her each and every time.
The first sigh she could remember was at her four-years-old developmental check-up in the local health centre in Castlebridge, Wexford. Her mother had dressed Ruth in her best dress, a burnt-orange tweed pinafore. She had thick black tights on underneath, which scratched her legs and made her cry. Her mother had sighed and asked, ‘Why must you always be so difficult?’
Ruth did not like seeing her mother upset so she pinched herself hard and tried to make the tears stop. She wanted her mother to look at her with different eyes. With love.
On the way to the health centre, her parents coached her. They were second-guessing what the nurse would ask Ruth. She had tried to listen to her parents’ instructions, determined to succeed, to win, to not be a loser again. But with every question they threw at her and every answer Ruth offered up, she saw her parents throw furtive glances at each other. She could sense that something was not quite right. She wanted to be at home again in her bedroom, wearing her soft pyjamas that were made of pink fleece. She liked how they felt on her skin. They did not itch or scratch like her tights and dress, and they made her feel safe. She wanted to go back to her picture book and read about Angelina Ballerina. Instead she had to sit in a cold waiting room with hard plastic chairs and dirty floors while her parents told her to act like a normal child.
‘I want to go home,’ Ruth decided, and she felt her arms begin to fly. She wished she was a bird so she could disappear into the blue sky. Back home. Back to safety. Back to her normal.
Her mother’s exasperated sigh filled the air with tension. ‘Oh, Ruth, stop that right now. People will stare! Why must you always be so difficult?’
Ruth had sat on her hands, shamed, scared and tearful.
A lifetime of sighs and sorrys. Now her son was in on the act, too.
‘DJ,’ she whispered, and her hand hovered in the centre of the car, in the space between them. Only a few inches away from each other yet it felt like an unbridgeable gulf. She let her hand drop into her lap and she looked back out through the window.
‘It’s not your fault,’ DJ said, finally, in a voice that was older and more knowing than it had any business to be. ‘It’s Seamus Kearns. I hate him. The … the … fucker.’
Ruth looked at her young son in shock. Had he just said that? DJ’s honest, innocent face jarred with his foul language. She was not naïve enough to believe that he had never used bad language before, but this … this really was out of character. One of the rules of their family was that they had a swear-free home. As much for her as him because, in truth, she enjoyed a good expletive.
Ruth wanted so much for DJ: an education, friends, social acceptance, a life without offence. Because offending people had been, and still was, a regular occurrence for her.
‘Hate is a strong word, DJ,’ Ruth said. Had it been any other day, she would have been cross with him. But she had to concede that on a day that involved losing your home, a few concessions had to be made.
‘You hate him, too,’ DJ said.
‘That is incorrect. I would say I abhor his actions. But hate is a negative, angry and all-encompassing emotion. He is not worthy of taking up that much space in my head. Or yours.’
DJ’s resentment filled the air between them, contaminating their close unit. She felt at a loss, knowing that she must, as the adult, find a way for them both to get through this. She turned to face him, then moved her hand an inch closer to his, letting her fingertips brush the top of his. He looked down and she saw a ghost of a smile inch its way back onto his face. He squeezed her hand for a moment then released it back to her lap.
It was a start. She would find a way to do better.
DJ turned his attention back to the blur of Dublin as they drove through the city. Their taxi came to a halt at a pedestrian crossing. Ruth looked up and watched an old man, unshaven and dirty, wearing a long grey overcoat, begin to cross the road. By his side was a dog with a long and silky strawberry-blonde coat. The man raised his hand in small salute to the taxi driver, thanking him for waiting. He walked slowly, with a slight limp on his right leg. He had a rucksack on his back and something about him – his clothes, his hair, the collar of his coat turned up to protect him from the chill in the air – brought a lump to Ruth’s throat.
Where is he going? Does he have a home?
Then a car behind them blasted its horn, impatient to get on with its journey. They all jumped in unison, including the dog, who stopped suddenly, causing the old man to crash into it. Like a deck of cards, he tripped and fell to the ground, his rucksack spilling its contents onto the road.
‘Probably pissed,’ the Uber driver said, looking with annoyance in his rear-view window at the car behind, whose driver continued to blast the horn.
‘His dog tripped him up,’ Ruth said, feeling the need to defend the old man. She watched a red-and-white flask escape his rucksack and roll towards their car.
‘Where you going?’ DJ asked in surprise when Ruth opened her door.
‘To help.’ She ran over to the flask and picked it up before it disappeared under their car.
‘That’s mine!’ the old man shouted at her, back on his feet again.
Ruth shook the flask gently to see if it had broken, relieved to hear only the swoosh of liquid inside, not broken shards.
‘It is unharmed,’ she said, handing it over to him. His boots were brown. Scuffed and worn. Like him.
He stuffed the flask back into his rucksack, looking at her curiously. Was she imagining it or did he look surprised? Without any further comment, Ruth counted the steps back to their Uber.
‘I don’t know why you bothered, love. His kind would stab you as soon as look at you,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Only last week I saw one of his lot robbing a handbag from a woman. Witnessed it from this very car.’
Ruth glanced towards the man still standing on the side of the road, watching her intently, his head tilted to one side. For a split second their eyes met and he raised his hand and saluted her. And in that gesture, Ruth had the strangest feeling she knew him. She had seen that salute before, she was sure. The memory teased her but refused to show itself. It was gone. And so was he when he turned away and walked in the opposite direction, his dog by his side. Her imagination was playing tricks on her.
‘Why did you do that?’ DJ asked.
‘Because it was the right thing to do,’ Ruth replied. She nodded towards the back of the Uber driver’s head. ‘Do not write off people based on how they present themselves to the world. You should know that better than anyone. Everyone has a story, if you take the time to listen.’
As their car moved on, the old man disappeared from her view but not from Ruth’s mind. She supposed he could have a home. But something about the way he retrieved his fallen items and put them back into his rucksack made her think that his home was in that bag. His face looked weathered in a way that suggested it had been exposed to the outside elements twenty-four-seven.
