The week passed quickly. Before I knew what was what, it was Saturday morning and I was sitting in the town library, poring over old newspaper reports and other documents. Reading up on the Famine for an essay. Interesting stuff of itself, and more importantly, it took my mind off everything that had happened in the last while. I needed a breather.
Chris Harrington, I’d heard during the week, was out of the coma, still in intensive care but slowly recovering. He’d live, and more or less return to full health – but he’d never be pretty again. The scarring was awful, by all accounts. I didn’t visit him in hospital. I couldn’t stand the guy anyway and felt no obligation to sympathise or empathise with his misfortune.
Also, a trip to hospital would have probably meant blowing off school, and amazingly, I looked forward to going these days. The atmosphere had changed for me, subtly and without fanfare but it was definitely different.
The bullying seemed to have faded away to a large extent. Nobody spoke to me much at all, admittedly, but nobody did anything mean either. I even got a smile or nod of the head from time to time. In any case I didn’t care. To hell with them: if anyone did want to make up now, they could stick it where the sun don’t shine. Podsy was enough friends for me. Podsy and, of course, Sláine.
My marble-white friend with lips of ice and fire. Friend? Or something else … ?
The Guards couldn’t say for sure what attacked Harrington. Their best guess was a pack of feral dogs, hiding out in Shook Woods or some other uninhabited place. Why they would have gone for him like that, nobody could say; wild animals are usually more afraid of us than the other way around. Maybe they didn’t like the smell of him. Maybe Harrington gave off a sour, bad odour, because he was sour and bad inside.
I didn’t want to think shitty things like that. I couldn’t help thinking them.
Meanwhile, my investigation into Sláine’s death seemed to be on hold. That hadn’t been a conscious decision; it’s just that with everything going on, this whirlwind of events lifting me up and spinning me round like the girl in The Wizard of Oz, enquiries had been pushed to the background. Not forgotten about, exactly, but the pause button was definitely pressed. I’d wait, I figured, until she told me what she knew. We could then work out together where to take it from there.
Now, on Saturday, I sat in the library – a disappointingly modern building, but filled with the wisdom of ages – and reminisced about that kiss. What a shock it had been. Not an unpleasant one. Not exactly enjoyable, but not unpleasant. In fact, it was hard to describe at all. When Sláine pressed her lips to mine, I’d had the strangest sensation that part of me was leaving my body, being transferred to her, as if she was squeezing it out of me, inhaling something of my essence into herself.
Which is weird enough. Even weirder is the fact that I hadn’t minded.
That kiss … It was just a friendly peck, right? A mark of affection between two people. Friends kiss each other, don’t they? Didn’t necessarily mean anything … Although, you know, if it did mean something, that might not be …
I shook my head, banished Sláine from my thoughts and got back to business. It was the weekend – I didn’t want to spend all day on homework. I’d already taken notes from a bunch of history books: national and local, academic and popular, professional and amateur. All were about the Famine, most telling me things I hadn’t already known. Now I clicked to the next page on the library’s microfiche. Old newspapers, scanned and stored on computer. The past brought bang up to date with the present. History coming back to haunt us.
It really was haunting. The Famine was a horrible time in this country, especially our part of it. Death stalked the land for years. People must have known it was on the way, it was coming for them. They must have looked at their own gaunt faces, their children’s hunger-swollen bellies, and known. They must have shivered like newborns as the cold filled their bones and drained their lives away, and been certain the end was near.
What an awful way to go, I thought, and how lucky we are to live nowadays. Even someone like me, struggling with personal problems or whatever. At least I wouldn’t be frozen or starved. I wasn’t going to wake up dead.
Mr Lee had asked us to present a personal history of someone’s experiences during the Famine. Not just regurgitate what we read, but imagine ourselves as that person. We could use a composite of different stories, reports or recollections. That’s what I was doing, collecting those stories. The assignment wasn’t due until sometime in January, but I wanted to get going on it – ‘tús maith, leath na hoibre’, and all that.
After a while I’d shifted my focus to records specifically dealing with our town and surroundings. I’d come across a few notable, even downright peculiar, tales.
First, the sea froze over at one point. This was during the winter of 1851, around the time that company of English soldiers arrived. Some remaining straggler found the strength to record what happened, probably because it was so unusual. Ireland is in a temperate climate. The Atlantic can get cold enough to kill you but this isn’t Norway or the Antarctic – we don’t have ice-entombed seas. Yet that’s what took place: the ocean froze solid, further than the eye could see, for several days, possibly weeks.
