December Girl

by Nicola Cassidy

  Chapter Five

  MOLLY

  Mr McKenna liked to take a drink on Saturday evenings when the week’s work was finished and he had his day off, Sunday, to look forward to. He’d have me boil up a big pot of water and he’d stand bare-chested in the back hall, soaping down his body with a cloth.

  I don’t know why he got me to bring the water in to him instead of my mother. Part of me knew it was so that he could be there in front of me, his hairy chest out, half hoping my eyes would wander over his body in curiosity. But I never looked at him. I made a point of putting down the water not catching his eye or his face and turning my head so I couldn’t see.

  You would hear him shaving around his bushy moustache, the razor slicing over the stubble, the rinse of it in the water, like a small fish coming up and going back down under. And he’d sing, an old Irish air, his deep throaty voice filling the back hall alongside the splashes. When he was done with the shaving, he’d rinse his comb in the water and pull it back with some oil over his hair. He’d rinse the comb then and that would go in his jacket pocket, ready to be pulled back over his oily scalp throughout the night.

  He always put a new collar on going out on Saturday nights. It rose like a white wall against his black stubbly neck, the bit of double chin coming down to meet it. The chain of his watch would be hanging out for everyone to see and before he put his bowler hat on his head, he ran the greasy comb back over his hair one last time.

  When it was time to leave, he’d kiss my mother on the cheek and tell us not to wait up, and when the door closed behind him it was as though the very walls in the house breathed a sigh of relief. We were alone, just the children and my mother and it was always our happiest time of the week.

  Sometimes Mam would pour a small glass of cooking sherry after the boys had gone to bed. She’d tell me not to tell Mr McKenna and I’d laugh and say, ‘I wouldn’t tell him anything.’ And it’s true. I wouldn’t share the weather, never mind a secret, with Mr McKenna.

  We’d play chess or draughts, or lay out the cards and dice and if Mam was feeling very tired, I would read the boys a story by the fire. We’d make up stories too and we’d talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Michael said he’d like to be a farmer, and Patrick said he wanted to sail the ships around the ocean. I don’t know where he got that from, but I guess he wanted to be different to Michael, in some way. He used to love to watch the sailors clamber up the rigs, jumping like fleas among the ropes and sails at the port, with Daddy.

  On these nights, I would sometimes think of the friends I used to have at Dowth and how the dances would be coming up or a ceili in someone’s house. Here in town, I didn’t have any friends to ask me to a dance. So, I’d take out the sewing that needed to be done or try to persuade Mam to let me have some of the sherry or I’d read the paper, cover to cover, because there wasn’t much else to be doing.

  With the sherry in her belly, Mam would start nodding off by the fire and I’d have to shake her by the shoulders and say, ‘Mam, Mam,’ until she woke up with a ‘Hmmmm’ and she’d get up groggily, and say she was off to bed because she couldn’t keep her eyes open.

  Because she wouldn’t give me the sherry herself, when she had gone upstairs and I was there on my own, I’d sneak into the kitchen and pour myself a glass and take it back with me to the fire, sipping it like a bee might on nectar, tasting the bitterness, not liking it, but drinking it all the same.

  Tonight, Mam had been later going to bed than normal and I was in the kitchen, my back to the door, just putting the stopper back into the sherry bottle when in walked Mr McKenna, earlier than he normally got back from the pub.

  I spun round, startled; he seemed surprised to see me too.

  ‘Molly, you’re up,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not daring to move, because behind my back was the glass and the sherry bottle.

  ‘Put on the kettle, there’s a good girl,’ he says and he parks himself down at the table, with a big ‘aaaaaaa’ and reaches for the bread knife to cut the bread Mam’s left out for him.

  I turn back around to the counter and I hide the glass behind the bottle. I fill the kettle, but not too much so that it won’t take long to boil. I want to get out of this kitchen and away from Mr McKenna. He’s bad enough in the daytime, sober.

