Chapter 17 Niall
Niall
SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO
‘Look after your wee brother. And don’t get drunk.’
Jimmy Butler’s words rang in Niall’s ears as loudly as the Katy Perry song blaring through the speakers at the party.
The nearest neighbours to this giant country pile – where the parents were away for the weekend and the eldest sibling was in charge – were a good half mile off, so there were no holds barred on the music.
Nonetheless, Niall was trying to honour both of his dad’s requests.
Sean, at fifteen and a year younger than Niall, wasn’t all that wee, though, and he was perfectly safe.
In fact, his younger brother seemed to be living life to the max, snogging some girl’s face off in the kitchen.
A far cry from the board games night their dad believed they were at, but there was no harm done.
Niall rolled the bottle of whisky he’d managed to get past his parents between his palms. The trick was to hide it down the driveway a few days earlier, then when you left the house and they gave you that glance over to check if you were carrying any contraband, it looked like you weren’t.
It was amazing his parents hadn’t cracked onto it since Cal and Jamie had been up to the same trick for years themselves, passing it down like a family heirloom that to teenagers, seemed more valuable than the distillery itself.
Three swigs was all he’d had, yet the bottle was three quarters gone.
Sean wasn’t getting anywhere near the rest of it.
As long as they both went home to bed quietly, then their parents would sleep through it and be none the wiser in the morning.
Fuzzy heads might be clocked, but nobody could take back the memories.
Not that there was anything worth remembering so far.
Niall wanted to call Carli. It would be Sunday morning in Melbourne.
But there was no signal here. He’d have to wait until he got home, sneak into his mum’s library.
He missed her. He really missed her. Whisky was absolutely no substitute for Carli so he wouldn’t try.
It was cruel of her dad to uproot her back to Australia at the end of fourth year.
She’d already lost her mum and now, for his own selfish reasons, he was snatching her away from her friends and her boyfriend.
‘Hey! Niall!’ Shona McCafferty from his year dragged her fingers down his chest. ‘How are you, honey?’ She was wasted.
‘Aye, awright, Shona.’ Niall held out the bottle of whisky to her, in the hope that she’d rather have it than him – and take it off his hands.
‘Och, a wee dram of Butler’s whisky. I like a bit of Butler’s.’ Shona glugged from the bottle and eyeballed Niall in a manner that was possibly meant to be flirtatious.
‘Mr McInally’s a dick,’ she said.
Well, that was definitely a mood killer, if he’d been in the mood. Niall laughed. ‘You’re not wrong.’
‘Do you fancy a wee snog?’
‘You’re alright, ta.’ Niall did not want a wee snog.
Not from Shona. Not from anyone here. And parties when you weren’t out to get a wee snog from someone were kind of boring.
What else did people do at parties apart from kiss or get off their face and be sick or fall over, or all those things at once?
He tried joining the one group that seemed not to be fixated on snogging or alcohol.
A group of lads posturing about all the bands they liked from the nineties when they hadn’t even been born but ‘music was so much better,’ blah, blah, blah.
Niall hovered on the edges of the conversation for a bit, but he couldn’t offer up enough knowledge about Nirvana’s deep cuts and he could tell this was the entry criteria, so he wandered off.
He checked his phone. Pointless due to the lack of signal and the fact that he and Carli had agreed that they should try to maintain a balance between keeping in touch and having a life in their respective homes, until they could be together again.
So, if one of them was out on a Saturday night, for example, they were to enjoy that night out and not spend the time messaging the other or looking at their phone.
A crap rule, but he went along with it all the same.
Niall checked on Sean again. He had finally stopped kissing the girl and was now dancing on the large country kitchen table.
Shit. Niall was tipsy but sober enough to see that his brother was wasted.
Then the girl he’d been snogging jumped up on the table with him and started wiggling her arse.
Sean joined in, evidently having the time of his life.
But he was a mess, and Niall wasn’t meant to let his brother get like this. He was supposed to keep him looking sober. There was no chance Sean could pass for anything but drunk right now.
He was having a good time, though.
Niall leaned against the kitchen counter and watched.
If he got into trouble for letting Sean get drunk, then his parents would take his mobile phone and he wouldn’t be able to message Carli anymore.
