The Choice, page 8
‘Look, this won’t make it any easier for you,’ Colm said, ‘and please don’t go saying this, but you were the first name on my list coming down here tonight. You’ve been excellent all season, and you’ve been training and playing out of your skin for the last few weeks.’
I tried one last time to change his mind. Getting picked for the trials was the only thing that mattered to me right now. I had been so determined, I had been working so hard, that I had barely had time to be worrying about John and everything else that was going on. I was so excited to go home with some good news for Mam and Dad. I had to go on Sunday. I needed this.
‘I’ll be fine in a few days, I will,’ I promised, my voice cracking, but it was clear that Colm had made his decision.
‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘Go on, you better go straight home. Try to take it easy for a bit, will you?’
And that was it.
Kellie was in the sitting room when I got home, sitting on the couch by herself, working on a drawing in her notebook. ‘What are you up to?’ she said suspiciously when she heard me come in and go straight to the freezer.
I took a tea-towel from the countertop and emptied a tray of ice cubes into it, and then tried to wrap it into a makeshift bandage around the back of my hamstring. A few of the ice cubes fell out onto the kitchen floor, and they stuck to my fingers as I picked them up.
‘Here, Frosty the Snowman, give up the messing,’ Kellie warned as she came in to see what the fuss was about. ‘Mam and Dad will kill you if they come home and find puddles of water all over the place.’
‘Do I look like I’m messing?’ I growled, and she knew straight away that I was upset.
She picked up the last two ice cubes that had scattered out into the hall and handed them back to me. ‘What are you after doing to yourself now?’
A couple of bits of ice escaped on me again, slipping out the sides as I fumbled with the knot, and I flung the whole lot, tea-towel and all, into the sink in frustration.
‘Stop,’ she said, concerned, rearranging the ice neatly into a far better bandage than I had managed. ‘Come here, gimme a look and I’ll do it properly for you.’
I limped over and she tied the tea-towel tight to my leg. The cold pressed through onto my skin and it already felt good.
‘How long do you have to do this for?’ she asked.
‘Until it’s better. I got picked for the trials on Sunday, but I can’t go if I’m like this.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll have it sorted by Sunday,’ she reassured me. She picked up the empty ice tray from the counter and ran it under the cold tap to fill it again, then put it back into the freezer. ‘There’s another tray of cubes already in there. Come back in to me in twenty minutes and we’ll put a fresh one on then.’
I kept ice on it for the night, with Kellie’s help, and I did the same again the next morning before I went to school. The tea-towel we had used was still soaking wet, so I wrung it out into the sink and filled it again before sitting down to have my breakfast.
I went into the bathroom before I got dressed and locked the door behind me. I quietly reached up and opened the little glass cabinet where Mam and Dad kept any of their medicine. It looked empty. Normally, there’d be a few little brown plastic tubs of pills, leftovers from the last time someone was sick or put away for the next time, but they were all gone. A thought of John flashed into my head, locked in the bathroom just like I was now, desperate for whatever he could get his hands on. I shook it aside quickly; for all I knew, Mam and Dad had got there before him and moved their medicine to hide it from him.
The bare shelves made it easy to find what I was looking for: a tiny jar with an orange and blue label and a picture of a mean-looking tiger snarling at me on the front of it. This was the stuff I had seen Dad use whenever he came in from work and had a sore back. I wasn’t sure what exactly it was supposed to do, but it couldn’t hurt to try.
I scooped out a big glob from what was left in the jar and gave it a sniff. It was a really powerful smell, a bit like one of those strong chewing gums that were supposed to be good for you when you had a cold. The hairs on the inside of my nose felt like somebody had put a lit match to them, and my eyes started to water. Whatever this stuff was, it must be good.
