It’s in the car park we bump into them. I stand back like the other man, before our wives can have a go at introducing us. He makes a business out of locking up their Focus and I bend down to tie my youngest’s shoelace. Then I see the second one is loose, so I go to undo it and tie it again. It’s hard to get the double knot in it to come free and she won’t keep her leg still. The other man has found a smudge on his wing mirror so he’s at that with a lick of spit and a tissue. His face is scrunched under a pair of glasses.
We let the two women do the talking.
‘Are you here for the big show?’ Slow motion jazz hands already, the dutiful spirit of things; I don’t know how they do it.
‘We are! I didn’t know yours did drama too. I’m sorry, I forget his name…’
‘Not at all, Kieran, it’s Kieran. I wonder is he in the same group as Stephen? That’d be mad.’ She’s remembered Stephen’s name and we forgot Kieran’s. I have the laces tied in a bow, so I hoist our youngest up but really there’s no need for the shoes; wherever we go, she wants me to carry her. I occupy myself by tickling her tummy and she tries to bite my nose. We had cottage pie before we came out, and there’s still mince and onions on her breath.
‘God, maybe! Though Kieran is only seven, isn’t he? Stephen’s that bit older.’
The other woman slaps her head. One all. ‘Of course, yeah Kieran’s in Hummingbirds, what’s Stephen in, Pigeons, is it?’
‘That’s the one! The names they give them!’
There’s a wide-eyed silence, and then, though we’re still early, ‘Come on, we better head up there, wouldn’t want to be late for the première.’
We let them hurry on ahead, and Maura turns to me, the whisper weighted.
‘Their son has cystic fibrosis.’ Her eyes are desperate, huge with all the mascara. It’s almost like she’s talking about one of ours. She won’t cry but is near enough to it. If we were at home and we got to discussing it, we both might end up in tatters. We’d forget about it just as quick though.
‘There’s a new medicine, but the state won’t pay. She’s been campaigning… ’ We’re closing in on all the other parents. Our youngest wriggles on my hip. I think of the woman, the mother. I never even really looked at her face; she’d masses of curly hair. The letters she’d be writing. Looking up addresses on the internet, trying to find the gatekeepers, people with power, support groups. Talk to Joe maybe, pleading over the phone to a researcher. The father reading the child—Kieran—reading Kieran a story in the bedroom. Coming to the end of the chapter, putting a dog ear on the page and closing the book. Walking back down the stairs to his wife. The sounds of her moving about in the kitchen below and nothing he can do to help her but load the dishwasher, wipe down the table.
The last of Maura’s undertone warns me we have to do something. We’re within earshot of all the other parents now, so we say nothing. There’s the odd ‘Hiya’ and ‘Hey there’ from a distance, but no one we know well enough that we’d be bothered.
What could we do to help anyway? Sign a petition? End up doing some 5K run? Lining up in a pair of shorts on a bank holiday weekend. It’d probably be better than nothing.
There’s groups of people and an odd kind of a line where no one’s sure if we’re queuing or not. Kieran’s mum with the curly hair is a good bit away. The husband has a belly on him. Arms akimbo and his back to the whitewashed wall.
The line starts to move. Inside the door there’s a child, the marks of a comb in his gelled hair: ‘Hello and welcome.’ And there’s more as we go on. They’re well trained, taking it seriously. Collecting tickets, hello, hello, welcome, welcome. There’s excitement off them, anxiousness, pride too.
It’s a great little theatre, maybe room for a hundred, rows of fold-down seats like in a cinema. The ceiling is so dark it’s like it isn’t there. Everything seems carpeted, even the low sounds of the people; a few are chatting, but in whispers. The air is dense and warm.
We shuffle along, climb up enough to go unnoticed without ending right up at the back wall like deviants. The stage below isn’t raised, it’s just a big space at the front—proper lighting rigs above it, black curtains around the back.
Kieran’s parents edge along in the row in front of ours. The crazy waves again from the wives, gritting their teeth with the fun of the nerves. The husband and I stare at each other, face to face for a split second. Behind his glasses his eyes are swollen. I think for an instant of the white bellies of goldfish. One nod each and it’s over. They turn their backs and take their seats.
The drama teacher comes on in a flannel catsuit and asks us to put our phones on silent. There was a time they used ask people to turn them off. Of course, we’ll all want to take lots of pictures, she says, but if we could try and keep them to a minimum it would be hugely appreciated. I don’t want to take any photos; I hope Maura doesn’t, though part of me hopes maybe she will. It can be lovely when the phone throws up a ‘memory’ but all it leaves you with is a terrible longing. There’s never any good in it. Our youngest wants her mammy, two little arms outstretched. Maura gathers her and the little one pulls her mammy’s arms over her shoulders like she’s putting on her favourite coat, and is snug then and safe.
