Collected Stories

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Is that the strongest you can find for the boy to drink, Vera?’ He laughed loudly. Colum had never heard him laugh before. He slapped the table again.

  ‘Father – if you’ll excuse us, I’ll just show Colum out now.’

  ‘No. No. He came to see me – didn’t you?’

  Colum nodded.

  ‘He’s the only one that would. Let him stay for a bit.’

  ‘His mother will worry about him.’

  ‘No she won’t,’ said Colum.

  ‘Of course she won’t,’ said Father Lynch. He ignored Miss Grant. ‘How many books did you sell?’

  ‘Forty-two, Father.’

  The priest raised his eyes to heaven and blew out his cheeks. Colum smelt a smell like altar wine.

  ‘Holy Saint Christopher. Forty-two?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Miss Grant moved behind Colum and began to guide him with pressure away from the table.

  ‘That calls for a celebration.’ Father Lynch stood up unsteadily. ‘Forty-two!’

  He reached out to give Colum a friendly cuff on the back of the head but he missed and instead his hand struck the side of the boy’s face scattering his glasses on the tiled floor.

  ‘Aw Jesus,’ said the priest. ‘I’m sorry.’ Father Lynch hunkered down to pick them up but lurched forward on to his knees. One lens was starred with white and the arc of the frame was broken. He hoisted himself to his feet and held the glasses close to his sagging face, looking at them.

  ‘Jesus, I’m so sorry,’ he said again. He bent down, looking for the missing piece of frame, and the weight of his head seemed to topple him. He cracked his skull with a sickening thump off the sharp edge of a radiator. One of his legs was still up in the air trying to right his balance. He put his hand to the top of his head and Colum saw that the hand was slippery with blood. Red blood was smeared from his Brylcreemed hair on to the radiator panel as the priest slid lower. His eyes were open but not seeing.

  ‘Are you all right, Father?’ Miss Grant’s voice was shaking. She produced a white handkerchief from her apron pocket. The priest shouted, his voice suppressed and hissing and angry. He cursed his housekeeper and the polish on her floor. Then he raised his eyes to her without moving his head and said in an ordinary voice,

  ‘What a mess for the boy.’

  Miss Grant took the glasses which he was still clutching and put them in Colum’s hand. Father Lynch began to cry with his mouth half open. Miss Grant turned the boy away and pushed him towards the door. Both she and Colum had to step over the priest to get out. She led him by the elbow down the hallway.

  ‘That’s the boy. Here’s your ballot tickets.’

  She opened the front door.

  ‘Say a wee prayer for him, Colum. He’s in bad need of it.’

  ‘All right, but –’

  ‘I’d better go back to him now.’

  The door closed with a slam. Colum put his glasses on but could only see through his left eye. His knees were like water and his stomach was full of wind. He tried to get some of it up but he couldn’t. He started to run. He ran all the way home. He sat panting on the cold doorstep and only went in when he got his breath back. His mother was alone.

  ‘What happened to you? You’re as white as a sheet,’ she said, looking up at him. She was knitting a grey sock on three needles shaped into a triangle. Colum produced his glasses from his pocket. Within the safety of the house he began to cry.

  ‘I bust them.’

  ‘How, might I ask?’ His mother’s voice was angry.

  ‘I was running and they just fell off. I slipped on the ice.’

  ‘Good God, Colum, do you know how much those things cost? You’ll have to get a new pair for school. Where do you think the money is going to come from? Who do you think I am, Carnegie? Eh?’

  Her knitting needles were flashing and clacking. Colum continued to cry, tears rather than noise.

  ‘Sheer carelessness. I’ve a good mind to give you a thumping.’

  Colum, keeping out of range of her hand, sat at the table and put the glasses on. He could only half see. He put his hand in his pocket and took out his pound note.

  ‘Here,’ he said offering it to his mother. She took it and put it beneath the jug on the shelf.

  ‘That’ll not be enough,’ she said, then after a while, ‘Will you stop that sobbing? It’s not the end of the world.’