I rubbed the ointment into the back of my leg. It was hot, very hot, which made me panic. I hadn’t read the instructions to see how much I was supposed to use. What if I had put too much on and burned all the skin off my leg? I waited until the heat level went from roasting to just nicely warm, and then I washed my hands quickly before I touched any other part of my body and accidentally set it on fire too. I closed the medicine cabinet but I didn’t put the jar back in; nobody would miss it if I brought it to school with me. And then I flushed the toilet – just in case anyone was wondering what I had been up to – and went to get ready.
During geography class I asked Ms Breen if I could go to the toilet, and in the cubicle, I quickly rubbed a fresh layer of the tiger ointment into my leg. The smell of it followed me back up the corridor and, as I sat back down at my desk, I was afraid one of the other lads would put up their hand and tell Ms Breen there was a funny smell, and I’d be caught. But nobody said anything.
I didn’t go out at all that evening, even though it was Friday; I stayed in to put more ice on my leg instead. June and Lindy had knocked up for dinner, and they were sitting inside having a glass of wine with Mam.
‘Look at you,’ Lindy said with surprise, watching me tie up another tea-towel bandage. I would have asked Kellie to do it for me again but she gone up to the youth club in the White Elephant with her friends. I had been paying very close attention after making a mess of my first attempt.
‘I never knew you were a doctor. Have you anything there for a sore neck?’ June laughed. ‘I must have slept on it funny last night.’
The next morning, I put my Kickhams tracksuit on and packed my boots and the rest of my kit into my bag as normal, and I was ready to go when Kev called over for me.
‘Where are you going with the bag?’ he asked, raising his eyebrows. ‘You off out to the supermarket or something?’
‘Ah, you know, just in case …’
‘Just in case? You’re a headcase, you are,’ he said, getting more high-pitched. ‘You’re not seriously thinking of playing, are you?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Nah, there’s no chance that Colm will let me. It does feel much better, though – honestly,’ I insisted, but one look at Kev told me that even he wasn’t buying that story.
We all met up outside the shops on the Ballymun Road, and then we piled onto the minibus to go to the southside, to Stillorgan, where Kilmacud Crokes’ pitches were. When we stopped at a set of lights, I chanced my arm and moved into the empty seat beside Colm.
‘I think I’m probably okay to be a sub,’ I suggested. ‘You could bring me on a few minutes at the end and see what you think?’
‘No, not today, it’s too much of a risk,’ he said firmly, making it clear there was no point in me even asking again. While everyone else got togged for the match and did their stretches, I took three balls out of the bag and went down to help Martin warm up in goal. I threw a few balls in to him to start, letting him come and catch them high in the air, and then I kicked a few, first off my right and then off my left. My leg felt good, which, when I thought about it, only made me feel worse.
It was a tight game but we won by two points. We were one up and hanging on a bit as Crokes pressed hard for an equaliser in the final seconds, but Jimmy somehow got his hand in to knock the ball away from one of their forwards and we came down the other end and scored to make sure of the win. It was another big result, not only because it kept us on top of the league for now, but also with one eye on Féile, where Crokes were surely going to be another one of our big rivals in Dublin.
Kev’s mam and dad were gone out for the afternoon, so when the minibus dropped us all back off at the shops again, he came home with me.
‘We’re home, we won again,’ I called out as we came in, but nobody answered, and when I opened the door to the sitting room to see if anybody was home, a third person was there with Mam and Dad.
‘Howaya, Philly,’ John said.
12
I looked from John to Mam and Dad, and then back to John again. ‘You’re home?’ I said, but it barely came out as a whisper.
‘Ah, yeah, I missed you all too much,’ he said. ‘Howaya Kev.’
‘All right, John,’ Kev said, still standing behind me, unsure what he should do now. ‘I better go and check if anyone’s home,’ he said quickly, to nobody in particular, turning back towards the front door. ‘I’ll talk to you later on.’
He closed both doors gently behind him as he left. Nobody said anything for a moment. John was pale. His skin looked like paper, like it would tear as soon you touched it, and big red blotches were dotted around his face. He’d taken off his baseball cap and put it on the table, and his hair was stuck to the top of his head; it was a lot longer than usual. I tried to remember how he had looked five weeks ago, the last time that I saw him, but I couldn’t get past how sick he seemed right now.
