The Jewel

by Neil Hegarty

  ‘Not a word,’ he said, ‘from you or from me. And sure, maybe we can do it again.’ She didn’t hear a question mark.

  Something else to tell Roisin not to do. Roisin would be OK. It came to Maeve – as the boy took up his hurley, mumbled a goodbye, shuffled off into the dusk – that her part in life was to do things first and report back to Roisin, to give Roisin the thumbs-up or down, to act as a, what did that hymn say, a shield in the strife. The boy had vanished now: his father was a holy joe, and scary too; so there’d be no playground boasting going on, at any rate. She was safe enough. She would think what to do with her knickers later. She slipped away in the opposite direction, made her way home.

  *

  Roisin looked over her shoulder. There was Maeve’s gang behind her, though of Maeve herself there was no sign. Roisin didn’t walk home from school with Maeve any more, and that was fine; it wasn’t the thing to do, once school had ended for the day. There were rules in teenaged life, in secondary school, and both of them knew what these rules were. Roisin was in her element now at school. Good at lessons, good at basketball; and the art room, the biggest classroom in the school, with its big window looking north, where she was spending more and more time. Maeve had no turn for art, either, she had painted a blue sky with a dark blue paint, a paint so blue that it was almost black, and she had, besides, ladled the paint on to such a degree that the paper tore, and Mr Cooper went through her for a shortcut – offended by just about everything that Maeve had gone and done – and that was an end to art for Maeve, there and then. Maeve didn’t mind: she’d laughed until the tears came, as she told the story – ‘it sagged down in the middle and then just tore in two, and the face on him!’ – and Roisin had laughed too. The two of them, laughing their legs off.

  Roisin smiled at the memory, checked herself. Because it wasn’t so funny, not really; it was another thing that Maeve wasn’t any good at, that Roisin was. ‘Nice work, Roisin,’ Mr Cooper had said the other day about a little watercolour she had put together, the colours watered and paled down to virtually no colour at all, just as an experiment, to see how it would turn out, but – Mr Cooper! Who frowned so much, who had a face on him, who was so hard to please! – ‘very nice indeed. You have an eye, Roisin.’

  There never were two sisters so unalike.

  Maeve heard the watercolour story not from Roisin, of course, but at school. She glowed, she looked at the watercolour in the bedroom they still shared, she exclaimed with pleasure. ‘The loveliness of it,’ was what she said. She kissed Roisin. ‘My talented sister.’

  And that was good, was one thing not to feel bad about. She didn’t have to feel guilty about her sister, which meant she could concentrate on feeling guilty about her mother, guilty about spending as little time as possible around the house. She was leaving her mother behind: but sure, wasn’t this the thing to be done, what everyone had to do?

  ‘Don’t feel badly about it,’ Maeve told her. ‘Sure, isn’t it what she’s trained us both to do? To get out and away? You’re only doing what you’re told.’

  Yes: and at least she wasn’t leaving Maeve behind. True, they didn’t cook up plans any longer to move to Hollywood: but London was still a definite possibility, with Paris for a weekend. They’d find a flat, they’d see what was what. ‘The hell out of here,’ said Maeve, ‘and Mammy can come and visit us.’ What would Maeve do? – for Roisin might have her heart set on university; but Maeve would have to find something else to do. The teachers were complaining about her. No academic bent: but, so what? Maeve didn’t mind her absence of academic bent: that was clear. ‘The whole world to choose from,’ she said, and her eyes sparkled. So there was no particular reason for Roisin to mind either. It would all be grand, in the end.

  On this late spring day, as she walked towards home with her friend Aisling, Roisin thought again about her mother. Aisling was complaining about her own mother, which was a surprise: to Roisin, Aisling’s mother had seemed to be sound, as mothers went. But apparently not: apparently she didn’t want Aisling to go on to university, when the time came. She wanted her to get a job as soon as the law allowed, to begin to earn. What’s the use of all that study for a girl, anyway? – seemed to be Aisling’s mother’s attitude.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Roisin said. It was true: Aisling’s mother seemed so sensible.

