Carn

by Patrick McCabe

Benny and Joe spent very few weekends in Carn after that. Joe had bought himself a Suzuki and together they found themselves in the cities and larger towns of the north. Wherever their favourite bands were to be found, they made their way there, standing at the back of the dancehall with their helmets in hand, until they eventually left with local girls who prodded them with questions about their bikes and where they came from. “We’re the Carn Angels,” said Benny with a smile. “Eh Joe?”

  “Si senor—whatever you do, don’t mess with ze Carn Angels.”

  They sat with the girls outside their tent as Joe strummed a tune. “You’re great on the guitar,” they said, “there’s no fellas around here like you boys. Where are you going next? Can we come?”

  In the city of Dublin they sauntered through the shops that had begun to spring up around the Dandelion market and the girls moved closer to them as they priced bottles of patchouli and Indian pipes, the longhairs passing them across the counter with the misty-eyed nod of understanding that had of late become an international semaphore. They went to parties in the city’s flatland where the air was thick with the smell of Lebanese Red dope and the sound of Pink Floyd meandered until dawn. They sat in cafés and drank endless cups of coffee.

  “I wonder what Maisie would do with an auld joint, eh?” laughed Benny.

  When they found themselves on the highways of Europe, it seemed that Carn was a distant place that belonged only in the dim recesses of memory. They sat in Dam Square and watched the pigeons fluttering into the sky like leaves as moustachioed policemen strolled casually past them.

  Joe drummed on his helmet and said, “Beats Belturbet of a Friday night anyhow.”

  They cruised as far as Istanbul and then the money ran out.

  “I told you youse’d come to a bad end,” mocked Joe in his Maisie Lynch voice. “Youse had no business running to them places. You could get a class of a disease out yonder.”

  They spent their last night in a camp outside Paris. The moon rose up above them and foreign voices clacked in the nearby tents as Benny lay back on the bank of the river and slugged the last of the cider. He turned to Joe who was lying beside him and as the flagon spun into the sky above him, Benny said, “Are you all right there Joe boy?”

  “Never was better senor.”

  And when they hit home three days later the birds were getting ready in the trees and on the wires and Blast Morgan was just beginning his tour of the gutters and pavements of main street. They grinned sleepily as they saw yet another trophy had climbed to the top of the pyramid in the photographer’s window, and high up on the hill the first lights were coming on in James Cooney’s new extension which had just received news of a massive order from Saudi Arabia.

  VII

  The Sacred Heart of Jesus looked down on Josie Keenan and outside the wind blew across the Hairy Mountains. Affixed to the oleograph, a small red lamp sent its shadows about the room. “I’d appreciate you leaving it there, we were reared with it like,” the farmer had said when giving her the key. The flowing golden locks fell on Christ’s shoulders and he pitied her. Once upon a time those same eyes had spent their days overseeing the daily life of God-fearing decent people, who toiled and trudged long hours in the fields and returned only at night to be fortified by griddle cake and buttermilk before falling on their knees to give thanks for their little bit of ground and the strength in their limbs. Eyes that kept a constant vigil in a town that had yet to know even the prosperity of the railway never mind meat plants, ruled then with an iron fist by a red-faced bull of a clergyman who rode his mare with his riding crop in hand, who could by his own admission perform miracles. Cassie, Josie’s mother had known that town in her youth and had heard at first hand the story of the miracle he had performed, instructing a distraught mother to put her sick infant into a barrel of holy water to cure her consumption, and not a whimper out of the people when it died three days later, of pneumonia. A long way from the Carn of the Turnpike Inn and the fluttering bunting.

  The eyes of the Sacred Heart had looked kindly down on Cassie Keenan every night of her life as she knelt on the stone floor of the kitchen where her husband lay snoring, her whispers drifting like moths out into the silence as she pleaded with Him for a glimpse into the world to which He belonged, a world that was blue and never-ending, where her and her one wee Josie would fuse as one and nothing bad would touch them ever again.

  And when he went away to the markets and fairs, she combed her daughter’s hair and said a Hail Holy Queen into her ear for she knew that the kindness in the eyes on the picture above the fireplace was the only hope she had.

