The Ballad of Mo and G

by Billy Keane

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this but he’ll know when it’s time to go, G.’

  I was listening carefully because Mame was a smart woman. I knew what she was telling me felt right.

  ‘I often sit up with the neighbours. The ones who have no one when they are dying or if someone needs a break if they are too tired. They’re hanging on for dear life but most in pain want to go. They have to be told, it’s okay to take their leave. Your Dad is mad about you. He’ll know it’s you, even if he is very bad, and only barely conscious. Tell him, G. Tell him and he will understand.’

  He came round a bit later that day and even ate a spoon or two of the baby food.

  The four of us were by the bed.

  ‘Dad, you’ll be fine,’ I said.

  ‘You were always a desperate bad liar.’

  ‘We’re all here with you, Dad’

  His long greying hair was flat and limp where there had been curls. I squeezed his hand and he summoned up enough strength to squeeze back. We kissed him. Our Dad who kissed his boys like he was a friggin’ Italian or something. Our Dad who was the only Dad around the village who kissed his sons.

  Mam was on the other side of the bed. She didn’t hold his hand but she did nurse him through the last few months with absolute efficiency.

  The twins were silent. Even Al, the talking twin. Their spokesman, Dad called him. They were well old enough to know what was going on but I think there some sort of tacit acceptance it was my job as the oldest to send him on his way, even though the truth was I was no more than a boy myself.

  I took on the responsibility. I didn’t want Mam and the lads to hear for fear they wouldn’t understand what was going on between us.

  I whispered in his ear again. ‘You can go now, Dad. We’re all here with you. Mam and me and the twins.’

  It took him a few minutes to shut down. He gave out a few last breaths and he died with all his family there beside him.

  We stayed in the room for a while without speaking. A ray of light came in the bedroom window and shone like a spot on a photograph of Dad. He was smiling in the photograph and I, in my emotional and exhausted state, thought he was actually alive in the frame telling us he was okay. Sometimes though I think it really was a sign but I never told anyone except Mo, who didn’t take much notice after all she had heard about death from Maureen and accepted what I was telling her as normal. But there was something going on out there in the vastness or smallness of wherever it is we go when we die.

  There I was sitting on my bed, dressed up for the road home with my ear bandaged up like a work of art before it’s unveiled, thinking of the old man’s death, in a hospital where there probably four or five people ready to breathe their last that very day. I felt so small and powerless up against the vastness and scale of all that was going on in the world. The world is too big. I’m too small.

  Mam and Mo were coming to get me.

  It was good to be going home, even if I was in pain. Good to get back to visiting my Dad up at the grave. Good to get out of the hospital where they woke you for breakfast at seven and lunch was served at twelve, which was breakfast time for me after I lost my job. Good to get back to hisbrotherwasworse.ie.

  hisbrotherwasworse.ie would make me rich. The big idea. And I was thinking of another less quirky name like sorryforyourtroubles.ie, which was the standard line when you met the bereaved.

  hisbrotherwasworse.ie came from a story the old fella told me. I think he got it from a DVD made by the actor Eamon Kelly. Dad kept on playing it until he had every word off by heart.

  It goes like this and it happens at the funeral of this truly horrible and deeply unpopular dude. No one can think of anything good to say about him. Back in the old days it was the custom to praise the dead, even if you cut the livin’ shite out of them when they were alive.

  The funeral goers scratched their heads and went through the back catalogue of the dead man’s deeds, but not a good word could be found in praise of the deceased. Then one of the gang at the funeral comes out with the best eulogy he can manage: ‘His brother was worse.’ And that’s where we got the name.

  I had been in touch with a web designer and a couple of buddies who were journalists and couldn’t get work. The orders for obituaries would roll in from all over Ireland and then the world. There would be ads on the site for undertakers and whoever was working in the death business like embalmers, ambulance-chasing lawyers, mass card printers, florists, bereavement counsellors, headstone sculptors, grave diggers, dating agencies and mediums.

  The loved ones would be praised and made blessed.

