Authors: Joe Murphy
His face is still in his hands so to the crown of his head I say, ‘That depends, Seán. I can’t promise you anything until you tell me what’s wrong.’
Fighting his sobs, he lifts his head and his eyes are the first things I see. They swallow the world. It’s like all the heartache, all the self-disgust that lives within Seán is now puddled in the holes of his eyes. They are bottomless shafts filled with an endless,
aching dark. Looking into them it’s like I’m looking into Seán and all that I see in him is a hungry universe of nothingness.
But from these blank, black sinkholes a whole world of tears is sluicing down his face. His lank hair is plastered across his forehead and his mouth is whorled about with deep lines of grief. His lips are working now but nothing’s coming out except for drool and this weird gurgling sound he’s making. Words want to get out of his throat but Seán’s too shattered to let them.
I kneel down in front of him and I can feel the mud caking to my legs crack and chasm and tug at the hairs on my calves and thighs. I can feel the damp grit of the floor beneath my kness. The studs of my boots scrape the concrete and score lines across it.
I’m looking into the swallowing dark of Seán’s eyes and I go, ‘It’s me, Seán. You can tell me. We always help each other. You’re my best friend.’
Seán snorts a clotted ball of phlegm back up into his sinuses and he reaches his big paw out to catch the front of my jersey.
His slack mouth works without any words for a second and then he says, ‘I can’t tell you. You don’t want me for a friend. Nobody wants me for anything. I’m a fucking freak.
And then he untangles his fist from my jersey and he hits himself in the forehead so hard I’m surprised I don’t see blood.
I’m reaching for his arm and I catch it on the second attempt but at the same time I’m turning my head to look out through the gap in the metal shuttering that covers the windows. Through the slot in the sheet steel I can see the caustic light of the training area and in my head I can see the lads coming back and finding us like
this. Me and Seán, me covered in mud and sweat, Seán covered in tears and snot. They’d ask a lot of questions that Seán is in no state to answer. Me neither come to think of it.
I’m thinking, if the lads come back, Seán’s going to look like a weirdo. I’m thinking this and a little Judas voice in the back of my head goes
and you’ll look like a fucking weirdo too with your fancy fucking words and your too-good-for-us fucking attitude. You with your psycho fucking friend
. That voice is starting to get a lot more frequent lately. That Judas screech. It terrifies me. Never before, never, have I been ashamed of Seán. I’ve never cared what people thought about him. He’s my best friend and that means something.
Thinking this, trying to strangle the Judas screech, hanging on to Seán’s hawser of an arm, I’m going, ‘For fuck’s sake, Seán, don’t be such a handicap. Tell me what the fuck is wrong before the lads get back and kick the shit out of both of us.’
Seán stills then. He goes quiet. Not limp but motionless.
‘I can’t tell you,’ he says. ‘It’s too bad.’
And then his face collapses and his whole body loosens like a landslide and his eyes start spilling tears again. And through lips that are in spasm, his voice comes clabbered and soured with self-disgust.
‘I can’t tell you,’ he says again. ‘But I can show you.’
Seán’s not stupid and he’s
not some kind of monster. Let me get that straight. Me and him have known each other for so long now that all our memories are shared. I used to be friends with him because I didn’t know how different he was. Then I was friends with him because once you’re friends with someone you can’t just not be friends with them. Especially when they’ve done nothing bad on you. Especially when they need you because they’ve nobody else. No Mam. A Da sliding away like grease in a fire.
There’s this girl in school. Jennifer O’Riordan.
Jenny
. She is far and away the best-looking girl in school. I think so anyway. A lot of the lads think so too and they know I’m head-over-heels about her. For months I get slagged at training and once someone stuck a drawing of two stick figures having anatomically incorrect sex into my kit bag. One was labelled
Jenny
with a big clumsy arrow scrawled in the direction of the stick figure with the giant boobs and the other one was obviously supposed to be me. I know it
was Brendan Currane who masterminded this because he always does his Js the wrong way round. The retard.
