth, and yet it is not acknowledged here in this room.
Bullshit, they say, without even paying attention. They would say that anyway, as predictable as a toilet flush. The problem of belief remains.
Father is back again after working up the country.
"You got bored is that it?"
"Someone around here has to work."
The voice wind and twine towards a climax. This is welcome. Doors will slam, his mother push and slap at his father. He throws her to one side roaring, "Stop your mad catfighting. You want me to hit you so you can call the guards, isn't that what you want?" She fights at him again, throwing her hands out in front of her. His father grasps her in a huge bearhug, presses her against the wall. She stops struggling. Her voice shakes with resolve.
"You pay me nothing. You give me no money. What are you doing here? This is not your home."
At last some words of sense. Words that mean something and are not just flung like pebbles against a wall. Why can he not stay away forever? The idea excites him; that would be a conclusion. That would show that change is possible.
The father stands for a while watching her sobbing over the couch. He raises his eyes to heaven in despair.
Then it is now as it has been so many times before: the keys jangling, engine roars into power, the dull whine of the car leaving. He has stood here, exactly like this, listening to this sound before. It's a strange shameful pleasure: the car engine slows at the crossing just down the road, the sound thins out to nothing, then whines back into hearing one last time. This is comfort.
He waits for his opportunity. His mother leaves for the shops, brings back bread and syrup. He makes a pot of tea without being told to. There are biscuits left in the tin, as there always are.
"If he doesn't pay you anything why do you let him back in?" he whispers.
"He owns the whole house." She sniffles and dabs her eyes.
"Why don't you leave him. He can't throw you out." The slap hits him unexpectedly. It isn't hard, but it catches him mid-sentence and makes him blubber.
"Don't talk like that," she says harshly. "Is that what you be saying out on the street?"
And later. "Are you any better than him? All you do about the house is eat."
And later again. "What happens within these four walls stays within these four walls."
It may be true that mind controls matter but the hacking device is a fantasy. He never really believed in it. It's only some crazy idea from a Japanese cartoon. What really works is Control of Time.
Think this: no matter what pain there is now, in ten hours, or twelve, it will be gone. In a few days you will not even remember. That's all there is to it. Time sweeps away the pain, so just let time do its work. Wait, and learn to wait.
When someone makes him stand up in the class, singles him out and asks the questions, there is the thought that keeps him calm: this moment will pass. And in the thought he is already outside the moment, already it is gone, shelved away with the things that happened a week ago. The teacher is powerless against this. Though his voice ratchet up in pitch, though his face turn red with rage.
Why do people erupt with rage?
On his night wanderings he keeps among the crowds spilling out of the pubs. The women's bright clothing warms the air and everyone is laughing. Ha ha ha, heads are thrown back, unsteady footsteps in high heels. People jostle in slow motion; he has plenty of time to dodge around the keeling bodies. Some call to him, hey young fella, they try to catch his eye. If they smile he smiles back. Three times he does the circuit, until he sees no more coins. Onwards he walks, out to the wide roads where only trucks are driving, out beyond the lights of the city. It is colder here. The wind takes its rise far off; he can see it rustling up crisp bags and dead leaves. It hurtles towards him, branches shudder, one two THREE, and hits him on the forehead and fringe, steady against it, eyes narrowed but open, forging a way. Who else in this city sees the wind at its beginnings?
On street signs he reads names he recalls from radio bulletins: Ringsend, The East Link Bridge, Sandymount strand. There will be time to sleep later. Now he is outside the city, here, even by the sea. The waves roll and crash, roll and crash. They bring sleepiness and wakefulness in turn. His legs have taken him so far, a mighty distance that even a map must acknowledge.
Father is back again. They watch the flickering television but they do not understand what they see and hear.
Instead they repeat portions of time.
I'm tired, so very tired.
You're one to be talking.
Off in your van and I've no idea when you're back.
Become the slut again, is that what you want?
You let them all swindle you, yet if I take one single penny -
Like a parasite on my back.
Have they no memory?
