Antarctica

by Claire Keegan

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night;

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  I can see it on the page, the curve of the question mark at the end. Slapper holds my hand and stands me up on the bonnet of the car in the rain, telling me to say the poems. I read them off my memory. He asks me what ‘immortal’ means, but I don’t know. He says I am the morbidest child in Ireland.

  ‘Get that child in out of the rain!’ Da putting a damper on it from the driver’s seat. ‘Do ya hear me, Slapper? She’ll catch her end and you can be the one to bring her home!’

  But Slapper just smiles. ‘Say the poems, Peaches.’

  *

  I shoot up like the rhubarb stalk Da says I am and the transformation begins. I take an interest in my cousin’s old dresses. Flowery things with thin, patent belts and matching pointy shoes that pinch my toes. I limp home from school and make the announcement. Ma says ‘Shusssssh!’ and gives me the elastic belt and towels to catch the blood. I think it’s the equivalent of Da’s newspaper for his chin.

  ‘Don’t let yer father see them,’ she says. Her always hiding women away, like we’re forbidden.

  Now that I am thirteen, I am sectioned off from men. It happens in school too, in gym class. I play basketball and jump over hurdles and come back all red-faced and sweaty and talk non-stop in class. Nobody sits beside me because I smell like an afterbirth. I wear the pads and Lily of the Valley and go dancing down the pub. Slapper Jim is always there with the bantam. I waltz around in the cigarette smoke with old men my father knows. Watch Sam Collins prancing across the floor in his patent shoes, swinging Pot Belly around, and him with his left hand up so high she can barely reach it. Foxy, we call him, with his head of slicked-back, silver hair, his horse’s eye. The men’s hands grip me by the waist and swing me round, same as I’m a bucket of water. They hold me close as an excuse not to let me go. The backs of their shirts are wet. I drink Babychams out of long-stemmed glasses. They taste like ice-cream and soften the pictures. Eugene sits with his elbows on the bar, watching the dancers, his shoe tapping in perfect time on the rung of his stool, but he won’t get out on the floor.

  Slapper cannot dance. If his feet move on the beat, it’s an accident. He just doesn’t catch the rhythm. He takes me out on to the floor and puts his arms around me and shifts his weight from one leg to the other, taking huge strides for the waltz. My head comes up to the fourth button on his shirt. I could almost see past him if I stood on my toes. I can smell him, get the whiff of the sticks on his chest as if he sweats out resin. Reminds me of the mare, the hair and the warmth under his shirt, the big feet moving over the floor. I try to lead him into the rhythm, exaggerating my sways, but he does not feel the music and I wind up stepping on his toes.

  ‘Should have worn me steel toe-caps,’ he says.

  His bantam isn’t even as tall as me, a dark, plump woman with a mouth like his. She wears a royal-blue blouse with gold sequins blown across the bust. He could scrape her sequins with the buckle on his trousers, if he had a buckle. That’s how funny-looking they are.

  At closing time, the couples stand outside, the women with their backs against the gable wall, the men leaning against them, both hands against the bricks, kissing. Snogging, we call it at school. I want to see Slapper snogging the bantam. I don’t know why, but I want to see what that looks like. I think he’d have to lift her up on a beer barrel. I look for them, but they’re never there at the gable wall. I wonder what it would be like to kiss Slapper, to have his strong hands inside my dress and his mouth on my mouth. Ma puts her arm around my shoulders and leads me to the car, shielding out that world of romance and men and women touching.

  The winters are dark here. I shiver from the chill behind the curtains, squat without touching the toilet seat. Downstairs the paraffin-oil heater throws shapes like tears on to the kitchen ceiling. Ma turns up the wick, making the shapes dance when Slapper comes in. I think of the way she turns up the oven when she puts the second loaf in. She braids my hair in two long plaits while I eat spaghetti hoops and a fried sausage. She wets her thumbs on her tongue, catching up the stray hairs. I listen to the suck of Slapper’s pink mouth slurping tea, the cast-iron pot with the Star of Bethlehem swinging on its hinge outside the window. I don’t want to go to school.