This is last year when we were doing our Junior Cert and I’m finding myself staring at Jenny O’Riordan during class. A lot of teachers make us sit in alphabetical order and because my second name begins with a D I’m usually stuck up in the top half of the class while she’s usually behind me somewhere. Seán sits on his own because he doesn’t really like anyone except me sitting beside him.
The school furniture consists of brown desks clad in a sort of slippery, fake wood veneer and brown plastic chairs that totter on the flexing tubular steel of their legs. You have to lie the chairs on their sides and straighten the legs before every class, the tubular steel is so kinked at the bends. The sixth years are too heavy for them and, if they’ve been in class before you, when you swivel in your seat you can feel the cheap steel start to give.
Last year I find myself doing stupid things in class so that I can catch even a glimpse of Jenny O’Riordan. I turn around in my seat for no reason. I borrow pens from people behind me even though my pencil case has a blue pen, a red pen, a HB pencil and a full mathematical set in it. It’s gotten so bad at one stage that Mrs Prendergast keeps me back to talk to me about my attention span. I have never been kept back before and all the lads
ooooooohhhh
at this. My neck and face are radiating heat and for the rest of the day I can feel a red stain swimming under my skin.
Now and then Jenny will catch my eye as I’m contorting like a fucking circus act in my chair and she will smile at me. She will
smile at me and there’s an expression on her face when she does this that I can’t quite fathom. It’s like someone looking at a baby or something. But as far as I’m concerned a smile is a smile and on each occasion I’m gurning back at her like a simpleton.
This all comes to a head one day in Maths.
I’m shit at sums and I start thinking about how Jenny looks with her head bent over her copy, the blonde curtain of her hair tucked behind her ear and the white nubs of her teeth nipping at the end of her pencil. Mr Fogarty isn’t paying much attention to the class. He’s doing something with the roll, his face wrinkled beneath his dome of slick, hairless, pale skin. It’s like his entire head is a ball of scar tissue. His control over his classes is absolute. His discipline is a beartrap thing of sudden cruelty. The only noises in his room are the scratching of pencils and the chitinous clicking of calculators.
Like something out of a pantomime, I’m flicking little stilletto glances around me under my brows before I elbow my red pen off the desk with all the finesse of a fat man falling off a high stool. Mr Fogarty looks up at me. Only his eyes move. His head stays bowed but his eyes move and his gaze travels from me to the fallen red pen and back to me again. His upper lip wrinkles in silent contempt and he goes back to his work.
Smiling inanely I lean out of my chair and smiling inanely I turn my head to catch Jenny’s eye.
She lifts her face and for a long moment we are locked
together
, she staring at me, me suspended awkwardly over the edge of the chair, my body torqued out into space.
The chair creaks once before the legs give way and the class explodes into laughter. One creak. Like it was jeering me.
At big break Seán says, ‘You have to say something to her.’
We’re in the gym and the place is an echoing church of laughter and conversation. I’m looking at him over the rumpled, golden hump of a chicken goujon roll. Around a mouthful of dough, ketchup and reconstituted chicken gloop, I go, ‘What are you talking about?’
I’m still embarrassed about what happened in Maths this morning and the last thing I want to do is go anywhere near Jenny O’Riordan for the rest of the day. I can picture her hand coming up to hide the laughter that sings in her eyes and shakes her shoulders. I can picture the hilarity on her face as Mr Fogarty hauls me off the floor by the collar.
I lost my fucking pen as well.
Seán looks at me with his big, blank eyes and he says slowly, like he’s thinking hard about every syllable, ‘You have to say something to her. Everyone saw that you were staring at her when you fell. Everyone sees you every day staring at her. I can hear everyone saying that you’re dying about her.’
I’m swallowing my mouthful of carbohydrates and pretend chicken and I’m going, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake. Is everyone talking about us?’
