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The idea came upon you not long after Dominic Kearney’s daddy had socked you in the face right in the middle of the main street there. His was a mean punch, not so much as a warning tap, and you felt sorry for Dominic - a little bit, for you were too much feeling sorry for yourself as your mouth was bleeding and maybe your eye too, maybe bleeding or perhaps just watering, but sore as hell nonetheless, and so not too much pity you had to spare for poor Dominic. If anyone had asked you, not that anyone had any such cause to ask you, but if they had asked, you would have said it was the punch gave you the idea.
You were not the lying sort, and this was a lie; but only a lie you’d have to give voice to should the situation arise. People did not ask you many questions. You were easily confused by such things.
Hy - po - thetty - cal. This was a word Siobhan had taught you, from one of her books, so. You remembered it nicely. A hypothetical lie. That was not a real lie and so it would be okay, you supposed.
Really, the germ of the idea came when Colm had laid hands on you. Or a bit after that, a bit after the fact, because you had been sore and then you had been crying and then you had to get home, and then the idea itself had come. That it seemed all right for Colm to lay hands on you. That it was not bothersome, and it was your botherin’ that made Colm so ragesome, but when he put his hand under your armpit and lifted you up from the dusty road, oh, it was like the story you’d heard in church a long Sunday past, when Jesus had pulled Peter up out of the water, you didn’t remember why or whatfor but the easy strength of it, the sense that Jesus saw Peter struggling and went to him and pulled him up from drowning just because he was kind and that’s how Colm made you feel right in that moment, even though you were truly very sore–
And he’d not even stopped at that. Bundled you up onto the horsecart and spoke gentle words to the old mare and took the reins for you, his hand never leaving you, his hand on your back, that fat, nice, kind hand, and when you’d reached the split in the road - your farm up on the brae, and his cottage down at the water’s edge and staring out to the mainland, always buffeted by the cruelest kind of sea wind, you wondered sure often why he didn’t move from it, when the wind whistled in through his cracked left-bottom-most window and rattled all his puppet people hanging from the trusses - at that split, that fork, which you’d always liked before, a point to say goodbye and so-long and see-you-at-two-o’clock-tomorrow-Colm, there he put both his hands on both your hands and put the reins in your hands and didn’t say nothing, didn’t say goodbye or nothing, and clambered down from the horsecart and loped off down his side of the hill.
It was no bother for Colm to touch you. That was surely unarguable. He’d just proven it.
What about the other side of it? If you were to touch Colm, as long as you didn’t speak a word, would that bother him? You’d no reason to see that it would.
You determined to go at night. That should be better for it. If you went in the daytime, he might thinking you were calling in on him like usual for to head to the pub, which wasn’t allowed now, and you feared deeply prompting him to take drastic measures a second time. Then you didn’t want to interrupt his supper, and if he had downed a few pints across the evening, and was loose and sleeping, he’d be primed all the more not to cuss at you and make you feel bad and pick up his garden shears. You loved Colm best after three pints and before he began in on the hard spirits, when he was quickest to laughter and his eyes were crinkled and soft and often he would take up his fiddle and play a grand sort of tune for dancing, you could not dance but you stamped your feet and clapped and if it was just the two of you, not at the pub, not out where others were, but just the two of you and his dog in front of his fireplace, then you might dance a while, shy with your arms but stomping out a bawdy drum beat with your boots to match with the gay old fiddle. “Sure you’ll never dance the céilí,” Colm had barked, and the dog barked too, and all of you had a good night then.
He was a softer man at night, was Colm. Yes, you should go at night for when you went to touch him.
That meant a day to pass with purpose, and this you were unused to.
You tended the farm. You milked the two grown up cows slowly, and the younger one not at all, seeing as how he was a little bull, and you would have to sell him soon for meat or breeding. You had never been able to slaughter the bull calves yourself. You didn’t think you could kill something that’d slept the night beneath your kitchen table, and this, Siobhan huffed at you, was why the animals were only for outside. If you managed to keep the animals outside for once in your life, Siobhan said, you could be in nice rump steaks for dinner for a month. But you must sell them. This one, too, soon. Nice rump steak dinners for some fatherless, brotherless family on the mainland.
You gave him a smack on his belly so he did not feel left out of the milking, and then poured the fatty milk out of the bucket into the pail, and put the pail inside in the hall with a checkered cloth over the top to keep the flies from it, and then looked at the sky and frowned and wished it were more dark already. You had never seen the sense in wishing the days away, because your days were always nice and you liked them, you liked to wish good morning to Jenny and eat Siobhan’s porridge, especially if there was brown sugar at O’Reardon’s that week, that melted atop the porridge into a sickly syrup that stuck to the back of your spoon and you could lick all dainty like the cows at their saltlick, and you liked to tend the farm, though it was less a farm and more a garden, but still, you liked to tend it and be proud of it, the patches of wonky vegetables and the cows and the old mare who was often tired these days but always stood still for when you harnessed her and took the milk into town without complaint, and then after midday, at two o’clock in fact, you liked to call in on Colm–
You liked–
You had liked that part of the day–
But now that part of the day never came any more. You wished very hard for there to be no more two o’clocks. What was the point of two o’clock if not to tell you to call in on Colm?
