by Orna Ross
“What are you standing there for?” says Mrs D. “Go on in and say hello to your father.”
We sit in chairs opposite him. Maeve says: “Hello, Daddy.”
I can’t say anything. It’s too sudden. The man I remember is still in England. The person in front of me is someone else.
“My God, you’ve grown,” he says, to both of us.
“I’m nearly eighteen,” Maeve tells him. “And Jo is fifteen.”
“My God,” he says again. “Imagine that. You’re a real pair of young ladies.”
He takes a mouthful of tea, peers over the rim of his cup with two hunted eyes. I notice how old his shirt is: the thin blue stripe is faded at the collar, the cuffs are frayed. My head rattles full of things that can’t be asked.
Later, Gran fills me in. He turned up on Wednesday evening without a by-your-leave and got a welcome from Mrs D. as good as the prodigal son’s. Had his feet back under the table by supper-time and now goes around the place like he was never away at all.
“Been good for business, mind you,” Gran says. “Every man and woman in the parish has been in for a look.”
That evening, Mrs D. sends me out to the shop to get some cooked ham for tea. I have to walk through the bar to get to the grocery and, for this ordeal, I always let my hair fall forward to shield my face. I hate this small journey: twenty-two steps of torture if certain customers are in, those who see me as a target. The ones who jeer my name (“Shove on your knickers…”) or my clothes (“Nice blouse,” they’ll say, their eyes poking through it). If I respond, they’ll mock my voice or my words. Any part of me is open to their taunts.
They are farm labourers, mostly, or fishermen or tradesmen. Lower on Mucknamore’s carefully calibrated social scale than me, the daughter of the public house owners, whose father wore a white collar to work, whose mother was a nurse before she married, who attends boarding school and is intended for university. But the advantages are not all mine: they are grown men and I am a teenage girl. Their family histories hold no shameful secrets. And they are our patrons. We have to be nice, whether we like them or not. My shyness is a chink through which they can funnel submerged feelings about our family and their resentment of the money they have to spend to get drink.
I’m not supposed to take it all so seriously, I know. I’m supposed to pretend their teasing is a game.
I wish I could be like Daddy: indifferent. He is seated on the high stool behind the counter, arms folded and his eyelids drooping over their talk, in just the old way. While I’m waiting for Eileen to cut the meat, I stand where the customers can’t see me, on the grocery side of the divide, listening. Easy chat slides across the counter and back in a way that it hasn’t since he left. Man-to-man talk, about last Sunday’s hurling match.
The bell rings and Pat Rowe comes in, stopping in the doorway with showy surprise.
“Well, well,” he says. “Boys, oh, boys. Look who’s back in town.”
The other customers stand to attention, hopeful of a bit of excitement: Mr Rowe is known for his direct talk. “Well, well,” he says again. “Christy Devereux, back in the saddle. And there was us thinkin’ you’d turned your back on this no-good town forever.”
“Ah, now,” says Daddy. “We all know what thought did.” This is an old joke. What thought did: stuck a feather in the ground and thought he’d grow a hen; peed in his pants and thought it was raining.
Mr Rowe won’t be diverted. “So where have you been, stranger?”
“Ask no questions, Pat, and you’ll be told no lies.” Daddy holds up a big glass. “Pint, is it?”
“Birmingham, was it?”
“Mmmm. Birmingham,” nods Daddy, his eyes narrowing above the word in a warning to back off. And it works. Something in him – what is it? What? – stops Mr Rowe’s advance.
“Did you see Mulcahy’s tackle?” John Buttle asks from the lower end of the bar, when the silence gets self-conscious.
“Tackle, how are you,” says Daddy. “That was nothing but a dirty foul.”
Talk of the match resumes. Mr Rowe pulls up a stool.
