Tick-tock. Or, still with the face cream on, but in a voluminous nightdress to look like my mother, whispering, ‘It’s Grace, your dead sister. Leave wee Jacky alone, he’s mine, after all, not yours.’ But that would be a wicked thing to do. Big Jacky would be ashamed. I pictured him up there, looking down at me and smoking the pipe, slowly shaking his head in grave disappointment. ‘Don’t torment Phyllis,’ he would say. ‘She’s not a bad soul.’
Tick-tock. I could just about hear her snoring. Does that mean, if she woke up, she could just about hear me crying?
Tick-tock. The starlings singing, puffed up with the importance of the morning, balancing on the telegraph wire with their gnarled little feet. The grey dawn creeping through the fine curtain. The piglet oink and whistle of Phyllis snoring. Me wide awake.
And all of that was just one night.
‘Your big mate got a beating last night.’ There was a mixture of fear and excitement in Marty’s voice as he ran up next to me: fear at the darkness of what had happened, excitement at the size of his news.
It was a lead weight casually pitched into the bowl of bad soup already swaying in my stomach.
‘Which mate?’ I said. I didn’t need to ask.
‘Your big dopey mate, Titch you said his name was.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘I heard the shouting in the night. Four fellas with balaclavas on pulled him out of his house, I seen them out my window. They yanked him out over towards the waste ground, and I couldn’t see, but I seen the one left behind pushing his ma back into the house. She was screaming too. The ambulance came later.’
How much later? I thought. They had got organised and cocky about the beatings now. I had heard that they dialled the ambulance themselves before they gave someone a doing. I wondered what they’d hit him with. I hoped to God it wasn’t the planks of wood with rusty nails in it. The last boy that got that had infections and was in the Royal for weeks.
I could picture him there, flailing around, a clumsy bear prodded with hot pokers. It made me wince even to imagine it.
‘Thanks for telling me,’ I told Marty. He nodded abruptly and sauntered off down the street.
Round the corner, the birds throatily singing, the children squabbling over the football like seagulls with a piece of bread. Everything was just the same and everything was different.
Titch’s house had brown cardboard tacked over the frame of the living-room window, where the glass had been. The red paint was coiling back from the dents in the front door, where boots had kicked it in. This was now the bad-luck house, singled out from all the houses in the street. The plague house.
I knocked. The door stayed shut. I knocked again. Nothing. I looked towards the window. As I stared at it, I saw the bottom edge of the cardboard peeling inwards: an eye was staring at me through the small triangle of space. Titch’s mum’s eye. My two eyes looked back into her single eye.
‘Let me in,’ I whispered.
A few seconds later the front door opened. I went into the hall and looked at her face. My God, she had aged twenty years in a night. Her swollen eyelids looked as though they had been scrubbed with the pan scourer. I went into the living room and sat down. ‘What happened?’
‘They came at about three in the morning. I ran downstairs when I heard them kicking in the door and they said where was Titch? I said he was at his aunt’s in Newry and one of them said “You’re effing lying you oul bitch” and two of them pushed me to one side and went upstairs to find him.’
She was crying now, pulling in the air with big, hungry gulps, her hands dipping and soaring. The words choked her as they came out.
‘And then they dragged him out of bed and down the stairs. He didn’t know what was happening and he kept shouting for me. Pulled him out the door and I tried to follow but one of them pushed me back and said “You stay out of it.” The same fella cut the phone and threw it out the front window, and then he said, “You effing stay in here. I’ll be in the hall and if you try to get out I’ll sort you out too and make sure he gets a worse one.”’
‘Where’s Titch now?’
‘Upstairs, lying in his room. He wouldn’t stay in hospital so eventually they let him home. When I brought him back from the hospital the only thing he said was “Don’t let anyone in.” He’s got a broken arm, a fracture in his leg and his face is all swollen up. The doctor said it was with baseball bats. He’s pushed his desk against the door of his room.’
‘I’ll leave him alone today then,’ I said. ‘Maybe call in on him tomorrow.’ I bent to give her an awkward kiss on the cheek. She wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t our usual parting gesture. Her head was bowed and hot, the cheek damp and stiff, crusted with a layer of dried tears. I walked out on to the street.
I took a few steps. Then something made me look back up to Titch’s bedroom window. I hadn’t expected to see anything, I don’t even know what made me turn round. But what I did see nearly stopped my heart: a swollen, malevolent thing looking back at me, standing in the space made by a tugged-aside curtain. It took me a second to realise that it was Titch. His head seemed monstrous, the eyes shrunk to sunken currants, the face a blackened, purple mass of bruises.
Those watching eyes, I knew, had soaked up all the horror on my face. I stopped and raised a hand to him from the street. After what seemed a long time, one bandaged hand rose slowly in reply. I turned back then and kept on walking.
As I walked, I was trying to think what he had reminded me of. Something from childhood. The lonely monster, shut up in a tower. That, but something else too. Then I got it. When I was younger, we used to play with a kit called ‘Mr Potato Head’. You took an old potato, and stuck plastic eyes and a nose and stringy hair on it, and turned it into a bit of a character. For a couple of hours you’d prop him up in fruit bowls and push him around in empty egg cartons. But then you would go on to something else and forget about it, and two weeks later you’d find oul Mr Potato Head lying somewhere behind the bin, with his head turning all purple and yellow, and accidental eyes sprouting out of him.
So that’s what they’d done to Titch. Except he had felt and heard it all: every kick, every spike, every burning word. And he wouldn’t have understood why this evil had fallen upon him. For a packet of biscuits? Dumped by the bins to bloat and rot, my best mate, Mr Potato Head.
I couldn’t go back home. There would be too much chat out of Phyllis. By the time I usually came in Phyllis was always hungry for my presence, even though it was invariably unsatisfactory. She yearned for gossip and confidences. I found myself unable to provide these things. She could have wolfed down a six-course banquet of discussion, and I was only capable of passing her the occasional bruised windfall.
Sometimes I would struggle to do my best, courteously assembling snippets from here and there, but I couldn’t tonight. How could I hand over the happenings of the day? ‘Four men in balaclavas came round to Titch’s house last night, dragged him on to waste ground and gave him a terrible beating. Could you change over to BBC 2, I think the snooker’s on?’
But it wouldn’t be left at that. The story would make too big an impact. You can’t drop a boulder into the centre of a still lake and not expect to create some ripples. There would be a silence – not a dead silence, but a busy one, building to a gush of who, what, why, where, when, and now what will happen? And I knew the answer to most of these things, and yet had no heart to