by Donal Ryan
My father split in two, and then fell to pieces. That’s what I think schizophrenia is: splitting in two and then falling to pieces. Am I a schizophrenic? Is it hereditary? I could find out, but I don’t want to. Like I needed only to open the wardrobe door to find out if there was a monster waiting in there to kill me, but I never did. I might have woken him if I did. I’m not waking a monster. No way.
I WONDER if that girl that lives near Dorothy has a boyfriend. She has no husband anyway, Dorothy says. Dorothy obsesses about her. Three different men call to her. A scruffy-looking character who seems to be the child’s father; he takes him walking by the hand up and down the road. An older man who must be her father. He mows grass all up and down her road. He tidies up that whole road by himself. He’s a respectable-looking man, too, Dorothy says, very straight-backed and just handsome enough to not be too aware of it. He must be pure solid ashamed of that one, Dorothy says, with her brazen chest and her bastard child. And a tall, fair-haired chap with muscles and sunburn started to call to her a few weeks ago. He’s called at least three times now. He marches in and out with tools and pieces of wood. He could be just doing jobs for her, Dorothy says, but they’re very familiar with each other. She always touches him. There’s no knowing what way she pays him for his work. She has no job, that one. She probably was given that house by the County Council. Imagine that, Dorothy says, you get rewarded handsomely these days for being a little hussy!
I’m going to paint Dorothy’s window sills very, very slowly indeed. I need to see this tall, sunburnt, muscle-bound person for myself. I need to know what kind of relationship he has with the girl. He is a bogey, an unknown quantity. I can’t think of her without him creeping into my mind’s eye. She was wearing a denim skirt one day. Does he put a big, rough hand up her skirt? I’d like to think he is respectful of her, but there aren’t many respectful men in the world. He probably asks her to do things for him and she feels she has no choice, because she is afraid he won’t finish the jobs he has started. That’s what those fellows are like. I would have to intervene if I happened to see him forcing himself on her while I painted Dorothy’s upstairs window sills. I would kick in her front door and he’d turn towards me and I’d hit him with the heel of my hand full force into his solar plexus, killing him instantly. It’s okay, I’d tell the girl, while she sobbed in my arms. It’s okay, the monster is gone, the monster is gone. I hope my heart doesn’t stop before I get to save that girl. I don’t feel very well. I think I’ve been thinking too hard again.
Bridie
I ALWAYS SWORE I’d never again set foot in County Clare. I don’t even like to look across at east Clare from the low shore at Castlelough. Ton Tenna mocks me from the Limerick road: it hides Clare behind it. We had a meal in a lovely restaurant in Ballina one time, but I kept my back to the river, because Clare was on the far bank. My second son went fishing with his uncle Jim and his brothers in Clare nearly twenty years ago and was swept off of a rock and drowned. I can’t bear the thought of that county since. I think every hour of every day about him still. I think mostly about the last moments of his little life: the shock he must have got when the wave grabbed him; the way he must have felt as he was dragged out and out and under. Could he hear the roars of Jim and his brothers? Could he feel the ocean tightening its hand around him? I know I shouldn’t think these things over and over again, but you may as well ask a bee to leave the flowers alone.
The day it happened, our neighbour John English drove us out as far as Spanish Point where the search party was organized. I’ll never forget that drive; the last time I had hope. There were no mobile phones that time, so I kept thinking we’ll get there now and they’ll have him, wrapped in thick white towels, shivering and crying from the shock and the cold. If there had been a longer road, I’d have made John English take it. I’d have stayed in that car forever, safe with hope. I knew the minute we pulled up there was no hope for my boy – no one seemed to be hurrying. I screamed at them all to get back into the sea, to hurry, hurry, he’ll be halfway to America, but they only looked sadly at me and then out at the rolling blue and shook their heads. He was never got for a finish. The greedy Atlantic ate him and kept his little bones.