The rest of the afternoon was a dull one, a greyish one, with the clouds low and the noise of the war from the mainland shuddery and all echoes, so that you could not tell how many cannons were fired exactly, nor how many gunshots; and neither warm nor cold, especially in the house, where you could not decide if for to start a fire in the grate, or if you should fetch a blanket atop your jumper, since you were sweating at the neck where it folded down but cold at your elbows where the wool had long ago started to fray. It all made you unsettled and restless, and you slumped in your chair, heavy and useless-feeling, but your right foot tapped out a military drum beat on the floorboards, ratta-tatta-ratta, accompanied all the while by the squeaking wood and the distant, distant gunfire.
Siobhan was home by four o’clock from her wanderings and chores, and she set to the laundry. “You’ll help me if you’ve time to just sit there like a lummox,” she said, and you were affronted. You tended the farm. Housework was her work.
“I’ve no notion how.”
“I’ll learn you plenty sharpish.”
“You’re all right.”
She hefted the laundry basket in her arms and huffed a great sigh like the cows when they were reaching the end of their milk and vexed by you still pulling. “It wasn’t an offer, Pádraic. If you’ve time with your afternoons now–”
She did not finish that sentence. She looked ashamed to have started it, and didn’t press on.
Siobhan did the laundry and you sat. Ratta-tatta-ratta. Waiting for night.
*
It turned dusky. Not quite night.
“Shall I read to you some from my book?” Siobhan asked in her gentlest way, and you shrugged your shoulders up about your ears and said, “No,” for you had already been made to feel small this day and did not want to shrink all the moreso. She had often read to you as a little boy, though you had not really listened to the words at all, just enjoyed the up and down lull of her voice. Reading to seemed like a thing for children. You wondered why she’d not grown out of the habit.
“Well, what if I were to sit by the fire and read my book aloud and you just so happened to be in earshot, hmm?”
You shrugged again, less roughly though. “I suppose that’d be well enough.”
“All right, then, Pádraic.”
*
You didn’t change properly into your pyjamas. You pretended, so as Siobhan wouldn’t have suspicions, and pulled on your sleeping shirt over the top of your jumper and tried to hide its lumpy bulk with your crossed arms, and kept your thick socks on, and did some deception with your hands quickly so it seemed like you’d changed your trousers when really they were your daytime trousers all along, and got under the bedsheets as prompt as a little boy on Christmas.
“G’night Siobhan,” you said, as you always said it.
“Goodnight, Pádraic,” she sighed. Often she sighed now. And often she cried at night, so you waited a little while in case she started up crying instead of sleeping, but no crying came, and her breathing got nice and calm and regular and you knew she was asleep.
You were patient and waited some more. Maybe half an hour. It was hard to tell. Maybe it was only a few minutes but it felt like a good half an hour.
Very, very slowly, you sat up. You knew the places where your bedframe creaked most, and kept your weight off them. You unbuttoned each button on your sleeping shirt and folded it as best you could and slid it under your pillow. You had not enough pillows to stuff the bed and make it look like a person still sleeping there, should Siobhan wake in the night, and you were annoyed that the thought only came to you now, too late, a good thought but far too late and with nothing to do about it, so you simply pulled the sheets to and tried to be neat. At least then it would look on purpose, that you had left, and not that you had been spirited away or robbed of your senses or murdered.
Leaving the house was a tricky puzzle too, all creaks and squeaks and cracks underfoot, but you were careful, you took it slow, there was plenty of night left and you in no rush. You took your big coat from its hook next to the door, and opened the door, and pushed the door to behind you–
The bell! The bell! Sweet Jenny’s bell, you had forgotten, and she so thrilled to see you at this unusual hour–
You ran to her in the little stable and grabbed the bell with one hand to stop it and her muzzle, gently, in the other, and shushed her, only love in your voice, and stroked her muzzle and kept the bell silent until her excitement passed and she was settled. “Be a good one now, Jenny,” you whispered, and rubbed and patted her back and her flank to show her how good she was and how much you loved her.
Is this how you were going to lay hands on Colm?
You hadn’t considered it.
All the while you’d considered what to do but not how to do it.
It was a long walk, so, to Colm’s cottage. You had time to think.
