A Slanting of the Sun

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SHE CRIES SOMETIMES, without noise. I know not to talk, only to leave my hand under hers on the gearstick. Where were you all the time before the court case, she asked me once, early on. In my room, I said, I slept a lot. She said she’d heard I was seen below in the Ragg and inside in Easy Street in Nenagh as bould as you like. She wasn’t accusing, just telling me what she’d heard. I said I wasn’t, and that was enough. You’d hear lots of things, she said. People thinking they’re helping. I look sometimes at the side of her face when she cries, the straightness of the line the tears make slowly on her cheek, the red of her lips, and I want to touch her cheek, to wipe away the mark of her sorrow. But I never do.

My mother and father don’t know what to say to me. Will you go back training? My shoulder, Dad, I can hardly lift a hurl with my right hand. Oh, ya, ya. Sure of course. More physio, maybe. And I say something along the lines of It’s fucked for good, Dad. And he clenches his jaw and I’d say he thinks to himself He must have got that roughness in jail and God only knows what happened to him in jail and I’d say me in jail is all he thinks about ever since the day I was charged and still he won’t ask me about it, never, ever. Would you not go out for a few pucks below in the field maybe or against the wall beyond and maybe it’ll come right? And I say nothing and he taps his forehead with his forefinger like he doesn’t know he’s doing it and asks will I eat another cut of fruitcake.

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