Secondly, all the crows died. Every single one, of every type: raven, rook, hooded crow, jackdaw, jay, magpie. As far as I could gather, piecing different bits of information together, this was about a month before the sea seized up. All of them, thousands, found dead within a few days of each other. In fields, streets, yards, farms, everywhere – as though they’d more or less simultaneously keeled over and fallen to the ground. There was no explanation for it. No other bird or animal had perished in such huge numbers.
Thirdly, and here’s where my interest was really tickled, one of Sláine’s ancestors had refused the chance to leave town with that brave group who made it over the mountains – who made it out alive. The McAuleys were pretty well off, by the standards of the time, and her great-great-great-great – I think – grandfather contributed money and whatever provisions he could spare to the expedition.
So, naturally he was invited to join them. When he declined, he was begged to join. Still he said no. William John McAuley instead put his wife Eleanor and three children into a cart, waved goodbye and settled down to welcome death, which surely wouldn’t be long. He was never seen again and they never found a body – I guess the dogs had him for a finish.
I wondered why he stayed. Like virtually everyone else, he must have known he couldn’t survive. There was no food left, disease was rampant, the town was in the grip of the worst cold spell in half a century. He was a dead man already, waiting for his body to catch up with reality.
Maybe he wanted to die where he’d lived, or under circumstances of his choosing, instead of halfway up a mountain while on a hare-brained flight to freedom that might never succeed. Some people are stubborn like that. Maybe he didn’t want to witness his wife and children dying, although if that was true, he still should have manned up and gone with them: they needed him more than he needed himself.
Whatever the cause, William John stayed behind to die; some of Sláine’s forebears lived and later returned to their home town. On down through history the line of family went, ending with Sláine and her siblings. Now she had joined the old man in death.
What would she say to him, I mused, if she were to meet him in the afterlife? ‘Should’ve got on the cart, dummy,’ probably …
I jumped as someone tapped my shoulder, whirling around on the swivel chair. A handsome middle-aged man in a smart suit was standing behind me. He raised his hands in apology and whispered, ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to give you a fright.’
‘No,’ I whispered back, ‘you’re okay. I just didn’t hear you for some reason.’
He gave an easy smile and said, ‘I should have coughed. Tapped my feet. I was wondering if you’d be long more on the microfiche?’
‘Huh?’ I checked the clock on the wall: I’d been sitting here for over an hour, hogging the machine. I said in embarrassment, ‘Aw, feck it. My apologies. I didn’t notice the time going.’
‘That’s all right. Time has a funny way of getting away from us, doesn’t it? “Tempus fugit.”’
I clicked off the page I was reading, muttering absentmindedly, ‘“Time flies.” Sure does.’
The man said, not hiding his surprise, ‘You speak Latin?’
I laughed and gathered my things. ‘Nah. Learned that from an old Batman cartoon.’
He laughed too. ‘Latin is … useful sometimes. In helping to understand very old texts, that sort of thing.’
‘Right. Are you an academic or something?’
‘Of sorts.’ He added, self-effacingly, ‘More of a dabbler, really.’
He left it at that so I left him to it and found a desk nearby to jot down a few more notes while they were fresh in my head. I reckoned I had enough now for a really good piece. I’d bring in the flight over the mountains, freezing sea and crow wipeout, and mix them with general facts about the Famine. I’d imagine myself as a boy of seventeen, same as my own age, desperately trying to survive in 1851.
Perhaps one of the last people left alive, but sadly, no room for me on the convoy heading out of town. Or perhaps I’d chosen to stay, one last act of defiance against my own mortality. Bite me, Death. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
The hunger, fear, misery, cold … it shouldn’t be too hard to conjure up those feelings. Especially not if this bloody weather got any worse.
I continued working for another twenty minutes, then had enough and decided to blow the gaff. En route to the exit I checked out a few books, an obese lady with a sweet smile doing the needful, bipping them through the security-tag scanner, stamping the date in royal-blue ink. I gazed around lazily, waiting for her to finish, and noticed the handsome man who dabbled at being an academic riffling through a stand of ancient yellowing newspapers fixed to a steel pole.
I said, really thinking out loud, ‘Wonder who he is … ?’
The librarian looked up. ‘Pardon me?’
‘Uh, the man over there. Going through the old papers. Sorry, I just haven’t seen him before.’
She took a good look then went back to her work. ‘Mr Kinvara? He’s often in here. A real scholar, that one.’ She smiled, handing over my books. ‘Some of the books he takes out, I’d say he’s the first person to read them since they were published. Ancient old manuscripts, they’re practically falling apart. Good job we kept them, all the same. Maybe all these old things are coming back into fashion. Now, that’s you done.’
I thanked her and strolled off, glancing over at the man, now reading one of the pages intently. The famous Mr Kinvara – our resident James Bond, with his presumed wealth and old Victorian pile and taste for classic cars. I wondered how my dad had got on working for him; he didn’t say, I didn’t ask. ’Twas always thus between fathers and sons, and always thus would be.