*
You hummed a tune. It was very dark and you could not see well and there were not cliffs enough around you in the landscape to echo the hum and help you find your place in the world, but you hummed to keep yourself company. You were not a tuneful person and it pleased you to have made up such a little ditty as you went along, but then you realised it was not your tune at all, but one that Colm had played on his fiddle at the pub the last time he had a session, with Eoghan on the bodhrán and a lady from the north end of the island that you sometimes saw in church singing a mournful tune, smiling while she sang though the words were sad, about a woman awaiting by the cliffs for the sea to bring her sailor husband back to her whether alive upon his boat or dead upon the waves; that’s the tune you had been humming.
You stopped.
So you walked on with no tune at all.
*
Colm never locked his door. He had a copper gate latch on the inside that he could keep out the laziest of thieves with, but he never did care to use it. Usually you would announce yourself as you stepped across the threshold, say, Colm, the door’s open– but you had promised him that you would not say a word, even a single word could be a bother to him, so you’d say nothing.
It was very dark. The moon hid behind the clouds and gave you no help. But you knew the inside of his cottage well from years and years of calling in, knew where he stacked his trunks full of books and paper for writing, knew where his worn out old armchair sat, knew where his masks and puppet people hung down and where to step so as not to rattle them.
Once you’d heard Jonjo say those puppet people were something unnatural, something un-Christian, but you had sat plenty an evening with Colm while he worked them with his little whittling knife that looked too small in his big hands but turned the wood ever so nice-like, carving big scrapes out of the driftwood he’d fetched up from the beach or sometimes if you had a hunk of firewood that was too big for burning and seemed just the right size for a puppet person, you’d lug it all along with you down the hill and say, Colm, Colm, I brought this for you for to make a puppet person, and he’d say, Ye, it’s just right, just so, isn’t it, and he’d whittle away all night while you talked, and laugh while you talked, and have to stop his whittling while he laughed because his shoulders were shaking so much. He did used to laugh at your talk. And not even such a long time ago, but recent times. He’d smile and laugh and talk back at you. That wasn’t bother, was it? Why’d he never said it was such bother?
There was a new smell in the room, a funny smell that turned your nose up. You swiveled your head this way and that, sniffing the air, and wondered if it was maybe cannon smoke drifted all the way from the mainland, but it was not a tangy smell, not acrid like used gunpowder, but meaty and rotting.
You felt out with a hand towards where you knew the table was.
You felt the battered shoebox on the table.
It was Siobhan brought it back to him, though you had much offered. The bottom of it was the crisp, uneven texture of something that had been very wet and dried very slowly. It smelled terrible.
Twelve days old.
You stopped touching the box and went on up to the stairs. Almost a ladder more than stairs, really. Colm was getting old and getting fat and you’d seen him struggle up them more than once, but he would not change things. He disliked change. He disliked change! And he’d damned you both with the hugest change of them all!
You had an idea that he would be different after you laid hands on him. You felt different because he had touched you. You were sure the same would be true the other way round. You would be Jesus-like, this time. Heal him up of this dreadful melancholy that made him so mean. You were sure of it.
You’d been up to his sleeping place only a few times past. You didn’t know it as well in the darkness, and wished for a slice of the moon to wave in through the uncurtained window. It didn’t, still. So you moved very slowly. Felt your way. Felt unfamiliar things. Colm’s things.
Colm’s dog snuffled in the night-dark, awaking. She did not bark, but whinnied, and you wanted to say, it’s only me, girl, it’s me, lass, it’s Pádraic, lass, so that she would know you for a friend, but once you had crossed the threshold into Colm’s house your throat had seized up altogether, and even if you’d wanted to speak you couldn’t, a terrible fear clammed you up, a terrible suffocating sort of fear. You breathed very shallow. You had to put your hand out and let her sniff it, her wet nose touching the very middle of your palm, and she did recognise you then, and whined just once more to have been disturbed from her sleep, and then calmed.
That’s when, exactly when, the clouds shivered and passed aside and the moon lit up the room. Not a warm candle’s light, but enough to make out shapes, icy whites suddenly there among the deep blacks.
Colm’s bed was too small for him. No bigger than your bed at home, and he was a bigger man. He slept by necessity with his knees bent and his arms folded across his chest. His sheets had come half off. He must toss and turn in his sleep. Not like you.
The moonlight made the crags and creases of his face deep and sad. He frowned, asleep. He had been giving you such blank looks for days, the look of a stranger, not happy, not angry, just ignorant of you. He was a man who looked at you and felt nothing. But asleep, he frowned.
You could punch him, after all. Maybe that was the idea all the while. You could sneak into his room at night and give him a good seeing to and show the whole of Inisherin that you weren’t a happy lad after all, you weren’t one of the good ones, you were just as mean as all the rest and could hit and smack and cuss and everyone would know it and Colm especially would know it that you weren’t a one to be crossed and this was his punishment for doing that foolish nonsense with the shears and his forefinger and he would have to say sorry for it and have to say he did not want to be hit again and have to say he would be your friend again so you would not be turned all the way mean.
