The Ballad of Mo and G

by Billy Keane

  ‘She calls it the lounge,’ I replied.

  ‘Chief, it really is serious.’ As he turned out the door he looked back and said, ‘I have bad news, very bad news.’

  I sat up in the bed.

  ‘Tell me now,’ I pleaded. ‘Is it Mo? Something happened to her?

  Mo was the first name that came into my mind in the context of bad news.

  The drip-drip of information had something to do with the fact the Gardaí are trained to prepare people for the worst.

  Wide awake now.

  I pulled on a black top. It was the right colour for what I was about to hear.

  ‘Mo and Maureen have been involved in serious incident at approximately 10.14 am this morning at Mo’s residence in a place known as the Olsen Compound.’

  Timmy spoke like he was delivering a report on the six o’clock news.

  I relaxed. Certain it was something innocuous like blowing up the Dáil or accidentally shooting the President or whatever shit it was they were up to in their world, where people fell off the side into stats every day. The way Timmy spoke in his on-duty cop-talk voice relaxed me a bit.

  Timmy sat on the bed.

  ‘Chief, you must be brave now. I have terrible sad news.’

  He paused to let it sink in.

  Tim took a deep breath.

  ‘Mo …’ and he stopped. The Garda delivering the report professionally was all but gone now. His voice broke and then he composed himself with another deep breath.

  ‘Mo and Maureen were shot this morning. The news isn’t good. Mo died on her way to hospital and Maureen died at the scene.’

  I just lay in the bed as if I too was dead. Laid out, unable to move.

  My mother called.

  So sorry and was I okay. On her way home. Don’t do anything stupid. Drink tea with lots of sugar for the shock.

  ‘Dermo didn’t even have the good grace to turn the gun on himself,’ said Timmy.

  ‘He’s in custody. He shot them with a gun he kept hidden at the house. It seems he snuck out from the hospital. He must have had help.’

  I couldn’t speak. I tried but no words came out. It was as if I had a stroke or a dentist froze my tongue.

  ‘Chief are you okay?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Dermo claimed Mo allegedly borrowed or took money from his stash for a holiday. He shot Mo first and then the mother, who died instantly. Mo died in transit to the hospital. We’re not really sure what happened, to be honest. It’s too early yet.’

  All I could do was keep saying silent Holy Marys to myself in my head but the words were mixed up.

  ‘I’m so sorry, G. But you had a very lucky escape. He was going to get you too.’

  I asked Timmy if it wasn’t all some sort of terrible mistake. Mistaken identity or could it be she was still alive.

  ‘I wish it was,’ he said. ‘Sorry, G. So sorry. Old pal.’

  ‘Don’t call me old pal!’ I shouted. ‘Only Dad calls me old pal. And you’re not my Dad and you never will be.’

  There were no tears. Somehow I knew there would be a sad story. It was like when you’re watching a movie and you know the end right at the start.

  Timmy kept calm. He told me there was no point in going to the city and the hospital in my state. I was in shock and he made me tea with lots of sugar. I started to shake. I was gasping for breath like a fish on the river bank. I told Timmy I was getting a heart attack. I couldn’t breathe.

  The doctor diagnosed a panic attack. He gave me something to calm me.

  I slept, woke, slept, woke. It was a waking up from a bad dream, but every time Mo was still dead.

  It wasn’t as if we lived together properly.

  We never even had a whole night in the same bed.

  I didn’t see her sleeping, her chest heaving ever so slightly like a boat on a calm lake.

  Or push back her wispy hair so I could see the beauty of her face. With her eyes closed as she lay on her back, exposed but unafraid in the sanctuary with me. Safe at last. Our toes touching as she woke. And she smiled at me and the new day.

  I have difficulty in recalling the next few days.

  The papers were full of the murder. Or so I was told. There was some story that Dermo escaped when the police man guarding the hospital skived off to watch The Sunday Game in the TV room. Then after a day or two there was no mention of the double homicide. Someone else got shot and the circus moved on.

