The Back Room, by Declan Morrissey
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
Liam Hennessy was eleven, and he heard it through the floorboards on a wet Tuesday in December 1955, lying with his ear to the gap by the hot-water pipe where all the important conversations in the house came up.
‘It can’t go on,’ his father was saying. ‘It takes up the whole of the back room. It’s past its best and everyone knows it.’
‘I know,’ said his mother, ‘but I’ve been fond of it since I was a girl.’
‘Fagan’s will come for it on Saturday. I’ll put down the money for the new one on Friday.’
Liam lay very still. There was only one thing in the house that took up the whole of the back room and was past its best, and that was Grandad, who had come to live with them in October after his fall, and who slept in there on the put-you-up, coughing, smoking his pipe out of the window and teaching Liam to cheat at cards. Fagan’s, Liam knew, was a place on the Drumcondra Road. He had never been inside. He had a clear picture, all the same, of what kind of place took old people away before Christmas.
He told no one. He did what any reasonable person would do. On the Friday after school he emptied his money box, which held seven shillings and fourpence, packed two of his mother’s scones, a torch and Grandad’s good cap into his schoolbag, and went into the back room.
‘We’re going,’ he said. ‘Now. Before they come.’
Grandad looked at him over his newspaper for a long moment. Then he folded it up.
‘Right you are,’ he said, and got his coat.
They took the bus into town and then the train to Bray, because Liam had an aunt in Bray who was known to be soft-hearted. Grandad paid for the tickets. He did not ask a single question. He sat by the window watching the grey sea come and go between the houses, and once, when the train went into a tunnel, Liam thought he heard him laugh, though it might have been the cough.
It was half past six and dark when they reached Aunt Peg’s, and Liam’s father was already on the doorstep, because Aunt Peg had a telephone and so did the Garda station.
Nobody shouted, in the end. On the last bus home his father explained, slowly, about the piano: the old upright in the back room that nobody could play, that had been his mother’s since she was a girl, that Fagan’s were taking away on Saturday so that a proper bed for Grandad could go in its place. Liam sat by the window with his face burning and wished the bus would swallow him.
Grandad sat beside him. When they stopped on Dorset Street he leaned over.
‘I knew about the piano,’ he said quietly. ‘Heard them on Sunday.’
Liam stared. ‘Then why did you come?’
Grandad took his good cap out of the schoolbag, where it had been all day, and settled it carefully over his eyes.
‘Seventy-eight years,’ he said, ‘and nobody ever ran away with me before. I wasn’t going to miss it.’
“Liam is presented as a foolish boy whose mistake causes nothing but trouble.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.