by Dermot Healy
She counted across the needle to find her place among the stitches. The heavy breathing started. “I’m not yet fifty.” Then she pressed her knuckles to her chest. “I wouldn’t let him be,” she laughed. She shook her head to indicate it was all beyond her. Her lusts. His lusts. The world’s lusts. Then long after the women had gone she would turn on them, the Catholics. How could a man interest himself in them? she’d ask. And so gross! So overweight! Her condescension towards them had a hint of hysteria which she tried to subdue. “Did you ever notice,” she’d repeat to the girls, “how tasteless they are? Look at their carpets! How could you – paisley on paisley?” She smirked ungraciously. “Those RCs are sad. They have no idea of patterns. Not an earthly. What I’d like to know is how they sleep in those rooms! And the way they spend money – it’s a sin.” She shivered, then hesitantly folded her hands and looked towards the sand dunes.
“Still, they’re our neighbours.” She laughed. “Oh, but your father was a marvel really,” and she clapped Sara’s knee.
Nothing could be done about the asthma. When Maisie asked the doctor for a cause, he said: “Grief.” It fell to Catherine to stay at home and look after her that long summer. Then Catherine woke one morning and all her hair had fallen out.
“If we had been in the North,” said Maisie, “this would not have happened. Somebody must have carried the worms into the house.”
It took a while before they could get Catherine to a doctor. One of the consequences of Jonathan Adams’ death was that now the Adams family was reliant on public transport because none of the women could drive. And on the peninsula there was no bus. This made Sara, the only woman in the house who was both able-bodied and capable of showing her face, begin taking driving lessons with a fisherman she’d met on the pier. It was the same Leitrim man she’d encountered years ago on the beach.
“Who?” asked Catherine.
“The geranium,” said Sara.
He’d given her four turbot the first day, mackerel another, and one day cod. Then, when he heard her circumstances, he offered to teach her to drive. Twice a week he’d walk up to the house, sit into the car and lean on the horn, and then move over to the passenger seat. Sara would run down the path. She’d look back up at the second storey of the house where the two women sat watching her with a mixture of fright and pride.
Then, closing her eyes, she’d turn the key.
“He’ll kill her,” said Maisie.
As the engine revved into life, Sara would look up again, smiling. With her lower lip pulled in over her bottom teeth, she’d ease out the clutch. She’d cradle the steering wheel. The car jumped and cut out. Immediately, she’d turn the key again. Soon, leaping into the air, the old Ford, with its yellow numberplates and rusty doors, would trundle down the road.
“Who is he?” Catherine asked.
“Jack something.”
“Is he, perhaps, not quite articulate?”
“When he condescends to speak.”
“And what do you talk about?”
“Well,” said Sara, “if you must know, he has a passion for dogs.”
“That must be lovely for you.”
“And films and musicals.” She knotted her hands. “Would you like to meet him?”
“No, thank you.”
Catherine, bald and wide-eyed, stayed indoors, refusing ever to go out till her hair had grown. The days she could have gone to the beach she didn’t. The holidays passed as if she were in prison. Sara said it was nerves. The neighbouring women said that alopecia was caused by depression. And Catherine agreed something terrible was happening to her.
But that summer she read many novels. She read Kidnapped, Wuthering Heights and Moby Dick. She read Jane Eyre, and started the first of her many diaries with an account of the Irish-speaker, O’Muichin. She wrote down shocking dreams about love-making, and erotic thoughts which were totally self-centred, and sometimes vituperative descriptions of Mayo people and Catholic towns.
As the weeks passed she grew morose and bad tempered, because life was passing her by.
Her mother could not console Catherine. The pills she was given brought spots in front of her eyes. When one spot cleared another greater one began, sometimes obliterating a whole landscape. She felt that while she slept the spots were spreading across her skin. Her periods lasted for days. She had a sexual disease, she thought. Each morning she checked her breasts, for if spots ever appeared there then life was over. Every few days Catherine shaved her skull with their father’s razor to get the hair to grow again. His razor had shaved him after he died and the first time she used it Catherine saw collected in its sharp teeth the few scraps of beard that had sprouted after death. It still smelt coldly and intimately of him.
All of these things became confused in her dreams: her father’s razor and her baldness.
When she had to, she went up the road with a scarf wrapped twice round her head. Outside, the summer passed like a room illuminated in another house. She saw the others go down to the sea with their towels. The lads pass by with their rods. The car come for Sara. But she remained indoors. She could not bear anyone to see her.
“You’ll get odd,” Sara said.
“Show us your head,” said Lizzie Summers.
Local girls would collect in her room to talk feverishly about men. When they’d gone, Catherine would look into the mirror. Her high unshapely skull, blue-veined, looked back at her, and for years that image of herself was fixed in her retina and, despite her humiliation, she grew fond of its dark-eyed purity for the absence of hair fixed all expression in the eyes and mouth and nose. Baldness stood for mourning. Her white skull and her mother’s terrible breathing were expressions of grief. In time, at twilight, when there were few about, she’d walk the beach hugging Sara’s elbow, her head wrapped in towels in the manner of a turban. They’d link each other. Someplace underwater the stones shimmered.
