A Star Called Henry (6 page)

I was crying now, full blast; everything was in my wail.

—He’s not, said my mother.

—He
is
, said my father.—For God’s sake, love. Where is he? He’s dead. And the other little one. They’re dead.

What about me? What about
me
?

I was a pink-cheeked howl in need of arms and milk. I was alone.

My mother shook her head. She looked up at the ceiling, at her children beyond it, waiting for her. She looked up at her first Henry. Her one and only Henry.

What about
me
!

My father looked up and saw the ceiling, just the ceiling. Nothing but the grey, sagging, cracked, stained ceiling.

—Stars are only stars, he said.—Melody?

My mother looked through the ceiling.

What about
meeeee
!

—Don’t pretend you can see anything up there, love, said my father.—Look at me; d’yeh hear me?

My father was angry and not interested in stopping.

—It’s the fuckin’ ceiling! he shouted.

He had to shout. I was making noise to drown anything less. I was becoming noise. Adding to his anger. I was choking, screaming. Disappearing.

—It’s a fuckin’ ceiling and the stars are only stars and his name’s Henry, d’you hear me.

I was named.

—His name’s Henry! Henry! So you might as well get used to it.

He got up, the chair fell back. He came over to the crib. I heard the charging tap tap. He looked down at me. I saw an angry blur, shimmering fury.

—Listen, he said to my mother.—Are you listening now?

He bent down - I felt his heat - and roared into my purple face.

—Henry! Henry! Shut up! Shut up, Henry! Shut up, Henry!

My mother kept shaking her head, hitting the name back with her damp curls.

—Shut up, Henry!

Was I obedient? Did I obey my daddy? I did like fuck. I screamed back up at him, my purple turned to black. I shoved my terror up into his face. And he stopped. He stopped shouting at me. He saw that I’d die before I’d stop, I’d scream my life away before I’d let him better me. What about
meeee
? So he stopped. He stood up straight and looked back down at me from a safe distance. He searched me, looking for some way past my screeches. His hands slowly surrounded me, gradually grew more solid. He picked me up. I left the crib behind.

—There, there.

He put me on his shoulder.

—Now, now.

I looked for a nipple in his coat. My lips met dust and blood. I tasted awful secrets. I kicked and shook. I fought his care and hands. He brought me quickly to my mother. Tap tap tap. I went from hands to smaller hands - shaking, frightened hands. Frightened faces watched me as I found a nipple, drank and fell asleep.

 

 

I was the other Henry. The shadow. The impostor. She still fed me, held me, doted on me. But when her husband was in the room she began to feel sharp cuckoo lips on her breast. She stopped eating. There was no Missis Drake to coax food into her and Granny Nash was too busy with her head in
Knocknagow
and
Bleak House
to be bothered with feeding herself, let alone her half-wit of a daughter. My father saw the food left on the plate, saw her fading. He cursed the vanity and sentimentality that had suckered him into giving me his old name. And he hated the sky over Dublin for not being thick and dirty enough to hide the stars; he hated the wind for making open curtains of the night-time clouds. And he looked at me and saw a different child. He began to see the baby who was eating his wife away. He wanted to hold me but sometimes, even as he bent over me, he couldn’t lift his arms to do it.

I was Henry but they never called me that. She wouldn’t; he couldn’t. But I was still Henry, too late for any other name. So they called me nothing. I was the boy. The lad. Himself. He. The child. I grew out of the zinc basin; my knees and elbows crushed its sides. I screamed as I stretched. My glow became a crust, my skin dry and furious. My mother swayed between fat and skeletal. She was a different woman every week. I went from breast to solids, straight to spuds and chunks of gristle; I bit with teeth that were robbed from a graveyard. I crunched and swallowed everything that was put in front of me. I gnawed at my father’s leg until he had to leave it on the landing before he came in. I struggled and walked and threw myself around the room. The ceiling shed its grey skin; it snowed all day on top of us. There were no more visitors, no more aahs and sighs, no food left behind. I claimed the mattress, marked my boundaries with my muck. I stopped their sleep; I muscled in on their sex, their messy efforts at saving their love. I crawled all over legs and arses and bit whatever seemed soft. They picked me up, patted me, smacked my arse, fed me, loved me, cleaned me - but they never called me Henry. I flooded the room with my stinks and waxes. I roared and screamed my right to be named.