Have they no memory?
Things cannot go on like this. Things will go on like this. Repeat.
They try to cheat you - teachers, the television - by turning what was inside to the outside. Needle into you, squeeze out the tears. I love you daddy, say the children on the television programme. They hug like toys you can see in a shop window, like pictures in a magazine.
Because the world is founded on love, the religion teacher said. All eyes were upon him. The big fake. To make it look like all he has to do is make one tearful admission and the world will be like living in a television ad for Bisto.
He hated this moment, but it is within time and time would pass.
"They brought you up from being a small child, didn't they Cyril?"
He sits resolute. This man wants something from him. This man wants to see his own life confirmed. He wants to feed off submission.
"Do you know that they love you?"
He pictures the house on fire, himself stumbling through the smoke, timbers cracking and falling in flames about him. One huge breath in him, clambering fast and faster so the flames don't have time to burn him. He's too quick for fire. Down below his mother wailing, a man in uniform patting her on the shoulder. A small boy's blackened face at the window.
"Do you love your parents?" the teacher asks. A sweet patient voice, for the third time.
"Yes," Cyril says. The word he speaks is Yes, but it is with the iron tone of No.
"You may sit down," the teacher says, and lowers his eyes. The boy feels a secret thrill course through him. This was a moment of pride. And pride is stronger than steel. Pride is stronger than hunger.
In the story that is what really happens he listens at the top of the stairs. The voices grate against each other, die down and rise up again. At last he understands. What they mean is this: He should never have been. That is the Truth. The world will not acknowledge it, nor can he say it. The schoolteacher will not mention it, it will be in no prayer book. He cannot be permitted to have this truth. For the world to continue on its way it cannot be supposed that he is even capable of thinking this.
Yes, he had said, with the tone of No. And the teacher had known what he meant.
The streets of the city are his. He knows how far his legs can carry him. If only the rain didn't slash in horizontally. He sits way at the back of a porch. It's a financial building - teacher at school has talked about tunnels and ports, suburbs and commuters. The centre of the city is full of offices. So many they pack them into special blocks rising to eight or ten storeys. The workers drive in every day to take their place in an office.
And it is really true. Now at night the streets are deserted. The commuters have gone back to the suburbs. This is the real city, a desolate landscape of vacant buildings and empty streets. The cars that pass don't count; he does not notice the drivers nor do they notice him. It's a terrifying thought that things can be exactly and as simple as they are explained in a book. One element of the city sits inside on a leather chair. It is the security guard, who stares long at the boy, then ignores him. The guard examine a wall panel, sits at a desk, reads a paper.
Warm air streams from under the door, drying the legs of his trousers. In his dreams he is sure-footed, over a wall in one leap, clack clack down a lane, leaving the sound trailing behind him. His strength does not fade, no, it increases with each bounding step. The man in the blue overalls, he keeps following, all the way through the familiar streets, but even he must give up some time.
The boy wakes up, still eluding a pursuer, still tracing an escape down familiar laneways. There is nothing to fear in the waking world. Fear is banished.
"You should go home," the homeless man told him. The man's face was wrinkled, he kept one hand folded over the other. "You should be in your bed." He spoke with an old man's voice, full of certainty. "You have a home to go to, do you?"
The boy shrugs, sets his face to neutral. Questions again, questions to trap you. He looks to one side so as not to give the idea he's about to answer. They always give up eventually.
Then it hits him. This is not any teacher he's talking to. This is someone who lives outside of it all. He does not deserve the control of time treatment.
"Yeah, I have a home," the boy answers. "most of the time there's no-one there though." Actually he wanted to answer truthfully, but it came out as a lie. Not much of a lie, but still. Now he notices the beery smell from the man, and the red welts across his face. It's a real bum, though he speaks like a normal person. Cyril finds himself telling a long tale of a father who beats him with a belt, a drinker, yes, bottles of vodka, and no food in the house so he goes to school hungry. Or no, not really starving, but having only boiled rice (his mother had once contemptuously dismissed boiled rice) for days and days. True hardship, being made stand for hours in a cold room, being told to fuck off if he asks for another blanket.
