Suzy Suzy Page 12

  Dad: Don’t be ridiculous.

  Me: What’s going on?

  Dad: I told you what’s going on. We’re going to lie low for a while.

  Me: We’re absconding. I know it. You should talk to someone, Dad.

  Dad: No, it’s only absconding if the summons has been served.

  Me: Did you ask your solicitor about this?

  Dad: You can’t ask a solicitor about something like that. I googled it.

  I could see my dad sitting in his car googling summonses and absconding on his mobile. Five billion hits. All from people who successfully absconded up to that point. No updates because the whole bunch are in a prison where they don’t get WiFi. Like, maybe just one of them might have said, Guys, be cool, this is not a good idea, it’s illegal, you could end up in gaol. But it would be hit number five billion and one. My dad is not the brightest idk it’s like he has a money brain but no real brain. They say entrepreneurs are geniuses, you hear it on the radio, like do you want to affirm and reward these unique individuals, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year and all that shite, but you don’t have be a genius to make money out of money, you just need a brass neck. And once you have money the dodgy chancers come round like bees to honey. I think he loved my mam, but did she love him, idk, maybe? You can’t believe everything she says.

  I decided I had to go with him because otherwise he’d lose it completely. He needed someone to take care of him and it looked like that someone was me.

  The most scariest thing my dad said to me that Sunday? I have everything under control, Suzy, just relax.

  The only person I told was Holly because you couldn’t tell Serena. And anyway Serena was obsessed by Graham Dwyer and why he had handcuffs and stuff.

  Holly thought it was a great idea. Screw the law, she said, you’d be like outlaws, guerrillas, Robin Hood and his Merry Men. I want to come too. My daddy and mammy would love it.

  Holly’s dad is a bit involved with the protests about the evictions. Holly and me agreed that no matter what our dads did we would stay friends forever. It turns out her dad is in a political party that’s not up for evicting people for non-payment. They’re not Blue, Green or Pink. Maybe they’re Red or Black, Holly doesn’t know about the colours. My mam thinks he’s the Antichrist. Like the Antichrist must be a commie or an anarchist, it just makes complete sense. If my mam was around in Christ’s time she would have said he was the Antichrist. And they stopped my dad doing an eviction one day. They all stood around outside and the sheriff didn’t want to risk it. My dad wants them all in jail.

  Dad says I’m not even supposed to mention absconding to my mam because seemingly my mam is too scared of the idea. But she’s going to do it. She Will Join Us Later.

  That doesn’t sound like your mam, Holly said.

  That’s what my dad said. She was so nervous she didn’t want to talk about it.

  Sounds to me like your dad is fucking kidnapping you. Like that’s what paedophiles say. It’s just our secret. You should have told your mam.

  My dad is not a paedophile for fuck’s sake.

  I’m not saying he is.

  And anyway Mam is gone to work.

  Phone her. Tell her.

  My dad would kill me.

  Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you if he cuts you up and stores your bits in the deep freeze.

  We were waiting at our bus stop. There was that dribbly rain that’s a bit heavier than mist but not fully grown rain. It was pissy. And it was cold too. The weather forecast said the air mass was coming from the continent where they were getting a nasty patch, people dying in their cars in snowdrifts. There was a weather warning yellow, wintry showers turning to snow over high ground. A danger of heavier falls in mountainous areas of the West. It never snowed enough. Ireland is a crap country for weather. Everything we get is wet.

  Don’t tell them in school. You’ll get into trouble.

  You know me. I won’t tell.

  I knew she wouldn’t. They could waterboard Holly and she would never talk. I had the feeling she was right but I thought I owed my dad. I had to give him a chance. Like, I was the only one on his side.

  I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, I said.

  Holly gulped suddenly, like a huge gulp. And then she threw her arms around me and kissed me. She kissed me right on the lips and I kissed her back. I think she was a bit surprised about that. But she stuck it out. Two resistors connected in parallel. Name an instrument for measuring resistance. Calculate the current flowing in the circuit. Potential difference. I could have stayed connected forever. We were a long time doing it. The two of us were crying and hugging each other. It was the best feeling. I love Holly. When she stopped kissing me she said, Stay safe.

