She lifted the packet to her nose and, strangely, smelt it. Absentish, she could be holding anything. Maybe she was thinking of a boy, he prospected, or a pop song or a hairdryer. Clairol, wasn’t that the name of a hair dryer? He exited the shop ahead of her to anticipate her route home.
He recalled a group of four girls at this checkout years earlier. He was nearby and observed them behave fidgety around a boy queuing to pay for a packet of crisps. They failed to notice him, but he did not fail to notice they noticed the other lad. He recorded something of that, kept the rind of it as a reminder. The other boy was indifferent to the girls’ attention; he was reading an offer on the back of the crisp packet. An older woman walked past and asked that boy something, likely about his mother. He was responsive, warm. Martin John watched as the girls vied for the boy’s attention by stealing a glance at him and then speaking just a little bit louder and shaking their hair over their shoulders, sticking one hip out and adjusting their clothes. He was, at that time, older than the boy. He was aware that none had ever performed thus for him.
It was a risk to allow that she might walk down this alley. A lotto-notion that she could cut through here. He was going to try to talk to her. Maybe tease her about smelling the sausages. He had not planned to take it out. But as she approached and noticed him there, she looked away. He didn’t like that. He didn’t like that she wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t looking at him the way he’d seen other girls stare and rummage around that boy with the crisps. Yet she chose this route. She chose this route because she knew he’d be there. She didn’t choose another route. That might have lifted him. If she had obviously avoided him. Ha! That would be progress then. It wasn’t enough. He would have her attention. He would have her attention no matter what it took. No matter if he only had it for five seconds, he would have it and he knew just how to get it.
How’d he navigate the zip so fast?
He’d prepared. His hand was in his underwear. Wrapped around it. Had she or had she not looked away? He wouldn’t have known. He couldn’t have known. Had he imagined she’d look away?
It didn’t matter as she was nearer to him now. If he turned his back and swerved around at this dead-on angle she could not escape seeing what he would present to her. It was fast, fleshy-fast. He pulled it up and down a few times as a commencement speech. A mere throat-clearing before the pounce of pronouncement. He wanted an obvious moment in her eyes where she registered it. It would need to be out. It would need to be hard. Hard. Out. Pointed at her. (Not out, down and limp.) Her feet making that putt-surr sound on the ground had it hardening. Her hand rustling the carrier bag. She was doing all the work for him. Good girl, he thought. That made it stiffen even more. Good girl, he thought again. Come, come on, come on, come on now. Stood sidewards against the wall of a house then rotated a rapid squint over his shoulder to time the turn to her passing. She was closer than he’d calculated. He swung on her, lifted his chin and worked his two hands more forcefully below. One to pull aside his jean fabric, the other to hoik it up and over further, protrude it at her. Direct, flat-eyed, he pulled. He pulled defiant, he pulled transported. Pulled and pulled and pulled. Plumpendicular, he slapped it against his other hand. It was a mere three seconds until he nailed her gaze. Nailed it to his groin.
Except it didn’t quite work. It did not work. She barely gave 2 seconds of notice to the site. Calm, elevated, she plodded past with her fist clenched onto the carrier-bag handle. It was not as it had been with other girls: she didn’t allow registration. He had taken it out and gone to a lot of trouble. It was a lot of trouble to take it out, he thought, dejected. She had not responded. Something was wrong. They always responded. That was the point in taking it out. It was guaranteed, where words could fail you. It could infiltrate the most desultory, absent gaze. Where words might fail him, the sight of his pound of flesh could penetrate.
After it he didn’t feel bad as much as flat. Flatness was what he felt. Like he’d lost interest in something. It was done now. There was a time early on when he’d felt guilty. Now he defaulted to again, again. He would go back for her.
That was the moment it did not work, it did not work the way it previously worked and it was the moment he could have predicted they would come for him.
They beat him. Beat him hard. Elbows to his stomach, knee to the groin and into his drooping, saggy pouches. They did not spare his eyes. There was no space for explanation, which was useful because he had no explanation to offer. The bridge of his nose was imprinted with the clasp of a watch. The top of his head was cut. His eye. They marked him in a way he could not leave the house.
What did you say, what did you say? Did you call for help? mam would later ask him.
—I said nothing. I said nothing. I had nothing to say.
He said it flat. Dull, ambivalent like the entire episode took place in his sleep.
—I expected it, he added.
She did not like that. But neither did she ask why. These days she never suggested calling the Guards. They’ve little time for the likes of us, she said. Unless it is we they are after.
With a similar careful attention and calculation, that girl’s brothers arrived for him. Two, this one sent. Double the force, double the words, double the sting. Yet only one explanation. The same explanation. The one explanation Martin John refuses to give. He allows mam her own explanation.
—We’ve to get you out, mam said when she saw the state of him. If you can’t stop it, we’ve to stop it.
Could he stop it? What would he stop?
—Stop what, he said. She will not go further. She would never give voice to that which she wished stopped.
With a similar careful attention and calculation, mam plans for him. With a similar careful attention mam detains him. She keeps him indoors. She kept him indoors. She organized around the damage, his damage. She did dress his wounds. Resentfully.