  Even at the end, Josie’s father had turned to those eyes and that face too, clawing at the grave as he cried out, “Don’t take my Cassie away from me, please Jesus please give me my Cassie back.”

  But there was no reply then either, not a finger twitch, the same immobile stare, and somewhere beyond, her mother, pale and serene beneath a blue sky in a meadow that never ended, waiting for her daughter to come and be a part of her.

  And when the Buyer Keenan called her to come to him in the days after her burial, she did not hear.

  Cassie, Cassie can you hear me calling you come to me Cassie!

  Cassie lay with her arms folded on her chest and if he called for all the days that would ever exist she would never hear him, and that was how the Sacred Heart made the Buyer Keenan sorry for all the wrongs he had perpetrated on her and his child.

  His face loomed up before Josie, his bottom lip quivering. He reached out to her with an unsteady hand. “I didn’t know pet. You were the apple of my eye. I swear I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. You don’t know what it’s like for a man. I’d kill myself dead if I thought I hurt you.”

  Josie tried to turn away from it, but then she thought of her classmates at school, all those frail bodies in patched dresses, grown now like herself to women and some of them already with her mother.

  Was that where they were or was it all a dream? A blue and never-ending place? Or a handful of bones and a grinning skull, a stopover for worms under a cross on a hill outside the town. Is that what you are Molloy? You’re a long way from it now, with your flashlight shaking and your bitter words. The side of Josie’s face tightened and she stroked it to ease the pain.

  The gas fire in the corner flickered. On the sideboard, Josie smiled in a London street, behind her the teeming crowds and flashing neon of the city. Her skirt was pulled tight against her behind, her bosom visible just above the neckline of her sweater. She held her sunglasses delicately in her right hand. In those days she was Gina Lollobrigida. She had flicked through a magazine and read that La Lollo had prayed to the Sacred Heart as a girl, and asked Him to send her a doctor husband, fame and a lovely daughter. And by the age of twenty-one, she owned a princely mansion and had married a millionaire. But the Sacred Heart was not so flush twice and she had to settle for a room in Moss Side where the club across the street played Connie Francis records into the small hours and, to the sound of girlish innocence, Josie stared at the ceiling as they travelled her body smelling of tobacco and guilt. Cassie was always in her mind at those times in a happy place that would not end, where her father smiled down, clean-shaven and said softly, “There’s nothing, only goodness in this world and you Josie pet, you’re the one and only apple of Willie Keenan’s eye.”

  She went into the bedroom and sat in front of the mirror. She brushed her hair and drew an arc over one eye with a pencil. She pouted. Mmmmm—ah! She stroked her profile. She thought of the pin-ups in the daily papers. Kittenish women curled up in straw. The way she had been when they smiled at her in a room above a Manchester bar.

  She thought of the first night a Carn man had come to the cottage in the Hairy Mountains. Like Phil Brady of years before, a frail body soon to be invaded by the moloch of age. Standing in the doorway, a cigarette shaking in his hand. “Maybe I could come back another time . . .”

  Josie knew.

  And the word of her
knowledge soon travelled among the old and lonely men of the town and its hinterland.

  She gave them the dark womblike world they wanted, drew them further into the web of their own weakness which they hated but could not best, she took them into the corners of their souls best left alone. And anything she felt within herself, she kept hidden from them. Only once had it got the better of her, when one of them had drooled like an infant at her breast, taking the nipple in his mouth and crying mama mama.

  She emptied her stomach into the sink that night crying, Why please what makes them do it Jesus Christ sick—

  Since then, she kept their gnarled obsessions as far from her as she could.

  But now as she thought of it, the disgust crept up on her from that time. She dabbed two powder spots on her cheeks and laughed. She told herself it was a laugh that couldn’t lose. She laughed louder and tears came to her eyes. Then she stopped laughing altogether. She fell on the bed and tried to stop the feeling that was coming over her, that nothing was ever any good, that nothing would ever be any good again. It was a feeling she had come to know well, and when they started again, she felt her hands begin to shake. The voices crept up on her, in no hurry, whispering in the distance at the back of her mind. Come in for your tea Josie—isn’t our Josie a wee pet? He passed away an hour ago sister, the poor child she’s as well to know nothing. Tell her he’s gone on a holiday poor thing and her with no mother . . .

