In Exile

by Billy O'Callaghan

  Eventually he tired of looking at nothing much and moved away. She could feel him go, and she knew it from how the moonlight poured across the linoleum floor of the kitchen, refreshed after its eclipse, but even though it was safe now to move she continued to hold her position, as though she owed something to this hiding place. Finally though, she did raise herself to risk looking outside, but by then a long time had passed, and the garden was empty.

  ‘That’s only Tadhg Maloney.’ Bennie Cuthbert looked up from the bucket scales full of potatoes, a 2lb weight nothing at all in his big open hand. ‘Has he been up along to you, then?’

  Marguerite stood, trying to decide between two cans of Campbell’s soup: Country Vegetable or Scotch Broth. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘No, nothing like that. I was out walking over along the Carrick cliffs that fine day we had last week. Sunday, I think it was. And I saw him. I was just curious, that’s all.’ She hoped that the casual strain in her voice sounded believable, and rather than have to face the shopkeeper’s studying glare she busied herself with reading the ingredients on the label of the Scotch Broth.

  ‘Well, them that know him say he’s a harmless sort. I don’t have much business with him myself, though I knew his people well enough and I have to say that they were all decent stock. Except for an uncle he had who took a queer turn and was taken off to the red brick in Cork city.’

  ‘The red brick?’

  In explanation Bennie smirked, then rolled his eyes and tapped his temple with a stubby index finger. ‘Took to shooting at fishing boats from Ban Head, he did. The men all knew enough to stay well out, but the rocks saw to that anyway. It can be treacherous around there if the wind’s blowing. A boat would come a cropper in a hurry if it drifted in too close to shore around that part of the island. Anyway, there was no danger of him actually hitting anyone, but did that stop him? Not one bit of it. He’d stand up there, ould Seamus would, and he’d blaze away with his double-barrel, raining buckshot down into the sea. The men would stand up in their boats and watch him. A few used to cheer when the pellets would fall short but most of them just muttered a few prayers and let the currents take them past. Ould Seamus was a bit gone in the head by then, used to say he was battling the invaders, but there was a time when he could clear a field of hay all by himself, and he was mighty when it came to cutting turf, had a set of shoulders on him like a Holstein bull.’

  Marguerite drifted around the small shop, gathering items from the shelves and dropping them in her basket. Supplies that would see her through another week, things like dried pasta, jars of tomato sauce, cheese. ‘Where does he live?’ she asked, when she made it finally to the counter.

  ‘Who, Tadhg? Oh, they have a place over on the southern side of the island, just himself and his mother. Hannah. She doesn’t leave the house any more. The last priest we had here used to visit her once a week, for a chat I suppose and to give her Communion, but then he was moved to a parish in Kerry. Father Hassett replaced him, and he’s an all right sort, from Inchigeela, but he got a feed of abuse whenever he tried to call and after a while he just gave up on her. They say she’s like one of them women you see on the television from America, the ones who keep eating until they’re too big to even stand up. Some of the people from over that side of the island have it that she must be up around the thirty stone mark now. Course, there could be a bit of exaggeration in that, but still, it’s true enough that she’s never seen outside any more, not even on the hottest days. Tadhg runs the errands, what little they need doing. Their ould cottage is falling down around them, broken windows, sunken thatch, the place is red rotten. They have a couple of acres, a decent enough piece of ground, and Big Tom, a bed in heaven to him, that’d be Tadhg’s father, used to get the best out of it until he dropped down dead one night while turning a drill of potatoes. That ground is gone to ruin now, all overgrown and thick with rocks, good for little beyond breeding rats.’

  She watched Bennie study the price tag on each item, the values handwritten in blue ink and barely legible, before calculating the final tally on the old-fashioned register. He didn’t look too bad for a man on the generous side of fifty. There was no wedding ring in evidence, but there was a wife, Maura, a dowdy creature with small eyes and a thick, unhappy face. Marguerite held out the money, thinking how funny it was that there seemed to be someone for everyone but that a person only really noticed when they themselves were all alone.

