‘If you’re happy to go ahead I’ll join you shortly,’ she said and went into the staff room.
I pushed the wheelchair for the first time. It was harder than I imagined. It was a sturdy piece of equipment that had electrics on it which could be powered by a joystick on one of the armrests. But Ronan couldn’t use his hands, so I didn’t understand why he had an electric wheelchair; maybe it was an incentive for him to think that one day he would be able to control it himself.
I pushed him over the ridge of the double doors with a bump and out onto the wet tarmac path that led to the canteen, which was about thirty yards away in a separate building from the main school. It was a silent walk. Ronan was always the one to start a conversation. I didn’t know what to say to him staring at the back of his head so I didn’t say anything. It was easier to be speechless when I didn’t have to look into his eyes. The only other time I remember looking at the back of Ronan’s headfor so long was during cross-country when he ran in front and I tried to keep up.
When we got to the canteen it was packed. Ronan began shifting in his seat. A dinner lady came up to us and pointed out a clear area in the corner of the canteen close to the open doors so that we didn’t have to go too far inside and could be separate from the crowd. Ronan seemed OK with being there; even though it was loud, we weren’t surrounded by people. That little area was all ours. There was a high table to allow room for Ronan to be pushed in close and a plastic chair opposite for me.
‘Can I get you boys your dinner for yous? What would yous like?’ said the dinner lady.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll come up and have a look, thanks very much.’
‘No problem, love, just come straight on up to the hatch, don’t be joining that godforsaken queue,’ she said and limped off to the table behind us to clear rubbish. I was sure I heard her curse.
‘I’ll go up and see what there is,’ I said to Ronan. He was circling his eyes again, but the canteen noise didn’t seem to bother him as much as the assembly hall had. He had his back to the packed tables, which helped I think because all that was in his vision was the view through the window: fields stretching out into the far distance. I went to the hatch to see what was on offer but kept looking back to Ronan. I didn’t want to leave him too long on his own in case anyone came up to him and unsettled him.
Cheesy pasta was a favourite of ours but they didn’t have it that day. Hot dog and chips was usually my backup because it was on the menu every day. But Ronan didn’t like hotdogs; in fact, he was a very picky eater. On a day with no cheesy pasta and the only other choices being chicken curry, spaghetti meatballsand mushroom stroganoff Ronan would have probably gone for a large doughnut and a bottle of strawberry milkshake. But that was Ronanbefore, I had no idea what Ronan atenow. Why hadn’t Roberta told me? And where was she? She was supposed to be with us like she said. I stood at the hatch and looked over to Ronan still staring out the window.
I decided to avoid the eating situation altogether and got two bottles of strawberry milkshake, took two straws from the pot by the tills, paid and went back to sit opposite Ronan, whose gaze settled in my direction. I pierced the foil lids of the milk with the straws and took a draw of my own, then reached across and held Ronan’s straw towards his mouth. His lips morphed into a sucker, like a sea creature, feeling for the straw. When it was in the clutches of his lips he sucked the pink milk in little gulps. He didn’t dribble, as if to spare me the task of wiping his mouth, as if he remembered me looking away that morning when his mum wiped his nose for him.
My face began to burn. I couldn’t help it. And I knew Ronan could see it. So I looked down at the table as he drank until I felt the little sucking pulls on the straw stop. When I looked up Ronan was also looking down at the table.
‘Finished?’ I asked.
He let the straw go from his lips but kept his eyes down.
I took the bottle away and set it in front of him as he began to make grunting noises followed by a tiny burp. Behind him I saw the football team entering, led by Kevin Sherry, still in their mucky football strip. I didn’t keep up to date with school football matches but there must have been one against another school that morning and we had won apparently.
‘Champ-ee-oh-nee, Champ-ee-oh-nee, oh-lay, oh-lay, oh-lay.’
The whole canteen joined in, drumming the tables and stomping their feet on the ground. The vibrations made our milkbottles rattle on the table. Ronan’s face began to contort and redden. His eyes crinkled up and he started to make a raspy groan that I could just about hear under all the noise. I immediately brought the milk back to his mouth as a kind of distraction but his lips didn’t respond, he turned his head away and his face got even redder and then turned purple as his groaning got louder. I looked around at what else I could do for him.
Then he screamed.
His mouth opened wide. Spittled pink stalactites hung from the roof inside as he let out a loud wail that cut through the chanting and caused it to stop abruptly so that he was the only sound. Every head in the canteen turned towards us. The football team with Kevin at their front froze. Ronan kept screaming and screaming. It seemed to go on for an eternity until Roberta appeared from nowhere and without a word to me wheeled Ronan back outside, crooning, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’
In the stillness of the canteen with every eye on me, Ronan’s screaming could be heard fading in the distance.
Painfully slowly, the rumble of chatter began to fill the canteen again. Even as people turned back to their groups they would glance round at me every now and then. Kevin Sherry smirked at me before he too turned away to skip the queue ahead of everyone else to get his food at the hatch. Every stare stung me as I sat there. I was supposed to be Ronan’s friend and yet I couldn’t help him or understand him enough to do anything and the whole school witnessed it.
I looked at Ronan’s milk bottle opposite me with just a few sips taken. I felt the muscles behind my eyes start to ache. Leaving the two milks behind, I screeched my chair back, stood up quickly, walked out of the canteen and felt the half-blind blur of tears pooling in the bottom of my eyes. The cold air made it worse. It was the cold air that made me cry.
12
‘Brendan, what’s wrong? Come in, come in.’
Mrs O’Neill’s voice had the effect of making you drop all defences, especially if you were on the cusp of crying; her tone could tip those tears right out. And her eyes, they seemed so shiny to me, a clearness that made her gaze feel like a balm. Her face itself was magnetic as if to draw in and catch all that a boy may try to hide. There was simple safety in her presence. It’s why I was crying hard when she sat me down in the chair beside her desk.
There’s a type of crying I only remember having when I was really young. It was like a combination of an asthma attack and crying, a winded kind of crying that left you gasping and messy. There’s another type of crying that feels like a heavy press of dark cloud on top of you, squeezing those tears out through a painful gauze; that was the kind of crying I got in January when Granny died. Then there’s the helpless kind of crying you get because of an injustice, because you’ve run out of all reasonable options and you cry because of how unfair things are; like when a boy in primary school accused me ofsaying a bad word when I hadn’t and the teacher wouldn’t believe me and kept telling me to stop lying in front of the whole class until I eventually broke down and cried and said I had said the bad word. I cried then because of the forces against me that made it impossible for the truth to win. I was outnumbered.
When I cried in front of Mrs O’Neill that day it was like all those kinds of crying balled into one. A great big overwhelming wave. Mrs O’Neill sat down beside me.
‘Now Brendan, I know I’m the RE teacher but biblical floods aren’t in my skill set,’ she said in a gap in the noise I was making. ‘You’re causing a right old downpour, I’m expecting Noah to come sailing in his ark pretty soon.’ She gave a little laugh and I couldn’t help but do that laughing-crying thing at her joke and sniffed up all the mess in my nose and rubbed my face with balled fists.
‘Sorry, Miss.’
‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’
That voice. That gaze.