  An acidic taste came into her mouth. She went to the dresser and took down the bottle. She emptied two of the capsules into her hand and washed them down with a vodka.

  She stared out at the bending branches of the hazel that reached towards the wreck of the railway and the town and, as the wind whistled through the leaves, she held back any tears she felt rising and saw the sunlight on the river again as her mother stood on a bucket half-buried in the field and snipped the catkins cleanly with a pair of scissors, handing them down to her. She bunched them in her arms and smiled as her mother stepped down gingerly and wiped the yellowish motes from her apron before they set off once more for the town.

  I might as well do it now, go to that place where you are, that blue place far away from here. I haven’t a thing to lose in the town of Carn or the world.

  Then the drug began to cloud around her and her hard-edged thoughts softened, all the blame and anger within her eased and she felt nothing as she repeated the words again and again. After spilling clay on the little hands and the little toes, there was nothing more to lose.

  The clock ticked on the mantelpiece. Inky clouds drifted desultorily across the anaemic face of the moon. Josie waited until the second gentle tap came before she got up. The man in the doorway looked about him uneasily, clutching his cap. She did not speak, and when he did, terrified by the silence, the words blurted out of him. “I heard . . . a man you know told me . . .”

  Josie smiled and said, “Come in.”

  She took his cap from him and led him inside. She poured a drink and handed it to him.

  “You’re very quiet,” she said to him. The glass was unsteady in his hand.

  “So you heard about me?”

  She moved closer to him. “You’re shy,” she said in a soft voice.

  The man nodded and turned away.

  “Oh now, don’t be like that.”

  She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the nose. He reddened and she laughed. His fingers strayed on his cheek.

  “What do you think of my house?” she said, in a deeper huskier voice.

  “It’s . . . it’s a fine wee place . . .”

  “And my wallpaper? Do you like that? I put it up all by myself.” She looked deep into his eyes. “All by my little self. And the pictures. Look—Venice By Night. Venice—what would the likes of us know about Venice?”

  She laughed mockingly and he sighed with relief. Josie went on, “We’d look well rowing up the river in one of them gon-doh-lahs, eh? Look, here’s a picture more in our line. The Sacred Heart. Names here for all the family and a big space at the top for mammy and daddy. That’d be more for us now and never mind them swanky foreign places. Eh?”

  She stared at him. He frowned and his eyes fell. Then all he could see were the red shadows of the Sacred Heart lamp as she breathed on his cheek. For a long time Josie did nothing, just stood there stroking the side of his face with her long red fingernail. His lips tightened, he tried to fight it off but each stroke whittled away his resistance. He wanted to collapse before her power. There was nothing he could do to stop her when she began removing his clothes, prolonging each movement as if to torment him. She ran her tongue along her bottom lip. The red shadows floated around her. He stood in the centre of the room like a pale sheared sheep. Josie stood back from him and stared. He whimpered. She stroked his shoulders gently, kneading the flesh. He began to cry.

  “If my wife . . . you wouldn’t tell? Would you?”

  “Ssh.” Josie put a finger to her lips.

  She led him into the bedroom. She lay him on the bed and stood over him. The sound of her breathing filled the room. She began to remove her own clothing. Her dress swished to the floor. Her breasts fell. She straddled his body and began to massage the parchment of his back. Small quivers ran down his spine. She bent down and whispered into his ear. “What’s your name? Mmm? Have you got a little name for me?”

  “Pat,” he stammered. “It’s Pat . . . Pat Lacey—for the love of God tell no one . . .”

  “I knew I’d seen you before. I saw you in the paper.”

  She ran her soothing fingers through his hair, occasionally giving it sharp little tugs. She could feel his heartbeart racing.

  “Is this what he told you about? This is what you expected—isn’t it?”

  “For the love of God, don’t breathe a word to anyone, I’ll pay you anything you want . . .”

