Carn

by Patrick McCabe

  There was nothing but disgust in the world, whether it belonged to men or women. She felt as if she had turned to stone as she sat above him in the bed. She stroked his back and he groaned again. “There there,” she said, “you poor little thing. Did you never see a girl before?” She spat in Culligan’s eye and drove a knife through Molloy’s heart as he stood before her with a face like a death mask above the lightbeam of the torch. Then she softened her voice. She could see that he wanted that. It was alien to him, accustomed as he was to his own sweat and the smell of the animals. “Your little Josie is going to be so nice to you, oh so nice. You like that, don’t you?”

  They lay there inert after that, until the first light of dawn touched the window and his eyes shot open as he reached out into the morning like a drowning man and cried frantically, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”

  The smell of Josie Keenan began to encroach upon the house. She made one of the bedrooms hers, washed and starched the sheets and placed a flower in a vase on the mantelpiece. When he came home from the fields in the evening, she looked at him with her eyes and that was all he wanted. When she found him in her room staring transfixed at her underclothes, she lifted the petticoat and stroked his cheek with it. “What were you doing in my room, Phil?” she said. “This is a girl’s room, you know that. You shouldn’t be in a girl’s room.” She unfolded the garment and spread it on the bed. “What do you want to look at things like that for, Phil? Mm? That’s for girls.”

  When she asked him for money, she told him it was to buy “some nice things for herself” for she knew what this conjured up in his mind, and watched stoically as he rummaged in the bag behind the sink where he kept the money in rolled bundles. “I’m going to buy a nice pair of stockings with that, Phil,” she said, and took the bus to a town across the border where she sat on her own in a café listening to a jukebox and eating ice-creams. She knew he would never have the courage to ask what she did with the money. She could take all the dignity he had from him with one flicker of her eyelashes.

  He never queried anything she did. The house became hers and he wanted that.

  One day, on her return from the town across the border, Josie saw that the door of the house was half-open. Her first instinct was to run but having told herself that it was nothing but another of the irrational fears that had taken root in her since her days in the dark dormitories of the orphanage, she went on and crossed the stile, then walked up the lane to the house. When the door swung open, she saw the white, hair-specked face of Sister Benignus. Beside her, a stocky priest with red jowls stood ominously with his hands behind his back. In the corner, the old man cowered with tears on his cheeks. The silence ticked away. Then the nun cried out in a voice that was creaky with anger, “You have flown in the face of God. You have flung everything back in our faces, you have abused your body which is the temple of the Holy Ghost. You have turned this man away from the path of goodness and virtue. You will have to ask the Lord God for forgiveness. You have become a scarlet woman Josie Keenan. You will have to atone for your sins!” The priest looked away, reddening and sticking a finger inside his stiff white collar. Josie knew it all by heart now, he was just another man, terrified of what his own body might do to him. But she also knew that the nun had no difficulty in staring straight into her eyes and gripping her viciously by the wrist saying, “You are coming with myself and Father Mooney. We are going to take you into the convent. But we will keep a closer eye on you there than we did in the orphanage. This must never get out and cause scandal. You go and get your belongings. You have done enough harm here! You have ruined this poor man’s life. He must now pray for his own soul!”

  The nun hovered as Josie packed her suitcase. She spotted the petticoat at the bottom of the bed and lifted it, crying, “What is this? What is this? You wore this?” The blood rushed to her forehead and she tore it to pieces like a woman possessed, flinging it to the floor. “We will punish you, it is the only way,” she said bitterly.

  The priest was waiting for them at the car, stroking his chin anxiously. They drove into Carn by the back roads and approached the convent by the rear entrance. Once more Josie smelt the sickening odour of boiling cabbage wafting to her nostrils. They entered through the kitchens where greasy-haired country girls darted between the bubbling vats. The nun parted company with the priest and when she got Josie on her own, dug her nails into her shoulder and made her fall on her knees beneath the pale bleeding statue in the chapel.