Catherine began wearing black scarves, a habit that would stay with her long after her hair had grown. Her head in a black scarf, she read every minute she could. Sara and Catherine had always spent a lot of time in their rooms. In this they had inherited much of the solitary nature of their father. But that summer a change came about.
Sara began doing things on her own, stopping out late, not telling much of what she did. Before this they had always faced the outside world together. Now Catherine pored over books alone. And it was not just a matter of losing herself – this she could do, but when she’d emerge she would feel transformed. A new dimension had been added to her consciousness. The characters existed more strongly in her mind than real people did. According to their emotions and their standards she measured her life and her worthiness as a woman. The afterglow would make her anxious – anxious enough to read the same book again. Finishing a book was something she never wanted to do. And it was not just being steeped in the character or plot – it was a fright to her that a feeble story could contain a truth that assembled far from the meaning of the actual words.
She moved inside the characters’ bodies. She spoke with their voices. When they died or were hurt in love it might as well have happened to her. By reading her father’s books she mourned for him. These were the pages he had turned and relished. The print and smell were his. A conjecture in the corner was written in his hand. A small pressed flower that had accompanied him through the pages, now followed her through Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, nestled at night amid Hardy’s poems, or peeped out from Crime and Punishment. It sat in the dark of Huckleberry Finn. When she lifted any new book in her life ahead it would fall open at that flower. It was the place where her father had lain down to die. Where the voice he had been listening to had stopped. It marked the place where the story was suspended. It marked the place where it would be taken up again.
18
The Greatest Man in Ballyconeely
“I hear it never grows back,” said Lizzie Summers. “The doctor told my mother that if it does you’ll always have a bald patch.�
��
“Is that so?” asked Catherine curtly. “Do you think, by any chance, that I might grow a new head?”
“That’s a dreadful thought,” laughed Sara.
She said to Sara that she did not want Lizzie Summers in the house. She barred her from her room.
“Well, of course, you have Mother, haven’t you, Cathy?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m envious of how close you and Mother have grown,” Sara said thoughtfully.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Ye are in cahoots.”
“You’re only imagining things.”
Maisie Adams was now completely bedridden. She developed a flu that later in summer led to pneumonia. “Of all things, in summer to be like this,” was her cry. Bald-headed, Catherine spent most of her day in her mother’s room reading to her. It became hard for her to spend much time away from her mother’s side. Maisie Adams was often thrown into fits to get her breath. Her nose shone purple. Her cheeks were clustered with broken veins.
The firm face had cracked down the side.
“I am only a young woman,” she complained to her daughter.
In the end, to soothe her mother’s sleep, Catherine lay in the bed beside her, with the windows, even on the windiest nights, thrown open.
Then she had to remove all perfumed linen from the room, clear the dressing table of powders and scent bottles, use only Simple Soap in washing her mother’s face. Any sweet odours brought on attacks of furious breathing. In time, the entire house was cleared of perfumes. The girls hid their creams and shampoos. Flowerpots were removed, windows closed against hayseed and blossoming. The house lost all aspects of femininity. It became a bare light-keepers’ home again. It was a male house in mourning, and of the chief mourners one was bald, the other was out of breath, and the third secretly shook perfume down her breasts when she was a decent distance from home. Sara did not return till all hours. Catherine would hear the car on the road tuck in against the gate and come to a stop with quiet malevolence. In the light of a cigarette being inhaled, she’d see Sara’s head on the stranger’s shoulder. She could not look away. She’d imagine all manner of sordid happenings. The curtain would shake in Catherine’s hand. Later she’d hear the quick tap of her sister’s heels on the steps, then, whistling, Sara would go noisily by Catherine’s door.
“Your driving lessons,” announced Catherine sarcastically one morning, “are practically going on all night”.
“One has to learn how to dip the lights,” said Sara as if she were quoting from some manual. “And reverse, of course,” she added, with shocking irony.
“Is that so?”
“You could come if you wanted to,” said Sara, without looking up from her breakfast. She curled in round her meal like a cat.
“You give promiscuity a bad name.”
“Hark, at the saintliness!”
“She asked again for you last night,” declared Catherine tearfully.
“I was in by two,” adamant, adamant.
“She got up. She went to your room.”
“Well, I’m not tied.”
“I’m not worried about you. I’m worried about Mother.”
“Would you like me to bring him home then?” asked Sara scornfully.
“Why not?” answered Catherine. “At least you’d be here when she calls.”
“And where will you hide?”
“You’re cruel,” snapped Catherine.
A few nights later, with her mother fed and bedded down, Catherine was seated by the fire. She had two mirrors in her hands, one in front to look into the other behind. Then she heard his voice out by the porch, some laughter. He was pleading with Sara, then came further hysterical laughter. Catherine stayed where she was. For no good reason she felt a terrible anxiety. She dropped the mirrors and reached to pull the curtains tightly across, but as she did so, the door opened into the kitchen and Sara entered.