Seán looks at me and his lips squirm in a weird smile and he says, ‘Why do you say “us”?’
He says, ‘They are talking about you. Not Jenny. You don’t have an “us”.’
I look at him for a moment that stretches into a long expanse of silence. Everyone else is having their lunch too and the silence between us is filled with other people’s laughter and
monkey-house
chatter. He’s right of course. There is no ‘us’ when it comes to me and Jenny. The admission of this is hooked into my bowels.
I’m shaking my head because I’m an idiot. I’m shaking my head and then I’m saying, ‘Yeah.’
And then I go, ‘Just don’t you start taking the piss as well.’
Seán looks at me then with his great heavy face and he says, ‘I won’t take the piss. I don’t ever take the piss. Even when all the others were laughing at you, I wasn’t.’
I look back at him and I’m thinking
all the others?
but what I’m saying is, ‘Thanks, man.’
Seán beams like I’ve just given him the greatest compliment he’s ever gotten.
We spot Jenny sitting with two friends on one of the low
windowsills
lining the corridor that links the old and new parts of the school. She is wrapped all about by the fall of sun through the glass and her hair has ignited into gold filigree. Herself and her friends don’t even look up as we stop in front of them. They are looking at Jenny’s iPhone and the scratchy, parched audio from the video they’re watching skitters all along the corridor.
I don’t know what to do and I’m looking at Seán. Seán shrugs and nods dumbly toward Jenny like he’s fucking Lassie or
something
.
Not knowing what to do I clench and unclench my fists and not knowing what to do I make this stupid polite cough.
One of Jenny’s friends, a fat girl with hair like unravelled Brillo Pads, lifts her big head and looks at me like I’m something she’s scraped off her shoe. She sneers at us and goes, ‘What do you two losers want?’
I blink at this and I say, ‘Can I have a word with Jenny please?’
I’m saying this and at the same time I’m thinking, why the fuck am I asking permission?
Jenny’s not looking at me. And Jenny not looking at me goes, ‘Tell him I don’t want to talk to him.’
The fat girl says, ‘She doesn’t want to talk to you.’
Again I look at Seán. He’s grinning encouragingly and he’s nodding eagerly at me. Now I’m looking from Jenny to her slab-of-lard friend and now I’m going, ‘Look, I don’t need an interpreter. Jenny, do you have a minute?’
Jenny looks up at me and she smiles and she goes, ‘Why? Do you want to show me how you can fall on your arse again?’
That thing that was hooked in my guts, the one that snagged there when I admitted that Jenny and I weren’t an ‘us’, that thing now rips free and unspools my innards. Jenny is smiling so sweetly that she’s threatening to give the entire school diabetes and my whole belly is opening up with a long agonising yawn. Both of Jenny’s friends are laughing at me and I’m thinking that this is what Daniel O’Hara must have felt like with his Mam
boxing
the back off him and the whole school sniggering at him.
I’m standing there like something built out of wet clay and I don’t know what to do. The expressions scuttling across the girls’ faces are awful things, cruel and in flux and all of a sudden every
atom of me feels like it’s being dissolved by their scorn. In the middle of the corridor I’m standing there and I feel like my entire being has become a big blank naught.
And then Seán says something.
He stands beside me and he goes, ‘You’re not very nice people.’
Jenny bridles and her chin tucks into her neck. Her fat friend lifts her hand, index finger quivering upright in a daytime TV
oh no you di’ant
gesture of indignation, and she says, ‘What business is it of yours, you fucking ape?’
But Seán is on a roll now and his voice just rumbles straight over fatso’s talk-show performance. He’s going, ‘You’re not very nice people. My friend is the nicest person in this school and you people are horrible. I don’t like you. You just talk about people all the time. You’re always mean. All the time you’re mean. You make all the other girls cry.’
