The Thing About December Read Online Free Page B

wild-looking one with jeans stuck to her arse; he’d mind her and his children and bring all his wages home and do silly things to make them all laugh. Thinking of those jeans and the bit of pink frill he could see peeping over the top of them made Johnsey think of the magazine again. And what if one of those who had passed away was watching him and he inside in the jacks, interfering with himself? The dead are all around us, according to Father Cotter. They’re having a right old laugh at me, so.
    Johnsey went down to the front room where Mother was watching the news and knitting something with no shape yet, and the big brown clock ticked and tocked the night slowly away. They’d hardly ever used the good room before Daddy died. If they were all watching telly, they’d sit on the long, battered green couch that was hidden away near the back kitchen, out of sight of visitors when not in use. Daddy would drag it into service and position it in front of the hearth, directed in by Mother like he was reversing a trailer in the yard, and Johnsey would sit in the middle between them and they’d look at a film or a comedy and Mother would make tea during one of the ad breaks and bring over tart and cream on a tray and you couldn’t get better than that. But now it was all the good room with Mother. That long, battered couch was covered in boxes and bits and bobs that had no business on a couch. It wouldn’t have been balanced right, anyway, without Daddy. There’d have been too much empty space on it, and that empty space would draw out your sadness like the vacuum cleaner draws out dust from behind the television: you’d have forgotten it was there until you went rooting around for it.
    When bedtime came he was glad to say goodnight to Mother and retreat upstairs to think. A man couldn’t think about thingswith his mother in the room – it was hard enough thinking of things to say to a woman who had hardly any words left for the world, only lonesome thoughts and muttered prayers.
    The cross one in the tight jeans had looked a bit like the girls in Dwyer’s dirty magazine. Johnsey couldn’t believe they were fully real, them wans. How could a part of a woman look so strange, like an alien’s face, and yet make you not be able to stop looking at it?
    JOHNSEY LIKED thinking about the stories Daddy used tell him before he went to sleep. A rake of his great-uncles were priests in Scotland and America and Canada. They joined the priesthood and exiled themselves as penance for taking the lives of so many Black and Tans years ago during the War of Independence. Daddy’s father was only very young, the youngest of six boys and a girl, and he and his sister would be warming blocks all night and placing them in the lads’ empty beds, down low where their feet would be if they were not patrolling the countryside shooting Englishmen, so when they came home and tore their clothes off and jumped into their beds, their feet would warm quick enough so that if they were raided, their mother would shout Sure look, sir, feel those boys’ feet, they’ve been in their beds since sunset, for they’ve all to be up at cockcrow. And sure enough the rotten bastard would beat them from their beds with the butt of his dirty English gun and line them up for his inspection and they would act like they’d just been dragged from the deepest of sleep and their toes toasty, and that trick saved many a young rebel’s life.
    The English officer would leave them their lives but before they went away he’d let the Black and Tan bastards loose about the place and they’d try to flush the Blessed Virgin down the toilet and they’d take the holy picture out to the yard and fling it on theground and piss all over Our Lord and God only knows what other depravities were visited upon holy things before finally the great-uncles won their war and John Bull and his savage legion fecked off home out of it. Johnsey thought of their bravery and boldness and