by Billy Keane
The chemist gave me drops for the eye.
Mo hurried down the shack street.
Maureen followed, waddling from side to side like an overloaded lorry on a bog road. She was orange, drenched in sweat and out of breath.
I hid in a shop selling sunglasses, swimming trunks, towels, fake Barcelona football jerseys and fridge magnets.
‘You like a watch?’ asked the salesman.
‘Just looking.’
I moved behind a large stand with newspapers from all over Europe.
Between Der Spiegel and The Sun I could see Mo and Maureen cut into a bar.
The shop assistant asked if I wanted to buy a video camera.
‘Special price for you, my friend.’
I could see Mo and Maureen through the peep hole in the canvass wall that separated the shop from the bar.
Mo’s eyes were red and swollen. She draped a scarf over the bite.
There were sound bites too, above the humming talk in the cafe, the street noises, the music and the whoosh and splish of the waves.
The sea breeze freshened and I took in huge gulps of air. After a couple of minutes I felt well enough to leave, but I couldn’t.
I lay on my front. Mo’s painted toes were flicking up and down in the flip-flops with the little strawberry on top, the pair she wore in bed with the big blond guy from Germany or wherever. Possibly he was a Viking, just like her beloved husband.
It was then I heard her piped words travel on the wind through an invisible acoustic tunnel and out under the canvass.
‘G is the only the man who was ever nice to me, always.’
There were more words lost in the rising winds that gave power to the waves and the flapping canvass walls of the plastic street.
A cat jumped down from the roof a timber store. I shouted out with the fright. I risked giving away my hiding place. Mo looked up and said something. She got up from her chair. Maureen placed her hands on Mo’s shoulders and sat her down. I still couldn’t leave her in the state she was in and I began to weaken. But were there others? More lovers? Love wasn’t the word for what went on in that room. Pity turned to anger. What was there to say to her anyway?
Whoa babe. How did you enjoy your euroshag?
Was he as good as little G?
Hope you didn’t have to wear his crash helmet to stop yourself getting hurt on the headboard of his bed? He being such a big old Viking with his two-horn helmet and him thrusting and bulling and snorting. It was then it dawned on me the Viking was a Dermo lookalike.
I was shaking now. There was a controlling voice telling me not to lower myself to her level. It was an us and them voice. A stick to your own kind voice.
But until I caught her with the pumping piston, where she came from never bothered me. Was I jealous then?
I began to think her bull was laughing at me. Maybe if Mo was a man it would be seen as holiday randiness and a sowing of wild oats in the last laddish victimless sex before marriage.
The conflicting thoughts and emotions swirled around in my brain.
I was so desperately sad then. I knew too that even if I ever met another woman, there would be three of us in the relationship. Mo, her and me.
I desperately needed to be loved and to love back. To be ordinary. Not to stand out for being anything other than a decent guy, who looked after his family and didn’t get into trouble, and changed the world in a small way, by just being nice to people.
Words from somewhere fundamentalist came in front of my eyes in bold Gothic 50 font. Words like adultery, fornication and promiscuity.
My mother never used such words. Even before her radio days, she was for sex in certain cases. My Dad told me on the night of our second pint together that I should ‘ride all round’ me while I was able.
Some biblical prophet from over the water in the Middle East might have taken over my psyche and burned the words into me. I was ashamed to tell Mo at the time. That night in the Compound was my first time. I always promised myself I wouldn’t have sex until I met someone I truly loved. That was me and I didn’t give in to peer pressure.
So how far do you go? Do you forgive all faults and failings? Can you love someone so much you eventually turn into an enabler like the husband back in our home place, who buys bottles of gin for the wife drinking herself to death behind closed doors?
John Steinbeck, my hero, wrote you have to believe in the perfectibility of man. I’m sure Steinbeck couldn’t have known a Mo. She was Mo and if change was to come there would be many events in between the beginning and the final product. Mo was a work in progress that would never be completed. A ghost estate.
The beauty of her haunts me. If I had stayed the sadness of her eyes with the playback of every tough year could have softened me.
No shame came through in her words of apology at the car. Sex for Mo was no more of a physical act than eating an ice cream for pleasure.
Her remorse was not for what she had done but for the effect the act in 5645 had on me.
I had this terrible vision right in front of me. I was pulling Mo from the bubbling waters in front of the boardwalk. Cradling her in a white shift, with her wet hair hanging like seaweed.
Dark empty sockets. A voice from the Moby-Dick. A book we did at school. A barnacled Nantucket voice saying knowingly, ‘The crabs got her eyes.’ Mo, pale and washed out. Anaemic and cold beyond ever warming. It was a horrific wide-awake nightmare and another of those desperate voices crying for attention in the confusion inside my head.
This was my last chance to save her. There can be no doubt but I understood the consequences of leaving Mo to the mercy of the winds, the sea and Maureen Olsen.
I left then. The walk away was fast and furious. In minutes I was on a nudist beach. I threw the engagement ring into the sea. Then I had this terrible, horrible picture of a leathery old pervert harvesting it from the incoming tide.
Into the sea I went, and dived under the water. It was crazy. There wasn’t a chance of finding the ring.
