Mary, Mary

by Julie Parsons

  He slipped the address book into his pocket and opened the car door. He slid through the hotel’s revolving door, into the cool of the lobby. He walked quickly past the porter’s desk and round to the public phones. He pulled a card out of his pocket and stepped into the dark of the booth. He punched in the number. As the electronic tone burbled in his ear he thought of its corresponding ring pulsating through the quiet house. He could see it now, the faded red door and peeling paint around the bay windows. The rusting wrought iron of the gate. The yellow rose, which climbed along and over the front wall. He had picked a bud to press between a stack of books, to preserve, to keep.

  Where might she be? What might she be doing? Sitting with her mother, or in the kitchen making coffee. In the garden, fiddling about, as Mary described it, lying down with her nose in a book. She will, he knew be thinking about me.

  ‘Hallo?’ The voice was questioning.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Is that you?’

  He let out his breath slowly.

  ‘I can hear you. I know what you’re thinking.’

  No you don’t, he responded silently.

  ‘Speak to me, please. Tell me who you are.’

  His hands were slippery with sweat. His breath came from his throat in gasps.

  ‘I’m trying to imagine who you are, what you are. What kind of a thing you are.’

  He closed his eyes, the blood rushing through his veins like rain in a storm drain.

  ‘You’re not a human thing, are you? Not a person like me or my daughter. You’re some kind of a disgusting beast that lives in the dark, aren’t you? Ugly, dirty, revolting.’

  The hairs stood up on the backs of his hands, and his blood surged. He rocked slowly backwards and forwards.

  ‘Was she easy to kill?’

  He opened his mouth. He wanted to speak, but no words would come out.

  ‘And what did she say, before she died? I want to know. Tell me.’

  Jimmy heard her scream then, no words, just noise. He shoved his fist in between his teeth, again that indescribable feeling of power and pleasure. Then there was silence. No, he wanted to shout. Come back, don’t leave me. But instead he slammed down the receiver and stumbled out and into the men’s toilets.

  They were waiting for him beside the car when he walked back into the sunshine. A mismatched couple. The man looked like he was in his fifties. He introduced himself as Rod. His hair was white and long but pulled back from a domed balding forehead in a ponytail. His skin was very brown and wrinkled. Black-rimmed glasses with tinted lenses obscured the top half of his face, exaggerating the power of his fleshy mouth. He was wearing an expensive grey tracksuit, which fitted snugly over his barrel chest. Jimmy watched them in the rear-view mirror. The woman’s name was Liza. She, too, wore dark glasses. Her hair was short and silver blonde. She wore pink Lycra leggings and a short pink top, which showed off her brown stomach. And a gold chain looped around her neck which slithered against her skin as she moved.

  They sat close together in the back of the car. The man’s hands were large and finely formed. One of them played with the knobs and buttons on the inside of the door. The other fiddled, smoothed, pinched and caressed the woman’s hair and skin. Jimmy watched the long, manicured fingers resting on her shoulder, dangling down, just above her nipple. He tried to keep his concentration on the road. He couldn’t see where her hands were. He watched the man’s mouth, the thick lips parting with pleasure.

  Skip the shopping, Rod had said. So he headed out along the Bray Road, keeping his foot on the accelerator. Occasionally the man would lean forward and ask a question, nothing demanding, just the names of villages, hills, rivers. When they passed the signpost for Avondale, he said, ‘Oh, yeah, right, Parnell,’ and began to whisper in the girl’s little ear. Jimmy watched his pale pink tongue flicking, probing, the way she turned her body into his. He wondered. Should he? Could he? He could veer off the main road. They wouldn’t notice. They wouldn’t know until it was too late. He could fake a flat tyre. He could open the boot, take out the jack.

  ‘Hey.’ Rod was tapping him on the shoulder.

  ‘Yeah?’ He part-turned his head to hear what he was saying.

  ‘Pull over here. This’ll do fine.’