Gran is right. Daddy’s slipped back into his life as if it were an old jumper he found and decided to start wearing again. His armchair is pulled out of its resting-place in the corner, his boots slump in their old place inside the back door, tripping everybody up. His razor and toothbrush have reclaimed their spot in the bathroom. The only change is that he has his own bedroom now, in the second spare room. His comb is in there on the dressing table and the faint tang of Old Spice smarts in the air. Under a pillow are his pyjamas and a book: The Honey Badger.
On the cover, a woman with gold skin holds a sheet in one hand to cover her pubic bone. Her eyes are turned away, but two pneumatic golden breasts stare hard at me. It looks like the kind of book that has dirty bits, something that would get passed around in my school with giggles and page numbers. It gives me a strange feeling to find it here, in Father’s bed.
In the wardrobe, two pairs of trousers hang, one over the other, beside a small row of shirts and jumpers. One shiny suit. And down at the bottom, his red canvas travel bag, empty and flat, like a deflated balloon.
Sunday morning over breakfast, Mrs D. announces that we’ll be having lunch in the dining room today for a change. It’s a celebration, we know, though she doesn’t say so. After Mass, while Daddy looks after the shop, she and Gran and Maeve juggle pots and pans in the kitchen. I stay in the sitting room, avoiding them, stretched on my front across the rug in front of the fire, reading. Auntie Norah too ignores the cooking fuss. These days, what’s happening on TV seems more real to her than the events in our house. She has not commented on Daddy’s return any more than she seemed to miss him while he was gone. Gran has turned on her favourite program for her, The Addams Family, and aside from one thumb rapidly revolving around the other when Gomez kisses Morticia’s extended arm, she seems relaxed. Smells of roasting meat and bubbling vegetables fill the silent room.
Close to serving-up time, Mrs D. bursts in on us. “Siobhán, make some gravy. I’ll be back in a minute to serve up.”
In the kitchen, Gran is mashing potatoes in the big pot. A roast leg of lamb sits in the dish, its bone sticking up like the handle of a club. I mix gravy powder with water in a cup, stirring it to get the lumps out, and when it’s smooth, I add it to the meat juices. Mrs D. comes back. She has taken off her apron, brushed her hair, put on make-up.
“Lipstick now, is it?” Gran says when she sees her. I’m so shocked I stop stirring. The only time Gran differs from Mammy is on her Matters of Principle. I have never heard her vexed like this.
“A daub of lipstick is a sin now, I suppose?” Mrs D. puts on a pair of oven gloves that make her look like a boxer, picks up the meat dish and sweeps it off to the dining room.
When she’s gone, I sidle across to Gran. “Are you not glad that Daddy is back?”
“As I’ve been told, lovey, it’s nothing to do with me.”
I pull close to her, searching out her softness. “Please, Gran.”
She looks at me and shrugs. “Your daddy disappears off with himself, then turns up four years later as if he only went out to bring in the milk. He just—” She breaks off.
“But it’s good that he’s back, isn’t it?”
“What would happen in the world if we all did a bunk when we felt like it?” A shard of envy seems to spike through her words. Is that possible? “If you bring children into the world, you do right by them. It’s that simple.”
But if it was so wrong for him to go away, why is she not happier that he’s back?
“Gran, can you not just forgive him?”
I’m thinking of all the times she forgives Mrs D.
I’m thinking if we can forgive Daddy, why can’t she?
“Oh, Jo, don’t give me the hard face. It’s only that I’m afraid for us, that’s all.”
“Afraid?”
Under her pounding, the potatoes turn to mash.
�
��You think he might go off again? Is that what you mean?”
She looks at me through glasses that have steamed over. “I’ll say one thing to you now, and listen to me good, because this is one of the best bits of advice you’ll ever get in your life. Don’t interfere. Keep yourself to yourself. Let the Lord above look after what’s to happen and stay out of matters as much as you can.”
What is she talking about?
“I mean it,” she says. “It’s when you think you’re doing good that things end up all wrong.”
“What do you mean, Gran? I don’t understand.”
She sighs. “I suppose you don’t. But think about it all the same.”
She turns off the cooker, points towards the bubbling gravy pot. “Now get that into the sauce boat, like a good girl. This food won’t serve itself.”
