The Ballad of Mo and G

by Billy Keane

  I continued with the calls to Mo, but not every day. More like every week. Our calls were shorter now. Mo was always just about to head off somewhere or Maureen was just after coming into the house or she needed to keep credit for a call to the hospital. I sent texts. You get out of intimacy by texting. Even if it’s just by forwarding a joke, the illusion of keeping in touch is maintained. We didn’t laugh as much anymore. I was away from it all now. Safe and fairly happy. We were drifting apart but there was no big bust-up. It was like the economy was supposed to be. A soft landing.

  Two months passed by as quickly as scrolling through an online airline calendar.

  Maureen moved Mo into her holiday home on the beach.

  Mo was fairly sure Dermo was persuaded to go for psychiatric help for his drug, drink and steroid addiction. Maureen, in answer to Mo’s questions about Dermo’s whereabouts, said he was still in Russia but Mo guessed he was away in Ireland, for treatment, probably at Sergeant Matt’s insistence, as part of the deal for keeping him out of jail. For sure Sergeant Matt would never become a Super if his protégé murdered Mo.

  But then one day Maureen asked Mo to get her stuff together, quickly. He was due home from wherever and they went for a drive to the seaside.

  Dermo knew about the house but he thought it was rented out. Mo seemed happy enough there and she invited me to call up to see her. By now I had made a clean break and I was determined to stay away for safety’s sake. My safety.

  Life was boring but I needed boring. For a while.

  Back home the pace of life was as fast or as slow as you wanted it to be. There was no getting swept along and it was nice for the mother to have some company, now the twins were gone.

  I picked up a few small jobs. Designed a hay shed for one man and applied for planning permission for a neighbour but there was no work and I knew it was only a matter of time before I too would have to leave this place I loved so much.

  Uncle Andy was a builder in London. With the Olympics coming up, there was a few months of work going and he was always on the look-out for a good engineer, which really meant he was always on the look-out for a crook to cook the books and fry his punters. London had ten times more people than Ireland. There was always building of some sort going on in London.

  You could finish up doing time over my Uncle Andy. My mother’s brother was so into bribery, he used to drop the singers on the Tube a tenner to sing Irish songs. Uncle Andy had Rasta buskers in King’s Cross singing ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Mother Macree’. Uncle Andy was always trying to proselytise the English.

  Uncle Andy was fond of me. I was the iachtair in the litter according to Uncle A.

  Meaning I was the weakest of all the family. But it wasn’t my fault that my mother smoked twenty a day while I was wallowing unawares in her womb.

  I was smoking a pack a day, at minus six months. I suppose I’m lucky to be as tall as I am.

  Mo probably went for Dermo as a boyfriend, as opposed to me, because he was bigger. We were in this old castle and the door lintels were so low. The guide told Mam and I the people of Ireland were smaller in the twelfth century. It was the only time I ever had to bend down going in a door. Man but I’d have been called Longshanks back in 1199 AD. It all proves conclusively the big survive. Dermo was tall and strong and handsome with all that Swedish blondness or whatever inbred fucking Viking fjord it was his ancestors came from.

  There’s nowhere, anywhere, safe is there?

  America was out. Green cards were like gold dust and jobs were scarce there too. Since 9/11 the undocumented Irish lived in constant fear of being expelled from the States.

  Bahrain were given the 2020 Olympics. There was work there too. Uncle Andy told us the Irish builders would be fucked if the Olympics were ever cancelled.

  Saudi might be best. If it comes to that. From Mo’s point of view it couldn’t be any worse than the Compound. It mightn’t be that nice for her though having to cover up. Her legs were straight and perfect. And it would be safe for Mo. But then we would have to come home some time and the Big Bad Wolf would be waiting for us.

  It’s all in The Law of The Wish. When you think about someone, that person comes into your life.

  I hesitated. But then I answered her call.

  ‘G, he’s out in the back lawn. I can see him now. He’s walking towards the house. Grey is barking like mad. I’m getting a knife, G.’

  ‘Never mind the knife. Call the cops. Cut me off and do it now.’ What can I do? Fly in like Superman and save her?

  Mo turned the phone camera on Dermo who was a haze, a far-off shot in a mockumentary.

