‘There’s a problem with tonight. The night help just phoned in sick. That leaves a problem with tonight.’
I took time in offering. To show enthusiasm would raise suspicion.
‘You’re a grand girl, Mary Sive. You can sleep for most of it once the men are put to bed.’
I had no need for sleep. At home I asked Lulu if she’d like to come to where I worked for a little party.
‘A little one, Lulu, with no noise. Otherwise I get the sack.’
‘And what about me?’ Fanny demanded. ‘My party girl days are not over I hope.’
‘Fanny,’ I smiled. ‘They are only just beginning. Follow me up the road an hour after I leave.’
* * *
St Manis Home at night was quiet from eight onwards. On St Michael’s ward the men had been put to bed regardless of age or condition. Even Peter and Thomas, the most able-bodied of them, were ordered to be under the covers. Most evenings, Thomas would slip out to play cards with the attendant, or into Peter’s room to talk about the few things they had in common. The conversations were shorter than the ones he shared with Black. Thomas was with Peter in his room.
‘Peter. That party you said you wanted. It starts in an hour.’
In sixty minutes his room had a record player, a small selection of scratched favourites, a couple of bottles of whiskey, cigarettes, chocolate and some crisp bowls. Peter’s bed was pushed against the wall and Black had been roused, none too happily, from his sleep, as had one or two others.
The men were assembled in their dressing gowns, but their hair had been combed and Ted had kindly let them all have use of his aftershave. They were as excited as the children they had once been and long since forgotten.
I walked down to the gates to meet Fanny and Lulu who arrived clutching at each other and screeching at the slightest rustle of wind.
‘No fucking lights, ’cept for one car that nearly took me legs off,’ Lulu raged. ‘You might have told us! Fanny has her nails dug into me arm bone.’
‘I have not! What about you leaping into my arms when the car went by, bloody great Jag it was!’
I went still and cold, but there was not sign of it now.
‘Come on, girl! Lead us to the drink and dancing,’ Lulu marched ahead.
I took them in the side entrance, on strict instructions to be quiet.
‘We know how to be that when we have to be,’ Lulu said, and moved quickly.
Fanny pulled at my sleeve.
‘How do I look, Sive? A long time since I went to a party.’
‘Well,’ I fixed a bright hair lock behind her ear. ‘You’re as nice-looking as I’ve ever seen you.’
Fanny and Lulu and all the girl inside them that had never had the chance to come out, walked ahead of me. I looked up at Margaret’s room. No light. Asleep at the same time as the inmates, as Joe would be.
They tripped over each other and giggled and shushed. I wondered whether it was a good idea at all, having them there.
Then I saw the men’s faces as I opened the door to Peter’s room and I knew it would be all it was meant to be and more, in those hours after dark when they played music and took turns to dance with the female company. After the whiskey was gone I made tea and they drank it like it was whiskey. The noise was kept low. They knew what the rules were. Lulu draped her silk scarf over the harsh light from Peter’s lamp, ‘for atmosphere’.
Thomas and I danced. I asked him if he remembered the two women and he shook his head and they shook theirs. I got his album and showed Fanny and Lulu. Everybody was so young they said.
Everybody was young now. It was a night that lasted a long time and when I packed two women through the gap in the hedgerow, to walk home through fields and tear their tights and curse me as they ground high heels into soft earth, the grey light of morning was already on us.
* * *
We saw Fanny and Lulu to the bus stop, Carmel, Eddie and I. Myrna had given them a long goodbye and a present each, wrapped in cloths.
‘Enough for both of you,’ she smiled. ‘But don’t open them until you’re on the ferry.’
‘We will come again,’ Lulu promised. ‘If we’re welcome.’ Fanny added.
‘You’re more than welcome, ladies,’ Eddie spoke. ‘Next time we’ll have an inside toilet.’
Lulu turned away before we saw the tears, Fanny had no trouble with us seeing them. Inside the bus they got a seat together and as it pulled off I saw them open their cloths. Working women have been trained to examine contents long before a giver intends them to. Both mouths opened. Then they rapped on the glass and showed us – two rings, with stones larger than most.
‘Costume jewellery?’ Eddie asked.
‘Must be,’ I said, Carmel and I looking at each other.
32 ∼ Blood and Hair and Fire Flowing
WITHOUT LULU AND FANNY the house grew quiet. My mother went into a long silence. The last thing Lulu had whispered to her had been, ‘You should marry that Eddie, or someone else will. Not many men like him.’
Carmel took to walking on the strand, with nothing to keep her from the growing cold but a thin piece of cloth, which the wind snapped at. The autumn was well in. The sky filled with the Vs of departing birds and panicked swarms of starlings that called to each other: ‘Where will we go to hide from the cold?’
Receiving no answer they clung to the ivied gable end of the house. In the late dusk they screamed and chattered high alarm and not one of them with a mind to do anything about it but be close to the next one.
My mother did not cling, but went out as she had done in the days of before. When he came home from work, Eddie had his dinner alone most nights now. Carmel was off just as soon as she put it on the table in front of him. The sun was setting earlier each day and she went to the beach to be with it in its dying moments and then she would not come home. Sometimes Eddie went to look for her and more times he did not, for she could not be found. He listened to his radio and read his paper and sighed.
