On his way home, black clouds peppered the horizon. A hundred yards from the house, the footpath ended abruptly and Aodh had to manoeuvre past puddles as juggernauts thundered by. His school bag hurt his shoulders, but the journey was almost over. Soon he crossed the road and traipsed up the drive, noticing at once that his parents’ car was not there. Reluctant to ruin the hall carpet with his muddy shoes, he went around to the back door. Nobody was home. After depositing his school bag and coat in the hall, he watched his favourite programme. His family still hadn’t returned by the time it ended.

Twenty minutes later, lethargic from the TV viewing, Aodh got his school bag and went to his bedroom. Climbing the stairs let loose a spurt of energy. He coveted his brother’s cassette player, set it up on the window sill, pushed a tape into the slot, and pressed the play button.

The electronic chords battered the air. Aodh leaped around the room, jiggling his body and waving his hands. The next song was also good, but the third one was too slow. He switched it off and eyed his table, piled high with scribbled-over books − dog-eared, second-hand, tea-stained… and jotters for the different subjects, and loose paper for private attempts at something that never worked. He slapped open the latches of his bag. More books spilled onto the table. He picked up his homework notebook and turned to the page marked Thursday. Suddenly, reading and fiddling with the locks in his hair, he experienced fear. He rewound the tape and stared out at the fallow fields behind the house like they held some answers.

The dark clouds of his homeward walk had joined like continents in the sky, and the gathering wind abetted their progress. Second time around the songs meant nothing. The first of the rain was like wayward spit on the window. He went downstairs to the kitchen. Halfway through making a jam sandwich, he dropped the knife and bounded back up the stairs where he exchanged his school uniform for crumpled jeans that were too long for him and a chequered shirt. He went to his table, opened the Maths book on page 143, and shook his head. Remembering his sandwich, he shut the book and returned downstairs. Vapour was blowing from the kettle. Outside it was getting dark.

Thoughts of school numbed him. Luckily he could think of the girl he had seen up town at lunchtime. There was something original in her face. When he glanced back to eye the curve of her hips, Robbie Carcher, who was coming out of the chipper with Nick O’Shea, had howled: ‘Stop looking at that hoor’s arse!’ Aodh sighed ­– this had certainly spoiled the sublimity of the moment.  

In the afternoon, some of the other boys had taken Nick up on his offer of an afternoon’s teasing after he retold Robbie Carcher’s comment. Most just laughed, and Aodh had laughed too, but the glint in Nick’s eyes filled him with dread.

When pressed between classes, Aodh shrugged his shoulders and denied the incident. Later, he said he’d only been looking, and it wasn’t perving.

‘There’s no harm in looking.’

‘You should have seen his eyes though, boys. You should have seen his eyes.’

Nick always played to a captive audience. The others watched to see how far he would go.

‘And his tongue sticking out like a dog.’

Nick stuck his tongue out and panted. The primitive effect worked on the hard apathetic fellows at the back.

‘Desperate fucker,’ a dry voice commented.

‘I’ll tell her brother next time I see him.’ This offering was greeted with lazy laughter.

‘Sit down everyone.’ The pupils groaned as the over-energetic Religion teacher danced in the door.

Aodh glanced at Nick during the lesson for any sign of relenting. The teacher’s clicked fingers punctuated the stream of his anxiety.

‘Turn around Aodh. You’ll get a creak in your neck.’

‘Already has one,’ Nick muttered.

‘Stop laughing! My God, you’d swear it was last-class Friday. Then I could at least understand.’

Aodh looked around later, but Nick seemed far away, maintaining his usual pose during a boring class – head sideways, eyes fixed on the clock.

Bong. Bong. Bong.
            It was six. Aodh sipped his tea. The darkness had truly descended, and he had no idea where his family could be. The echo of the Angelus made the baroque mother and infant quiver on the television screen.  It was chilly, but Aodh did not light the fire. The news came on. There had been a shooting in the North – one man killed, another injured. Aodh pursed his lips and stared into the newsreader’s eyes, and she, nonplussed, stared back.

An element deep within wanted something indefinable from her. He wondered if the boys were right, if he was sick. He wondered what she looked like with no clothes. He jumped up and hastily changed sides and stared at the UTV newsreader through lowered eyelids. She was lighter somehow than her Southern counterpart; she was someone who could walk through crowds being herded away from bomb scares, without noticing a thing; she’d get her shopping done, her dresses and her makeup. He changed channels again, replacing the paisley-patterned lilt with the flat brogue of the RTE weather forecast: Gale force winds spreading in from the Atlantic coast would reach the Midlands by late evening.

