The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  johnny johnny all gone and dead, now only cold air and light instead. never been this alone before, since johnny’s angel came through the door. johnny’s angel touched my hand, then johnny’s angel screamed and ran. johnny’s angel’s hair was black, johnny’s angel wore no mask: mammy’s face broken in blood, now johnny’s angel came for her. no voice left now to answer mine, no way to know if she is lying. mammy’s approaching, arms outstretched, raise up my hands to protect my neck: so terrified to leave this world, cold and white outside if i uncurl.

  When dawn had broken on the following morning, certain of the women gathered beyond the gates of the house. Like a stone that had been rolled back, the front door hung open. A young teenage boy gazed from beside his grandmother at tiny shards of glass glittering on the doorstep. Thirty-year-old lino, worn and threadbare, ran down the hall. Some could remember standing on it the day a young girl ran home from school. Some remembered a coffin being carried down the stairs. And the shadow of a broken man watching from behind lace as his daughter laughed and raced after her brother in the street. They shouted her name over and over, gazed in disbelief at old Mrs Whelan who had brought them here. The old man at the back of the crowd leaned on his stick to watch.

  ‘Give me your shoulder’s Johnny,’ she said as, leaning heavily on her grandson and not knowing what to expect, Mrs Whelan led them painfully and cautiously up the path and into the hallway that stood as silent as a deserted churchyard in the early spring sunlight.

  PART TWO

  Victoriana

  This is how I would sketch a self-portrait: barely enough light to discern the features of a figure stooped at the edge of the bed, the white bars of a cot outlined in the dimness, as still and grey as those new photographs. The child is so small as to be no more than a single brush stroke, a curve of blanket in the background, and yet her very smallness makes me, the figure, seem small too. I am so aware at this moment, as I listen to her last reluctant cry fading into a pattern of sleep, that I suddenly know that I am just one moment in history, one of an infinite line of fathers who watched at evening’s end their children drift to sleep. They stretch behind me and before me, I as much a speck in their minds as they are in mine. And I feel so dwarfed by time, so insignificant and yet unique, taking my place here before the light goes, before I rise, closing the loft door softly, and descend to where my young wife lifts her head in the candlelight, smiles and looks back at the sewing in her lap.

  A brown dog nestles near the fire, bothered by the heat but too lazy to move. He stretches on his stomach as though his limbs were amputated, lifts his head sideways to observe me and waits. I neither move nor speak but he knows it’s his time. He rises, shakes himself and pads towards the door. I lift the latch and stare out. The wooded fields behind the cottages are quiet tonight, a few lights flickering from the farmhouse across from the barracks. The last tram waits to return to the city, the horses’ breath discernible in the jets of gaslight at the convent entrance.

  I look back at my wife, my daughter, my home. The few pieces of furniture we’ve gathered together, the gift of a mirror hung in a corner. And I’m suddenly scared for a reason I cannot comprehend. The dog brushes past me and looks back, the trees creak in the wind. I close the door and step outside, knowing the path I will take, the other me that I will become – younger, with an obsessive hunger. A carriage jangles on its ascent of Washerwoman’s Hill. I avoid the route it will take, the road which swoops down through hawthorn bushes to the bridge. I take to the fields instead with an echo of that same illicit thrill. My wife and child retreat. For twenty minutes or more I will forget them, forget the present, the comfort of knowing a home. It’s that old craving, diluted but still not cured, sending me stalking the woods by the back of Bridget’s father’s cottage down to where the streams meet, to the wall of the asylum which is the only home left to Bridget now. I want to forget as much as I need to remember, I’m torn between worlds like a hare caught by hounds. But I’ll stand under those oaks by the stream’s edge, just beyond the sphere of light from the gatekeeper’s lodge, and remember her voice, her eyes as they stared about the walls of her room, remember the trickle of sweat that lodged between her breasts, until even the dog whines for home.

