by Phelan, Tom;
Patrick said, “Beneath her glamorous exterior Deirdre Hyland was as dreary as a late November day . . .”
42
The Day Before the Inquest
1951
In which the Great Damp of autumn descends on Ireland, and Mikey Lamb and Kevin Lalor pass each other like two abandoned, silent and leaking ships on a dark afternoon.
IT WAS A LATE NOVEMBER DAY in late September, and like anything out of season, everything was wrong with it. That morning the country had awakened to an unexpected damp autumnal day, and when dampness descends on Ireland it is as ubiquitous and as cloying as God in the Short Catechism.
The Damp was in the bedrooms and on the top bedcovers, whether they were old coats or embroidered eiderdowns. The Damp was in the clothes the people put on after hesitating in their beds like swimmers contemplating the chilling waters of a mountain river. It was in the kitchens even after the fires were set to blazing; it was in the boots and overcoats and caps the people and children put on before venturing out into the cold, liquid morning.
The Damp extinguished everyone’s summer mood with the same swift and brutal finality as a brass snuffer smothering a candle flame—nothing left but the darkness and the insidious stink of the smoking wick. The Damp was here with the same disturbing presence as the family drunk; in one night it had descended like the precursor of the final fungus. It might be eight months before next year’s late spring sun would kill it.
The hot breath of farm animals came whitely out of their nostrils and briefly hung its shape on the cold droplets in the air. Dogs stood on tippy toes shivering, drops on their noses like those on aged men too old to care anymore about social niceties. Cats queuing up for warm milk in cowhouses angrily eyed each other. Birds ruffled their feathers on bare branches, moved their scaly feet like the fidgety hands of old women in church pews at a loss without their knitting needles.
People went to work on their bicycles wrapped in their dismal thoughts and their heaviest topcoats, ungloved hands turning red and raw on the handlebars. Depressed schoolchildren dragged themselves to cold classrooms, where everything was harder to understand and learn, the language in the catechism even stranger and more meaningless than usual. Throughout the day the dampness tightened its grip, and by evening it had penetrated the souls of the people, sending their spirits spiraling downward as efficiently as the first warm summer sun had sent them soaring.
With peaked cap resting on his eyebrows, overcoat collar tied under his chin with a huge safety pin, overcoat hem covering the tops of his cold Wellingtons, Mikey Lamb stood with his back to the gable end of his father’s barn, hands buried in his pockets. His chin was on his chest, his heart in his boots. This had been, still was, the worst day of his life, the saddest, the most depressing, the dampest. His insides were aching worse than his battered face. He was crying on the outside, the salty tears flowing across his split lip and making it burn—Barlow Bracken had disappeared into England with his family last night, and the whole world was in the grip of a darkness and a dampness that would last forever.
Mikey was waiting to talk to Kevin Lalor.
Two miles away, on his way home from Gohen, Kevin Lalor was straining to keep his wobbling bike in motion as he neared the top of the Esker. The rawness of the day had found its way inside his socks, and his feet were cold. From his shoulder blades to his waist he was as cold as if he were wearing a wet blanket. His nose was cold. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He was aching on the inside as if a frozen hand was squeezing his heart. His soul was weeping. Not even when his father and mother died had he known the feeling now residing in his chest. If he had been able to talk about it, he would have said it was the antithesis of the feeling which had inflated him after he had been introduced to Deirdre Hyland in July.
This morning Deirdre had leaned over his desk in the Courthouse. In a strong whisper she told him he was no different from any other man in Gohen. Before she said another word, the Civil Servant knew that by this equation he was no longer the apple of Deirdre’s eye—that he had been consigned to membership in her vast void where resided the men of the world who had disappointed the women of the world because they had expressed behavior which defined them as males.