  “Tell the blessed virgin, tell the blessed virgin that you repent for the way you have flown in the face of God!” The nails dug in deeper and Josie, knowing well from all the years she had spent in the cold anaemic chapels such as this one, knew what to give her so she began an endless chant of rosary decades and counterfeit whimpers which gave the nun her gratification as she stood with her fat, middle-aged arms folded, conspiring with the chipped statue. “Oh lady most pure,” said Josie. “I am heartily sorry for what I’ve done. I have been a sinner!” But she was a long way now from the stick-limbed girl in a shopcoat who had smiled innocently from behind the counter of Molloy’s shop, who had lined up every morning in the freezing corridors of the orphange to have her hair inspected for lice, who had clasped Culligan’s pendant lovingly in her palm. She was the woman who saw the brittleness of anything warm and comforting, the cruelty which was provoked by dependence. She gave the nun the performance of helplessness and weakness she craved. Since she had lived with him, her life at last had become her own, none of them could touch her. And now, she could ice over her emotions with ease and feel nothing. She stood outside herself and watched herself snivel and plead at the statue’s feet. She felt like laughing. One voice almost travelled downward to the real world crying, “Sister—where did you get the hairs on your chin? You’re a lovely-looking woman sister. I’d say Phil Brady would like you to take his thing in your hand when he’s finished with your underwear.” She held it back however and meekly followed the nun through the echoing corridors to the laundry where she was given a black overall and told to go and change straight away. “You’ll not slack here!” snapped the nun. “You’ll have no time for your satins here, I can tell you. Oh by the time you’re finished here those pretty little hands won’t be in any state to flaunt, my girl!”

  She stormed off and Josie stared down the corridor after her, thinking of nothing.

  The steam of the laundry billowed above the vats as woebegone fifteen-year olds who looked forty pushed baskets on creaking wheels. Josie Keenan, lest she become indolent, was regularly taken to the corridor in the nuns’ quarters, kitted out with a new overall, handed a toothbrush and a zinc bucket of soapy water and told to scrub until every single tile was sparkling clean. “Yessister!” replied Josie and set about her task without complaint. The nun lurked in the shadows hoping to apprehend her in a moment of inattention but Josie applied herself and thought of nothing else but her work. In the laundry, the girls quizzed her and spoke in vague, circumspect whispers of babies they had had in outhouses and ditches. Josie told them nothing of her own life. “Don’t tell them anything,” she repeated silently to herself. “Let nobody know anything.”

  It was only when its small helpless face came back to her that her inner strength waned. Its eyes kept coming and going when they spoke of these things and one day she found herself crying aloud to one of her workmates, “Stop it! Stop it! I don’t want to talk to you!” The young girl looked on in amazement, whitefaced. All she had said was, “There was a girl in here whose baby died on her.”

  Apart from the one incident, Josie merged anonymously into the workaday life of the laundry and slowly the extra punishments they gave her began to dwindle. She no longer was instructed to scrub toilets with toothbrushes or peel potatoes with scissors. The nun stopped hounding her and turned her attention to other burgeoning recalcitrants.

  At night the smell of women washed with kitchen soap turned Josie’s stomach.

  She left the window of t
he laundry open on a number of occasions to see if it would be noticed. On each occasion it was still open the following day.

  She made her decision to leave the convent six months after the nun had brought her there.

  Standing in the corridor, she could still see the blunt outline of the virgin. The black disc of the gong. She held her slippers in her hand and crept to the laundry. She climbed on the wicker basket and eased the window open. The night air wiped the clammy smell of the laundry off her face. It was a short drop to the ground. She was not afraid for she had planned it for so long and she knew every move she was going to make. She put the convent behind her and did not look back until she was far down the avenue. Its twin spires grinned evilly at her. She thought of all those sleeping soft white bodies, all those heaving little breasts. Oh Phil, oh Culligan, wouldn’t you all like that? Wouldn’t you now?

