The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  They left the library and stepped into the cool afternoon, wandering the college green among earnest students. The students seemed like modern manifestations of those monks: bookish, determined, dedicated to higher pursuits of the mind and spirit. Maggie could see why Aíne’s great dream was to be a student at Trinity one day. They crossed back through the iron gates and bought sandwiches and chips from a shop across the street. Carrying their lunches, they returned to the college green, past the museum to the rugby pitch where Eoin’s mother had taken him when he was small. They found a bench beneath a large beech tree and unwrapped their sandwiches.

  “So, what were you thinking about back there?” Eoin asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Back in the Book of Kells room. You were a bit zoned out.”

  “Oh.” Maggie bit into her sandwich, chewed slowly. “I was just thinking about artists.”

  “Like your uncle?”

  “He was a great musician.”

  Eoin nodded. “My mom’s a singer.”

  “Really? What kind of music does she sing?”

  “Irish music. Traditional stuff. She used to have an agent and a CD and everything. But—well, all that’s gone now.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want,” Maggie said, picking at a blade of grass, “but how come you don’t live with her?”

  “I don’t mind.” He stretched his legs out in front of him. “I’m not ashamed of anything.” He spread a napkin on his lap. Maggie sat and watched, waiting for him to continue.

  “Things were great when I was small,” he began. “We had plenty of money and we lived in a nice flat in Dublin. I was alone a lot—she did a lot of touring, but I didn’t mind because when she was away I got to stay at my Auntie Rosie’s house, and my uncle Dan would teach me how to do the farm work, kick around the football with me sometimes.

  “Then, maybe four or five years ago, things started to get bad. My mom started acting really strange. She’d show up hours late for her gigs, get in shouting matches with her manager over the littlest things. Everybody thought she was on drugs. Eventually, her agent and her studio dropped her.” A leaf fluttered down from the beech tree that shaded them, landing on a corner of his untouched sandwich. He didn’t notice. Maggie reached over and picked it off.

  “By then we were broke, and we had to move in with Auntie Rosie and Uncle Dan. Mom began accusing us of things: saying that Uncle Dan was spying on her in the shower, or that I was sprinkling rat poison in her supper. Crazy stuff. She started hanging tack paper over her bedroom windows and she wouldn’t eat anything home cooked, would only eat prepackaged cream crackers and canned soup.

  “Then, a couple years ago, when Cork played Meath in the All-Ireland, she took me down to Croke Park for the game. We set up a little table near the stadium to sell copies of her CD for a pound a piece. This rich Cork fella—I’ll never forget, he was wearing a suede jacket and a red and white scarf around his neck, he came up to our table and told my mom that he’d only buy a CD if she could sing him a Cork song. I’m sure he thought, by the looks of us, me with my messy hair and mom dressed in some ratty pink shell suit left over from the eighties, that she’d be a disaster. But the minute she opened her mouth and sang the first lines of ‘The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee,’ he saw that she was the real thing. A crowd gathered, and when she was finished, the fella bought a CD, then reached up and untied the red and white Cork scarf from around his neck and hung it on my shoulders. Being the bold little bastard that I was, I said, ‘But I’m not a Cork man.’ And he said, ‘Well, do you want me to buy another one of your mommy’s CDs?’ And I said, ‘No. I want to go to the match.’

  “See, Maggie, Gaelic football is more than just a sport in this country,” he went on. “It’s, like, part of our national identity. And I’d been playing since I was a kid. But nobody had ever taken me to Croke Park before. And that’s exactly what I told the fella—I gave him my sob story about growing up without a father, never having anyone to take me to a game. And just that easy, he reached into his jacket pocket and handed me two extra tickets. I nearly died right then and there.”

  “That’s amazing!” Maggie laughed. “I had no idea you were such a little hustler! Was it a good game?”

  “I’ll never know,” Eoin shrugged. “The minute the man walked away, my mom said, ‘we can get good money for those tickets. We’re touting ’em.’ ”

  “Touting?”

