There’s a man standing at the front of our estate and he is wearing the wrong clothes. His face and his clothes don’t match. They are teenager’s clothes, but he is an old, old man. He has a bright neon-like-a-highlighter hoodie, black puffy jacket and baggy pants. His boots have their laces undone like how I used to when I was four, before Granny Mary showed me about the rabbit ears. He doesn’t make sense because old people know how to tie their own laces. Old people don’t like bright colours: they wear greys, browns and blacks. Old people don’t wear hoodies. Mrs. Daly would call it a ‘mismatch.’ She might call him a ‘mismatched man’ because Mrs. Daly likes adjectives and loves prefixes.

Mrs. Daly is alright, even though she has hairs on her chin and spits when talks. When we were small boys in Senior Infants, she let us dig up the flower patch in the schoolyard when we searched for treasure. Other teachers would shout, ‘Get out of it!’ But she’d put her hands in her jacket, look the other way and pretend she didn’t see. She’d even ‘ooh,’ and, ‘ahh,’ when we showed her our treasure. She never told us they were just bits of old glass bottles.

In 3rd class, we went on a school tour to a museum in Dublin to see real treasure, and there was a whole section of stuff that you were allowed to touch. There was a long, wooden rolling-pin thing with Celts and Normans and Vikings and you had to swivel it around till the Celts were fully Celts and the Normans were fully Normans and the Vikings were fully Vikings. The mismatched man at the front of our estate is all wrong – like a Celt with a Viking’s body and a Norman’s head.

I tried to tell Mum about him that first day I seen him, but she didn’t listen to me – she just said, ‘um,’ and, ’aha, yeah,’ the way she does when she’s looking at her phone. In the morning, on the walk to school, she rushes along with her face in the phone. She’s stepped on dog dirt a few times because she hasn’t noticed. She doesn’t see the faces in the manhole covers either, the way the nuts and bolts look like eyes and noses. She used to always look and laugh at that when I pointed it out before. She doesn’t notice anything like that now. Sometimes, I want to grab the phone off her and smash it into little pieces. I know phones can break because she had a cracked screen for a few weeks before she got a new one. But I reckon I’d need a concrete block to finish a phone off properly. She doesn’t allow me and Fred to have a phone because she says they are addictive, but she doesn’t care that she’s addicted herself. I told her that one day and it just made her sad and quiet and I felt bad so I didn’t say it again. 

That first day I seen the mismatched man, I told Fred about him as we walked along. Fred wasn’t interested because Fred is five and just cares about sticks. Sticks and chessies. He just said, ‘Stop lying!’ in a whiny voice and Mum looked up from her phone and said, ‘Ah, Jack, don’t be scaring your brother!’ So I didn’t talk about it again, but I did write about the mismatched man in my Free Writing copy when I’d finished Mental Maths.

Mrs. Daly is strict, but she lets us do whatever we want in our Free Writing copies as long as you don’t ask her to spell out words. She even lets you draw in it so, for a while, I just used to do Minecraft figures, but now that I’m nine I’ve been doing comic strips with the little bubbles coming out of the mouths. Sometimes, I do a sketch and write a story about what I’ve drawn. The day that I seen him, I drew the mismatched man on a clean page of my copy. I drew his kids’ clothes and his big rectangular face. I coloured the face greyish by slanting my pencil sideways and shading it softly and then put the pencil up the right way and dug lines in it for his wrinkles. I borrowed Sophie Tierney’s yellow highlighter (which she’s not supposed to have ‘cos highlighter always goes through the other side) to do his hoodie. I gave him a slit for a mouth because it’s so thin and did two full stops for his eyes. I didn’t change pencils for the eyes because I couldn’t see the colour of them. You have to be right up close to someone to see their eyes. I made his eyes black in my picture by digging down hard.  

Charlie Ryan sits at my table in school. He’s alright but he has an ear wax problem, and the sticky goo slides down his neck sometimes like the way slime oozes behind slugs. His left ear is the worst, but I sit on his right, so that’s okay. Charlie is obsessed with robbers and he’s always drawing plans for booby-trapping them in his house. He likes looking at my sketches, and when he seen the mismatched man in my copy at lunchtime, he said: ’Jack, why’ve you drawn Frankenstein in a hoodie?’

After he said that, it gave me an idea for a story and I wrote some lines about the mismatched man on the next page. It was a story about a man with a Frankenstein face following you, and no one listening when you told them. I ended it by saying: ‘And then I woke up and it was all a dream.’ Mrs. Daly doesn’t like when we end our stories like that; she says it’s ‘a bit lazy’, but it’s a great fast way to finish them if you are rushing and want to get out to the pitch quick at lunchtime. 

