Free The Visitors by Patrick O'Keeffe Page A

go outside, run around, enjoy the fine long evenings, what were we doing indoors anyway, watching that awful American trash, but if we were going to the river we were to be careful, even though the water was low.
    High or low in summertime, we went to the river. Oh, how I loved the river so! We’d take our shoes off and stand in the warm mud below the sloping bank and we’d laugh and shove each other and slowly sink into that mud that boiled up to our ankles. Then we waded in and tore out the rushes, ferns, and water lilies, and we swatted the fat bluebottles and the clouds of midges and laid down jam jars and tin cans on the sandy riverbed to catch the tiny fish we called brickeens. We decorated the jars and cans with moss and pebbles from the riverbed and placed them on our bedroom windows. The brickeens survived a few weeks.
    Anthony stopped coming to the river with us that summer. He had stopped spending any time with his younger brothers and sisters, and when our parents told us to go outside, Anthony was allowed to cycle up the road to meet the Mahers, who had a record player and two or three K-tel records. The Mahers and Anthony smoked Majors and drank cheap English cider. Rarely had they the money to buy them, so they just shoplifted them. My parents knew nothing about any of this. Or if they did, they pretended they didn’t. Rules for boys being way more lenient than rules for girls.
    Kevin’s interest in coming to the river with us was Tess. She was sixteen. She was beautiful. She knew this. And she rejoiced in Kevin’s telling her how nice her red hair looked, how fine she was in her pink skirt, and she sat before the mirror in the girls’ room and rolled the hissing curling iron through her hair and carefully brushed on mascara and eye shadow.
    —Don’t put that stuff on your face, they’ll go stone mad, Hannah used to say.
    —Let them go stone mad, Tess used to say.
    And she’d smile at me in the mirror and I’d smile back at her, and she’d press her face closer to the mirror.
    —Tell her not to do it, Jimmy. She’ll listen to you, Hannah used to say.
    —She won’t listen to me, I used to say.
    —Don’t blame me when they get mad at you, Hannah used to say.
    —Don’t worry, I won’t, Tess used to say.
    Then Tess would laugh in the mirror, and when she laughed I did.
    —You’ll get us all into trouble. That’s what you’ll do, Hannah used to say.
    And she’d tightly fold her arms and sigh and turn her back on Tess and the mirror.
    On one of those evenings in early July, Kevin sat on the riverbank. He took off his work boots and socks and rolled his pants legs up to his knees. Tess sat beside him and slipped her sandals off. They had walked hand in hand through the meadow behind the three of us. Hannah and Stephen were bent over, singing into the water.
    Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea
    Silver buckles on his knee
    When he comes back he’ll marry me
    Bobby, Bobby Shafto!
    Tess was wearing the pink skirt and the tight gray blouse that had two or three cloth-covered buttons at the neck. The skirt and theblouse, Tess’s purple coat, other secondhand clothes, and four pairs of girl’s platform shoes had arrived a few weeks before in a parcel from my mother’s old National school friend who lived in a neighborhood at the end of the Piccadilly Line in North London.
    Kevin and Tess stood whispering in the mud. The three of us were eyeing the fleeting shoals of brickeens. I’d follow one brickeen, pick it out from the rest, but every time it got lost among the others. Stephen and Hannah were shouting with delight that there were more brickeens this evening than ever before. Kevin and Tess left the riverbank and headed toward the small hill a few hundred yards away. I waited ten or fifteen minutes before I told Hannah and Stephen that I needed to piss. They weren’t listening; they were too into their brickeens. And so I waded out and strolled up the side of the hill. At the top of it I hid