The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘Anything I stole I stole for you, I spent on you. Did you see me with a scrap of new clothes, did you ever know about all the evenings I walked here so I could even spend the bus fare on you?’

  I heard her footsteps descend. I put my hand on the door. Instead of painted wood, for a moment I imagined her skin slightly glistening after we had made up, had found an excuse to carry on. And I knew that, even as I had waited in the gents and cursed her walking along the quays, part of me had already been anticipating our reunion in the bed. When I reached the window she was walking across the bridge, her shoulders straight as if she knew she was being watched, her brown hair, the way I loved it, waving back.

  Bridget’s bedroom was plain. A small window was set deeply in the wall, the wooden lattice spilling its shadow like a crucifix across the stone flags. I paused awkwardly beside the bed and tried to kiss her but she pulled away.

  ‘Why did you ask me here?’ I said.

  She shrugged her shoulders. Her eyes had lost that unease. They seemed cold as though staring at something beyond me. She gave the same smile I had only seen hinted at before. I put my hands on her shoulders and she sat on the white linen bedspread. When I began to undress her, she shrugged my hands crossly away.

  ‘I can do that myself,’ she snapped and, keeping her eyes on my face, began to unbutton her dress. She was naked when she lifted the blanket to climb in and turned on her side as though oblivious to my presence and ready to sink into a long-awaited sleep. Nervously I undressed. Her behaviour was erratic, I was not sure what she would do next. When I climbed in beside her would she feign sleep or scream for the neighbours? Would I be trapped here by men with pitchforks and sticks while she sobbed innocently in the corner? She had left an oil lamp on the small stool beside the bed. I debated whether or not to extinguish it. I wished to see her naked and yet felt I would have more courage in the darkness. I quenched the lamp. That night would compensate for the hundreds spent alone in Shallon House, for the thousands of slights to remind me of my place. Now I wanted her and all I could feel was my want. There was nothing I would not have promised for her to let me join her in that bed and, I realized with a chill, nothing I would not do to keep her there till I was finished, no matter how hard she might plead to escape.

  I lifted the rough blanket and climbed in. It was cool beneath me. I lay still, staring at the whitewashed ceiling while I sensed the warmth emanating from her skin a few bare inches from my side. My penis had grown hard and suddenly I wanted it over, now while the strength was in me. I felt a terror that I would stall, grow limp before I had even touched her flesh. Again, as in that dream, I felt as if I had stepped outside this time and world. Had I seduced her, had she led me here or was there something else which neither of us could control, a devious god, a retarded creator playing games with us? What was she thinking as she lay there, what did she expect of me? Every inch of me yearned to roll into her warmth. It was like clinging to the edge of a slope, knowing you were about to fall, and as I turned I could sense her fear, filling the entire room, an overwhelming aura of apprehension. I expected her to push me away but instead she clung to me in a sort of desperate yielding. Her skin was damp, I could feel the beads of sweat beneath my hands. We never spoke, mouth just tearing against mouth, flesh rubbing against flesh, two panting breaths punctuating the silence, two bodies uncertain of where to go next. Twice I tried to enter her and she quickly moved her thighs to dislodge me. Then her hands moved down my flat stomach and she began to massage my penis as though milking a young cow. She lay astride me, her tongue alive and wet in my throat, her other arm stretched across my chest to hinder my hands and her thighs locked against mine as I tried to writhe from her grip. She was stronger than I could have imagined and it would have needed physical violence to dislodge her. I lay back then as the pleasure increased and let her have her way. She loosened her grip as she felt my resistance weaken and half sat over me, her mouth still in mine but her hand now pressed against the pillow to keep her torso arced. I could feel it coming now and knew she could too from the tremors of my body. Her mouth plunged deeper into mine, her teeth nipped cruelly against my tongue when I twisted my head away in shock as the spasms racked my body which she was holding down.

