The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘When did she go mad?’ I asked, realizing that my voice was apologetic.

  ‘She gave birth to my granny in there. It was a scandal. Her father lost his job in some local mill for refusing to give the child up.’

  ‘Was it the same house you lived in?’

  ‘Yes, but only the back bedroom hasn’t been rebuilt since. My granny never let anyone touch that.’

  ‘Did she know … as a child?’

  Joanie lowered her head and hunched her knees forward. Without her replying I could see the small community on that bridge ninety years before. A child in a white dress surrounded by whispers, staring across the river valley at the trees blowing above the locked gates. I found I stopped myself from imagining Joanie’s great grandmother. Perhaps I didn’t want to face the intensity of her yearning for her child among those trapped inmates, or maybe I was frightened of putting madness on Joanie’s features.

  ‘You’re not lying to me, are you?’

  I knew the question hurt her and was sorry I had spoken. For once it didn’t need an answer. I no longer thought of manipulation. I felt something had been stripped away, I was finally coming closer to whoever Joanie really was.

  ‘It’s easy for you,’ she said, ‘with no ties to nobody. I’ve never heard you mention a mother or a father or any goddamn thing. You think you are free, don’t you, above all this but tell me, do you ever feel anything?’

  Her words hurt the more for echoing what had been in my head, and we were even now. You are born alone and you die that way. The boy alone in the church where the winter light faded had given way to the youth running through fields not towards a rendezvous with his gods but away from them. The question I had promised myself that every morning I would answer, to believe in something or to believe in nothing, the question I had put off for all my life, the only question that had finally mattered. The funny thing was that up there it felt like I had stopped running. The thirteen-year-old boy wakes at thirty-one on a dirty, littered headland. Do you ever really feel anything? I did for a moment there. A sudden closeness with something I could not explain.

  Joanie stumbled on through crooked briars and dumped litter to the far edge of the headland which ended with the stumps of severed trees. I still didn’t know why she had brought me this way. She slid down and almost fell into the stream running through the small untouched meadow where two horses slept upright. When I climbed after her she kissed me for a moment and then, uncharacteristically, took my hand. Neither horse moved as we passed close to them. It felt eerie to walk through high grass in the midst of a city with the distant lights of factories and houses and streets encircling us.

  The back wall to her cottage was low, the garden slightly overgrown. I was sobering up but still followed her through the window of the old back room, undressing in the darkness without making a sound. There was something illicit there which made our sex seem special. I could have been a gentleman caller stealthily stealing her virtue. It was a fantasy which I felt we were both sharing, but I wasn’t sure if she was controlling it by her muted sighs, her half glances of fear or vulnerability towards the door. It was different from any other time, before or since, with her or with anyone. It was as serious as death and just as inconceivable. I kept my eyes closed. I felt no longer just myself, but like a man from another time, a man with a name or secret I should know which erased itself from my mind as I spent.

  I must have slept again for no more than an hour. The room was still dark when I half woke up, the pain in my head intense. Bridget was crouched in the corner. She looked up bewildered; it was obvious she had not slept. I felt overwhelmed with contempt for myself, with sudden pity for her.

  ‘I’m going mad, tutor,’ she said. ‘Is there to be no help for me? It was just a game I played when I used to be left alone. In the years after Mama died, just me and Dada here, me trying to be a woman, look after him. Did you not invent things when you were a child, people, friends who never really existed?’

  Although I tried to speak, all that came was a dry choking sound in my throat. I glanced towards the floor, both relieved to make out the shape of my clothes there and ashamed that my first thought was my own safety, though I could not have arisen if I wished to.

  ‘It was just a game I used to play out walking. Playing up among the stones where the old house used to be. They used to tell me not to go there, that I’d remember bad things, but I remember nothing from that time. Used to pretend I’d meet her there, always waiting for me in the stones. Her funny way of talking like nursery rhymes, only black and dark and terrible. It was like she needed things, words, people’s names, names of fields, townlands. Like she knew of nothing herself, only words I didn’t understand, makey-up ones. It was just a game, tutor, like playing with an imaginary doll. Then one day she followed me home.’

  ‘Please, Bridget, listen to me,’ I mumbled, trying to rise up on one elbow and failing. ‘I give you my word. There is nothing in this room to be scared of.’

  I am unsure if my voice even carried. Bridget bit at her knuckles, then raised her hand and banged it against the wall.

  ‘Babyface I used to call her. Tap at the window, Babyface, tap lightly when Dada’s asleep and I will let you in. I’ll dare you, I’ll dare you to do bold things. Like I had to tell her how everything felt. I’d sit here at night inventing words for her to say, laughing at them. Tutor, I didn’t know the words that I made up. I said one to my father once and he slapped me across the mouth, “Where did you hear that, you filthy little girl?” How could I know a word that I have never heard? You’ve read the books, tutor, you tell me that.’

  I felt as if I were being lulled by opium into a pit that her words were echoing down. And the more I tried to speak and reassure her, the further I sank. I wanted to listen, I wanted to help her, yet sleep was my only master and I could only struggle to delay its call.

