by Peter Murphy
‘What was it?’ I said. ‘Put me out of my misery.’
She chuckled a little.
‘It was two giants, one of them sitting on the other’s shoulders.’
My birthday fell on the day before Halloween. My mother was well enough in herself to come downstairs and take her meal at the dinner table. It was the first time she’d been out of bed in weeks, and even though her breath rattled and her movements were so slow it was hard to look at, her spirits seemed improved somewhat.
‘Not so sweet sixteen,’ she said and winked when she sat down to dinner. She managed to eat most of a plate of watery colcannon and even indulged in a bowl of ice-cream for dessert. Mrs Nagle bustled around the kitchen in a sullen fury, muttering about how a woman in her state should be in bed. My mother threw her a filthy look, and Mrs Nagle’s mood abruptly improved.
‘Sure what kind of birthday party is this at all?’ she exclaimed. ‘Let me pop down to the cottage and see what I can find.’
She returned a few minutes later with a box of chocolates and a set of Christmas crackers.
‘Now,’ she said with forced heartiness. ‘This is more like it.’
We ate the chocolates, Mrs Nagle flinching every time I took one. My mother was so weak she could barely pull a cracker, but she placed an orange paper party hat on her head and forced a smile. Mrs Nagle cleared the dinner things away and began the washing-up, and my mother asked me to take her back upstairs. After I’d helped her into bed, she instructed me to open the top drawer of the bedside locker.
‘Now,’ she said, her voice barely audible, ‘take twenty quid from my purse. I want you to go out tonight and have a bit of fun.’
I began to protest, but she wouldn’t hear it.
‘It’s your birthday for heaven’s sake. You’ve been stuck in this house for weeks with only a pair of old women for company. Go out and have a drink on your mother. Not too many, mind. Phyllis will look after me. Let her earn her keep.’
The prospect of a night out was too tempting to refuse. I waited until my mother was settled and went downstairs and put my coat on. Mrs Nagle was up to her elbows in suds.
‘Where are you off to at this hour?’ she said.
‘Out.’
The village was alive with Halloween sounds and smells, bonfires and smoke, bangers like pistol shots. Packs of children roamed the square, ecstatic with the dark, yelling trick or treat. I bought a naggin of whiskey from Hyland’s off-licence and sat on the monument and took it all in, alcohol spreading outwards from my stomach to my fingertips.
A car pulled up and a girl got out of the passenger’s seat. She was wearing a sort of fairy costume, a glitter-studded mask strapped across her eyes. She brandished a wand over me, thrust a flyer into my hand and stuck a few more under the wipers of parked cars and took off.
Halloween Ball
Afro-Kilcody Superstores
Adm €5
I stuffed the naggin in my coat pocket and set off towards Barracks Street. The air was thick with coal slack smoke, the odd firework going off with a sound like stitches ripping. Music boomed from the Superstores and jack-o’-lanterns flickered in the windows, candles guttering behind their gap-toothed grins. The front door was open, people spilling onto the step. The bouncer on the door was wearing a Frankenstein costume. I stepped past him and paid a girl sitting on a keg, a biscuit tin full of change on her lap.
Figures milled about in fancy dress, pirates and ghouls and vampires. The walls were draped in bats and bones, the ceiling hung with fake cobwebs. A sluggish beat throbbed from a sound system set up on a raised platform of pallets. Sub-bass and smoky vocals. The DJ was dressed in a Day-Glo one-piece skeleton suit, working the faders on a mixing desk. Some guy in a white coat squeezed by me, stethoscope swinging around his neck.
‘Hey,’ he yelled into my ear. ‘The homeless look. Original.’
I pushed my way through the packed room. A girl threw her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. She was poured into shiny black PVC pants and wearing a cat mask that covered her eyes.
‘Finnerty!’ she shouted over the music.
‘Have we met?’ I said.
She blinked. Her breath was industrial.
‘Sorry. Thought you were someone else.’
Tucked under her arm was a whip.
