Shift

by Mia Gallagher

  Take her away, screamed this neighbour to me.

  My wife did not listen to me.

  I will call my mother, screamed this neighbour.

  Fine, said my wife, and stepped back.

  We waited on the front path, beyond their gate, with the neighbour behind her door, and then the mother arrived, and more shouting took place.

  Don’t patronise me, said this neighbour’s mother. Pointing her finger in my wife’s face.

  I’m not, I don’t mean to, said my wife, spreading her hands again and stepping back. Which was now too late and a bad move, as any city person would know, because the thing to say, when accused of something like that, is: How exactly am I patronising you? But I was shying away from it, and she wouldn’t have listened to me anyway, because she didn’t before, and I was shying away because with that type, once it gets to that stage, there’s no point trying for conversation. The best you can hope for is a stand-off, and something like that did happen after the argument, for a while.

  My wife stood her ground. She was gauzy with rage. She was a candle-flame. Plasma. The purple file was brandished, along with the phrase these type of people. I could see where this was going and that night, following the argument, I made a pact with the house, more specifically, its walls.

  I don’t mind you, I told the walls. I get you. I’m a city person. But she…

  I thought of the red-brick semi-detached house where I’d grown up, in what is now regarded as a very desirable part of the city, and the loud, cheerful family beside us who had played jazz at all times of the day and night, including sometimes the wee hours, and their occasional arguments, which we never discussed in our house, but which I took to signify a healthy sign of life, and the father of that family, who had always greeted my own mother with a glorious Hello, my angel anytime they’d bumped into each other on the street, or he’d seen her coming out of our house, or vice versa. This man was, unambiguously, a city man. I had never thought of him as these type, the same type as this neighbour, the one who says Be a Man. My wife, however, who did not grow up in a city in a red-brick house, either terraced or semi-detached, and therefore possibly did not know what she was talking about, was beginning to lump everyone into the same basket. How easy it is at those times when, through lack of sleep, one’s capacity for just about anything is strained to a fine, stuttering filament of drool, to make assumptions.

  My wife was shrinking. At times she would resemble an exceptionally long leaf, waving in a breeze I could not feel.

  Have you heard me? I asked the walls.

  This neighbour watches TV on a small screen, and eats. I am speculating about the TV because I can’t see it. I am not there yet. Nor can I hear it. But nearly everybody watches TV, so this is probably an assumption that is not offensive to make. This neighbour’s TV may be streamed on a smartphone, and she might be wearing earbuds. I can’t hear her child either. Maybe he is staying with his grandmother, the woman of the pointing finger, as he often does these days. He could be asleep. What I do hear, with my ear against a cup and the cup against the wall, is the sound of my neighbour’s teeth meeting each other and squashing her food and her tongue slapping against them and against the inside of her mouth too. The liquid clicks and gurgles of suction and spit inside her oral cavity. When she speaks, though, I hear nothing.

  There was, as I have said, a lot of finger-pointing on the part of the neighbour’s mother, and a lot of arms crossing and flat eyes and protective covering of the child’s ears and I have had ENOUGH of yous repeated at length by the neighbour herself. There were indirect accusations of harassment and insinuations of voyeurism and the word abuse was mentioned several times and there was the painting of certain people as innocent and others as bullies who listen in on young women and want people to take their shoes off at night and some people – for example, my wife – might say that’s exactly what you might expect from that type of person. A veiled threat was made about our dog and what wouldn’t be done to it if it was caught shitting where it shouldn’t. Though we don’t have a dog, so the reference might have been to the feral cats who my wife occasionally feeds.

  Later, sitting on our loo, I would think of that dog and wonder if, in some parallel seam of reality, I was actually it.

  And though in the heat of the moment, after the foot had been retracted, there was mainly calmness on the part of the other type, i.e., my wife, and a reasonable tone of voice and only one instance of swearing – Oh, this is fucking ridiculous! – which not totally unexpectedly was greeted with a You see, you see, it’s all coming out now, later there would also be other reactions on that part, i.e., the part of other type, i.e., my wife. Namely, outrage and finger-pointing of the incorporeal kind and crying and panic.

