by Adrian Kenny
‘No. I’d say Paddy died a virgin.’
Her face filled with wonder, as it had at the butterfly’s eggs.
‘That was the way then.’
The gutters trickled into silence, the sun appeared between dark slate clouds, tinting the ash-tree branches silver, and they sat outside against the warm bonnet of the car.
‘What will you do with it?’
‘I don’t know.’
He rooted his toe under a rotting green hose pipe, she stooped and drew it up, and together, tearing it free of matted grass, they followed its snaking to a cattle trough full of dead leaves. A tractor roared down the narrow road, and they set to work again. In a few days her face was bronzed, and his was red. She had a mix of blood, he was the freckled Celt.
SHE CAME IN SUMMER, as he had once come, but in winter he came alone. One snowing day when fire could not spread, he dragged his uncle’s rotten furniture out into the field, threw on a can of petrol, lit a match and ran. He kept the long kitchen table of planks worn into ridges, the clumsy deal chair, the stool smudged with faded blue cart paint, and his uncle’s old canvas armchair. He painted the walls pale and the ceilings white. Each time he came, he sharpened his uncle’s worn scythe with the broken whetstone and mowed the grass and rushes about the house. As he walked the clean field in the evening and breathed its sweet scent, he had that childhood peace again.
Sometimes it lasted for days. The damp green moss six inches deep on the ditch banks, the red spongy moss in the cutaway bog, the huge bleached stones in the small walls about the small fields – they hadn’t changed. The crest of wild grass still grew in the centre of the road. A mare, maybe a granddaughter of his uncle’s wild mare, sank on her haunches to stale, and the wind blew the piss to spray. He walked the thin tar road around the townland, chatting with his uncle’s old neighbours, but his life and theirs were different. He was just a city visitor, restless after a few days. But before he left he always stood for a minute as he shut the gate, looked up the trim boreen at the smoke of the last embers rising from the chimney, the pheasant already advancing from the thorn hedge to peck in the mown field. It was a shrine to peace.
NATURE PRESSED IN. A boundary bank was knocked by accident, then another one. Furze crawled over the hill. To keep the land, he planted it with trees: ash, alder, beech, larch, pine, sweet chestnut, oak. Their children joined them for a week each summer, beating down the briars and nettles until the saplings had risen into the light. But still there was the house. When he arrived in winter the walls and windows were glistening with cold damp. Wind carried slates away and the roof leaked. The rushes grew in spring, green briars snaked out from the hedge. His drive west became more duty than pleasure. His wife came less often in the summer: her nature was giving, growing attached to people; not holding on to a place far away. But still he couldn’t bring himself to sell. In the end, ambivalent, he let the house. It was a year before he returned to see how the tenant was getting on.
THE BOREEN was worn to mud, the overhanging blackthorns had been hacked away, sacks of coal were heaped against the gable he had painted white. It was like any poor country bungalow. He heard TV noise, a child crying inside. She had the child in her arm when she opened the door. The porch was full of turf, sticks, a bush saw, a Calorgas cylinder – everything was to do with keeping warm. She shut each door behind them and shoved a mat against the door. A clothes line hung from the kitchen ceiling, the cement floor was carpeted and littered with toys. A small boy sat on the clumsy deal chair looking at a TV on a shelf her husband had fixed to the wall. It was just what he had wanted it to be, a living house. She sat in his uncle’s old canvas armchair, took a joint from the hob and lit it, as naturally as his uncle had lit his pipe. The hot rich scent of herb mixed with turf smoke and made a strange new scent.