  ‘I don’t believe it either,’ Aisling told her flatly, ‘but it’s true all the same.’

  ‘Where does she think you’ll get a job? Does she think there are jobs? What, would you go into the creamery?’

  ‘The abattoir, maybe,’ Aisling said, ‘making glue.’

  ‘Dog food.’

  ‘Cat food.’

  They laughed, shoved the problem aside. But it put Roisin thinking about her own mother. Of course there’d be no university problems there: her mother was so hungry for her daughters to better themselves, to get an education, that Roisin could almost hear the stomach growls. She was – good that way, Roisin thought, though she knew better than to say it to her friend. Her mother was not the worst: Roisin suspected that her mother harboured thoughts that were not in the Catechism. She suspected that her mother had no great regard for Ireland, where they buried babies in the fields, where bishops ran amok and belted their parishioners across the head with croziers of solid gold. ‘My lord’ here and ‘My lord’ there. They were all still living in the olden days, right now, in this country: and Roisin suspected that her mother wasn’t too pleased about it all.

  Her mother, though, she kept her mouth shut. You had to read the runes, to study the stars wheeling slowly in the sky, to get a sense of what was going on in her mother’s head. She kept her thoughts secret, and she passed the lesson on.

  ‘Glue!’ Roisin exclaimed, and Aisling laughed aloud. ‘“Excuse me, modom, may I borrow your prize wolfhound? – we’re running a little short of glue, don’t you know.”’

  Roisin knew to keep her mouth closed, out in the world. She had learned from the best. She lowered her eyes, nowadays, when she passed one of the nuns, or a priest: and she supposed they thought she was doing it out of courtesy, out of respect. But she knew better. She knew she was doing it out of the contempt she was beginning to feel for such people. She lowered her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to look at them or talk to them. And that was the right thing – but of course better to keep her thoughts to herself.

  ‘She’d make a grab at your tits,’ Aisling had muttered the other day, as they passed a nun (obviously a nun, you didn’t need the sight of a habit to identify them, the short hair, and the tight lips, and the odd fashion choices, all combined to give them away), ‘given half a chance. You just have to keep walking, keep away from them.’ They both laughed – but they both kept walking, too. You couldn’t be too careful.

  She glanced over her shoulder once more. There was Maeve’s gang. Laughing their heads off, bags of crisps; the purple wrapping of a Dairy Milk cast away onto the pavement. No Maeve. Maeve wanted to talk to her: she had something to tell, she’d said. ‘A bit of craic, just; tell you later. Something to manage.’ So many thoughts to think, so many of them to be considered silently: Aisling’s mother and her strange behaviour; and her own silent, secretive mother; the future, and the past, sister and father and mother. It was best to sail on, to stride forward, to never look back over a shoulder, to make the past dead and keep it dead. Aisling cracked a joke – a dirty joke, a bishop and a nun, a joke that would set the fires of Hell burning around your feet and racing up your skirt – and Roisin smiled, but now she was only half listening. She was tracking a future course.

  Of course there were a lot of problems. Their house was falling apart, was one of them. Which was a worry – though she hoped she’d be well away before that particular problem would have to be solved. Mica. Causing the house to crumble. The irony of it: and her mind flitted again to the sparkling rock in the donkey’s field. How it had gleamed, how warm it had been from hours of soaking in the summer sun, how green th
e air had been, how gentle the donkey’s brown, lash-fringed eyes had been. How she had laughed and Maeve had laughed, in that bowl of warm green. And how – contaminated that memory was now; yes, that was the word for a memory that she ought to be able to look back upon with pleasure and delight; a child’s dream that was laced now with poison, with mica, with the horror of a disintegrating house.

  She and Maeve would have to get out of the house before the roof fell in on them.

  And the donkey, most likely, turned into dog food by now.

  Well, and they would get out. The parents would manage, would swim, would not sink, each in their own way. She had a life to live, and she would live it far from these damp fields.

  She looked over her shoulder. The school crowds were thinning now. Still no sign of Maeve.

