Róisín Lanigan

The news told them every day that society was coming apart at the seams. The presenters in their pastel suits frowned into the camera and recounted numbers. 12 dead. 45 injured. 6 legs. 910 bullets. 250 tonnes. It was funny (as in funny peculiar, not funny ha ha, because eventually you learned to dull it all to a buzzing in the background). You took in the numbers and repeated them to each other. Awk isn’t it terrible. Yes 45. Found his leg on the overpass. I heard that. But you didn’t engage with it, not fully, with any level of depth. It was just a low level mumbling in the back of your mind. You said the words but your brain didn’t connect to them, or give them any more meaning. Sometimes you just said them to each other to fill the silence.
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The numbers on the news wormed their way into Peter’s mind and ticked there, like a metronome. They buzzed, not unpleasantly, in the back of his head. They soundtracked his every move. Like, if he was boiling the kettle, that was a news report on 45 people injured in a blast on Castle Street. He repeated it over and over in his head as he waited for the kettle to boil, 45 45 45 45 45. If he didn’t say it a certain number of times then that would put the scud on the whole day. But if he did say it a certain number of times, then that meant the day would probably be okay. The numbers soundtracked Peter’s walk to work, each number punctuating his steps on his way to his shifts at the bar. Stuff happened every day and you had to go on as normal. If the newsreader said there was 250 tonnes of mortar somewhere he knew it would buzz in his head all day, 250 tonnes 250 tonnes 250 tonnes, as he walked from one paving stone to the next. If Peter stepped on the middle of the paving stone when he was saying ‘250’ or ‘tonnes’ then that was bad luck. It might mean some fella getting drunk and kicking off during the next eight hours because he said right enough now that’s enough for you the night. Or it might mean Bernard was in a mood with him for fucking up one of the kegs, or dropping a pint glass or taking a dud score note. Or it might mean something worse. Someone might drive slowly behind him as he walked home, jump out and rip him into tiny wee pieces. Or they might do it to someone else. On the other hand, if he didn’t step on the middle of the paving stone when he was saying ‘250’ or ‘tonnes’ in his head, then it was all fine and nothing to worry about.
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It might sound like it was a lot of effort, the repetition and the news reports, but it wasn’t actually that bad. When you were thinking these things over and over again, you see, Peter told himself, there wasn’t any room to be thinking your own thoughts. There was no room to worry about Irene going off him. There was no room to worry about Bernard saying no more work for you, or getting caught in a bomb on the way home, or getting dragged into a car, or getting stopped, or getting lifted, or getting shot, or thinking to yourself, are you happy, are you fulfilled, is this what you want to be at with yourself now or forever? The repetition could be a ballache, but it was a kind of magic too. It was a way of protecting yourself from bad things that just happen unexpectedly in the world. In that way it was peaceful.
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Of course, as with all magic, it was not an exact science. Sometimes the numbers would all line up right, but there’d still be wee fuck ups. Sometimes he would lose focus and go spacey, and forget what he was doing for a second. He jumped whenever someone dropped a pint and it smashed. Or whenever a car backfired just outside. Or whenever someone shouted at him from the other end of the bar, roared YO because he’s messed up an order or missed them in the queue. Sometimes Peter would get so worried about all that he’d call in sick and miss shifts. By the end of the week he actually did begin to feel sick, and called in sick for a double weekend shift. His stomach had begun to crumple unpleasantly on itself and cramp when he lay in bed at night after work. On Saturday night, their busiest night of the week, Peter went to the Chinese takeaway with Irene when she was working instead of working himself.
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I thought you liked it, Irene said carefully to him, as he stood by the counter, doodling in her orders notebook. I thought you liked the job down the town. I do, Peter said back, picking at the peeling faux marble countertop and not meeting her eyes. This was true. He did like it, most of the time. And he liked having money, being able to do stuff. He liked the weight of the wallet in his pocket when it was flush with cash, handed directly to him by Bernard, in a big thick envelope. He liked the safety of the money, the opportunity it revealed to him to do things and go places, even if the opportunity never materialised to anything other than fegs and some money he threw his Ma and sometimes wee drinks and things for Irene. He did mean to save, but more often than not the novelty of the cash manifested itself in stupid purchases. He bought himself a set of dumbbells and brought them up to the flat in the lift, hurting his back in the process and never using them. He bought himself a brand new guitar, before discovering the process of learning to play it was too tedious. It was nice to have things around him in the room, just. It made him feel like more of a real person. I do like it, he says to Irene. She said he should ask Angela, who ran the Chinese, if he could pick up some shifts as a driver for them. I can’t drive, Peter reminded her. Neither could the last guy, she pointed out.
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It was nice not to have to do the counting as he walked down the town to work anymore, but Peter had forgotten, in his brief sojourn into employment, what it was like to be in the flats at night. He would go to Irene’s, usually, after his shifts in the pub, or he’d be coming home to his own block of flats in the early hours of the morning, in the small sliver of time when the spider in the sky yawned and slept, taking a short break from the chaos of the day and the danger of the night. The grey of the building and the sky blended together, weak and almost white, and though it never felt peaceful, more like a tightly coiled spring held in tension, waiting to be released again, it was a moment of reprieve. He had forgotten though, the noise and chaos of nighttime in the complex, and found it instantly intolerable. He lay awake in his bed, surrounded by trinkets and guitars and dumbells, things gathering dust. He listened to the near constant screeching of tire wheels and yelling in familiar and foreign accents, to children squealing and high-pitched laughter of revellers returning from their own nights out, laughter that was too tight and self-conscious to ever sound anything like it should, more alien than carefree. He listened to the bang and wails of doors being hit with battering rams and of men being removed through the holes where the doors used to be.