I left the sea before the seventh deadly wave.
I made my way home to Ireland the very next day.
Timmy collected me at the airport. He had the full story of Mo’s accident.
It seems Mo was driving and Maureen was in the front seat when their jeep hit a poodle. Mo and Maureen jumped from the car. The curly dog was wearing a little tartan waistcoat and a diamond stud collar.
The poodle was squirming around on the hot tarmac like a permed wig, gasping for breath, shaking and quivering and squealing.
Mo ran to a nearby shop for water but in so doing tripped over a piece of concrete that was sticking just above the level.
She put out her hands to stop herself falling but there was no guard rail and Mo banged the finger next to her index finger off a large boulder. The finger was dislocated and Mo ran back in a panic with the piece of paving brick that had become dislodged when she fell. Probably to show Maureen how it was she fell.
Maureen took the brick from Mo and smashed the poodle on the head, killing her instantly. In her statement to the Canarian police, Maureen genuinely thought the dog was in terrible pain and wanted to put her out her misery.
Mo turned around to get away from the spray of blood and poodle brains.
There was another white poodle stuck on to the grill of the hired Pajero.
This poodle was definitely dead.
‘Jesus,’ Mo asked Maureen, ‘did we hit two poodles?’
Maureen was in a state.
‘I’m dead certain we only banged into the one.’
By now a crowd had gathered. A woman by the name of Alice Lackabegley from Feakle in County Clare had a good year on the family farm. Her husband Lee sent Alice and her sister Sumatra off on a two-week break in Gran Canaria. Alice videoed the entire incident.
The owner of the mercy killing poodle arrived and Alice showed her an action replay of the cull on the small, square screen of her Sony.
It seems the poodle ran off a
nd the large woman wearing silver high heels who owned it couldn’t catch the little dog. The mercy-killed poodle, not used to such freedom, was chasing the escapee in-heat poodle now stuck on the grid of the Pajero like an installation in one of those grizzly art exhibitions of body parts and dead people’s organs steeping in formaldehyde.
Not used to exercise and wearing a wooly coat in such searing heat and panting with animal passion, the male poodle was quickly out of breath and dehydrated.
All the male poodle needed was a drink of water. But Maureen wasn’t to know this. She only knew there was a thud when the in-heat poodle was struck down.
The police arrived and Mo and Maureen were taken away in handcuffs.
So it is that an event such as the careless handling of a couple of poodles can change people’s lives forever.
Maureen cried so much, the owners of both poodles were won over and the two were released after nearly thirty-six hours in custody.
Maureen paid a thousand euros each to the owners and left the police wondering at why any tourist would carry such money. The police checked out Maureen with their colleagues in Ireland.
Timmy was pretty sure Maureen was not in any way involved but she must have known it was going on, her being a smart woman and all that. Her Dermo was thought to have been up to his eyes in the transportation of the drugs.
Everyone finds everything out about everyone in Ireland, eventually.
Timmy told me I was mixing with a bad lot and it was inevitable I would become a target as these drug gangs had no scruples when it came to killing people. The going rate for a hit was €2,700, down 10 percent due to the rebalancing.
My mother, who wasn’t aware of Room 5645, took the liberal view.
‘Mo needs our support.’ Always welcome and all that, if she was to be my future partner.
Timmy shifted around on his seat, shining the seat of his pants and the chair simultaneously.
My mother wasn’t in the least bit bothered while Timmy circled the rim of his tea mug with his index finger.
‘Now first and foremost,’ said my Mam, ‘you know I love you and your brothers and I think on the whole I have been a good mother to you.’
This was unusual in itself in that my mother didn’t usually say stuff like ‘I love you’. Our house was the opposite to most in that the love stuff was my Dad’s job. Mother saw these expressions as meaningless unless backed up with doing stuff like hanging up pictures and cutting the lawn with a scissors or whatever hardships she lined up for him and which he refused to do mainly because he didn’t know how and /or he was too lazy.
I always thought my mother would have been happy if she married a handyman.
‘About a year ago when I got the hang of that laptop you bought me, I joined a dating agency for the over fifties and it was there I met someone I knew for many years. That someone was Timmy. We are in a serious relationship and Timmy will be moving in here soon. I just wanted to reassure you this will always be your home. Isn’t that right, Timmy?
‘Yes indeed, Mary,’ agreed Timmy, right on cue.
‘I’m on your side, Chief.’ Timmy looked at me with the sincerity lasering a hole through my head.
I think I was the Chief he was referring to but it might well have been my mother.
I turned on the television. Another soap, just like my life. Some Aussie dickhead with bigger tits than some chick he was shagging was poncing around Summer Bay or somesuch kip, where there’s more bother than hell.
My mother looked nervously over at Timmy, who was still circling the rim of his mug. This time Timmy was travelling anti-clockwise, and going so fast I thought he would burn off his fingerprints. There was no way I could explain why I turned on the TV. I turned down the sound. The pictures were enough to blot out my own internal channel.
‘Sorry, I suppose I’m a bit nervous. Ah sure no bother. That’s okay. Sound.’
My mother told Timmy to stop with the cup.