  12

  Philomena was at the shop. This was her usual beat, her midweek beat: when Maeve and Roisin were younger, they had liked to accompany her, to cruise the aisles, to slip forbidden objects – Oatfield Emeralds and Angel Delight – into Philomena’s basket. They knew, even as youngsters, that this was the time, these were the places, when Philomena was at her most relaxed – the bungalow with its mould and its damp and Cormac, safely out of sight. Sometimes they would go to the cafe beside the shop and feast on sardine sandwiches (for Philomena) and jammy buns and squash (for them), and Philomena would let her hair down, a little, and smile. Even laugh, sometimes, for it was difficult not to laugh when Maeve was around and Cormac was not. At such times, Maeve laughed and laughed.

  But those days were over. Of course, and she wouldn’t wish them back: her children wouldn’t be seen dead with their mother, wandering the aisles; and quite right, too. Philomena suspected that Maeve would, in fact, have been glad to take off to the supermarket with her mother – but imagine what those friends of hers would say if they caught her at it. Out of the question.

  Philomena focused on the list. Washing powder, and apples for Roisin, and chicken. And – she shouldn’t have married him. Scanty comfort to know that most of the women she knew felt the same about their husbands: who had seemed at least tolerable as fresh-faced, unlined young men of twenty-two, twenty-four, all with a bit of knowledge of the world, all more or less tolerable. Toilet tissue, which this family seemed to eat, to judge by the way they went through roll after roll of the stuff, and beans. Or so it had seemed: now, the women seemed to be saying, their men had slipped to just the other side of tolerable: thick about the waist from chips and grease, red about the face from beer and spirits, narrow in the brain, and getting narrower with every passing day. Which reminded her: oil, for the stuff in the chip pan needed changing. That’s what men did: they got narrow, there was no changing their ways, not a jot nor a tittle, not after a certain age.

  Philomena listened quietly to all this stuff. She agreed with it all, too. She had reached these conclusions years ago, long before her peers. She didn’t say much, and the other women didn’t probe. They knew that her Cormac was a case apart. Thick and red and narrow, and all these things – but there was something else going down too, with Cormac.

  Chicken: she’d make a casserole, later, and freeze it for during the week; and another chicken for tomorrow’s dinner, with roast potatoes, and cauliflower and peas. Cooking apples for a crumble. She nodded at a familiar face pushing a trolley, but she didn’t stop to speak. No idea who it was; it would come to her later. (Philomena looked pale, she looked failed, thought the acquaintance, she should make more of an effort with the poor woman. She would, next time.) Philomena thought: I might pop into the cafe next door, if I have time: I might get myself a sandwich and a milky coffee, it might put a pep in my step.

  She had met Cormac – where else? – in the pub. The pub was in Galway, where she was visiting friends, and he was visiting as part of a stag weekend. He caught her eye across the room, he nodded, and she nodded back after a moment; later, he appeared at her elbow, and her friends melted away. He wasn’t a stranger, exactly: that was the point. They knew each other to see – same parish, same fields, same church on Sundays, and now here they both were in Galway, city slickers for the weekend – but had never exchanged so much as a word, the age difference of seven years having put paid to that kind of intercourse. The other kind, rather to Philomena’s dismay, took place that very night in Cormac’s hotel room on the edge of town: having bought her a number of drinks, he seemed to expect that this was pay-back time, and she hadn’t liked to resist, to seem ungrateful or frigid or a user or any of those things. (She knew how men talked about women, she had heard her brothers talk that way when her own mother was out of earshot; and she didn’t want Cormac to talk that way about her.)

  She hadn’t enjoyed any of the different forms of intercourse on offer, because Cormac was a bit lacking in the small-talk and charm departments; and, as it turned out, in the sexual department too. Surely it should have amounted to more than this – though it was difficult for Philomena, given her own profound inexperience, to reach a conclusion, and she didn’t want to think unfair thoughts.

  Maybe this was the way it was with everyone. Maybe it was a conspiracy of silence. She heaved the chicken in on top of her other groceries.