  ‘Will you have a cup?’ he asks, looking at me where I’m stood in front of the stove and I say no, that I was just going to bed and I’m thinking how can I get back over to the counter to empty the sherry glass? ‘Ah sure you can stay up to have a cup with your stepfather,’ he says. I hate that he is able to use the word father in a sentence pertaining to me.

  ‘Alright,’ I say, thinking I might be able to manoeuvre the glass into the dip of the sink if I shuffle over a bit, quietly.

  He lifts up his leg and puts his boot on the chair, picking at the laces and untying them. ‘That’s better,’ he says wiggling his toes in his socks and I wonder if his feet have black hair on them like the curly hair on his chest.

  ‘You’re settling in, Molly? You like it here?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, Mr McKenna,’ I say.

  ‘Because you know,’ he says leaning in a bit, ‘Sometimes I wonder.’

  ‘Wonder what?’ says I, eyeing him up, not liking his tone at all.

  ‘Well …’ he says. ‘It must be hard on you, like. So young. Losing your father. Living here, with us.’

  ‘I’m grand,’ I say and I’m wondering how much drink he’s had. Could I leave the sherry there till morning and get up early and get rid of it?

  ‘Your mother’d be lost without ya,’ he says. ‘And you’re turning into a fine young gersha. Any man would be glad to have ya.’

  I don’t say anything. Instead, I turn the gas up on the stove and tap my foot.

  ‘Have you been thinking about it, Molly?’

  ‘Thinking about what?’ I ask. There’s a glint in his eye and I don’t know if it’s the drink, or what.

  ‘Getting married.’

  ‘Getting married!’ I say and a big pssst sound comes out of my mouth. ‘Why would I be thinking about that?’

  ‘Well why wouldn’t you be?’ he says. ‘A fine girl like you. Are you telling me you’ve never thought about it? About what it would be like to be with a man?’

  I don’t like where Mr McKenna is going at all.

  ‘No,’ says I. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Ach,’ he says and he goes silent, watching me pour out the water into the pot and sit down at the table to stir it and make it draw faster.

  ‘You’d make a grand wife,’ he says and he puts his hand across the table and puts it on mine. I draw it back, feeling as though a rat has run across my knuckles.

  ‘Are you worried you won’t make a good wife?’ he says and he has a grin on his face as if this is all a big joke.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Because if you’re anything like your mother,’ he says and I stand up, the chair shooting back, making a loud scratching sound on the tiled floor.

  ‘I think it’s time for bed,’ I say and he holds out the palm of his hands and he says, ‘Don’t go, you haven’t even had your tea.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I say and I walk over to the sink, pouring my full cup of hot tea down the drain and reaching for the sherry glass, not caring if he sees. I chuck the sherry into the sink, watching the red and brown mix together, like the blood from a steak on milky pepper sauce.

  ‘Ah, don’t go, Molly,’ he says, looking at me all forlornly as I walk past him towards the door.

  ‘Goodnight, Mr McKenna,’ I say and I feel a big sense of relief as I get out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

  Next Saturday, I think, I’m not taking any chances. I’m going to be in bed early, asleep, the lock turned in my door, just like it is tonight.

  I wonder if I should tell my mother.

  But what is there to tell?

  * * *

  People keep saying that time will heal. But I
can’t understand that. If you put a big giant hole in your hand and it forms a scab and a scar, that’s how time heals. When you tear someone out of your life, like Daddy was torn from ours, where’s the healing in that? What can scab over to heal there? Nothing.

  Mam is seeming to get on with things. She’s up early making the breakfast, cleaning the fires, making the beds. She’s bright and breezy, as if nothing ever happened to us. I think even Michael and Patrick don’t miss Daddy like I do. They go to school and they play their games and go outside and walk down to the park. They talk about him sometimes, but I don’t think he’s in their thoughts the same way as he is in mine. I can’t stop thinking about him.

  Mr McKenna walks to his drapery shop every day, with a cane in his hand like a gentleman. I’d only been in the shop a few times before we came to live in the town and I remembered it as dark and stuffy, smelling of snuff and mothballs.