  Bennie meticulously calculated her change, and she nodded her thanks when he handed her some coins, not bothering to check whether or not the returned sum was correct.

  ‘Tadhg is harmless,’ he repeated, just as she reached the shop door. ‘But if he’s bothering you at all, it might be worth mentioning to Sergeant Twomey. The sergeant has a good way with a quiet word, and that’ll be an end to it.’

  Her smile was meant to show gratitude for his concern, but it felt brittle to her and probably looked it, too. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m fine, really. I was just curious, that’s all. You know how it is.’

  The summer pushed on, colours softened, and the visits of Tadhg became more frequent, until there were evenings when Marguerite would catch herself actually waiting for his arrival. In the depths of her loneliness, she found something flattering in the idea that anyone cared and admired her enough to come and watch as she toiled with her latest slathered depiction of a sunset sky. Even though he was a hunchback, a tortured, outcast soul who wrestled constantly with isolation and despair, she had grown to rely on his presence. When she painted, the headland rocks became the rounded bulge of his hump, and the moiling sea and sweeping winds whispered his innermost secrets.

  She no longer felt even a hint of fear any more either. The passing weeks had helped her grow accustomed to the idea of him as a feature in her life.

  While on her way down to the village one afternoon to stock up on some provisions, she passed him on the narrow road. On impulse, she smiled and said hello. He flinched, stepped into the grassy dyke on his side of the road and almost stumbled. Then he hurried on his way, not making any attempt at a reply, though she could feel the intensity in his eyes as he studied her. Memorising the details, perhaps.

  He wasn’t bad looking. There was something not quite right about his face, the muscles set in a certain way as though used to bearing pain, but his features were finely balanced, and he had the most striking eyes she had ever seen. A vague blue the shade of cigarette smoke in a particular sort of light. Pale and only half-aware. If she hadn’t known he was just thirty years old she would have put him down as late forties, but that sense of premature aging was nothing unusual for the men on this island, men with flesh used to the worst elements of a bolstering sea wind, their hides thickened by suffering. Perhaps it was the island that made the hump on his back far less repulsive to her than it would have seemed had their paths crossed in Dublin or in London; maybe it was some overdeveloped level of compassion on her part, one made so insistent by her exile.

  When she lived in London she had seemed so refined. Not a snob, never that, but she mixed with a particular sort of crowd and rarely drifted beyond that sphere. There were demands, and expectations. The eccentric element of her nature came to the fore, and mostly it was genuine. Her dress sense favoured ’sixties chic, encompassing gaudy, running colours and choosing materials that rarely seemed suited to one another but somehow went together well enough. Like leather and wool, or velvet and rubber. For an entire year she had gone barefoot, an act which brought no end of funny looks on the streets and in the Tube. She wore a red gypsy earring hoop through her left nostril, and it earned enough stares for her to add a second one, blue this time, to her lip. Her friends tolerated her with patient smiles and breathy sighs. She was an artist, after all; some quirks were only to be expected. The quirks were, however, mainly limited to her appearance. London was a game that she played well. Those in her circle expected exhibitions of strangeness, and there were obligations to be met. It was art imitating life imitating art.
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  And yet for all her surface compromise, her instincts remained wholly conservative. The men she dated, the occasional men, were strictly acceptable types; finely suited, stable in their outlook, men who tended towards the world of high finance or matters of law. They were typically well-mannered and immaculately groomed, and they knew how to treat a woman. She knew that they enjoyed the idea of being seen around town with someone like her on their arm, and she understood that way of thinking. With her, they could feel adventurous without ever really having to lay anything on the line. But when she let them take her to bed, finally, after the necessary four or five dates, often longer than that, their roles reversed, and it was they who turned wild while she found herself overcome by the plague of shyness. Intimacy was always so difficult for her.