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When Irene wasn’t working they’d drive her car out past the limits of the concrete basin and into the lush green wetlands that surrounded it, the coastal paths and sprawling forests. It was shocking how quickly you could get out of the place, when you had a motor car. In twenty minutes. Peter rolled the window down and inhaled deeply, smelling muck and manure and wind and surf. They left the car by the road and trekked up a mountain in jeans and trainers, stopping beside a brown foamy waterfall to take pictures of each other. After they descended, freezing and stiff, Peter ate chips out of newspaper in the passenger seat while Irene wrote the dates and a little message on the back of the polaroids once they’d developed. He watched her painstakingly add a smiley face to the corner of one where she’d caught him unawares, hunched over a rock formation and looking out of place in the pastoral setting in blue Levis. Irene had a way of looking at him but choosing not to say what she saw that unnerved him greatly, and made him like her a lot more. Sometimes it was kinder not to say things, and this was a thing that not everyone appreciated.
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When there weren’t car days, he’d go into the town and spend the rest of his now dwindling envelope of cash on expensive, useless things. He bought three pairs of the same trainers, in different colours, and lined them up against his bedroom wall. He let older ladies spray aftershave on him in the shopping centre, and then picked a red bottle of it that made Irene sneeze when he sprayed it on himself before they went out. Sometimes, on the rare occasions Peter would have his door open while he brought home his purchases, his sister would stand in the hall and stare at the boxes and the dusty hauls of weeks past. You never even use this stuff, Sarah said, laughing as the door shut in her face. Sometimes it’s kinder not to say things, Peter wanted to tell her. When the brown envelope became thin enough, Peter went back to the bru.
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One day he was in the bru and these three fellas in masks came in and he thought at first it must have been a kissogram. One of the three masked kissograms stepped in front of him, and blasted the man in front of him through the skull. Peter watched as the fella’s brain matter came out the other side of the gun, and splattered the pale bald spot in the middle of his ruined head. They let them all go home after that, without signing on, but everyone still got their money, even the fella with the drink on him that was having the argument. That was decent of them, in fairness, Ma said. Yeah, Peter agreed. He watched her wash the brains out of his bomber jacket over the sink with dish soap.
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The attacks started happening more and more. They caught him off guard: once when he was on a freezing cold beach with Irene, the wind stinging his nose. I can’t breathe, he told her all of a sudden. I think I can’t breathe. You have to breathe to be able to speak, Irene said patiently, watching Peter’s grey eyes bug out from his head. She placed a hand on his chest and he watched it rise and fall, reminding them both he was still alive. He rarely slept or ate. At night he faced away from Irene and feigned sleep and he felt her cold fingers tracing his ribs one by one. He heard her breath catch as her hands found the hollow that used to be his soft stomach, felt them trace the hip bones upon which his shorts hung. He heard her swallow hard and sniff. He did not open his eyes.
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Sometimes their car trips were unsuccessful. On one occasion, for instance, the two of them got lost coming back into the basin of the city, and the camouflaged men stopped their car and demanded to search them. Peter’s chest was tight even though there was nothing in the car except for chip papers and Irene’s heavy metal cassette tapes, which he did not like to listen to while they drove, because they made him nervous. But the search was anticlimactic. I saw them play live last year, one of the camouflage men said to Irene, nodding to the cassettes, and she smiled in a bemused way. Sometimes you forgot the soldiers were real people. After that they had an argument on the motorway back to the city, an argument over nothing really, and Peter said he would get out and walk home, even though they were miles away from home still. Irene even let him do it for a while, him walking alongside the car, her rolling along the empty road at about five miles per hour with the door open and all, just watching him trudge along the hard shoulder with her eyebrows raised.
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He still couldn’t stand being in the flat at night. He would lie in bed and wait for sleep but he’d feel as though he’d just been running, running very fast and for a very long time. He started watching TV then, to stay busy. He gorged himself on sweets and crisps and the ribs Irene had touched while he was feigning sleep slowly, and then all of a sudden, disappeared under a thick layer of soft skin. Stretchmarks bloomed under his armpits and across his stomach. Once he started to eat again, Peter found himself unable to stop. There was a comfort in the steady injections of sugar and sodium he medicated himself with. It broke up his evening, keeping him company until he could walk home more, full and calm, in the crisp morning sunshine. He chewed on jellies and chocolate and sticky rice and noodles and pizza and he counted. 12 dead. 45 injured. 6 legs. 910 bullets. 250 tonnes. 12 dead. 45 injured. 6 legs. 910 bullets. 250 tonnes. It helped stop his mind from wandering too much. He lined up all the remotes on the sofa one way, and then changed them to line up in the other direction. He set his bottle of fizzy energy drink down lightly on each corner of the table, before returning it to its initial position and taking a sip that lasted exactly four seconds. Thoughts rolled over and under the numbers in his mind as he coated the inside of his mouth with chocolate.
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He felt neither unlucky or lucky. These things just happened. You found a job, you lost a job, you found a job. You got pulled in, you got beaten, you did nothing wrong, they were looking for someone else. It happened to your Da, it happened to your friends, it happened to your friend’s Da. Peter felt calm and at peace.
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