  It ends like this: a downward curve of road past a crest of old cottages and a shabby field littered with the ruins of hen-runs where clipped strands of rusted wire fence the weeds in. To the left is the old estate where Joanie told me the woman locked her daughter up and, to the right, the half-flattened walls of mud and rock that once formed two-roomed labourers’ cottages. Among the debris and glass a few scraps of wallpaper have survived a decade of exposure beside a tumbled down chimney breast smeared in graffiti.

  Only one cottage stands intact on the right of that last slope into the river valley, the back gable unchanged for a century while at the side and front a room seems to have been added on or rebuilt with each passing decade. The building splays out like a drunken footstep, all styles of brickwork with twists and unrelated curves and crevices. No neighbours are left to complain of by-laws, no building inspectors tramping the yard with measuring tapes and notebooks.

  The road falls steeply then to a lone set of traffic lights, to the left of which most of what Joanie claimed was an old famine burial mound has been bulldozed to make space for a cramped terrace of Noddyland town houses piggybacking each other back up the slope. To the right, the carriageway veers up towards the old village, railings sealing off the narrow gorge where a stream crosses the last remaining meadow perched incongruously among the factories and roads and houses. Across the road only the pillars remain of the gates of the big house where Joanie claimed her great grandmother lived. Beside them a meat refrigeration plant hums under floodlights, the air circulating like a chilled hand among the upturned carcasses. And finally to the left, past a pub and then a half mile of twisted cemetery railings, the road leans back upwards into the city.

  I know that junction and those lights. On nights that summer when the last of the pub traffic accelerated up the carriageway I stood with Joanie arguing among the broken saplings ensnared by wire on the traffic island.

  ‘I’m not going back, I’m not!’ she’d argue. ‘I hate that house. My granny like a crooked beetle stalking the gaff. I’ll sleep on a park bench or where it’s dry under the bridge, but I’m not going back in there.’

  One night she had snatched up my tie when we were dressing and hidden it among her clothes. She produced it there, and wrapping it through the wire mesh protecting a slaughtered cherry blossom, bound her hands to it, her bobbing hair lit by the glare of a dozen headlights. She turned her back on me, pressed against the wire and bit into the cold steel with her teeth. Car horns were beeping on both sides of us, shouts from open windows, heads turning in the back seats. I thanked God that the lights were green, knowing at any moment they would force the cars to stop.

  What the hell was I doing within sight of her own house with a nineteen-year-old girl who was acting deranged? I banged my fist against my forehead and looked around, thinking of escape.

  ‘You’re a crazy bitch,’ I suddenly shouted. ‘Sleep wherever you want. What the hell do I care?’

  The lights turned red. A blonde in a low-cut dress was staring at us from a Volvo. I could read her lips as she spoke to the woman in the passenger seat.

  ‘You fucked me, didn’t you?’ Joanie shouted over her shoulder.

  ‘I wasn’t the first.’

  ‘Or the best.’

  I stepped in front of the Volvo before the lights changed. I was half-way across when I glanced back. I could see Joanie’s face peering through the long strands of brown hair, her eyes suddenly terrified at being abandoned. I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to go back but could not leave her. The lights turned green and the cars on the inner lane began to speed past. I shook my head and started to grin. She smiled back, exaggerating her bonded posture. The blonde beeped on her horn. I jumped out of her way as the car took off, both d
river and passenger glaring back.

  ‘No more blonde than my arse,’ Joanie said. ‘I bet you she had a black box bigger than an aeroplane.’

  I could feel headlights sweeping over me as I laughed. It felt like those old films about escapees cornered between the barbed wire fences of a prison camp.

  ‘You’re going home, do you hear, and no more nonsense.’

  She nodded her head.

  ‘I can’t untie myself.’