  That life felt an eternity from how she existed now. Here, there was none of London’s excess. Most of the families who populated the island had set their roots here generations ago, back even to a time before records were kept. These people had neither time nor patience for the flippancies of a casual lifestyle. There was no need to walk barefoot on these roads, no need to dress in flamboyant fashion in order to make an impression; she could not have been more noticed if she tried. She was alien to the locals in every way, betrayed by all the details of her being, from the slow and ever so slightly judgemental precision of her accent to the very notion that she could make a living from painting pictures. Better than a living; that she could come into such serious wealth from the pursuit of what they saw as a trifling pass-time, nothing more. Everyone was polite to her, smiling if they met her on the road or passing a few words of conversation if they were in the queue behind or ahead of her in the post office or in the butchers shop, but there was never an open-armed embrace, never anything to suggest that she belonged here.

  One night she undressed for bed without drawing the curtains. The bare light bulb’s hundred watts felt harsh around her as she peeled off her blouse and her old paint-splattered denims and in her underwear drifted back and forth across the bedroom, busying herself with folding clothes, rearranging the stack of weary, dog-eared paperbacks that crowded the shelves of the corner bookcase, tending to the things that irritated a tired mind. She moved around the room, enjoying her freedom, carefully only to avoid the large square canvas that leaned against the wall behind the room door. It was her latest painting, unfinished, a layered sky over an empty foreground. She’d spent a couple of days trying to find the necessary motivation to tackle it, but it was a commissioned piece for somebody who wanted the work simply as a boast. She had accepted the October deadline and had already cashed and banked the cheque, of course. Now it was a piece of work, no longer even art, something better ignored.

  Her bedroom window afforded a view all the way to the sea, and there were no houses to bother her, nothing but the tumble of open land. She hadn’t looked to see if her visitor might have been watching from the hawthorn or even closer, because such confirmation would have made towers of her inhibitions. Juggling knowledge and denial fit perfectly into fantasy. Feigning distraction, she slipped from her black lace bra and, with a deep steadying breath, from her panties, then forced herself to bother again with the busy chore of folding clothes.

  After a while she moved to the window and opened it, leaning out a little so that she might feel the night’s fine breeze caress her face and breasts. When she caught sight of him down below, hunched low in the open part of the garden just where she liked to set up her easel, she looked quickly away and pretended instead to study the village in the near distance to the west, the reflecting lights of the houses and pubs setting alight the calm imposition of the harbour tide. Below her she could hear him breathing, that thin asthmatic rasp coming in fast spurts, and then that breathing broke into choking groans. Forced to look, she saw him drop to his knees and spill onto his side on the shorn grass, but rather than shame or frighten him, she pulled the window closed again, humming softly to herself the air of a fiddle tune she had picked up from somewhere, the murmur of it quivering in her throat, shaken in its time by the hard beat of her heart. A wave of self-loathing flushed through her, threatening darkness, and she pulled on an old oversized t-shirt, snapped off the light and crawled into bed to cry herself to sleep.

  ‘Hello, Tadhg,’ she said, startling him. He was sitting on the rocks down along where the seals tended to gather, a mile or so further east of the harbour, a peaceful place. She had watched him throwing stones out into the water, underarm, sending them out twenty-five or thirty yards with no effort at all.

  ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ The sun was mostly lost behind a marbled veneer of cloud, but the air was fresh and warm, pleasant for walking or for a picnic.

  Tadhg stared at her, his mouth pulled into a gag in place of an answer. They had not been introduced, and he was not used to people speaking to him. She gazed out across the sea and let him stare. This part of the shoreline was sheltered by the cloaking rock walls of the low cliffs, but farther out a breeze was churning up the water, capping the bilge with froth. Gulls circled, watching for food, canting in and out of their own unconvincing rotation pattern.

  ‘I’ve seen you around the island,’ she said, smiling to herself as she watched the waves pull towards the rocks. ‘My name is Marguerite, by the way. I have a place up on Broad Hill, but you probably know that. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this place it’s that nothing much stays a secret around here for very long.’

  He licked his lips and took to studying his hands. ‘You’re pretty,’ he said, the first words she had heard him speak. His voice had a peculiar quality; deep and hoarse, yet soft, somehow. The accent accounted for some of that softness but there was something more too, rubbing away all edges. He sounded uncertain of his words; not used to speaking, she supposed. Certainly not used to speaking to a woman.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, embarrassed and pleased.