He attempted to light the fire, but couldn’t because his father always performed this chore. Giving up, he went to the hall, and draped a long coat over his shoulders; then he stood at the window and pondered his family’s absence. The thought that they might have travelled to the capital triggered a search for a note. When he got tired of this, he rang his Auntie’s in Dublin, but she did not reply.

Upstairs, he clutched the Maths book like it was a tome containing the secrets of life and death. If he didn’t get past this chapter he might have to stay back a year. This thought was usurped by a worse fear. Nick and his pals were right: Aodh couldn’t even watch the news anymore without a slimy, dizzy sensation creeping through him.

Apart from Jane Sweeney the summer before, he had never touched a girl, and she just kissed him to get revenge on Joseph Doyle. She told him so much when he offered to buy her a milkshake.

But now he heard the car for sure. He tramped down the stairs.

‘FUCK!’ he yelled.

Nobody.

He decided on another cup of tea. As he waited for the kettle to boil, he recalled how the girl had faintly smiled as she passed. Of that he was certain. There was hope – he imagined them meeting at the lake and rowing out to an island in a boat with the paint cracking off; there they would live off berries and rainwater, and swim together in forgotten lagoons.

Just then, tyres spliced the drive’s gravel. Easing the kitchen door ajar, Aodh watched twin beams cut a path through the dark.

It was a man Aodh had never seen before. A damp ribbon of hair hung across his pate and his right eye was dug higher into his skull than his left. When Aodh opened the door, the breeze filled the hall. The visitor was wondering if Mr. Walsh was home. Aodh stared at him, and especially at his eyes.

The stranger got vexed: ‘Are you young Walsh?’

‘No!’

‘Do ya know what? I’ve come to the wrong house.’

Aodh did not reply. The man looked past his shoulder at the hall and snorted.

‘Do you know where the Walsh’s live?’

‘Eh. I think they live in a yellow bungalow, just before the crossroads. But I’m not sure’

‘Going out of the town, or into the town?’

‘Out of it,’ Aodh’s voice trailed off. ‘As far as I know…’

‘Seeya so!’ the man said. He jogged back to his car, muttering, ‘For fuck’s sake!’

Aodh closed the door, waving slightly at the red Toyota as it turned at the garage, and waited until it was safely down the drive.

A few moments later there was a thump upstairs. Aodh stood still like an artist’s model, his heart booming, his eyes focused on the melanoid grass outside.

The wind swept down from his bedroom; summoning up his courage, he went up the stairs. The small side window had become unhinged. Aodh stood watching the curtain flap against the wall, the forlornness of the scene captivating him until he remembered his Maths homework. It was the last warning from Clancy. Aodh hated Clancy and despised teachers generally. His bedroom was freezing now. He covered himself in a duvet and sat fingering his Maths book and counting the curtain’s slaps.

At eight o’clock he roared into space and hurled his table over, savouring the floor-shaking thud and the sight of books and papers scattering across the carpet.

Later, he checked the freezer for something to heat up, but there was nothing he liked. So he ate cornflakes. As he added the sugar, he seriously fretted about his family’s safety. They really must have gone to Dublin.

‘That must be it. Indeed… unless there has been an accident.’

 He sat eating, eyeing his profile’s reflection in the kitchen window. 

‘And I had to stay home because I’ve been falling behind in Maths.’

When he’d rinsed out the dish, horrified by the sugary milk and cornflake detritus discolouring the water, he tried to ring his Auntie’s again, but no one answered. By now, the cold had conquered the downstairs rooms. It made him awake and alert, and he quickly resolved to spend the twenty-five remaining minutes before the nine o’clock news ploughing through the Maths homework. If he even got two of the questions halfway started, he might be safe; the actual answers he could scrounge from Anthony Rourke in the morning.

On his way back upstairs, the phone rang. He stood a moment on the second step, hand clenching the banister, brow knitted.

‘Hello?’

A girl or maybe two, giggling.

‘Who’s that?’ The voice was so close it seemed to splash inside his ear.

Aodh said his name. Silence – he could hear urgent whispers.

‘How are you?’

‘I’m okay,’ he replied.

More whispers.

‘My friend would like to meet you,’ the voice said, then broke off giggling.

‘Who are you?’

‘You know who she is. You saw her up the town. At the lunch break. Outside the chipper.’

There was a pause. One voice giggled, a more earnest voice shushed.

‘Do you want to meet her?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know!?’ More giggling, muffled arguing, then the more serious voice said: ‘I have to go now, I’ll ring again.’

Aodh was unable to replace the handset for several seconds. He felt no joy. The world was hollow. He stole up the stairs, walked over the books strewn across his bedroom floor, and collapsed onto the bed pulling the duvet over his head and pressing it tight against his ears to force out the sound of the curtain beating the wall.

