“You have to get up,” I told her. “I’ve the rest of them sent off to school, but Sean is downstairs. Nanny’s in Beara with Aunty Alice so she can’t take him, and I can’t miss school again.” I’d already missed yesterday. “Please, Mam.”
Nothing.
“I have to get my project sorted for Construction.”
Not even a twitch.
“It’s worth over fifty percent of my leaving cert exam.”
Silence.
“Mam!” I said it louder this time, hoping by some small miracle that I would be able to somehow get through to her – wherever the fuck she was in that head of hers. “You’re better off without him. Do you hear me? You are better off. Let him fuck off with that barmaid from town. She’s his problem now.”
Blowing out a frustrated growl when she didn’t so much as flinch, I walked into the room I hated most in this house and forced my legs to walk over to the bed.
“Mam.”
Crouching down in front of her, I tapped on her lifeless hand.
Nothing.
Dead blue eyes stared back at nothing.
I knew she was alive.
I could see her chest rising and falling, but that was the only sign.
Other than that, she was a glorified zombie.
“Mam, please.” Voice softening, I reached over and tucked her hair behind her ear. “You have to get back up.”
A lone tear trickled down her cheek.
It was the only response she gave to tell me that she could hear me.
“Okay, Mam.” Sighing heavily, I pulled the covers over her frail shoulders to keep her warm, and then I headed for the door. “I’ll stay home and mind Sean.”
SPECIAL_IMAGE-images/svgimg0003.svg-REPLACE_ME
“How is she?” were the first words that came out of Shannon’s mouth when she walked through the front door after school. “Did she come out?”
“Heard the toilet flush twice, but that’s about it,” I called over my shoulder, as I tried to save the mince from burning the pan, having made the rare mistake of forgetting I left the ring on. “Shit, fuck, shit.“
“Nice language,” Tadhg mocked from the kitchen table. “Should I learn how to spell those words too, Joe?”
“Just concentrate on your homework and less of the snark,” I shot back, eyeing my sister to come save me.
Smiling, Shannon walked over to the stove and nudged me out of the way. “Need a hand, Joe?”
“Please.” Tossing the spaghetti smeared tea-towel over her shoulder, I scooped up the toddler who, I was fairly sure was contemplating taking a dump in his pants and headed for the bathroom. “Does Seany have poos for Joe?”
“No poos, o-ee.”
Little liar.
“Go on and check for me,” I ordered, setting him down in front of the potty in the utility room. “Good lad yourself.”
“Hey, Joe? What’s a click-or-is?” Ollie called from the other side of the kitchen table.
“The fuck?” Gaping, I stalked back to where he had his homework book open. “Where did you see that word, Ollie?”
“I didn’t see it,” he explained innocently, smiling up at me. “I heard it.”
Jesus Christ. “Where’d you hear that, Ols?”
“In the sexual education talk at school.”
What the absolute fuck?
I looked to Shannon for help, but she had turned redder than the bolognaise she was stirring.
At a loss, I turned to Tadhg. “What’s this I’m hearing about sexual education?”
Tadhg shrugged. “No clue, Joe. I was away with the school’s hurling team.” He grinned proudly. “We won, and I scored two goals.”
“Nice.” Accepting his high-five, I quickly turned my attention back to spawn number five. “You’re in fourth class, Ollie. In primary school. You don’t need to be taking any sex education class.”
“It’s cunt-pulse-hairy.”
“Compulsory, you dope,” Tadhg growled. “Jesus Christ.”
Jesus Christ, I needed to get this kid into speech and language. “I’m going to have to call your school,” I told them both. “You’re too young to be learning about this kind of thing.”
“But what is it, Joe?”
“What’s what?”
“A click-or-is?”
Shannon choked on her own spit behind me.
“Well, uh, it’s like you said, it’s something you click,” I muttered, having no idea what to do, or how to handle the kinds of questions these kids continued to throw at me.
“Like a button?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“Where?”
“Where’s what?”
“The click-or-is, silly,” Ollie said, and then frowned. “Teacher said that only girls get a click-or-is, but that’s not fair, is it, Joe? How comes they get a secret button, and we don’t?”
“O-ee poos!” Sean hollered from the utility room, and I had never been so relieved to clean shit up than I was in this moment.
“Coming, Seany,” I called back before saying, “Ols, we can pick this conversation back up when you’re a teenager.”
HOUSE CALLS AND DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES
DECEMBER 10TH 2004
AOIFE
Being in love with someone who was hell bent on self-destructing was such a lonely place to exist. I felt incredibly helpless, watching on as my boyfriend buried his secrets with lie upon countless lie.
I wanted to save him.
I felt like I was watching him drown. That I was desperately reaching my hand out, but his pride was so potent that it meant he would rather go under than let me pull him to safety.
I knew he wasn’t clean.
Hadn’t been since the day after Halloween when I had made the fatal decision of admitting to him that his father had made another pass at me.
I physically watched the light in his eyes leave that day, and nothing I’d been able to say or do since had been able to reignite that spark.
I could see it on his face every day.
He was slowly slipping back into old habits, and I was afraid to push back against his behavior, for fear that it would make it worse.
Make him worse.
I was so afraid of him ending up dead in a ditch somewhere, that I found myself, disgustingly, turning a blind eye when he came back from lunch with bloodshot eyes and a faraway look in his eyes.
But there were two things that I was absolutely sure about when it came to Joey.
The first; it wasn’t uncommon for him to skip a day or two of school.
The second; when it came to his job at the garage, he was the complete opposite,
Never mind being uncommon, when it came to his job, the boy’s rap sheet was virtually nonexistent.
It was for these reasons that I found myself incredibly concerned over the fact that he had missed almost two whole weeks of school and work.
To be fair, he had returned all of my text messages and phoned me for a chat every night, fobbing me off with the reason for his absence being family business, and nothing to worry about.
Of course I was worried.
All I seemed to do nowadays was to worry about him.
The fact that he had refused to meet up or let me come over had unsettled me to the point of blind panic.
Which was why, by the time the second Friday he missed school rolled around, I drove straight to his house after my shift at work. I needed to see with my own eyes what he had been assuring me nightly on the phone. That he hadn’t slipped up to the extent he had last September.
What I didn’t expect to find when I got there was a Garda car.
Panic immediately setting in, I hastily parked my car at the side of the road and jumped out of the car.
“What’s going on?” I asked a group of women, who were standing at the wall in their dressing gowns, smoking cigarettes. “What happened?”
“Domestic disturbance, apparently,” one of them said.
“What’s new in that house.”
“Sure god love them, the poor craters.”
“Marie’s young fella’s gone off the rails again,” the first one added. “Pity about it, too, because he’s a fine lad if he could only keep ahold of that temper of his.”
“Who?” My eyes widened in horror. “Joey?”
It was at that exact moment that the Gards walked out of the house with my boyfriend in handcuffs.
“Ah, that’s very sad,” one of the women said with a heavy sigh. “Poor old crater.”
“Joe!” Feeling like my windpipe had been severed, I bolted towards him. “Are you okay?”
He clearly wasn’t okay.