Winterwood

by Patrick McCabe

  I had to do something!.

  I couldn't believe it the first time I went out to Ballyroan, especially when I saw the little orchard out the back. I waited to see if Immy would come out. She didn't. I took a taxi to Rathmines and sat for hours in the Sunset Grill, trying to eat a Knickerbocker Glory. I couldn't. Then I went up to Cowper Road. It was awful, standing there looking in foolishly through the window — thinking of Catherine reading by the fire, listening to John Martyn as she serenely turned each page.

  When we went to London first, Catherine and me, the life we lived was a kind of fairy tale, really. With your firstborn it's always different. You'll always hear people saying that. I can't comment, however, because - well, I'm never going to know about that now, am I?

  No, I'll never know as we never got to have a second child. We had often talked about having a son. We had even extensively discussed his name. Owen he was going to be called. If he had ever managed to get born, that is. She said that things had changed between us. That my moods had altered with my lack of success. That she considered it somewhat risky — bringing a child into a situation that was unstable. Both financially and emotionally, she said. Giving me that look, which had become so familiar. Which once had said:

  —I love you.

  But now said:

  —Now I'm not so sure.

  But Christmas 1987, I remember as being really extra-special. Catherine had never looked more beautiful. In the rise of her bloom, as Ned had once remarked about Annamarie Gordon, when he'd told the story about her and him by the river. Where the two of them had gone on that precious day of The Heart's Enchantment.

  Some of the things he said could really fool you - win you over and have you at his mercy.

  —The Heart's Enchantment, he would say, abstractedly, that unique day of the heart's enchantment when I looked in her eyes and she looked in mine. When we knew we were going to be together for ever.

  In the early days of marriage, it's like simple things, they've got this power to fill your entire heart full of love. After the initial debacle with the North London Chronicle, Catherine could so easily have grumbled and moaned, and made things really very difficult indeed. But never - not once did I ever hear that woman complain. On special occasions, in Victoria Wine, they'd give her champagne or cigars as a perk.

  —We live like kings, I remember her saying, around the time our ship started coming in, and I'd managed to get a few bits and pieces of freelancing. Too little, too late, as it turned out - but it seemed good then.

  After a while, it gradually becoming clear that whatever difficulties we'd had, they were very soon going to be well and truly over.

  It's still those early days I cherish most of all - the look on Imogen's face that Christmas Eve when I lifted her on to the carousel. She was four now. It was the most magnificent roundabout I'd ever laid eyes on — Russian or East European in style, painted in these gloriously elaborate swirling colours, with its herd of leaping horses and their fierce enamel grins.

  I felt like the world had just begun as around and around I watched her turn, the light bulbs waltzing over Leicester Square as Santa urged his reindeers ever higher, his sleigh shimmering triumphantly somewhere beyond Admiral Nelson's hat.

  Another magical time is the Saturday we discovered, to our complete astonishment, that a tax rebate had, just the day before, been credited to our account — to the princely tune of £2,000. I just stood there with my ATM card, staring blankly at the screen.

  When I came to my senses, without hesitation, we whisked Imogen into Harrods' children's department and had her fitted for this lovely little coat, with a fur-trimmed collar and these great big buttons. She loved it. I never saw anything to compare with it, I swear.

  She was a picture.

  The Innocent: A Nation Mourns

  The Lonely Death of Michael Gallagher

  The report in the Sunday Independent, dated October 1989, had been truly unbearable. Describing how Ned had lured the boy away from Slievenageeha, betraying his trust in the most despicable way. It gave details of how he'd been regarded as Ned's 'little assistant', and in the photo he looked as sweet as an angel, completely oblivious of the true nature of his 'mentor'.

  By all accounts, Strange had bribed him with a bar of chocolate, before driving him to a secluded spot on the outskirts of Dublin, near Blanchardstown. To a stream near a factory and a copse of pine. Under cover of which he intended to perpetrate his callous act.

  You could see the factory in another photo — a grim, grey, functional building with the name ROHAN'S CONFECTIONERY in the foreground. There was a description of the elevated ground and the thick pine-wooded area behind it, and the small winding river that ran close by. With a detailed account of how it had been coloured pinkish by the factory effluent, with the smell of spearmint 'thoroughly sickly' in the air, as though especially chosen 'for one evil purpose'.

  I lowered my head and prayed softly for Michael Gallagher, his precious life snuffed out by a duplicitous, self-serving pervert.

  A man I'd once known by the name of Ned Strange.

  Renewed revulsion began welling up within me when I thought of how I too had been so cunningly deceived. And — actually tolerated itl

  He had been amusing himself with me right from the beginning, making up stupid stories in so-called mountain language - old-time phrases which probably never, at any time, possessed any authentic currency. He gradually came to symbolise for me everything I'd ever resented about the mountain, reminding me why I'd fled from it the very first chance I got.

  It made me uncomfortable even thinking about it. Thinking that I'd been born there — in Slievenageeha or anywhere near it.

  A place - as has so often been observed about such places - where the inhabitants never looked you in the eye, where everything they did seemed sly and calculated. It was as if everything they represented was to be found in him, Ned Strange: hospitable, certainly, but never, under any circumstances, to be trusted.