  Her breasts were smeared and the underside of her neck. I could feel the sperm lying on my face, knew the pillow and the wall behind me were speckled. Bridget was gazing down at her body as though astonished to find the white substance there. Her forcefulness had vanished, she was timid, anxious again as she covered her breasts with the sheet.

  ‘You will stay till dawn now, won’t you?’ she whispered.

  If I answered I do not remember it. Her fear was needless. Even if I had wished to I doubt if I could have risen. The drowsy after-taste of sex had spread to every part of my body, filling it with sleep like a warm tide washing in to obliterate everything. That’s the last I remember, her blurred face peering down and the stains from her breasts already beginning to come through the white sheet she was clutching against her flesh.

  A week passed when the only sign of Joanie was a sick cert sent in by post. There were whispers in the vans that ceased when I entered. The others would cluster around me as I worked, awkwardly trying to show their friendship. On the following Thursday the girl sent for the wages was told that Joanie had called in earlier to collect her own for herself.

  There was a talent contest on that night. Sharon, a new girl in work, was singing. I loathed such events but joined the few girls who wandered out to watch her. I needed to feel part of something, even though I knew the same ease I had felt among them would never be there again. Besides, I couldn’t bear another night alone with just the unsold furniture in the hallway of my flat. The pub was at the top of the old main street up from the carriageway near Joanie’s house. Red leather seats wrapped themselves into alcoves where clusters of supporters for each act were gathered. The amplification was terrible but it didn’t really matter. Whoever had persuaded the most friends to pay into the half-full lounge and vote for them would win at the end of the night.

  We drank with our back to the stage, shouting over the static from the speakers. There are times when I drink for pleasure, and times I just drink. That was one of those nights; a rich melancholy void had settled within me. I was older than anyone else at the table except Billy. I had wasted a decade working on those throbbing blue trucks with nothing except a shabby flat littered with books and a hundred and fifty record albums. Sometimes old schoolmates beeped at me in their cars, business suits and mortgages, the comfortable monotony of family cares. They looked so aged they frightened me away from the mirror.

  I knew that in a suit I would look even older than them. Yet at that table with the thump of poxy music in the air, it seemed I could remain suspended for as long as I drank, a solitary age that was neither young nor old. Most of the girls were drifting off for buses. I knew I should too but I hung on to the end. Sharon climbed back down to join us, flushed and slightly embarrassed from the thrill of singing to the backing tape, but knowing she had not won. I wished I could have bought fifty admission tickets without her knowing and sent her home with that trashy silver cup. The MC was announcing the winner to screams from a far corner. The two girls left consoled Sharon. Apart from them, just Billy and I remained in front of a mass of slops in stacked glasses.

  I knew why I was waiting there, though I had not admitted it to myself. I was not surprised or happy or sad when Joanie appeared, I just felt that the spell of drink was broken and I was suddenly locked back into my own age. She was wearing a duffle coat that was too large for her. It looked incongruous with the black dress she wore underneath. Some locals nodded to her. Two youths at a table laughed and muttered something when she passed.

  Although the bar had closed she went up and they served her. When she came down it seemed like she had bought drinks for everyone. She pushed a double vodka across to Billy who shook his head to refuse it and another to me, then took the other fou
r vodkas on the tray and emptied them into a tall glass in front of her. I knew how hard it was for her to sit beside the girls who ignored her, yet I gave her no help, sitting back with Billy and letting her suffer. After a few moments Billy leaned across to clink his untouched glass against hers, then placed it down, smiled sadly and departed.

  The girls left shortly afterwards. Joanie and I had still not spoken. I downed my glass, took my jacket and walked outside. She followed suit. We stood together at the foot of a huge metal bridge. I could smell vinegar from the chip shop behind us. I felt cold and pure and empty. The coat made her shapeless, her bowed head indistinct in the darkness. She looked suddenly as young as she really was. I felt sorry for something in her that I knew I could not comprehend.

  ‘You should go home, Joanie,’ I said, ‘it’s late.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Not going back alone to that bloody cottage.’