Whatever you did to deserve this. . . she muttered. She could hardly leave him bleeding at her table. They moved forward. She had questions she chose not to ask. We’ve to get you out, she said as she pat, pat, patted around the scrapes and incisions. Cuts from fists and knuckles. Punched-in digs and fisty bruises.
I’ll kill you, one brother told him as a fist smacked his jaw. Another had his eyes up against his face, so close he could see the man’s dirt-packed skin pores. Bruises, knuckle and ring, fist tracks formed mounds around his eyes, his jaw and the side of his head. Every strike had layered itself onto him.
Harm was done.
There might be further abrasions before she could get him out.
There were rumours. Gossip she refused to believe. Slander she scuffed off. People talk, refuted. There were rumours about Martin John that reached her, the way there were rumours about that man in Galway that reached her and that other fella in Kilkenny who ran to Amsterdam. It was in the papers. People would affirm, Oh him. Sure people knew exactly what he was at, he’d been doing it for years, or, It was only a matter of time.
Evil. Pure evil. Pure deviant sick evil. Adjectives combusted beside reason: there were people who did these things, that she did not dispute. But she could barely get her son to take his socks off all these years, so the public-exposure rumours were ridiculous and malicious. He sometimes kept his hat on indoors. He might be a bit of an odd shilling, but not that odd.
Who had seen it?
Show me the videotape, she planned to ask. Show me the videotape and he’s yours. He’s yours with a ribbon on him. There are enough cameras about the place these days, if he was doing what was implied, he’d be captured.
There was hearsay that reached her as warnings. Or illumination. They were pressed gently enough to her ear. People customized it as questions, they sought her opinion on news stories. What did she know about this or that and could these perverts be healed? They wanted her speculation. I can only deal with the facts. She disappointed them. In m
y eyes, a man or woman is only guilty a minute after the jury says so. Until that day, in my eyes, he or she is innocent. She was inclusive. She never let a she alone. If women wanted equality, they could all be equally at fault.
There had been rumours for a while.
Rumours were delivered as questions in these parts.
What could a woman like her do about rumours like those?
Girl rumours were worse. Because he was a boy she didn’t pay much heed.
She believed boys were rumoured about for no reason. The girls with the protruding tummies no longer wanted to face their actions and were turning on the boys. All of them. If you let them at you, she would say, what can you expect? When we had chastity in this country we hadn’t any such problems.
That was the roundabout exit she chose.
He did it. He did not do it. He could have done it. She made it up. Except there was more than one she now.
Rumours and warnings were not evidence.
She worried how it would affect his sisters.
If he had sisters.
She worried if it got out or they came home how could they be married in the church. She worried about the sisters he didn’t have.
She worried if it got out how could they prove he hadn’t done it?
She worried he had done it. She began to believe he had.
She had seen enough to confirm it.
It was when he did it to a man she really panicked.
She really, really panicked.
If he was taking it out and waving it at a man, it meant it was highly likely he wouldn’t have spared a woman.
Then she got a straight head on her.
Then she got him out.
To London.
But not before he got at the girl waiting in the dentist’s office.
If he ever came back they’d kill him.
It was simple. He could not come back.
He had complicated it.
As if it were not complicated enough already.
This list is inside the teapot with the other lists.
She did all her reckoning on the back of receipts.
Her writing had to become smaller and smaller to fit the explanations on the back of the receipts.
When it was all said and done there was an inventory in this teapot.
It sat as evidence.
If there was a fire, it would all be destroyed.
Then she remembered the teapot would not catch fire.
It would be retained.
What would you do?
This would be the final receipt she would write on and place back in the teapot.
What would you do?
The next time he was admitted to hospital, she would bring the teapot and turn its contents onto the table and let the doctor see it all.
See the mistakes I made, she would tell him.
She went to confession.
She didn’t mention the mistakes.
She did tell the priest that she was writing things on the back of papers and storing them in teapots.
He asked, Were they bad things? She said they were.
It had happened before. Mam knows this. Yet she’ll try to squeeze this information to the back of her eyes or to the left of the situation. My memory is going, she’ll say. It’s the stress, she’ll say. It’s very difficult, she’ll say.
Yet she knows the first moment she thought Martin John might be taking strange. He was stood in the hall in front of a religious picture she still has there on the wall with his trousers down. Except he was stood with the religious picture removed from the wall and placed on a chair. He was stood there with his hands inside his underpants. She passed him in a whoosh and retrieved the Mother of God’s picture, pressed it into her cardigan, moved promptly to stand up on a kitchen chair and hang the woman back up.
It was the way he did not rush to cover himself up. It was his non-reaction that frightened her. She had to go back and call his name and tell him get dressed. Stop standing there, someone might come to the door. She should have said, Have you lost your mind? Instead she allowed her concern to remain with who else might see him rather than what he was doing.
She had ignored it, or fudged it. Whatever she had not done, she’s paying for.
The disassociation was only the start. He became more flagrant. He’d lie in his bed with his bum bare to the ceiling, head down, and wait ’til she came in to find him. She could call and call and call him to the kitchen for his tea and he wouldn’t budge. She’d go down to the room, find him in that state and he’d issue a peal of laughter when she came in.