  He watched them walk into the forest, the girl with a tartan rug slung over her shoulder, the man swinging the cooler by its handle. He waited until he could barely hear the sound of their voices. Then he locked the car and followed, slowly and quietly.

  They had stopped only a couple of hundred yards from the road and spread the rug in a small clearing thickly covered with pine needles. Thin shafts of sunlight illuminated the man’s white hair, the girl’s gold jewellery. Jimmy found himself a comfortable spot on a fallen tree trunk and waited. At first there was only the sound of the champagne cork and laughter. Then there was silence. He crept closer and watched the scene unfold. Without her clothes the girl was extraordinarily beautiful, her breasts paler than the rest of her skin and pink-tipped, and the man, despite his age, was muscled and strong. Jimmy’s heart began to beat faster and faster. Keeping time, he thought, with them. He groaned, softly, slowly at first, then, like his pounding heart, faster and faster, as they too groaned, then screamed, calling out to each other, shattering the forest’s drowsy peace. Their brown bodies were wrapped one around the other, arms and legs entwined. He could barely tell them apart. Yes, yes, yes, he wanted to scream out to them, but all he could do was shove one hand into his mouth and stop his cries with his clenched fist. He had never seen as much as this before. Bits and pieces, snatched through windows, or glimpses of couples in parked cars. But this was different. And absolutely complete when he saw that the girl’s eyes were open and she was looking across the clearing towards him as she pulled herself up onto the man and arched her body, and offered Jimmy her breasts, and her mouth.

  When they got back to the car, their bodies slack and indolent, he was waiting. He opened the back door, and put the remains of their picnic away in the boot. Rod smiled and patted him on the cheek as he handed him a bundle of notes.

  ‘I guess we might as well have a look at this waterfall you people are always talking about,’ he said, as he settled himself into the back seat. And as they drove north towards Enniskerry Jimmy watched them again in his rear-view mirror, taking pleasure in their pleasure, and reflecting on chance and happenstance and their part in his life. He had come very close to blowing it today. Planning was the key to success, his father was always telling him. He could see now that he was right. If today he had acted purely out of desire he would have been finished. He had planned Mary. He had taken his time. He had wanted to do it as soon as he met her. The afternoon of the thunderstorm, three weeks ago. He laughed when he thought about it. Talk about heavenly portents. The sky had opened and bolts of lightning had crackled in huge illuminated Ys against the black of the clouds. Swollen raindrops had drilled into the roof of the car. And a girl had held out her thumb to him. She was standing on the kerb, her T-shirt and skirt sticking to her body, her hair in dripping hanks. And she was laughing. He remembered the look of her nipples through the wet cloth, like those hard, crunchy, pointed sweets that kids eat at birthday parties. He had wanted to sink his teeth into them immediately. But he didn’t. He gave her a towel to dry her hair. He offered her coffee from the flask he kept in the glove compartment. He brought her home and he asked her for a date.

  ‘Did you enjoy your day?’ he asked Liza, as he dropped them back at the hotel. She smiled at him, and nodded towards Rod’s broad back.

  ‘Anything to keep him happy,’ she said, resting her hand on his for a moment.

  ‘Would you like my phone number?’ he asked her quietly.

  ‘Why not?’ she replied.

  He put his hand in his inside pocket and pulled out a wad of paper. He shuffled through it, looking for one of his business cards.

  ‘Hey, who’s this?’ She pulled a photograph out of his hand. A woman and a girl.
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  ‘My mother and my sister.’

  She studied the picture. ‘Real cute,’ she said, looking from him to the two faces and to him again.

  He took the photo from her. Written on the back in a childish hand was ‘Me and Mummy, Christmas 1995’. It was creased and crumpled, one corner folded over. She shouldn’t have left it loose in her bag like that, lying in the bottom with her lipsticks and her comb and all the other bits and pieces she carried around with her. He was surprised at how messy she was. When he went through it after she was dead he’d found a half-eaten apple smeared all over a battered paperback book. He’d cleaned the brown goo off its cover. William Blake, it said, Songs of Innocence and Experience. And inside on the flyleaf was printed, neatly in black ink, ‘David Mitchell, London, 1972’.