After a while, he got up and found his watch under the books. It was a quarter past nine and he had missed the news. With dread and boredom, he commenced drawing parabolas and scratching numbers and letters into his Maths copy. It was slow progress. He wished his family would hurry up home. Something terrible in the curtain’s swinging told him they were a long way away, and that she, the nameless voice he’d spoken to was even further.

He fast-forwarded the tape to a slower, melodic tune and summoned a vision of the girl and himself walking a whitened avenue. This avenue’s straightness lent it the appearance of endlessness and bright fields stretched from its silver margins. Aodh paused to drink some water from a jug the girl held cradled against her belly. Her school uniform was frayed, hair tousled, a couple of buttons were missing from her blouse: even so, the girl’s face scintillated in the light. At the end of the road, dust rose from a fast-approaching vehicle. She touched his cheek and a rainbow of bliss bridged the gulf between them. As the vehicle neared, it morphed into a pick-up truck with orange flames airbrushed across its bonnet.

The tape got caught and the dream dissolved. Aodh sprang up and squeezed the eject button before further damage could occur. Then he spooled the reel back with a biro, reinserted it, but did not press play again.

There was a late film on Channel 4. A pink triangle hovered in the top left corner of the screen. Lights off, Aodh sat curled on the sofa, legs wrapped in the duvet, the rest of him covered by the coat. The film was about a housewife who moved to a strange city with her family. 

Aodh reckoned a dirty scene was on the cards. Things were indeed looking promising when the housewife, accompanied by a young man, entered a shabby room with a bed in the corner. They were talking feverishly. Their incomprehensible words woke him, like darkness a nocturnal animal. In the light of the roseate triangle they began undressing…

The phone! Aodh slipped on the carpet in the hall as he ran to get it. Stumbling, his head hit against the wall, and he collapsed, writhing in pain. For a moment, he thought the carpet’s red pile was blood, and that his skull had been split in two; he pressed it together and screamed at the top of his voice. The phone was still ringing − he propelled himself like a crab towards it, jerked the chord, and watched it topple off the table.

‘HELLO?’

The dial tone. Aodh waited a short time, sniffling. Then he laughed at himself, a hateful, mocking snigger. Just then, he heard a woman groan in the living room. He rushed back in, but the moment had passed – she was fully clothed again, engaged in garden activities with her husband and children. Aodh returned to the hall, picked up the phone, cradled it at his chest, incanting evil words, then threw it as hard as he could against the wall. With a dull drrrring it broke into two jagged pieces of Bakelite. 

Her husband watched her change with the new love. She was deliberately cruel to him and neglectful of the children. Aodh was waiting for her to do it again; the corruption was colouring her every move. The television reception was fast deteriorating too: It always got bad during a storm. For the last twenty minutes, he could not see anything beyond grey fuzz. He could hear voices though and during her last monologue, he touched himself bitterly. The last sound was a gunshot.

As he urinated, Aodh stared into the toilet bowl and saw what he believed to be millions of pieces of sperm swimming around like tiny black eels. He looked at himself in the mirror when he washed his hands, at the purple rings stamped under his eyes. He felt there was no way he could ever go back to the school. A creature that looked like him had no place there.

He thought briefly of the girl who had rung. He spoke to her through the mirror, his lips moving, but no words coming out. He told her he knew of her incredible betrayals even before they had made contact, and how it was obvious that she was trying to destroy him.

 He recalled the woman in the film. Behind the cathode veil, he had watched her change from the nice young bride… He spoke silently to the actress, demanding to know how it had felt.

At three a.m. Aodh listened to the conflagration of wind and rain surrounding the house. He was on a journey in a van with the girl, passing through dark towns, the houses festooned with black flags. The vehicle was accelerating; she whispered in his ear, told him what it had felt like, and how she had been able to betray his love. When her bony knee knocked against the steering wheel, the van swerved onto the wrong side of the road. A car was speeding towards them; he could recognise the faces in the oncoming windscreen, all bunched together, peering into the night.

When Aodh woke up, the sky was bright and the wind had abated. He ate some cornflakes, and then walked, head bowed, to the school, where he sat half the morning without raising his eyes. None of the teachers bothered him, nor did any of the other pupils come near. Just before the midday break, a shy lad from a junior year knocked and stood by the door, until Clancy asked him if everything was okay. To the class’s mirth, he stumbled across the room and whispered in Clancy’s ear. Clancy nodded, looked directly at Aodh, and said: ‘The headmaster wants a word with you.’ Aodh got to his feet and left the classroom. Disinfectant filled his nostrils in the corridor; he looked through the window at the canal and the railway bridge and the Virgin’s statue. It was over. Everything had finally come to pass. He bowed his head and walked on.