I knew what was in my mother’s heart. She knew that life had stopped and was moving backwards and she feared that. For the past was filled with people she did not wish to meet. The ghost of her mother was often with her and she cried out to her in the night air of the woodland, ‘Keep them from me.’
But Gomez and Joseph were not far, their blade eyes cutting into the back of her. She went to the beach for the heron and it did not come and it did not give her the stillness she needed, the life she needed.
Carmel Moriarty, alone still, after a life of alone time.
I asked Myrna why it was happening and she told me the walls between worlds are thin. There are places where the past still exists and the future has already begun and ended. I did not like what Myrna said. I asked her to give me the cards that I might determine what would happen. I might have the power now to push my mother out of the madness and guide her to the peaceful.
‘The cards are the last thing that I will give you.’
Myrna spoke sharply, her spit was dry and formed in white beads at each corner of her mouth. ‘Not yours until I am gone.’
‘I only want to help my own mother. How is that harmful to anyone?’
‘Leave the cards to their work and you get on with yours.’
But while Myrna slept I took them from their box and went to sit by the fire I sit at now. I turned over the first.
It was nothing but red. Blood poured out and over my hands and on down over my clothing and blood poured from my temple and I screamed but no sound came. Then the strands of red hair the same colour as my mother’s came and twisted around my fingers and entwined around my arms and made to encircle my neck and choke the life out of me. Then thin licks of orange flame sampling my fingertips, turning them black, and still my scream could not find a way through.
I cried out to Myrna and my cry was heard. I heard her moan and open the door with a slowness that must surely mean I would die before she came. But she came and she wrenched the card from me and sp
at on to my hands and the fire and blood and hair shrank and disappeared without trace.
I trembled. She spoke with barely a voice at all, ‘You were told. How can I teach you when you will not learn?’
‘But I have learned! I have learned about Carmel, what you knew all along and kept from me.’
‘I know, child, and I know there is nothing to be done, nothing I can do.’
‘Who will do this to her, Myrna? Who? Answer me.’
She put a hand up.
‘I cannot answer because I am bound up in this ending too. The cards can’t tell.’
And it came to me then. It came to me why she would not have spoken to me of this.
‘It is not you that brings this death. It is me. It is Jonah Cave who will cause this.’
‘It is not told. The cards say only that Jonah is the one who watches. And his eyes are everywhere.’
‘I will not see Thomas.’ I was not listening to her. I was lost in my own talk and thoughts. ‘I will leave St Manis, leave this house. We will go to live in Eddie’s house.’
‘Your mother will die there just as surely as if you had killed her yourself. She belongs here. This is her place. She will never leave it, even if you take her away, she will come back.’
I listened and knew what Myrna said was true. I had no power to change my mother, only to look after her.
‘If I do not see Thomas, then Jonah cannot harm us.’
‘Sive,’ Myrna used my name, her black eyes now turned to a clouded grey. ‘Your mother has been with men worse than Jonah. It could be one of these comes to get her. Dreams can be as bloody as reality. We cannot know which comes for her. The cards do not say. But you are bound to Thomas Cave. The cards say that. Your mother’s death may come from her aloneness, from the dreams and fire of before.’
She came to me then, whispered softly, ‘It is not possible to change your mother’s heart, any more than it is possible to change your own. You must walk your own way, Sive, go where the heart follows.’
Myrna then went to rest. So little left of her. I was taken by longing and rushed out into the night, calling for my mother. No sign of her. Eddie looked out of the window of their bedroom.
‘What are you at? You know she’s off. Quit the noise! I have to be up in the morning. Get to bed!’
‘I will not get to bed, Eddie! You get up and go find her. You help me find her.’
He got his trousers on, and his bad temper with them, went off into the night pulling on the coat I threw at him.
‘I have had it with you all,’ he warned. ‘I need to go back into the town where there’s peace!’
‘You’ll go no such place,’ I shouted after him. ‘You’ll be with her night and day now and make sure nothing happens to her.’
I went back into Myrna’s room. She sat up in the bed looking at me, her eyes half closed with a tiredness that never left her now.
‘I have thought of a way, Sive,’ Myrna whispered. ‘A way to bring Carmel out of aloneness. What is her heart’s desire?’
I looked at the old woman and the kindness all around her.
‘She wants to be married to that little man, more than she wants anything else,’ Myrna answered her own question. ‘I can give her that, still. It will help her, Sive, I am sure of that.’
I believed Myrna, because I wished to and because she would never lie.
* * *
When Eddie came in he had Carmel by the hand and she was talking the talk of all the time she had stayed quiet.
‘She has the ear bent off me,’ Eddie smiled. ‘She leapt up on me and I walking down the Gamble’s wood way. She had me out of my skin!’
I knew it would be different now. Myrna called for Carmel and Carmel went.
Carmel came out of the back room.
‘We can be married, Myrna says. She will marry us.’
‘With a wave of her magic wand,’ Eddie muttered.
He stoked the fire and put on more sticks to start it up again.