I squeezed sideways through bodies squashed rush-hour tight. The room blurred with harlequin faces and beatific smiles. Everything had that mellow faraway look. Projected high on the back wall was an old black-and-white 1950s monster film. Huddled in a corner, a guy in a full-face Reaganstein mask snorted a rail of powder off the back of his hand. He pinched at his rubber nostrils and rubbed the surplus powder on his gums.
I gulped whiskey, exhilarated by the strangeness of it all, and found an empty fruit crate and turned it on its side. Someone handed me the biggest, fattest blunt I’d ever seen. I sucked deep, the sweet smoke burning in my lungs. My head grew heavy and lolled like an infant’s. I took another drag and rested the back of my skull against the wall and closed my eyes. Someone removed the blunt from my fingers. I groped for the naggin and took a slug and swam inside the deep, bass-heavy throb of the music.
‘Hey. Sleeping beauty.’
A young black man was crouched before me, short and slim, with delicate features and huge almond eyes. The party had thinned out and the music was chilled and spacey, the beats slower.
‘Looked like you were having a nice dream.’ The young man smiled. He had on tailored trousers and pointy-toed boots with Cuban heels, a packet of cigarettes stuffed into the sleeve of a skinny-fit white T-shirt. His arms were whipcord wiry. ‘You all right?’
My head reeled a little, a weird field of insulation around my skin, but I was OK, no spinnies, no nausea. The naggin was gone.
‘Somebody stole my whiskey,’ I said.
The young man jerked his head.
‘Come into the back room. You look like you could use some air.’
Groggy and uncoordinated, I followed him into the part of the shop that used to be the hair salon, stepping over empty bottles and beer cans and paper plates blackened with stubbed-out butts.
The back room was empty but for a few chairs and a table strewn with cards. There was a mini-bar fridge in the corner. The young man took two cans of lager from it, pulled the ringtabs and handed me one.
‘Sit,’ he said. ‘It’s cool: I work here. What’s your name?’
I collapsed into one of the chairs and told him. The beer can was blissfully cold. I rolled it across my cheeks and forehead.
‘I’m Jude,’ he said, and took the opposite chair.
I spluttered a bit.
‘Udechukwu?’
He pulled a face.
‘You read the paper.’
I wiped beer from my chin.
‘I thought you’d disappeared.’
He pursed his lips.
‘What else did you hear?’
‘Nothing. It was probably bullshit.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
‘I heard Gunter Prunty attacked you. Something to do with his girlfriend.’
Jude lit a cigarette.
‘I knew Maggie,’ he said. ‘Nothing happened. I don’t go with girls.’
He raised an immaculate eyebrow, picked up the cards and began to shuffle them.
‘She got me into a lot of trouble. But I couldn’t stay mad at her. My mistake was going to the Guards. I got my boss into trouble. He had to let me go.’
He began to lay the cards out on the table. It was a Tarot deck, illustrated with Day of the Dead designs, skeletons and flowers. I nodded at the cards.
‘It said in the paper you were wrapped up in some sort of voodoo stuff.’
He pulled a face.
‘They made that up.’
‘Who?’
‘Gunter and his friend, the Guard. They told the reporter what to write. It was a cover-up.’
‘You’re joking.’
He grinned, showing freshly
capped teeth.
‘I wish.’ His voice was melodious, almost sing-song.
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘Why would he do that for Gunter?’
Udechukwu shrugged.
‘Smokescreen.’
And it was then I realised that the stories Jamey had written were truer than the ones printed in the paper. It was Canavan that Maggie was seeing on the sly, of course. She had lied, and Canavan had gone along with her lie. Udechukwu read my thoughts.
‘People don’t care if a story is real or not,’ he said. All that matters is if they believe it.’
He scrutinised the cards, looking rueful.
‘Have you ever heard the story of the fool and the skull?’ he said.
I shook my head and gulped from the can. It was way late.
‘Don’t think so.’
He reshuffled the cards.
