Let the Great World Spin Read Free Page B

E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
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    He disappeared towards his classroom.
    All day I sat at my wooden desk, gnawing my pencil, wondering—
    visions of a forgotten uncle, or our father somehow returned, broken.
    Nothing, in those days, was beyond the realm of the possible. The clock was at the rear of the room but there was an old freckled mirror over the classroom sink and, at the right angle, I could watch the hands go backwards. When the bell struck I was out the gate, but Corrigan took the long road back, short, mincing steps through the housing estates, past the palm trees, along the seawall.
    There was a soft brown paper package waiting for Corrigan on the top bunk. I shoved it at him. He shrugged and ran his finger along the twine, pulled it tentatively. Inside was another blanket, a soft blue Foxford. He unfolded it, let it fall lengthwise, looked up at our mother, and nodded.
    She touched his face with the back of her fingers and said: “Never again, understand?”
    Nothing else was mentioned, until two years later he gave that blanket away too, to another homeless drunk, on another freezing night, up by the canal on one of his late- night walks, when he tiptoed down the stairs and went out into the dark. It was a simple equation to him—others needed the blankets more than he, and he was prepared to take the punishment if it came his way. It was my earliest suggestion of what my brother would become, and what I’d later see among the cast- offs of New York—the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless—all of those who were hanging on to him like he was some bright hallelujah in the shitbox of what the world really was.
    —
    c or r i ga n s ta r t ed ge t t ing drunk young—twelve or thirteen years old—once a week, on Friday afternoons after school. He’d run from the gates in Blackrock towards the bus stop, his school tie off, his blazer bundled, while I stayed behind in the school fields, playing rugby. I could see him hop on the 45 or the 7A, his silhouette moving towards the backseat of the bus as it pulled away.
    Corrigan liked those places where light was drained. The docklands.
    The flophouses. The corners where the cobbles were broken. He often sat with the drunks in Frenchman’s Lane and Spencer Row. He brought a bottle with him, handed it around. If it came back to him he drank with McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 16
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    C O L U M M c C A N N
    a flourish, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth as if he were a practiced drunk. Anyone could tell he wasn’t a real drinker—he didn’t search it out, and drank from the bottle only when it came his way. I suppose he thought he was fitting in. He got laughed at by the more vicious drunks but he didn’t care. They were using him, of course. He was just another snotnose trying on the poorman shoes, but he had a few pennies in his pockets and was always prepared to give them up—they sent him to the off- license for bottles, or to the corner shop for loose cigarettes.
    Some days he came home not wearing any socks. Other times he was shirtless and ran up the stairs before our mother caught him. He brushed his teeth and washed his face and came down, fully dressed, a little starry- eyed, not quite drunk enough to get caught.
    “Where were you?”
    “God’s work.”
    “And is God’s work not looking after your mother?” She adjusted his shirt collar as he sat down to dinner.
    After a while with the down- and- outs he began to fit in, slipped into the background, melted in among them. He walked with them to the flophouse on Rutland Street and sat slumped up against the wall. Corrigan listened to their stories: long, rambling tales that seemed rooted in a different Ireland altogether. It was an apprenticeship for him: he crept in on their poverty as if he wanted to own it. He drank. He smoked. He never mentioned our father, not to me or anyone else. But he was there, our gone father, I could tell. Corrigan would either