Mikey Lamb looked up Glower Road toward Gohen, and even before he had confirmed that Kevin Lalor was not approaching, he was lifting his right foot and planting the sole of his boot against the wall behind him in anticipation of a long wait. Like a one-legged miniature remnant of the First World War, he stood motionless, the pain in his guts twisting the flesh of his face into knots. His sadness was underpinned on a deep foundation of anger; Barlow Bracken could at least have told him, could have warned him. Not once during the long summer, not once during the days since school had resumed, had Barlow even given a hint about disappearing. He hadn’t even left a message, written a note. It wasn’t fair; it just wasn’t fair.
This miserable morning, Mikey hadn’t even had the time to miss Barlow at school before he heard that the Bracken family had gone away during the night. The schoolboys were huddled in groups whispering about it, as if a dire supernatural power had been involved in the disappearance. Some children were frightening themselves and their listeners with the breathless news that the front door and the windows of the Brackens’ house were gone, and the doors of the rooms inside, too. The house was so clean that the fairies must have come and cleaned the house after the occupants had been spirited away.
Kevin Lalor crested the Esker and the moment he put pressure on the pedals to get the momentum going, a swooshing sound startled him. Then, in the handlebars, he felt the flatness of his front tire.
“What else could I expect?” he muttered as he dismounted. He lifted the bike and spun the front wheel slowly until he saw the rusty staple, one leg buried to the hilt in the rubber. “Scuttering farmers and their scuttering barbed wire and scuttering staples,” he said aloud. Grasping the staple between his thumb and forefinger he pulled it out and put it in his pocket. “Nothing’s any good outside the place it’s supposed to be,” he grumbled. With gloved hand on one handlebar, he started walking.
“Scutter!” he said to himself, and his mind filled up again with thoughts of Deirdre Hyland.
He knew now, too late, that he should never have confided in her about tomorrow’s inquest. He had made a conscious decision not to confide in anyone, but he had fallen into the trap of showing off. If only he’d listened to the advice he’d given to Mikey Lamb many times: never show off, you’ll only fall on your face.
During lunchtime yesterday, Kevin had tried to impress Deirdre Hyland in the stupidest way; he had tried to show her how clever he was by talking about how thick Sergeant Morrissey was. In so doing, he had told her what he was not about to reveal at the upcoming inquest.
Yesterday, on his way home after work, he’d had an uneasy feeling in his guts. Deirdre had not only failed to applaud his cleverness, but she had voiced dismay that the Civil Servant was more interested in preserving social harmony than he was in telling the whole truth. He had slapped the handlebar several times in anger at himself.
This morning, not only had the unexpected dampness depressed him the moment he felt it beside his face on the pillow, but the memory of yesterday’s stupidity came galloping into his head, filling him with trepidation. And then, he was just sitting down at his desk in the Courthouse when his worst imaginings began to take on the shape of reality. There was Deirdre bearing down on him, and before he was even equated with every other male failure in Gohen and environs, he knew his dreams of a future with this woman were now as real as the mirage of a puddle of water on a tarred road in summertime.
“Feck!”
In the schoolyard some of the Tilers were pretending to know more than everyone else, scoffing at the talk of fairies, jeering at the stories about the windows and the doors. The Tilers said they knew all along that the Brackens were getting ready to go to England, that Mister Bracken had brought tea chests home from Janey Delah
unty’s, and this was a sure sign they were going to move.
Mikey, too proud to ask a question that would reveal his ignorance about his friend’s disappearance, listened with growing anger at Barlow for not telling him.
The Tilers said that Joe Coss had come in his car in the middle of the night, and before anyone could say Jack Robinson, all the Brackens were gone. The toughest Tiler, Elbows Kelly, said the Brackens had run away to England because they were crooks.
“They were not,” Mikey said.
“They were so, Sheepy-Shipey, Wammy-Lammy.”
“They’re not crukes,” Mikey persisted, even though he was very afraid of Elbows Kelly’s fists.