  Without waiting for an invitation, she found a place to sit on the rocks, close enough to seem friendly but still beyond the reach of anything but the most desperate lunge. A silence stretched out between them and became uncomfortable. He stopped throwing stones and stole glances at her with a certain rolling of his neck; meant as discreet, it was actually quite charming in its naivety. His eyes were the same pale and beautiful shade that she remembered, and she wondered if he was thinking about the way she had looked that night at the bedroom window. Today she was wearing a summer dress, sleeveless but still quite proper, and it was one of her favourites because she knew how much it flattered her, making a boast not only of her complexion but also of her body’s shape.

  ‘I love the sound of the sea,’ he told her, his voice breaking. Marguerite was surprised to see tears tracing runnels down into the jagged red brush of stubble that mottled his jaws. She wanted to ask what was wrong, but the words seemed unnecessary. Edging closer, she touched his arm. It was the greatest gesture of comfort that she dared to make. Any sense of nervousness fell away when he flinched at the contact and, overcome by sympathy, she persevered, gently stroking his arm and uttering soft, nonsensical noises of consolation. The muscles of his forearm felt immense through the coarse wool of his shirtsleeve.

  Time lost all thread of itself. Tadhg’s face seemed to crumble, giving vent to what must have been years of pent-up strain, and he clenched his eyes shut and began to sob from somewhere deep within. Marguerite continued to mumble sounds of reassurance, easing her arm around him and whispering that it was good to cry sometimes, that he had nothing to be ashamed of and that he’d feel better once he had let it all out. When he folded his body towards her, embracing, she didn’t hesitate. She could feel his heartbeat racing against her breast, and nothing but her whispered breath felt appropriate. The gloom that gripped the day was stifling, an avowal that the sun had been put away. The wind sighed out across the water as a judgement call. She had to battle to keep from shivering, though it was still warm, not yet five o’clock, a Sunday in early September. His arms h
eld on as though they’d never let go, not hurting her exactly but ferocious just the same in their hinted strength. There was something wrong, she realised. The loneliness they shared had a diseased quality. She tried, as gently as she could to pull away from him, her left hand easing from his hunched back and dropping to straighten the skirt of her dress.

  But he held her tight to him.

  ‘I have to go, Tadhg,’ she said, trying to project a sense of calm when her mind felt only like screaming. ‘It’s getting late and I have work to do. Please, Tadhg, let me go.’ There was an instant when it seemed as though he would, and as she felt his grip loosen around her more words gushed to the surface, dramatically happy, false. ‘I want us to be friends,’ she told him. ‘You’re welcome to visit me any time. If you call, I’ll show you some of my paintings, my best ones.’ Feeling some need to explain, but nearly delirious at the thoughts of being away, and free. ‘Maybe I’ll even paint one for you.’

  When the grip tightened around her again it was higher on her shoulders than before, those great strong arms crushing even as she tried to squeeze free. Tadhg held her that way for a long time after her neck had snapped, held her until dusk closed in and until he had cried himself out. Finally, he stood up and let her go. She slumped down onto the rocks, almost without a sound, slipped partially and then caught on some granite outcropping, so that she lay directly below him, perhaps five feet down, the waves lapping back over her splayed legs, their foaming edges pulling at her dress, offering him steady glimpses of her thighs and, occasionally, her buttocks hemmed in by the high cut of her black lace panties.

  The tide would carry her away. People would wonder where she had gone, but she was a stranger to these parts. If they found her at all, if she somehow ended up tangled in some fisherman’s nets, they’d decide that she had fallen on the rocks, or maybe jumped. That had been known to happen. No one would look too hard, though, not for an outsider. And no one would bother Tadhg about the matter. He sat a while and watched how the water lapped at her, and when the twilight began to take on the final sanguine tinge that often ushered in a late summer night on this island, he turned and traced a familiar path back up through the rocks towards the road.