All We Shall Know by Donal Ryan

Author:Donal Ryan [Ryan, Donal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473509955
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2016-09-14T18:30:00+00:00

Week Twenty-six

BECAUSE A TERRIBLE need has come over me, a burning, scorching want. It’s not that warm outside tonight, there’s a smell of rain in the air, but I have the bedroom window open and I’m covered in sweat and even the coolness of the breeze is adding to it, stroking my naked skin, stoking this imposturous flame. Every time I close my eyes I see Martin Toppy, his wide, suntanned shoulders, his V-shaped torso, his arms either side of me, his blue blazing eyes, his voice whispering, Miss, oh, miss, I love you. I see Pat, too, seventeen-year-old Pat, whiter and ropier than Martin Toppy but no less beautiful, his eyes shut tight with the effort of holding back, to please me, to make sure I knew he was a man, and could satisfy me, his woman, his girl.

There’s a lad that holds a STOP sign at the roadworks on the bypass. He winked at me one day when I was at the front of the queue, and he held my eye and smiled. I saw him running on the Long Hill one evening, in a singlet and shorts. He has long, muscular legs. I woke from a dream where I slowed beside him as he ran, and stopped when he noticed me, and he stood sweating on the path across a narrow grass strip from the road, heaving breaths in and out, and I leant across and opened the passenger door, and he got in, and I tried to slip back into the dream when I woke drenched from it, but instead I dreamt of a wooden ship, tossed on a black sea, its hold packed tight with children and their mothers, their fathers and husbands lying flat on the pitching deck, whispering prayers to an absent God, and I woke again and there was a taste of salt on the breeze that touched my face from the open window, and I was coverless in the dark, and I breathed in and breathed out and lay still.

I stopped on the road near Borrisokane to get sick. I stood in a gateway, watched by a long-lashed cow, until I heaved and moaned and my moan turned half to a scream and the cow ran away in fright, shitting as she went. I leant back against the bonnet of my car and wiped vomit from my chin and tears from my eyes and watched a gap of blue as it was closed by clouds, and the sky darkened and the air cooled around me and a mist of rain wetted my forehead, and I rested against the car and gave consideration to turning and going home, and trusting in my instinct that my baby’s limbs were forming, his heart beating strong. Why look in at him? Millions of years of babies were born with no scans or ultrasounds having checked their progress, and here we all are. But I drove on anyway, across the clanking bridge in Portumna, and along

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