  Not to mention the shrinking and so on.

  By the time the veiled threats to our non-existent dog’s life were being made, I wanted to be shot of the whole situation. I could see what it was doing to my wife and I had had enough. I was surprised that others couldn’t see. By others, I mean not just this neighbour and her mother, but also the police, who were called down to, by us, on the evening of the argument in order to clarify beyond a doubt who was the victim and who the bully. None of these people could see it as I could, how transparent my wife was becoming. One young policeman said all he could see in the situation was a mother, meaning this neighbour, protecting her child. Though some members of the force did offer calming, if not exactly tender, words, others told us this was not a criminal matter so they could not help us. But by then I had more or less lost hope in that strategy.

  Little man, the neighbour had roared at me, while the mother pointed a finger and told my wife not to patronise or bully her. The mother stepped up to my wife with her finger extended and – little man, the words burned my ears – my wife, practically invisible at this stage with fury, the texture of a flattened jellyfish, stepped up too. It was then that the mother uttered accusations of being threatened, Oh oh oh I see you, I see you all the time pointing the finger, while the neighbour, her daughter, cupped her three-year-old’s delicate ears.

  I stood at our bedroom window later, before we went down to the police station, and watched the feral cats bask on the roof of our shed. They looked back at me with amused green eyes.

  When I started working as a tour guide, after the newspaper closed down, I put in some time at Glendalough. It was not local and I didn’t enjoy the long trips there and back on the bus with the tourists, so I didn’t work there for long. But while there, I became interested – I wouldn’t say obsessed, just curious – in the difference between hermits and anchorites. Hermits are outsiders, but they still maintain contact with others; they can move around and have been known to work at real jobs – mending roads, building bridges. They are, you might say, handy. Anchorites such as St Doulagh, who burrowed himself away in what is now the oldest stone-roofed church on the island, are a different kettle of fish. They usually don’t have a religious profession before they find their calling, or it finds them. But once they have, they withdraw from society and spend their lives walled up. A hatch for food and drink. One small window to look out from onto the world.

  I would do anything, I said to my house that night, long after we’d come back from the police station and my wife had gone to bed with a handful of sleepers washed down with a slug of Powers. I stood in the patch of railing-enclosed footpath at the front of our house, which, like all the front so-called gardens on our road, had been illegally commandeered from the city council by an early tenant or, more likely, owner. A worker, perhaps, needing to marshal more soil for the spuds to feed his family; or the worker’s landlord, seeing an opportunity to raise the rent. Anything, I said again, entreating our friendly windows with their wooden frames which my wife had installed at great cost, our brick that I with my own unhandy hands had scraped free of the leprosy-red gloss paint it had been covered with when we moved in, because that’s what the type of people who grew up in this neighbourhood do, to pr
otect their houses from the seeping rain they paint the brick with flat colours, sometimes emulsion but often gloss, the tones approximating but never matching the original brick because how can paint, a liquid medium, ever match brick, a solid ground? Not only does this paint not match, neither is it effective at serving its original purpose – i.e., to keep out the damp – because, as my wife, who grew up on a large farm with lime-rendered buildings, used to point out, it is plastic, this paint. So it traps the moisture in the body of the brickwork, rotting the grout and making the plaster on the interiors crumble and fall, spreading damp across the structural and party walls and around the single-glazed aluminium-framed windows commonly used to replace the wooden originals since the 1970s and, occasionally, this seepage can even lead to cracks in the walls – though probably not our crack, the one at the corner that I had found myself stroking – and, if let go unchecked, may eventually, and fatally, result in subsidence. I pleaded with those exposed bricks, the ones I’d scraped by hand with a triangular scraper and had also sanded, which was a mistake in the end, because along with the ugly scabrous patches of rosacea-coloured paint, I had sanded away the fine protective coating granted the bricks when they were being kiln-fired. And in that respect I was no more effective, and perhaps a lot less, than the people who had been living here all their lives and back even a few generations, people like this neighbour and her mother. Please, I said. Help.