  “Yeah. I think Americans call it scalping.”

  “She scalped your tickets?”

  “I begged her to let me see the game. I said I’d go by myself and she could sell the other one. I promised I’d get a job the next day and pay her the difference. But she told me to shut up and man the CD station, and off she went with the two tickets.”

  “That’s awful,” Maggie said.

  “So I’m standing there at our table holding back tears and trying to hawk the rest of the CDs, and I’m watching her in that old pink shell suit, chasing after people with these tickets. With my tickets. And these two guards pass by. I call ’em over. I say, ‘see that woman over there? She’s trying to tout some stolen tickets.’ I don’t know why I did it. I knew that now, we wouldn’t get any money, and I still wouldn’t get to go to the game. But I suppose I was just so pissed off I didn’t care.”

  “Did they arrest her?”

  He shook his head.

  “They told her to shove off. They said, ‘If we see you around here again today, we’re gonna lock you up.’ And then they pointed at me. They said, ‘That young fella over there, he’s our lookout. So don’t try anything.’ ”

  Maggie raised a hand to her mouth. “So your mom knew you ratted her out? What did she do?”

  “She got mouthy with them, and they took the tickets from her and they pushed her onto the street. She came storming back over to me, we packed up our table and the rest of our CDs, and we went back to Bray. She didn’t say a word to me the whole bus ride home. She just sort of looked out the window. And when we got back to Auntie Rosie’s, I watched the game on TV, just like I’d done every other year, and she went off to her bedroom and didn’t come out for the rest of the night.”

  Eoin shifted his legs in the grass and began playing with his sandwich wrapper.

  “That night I dreamed that I was drowning. I woke up, all in a panic, and shot up in my bed. There was this mirror on the wall across from me and there was a clear moon outside the window, so I could sort of see what was happening even though it was dark. I could see my face, and it was all purple, and above that, behind the headboard, I could see my mother’s face. The expression on it was just totally blank, the same face you might wear watching an ad for laundry detergent. She was standing behind my bed and she had my red and white Cork scarf tight around my neck and she was strangling me.”

  “Oh my God,” Maggie whispered. She reached a hand to touch him, but he seemed so far away, so alone with his memory, that she was afraid he might flinch at her touch. Her hand went back to her lap, to the forgotten sandwich gone soggy in its wrapping.

  “I tried to scream and Auntie Rosie heard it. She woke up and ran into the room and knocked my mother in the head to make her let go. Uncle Dan called the police, and they took her away, and by the following week they had a diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenic. Sometimes she’s well enough to come home and stay with us, but every few months or so she has another episode and back to the hospital she goes.”

  A soft mist had begun to steal over the mossy carpet of the college green. Maggie finally found the courage to reach for Eoin’s hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” Maggie said. “I didn’t know.”

  He hung his head. “Now you think I’m some nut, I suppose.”

  “No.” She shook her head and held his cold hand to her cheek for a long moment. “Families do horrible things to each other all the time—it’s not your fault.”

  The mist had scattered all the students back to their classrooms and library
cubbies. She and Eoin were alone, and Maggie felt like crying—for him, for herself, for the poor dead monks who couldn’t save the jeweled front cover of the Book of Kells so that now, no one would ever be able to gaze at it under lit glass in the warm room of the Old Library.

  “We’ve still got a couple hours to kill before the bus,” Eoin said. “If you want—but it’s cool either way—we could pay her a visit?”

  “Your mom?”

  “Yes. She’s staying in the hospital just up the road, in Dun Laoghaire.”

  “Is that why you needed to come to Dublin today?”

  He looked down at his sandwich wrapper. “I just didn’t want to go by myself.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Maggie said. “Of course I will.”

  Our Lady of Perpetual Help Hospital was a short bus ride from Dublin, a gothic stone building set back from the road and surrounded by gnarled trees. It looked like the kind of place where delicate Victorian women may have gone, a hundred years earlier, to cure their nerves. Inside, the walls of the lobby were as blank and sterile as the outside had been turreted and mossy.