I drove my mother out onto the step. She had to get away from walls. Already big and pregnant with the next one, she fumbled her way down the black stairs, trying to hold me on her suffering hip. She sat on the cold step and sweated. She waited for twilight and night. I beat her. I climbed onto her hair. I pressed into the breasts that were no longer mine. I scratched my sores and bled for her. She rocked me and soothed me, waited for her stars. It got colder and darker. I scratched her face. I puked white loads on her shoulders and lap. She rocked me, rocked me. She looked up at the sky and waited for the grey to turn black. She wrapped me in her shawl. She trapped my hands and legs. The North Star appeared. I fought against her arms. More stars lit up and twinkled. She held me tight. She gazed up at all the stars. She wandered from one to the next. She wrapped me tight in her shawl and lifted her free hand. I struggled to escape; I puffed and shook and spat. She lifted her hand and chose a star. Her index finger swayed, then stiffened.

—There he is, she said.

I bucked and tossed. I screeched blue murder.

—There’s my little Henry.

The star grew and shimmered. Blood ran from my nose, in a rush that failed to shock her. She put her shawl to my nostrils and continued to gaze at her star. She wasn’t being vindictive. There was no cruelty in her pointing. She wanted me to see him, and him, far away, to see me. Henry met Henry. She hoped we could be friends, that we could love each other. She smiled as I screamed. That was what my father saw the moment I was born; the shooting star was big brother Henry charging across the sky in a fit of celestial jealousy. If my father had listened too, if Granny Nash hadn’t distracted him, he’d have heard the star’s wail slicing the heavens—

—Maaa-
meee
!

She turned my head to the star and held it firm.

—See? See?

Years later, when I lay under my blanket on the lonesome prairee, full of beans and disgruntlement, or I sat on a rock in the Utah Desert and shivered, I’d gaze up at the huge, cold, black-blue sky and I’d find the star - I always knew its sly twinkle and fade, it could never hide from me. I’d stare at it, fix my eyes on it and refuse to let them stray to any of the other millions of its still and shooting siblings. I’d stare at my star till I knew I had it. I’d make a copper rope of my gaze and I’d lasso the twinkling bollocks. Then I’d yell.

—My name is Henry Smart!

I’d watch it shimmer and fuss. My voice was hard and sure and triumphant, hard as the rock I was sitting on, cold as the air that was lying on top of me. There was no one else to hear me. My nearest neighbours were as distant as the stars above me.

—My name is Henry Smart! The one and only Henry Smart!

I’d watch its gases splutter and die.

—My name is Henry Smart!

I’d yell until I could no longer see its shadow against the blueness of the night, until there was nothing out there. I killed my brother every night.

H
e went to work every evening. He kissed my mother. He kissed me. He patted his coat, then left us. He sat on the landing floor outside and put on his leg. Then he was gone.

Off to his work.

Henry Smart, the tap tap man. He stood outside Dolly Oblong’s kip house. Henry the Leg. In the week after my birth, he went at his work with new enthusiasm and vim. My birth had freed him. There’d be no more punishments; there never had been any. The earlier deaths had been bad luck. Just that. Dead children, thrown on top of all the city’s dead children. Henry looked at the certainty barrelling through my arms and legs and decided that he could do whatever he wanted. He stood on the steps of Dolly Oblong’s, a new man yet again. A new man with a new leg. The ships spat out ruffians and bowsies from far-flung, savage corners of the world, hard men tired of riding each other. They scoured the city with pockets full of itchy cash and found my father on the step of the brothel, between them and the women they dribbled for. They pointed at his leg and laughed and said things in languages that my father had never heard. They started up the steps, these nut-tough bastards, and suddenly the leg was gone and, even more suddenly, they were on their backs and bawling. They looked at my father rejoining his leg. They saw the warm gleam of the streetlamp purring in the wood, and the same warmth in my father’s face. They went away, and carried the legend of the leg back to the creaking, tinder-built outposts they’d sailed from. Bollixes from Stoneybatter got the same treatment. Men who had never been to sea in their lives, who’d never even gone down to the docks to look at it, men whose only language was a few dozen words of nose-propelled English, crawled away from the steps of Dolly Oblong’s with cracked skulls and wilting langers. Only the meekest and the mildest and, of course, the wealthy regulars got past my father in that first week of my life. He swung his new leg with a conscience as clear as my blue, blue eyes.