  You too.

  Then our bus came.

  46

  Naturally it wasn’t a holiday cottage. It was a shitty cottage. Jesus wept twice. A wannabe holiday home by the sea. But it was halfway to ruin and the sea was a long way down. What kind of a friend of my dad’s thought this shack was a holiday cottage? I didn’t know he had such dodgy friends. Well, I knew he had dodgy friends but they were all builders and auctioneers. The walls were made of stone and they were a metre thick. The floor was concrete. The facilities comprised of: lounge (concrete floor), kitchen (pine, ancient manky cooker with like iron rings, decorative sprinkling of mouse shit), bathroom with shower (no heating, tiled floor), master bedroom on the ground floor at the back, mezzanine bedroom. A mezzanine bedroom where I was supposed to sleep. I hate sleeping if people can see me. Like even on school tours I never wanted to sleep with someone else. The walls were bare stone hundreds of years old. I don’t know what lived in the cracks. There was a big iron stove in the lounge, two ratty couches and a woodwormed table with four woodwormed chairs. The wormholes could have been fakes, I saw a documentary about that once. There was one window in every room but they were all small. The floor of my room was pine boards and my bed was pine and there was an old pine trunk as a bedside table. And all the pine was mainly woodworm, more holes than wood, mostly air and dust and whatever woodworms look like, maybe not worms at all. The trunk was empty except for woodworm. I put my clothes in it. My fucking life.

  47

  But on the very first evening a man knocked at our door to sell us turf. He saw the light, he said, though he didn’t mention where he saw it from. He must have been hanging around on the edge of some cliff or up the mountain. His name was Peter. I suspect he saw a car passing and when it didn’t come back he loaded up the van and drove out just in case. We bought two bags at six euro a bag. Peter wanted to talk. He stood half-in, half-out, not looking at us except every now and then when he wanted to check how we were reacting. The wind howled past him. The inside started to feel like the outside. And the outside was the North Pole. He told us the house was built before the famine, that once upon a time a hundred people lived up here on this side of the cliff, and further out there was another empty village and a hundred and twenty-two people lived out there and now there was one and he was an old man and a cranky man at that, and sure all the young people were gone from this place, America, Australia, England, it was only all old people were left, dying away one by one, since The Crash nearly everyone left, no work, no money in the fishing or the farming, no one wants to be on the dole all their life, you couldn’t make the land pay around here, it was mostly bog, even the sheep got foot-rot and maggots were as common as flies, you couldn’t even cut turf without a licence, it was like the famine all over again only they weren’t hungry or they weren’t too hungry anyway and nobody was paying their fare to America, but every second house was empty, and those that had inhabitants lost someone every winter, for it is winter that kills the old people, only for that they would live forever around here, his own neighbour, a young man who had a bit of a farm and who was only two fields away, came in one morning and handed him the key of the house, Look after that for me, Peter, he says, I’m off to Australia, I’ll be back in a year, didn’
t he have a job in the mining in Adelaide or wherever they had the mining, his cousin set him up with it.

  My dad wanted to get rid of him. I could see it. He has no patience for talk. But he couldn’t find a place to say something. Peter just kept talking without looking. Every now and again he would take a step closer to the door and then he would take the same step back again. It was like a dance. Sometimes it was two steps. I wanted him to stay because I was scared of what would happen when the door would close and it would just be us.

  He gave us his mobile number in case we burned through the turf before our holiday was up. It was good dry stuff, he said, maybe too dry some of them were saying. It was all machine cutting now, the machine did no damage at all, and it had a sort of hose out the side to spit out the turf. I had no idea what he was talking about. He had a Ford van. He got back into it eventually and waved and drove away.

  What an asshole, my dad said.

  And after that it was just me and him. We lit the stove. I don’t know why, but that first evening we were happy. There was no television or radio but my dad found a pack of cards in a drawer and we played poker and snap and beggar-my-neighbour until bed time. It is hard for two people to play cards. My mam did not come that night. And neither did Tony.