‘Mam and Dad said they told you and Kellie the whole story,’ John said when he spoke eventually. ‘I’m sorry, Philly.’
He waited for me to respond and when I didn’t, he continued. ‘I’m trying to get better,’ he said, and I could hear in his voice that he really meant it. ‘I am. It’s just hard.’
‘Where have you been?’ I asked.
‘Ah, you know, here and there,’ he said. ‘I have a few friends in town that I was able to crash with for a while.’
‘Are you back for good this time?’
Dad shifted uneasily in his chair.
‘I hope so, yeah,’ John said, and slowly pulled himself up out of the couch. He moved like an old man, like every bone in his body ached. ‘Anyway, come here and give us a hug, would you? I haven’t seen you in weeks.’
I was happy to see that he was home and safe, but I didn’t want a hug. I didn’t know what I wanted. ‘I’ve to go and sort my gear out,’ I said and I turned my back on him, leaving him standing there waiting, his arms hanging by his sides.
John’s bags were lying in the middle of our bedroom floor where he had dropped them, open and waiting to be unpacked. Some of the stuff smelled like it hadn’t been properly washed since he left. I pushed the bags out of the way with my foot and climbed up the ladder onto my bed. I thought Mam or Dad might come in to check on me and see if I was okay, but nobody did. I pulled my knees in to my chest and lay there, staring at the wall, trying not to think. I could hear them talking again in the sitting room, and I heard the front door open when Kellie came home, and then I fell asleep and didn’t wake up again until I was called for dinner.
Dinner was fish and chips, our usual Saturday treat from Macari’s. The salt and vinegar hit me before Dad had even started to dish it out from the brown paper bags, and I could hear my stomach rumbling. I was starving.
Dad handed out each of the five plates, saving the one with the biggest piece of fish for Mam. Dad had done that for as long as I could remember. Even when we were all a lot younger, pushing and elbowing for a bit of space as we all squeezed in together to eat, Dad would always save the best for Mam and make a big show out of making sure that she got her food before any of the rest of us did. Sometimes he’d sing a little bit of a song as he gave her her food, in a jokey way – like the old Elvis one that he liked, ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You’ – and Mam would roll her eyes at him and say, ‘What are you like?’ But we could all see that she was smiling.
Those days felt like a long time ago now.
I tapped the bottom of the ketchup bottle until there was a little pool on the side of my plate, then I passed it to Kellie, who did the same. For a minute, the only sound was of our knives and our forks as they scraped the plates and the golden crunch of the batter as the fish fell apart into little pieces.
‘You never told us how your match went, Philly?’ Dad said.
‘Good, yeah,’ I said. ‘We won by two points.’
He looked at me hopefully, waiting to hear a little bit more than the bare minimum, but I didn’t really feel like talking.
Mam tried again. ‘How’s your leg today?’
‘Yeah, it feels a good bit better,’ I said, and dipped another chip into the ketchup. I just wanted to be left alone.
I loved dinner time; it was the only time that we all spent together, really, and it was usually a battle to get a word in edgeways. Everyone wanted to be first, or next, with their story. There was always a tale to tell, whether it was something that had happened in school or in work, or a bit of news that Mam and Dad had heard from one of the neighbours.
But now there was only one thing that mattered, and it was the one thing that nobody wanted to talk about. Everything else seemed irrelevant. Whenever someone spoke, it sounded forced, and every new conversation quickly died after a few short sentences. By trying so hard for things to be normal, they only became more strange.
John put his fork down on the side of his plate while he finished chewing the food in his mouth. ‘I have a funny one for you,’ he said, and he launched into a story about some guy called Stephen that I didn’t know. It was about how some people had mistaken this Stephen lad for a famous American actor, and how he started posing for photographs and signing autographs, and then the newspaper wanted to send someone down to interview him … I don’t know what the story was about, really. I was too angry with John to listen properly.
