Mary, Mary

by Julie Parsons

  He woke the next morning slumped in the front seat of his car. It was parked outside the closed gate. Janey must have shut it when she came in, long before he got home he presumed. His mouth tasted sour and dirty. He craned his neck to look in the rear-view mirror. His lips and tongue were stained berry red. He looked down. His fly was open. He didn’t remember driving home, but he did remember, just about, the club he’d gone to, the woman for whom he’d bought the bottle of expensive wine, the fumbling in the street outside. He remembered it just enough to feel sick, disgusted, angry and sad.

  To passion, he thought, as he climbed stiffly from behind the wheel, and prepared to face the day.

  23

  She stood on the doorstep and went through the checklist. Keys, money, what else did she need? A small hand pulled at her skirt. Don’t forget, Mummy, your hankie. She felt in her pocket. It was there, folded, ironed, folded again, embroidered with their initials, M.M.

  ‘Maggie, are you off out?’

  Nellie stood at the top of the kitchen steps, the broom in her hand.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘Will you be late?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I’ll probably be back around six. Can you stay till then?’

  The older woman nodded, her double chin shaking. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere special. Just into town.’

  ‘And if anyone phones what’ll I say?’

  ‘Say I’m not feeling well, that I’ve gone to bed and can’t be disturbed.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Margaret turned and went into Catherine’s room. Her mother was sitting up against the pillows, the television flickering in front of her.

  ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘I’m going out for a bit, but Nellie is here.’

  Catherine didn’t move. Margaret bent to kiss her cheek. Catherine pulled away, a fraction, but enough.

  I’ll remember that, Margaret thought, as she let the heavy door slam behind her. She paused at the top of the steps, conscious of the brightness, of the gleam and glitter of the outside world. She felt suddenly fearful. I don’t need to do this, she thought. I could go back inside. Upstairs her bed was waiting, unmade, the quilt lying where she had left it when she crawled out just an hour ago. It would be so easy to take off her shoes and sneak back into the warmth and the dark. Even if she didn’t sleep she could lie with her eyes closed. But that wasn’t good. To lie in the dark without sleep was to call back all the bad things. The things she had learned, been told, hadn’t wanted to know.

  She put on her dark glasses, comforted by the protective shield that slid down over her eyes. She scanned the road in front of the house. The car was parked as always four doors away to the left. She walked down the steps, over the cracked and uneven surface of the flagged path and through the creaking wrought-iron gate. Three children came towards her with a black Labrador puppy on a lead. Its paws, too big for the rest of its body, flopped on the ground, malleable like Plasticene. The children pushed past her, talking loudly, quarrelling over whose turn it was to hold the dog. The youngest child, a little boy, straggled behind, trailing a blue and white towel, its edges already grimy. She watched as they crossed the road to the Martello tower and disappeared down the concrete ramp to the sea. Then she turned away and walked along the footpath towards the car. As always it contained two people. There was a woman in the passenger seat. Margaret had never seen her before. She had straight blonde hair with a fringe, and she was wearing a crisp white blouse. From behind her glasses she noticed how their demeanour changed as she approached, how in spite of themselves they straightened up and began to speak to each other very earnestly. Ten yards more and she would turn the corner to go up the metal steps over the railway line and along Seapoint Avenue to Monkstown DART station. She glanced back over her shoulder towards the car. The two heads were facing neatly in front, no sign that they were watching her. But she knew that someone would be waiting when she came out of the narrow alleyway that led from the top of the steps to the main road.

  She walked quickly up the stairs, the soft leather of her sandals making barely a sound. How many thousands of times have I left my footprints here? she thought. In rain and in shine, by day and by night, in despair and in elation. As a child and an adult. In sober black lace-ups polished for school, my dark red gabardine flapping in February gales. In platform-soled shoes, strapped around my ankles, skirt so short that anyone coming up behind me could see my knickers. I have run up these steps, taking them two at a time, the sound of the train getting louder by the second, and I have dawdled and dallied, puffing on the last of a cigarette before facing home. I remember necking here. Can’t remember who the boy was, but I can still feel the ache of the mark on my neck where he sucked and sucked until the blood stood out, dark red and purple, dots of colour in a pointillist bruise. To be covered up in the house and displayed proudly everywhere else. And the flasher. Penis, white, dribbling from his fly, the moment’s wonder then the giggles, ‘Did you see that?’, the mocking and ridicule. Looking back, the man’s shoulders drooped as he turned away. And always the same smell. Piss and rotting leaves. Damp even now in the middle of the summer drought.