  He stocks bowler hats and top hats, silk handkerchiefs and coloured braces. He sells flat caps with designer labels from London, keeping them down the back of the shop. At the front, near the doors, he arranges gaming hats for the gentry. He has notions about himself has Mr McKenna.

  I was only in the house a few weeks, when he hauled me into the shop to help, saying I couldn’t be rattling round at home all day with my mother. He was right in that there was less work to do in the grey house than there had been on the farm. There was no milking to be done, or butter to be made, there was no farm work to help out with, or crops to be sown, or weeded or harvested. But still, I would rather have stayed with my mother than spend hours in the shop with him.

  The more time I spent with him, the more he sent spiders over my skin. I saw that look on him sometimes - the one he had on his face when he stood at the door with the tulip for my mother, a curly smile under his moustache. Wanting something.

  He came in and out all day, standing close, sometimes in the doorway to the back office, trying to talk to me, to share a joke with me, to ask me to go fetch him a bar of soap or to leave a pair of shoes in the cobblers for him. I felt like he was thinking of things to come and talk to me about and he made me walk beside him on our way home, swinging his cane, pointing buildings out to me as if I was a tourist and not a native of this place at all.

  On the days when I wasn’t in the shop, I was helping Mam in the house. There was always cleaning to be done. It was a different type of work here, I felt. On the farm, it didn’t matter if things were a bit dusty or black; in the grey house, everything had to be kept very clean, bare and white.

  When we’d first arrived, Mam had done her best to make it homely for us and had bought some material and sewed new cushions for the parlour. But Mr McKenna said he didn’t see the need for any superfluous items and he put her off so she went back to sewing up the sheets and socks and linens instead.

  There were no more plans for pretty patterns. We had moved into a new life now. I thought that the tulip was a big falsehood of a flower. I had never seen so much as a daisy in the grey house. There were no petals, no vases, nothing of colour to brighten our day. There was only Mr McKenna and his routine and us fitting neatly into it, the way he wanted. And my mother might have chosen this life for herself, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t signed up to this at all.

  * * *

  Some days I walk up Mell, out the Slane Road and as far as Curley Hole, past the bridge and the weir at the Boyne. I go on Sundays mostly, after mass is done and the dinner cleared and Mr McKenna and Mam are going on their own march about town, which he likes to do to show her off on his arm. He nods his head at everyone who passes, tipping his hat and raising up the arm he’s clamped across my mother’s.

  I like this bit of time to myself, the country air going up my nose and the birds twittering all the way with me as I walk, by the bushes, past all the cottages, the trees starting to forest in front of me. It’s the one bit of time I start to feel like myself again. Like the old me. The country me.

  Other people walk out here too. It’s very scenic but I never really noticed because it was all I knew. Now I see it for what it is; the bend in the river, the blue sky, the calmness that this landscape cut into the earth brings. I don’t look at anyone, I just keep walking, my head held high. I don’t want to make idle chit-chat, to have anyone poke their noses into what I’m doing now, and how’s my mother and isn’t it terrible what happened to your father, you poor thing.

  I’m feeling older. It’s not just my figure, which is all developed into my dress - I know I look like a woman. It’s my mind too. I don’t think like I used to anymore. I’m not a child. On these walks, I pretend that I am on a journey, that I am a woman setting out on a new life for herself, on an adventure.

  Usually I sit at my favourite spot along the river, hidden from the road and home to a small nest of kingfishers who dart in and out of the bank, all whirr and snap of colour. When I sit in the grass and look at the water breaking in giant circles where the flow is quiet at the bank, I think of the days when Michael and Patrick and I would tramp across the field and cast our own lines out for the salmon.

  The place where I sit is right across the road from the entrance to the Brabazon estate. I hear the carriages pulling up to turn and go up the long lane, the horses whinnying if they’ve come at speed from town. I find myself looking up the driveway wondering if Henry Brabazon remembers me and what happened to us or if we’ve already fallen from his mind.