  ‘Our darling Dad was loved by one and all. He was a generous man. Dad killed a ram every Christmas and gave his nuts to the poor.’

  We were going to publish and write all the obits on hisbrotherwasworse.ie.

  Then we would set up a page like Facebook for the dead. A book of condolences. Like the Egyptians, with drawings and wise words. There would be little tributes by people who couldn’t make the funeral and a MyPics of the deceased with links to anything he did on YouTube. That sort of thing.

  We couldn’t lose. When I say we, I mean Mo and me. She was in for 50:50, even though it was all my idea, but that was the way it was going to be from now on. Halves in everything including and especially our baby, when the time was right.

  The banks wouldn’t lend us a cent. The manager decided it was too high-risk.

  He tapped a pencil on his desk as he told us the bad news.

  It drove me nuts.

  Then he stopped tapping and asked, ‘Anything else?’ Which really meant your time is up, now get outta here. Five years earlier they would have given us ten million and ask have you enough in that?

  ‘Do you have any rubbers?’ Mo asked before we left.

  ‘Rubbers?’ asked the thrown bank manager.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mo, ‘for the bottom of your pencil.’ He was lucky she left at that and didn’t wish him dead.

  Mam and Mo hooked up and came to the hospital together. My mother fussed over me while Mo looked on quietly, afraid my Mam would say something that would hurt her. It was a bit like when the old boss is still clearing her desk and the new boss is waiting on her to move out. My mother interrogated Mo in the car on the way to the hospital. Asked her about the status of her divorce and how would she pay her way if she didn’t have any money and what if any were her job prospects and there was always McDonald’s.

  Mo carried my bag and Mam took my laptop.

  The hospital was really busy. The entrance narrowed into a bottleneck, at the point where the coffee shop and the bustling reception area intersected.

  He didn’t seem to notice us at first. Dermo had lost a lot of weight and his eyes were grey. It looked as if the mad squatters in his head had left for another host.

  It was pretty shocking for Mo. After all, she was married to him. You would just have to feel for him and then again you wouldn’t.

  Dermo’s nurse took the wrapping off a bar of chocolate. Dermo broke off a piece. We stood and watched from behind a large pillar, without which the hospital would have fallen down. Every now and then our view of him was blocked by passersby. A hospital helper sneezed three billion molecules of deadly germs into the air. Two one-legged men passed each other in the corridor without so much as a hello. A lost young girl who looked to be about thirteen months’ pregnant looked up at the signs for directions to the wards, here in the very hospital where Mo lost her baby.

  Dermo blinked several times. He sneezed and wiped his nose with his sleeve. The sneezing started up again and with such violence Dermo’s head recoiled each time in a whiplash movement. The nurse cleaned his nose and face. Dermo looked up over the cloth as if he were peeping over the top of a yashmak.

  He threw himself from the wheelchair when he saw Mo peeping out from behind the pillar. Dermo crawled quickly across the floor in our direction.

  ‘You tried to kill me with a hammer. Your poor husband what is only ever
mindin’ everyone. A man what never done nottin to no wan.’

  Mo ran.

  The nurse picked up a kicking and revolving Dermo with the help of a security man who wheeled him away.

  ‘You’re all dead. Dead. I swear to God. Dead fucking dead, dead, dead. I swear to God I’ll get ye.’

  ‘You, you!’ he screamed at me. ‘She’s my wife. Mine. Give her back. You fucking wife robber you!’

  His voice trailed off as he was pushed into a lift at the end of the corridor. Mo had to sit down. My mother got her a drink of water and rubbed her hands. Mo was shaking. Her face was pale and her legs were so weak she couldn’t stand up. I put my arms around Mo and told her I would always mind her.

  Maureen said she would die of loneliness if Mo left. Mo was adamant she was going to leave and soon. As it was, there was no danger from Dermo who was wheelchair-bound for now, and would be sent to prison for four years, or even more according to Timmy. Our Garda family friend.