  ‘My dad’s,’ she had said. ‘His favourite poet. I like him too. Listen to this.’ And she had read to him. Not the first time they’d gone out together, but maybe the second.

  ‘To see a world in a grain of sand,

  And a heaven in a wild flower,

  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

  And eternity in an hour.’

  ‘Isn’t that neat? I love it.’

  The photograph should have been in her little album with all the others of her mother and the one of the man with the long handsome face, and the black curly hair.

  ‘My dad, that’s him,’ she had said. ‘It’s so sad that he died before I was born, that I never knew him.’

  ‘I never knew mine either,’ he told her, and she kissed him on the mouth and said, ‘Well, that’s something else we’ve got in common, isn’t it?’

  He had gone through the bag looking for her house keys. And in the inside pocket he had found the shell. Suddenly he wanted to hold it up to his ear and listen to the sound of the sea, the faraway sea that she had told him about. ‘It’s warm,’ she said, ‘and dark blue and when you lie on your back with your face in the sun and the water lapping up over your ears you think you’ve died and gone to heaven.’

  ‘Hey, Liza, what’s keeping you? I’m getting hungry.’ Rod stopped at the revolving door, and beckoned to her, his manner suddenly petulant, impatient. She folded Jimmy’s card in two and pushed it into the waistband of her leggings.

  ‘Gotta go,’ she whispered. ‘Hope you enjoyed yourself today as much as I did.’

  If she only knew, he thought. Only knew.

  18

  McLoughlin stood in the doorway of the long, high-ceilinged room. A bunch of white chrysanthemums hung limply from his right hand. Guilt tugged his face into a dutiful smile and dragged his feet slowly forward. In front of him was a large wooden table and seated around it were six women and two men. White heads were bowed, pink scalps stretched tightly across old bones. Plates covered with cabbage, mashed potatoes and slices of meat were laid out before them, the food congealing into a mess of green, grey and light brown. The smell made saliva trickle into his mouth and his stomach twitch and flutter. He took another step into the room. Sunlight barely made it through the smeared windows. Three 60-watt bulbs suspended over the table did little to help. Their white glass shades were greasy and fly-spattered. A dusty cobweb, long since abandoned, looped from light to light.

  No one spoke. A knife scraped across the surface of a plate. A glass was filled and water gulped noisily. A spoon dropped from an arthritic hand and bounced to the floor. A trolley laden with bowls, butter-yellow custard slopping over their rims, pushed through the swing door from the kitchen. A burst of radio chatter followed, competing with the rattle of its uneven wheels. On a bracket high on the room’s end wall, a television flashed pictures silently. Children, dark-skinned and dirty, mouthed at the rest of the world. Then a girl, seated on the case of a cello, peeled the yellow wrapper from a chocolate bar and sucked it greedily into her red mouth. McLoughlin ran his tongue around his lips. He could feel the crumbs of sweetness, clinging.

  Another sound competed with the bang of the crockery on the wooden table. A trickling, slow and hesitant at first, then more insistent. McLoughlin’s eyes found the puddle, spreading out round the red rubber stoppers on the feet of the chair nearest to him. The woman sitting on it began to shift awkwardly, moving her slippered feet out of the wet. She banged her spoon on the table and began to cry. Tears rolled down her white cheeks.

  The woman next to her got up, slowly, pushing herself to standing with her stick. McLoughlin went forward, holding out his hand to her. She took it, grasping his fingers as strongly as her twisted joints would allow, and pulled herself upright, planting her feet carefully. He leaned forward and brushed her cheek, still soft, with his lips. Close to, her skin smelt of Chanel No. 5, keeping at bay the stench of cabbage and urine.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go somewhere we can smoke.’