  “How long has she been in here?” Maggie asked as they waited for the elevator.

  “This time around, been about two weeks. Since right before Christmas. Holidays are not optimal times for people with mental illness.”

  “Holidays are not optimal times for most people,” Maggie observed. The elevator dinged, the doors slid open, and a nurse wheeled out a balding, jaundiced man, who was hunched over in his wheelchair and muttering to himself “One, two, three! One, two, three!” over and over again. Maggie’s heart began to pound: she’d never been in a hospital before. Eoin remained stoic, but in the empty elevator, he stood closer to her than he needed to.

  They stepped out of the elevator into a clean, carpeted hallway. A signpost on the wall read: FLOOR 8 PSYCHOSIS. Unmarked doors stretched in two directions. Eoin marched to the one on the left and pressed the buzzer. He waved at a small camera hanging from the ceiling and the door clicked open. Maggie hesitated.

  “Come on,” Eoin said, reaching back to grab her hand. “They don’t bite. Well, some of them do. But they keep those ones in a different ward.”

  Maggie laughed weakly at his joke and followed him toward the sound of a bell-sweet soprano that was drifting down the empty corridor. The voice was singing “Raglan Road,” perfectly on pitch, clear as rainwater, without the accompaniment of so much as a harmonica.

  The door was ajar and Eoin knocked gently before pushing it open. His mother was sitting in a plastic chair, facing the window. She was dressed in a beige tracksuit, her thick back and large rump spreading across the seat. She wore a pair of gray socks and Adidas sandals, and her hair was tied up in a ponytail. The ponytail part was showgirl blond, but the roots were a faded, dull brown.

  It was only when she stopped singing that she seemed to feel, as mothers do, the nearness of her child. She whipped her head around, revealing a once-pretty face gone droopy and stretched with rapid weight gain—the bloated side effects of steroids or heavy meds. A sheen of sweat stood out at her hairline and upper lip, where a faint mustache was apparent in the sunlight that slanted in through the barred window. Her star had fallen, that much was clear, but Maggie could see that Eoin’s mother still possessed a faded glamour, the imprint of a memory of what she once was. She passed a hand over her lips as if ashamed at their chapped state, and pawed self-consciously at her hair. But if she was surprised or unhappy to see them, she didn’t show it. Her smile was genuine, maternal: normal. She didn’t look like the type of woman who could be capable of strangling her child.

  “Hi, Mammy.”

  “Eoin, darling.” She rose from her chair and wrapped him in a hug. He collapsed into her just a little, pressed his cheek to her hair. Touching his mother, Eoin’s eyes fluttered closed. Maggie picked up a week-old issue of the Irish Times that was folded on the nightstand and pretended to read.

  “Mammy, this is my friend, Maggie,” he said.

  “Hello, Maggie,” Eoin’s mother bowed her head politely.

  “Hi, Mrs. Brennan,” she said shyly.

  “Oh, please! Call me Mary. You make me feel old. Please, sit down! You’ll have some tea.” She pointed at the bed, and Eoin and Maggie sat next to each other on the edge of it. She went over to a small dresser next to the sink and flicked on the electric kettle.

  “How are you feeling, Mammy?”

  Mary sat down heavily in her chair, sighing deeply.

  “I’m good, I’m good,” she said. “Everyone here is very nice. Except the night nurse, of course.”

  Maggie wanted to know more about the night nurse, but Eoin changed the subject quickly.

  “We heard you singing when we came down the hall. Your voice is top-notch, Mammy. Sounds like the good old days.”

  She pulled nervously at her ponytail, girlish and pleased.