John kept going and I kept getting angrier. I stared at him, hoping he’d see that I didn’t find it funny, but he was too caught up in the story to even notice me. I could feel my face getting hot. Why was he acting like nothing was wrong, like everything was normal? I wanted to scream at him: this isn’t normal; normal people don’t joke around like a heroin addiction is no big deal. Our family isn’t normal any more. And it’s all your fault.
John was up off the couch now, acting out every bit of it, trying to stop laughing at his own story for long enough to finish actually telling it. Mam and Dad were doing their best to smile along but I couldn’t sit there any longer. I stood up quickly to leave, accidentally knocking my glass off the arm of the chair where I had left it. It was empty but it shattered as it hit the floor, scattering jagged bits of glass around everyone’s feet.
‘I’m going out for a while,’ I announced, scooping up the big bits of glass nearest to me and squeezing past Kellie before anyone could try to stop me.
‘You haven’t even finished your dinner,’ Mam said, motioning for me to sit back down.
‘It’s grand, I’m not hungry anyway.’
I had interrupted John mid-sentence. He sat back down without finishing his story, his shoulders slumping as he picked a few mushy peas off his plate with his fingers. ‘Don’t be like that, Philly, come on,’ he said without looking up. ‘It’s just a story. You don’t need to go, I’ll shut up now.’
But I couldn’t stay. I needed fresh air, and I needed to get away from that table. Everybody else might have been happy to pretend that our lives were grand, but I wasn’t. If John had any idea how much he was hurting Mam and Dad, how worried they were because of him, he wouldn’t be pretending either.
The evening breeze slapped me in the face as I crossed the field. I thought about calling to Kev’s, even though I had no real reason to, but then I changed my mind. I wandered aimlessly instead, and before I knew it, I was standing outside Colm’s front door, waiting for him to answer.
‘Philly.’ He sounded surprised. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you again this evening. Is everything all right?’
‘No, not really, to be honest. Can I talk to you for a minute?’
‘Sure, come in.’
I wondered if I should take my shoes off as I stepped into the hall. Everything about Colm’s house was always so spotless. He closed the door to the front room so that the noise from the television wasn’t too loud. It sounded like he was watching a match.
I got straight to the point. ‘You need to let me go to the trials tomorrow. I can’t miss them.’
I knew I was wasting my time asking again, and I expected Colm to be mad at me for barging into his house unannounced on a Saturday night to waste his too.
‘It’s not about me letting you go or not.’ He sighed. ‘I picked you to go. You absolutely deserve to go, fair and square. But you’re not fit.’
‘I am.’
Colm scrunched up his face like it was physically paining him to have this argument all over again.
‘Okay, I’m not fully fit,’ I admitted, ‘but I’m still fit enough to go there and be good enough. You have to let me go. I’m begging you, please.’
‘What’s going on?’ He sounded concerned.
I wanted to tell him. I wanted to tell him the whole story – about John, about how I needed this opportunity to take over every minute of my life so I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else – but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t admit what was wrong. I didn’t want Colm to know that John had a drug addiction, for him to think that my brother was just another Ballymun zombie, strung out on the blocks. He’d never look at me in the same way if he knew.
‘It’s my dream,’ I pleaded with him. ‘It’s the only thing I want. And if I can stand, I can do enough to get into the academy. Please.’
‘Are you sure that everything’s okay, Philly?’ Colm asked, the wrinkles on his forehead getting deeper. ‘Did something happen at home?’
Yes, I wanted to say. Yes, something terrible is happening at home. But I shook my head. ‘No, nothing like that. You just need to let me go tomorrow.’
Colm’s face fell, and he rubbed his chin with the palm of his hand. ‘I wish I could, Philly, but there’s nothing I can do, I’m sorry. I’ve already given Gerry Mangan the names, and Jimmy is going with Kev and Taz in the morning. I’m sorry.’