You’d raised your fist without even thinking to do it.
His hand with the stump knuckle was lying on top of his disheveled sheets. It smelled the same smell as the shoebox downstairs. That must be why the smell needn’t bother him.
It bothered you.
It was not nice to be bothered.
You didn’t want to punch him at all. You just came here to touch him.
You unmade your fist.
And so, to it, then.
Very slowly, very careful-like, you put your left knee onto the edge of his bed and let it take your weight. It rolled him ever so slightly towards you, and you kept very still, but his eyes were closed and his breathing deep.
You put the back of your hand on his cheek first. You remembered Siobhan doing that when you were feverish as a boy, and clucking her tongue when she felt your hot-cold skin, but Colm was not hot-cold, just the normal sort of cold, and his skin quite dry, and not that soft seeing as he lived so close to the saltwater and the sea air, but not unpleasant neither. The skin of a man you knew.
Then you put the front of your hand on his jaw. It felt like your own jaw when you had shaved the morning before but not that morning. It was funny to feel all the extra skin he had on his neck. He was not fat, really. You called him fat. You had never called him fat before but now you called him fat. Really it was just age. Just how a man’s skin got when he was older. You’d get like that too when you got old, if you got old.
Then you put your hand to his hair. You carded your fingers through his hair. Two times. You didn’t really know what to think about that and so tried not to think anything at all on it.
Then you touched the back of his hand on the hand where he had taken the finger off.
“Pádraic,” Colm said, because he was awake.
You didn’t say anything. You didn’t and you wouldn’t and you couldn’t.
He gave you space to answer, and when you did not, he seemed satisfied somehow. You were learning the lesson he’d set out to teach you, even though you had been ill-schooled as a child. It never came easy to you.
“It’s a cold night,” Colm said.
You nodded. That felt dangerous. It wasn’t speaking but it was like speaking, it was a reply of sorts, and your heart beat badly while he decided if this was bothersome or no.
“I’d like to go back to sleep now, Pádraic,” Colm said, looking at you in your eyes.
You’d planned it all day and come all this way. You were still holding his hand.
And then you lent forward on your knee and hefted yourself up and climbed into his bed with him.
–For what did you do that?
*
So that you could touch him as much as you could touch him.
*
Colm let you in. The bed wasn’t big enough for him alone, and made a noise of such distress under the weight of the both of you that the dog barked and turned in a circle. Colm shifted back as much as he could, flat against the wall he must’ve been, and you tried to make yourself small and fit yourself in the nooks and crannies of his body, your leg between his legs, one arm over the top of him and the other tucked out of the way, your face pressed under his chin and above the swell of his chest. He made a disgruntled sigh but let you in.
As long as you didn’t speak, it was no bother. That was the rule. He’d– he’d never said that rule aloud but you were sure of it.
Maybe he’d be able to sleep like this. It sure didn’t seem comfortable. But maybe if you laid very still. If you laid very still and were no bother then at the very least if he couldn’t sleep he could think, he could think of his poems and his tunes and his woodwork and his legacy and all the things you had distracted him from thinking about before. Just keep very still.
The moon grew tired of wasting its light on Inisherin while Inisherin was asleep. It was dark again. You turned your head even more down against his body and it got darker still. His breath rumbled in his chest. Not a healthy breath. His sighs rustled your hair and made the top of your head warm. He slid his hand out from where it was stuck between you and shook it and put it atop your hip to hold you from falling out the bed.
Thumb, then nothing, then finger, then finger, then finger. That’s how it felt on your hip.
*
You fell asleep.
You fell asleep?
*
Was Colm sleeping also? It was not right comfortable.
*
Nonetheless you got some sleep. It felt good there. It felt safe. Colm had always felt safe until twelve days ago and now here it was again.
*
Colm made a noise that sounded a bit sore, a bit wounded. You had been lying in the same stiff way for ever such a long time.
“It’ll be dawn in a moment,” he said quietly. His voice was a growl but not a mean one, just because he was old and bear-like. “Best be off with ye.”
It was a kind thing for him to say. Not to turn you out but to let you go of your own accord.
You had been sleeping and your body was slow. He waited, unmoving, until you had gotten out of the bed. You’d never taken your shoes off. It had happened too sudden-like. You felt good about it all. You had stuck to the rules, and now he knew that you loved him still, because you had laid hands on him, just like he had laid hands on you, and you were equals again, and friends again, and both of you Jesus and both of you Peter, drowned and saved.
“G’night, Pádraic,” Colm said.
“G’night, Colm,” you said, sheer habit.
He stared at you.
You stared back.
And then you turned and you ran.
*
You stopped and vomited on the walk home, at the fork in the road where the road split between Colm’s house and yours.
*
It had been such a good idea, and you, you were beginning to realise, had grown a mean habit of ruining all the good things in your life.