In real life, the mismatched man is not a dream. And he’s back at the front of our estate, staring at me by the kerb, and Mum and Fred take no notice as usual. Fred has his hand in Mum’s. She has her phone in her other hand and they walk right past him without even looking up, Fred dragging his stick through the leaves. I walk behind them slowly, watching the mismatched man the whole time. I want to see his eyes so I can go back to my drawing and fill them in with the right colour. I walk right under him even though my heart beats so loud I can hear it in my ears. When I pass by, he lifts something out of his puffy jacket and puts it in his mouth. A cloud of smoke covers his face and I cannot see his eyes. The smoke smells like the candy floss I had at the Christmas market last year. But underneath that smell, there’s something else – sweat, dirt and sourness. 

‘Come on Jack, stop dilly-dallying!’ 

Mum gets nervous when we leave the estate and meet the main road. She waits for me holding Fred’s hand. I look over my shoulder. He knows my name now, the mismatched man. He turns to look at me, pink puffs of smoke curling out of his mouth. 

I have a night terror. I know I’m in one while I’m having it. It’s like being underwater in a swimming pool and seeing other people but not being able to get to them. When I come out of it, I’m shouting the house down and thrashing my arms about. Mum is standing over me in her nightie with Fred behind her clinging on to her legs. Fred is roaring crying. Mum’s face is squashed from sleeping. If I drew her, I’d really have to dig down hard with my pencil to fill the wrinkles in. She keeps saying, ‘Shush, love, shush,’ and stroking my forehead. Fred stops crying and takes big gulps instead. She lifts him up and puts him back to bed in his room. I am all sweaty and I get up to change my pyjamas. When Mum comes back, she says: ‘Oh, love. What was that about?’ 

And I tell her again about the mismatched man, but this time there’s no phone in her hand and she just listens. She scrunches up her face and tries to get the words out right when she speaks. 

‘Do you think we should go back to art therapy, love? Do you think it would help?’

I am so tired. I just sink back down into my pillow and my eyelids move up and down slowly. There’s Mum. There’s blackness. There’s Mum. There’s blackness. And then, I’m gone. 

At the parent teacher meeting, the first one without Dad, Mrs. Daly told Mum about art therapy and gave her a brochure. Mum was at her ‘wits’ end’ because of me. I didn’t want to go at the start. But Mrs. Daly said it would be good and Mrs. Daly usually has good ideas. In that big, bright art therapy room I started drawing faces – the faces I could see everywhere: on manhole covers, on door handles, in puddles. I got really good at them. The art therapy teacher told Mum about ‘pareidolia’– when people can see faces in objects that other people can’t. She said I had it, that it wasn’t a bad thing, just that I had a ‘superb’ imagination. But Mum cried on the phone to Auntie Susan that night. She said, ‘He’s looking for his face everywhere.’

I wasn’t though. I just liked drawing the faces. Sometimes adults can be a bit overdramatic.

The morning after the night terror, we are back on the school run. The school run is a funny way of saying it since it’s a stopping-starting walk of, ‘Hurry up!’ and ‘Watch that puddle!’ and ‘Keep in off the road!’ The mismatched man is there again, but Mum walks next to me instead of Fred this time and whispers, ‘Jack, he’s just a builder waiting for his lift, smoking his vape.’

But how can I be sure he’s not a robber like the ones in Charlie Ryan’s copy?

‘I know you’re just trying to keep us safe, Jack.’ Mum’s smile is watery – like if happy and sad were colours swirled together.

I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything. I just nod and lean into her elbow like I used to when I was Fred’s age. Mum smells how our house smells: of breakfast pancakes, soap and fresh clothes from the washing machine. It’s the same smell on my school tracksuit; when we throw them in a pile in the PE hall, I always know I have the right one on afterwards because it smells of home.

We pass by the mismatched man, but Mum stops in front of him. She squeezes my hand tight and says: ’Lovely day, thank God.’

The mismatched man’s thin lips part and crack open. 

‘The rain is holding off, alright. Long may it last,’ he says. 

I look right up into his face and I see the colour of his eyes. They’re a brownish sort of orange. Amber, Mrs. Daly might say. I wonder if Sophie Tierney will lend me her highlighter again so I can finish his eyes in my copybook.

I nod at the mismatched man. He nods back.