  It is quiet here. I don’t hear her eating anymore.

  Our neighbour’s washing line is in their back garden. Unlike our washing-line, which is a single cord stretched between two of the trees that my wife planted after we moved in, the set-up next door is far grander. They have one of those inverted-pyramidal contraptions easily found in DIY or hardware shops: a symmetrical and rather pleasing design of green nylon cord filament in a transparent cylindrical casing, suspended from a central metal, or perhaps plastic, pole that can be contracted, like an umbrella, when not used. The landlord installed it. For days after their departure, a damp dressing-gown hung from it. An adult’s dressing-gown, grey like rabbit’s fur. It tilted and swayed in the wind as the contraption swung around its metal axis, and it flapped pale at night when the big light at the back of the neighbour’s house, the light my wife used to call ignorant, snapped on. If one wanted to, one could imagine a person inside the dressing-gown, leaf-thin and insubstantial as memory, dancing or dangling from the ropes. At some stage the landlord took the dressing-gown down. I say landlord because it was revealed, in the end, that the house was not sold to that neighbour, the one with the child, and never had been. I didn’t see the dressing-gown being removed in person, because I was too ensconced at that stage. What I did notice was that my wife suddenly stopped calling it names and the silence landed on my ears like velvet.

  I didn’t hear them go. I don’t know where they moved to. They were there that evening and in the morning, when I woke, they weren’t and I was here.

  Now the landlord can’t get anyone to stay longer than a month, not even people who aren’t the type to point fingers or land unfounded accusations against their neighbours.

  It’s haunted, said the young man who was the last to move in. A pleasant enough chap: Spanish. I had the feeling he was gay, but he didn’t stay long enough for me to find out. I saw eyes in the kitchen wall, he said. Give me back my deposit, I wouldn’t stay here to save my life.

  His English was very good, with a certain mastery of the Hiberno idiom.

  But I’m not doing anything, I would have told him, if he’d asked. I’m just sitting here, having a few quiet drinks in my own home. I am proud, I admit, of how certain those phrases now sound in my mouth.

  My wife grows sturdy and content. The feral cats fight over her leftovers. One or two have died since I moved in, but there are always more. You can count on that in a city. One of the new cats has begun to enter the house that used to be ours but which is now my wife’s. My wife doesn’t seem to mind. She takes lovers from time to time. Occasionally, they go on for hours. Sometimes that’s because she is with a woman.

  Ageing will suit her. Sooner or later, in one form or another, like the feral cats, she will leave this neck of the woods.

  The neighbour’s house is still empty. I tend to keep to the extension, at the back of the house, the party wall whose precise nature, double or single, continues to remain unrevealed to me, but there are times when I am feeling particularly relaxed and in the mood to luxuriate, and then I allow myself to spread myself through into the original section of the wall, the double rows of yellow Dolphin’s Barn bricks laid and mortared at the turn of the twentieth century. The other morning my wife walked past just as I was in the middle of all that, the spreading. The blinds were up. I saw her face, puzzled, in the narrow rectangle of the neighbour’s front window. And then, I swear, she smiled.

  Shift

  Gas, clutch up to biting. Hold it there. Let her move forward, roll, easy does it, easier on the gas, bring your revs down, that’s it, no, not that much, ah—

  Fuck.

  He’s awake. Sweating, tasting of salt, mouth bitter, heart thumping, acid in his veins. Pillow’s soaked, a soft wet lump under his ear. His ear’s soaking too, and the bits of hair he’s still got left, little strings ready for the comb-over. His knees locked together, his jaw a rictus.

  He looks over at the clock radio, a present from Ritchie seven years earlier, when he’d given up the van. That’s an awful yoke, he’d thought then, looking at its smooth gunmetal-grey shell.

