McLoughlin stood up. He closed his eyes and held his face to the sun. Then he turned back towards her. ‘Passion and proximity. As you say, a lethal weapon. Are you sure your daughter didn’t have a boyfriend here?’
She began to cry then. An ugly sound, her body jerking, her hands over her face. A black cat jumped down from the apple tree. He ran over to her, pushing his face into hers. She stretched out and pulled him close. McLoughlin got up and went into the kitchen. He opened cupboards and ran his hand along the dresser shelves until he found a bottle of whiskey. He walked back into the garden and poured some into one of the lemonade glasses. He handed it to her. She drank it quickly. He sat down again on the wooden seat and waited.
She put down the glass. He handed her a handkerchief from his pocket and she wiped her eyes and nose.
‘That phone call you got, do you have any thoughts about it?’
She shook her head. ‘I haven’t heard that tune for years. New Zealand is a very secular society. Religion doesn’t play the same role that it does here.’
‘No?’
‘It’s a strange place. On the surface very beautiful, very peaceful, very green.’
‘Lots of sailing I hear.’
‘That’s right. The beautiful Pacific Ocean. Outside the window, like an extraordinary sleeping sea creature. It makes people very agoraphobic. It stretches for thousands of miles. In every direction, nothing but water. And people do the most appalling things. Every few years. Madness seeps out of the earth, the way the steam, the geysers, the boiling mud escape through the fault lines. Whole families massacred, wiped out. Dreadful anger.’
‘Like this?’
‘Maybe.’ She held out her glass for more. ‘What about you? Are you not drinking? On duty I suppose.’
‘Well,’ he drained the last of the lemonade from his glass, ‘why not? My mother always says it’s bad manners to let someone drink alone.’
‘A sensible woman.’
‘So,’ he poured from the bottle and saluted her, ‘why did you go to New Zealand?’
13
The shutter opens. Light pours from the object in the frame onto the piece of film. The shutter closes. The image is trapped, an insect caught in amber. Light from the enlarger saturates the sensitive paper. Waves of crystalline sodium sulphate, mixed with potassium bromide and water, release the image. Slowly, gradually, as the paper rocks in the solution, it swims back up to the surface. Light meets light again.
The row of damp prints hung limply from a piece of cord. They twisted gently in the draught as the door opened and then closed quietly. A woman in a garden. Black and white reducing everything to its simple constituents. Her dress is white, her hair is black. She is picking pale roses. The foliage around them is ebony. The woman’s face is milky, her lips and eyes dark shadows. She turns towards the camera. Her gaze is distant, remote. She sits on a white chair, a book open on her lap. A sable cat sits beside her. One bleached arm rests on his back. The same woman is seen through an open window. She has something in her hand. Her hair is loose. Her hand has moved. She is brushing, brushing. Click, click, click. Her hand moves from the top of her head down through her hair.
Jimmy inspected the prints carefully. He was pleased. It had been worth spending the money on the telephoto lens. His father was right again. He had gone on with all the usual crap about taking things seriously. He kept repeating, ‘If a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing well,’ like a mantra. He suggested photography classes. Jimmy complained and moaned and thought about refusing them point-blank. But if the old man was going to pay what was the point in looking a gift horse in the mouth? After all, he’d bought him the Mercedes to get the chauffeuring business off the ground. And it wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford it. All those fucking awful townhouses he was putting up all over west County Dublin.
The classes had surprised him. They were difficult. The word, he thought, is ‘challenging’. Completely unlike school. What a waste of space that had been. Even thinking about it made him chafe with boredom. The rules, the discipline, the creeps you had to spend time with. The work was never a problem. He could, he knew, have been one of the stars if he’d wanted. But what was the point? He hated all the teachers. They were either brothers who leered, or lazy arseholes, time-servers, only interested in rugby or their nice wives at home in their nice gardens.