  Phil Brady’s face appeared at the window of the cottage, a grotesque mask lit by a candle. He clasped his hand over his mouth in horror. She knew that this time his fear would be greater than his desire, so she opened her blouse and took out one of her breasts for him, slowly kneading it with her fingers. “Please Josie,” he said. “You don’t know what that priest said to me. You don’t know what they can do.”

  Josie let him speak, then she took his face in her hands and whispered to him, “Oh Phil, I’ve missed you so much. You were so nice to me.”

  He crumbled like clay as she stroked his forehead and she said, “I’m going to need some money, Phil.”

  He looked mournfully at her. “Yes Josie,” he said.

  At first light she crept to the kitchen and took the stained bag from behind the sink. She put the notes into her slipper and closed the cottage door behind her, setting off for the town across the border. It took her over two hours to walk and her feet were sore and blistered because of the cheap slippers. She bought herself nylon stockings and shoes, as womanly as she could find to rid herself of the clutch of the convent. She treated herself to a large meal in the café with the jukebox. Then she went to the cinema where she spent two calm, soothing hours watching Alan Ladd trudge the black rainy streets of New York in his belted raincoat.

  After that, she took a taxi to the docks and waited for the rest of the evening in the terminal until she stepped up the gangway of the Liverpool ferry at ten o’clock that night.

  After a week in a boarding house in a dingy back street not far from the docks, Josie Keenan found herself standing in front of a fat-bellied Englishman with a cloth on his left shoulder who eyed her up and down and said to her, “You’ll do, gel. But you gotter remember—the blokes like a nice pretty barmaid. Get yourself a nice dress. I’ll pay for it. The blokes what comes into my place—they like a good time. Know what I mean? Doesn’t have to be anything serious, mind, but you get my drift.” “Yes,” replied Josie and thought of the nun tightening her grip on her wrist.

  Some days later she found herself pulling the brass pump handles on the counter of the bar in the Bunch of Grapes, bleary-eyed Scotsmen leaning over to touch her. Josie shrugged her shoulders and thrust their drinks at them. The owner put her up in a cosy room with no holy pictures or chipped saints, nothing but a solitary print of Blackpool illuminations adorning the wall.

  On her days off, she sauntered through the bustling streets of the city, the town of Carn far behind her. She painted her face and powdered herself. The girl of Molloy’s shop and the orphange belonged to another age and when they grabbed at her body or leered at her, it meant nothing to her, she had seen right to the heart of it with the old man.

  She wanted no pretence and soon they understood. They did not smooth it over with the respectability of trust and warmth. They pressed five pound notes into her hand and loitered outside the bar after closing time.

  She worked in Liverpool for ten years after that and did not leave for Manchester until it transpired that the Bunch of Grapes was to be closed by the brewery. She was given a week’s notice and a fortnight’s money. She found herself in a pub in Moss Side, following up an advertisement in the city’s evening paper. The black faces that stared at her from the shadows did not bother her and the next day she found herself talking across the counter to bright-shirted men from Trinidad and Tobago who rambled at length about tobacco leaves and their children, their eyes falling to her breasts as the alcohol robbed them slowly and steadily of their fragile restraint.

  She remained there for six more years, lying on the bed above the pub, listening to the sound of singsong accents as children played on the dilapidated playground in front of the high rise buildings. Then she was told that the pub had been purchased by a supermarket consortium. She was unemployed once more. She went on the hoof again with her adverts ringed in red marker but this time a replacement position did not surface with ease. “We really wanted someone younger,” they said.

  She searched for over a month without success and then she began to worry. She had saved very little money. She had no home of her own. She could not live forever on the bit she had put away. One day, after a particularly fruitless day’s searching, she was amazed to find herself crying. “There’s nothing here for me now,” she said to herself but fought off the dark feeling of helplessness that was moving in on her. As she lay in bed that night, she thought of Carn over and over again. She thought of Phil Brady, his face muscles jerking as he heaved above her. She went to the mirror and examined herself. “I’ve got to live somehow,” she said to herself. “In Carn the old men would have nobody. The nuns and priests have seen to that. I don’t care about them now. They’ve had their day with me. I’m no sixteen-year old child now. Let them try to tackle me now.”