  ‘He’s outside the back window. His head is up against the glass trying to look in. The eyes are popping out of his sockets.’

  Dermo fixed a speaking collar on Grey. It was like one of those talking Barbie dolls.

  ‘How are you today?’ asked Grey in a deep, slow tenor voice.

  The talking collar spooked Grey, who kept revolving his head until it almost snapped as he tried to get at the collar.

  ‘I am hungry. Let’s eat. Yum yum bones,’ said the collar.

  Dermo screamed a hysterical laugh.

  Dermo jumped on Grey and caught him around the belly to stop him turning round and round in the same way a cowboy catches a calf for branding.

  Mo was hysterical. ‘There’s no one living round here. It’s a freakin’ ghost estate. This whole place is deserted.’

  I took a deep breath, sure that if I said the wrong thing, it would cost Mo her life.

  ‘Call the cops quick. Now. 999. Or is it 911 or is that America? It’s 999. Quick, Mo. Quick.’

  Mo must have been moving about. The home movie was all a blur on the little screen.

  Mo was before me again.

  ‘I pulled across the bolts Mikey put in. What if he breaks in? Kicks the door down? Record this. Please I want a record. Please, G.’

  The camera pointed to the floor and the walls and the ceiling and then out the window at the dog.

  Grey asked for a drink of wawder in an American accent.

  ‘Gimee the address,’ I shouted, ‘and I’ll phone the cops!’

  Dermo had gone out of sight, and Mo was in front of me, yet again, like a reporter from the war on the nine o’-clock news, but without a flak jacket or a helmet. She was flushed and petrified. Mo was panting between words and sentences.

  ‘Mo will you phone the cops? Please. Do it now. Gimee the address and I’ll do it.’

  Dermo tried his key but Mikey had changed the locks.

  ‘He’s leaving. I think he’s leaving.’

  I could see Dermo’s big frame, hunched, walking away from the house. Cut to Grey staying put on the porch.

  Dermo turned round suddenly.

  ‘He’s still looking this way. He’s laughing. He’s turning away again. He’s turning back again. The loony is playing games with me. He’s looking at me looking at him through the front window.’

  Dermo moved closer and closer to the camera.

  ‘Phone the fucking cops! Phone the fucking cops!’ I shouted.

  Dermo was smiling madly into the iPhone. A close-up. He was out of it. His mad head filled up the screen. He was on stuff. Must have been. Had to be. I prayed in my own head. More Holy Marys for Mo.

  Dermo lifted Grey from behind, under his forelegs, up to the level of Mo’s face and on cue the dog collar sang, ‘How much is that doggy in the window?’

  Dermo dropped Grey roughly and walked away again as if he was in a hurry. For a moment Mo thought the police had come into the estate. Grey didn’t follow. He was hurt from the fall and Mo could hear the dog howl in pain above the twang of the collar wishing her ‘have a nice day’.

  Dermo ran back towards the house, at full speed, and pulled the speaking collar from around Grey’s neck. The collar spoke rapidly as if Grey was possessed by demons with sentences running into each other.

  I am hungry. Have a nice day. How much is that doggy in the window? Yum yum bone
s.’

  Grey limped away from Dermo on three legs.

  Dermo head-butted the window but it didn’t break.

  He smeared his bloody forehead round and round the glass. Mo had a lump hammer she found on the ghost estate. With both hands she swung it at the window. The momentum of the downswing smashed the reinforced double-glazed glass. Dermo’s head recoiled as if he had been whiplashed.

  She kept the camera on him.

  It was impossible to see properly through the broken, bloody glass. Mo’s shaking right hand made her movie seem like it was shot during an earthquake.

  ‘I want to record it all,’ she said calmly. ‘You are my witness. If he kills me, you know who did it.’

  Dermo threw the blood from his interlocked cupped fingers onto the window. The screen went redder as the streams of blood streaked down the cracked and broken frame like a delta. Mo pushed her thin hand through the letterbox and filmed Dermo running from the house. As he ran he screamed, ‘I’ll kill you, bitch! I’ll kill you!’ Mo told me Dermo drove off at a mad speed.

