The Ballad of Mo and G

by Billy Keane

  There was a quiz for retards on the car radio.

  Yipee G, you win a weekend for two in your own house.

  The old man would swear if he ever won a weekend for two on the mother’s radio show, he would ask to change it to two weekends for one. Not that he would ever ring in. But he will not be calling up. Will he? Sometimes I forget my Dad is actually dead.

  I wished I didn’t think so much. Wished I was in an automaton’s job, like putting toys in a cornflake packet.

  Wished I could just have savoured the kiss without worrying about the consequences or the intent.

  Wished I was answering easy questions on the radio phone-in, like spell CAT.

  I sang a song aloud. About me.

  It ain’t easy

  It ain’t easy

  Bein’ Tommy G

  Wo wo wo

  It ain’t easy

  It ain’t easy

  Spellin’ C-A-T

  That’s it, the song that is, and you sing the same verse over and over again. For the sad verse you just sing it slowly.

  The car was held up at the lights.

  I Googled Schadenfreude.

  It means taking pleasure out of other’s misfortunes.

  Mo was playing a very dangerous game. Dermo failed playdough in Junior Infants but his instinctive hunter’s instinct would instruct him when it was time to strike out.

  And as for poor Mo, well she was afraid to go and afraid to stay.

  Mac Sorley Homes went bust without warning.

  Owed millions. They were our biggest builder clients. But I held onto my job. Just. Mostly everyone in the construction business felt this was what was called an ‘adjustment’. Whatever that meant.

  Mac Sorley’s collapse was the beginning of the worst recession in decades, but it wasn’t a recession, even though the building industry was falling in on its own foundations. At the start the experts called the recession ‘a soft landing’. As if the recession had the landing gear of a cat.

  Whatever it was, I might soon have to look for work abroad.

  The boss tendered for a job in Saudi, which never appealed to me due to the heat and lack of pubs. Then I got to thinking, and the upside was we would be safe there from the Olsens, who surely wouldn’t try it on in a country where they chop off your hand for wanking. I wondered if we would be kept in a Compound guarded by dogs. There was no way I could live in a place with mad dogs and no pubs.

  The owners of big mad dogs have a want in them.

  As if they needed the dogs to scare people and not because they loved the dogs, like say a sheep farmer who loves his Border Collie and who might even go on the telly with him, on one of those sheep herding programmes, with whistling, and the owner and the collie on first name terms. No one ever heard of anyone going on the telly showing off a Doberman. Unless alone they hired him out as an extra in a prison break movie.

  I had these terrible fears Dermo would set the dogs on me. On the news there was a story about a little boy who was ripped apart by savage dogs. I had seen what had happened to the Papi. It was a phobia now.

  Dermo told Maureen I was a threat when he came back from the horse races, just a few days after my visit.

  ‘If dem little jockeys can ride a thousand kilos of a horse travellin’ at forty mile an hour, well then the Runt might be able to ride my missus lying on the flat on her back.’ Maureen just laughed it off, but the story made me more scared of him than ever.

  I think Maureen told Mo the jockey line, to let her know Dermo was jealous of me. And that he was very witty or humorous as well. Jealous meant he still fancied her and wanted the marriage to work. There was no way we could’ve figured that at the time. With some people, and Maureen was one, you have to examine their every move and every word as there’s always a motive or a plan.

  Safety pushed me for Saudi. Mo would be dressed up like an old nun. Except for me. Exclusivity. She was wearing see-through knickers and bra. You could hang wet crombie coats on her nipples. I was driving when the image appeared in my head but I could still see the road. The car swerved as I drove and the fantasy died.

  The kiss put the stamp on it. It tasted of longing and love.

  It was then I decided not to leave Ireland. Messed up and all as it is, I kinda like it.

  We were touring Brittany in a hired out motor home, with Mam and Dad, on our summer holidays. It was about ten at night in this big town called Pont something with eight eyes in the bridge. All the lights were off in the houses and even the pubs were closed. Dad said there must have been a curfew.

