Antarctica

by Claire Keegan

  It was late when they got back. She’d dozed off in the chair, but woke to hear them talking in the bedroom. Then the talking stopped and the man went out on to the balcony. Cigar smoke and freezing cold air drifted back into the room. He bolted the balcony doors and came back in and sat on the edge of the couch looking down at her. He smelled of beer and Polo aftershave and the au pair felt the cold off his good wool suit.

  ‘You know what happens if we lose the baby, don’t you?’ he said. ‘We lose the baby, we lose the babysitter. You keep those balcony doors locked, sweetheart, or you’ll be taking the first plane home.’ He kissed her then, a strange, deliberate kiss, an airport kiss for someone you’re glad to see the back of, then got up and went back in to his wife.

  When she heard his snores, she rose and stepped out on to the balcony. A weak wind was driving large snowflakes across the air, sifting them into flurries. A December speckled night with the hooting of traffic. Soon it would be Christmas. She gripped the railings and looked down. A snarl of angry yellow taxis clotted the intersections on the streets below. She sucked her breath in. She remembered reading somewhere that a fear of heights masks an attraction to falling. Suddenly that made some kind of terrifying sense to her. If she didn’t think of jumping off, standing on the edge wouldn’t cost her a thought. She imagined falling, imagined how that might feel, to dive down, be lost like that, mean everything for moments only, then be gone. She backed inside and locked the doors.

  The next morning they planned to visit F.A.O. Schwarz Toystore. In the lobby, the au pair wrote the boy’s name and his room number on a slip of paper and pinned it to the inside of his trouser pocket.

  ‘Now give this to the nice policeman if you get lost.’

  ‘But I won’t get lost!’ he said.

  ‘Of course you won’t.’

  *

  It is dark now down at the lake. The au pair senses movement in the bushes at the far bank. Somewhere in those fields are wild boars. Once the boy’s father trapped a boar, paid a man to slaughter the animal and stacked the deep-freeze solid. Another dozen casts or so and she’ll turn in. The cheese is nearly used up anyhow. She listens to the frogs ribbuting and for some reason remembers the tock, tock of the electric fence back home. Her father taught her never to touch it with the palm, always the back of the hand; that way the reflex would make her pull away, not grip it if the current was still running. Small things, that’s what fathers are for, far as she can see. Practicalities. How to tie your shoelaces and buckle your seat belt. She reels in the line and checks the bait, casts again. The bait plops, but she can no longer detect the line against the sky.

  Nobody sees the boy leave the house. He sneaks down the back steps but doesn’t hold on to the railing like he’s told. It doesn’t matter that his eyes have not adjusted to the darkness; he knows the grassy slope that leads down to the lake. He can see her pale blouse, the sleeve coming up, the elbow whipping back, casting. The boy runs although he is told never to run near water. Small grunts, like the noises his cousin’s doll makes when he turns her upside-down and right-side-up again, come from his chest. The au pair has her back to him. The boy’s feet are soundless; he is silent as a panther in the cool grass.

  The au pair doesn’t turn her head until his foot hits the first plank of the pier.

  ‘Yoo-hoo! Catch me! Catch me!’ the boy calls.

  He is running, fast. The rod drops from her hands. The boy’s foot catches on something and then he seems to travel a long, long way. The au pair is finding her feet, trying to stand and turn all at once. The boy feels a chill. Suddenly her arms are there, enfolding him as he knew they would. He flops down and giggles on her shoulder. ‘Surprise!’ he yells.

  But she isn’t laughing.

  The boy goes silent. Beyond the safety of her shoulder, he detects danger. Beyond her, nothing. Only deep, black water and beneath it the world of soft, velvet mud. Mud deeper than two grown men.

  ‘Oh, my baby,’ the au pair whispers. ‘There, there.’ She rocks him and he rests his head on her shoulder for a long, long time, feeling her chest fall and rise. She kisses the silk of his hair; his eyelashes brush against her collarbone. The au pair holds him until their heartbeats slow and a woman’s voice calls out the boy’s name. Then she carries him back up to the lighted house and gives him to his mama.

