Wild Decembers

by Edna O'Brien

  Millie, who showed me around the first day, took against me on account of my not speaking to her. I tried my vocal cords in the bathroom and a sound came, but no speech. In the mirror, I saw the terror jumping in my own eyes. Terror of what. Terror of everything. Millie thinks I hate her. She is in love with a doctor, paces up and down in her loud paisley trousers that are much too tight for her, and says that she will write to him for Christmas and he will come. She can wait until Christmas, but not a second longer. She’ll burst then. She called me Loretta the day I arrived and asked me to hold her, said no one ever held her, not even this doctor of whom she dreams, to whom she sends her voices. Often she curses. Her nails are bitten and so are the stumps of her squat fingers. All bloody, all bloodied.

  “I’m like that inside,” she said, and held them up for me to kiss. Minutes later she erupted, said that I did not like her, that I told stories about her, dirty things.

  I prefer being out in the grounds, at least I’m outside, I can breathe. Therese is in charge of us. One day she’s all over me and the next day she’s shouting. Commands, commands. She dug up the pansies that I put in. They lay on the ground, their little purple faces shrivelled, their clayey roots dead. Another of the gardening brigade is called Nancy. She’s not a local. Her husband went up in flames in his own house, in his own wheelchair. She laughs, splits her sides telling it. Took the house with him. Fuck him, she says. Left her nothing. She tells it to everyone, even the young man who delivers the trays of cakes and bread and sausage rolls. She tells him and others how the phone call came to the office, how a nurse had to break the news to her, and soon after the two of them got into a posh car to go home for the funeral. Nothing to bury, only this small pile of ashes. She laughs. I don’t know whether she’s telling the truth or not. You never know. Sometimes out in the grounds someone will whisper, “What did you do?” They like to exaggerate. The men are dying for a kiss, even the old men. They sit on the wood benches and make slobber sounds. They try to get us into conversation.

  No one will tell me how long I am to be here, and I haven’t asked. There are some who have lost the will to go home because they have company here, even if it’s company they fight with. The meals all taste the same — the stews and the roasts and the bacon and cabbage, all identical. The sweet things have a bit more flavour. I am never hungry. The opposite.

  My brother put me here. Dr. McCann and himself did it. When he saw me looking back at the house and my little plantation, he turned and said, “Don’t hold it against me, Breege.” He was in the front with the driver, Tom Liddy. They talked to one another the whole time, as if everything was tiptop. They said that it was different to the old days, people were no longer in straitjackets. It’s not that different, it’s still locked up. We had an uncle here, but my brother did not mention it. He stayed in our house once. He chain-smoked and would laugh for no reason. Tom Liddy said that March was the month when most people went loopy, like the March hares.

  It was after I got into the crib that Joseph put two and two together. A piece of paper that he found on the dashboard of the tractor. The rain had run onto it, but he guessed it, my secret, my rained-on plea. I asked Bugler to see me just once. I begged. I hate that I begged. My brother said it was a sickness. McCann and himself said that it was a child’s crush inside a twenty-two-year-old woman, a daftness. Maybe it was, maybe it is, but how can you stop liking someone, even loving someone, how. I would have got into the tabernacle that day if I could have fitted. It was a loneliness to get closer to Jesus or the Holy Ghost. Or else to disappear, to vanish. Bugler opened up some vein in me, and it is not his fault no more than it is mine. I will know him again, I will be the one to hold him when dead, the one to bury him. I know that. Hard ground, ground as hard and knotted as people, including him. You can go years and years of normal life, all day, every day, milking, foddering, saying the given things, and then one day something opens in you, wild and marvellous, like the great rills that run down the mountain in the rain, rapid, jouncing, turning everything they touch into something living; a mossy log suddenly having the intent and slither of a crocodile.

  Down in the surgery, Dr. McCann and my brother tried to pluck it out of me. They couldn’t. I had gone silent. That was my way. It was not the first time. Years ago, a different doctor, a lady, operated on me in our kitchen, no anaesthetic, no nothing, men holding me down while she dug the knife. Weeks after, she called on us and I was asked to say her name. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. They stood me on a chair so as to be level with her face and her velour hat, but I wouldn’t. She was livid.

  So were they, McCann and my brother. In between coaxing me they thumped me, and McCann put a tiny torch down my throat, then a spatula on my tongue, forcing me to say A’s.

  “Unreal … fecking unreal,” he said, and got out another encyclopaedia. Joseph gave me a cough lozenge to suck, thinking it might do the trick.

  Leaving the world you see it more clearly. It is like things lost, earrings or brooches, they loom up in the mind’s eye. People too. The way I see Bugler in his many guises: on that dance stage in the red shirt with the dappled patterns, his throat soft but stretched, emotion in his eyes.

  It was a beautiful winter day that I left home, the trees bare, their trunks so sleek and damp, the sky all pageant, clouds of every denomination, their pink-frilled edges overlapping, like the waves of the sea. Sunset like a monstrance, spokes of light forking out from it, white white gold. I thought how in summer all the trees are twined together by foliage but in winter they stand alone, stark, leafless. The same with people. In happiness they seem all one, but in misfortune they are apart. It would have been useless to defy them. And I had nowhere to go. Certainly not to him. I will not be listening for the sound of a tractor in the future.