  I loosened my tie and we kissed, a rare event in public. She fixed her black skirt and we walked up the far side of the hill together, gradually moving apart as we neared the windows of her granny’s cottage. She crossed the road in front of me without glancing back. I walked on towards the crest of the hill and stopped in the shadow of an old wall. I lit a cigarette. Below me in the dip near the river I could see the ruins of other big houses, the roofs long stripped for lead, the walls tumbled in, trees growing in the windows, an old notice on a wall protesting at some local factory closure. I wondered how long it would be before they were cleared for yet another row of dinky town houses. It was hard to imagine anybody wanting to live at that halfway point between the city and nowhere. Security vans criss-crossed the industrial estate on the far hill. Six minutes passed before the door of the cottage opened and Joanie’s little sister emerged, sleepy-eyed as if bribed to leave her bed. She glanced at the darkened window of her granny’s bedroom, then ran down past the traffic lights and swung left towards the all-night garage opposite the cemetery. She was nine years of age. Her sneakers made no sound as I watched her fade into a blob under the ranks of amber lights. She was no concern of mine but I always waited till she came back, breathless, clutching crisps and chocolates for herself and, in their anonymous black cases, three horror videos for Joanie to sit up and watch.

  I was born at the tail-end of a famine. Not the great one, just a minor, local affair where only scores died. Wasted bodies of children wrapped in sackcloth being carried by fathers past the cabin where my mother cried with the pain of birth. McAndrew, the landlord’s agent, offered transportation to St John’s in Newfoundland. My father brought us as far as the quayside in Sligo, queued with his neighbours in the sleet and looked at the ship.

  ‘I’d sooner sink to hell than sail in that,’ he told McAndrew.

  ‘You’re welcome to hell,’ McAndrew spat back, ‘and every last cottier with you.’

  My father came closer to hell than his neighbours to Newfoundland. Cholera broke out when they had put to sea only eight days. Over half were dead, dumped at night overboard, before they sighted land again. Famished children with blue, wind-lashed faces staring back at the waves where their parents’ corpses rode. Three times the ship tried to land, three times she was driven off. The captain died, two sailors who tried to swim for shore were shot by guards on the beach. They anchored on an island off the coast. A priest came out in a rowing boat and blessed them standing up while his oarsmen steadied the craft. The few remaining neighbours knelt, calmed by the sight of him like Jesus on the water. He gave a sign and the oarsmen began to pull, his hands still making the sign of the cross until their cries were no louder to him than the screeching of sea birds.

  Hell, on the other hand, was dark as a rabbit burrow, twelve of us in an attic with a shattered skylight stuffed with papers to keep the rain out. Below in the streets ran creatures dressed in the scrapings of a dozen garments, battered top hats, skirts, anything that would shield them from the cold. Dublin was an alley-way with a million starving faces which I was led through clutching my sisters’ skirts. An old woman with a bottom lip like a bloated crimson eel, a man missing his chin who swayed back and forth in a doorway. My mother pined for the sky above Sligo, my father for the plot he’d once rented, coming home late from other men’s fields to tend his own few yards of rock and soil. My brothers pined for food, my sisters to grow upwards and out and become the wives of soldiers. I pined for a white space, somewhere clean, a corner without noise or clutter, where I might not be threatened or made to feel small.

  Hegerty lived on the landing below us with a whole room to himself crammed with books and a black cloak he hung up carefully whenever he entered the house. He donned it again to tutor the offspring of shopkeepers, walking miles back from their houses to his own room, cursing any child who made a noise outside his door. Below us in a passageway he held a tiny school for scholars, a shed with half a door and barely light to make the print out. He hounded the street to seek pupils, to beat the outline of Latin and Greek into their heads. Those parents who could afford to paid, mostly he earned money by writing letters for strangers.

  When I saw his door ajar I would creep in, in awe of the space of it, the luxury of being able to stretch out your hands. Often Hegerty would look up and roar, sometimes he just nodded and I could linger.

  Outside on the landing knots of older boys fell down the steps, screaming and wrestling like a tattered octopus. I could hear the shouts of my brothers, stronger than me, real men of twelve and thirteen bursting on to the street below. I was lost among such a crowd, a tongue-tied stutterer, a weak coward. I joined in only when they had taunted me to, as lost among that cluster of limbs as I was desperate to merge into them. That’s how I remember myself, bare feet slipping on the cobbles as I tried to keep up with the crowd, a thin snail of snot eternally lingering on my lip as I shuffled along in the cold.