  There was, you always suspected, a self-aggrandising purpose to everything they did, a callous selfishness ever-present in their shady, dirt-poor, suspicious, backward hearts.

  I was sorry now I had ever returned there, to compile an article on folklore or anything else. And was embarrassed beyond words by the more sympathetic things I'd written about it in the past, lamely seduced by Ned Strange's honeyed words and my own dishonest, rose-tinted memories, many of which I still retained, stuffed in a folder back in the hostel, including the manuscript of our proposed 'story of his life'.

  I couldn't bear to think about them now.

  Enchanted Days: Courtship in the Ireland of Long Ago by Redmond Hatch

  (Leinster News, 9 April 1982)

  When Red Ned Strange, or Auld Pappie as he is affectionately known in his home place of Slievenageeha, was a young man in his early twenties, he met and fell in love with a young girl by the name of Annamarie Gordon. Annamarie's father was long since dead and she lived on a farm with a few cattle and her mother. It was quite by chance that those two young people encountered one another one day at the fair. Ned at the time was quite a shy young man and it took a lot to ask her out walking, as was the custom at the time. But ask her he did and they were soon boon companions. And rarely a day would go past without them wandering along the valley and off down by the river. These were the sort of things they used to say to one another:

  —I'll love you till the ends of the earth.

  And:

  —You're my darling, my loving sweetheart for all time.

  Ned Strange is a virtuoso musician — a fiddle-player without peer, whose renditions of'The Pride of Erin' and 'Strip the Willow' are legendary in this part of the world. He is fascinating company and an incomparable storyteller and repository of local history. He is an absolute delight to converse with and his heart-warming reminiscences are uplifting in an age that has seemed to have forgotten the value of such storytelling skills - if not indeed abandoned them altogether. While M
r Strange is around, the spirit of the ceilidh - by which I mean the good neighbourliness and fellowship which our fathers and grandfathers knew so well - I am pretty much sure will never be lost.

  Good health to him and all his noble generation!

  1990

  Two: Where the Wild Things Are

  I WAS WALKING ONE day by the Royal Canal. I do that often. I haven't worked since the night he came, that dreadful night in the Portobello bedsit. I keep thinking of his eyes: those loathsome, lustful, self-serving eyes. That caliph smile.

  For a while I tried — I got a job in Supermac's, a fast food outlet on Drumcondra Road. But I got the customer's change wrong on a number of occasions and in the end they had no option, I was told, but to release me.

  It was nothing personal — that was just the way things were. In a way, I was relieved: it gave me a lot more time to think, to root out all impediments and obstacles and clear in my mind an unobstructed path towards the future — and, with a bit of luck, a whole new life.

  I was walking along the towpath of the canal one day when two street people, I suppose you might call them - or maybe more precisely, junkies - approached me, positioning themselves somewhat oppressively on either side.

  They began making demands with various veiled threats. For watches, money, this and that. I gave them what I had —which wasn't much, predictably. And which, they soon made clear, they didn't consider sufficient.

  They then insisted that I turn out my pockets.

  I hadn't slept the whole night before and I'd been thinking of Imogen riding around on the carousel. So I just said:

  —No. I can't do that.

  The box camera photo was still in my pocket. And, more than anything, I didn't want that taken. It was the only one from those days which wasn't vile. It was all I had. I did my best to explain that to them.

  But that, evidently, provided them with little more than a source of amusement. One of them even laughed aloud, as a matter of fact, before brushing threateningly against my shoulder.

  —Just fucking give it, will you, one of them - even more menacingly now - suggested, don't go making things hard on yourself.

  Life is so cruel — full of these chance, random encounters.

  I read about the incident in the evening paper the following day. The taller one was wearing a hood, shrinking from the camera as he related his story. You could just about make out the bandage, masking the deep wound I'd inflicted on his face. He went on at length about how I'd done this and how I'd done that . . .

  Things I had neither done nor contemplated.

  I didn't read as far as the end.

  Catherine had always planned to come back to Ireland - to get herself the house with the orchard. How many times we'd imagined Imogen in that, just playing away in a world of her own.

  That was our dream when we came home.

  As I say, they live in Rathfarnham now. In common with so many other places in Dublin, it's been utterly transformed, with swirling concrete motorway intersections and endlessly pounding, remorseless traffic. The city seems blighted, almost out of control: the carnage on the roads continues as though some inconsequential, diverting carnival. You are hunted in and out of shops, glared at by security men bloated on steroids. Old-timers haunt the fringes of the city, afraid to penetrate its boundaries lest they be set upon by the young: arraigned and made to give an account of themselves. Much of the time I'll travel alone. Spend hours, perhaps, drifting on a bus. I feel at home in its bright, insulated interior. As though it were a link with former, less complicated times. As I travel onwards, going nowhere in particular. Sometimes I'll go out to Cowper Road, or just sit in the Sunset Grill.