  ‘It began with funny words but soon she took over my thoughts. Thoughts I could never have dreamt, of men’s bodies, always whispering about them, Johnny, Johnny over and over. Her voice was in my skull and it never let go. Even in Mass it was mocking me, almost making me choke on the Sacred Host. Like she never heard of God, there was no heaven, no hell, just an emptiness, an ache like some black gaping hole. I wake at night-time and I can see her here, a shadow on the wall, a dark silhouette, crouched up, rocking back and forth. It frightens me so much, makes me feel … like I were a ghost and she the live one. Oh, God help me, Sir, she’s here with us now. Can you not see anything, tutor, do you not even have the slightest fear?’

  But my eyes would not stay open. I tried to turn my head, glimpsed the bare ceiling and part of the wall and after that I sank into sleep again.

  Afterwards I lay swamped in the sensation of heat and drying sweat, and longed for a cigarette. The feeling that I should know something still lingered. I was sobering up fast.

  ‘Is this room haunted?’ I whispered for no reason and Joanie shook her head.

  ‘There are no ghosts,’ she said. ‘That’s just rubbish they invented to make videos.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Of course I know. If there were they could queue up in this room. Now let’s not talk about it.’

  She sulked for a few moments before she spoke again.

  ‘Every Sunday my mother was locked in here for four or five hours at a time when my granny and granda went out. She told me once. They’d dress up and take a tram to town, have tea and cakes in a hotel. My granny did it. Granda was just a weak giant of a man who worked himself to death. My granny still gets his pension. She gets some of my father’s too, paid over to her. All those different pensions from dead men.’

  I remembered a film I’d seen about an old woman who killed her lodgers and kept them preserved under the floorboards. The eyes of the young man who was next in line came back to me as he pulled the boards up and stared down.

  ‘Are you sure she can’t hear us?’

  ‘She’s deaf, stone deaf as the wal
l.’

  A night bird spoke on a branch in the garden. I could hear nothing of the traffic which must be passing on the carriageway. There were no lights visible from the window. When the bird stopped I could hear the noise of the stream down in the gully and nothing else except Joanie’s breath.

  ‘Haunted isn’t the right word,’ she said suddenly. ‘I don’t know the word but that isn’t it. When I was young I used to pretend that there were two girls trapped in here. A weaker girl who was old-fashioned and good, a real little Victorian Miss, and the other could make her do things she didn’t want. The other would punish her for no reason whenever I was sad, would take out all my fears and pains on her for me, make her live them for me, make her do things I wanted to know and feel but was too young to. The other was like … she was like nothing, like a face with no features, laughing and cackling, tormenting the girl. You know how a child is cruel, mindlessly tearing the legs off daddy-long-legs to see what it would do. That was me. It seemed almost real at the time when I was half asleep but it was just a game in my head. I’d forgotten all about it until the day Johnny Whelan found the room where that girl was locked up on the hill.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joanie whispered. ‘Just felt this awful sense that …’

  Joanie crossed her hands on the pillow and cradled her head. She stared at the ceiling although nothing was there. I waited for her to finish the sentence but instead, after a few moments, she began to speak about her mother’s death in a low voice, about how when the labour pains started her granny had ordered her father to stay at home, but her mother refused to leave without him. They shouted in the kitchen while the pains came quicker and the taxi meter ticked away like a time bomb on the hill outside. Finally they all travelled in the taxi together. Her father in front, Joanie squeezed between the two women. Her mother was sweating, her dress damp when Joanie leaned her head against it.

  ‘Soft I remember, like nothing else was ever soft. And wet like your body would be after a shower.’

  I shifted sideways and stretched my knee towards her. Joanie wrapped her thighs about it and I felt the weight of her breasts against my chest. Her body was hot like a child with fever, her voice the faintest whisper coming through a tangle of damp hair.

  ‘When we reached the hospital the shouting really started. The doctor, a little Asian, said that only husbands could be present at the birth. My granny was furious. Mammy was put on a stretcher. She kissed me and took Daddy’s hand. I spent an hour in the husbands’ waiting-room with all that thick smoke till my granny gave up arguing and took me home.’

  A haemorrhage from a ruptured womb the doctors called it, a rare event now, the whole hospital shocked by it. The baby survived in intensive care, the mother died after two days in a coma. Her grandmother blamed it on her father for being in the labour ward where a man had no business. She badgered him back to work the day after the funeral and then took all his wife’s possessions, burning the clothes in the garden, hiding the presents he had given her. His own belongings were heaped in the room that we were lying in and Joanie’s bed moved into the room where her parents had slept. The bright cot he had bought for Joanie was smashed for firewood, her granny’s old heavy one taken down from the attic and put beside the old woman’s bed.

  ‘I never knew the woman could have such strength,’ Joanie whispered. ‘She was over eighty, yet she was hauling things like a young man.’

  She had ripped off the kingsize sheet that held the two single beds together. Joanie claimed she shredded it between her bony fingers. Joanie sat on his bed, clutching her favourite doll until her father walked up from the bus stop and stared at the mess of shirts and socks on the floor.