  ‘What a surprise. I thought you’d be far too busy to come and see me for weeks. Even more weeks than usual.’ She watched closely while he fitted a Sweet Afton into her amber cigarette holder. He placed one end in her mouth and held a light to the other. She sucked hard, until it glowed a satisfying red. As she exhaled, yellow smoke from her lungs mixed with the pale grey, which curled and floated like scraps of water vapour up and around her head. She took the holder from her mouth with a hand that trembled. For a moment he thought the cigarette was going to end up on her lap, but she managed to hold on to it with the tips of her fingers. Then she put it back between her lips and drew the smoke deeply into her lungs again.

  Cigarettes and his mother. Never the one without the other. Wherever she went through the house she was preceded by a series of ashtrays and followed by a collection of butts. He’d tried to get her to give them up, but he supposed now there was no point. They were her one real pleasure.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘How’s the pain?’

  ‘The pain is the pain. It doesn’t change.’

  ‘I thought the doctor was going to try some new drug or other.’

  ‘Michael,’ she tapped the ash onto the floor, ‘I don’t know what other old woman you’ve been visiting, but I’ve told you a million times, there is no new drug for me and my arthritis. Now,’ she leaned back in her chair, ‘do me a favour. Tell me something about the world outside. Please.’

  He leaned towards her and carefully unbuttoned her grey cardigan. He smoothed the wool down and began to fasten the buttons again, making sure that each fitted neatly into the hole opposite.

  ‘There,’ he lined up the two edges of ribbing, ‘that’s better. Whoever dressed you this morning wasn’t looking at what they were doing.’

  ‘For a change,’ she snapped, pushing him away.

  He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a naggin of Paddy. He poured a large tot into her bedside glass and picked up the carafe of water.

  ‘I’ll have it without,’ she said, as he carefully placed the whiskey between her two disfigured fists.

  ‘You don’t have to live here, Mam. You could come and stay with me,’ he said.

  ‘For God’s sake.’ Her lip curled incredulously. ‘You. You must be kidding. What you really mean is live with Janey. You’re never at home. And you know how she would just love to have me to look after.’ She drank deeply from her glass and nodded at him for a refill.

  ‘Well, if not me then what about Clare? She’d have you.’

  ‘I don’t want to live in London. I don’t want to be “had” by you or your sister. At least here I get a minimum of pity every day. Now, will you either shut up or talk about something that’s a bit more interesting than me and my bloody illness?’

  They sat in silence. He watched her over the rim of his glass. She must be in her mid-seventies, he thought. Roughly the same age as Catherine McKenna. Not that she’d ever tell him exactly how old she was. But while the McKenna woman was tiny and frail, as insubstantial as a dandelion gone to seed, his mother had got bigger as she got older. Once she had been strong and solid. Now her fat was
soft and flabby, her breasts pendulous under the shapeless woollen sweater. Her legs were swollen too, her ankles falling out over her black-laced shoes. But she still had the same beautiful brown eyes, and thick hair, pure white, caught up in an elegant pleat at the back of her head.

  ‘Who does your hair, Mam? It’s lovely.’

  ‘A gorgeous young nurse. New. Very sweet. She’s mad to meet you. We saw you on the news last night.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘So, tell me. Who did it?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine, I’m afraid. We haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Ah. I was wondering.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why the visit.’

  He laughed. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Propitiation of the gods, isn’t that it? One good turn deserves another.’

  ‘And have you, what’s the saying, “rounded up all the usual suspects”? Your father always did that. A good beating and you’d be amazed what you’d get. That’s what he’d say.’ And it was her turn to laugh.

  He filled her glass again, noticing the way the stiffness had gone out of her jaw, the tension had seeped from her shoulders as the whiskey did its job.

  ‘Yeah, well, things were a bit easier in his day. Not nearly as many rules and regulations, safeguards for people’s civil liberties.’

  ‘Civil liberties. That’s a joke. What about the victim’s civil liberties, the victim’s rights? Eh? Tell me that.’