  Then he came out with, ‘It’s no wonder the French have the name of being such good lovers. They’re in bed half the night.’ He was a journey shortener with gags and quizzes and stories. The twins didn’t get it. They were too young, but even Mam laughed at that one.

  Dad explained he used to bring us on foreign holidays to show us how good Ireland was and that we should try to stay at home when we were big. Make a go of it. He used to say it would be great if we could live near each other when I grew up. I was delighted Dad wanted me to be near him always.

  I’d miss calling to his grave if I left Ireland.

  He died at fifty-three.

  My mother was probably an accomplice, or guilty of murder in the second degree. Everyone is a killer. We all kill each other. Either in one go or incrementally. Mam killed Dad with her constant nagging. Our mother was very good to us and to everyone else but she didn’t really like my Dad. I think they fell out of love through being bored with each other and getting annoyed by small things, like Dad putting his feet up on the coffee table and her smoking in the house. We didn’t live in a Compound but Dad and Mam did.

  At first I used to pray at his grave with a flurry of Hail Marys, said so quickly they blended into each other like a closing concertina.

  He died when I was nineteen. Now I go to talk to him. Bring him all the news.

  I look up at the hill behind his grave, as if he’s sort of up there, wandering about in some form we have yet to figure and then I look at his new Compound and sometimes I think it’s not really a compound at all, and Dad is free at last. Maybe I just imagine those messages from him are coming into my head. I suppose it is a kind of hereafter when the thoughts of those who die are with us. In that sense part of them is in us. My Dad lives on through me and his influence on me.

  I visited Dad’s grave the morning after the kiss. We got to talking, or maybe I was a ventriloquist talking for the two of us, but I do believe he is present when I tell him my story. One of his sayings was never judge a man until you walk a mile in his moccasins. I was scared of the Olsens. So. Then I thought I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. Walk in my shoes and see if it’s easy.

  My mother didn’t really like Mo. It went back to my twenty-first. The morning after the party, Mo was sitting cross-legged on the sofa in what my mother called ‘the lounge’. My mother was like a bitch as someone got sick the night before in the sink of the en suite.

  ‘Get your feet off that sofa. You wouldn’t do that at home would you? Then again maybe you would.’

  Mo wasn’t even wearing shoes.

  There were half-awake, half-asleep partygoers, my friends, scattered all over the floor and on the chairs. Mam had an audience and Mo was so embarrassed and isolated, she turned scarlet.

  But that was my Mam. She just came out with horrible statements and then she forgot all about whatever wound she inflicted five minutes later, but the object of her rant didn’t. Ah man, but when my Mam humiliated Mo, it was like a nail scraping glass.

  Mam was on local radio, on this discussion about women’s issues. I was never so embarrassed. Mam said an educational movie should be made for Irish men, because all the Irish women were buying dirty books, not so much for the porn content, but as sex manuals. The ladies on her show laughed hysterically and so a star was born. Mam was given her own show.

  ‘The set,’ she said in a different accent to the one she used at home, ‘would be a gia
nt vagina and we could get Sir David Attenborough to walk through it pointing out erogenous zones and G spots in that educated, excited but whispery voice he puts on when he spots a stripeless zebra or a new species of armadillo.’ Her guests were in stitches. I switched stations.

  It was three months before I came home from college with the shame of it. Dad ignored The Woman’s Hour, other than to say it kept Mam from asking him to lift up his feet when she was hoovering, while he was watching the racing on TV. I felt really sorry for Dad. Would everyone think Dad was bad in bed? The sex talk still goes on in The Woman’s Hour. Dad isn’t alive to stick up for himself now that he’s dead. If Dad was alive he could put anyone down with his gunslinger repartee.

  And then it upset me even more that all the locals would be listening to what should have been private. But at least he was dead for most of the shows.

  Mam never left Dad alone, constantly controlling and bossing him. He usually gave in and kept quiet, but every now and then it all became too much and the arguing started. Mo and I never argued and we told each other everything. If Mo was having a bad day I just backed off and gave her time to sort out whatever it was that was bothering her.

