Excerpt from the short story “Bloody Nonsense”, by Thomas McCoy

Then we drive under a blue and grey railway bridge with a train going ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump slowly over the top of it. There’s a hump in the road and then I see a row of ten tall, skinny green trees that look like our Christmas tree when it’s all folded up to go back up into the attic.

The next thing I see is a bridge above the road with cars racing past on top of it and I ask my mammy what it is. She tells me it’s the M1 motorway. It’s dark and noisy underneath the M1 motorway and I look out the back window of my Aunty Bridie’s car to make sure the big van fits under it. I’m kind of hoping it doesn’t and that we’ll have to turn round and go back to our old house, but there’s loads of room.

When we come out the other side of the M1 motorway, I see a big, green mountain taking up most of the front window of my Aunty Bridie’s car and I start to get a bit excited.

‘What’s that mountain, mammy?’ I ask.

‘That’s the Black Mountain,’ she says, and she turns round and smiles at me.

‘Are we going to live on top of it, mammy?’ I ask her.

‘No, but you’ll be very close to it,’ says my Aunty Bridie. ‘You’ll be at the foot of it. And when you’re a bit older you can climb up there in the summer and get away from all this bloody auld nonsense.’ And she lifts her head up and can I see her eyebrows and her eyes smiling in the mirror.

I’m so excited looking at the Black Mountain that I forget about our old house for a few seconds and I nearly miss another landmark, a roundabout that has lots of old vans and lorries and stuff on it and they’re all black with soot.

‘Would you look at that,’ says my mammy, quietly, shaking her head and going tut tut tut with her tongue like she does sometimes after tea when the news is on.

Then Patrick points and goes, ‘Bus! Bus!’ and right enough there is a bus and you can see a wee bit of red above the top windows. It must be a junkyard, I think.
            

We pull up and stop outside a house which has two other houses attached to it.

‘Here we are, boys,’ says my Aunty Bridie.

My mammy looks out at the house and lets her breath out, like she’s been holding it in the whole way there. I look at the side of her face and I don’t think she’s too happy. Neither am I. Our old house only ever had one other house attached to it and that’s where Mr and Mrs McIlroy lived and they were nice. There’s no tree in our new garden, either. There are no trees anywhere at all except up on top of the Black Mountain.

Patrick looks up at the row of houses with a frown on his face and then he turns to me and whispers, ‘I don’t like it’ and I whisper to him that I don’t like it, either, and then Donal just goes, ‘I don’t like it!’ But he doesn’t even whisper.

Copyright: Thomas McCoy