  She saw the tears trickling from his eyes.

  “I’m sorry—I don’t mean to be like this.”

  He took out a handkerchief and wiped them. She ran her fingers through his hair.

  “I’m not a bad man, Josie,” he said. “I try to fight it. I know it’s wrong. I have everything. A good family, a lovely daughter. There’s nothing I want for. There’s people in this town would die for me. But it isn’t like they think it is. Sometimes it goes wrong, doesn’t it? I loved her Josie. I loved her like any man should love a woman. But women can’t understand everything about a man. Sometimes—sometimes something fades away. We don’t argue. My wife and I . . . we don’t lay a finger on each other. These things get inside my head Josie and I don’t know how they get there. I never touched a woman until I was thirty years of age. That’s the way it was when I was growing up. These things in my head—I try to stop them coming. But there are times I can’t. They take me over. I think of you—the way you know. Like no other woman can. It’s like I wake up out of a bad dream and then I’m here—in this house. It makes me afraid. If it ever gets out that I’m like this . . . Mr Cooney or the priest—if they found out Josie . . .”

  He gripped her forearm fearfully. Josie smiled.

  “What would they do, Pat love? What would they do if they found out what you liked?”

  Without warning she slapped him across the face. His tears stained the pink bedspread. Outside the wind howled. The bedsprings creaked. She stroked his forehead. She dried his tears with her sleeve.

  “I don’t know how it started. I was caught one time. I was only young, Josie. I didn’t know. The priest—in the school—he caught me in the toilet. I had a picture. A picture of a woman. He caught me with it. I was half-naked there in the toilet and he caught me with it. It was like I told you—a bad dream. I came out of the dream and he was standing there. He pushed me out of the toilet. I fell. Then he took the picture and pushed it into my face—over and over again. He started kicking me. He couldn’t stop himself, there was spit on his mouth. He just kept kicking. It did something to me that time. I know it did. He beat me because of her and he beat m
e till I couldn’t stand. He was afraid of her and he took it out on me, Josie. He told me the picture would haunt me till the day I died. Maybe that’s why I am the way I am, Josie.”

  “Ssh,” Josie soothed.

  “I know it wouldn’t be like this if I was away someplace. Anywhere. I know Cooney doesn’t give a curse for me. He uses people like me. I’m not stupid Josie. That’s the only thing I ever did with my life—a football club. That’s all I have. I should have left this town. I’ve lived here all my life. I never seen places. I never gave myself a chance. I should’ve left a long time ago . . . I saw nothing, Josie. The football club—what is it? What is to me or anyone else?”

  She touched the nape of his neck with her hand. Hard pimples pocked the reddish skin. He trembled as he wept on her chest.

  Josie was cold. The wind rattled the window. For a split second she stood outside of herself and looked down, then turned away in horror from what she saw, her tongue licking an old man’s ear as she cooed, “There there. Who’s a little baba? Who’s a little bitty-baba?” and the sound of Pat Lacey’s whimpering increased as he covered his face with his hands to hide out all the world.

  VIII

  In Carn Poultry Products, the procession of claws continued past Sadie Rooney, the glazed eyes of the inverted fowl fixed on the ceiling girders as the deejay ranted breathlessly from the wall speakers. Only occasionally did Sadie bother to cock her ear to catch the name of a singer or the position of a song in the charts. Across from her the frenzied topic of discussion was the forthcoming factory outing to Kilkenny. Fact and fiction overlapped as incidents from the past were embellished with glee. The removal of the foreman’s trousers, the ducking of the office girl in the swimming pool. They shook their heads and wiped the tears from their eyes. Sadie smiled along with them but she knew only too well that they would eagerly disown it all in the morning and secretly longed for the day when they would toss the nylon overall in a corner, curse Farrell the foreman yet again and walk away from it all for the last time. Much of it Sadie no longer heard, but when Una Lacey announced her engagement over the metal whirr of the assembly line, her words went right through Sadie like well-aimed bullets. “We finally got around to it, Sadie. Are you not going to congratulate me? It was eighty pounds!”