  I crack wafer ice on the puddles in the lane and smoke twigs until the bus comes, blow my breath out white. I bring home nits from school. Da holds me down with his farmer’s grip while Ma douses my head with turpentine-smelling lotion. She pulls the comb along my scalp and catches the nits between the teeth and crushes them with a crunch beneath her thumb-nail on the kitchen table saying, ‘There, we’ve got him.’

  *

  The snow has come this Saturday. I have taken everything but the blinkers off the mare, left the men to pack the gear. I am riding her the whole way home to keep her in the stable until the weather improves. When the car passes me on the road, the mare whinnies and trots on after them, but soon we are left behind. Slapper’s hand waves from the passenger window. Sometimes you’d think he was the Pope or somebody. The road is quiet, but the mare’s ears are up. Then further on I see three yearling colts leaning up against a field gate, waiting. I try to pull the mare to the far side of the road, but there’s no bit in her mouth and it’s impossible. She puts her nose to theirs, and squeals. I dismount. The colts have their willies out, the pink-and-black hoses almost reaching their girth lines. They snort and push the gate until I think it will fall over on to me. The mare kicks out with her hind leg and squats to piss on the road. I pull the reins down hard, but she is oblivious to me now. Her snorts deepen and the colts bite each other, their mouths fast and open. They scrape the bars with their hooves. I throw stones at them and eventually they launch into a farting gallop down the field and back again, trotting inside the ditch beside the mare as I pull her home. I am afraid to mount her until I get well away from the colts, knowing she will canter back given the slightest chance.

  When I reach home, Slapper’s grey Escort is still parked in the yard. He comes out of the barn and pulls me down into his arms.

  ‘Are ya frozen, Peaches?’ he says.

  ‘She’s horsing, Slapper!’ My teeth chatter and my hands are stiff.

  ‘Haw?’

  ‘I’m not joking ya. Them colts nearly climbed over the gate to get at her.’

  Slapper says nothing but smiles as he pours oats into her trough. We walk across the frozen mud towards the house. Pot Belly has made beef stew with the bone from the round steak sitting in the soup, dumplings bobbing on the surface. Eugene’s reading a book called Seven Deadly Nights at the Edge of the Universe. His eyebrows have grown together since the last time I looked at him. Pot Belly gives out and tells Slapper he’s not to be going home in this weather. He is to stay the night and she’ll not hear otherwise.

  Upstairs we make up the extra bed.

  ‘I hope the shagger doesn’t snore and keep me and Eugene up all night.’ I say this to put her off the track.

  ‘Your mouth’s getting worse, young lady. I’ll have to have a word with Slapper about that.’

  But she never would. She, like the rest of us, thought the sun shone out of Slapper’s arse.

  *

  He doesn’t know I’m watching. He stands where the slant of blue light partitions the room. I am glad of the snow. Slapper closes the door behind him and doesn’t bother to open the buttons on his shirt. Instead, he holds the back of his collar and pulls it over his head. There’s hair all over his chest; his stomach is a plank of muscle. He slides the zip down, exposes his legs, sits down, pulls the waistband down over his feet. I imitate Eugene’s breathing in the far bed. Slapper comes over to my bed in his navy-blue underwear. He bends down over me. His breath fans my face. I am just about to let him kiss me when I hear the creak of the other bed.

  His feet hang over the end of the mattress. I know by the quiet that
the snow is still coming down outside. The light gets whiter. We are safe inside the drifts. Snowed in. Tucked up. Perhaps the drifts will come and he will have to stay another night.

  ‘Are ya asleep, Slapper?’ I whisper it.

  ‘Haw?’ For a long time he says nothing. ‘It’s a cold fucking house.’

  I go to him, wrapped in my blankets. I pull his bedclothes down and get in, compounding our warmth. I lie up against his back and breathe on the down of his neck. My hand slides around his waist, feels his hard belly, wanders shyly down through the curls of his pubic hair. I feel him stiffen. I think of the colts. When he turns over, his hands are cold. Big and gentle and precise. ‘Jesus, Peaches,’ I hear him whisper as his will subsides.