  ‘Where will you sleep then?’ I asked, then paused. ‘If you won’t go home you can have the bed in my gaff and I’ll sleep on the floor. Just for this night, give you a start. You should make the break away from that house.’

  Joanie shook her head and looked up.

  ‘A real man wouldn’t have just left me like that. If you were a real man you’d punish me like a Victorian would his mistress.’

  I gazed at her, yet there was no trace of mockery on that solemn face or in her voice.

  ‘I’m not some Victorian. Go on home, Joanie. I’m tired of all these games.’

  ‘If you were a real man you’d sleep with me tonight, sleep in my room.’

  ‘And what about your granny?’

  ‘My granny is deaf. She won’t hear us no matter what things you did to me.’

  How long I slept I have no real idea. That part of the night seemed to pass in an entangled succession of sleeping and waking nightmares. Even now I am unsure how much of it I dreamt and how much I experienced. All I remember is waking that first time to find Bridget hunched up in the bed with her eyes fixed on one corner of the room, then trawling slowly along the wall as though tracing a movement. I could feel an incomprehensible dread within me and I knew it was that fear which had woken me rather than her shifting in the bed.

  ‘Can you feel her? Can you, tutor? She’s still here. I thought with somebody else here she wouldn’t dare to come, but there she is. Can you see her? Can you?’

  The room seemed the same as before I had slept, although a little more distinct with my eyes now adjusted to the dark. Moonlight slid in through a slight gap in the curtain. Everything was in its place, the only thing strange was the girl herself, hunched up into the smallest possible space, unable to lift her eyes from what she saw or imagined she saw around her. I reached out my hand and placed it on her shoulder to comfort her. She turned with wild eyes towards me.

  ‘Are you blind, tutor? Are you taunting me? There, look in front of you!’

  ‘Calm yourself, Bridget,’ I said. ‘There is nothing here except the pair of us. It is just a nightmare you’re after having. I assure you there is nothing.’

  Bridget’s eyes returned to where they had been staring and repeated the last word coldly with a resigned air. She looked down at me again and laughed bitterly to herself.

  ‘Then it was for nothing I allowed you in here to use me. For nothing.’

  She drew the sheet more closely about her body and resumed watching whatever phantom she imagined was there. It is hard to describe lying in the cold after-shock of sex which had not really taken place at all, beside a woman who did not want me. Walking through the woodlands it was I who had seen myself as the hunter drawing his net gradually in. Now I realized it was Bridget who had tolerated my interest and allowed me to fall into her scheme. She had regarded me with such contempt as to have confidence in manipulating even the sexual act so that instead of the conquest I had dreamt of my seed mocked me in dry stains on the sheet.

  And then I thought of the terror which must have lain behind her actions. To lead on a man into her very bed, to risk everything sooner than face a night alone there by herself. The scene unnerved me, the crouched figure whose terrified eyes moved slowly as if witnessing some act. Her very weakness gave me strength. I rose from the bed and reached for my clothes. It took Bridget a moment to realize what was happening. Then she sprang forward and ran towards me.

  ‘You promised!’ she shouted. ‘You promised.’

  I motioned her out of my way and she blocked the door with her body.

  ‘Go back and watch,’ she said like a trapped animal. ‘If you look long enough you will see her. You must, I can’t be mad. Try to leave now, tutor, and I swear I will kill you. Do you hear me, tutor?’

  The girl was deranged, I decided, and it had been crazy of me to even think of going there. There were brothels on every second corner of Dublin. Why had I been so crazy as to risk my job, my position for this one failed night? I knew I had to get away as soon as possible. How could I be sure her father might not return, that the hours she gave me for him were not invented? I grabbed her wrist and pushed her from the door so fiercely that she sprawled on the floor behind me, and I had the lock turned before I felt the searing pain in the base of my skull. She had struck me with a poker which had hung in the unlit fireplace. I half fell to my knees, clutching my head and as I turned I saw her frightened eyes staring at me. She backed away as I rose and I followed her until she stopped against the side of the bed. It took one slap to send her across it. I looked at my hand in astonishment. I had never struck anybody in my life, never known myself capable of such an act. I stared at her cheek which was already turning red and she made a choking sound that I thought was a cry. Instead she laughed, long and high as if the noise came from deeper within her than her normal voice. The sheet she was wrapped in was undone.