  The Ginger Rogers Sermon

  Don’t ask me why we called him Slapper Jim. My mother stamped his image in my head, and I was at an age when pictures of a man precede the man himself. The posters verify: Thin Lizzie with a V of chest exposed, Pat Spillane’s legs racing across my bedroom wall, the ball poised. I was the girl with the sweet tooth and a taste for men. And pictures.

  I have a photographic memory. I can see every tacky page of my cousin’s wedding album, the horseshoe on the cake with the man slightly taller than the woman and their feet stuck in the frosting. I parcel out my life in images the way other people let the calendar draw a line around them every month. That time of Slapper Jim was the time of the strangest pictures.

  We killed pigs around then, ate pork cracked in its own fat with a pulpy sauce. Plasticine-grey and apple-green, those were the colours of my home. Ma held my dinner plate with the tail of her skirt and talked through her day while I tucked in:

  ‘You should see the new lumberjack your da hired. Slapper Jim, they call him. A great big fella he is! Walked in here and I’ll tell ya nothing but the truth, he leaned up against the partition there and I thought the whole yoke was going to cave in.’

  My brother, Eugene, quacks his hand behind her back. I spear a slice of pork and in my mind see a giant, the earth tremoring where he walks. A man who doesn’t know his own strength. That can be dangerous. I’ve seen my father crack a cow’s ribs with his fist, just trying to slide her over in the stall.

  ‘I gave him his bit of dinner and he was able to reach over for the handle on the saucepan without getting up. Ate eleven spuds. Eleven spuds if ya don’t mind! Yer lucky there’s aer a one left.’

  Ma rummages in the cutlery drawer for a spoon. Tapioca and stewed apples, I suppose. I hope for sherry trifle, gooey caramel, dollops of ice-cream.

  ‘What’s for afters?’

  *

  They leave me alone here on Saturday nights. Eugene goes too, even though he doesn’t dance. Him staying home with me is a sissy thing to do because he’s so much older. Seven years older. I was made out of the last of my father’s sperm. I found that out just recently. My mother says I am The Accident in the family. My father tells people I am The Shakings of the Bag, which I suppose is much the same thing.

  Dance mad, my parents. Ma says a man who can’t dance is half a man. She’s taught me the harvest jig and the waltz, the quickstep and the Siege of Ennis in the parlour. She says dancing is good therapy, makes her feel like she’s in time with the world. Mostly we move where we’re put, stooping under the rain and such, but dancing frees her up, oils her joints, she says. Everyone should know how to move in their own time. She puts the record on, I shake Lux across the lino, and we whirl around the parlour floor like two loonies. I am the man loony. I pretend I don’t see her watching her reflection in the mirror of the sideboard as we pass. The Walls of Limerick requires two-facing-two, so we hold our hands out to imaginary partners and move them into the places they should go. I like this, knowing what Ma will do, where she’ll go before she does, not having to think about it.

  Saturdays smell of girls: wet wool, nail-polish and camomile shampoo. In the kitchen, Ma sets her hair. We call it The Salon. I hold the pins between my lips and roll her hair around the spiky curlers, stiffen it with setting lotion. Her head goes into the net and she sits in under the hood of the dryer we bought down at the auction when the His ’n’ Hers went out of business. I hand her an old Woman’s Weekly and imagine it’s Vogue. The last page is ripped out so Da can’t read about women’s problems.

  ‘Do you want a coffee!’ I shout above the noise.

  There was never an
y coffee in that house. She stays under there, deaf and talking loud like an old person, and I hand her a cup of frothy Ovaltine and an hour later she’s out, relieved and pink. Then the daubs of shoe-cream, the shush of the steam iron smoothing out the creases. The shuffle of the entertainment pages and Da working a lather for his face, sticking the headlines on his chin to stop the blood. Ma wriggling into her flesh-coloured roll-on, big elastic knickers to keep her belly in. Pot Belly, I call her:

  ‘Are ya going dancing now, Pot Belly? Where’s the beauty contest, Pot Belly? Where did yer pot belly go, Pot Belly?’

  She calls me The Terror: ‘Shut up, ya terror.’ She dots Lily of the Valley behind her ears with the glass stopper and slides her tapping feet into her dancing shoes, ready to take off.

  ‘You won’t fall into the fire, now will ya?’ Da always having the last word, jingling his keys like they belong to the only car in the parish.