‘A young man was walking a path through the desert. He found a skull and poked it with his staff and said, “Foolishness killed thee.” The skull replied, “Foolishness killed me, but I will kill thee.” The young man returned home and told the old men of the village what happened, but they didn’t believe him. They’d passed that skull many times but never heard it speak. So the young man said, “We’ll go back to the place of the skull and I’ll strike it with my staff, and if it doesn’t speak, you can cut off my head.”
‘So they retraced his steps to the skull, and a crowd followed them. The young man struck the skull with his staff and said to it, “Foolishness killed thee”, but the skull didn’t answer, so he struck it a second time, and still no answer. The crowd grew angry and accused the young man of telling lies and they fell upon him and cut off his head. But then the skull spoke. It said, “Foolishness killed me, but I killed thee.”’
Udechukwu went back to his cards. I got to my feet and made my way through the debris. There were maybe a dozen stragglers sitting around, bright eyed and red lipped and pale from drinking. I pushed the front door open. The new day was breaking, the sky a gorgeous scarlet, the kind of sky that could break your heart.
***
By December my mother was confined to her sickbed, still wouldn’t eat anything more substantial than soup. Most evenings I sat at her bedside and read from one of her Westerns, a yarn about some salty old shooter name of McLean who embarks on one last sojourn across the border to retrieve his trusty horse, Horatio, from the bunch of no-good Mexican bandits who’d rustled him from the livery while McLean was sleeping off a bender in the local cathouse. The story ended with the shooter, having plugged every last bandit and rescued Horatio, bleeding buckets from a gut-shot wound as he sat atop the stoic old horse, who wouldn’t rest until he’d ferried his dying master back across the border. My mother’s eyes sparkled.
All day long and most of the night she slept, and each slow and sickly hour that passed seemed to suck the life from her body until she shrank beneath the sheets. Sometimes her coughing woke the whole house, painful hacking sounds. Each morning I tidied away the crumpled origami shapes of tissues from her bedside dresser and examined the ugly slugs of phlegm for specks of blood, but there were none. Sometimes after she’d drifted off to sleep, I put the books away and told her about the goings-on in school, or things I’d seen or heard in the village on the way home. The sound of the wind and rain outside reminded me of when I was small and she read to me. Now the roles were reversed. The world was completely out of kilter.
The nights grew longer and colder. Every night when she dozed off I talked until I’d grown weary of the sound of my own voice. I told her about the day I first met Jamey in the market square, and about the trick Jamey and Ollie played on me when I visited their house. I told her about the night Jamey and me went to the Rugby Club. I told her what really happened in the chapel, and about the morning Guard Canavan took me to the Barracks in Ballo. I described what I saw on the camcorder tape. I even told her about the day I hitched to Ballo (leaving out the bit about Miss Ross) and what happened at the old slaughterhouse. And one night I told her that when Jamey walked away, it felt as though something inside me died, like I was a twin whose body had absorbed that of its brother, and now he lived in me. I looked off into space as I spoke, and I didn’t see that her eyes had opened until I felt her cold fingers close around my wrist.
‘Labhra Loingseach’s got donkey’s ears,’ she whispered.
Christmas was a dismal affair. I gave Mrs Nagle a box of chocolates, which she grunted at and spirited away to the fridge. She was too mean to buy a turkey and would’ve burned it anyway, so we spent dinner glowering at each other over a miserable little chicken and a plate of soapy spuds and sprouts boiled to mush. I brought a plate up to my mother, but she wouldn’t so much as look at it. I couldn’t blame her.
New Year’s Eve ushered in another year on earth. I lay awake until midnight when the radio squawked Auld Lang Syne. It sounded like a bitter joke. Sometimes when my mother woke, she had trouble remembering who or where she was. Dr Orpen couldn’t help. Eat, he said. Rest. Cut down on the fags. Any time I tried to discuss money, he said we’d settle our account at a later date.
One day when he called to check on what he called her ‘progress’, he glanced at Mrs Nagle, who was scrubbing out a burnt pot in the sink, head cocked, earwigging as usual. He put his arm around my shoulder and took me outside.
‘You and Phyllis have been doing Trojan work,’ he said, squinting against the light. ‘But at this stage I think your mother would be better off in St Luke’s.’
