The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  The family ate breakfast quietly, heads bowed, while Nanny Ei forced the conversation along between gaping silences. Maggie could smell the booze coming off her mom’s skin, the stale cigarettes off her stepfather. They guzzled tea through cracked lips.

  “Sausage, Mags?”

  Maggie took the plate, smiling pointedly at her grandmother to indicate that Nanny Ei was the only adult in the room who she did not want to disown. She bit into the meat, the rich, greasy taste filling her mouth and making her want to vomit. Johnny Cash still played on the record player, but in the gray morning light, with a family-wide hangover, the deep bass of his voice felt alien and threatening. Even so, it was better than the sound of rumbling throats and dry mouths chewing and swallowing.

  “Well. Should someone go and wake up Kevin?” Nanny Ei said his name carefully, bleaching out any hint of reprimand she might be directing at Colm as she cleared plates.

  “Sure, wake him up,” he said, his mouth full of eggs. “No hard feelings here.”

  Laura smiled tightly and reached for his arm.

  Maggie bit into her toast. She wanted to savor this moment until the time when the secret no longer belonged to her and Kevin alone. She waited until Nanny Ei was nearly to the hallway before she made the announcement.

  “He left.”

  Everyone looked at her.

  “What do you mean left?”

  “I mean, he’s gone.”

  Maggie glanced up from her plate at Nanny Ei, whose face had taken on the same perplexed, fearful expression it had at the Quayside, when she’d held a forgotten cigarette between her fingers and watched her son play “Fairytale of New York,” those pale fingers coaxing out of a guitar emotions that he himself would never express. It was a look that wondered how a mother could give a child life and still find herself, more and more as the years went by, locked out and estranged from that child’s inner life. Since they’d moved to Bray, Maggie had often caught her own mother looking at her in the same way.

  “He left for the airport a couple hours ago,” she said, leveling her gaze at Colm. A dusting of dried blood clung to his knuckles. “He said he doesn’t want to stay here, under this roof, with you people.”

  Ronnie began pushing the eggs around on her plate with great concentration. Colm, looking supremely weary, pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose and sighed. Laura got up and threw a handful of dirty silverware into the sink.

  “That’s just fucking great!”

  “Laura Lynch!” Nanny Ei said sharply. “For Christ’s sake, will you watch your language in front of your children?”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Mother, but here’s another family holiday he’s ruined. He just had to make me and Colm look like the bad guys. It’s like he’s always trying to pit me against my own children! And it works every time! Because of course, whose side is a teenager gonna take? Her mother’s, or her twenty-six-year-old rock star uncle’s, who sends her care packages every once in a while?” She pointed a dirty spoon at Maggie. “And let me just say that if you are mad at me or Colm—if you blame us for any of this—then you’re being incredibly unfair.”

  “I’m being unfair?” Maggie could feel the hotness at the back of her eyes. “You’re the one who—and Colm’s the one who practically killed him—” She stopped and looked up at the timber-slatted ceiling. She would never forgive herself if she started to cry now. It seemed that whenever she was gaining ground in an argument with her mom, she burst into helpless tears.

  “He didn’t start that! And you know it!” Laura was standing behind Colm now, her hands pressing into his thick shoulders.

  “Well, we can all sit here and fight,” Nanny Ei interjected, “or somebody can drive out to the airport and see if we can go get him. It’s only 11:00, he surely can’t have left yet.”

  “Oh, let him go,” Colm said, pushing his plate away. “He doesn’t want to be here, that’s his business. Why do ye always let him ruin things? That’s why he does this shit, because somebody always runs after and tries to fix it. He’s twenty-six fuckin’ years old! He ain’t a fuckin’ cripple is he? He ain’t a retard, is he? So let him be!”

  “Stop yelling!” Ronnie shouted, and then ran off to her room, her blue nightgown trailing behind her.

  “Who cares what you think?” Maggie slid back from the table and stood facing her stepfather. “You think you’re part of our family now? You’re just some guy my mom met at a bar.”