  Drifting onwards, jostled, directed - skitting like a steel ball through the polished and brightly coloured channels of the new city-machine, my ears ringing with the sound of sirens and engines, pneumatic drills and sweeping cranes and the transatlantic beat of the new lingua franca, the patois of schoolchildren and businessmen indistinguishable now, rising as it does in bursts from the pavements - past twenty-four-hour shopping malls, asphalt grids and multi storey car parks, takeout delis, convention hotels, brass-and-glass bank doors and multiplex cinemas, hurtling now towards some amorphous, haphazard future.

  It's not like the city I knew at all. The young can have it. I'm not young any longer. It's a long time since I felt that way. I know a lot of people might think that the age difference between me and Catherine - having been born in 1941, I was twenty years older — was significant. But anyone who thinks that — well, I've got news for them.

  They're wrong. It had nothing to do with it at all. I asked her.

  —I didn't even notice, she told me. All I noticed were your cute copper curls.

  Imogen anyway used to make me feel young. Once I caught this old woman staring at us, shaking her head in disbelief as the pair of us played together in Queen's Park, pretending the whole park had been turned into Ponyville from My Little Pony. I think the old lady thought we were being too noisy. But I didn't care. That's how, you see, Imogen could make you feel. I emitted this whinny and the old woman winced.

  —Giddy-up! Imogen said and chucked the imaginary reins. Giddy-up now, Kimono!

  —All right, Pinkie Pie!

  Pinkie Pie was a sweet lamb of a pony who loved to try all these new fun things but sometimes could get just that little bit nervous. Sometimes Immy liked playing at being her because she liked me comforting her when the 'afraid' things were over. There was no evidence of anything frightening her now. No 'afraid' things at all as she chucked on Kimono's reins.

  —Giddy-up! I told you, you bad pony, Kimono!

  After playing My Little Pony we went to Burger King where we both had Bacon Doubles which we loved. That was what we always had there — and we promised not to tell Catherine, for she'd always said that it wasn't food at all. That it was full of starch and additives and everything. I would have given anything for one of them now, one specially made in Burger King in Kilburn, as I drifted aimlessly through the streets of Dublin city.

  There is a pub across the road and I can see their house from there. I've seen Catherine a number of times. The very first time - it was hard. It was unbearable, actually, to tell the truth. Imogen goes to the Holy Faith Convent now.

  Not long after Catherine began studying in Willesden College, whenever little things I'd done had got on her nerves a bit, she'd start these arguments. Especially if she was a little tipsy or in any way intoxicated. You could often find them erupting then.

  —Do you ever think you might have a problem with women, Redmond? A sort of old-fashioned, almost backwoods tendency? That you might tend to idealise them a little in your mind? That somehow, in your mind, they're either angels or . . .

  I don't remember her finishing that sentence. She didn't have to — I knew what she meant. I could see why some things about me might have annoyed her - but that one I never could quite understand. Because any time I looked at her or Imogen, that was all I could see.

  The most beautiful angels in all of Christendom.

  'Whores' is the word she didn't use in that sentence. She meant: do you think of other women as whores? If she'd said it I'd have answered her 'no'.

  Because I didn't, you see, think of any other women. Never had and never wanted to. I had all the women I needed at home. Although, like Ned had often pointed out, it would have been nice to have had a son. It would have been nice to have been given the opportunity. But that's no excuse to raise your hand to your wife. Which Ned had done.

  I know because he told me.

  Catherine's partner works in finance. He works in the Financial Services Centre in the centre of town. When I'm feeling down, I've this urge to imagine that Catherine has gone to seed.

  It isn't true, however.

  I've heard it suggested that certain women have this quality — that they become more attractive as they get older. Kind of more refined, and . . . classy, or something. I don't know. I can't say for sure
. But if anyone has, it's Catherine Courtney. She didn't stay with her Maltese friend. I don't know why. I don't know any of the details. All I know is, they broke up very shortly after coming back to Dublin. He didn't like Ireland I think. And after a while Catherine met someone else.

  I wonder does she ever mention him to her new partner?

  I wonder does she tell him that her and the Maltese made love every Wednesday?

  While I was trudging the wet streets of London, collecting rejected articles, dreaming of having another baby with her, racking my brains trying to come up with ideas for features that might make us some money.

  —Owen, I'd sigh, as I strolled along.

  While she was attending her 'Women's Studies' classes which were held in Willesden three nights a week. After which she attended her 'Maltese' class.

  I wonder does she ever mention that to Ivan?

  I wonder does she ever mention me!

  Renewed football fever saw the city deserted. Ireland were playing Albania in the World Cup qualifiers, so the radio said. Papers blew idly, alarm bells lingered emptily. It was like the aftermath of a neutron bomb. I'd try not to think at all about Strange.

  Not to mention what he'd done.

  I almost vomited when I thought of it.

  Then I'd have a few drinks and realise how absurd it all was - sitting in a pub, considering what effectively were mere symptoms, by-products of stress.

  —Ghosts! I'd laugh.

  In a modern city in the middle of the day. It was ludicrous.

  —Ned! I'd hear myself chortle. For Christ's sake Redmond - I mean Dominic - what are you bloody well talking about!