I charged like a madwoman off up along the coast road towards Quilty for miles and miles that day, looking out at the ocean, as if I might spot him, treading water and waving his little hand, waiting to be rescued. There was a second search party raised to find me. I came to a little church with a lovely name: Star of the Sea. I went in and knelt down and blessed myself and bowed my head and anyone looking on would have thought I was praying to God for my lost son. I wasn’t, I was cursing Him. You bastard, I was saying, you bastard, just because your son was killed, have we all to suffer forever? Have you not had enough revenge? And your boy only stayed dead three days. Will my boy be back on Sunday, the way yours was? I never went to Mass again. I stayed away from God and Clare for twenty years. Now I’m thinking of going to live in Clare, and not that far from where Peter was lost, in a new hotel as a live-in housekeeper. I’d be head of housekeeping, actually, if you don’t mind.
My husband blamed me for Peter’s death. It was my brother took him off fishing. It was I left him off that day with his little shorts on him, slathered with sun-cream, with his rod and his bag of sandwiches and sweets, hardly able to talk with the excitement of being allowed go fishing in the sea with his uncle and his brothers. If he’d been there, Michael said, he’d have warned him of the dangers, he’d have had my brother well told not to take his eyes off him for a second, he’d have done the world of things I didn’t do. The list of things he’d have done got longer and bigger over the years until we couldn’t see each other at either side of it, and he left and never came back and the only difference was the noise of him was gone. There was no more and no less pain. We pass each other every now and again; we only barely nod. The children don’t tell me what they talk about with him. I don’t care. He’s gone very old-looking lately.
I haven’t a penny left. Michael sent money every single week until the last one left home, and then the envelopes stopped. I worked for years and years below in Thurles in the Town End Hotel. I was let go last year and they gave my job to a skinny little young wan. I went in and said it to Mary Wills, the personnel manager. Oh, that wasn’t your job we gave that girl, Bridie, you were never a manager you see, she’s been taken on as an accommodation manager. It would have been against the law to make me redundant and then to give someone else my job, so they made up a new name for my job and gave it to that little strap. Next thing didn’t I see an ad in the paper for interviews for jobs in a new hotel that was opening. Anyone could go, all you had to do was go in as far as Nenagh to the Abbey Court and wait your turn to talk to some little madam in a short skirt who thought she knew it all. Your CV isn’t very varied Bridie, she smirked at me. I haven’t had a very varied life, I told her. I never missed a day of work though, or looked for a rise, or left a speck of dirt in a room. I didn’t even want their poxy job, but I have it got now, and the offer of living in and having all my meals there. You could get a lot worse offered to you in this day and age. In the current climate as the fella says.
I told my second-youngest fella I was thinking of selling the house. You should have seen the way his face fell. He’s shacked up inside in town with a doctor’s daughter, if you don’t mind. She’s studying for her Master’s inside in the university. He’s studying his options, thank you very much. I’d give him two options: a kick in the hole or a kick in the hole. He’s too used to being able to swagger in here, dragging in all sorts of muck and germs, with a puss on him like a slapped arse every time he fights with that wan. She was here one time. He’s so sensitive, Missus Connors. He is, I said, he’s a delicate little flower all right. She smoked fags into my face and looked down her nose at my house, and got the world of ash on my lovely clean carpet even though I actually put an ashtray on her lap. She hadn’t a pick on her. She doesn’t eat meat. Neither d
oes Billy, now. He says it isn’t natural for humans to eat the flesh of other animals. It’s an evolutionary aberration, he says. I’ll give him an aberration into the mouth one of these days. If you saw the way he used to eat my roast beef – he hardly used to use a fork.
