Everything in This Country Must Read Online Free PDF

through the cemetery, patting his shirt pocket where he had a near-empty box of cigarettes stolen from his mother’s handbag. Hunching under his jacket, he lit a cigarette and then spat near a crucifix. He felt a sudden shame rise to his cheeks, but he spat again at another gravestone and walked on. He was thirteen years old and it was the fourth cigarette of his life. It tasted cruel and lovely and it made his head spin. He smoked it down to the filter, put it between his thumb and forefinger, then flicked it high out over the stone wall of the graveyard. It fizzled red through the air and the suggestion of it remained on his tongue like morning breath as he walked around the graveyard, past all the curious wreaths and statues and carvings. He looked at the names and dates on the stones, many of which were covered now with long grasses and lichen.
    At one of the stones he saw an empty pint glass with lipstick on the rim and, when he looked closely, he saw that it belonged to the grave of a young man not much older than himself.
    Tough shite, he said to the stone.
    He turned and hopped the stile in the wall, rejoining the road toward town. The road had no markings but he balanced along an imaginary white line that twisted and curved around the corners, switchbacking once so he thought he might come around and meet himself.
    A car passed him and beeped and the boy wasn’t sure if it was a greeting or a warning. He waved back weakly and stuck to the grass verge as the road cantered down the hillside into the town. He stopped and looked at the sign that gave the name of the town in two languages—he could not make the connection between them, the English being one word, the Irish being two. He tried to juggle the words into each other but they would not fit.
    A few men stood brooding and malignant outside a pub at the bottom of the hill. The boy nodded at them but they didn’t gesture back.
    How’re you? he said to nobody, under his breath.
    Oh, flying.
    And yourself?
    Sound enough.
    He thought to himself that he wore a shirt of aloneness and he liked this idea; he pulled it around himself as he walked for hours past quiet shops, beyond a boarded-up blacksmith’s, along a row of lime-colored bungalows, through a barren football field, over the high wall of a handball alley, then back to town, where he came to a small amusement arcade full of rude and tinny noise.
    This is a stickup, he said to a machine.
    He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket without removing the pack—the way his uncle might once have done—and he played a single video game with the unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. It bobbed up and down as he cursed the spaceships on the machine. On one of his fingers he had, months ago, begun to tattoo a single word but had stopped when he wasn’t quite sure what the word should be. All that appeared now was a single straight line where he had stuck a hot needle into his forefinger and smudged blue ink on it.
    The tattooed finger repeatedly struck the button on the video machine and the boy was well into his third game when he simply turned, left the arcade, and strolled down to the pier.
    Just outside the harbor, the yellow kayak was making its way back through the water and the old couple was paddling with surety and grace. The paddles sliced the air in rhythm and the sunlight flashed on the turning blades. Seagulls flew over and around the kayak, looking for fish, he supposed, and it seemed to the boy that the birds made hunger look easy.
    *   *   *
    HIS MOTHER HAD TOLD HIM : Do not say wee. Do not say wee. She said there was a landscape to language and their accents could be a dangerous curiosity right now. He thought to himself that he was a boy of two countries with his hands in the dark of two empty pockets. He walked along the distance of the pier and he said the word wee repeatedly until it meant nothing at all. It could have been a rope or a knot or a winch or perhaps even a thing of