The photography teacher, now, she was different. She was English, from somewhere down south, some boring provincial town. She had an obsession with the west. She wanted to go to Connemara and shoot stacks of turf and stone circles. Apart from that she was fine. She knew her stuff. She could answer all his questions, and she was very pretty. Small, with a neat little waist and glossy brown hair, cut like a little boy’s. The last night of the course the whole class had gone for a drink in Temple Bar. Little Miss Teacher got completely pissed on tequila. She was like something out of a 1950s Doris Day movie. Transformed. She took off her glasses and began to sing. All that old Billie Holiday stuff he loved. She was amazing. She sashayed up and down the bar, sticking out her little tits, practically shoving her cunt in his face. So, of course, he had to give her a lift home. He fucked her in the car, and again in the hallway of her house, and that was before he managed to drag her upstairs to the bedroom. He had a lot of fun that night. She was so drunk she didn’t make a sound.
He unclipped one of the prints and put it down on the light box. He picked up his magnifying glass and moved it slowly and methodically over the surface of the paper. The image of the woman grew and shrank. He liked it when one side of her face was huge, the other tiny. It made her ugly, distorted. He examined the photograph for technical imperfections. As far as he could see there were none. It had been a particularly good negative and he had made it into an equally good print. No scratches, no blemishes. Just a nice sharp image, well composed, and well printed.
He kept his favourite photograph in one of the little pockets in his wallet. He took it out now. It was small, perhaps three inches wide by two inches long. The white border had been trimmed with a guillotine that cut with a fancy rippled edge. The photograph was of a girl with a baby. The girl was very young. She looked like she might have been twelve or thirteen. Maybe the same age as Molly was now. She had a fringe and long straight fair hair. Her nose was slightly turned up. She was wearing a nightie, with a frill around the neck. The baby was wrapped tightly in a blanket. Although it was very small it looked too big and heavy for the girl’s skinny arms. The baby’s mouth was open, and one tiny hand had escaped from its shawl. The hand was waving. He held the magnifying glass up to it. There were deep dimples over its knuckles. Its thumb curved back, the nail long. The baby had a birthmark on its tiny wrist. Brown, like a smudged ink blot. He held the glass over it and then over the mark on his own wrist. Bigger now that he was fully grown, but exactly the same shape.
He had found the photograph years ago. In the shed at the bottom of the garden, in a tin trunk filled with old crockery, battered saucepans, bits and pieces of kitchen rubbish. It wasn’t long after they had come back to live in Dublin. The trunk had come with them. He remembered it being unloaded from the big truck with all their other furniture. All the stuff from their flat in Manchester.
It was cold in the shed. It was November. Through the little window he could see the washing line, the sheets and pillowcases hanging wet, grey smoke from the chimney drifting down with the mist, and piles of leaves that his father had raked together. When he got out he’d smash through them, scatter them across the garden so his father would have to start all over again. He kicked the door. It rattled and shook but didn’t give. It was no use. It was bolted from the outside. His mother had done it. He had listened to her footsteps, the click of her high heels on the concrete path getting fainter as she walked quickly away. He had screamed after her, I hate you, you’re a bitch and a cow, but she didn’t answer.
It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t the only one who’d been stealing at school. Everyone in his class did
it. But he was the one who got caught, taking the senior infants’ lunch money in the playground. The head teacher, Brother Miley, had phoned her and she’d driven to collect him. She was wearing her new fur coat, the mink she was always telling everyone about. She hit him when she got him outside, away from the teacher’s knowing gaze. Her diamond ring cut into his ear and made tears jump into his eyes. But he wouldn’t cry. Not in front of her. And when they got home she caught hold of his tie and dragged him out of the car and through the house, yelling and screaming, calling him all kinds of names, not caring who heard, and then she shoved him into the shed.