  ‘No, Da.’

  Eugene pulling on his corduroy jacket, giving me a look like I shouldn’t be alive.

  The film comes on after the nine o’clock news. I change into my pyjamas and find the biscuits. She hides them in the washing machine or the accordion case or the churn. Once Eugene ate them all and left a note that said: ‘Find a better hiding place next time,’ but Pot Belly went mad, so now we leave nothing and she says nothing. That’s the way it is in our house, everybody knowing things but pretending they don’t.

  I turn off all the lights and sit with my feet up and play with myself in the dark and hope the actors take off every stitch and go skinny-dipping in close-up. The Birds is the name of tonight’s film. Birds line up on the wires, watching the children with their glassy eyes. Ready to swoop. Even the teachers can’t offer them protection. I think of the grey crows picking out our ewes’ eyes. I hear a noise but it’s only the milk strainer hammering the glass in the wind. Looks like a metal claw, a wiry hand. I slide the bolt across the door and let the setter up on the couch. I keep my eyes shut when the birds dive on the town.

  It’s after midnight when the headlights cross the room. Ma wobbles in, opens the fridge, its light shining pink on her cheeks. Da slides the kettle over on the hot-plate and warms his hands, ready for a feed.

  ‘Saw the Slapper down in Shillelagh. He was out on the floor with a one.’

  ‘And the size of her,’ Ma chips in. ‘No bigger than a bantam hen she is, sitting up beside him. And neather one of ’em has a step in their foot. Fecking useless.’ She bites into a tomato with a vengeance and Eugene heads for the stairs before she starts her Ginger Rogers sermon.

  *

  ‘How’s the bantam?’ is the first thing I say when I meet Slapper Jim. He laughs a big, red laugh that sounds like the beginning of something. He has plump lips and blonde hair and standing beside him is like standing in the shade. He’s as big as a wardrobe. I want to open all his shirt buttons and look inside. ‘Haw’ is the word he uses all the time.

  ‘Who’s this bantam now, haw?’ Sounds like he’s talking down a well.

  My father sits at the head of the table and rubs a wedge of tobacco between his palms and packs his pipe. He has no teeth to distract the smile away from his eyes.

  ‘Ma says your one is like a bantam,’ I say.

  ‘Haw?’

  ‘Do ya leave her sitting on the nest all week?’

  ‘Maybe she’s not nesting at all.’

  ‘Pluck her.’

  The bantam jokes went on until the end. The hatching, plucking, sideways-looking, gawky jokes carried us through summer and beyond.

  Slapper doesn’t wear a belt. When he pulls his trousers up, the hems don’t reach his ankles. On real wet days, the men stay home and do odd jobs around the yard. They fence, pare sheeps’ feet, weld bits and pieces. On Saturdays Eugene watches Sports Stadium and bites his nails. I help Slapper split the sticks. I am a girl who knows one end of a block from the other, knows to place it on the chopping block the way it grows, make it easier for Slapper. But I don’t suppose it would make any difference. That axe comes down and splits it open every time, knots or no knots. Even the holly, which my father calls ‘a bitch of a stick to split’, breaks open under his easy strike. We have a rhythm going: I put them up, he splits them open. With other people, I take my hand away fast, but not with the Slapper Jim. He and I are like two parts of the same machine, fast and smooth. We trust each other. And always he gives his waistband a little tug when I’m putting them up, and that waistband slides down with every swing of the axe.

  I too am a lumberjack in summer. Pot Belly says it is no job for a girl. Girls should flute the pastry edge or wash the car at best is what she thinks. I should tidy my room, practise walking around with a book flat on my head to help my posture. Anything to keep me home.

  ‘Keep her away from the saws. If that girl comes home from that wood with no feet, don’t come home here.’

  We’ve all seen such things. Toes sawn off, an arm mangled in a winch, and once, a mare gone mad with the sting of a gad-fly pulling the slig out on to the road and scrapping the car. But when morning comes I’m up and ready, watching for Slapper’s Escort in the lane.