  She paused again before she stepped out onto the wide footpath. I spy with my little eye, someone, someone, who will it be?

  A young man was walking along the other side of the road. His step didn’t falter as she turned parallel to him, matching his stride. Surveillance, she thought. That’s what this is. Pronounced in the American way, sounding the double ll, as if it was English. She had looked the word up in her father’s Oxford dictionary. When she realized she was being watched. From the French, it said, surveiller and the Latin vigilare. Meaning supervision, close observation, invigilation, specially of suspected persons. And how many of these young men who have had her under ‘sir-veylance’ have also been voyeurs? Enjoying her ignorance of their existence, her unconscious state of being in the shadow of their consciousness?

  She turned down the lane to the DART station. There were footsteps behind her. It was mid-morning, way past the rush hour. She bought her ticket, pushed through the turnstile and walked quickly down the wooden steps to the platform. She counted the number of people waiting. A young woman rocked a crying baby in a buggy. Two teenage girls, twins, she noticed, were lighting cigarettes. Giggling as they manoeuvred the cigarette ends into the single flame. They were identical except for their hair. One was bleached white blonde, the other a natural brown. They still looked like children, despite their tiny skirts, Lycra tops and thick makeup, their faces round and soft.

  She felt Mary’s cheek against hers, her arm linked through her own, as they sat on this same bench. Mary’s long legs stretched out in front, one thong sandal slipping on and off her arched foot. A young man walked past and she made as if to trip him. He smiled and she smiled back, pulling her legs back in under the bench, and whispered into Margaret’s ear. She felt the warm breath and heard the words, ‘Nice, eh?’ and then the giggle and the sidelong glance, and the hand twisting the black curls away from her face.

  She leaned back in the sun, ignoring the young man with the rolled-up newspaper who lounged against the end of the shelter. She rested her head against the warm granite, closed her eyes and waited.

  McLoughlin was used to waiting. Once, he had added up all the hours that he had spent in cars, in bars, on street corners, on park benches, in chippers and cafés. In bus and railway stations, in hotel foyers, in stinking gents’ toilets, and the grand total was something like four weeks for every year he had been in the force. Hours and hours balancing on the cusp between complete boredom and adrenaline-pumping alertness.

  They’d got the call at 10.43 just as they were leaving Harcourt Square. He and Finney had been at a meeting with the Crimeline people. They were talking about featuring the Mitchell case on next month’s show. Apparently Margaret had left the house, heading for the DART station. Brian Conroy had been with her on the train. She’d got off at Lansdowne Ro
ad. Stupid arsehole had assumed she was going to Pearse Station and had nearly missed her. Not that he said as much, but McLoughlin could hear it in his ‘Fuck it, I nearly blew that one’ tone, and his heavy breathing. A lot of these new guys puzzled him. It wasn’t that they were stupid. Far from it. Most of them were, in his opinion, overqualified, with their law degrees and management courses, sweated through by night and on their summer leave. But they lacked imagination. They didn’t believe in any of the mysteries of life. Everything was cut and dried. Good and evil were concepts outside their range of knowledge and understanding. Brian Conroy’s view of Margaret Mitchell was that she was respectable, middle-class, better-looking than his mother. She had got the DART into town. She was going to get off at Pearse or Tara Station, and go shopping. What else would she do?

  McLoughlin reached into the glove compartment and took out his binoculars. They were parked on Wellington Road, just about twenty yards from the intersection with Pembroke Road. According to Conroy, Margaret had gone into number 378, the house with the red door, which was clearly visible from where he was sitting. He trained his glasses on the house. Three storeys over basement. Two windows on the top two floors. One window at hall level. Net curtains covered their lower halves. He scanned the blank glass above. Something was hanging in one of the srmaller windows at the top of the house. It looked like a mobile, possibly the kind that hangs over a baby’s cot. No sign of any of the occupants. A metal milk-bottle tray with six empty bottles was on the wide front step, beside the old boot-scraper. He couldn’t see much of the basement. A straggly box hedge obscured his view. He focused on the front door. Only one bell. Unusual in this street where most of the houses had been in flats for years.