—What’s that? he’d say, lifting his head.
—I’m calling you.
—I can hear that, he’d say.
—What are you doing?
—I am waiting to be heard.
—What are you doing? Why aren’t you dressed?
What would follow was difficult. He’d rise and saunter past her, letting his parts drift and wobble. He’d have swiped her with them were they long enough to do so. The way in which he’d look at her was odd. Calculated and vicious. Deviant, she thought in retrospect.
See how still no one mentions the girl?
He would leave the bathroom door unlocked. He would want her to walk in on him. Whether he was bathing or not. Once she found him sat on top of the toilet-seat cover yanking at his parts. When she stuttered an apology: God, sorry, and lock the door, he stared her in the eye and pulled even harder at the exposure below. Like it didn’t matter whether she was there or not. He’d carry on.
She never entered any door, any place, without knocking. Even when she pushed the door in, she automatically protected herself now by closing her eyes. She did this as she approached any door that was closed, even if she went to the doctor’s. She never assumed what she would find behind a door would be a normal, clothed human being, behaving in a normal, clothed manner.
Still no word on the girl. Or that mam knows that he did what the girl said he did.
It became sinister and more sinister. She became afraid of him.
We have to get you out, became an unuttered be gone because I am afraid of you. You and your possibilities exhaust me. I will be relieved to hand you off so someone else may worry about you.
He knows this today as an adult and has considered admitting it, except no opportunity has come up. Harm was done said aloud is as far as he’ll go until you ask him to go further. Who will ask him? Will you ask him? Should I ask him? Who asks these people? Are they ever asked outside a courtroom or must we get them into a courtroom to pose the question: Just what the fuck do you think you were doing or thinking? Tell us this at your leisure. We are gathered here to hear you. Finally.
He will admit that he did not back off. Not that day in the dentist’s waiting room. There is a moment when you back off, when you make the decision not to proceed, when your brain acknowledges the signal, but on he ploughed. He could tell you he ploughed on because he wanted to, but usually he’ll only tell you what he has told her: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t remember.
He couldn’t tell mam he does remember.
Harm was done is all he could tell her.
Harm was done by him.
But she will want details and he doesn’t have details. He’s cobwebbed them in behind the blankness of Harm was done.
Once, in a dim moment, they forced him to remember. He slipped up. Or one doctor slipped him up. She was a student and he can’t remember how she asked the question but it was in some kind of assessment. But he slipped and admitted. They drugged it out of him.
They drugged him when they took him in. Said if he didn’t calm down they’d have to give him something to calm him down. He told them nine different ways in nine different languages that no way was he calming down. He held onto the
newspaper he’d attacked the man in the shop for. The man who called him a savage. Or the other man beside him. All of it. Baldy back at home watching telly, ruining his life’s work. She talked him into the topic and out of the topic and around the topic and then they had talked about it, but by the end he remembered how to deny it and it came back to him and he denied everything he’d said even though it was only minutes since he said it. He was surprised she did not look more wounded. She was blank about it. This troubled him. It troubled him that she didn’t demand more. If she railed on him, he could back off, but the way she sat there still as jam and gave nothing away was trickier. At the end of the session, she reminded him the session was taped. He left furious. Furious that she caught him, furious that he couldn’t just forget. Then within a few hours he couldn’t quite recall why he was furious.
If they’re going to keep taping me it’ll be very hard to admit to things, he reasoned.
And he commenced with ‘but,’ ‘and another thing,’ to confound and make himself indecipherable.
Anytime any person remotely connected to the mental services came near him he commenced and ended his sentences these two ways. This he enforced as the means not to tell them anything further, not to be confessing to things he could not recall, nor even recall confessing to, once he’d confessed. He told mam about what he was doing. I am only talking to them two ways, he said.
—Good, she said, if I have told you once I have told you a thousand times to stop talking and shut up. For the love of God shut up.
—And another thing, he said.
—Shut up.
—But . . .
—Shut up.
He had it right. His testing process had succeeded.
It was an awful lot of work, but he had to teach Baldy Conscience a transdermal lesson. Other people rigged with better fists would have merely punched Baldy Conscience or kicked him in the arse down the stairs and out the front door. He had not that constitution. He had the hanging-around-the-post-box and waiting-on-a-shift constitution. He had the walking in circles and avoiding-the-gaze-of-those-who-were-clearly-out-to-get-him look, from the top of the academy to the men in manholes, all of whom were conspiring, he didn’t doubt, from the elbow-directing of Mr Baldy Conscience. To take him out would require taking out the whole planet, something he found 7 days in the week wasn’t enough to achieve. What could he control? He could control the language that wiped this man’s arse. Once he’d recovered from the shock and awfulness of finding his treasured Eurovision archive heading up the man’s bum, he replaced those precious papers with every depraved story published. Since there was a non-stop supply of them, he’d merely to collate and create a pile of papers that included them. Baldy Conscience was blithely tearing strips off the paper during his daily trips to the seat. He was going to blast the plumbing, this was clear, but that was a problem he’d accept for the newfound control he had.
Martin John Page 9