  Only once did I prove my courage to them, on a December night when the light filtered in a dozen colours through the high stained windows of the Black Church.

  ‘Three times around that and you’ll meet the Devil,’ an older boy cried. A carriage had stopped outside, a Protestant lady late for service. The boy ran with a scream once around it and then twice as we watched. He slowed, then ran on, weaker now, before gathering speed and suddenly turning to race away towards the canal leading into Broadstone station.

  ‘He was that close,’ an impressed youth whispered. ‘What if he couldn’t have stopped and Lucifer had sucked him in?’

  Suddenly I surged forward and began to run. I could hear the shouts of derision and then the warnings from my brothers. But I felt eerily calm as I ran. I was not strong or good at thieving, but I did not have to be. Because I now knew who I was going to be, the boy who had run to meet the Devil. Twice around I went and I could see their blurred faces, my brothers being held back, their mouths opening and closing. But I heard nothing except my blood pounding. I would never again need to hide in a corner, never fear a kick on the landing once I’d met the Devil. On the next corner I’ll meet him, I told myself, on the next and the next. How often did I circle that church, the solemn organ playing, a huddle of terrified boys watching. ‘Where are you?’ I kept beseeching, as the world spun white and spacious and warm and remote.

  When I came to they were crowded in a circle, bleached faces with awed expressions. ‘What did he look like?’ they asked. I should have felt pride, but I just knew disappointment and the same monotonous hunger. I said nothing on the way home as they jostled around me. Hegerty’s door was open. He stood surprised at our silence.

  ‘I saw the Devil,’ I told him.

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He was all white empty space,’ I said. ‘Empty space waiting to be filled.’

  What was it about the mobile libraries that summer? The half-cracked spinster who had pottered around in charge for centuries was sick and a peaceful anarchy blossomed in her absence. The public service embargo had lasted so long we had all grown sick of one another’s faces. Then suddenly in one month Joanie and three other school-leavers were thrust in among us. The yard thrived on their youth and life, drivers waylaying girls with buckets of water, impromptu singsongs on the vans we were meant to be cleaning. The trucks were battered blue antiques, throbbing out filthy diesel fumes, freezing cold in winter. The office was a lean-to built on to the front of an old warehouse that smelt of wax and dankness and had a cellar door leading down through a grim network of passageways to
the city’s sewers.

  That summer every other girl there seemed to wear jeans, pastel shades so delicate one could trace the curve of panties as they climbed up into the vans. On the morning Joanie started work I had thrown the issue on board with the fine box we never used and the handful of reserved books, when Billy the driver came out with Joanie behind him dressed in a long loose black dress.

  ‘Mind yourself,’ Billy said as he stood back to let her climb in. She gathered the dress in her hand as she put her foot on the step, then swung her other leg forward up into the van. We both caught the brief flash of a white stocking top marking out a ridge of pale flesh bordered by a suspender. Billy whistled.

  ‘Will I be safe with the pair of you?’ she said, kneeling on the driver’s seat to look down at us. Billy ruffled my hair as we climbed up to join her.

  ‘You will with me, but this lad won’t be if he starts wearing them yokes.’

  She settled herself down on the long passenger seat, her shoes kicked off, legs already up on the dashboard touching the glass. Billy winked at me as I squeezed in beside her.

  ‘I never wear jeans or tights,’ she said, ‘I hate them. They’re not …’ She paused for the right word. ‘Victorian.’

  There were four drivers in all but it was understood that Billy and I were a team together. He was bald and short and just the wrong side of fifty. A Scot who shared a spotless apartment with a lover, Graham, who sometimes came down to the yard. Watching them confer on something, I found it hard to imagine them making love. I just knew they would do it quietly and very slowly, with great tenderness and humour.