  They waited. Another beautiful day. Warm now, hot later, the weather forecast had said. Finney fiddled halfheartedly with the radio and yawned loudly. McLoughlin got out of the car and stretched, then began to pace up and down the wide footpath. He had always thought that Wellington Road was one of the finest in the city. The houses were mostly two-storey, crumbly red brick, built in the second half of the last century, with high ceilings and good plasterwork. A few years ago they were full of cupboard-like bedsits occupied by students. Now most had been restored to their full splendour, front gardens rampant with designer growth. He leaned his cheek against the fraying bark of a cherry tree, part of the avenue planted along both sides of the road. Incredible in spring, pink and white blossom, frothing like a strawberry milkshake.

  And then as he turned slowly back towards his car he saw her. Standing on the front step of the house with the red door. A woman beside her, holding a baby in her arms, and as he began to move in her direction she started to run. Down the stone steps, while the other woman first of all tried to restrain her, then stood back, watching until she had disappeared from view up Baggot Street.

  ‘I’ll go, I’ll stay with her,’ McLoughlin shouted back to Finney. ‘Stay in touch.’ And he waved his radio, as he ran around the corner onto the main road.

  She was still walking quickly, and McLoughlin could barely keep up with her, but her cream linen dress was a beacon that led him on through the crowds past Quinsworth, the Waterloo House, the old red-brick hospital, now a drug clinic, whose shallow granite steps were littered with junkies, over Baggot Street Bridge and on towards the city. There was something about the way she moved that attracted him, gave him pleasure. He watched her from the other side of the road. She seemed to glide, negotiating smoothly around anyone or anything that got in her way. He noticed how both men and women responded. Heads turning as she passed, sidelong looks of interest. He watched, engrossed, imagining, then realized that she had stopped, still on the pavement, outside Doheny and Nes-bitt’s pub. She was standing looking at the window, the wide brass trim sending shards of light back out into the street. Reflecting her imperfectly. As he pulled himself up short a woman walking behind him cannoned straight into his back. He apologized sheepishly, and slunk into the nearest doorway.

  Later his notebook said some of it, his memory told it all.

  11.30 Sits in the snug in Nesbitt’s. Drinks two cups of coffee. Asks the barman for the Irish Times. Speaks to him about the weather, the number of tourists in town, etc. (I sat in the bar, and watched her through the half-open door. When she took off her dark glasses her eyes were swollen.)

  12.30 Bar is beginning to fill up with lunchtime trade. She pays and leaves. (Looked uneasy, scanned the faces as they came in.)

  12.35 Walks west along Baggot Street, turns north down Merrion Street to Merrion Square. Enters National Gallery. Goes immediately to the Irish section. Stops for eight minutes in front of Self Portrait by Robert Fagan and The Conjuror by Nathaniel Hone. Goes to the ladies’ toilet. (Gazed at the paintings as if they could answer questions for her. Seemed to take particular pleasure in Fagan’s Italian wife, the French cap of Liberty on her Regency curls, her breasts bare and unadorned. Two French tourists, male, stood beside her. One tried to talk to her. I wanted to intervene, but she took care of them herself.)

  13.15 Leaves National Gallery. Walks west along Clare Street, turns north down Lincoln Place and goes into Trinity College through the Lincoln Gate. Walks as far as College Park. Sits on a bench for fifteen minutes. (Hot, very hot. She took off her sunglasses and leaned back, her eyes closed. Letting the sun warm her, soothe her. Her legs were splayed out across the grass. Did she sleep? Possibly for a couple of minutes. When she opened her eyes again she looked confused.)

  13.55 Proceeds north through New Square and left Trinity College by the Pearse Street gate. Continues north up Tara Street, across Butt Bridge and up Gardiner Street. Enters Hill 16 pub. Contact Sergeant Finney to tell him of my whereabouts. Ask him to keep in touch. (She walked like someone possessed. She looked neither to right nor to left. A group of kids begging on the bridge grabbed at her. She pushed them away. She began to run. They pursued her. She lost them in traffic. She stopped for breath. She checked her bag, her purse. She smoothed her hair. Then she turned and walked quickly up Gardiner Street. She stood out like a pale narcissus, a beam of light on an overcast day. She crossed Gardiner Street at the Parnell Street/Sheriff Street intersection. She went into Hill 16. She ordered a gin and tonic. I stood outside and craned to see in through the windows. She drank it quickly. Ordered another. Does the barman recognize her? He speaks to her quietly. She smiles, he takes her hand. She squeezes it. I am filled with envy. I look at his ugly nicotine-stained fingers. I want to break them.)