  I stayed in bed for three days, with the curtains drawn, unable to dream, awake or asleep.

  At dawn, on the morning of the funeral, I went up the hill to Dad’s grave and asked him to look out for Mo.

  If there was a heaven, he would surely be there. Dad liked Mo.

  Yeah, Dad would mind her for me until my time comes.

  Surely by then she would be safe and maybe I would have found my moral and physical courage among the wreckage of a life that for me seemed over before it really got going.

  I drove to the funeral.

  On my own.

  Timmy and Mam begged to go but I needed the peace and isolation of the car. Timmy warned me to watch out for the Olsens but I didn’t care if they shot me. It seems they knew about Mo and me. Maureen must have told them when she came back from the holidays.

  There was a mass. People went up to the front pews when it was over, to shake hands with a dried-out old woman.

  The old lady sat in the front seat, on her own.

  Four or five hundred people packed the church.

  Mostly murder-tourists, neighbours, the girl from the nightclub on the first night, old praying people, and journalists.

  I could feel the life leaving me. As if I was leaking and didn’t really care.

  There was communion. I took the host for Mo. Prayed more Hail Marys for her.

  Passed by the coffin on the way down. Touched the polished timber.

  The priest was making out death wasn’t so bad after all. Made a lovely speech. A generic one for one of the many murder victims in Mo’s parish.

  Mo was alone in her coffin at centre stage in front of the altar, an offering.

  All that girl ever wanted was her own home. A little plot, and soon enough at least one wish would be granted.

  I joined the cue of hundreds of people at the end. Most of them didn’t know Mo.

  The old lady took my hand. It was as limp as if she was dead herself.

  I didn’t have to ask who she was. The old lady was Mo’s mammy. I knew her from Mo.

  She was pretty once. But there would be no presents now from Bob’s pals. I could see from her sunken, broken, forlorn, forsaken, baggy, wrinkled, unreflective eyes Mo’s mother knew, she too had failed Mo.

  The graveyard I couldn’t do. The lowering of her coffin and the thud of the earth on the timber was an erratic last-post drumbeat I never forgot when Dad was buried.

  The world went by.

  Life was turning tricks.

  You expect everything to stop just because you can’t go on.

  People were making their way to cars with bags of shopping.

  An earnest girl with her hair tied up jogged past and a crow stuck his beak in a dunce’s cap of popcorn.

  A pregnant woman with the pink hair drove a pram while talking on her mobile.

  Three old boys were smoking and shifting from foot to foot outside the bookies.

  I drove away from it all.

  Longing for the isolation.

  The car was moving from side to side almost involuntarily.

  I didn’t really care what happened to me but what if I killed an innocent person?

  I asked Dad to help and I was better then.

  In the distance was the outline of the Compound.

  The police wouldn’t let me into the house.

  It’s a crime scene they said. The perimeter was marked off with yellow tape. Mo’s bloody long fingers were painted on the cream-coloured front wall like ancient cave art.

  The detective checked my car reg. Kne
w who I was.

  The Chinese bells tinkled.

  The Compound was a scene from an old movie. A set where so much action took place. And now it’s The End.

  ‘You were her friend.’

  ‘I was her friend.’

  He lit up a cigarette and asked if I’d like one.

  ‘How did she die?’ I asked impatiently, while the detective was in the middle of a deep drag. ‘Timmy told me but can you show me what happened and where?’

  The detective nodded.

  He pointed to the bloody porch.

  ‘That’s where they died.’

  ‘Can I go in?’

  ‘Better not,’ he said. ‘There’s still forensic work going on.’

  But he did tell what happened on the day of the shooting.

  ‘He, the husband, pretended he was much worse. He was able to walk and his injuries were improving. And then one day when security became too relaxed, he escaped. You know the rest.’

  The detective looked over my head as if to say there’s your way home. But I didn’t know the rest. Knowing was better than imagining. For me, who had awake dreams worse than any reality.

  I had to know and I told the detective.

  ‘I don’t really know the details. You see there are these pictures, in my head, and I can’t stop them. I’d like to know and then the pictures might stop.’

