Michael Wynne

To the circling screech of terns and gulls, they skidded to a halt outside the flat-roofed house near the edge of the peninsula. Agilely, the uncle swung himself to the ground, and when he came around to slide his arms under Ger and fold the feeble body to his chest, the deep green wheelchair was waiting, looking slouched and stolid, on the stones. As he jerked the boy in the chair over the short stony track to the house, whistling with an uneasiness that his charge was aware of, Ger's mother, slender in a summer dress and long gardening gloves, came around from the back where she'd been strategically placing plants in the sun room. She met them before the steps to the open front door, through which Ger could see in the tiny hallway an aquarium placed provisionally on a trestle table against the wrought iron supports of which rested a dusty, freshly dismounted Sacred Heart picture. A pair of spare secateurs hung obliquely from a vertical nail in the lime-green wall. From a black bulging refuse bag on the left the begrimed leg of a man's pair of longjohns trailed.  

After the adults had murmured in a businesslike way for a couple of minutes his mother, hitching her head in Ger's direction, said, "Well, any trouble?"  

The uncle, his hand, restless but gentle, leaning on the boy's sloping shoulder, said, "Arra, not at all," and asked Ger in the singsong way much used for him how he enjoyed the drive there.  

Ger thought of the series of annihilated creatures on the tar and shivered, but since he had long learned that to give his real opinion was to be perceived as asking for it he only said, "I liked it."  
"His room's as good as ready. It's the back one," his mother said over his head to her brother-in-law, an impatient tightness in her voice; "the room where Garvey slept."And died, most likely, thought Ger. Garvey, he knew, was the eccentric - so-called - who'd lived alone on this wild headland in this squat, modern house. Without delay the adults - to get him out of the way, as he knew - brought Ger to the dim shabby back room that was to be his, with its single-paned window looking towards the hazy horizon. As they left him to get acquainted with his new space, one of the first things he glanced at was the stained ticking on which he was to sleep, where nights out of mind Garvey had lain and tried vainly to dream his way toward better understanding of his sanity and himself, as Ger imagined now. Here Ger's powerless body would be lying for the autumn, on a mattress that soaked up quarts of the dead man's semen, against a pillow that supported his frustrations and his foresight of oblivion. Framed high above the bed were the words to the national anthem, Amhran na bhFiann, the words of which Ger had by heart, though no-one closely related to him would have known this.  

Ger remembered the conversation with the next-door hairdresser that his mother had had in the florist's place she helped run back in the town, about how, bizarrely, she'd been left the house by a crazed nationalist who'd been related to her cheating and absconding husband, and how there seemed to be poetic justice in the bequest. There, she had continued, she would rest for the latter half of the year, taking a break from her work in the town while she decided what she wished to do with her life. Ger, she had mentioned grudgingly in his presence, must be brought out of necessity, there being no way around it. Loudly and lovelessly she had said it, in the constant manner she had, to get back at him for being born the way he was.  

He turned his chair from the bed to the plywood closet with the thick, laboured movement of the solitary and the drudge. At the foot of the closet a black refuse bag, like the one in the hall, sat hunched like a dwarf. From tears in the plastic, colourful portions of objects could be seen. Later, they would be picked up and dumped with the rest of the debris the man's life had accumulated.  

Ger, overcoming guilt like an expert, hauled the bag from the bottom of the closet and upended it with such abandon as he gloomily felt he would have little chance to repeat over the ensuing months. From the dusty depths of the sack fell to and spilled from his lap an assortment of ephemera: the inserts of toilet paper, disposable razors, flavoured condoms, newspaper clippings, a polystyrene beaker, a bound collection of business cards, a small tricolour. Wedged at the bottom, so that Ger had to reach in and tug it free, was a stout envelope filled with magazines that when opened with young, shaking fingers disclosed full-length pictures of gleefully musclebound men with naval-high erections, or bent over with pulled apart buttocks and pink glistening anus winking at the viewer. Never having seen anything like it, though aware that such existed, Ger, tumid, sat with his arms bracketing the pages, his mind full of their images, and of the months that he would spend indulging his other, hidden difference here in this room, not as absolutely alone as he had originally thought.