"The teacher at school asked me why I had no coat, and I lied and said I left it at home because there was rain. I mean because there was no rain." The ingenuity of his lies confuses even himself.
"But I'm alright now," he finishes implausibly. "Things have calmed down."
It's not so bad at home after all. It's not so bad out on the street. Nothing really bad can happen in the world.
Maybe it was that night he decided to throw himself at the mercy of the world. To see what people are made of, as a probe, to give them a chance.
His mother open the cupboard doors, one after the other. "For jaysus sake do you not get enough to eat? There's every kind of food at home." Cyril looked at the cupboard as though he really might find something surprising inside. He was conscious of having set in motion this train of events. He felt big, beyond himself and beyond regret.
"Don't you know they'll take you in? They'll put you in an institution."
"No they won't," he said with a scorn he didn't feel.
"They will! The woman from the department has the right to do that. She as much as told me." His mother put her hands to her face and wept. "Oh Jesus. Why are you doing this to me? Begging on the streets when you have all the food you want in the house. Putting me to shame. Now that bitch can come in any time she wants and waltz around. Why were you sitting out on the street? What notion did you get?"
There is no explaining it, not to his mother nor to Miriam. His silence this time is not wilful; it's a lack of anything to say. He watches her piteous weeping, thinking he should be feeling something, that maybe after all he is a little bit brutal.
On the top shelf, for weeks afterwards, there is a carton of KIDZ superjuice in green and orange with bubble faces (we know why it's there).
She had been very kind, Miriam. He'd seem her pass and then come back along the street taking a sidelong look at him. Are you making much, she'd asked first, on her hunkers down beside him. This embarrassed him. He stood up, pushed the money to one side to indicate it was of no importance. But she counted it up, asked if it was a good night so far. Making fun of him perhaps, because surely anyone could see he wasn't a serious beggar. So he admitted it was his first time. Half an hour is all he'd been there. She laughed, prettily, and he did too, see how ridiculous it was. He basked in a sense of being discovered, some secret sacrifice was at last revealed.
Well we can't leave you here, I'll give you a lift home, she said. - Are you not taking the money with you?
He picked it up reluctantly, like collecting evidence against himself. If only she didn't keep noticing the money. Now it would jangle in his pocket. He vaguely expected that she would take it from him, as a sign that this part of his life was over. He got into her car with a warm feeling that something good was going to happen. Or at least something would happen rather than the recurrence of nothing.
Where do you live? she asked. The engine started immediately with a nice burring sound. A warm hum that enveloped them. Then he watched the vegetable shop pass, the novelty store with its glass front that went right into the ground, the stone wall alleyway, the bank porch and all these places he knew well, but now from inside a car, so he felt they were a long way off and he was seeing them for the last time. Remember us well, they seemed to say to him.
Give me a call tomorrow and tell me how you are, she said, writing out a number on a yellow rectangle on the dashboard.
Stupid stupid child. He understood now that this was someone whose business it was to look after children. It was her paid role. This was not the one he had been waiting for. No matter how nice she was (and she was paid to be) she was not the one.
The rain rouses to a bluster. It spits in his face, pushes his hair to one side. His cheeks are scrubbed raw by the wind, his nose a ship's prow that is taking a battering. At last he stops, huddles in a bus shelter. The gusts whip at his shirt collar and by degrees he shuffles into the quietest spot. If he holds his hands to himself the warmth is preserved within.
Three teenagers arrive. They shove and jostle each other: elbows bang against the perspex display, slaps are exchanged, laughter all the while. They trip and fall in a confusion of limbs, then jump up again. They are of indestructible material.
He gives a few cautious glances and keeps to himself. The rain will end soon.
LOOK AT THE STEAM OFF YOUR MAN!
The teenagers gather around him, drag him out under the street lamp. He is passed from hand to hand, rotated, admired. He sees it too, the wisps rising from him, his energy made manifest.
Don't be queering the man.