  As we were passing the big power station, the pylons glistened, wires taut with messages, messages of love and hate and pity and condolence. Goodbye, Bugler.

  There were no entrance gates, just a wide gap where two gates would have fitted, and my brother turned to me and there were tears in his eyes: “I’d do anything to see you better.”

  “Fine place,” Tom Liddy said. He could not have meant it. The stone and the plasterwork of the main building looked dilapidated, slates had fallen, the gable wall full of cracks, with ivy growing out of them. That was when I first saw Therese. We all saw her, going across to the single-storey chapel. She holds the keys to the chapel and keeps it locked as it suits her. When she saw us driving in she put her shovel down and came across and asked us for cigarettes and money. Liddy said we hadn’t any and she told us to fuck off, fuck off. A stubby woman in black boots with a shovel. If you did a drawing of her it would be that.

  They encourage drawing and painting. One of the young girls, Dolours, does it. She draws pop stars with a single eye. The third eye she calls it.

  Always coal black and slanting. She signs her name in flowery lettering. Otherwise she is a fashion plate — jeans, tight bodices, and very high platform shoes. Tall as a flamingo. She carries her makeup kit with her wherever she goes: to the bathroom, to the painting room, to the dining room, wherever. Her eyeshadow is a pale lilac, which makes her look in mourning. She was due for release, but not now. She went into the bathroom a few evenings back and cut her wrist, at least grazed it. With a broken bottle. Her friend Chrissie had done it, so why not her. Chrissie had told her that seeing the blood and watching it drip was brilliant, gave her a fantastic sense of release. They are supposed to be studying, but boys are all they can think of. Chrissie says there’s not nearly enough men in the world; she’d do anything for a snog.

  McCann was furious with my brother for having allowed me to see the herbalist, the Dutch woman; he was against her because a lot of his patients defected to her. He said no one with an ounce of common sense would pay for dandelion coffee or thistle milk or a thong of yarrow root. They kept asking things. Why had I got into the crib. Had I my faculties when I did it. Where was my voice box. Why didn�
�t I mix more. Why did I cut up a silk neck scarf in two and then sew it back together. All the time I knew they were weevilling their way around to Bugler, because they wanted him nailed. By now I had a pen and a jotter to answer things. My head was fuzzy like glass paperweights with the snow in them, not clean snow, more like shovelled snow. It was after midnight. The ashtrays were bulging with their half-smoked cigarettes. They asked me did I consort with Mick Bugler, and I shook my head. No one knows about the night on the island, only him and me and the waves. They said that there was nothing for it, only to ring the fecker. Let’s ask him, they said. I was sent out to the waiting room. I prayed that he would be sound asleep, or off at a dance with Rosemary. The phone must have rung a lot of times, because I was able to pick up comics and magazines strewn on the floor. They called me back in. I do not know what he could have said, or even if they spoke to him. All they did was to pronounce my condition: Hysteria ad absurdam.

  McCann got out the forms and began to write.

  “Your mistake is that you believed,” my brother said, dismayed. He wanted me to forgive him for what he was doing to me.

  * * *

  Dolours is at the end of the bed in a black satin skirt, her thin body atilt, her eyes with the glitter of marcasite. She wants to know if I’d like a tattoo. Her new boyfriend does them, it’s his trade; he warms the needle with a cigarette lighter, pierces the design, and then paints over it. She shows me hers. It is a little serpent. He needs the money. She is hoping to go out on the quiet at the duskies to give herself to him. She’ll sweet-talk the male nurse. There is nothing she loves more than giving herself to a man. She’s had oodles. She says every inch of her body is covered in love bites. She shaves because they like that. All of a sudden, she is clinging to me, breaking, sobbing. Why are we here, why are we here? She’s howling it. Explain. Explain. No one can.

  Is it the serpent. Is it that we love too much. Or is it that we don’t love at all.

  “AAGH!” The young baby calls loudly in the pushchair. Oh no, not again, I fed that baby an hour ago, says mother. “Aagh!” The young baby calls loudly in the pushchair. Poor baby, must be hungry, let’s give it something to eat, says mother.

  Two different reactions to the same call from a young baby in need. Two women, mothers. One exemplifying worldly selfishness and the other willing to sacrifice herself for her young.

  It is the third Sunday of Advent and the chapel is crowded, the nave, the main aisle, the side aisles, the gallery, all packed; people arriving and trying to steer their children ahead of them, looking around to see where there might be empty seats. Other children already in an orgy of screaming, and Canon Daly, never a patient man, irked by this bedlam, is glaring out at the parents as if that could silence them. Undeterred, he rested his arms on the edge of the pulpit and settled in to that half-slunk stance which he always took before a long sermon.

  “We know not the day nor the hour, says the Lord,” he began, stating that his theme for the day would dwell on women, the great reconcilers, women made in the likeness of Mary, the mother of Jesus, her sister Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene, the reformed sinner. He went on to expound on how these women in their several ways knew sorrow and joy through their beloved sons, women of whom the words of the Gospel could be said — “their own souls a sword had pierced.” He moved thus to penance, the penance that was preparatory to the season of Christmas, to the birth of the infant Saviour that would in turn end in his crucifixion as a grown man.