  The next morning my dad didn’t wake. I knew he had his sleeping pills so I let him sleep. I could hear him snoring. I made a slice of toast. And then I went out. It was a fine morning, sunny and warm. Or at least it was not cold. I climbed up behind the house and had a look around. About four kilometres away to the north I saw the first house, down below in the valley and close to the shore. There was smoke coming out of the chimney and Peter’s van was parked outside. The sea was empty. There were no fishing boats. I saw sheep and one or two cattle. I thought, ffs we’re off the edge of the map. This was the middle of nowhere, in fact it was the outside edge of nowhere. We were inhabiting an uninhabited peninsula on a temporary basis and America was our next-door neighbour. There was just my dad and me. By then I didn’t think my mam was coming, and I knew Tony wasn’t. Tony liked his comfort. One of the ratty couches was convertible. I couldn’t see Tony sleeping on it. And my mam would miss the gym and the aircon.

  My mam would be talking to her solicitor already. She would have a good story for the Revenue: Her husband ran away to a place or places unknown, she didn’t. Evading his responsibilities. How long would it take them to find him?

  That time I decided that my dad was a stupid bastard, a selfish bastard. I thought about walking down to Peter’s house and getting him to drive me to the nearest bus stop. If they had bus stops in this shithole of a place.

  48

  So my dad crashed idk he stayed in bed all next morning and he wouldn’t eat unless I cooked. I’m a crap cook as my mam Never Tires Of Telling Me and my dad can’t boil an egg. And I was paranoid about the mice even though I never saw one personally. I put everything in the fridge, even the tea. And at night sometimes I would hear them running. Or I would think I could hear a sound like a million needles clittering somewhere between my floor and the ceiling below. Maybe they were ghost mice, ex-mice that died in the famine. Or did the mice have plenty to eat, maybe it was only a human disaster and the mice and rats had a fun few years. Then again maybe they were bionic woodlice. The first night I fried a steak. I didn’t fry it enough and when we cut it the blood leaked. I freaked. I put mine back on the pan and left it there until it was black on the outside, but still when I cut there was that dribble of blood. I wanted to put an Elastoplast on it before I put it in the bin. So I just ate toast and oven chips. On the second day I made an omelette and it was OK. There is no blood in an omelette.

  I said, Dad we have no food for tomorrow, just the stale bread.

  He gave me fifty euro.

  I’m like: Where am I supposed to find something?

  But he didn’t answer. By then he wasn’t talking much. He stayed in bed until his tea was ready and then he got up and ate it and went back to bed again. He was taking a pill in the morning now too. I thought maybe it would be good for his heart. They say rest is good. In the Shakespeare we were doing in school someone says, Sleep that knits up the ravel’d sleeve of care, balm of hurt minds idk that’s what I thought at the time and if I changed my mind it was afterwards. Otherwise I would have got him out of the bed every morning.

  So I walked down to Peter’s house with my fifty euro. I knocked on his door and he let me in. He made me tea. His house was nice idk it was warm and there were two comfortable chairs and an open fire. He was burning his own turf, I saw. I asked him about a shop and he said the nearest shop was eleven miles away, my dad would have to drive me. I said my dad wasn’t well and he was sleeping a lot, he had a stent put in. Peter said the stent was mighty, his own brother had one, before he was hardly able to stand up out of a chair and afterwards he was taking long walks on the beach every day. I said my dad was mostly asleep all day. He had sleeping pills they gave him. Peter said nothing. We drank our tea.

  I’ll drive you out to the town, he said.

  I said I didn’t want to put him to any trouble.

  Sure I have to go out anyway, I have to go to the Post Office.