‘We might as well get up before the rest of the world. Put on the kettle, Sive. I’ll grab what eggs I can from the ladyships. If I am to be married I will need some breakfast, as will my little wandering wife!’
* * *
Carmel took the walk as if she had not taken it before, as if each thing so familiar was new and unseen. She walked slow from the back of the house, up the sloping field and into the woodland and I walked with her.
It was autumn and Carmel’s fire was all around her and the blaze of the trees was answered by her in the high flush of her cheeks and they were young girl cheeks once more. No longer white and without life or interest.
She had been this way since the night before, since the news that she would marry Eddie. He had felt the heat of long ago rise in him too. He knew this girl that Carmel had become again better than any of us and the ripe expectancy of her. It had not occurred to him until she returned that he had missed her so and that every day that he had spent with the shadow woman, was a reminder that she was long gone.
The girl hid behind the lost lines in Carmel’s face and the worn lines of her body, she taunted him with the occasional, teasing glimpse or movement that had once held all suggestion and love. The younger woman had loved him with her fullness, the older woman loved him with an aching.
On this day it seemed all of this aching was behind them. The high hope of the young ones had returned and made the bodies marked by ageing glad of it and, for now, able to bear and even forget what time had done to them.
Carmel Moriarty. Autumn was hers. She had lost years but she had the riches of surviving them, in this day, as her reward.
She was called, now, to her woodland, her familiar, and she answered that call. It was as if the vibrant nature of her hair, the wildness that had been stolen from her, had been offered to the trees and they had taken the offering and held it close to them and called to her: ‘We are grown old. We are soon to be stripped bare. We fill the air with our blood-seeped leaves and we cover green and earth for you as a welcome back to us.’
The wind issued the invitations, lifted its skirts and ran calling through the woodland that the girl was come back, one of their own. And the wind called that the small, dark man who waited for her return just as the woodland waited, he should be welcomed too, as her chosen one.
And I walked behind my mother, Carmel, up through the high, sloping field where I had learned to hear so well. A heron perched on a rocky outcrop came to rise and fly when it saw Carmel advance in a pale cream dress, bought that day in Rose’s Fashions. Her feet bare and her head bare but for the last of the roses we had pinned in her hair. The last roses, a deeper red than the darkest blood, to crown her.
The heron flew over the path of Carmel’s progress, its shadow fell across her and she raised her eyes and shielded them against the brilliant sun. She stopped and turned to make out its flight and descent. It flew to the beach of beginnings, over the sea and far from sight.
On she went, followed closely by me and I asked her softly if she was glad that this was her wedding day and she smiled.
‘I am not a pretty, young bride. But I am a happy one.’
Our party walked through the rustling trees, to the clearing and the oak under which Carmel and Eddie had come to know each other. It was there that Myrna and Eddie waited for us. Eddie, wearing his one suit that he had worn on single days spaced far apart from each other, since his eighteenth year. He had not put on weight, for he was an active man who worried.
The tall frame of Carmel came towards him, sure in her step, and his eyes filled with the tears no man of his kind dare shed in company. But he shed them now, in the company of women and woodland. She so thin, more a shadow than ever, but the vibrancy of old times was in her eyes and the trees knew her real beauty and they showered their leaves on her like confetti and she smiled.
When Carmel came into his open arms and leaned into him he cried more and she was like the willow that reaches down to gaze at the moving wate
r, and in his eyes she found her own reflection with the years taken off her. Restored in him. Restored.
And for Eddie Burns, Carmel Moriarty was all she had ever been or could be. And for Carmel Moriarty, she had all she ever wanted.
Myrna sat in the chair that Eddie had carried for her from the house, before he had gone back to carry her. She was light now, lighter than air. All bones and eyes.
Now she stood. Eddie had wrapped her woollen blanket around her shoulders and I had pinned it with a silver brooch of hers. I had brushed her long, grey hair out of its coil and it ran like moonlight on night water over thin shoulders.
Myrna raised her arms, trembling. She was the dead come to life, so pale the sun shone through her bare arms making the bones visible. She could have been a dead one were it not for her wet lips and the moisture pearls appearing on her forehead.
She spoke and we knew her voice, clear and sure, without the tremble her body had taken on. The wind quieted to hear it.
‘In this place,’ Myrna said, ‘they came together. Beneath this tree they knew each other. The place knows Carmel and Eddie and they know the place. They are part of each other. This, then, is a match in nature’s eyes. Let us say you are married and let no one say different. Carmel and Eddie. Married now.’
Myrna sat then and Carmel and Eddie embraced and I was witness to the union under autumn sun and under kinder circumstances than my mother had ever known. I embraced them.
Eddie gave Carmel the same ring that had been his mother’s. We talked some time there and the wind talked with the trees and the trees with the sun until we noticed that Myrna had grown silent, she was sloped in her seating and whiter than she had ever been before.
Eddie made to lift her, but Carmel said, ‘We will all carry her.’
She was so little weight she was none at all.
Eddie laughed and apologized to Carmel that she would not be the first woman he would bring over a threshold. The dogs that were ours now barked loud and long and rushed to meet our arrival. Myrna came around at their barking and whispered hush to them and they quieted.
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 20