  Dad used to dodge Mam at every opportunity. ‘Your mother repeats more than the worst case at any gastroenterologist clinic.’ Mam maintained Dad couldn’t face reality.

  Dad said he could but not all the time.

  They only spoke when she corralled him into one space, which was usually at meal times. Dad would have won a prize at a quick-eating competition. He horsed back his food and was gone before Mam could get stuck in properly.

  Mam never tortured me much, except maybe around the time Mo came down to stay, or in small ways like asking me if I knew the facts of life. Mo took my mother’s dig very much to heart. I apologised with a take-no-notice-of-the-mother. Mo was self-conscious of being who she was back then, and coming from her part of the city.

  My mother kept going on and on with ‘like in any man’s language’ and ‘I don’t know the half of it’ and ‘in my day’ and ‘what’s the world coming to’. That was Mam. Torn between being a modern mam talking about sex on the radio, and an old-fashioned one, who was liberal for everyone except her sons. Looking back on it now, I think she wanted another her for me. Which I’m sure is against some law or is at least seriously unhealthy. But that’s what she wanted. My mother.

  Mam meant well.

  She worked hard at keeping the house going and when the twins left for Perth she gave them seven K, which was probably most of her ready cash.

  Dad the philosopher had a theory. ‘There’s only one frontier left and that’s the mind and it’s the only place where you can escape to.’

  Mo was trapped and now I was too. We could dream all we wanted but we could never dream away Dermo.

  There was always Oz. Dermo might not bother to go to the trouble of following us there. He might just see it as an expulsion from the land of our birth, and that was a strict enough punishment in itself.

  Overlooking the cemetery was a low hill, with the ditches knocked to make more grazing for cattle. There was one tree left in the middle of the mini-prairie. I always looked up there to mark time, to remember when last I was here by reference to the leaves on the tree.

  That tree was a remembrance of my Dad. More so than the gravestone.

  Mam wanted a dice-throw of white marble pebbles on Dad’s resting place. Dad asked me to make sure only grass grew over his grave. It was the only time I got the better of her. I told Mam I liked to smell the grass when it was cut for the first time in the spring. I’m not sure what would’ve happened if I told her Dad wanted the grass, so I made up that line about the scent in the spring.

  I stood there, talking away to him. Not aloud but in my head.

  Dom Dooley came over to Dad’s grave to say hello.

  Dom was dad’s pal from school. Dad used to call him Dom Pérignon because he had a very bubbly personality.

  ‘Tough times, G but if the good times don’t last forever, neither will the bad.’

  I just nodded. Everyone knew everyone’s business in our little home place. Dom knew my job was down to three days a week.

  ‘Do you know what your oul fella said about six months before he died? We stopped right here to say a prayer at your grandparents’ grave. “Pérignon, you go along without me, sure it’s hardly worth my while going home.”’

  That was him alright. Dad laughed at death as well as life.

  I left the grave with the implanted thought from my Dad that it wasn’t my mother who would be going out with Mo. It was me, so Mam would just have to deal with it.

  The oul fella looked at life as if it was bewildering and totally random, but very funny at the same time.

  That did it for him but I had to figure it all out. Try to sort it in some way. He was an observer and that was easier. Dad was always positive. The fact that I had a special drawer for my socks meant that I would be okay and wouldn’t lose things like the deeds of the house, which he did, much to my mother’s annoyance.

  My mother was strong and opinionated. Dealing with her would not be easy and I was wondering if the El Paso lumberjacks would lend me a chainsaw to cut the umbilical cord.

  Maybe I’m not being fair to Mam and Dad. It wasn’t that we were unhappy growing up. It was just that it wasn’t perfect. But we had a chance, a very good chance of turning out alright.

  Dermo got into the habit of tagging along with Maureen when she came to visit next door.

  Mo was uncomfortable, but because of her relationship with Maureen, she just about tolerated him. Mo didn’t speak to Dermo, who was unusually quiet and walked a few paces behind his mother.