  Maureen asked Mo to give up her marital property claim to the Compound in favour of Dermo. Maureen was sure Dermo would need constant care ‘near his old mammy, when he was wished better, or came out of the hospital, and the prison, eventually.’ Mo was relieved in that she saw the signing over as part of the process of leaving her husband.

  ‘I just want to be shut of him forever.’

  Maureen was sure Dermo would be less likely to look for revenge if Mo signed the house over. And then she corrected herself quickly by saying, ‘That’s if he ever do come around to his full senses.’

  ‘Ah but he’s very bad and maybe someday when he do get better and I’m sure he will, God willing, ye might be friends again when he’s back to hisself. With the help of God and his blessed mother.’ Maureen was truly beginning to annoy her.

  The solicitors took a while to sort out the paperwork for the transfer of Mo’s share of the house. Then there was Maureen’s sixtieth, which took up another week. Maureen was trying her best to cling on to Mo for as long as possible.

  Maureen issued almost daily bulletins on Dermo’s progress.

  ‘He’s not able to speak too well after the three mini-strokes but theys giving him speaking therapy. Teachin’ him to talk all over agin the poor cratur. The angry things weren’t him at all. All the doctors said that. Even the foreign wans. It was the accident. He ate shepherd’s pie today.’ Probably with a shepherd in it.

  In the end Mo told Maureen, crossly, she didn’t want to hear another word about Dermo, and she didn’t care if she ever saw him again. About a week before Mo was due to leave, Maureen, as a treat, purchased a sixtieth present for herself, and a goodbye to the Compound present for Mo. It was a surprise trip to the Canaries

  Mo refused the holiday but she gave in when Maureen showed her the brochures. It was cold for early spring and the bitter north-east wind blew through the Compound for days on end. Mo longed for sun and blue light.

  The hotel was on Gran Canaria. A themed African village with tall, thatched huts and an azure lagoon.

  ‘It’s a girl’s trip. Tanning, shopping, cocktails. That sort of thing.’

  Maureen was now resigned to Mo’s leaving the Compound for good.

  ‘I’m sorry about trying to fix up you and Dermo. It’s just that I love you like the daughter I never had.’

  There were floods of tears. Mo painted Maureen’s bitten finger nails. Mo said Maureen’s nails were like little islands surrounded by acres of rosy flesh.

  ‘Trip of a lifetime. I’ll be like a cooked chicken when I come back. The white meat will be the best,’ said Mo, who couldn’t wait for the holiday. She was never anywhere farther away from her flat than one of the seaside towns near the city and only then for a day out. It was her first plane trip. I was happy for Mo and Maureen too.

  We made love on the night before she left, several times, ‘Just in case I get tempted over there. You know what Irish girls are like on their holliers.’

  Irish women, around my age and younger, went a bit on the wild side when they went away on holidays. Most of the girls didn’t see sex as any big deal. Especially on holiday. I trusted Mo but when it came to sex, she just didn’t take it seriously enough. ‘It’s only natural,’ she said, ‘and anything natural is good.’

  One night we were out for an American ride, in the car, and she said something that stuck in my mind when we pulled in to a lay-by, for the real ride.

  ‘I think like a man.’

  I wasn’t quite sure what she meant.

  Maybe it was that Mo needed sex more often or that she didn’t need to be emotionally involved. Mo had sex with a good few different guys in college and before. That was the way it was with most of the young ones. I had this idea of me and her and no one else, even in fantasy. I felt that bond kept us together to the exclusion of all others. Not that in any way I felt I owned Mo. It was a sharing.

  I was going to say something before she left for Spain but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. It wasn’t as if we were just casually going out with each other. We were about to become life partners.

  Mo loved sex.

  She used vibrators while I was watching. It was a huge turn on but I eventually resented the Rampant Rabbits. The constant drone was a pneumatic drill in my head. I was jealous of a machine. She parked the Rabbits in a drawer in her bedside locker. ‘The warren,’ she called it. Mo told me she would get rid of her collection, if that’s what I wanted. Mo found it impossible to get to sleep without some sort of sexual activity.