  The following day she went to a department store and bought herself a selection of satin underwear. She laid it on the bed then tried it on. She examined her skin again, for blemishes.

  “There’s nothing else for me to do,” she said.

  The following day she went down to the booking office in Deansgate and bought herself a one-way ticket to Ireland.

  And now she found herself standing in the lounge bar of the Railway Hotel trying to make sense of what she saw before her. Middle-aged women argued over the most appropriate dressing for a salad niçoise as their well-nourished children cavorted brashly. Above the entrance, flags fluttered gaily and announcements crackled from loudspeakers in the main street. Long lines of parked cars stretched for a mile outside the town.

  It seemed as if the town of Carn, the town in which she had been born and reared, a huddled clump of windswept grey buildings split in two by a muddied main street, had somehow been spirited away and supplanted by a thriving, bustling place which bore no resemblance whatever to it.

  She left the hotel and walked to The Diamond where a young girl in dancing costume tightened her thin body and kicked her legs high in the air as a row of adjudicators on the makeshift stage consulted their clipboards judiciously. Many of the old shopfronts had been replaced. Any that she remembered had been completely repainted and refurbished. Josie could not believe her eyes when she found herself standing outside the pub where her father, the Buyer Keenan, had spent many of his waking hours. Once called the Greyhound Bar, now a neon sign spread in an arc above the door read the TURNPIKE INN. A poster advertised Crazy Crazy Nites.

  When she came to the graveyard she felt the pain growing inside her again as she stared at the gravestones of her father and mother.

  Michael Joseph Keenan, R.I.P.

  Kathleen Josephine Keenan 1898–1946 R.I.P.

  For a split second she saw her own death, a gunmetal face fixed on the sky, all around the faces and voices of Carn as she had known it. The graveyard overlooked the town. Below her, she could see the crowds streaming from the dancehall, The Sapphire Ballroom.

  The fields about her were specked with forget-me-nots and a long-forgotten day came into her mind, her mother with a basket bending down to pick them in the same fields, Josie by her side in white socks and a pink check dress.

  Jo
sie Keenan had come home to the town of Carn, the only home she knew.

  V

  “Are you going to lie there all day? Do you think I have nothing better to do than run up and down after you—is that it?

  Sadie Rooney’s mother shut the door loudly behind her and with that the Aston Martin in which Sadie and her companion Steve McQueen had been splicing the wind together, dissipated like smoke and Sadie’s eyes travelled the red flock wallpaper before coming to rest on the weary face of the Infant of Prague on the mantelpiece. She shook her head and moistened the dry roof of her mouth with her tongue, then tumbled onto the floor and stood at the window scratching her arm as she waited for some sort of order to come into her mind.

  Outside the town was cranking into life. Indeed, thought Sadie, life is right.

  The words of the butcher came to her. “Do you know,” he said, “this is the best wee town in Ireland. I mean, you have everything you want here. You have a picture house. And the dances. You couldn’t meet friendlier people. And what about the celebrations last year for Matt Dolan? No other town has anything like that! The bands and the parades!”

  Carn, thought Sadie, Carn, Carn, Carn. Nowhere but Carn. Carn—the beginning and the end. Nothing else in the whole wide world but it and its cramped streets.

  She could see it all unwinding from her bedroom. Jacko the grocer taking out his cabbage crates whistling. Mrs Wilson screwing up her nose. “Are them cabbage fresh?” She looked at him as if she suspected him of injecting them with a deadly poison. “Fresh? Fresh, Mrs? Did you ever know me to sell bad cabbage? There you are.” He heaped two fat-headed cabbages into her arms and off she went, beaming. Then along came Grouse Monaghan and urinated on a lampost. In the doorway of the supermarket, Mrs Reilly and Mrs McKenna swopped domestic tales. Sadie knew their style. “I have awful trouble with Declan and this constipation. He was on the pot for nearly a whole hour last night, nearly a whole hour I waited—and do you know what I got for my trouble?”