  How amazing, though! – that an unsatisfactory evening on the Headford Road could lead on, with seemingly unstoppable, inexorable haste, to marriage, to a white wedding, with Cormac’s belly bursting out of his shirt, to a rambunctious, drunken reception, and a pregnancy hot on its heels, and the lot! So rapidly! – and without so much as a by your leave! Philomena stopped in her tracks right there in the supermarket aisle, with pure astonishment – even all these years later – at the package she’d ended up holding.

  Like a chicken, heavy and plucked and nothing much to look at.

  And now a house, a bungalow, with mould on the walls, a house that would – just watch and wait and see – eventually fall down.

  Her daughters were the only good thing to have come out of this bloody mess. At least Philomena had that. Something – some dignity, some substance – to hold on to, though by the very tips of her fingers.

  *

  Saturday, again. By the middle of the afternoon, Roisin had her homework done for the following Monday, and her reading up to date, and all set for the week ahead. Maeve had been out all day; her mother was in and out; her father was out somewhere, the further the better. She would go to the Vigil Mass, and her Sunday morning would be free for something that was not Mass. Ten minutes’ walk would take her there and ten would take her back; and she was sure of seeing Aisling and some of the other girls there too, for a bit of craic afterwards. I wonder where Maeve is?

  ‘Not important,’ Maeve had said. ‘Some scandal I was going to pass on, and that I’m now not going to pass on. I’m turning over a new leaf. I am Virtue Incarnate, from now on: just you watch and see.’

  ‘Right,’ Roisin said, ‘we’ll see how that goes’; and she laughed then at her heavy irony; and Maeve smiled but did not laugh.

  Mass passed in a daydream, which was the only way to get through it, and thank God for rote, so that she knew when to stand and sit and kneel and speak and stay silent; and thank God too that the new priest with the agonising stammer knew to keep the homily short.

  She had a bit of a laugh afterwards, with the girls, on the steps. Then it was time for home, for Saturday-night lasagne.

  The next bit – she realised later, for there were years and years still to pass – she would never really leave behind.

  The best feature about their church was the stone grotto, off to the right. You turned into a crazy pathing that ran between tall shrubs – it was not a shrubbery as such, because most of the shrubs and trees that had once grown in the church grounds had been grubbed up and cut down on the orders of the last-but-one parish priest, who thought that they were a nuisance to keep clipped and tidy; better to give them the chop; and he had spared only the tiny patch of planting that screened the grotto, and laid a sea of inky asphalt instead.

&nbs
p; Roisin liked the grotto, though this was a fact she would not have admitted to anyone. She’d left her religious phase behind her now, that was years ago – but maybe this phase had left some sort of trace. For Roisin liked the gold and blue statue of the Virgin framed by the gleaming white stone arch, and the modest acreage of mosaic-work, gold-glinting on the walls behind the Virgin. The mosaic reminded her of the illustrations of Byzantium in her History textbook: so decadent, so lustrous. The gleam and glitter and colours that stirred associations of long ago.

  Summer, and sunshine, and the green smell of growing grass.

  She wouldn’t make a habit of going to the grotto, of course – it was nothing like that – but she liked its environs, and the glint of gold that had such associations for her now, for good or ill. She also liked the expression on this particular Virgin’s face: it seemed right, wise, clever, neither too sweet nor too sour. She could see that this was a superior statue to the Holy Mary which had strode the corridors of her primary school, long ago. This one was better-looking, and she wore better clothes, a better cut and fit; she seemed less downtrodden, she had an altogether better sense of herself, in Roisin’s opinion. She had style.

  Their mother had brought them there, she and Maeve, from time to time after Mass, when they were tinies; and she liked these memories.

  On an impulse, on this mild Saturday evening, Mass over, and the sky still bright, she turned onto the crazy pathing and slipped in behind the screen of shrubbery. The grotto appeared: a bar of late sunlight fell across the white arch, so that it fairly dazzled; and onto a band of mosaic-work, so that the gold gleamed too. It didn’t fall onto Maeve, who was sitting inside the arch, against the mosaic, nor onto the blood that flowed from between her legs and across the ground. Not a thin trickle of blood, but a lot of blood – pooling like a shadow, like a patch of darkness there on the shadowy ground – and the straightened wire coat-hanger on the ground, enveloped by blood.