The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘You’re a stranger now in this place,’ the old man said.

  Johnny shrugged his shoulders, awkward suddenly in the old man’s presence and not certain of the question he wanted to ask.

  ‘Did you hear about the woman and her daughter, Turlough?’

  The old man nodded quietly. The cigarette in his hand was held back to front, with the tip peeping through his fingers and the lit tobacco nestling in his cupped palm. He raised his knuckles to his mouth and inhaled.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Did you know her, Turlough? I mean to see even? What was she like?’

  ‘The mother? Lonely, frightened.’

  ‘Did you know about her daughter?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘I don’t know. But did you?’

  The old man raised himself slowly from the window-ledge and limped through the low doorway without replying. Johnny followed him across the stone flags into the dim kitchen.

  ‘You did know about her, Turlough. Did the woman tell you?’

  ‘Sandra was the woman’s name. I never spoke to her.’

  ‘Then how did you know about her?’

  The old man moved further away into the only other room in the cottage. The second bed was made up as though awaiting his father’s return. A narrow space divided it from Turlough’s bed where he sat down, his face grave, almost angry. The room smelt of must. Johnny waited a moment before following. It was the first time the old man had refused him anything and instead of welcoming him he now seemed to resent Johnny’s presence.

  ‘What were they doing in that house all those years?’

  ‘Waiting.’

  ‘For what? For someone to come?’

  Turlough turned his face towards the wall as if annoyed at himself for having said so much. He ignored the boy’s other questions and lay there, waiting for him to leave. Johnny walked towards the doorway and stopped. Since that morning a buzzing had been in his head, like a fuzziness he could not shake off. Tinnitus. The word came to him, remembering the father of a schoolfriend who had suffered from a disease of the ears. But it didn’t feel like anything physical. It was an irritation, like when you wake at night, trying for no reason to remember a word which retreats further away the more you try to think of it.

  ‘I felt something there, Turlough,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Something I couldn’t see. I’m frightened by it.’

  Turlough raised his head. Johnny hesitated, ashamed to say anything that might seem ridiculous. But Turlough was not part of the everyday world, the old man rarely spoke to anyone, and what was spoken of in that room would never matter in the real world that Johnny could return to just by climbing back up the path to the roadway.

  ‘It was as if a child’s bony fingers had pinched me in the back. I felt the hair of my neck go stiff and it took me a long time to turn my head. When I did I could see the faded roses on the wallpaper pattern behind me but there was a small child there and yet there wasn’t one. It was as if I could see the outline of her and yet also make out the pattern of the wallpaper perfectly through her. But it wasn’t really a child, more like an embryo, just a presence, the faintest hint of features and it seemed to be smiling. It doesn’t make sense, Turlough. I’m afraid to tell anybody else. Am I going mad in the head or what?’

  The old man had risen excitedly from the bed. Any trace of animosity was gone. His arms shook as he reached out to touch Johnny’s shoulders. The boy pushed him back in alarm, staring at the discoloured skin around his nose, the folds of loose flesh in his neck.

  ‘You’re not mad, Johnny, you saw it too.’ His voice almost trembled with excitement. ‘It’s over a century since that house burnt down. Her people still live in the cottages below by the bridge.’

  Which cottages? Johnny wanted to ask, thinking suddenly of Joanie, but the old man was rambling on almost incoherently and he couldn’t stop him.

  ‘You could still see the charred stones when I was a boy. It happened the year before I was born. They say the woman fell piling turf on the fire. The child was stillborn inside her. Never saw the light of day. Limbo, Johnny, that’s where the priests said souls like that go, if they can find their way there. What man can live with a presence like that? Burnt to the ground. Every last stick in it burnt.’

  ‘Turlough, will you listen to me. It’s like my head is throbbing, like I can’t think straight …’

  ‘I know. I know. Johnny, we cannot always pick the path of our lives. Forgive me, Johnny, and remember me, that’s all I ask, just remember me too.’