It hung over him at all times, like rain clouds over the peninsula.
Fair play to his parents: as a threat, it worked.
They wouldn’t be able to stop him and Carli from sending each other letters, their primary mode of communication, but if they took away the texts, that would kill him.
Sean, still on the table, was back to snogging the girl again, this time whilst gyrating his hips in embarrassing moves it looked like he’d picked up from watching Dirty Dancing with Eilidh and Cara.
It wouldn’t end well. Although the audience that had gathered around them were cheering and clapping like it was the series finale of a talent show.
Which it definitely was not. The only judge’s house Sean would be going to would be their parents’, with Niall joining him.
Niall, in his near sobriety, may have been a few microseconds ahead of the drunken crowd in noticing when Sean’s table dance went wrong?
Or maybe he cared more because his wee brother was flailing, losing his footing and tumbling backwards through the air towards the kitchen floor, his girlfriend, or whoever she was, surging down on top of him.
Niall watched in what seemed like slow motion and heard the collective whoops that had been reverberating around the kitchen slowly segue into screams and cries of ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’.
There was a dull thud and for a fragment in time, it seemed like there was utter stillness in the kitchen.
The girl lay on top of Sean, bum in the air, both of them deathly motionless.
Then, she groaned and rolled off him, and Niall saw his brother underneath, eyelids flickering but his body uncomfortably still.
‘Shit! Sean!’ Niall was there in a second. Sean was lying on his back on the kitchen floor, which thankfully was covered in linoleum rather than ceramic tiles. That might explain why his head wasn’t split open.
‘Sean?’ Niall slapped his brother’s face like he’d seen people do on TV. ‘Sean, can you hear me?’
Sean mumbled something unintelligible.
‘Can someone call an ambulance, please?’
Everyone stood around, gaping at one another.
Fuck’s sake. ‘Can someone call a fucking ambulance? Please.’
Nobody moved.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Niall turned back to Sean. ‘Sean, can you hear me?’
Sean mumbled. ‘Aye.’ Then he rolled over and spewed all over the floor.
‘You should get him to a hospital.’
Niall turned to see a swotty kid from his biology class at school. What was he doing here? ‘There’s a risk of secondary brain injury,’ the boy added.
Niall had no idea what secondary brain injury was, but the words brain and injury were enough to panic him. He pulled his phone out of his pocket to dial 999.
But the signal was non-existent.
‘Where’s the landline?’ he demanded.
At last someone answered. ‘It’s in the lounge. I’ll call an ambulance.’
But none of it was fast enough for Niall who was watching his brother lying on the floor, the rosy, happy colour of his face being replaced by grey, and the words ‘secondary brain injury’ ringing in his ears like the ambulance siren he longed to hear but could take forever to arrive around here. There was no time to waste.
Niall jumped up and opened the kitchen drawer he’d looked in during a curiosity streak earlier and grabbed the keys that were lying there.
‘Come on, Sean. Stand up!’ He hauled Sean to an upright sitting position and wrapped his brother’s arm around his shoulder, rising up and bringing them both to a standing position.
How he got past the kid whose parents’ house it was and out into the Audi parked in the driveway, Niall didn't know. Later, he would discover that the kid was busy with some girl action of his own in the summer house.
With some help from willing but drunken bystanders, Niall folded Sean into the passenger seat, got into the driver’s seat and fastened both their seatbelts. He was about to pull out of the drive when he heard someone get into the back seat — Shona McCafferty.
‘Shona? What’re you doing?’
‘I’m coming with you. For moral support.’
Niall didn’t have time to argue. ‘Whatever.’
Niall was sixteen and hadn’t even begun driving lessons, but he’d learned a bit from his older brothers, so if he could get somewhere with this car, call an ambulance and meet it halfway then that was all he could hope for.
He’d probably had three generous swigs of whisky an hour ago.
He didn’t feel drunk. Thinking your brother was dead kind of sobered you up.
The car juddered as Niall started it and accelerated out of the driveway and into second gear.
Given that he’d had any alcohol at all and no licence, he shouldn’t be driving, but they were in the middle of the country so there probably wouldn’t be any other cars or pedestrians.
He couldn’t stand by and do nothing. Not when his brother might have a secondary brain injury.