  The series of dangerous bends is about eight kilometres from the holiday home on a winding, twisty coastal road. Dermo must have taken the wrong route to the hospital or maybe he was trying to get to a criminal who was also some sort of paramedic. Mother Aloys was on her way to see her brother in the Home. The Mother drove ‘in my time,’ as she was fond of saying.

  Mother Aloys was eighty-seven. She shouldn’t have been driving but the Convent insurance was still a big commission for her broker and the Mother bullied him into adding her name on to the policy. It seems Mother A was named after a martyr who was fed her own hands by some tribe of pagan cannibals but refused to renounce the one true faith even as they forced the finger food in her mouth.

  With a name like that to live up to, Mother A wasn’t going to give way.

  Dermo and Mother A met for the first and only time in the dead centre of the Kilnaboy Road. It was calculated from the length of the skid marks burned into the tarmac that Dermo must have been doing around 160km per hour.

  Dermo’s car was heavier than the old nun’s tin can. It was an old souped-up Merc. A tank.

  Dermo braked. Too late. Physics killed Mother Aloys. Her almost severed head hung down on her right forearm. Dermo was knocked unconscious by the impact and there was blood everywhere. Old and new.

  The nurse was on her way to work. One look was enough to confirm the Mother was dead.

  The nurse climbed the stone wall and into the field where Dermo’s Merc ended up. She tied her scarf into a tourniquet and managed to limit the blood flow. If the nurse hadn’t been delayed by a stop-off to buy her favourite American-style Buffalo wings, which were really chicken wings, Dermo would have bled to death. If only.

  By the time the ambulance came, Dermo was nearly all out of blood, but he was still alive. Just about.

  Grey was licking Dermo’s blood off the cement path by the broken window. Mo took what was left of the now silent collar from around his torn neck.

  Sergeant Matt interrupted the clean-up with a call. ‘My dear,’ he said, his voice quivering with emotion, ‘I have the most calamitous news. Dermo, your husband, is in mortal danger. He is as near to RIP as he will ever be. It is not looking good, my dear. We may lose the poor fellow. Would that Big Matt was a surgeon, but he chose another career in which to better the lot of his fellow man. Mo, Mo can you hear me? Hello. Hello.’

  ‘I can hear you.’

  ‘He has lost a lot of blood. I have offered my own plasma selflessly to your husband, Mam, but alas it is the wrong type. Do you want to come over to the hospital? I can send one of my cars and believe me, my Garda will drive like hell. My men would die for me. Maureen and Mikey are on their way, as we speak, from the Compound. Only say but the word and I shall have you by his side. By his side I say.’

  Mo, the possible husband killer, chaperoned by the police to the victim’s deathbed. Good one, that.

  ‘No, no. I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind.’

  Sergeant Matt hadn’t told her Dermo had been in a car accident. So Mo kept scrubbing. The sweat pumped out through her but the work kept her from going crazy.

  There’s no privacy anymore. Every call, every text can be traced.

  Here I was on the phone to a woman who could be in the frame for the murder of her husband. I watched a home movie of the last minutes of a man about to die.

  It was also going through my cowardly head, I would be seen as ‘the other man’.

  It would be death by tabloid or death by Olsen.

  The red-tops would use words like bonk and love rat. Phone records would be checked and the calls I made to dodgy phone lines would be out there.

  It wasn’t as if I ever made dodgy phone calls to sex lines. Well just once and then I stopped. Who was I talking to on the other side?

  It could be some perv playing with himself and putting on a girl’s voice or an oul one of ninety pretending she was a young one. Seriously gross, and then you’re paying about a tenner a minute.

  They could check every email I ever sent to Mo, including some that were very critical of Dermo.

  There was one, I think, where jokingly I suggested Mo should shoot him and she would be fined a tenner by the judge and warned to behave herself in future or she would be in serious trouble.

  ‘Mo,’ I gushed, ‘I’m a … I’m a …’

  I couldn’t think of the word.

  ‘I’m a … as in a handbag.’

  Mo was calm now. She was making tea.

  ‘It’s an accessory, G. Stop panicking, will ya. It was self-defence. I had a court order. Jesus, G will you stop. Call you soon.’