  It’s a joke, Da, Ritchie had said. Keep you on time now you don’t have me to get you up in the morning.

  Cheeky pup.

  01:41

  The dots between the numbers are blinking on and off. How can you expect to rest with a thing like that blinking all night long? Make no mistake, it’s an awful yoke, but Sandra thinks it’s the dog’s bollox.

  Ah Ritchie went to all that bother you wouldn’t want him disappointed Dessie.

  She’s way too soft on the lad; always was. She’s on her back now, snoring. Soft and round, an eiderdown in woman-form. Or – what’s the name the Yanks have? Comforter.

  It must be stress, getting to him. The teaching. That young McFadden one has been doing his nut in. Thinks she’s Mario fucking Andretti in a dress. Nice-looking girl, sure. Slim. Elegant, that’s the word that came to him when he first saw her. Moves like liquid, he’d thought, watching her slip into the driver’s seat.

  She’s blonde, and it looks real, though you couldn’t count on it. Shoulder-length, curled under at the ends. It put him in mind of those black-and-white films he used to watch on a Wednesday afternoon in the eighties when he was on the dole. Veronica Lake. Lauren Bacall. All legs and hair, eyes gleaming, cigarette just resting there on the little round red mouth. McFadden smokes. He’s told her God knows how many times since she started that there’s no smoking in the school cars – the sooner they bring in the laws they’ve been talking about the better – but she’s never listened. Must think, and this barbs, oh it does, he came up the Liffey in a bubble.

  Twenty-six, maybe twenty-four. He’s guessing. The kids all look like grown women these days, with their chests and implants. And the women look like kids. Are you not into all that? said Sandra once, a real dig in her voice. The youth, Dessie? She’d just started the change. No, he’d wanted to say, I’m not, love. But that dig had an edge to it, so he let it stay there between them, sharpelbowing both of them. Back when he and Sandra were courting, women knew how to get old. Take the ma and her like. They’d let go of the finery and the pencil skirts and moved into the flat shoes and housecoats no bother. There’d be the odd one who’d still dress up, but on the whole that generation didn’t fight. Now, pushing forty and they’re all in tight trousers and tee-shirts that wouldn’t fit a kid, the hair dyed so they look grand from the back, and the chests sticking out even more than the young ones, or God forbid, if there’s no bra, off they go with the beacons drooping down at their waists.


  The other day McFadden came in wearing a skirt. It just about reached her knees when she was standing but it rode up the leg when she was sitting down. Not too far, just a few inches, and only at a difficult junction, when he was giving her loads.

  over my side, clutch down to second, that’s it and steer to the right, more on the gas, more, no, okay, gently on the brake, clutch down, brake fully, that’s it

  She gets rattled, McFadden. The legs move too much, too fast, the feet still only with an L-plate on them, not knowing if it’s gas, brake, clutch. The left knee bends, jerks, jerks back – making the Punto hop forward with a shudder – and there’s the skirt, on its way down. Over the creamy stocking – it’s all tights now, he knows, but he likes that word stocking, nice old-fashioned word – down, down, or is it up, up, to the – no, not that far. Just enough to show him the top of the thigh. Trembling, muscled, her tights, stockings, whatever, shiny, little sparkles on top, woven into the fabric.

  Soft skin, hard bone underneath.

  He’d started off, like a lot of his buddies, with nothing. Bits and pieces: security guard, shelf-stacker, potato-picker out beyond Swords three summers in a row. Then he’d got the forklift number in the parts factory off in the Glasnevin Industrial Estate. That was a grand thing, while it lasted. Training, certification, regular money. A man with a skill. It gave him and Sandra the chance to tie the knot and get a decent gaff in Cabra on the never-never. They had the first three: Ritchie, Lorcan and little Triona. Then bang. The economy hit the wall, and the country was down the tubes and into the godforsaken nineteen eighties. His job went, along with his pals’, and in no time they were queuing up outside the foreman’s office on a misty morning in February, waiting to get the P45 in the brown envelope.