My brothers were always fixing things, and drinking. I aspired to fix things and drink when I was older, although I never liked the taste of beer. I tried shandy once, and it was horrible, even mixed with cheese and onion crisps. I feared I was never going to be good at the drinking side of things.
They used to hold on to those thingummies that you're supposed to hang suits on, as they bumped around corners in cars they'd fixed up; they looked to me like cars I'd seen on Starsky and Hutch, and I longed to wear leather jackets like the ones zipping up their teenage bodies – one of them had a red and white one, as if plain black wasn't cool enough.
In the summer, sometimes they’d get home and drag speakers outside onto the grass, hook things up, and play everything on vinyl from Lennon and Dylan, to disco and punk.
Fixing things involved noise, grease, tools – some of which were so heavy I couldn’t lift – and a large pit in the garage that cars hovered over, whilst fixing stuff went on underneath. I never trusted those things; I believed in gravity.
Fixing things was not restricted to cars. Motorbikes came and went, and one stayed – a monument to failure – parked eternally on one corner of the front garden.
The smell inside a motorcycle helmet is similar to the smell of warm leather in cars in the summer, but it’s mixed with the sweaty fug some people have on their clothes after the gym. I was eight, or seven, or even six when I first went on the back of a motorbike, tearing up the hill to our house, my screams inside the visor, hot little gasps.
Fixing things also meant wood, which to me held a kind of poetry, the going with the grain, the slow uncovering from a varnished piece to the simplicity of natural things; it meant wood shavings, sturdy flower petals in your hand – but you wouldn’t say that, as any kind of metaphor could land you in trouble.
Fixing things meant lawnmowers on the kitchen table that were kept alive beyond any reasonable expectations, their last bodily gasps not honoured, hooked up to drugs, and to treatments that prolonged their usefulness.
Fixing things did not extend to animals. Creatures who got sick, had injuries, or reproduced without thought were “put out of their misery”, as if saying they were miserable was enough to end their lives.
Once, I found a dead cat at the bottom of the car pit. It was lying like human bodies do in television dramas, as if it had chosen the most beautiful way to place its limbs, its head on one side, unmarked except for a small tributary of blood, mixing with the concrete.
Concrete could fix anything.
“Put a bit of concrete at the bottom of that swing, it’ll keep it right.”
A red swing, the seat made by one brother, a sturdy oblong with paint that blistered in the sun and stuck to your legs, but you didn’t care because it went high, high, right over the hedge so you were almost flying, the catch on the way forward enough to send your stomach backwards. There were blue steel poles that bent slightly with the weight of a child, but did not hear her songs.
Electric cables, pipes, motors, bricks, all could be manipulated, put together, thrown together, made into something. My brothers seemed always to be moving, carrying too much at one time, doing too much at once.
I say ‘brothers’ indiscriminately as I had many of them, and as a small girl they were an amalgam of testosterone driven boy-men who sailed – tall, good looking creatures who flung me around, gave me burlies, slagged any form of precociousness, whilst simultaneously goading me to do precocious things.
I was inordinately proud of them; I had my own mafia protection unit who could also open tricky sweet wrappers and jars, and put decorations up high at Christmas, and do pull ups from any available beam in the house. And drinking.
Once, I remember trying to copy my brothers’ technique in fixing things, which meant taking things apart, cleaning them, oiling them, doing something else and then putting whatever it was all back together.
I decided I’d do this with my bike. Taking it apart was easy. I had great fun loosening nuts and bolts, mentally trying to remember which was which; I got quite into the part, whistling a little, wiping my hands on my jeans, standing back to observe and contemplate. But then I think it started raining, or I lost interest, or perhaps a little of both, and all the parts splayed out in the back stayed there for days, then got kicked to the side to make room for something else.
Guilt kept me away from it, and laziness, or fear (are they related sometimes?). I was frightened I’d get it wrong. I looked at it once, speculatively, picking up the cogs and chain, which seemed like the heart of the machine, and I felt a kind of helplessness.
My mother was raging that I’d taken my bike apart and not put it back together – for how hard can it be? Back then there was no YouTube; I can only imagine an entire trajectory of my psyche could have been saved if only I had had a video of some kid from Ohio fixing her bike, talking about each little step in part one, part two, part three.
But there wasn’t any part one. I stacked up all the pieces in the corner of the garage with some sort of promise to myself that I would get a book out of the library on bike maintenance, that I would swallow my pride and ask one of the big boys for help.
The dismembered bike stayed in that pile, nuts and bolts – I still confuse which is which – rolling away, bits being commandeered for some other project, until it was hard to tell it had ever been a bike. But by then the teenage boys were more manly, and doing grown up things like leaving home, and getting married and having houses of their own that they could tear down and rebuild, creating new guts of buildings, wiring things together, places where they could have their own children, and teach them properly about how things work.
So they left, one by one, and when it was just me outside in the garden, or in the garage, I would pick up things, old tools or unknown parts of something, and I wished they were still there, lounging over a car in the driveway, music blasting, drinking.
I was left with the things that I could make, which were all on the inside. I liked putting together languages, fixing up sentences, getting a whole pile of words and making a house – useless things, things that don’t pay mortgages, things that don’t put a roof over your head, or stop it leaking.
I eventually got good at the drinking, but not until years after – I was a late starter and even in college I’d be under the table after two pints of cider. But I learned my lesson from the bike, and I persisted, if only to be good at the other skill which runs in the family. I would say now that I could go semi-professional.
Today someone pulled over to ask me how I was. Their window slid down, an electronic whisper. It was not the energetic rolling down of a car window, a brown elbow resting on the side that I remember, but the smell that hit me was that leathery, hot car perfume.
It forced me to think of my brothers, those years ago, with their restless energy, their muscular arms, the bar of carbolic soap I could hardly hold in two hands that they used to wash off the grease.
It made me think of fixing things, and drinking.
But of course, some things can’t be fixed.
I am not a car, or a motorbike; I am not bricks, cement, wires or pipes; I am not even a piece of wood.
I think of that cat, and how beautiful she was, lying there on the cement.
Ruth McKee is joint winner of the Irish Novel Fair 2015 for her book The Jealous Wall. Her work was also longlisted for RTÉ/Penguin short story competition in 2014, and previously shortlisted for the Francis MacManus prize. She is editor of spontaneity.org.
