A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

lonesome prairee, full of beans and disgruntlement, or I sat on a rock in the Utah Desert and shivered, I’d gaze up at the huge, cold, black-blue sky and I’d find the star - I always knew its sly twinkle and fade, it could never hide from me. I’d stare at it, fix my eyes on it and refuse to let them stray to any of the other millions of its still and shooting siblings. I’d stare at my star till I knew I had it. I’d make a copper rope of my gaze and I’d lasso the twinkling bollocks. Then I’d yell.
    —My name is Henry Smart!
    I’d watch it shimmer and fuss. My voice was hard and sure and triumphant, hard as the rock I was sitting on, cold as the air that was lying on top of me. There was no one else to hear me. My nearest neighbours were as distant as the stars above me.
    —My name is Henry Smart! The one and only Henry Smart!
    I’d watch its gases splutter and die.
    —My name is Henry Smart!
    I’d yell until I could no longer see its shadow against the blueness of the night, until there was nothing out there. I killed my brother every night.

Three
    H e went to work every evening. He kissed my mother. He kissed me. He patted his coat, then left us. He sat on the landing floor outside and put on his leg. Then he was gone.
    Off to his work.
    Henry Smart, the tap tap man. He stood outside Dolly Oblong’s kip house. Henry the Leg. In the week after my birth, he went at his work with new enthusiasm and vim. My birth had freed him. There’d be no more punishments; there never had been any. The earlier deaths had been bad luck. Just that. Dead children, thrown on top of all the city’s dead children. Henry looked at the certainty barrelling through my arms and legs and decided that he could do whatever he wanted. He stood on the steps of Dolly Oblong’s, a new man yet again. A new man with a new leg. The ships spat out ruffians and bowsies from far-flung, savage corners of the world, hard men tired of riding each other. They scoured the city with pockets full of itchy cash and found my father on the step of the brothel, between them and the women they dribbled for. They pointed at his leg and laughed and said things in languages that my father had never heard. They started up the steps, these nut-tough bastards, and suddenly the leg was gone and, even more suddenly, they were on their backs and bawling. They looked at my father rejoining his leg. They saw the warm gleam of the streetlamp purring in the wood, and the same warmth in my father’s face. They went away, and carried the legend of the leg back to the creaking, tinder-built outposts they’d sailed from. Bollixes from Stoneybatter got the same treatment. Men who had never been to sea in their lives, who’d never even gone down to the docks to look at it, men whose only language was a few dozen words of nose-propelled English, crawled away from the steps of Dolly Oblong’s with cracked skulls and wilting langers. Only the meekest and the mildest and, of course, the wealthy regulars got past my father in that first week of my life. He swung his new leg with a conscience as clear as my blue, blue eyes.
    And after that, after he’d named me Henry, he still cracked heads, and more and more heads. He brought the leg down and took chunks out of it. He battered and hammered. One small thing, a name; one tiny mistake, a moment of sentimentality, and that beautiful week became a mocking memory. Melody cried and closed her face to him; she buried herself in her shawl. She started grieving a week after the birth of the healthiest child anyone had ever seen. My father found her at dawn on the steps outside the house looking up through the fog to where there were no stars. She was shivering, soaking, me inside the shawl fighting her. He took me and looked. My glow was now a flake-skinned crust, scratched raw, cracked by the cold. My baby blues were a fierce black, throwing outrage, revenge at him. I was the baby with the bloodshot eyes. He kissed my hard cheeks