1995
The air in my shed is thick and stuffy, like a hand over my face. I’m coated in the dream that just spat me out. A woman whose voice I knew but could not place was in the newly renovated house, calling across to me from one of the upstairs windows. “Come,” she entreated, her voice a dry whisper. “You know why you’re here. Come on over.”
“In a minute,” I said.
“When?” she asked. “You don’t mean it. You’re not coming.” Then she leaped from the window and hurtled through the air towards me, so fast I couldn’t see her face. Through the night and in through the window of my shed she flew, frightening me out of sleep.
“Noooo!” I screamed as I jerked upright in bed, heart thrumming.
I’m still in my terror for a second or two longer, then I come to. A dream, that’s all. I look around: nobody else is here. My shed’s whitewashed walls, my few belongings, the broken furniture at the end, Mrs D.’s suitcase: all are here, less distinct, less separate from the world and each other than in daylight. If I can see like this, there must be a moon outside. I look and look, settling myself with the actuality of things. They are here, I am awake, I’m OK.
Through the shed window, I can see the new version of the house, its outer shell complete except for doors and windows. The remodelling has been extensive: our old house used to hunch in that space but this new construction, not even finished, is already preening itself. I swing my legs out, slip my feet into their shoes. “All right then,” I say aloud, to the voice in the dream. “I’m coming.”
Outside, the night air is still and warm: no need for a jumper or jacket. Under the light of a full moon, my white T-shirt glows. My belly mimics the lunar bulge. I am now expanding day on day.
I am changing fast, but not as spectacularly as you, the life inside me. You are about a foot long now and already you have fingernails and skin, a nose and eyes, lips and ears. You have a heart and a stomach and kidneys and tiny ovaries containing all the eggs you’ll ever need to have a baby yourself. Two days ago, I felt the first strange shudder of your movement, a quiver that was in me but not of me. It has come often since then, little seismic flutters that make me smile. Tonight I placed Rory’s hand there.
“Isn’t it amazing?”
“Amazing,” he said, the intimacy of the act – the first time in twenty years that I have asked him to touch me – spiked with the knowledge that he has felt such movements in another belly. Not that we mentioned that. Since the night we almost quarrelled, we’ve given up such talk. He has stopped pushing me towards sex, which should have eased the tension between us, but hasn’t. While he kept pressing for more, I held the line, but now he’s stopped, I can feel my own need growing.
Up the garden path, past the machines that crouch in the dark, through the space that will be the back door. The stairs rising by the wall are naked timber blobbed with cement. I get cement powder under my nails from the banister as I climb, and I tighten my fist against its chalkiness.
I spy stars through the open slats of the roof. This is not the house I lived in. Concrete squares have elbowed out our unsymmetrical rooms. Eight squares, six doubles, two singles, each with a smaller square attached, the bathrooms.
In my bedroom, the little alcove where I kept my toys is gone. The walls are shorter than they used to be, squared off from each other. It smells of new plaster and wood, empty and open, not a trace of me in it. Nothing is the same except the sea outside the window, where it always was. I cross to the open rectangle, look out at the same old picture, milky in the moonlight, hear the familiar lullaby of the turning waves. I rest my elbows on the brand-new concrete windowsill and lean out and look.
I know now what Gran meant, all those years ago. That she regretted ever having arranged for her daughter to marry Christy Devereux.
* * *
It was in 1953, when she stepped in. Mammy had devoted her young life to doing everything right: becoming a nurse in Wexford hospital, tipped to become a ward sister — except that, by this time, she no longer cared about all that. She was tired of night-shifts and bedpans and it was all useless, anyhow, if it meant she remained single. Being good, working hard, getting on, she had done it all presuming it would help her attract a good husband. As a spinster, ward sister or not, she was nothing.