  “D’you think so? I’ve been putting lots of lemon and honey in my tea, trying to get my voice back. And I even gave up the fags. Haven’t smoked in three days! The doctors here have arranged for me to put on a little concert this evening. Nothing too glamorous, of course. Just a little singsong in the canteen for the other patients on the ward.” The kettle clicked off and she stood up and began to pour the tea.

  “Well, that’s great!” Eoin’s voice had taken on an artificial quality, as if he was talking to a child prone to tantrums.

  “Well, it’s the least I can do for these poor people,” she said, handing them their tea in thick paper cups. “You should see them—shitting themselves, wandering the halls half-crazed, babbling to themselves. It’s awful. They’re pure lunatics, most of them. But even a mad man can appreciate a bit of music, and as Jesus teaches us, we’re meant to shine our light with the world—”

  “Not hide it under a bushel,” Eoin finished. “I know, Mammy. That’s one of your favorites.”

  Mary beamed, reached over, and patted Eoin’s cheek.

  “My good boy,” she said. “You always listened to your mother.” She turned back to Maggie. “You see, I treat these little concerts as practice. I’ve got to keep my voice in shape for the bigger venues. Why, only next month I’ll be giving a show at the Cork Opera House.” She stopped, struck with an idea, and clapped her hands together. Her nails were long and pointed, and smeared with chipped purple polish. “You know what? The two of you should come! I’ll call Eddie Naughton and get him to reserve you some seats!”

  “That would be great!” Maggie said. “I’ve never been to an opera before.”

  “It isn’t opera, though,” Mary explained. “I sing traditional music. They’ve got Luke Kelly to accompany me on the banjo.” She sipped her tea gleefully. “Can you believe it? The great Luke Kelly!”

  Eoin, who had been twisting his hands together on his lap, began cracking his knuckles loudly, one by one. His Adam’s apple bounced like a Geiger counter. He glanced at Maggie and shook his head nearly imperceptibly.

  “What time’s your show today?” Eoin asked with that same bright tone he’d been using since they’d arrived. “We’d love to stay and watch. I’d love for Maggie to hear you sing.”

  “Well, that would be lovely!” Mary smiled broadly. “What an unexpected treat. The show goes on right after supper—in about an hour. So you’ll have to clear out for now. Even if it’s just a practice gig, I need my privacy before I go on. I need to practice my scales, put on a little makeup and all that.”

  “Well, we’ll leave you then, so.” He put his cup on the dresser, leaned down, and kissed her quickly on the top of her head. “And we’ll see you in the canteen in about an hour.”

  Mary walked them to the door. She put a hand on Eoin’s cheek, searched his face with a pair of blank, gray eyes.

  “My good boy,” she said again, and now her voice was trembling, and she threw her arms around his neck. He hugged her back, and Maggie watched with a growing sense of shame. How can he still love his mother, who almost killed him, she wondere
d, when sometimes I hate mine and I don’t even know why?

  The hospital canteen was filled with late-afternoon light. It had high, arched, Plexiglas windows. The patients, murmuring quietly, were shuffling along the food line with their dinner trays. Young women in hairnets scooped turkey and parsley sauce, potatoes, and mashed turnips onto their plastic plates.

  “I’m excited to hear your mom perform!” Maggie said, as she stepped into the canteen. “Will we eat dinner here, too?”

  Eoin took her arm gently and held her back.

  “There’s no concert in the canteen,” he said. “And no concert in the Cork Opera House. Luke Kelly’s been dead for ten years, and my mother will probably never sing again for any crowd, not even this sad bunch.” He waved a hand at the dining room. The patients were seated together at long tables, high school cafeteria style, but most ate with their heads bowed, content in their solitude, and Maggie was struck by how deeply lonely the sound of a fork scraping a plate at a silent table could be.

  “I’ve found that the best way to keep her happy is to humor her,” he said as they waited for the elevator. “We smile at each other and tell polite lies—and that’s how I save our relationship.” He shook his head. “I know it sounds funny, but you don’t know what I would give to have a knock-down-drag-out fight with my mother, like a normal teenager!”