  Without warning the old man placed his withered arms around Johnny’s shoulders in an embrace that the boy was too terrified and filled with incomprehension to back away from.

  It was May when the Head Brother himself phoned the house. The clamour of feet and bells was drowned as Mrs Whelan closed the glass door into the narrow corridor and knocked on the office door. There was a smell of floor wax in the small room. Copy-books and schedules were piled in every available space. She listened to the man in the black robe with the glasses set far down his nose. Walking out of classes in progress, incomprehensible essays, minimum attention span, shivering at his desk and talking to himself.

  ‘How long is the boy’s father dead?’

  ‘Four years. His mother sold the house and moved back in with me.’

  ‘The father’s name was Whelan too. When I was growing up in Monaghan that was a cure for the whooping cough, to visit three houses where the woman’s married and maiden names were the same. As a retired nurse you’d have no truck with ideas like that.’

  ‘I saw women with sick children queuing here without the money for doctor or tablet. They’d have walked to Monaghan or anywhere else for the faintest chance their children might get well.’

  The Head Brother rose to stare out between the slats in the blinds at the playing fields.

  ‘Maybe we were all too poor back then, too preoccupied with keeping body and soul together to worry about disorders of the mind. The boy took his mother’s death hard. And now the pressure of exams. It’s hard for us to imagine, Mrs Whelan, what sort of pressure these young people are under. It’s … disturbing for the other boys, not good for himself. A few weeks’ rest perhaps and Johnny will be as sound as a bell again.’

  Mrs Whelan found herself standing once again in the quiet corridor, watching the swarms of boys changing class through the glass doors, and knew that she had been fooling herself for the past weeks. All the winter mornings that she had risen, the list of calls in the breast pocket of her uniform; the black bicycle harder to push with the years; the varicose veins. The thoughts of her final years had sustained her: plants growing in ordered rooms, the scratch of claws as a cat climbed up to sit astride her armchair and the prospect of grandchildren running in, the scent of baking, her smile as they sliced the hot scones open. Nothing was normal any more and the world she had spent her life working towards had been eclipsed without her noticing.

  A row of cherry blossoms stood in the square of grass beyond the high railings of the dispensary. He remembered his mother’s stories of waiting there as a girl after school for his grandmother to finish her work; the rows of children to be vaccinated from the new estates, the glances sneaked at the boys in short black trousers, their hair cut as if their fathers had placed a bowl over their skull and trimmed around the sides of it.

  Even when he had last sat on these ranks of chairs below the high windows queuing in turn for his own vaccinations, the two new nurses had fussed over him because of who his grandmother was. Now he was anonymous, the youngest in the row of adults awaiting medication. The psychiatrist read out a long list of questions, ticking off his answers with a biro while Johnny stared at the calendar with the map of Ireland, from the pharmaceutical company, above the man’s head.

  ‘That’s what my mind’s like,’ he said. ‘Like the tip of Kerry and the whole of Connacht were straining to link together and yet they can never join up.’

  It was late, the ro
ws of benches empty at last, the cleaners chattering in the corridor outside as they started their work. The man handed him the illegible prescription without replying. Johnny stared at the small sheet of paper.

  ‘My granny, Mrs Whelan,’ he said, ‘she’ll be able to decipher it.’

  ‘Why?’ the man replied. ‘Is she on tablets as well?’

  The red tablets made him drowsy and as the summer drew on he began to gain weight from lying in bed until early afternoon. When he rose he walked the streets or was drawn reluctantly down to Turlough in his cottage. If only his mind could shape the question he needed answered he might get well again. Instead, the old man and himself sat in the gloom of those small rooms like an old married couple sulking for so long they had forgotten what they had quarrelled about.

  He shunned his old schoolfriends who either jeered or treated him cautiously like a retarded child. Autumn came and only the gang of youths who spent the evenings littering the waste ground along the rivulet with flagons of cider and cheap sherry accepted him without question for what he was.