  ‘He had that look you see in horror videos,’ she said. ‘When the aliens have sucked the blood from a man and he’s walking around all rubbery with dry air in his veins and when his eyes hit the sunlight you know they’ll crumble.’

  Joanie’s eyes were dry and hard as if they would never blink again.

  ‘She gave him his meals in silence and then left him to rot in this room, badgering him if he went into the kitchen or other rooms, complaining if he went out of the house. After he died she wanted to close off the room but I fought to get it back. I can still smell his sick breath here as he wasted away to death.’

  ‘How did he die?’ I thought of that momentary sense I had had of being someone else. Was it something of him I had felt?

  ‘Six years he came in and out when I was barely allowed a glance at him. Then one day he collapsed in work. The doctors can call it what they want but I know the name for it. Not that he got the doctors or nurses or medicine in this place. My granny wouldn’t allow it and he never went against her. He knew this wasn’t his house, his home. Only once did he defy her – that day the papers were full of photographs of the girl’s room that Johnny found he sent me out for them all. He had some coins hidden under the mattress. I remember the pages spread out on the bed before him. My granny was in like a hen, clucking at the cost of them, but he ignored her, just looking from one photograph to the next and when his eyes looked up at me they were weak and yellow.’

  I saw him, as she spoke, in this very bed a few years before, saw the thousand and a half nights he must have passed alone, the arc of light under the door, the sounds of his own children’s voices coming through the wood. Not even a photograph of him remained, Joanie said, but I could picture him, a thin man with a mousy moustache, a model worker, popular and overlooked. What were the small triumphs he set against the humiliation of every day? The chance a child might smile at him when her granny’s back was turned, a few moments sneaked at a doorway watching his daughters lost in sleep.

  ‘I knew he was dying that day,’ Joanie said, ‘and when I looked at my granny I knew she knew as well. I told her he was sick as we left the room. “Sick of going to work and earning his money like a Christian,” she said. “He’s not sick of being a nuisance here.” She was letting him die, punishing him for something. Knowing he hadn’t the courage or strength to phone a doctor for himself.’

  Joanie was silent. I knew why he had kept those newspapers about the woman’s daughter. They were his identity too, the story of his entombment. Joanie said the room had not been touched since his death and in whatever moonlight remained it could have been an anonymous hotel bedroom with just a bed and chest of drawers. He must have known his fate, what reason would he have to pretend or hope he might recover? All he had were those newspapers under the bed, within reach at night when despair got too much, the knowledge that someone else had lain in such a room so close to him and that her name at least had one day been spoken. Did he welcome death, wait for it like a friend, or fear it? Suddenly I wanted that feeling to have been him, that room to be haunted. I wanted his ghost to appear, to be able to look at his eyes, to say something; not that I understand or feel what you felt, just that I know you once existed.

  I woke shortly before dawn to find the window open. I knew she was gone before looking around. I dressed quickly and went in search of her. I no longer cared who saw me now. I just wanted to find her, make sure she was safe. I knew she would be sitting up on the headland above the stream which flickered through the trees below. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and was staring across at the blackened rocks on the far slope beyond her father’s cottage. I called and she looked up with a wide vacant smile. Her face looked radiant and childlike, yet something in that glazed happiness frightened me more than the haunted look she had previously worn.

  ‘You’ll catch cold,’ I said, ‘you must come down.’

  ‘But I don’t feel cold,’ she replied, ‘I feel so warm.’

  There were goose pimples along her arms. I heard a sudden noise behind me; young Turlough had scrambled up through the wood. He stopped, startled to see us, and looked scared as he darted away through the trees. I got Bridget to her feet.

  ‘Come on down, Brid
get, your father will be coming home soon.’

  ‘Poor Dada, left all alone.’

  She walked with her head high in slow exaggerated movements as though stepping through water. We crossed the meadow, this time together with neither of us speaking. She was humming to herself, gazing around with that terrible heightened elation. A crowd had gathered at the back of the cottages. I thought they were watching us but then saw how their eyes were fixed on the hollow beneath the bridge. A battered cart had been backed down to the stream’s edge. The driver jerked the horse forward by the harness and it clambered up on to the road, breathing heavily through its nostrils at the effort. Old potato sacks were heaped over something in the cart. The small crowd blessed themselves as the wheels creaked past.

  Bridget’s father turned from the cart and, seeing us, ran forward to take her in his arms. His face was white from dust and worry as neighbours crowded round with soothing clucking noises. I waited for the blows to come. He drew his daughter under one arm and turned towards me.

  ‘Thank you for bringing her back, Sir,’ he said. ‘Where did you find her? With old Matthew found drowned I’ve been nearly out of my mind with worry.’

  Bridget looked up serenely.

  ‘I got lost on the hill, Dada, and the gentleman showed me home. Up in the woods. I shouldn’t have gone wandering.’

  Her father patted her and turned towards the house with the neighbouring women following. An old fellow paused and spat companionably at the grass.

  ‘Was it up yonder above the dairy you found her?’

  I nodded nervously.

  ‘Aye, that’s where I find her myself often enough. There or over by the old house. Half simple she is but a good little girl all the same. Takes notions about herself but you know, when she was born she was the most ordinary of children.’