She’d done this before, but she wouldn’t do it for much longer. He might only be twelve, but he was tall. Already his head was level with hers. Soon, if she tried to hit him he’d hit her back. But meantime it was cold. He was hungry and it was getting dark. Perhaps there might be something to eat in the trunk. A box of biscuits they’d forgotten about. So he knelt and scrabbled among the piles of newspaper-wrapped cups and saucers and chipped vases, until he reached the bottom. An old apron was bundled in the corner, probably put in as wadding for the breakables. He held it up, shaking out the damp material. There were patches of mould all over the pattern of yellow sunflowers. He put his hand into the square front pocket and felt his fingers slip over something small and shiny. He took it out and held it up in the fading light. He looked at it closely. Then he put it carefully in his pocket. And he kicked the door again. Harder this time, his big toe hurting against the wood, until the bolt gave and the door swung open, banging back against its hinges.
Upstairs, warm and safe, he lay in the dark under Tina’s bed. She wasn’t home from work yet. But she’d be here soon. He could imagine her legs coming towards him, her calf muscles big and strong underneath the fine nylon of her tights. When she got close enough he would be able to see the dark hairs trapped beneath the mesh. He wanted to reach out and stroke them, but he wasn’t allowed. Not any longer. When he was little she had always taken him into the bath with her, and into bed, snuggling him close, hiding him under the blankets. But when he started going to secondary school she told him he was getting too big, that she didn’t have room any longer for him. That it wasn’t right for sisters to sleep with brothers of his age. But he discovered that if he kept really still and was very quiet she didn’t notice when he hid under the bed, or in the big hot press in the bathroom. And he could peek out through the little split in the boards and watch her washing herself, the soapy water running down her white body, dribbling into the deep fold between her breasts and the creases in her tummy, trickling through the thick black curls, and onto her heavy thighs.
The light came on, and he watched her feet walking across the carpet towards him. She sat down on the bed, the springs sagging over his head. He took the photograph out of his pocket and put it down on the dusty floor where he could see it. Why was she holding him like that? He was very small. He must have just been born. And why was she wearing her nightie?
He had wondered and wondered. And he, too, had hidden the picture, in a wooden pencil case under a loose board in his bedroom. A couple of times he thought he would ask her, but when he tried to sit on her knee, or hung over the back of the sofa and put his arms around her neck she always pushed him away. And then he found out all about it. At school, in the playground, one break-time. Just after his thirteenth birthday. It was that snotty-nosed creep Peter Cooney who told him. In front of all the others. Came straight out with it. Of course he didn’t believe him. How could Cooney know that his big sister was really his mother? Because I heard my ma talking about it. On the phone to her friend Mrs O’Brien. Crap, crap, crap, he had screamed, and he’d gone for him, with his head, so Cooney fell back on the tarmacadam, blood pouring out of his nose. But still he wouldn’t shut up. It’s true. Fitzer is a bastard, Fitzer is a bastard, Fitzer is a bastard. He was still shouting it when Jimmy kicked him in the balls, as hard as he could. And then the others joined in, pulling at his hair and his sweater, and shouting, together, as if they’d been practising, as if they knew already, until Mr Linehan who was on yard duty came running over, and grabbed Jimmy, and held him down until they got the ambulance for Cooney.
He never went back to that school. He never told her, the woman he had called his mother, what had happened. And soon after they moved from the pebble-dashed semi in Booterstown, to the big house in Killiney where they lived now. And not long after that Molly was born. They sent him to boarding school, where he daydreamed his life away. He didn’t talk to any of them very much any more. Except Molly. And he still kept the photograph, hidden, a secret. Tina didn’t come with them when they moved house. She got her own flat in town. Sometimes at the weekends and during the school holidays he’d follow her as she went from work to the pub to meet her friends, and back to her flat. He was very good at it. She never spotted him. And then she got engaged.