It dawned slowly on them both, that nobody was going to marry her. She was a good-looking girl, a qualified nurse, the only child of a family with a public house behind them: she should have been flooded with offers. Gran railed against the weak boys who showed interest but only for a while, who shrank from her sooner or later because of what they were told. Against those locals who took newcomers aside and explained why they’d be better off not getting involved.
Surely, there was some family out there broader in mind than the rest, able to get beyond the small talk.
But by the time Máirín was thirty, it could be denied no longer: none of it was her fault, but the consequences were hers to bear all the same.
That’s what spurred Gran to action. Since it was the older generation who had brought stigma on the girl, it was up to her to mend matters. And while she was thinking this way, who should she meet in Wexford one day but the widow Devereux, an old Cumann na mBan girl, now a good Fianna Fáil woman, who had a son she wished to marry into money. For the sake of this boy, the widow had worked two jobs since her husband’s death in 1938: as housekeeper in the mornings, serving in the public house on her street corner by night. Jobs that allowed her to be home when young Christy came from school in the afternoons, so she could have his dinner on the table and keep an eye on his schoolwork, while keeping enough coins in her red money-tin.
Out of her industry, Mrs Devereux was able to give her boy an education. She got him past the primary certificate into St Peter’s College and people were starting to give him the same respect they gave to the sons of farmers and small merchants. Her plans didn’t stop there: her intention was that he should go to the university.
Except the boy didn’t cooperate. First he said he didn’t want to go. Then he failed the scholarship. And not even the widow’s sacrifices could support him at university without that. He could still have looked for a good job, an office position in Wexford or further afield, but instead he went to be a shop assistant in Doyle’s Hardware, selling nails and the like to the tradesmen of the town. She was livid with him over it and frantic that he should correct his error before it was too late.
Sometimes she blamed herself, that’s what she told Gran, one day in the middle of Wexford’s Main Street. She had spoiled him, given him everything, and now he understood the value of nothing.
Back home in Mucknamore, Gran started thinking. Being married into a pub would be a great deal better for that young man than serving in a hardware shop. And she might, just might, be able to swing him an office job in the new building society that was opening in the town. A lot of Fianna Fáil people were involved in that enterprise and they were behoven to look after each other when it came to jobs and positions, after the way they had been treated by the Free State. The widow had done her bit for Ireland in her day, as had her dead husband – it was the treatment he was dealt in
a Free State jail that had seen him off. The boy deserved help.
She wrote some letters and in time was able to call to the little house in Hill Street with a proposal.
The boy resisted at first, blustered and blew, never admitted then or since, to his mother or to Gran, that a part of him relished the plan. He knew that with a pub in the country and a job in the town, he could be a very fine fellow, might even, maybe, in time, be able to buy himself a motor car. The girl was older – thirty to his twenty-one – but not grey or fat or wrinkled and she seemed biddable enough. And – unforeseen inducement – Mucknamore was far enough from Wexford town for him to put distance between himself and his mother, who for some time had been a burden to him with her plans and ambitions.
So he did it.
He did it and when it didn’t work out, Gran, you blamed him -- but you also blamed yourself. Is that what you were referring to that day in the kitchen, how that good deed of yours turned bad? Or were you thinking further back, to the days that began the trouble, to the things you had done that made your poor girl so unmarriageable in the first place?
I leave my own room, go down the corridor to the room my parents shared, and then no longer shared. Here was where I brought the post to my mother, where I searched for evidence of Daddy after he came back, where he was laid out for his wake. Yes, Mrs D. moved him back in after he died. How I hated to see him where he hadn’t been for years, knowing it was all for show. How I haunted this room, all the same, kneeling and pretending to pray while I waited for other mourners to go.
Here, right here, is where I ran my fingertips over his dead face and hands, searching out places that looked soft: the swell of his cheek, the pout of his lips. All unyielding; even his eyeballs under their lids were hard, like marbles. I didn’t touch him while others were there, praying beside me. Then I would only look. His mouth was not quite closed, a tiny crack of black showed between the pink. I’d look at this so hard that I’d think it was opening, that his lips were about to part, pop open into a surprised O.