A little girl, slightly taller than the others—all in black, arms down by her sides—walks on, her fingers straight out on her hands. There’s a hush and she’s clever enough to wait for silence before she lifts her chin and speaks. The teeth are what I notice first, the teeth that are too grown, the head that is too big for the body. A long ponytail and a big misshapen grin. She says her lines deliberately and clearly. She might be in front of a mirror, practising, getting it right. A slow air of complete solemnity, but she can’t help her eyes flick down to the side. There’s a little smile fighting at the corner of her mouth.
The… Hummingbirds from Theatrics Naas—she gives it the required emphasis—are very pleased to welcome everyone to their show. I look at the backs of the couple in front as we applaud—Kieran will be coming on stage now. The woman and her husband are clapping enthusiastically, their hands raised a little higher than other people in their row. I clap harder too. Someone down the front does a whoop.
The kids are in costumes. Lots of fluffy onesie pyjamas, animals mostly. I try to guess which one is Kieran. As if you can tell by sight who has cystic fibrosis. Does it make them a bit puffy looking, maybe?
One boy has his face painted white, his nose blacked out in a circle, his eye sockets too. Black and white pyjamas. A skeleton. That can’t be Kieran. The drama woman would know; she wouldn’t have him dressed up as a skeleton. That rules him out, so I run my eye over the others. But I can’t stop coming back to the skeleton and staring. He’s thin, a skull head on him.
The girl who did the introduction has put on a fluffy tail. She lines up with her friends. I keep glancing back at her; she’s not Kieran but she’s someone else. It frightens me, and I want to ignore it. I run my fingers over my knuckles. I thread my hands together in my lap and I look straight at her. I feel ashamed to be staring. I drop my eyes again. It’s something in how she holds her shoulders back, confident and smiling, her eyes moving in the bright lights, not settling.
I don’t believe in ghosts but sometimes I dream that she is lonely. When I dream about her I wake up unable to help. The last time, I was doing all kinds of stupid tricks and jumps and she was sitting only a small distance away. I feel myself tearing up. Concentrate on the humiliation of being seen crying, about how selfish it is to produce tears, and go back to trying to guess which one is Kieran to take my mind off it.
The children step forward one by one, and say, ‘I’m special because…’ and one by one they fill in why with brave, loud voices. They’re too young to hide who they are. The people watching them know them better than they’ll ever know themselves. The first lad is an unpleasant character. ‘I’m special because I like creativity.’ He says it as if it does actually make him special, with one slow, involuntary blink. From a couple of rows down there’s two little laughs at the same time, one male and one female. The child looks towards them and smiles the smile of an only child. He has a thick top lip drawn down over his teeth.
Beside him, the one I think is Kieran, the one that can’t be Kieran, is nervous—but plucking himself up. He can’t stand completely still, the inside of his wrists brush his hips as he squirms, waiting, his skeleton shoulders rise up and down in slow motion. And I know it is him now, because when he steps forward I can see the woman with the curly hair tense. Her left hand moves to the side of her head. It looks like maybe he won’t even speak, and when he does it’s quiet, but he’s done it and the mother smiles. I can see her profile and her husband’s, turning to each other in the dark. It’s him: I’ve found Kieran. He’s special because he likes Manchester United, the same as one of the kids earlier. The fact of his illness is brazen under the lights. Are his parents ever able to get away from it? He’s not mine, but I feel that special parent helplessness, the awful anger. That chimpanzee fury, when you’re standing on the sidelines and you’re not allowed out on the pitch. There’s nothing you can do but roar.
I thought Manchester United weren’t popular anymore. Cantona. Kanchelskis. Schmeichel. Denis Irwin—the best full-back in Europe. Paolo Maldini had nothing on him. Giggs. Paul Ince. She liked Paul Ince. It was the name on the back of my shirt that got us talking. Could I not be someone else but Cantona? It was lost in the move I think, that shirt. It used to catch me out when I went looking for a jumper; another life folded under the sheets in the hot press.
The kids have all copied each other’s answers; it’s a stupid fucking game because all they want is to fit in. They’re all desperate not to be special. Apart from the little cunt at the end who likes creativity. ‘I’m special because I collect Pokémon cards,’ is used three times. ‘I’m special because I’m me,’ seems to be the one they’ve been told to use if they can’t think of anything, or don’t want to. The children saying it are embarrassed the way they should be. Kieran’s special because he’s going to die slowly and be buried by his parents before he’s forty.
Who painted his face white, and then took a black brush and did a circle on his nose? Who blacked out his eyes, painted over his eyelids so when he blinks there’s two holes in his skull? Was it the mother, holding him gently steady by the chin? Did she get a fright when she held him at arm’s length to look at him, and saw what she had done? Maybe they haven’t told the drama teacher. But this is a small town; if I know, everybody knows.
The girl tosses her long ponytail in a flourish. She gets the game. She’s wise to the joke of it. I can’t hear why she says she’s special; she speaks clearly but I cannot listen. Everybody laughs. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t look at her and I can’t not look at her. And this girl in my mind now, I can see exactly how she walks, the tilt of her head.
I don’t believe in ghosts.
On stage, the children are doing an awkward dance to some chewy bubblegum music. They’re almost coordinated but none of them are in sync. They tramp forward and swing their bony elbows, and step back with wooden jerking hips, rictus faces under paint. They hobble and they twitch and twist in their animal skins. One writhes slowly and one jerks his head, shuffling, mumbling and looking at the ground. They hesitate and linger and clench their fists and spread their fingers. What order will they die in? I stop pitying Kieran. Who knows if he will be the first to go? What are the odds? He’s probably strong favourite but it’s not that often the favourite comes in first. That young buck who’s just delighted dressed up as a cow with his udders out; he might well go out in a car too fast and too high. Or that girl—a cat of course, a kitten—might end up drowned in a river.
And even if Kieran has the shortest life, maybe that doesn’t matter so much. Better to be him than be a prick all your life, like the kid at the end is going to be. Better to be Kieran, than to be them struck down by frustration, living long lives with everything just out of reach. Pishing their last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish fucked up brats they spawned to replace themselves. Is that how it goes? The truths we knew. I can see the orange poster on my bedsit wall, but I can’t quite read it. She bought it for me in HMV and stood on my bed to stick it to the wall. She looked down at me out of the side of her eye, her smile fighting at the corner of her mouth when I annoyed her ankles. It always surprises me how young we were.
Better to be Kieran, painted as a skeleton and jumping and raging and shy; a bittersweet boy who will be mourned and never despised. Better to give him the strength to explode out from under the parent grief we put on him.
Another child is dressed as an old man and he is speaking. It may be his last public speech for all I know. He may be a priest burying someone one day; that big grey moustache might one day be a real one. Though who’d be a priest nowadays? He’s a farmer for now; these are the animals on his farm. At last, a bit of context. I look along the creatures in the farmyard. Kieran is a dog, not a skeleton, with a black nose and a patch over his eye. He is curled in a basket and when it’s his turn to speak he kneels up and holds hands like paws under his chin.
It’s the story of the Little Red Hen, she’s making bread and asking the other animals to help, at all the different stages. All the different jobs that have to be done. I look at my youngest, to see if she’s following things. Her face is like it is when she’s in front of her cartoons, blank and transfixed, the lips a still kiss. Only the eyes flickering, focusing. I’m glad we came, for her. Maura sees me watching her and our eyes meet, complicit, we’re still not able believe our luck. We’ll never get over winning the lottery and getting the cutest little girl in the whole world. I look around for other little brothers and sisters, the only people enjoying the show the way it wants to be enjoyed.
None of the animals will do their bit and they all give the same excuse every time. Easy for them to learn their lines that way. A few rows down someone is filming and I can see the tiny figures on the stage of their screen. It’s a man holding the camera, his wife leaning in to look at what he’s getting. When will they watch that video again? And how often? And why? And what will they feel when they watch it? Maybe it will be projected on a wall at a twenty-first for all the young adults to laugh at. The parents smiling along, punched in the gut with the time lost. Every time they look at that film, they will mourn something a little more. They will lose a little more.
Whoever wrote the script changed the ending. In the old days Little Red Hen fucked off with the whole loaf. Now, all the animals have learnt an important lesson, just from the threat that they might not have been allowed to share the bread when it is baked because they didn’t help with the work. They all gather round to eat together.
The kids bow, and we clap and whoop, I’d stand up to applaud if someone else did and God love Kieran the smile on his face.
The teacher is back to announce the interval. My son Stephen will be on afterwards. I wonder what it will be like to watch him. Snacks and drinks are available for all in the foyer. Maura wants us to go out, everyone else is going out, the youngest would like a drink of juice. But I can’t be near anyone, so I refuse to go with them.
I think about Kieran’s father. I want to say something to him. But what can you say? I want to tell him I’m sorry but I know what he’d think; it was there when our eyes met for that second earlier. You’re sorry for me, and now what?
There was nearly a fight at the burial. There weren’t enough shovels and men from different sides of her family wanted to fill the grave in. Her uncle lost his in a scuffle. I let him take mine because he looked like he’d tear it from my hand. I stood and watched those grim men grimly working.
I’m happy when everyone is gone and I’m sitting alone in the shady ranks, the bare space lit up below. The empty seats all around have folded themselves up, closing in the warmth the bodies left there. The rows are like the serried crosses in those soldiers’ cemeteries in France. Something alive in the numbers of them.