  I gave an okay. ‘Better to be counting Rabbits than eating sleeping tablets.’

  For my Mo, pre-sleep sex was a bedtime book.

  Maureen was Mo’s mammy now, but Maureen was more loco than parentis. She went on a crash grapefruit-only diet and lost two and a half stone in three weeks.

  At the end of the grapefruit diet Maureen sucked in her tummy and showed the new waistline to Mo.

  ‘Look at me, Mo, look at me. I’m only two bellies more than regulation.’

  Maureen always hated her eyebrows which she said were two hairy caterpillars. The kids in her school used to ask the young Maureen if she was Groucho Marx’s daughter.

  Maureen booked an appointment at a hair removal clinic.

  ‘They’re butterflies now. And they’ve flown away,’ the therapist said.

  All that was left over Maureen’s eyes were parallel, pencil-thin lines in the shape of upside down half moons. Maureen’s hairy legs were reduced to hedgehog stubble by Mo, and she had the beautician smooth her shins with electrolysis and creams. Maureen’s big purple lips were injected with collagen ‘for fullness and firmness’. She wore Marilyn Monroe’s lipstick. A new set of long, pointy purple nails were grafted on to the stumps of the bitten-down natural ones. Her teeth were whitened and her skin was browned.

  Maureen cut a strip of fabric from her bedspread and showed it to the hairdresser who Maureen said was ‘a small bit gay, but he was a genius and very nice.’ Maureen’s furze hair was tamed and coloured Papal Yellow.

  She was made over from top to toe, for the holiday.

  Mo didn’t tell Maureen about us. I’m sure Maureen must have suspected when Mo mentioned, pretend casually, she was moving in to my house ‘down the country, for a little while, until I get sorted.’ And she would visit Maureen ‘every two or three weeks, at the very least.’ Mo softened the blow further by saying to Maureen that she was the mammy she never had and once again Maureen told Mo she was the daughter she never had. There were tears but no ice cream this time, because of the grapefruit diet.

  Maureen never once brought up Mo’s leaving the Compound after that.

  I could never figure out how Maureen and Mo could get over a trauma like the one in the foyer of the hospital and book a holiday, as if nothing had happened. Conflict had become part of their daily lives. I, in my own way, was now part of their story.

  They were like school kids. Mo and Maureen were all excited about going away.

  Mo handed me an envelope as she
was going in through the security gate at the airport. A large one with bubbles. The kind of envelope you would send a book in. Mo wrote a big letter G inside a red heart.

  ‘That’s the money I owe you, G. My savings bonds came through. It’s the money for the teeth and the phone and the laptop and for a good suit for job interviews. Never let it be said a girl from our place didn’t pay her debts. You can tell your mother that. Love you.’ We didn’t kiss as Maureen was looking at us from a distance.

  Then Mo was gone through the departure gates. I never told my mother about the money I gave to Mo.

  I opened the envelope in the car. Inside was three grand in fifties.

  I had a day around the city trying to shift my social welfare payments down south. My old boss wrote me out a really nice reference. Told me he owed twelve million to the banks and that his house was going under the hammer. I felt sorry for him. He was a good guy who just got a little greedy.

  I had my fill of the city and couldn’t get out quickly enough. The city was hard work in the wet. The incessant rain had the windscreen wipers opening and closing like a manic book. It was nice to be able to think about stuff that didn’t involve life and death and getting killed or wishing people were killed or having your ear eaten bitten off by killer dogs or getting threatened by psychopathic husbands.

  But I was missing her already.

  I, who nothing ever happened to other than the usual stuff like Dad dying, was now on my own. An actor looking out for a part in his next movie. There was nothing going on. No drama, trauma or shocks. In a way I missed being on the edge but I knew too if I kept on going the way I was it would give me cancer or some stress-related disease when I got older.

  I’m sure it was the stress that killed Dad. The stress of living with Mam. Maybe Maureen and Dora would say Mam killed Dad, but I’m sure she never wanted him to die. I just wanted Mo and I to be always really happy and to live together until we were really old.