  ‘Here’s the bleeding mad bloke,’ they would say and he’d sit on the grass beside them and slug from the bottle in turn while they passed the hours boasting and cursing and trying to throw each other into the oily water. With them he forgot everything except the burning sting of alcohol on his throat and the harsh raw laughter in which he joined at the clowning of men whose brains had been burnt away by acid and booze and smack.

  All the deaths his grandmother had witnessed without breaking. Her husband and son-in-law and then even her own daughter lowered into the earth before her. But that ingrained sense of purpose had kept her battling on. Parents to be consoled in the early days of the suburb, collections organized, children whose mothers were sick sleeping on mattresses on her floor. Even in her own grief, caring for her grandson had been first in her mind. Poverty and physical sickness, these were the enemies she knew. Carbolic soap and plates of soup covered with a cloth, a feverish child to be sponged down. Even after she retired she had never been idle, neighbours still calling to her door in the night. Now, faced with Johnny, she was suddenly impotent, sitting in the dining-room by the television and the new gas fire, her face aged as if all the tragedies she had witnessed had only now sunk in.

  Some evenings Joanie still called. She was in fifth year now, impersonating the old nuns who wandered like hens in and out of the classrooms. Johnny lay on his bed while she rooted among the abandoned school books in the corner.

  ‘I know they’re a crock of shit, Johnny,’ she said. ‘But you can’t just give up on everything. Do you never even try to open them?’

  ‘I can’t. It’s like there’s a perpetual humming in my head, like a radio that has been left turned on between stations. Those tablets they gave me have only made it worse. I can’t drown it out and I can’t think straight with it. Yesterday I started playing music at the wrong speed just to block it out and when that failed I smashed every record I have on the roadway. Jesus, Joanie, this morning I couldn’t even remember doing it.’

  ‘My granny says you spend half your life down visiting that old bastard.’

  ‘So what if I do?’

  ‘You promised me once.’

  ‘Joanie, I’m frightened of something I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m frightened too,’ she said, ‘scared of losing you. Whatever that old fellow is saying he’s screwing you up. My granny is away tonight. Come over, we’ll be alone. We’ll see this through together.’

  ‘What about your sister and your father?’

  ‘My sister will do what she’s told. My father is in his room. He doesn’t want to come out of it.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She gave him a strange look as though reluctant to speak.

  ‘Please, Johnny. I’m frightened to be in the house alone with my Da.’

  That night she had a bottle of gin hidden in the bedroom. Meatloaf roared out of hell from the record-player. The bottle was nearly finished before they undressed. He took her with a violence she had never experienced before, on her knees with her head buried in the pillow. He raised the gin to his lips, drained it and felt her shiver when the bottle smashed against the wall. He imagined her father lying there, listening to him. If the man was in the cottage he gave no sign of existing. It was the eve of Hallowe’en. A mask belonging to her sister lay on the floor. The distorted features leered back at him. He gazed at Joanie’s naked shoulders sloping away and tried to recapture the closeness which had once overwhelmed him, but all he saw was an anonymous body granting anonymous pleasure. The glimpse of a blue jumper in a dance hall, two heads touching over a school book, the outline of breasts beneath his open jacket in a moonlit field: these were the memories of somebody else, a tenderness he remembered but could not recreate, the lights of a bright ship ploughing towards the horizon leaving him cast off on an island of inertia.

  He wanted to ask her to forgive him but when he looked down again for a moment he seemed to glimpse the anaemic flesh of the woman’s daughter hanging like an after-image between Joanie and him, like the indistinct features of the child he had seen in her house. He shuddered and came and in the cold aftermath of sex Joanie lay beside him, her skin saturated with sweat, her arms clutching him desperately.