  14.30 Leaves Hill 16. Continues north to Mountjoy Square. Turns on to the south side. Stops outside number 50. The last intact house. Restored by Desmond Guinness and the Georgian Society in the late sixties. Opens the door with a key. Enters house. (What was she doing there? Did she live in that house? Why didn’t I meet her then, know her then? I was working in Store Street when she was a student. I could have bumped into her, late at night. I’d go into Hill 16 sometimes. Funny crowd. Rough bunch. Locals, market traders and a few hippies. Afghan coats. Curly hair, all very pretty. Squatting, ‘caretaking’, they called it, the old houses. Living rough, I called it. No running water, rats in the basements, who cares about the plasterwork? Could have busted them all for dope, acid, magic mushrooms, but the Super never thought it was worth it. I stood back against the railing that bounded the park. I looked up at the second floor. Metal grilles over the windows. Couldn’t see much. She was standing up against the window. Her palms were against the glass. She looked over me. What did she see? Come down here to me. Let me comfort you. Let me hold your sweet body against mine, let your heavy head droop on my shoulders.)

  15.40 Mitchell walks back down Gardiner Street, turns into Parnell Street, crosses O’Connell Street at the Parnell Monument, and continues east along Parnell Street. Enters Conway’s pub. Sits at the bar. Drinks gin and tonic. Picks up an Evening Herald lying on the bar and reads it. (She looked tired. Her dress was rumpled, her feet were dusty. Strands of hair escaped from the once neat coil at the nape of her neck
. There were shadows under her eyes. She looked towards the dark corner where I was sitting, drinking a pint. Our eyes didn’t meet. She shifted her weight on the bar stool. One leg rubbed against the other. She lifted her arm to smooth her hair. Her breasts moved underneath the soft material of her dress. She finished her drink, ordered another one. She moved from the bar to a seat from where she could see the television. The channel was SKY or CNN, one of those rolling news bulletins. I looked towards her. Tears were streaming down her face.)

  16.45 Mitchell leaves Conway’s. Crosses Parnell Street to the Rotunda Hospital. Enters. Sergeant Finney takes over. (It happened suddenly. She had gone to the ladies’. I had just ordered another pint with a vodka chaser. I was paying the barman when she came back into the bar. She didn’t stop, she practically ran out the front door. Hoped to fuck that Finney was outside. I ran out after her, just in time to see her going in through the Rotunda’s old front entrance. Finney was behind her, thank God. I followed, along the old tiled corridors, up the stairs beside the lift. One floor, two floors. Women everywhere, swathed in floral dressing gowns, bare legs and fluffy slippers. The smell of babies, sweet, sickly. Nurses, sexy in their crisp white and blue uniforms. What the fuck is she doing here? A nurse tried to stop me. She pointed at the sign. Neo-natal care. I pushed her away. Doors leading off a wide corridor. Doors with glass windows. I peered through each one in turn. Then I found her. She was standing over an incubator. Tears were falling down her cheeks, and splashing on its plastic lid. Inside a baby lay swaddled in cotton wool, its red face like a mouse from a Beatrix Potter story, peeping out from underneath its soft white bonnet. She sobbed, agony pouring from her body. Then she saw me. Go away, she screamed, pushing me with hands made fists. Haven’t you done enough? I stepped back, dumbly, back and back, until I was against the door, while she screamed and screamed. Her pain, her rage. But what could I do? I’d had to ask her. I’d had to tell her. It was my job. I had to go to see her, sit in the garden with her, watch her disintegrate once more with grief and hurt. Tell her that the pathologist had said that Mary had been pregnant. Once. That the signs were there. The slit-like opening to her cervix, the change in pigmentation of her nipples. He couldn’t say when. He couldn’t say whether she had had an abortion or a miscarriage. But he could say that once she had conceived, and the embryo had become a foetus. How was I to know that she, the girl’s own mother, didn’t know? That she would turn on me, first of all deny that it was true, say that it couldn’t have happened. Then stop and think, and wonder. That she would scream abuse at me, then tell me to go away, never to speak to her again, to leave her alone. Pound on the table with her hands till they were bruised and swollen.