  *

  Three feet of snow has fallen over Ireland, the wireless says. I find a bonnet from an old Volkswagen and Slapper and I spend the afternoon sliding down the top field, right over the ditch, across the lane and into a nice curve in the field below. The track gets a little longer every time, but when we get off at the bottom and look back up, I cannot resist doing it again. Slapper pulls the bonnet in one hand and mine in the other and hardly says a word. Suddenly, I am somebody no one is supposed to know about.

  I saddle the mare and take her the full circuit through the snow, down the lane and up past the bog-field. The moon brightens the dark sky like a fake sun, but the land is white. The world’s turned upside-down. The evening is edged in blue like TV light. All the chainsaws have stopped. I listen to the puff of the mare’s breath and her hooves compressing tracks along the snow. The smell of the pines is everywhere. We have just eased into a canter along the car-road when she shies. A pheasant flutters out over the trees. Horses frighten easily when there’s wind. I pull her up and listen. It may be deer. I dismount and lead the mare down between the trees. The ground is dry, the moss smooth underfoot, and the mare stumbles. It’s black beneath the branches. And then I get the smell. The mare pulls on the reins. I stop and listen. The wind pheews through the treetops, like someone learning to whistle. We walk towards the smell and then I see the source. Slapper’s boots are there, neatly laced, his hems not reaching his ankles. His boots are at eye-level, beneath them nothing, nothing. As I draw closer, I see his face: his face is black and Christ, the smell. The wind spins him gently on the rope. I can’t even cut him down. I leave him there, hanging in his own dung, and gallop home.

  That was the hardest part, taking the others up there, letting them see him like that. The way they stood and looked and cursed and said Jaysus and Holy Mother of Divine Jaysus and What in the name of Jaysus would a fine fella like him go and do a thing like that for? and took their caps off and carried him down the hill on the bonnet of the Volkswagen we had used as a sled, my father’s coat draped over his body. Eugene standing there looking at me like I did it.

  *

  We come home from the wake and sit in the parlour. The room is like a second-hand furniture shop, the walls painted lime-green, a border of faded roses creeping below the ceiling. Pot Belly produces a bottle of Bristol Cream from the sideboard and fills four glasses to the brim. The padlock on the yard gate beats its clasp, hammering down the silence of the room. My father watches the sparks lifting into the soot. Eugene has no nails to bite; they are bloody at the quick. When his eyes meet mine, they are full of accusation and blame. I am aware of my own breathing.

  Pot Belly brings candles down out of the kitchen, white, blessed candles she got at Easter, and lights them from my father’s match. She stands them upright in their own grease and places them about the room. She takes a record from its sleeve and turns the light off. The room is lit by flame. On the mantelpiece stand trophies, silver-plated couples frozen in mid-swirl. They quiver in the firelight. The music starts. Pot Belly catches Eugene’s hand and pulls him upright. He does not want to dance, but her tug is steady. I know what she is doing, and from my father’s evasive eyes, that look he has when Ma is changing her dress, I know that something’s going on, know my parents have spoken of this. They have it planned. Ma has always thought a man should know how to dance. The only flaw she could see in Slapper Jim was his leggy, graceless motion on the floor. She is teaching Eugene, as a precaution, as if him knowing these steps will carry him through, prevent him from tying a noose around his neck later on.

  She begins the slow waltz and reluctantly he follows her, shifting his weight, his body stiff, his feet imitating hers. My father keeps his eyes on the fire. Pot Belly takes Eugene around the furniture, whispering one-two-three, one-two-three until the music stops. The stylus crackles in the groove and the rhythm changes to a quickstep. Da stands up, pulls off his overcoat and takes my hand. The steel of his suspender digs into my side. The voice of a travelling woman, clear and stern, pushes us together. Pot Belly counts the beats into Eugene’s ear. One, one-two, one. We dance around each other, cautious of the space we’re taking up. And then the song changes to a reel and there is nothing but the primitive da-rum of the bodhrán, the sound of wood pounding skin. Da-rum. Da-rum. The near screech of a fiddle, the pull of hair on string, the melodeon, the wheeze of bellows catching up, and the slight imprecision of the live instruments playing. We lift the furniture to the edge of the room, and I shake the Lux across the floor. We swig our drinks and exchange our partners. Eugene starts moving with the beat, throwing himself in time. Ma removes her shoes. Sweat darkens the back of my father’s shirt. The music is raucous, ornamented. Our shadows are larger than we are, doubling our statures, bending us up on to the ceiling. It is two-facing-two. We face each other. Eugene jumps up and down like a highland dancer and although he does not know the moves, he has found the rhythm. We move him into the places he should go. First the ladies exchange places, then the men. We take the man facing us and go right for seven and back again. We swing our partners and begin over. The fire heats the room and I take off my cardigan when the tune ends. Eugene and I gulp sherry. It tastes forbidden. Ma gets the stand from the hair-dryer and sings into it like it’s a microphone. Eugene puts his hand up very high, imitating Foxy, sticks his belly out, and we move around in circles.