Now he held the photograph between his thumb and index finger, rubbing it, smoothing it. Then he put it back in his wallet. He plugged in the little kettle he kept here in his darkroom. He was thirsty. He took a brightly coloured packet off the shelf. It was Red Zinger herbal tea. He had taken it from the English girl’s kitchen, that night when he had gone in to get himself a glass of water. It was on a shelf with all kinds of strange foods. Glass jars bright with coloured beans, and herbs and spices. The packet caught his eye. It was so cheerful. He read the ingredients. Hibiscus flowers, lemon zest, cinnamon, rose-hip. He said the name over and over. It jumped off his tongue like sherbet. He took out a tea bag and put it in his special mug, pottery, dark blue, with a big J scratched into the glaze. Molly had given him the mug and a jar of honey last Christmas. She had been going through a Winnie-the-Pooh phase and the jar had a picture of a bear on the label, the word honey spelt ‘hunny’. He chanted softly to himself,
‘Isn’t it funny how a bear likes honey?
Buzz, buzz, buzz I wonder why he does.’
Steam curled from the kettle’s spout. He switched it off and poured the boiling water into the mug. He dunked the tea bag up and down and dropped it neatly into the pedal bin. He stirred a teaspoon of honey into the dark red liquid. As he waited for it to cool, he unlocked his filing cabinet and began to leaf through its contents. He had read in a photographic manual that for really efficient work a proper filing system was highly desirable. The book recommended an album for negatives, a picture file and an index. He had followed this prescription to the letter. Now he had a perfect record of all his photographs. My family, he thought. My kith and kin. My flesh and blood.
Carefully he slid the negatives out of their envelopes and held them up to the light. There was no doubt about it. He had come on in leaps and bounds. In the beginning he hadn’t bothered about light, framing, depth of field. All he had wanted was the image, pinned to the paper. He was embarrassed now by some of his earlier work. He had been a fool to think it would be easy. But his mistakes had taught him about timing, control, preparation, follow-through. Every time he went out with his camera the end result was more perfect. The English girl had taught him well. She quoted the economist Schumacher, who had written a book called Small is Beautiful. This, she said, should be his motto when he was taking pictures. Getting the little details right. He had found the book beside her bed. He had photographed her that night with the jacket lying on her stomach. The flash had gone off right in her face, but even that didn’t wake her.
He finished his inspection and locked everything away. He washed his mug and put it back on the shelf. He took one last glance at his latest crop of prints still hanging, drying. Then he switched off the light and opened the wooden door. Outside it was quiet, the only sound the stirring of the branches of the pine trees, the only brightness the pinpricks of stars flung across the sky, and a smell of the countryside, newly mown hay and damp earth. He fastened the heavy padlock and checked it again. Locked up tight. Until the next time.
14
The black cat rubbed the length of his body again
st and around Margaret’s legs. Once, twice, three times, backwards and forwards. His tail felt hard and muscular, prehensile, unfamiliar as it rolled off her calves. She reached down and ran her hand along his gleaming back. He arched under her touch, then pushed his bony head against her, nuzzling her knuckles with his sensitive nose. Then he lay down on the kitchen floor and rolled over, wriggling from side to side to attract her attention. She rubbed her foot along his soft belly. There was a little tuft of white just in front of his empty testicular sac. As her foot got near it, the cat grabbed at her toes with his claws, then followed up with his sharp teeth. She pulled away, but not before he had drawn a thin line of red on her instep.
She looked at the small beads of blood strung like tiny corals along the line of the scratch. Already the body was taking care of its defences. The blood was coagulating, the white cells rushing to repel bacteria and in a couple of hours a scab would form, providing the protective armour beneath which new skin would grow.
The coroner’s office had phoned that morning. They had suggested an undertaker. The arrangements had been made. Mary would be buried with her grandfather, the day after tomorrow. The funeral Mass would be at ten o’clock in St Patrick’s Church in Monkstown. There would be no notice in the paper. There would be no fuss. Margaret repeated the words aloud and banged her fist on the kitchen table. No fuss.
‘Dr Mitchell, are you all right?’
Margaret looked up. A large woman in a tight white uniform was standing in the door.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to intrude.’
‘You’re not, of course you’re not. Please,’ Margaret gestured to a chair and cast around for a name, ‘Sinead. Sit down, have some coffee. Or would you prefer a cold drink?’
Mary, Mary Page 6