Isn’t it a fright the way I get risen like that, so easily? And the poor boy still only feeling his way around the world. Sure, he hasn’t a clue how clueless he is. God help us, he’s still a child. I’m the same way with all of them: I can take the faces off of them with only the very slightest provocation. I changed when the sea took my Peter. I was never short-tempered or judgmental before it happened. I always encouraged people and forgave easily and laughed troubles away. But for years and years after it happened I used to hear them in the next room, my children, huddled together, whispering nervously, the odd stifled giggle breaking the gloom, while I stomped around the house, shouting about nothing, about everything, about dust and dirt and dishes and attitudes and how none of them ever did a hand’s turn to help in the house and how it was a fright to God to say I had a big family and still and all I was left alone in the world. Then one day there was no more huddles in the front room and no more nervous whispering; they were all gone, as fast as their legs could carry them. They’d sooner pay sky-high rents inside in the city for little boxes of mouldy apartments than have me every day stripping the good out of their lives, ruining their fun, blocking their sun.
I couldn’t ever get over it. I was never able to get around it. I never forgave my brother or my sons that were there that day or God or the sea or the wind. I never forgave myself. I could never get the light to go back on in my mind. I never found peace. I told John Cotter to go way and fuck off for himself one time. There aren’t too many have actually said that to a priest in spite of all the auld bile you hear people spouting these days. He got an awful shock: he’d been sitting there, in my house, talking gently the way he does, with those lovely words that most people would let rub gently against their wounded hearts, but I could only feel the anger building and building inside me until I knocked my tea off of the arm of my chair on purpose, I slapped it clean across the good room, and he jumped and looked at me and he must have seen the devil looking back at him because his face dropped and he hopped up from his chair and I told him where to go and where to shove his Scriptures and Michael rushed into the room and started apologizing and sure I blew the lid completely then and screamed and roared that no fucker had apologized to me, and I screamed on and on and on and there was no quieting me.
I SAW that girl of the Cahills that married that boy of the Mahons below in the post office on Thursday. Triona, her name is. She had their little boy with them. He’s the pure solid cut head off of his father. He’s solid gorgeous. She looked wretched. She was three or four ahead of me in the queue. The queue wraps around in an S, so the coven of auld bitches that are forever standing in that queue got a fine view of her. They’d look at her and then look back at each other with mock sympathy, their eyes glistening with delight, with triumph. The whole place has it that Bobby is doing a line with a little strap of a wan from town that bought one of Pokey Burke’s houses. Ha ha, them auld biddies are thinking, that shook her! I wonder is it true. I normally wouldn’t care a bit; only that Bobby is a lovely boy. I’d hate to think he was just a rotten auld faithless yoke like so many more. There’s something in that boy; the way he looks at you while he’s talking, sort of embarrassed so that you nearly want to hug him, and with a distance in his eyes even when he’s looking straight at you, that makes you think there’s a fierce sadness and a kind of a rare goodness in him. So, if that boy is off doing a line with some little piece of fluff I’ll eat my hat. Maybe it’s because I always think of him the day of his mother’s funeral, and he fully grown at the time but still and all he had the eyes and the expression of a small boy and to look at him that day, anyone else bar me would have asked God for some of his pain so he hadn’t to bear it all alone. I was out with God though, for good and glory, and was finished asking Him for anything.
I went mad doing things to the house one time. Michael didn’t argue. The drilling and hammering drowned out the sound of me, I suppose. We got a delivery of blocks early one morning, for the bottom wall of a sunroom we were putting up at the back of the house, stretching into the garden. Michael wanted to be certain sure the lorry wouldn’t be spotted by too many, the way there wouldn’t be too much auld talk out of the neighbours about planning permission or what have you. You’d never know what way people are going to react to changes in their surroundings or to a bit being gone from their view of a field they never looked at in the first place. But we were spotted taking in our blocks anyway: Frank Mahon walked down along past us just as the two boys in the lorry were jumping down out of it. He had an auld scraggy-looking yoke of a dog with him and it collared with a piece of twine and a bolt or something shoved in through the knot so as to stop the poor creature from being choked by a tightening of it if he pulled against the mean twine too hard.
This was a fair few years ago now and that man’s wife wasn’t long dead. And there I was, and Michael only a step or two behind me, and the only noise to be heard was a ticking from the lorry as the heat left it. I can hardly think of words to describe what I saw, or the strange feeling of it. Frank Mahon stopped across from our gate, against the far ditch and stood looking up along the gable end of our house. And I suddenly knew why: one of the two boys doing the delivery was Bobby, his son. The world and his wife knew those two had had a big falling out.