  The detective thought for a second and then he broke the rules.

  ‘He came here to where he had money stashed, probably from drugs. In a room he called the Den.

  ‘Your friend Mo borrowed or took money thinking he, the husband, would never need it, because he wasn’t okay in the head. She produced a marriage cert and ID at the hospital. Took his keys, saying her stuff was locked up in the family home and she couldn’t get at it.

  ‘They went on a holiday the next day. The mother and herself. To the sun. But sure you knew that.’

  I nodded.

  ‘The bastard waited in the house until she came home. Or that’s our guess. He greatly resented the fact that the wife was on holiday spending his money while he was banged up.

  ‘The mother, it seems, from our investigations, threw herself between Mo and the gun. He, the husband was saying he didn’t mean to kill his mammy. I have it here.’ The policeman walked to his car and came back with a file.

  He read in a voice different to his speaking voice. The detective was giving evidence.

  ‘“I wasn’t out to kill my mammy. I swear on my father above in St Sepulchre’s. My mother thrun herself all of a sudden like in front of that robbin bitch what’s a thief and a whore.”

  ‘That’s all we got out of him. But it’s enough to put him away for a long, long time.

  ‘Forensics and the post-mortem backed up his story. The bullet went straight through his own mother, killing her instantly and the same shot wounded Mo.

  ‘He just left her there to die. Mo might have been saved if he dialled 999. She lost so much blood before the ambulance came.’

  The kind policeman stopped as if to gather his thoughts.

  He looked at me. Eyes full of empathy, as he flicked through the pages of the bound file. ‘There’s a conversation that took place in the ambulance. Your friend was calling for G as she died. You are G. Your nickname.’

  ‘That’s me. She … Mo … was my … my fiancée.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  The long silence following the posthumous announcement of the engagement was interrupted by the gunshot sound of a crow scarer. The policeman jumped around and took a gun from a holster inside his jacket.

  ‘It’s only the farmers trying to scare away the birds,’ I explained.

  The embarrassed detective put the gun back in the holster as a clatter of starlings rose up as one from a stubble field a few hundred metres to the east.

  ‘At least we have him now. Crashed his car at those Bad Bends on the road to the motorway. But I’m sure Timmy told you all that.’

  I thanked the detective and turned to walk away.

  ‘There’s more.

  ‘He’s in the Central Criminal Mental Hospital. In Dundrum.

  ‘Rocking and swaying. All day. Just going back and forth. I was almost seasick and hypnotised at the same time from watching him.’

  He walked beside me to the car.

  ‘The sign is gone,’ I said, pointing to the steel pole where ‘Bewear of Dermo’ had been tied on with bailer twine. There was never a truer sign.

  ‘Evidence,’ said the detective.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ I asked. ‘Please don’t spare me. It’s worse not knowing.’

  ‘No, that’s it. Although there is one theory, but we can’t prove it.

  ‘It seems the mother pretty much wanted reconciliation between Mo and the husband before he was sent down for killing the nun. At least we think that’s what happened. There’s no way of proving it but she might have helped him to escape.’

  ‘That would be Maureen alright,’ I replied.

  The cop put an arm round my shoulder as we walked. I stopped to take deep breaths. Almost hyperventilating. He handed me his card.

  ‘I’ll be finished here in an hour if you need company.’

  I thanked him but said I would be okay. There was somewhere I needed to be. I was driving away when the detective beckoned at me to press down the window button.

  ‘I’ve been married for nearly twenty-three years and I’ll bet I didn’t have as many happy days as you and your fiancée.’

  I made my way there around dusk. Through the many-graved cemetery in the foothills of the mountains. Past the teddy bears at the kids’ plots. Along the flower-strewn narrow streets of the city of the dead. Searching for freshly dug graves. Searching for Mo.

  Eventually I found the spot where she was buried. Just one more uneven, rough-seamed jigsaw quilt where the joins in the grass sods were still showing.

  Her name was typed on a little strip of tape attached to a knee-high, unvarnished wooden cross.

