Read A Mad and Wonderful Thing for Free Online Page A

OF MAY, AND IT IS TWO WEEKS SINCE THAT FIRST evening with Cora Flannery. Two weeks. I am nervous. Today I’m to call at her house for the first time. Today I shall meet her mam and dad. I have held out for as long as I can, but Cora says that I am really pushing it, that at two weeks I am being just plain weird. What can I say? There is normal time and there is Cora’s time, and well …
    I tie the low gate closed behind me with the shoelace and salute Dad, who stands watching me from the front porch.
    â€˜All right, Son?’ he calls.
    â€˜All right, Dad.’
    Next door, in the front garden of an identical house, a small man is bent low at work among some roses and shrubs.
    â€˜She has you on your hands and knees again, Eddie,’ I comment.
    He barely looks up. ‘Gobshite.’ It is just a whisper, but I catch it, and too late he tries to run. Too late and too slow. Before he can get going, I have cleared the wall and have him in a firm grip.
    Eddie Reynolds is my uncle. He is ex-army and he is a small man. But he is a proud man. He was, in his youth, the featherweight boxing champion of Leinster, and he held that title for five years. Eddie and Hannah are my mam’s brother and sister, and live next door. The three of them do everything together — shopping, socialising, holidays, the whole fruit-basket — and the rest of time they give out about each other. Eddie and Hannah never married and neither one has children. When Eddie retired from the army he took me as his vocation, and many of his afternoons were spent teaching me boxing, arm-to-arm combat, and — removed from the eyes of others — how to handle a gun. Eddie delighted in the telling of tales of army life: the barracks, the rifle-range, the border, the Curragh, the Congo, and the Lebanon. I loved to hear the stories. Back then, Eddie could manage me, but that was ten years ago, when Eddie was fifty and I was nine. This is now. It is no longer a contest.
    â€˜Gobshite, is it?’ In one movement I lift the small man up on my shoulders and spin him around.
    â€˜Johnny,’ Eddie pleads as he tries to fight my hold. ‘Let me down, you fecker.’
    But I hold him easy enough.
    â€˜Hannah, Hannah,’ Eddie calls out.
    Aunt Hannah appears in the central doorway. She takes no notice of the scene at play on the front lawn. She turns to Dad, who still stands in the open front porch.
    â€˜A beautiful day, Oliver,’ she calls.
    â€˜A beautiful day, Hannah. Thank God. A beautiful day.’ He looks up to pencil-grey clouds that move below a blue-and-white sky. ‘Though we could see a shower yet.’
    â€˜How’s herself?’ Aunt Hannah asks.
    â€˜Right as rain, Hannah,’ Dad says, indicating over his shoulder. In the brief silence of his pausing, a few faint notes of song escape the hallway. ‘She’s right as rain.’
    I let Eddie down, and have cleared the wall before he steadies and takes a swipe.
    â€˜Too slow, you old fox,’ I call, pulling the Dunn & Co straight.
    I take the bicycle from where it rests against the front wall, check the tyres for hardness, mount, and I am off. I look back as I go. The old soldier waves, acknowledges Dad with a salute, gives his sister a shake of his head, and returns to his gardening low among the roses.
    I cycle out of the small estate and turn west onto the Ramparts Road. I pass the grounds of the lawn tennis club where on summer mornings Anna and I would climb the wall for a game before the caretaker arrived and threw us out. I turn north through Distillery Lane and then west again through Jocelyn Street, passing the office of a local newspaper below the first-floor snooker rooms of the Catholic Young Man’s Society where Éamon and I played every week while the rest of the class took to the cold and windy sports-field. At the junction with Chapel Street I pass the Home Bakery where Mam queues on a Saturday morning