  Following the mare is the job for me. A grey Clydesdale with a white face, she’s seventeen hands if she’s an inch. And the smell of her, the warm earth smell like the inside of a damp flowerpot. I put my nose on her neck and breathe in. And she’s smart too, knows to stop when she snags and bikes up without putting out your shoulder. No dirt in her, but still she’ll lash your face with that tail if you’re not quick. We’re clear-falling every second line on the slopes. Slapper and Da fall and trim, Sitka spruce mostly, and larch, the trimmer’s dream. I hook the chain around the slig and follow the mare down the lines on to the car-road, drawing the timber as close together as I can, keeping the butts even. I unhook the slig and lift the swing back up on the hames and then hold on to the mare’s tail and let her pull me back up the line. Slapper says I have brains to burn, thinking of that. Da says I should give some to Eugene because he does nothing, only sit around on his arse with his nose in a book all day.

  We drink mugs of tea from a flask at nosh-up, milk from an old Corcoran’s lemonade bottle. Soda bread soggy with tomatoes and sardines in red sauce. The tea tastes bitter towards the end of the day. Slapper dents the bumper where he sits, talks with his mouth full.

  ‘’Uckin ’lies,’ he says when he swats the flies. They light on the horse-dung and the jam. They chase me up and down the lines and drive the mare cuckoo. I sit on the mare backwards with my feet up on her flanks while she grazes the bank, and wait for somebody to open the biscuits. Slapper lifts me up there. ‘Peaches,’ he calls me, but I am nothing like a peach. My father says I’m more like a stalk of rhubarb, long and sour.

  ‘Ya have a way with that baste, Peaches. She bites the arse off me.’

  ‘It’s always hanging out anyway, Slapper. Here,’ Da says, handing over a wad of baling twine, ‘until ya buy yerself a belt.’

  ‘Haw?’ Slapper smiles, but he doesn’t tie his trousers up. He just looks at the twine in a way that makes Da put it back into his pocket, and gives his waistband a tug the way another man might push his glasses up on his nose.

  Slapper teaches me the tricks of the trade. He holds his big finger up but doesn’t stoop when he says these things: ‘Don’t open the slig until you’ve unhooked her; if she takes off, yer fingers will be dogmate. Don’t stand in front of the saw; if there’s a loose link and the chain breaks, you’re fucked.’ He opens up that forbidden world of adult language and invites me in. Then he leaves me alone to be capable.

  We stay at it until dusk. Foresters come around with their kettles in the evenings and paint the stumps with the pink poison. We hide the saws and the oil and petrol cans under the tops up the line and let the mare loose in the field down the road. Every week the lorries drive up with their robot claws and load up the lengths. Twenty-five tons is a load for them, a cheque for us, and a pound of wine gums and a Bunty and Judy after mass and
two choc-ices and gob-stoppers for me.

  ‘What do they learn ya in school?’ Slapper asks as we’re driving the mare down to the field.

  I know trigonometry. ‘I know that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.’

  ‘What’s a highpotinhuze?’ Jim pushes back the passenger seat to make room for his legs, but his knees are snug against the dashboard. He holds the mare’s reins out through the open window as she trots next to the car. ‘Go on, ya lazy cunt ya! Whup! Whup! Ya hairy, farting fucker ya. Go on!’ He claps the outside of the door with his left hand.

  ‘The child, Slapper. The child!’ Da admonishes.

  Slapper looks back at me. My father’s eyes watch me in the rear-view mirror, but I pretend I haven’t heard a word.

  ‘What’s this highpotinhuze?’

  Those are the pictures from that time. Three dirty lumberjacks sligging out timber, the wood slick and white beneath the bark. The forester looking at me because I’m a girl. Eating packets of Bourbon Creams, spitting, listening to Radio One in the car when it rains, sharpening chain, files grinding on the rakers, the cutters shining all round like some deadly necklace. Slapper asking what they learned me in school, his file sharpening smack-on with the slant of the cutters every time. Da says Slapper’s a great man with a saw. The last fella Da had working with him slid a matchstick in between the spark-plug and the petrol tank so she wouldn’t start, but Da found out and gave him his walking papers. I tell Slapper Jim the things I learn in school. I know that Oliver Cromwell told the poor people ‘To hell or to Connaught’ (I can see him on his black horse, pointing west), that Jesus lost his temper. I can recite William Blake: