Page 62 of The First Time I Saw You
‘I will, thanks for your help anyway.’ I’m being polite. How is it that I am still managing to be polite when inside I am full of chaos?
I hang up and look down at my stomach.
‘Oh, Bean, where do we go from here?’
‘Would you tell me, please,’ I whisper into the silence, repeating Alice’s line as I did as a child, ‘which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’Mum replies.
But deep down I already know. Washington DC.
Week Twenty-Five
Samuel
The McLaughlin family are clambering towards their seats en masse. The Kingspan Stadium is filled with the smell of grass and beer, the excited chatter mixed with the anticipation of the game. We used to do this a lot when I was a kid, come to see Ulster play. And when I played here, they didn’t miss a single game: Mam, Da and Sarah always screaming my name, always telling me to get up off my fat arse.
Michael is leading me to my seat. I’ve had to pass my plastic pint glass to Sarah to carry as I side-step my way to my chair, my backside sliding against strangers’ knees. What must I look like to them? A blind man coming to watch the game. We take our seats and I collapse Michael and put him below me.
The doctors knew my sight would deteriorate quickly, but I didn’t think it would happen so suddenly. The fist has begun to lose patience and has started to squeeze harder and faster; in the space of the last few weeks, the darkness has begun to creep closer. Like hot tar, it oozes from out of the shadows and swallows the world in front of me. I haven’t mentioned this to anybody just yet and I wonder if they’ve noticed how much more I’m relying on Michael, how much more I have to move my head to let my surroundings in. Sarah’s hand takes hold of mine and she passes the plastic cup into my grip.
‘Cheers,’ I say and take a sip. I hear her passing drinks to her kids as I stare out at the pitch, taking in as much of it as I can. I’ll be able to see most of the match if I move my head quickly enough with the players; it’s the rest of the stadium that will be stolen from me. The sky above it will be sucked away into a black hole. I will be able to hear my sister’s cheers and I’ll be able to hear Da’s insults and Mam’s gasps at a tough tackle, but unless I turn my head right towards their direction, their expressions will be hidden from me. My time is running out.
As the players run on to the pitch, we all clap and cheer, the noises of the stadium knitting together just as they always have, the whoosh of heat that comes from thousands of gasps, thousands of cheers, thousands of ‘ooohs’ as a player takes a hit, all the sounds weaving into each other to produce a whole ‘image’ that is just as complex, has just as many components as the view on the pitch, and it is just as intoxicating.
The game begins, and I watch the kick-off easily enough. White shirts with black collars chase after the ball, but the ball . . . well, the ball is just too fast for me to follow. Play soon slows down; I can watch the phases, the ball hunkered down beneath the players before it is thrown backwards, but then I’m lost again amongst the flashes of white shirts being guarded by the opposing reds. My eyes search the pitch until I find it. I never thought it would be this exhausting. I’ve lost track of the ball again.
‘You all right, Sammy boy?’ Da asks.
‘Yeah, I’m grand, thanks, tremendous game so far, eh?’ I answer as I scan what I’m fairly sure is the twenty-two-metre line.
‘Only, well, I only ask because you’re looking the wrong way, son.’
Arses.
I turn towards Da’s face. The crowd roar and I can sense that most of them are in the halfway position of standing to cheer for a try and sitting back down when the opportunity is snatched away from them. He isn’t looking at the game; he’s looking at me in a way that I haven’t seen for a long, long time. He’s looking at me just like he used to when I was a child – when I was Joseph in the school nativity and forgot my lines. Or when I got my arse kicked in a scrap when I was ten. The expression that tells you that your father would live that moment for you if he could.
‘It’s hard to keep track of the ball,’ I say and turn my face back towards the pitch.
‘Well, why didn’t you say so sooner, you silly arse? I always wanted to be a commentator. Now, turn your head towards the five-metre line, can you see they’re about to throw in the line-out?’ I feel Da’s arm around my shoulder as he begins possibly the worst commentary in a match that I’ve ever heard before, but, at the same time, one of the best.
I’m drunk by the time we get back into the car, which is more like a minibus, really. Gone are the days when we would all just squish in, Sarah sitting on my knee while as many cousins as we could manage would sit shoulder to shoulder, rugby shirts on top of rugby shorts. My limited sight is even more distorted, even harder to keep hold of, but I don’t care. Da, Sarah and I are singing rugby songs and Mam is telling us to hush up before we get ourselves arrested for disturbing the peace.
‘What’s next on your list, Sammy?’ Da asks in the over-loud way that we all do when we’re drunk.
‘A show,’ I say.
‘I get you, but that’ll be just me and you, lad,’ he winks over his shoulder at me.
‘Not that kind of show, Da,’ Sarah says as she rummages in her bag and passes packets of crisps to the kids sitting behind us who are whinging about not having another hot dog. ‘Sam likes musicals.’
‘What?’ Da yells.
‘Mr McLaughlin! Lower your voice or I’ll end up crashing the car and killing us all, and then where would you be?’
‘Where would I be? Dead, I’d imagine! What do you mean, Sammy likes musicals? What, likeJesus Christ Superstarand all that malarkey?’
‘I was thinking more along the lines ofWest Side Story?’ I say and then burp behind my hand as Mam takes a sharp corner. ‘You’d like it, Da, I hear there are more deaths in it than an episode ofGame of Thrones.’