“Crukes, crukes!” Kelly jeered, and gleaned encouragement from the laughs of his Tiler entourage. “He can’t even say the word because he never goes to the pictures. Crukes! And the Brackens were crooks. They owed a whole lot of money in Janey Delahunty’s shop.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“No, they didn’t!” Kelly jeeringly whined back at Mikey. “Sheepy-Shipey Ba Ba, Wammy-Lammy Ma Ma.” As Kelly glanced around for more encouraging smiles, Mikey ran forward and, winding up a haymaker, tried to hit his tormentor in the face. Before Mikey’s fist had completed half its arc, Kelly had already beaten the snot out of him with four lightning jabs to the face. But Mikey was too angry at Barlow Bracken to give up. He wanted to land a punch no matter what the cost, and it didn’t really matter what that punch landed on.
Kelly put his foot behind Mikey’s feet and pushed him in the chest. Mikey didn’t know he had fallen until the ground jumped up and whacked him in the rump.
Since the moment he’d been introduced to her, Kevin Lalor had been besotted by Deirdre Hyland. Lalor was not only in love with a person, he was enthralled by all her individual parts; he was blinded by the perfection of her eyes, her hair, accent, ears, nose, eyelashes, the shape of her nostrils, her lips, teeth, eyebrows, chin, neck. Her hands were masterpieces. Her skin was as flawless as the surface of a lake that hasn’t known a breeze in a billion years. The underlying form her body gave to her clothing bespoke a female perfection surpassing any of the women in the pictures. Her mind was sharp. Her speech was direct. She was very clear about her likes, dislikes, prejudices, fears, hopes and expectations. She spoke correctly.
In the four months he had known her, Lalor had heroically curtailed the impulses which had been carved into his being since the time his one-celled ancestor tried to mate with a passing speck in the swamp. Not once had he even held her hand, even though he had fantasized wildly about kissing her fingers, sucking them one at a time into his mouth. In his daydreams he had been incapable of removing her last layer of clothing.
“Even if you do go to Germany for the operas, even though you read literature, even though you are a civil servant and have a crystal set and a stamp collection, you’re still like the rest of them,” she had said across his desk, he sitting there with his mouth open and in his guts the cold, bitter, rusting, cast-iron claw of rejection.
After she had walked away, he just sat there with his mouth open, his intestines all knotted. Across his frozen brain, vague, snowy eddies of thought wafted. He could never unsay what he’d said yesterday about the inquest. If he told her now that he’d reform himself and throw Eddie Coughlin bare-arsed onto the scales of justice she would not have him. He was simply another man. In Deirdre Hyland’s mind he was just one of a zillion tadpoles wiggling around in the cold, brown water of an early spring ditch.
And all because he had wanted to show off how superior he was to that big, fat, thick galoot of a gobshite from Cork in his silver-buttoned uniform.
“I am thoroughly disappointed in you, and I have no desire to ever speak to you again.”
To fall from grace because he had made himself superior to Sergeant Morrissey!
“Oh, good fuck!” he groaned aloud, and in a deeply visceral reaction to his own stupidity Kevin Lalor propelled his bike across Glower Road toward the ditch on the far side. Then, disembodied and dismayed at what he’d just done, he watched as his precious Raleigh lost its uprightness and, with a rattling of the bicycle chain inside the chain cover, fell out of sight.
From the gable end of his father’s barn wall, Mikey Lamb lowered his foot in an unconscious reaction to what he was thinking. From the surface of the schoolyard that morning, despite his blindness, despite the blood coming out of his nose, despite not knowing how he had suddenly landed on the ground, he had propelled himself forward and thrown his arms around Elbows Kelly’s leg.
Then he buried his teeth into the flesh on the side of his nemesis’ knee.
He had bitten Kelly.
Like an ill-bred dog, he had bitten Kelly on the knee; he had sunk lower than the most miserable person in the school. Biting a person was worse than spitting on someone. There was something wrong with people who bit other people.
The shame of what he had done was pushing Mikey down into the tall weeds at the edge of the Lower Road. He didn’t know he had sunk, had disappeared from view until he heard Molly calling him to come to help her with her sums. Molly even came out and stood on the road in front of him, but she didn’t see him in the weeds, and he was too far gone into his own darkness to respond.