  The next morning Colum was surprised to see Father Lynch in the vestry before him. He was robed and reading his breviary, pacing the strip of carpet in the centre of the room. They said nothing to each other.

  At the Consecration Colum looked up and saw the black congealed wound on the thinning crown of Father Lynch’s head, as he lifted the tail of the chasuble. He saw him elevate the white disc of the host and heard him mutter the words,

  ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum.’

  Colum jangled the cluster of bells with angry twists of his wrist. A moment later when the priest raised the chalice full of wine he rang the bell again, louder if possible.

  In the vestry afterwards he changed as quickly as he could and was about to dash out when Father Lynch called him. He had taken off his chasuble and was folding it away.

  ‘Colum.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sit down a moment.’

  He removed the cincture and put it like a coiled snake in the drawer. The boy remained standing. The priest sat down in his alb and beckoned him over.

  ‘I’m sorry about your glasses.’

  Colum stayed at the door and Father Lynch went over to him. Colum thought his face no longer sad, simply ugly.

  ‘Your lace is loosed.’ He was about to genuflect to tie it for him but Colum crouched and tied it himself. Their heads almost collided.

  ‘It’s hard for me to explain,’ said Father Lynch, ‘but . . . to a boy of your age sin is a very simple thing. It’s not.’

  Colum smelt the priest’s breath sour and sick.

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘That’s because you have never committed a sin. You don’t know about it.’

  He removed his alb and hung it in the wardrobe.

  ‘Trying to find the beginnings of a sin is like . . .’ He looked at the boy’s face and stopped. ‘Sin is a deliberate turning away from God. That is an extremely difficult thing to do. To close Him out from your love . . .’

  ‘I’ll be late for school, Father.’

  ‘I suppose you need new glasses?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Father Lynch put his hand in his pocket and gave him some folded pound notes.

  ‘Did you mention it to your mother?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How they were broken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure? To anyone?’

  Colum nodded that he hadn’t. He was turning to get out the door. The priest raised his voice, trying to keep him there.

  ‘I knew your father well, Colum,’ he shouted. ‘You remind me of him a lot.’

  The altar-boy ran, slamming the door after him. He heard an empty wooden coat-hanger rattle on the hardboard panel of the door and it rattled in his mind until he reached the bottom of the hill. There he stopped running. He unfolded the wad of pound notes still in his hand and counted them with growing disbelief.

  EELS

  THE OLD WOMAN sat playing solitaire, hearing the quiet click of her wedding-ring on the polished table top each time she laid her hand flat to study the ranks of cards. They were never right. Never worked out. A crucial king face down, buried – and the game was lost. She realised how futile it was – not only this particular game but the activity of playing solitaire, and yet she could not stop herself, so she dealt the cards again. They flipped down silently, cushioned as they slid on the shine of the wood. She was reluctant to cheat. She played maybe six times before she gave up, put the cards away and sat gnawing her thumbnail. Perhaps later, left alone, it would come out.

  She moved to the kitchen and took her magnesia, not
bothering with the spoon but slugging the blue bottle back, hearing the white liquid tilt thickly. She swallowed hard, holding her thrapple. She stopped breathing through her nose so as not to taste, and held her mouth open. She walked to the bedroom, still breathing through her mouth until she saw herself in the mirror with crescents of white at the sides of her open lips. When she closed her teeth she heard and felt the sand of the magnesia grate between them. Her skin was loose and wrinkled, hanging about the bones she knew to be beneath her face. There were crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes. With one finger she pressed down beneath her eye, baring its red sickle. They watered too much when the weather was cold. She wiped the white from the sides of her mouth with a tissue and began dressing, putting on several layers against the cold, with her old cardigan on top. She combed her white hair back from her forehead and looked at the number of hairs snagged on the comb. She removed them and with a fidget of her fingers dropped them into the waste-paper basket.