He was too close to this country to stand out. When he talked with the neighbours his voice slipped into their tone. He had been careful not to be caught at sunset mooning over a blackbird’s song. She was different, herself. When the neighbours found her sitting on a ditch, cross-legged, and asked was she all right, she answered simply, ‘I’m doing my yoga.’ They were polite, and only said that she was odd. She walked the road in her long tweed overcoat, talked in her plain middle-class voice about children’s allowances or the Offenbach she had heard on Lyric fm. She invited the neighbours’ children in for drawing lessons, talked to them about the left and right sides of the brain, told them to draw whatever came to mind. She had hung green scapulars in one of the hawthorn trees; tiny Buddhist bells in another tinkled with the wind. When he saw the parlour mirror ruined by rain behind the cart house, she explained that she didn’t want to see herself. To make herself plain, she had cut her long hair short as a boy’s. But she was beautiful still. She boiled a kettle, poured green tea leaves like pine needles into the teapot. She had a Brennan’s sliced pan, but also anchovies. She sat down, opened a blue plaid shirt, bared a white breast and nursed the baby as they talked. He looked away, up at his uncle’s mildewed picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel that she had left on the kitchen wall.
SHE HAD BEEN the only one to answer his advertisement. Unerring fate had found the right tenant for this shrine to peace. Her husband was out at work all day; she was at home living a childhood dream. Each time he called he saw it drift closer to a nightmare. The shed was too far from the house, she had the turf tipped at the gable, and soon it was too wet to burn. The wild grass went on growing, the rushes drew closer, nettles were nodding their heads again above the windowsill. Ivy he had trained against the wall began to creep over the windowpanes. Her husband began to spend more time in the pub, and soon he was drifting away. When the ivy closed over the back door, she left suddenly and moved into a nearby cottage with central heating. He had to drive down again to an empty house.
WITH A CLAW HAMMER he tore the ivy from the back door. The field behind was a wilderness. The scythe wasn’t able for three years of grass and rushes; he asked a neighbour to sweep the field with a mowing machine. He said that he was preparing it for sale. But when he walked the field that evening and saw a rabbit chopped in half among the sweet swathes, he changed his mind again. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t sell.
He was sitting by the fire when he heard a knuckle knock on the front door. It echoed through the empty house, and then she stepped inside with the child in her arms. She had allowed her hair to grow again; it lay about her shoulders, thick auburn gold. She sat in his uncle’s canvas armchair, as naturally as if she still lived there, and they talked. Her husband had gone; their marriage was over, now she was living alone.
The child fell asleep in her arms, and they talked more quietly. She missed this place already, she said, its air of peace. He agreed. He said he had often called on his uncle, as unexpectedly as she had called now, and found him in that canvas armchair, his feet on the stool, looking up at the ceiling or at the fire. He had once asked him what he thought of as he sat there, and his uncle said, ‘Musha nothing, dreaming.’ He had once asked if he was happy, and his uncle had said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ as if he had been asked was he alive. He had even asked once if he was afraid of dying, and his uncle had said, ‘Why would I? Isn’t very near everyone I know dead.’
They talked about him as they sat by the fire. He had lived in this place for ninety-two years, except for one season in England working on a farm. He had never set foot in Dublin, never married, never been ill, never known a holiday. She said that that was beautiful. He agreed again. The evening light, reflected from the grass growing up to the window, threw a green glow into the room. She sank lower in the armchair, her body slackened by tiredness, intimacy, warmth. Then it was dusk, but they went on talking, their stretched feet a foot apart. In the firelight he saw her face dissolve until it was like the sleeping child’s. She answered his look with a smile of dreamy desire. It would take a moment, said a butterfly thought, to take the child from her arms, lie it to sleep in the canvas armchair, and lead her into his un
cle’s bedroom. But he couldn’t do that. That mass of memories was too strong, that dream of peace blocked the door.
IT DREW HIM BACK. Again nature was advancing, resolute now. A tendril of ivy worked in above through the warped frame of the kitchen window, and grew up the pale painted wall. Field mice squeezed underneath the door. Jackdaws dropped sticks down the chimney, and would continue until one lodged. A storm lifted the roof from the turf shed and blew it across the field like a hat. The silence took on a life of its own; at night it seemed to move out from the walls into the centre of the room. One night a fox’s laughing mask appeared at the dark window, and for half a minute held his stare. To get out one evening, he went for a walk, along the thin tar road, down by the wind-crushed hawthorns, down to her new home.