  The graveyard was empty of alive people, bar me.

  Darkness fell and we were alone at last

  I tried to pray. To talk to her but I felt I had to get nearer. To lie with Mo, for one last time.

  The grass scraws were muddy and wet.

  I lay down and smelled the earth. It was warm and moist. I could hear the growing, felt the eternal in the scent of the grass, the feeling of life and renewal in a place where there was so much death. There was an energy travelling along and up through the palms of my hands and through my finger tips.

  I spoke to my Mo. Told her there was nothing to forgive or if she felt there was then I forgave her.

  My good interview suit was covered with mud and my face was muddy too.

  Couldn’t get up or go. The night fell and it was colder then. Rain came and went in flurries and fits.

  Tears too.

  The grass stopped growing.

  I could hear a slight vibration in the earth and then a-thud a-thud, thud as if an army was bearing down on me.

  I looked up and there standing over me was Mikey Olsen. With him was a group of about ten men and a couple of women. I knew from the look of them, they too were Olsens.

  This is it now.

  The day that you die.

  I didn’t care.

  Mikey bent over and lifted me up.

  ‘Come on now. Don’t be afraid of nottin.

  ‘Mo’s mammy ordered it that no Olsens would come to the funeral. We’re only here to pay our respects.

  ‘Come on now. Your good suit is all dirty.’

  We stood silently as the Olsens prayed.

  When they finished Mikey called me to one side.

  ‘Do you see that grave what’s been dug up over there?’

  ‘Where, Mikey?’

  ‘There, next to where you’re standin, ’ahind you.’

  ‘I see it, Mikey.’

  ‘We’re puttin’ the mother in there tomorrow.’

  He helped me to m
y car. I was stiff and cold as any corpse in the cemetery.

  Old Grey snuggled up beside me, rubbing his coat along my leg as I walked, as if in sympathy.

  ‘Don’t go blamin’ yourself for nottin,’ comforted Mikey. ‘Poor Mo was a great little girl but she had no luck.’

  Mo had no luck. From the day she was born.

  The Bad Bends near my own home were almost upon me. Visibility was poor. Fog came in from the sea and there were no gaps in the persistent drizzle.

  The car drove itself on autopilot.

  I lost concentration. There was a swerve and the car skirted the ditch. The wing mirror was broken off. I drove on but the images were in front of me.

  I could see myself standing alone and naked with my hands covering my modesty on a windswept beach, waiting for the two-storey-high house tide to come in.

  She smiled at me. Knew me in that smile. Knowing, and accepting and understanding the last verse of the Ballad of Mo and G.

  Then it was I knew I could live with myself and bear witness to my own company.

  For who was I anyway but young G.

  Mo knew her G.

  And she knew he wasn’t a brave lad but he loved her once and now again, forever.

  She could kill me now, if that was her last wish. But she didn’t.

  Now Oz will take me in. The twins will mind me under each wing as I had done with them.

  Mam and Timmy were good.

  They drove me to the airport. He, in his attempt to show he understood, tried to hug me but it was awkward because I wasn’t capable of any intimacy since Mo died.

  Mam cried. Said she loved me.

  Tim put his arm around Mam and walked her slowly from the departure area, heads low, home-from-a-funeral gait. They didn’t look back. I ran to them and kissed Mam and hugged Timmy.

  The Ballad of Mo and G has the compulsory sad verse common to all Irish songs of emigration. The one where the boy’s sweetheart dies and he goes over the water into exile.

  I closed my eyes before the plane took off.

  Mo would be the last person I would see before I left Ireland.

  There was never any danger when I lost control at the Bad Bends.

  For Mo would never kill me.

  About the Author

  Billy Keane is a sports columnist with the Irish Independent and runs the world-famous John B. Keane’s pub in Listowel in his native County Kerry. His previous books include the novel The Last of the Heroes, Rebel, Rebel: The Billy Morgan Story (with Billy Morgan) and Rucks, Mauls and Gaelic Football (with Moss Keane).