Bobby was facing me, coming in the gate. His mate was foostering with the controls on a panel attached to the lorry’s flat bed. And Frank was standing still, looking across, and it was for all the world as though Bobby sensed him there and he froze. And he couldn’t have known he was going to be there; they’d arrived at our gate from opposite directions. I saw with my own eyes the colour draining from that boy’s cheeks. His face never changed, but I swear a sadness you could nearly touch came down over it, and he turned slowly. There was nothing said for long seconds, and Michael and myself stood rooted to the spot. And then Bobby Mahon said: Well Dad.
Just that. Well Dad. And his father just stood looking at him and his eyes were an ordinary blue like any man’s but still and all, as dark as night. And he raised his arm and pointed across at his son with the bit of a sapling stick he had in his hand and it was like as if a cloud had darkened the sky, even though the early-morning light never changed. And he lowered his arm and opened his mouth as if to say something. God bless us, said Michael under his breath, as if he couldn’t help it. Howya Frank! And the cold spell was broken as auld Frankie Mahon turned away and walked off down the road towards the village, away from his pale son. That all took only a handful of seconds but I felt after it as though the entire morning was gone.
Bobby wouldn’t even take a few bob for himself off me that day, for doing us that turn. I think maybe he remembered the time when he was a child that he and his mother gave a whole day and night in my house when his father was gone mad on the drink and was after making splinters of every stick of furniture that was in their little cottage below. I met them on the road, she was crying and he was barefoot. I picked them up and brought them home and asked her nothing. I didn’t embarrass her. She was graceful and quietly grateful; she knew I knew he was below, wrecking the place. We’d have been great friends after, I’d say, if my little Peter hadn’t left this world and taken my heart and soul with him. How is it at all that I let one child take my whole heart? It wasn’t fair on anyone. Life isn’t fair, as the fella says. He can say that again.
Jason
I SEEN A lad walking up the road towards me that day last week when your man Bobby Mahon killed his father. But then the lad hopped in over a wall before I could make out who it was. The dogs smelt something. I know in my heart and soul it was Bobby Mahon. The dogs smelt death. We walked on down past Bobby Mahon’s auld lad’s cottage and he was dead inside in it and we never knew. I seen hi
m just after he done it. He must of still had blood on his hands. I wish now I would of gotten them glasses that time they was free on the Social besides going around squinting like a fool. I seen him again on the news being taken in to be charged, handcuffed to a big fat cop. Some lads do try to cover their faces when they’re getting taken in and out of court. Bobby looked straight into the camera and there was nothing in his face. It must have been Bobby I seen that night last week. I wonder is there any gain to be had in telling the cops what I seen. I have no problem telling the cops stuff about a lad that’d do his own father in. Fuck him. Why wouldn’t I? They might be a bit slower to stick their big red noses into my business the next time if I put the bollocks in the right place at the right time for them. Fuck it, though, I won’t I’d say. He’s a sound skin all the same.
THE BIGGEST MISTAKE I made when I was younger was getting tattoos all over my face. The very minute you’ve a tattoo on your face, the whole world looks at you different, even if it’s a real nice tattoo, like birds or flowers or something. I done it for a woman. I only had a few birds up my neck that time. She told me I’d look rapid with a spider on my cheek. I would’ve done anything she wanted. She was sixteen and I was eighteen but she had way more brains than me. She had it all worked out and wrote down on a sheet of paper how much she could claim for this and that and the other and she even had it worked out how much she could get with one child, two children, three children and so on down the page. She knew everything. She had her life all planned out. All she needed off of me was a bareback ride. After I done the business she only wanted to have a laugh off me till the next prick came along. I only ever seen my young fella once. He was mad-looking. She was gone right fat but I’d still of rode her in a flash. I wonder how many has she now.