IT WAS ON A STEP of a steep hill. Its door opened onto the road. Children’s toys lay on the roadside, there was road grit inside on the floor. There was a piano, a brindled greyhound she had rescued from Travellers, and a boxer dog that a divorced friend had given her to mind. His eyes followed her as she moved about the kitchen, tidying while she talked. She was pregnant – she was with someone else now; she was the talk of the townland, she smiled. Cattle roared from a slat house nearby. He gave money to the children, and looked at their school homework. They couldn’t remember his name. When they reminded their mother that they were going shopping to Lidl, he stood to leave. As she searched for her car keys and put up the fireguard, she said an absent goodbye. The moment they had shared in green twilight was scattered, like the toys on the side of the road.
As he continued down the steep hill he saw her daughter’s Hello Kitty purse on a stone wall, soaked, with a few cents rusting inside. Crossing the wall, he walked down through sedge grass already stiffening with frost. Memories hung in every hawthorn, like her green scapulars and Buddhist bells. He remembered when there had been a lake there, where in winter the old men had hunted for pike; walking on the ice with a sledge hammer, striking when they saw a shape below; smashing open the ice then and drawing out the stunned fish. The lake had been drained, there was only a stream now, winding through a bed of white marl. The old men had said that long ago, before the lake was there, the Fianna had raced their horses on this plain …
There was a rasping cry; two snipe flew from the rushes, zigzags of silver and brown. As he stood to watch them he heard a shrill chattering, and saw a migrant flock of starlings settling for the evening in the trees about the ruined big house. They rose suddenly like a swarm of bees, and he saw a kestrel gliding towards them – sickle wings and long straight tail, like a small anchor in flight. With a rushing sound like wind in trees the flock closed tight. The kestrel turned away, and the flock scattered. He heard the sound of their wings, like a fire burning overhead.
He stood in the cold air, watching as the kestrel returned, copper against the dark cloud. The long skein of birds drew into a black ball. Now it was a sound like a furnace burning, a quiet roar. The kestrel flew into its centre, which shattered open like a thousand broken pieces when he passed through. A fourth attempt followed, and again they made a hedgehog ball, into which he plunged. Again he appeared from the other side without prey. They dropped suddenly behind the old island, a thicket of alder trees in the lake bed, to shelter until it was dark. He heard the whistle of a bird or an otter, then a squeal like a rabbit’s, as he walked back to the road.
Her car had gone, the door was shut, the greyhound and boxer were lying outside. She was learning what it was to live all the year in this place. He had always been a visitor like the starlings, flying from its grip, always coming back – for what? As he left the Hello Kitty purse on the windowsill he saw the fire burning quietly inside, a red glow in the dark. The dogs snarled, and he turned away. They lay down at the door again, watching as he walked up the dark steep hill. At last he had made up his mind. He would spend one last night in his uncle’s house. He would go into town next morning and see the auctioneer.
Mister Pock
IT’S LATE, 11.30 at night. It’s raining, the first rain in a month. Both windows are wide open still, it’s been so warm. He can hear the rain falling in the back garden, rattling on the privet trees. He can see their cream blossoms even in the dark. The sweet scent comes even through the rain. Then he hears a groan. Standing up, he looks out at the dark backs of the houses in the next street. It comes again. It’s like the sound of another species. It’s been so long since he was a part of that, it’s a while before he realizes what it is. His wife goes on reading, he goes on writing his letter. It goes on for five minutes more. There’s a boy’s cry, and at last it’s over. A light comes on, and a girl’s face appears at an open window, leaning out smoking a cigarette.
AFTER THIRTY YEARS living in this street he sees it through the glass of time. When the young couples leave their doors open these summer evenings, he sees not just their pale sanded floorboards but the carpeted front rooms of the people who lived there before. There’s a story in every house. The derelict garage door is black because Mr Campbell came out one morning, sweating, in a miniskirt, with a pot of paint, and covered it with white zigzags. They took him away. The black cat is watching Delia’s house because she gives him food.