And after that, after he’d named me Henry, he still cracked heads, and more and more heads. He brought the leg down and took chunks out of it. He battered and hammered. One small thing, a name; one tiny mistake, a moment of sentimentality, and that beautiful week became a mocking memory. Melody cried and closed her face to him; she buried herself in her shawl. She started grieving a week after the birth of the healthiest child anyone had ever seen. My father found her at dawn on the steps outside the house looking up through the fog to where there were no stars. She was shivering, soaking, me inside the shawl fighting her. He took me and looked. My glow was now a flake-skinned crust, scratched raw, cracked by the cold. My baby blues were a fierce black, throwing outrage, revenge at him. I was the baby with the bloodshot eyes. He kissed my hard cheeks and tried to call me Henry. He brought us up to our room. He pretended that his wife saw him, pretended that his son’s rage was an infant’s fun.

—There there, there there.

He put us to bed and sat on the chair. He took off his leg. I screamed and he threw the leg at the fireplace. It bounced back out like a skittle and rolled along the floor and stopped at his foot, like a dog wanting to be petted. He put the leg back on, picked me up and tried to sing to me.
Oh the bridge it broke down
. I heard the gulps that broke the song’s back. He stopped and dropped big tears onto my head.

He put me back into the bed beside my mother. He moved gently around the room while we slept. He waited for things to get back to normal, the return of that wonderful week. He waited for it all to come back. Every day. He never slept. He guarded us all day and waited. And he went to work every evening, at ten to six. He kissed my mother. He kissed me. He patted his coat, then left us. He sat on the landing floor outside and put on his leg. Then he was gone.

Off to his work.

And then the violence and hurt poured out of him. He raged and whacked. He roared and blew. The few who still braved the steps walked into the shadow of my father’s towering anger. He defended the steps so efficiently that there was one night when no one at all got past him. No one even tried to. And one of the girls opened the door a chink and called him in.

—Herself wants you.

And he went inside. Into the smells and hints that men paid for. The darkness and promises. He went up the stairs to Dolly Oblong’s room. Up the carpeted stairs, where his tap tap carried no threat. It was quiet. No grunts or laughter, braces snapping, beds protesting. Only the piano downstairs, some tune that Henry didn’t know or like, some plonky-plonky thing that you had to be drunk to feel. He hadn’t been drunk in years, since the day he met Melody. He was nervous now. He made his way down the dark red corridor; behind each shut door a lonely girl.

He was there. He knocked on Dolly Oblong’s door. It was a good, thick door; his knock was a small thing on it.

—Come in.

He opened the door.

—Come in.

He stepped into Dolly Oblong’s room for the first time. It was dark. He saw a line of light where the closed curtains didn’t quite meet and the strict shapes of furniture.

—Shut the door.

He heard the door’s canvas cover settling back into place. He stood there in the dark and waited. He could hear no breathing. A sideboard, a chair. He began to know the room. There were no colours yet. He was standing on a rug that rubbed his ankle.

Now he heard a neat cough.

—What is the weather like?

—Grand, said Henry.—Not too bad.

—And how is your family?

—Grand, said Henry.

He could see more chairs now, big armchairs, and there was a large, high bed right in front of him but he couldn’t find the woman who was talking to him.

—The baby?

—Grand, he said.—Gameball.

The bed creaked.

—The baby has both the legs?

—Yes.

—Good. And a brain?

—Yes.

—Good. But you must not be the father. A fool like you could not produce such a baby.