‘I’ll be very good to your mother and I know I can never replace your father but I hope we can be friends, Chief.’
If he stopped calling me Chief in that patronising voice of his, I mightn’t have minded too much.
I knew immediately that life in our house would never be the same. I wouldn’t be able to dump my clothes on the bedroom floor or pick what I wanted for dinner. Timmy would get at the sports pages before me.
My mother was entitled to a partner and in a way it freed me from the duty of looking after her in my role as man of the house. But I knew that from now on, I would be a lodger in my own home.
I left the room with a ‘Well that’s okay so.’ It wasn’t a very mature response from me, who was born mature, but I could hardly throw my arms around my new Dad and say ‘Hey, I love you man!’
Timmy walked out the door after me.
‘By the way, Chief, I signed a pre-nup.’
My mother, who always stuck up for people she loved, other than Dad, added ‘And it was Timmy’s own idea.’
Time to go, I thought. Time to leave home, for good. A big man like Timmy was bound to make noise in the bedroom.
A couple of days later I attended a recruitment fair for Oz in the Burlington Hotel. Hundreds queued just to register.
The Aussies promised they would find me a job. My 1:1 and my two years working in the city during the boom gave me as much experience as ten ordinary years and responsibilities well beyond my age.
The money would be okay and I would be with the twins. There would be no fear of the mother. How could you worry about someone who had a policeman kissing her and could fix up her own Skype?
That was how she told the twins. On Skype, with Hubby 2-to-be sitting in the background, like the cat who got the cream.
Timmy looked earnestly into the camera and waved a big wave.
The boys were shocked. They used the word gross a lot and said they knew now why Timmy burst a gut getting them out of that dope rap.
The twins were ecstatic at the thought of my joining them.
‘You’ll love this one, Chief,’ said Al.
‘Guess what you’re brother shagged last week.’
‘It’s “who”? Not what, you illiterate git.’ I was always correcting them. I made a vow that would stop when I go to Oz.
‘He shagged a sheila from Mayo whose name was Sheila but she’s had to change it to She-she since she came out here.’
Yeah, Oz was the place for me alright. I never really got that mad, carefree stuff the twins had. I was always the Chief, what with poor old Dad dying young and all that. I’d miss him. Felt almost as if I was deserting Dad. Leaving him alone up in the graveyard, with his hair growing away in his ears.
It was now that I’d love one of his kisses. Lately it’s as if his physical presence is fading away. I remember his face alright and his accent but when I go back, the pictures I have of him lack depth, focus and background.
I always imagined Dad was sitting at his usual seat at the kitchen table. It was comforting in a way but now I felt he too was on his way out of our home. I hated leaving him but maybe this was Dad’s way of telling me it was time to go. His letting go.
I could always come back in a couple of years. Who knows? By 2015, the country might be back on its feet. I would have a stake. Spare up my money and return like all the emigrants promise to do before they leave home.
But would I be frozen with the cold? Would it take fifteen years for the economy to get fixed?
The thought of swapping barbie marinade recipes with some plonker named Rip, who surfed and could look on at deadly birds in deadly bikinis without getting an erection sort of put me off Oz. But maybe that was a cliché.
And then when I get there it would be me ringing up my mother and telling her we had Christmas dinner on the beach and her wondering how we cooked the turkey on the strand and how did we boil the ham. Then after five years we would go home on holiday and give out about the weather in Ireland and the lads in the village would say I had an Aussie
accent and I would overcompensate by talking like a complete yokel with marbles in his mouth and H’s in words like shnow and shteak.
My new Dad’s last wife must have died of boredom. Or so the boys in the Baltimore Bar told me. Timmy went on forever with very long stories and trapped people with his bulk in the corner of the local pub so as to make sure they would have to listen to his every word.
We drank all night and talked shite and the lads making out how lucky I was to be heading for Oz and them stuck here on a farm having fantasies over heifers. What with all the young ones gone to Oz and Dublin. But I knew they were just trying to make me feel good. Most of those who left would’ve stayed here or returned home after a year or two if there was work.
‘I’ll be back in a year or two with the twins,’ I said to Mam.
‘They said that in our day,’ she replied in a sad and resigned voice, ‘but they stayed away. There was nothing here for them in our time either and America wasn’t too bad. There were Irish bars and Gaelic football and hurling clubs. Enough to keep you going and a network to back you up that was tighter and more loyal than any group at home, except maybe family.
‘There will always be a welcome here for you and the twins. Don’t ever forget that.’
There was a knock on the door of my bedroom and then another knock.
I had the Baltimore Bar fear. All sorts of thoughts went through my head. Drink made me depressed.
I just knew I had to get out of Ireland but I was scared of leaving home. Of making a new life in a country where I was a guest, and not a citizen.
Timmy knocked again on the bedroom door. Mam was away in the city for the day. Shopping for her trousseau or whatever it was brides who were round the track before wore on their second big day out.
I pretended to be fast asleep. Thought Timmy was coming in with a tray of sunny-side-up breakfast and that he would want another ages and ages, buddy-daddy chat.
Timmy half-opened the door.
‘Hey, Chief we need to talk. It’s very important. I’ll wait for you in the sitting room.’