  She remembered as a girl at the cottage combing her hair in spring sunshine and each day taking the dark hairs from the comb and dropping them out of the window with the same fidget of her fingers. A winter gale blew down a thrushes’ nest into the garden and it was lined and snug with the black sheen of her own hair. For ages she kept it but it fell apart eventually, what with drying out and all the handling it got as she showed it to the children in class.

  She lifted her raffia basket and put into it the magnesia, the pack of cards and a handful of tea-bags. In the hall she put on her heavy overcoat. The driveway to the house had not been made up, even though the house had been occupied for more than three years. It was rutted with tracks which had frozen over. She stopped to try one with the pressure of her toe, to see how heavy the frost had been. The slow ovals of bubbles separated and moved away from her toe. They returned again when she removed her weight but the ice did not break. She shuffled, afraid of falling, the ice crisping beneath her feet. Above her she saw the moon in its last phase shining at midday.

  The air was bitterly cold. She had a pain in her throat which she experienced as a lump every time she swallowed. She had to chew what little she ate thoroughly or she felt it would not go past the lump. Everyone accused her of eating like a bird. Everyone said that she must see a doctor. But she knew without a doctor telling her that she would not see another winter. In September her son Brian had offered to buy her a heavy coat but she had refused, saying that she wouldn’t get the wear out of it.

  On the tarmac road she walked with a firmer step. There was no need to look up yet. She knew the bend, the precise gap in the hedge where she could see the lough. First she had to pass the school. The old school had been different, shaped like a church, built of white stone. But still, the new one had good toilets – better than the ones that she as a monitress had had to share with the whole school. It had got so bad that she eventually learned to hold on for the whole of the day.

  The sound of the master’s voice rang out impatiently as she passed, shouting a page number again and again. She smiled and anticipated the gap in the hedge. The shoulder of the hill sloped down and she raised her eyes to look at the lough. It was there, a flat bar almost to the horizon, the colour of aluminium. She stopped and stared.

  Round the next turn was the cottage, set by itself with its back to the lough. No one saw her. Not that it would really matter. She let herself in the front door with her own key and hung her coat on the hall-stand beside a coat of her son’s. He never wore it because he went everywhere in the car. He had got fat with lack of exercise and the modern things that Bernadette fed him. Spaghettis and curries that made the old woman’s gorge rise to smell them.

  In the kitchen she felt the heat on her face. She opened the door of the Rayburn so that she could see the fire and its red glow. She sank into the armchair and extended her feet to warm her shins before putting the kettle on.

  From where she sat she could see the lough framed between the net curtains of the back window. When she had moved house it hadn’t really occurred to her that she would miss it but the first morning when she woke she had glanced towards the window and been aware of the difference – like passing a mirror when she had had her hair cut. Then with each waking morning the loss grew. She did not become used to the field at the back. It had a drab sameness. The lough was never the same, changing from minute to minute. Now it was the colour of pewter. Through all the years she had spent in this cottage the lough was a presence. She would stand drying dishes, her eyes fixed on it but not seeing it. Making the beds, she knew it was there behind her.

  Suddenly the phone rang, startling her. She looked at it, willing it to stop. She began to count the rings. At ten they should have stopped but they went on. Insistently. When they did stop they left a faint trembling echo in the silence.

  She moved to fill the kettle. What if it had been an accident? At Brian’s place anything could happen to him. She remembered a Saturday in Cookstown when she missed the bus and had to go round to the garage to get a lift. Brian lay in dungarees beneath a jacked-up car, speaking out to her. She hated the whole place. It was like a dark hangar, full of the smell of diesel and the echoes of dropped spanners. Rain came in through a broken sky-light and stayed in round droplets on the oily concrete. A mechanic, whistling tunelessly, started a car and revved it until she thought her head would burst. She hated the fact that Brian owned this place, but what was worse was the fact that he had bought it with money earned from fishing. Always the men of her family had fished for eels.