Elbows Kelly had clutched Mikey by the hair and yanked him off his flesh. Holding him as if he were the head of a guillotined king, Kelly showed the bloody teeth marks on his knee to the circle of onlookers that had quickly gathered at the cry of “Fight, fight.”
“He bit me!” Kelly shouted. “The dog bit me! He’s nothing but a biting dog that should be put in a sack with a rock and drownded.” Kelly began to bark and was immediately joined by twenty other howlers.
It was Mister Tracey’s bell that had interrupted the humiliation. But at lunchtime, and again when school was let out at the end of the day, Mikey was greeted everywhere he went with the sounds of barking dogs. And beneath all this torture was the bottomless feeling of loss. Barlow Bracken was gone.
In the dying weeds of summer, Mikey put his forehead on his knees and cried, not caring, not even aware that the cold dampness was seeping into the seat of his pants.
The Civil Servant looked down at the spinning rear wheel of his bike, the axle mechanism clicking in his ears with the belligerent rancor of an early-morning alarm clock.
For a long time Lalor stood there, his mind a block of black ice, no thoughts zipping about, just the same lumpness of skull that is felt after walking into a phone pole in the dark. He wasn’t angry, sorry, or sad. He was nothing. He was as unfeeling as the Damp. He was his own Damp.
As if reaching across from one world into another, he bent down and stretched his hand toward the rim of the back wheel of his bike. He slipped his fingers between the spokes and heaved until the bike was lying on its side at the edge of the roadside ditch. He picked it up by the handlebars and set off again toward home, guided only by instinct like an old horse.
He didn’t feel the cold. He didn’t feel the shocks that his airless wheel was sending up through the frame of the bike. He didn’t hear the rhythmic scraping that the bent front wheel made every time it completed a revolution. He didn’t know when he came within sight of the Lambs’ house. He didn’t know, as he passed the end of the barn, that Mikey had peeped out at the approaching noise; had decided that no matter what the Civil Servant could say, there was nothing that would alleviate the pain he was feeling.
As Kevin Lalor passed, the opening in the weeds closed in front of Mikey’s eyes, and he lowered his forehead onto his knees.
43
In the Sunroom
In which Sam Howard makes a confession, even though he’s a Protestant.
“POOR MIKEY,” ELSIE SAID. “Poor Kevin. Even poor Deirdre; she was her own only and worst friend. I wonder how it was for them for the rest of their lives—Deirdre and Kevin—working in the same building.”
“Seemingly not bad,” Patrick said. “Kevin told me that Deirdre was able to make certain peo
ple invisible in her world. Kevin became invisible to her, and after his emotions regained their equilibrium, the magic began to work both ways. She became invisible to him even in narrow hallways and doorways.”
“Deirdre must have lived in a sparsely populated world. She did not deign to lower herself to those beneath her, and she had few equals.”
Patrick said, “Here’s Sam coming back to tell us the conclusion he has reached.”
“What?” Sam asked as he stepped into the sunroom.
“There you go again, walking into a conversation and saying what. My answer to that question in future will be which what are you whatting about because while you were away a lot of whats were whatted about. You will just have to be more specific with your whats.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” Sam said, and he plonked down into the creaky chair.
“Well, did you arrive at a conclusion?” his wife asked.
“What conclusion?”
“The conclusion you reached—what other conclusion would I be talking about?”
“There are times I don’t know what you’re talking about, Else.”
“There are times you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about so you won’t have to talk.”
“Now you’re in my brain, Else, misreading my snapping synapses,” Sam said. “Patrick, my wife talks in enigmas sometimes.”
“Sam says I talk in enigmas when he wants to avoid talking—it’s a man thing, avoiding talk.”
“Any man is reluctant to talk when he knows he is going to be pestered with questions while he is talking, all of which questions would be answered by the time he would have finished talking if he hadn’t been ambushed and quizzed in the first place with every sentence spoken, or half sentence, for that matter. It’s a woman thing—the interrupting. Talking to a woman can be as exhausting as running with a horse on your back in the Grand National with Becher’s Brooks popping up all over the place without warning.”
