Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online Page B

on a stool near the piano, where he did his homework. She sang from seven until ten. The restaurant was quiet and she bought him a lot of Cokes, sang love songs that had no politics to them. She had a beautiful voice and sometimes he thought it was made more beautiful by all the cigarettes she smoked. He would watch the customers as they whispered. They were conspiratorial. They didn’t talk loud or address each other by the clue of their first names. They hunched over their plates. It seemed to the boy that even the food was under siege.
    At the end of the evening she always sang a song about ferrying her love over the ocean, but the sea was too wide and she could not swim over and neither did she have wings to fly.
    He and his mother took a taxi home each evening and he would watch her in the kitchen, staring at the back door, a teacup shaking in her hand, cigarette smoke curling up from the butt placed on the edge of the saucer.
    In her nightdress she would practice moving through the dark of the house, beginning in the kitchen, then along the hallway, her eyes closed, touching the welcome mat with her toes, reaching out to check the bolt on the door, turning around, climbing the stairs without holding the banisters, still blind so she would learn the whole landscape of the house, along the landing, and into the bathroom, where she would take the duvet out from the airing cupboard. And then she would kneel down by the bath to run the water, all the time her eyes still shut tight, both taps fully opened. She would plunge the duvet into the water and finally she would carry the dripping mass down the stairs and lay it against the bottom of the door in case the street outside went up in flames.
    Always that strange collaboration. Outside, the arc of color. Inside, the duvet soaking.
    *   *   *
    THE BOY TRIED to stake out a cell in the caravan, one window, one bed, a jug of water, a fluorescent light, a chair, a galvanized bucket for a chamber pot. He stayed in the space, not breaking its borders, hungry for three hours until she came home—her face flushed with drink, he thought—and she was carting groceries: sausages, eggs, cheese, black pudding, three fresh loaves of bread.
    I got the job.
    Did you hear any news?
    Two nights a week, she said.
    Any news, Mammy?
    Isn’t that great?
    Mammy.
    She sat down at the table and lit a cigarette and stared at the ash as it crumpled and flared. His first day he went to see the doctor, she said. They took his weight and his blood pressure and all that. Gave him a water cooler and some salt tablets and they put him in a cell on his own.
    Salt tablets?
    I think he must need them for—
    Isn’t salt a type of food?
    I don’t know, love. I don’t think so.
    How much water does he drink?
    A few pints a day, I suppose.
    How much weight has he lost?
    Oh, God, I don’t know, maybe a pound, love. Maybe more.
    The boy pondered this for a while and then asked: Is he okay?
    He’s fine, I think. They put food by his bed though.
    They what?
    They put food in his cell just in case. Leave it by his bed. On a little tray they wheel in and out. I heard it’s better food than they ever gave him before. And they count every last chip and pea.
    Pigs, said the boy, and he was delighted when she didn’t scold him.
    Did Grandma visit? he asked.
    There’s no visits. There’s a priest in the prison and he phones her at night and he tells her everything that’s going on. And some others keep in touch with her, too. And there’s notes, they write notes on pieces of cigarette paper and get them smuggled out.
    Jesus, they must have wild wee handwriting.
    She gave a little chuckle and finished off the last of her cigarette. He noticed that she was smoking them farther than ever before, dragging all the way down to the filter, burning all the white paper, and that her fingers were a darkening yellow.
    Will he write me one?
    You never know, but I’m sure he’s exhausted.
    Can we visit when