Read The Fields for Free Online Page B

songs that I taped off the Larry Gogan Top Twenty. I love taping things with my boombox. I sometimes tape films off the telly and listen to them when I’m lying in bed at night. Like
The Valley of Gwangi
. It’s brilliant when you’re under the covers and you’re really sleepy and suddenly you hear Gwangi screaming his head off. I know video recorders mean you can tape the picture as well, but the only person on The Rise who has one is Gerry Butler who works for RTE and he doesn’t have any kids. Mam can’t stand the way he dresses and is always saying, He’s a right queer fella, that Gerry!
    She doesn’t mean to be saying out loud to all of us that Gerry Butler is a bender. But inside she secretly thinks that he is abender and so she’s trying to say something different to bender without realising that she’s actually saying that he is a bender. Coz between all the fellas in school, ‘queer’ is pretty much the same word as bender nowadays.
    I once taped the thirty minutes of us all squashed around the table having Sunday dinner without anyone noticing. I was silent and a bit giggly, but it was brilliant getting Sarah saying that Dad was an Old Fogey, and Susan saying that Fiona was a bitch for nicking her gel, and Mam trying to get Dad to talk about the unemployment figures from the news. When I showed them all that I had been taping them they all screamed and went spare and then laughed loads when they listened to themselves back sounding all nasally and hollow. They said it was a great laugh, but any time I tried to do it after that they could spot it a mile away.
    So, Foreigner’s singing about their imaginary girlfriend, and how she’s amazing at doing it, and how she’s so brilliant at everything that she doesn’t even exist. They go all woozy and sigh, ‘It’s more than a touch or a word can say, Only in dreams could it be this way,’ and me and Gary feel sad. We’re still breathing heavy from the dancing, but now we’re sitting on my bed underneath the big Porsche poster. The song is slow and sounds like the Foreigner boys are wishing their lives had turned out differently, and wishing that they actually had this girl in their arms instead of just dreaming about her. Me and Gary know all the words but we don’t sing them out loud. We hum along all the same.
    Halfway through the second verse I notice that Gary has stopped humming. He’s frozen stiff, staring at the small straw bin beside Fiona’s make-up table where she’s dropped a maxi pad with blood on it and forgotten to cover it up with tissues, like she usually does. Gary’s seen Fiona’s maxi pads before, but always in packets, and never like this. He’s asked about them too, but I told him that they were make-up stuff for girls, forwiping stuff. This is different. Gary is terrified of girls. He normally just lashes up the stairs to get to my room, and if Fiona is already in it he goes all red and doesn’t say a word until she leaves. He’s scared stiff of being left alone with Claire and Susan, and if he ever had to spend a minute with Sarah and Siobhan I think he’d faint.
    I turn off Foreigner and I tell Gary about periods as best I can. He gets really upset when I tell him that all women have them, even his mam.
    The summer bike route takes me and Gary out of The Rise and through the dark and bushy overhanging laneway that slopes steeply and for ever up towards Clannard Road. When we reach the top, after much hard-pushing, standing-up cycling, we always stop, catch our breaths, and stare down at the hazy grey hugeness of Dublin below, newly blanketed by all those shimmering twinkling house lights that’ve only just been switched on by tired parents who are looking sadly up at the sky and turning to each other and swearing, even in the midst of high summer, that they can sense the change in the evenings already, a slow drift from bright to dark blue, a hint of almost black.
    We dash along Ash Lane, towards Kilcuman, past the