Then he lifts his big hand and he points at Jenny. His voice just keeps coming out of his mouth gathering momentum and speed like a tsunami.
Now, still pointing at Jenny, he’s saying, ‘You like to keep these two around you because they’re not as good-looking as you. You always want everyone to look just at you. If people aren’t looking at you, you disappear. I see the way you keep looking at your own self in the windows. You have a mirror in the lid of your maths set too. You’re friends with ugly people because you want to stand out. You don’t even like them. You talk about them behind their backs.’
Jenny looks appalled but Seán just keeps going. Now his spar of an arm has swung to point at Jenny’s friends and he’s saying, ‘And you two only hang around with her because you think that people will look at her and see you. But they don’t. They see Jenny and her ugly friends. And you know it and you cry yourself to sleep knowing it.’
His arm finally lowers and his voice slows and he says, ‘You’re all horrible people. You’re not really friends so you try to make everyone else feel as horrible as you do.’
He stops then and he mumbles, ‘Friends don’t do things like that. Friends are nice.’
The three girls all sit with their mouths open and you can actually feel the tension between them. The slimmer of Jenny’s friends, her nose a fleshy hook overhanging her mouth, is going bright bright red. The truth in Seán’s words has tugged at
something
raw between them and over the next few weeks everyone notices that Jennifer O’Riordan finds herself more and more on her own.
That’s my friend Seán. Like I said, he’s not stupid and he’s not some kind of a monster.
In the dark it’s hard to peel myself out of my football gear and tog back into my clothes. My skin is slick and clammy and every fibre of my football gear clings to me like it’s feeding off me. I’m sitting on a wooden bench and I’m trying to yank my socks on over the cold blocks of my feet. Seán is standing in the
dark sniffing and dragging his sleeve across his face.
I look at him and then I’m going, ‘Any chance of a bit of light? Use your phone or something.’
Seán blinks at me. Even in the dark I can see his white lids flicker down over the inky pools of his eyes, blotting them out like petals on black water. Now he’s shrugging and now he’s
saying
, ‘I don’t have it. Da took it on me.’
I stop with my sock half on and my shoulders slumping
forward
and I go, ‘Why did he do that?’
Seán shrugs again and he says, ‘He says I’m not getting it back until I cop on. It’s quare annoying.’
He says this last in a flat voice of dead lead. He couldn’t sound less annoyed if he tried. I’m thinking, that’s what Seán knows you should say when your Da takes your phone on you.
Annoyed
is how you should feel.
Then he goes, ‘Where’s yours? I’ll hold it for you.’
I’m struggling with my jeans now and I say to him, ‘Why would I bring my phone to training? I don’t even have any money on me. They don’t lock these dressing rooms.’
Seán nods, slowly and deliberately and says, ‘So we’re in the dark?’
I smile up at him and I go, ‘We’re used to it.’
We sneak out of the dressing rooms. Off to our left the lads are all still slogging their slog on a patch of grass that they’ve churned to quag. The floodlights are dousing the scene with a bitter light and the cold smoke of their body heat haunts their every move and footstep. Paul Cullen is a black crepe cut-out against the
light. His voice bells out and drowns out all the slopping, all the squelching, all the panting, all the parched whooping for breath.
The driveway leading from the pitch is covered in loose
chippings
of this hard grey stone that’s flecked with little winking dots of quartzite. This means that as we walk away from the pitch and Paul Cullen’s training session we kick sprays of gravel out in a fan and we leave shallow gouges in the carpet of stones behind us. The only noises are our breathing, the rattle of my gear bag and the steady hiss and crunch of our footsteps. As you get to the bottom of the driveway you start to hear the sounds of traffic and a haze of orange light starts to filter across the stones from the sodium arcs angling over the road. The lights are at the end of these long arms that jut out perpendicular to the lampposts just like the gallows you draw when you play hangman. In their Halloween-orange light Seán is the biggest and saddest munchkin in the whole chocolate factory.