Carry Me Down by M. J. Hyland

Author:M. J. Hyland [Hyland, M. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literary, Azizex666, Fiction
ISBN: 9781841958781
Google: foJpWsQgtEoC
Amazon: 1841958786
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

22

I wake early, before the streetlights have been turned off, and I think that Liam is also awake. I hear him say, ‘To the bearer,’ and ‘One million pounds.’

‘What?’ I say.

‘To the bearer. One million pounds,’ he says again, as clear as though he were awake.

He is sleeping on his back, with his mouth wide open. I want to put something in it, like the lightbulb that hangs from its broken socket above my head.

I get out of bed at half eight and go into the kitchen in my pyjamas. Nobody is there, but the lights are on. I don’t want to be alone.

I go down the stairs that lead to the bookshop in the basement. The staircase is dark. There are rats scratching behind the walls and they sound like the ones we had behind the walls in our old flat in Wexford. Sometimes, when we had been sitting in silence in the living room, one of the rats would come out onto the carpet in the middle of the room and look around, as quiet as a pillow, as though it were sightseeing. Then it would see or smell one of us and run back to the hole it had come from.

The rats always came out alone, never as a family, and there was one especially big brown rat with a long black tail. I decided he was the boss rat. After I saw him a few times I expected to see him all of the time. If I walked into the living room and saw something brown or black on the floor, out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was the rat, and I’d feel jumpy. I’d often think I’d seen that rat. My father said I had a rare case of rat psychosis. ‘You saw one rat in the middle of the floor,’ he said, ‘and now you think everything smaller than a shoe is a rat.’

A few weeks after my father said this the rats stopped scratching behind our living room wall.

I stand for a while and listen to the scratching and then kick the wall once before I open the back door that leads to the bookshop.

‘Morning,’ says Aunty Evelyn, who is standing on a short stepladder reaching up to some bookshelves.

My twin cousins, Celia and Kay, sit on the floor and look up at me. They are seven years old, but small for their age and, like their father, hardly ever speak. Instead of speaking, the twins look at people; fix their eyes and stare. No matter where you move to, their eyes are on you. But they don’t seem to see anything. They aren’t really watching, I don’t think, not properly watching. Their eyes move as though pulled by magnets, as though they have no choice.

‘Morning,’ I say as I sit down behind the counter. Aunty Evelyn climbs down from the ladder and sits next to me. She takes hold of my hands.

‘Where are they?’ I ask.

‘Who? Mammy and Daddy?’

‘Yes.

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