  ‘I’m frightened in this house, Johnny. My father is going to die on me, I can feel it. He’s going to die and leave me alone with her. She’s killing him and I’m helping her. I’m afraid to go near his door, afraid she’ll see. Johnny, don’t go away on me. I’d do anything for you, even have a child if you wanted. I need you, Johnny, do you understand me?’

  He lay beside her without speaking.

  ‘What are you thinking of, Johnny? Do you even know I’m here?’

  He said nothing and eventually when he felt her shoulders move as she cried he stroked her.

  ‘Why are you doing this to me, Johnny, I’ll give you anything you want. It’s that old fellow causing it, he’s an evil bastard. You were never like this before you went back to visit him. He’s destroying you. For my sake give him up!’

  Inside he felt as barren as a burnt cigarette. All there was left was pity for this strange weeping girl and an overwhelming desire to get away from her. He began to dress with the light still off and the tiny red glow of the record-player like an unblinking eye watching them from the corner.

  ‘It’s like my brain is jammed and nobody else can help me. Maybe he knows nothing but I need to find out why my life has stopped.’

  He closed the front door and stood on the path. There was the noise of oiled chains rattling in the factory on the hill across the carriageway. The small garden smelt of clay and decomposing leaves. He began to walk towards the traffic lights and with each step found that he was crying for a life which he had lost.

  All afternoon I waited for him to call, the selfish part of me longing for release, the other part wanting to scream a warning. How many more chances would I have to save him, how often more would my tongue fail?

  Daylight was starting to fade when he came. Now he will not come back again. His footsteps crossing the plank and climbing up the bank to the road, leaving me here to watch the sky darken through the branches outside the small window. Would he have believed a word I said and even if I told him would it make any difference? Could it all be a crazy delusion spun round an unjustifiable act in my youth? Was I normal even before it happened? He started again about the woman’s daughter, as if she were the only one. What did I know about her, who had told me? I knew exactly how he felt, his face so like my own eighty years before that when I looked at him I seemed to be staring out of his eyes watching myself peering in.

  ‘I keep thinking you’re going to tell me something I should know, Turlough. But now I think you don’t know anything. You’re just an old man wasting away in this stinking cabin.’

  He sat on the bed with his fists clenched, two stone heavier than six months ago. Whatever pills they had given him lent his face
a cloudy, retarded look. I wanted to explain, to tell somebody after all these years.

  ‘I was a bit younger than you Johnny, hired out to farmers, bringing in a wage. There was one night that I never told you about. My head splitting for weeks before it, afraid to tell anyone in case I wound up in the asylum down below the bridge. My father had sent me through the woods with a message for a neighbour. I knew every stone there and yet I got lost, down below the village where the stream swirls its way in and out of trees. Suddenly I knew fear like I had never known, the very roots of the trees seemed to be alive there, the blind nostrils of rabbit holes breathing at my bare feet, the animals scurrying away on all sides of me.

  ‘My head was filled with the stories I had heard as I crashed and stumbled through the crooked branches. Suddenly I stumbled over a root and fell among the ferns and nettles on to the ground. I cried out as though some beast had caught me and then down to my left I heard a soft explosion of flame, saw the half moon of an old face through the trees as a cigarette flared and took hold. That single match lit up the whole darkness for me. I could make out the bridge where the smoker was and the whole woodland around me fitted back into place. Do you understand me? It was like the man below me was showing me the whole world I knew in a different way. I knew who he was now, old Matthew who lived up in the woods. He was just standing there waiting, as though he had a rendezvous to keep.’

  I stopped talking and looked at Johnny. I don’t think he had even been listening. His impatient eyes gazing through the window at the people on the road above, coming home from work, the youths passing with their piles of wood for bonfires and the headlights of the cars flashing past like beacons that drowned out the light of that single match from all those years ago. I watched him rise and walk without speaking from this small room and out into the light of them.

  ‘You’re a bleeding mad bloke,’ Mono said. ‘You’re soft in the head, you’re a fucking chicken, chuck, chuck, chuck …’