I trotted down the steps outside, thinking, should have told Kinvara who I was. Carefully, carefully: it was hazardous outside, a film of ice making every surface slippery. I couldn’t get over how cold it was. Temperatures now remained below zero all the time, around minus two during the day and down to minus ten at night. This, in Ireland. Heavy snowfall every day for several days. It was unprecedented, according to TV climatologists.
The worst Big Chill since, it so happened, the winter of 1851. How’s that for coincidence?
Even stranger, they reported, was that the cold snap was unusually localised: basically, our town and its hinterland. We were situated in a funny spot anyway – as I said, hemmed in by the sea, forest and mountains – which I presumed had created some kind of microclimate or whatever they call it. I didn’t know the causes – I didn’t care. I just wanted it to warm the hell up. My fingers were turning an angry blue already, starting to hurt, and I’d only just left the building.
Turning towards home, I saw one of my former tormentors, a fat girl called Clara, staring into space outside a closed-up record store called Music Sounds Better With You, after that song. She looked a bit freaked over something, muttering and pressing one hand to her head. A cigarette was perilously close to her hair, and with all that peroxide it’d go up like a fireworks display, but I wasn’t feeling very charitable towards her. At first I thought she was speaking into a phone but as I got nearer I saw there was no phone and Clara was talking to herself: ‘Who – who are you? What do you want? Get … how are you doing this? This isn’t … it’s not funny. Go away. Go away go away go awaaaaay.’
Whatever. I didn’t stop to ask what was wrong – screw her. I continued on, past a little park, bag swinging on my shoulder, thinking about Sláine. I hadn’t heard from her since the start of the week, that Monday night. I’d woken up in bed the next morning and checked my lips in the mirror to see if her kiss had left any mark. Maybe something, there on the bottom lip – was that a slight bruise … ?
Since then, not a word. I wasn’t massively offended by this – I figured she’d contact me when she was ready – but it annoyed me. I was impatient. I wanted to see her again. And a whisper in my mind made me the tiniest bit afraid: what if I didn’t? What if something had happened to her?
Ha. Something happened to her? What exactly, genius, do you think might have happened to a girl who was already dead? Sláine was going to get more dead, and this would stop her being able to talk to you?
I shook my head, laughing at myself. Then I turned a corner and bumped into John Rattigan. Oh no.
A can of beer jumped in his hand, splashed his coat and fell to the ground. Rattigan followed its flight with a look of shock and dismay that would have been endearing in anyone else. He muttered, ‘Huh?’ and glared up at me, the old anger and aggression abruptly back in place, his eyes bloodshot from cans already drunk.
When he clocked who it was, the look of shock returned for a moment, as if he couldn’t believe a maggot like me had dared to knock his drink away. If I’d done it on purpose, I wouldn’t have believed it either. As it was, it had been a total accident, no fault on my part. And though I knew concepts like logic and fairness didn’t hold much sway with Rattigan, I felt obliged to point this out anyway.
‘Sorry about your beer. It was an accident.’
I held my palms up in a show of peace. That only stoked the rage inside him further. Shock got pushed off his face for the second time, aggression returning again. That bastard’s ugly mug was having a real emotional tug-of-war today.
Rattigan spluttered, ‘You – you – clumsy asshole. Look what you did.’
‘I said it was an accident, all right?’
I made to move past. His arm shot out and stopped me.
‘Why am I not surprised?’ he said. ‘The dipshit you are, can’t even watch where you’re going. Who else would it be but the Carnival Boy?’
I didn’t reply. A small crowd had stopped to watch, shoppers and construction workers, kids with their mothers; even a hunched old crow, wings tucked back, leaning forward as though listening in. Everyone was keeping their distance: they all knew Rattigan’s reputation as a thug – nobody wanted to get involved.
He went on, ‘Moping around like a little faggot. What’s this?’ He grabbed my bag with his other hand, keeping the first one on my chest. ‘In the library, were you? The faggot spending his Saturday reading. Jesus Christ. No wonder your girl left you for that knacker of a carnie. The only thing I don’t get is why a fine bird like that was going with a mopey little puke like you in the first place.’
He flung my bag to the ground. Stupid Aidan, you left the top untied – books and sheaves of loose paper spilled onto the ice in almost geometric patterns.
Rattigan stepped back and smiled, as if to say, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’
I thought of a few weeks ago, when he’d punched me in the face just because he was an ignorant Neanderthal and got the notion to do it and I was too weak to stop him. I thought of all the times he’d made me feel pathetic and afraid. I thought of Sláine, what she’d said about my life being worth more than any of those ‘vindictive babies’.
