A Slanting of the Sun by Donal Ryan

Author:Donal Ryan [Ryan, Donal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58642-236-3
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2015-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

Physiotherapy

I SQUEEZE THE rubber ball three times and raise my arm so that my left hand meets his right and he always seems to smile as he takes the ball from me and grips it softly and I nod three times at him in time with his three squeezes. He reaches across himself with his good left arm and takes the ball from himself and repeats the exercise and I take it in my right and so on and so on and so on. The physiotherapist gave us a long-handled stick with a netted scoop at its end to retrieve the ball when we drop it the way we wouldn’t be hauling ourselves up and out of our chairs and exhausting ourselves before we have our exercises done. Why don’t you just give us a square ball the way it won’t roll, I said to him, and he got a bit sour I think, and muttered something about the bones of our hands or some such. He reminded me of a nephew of mine I haven’t seen for a long time. A curly-headed lad, long in the back and longer in the face, my sister Noreen’s boy, gone off to London or somewhere but years and years. A lot of them get lost out foreign, they don’t come back themselves.

We were married at twenty, Pierse and me. He was older by a week exactly. I wore a simple white dress my mother made for me, and he wore a navy suit borrowed from his father’s brother who was about his size. We had our wedding breakfast inside in O’Meara’s Hotel and only our families were there and my friend Theresa who was maid-of-honour and his friend Mossy who was best man. We went for a week to Galway on our honeymoon in a Volkswagen Beetle lent to us by the manager of the co-op, who was a friend of Pierse’s father. Pierse held my hand every minute of every day, hardly letting me go even while we ate. I sat on his lap in our narrow suite and he hugged me fiercely, and he kissed my mouth and face and eyes. We adventured up and down narrow streets and watched fishermen on the quays as they inspected their nets in the mornings and hauled their catches in the evenings and Pierse tried a few words of Irish out on a chap one day and the chap only smiled and didn’t answer and Pierse smiled into the quayside stench and reddened so deeply I thought he’d burst.

Pierse got into auctioneering through another friend of his father’s and he quickly gained a reputation for thoroughness and honesty and there was never a trace of sneakiness that was ever known about him, and people could see that in the first few instants of knowing him. He grew inches at an auction; it was the only place that time he seemed to fit, it was as though his gavel protected him from embarrassment, as though his practised ululations, inscrutable to me, threw up a wall of strength around him.

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