The Outside Boy by Jeanine Cummins

Author:Jeanine Cummins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

“SO HOW ARE YOU GETTING on in school?” Dad asked that evening. He was just finished his tea and was picking his teeth and warming his boots beside the fire.

“Grand,” I said.

“What are the studies like?”

“A lock of shite, really,” I said.

I was still browned off about the Commandments, and Dad was in my bad books anyway. He knew why. He thought he could make all my questions go away just by burning up my mother’s photograph. But they only got stronger in me. Dad didn’t know how I’d tricked him, that the photo was still safe, my prized possession. My gift from Grandda. I wouldn’t never let him take it from me.

“A lock of shite?” he said. “They’re teaching you lovely language, anyway.”

I shrugged.

“We learnt the Ten Commandments today,” Martin said. “And Christy got an awful fright, thinking we was all going to hell.”

“Feck off, I did not get a fright.”

“He puked in the ditch,” Martin announced. Bastard.

Dad ran a hand up the back of his head, and he looked at me. I did my best to deflect his sympathy. I didn’t want it.

“What had you worried, son?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope.”

“okay,” he said.

But then, after Martin was finished his tea, and Auntie Brigid was collecting the things for the washing up, he tried again.

“Why would you think we was all going to hell?” he asked quietly. “What did the teacher say that worried you?”

I looked down at my plate; it was still full. I wished Grandda was here, for talking to instead. But he wasn’t. I felt like God was letting us down, and I was angry. And in truth, I was afraid. For Grandda, for everybody. I didn’t have nobody else to talk to about it, only Dad.

“Thou shalt not steal,” I finally said. “That’s one of the Commandments. That stealing is, like, an official sin.”

Dad opened his mouth and then closed it. He was trying to think what to say. “But surely you knew that already?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“Surely you knew that stealing was a sin.”

I hadn’t eaten a bit, but suddenly, I thought I’d puke again. “How would I know that?” I said.

“Sure, I’ve always told you stealing was wrong, haven’t I?”

“Told me? Yes,” I said. “You told me. And then you also told me to steal the plastic buckets, and sometimes you told me to steal eggs from a henhouse. And one time you even told me to steal a goat—d’you remember that one? Because no one was minding him?”

My voice was rising, and Dad eyed Brigid’s back, bent to the washing, to see was she listening. I didn’t care. I wanted him to feel the way I’d felt in class. Forsaken. Damned.

Dad took a deep breath and licked his lips. I was staring right at him. I’d never felt so defiant. I thought I might throw my whole plate of food ’round his head.

“You’ll not speak to your father that way,” he said. He looked back at me, dead in the eye, and his voice had a strength I’d forgotten.

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