Read Online The Onion Eaters by J. P. Donleavy - Free Book Online Page B

uncontrollable temper kept him in excellent condition. Leaping as he did out at traffic lights to drag some poor unfortunate from another car who had the folly to sneer at him at a previous traffic light. I sat in the front seat. A little boy with curls and enormous sad eyes. Standing up to see as my father used his usual right hook to lay a chap backwards over the engine hood. Climbing to the rear seat to peek out and see the victim cross eagled unconscious. Goodness Rose you are strong. Got me by the wrists. Winds raging outside. Last candle going out on the bedside table. Life tip toes back in. As you wait and never see it. Till a time comes. Just like this. The Charnel Castle cure. New vigorous lethal terrors drive out the stale mouldering ones under which one was smothering. Still begging for mommie. To come back. She left on a sunny day. In an ambulance from the side of a house. Carried out on a stretcher and loaded in the shade of the old coach porch. Pressed my nose to the copper screen. My father said mommie wanted peace and quiet. He would take me to see her soon. We went on a rainy day. Down town. It had snowed in the morning and now the streets were grey with slush. Pipes tingling and throbbingin the hospital. We went up three floors in an elevator and down a long corridor. A little boy pushed by sobbing on a trolley. His own mommie holding his clothes in her arms. We came to a door and I felt chilled. As I stood, my father behind me pushing me in the back, saying go in. See your mother. There she is. Go over to her. A silhouette as she lay on the bed, her long delicate nose, eyes closed and her wavy brown hair spread on the pillow. Out the window the roof of another building covered with pipes and roofed with little grey pebbly stones. The sky darkened, rain falling straight and hard. Old snow tucked in the corners of roof tops. My father standing at the door. My mother’s hand was pale. Her nails white at the finger tips. I reached over and touched her. I didn’t know what dead was. Until the tears started to come out of my eyes. And when I turned round my father was gone. I looked down the hall and saw him talking with a doctor. A nurse passed me to go into the room. I stood at the door and watched her pull a white cover over my mother’s face. And when the nurse came out she said to me who are you little boy. I said I’m not anyone.
    Nor
    Anyone else
    Either
    Who
    Made
    All that
    Sorrow

5
    A nightime murmuring and mumbling on towards dawn. Comes sweeping across the earth making winter bird choruses and chasing out to sea. Puts light on the waves. Pushes fish down in the deep. Where their teeth might miss each other in the dark. And after all these obtuse thursday goings on, would that I sleep. Buried under Rose’s snores.
    Clementine rolling his head back and forth under Rose’s hair. Till a great moist nose peeked through followed by the tongue and paws of Elmer. Who wanted to join the fun. Pushing his monstrous head between the two of us. Just as one is tasting the tip top joys again way up inside Rose. As she sleeps and now wakes roaring. And growling just like Elmer.
    ‘Ah God it’s the dog on us. Is he vicious. Get him away from me altogether.’
    ‘Out Elmer. Naughty dog. He’s only playing.’
    ‘He took a nip out of me.’
    ‘I’m sorry. Down Elmer. He’s just lonely.’
    ‘Woof woof.’
    ‘He doesn’t understand what I’m telling him.’
    ‘Well fuck off you monster understand that from me.’
    ‘Please don’t speak like that to my dog.’
    ‘Would you have him savage me defenceless in the condition we’re in.’
    ‘You could easily hurt his feelings.’
    ‘While he takes it into his head to make a horse dover of one of me appendages.’
    Rose is somewhat savoury under the oxsters. Inciting Elmer who according to a mouldering dog reference book in the library can distinguish more smells than you couldshake a mamba at. He only wants to know what sniffs. Between the strong