  “Met and married,” Colm said. “I think that counts for something.”

  “You were just the first one to come along who was dumb enough,” Maggie snapped.

  “Margaret Marie!” Laura lifted the dishrag to her eyes.

  “Mom, I didn’t mean—” She looked down at the table full of empty plates. She had intended the words to have an effect, but she hadn’t exactly meant to make her mother cry.

  “Sweetheart, your uncle is a bleeding fuckin’ druggie.” Colm smiled at Maggie, a mean smirk that showed the top row of his white, square teeth. “Thought you should know that. So at least when you stand here and defend him, you know what you’re defending. Or haven’t you ever looked at the crook of his elbow? No wonder he’s such an admirer of Kurt Cobain. He’s just like him, except for the talent part.”

  Maggie shook her head. Suddenly, it all made sense: the bulging eyes, the boiled-out skin, the emaciated frame. Self-destruction had a look, a smell. He wore his addiction like a loose cape, as close to the surface as blue veins. That’s what had scared her so much, under the garish lights of Harry and Rose’s, not his quitting the band. She felt both enraged and impotent. She hated that all her good days had to be followed by bad ones, and she was furious, too, because she knew that Colm was right—that loving Kevin meant always having to defend him. She felt a hand, cool and dry, on her bare shoulder.

  “You shouldn’t have told her that,” her mom said quietly.

  “I already knew,” Maggie said quickly, shaking Laura’s hand away. Maggie would be damned if she’d let Colm think that he could tell her something about Kevin that she didn’t already know herself. “I’d still pick him over any one of you, any day of the week.”

  She walked out of the room and into Ronnie’s bedroom, where her sister cried softly under her blankets, her Christmas ruined. Maggie sat at the edge of Ronnie’s bed, put her hand gently on her sister’s thin back.

  “I’m sorry you have to be a part of this crappy family, Ron,” she whispered. Ronnie curled tighter into her ball beneath the covers and heaved a sob. Maggie got up, grabbed her Discman and her jacket from her own bedroom, and walked past the table of stunned adults, out into the cold morning. She could still hear Johnny Cash singing as she headed up the road.

  It was Christmas Day in County Wicklow, the rain blowing in from the sea, and by the time she made it up the back hill to Dan Sean’s house, Maggie was soaked, her face ruddy with rain. She knocked once, then let herself in, as was the custom at Dan Sean’s. He was sitting in his usual spot, the high-backed velvet chair in front of the enormous fireplace. Mike had strung Christmas lights and tinsel around the ceiling, and it lightened up the drab Oriental carpet, the wallpaper etched in years of dust, the pictures, brown and fading, in their frames.

  He smiled at her beneath his Cossack’s hat and waved her in. He was dressed for the holiday in a more dapper manner than usual, a bright green scarf knotted at the loose skin of his neck. Maggie went over to him and kissed his cheek, which was soft and hairless as a baby’s.

  “Happy Christmas, Dan Sean.”

  He insisted on making the tea himself, and she sat with him in front of the fire for the whole afternoon, the mug cooling in her hands. There were no arguments or whispered conversations, just the crackling of the fire, Dan Sean’s whistled breathing, and the rain against the window. It calmed her. In the presence of all his years, it was hard for Maggie to feel that her problems were all that special. As the shadows lengthened outside the windows, she reached into her jacket pocket and held K
evin’s compass in her palm, rolled it across her knuckles like an ocean-smoothed stone, and let her anger ebb away into Dan Sean’s great ancientness. His head nodded forward on the lump of his scarf, the cat and dog stretched indolently next to each other, the fire flickered, the tinsel sparkled, and it began to finally feel like Christmas.

  Mike came in after the sun went down and pointed at the hunched form in the rocking chair.

  “He sleeping?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “We’re just going to have a bit of dinner down at the house,” he said. “Dan Sean?” He put a hand softly on a corduroy knee, and the old man awoke with a jerk and a snort.

  “I was just on my way, anyway,” said Maggie.