  His favourite TV programmes were Masterchef and Strictly Come Dancing. Strictly was brilliant the way you had these leggers who couldn’t put one foot in front of the other and at the end of the series they could dance on an egg-box. That was the whole thing about it, the sense of achievement. Ballroom dancing was all the rage when he was a youngster. The priests didn’t like it of course, but them boys were against anything. If the clergy had their way there wouldn’t be a child born in Ireland from the coming of St Patrick to the present time. Supposedly they were against it because it was foreign. Great saviours of the Gaelic way of life were the clergy. But sure wasn’t the Latin foreign too? And Christianity itself? It’s not like Jesus started his ministry in a bog in the West of Ireland. And if he did, things would have taken a different turn and there might have been less burning at the stake. It’s very hard to set fire to a person with turf.

  I liked to hear Peter laughing.

  It’s lonely enough at times, he said, as we turned into the village. And sure if you ever think of marrying a bachelor farmer with a pension when you grow up, you have my mobile.

  And the two of us laughed over that again. But he might have been serious idk. And if he was, I wasn’t against it either. I could think of a lot worse. Like once I saw Leary our history teacher on a date. He was with a woman. He had on a tweed jacket exactly the same as the one he wears in class but cleaner. He had the same pair of pants he wears in class. We don’t think he changes it, but maybe he bought five pairs at the start. His shoes had a shine on them. He opened his car door for the woman. Like his car is this half-Renault half-Datsun, I don’t even know if it has a name, maybe just a number like fourteen. Datsuns are hip now if you can get one, they all rotted. But I was also bizarrely like so jealous, a little bit idk not much but it was there. Leary must be over forty. Maybe it’s because he’s History. The woman looked like a teacher too, kinda smart idk Primary maybe, with glasses. I was hoping they’d make it together. Leary is lonely and I am attracted to lonely old guys.

  I would not invite Serena to the wedding, I could imagine what she’d say.

  I went to the SuperValu and I bought a super-giant bag of frozen peas, three packets of lamb chops totalling twelve chops in all, a giant bag of oven chips and a few sliced pans. Peter told me the trick of the sliced pan was to freeze it and soften it in the toaster as you wanted it. That way you could have fresh bread for a long time. He drove me back up to my house. We didn’t have a toaster but I froze the bread anyway.

  Listen, girl, he said, call me any time, or come down for a cup of tea. Don’t be a stranger now.

  I nearly cried. But I didn’t.

  I missed Holly and Serena. I missed kissing Holly. That was the best. I missed my bedroom. I was scared all night here, like the place had to be haunted. Even if no
ghost turned up just yet, there would be one sooner or later. Probably some long-dead bogman trying to sell me a load of ghost turf. Like people must have died here during the famine. I could see these hungry bastards tapping at my window and demanding to be fed, like it was hard enough cooking for my dad. And as far as I knew, they only ate potatoes and I was shit at boiling potatoes, I always boiled them to mush or else they were hard. The bathroom was freezing and you couldn’t lock the door and I was scared my dad was going to wake up and walk in on me. He wouldn’t even know where he was. And I was expecting my period and I forgot to bring pads and I couldn’t ask Peter to drive me into town for them. And I was scared my dad was going to die in his sleep like you do. And other times I felt like going down and putting a pillow over his face and sitting on it until he stopped kicking. The bastard.

  He kidnapped me. The bastard. I hate my father. I swear.

  49

  Dad, I said one breakfast time, maybe the third morning, I lost track of time, What’s Mam saying? Is she coming down?

  He didn’t look at me. That was a bad sign. I said, Did you talk to her? Or is it just texts?

  Nothing, he said.

  What, she like just didn’t reply?

  He looked at the stove. The turf was burning bright. It was like he saw it for the first time. He put his head on one side and then the other. It was comical idk maybe.

  Dad?

  I threw the phone in a bin before I left the office.

  What? Why?

  They can trace you. I saw it in a court case in the papers. Triangulation.

  So Mam doesn’t know where we are? Right, Dad? She doesn’t know and she thinks we just disappeared. Maybe she thinks we went to England? Maybe she thinks we’re dead? Like that suicide a year ago, the guy that drove into the sea with his two children.

  He shrugged. Those kids were only toddlers.

  Like is that better? It’s OK to drive into the sea with a pair of toddlers?