  Maureen passed the marriage problems off by calling it ‘the silent treatment’ and told Dermo ‘you had it coming’. Like as if he was out with the boys and didn’t come home until 4 AM. Torture in Olsenville was no more than being a bad boy.

  Maureen was a peace-keeping force and so Mo wasn’t afraid of Dermo, as long as his mother had him by the hand. Mo knew too, if she left Dermo and the Compound, Maureen wouldn’t be around as a human shield. He would find her and take his revenge. Maureen’s little boy had a big ego. If word got out Dermo was thrown out by Mo, then the other criminals might sense weakness and try to get him back, for the horrible things he must have done to everyone and anyone. If Dermo couldn’t have her, well then no one else could either. And what would he do to the someone else? Could it be Mo was thinking of me and my safety? That the schadenfreude excuse was just that.

  Mo figured Dermo would eventually meet someone else and then, under the rules of the game, she would be free to go. Mo would be the one who was rejected. It was a case of hanging in there until he did find the someone else.

  Dermo had sworn off the drink, according to Maureen, and he was going to the gym every day.

  Then one day, Dermo arrived in to his former home on his own. Out of the blue, as usual. Maureen was in the city getting her hose-pipe varicose veins diverted into a culvert.

  ‘I’m here for our jigsaw, Missus. I bought another one the same kind on the ferry and I’m takin’ the pieces what’s missin’ and putting em inta our wan.’

  Dermo must have thought he had served his time, and that now he was entitled to move back in with Mo.

  She asked him to leave but he ignored her. Mo couldn’t help herself. It just came out of her mouth before she could stop.

  ‘And it’s not our fucking jigsaw, it’s yours. Your jigsaw. Now get the fuck out before I call your Ma.’

  Dermo hummed in a bluebottle monotone as he walked non-stop from one side of the living room to the other.

  Dermo’s eyes were red, bloodshot. She always knew how he was mentally by looking at his eyes. Mo didn’t make full eye contact. It was a surreptitious look. No more than a glance but she knew from the way his eyes darted about like a swallow, Dermo was out of his mental mind.

  Mo got to thinking it wasn’t drink or coke this time
. It might have been steroids. Bought in the gym. His arms were huge now, like thighs.’ Roid rage was common enough among the Dermos who needed to be bigger and stronger than everyone else.

  When Dermo peed in the kitchen sink, Mo knew it was the end of schadenfreude in our time. That was how his dogs marked territory, by peeing everywhere. Maybe Dermo had spent so much time with the Dobermans, he had turned into one himself. This was him reclaiming what was his.

  There was a tiny window in the bathroom. It worked on hinges and did not fully extend. Dermo could not have suspected Mo might escape that way. There wasn’t enough room to squeeze out, but Mo had already loosened the screws on the catch. Weeks before, Mo hid a screwdriver in a plastic bag in the cistern. There was a fifty euro note in the bag, a spare mobile phone and a Stanley knife. She removed the screws quickly.

  Mo climbed out the bathroom window. Head first. For a few seconds, she was hanging upside down, with her insteps curled round the window frame, like a circus acrobat swinging off a trapeze. Somehow Mo managed to swivel her legs round and she wedged her left foot against the cement casing surrounding the window.

  Bit by bit, Mo crabbed down. She jumped off the windowsill from a standing position. Grey was watching her every move.

  The old mongrel walked with her until they reached the gateway out of the Compound. Mo ran the roads until a taxi she called picked her up about a kilometre from the Compound, just off the intersection with the motorway. Mo spent the night in a hostel for women, who were victims of violence in their own homes.

  Dermo kicked in the bathroom door, smashed the cistern top and promptly left for Le Havre. It would be a week before he came back. Or so Maureen reasoned.

  Maureen, along with Dermo’s brother Mikey, collected Mo in a café near the hostel, the very next day. She didn’t call me.

  Mikey warned her.

  ‘He’s gettin’ worse. He’s goin’ to explode. Can you go? D’you know, for a while like you know, until the polis comes? I’d call them if I was you. You can get him barred out of the house. Official like. Mam dunnit to Dad wance and it quietened him.’