He’s been here so long he remembers the beginning of that story, a few street cats slowly growing wild. They hunted the canal-bank reeds for ducklings; waited under cars for street pigeons to land. At night he heard them on the rooftop, running down the alley after rats. When his children were small they had tried to tame one, lured it inside at last and shut the door. That was when they saw what wild meant – spitting, screaming like a firework, throwing itself against the window until they set it free. He saw it on the back garden wall one evening crouched under a tom, and the next year a wild litter was born. And the next. One winter night he saw a dozen of them, a black inbred pack, hunting in the snow. A neighbour called the Corporation, who came and trapped a few. Others left for better territory. In the end there was only this one. He waits until the door has shut, then advances slowly. The thick lace curtain opens and Delia appears at her front window to watch him eat.
AND NOW THERE IS the new face that appears at the back window – young, golden-brown, in a frame of oiled black hair. If she weren’t so tall she could be from the Philippines. Maybe South America, he thinks. When he goes down for the milk and paper in the morning, she is coming round the corner, setting out for work. She doesn’t walk on the pavement but in the middle of the street, along a straight black seam of tar. He notices her springy breasts, her pale tight blue jeans, her bottom twitching like the waterhen’s white rump when it runs down the canal bank from the cat.
One day going past the restaurant, he sees her inside cleaning the big window. As she reaches up to spray the top half with an aerosol he sees her bared brown stomach, a jewel swinging from a gold navel ring. He smiles at her but she looks through him, as if he were a windowpane.
HE GIVES the same glance to old Delia. She reminds him of what’s ahead. Usually he walks past with a word about the weather, but now she has a pretext. ‘You didn’t see Mister Pock?’
‘Who?’ He has to stop.
‘The cat. That’s what they do call him.’
‘He was in our garden yesterday, he killed a sparrow.’
‘Well did he?’ Seeing his look, she withdraws. ‘Well isn’t he terrible.’
Her wirrastrue country accent, the Maria wooden plaque screwed outside her door – everything about her gets on his nerves. He is about to slip away, but she says, ‘You wouldn’t open a tin for me. That tin opener, it’s as stiff.’
She can’t go upstairs any longer, her bed fills the front room. A Sacred Heart picture hangs over the fireplace, the heating is on full blast, Daniel O’Donnell is on the TV crooning a song. As soon as he opens the tin of Whiskas he almost runs out the door. But a threshold has been crossed. Now each time he passes he has to stop and talk. Her big lonely eyes fix on his. He can’t escape.
So he remembers how it happe
ned, he knows how it was done. He’s at her doorstep talking when the cat comes around the corner, belly slung low, yellow-green eyes with black-slit slanted pupils looking left and right. It’s the first time he’s been so close to him, he sees his black coat is flecked with white hairs. Delia smiles, and he rubs his side against the lamppost, then he brushes against her legs. ‘Well, Mister Pock,’ she says. ‘Are you going to come in?’ She goes inside, leaving the door open. The cat glances over his shoulder, then slowly steps in.
AS HE’S GOING down the street one morning, her door opens and Mister Pock slips out. Delia blushes like a girl when she sees him. He glimpses her bare feet, a pink nightdress as she withdraws. But another threshold had been crossed. Soon she is ringing him at night.
‘Well, were you looking at the Late Late?’
‘I missed it,’ he says.
‘Indeed you didn’t miss much. They had this fella with long hair on talking for half an hour. Now, Pat, I said to myself, if you’ve any sense you won’t argue with him. That’s just what he wants …’
He doesn’t answer one night. An hour later the blue flashing light of a squad car stops outside her door. Two guards go in. He rings when they have gone.
‘What happened? Are you all right?’
‘I couldn’t open the tin, and I said to myself, I’ll ring Kevin Street. Well they were nicest lads – and do you know what, one of them is from Ballindine. Delia, they said, do you mean to say that the neighbours wouldn’t do that for you?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Delia, they said, it’s no trouble in the wide world. Any time you want, just pick up the phone, they said.’