“I’ve brought him,” said Sara. She was still laughing, and she gestured behind her. Whoever it was, he refused to enter. She gestured again.
“C’mon,” she said.
“Sara!” screamed Catherine.
As the man entered he took off his cap and with it covered his groin in the attitude of a man at prayer. He nodded at Catherine, whose first reaction was to notice how old he was, then she reached for her scarf.
“Hello, Miss,” he said in an unnaturally loud voice, as if he were standing out in the street. “Did you hear the corncrake this evening?”
But Catherine was shivering with rage and despair and staring at her sister.
“Say hallo, Catherine,” said Sara, and she looked at her sister, daring her. Near tears, Catherine, in an equally unnatural voice, whispered: “Hallo.”
“Now that you two have met,” said Sara tipsily, “I’ll have to go upstairs to see my Mammy.”
“Belmullet is one of the last parts of Ireland you’ll find the corncrake,” he explained.
“Is that so?”
“It is.” He paused. “Sadly. But what can I say that hasn’t been said before?” he said.
“Our Sara is causing concern.”
“Is she?”
“Have you a mother?”
“I always wanted a mother.”
He sat down.
“When I was young a little man came out of a chink in the ceiling. It was a ceiling like you have here. Old tongue-and-groove, painted cream, I think. He went along walking upside down. When I think of it I must have took him to be a pleasant fellow because I wasn’t in the least afraid. He came to another hole, looked around and went up and in.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“No.”
He considered the ceiling.
“And how is Sara getting on with the lessons?”
“Oh, she’ll make a dacent driver.”
“Is that so?”
“Inclined perhaps,” he nodded, “to wander.”
“Especially,” replied Catherine, “since she met you.”
“I’d say it’s in the breeding,” he answered cheerfully, and turned his foot.
“Would you.” She sniggered. “And where do you go with her?”
“We tour the nightspots of Mayo,” he said. “She said she was in need of a chaperone. A’course, I’m only a decoy. That’d be about it. I do the driving.” There was the sound of movement upstairs. He looked at her. “Will I go now?”
“Stop where you are,” she said sharply.
The man arose, tipped his forehead to Catherine.
“It was very pleasant meeting you.”
“Please stay.”
“Is there something wrong?”
“Yes, there’s something wrong.”
“Well then, I’ll go.”
He lifted the latch and stepped out into the night. Bright-eyed, as if she had been listening all the while on the stairs, Sara breezed into the kitchen, and dragged the heel of a loaf of bread, very ladylike, across the butter.
“Isn’t he a dote?” she said.
“He must be nearly thirty.”
“Well, you frightened him away anyhow,” Sara laughed. She came abruptly to her feet, as was her habit, drew her dress above her knees, and checked the back of her calves for dirt kicked up from the road. “She said to me,” and Sara mimicked her mother, “that I was ‘to do nothing that Catherine wouldn’t do’. I said: ‘Ara Mammy, I don’t like men.’ ‘Aye, well,’ she said, ‘but you can’t keep away from them either.’”
“You’re perverse,” said Catherine.
“Don’t think I don’t see you at the window looking.”
“I do not!”
“Men are right about one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the quiet ones you have to watch,” she said.
A fine bristle soon appeared on Catherine’s skull. With delight she watched her hair grow back in blond tufts and wisps. The mixture delighted her. It grew together first a
t the back of her head. It seemed to take for ever. She sat in a chair in the garden and Sara rubbed ointment into her scalp to hurry it on.
With the return of her hair, she felt ashamed of how much she had withdrawn, but she was not ashamed in the least to discover that she had a woman’s vanity. Hair made her feel sane.
And as she returned to normality, she pledged herself to her mother, saying I’ve been too long in mourning for my father, and the thought of the woman upstairs, with the marble chips gripped tight in her clenched fist as she slept, made the daughter flinch with an ache of painful nostalgia and guilt.
Her scalp in this disorder, Catherine bravely answered the door to Jack Ferris. He stood there with a pair of football boots swinging round his neck and a flashlight in his hand.
“She’s not here.”
“Sara?”
“Who else?”
“You’re looking well.”
“Oh but you have a nerve.”
“It’s the same with a beard. Every time I shave, the harder it gets.” He felt his chin. “Not that I have much anyway. When I was young I shaved my legs. And begod if nothing grew back at all.”
He laughed at himself. He had hair that looked as if it had been dyed jet black, and sleepy eyes, mischievous, of a pale sensual grey. They seemed fixed beyond what he was looking at till he took you into view, and he was saying – none of this is true, it’s all absurd.
“There’s a storm coming,” he said.
“Is there?”
“An almighty one. From the northwest.”
“I’ll bear it in mind.”
“Do.”
“Why don’t you sit down?”
He dusted his knees with his cap and sat down, looked about him and hummed a bar. Could it be him? she wondered.
“Sara is in Belmullet, I think,” she said sharply. “As a matter of fact I thought she was with you.”
“Ah.” He nodded. Continued humming.