  “I heard about what happened down at the Quayside last night,” Mike said. “With your uncle. Nothing like the holidays to bring out the worst in people.”

  “They’ve never gotten along,” she explained. “It’s just family stuff.”

  Dan Sean stood creakily and ambled off to the bathroom.

  “It’s good of you to come up here and see him,” Mike said. “Poor old fella. Sometimes it’s hard, with the family and the kids and all, to get up and see him as much as I’d like. I hate thinking of him up here all alone for hours at a stretch. But he won’t move in with us. Everything important that’s ever happened to him has happened within these walls. He says he won’t leave till he’s carried out in a casket like his wife and child before him, the stubborn old codger.”

  While Dan Sean held onto Mike’s arm and retreated slowly down the hill, Maggie walked home in the darkness. The ditches along the side of the road and the shadows of stone fences were all familiar now. She lingered, walking slowly past Rosie Horan’s house where, back from the road, the sitting room windows gleamed their bright warmth. Human figures moved about behind the bright squares like moths, and Maggie walked as slowly as she dared, squinting for a sign of a buzzed head and broad shoulders. Just to see him from far away would be enough, she thought, after a Christmas like this one. But as she passed by, someone reached up and shut the curtains.

  When she got home, dinner was almost ready and nobody asked where she had been. Maggie ate a little roast beef and some lumpy potatoes. The food felt heavy in her stomach and made her tired. Ronnie had gotten a puzzle for Christmas, a giant map whose pieces were every country in the world. When dinner was over, the two of them spread it on the carpet in front of the Christmas tree and split up the continents between them. Africa gave them the most problems, and they stayed up later than all the adults, who had gone to bed early to end the dull ache of their hangovers. By the time the clock had moved past midnight on Christmas 1993, they finally clicked the last piece into place: Angola, nestled between Zaire and Namibia and bordering the vast, lapping Atlantic. Then, having succeeded in putting the world back together, they went to bed.

  When Maggie was a little girl, she suffered from terrible ear infections. They always got worse in the middle of the night, while her mom was out working at the bar. When she cried out in pain, Nanny Ei would come into her bedroom, lay her on her side, and squirt a medication down her ear canal that fizzed through the clogging pus, making Maggie feel like her ears were melting from the inside out. The pills she was given made her groggy and heavy-headed, and everything—her bedroom carpeting, the streetlights outside, her pink and gold bedspread—took on funhouse colors that made her reach out her limp fingers in weak wonder.

  On these fevered nights, while she tossed and turned, Uncle Kevin would come into her room, sit at the edge of her bed, and play softly on his guitar. He was eighteen then and deeply entrenched in his hippie phase. He wore the same tattered pair of gray corduroys every day and had a ponytail of fat, fuzzy dreadlocks that Nanny Ei was always threatening to chop off in his sleep. When he leaned over Maggie to kiss her good night, they brushed her forehead, softer than they looked, and filled her room with their loamy smell. It still remained one of Maggie’s favorite memories, lying with the pressure leaking out of her ears and the bedspread soft and swirling pink and her uncle singing folk songs to her in the darkness: I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train. I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train. I’d shine my light through cool Colorado rain.

  Kevin had a mystical hold on the memories of the people who loved him, a magnetic pull, and maybe this was the reason that although Nanny Ei had planned to stay in Bray until New Year’s Day, she became anxious to get back to Chicago as soon as Christmas was over. On Saint Stephen’s Day, the family took the train to Dublin and walked the holiday-abandoned streets along the path of the Liffey, which was black and oily, its concrete banks clotted with dark moss and the occasional silver of dead fish. The following day, Nanny Ei announced that she was worried about Kevin, about whether he got home okay, about whether he had gone to the hospital to get his nose set, about whether the transient women and burnout men with whom he associated were sleeping naked on her hand-patched quilts while she was out of town. There was another argument, of course, with Laura yelling and Colm shaking his head and Ronnie crying and Maggie quietly seething. Nanny Ei left the following morning.