  The kettle began a tiny rattle on the range and she took a tea-bag from her basket and put it in a cup. When the water boiled she poured it, watching it colour from yellow to mahogany. She removed the plump tea-bag with a spoon and dropped it hissing into the range. The tea clouded with the little milk she added to it.

  The eels had become profitable a couple of years before her husband Hugh had died. A co-op had been formed and the prices soared. Within the space of a couple of months cracked lino was thrown out and carpet appeared in its place. They changed their van for a new car – not second-hand new. But they had worked hard for it, snatching sleep at all hours of the day and night. Often she had seen Hugh making up the lines by the light of the head-lamps – four hundred droppers with hooks off each section of line, four lines in all, while she, with her back breaking, stooped, a torch in one hand, pulling the small slippery hawsers of worms from the night ground to bait every one of them.

  One night she had taken a step to the side and stood on something that made her whole head reel, something taut and soft at the same time – something living. An eel. Eels. An ahh of revulsion followed by ‘Mother of God’. She remembered the words exactly and remembered the hair of her head being alive and rising from her scalp. She had stepped back but another squirmed under her heel. Her torch picked out the silent writhing procession, crossing the land from one water to another. Out of the depths, into the depths. Glistening like a snail’s trail. Shuddering at the memory, she almost spilled her tea.

  She turned on the transistor and changed the wavelength from Radio One to the local station for the news. She heard without listening, staring at the lough. Accidents, killings. The lough will claim a victim every year, was what they said. It was strange that, because on the lough there were no real storms. The water became brown and fretted when the wind got up. Even so, there were windy nights when the men were out fishing that she worried, seeing the water see-saw in the toilet bowl. Last year Hugh had died in his bed, thank God. The cat died about the same time. Both were ill for long enough.

  Only once in her life had she gone out with them in the boat. When she had asked, Hugh had laughed and scorned the idea but she had said that all her life she had been cooking for them and she was curious to know what they did. Besides, now that they had a cooker that could switch itself on there was no reason why she shouldn’t. Every time Hugh looked at her – a spectator sitting in the prow of the boat with her arms folded – he shook his head in d
isbelief saying to Brian, ‘As odd as two left feet.’ And she knew it was a compliment. It was an open boat with an outboard and in the middle sat an oil-drum with a kitchen knife blade sharpened to a razor’s edge protruding above the rim, like an Indian’s feather. As the men lifted the lines, if there was an eel on, they walloped it into the drum, the blade slicing the line as they did so. She had felt a strange admiration for her husband and her son as they became involved in their work. They were so deft yet so unaware of her watching their deftness. She wanted to reach out and touch them but she knew she could not touch the thing that awed her, knew they would mock her if she tried to put it into words. She watched the writhe of brown and yellow eels build up inside the drum, intricate, ceaselessly moving, aware that each one had swallowed a hook. She was too soft, they all said. They had ridiculed her when, drowning a bagful of kittens, they caught her warming the water in the bucket to take the chill off it.

  She finished her tea, swallowing hard, and while she remembered she returned the pointer on the transistor to Radio One and switched it off. It would be the kind of thing that Bernadette would notice. Always she had to leave the place exactly as she found it. One day when she had been on one of her ‘visits’ she had seen a young man crouching outside the garden gate at the back. She was not afraid but curious. As an excuse she had hung out a dish-towel and asked him what he was doing.

  ‘I’m a student – of a sort. I’m looking at rocks.’

  He had a bag over his shoulder and a hammer in his hand. She offered him a cup of tea and he accepted. He was young and full of an enthusiasm for learning that her own son lacked. But he had tried to talk down to her, using simple words to explain the geological research he was engaged in. She told him curtly that she had been a teacher.

  ‘The latest theory,’ he said, ‘is that the continents are moving. These vast countries can move vast distances. But it takes a vast time.’

  ‘I’m vastly impressed,’ she said. ‘More tea?’

  He held out his cup by the handle and she filled it. His skin was pale and he had not shaved for several days, but his eyes were keen.