  ‘Do ya come here often?’ he says.

  ‘I do when the ewes aren’t lambing.’

  ‘Do ya live in a disadvantaged area?’ He belches.

  ‘Yeah, I get the subsidy.’

  ‘God, you’re lovely. There’s nothing like the smell of a hogget ewe.’

  He breathes me in with his sherry breath. We move with the squeal and squeeze of the uileann pipes, we are pulled in with the bellows. The quavering lilt and sway of a tin whistle curls through the darkness. The long swath of hair that covers Da’s bald patch falls down and almost touches his shoulder. Ma pulls off her roll-on and swings it like a hula hoop on her index finger, keeping her left hand at her waist. The last picture I remember is the roll-on flying across the room with the snap of elastic and Eugene asking, ‘Can I interest you in a snog at the gable wall?’ as he swings me in a perfect twist.

  Storms

  My mother dreamt things before they happened and found things in her dreams. That morning she came down all dreamy, sleepy, saying, ‘I know where the old slash-hook is now.’ She pulled her boots on and I followed her up the bog. She stopped under a sycamore, and pointed to where a clump of briars choked the limestone wall.

  ‘It’s in there,’ she said.

  And sure enough, she was right. We chopped through those briars with our new slash-hook and found the old.

  *

  The dairy was a dark, damp place my parents filled with the things they seldom used. From the time before me. Yellow paint bubbled on the walls and flagstones shone across the floor. Bridles hung stiff on the beams, their bits dusty. The churn was still there and the smell of the sour milk still in it, the wood smooth but riddled with woodworm, the paddles long since lost. I never remember glass in those windows, only rusted bars and the strange applause of the wind blowing in through the trees.

  Someone shoved the old incubator and run
in there too, a rusted, metal affair that used to shine like teaspoons. We would put new chickens in there, scoop them up in our hands like yellow petals and drop them into that heat, the fluffy balls with legs always moving, taking in that warmth as their own. Warmth keeps us alive. Sometimes those yellow moving balls fell down, the cold outside winning over, the feet like orange arrows pointing down. My father’s hand chucked them out like young weeds. My mother’s picked them gently; inspecting those yellow bodies for some sign of life, and finding none, she’d say: ‘My poor chicken,’ and smile at me as she slid them down the shoot.

  The milk strainers were still there too, the old gauze hanging in dirty clumps on a fraying thread. And the jars of gooseberry jam that smelled like sherry, shrunken in the glass with the whisker of mould. We used to make crab-apple jelly, quarter those sour fruits and boil them to a pulp, cores and seeds and all. Poured the lumpy fluid into an old pillowcase, a corner on each leg of a stool turned upside-down. Drip. Drip. Drip. Into the preserving pot all night.

  I went into the dairy when I was sent: for a pot of varnish, six-inch nails, a bridle for a mare whose head was big. The latch was too high. I had to stand on a can of creosote to reach up and the metal round I pressed on was leaf-thin. When I went there of my own accord, it was to look into the chest, a big metal, rusted box, a pirate’s suitcase to a child. So old that if you emptied it out and held it up to the light, it would be like looking through a colander. There was nothing in it I liked – old books stuck together with damp, no pictures, brown maps and some prayer-books. ‘It all belonged to yer father’s people,’ my mother told me, using the voice he was not supposed to hear. The chest was just as long as me and half as tall, with a tight lid and no handles. I would open it and look at those things, finger the books with their fractured spines, the missing covers, slam the lid down hard, make that metal screech.