Blood running down the bricks
An extract from Timothy O'Grady's Monaghan
The boy opened his eyes. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, seconds, minutes, maybe even an hour. He was too young to have an accurate sense of the passage of time. But he knew, nevertheless, that he had this lack. He was in the back yard of his house on a hot July afternoon, his back to the wall and his legs stretched out before him. The air over the ground rippled in the heat.
The street door had slammed. That was what had awakened him, he now realised. He had dreamed something, but what? He tried to chase an image but couldn’t get it. He heard the footsteps of his father move through the house. What a scorcher! said his father through the kitchen window, then pulled his head back in again.
The boy looked along the yard to the end wall. He saw a white cat stretched out there on the ledge, his hind quarters in the sun and his head in the shade made by the shed. The boy rose to move away, but a heaviness in his legs kept him there. He slumped back against the wall. There was no wind. The boy heard the woman in the house next door singing along to the radio. He watched the cat. He watched the way the light came off its fur in a different way as it breathed. After a while the cat got up, stretched, turned around and lay down again, its head resting on its paws, the line of the shadow bisecting its face. The sun bothered it and it closed its eyes. The boy narrowed his eyes too and when he did the lines that defined the cat became indistinct, the light splintering into bands of colour. He opened them and closed them. He leaned a little to his right, then to his left. He could, he believed, go on doing this through the whole of the afternoon.
Each time it was a different cat.
*
When he was nine his father’s hair began to fall. It came out in clumps, like grass in a drought. He was forty-one years old when the illness came to him. In his time he’d boxed for Belfast. He’d been to Berlin and Paris. A boxer moving down stairs would be like water flowing over rocks, he’d told his sons. A trainer had showed him how to stand, watch, move. The father let the boys pound the solid plane of his torso. He could catch their punches in his fist as if they were slow-moving flies. Now the boy heard him vomiting in the night. He watched him sit in a chair growing yellow and weak.
They lived in the Ballymurphy Road in West Belfast in a small house at the end of a terrace. There were nine of them there, with his parents and his grandmother. He was the fourth of the children, and slept in an upstairs room with his three brothers. At times the house seemed like the weaving machines he’d seen in the linen mills – all moving parts and noise, his brothers practising football moves, his sisters fighting over the radio, his grandmother saying prayers under a blanket on the sofa, his mother pulling her coat on as she ran out the door to her cleaning job. All the doors of the house were forever emptying and filling, like the gaps through which the needles of the machines passed as they weaved. The others wondered about the boy’s stillness and his silence.
Are you depressed? his sisters asked, then smirked.
He didn’t understand the reason for the question. He was never depressed.
Each morning he collected Ambrose McGuigan, who was a year younger than him, from the house next door, and walked with him to school. Ambrose bounced a golf ball out in front of him all the way and told stories from comic books that had been sent to him from a pen pal in America. Above them they could hear the fluttering of military helicopters like the panting of a dog after running. The first drawings the boy made were of the heroes in these books, faces at the beginning, then of figures rappelling down skyscrapers, flipping over cars, flying over buildings with girls in their arms.
Christ! said his father one time as he passed behind him. He looks like he’s about to fly into the house!
When he finished them he pushed them in through Ambrose’s letterbox and Ambrose taped them in a line to the wall of his room. The boy drew as naturally as he walked. Drawing had a rhythm to it. He had no objective. He drew what he saw or remembered and didn’t think, at least not at first. He drew over his mistakes when he was small, then erased them and tried again when he was a little older. In time he came to doubt what he did, to make harsh judgements, but he survived this and kept drawing. He drew spaceships at war, Egyptian gods, insects. When he finished a drawing he didn’t look at it again. He didn’t want to think of what he had made. To think was to question, and he didn’t like the feeling this gave him, at least not then. He only liked to do it.
At night he sat on the window ledge of his room and looked out while his brothers slept. The walls of his room were full of posters, schoolbooks, pegs with coats on them. Nearly everything there belonged to his brothers. The window, though, was his space, and the night his time. He looked out over walls and chimney pots. Beyond them, the dark silhouettes of the mills, the observation towers of the British and the rolls of barbed wire on the barracks walls. He saw the weak yellow glow of the lights from the centre of the city where none of them ever went. He listened to the sounds of the night. They each came to him singly, as if framed in their own moment – a breaking bottle, the howl of a cat, running feet, a rifle shot, songs of men going home from the pub. When he sat in the window in the night he felt the world outside and also the way it arrived to him, the way his senses took it in and the way his thoughts moved. Nothing like this ever happened in daylight. It was as though he was meeting himself for the first time.
His father went to the hospital for his treatments, then came back home and lay in the shadows. They all moved around him as if he were no longer there. As a boxer he had won thirty-eight fights and lost four. He never turned pro because he married at nineteen and found a job driving a bread van. In time as the disease progressed and he lost more hair and his body shrank the boy thought he looked more like a baby than a man. But that was later. One time when his father could still walk, when he could still feel anger and pain, the boy looked down from his room into the yard, where he saw his father drive his head over and over into the wall. Blood ran down the bricks.
Monaghan will be published on June 19, and is currently available to preorder