  He wasn’t like I expected him to be, I realise. He was tall and skinny enough, nothing like his pot-bellied father or Flann Montgomery. He had jet black hair, so black it made his eyes pop, blue, the colour of the tiny cornflowers in the field. I remember him looking at me in the high-ceilinged hallway and outside in the giant archway of the front door, trying to calm me down, even though I was on fire on the inside and raging like a bull on the out.

  That night, when my family were huddled, white-faced at the Brannigans’, I left without my shawl, forgetting it on the back of a chair in my rush to get outside. I’d just upped and left as the people poured in, the whole parish on their way back from the dance, everyone out in support of us, coming from their homes with Christmas hams and bread and slices of apple tart.

  ‘If we had’ve known,’ they said. ‘The snakey bastards.’ They were sore and sorry. And when they heard about Daddy, their faces went white, tears springing to their eyes, the women wailing on the spot, going over to Mam and embracing her. It was easy to slip away from all that. Out on to the road.

  People were shuffling in the dark, they passed by me and I stepped into the ditch, trying to remain unseen. I didn’t want anyone to stop and talk to me, to question me, to pass on their sympathies. I’d no time for sympathy. I wrapped my arms around myself, passing by Dowth mound, black against the sky, solid.

  I wondered if myself and Turlough would have ended up there that night, after the dance, among all the other courting couples. He’d his hands all over me, touching my back and my bottom, running them up the inside of my ribcage, sending shivers through me with the hotness of his breath. I would have gone with him, I think. I would have climbed up there in the dark and found a spot and settled down to giggle and kiss and let him put his hands on me some more.

  We were at the courting wall, a low cement structure behind the school hall, where the music could be heard pouring from the small open windows under the school roof; where couples were spread out, pawing at each other, when Stuttery Jack appeared, calling my name, in the dark.

  At first, I was embarrassed to have been caught at the back of the school hall, but when I heard what Stuttery Jack had to say, that I had to get home quick, that the bailiffs were there, that the sheriff was there, that it was happening, again, and this time they had a warrant nailed to the door, the embarrassment turned to fear and then rage, as we ran, Turlough and I, hand in hand, from the school hall to my lane.

  Poor Turlough. The face on him, what he must of thought, as I screamed and left his side and ran past the horses and the men, into
the house to my brothers and my mam, who were standing there, watching the yard, the candles glowing against the firelight.

  I breathed it in the frosty air, as I walked towards Brabazon House, feeling it go high into my head, past my nose, up behind my eyes, my boots crunching on the grass in the middle of the road. Hard then soft, road then crunch.

  And there it was - all lit up, ablaze, standing out against the hill.

  If I was crying the tears would have felt crisp on my skin. But there were no tears. It was as though I was saving them for the anger, for the power, for the strength I would need for what was to come. I probably should have been crying, great big gulping sobs - but I wasn’t one for crying. It took an awful lot to make water come out of my eyes.

  Mam said I should have been born a boy. Daddy said he was glad I wasn’t, that I never cried because I had a power inside me. I was born on 21 December, a winter solstice baby, his December Girl.

  ‘It’s a special baby, born on the winter solstice in this part of the world,’ he told me, every year on my birthday. It was our ancestors, you see, the people who came before us, the people who formed the mound up out of the ground, who built their temple to welcome the winter solstice sun into its chambers to awaken the dead.

  I wondered if he was right. If I did have a power. If I did have something special about me on account of my birthday and the spirits inside me, breathed in from the tombs and the land.

  It was no coincidence that they had come for Daddy, there, on that night. As we left our house, with a jennet cart of our belongings and we set out to walk into the black, it was right there in front of the mound that the spirits came for Daddy. There, at the tomb, they reached into his heart and stopped it and he fell on the road, a stack of pots falling from his basket and clanging, echoing against the backdrop of the sheriff’s men hammering wood across our windows and hurling heavy stock from our sheds. Perhaps the spirits watched me as I ran to him and rolled him over to see the white in his face and the breath in his mouth evaporate into the sky.