And I had a realisation, it washed over me like a blast of fresh air: in most cases, other people only have power over you if you let them. They can strike or tease or ignore you, yes. But their power over you is dependent on your acceptance of it. Once you stop giving a shit, they’ve got nothing.
I realised that I’d stopped giving a shit about John Rattigan. He had nothing. And he was nothing.
So I said it to him: ‘You’re nothing, Rattigan.’
He stared at me, boggly eyed, incredulous. Before he could speak I continued, ‘You’re nothing. You’re a bully and a cretin. You’re scum. You are nothing, and you offer nothing. You’re a waste of oxygen and a drain on society. If you were to drop dead right now, you know what everyone in this town would do? They’d celebrate. They’d throw a big party and celebrate. Then they’d forget you ever existed, because you’re nothing, and who remembers nothing? Now take your filthy hands off me.’
To my amazement, he complied. Probably to his own amazement too, if he gave it any thought, and the amazement of everyone watching – they stood open-mouthed, motionless. I couldn’t believe that I was saying all this stuff either, but there it was, pouring out of me. It was almost like someone else had taken control of my mind and was using my tongue. But no, it was me, the real me. Some newfound courage was making me face up to him. Making me honest and unafraid.
‘Yeah, I was in the library,’ I went on. ‘Know why? Because I’m a human being with a brain that I like to use from time to time. I’m not an animal, Rattigan, like you. In ten years I’ll be doing some job that you won’t even understand what it is, living far away from this kip. But you’ll still be here, still stupid, still acting like an animal. Drinking cans in the park and trying to prove how tough you are. What a great future you have to look forward to.’
I heard one of the workmen chuckling, probably happy to see Rattigan get what was coming to him, finally. For the first time, I looked him right in the eyes; and for the first time, Rattigan looked away. He couldn’t hold the stare.
I said, ‘All you have is brute strength and the willingness to use it. That’s all you have, and all you are. I know you can beat me up, you’re stronger than me. That doesn’t change the fact that you’re a shitty person, nobody likes you, and hopefully you’ll be dead soon so we can have that party I was talking about. Okay? So I’m going now. Take it easy, jerk-off.’
I turned to leave. He looked in shock again. I was pretty sure that was going to win the tug-of-war; aggression had slinked away for good. Rattigan muttered, ‘I should … should bust your bloody teeth out for … talking to me like that … ’
‘If that’s what you need to do, Johnny boy, knock yourself out. Knock me out, I can’t stop you. Won’t change a goddamn thing. You’ll still be a supreme asshole. Still be nothing. You’ll always be nothing.’
I left him, hunched, staring at the ground, his lips moving as he tried to process what had just happened. I wasn’t fully sure myself. I crouched and picked up the books and things that fell from my bag; a little old lady hobbled over and helped, smiling kindly. I smiled back and said, ‘Thanks.’
And I nodded and smiled to the crowd around us as I stood, now separating and returning to their lives – it was all smiles today. Including the man from the library, Kinvara. He must have left soon after me. He grinned mischievously, tipped his finger off his forehead in salute and said, ‘Bravo.’ I gave a little bow.
Kinvara added, ‘From the Latin. Look it up.’
I said back, ‘I will.’
One of the children smiled at me too, as if I was his big hero, and I wondered if he was a victim of bullying. So many poor kids getting hassled; it was always the way. But for once, I wasn’t one of them. For once I had the power.
I walked off with a light step, heart pumping, head buzzing, a surge of energy through my whole body. It felt like I was being lit up from inside with a thousand electric lights.
Then I burst out laughing. Holy crap. You just owned John Rattigan. What the hell’s going on with you, man?
I felt pure happiness, an adrenaline shot, boom, straight to the heart. I only wished I’d done it months ago. Although maybe I couldn’t have. Maybe I was only now rediscovering the strength inside me. Becoming a different person.
I heard a voice behind me, aged but not weak, medium-pitch. It was the old dear who’d helped me gather my things off the snow. Once more she hobbled towards me – it sounds like the start of a literally lame joke – held out her hands and gestured for me to give her mine. She took my fingers and looked deep into my eyes. Her own seemed a bit funny, gone blooey, very distant, as if she were high on something. I smiled self-consciously, wondering what this was all about. But I kind of already knew.
The old lady said, ‘Now look at your hand.’
She left and I looked down. There was writing on it. Tiny veins under my skin had redirected the blood, filled themselves with it, which made them rise up and form words.
Sláine was doing this. It wasn’t really happening, I was hallucinating, yet it was as real as anything I’d ever experienced.
‘I think you’re ready to know what happened,’ the words read. ‘How I died.’