Jesus, you're mad hot.
Feel his arms, seriously.
Where did you come from?
Fucking hell, you're an engine. What's your name?
"Cyril," he says.
They offer him bars of chocolate and a bag of chips. He accepts their tribute and goes on his way. Something of the power within him has been revealed. The body can resist the cold. The dogs on the streets need no shelter. The polar bear can live on ice. They too are just flesh and blood. And yet they can live in the cold.
"Jesus you scared the life out of me," his mother says. "What's up with you?" She's amazed to see him still there, because he always leaves on time for school. It's gone ten now and the traffic outside is quiet. His eyes and nose stream with moisture. He shivers uncontrollably, but it is only the motor within, burning with excess energy.
"You've a fever," she says, "stay in your bed." She is relieved to see him sick: it explains things. In a minute, just as she promised, she brings in a mug of tea and slices of toast. He eats and sleeps. Wakes and eats. The house is empty. Next door he hears footsteps, floorboards creaking. There are people who do nothing but stay in a house all day. Cars slowing and accelerating. These are all comforting sounds. He knows the sound that will disturb the quiet: that one particular car engine, those precise footsteps.
"Who ate all the bread? Every last slice is eaten!"
The mother barges into the room. She puts her hand on his forehead.
"That's no fever. You're stone cold."
"It's a fever where I've a low temperature," he says.
This is not something she has heard of, but the evidence is there in front of her. She has no mind to pay a doctor just to hear the expert advice: 'wrap up and keep warm'. It's not like Cyril to fake being sick anyway - as Mrs Renn herself was to say a couple of hours later.
So his secret training continues. Five hours out in the cold, then six, then seven. No-one would believe it possible, but there is no-one to tell.
"Put your jumper on you'll get the flu," said Mrs Renn. "There's a chill in the air, you'll catch your death," said Mrs Guinn at the shop.
These are things that people say. But they do not apply to him. Like the words from television, like the religion teacher's fatuous ploys, they are words
for empty-headed people who know nothing
for fakes and frauds
for unreal people who live in a story
for those who cannot bear the truth
for those who force themselves to laugh
for those who say what they have been told to say
for those who will repeat portions of time forever
He is the bearer of a ruthless discipline. I am the bearer of a ruthless discipline, he thinks.
Another regular resting point is the train station. Warm air billows from the doorway grids. (But he doesn't need it.) There are benches you can sit on, no-one bothers you.
The real down-and-outs talk to him. They have nowhere and no-one and yet they live on. See! The worst thing that can ever happen is nothing to fear.
The train pulls in with an extended shriek. People step down from the carriages, busy with their bags and smiles. Thousands and thousands. Do you think I don't know the rules? he thinks at them. Do you think I don't know what it's all about?
If things could be stripped bare, the sandwich boutiques fade to grey, the shop fronts shatter, the fan heaters stutter and grind to a halt, the tiles crack and the earth show through. Better to be all left standing in a field of cinders than this. Better to strip things to the bare reality, in some manner as yet inconceivable, so each would see that he is truly alone and that the polite words and plastic people will be forced to reveal their true nature.
That at last the pretence may end.
That at last.
He walks away from the station with steady steps. The ground is frozen outside, ice sparkles hard from the pavement. The air is tight around him.
See! it is the (boy) striding out, his legs will take him as far as he wills, his forehead is steady, his course is set. He is out on the verge of the western highway, heading north. There, where no human had a right to be, a (boy) walks and survives. He can sleep on a bed of ice, his nose can pierce the heaviest hail, his chest is a bulwark against the wind. Mere flesh can hold its own. He is going out to the cold, where there is no smell. That time may not repeat itself, that words may not be empty sounds, that something will at last have consequence.
And sometimes he burned within, and that was how he withstood the cold, and sometimes his temperature dropped to meet that of the icy wastes around, and that was also how he withstood the cold, and in this way he wandered far from the rooms where people live, and understood things he did not understand before. For those who will not yield to pretence must learn to endure an eternity of cold.