  Aíne returned from Kilkenny the same day and immediately called Maggie to put the screws to her to go on another double date with Paul. Maggie refused, until Aíne, near tears, confessed that her mother wouldn’t let her spend time alone with Paddy and that she needed Maggie and Paul to act as buffers.

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” she begged. “You don’t even have to talk to each other if you don’t want to. You just need to be there.”

  “Why don’t you just lie to her about who you’re going out with?” Maggie asked. “That’s what I would do.”

  “This isn’t a big city like Chicago,” Aíne sighed. “My mother’s got spies all over the place. Can’t you just come out with us for one night? I know the two of you didn’t fall madly in love or anything last time, but Paul’s a lovely fella once you get to know him. Smart, too. Please?”

  And Paul was nice. He wasn’t bad looking either. But then there was the matter of his cold, acrobatic tongue. Kissing had felt more intimate—more physical—than Maggie had anticipated. She’d been aware of the soft, mammalian puffs of Paul’s nostrils, the tremor of his shaking hands. It wasn’t something she thought she could fake her way through again, especially because, having experienced it, it just made her wonder all the more intensely what it would be like to kiss Eoin. Would it be different with every boy? Was kissing a boy the one true way to find out how you felt about them?

  “Fine,” Maggie finally agreed. “But if you think I’m going to make out with him again, you’re crazy.”

  They met the boys at the carnival later that evening. The night was damp; a cold, briny wind blew in from the sea. They took shelter underneath the heavy canvas shell that protected the magic teacups from the corrosive winter air. Inside, it was dark and cozy as a tepee, the teacups immobile, skewered like huge marshmallows at the ends of their metal spokes. The hub in the middle of the ride was large enough for the four of them to sit cross-legged in a tight circle, their backs against the cold spokes, squinting to see the features of each other’s faces in the darkness and listening to the wind batter the tarp outside.

  “Look what I brought,” Paul grinned, pulling a small bottle of whiskey from the inside pocket of his coat. “Who wants some?”

  “I don’t drink,” Aíne sniffed, nestling into Paddy’s lap.

  “Yeah.” Paddy folded his skinny arms around her. “Keep that stuff to yourself, Paul.”

  “Suit yourself, lads.” Paul unscrewed the cap and took a swig, grimacing as the liquor spilled down his throat. “Maggie? Care for a nip?”

  Back in Chicago, it was mostly the rich kids who spent their weekends getting sloshed on the stolen contents of their parents’ liquor cabinets. As the daughter of a bartender, and a member of the hard-partying Lynch family, Maggie had never really seen the allure. But the events of the last few days had
put her in a self-destructive mood.

  “Hand it over,” she said, ignoring Aíne’s disapproving glare, and took a sip big enough to make her eyes burn.

  “Strong stuff, isn’t it?” Paul laughed as she wiped her eyes.

  “It’s not that strong.” She took an even bigger drink, then, and forced it down with a straight face. It continued in this way: while Paddy and Aíne whispered and kissed on their side of the teacup’s hub, she and Paul passed the bottle back and forth. In twenty minutes, it was empty. Maggie scooted closer to Paul, and taking her hint, his fingers crept across her back and came to rest around her shoulder. Our first kiss wasn’t so awful, she thought. I mean, it could have been a lot worse. She experimented with resting her head on his arm. It didn’t feel terrible. On the other side of the hub, Aíne was welded to Paddy with the needy grip of a skydiving pupil to her instructor. He began reciting to her some poetry he’d learned in school.

  “Te spectem suprema mihi cum venerit hora,” he said, twining his fingers around hers, “Et teneam moriens deficiente manu.”

  “That’s Tibullus,” slurred Paul. “We’re in the same honors Latin class. Don’t let him impress you, Aíne.”

  “But I know how to translate it, too,” Paddy bragged. He turned back to Aíne and cleared his throat, looking deeply into her eyes in the way Maggie was sure he had practiced after seeing in a movie. “May I gaze upon you when my last hour has come, and dying, may I hold you with my faltering hand.”