  “And …” he said, his voice high-pitched now, as with infuriated glances he strove to tell these parents to slap their children to chastise them, to take them outside and give them a good shaking, which they deserved.

  “And,” he continued, “the season of Christmas is not only one of love and joy but one in which we should try to put a stop to the hatred and the resentment that is at the core of our society. Why do we hate our neighbour? Why are we jealous if our neighbour has a bigger car or a bigger digger, why all this begrudgement …”

  O’Dea had kept watching the door, hoping that Bugler would come and remembering that he almost always came towards the end of the sermon. He saw him then, saw them, Rosemary all tarted up, marching up the aisle and looking back at Bugler to follow, which he did not. O’Dea had given him the wink.

  They move across near the crib, which due to Breege’s recent maraud has a stout girder of holly guarding it.

  “I waited for you last night down at the pier,” O’Dea said.

  “What did you want?”

  “You were seen out on the lake with her … Ye stayed all night.” O’Dea spoke between his teeth, though not exactly in a whisper.

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “If the brother gets to know this, you’re a goner.”

  “Just because I want to cut a road.”

  “It’s not only a fecking road … And you know that. Did you kiss her?”

  “I won’t answer that.”

  “That means you did … Did you lift the lid?”

  “Feck talk is this.”

  “That means you did. You pup … You blackguard.”

  “I did nothing to hurt her.”

  “Well, if you didn’t, someone did. She’s in one big mess … A young girl that stops talking … She doesn’t want to be found out. She’s on the run … My wife’s contention is that she has a pod in her.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Maybe you helped with the Immaculate Conception … I take it you got your way.”

  “Why are you so concerned? You’re a solicitor.”

  “I like the girl. She has no one.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Go see her. Talk to her. Listen to her.”

  The sermon had ended without their noticing. The collection is being taken. Boscoe and Miss Carruthers, going down either side, carrying the knitted purses into which coins and the odd note are being dropped. Canon Daly is sitting on a dais, his hands across his paunch, a satisfied smile now, indulgent of the children who are still crying.

  “Who told you we were there?” Bugler asks.

  “The usual … Gossips.”

  “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “It does … If she fell in love with you.”

  THERE WERE ONLY six people left in the ward, some had gone home for good and others were allowed out for the Christmas holidays. T.J., a young man dressed as Santa Claus, comes running in, apologising for the soot on his cheeks, incurred from all the chimneys he has scaled.

  “Do you accept presents from small men?” he asks. He is carrying tiny parcels wrapped in silver paper and tied with thin silver cording. In his other hand he is holding out a colander of warm mince pies, describing how he soaked the raisins, currants, candied peel, and angelica, first in porter, then in whiskey, then rum, and he reckons that everyone including himself will be well boozed.

  For each he has a special word, a special joke. For Kevin, the little boy visiting his mother who is marching up and down in a cowboy outfit, he plays the dumb cop. He has been playing it on his rounds and is now an expert at it: “The kid rises, cop gives chase, the kid spins, comes up with a 12-gauge sawed-off, puts cop square in his sights, there is maybe fifteen feet separating them — the kid pulls the trigger. Wow. Bow-wow.” T.J. falls in a fit of laughter to the floor, his running shoes in contrast with the red crepe of his overall and the straggly cotton beard. Kevin stamps on him, shouting, “I won … I won,” while behind the curtain, his mother still weeping, still refusing to come out, is calling to him to behave himself, to be a good boy.

  Next it is Millie’s turn. “How’s my girlfriend?” T.J. says, and leads her into a dance. She throws her arms around him and tries to follow the instructions, toe-heel, toe-heel, her hips swaying as she snuggles up to him and says that it is the best day of her life, the best fecking day of her life.

  “How do you like my steps?” he asks, to which she answers with a kissing sound. Given it, she star
ts to cry. He tells her life is too short for tears. He cites only a few weeks back he went with a friend to the hurling finals, brilliant day, brilliant seats, brilliant match, super great, then on down to Kildare, stayed for a week, and guess what — your man Patrick got a heart attack loading cattle onto a lorry a couple of days later. Life is short. He wanted her to know.

  “Not in this flipping nuthouse,” she says, hitting out now, punching him and pulling off his glued-on beard. He humours her with the worst joke he knows: “How do you remember your wife’s birthday? Forget it once,” then tweaks her nose until she laughs. Soon she is changing into her high heels and putting odds and ends into a big handbag to go off with him.

  With the older woman he does a peasant accent: “What ish my nation, Astoor.” She looks up at him blank, staring, as he hugs her and tells her that he is one of them aul leprechauns from Tir-na-N-og. He unwraps her present then, a teeny miraculous medal, gold-coloured, which he puts to her lips. Kevin is pleading to play cops again, Millie dances by herself, and Chrissie, a young girl still waiting to be collected, turns the sound of her cassette player so loud that the whole ward is deafened by it, the walls seeming to inflate and deflate from the throbbing.