  Mo went back to cleaning the blood-stained cement with a scrubbing brush and washing powder. Grey stayed with her. She called a handyman who used to do odd jobs around the Compound. He couldn’t come straight away. But he would be there first thing tomorrow, which in handyman talk could be at five in the evening, or a week later, or never.

  The handyman came to fix the window later that day. By then Mo had sprayed the area in front of the house with a power hose.

  ‘I heard about Dermo. I’m sorry. I came the minute I heard.’

  ‘Ah well, we’re separated. Can you fix the window?’

  The handyman asked Mo if there was an accident what with the blood smears.

  ‘Grey tried to get a fox,’ Mo told him. Grey was hardly going to contradict her now that his batteries had run out. The bruised dog sat by Mo’s side, quietly licking his wounds.

  The handyman made himself at home. He sat at the kitchen table and sipped a coffee before he spoke.

  ‘I know you and Dermo were split up but it must be still be a bleedin’ shock. Jesus that oul bitch was completely on the wrong side. She’s stone dead. Dermo had no chance. Ploughed right into her.’

  The handyman took out a box of Olsen own-brand Marlboro cigarettes from a pouch on the front of his utility belt and lit up. He got up to measure the frame. The window was boarded up.

  ‘Dem modern foxes would nearly sit down at the table and eat your dinner. I’ll be back tomorrow with the glass. That nun. I knew her well. She had a brother with Alzheimer’s up in the Home. I done a few jobs there.

  ‘She was half-deaf and had thick glasses like the bottom of a jam jar. The oul nun used to drive with her head up agin the windscreen same as a suction Jesus.

  ‘Lookit, I’m not knockin’ no one, but that Mother Aloys was an accident waitin’ to happen.’

  Mo felt herself go weak. She had to sit on the windowsill.

  Mo curled up her toes so much she felt a cramp go up her leg. The piece of glass she squeezed cut her hand.

  The handy man stubbed his cigarette.

  ‘You didn’t mind me smoking, Mam?’ after he took a long drag.

  The handy man put the decommissioned cigarette over his ear. I suppose he could hardly stick it under his ear.

  ‘It’s a recession,’ and shrugged an ah sure you know yourse
lf and we’re all in the same boat.

  ‘MotherAloys?’ asked Mo. ‘From who – sorry where?’

  It had to be her Mother Aloys. The handyman confirmed her thoughts.

  ‘She was your one what was the head nun over in St Mary’s boarding school for rich girls up in Clandeboyce. I think it was Aloys. Yeah it was Aloys. Sounds like she was called after hubcaps or somethin’. Do you know what I mean?’

  It was the hand-me-downs that killed the Mother.

  Mo was a student for three years at Clandeboyce, a very expensive and exclusive boarding school. The nuns took in a few kids from ‘the wider locality’ as day pupils, to maintain the illusion they were carrying out God’s work. Mother Aloys was fond of saying, ‘The well-off are God’s children too.’ Which was true, in a way, as God was looking after them much better than the poor kids. Even if he did have a change of heart after Ireland went bust.

  Mo passed the entrance test with flying colours and her mother went on the piss for three straight days to celebrate the scholarship. An I wasn’t such a bad mother now was I sort of a piss-up. She drank the back-to-school allowance, which was given by the government to parents to help out with buying school uniforms and books. There was no money left for Mo’s uniform. Mother Aloys arranged for hand-me-downs.

  Twelve-year-old Mo knew straightaway it was a second-hand uniform. Her mother told her no one would know it wasn’t new. Mother Aloys sent a thank you note to the mammy who gave her the uniform, mentioning Mo was the recipient, and all about her family circumstances. The kid who had worn it the previous year read the note when she was rummaging through Mammy’s bag for cigarette money.

  Mo was teased from her first day in the school and left at the end of third year for a Community School in the city. It was pre the big take-off of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. So the bullying was all stored in head memory only. Mo either forgot or blanked out the details of most of it, but the girl who found out her secret never left her alone. She was cruel. Took off Mo’s accent and sent her notes like ‘Why do you always smell? Does your mammy wash your sanitary pads?’ Then there was the taunting, ‘Your mammy is your sister. Your mammy is your sister.’