When All Is Said(8)

‘Listen to you and the lingo,’ I call back to her, not letting on my concern that I’ve left my trip a little too late, ‘by the neck or the arse, I don’t care, just make sure it’s still in the bottle and from the shelf,’ I say speeding up.

‘One of these?’ she says, halting my escape.

Can she not sense the danger?

‘Aye,’ I say, starting again.

‘Glass?’

Heavens above.

‘No, sure stick an auld straw in it and I’ll be grand,’ I call back to her.

‘You joke right?’

I wave a hand as I disappear from view.



* * *



There were four children in my family. Four was relatively small, I suppose, for that time in Ireland. There were families of nine or ten or more all round us. We must have seemed odd. Two adults and four youngsters to a two-bedroom cottage. A luxury, almost. Tony was the oldest, then there was May and Jenny and me, the youngest. A year, maybe two, between the lot of us.

You never knew your Uncle Tony. He was long gone by the time you arrived. ‘Big Man’ – that’s what he called me. I know that’s what I became, six foot three and built like a house. But back when that nickname stuck, I was far from it. At four, I was the tiniest of things compared to the towering giant of him, or so he seemed to me. I imagine my little steps beside his on the road or round the farm. Always running to catch up, three of my little trots to his one stride. All the time him chatting to me, telling me about the hens we were feeding or the carrots we were planting in Mam’s little garden or the ditches we were clearing. The man loved the land as much as my father. And I’d be looking up at him, trying not to trip while taking everything in, trying my best to remember, to show him I could do it too, relishing his praise.

‘Now you have it,’ he’d say, ‘aren’t you the great man.’

Despite my best efforts to keep pace, I’d inevitably fall or do myself some kind of injury trying to carry buckets that were far too big for me, just to be like him. He’d come back then and hunker beside me.

‘You’ll be better before you’re twice married,’ I imagine him saying, brushing me down, hugging me maybe, lightening my load then and slowing his pace for a while. You’d swear he was decades older than me, the way he used to mind me. But he was only five years my senior.

I’d have worked well into the evening with him, had I been let. But somewhere along the way my mother would come to fetch me.

‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ he’d say to my protests, as she carried me back in. Me with my hands outstretched to him trying not to cry for fear he’d see what a baby I was. And would you look at me now, still at it, battling those tears.

I’d wait by the window in the kitchen for him then. Getting up and down on the bench, despite my mother’s scolding, until he and my father finally finished their day.

I remember once when Father Molloy visited the house. Like all adults he was curious about what I wanted to be when I grew up. It seemed an odd type of question to me, I mean, the answer was so bloody obvious:

‘Tony,’ I said.

I couldn’t fathom why he and my parents laughed so much at my reply. I walked out of the kitchen, leaving them there with the hilarity of it all and the good china.

The name ‘Big Man’ stuck from our school days. Tony had been walking the half-mile to the one-roomed school for a fair few years before I joined him. Rainsford National School – engraved in an arch over the front door – that’s what Tony told me it read, as I proudly passed under it on my first day. Tony had me wound up the whole way there with the thoughts of how exciting it would be, what with all the children from around gathered in one place. I don’t think I’d slept a wink the night before, either.

‘Tony,’ I whispered to him beside me in the bed, not wishing to wake Jenny and May, who slept behind the curtain that divided the room, ‘does Patrick Stanley go to the school?’

‘Of course he does.’

‘And Mary and Joe Brady?’

‘Sure, what other school would they go to?’

‘And Jenny and May?’

‘Would you stop your messing and go to sleep or we’ll be going nowhere tomorrow,’ he said, pucking me with his elbow.

I was up first the next day, asking the same stuff all over again. I walked in Tony’s shoes, literally, that day. His hand-me-downs. I’ve no idea whose shoes he got. I strode through the school door, staring around in awe of the place that would make me as clever as my big brother.

‘Well, now, and who do we have here?’ a voice boomed as I entered. ‘Another Hannigan is it? Get up here and let’s have a good look at you.’

Master Duggan hauled me up, on to a desk at the front of the room.

‘Would you look at the size of you, a big man, what? I hope we have a desk big enough to fit you and all those brains you’re storing in that head of yours.’

I was ‘Big Man’ from that moment on.

I was beaming, proud of the welcome. I watched Tony laughing, elbowing his mates. I looked at the desks and the blackboard and the few books behind me on the master’s table and felt a warmth for the place and the things that were a part of my world now. I was keen to get on with it, to prove the master correct. I shuffled my feet in anticipation and was down soon enough sitting at the very desk on which I’d stood.