‘The home?’
He fixed me with clear blue eyes.
‘This house is perishing, son. She stays here the rest of the winter, she’ll get her death.’
He glanced at his wristwatch. I visualised a pendulum being set in motion.
‘I’ll make all the arrangements,’ he said. ‘Call me in the morning.’
I watched him walk down the path and into the cold, bright afternoon, his shadow scissoring the hard ground, then I went inside and repeated what he’d said.
‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Nagle scoffed. ‘We’re doing our level best here, John. I’m sure your mother would much rather be in her own house than some old knacker yard of a home.’
I desperately wanted to believe her.
That night as I was trying to get to sleep, I heard the landing creak and saw Mrs Nagle standing in my bedroom doorway, grey hair slithering down her shoulders. She stood for what seemed like a very long time, just watching, before she turned away and softly closed my door. I was disquieted by her uncharacteristic stillness, as though the daytime Mrs Nagle, the thick-necked here’s-me-head-me-arse-is-coming Mrs Nagle, was some kind of act, a front for an even colder, steelier creature. My mother was getting feebler, and here was this old hatchet growing taller and stronger with every passing day, like there was some queer transfusion of energies taking place.
I turned on my side and tried to sleep, struck by a terrible feeling of being displaced, homesick, even though I was home. I kept trying to imagine what life would be like without my mother, and my chest ached.
Some time later I awoke with a jolt. The night was very still, disturbed only by the sound of branches fingering the slates and the bones of the old house groaning. I got out of bed and went to check on my mother.
Her bed was empty, the covers thrown back. For a moment I thought perhaps her sickness had lifted and her senses had returned and maybe she was downstairs making breakfast or reading the paper, but there was no one in the kitchen except for Mrs Nagle, dozing beside the crumbling embers of the fire. I pulled my boots on and threw a coat over my thermals and checked the backyard and the surrounding fields.
Everywhere was white, so white it almost hurt to look at. Icicles hung from the gates and the grass was covered in what looked like pale moondust. Frost had petrified the nettles and the puddles on the ground were cracked panes of glass. I called out for my mother, and the chill turned my breath to plumes of white.
The sky in the east began to brighte
n as I searched around our house as far as Lambert’s land. I hurried across the frozen fields, scanning the landscape for my mother’s form, kept going until the ground deteriorated into marsh. Rabbit droppings pebbled the clumps of grass. Ferns curled from the ground, delicate spiderwebs strung from dock-leaf fronds, briars and brambles intertwined in weirdly pornographic tableaux. The edge of Lambert’s shallow pond was jellied with frogspawn, dead tadpoles preserved in cryogenic ice.
The ground grew spongy and uncertain beneath my boots, threatening to suck me under, and I imagined creatures writhing below the subsoil, hideous squids with saucer eyes and birds’ beaks and sucker-studded tentacles. Panic began to rise in my chest. I was lost. My mother was lost.
Daybreak spread across the earth, bleak light that promised neither warmth nor hope, merely its own inevitable self. Then I saw her, still and bewildered amidst the gorse bushes. She was wearing only her nightdress, violently shivering.
‘Ma,’ I called out. ‘You’ll get your death.’
She turned and stared at me, eyes urgent, teeth clicking.
‘I have to c-collect the children’s allowance.’
I took off my coat and wrapped it around her shoulders and helped her home through the merciless winter dawn. I put her to bed and then hurried into the bathroom to run her a hot bath.
Mrs Nagle was bent over the sink—she still hadn’t gotten into the habit of locking the door. At first I thought she was washing her hands. She murmured in a low voice, like a chant. Her right hand was held palm down over a bowl of milk. A length of twine dangled from her wrist, knotted at intervals like a rosary. She’d placed a lit candle on the soap dish. The draught from the open door made its flame flicker. She glanced up at the mirror, saw my face and whirled around.
‘You put the heart across me,’ she said, leaning her back against the rim of the sink, blocking my view. She was wearing one of my mother’s dresses, but it didn’t fit; the sleeves came down to her elbows and the hem stopped above her knees.