  ‘Get me pregnant and I’ll kill you, Johnny Johnny,’ she repeated twice. She said she was a virgin. She only cried out once. This time I had no fear of failure. When my time came I withdrew and with my own hand covered her stomach and breasts again with glistening white pearls. As I lay, drifting once more towards sleep, I asked had it been too sore, had she known any pleasure. Her voice was drowsy also, distant as though coming from somewhere else.

  ‘I think she is pleased, tutor.’

  ‘What are you saying, girl?’

  I remember trying to wake up, puzzled by her words.

  ‘I think she is pleased with the Johnny Johnny I’ve brought her.’

  Why did I go back with her? It was like I was no longer just myself, something was stirring within me, some illicit thrill I was too drunk to fight that seemed both foreign and familiar, as if I had felt it once before so long ago that I could not fully remember. I let Joanie lead the way with part of my mind clicked off. I realized how she had deliberately tried to make me feel superior in the words she had chosen, in subjecting herself to such a public reunion. It was as if she had created roles for the pair of us, outdated roles I did not wish for, and yet I could not even be sure if she was aware of her manipulation.

  She was quiet now as we walked in the glare of headlights down the carriageway. When we reached the railings of the old dairy she stopped, then suddenly began to climb up over them. She beckoned me to follow. I shrugged my shoulders and jumped up.

  A night-watchman smoked in a raised wooden hut near the entrance gate, his eyes not seeing the empty milk trucks and stacked crates in front of him. His face looked waxen and yellow in the security lights. Joanie ran across the tarmacadam to the side of the building and scrambled up the far wall into the shadows of the hillside. The lights were on in the building. I could hear the cleaners’ voices as I climbed up, searching for her. I felt uneasy suddenly, a quiet terror. I shook my head, imagined her lips suddenly tasting of vodka and sin. How long was it since I had used that word? A tree was growing sideways from the cliff-edge of wasteland that towered over the dairy. I reached the crest and found her resting against the trunk.

  Sin. I remembered
when there was something to sin against. A child in my local church where the late winter sun blunted the light in the stained-glass panes into faded blobs like cancer on a lung in an X-ray or a mark on my soul. I followed Joanie’s gaze beyond the cluster of floodlit buildings. Below us a little stream trickled out from a concrete pipe and meandered through the darkness towards the bridge. The carriageway was smooth and blue like a model in a shop window at Christmas. I had been happy back then, something to sin against, a right and a wrong. I thought of my schoolmates again, the lower ranks of party members, residents’ association chairmen, studying for late degrees in public administration. Sin. When the first illusion died I could believe in no other. On the hill beyond I could see an estate of houses and the squat roofs of the industrial estate and I realized that, below them, Joanie was staring at the caved-in rafters and bricked-up windows of an old gate-lodge beside the traffic lights. I remembered one night trying not to smile when she claimed it had once been the entrance to the residence of her grandmother’s mother.

  ‘The family residence before you fell on hard times,’ I joked. ‘If she came back now she’d think you were living in the servants’ quarters.’

  It was windy up on the headland. Joanie’s hair blew about her face as she stared at me.

  ‘That was an asylum, didn’t you know? They locked her up when she was young.’

  A container lorry moved off from the lights, changing gears as it faced up the hill towards the north. Joanie raised her face so I could see how the moonlight softened it.

  ‘I look the image of her. That’s what my granny always told me when I was young.’

  I could see it too, although I had never seen a photograph of the woman. But in that moonlight Joanie’s features were like an old black and white print. The duffle coat was open and her cheap black dress and her hair, even the arc of her neck as she leaned her head back, all seemed from another century. Was it my imagination or was she suddenly scared to be out there, isolated on that last untouched headland away from the comforting lights of the suburb?