Antarctica

by Claire Keegan

  Spellman Hall stands in the middle of a car park, an arch of bare, multi-coloured bulbs surrounding a crooked ‘Merry Christmas’ sign above the door. Inside is big as a warehouse with a slippy wooden floor and benches at the walls. Strange lights make every white garment dazzle. It’s amazing. I can see the newsagent’s bra through her blouse, fluff like snow on the auctioneer’s trousers. The accountant has a black eye and a jumper made of grey and white wool diamonds. Overhead a globe of shattered mirror shimmers and spins slowly. At the top of the ballroom a Formica-topped table is stacked with bottles of lemonade and orange, custard-cream biscuits and cheese-and-onion Tayto. The butcher’s wife stands behind, handing out the straws and taking in the money. Several of the women I know from my trips around the country are there: Bridie with her haw-red lipstick; Sarah Combs, who only last week urged my father to have a glass of sherry and gave me stale cake while she took him into the sitting room to show him her new suite of furniture; Miss Emma Jenkins, who always makes a fry and drinks coffee instead of tea and never has a sweet thing in the house because of her gastric juices.

  On the stage men in red blazers and candy-striped bow-ties play drums, guitars, blow horns, and The Nerves Moran is out front, singing ‘My Lovely Leitrim’. Mammy and I are first out on the floor for the cuckoo waltz, and when the music stops, she dances with Seamus. My father dances with the women from the roads. I wonder how he can dance like that and not open gates. Seamus jives with teenage girls he knows from the vocational school, hand up, arse out, and the girls spinning like blazes. Old men in their thirties ask me out.

  ‘Will ya chance a quickstep?’ they say. Or: ‘How’s about a half-set?’

  They tell me I’m light on my feet.

  ‘Christ, you’re like a feather,’ they say, and put me through my paces.

  In the Paul Jones the music stops and I get stuck with a farmer who smells sour like the whiskey we make sick lambs drink in springtime, but the young fella who hushes the cattle around the ring in the mart butts in and rescues me.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ he says. ‘He thinks he’s the bee’s knees.’

  He smells of ropes, new galvanise, Jeyes Fluid.

  After the half-set I get thirsty and Mammy gives me a fifty-pence piece for lemonade and raffle tickets. A slow waltz begins and Da walks across to Sarah Combs, who rises from the bench and takes her jacket off. Her shoulders are bare; I can see the top of her breasts. Mammy is sitting with her handbag on her lap, watching. There is something sad about Mammy tonight; it is all around her like when a cow dies and the truck comes to take it away. Something I don’t fully understand is happening, as if a black cloud has drifted in and could burst and cause havoc. I go over and offer her my lemonade, but she just takes a little, dainty sip and thanks me. I give her half my raffle tickets, but she doesn’t care. My father has his arms around Sarah Combs, dancing slow like slowness is what he wants. Seamus is leaning against the far wall with his hands in his pockets, smiling down at the blonde who hogs the mirror in the Ladies.

  ‘Cut in on Da.’

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘Cut in on Da.’

  ‘What would I do that for?’ he says.

  ‘And you’re supposed to be the one with all the brains,’ I say. ‘Gobshite.’

  I walk across the floor and tap Sarah Combs on the back. I tap a rib. She turns, her wide patent belt gleaming in the light that is spilling from the globe above our heads.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, like I’m going to ask her the time.

  ‘Tee-hee,’ she says, looking down at me. Her eyeballs are cracked like the teapot on our dresser.

  ‘I want to dance with Daddy.’

  At the word ‘Daddy’ her face changes and she loosens her grip on my father. I take over. The man on the stage is blowing his trumpet now. My father holds my hand tight, like a punishment. I can see my mother on the bench, reaching into her bag for a hanky. Then she goes to the Ladies. There’s a feeling like hatred all around Da. I get the feeling he’s helpless, but I don’t care. For the first time in my life I have some power. I can butt in and take over, rescue and be rescued.

  There’s a general hullabaloo towards midnight. Everybody’s out on the floor, knees buckling, handbags swinging. The Nerves Moran counts down the seconds to the New Year and then there’s kissing and hugging. Strange men squeeze me, kiss me like they’re thirsty and I’m water.

  My parents do not kiss. In all my life, back as far as I remember, I have never seen them touch. Once I took a friend upstairs to show her the house.

  ‘This is Mammy’s room, and this is Daddy’s room,’ I said.

  ‘Your parents don’t sleep in the same bed?’ she said in a voice of pure amazement. And that was when I suspected that our family wasn’t normal.

  The band picks up the pace. Oh hokey, hokey, pokey!

  ‘Work off them turkey dinners, shake off them plum puddings!’ shouts The Nerves Moran and even the ballroom show-offs give up on their figures of eight and do the twist and jive around, and I shimmy around and knock my backside against the mart fella’s backside and wind up swinging with a stranger.

  Everybody stands for the national anthem. Da is wiping his forehead with a handkerchief and Seamus is panting because he’s not used to the exercise. The lights come up and nothing is the same. People are red-faced and sweaty; everything’s back to normal. The auctioneer takes over the microphone and thanks a whole lot of different people, and then they auction off a Charolais calf and a goat and batches of tea and sugar and buns and jam, plum puddings and mince pies. There’s pebbles where the goat stood and I wonder who’ll clean it up. Not until the very last does the raffle take place. The auctioneer holds out the cardboard box of stubs to the blonde.

  ‘Dig deep,’ he says. ‘No peeping. First prize a bottle of whiskey.’

  She takes her time, lapping up the attention.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘good girl, it’s not the sweepstakes.’

  She hands him the ticket.

  ‘It’s a – What colour is that would ya say, Jimmy? It’s a salmon-coloured ticket, number seven hundred and twenty-five. Seven two five. Serial number 3X429H. I’ll give ye that again.’

  It’s not mine, but I’m close. I don’t want the whiskey anyhow; it’d be kept for the pet lambs. I’d rather the box of Afternoon Tea biscuits that’s coming up next. There’s a general shuffle, a search in handbags, arse pockets. The auctioneer calls out the numbers a few times and it looks like he’ll have to draw again when Mammy rises from her seat. Head held high, she walks in a straight line across the floor. A space opens in the crowd; people step aside to let her pass. Her new high-heeled shoes say clippety-clippety on the slippy floor and her red skirt is flaring. I have never seen her do this. Usually she’s too shy, gives me the tickets, and I run up and collect the prize.

  ‘Do ya like a drop of the booze, do ya, missus?’ The Nerves Moran asks, reading her ticket. ‘Sure wouldn’t it keep ya warm on a night like tonight. No woman needs a man if she has a drop of Power’s. Isn’t that right? Seven twenty-five, that’s the one.’

  My mother is standing there in her elegant clothes and it’s all wrong. She doesn’t belong up there.

  ‘Let’s check the serial numbers now,’ he says, drawing it out. ‘I’m sorry, missus, wrong serial number. The hubby may keep you warm again tonight. Back to the old reliable.’

  My mother turns and walks clippety-clippety back down the slippy floor, with everybody knowing she thought she’d won when she didn’t win. And suddenly she is no longer walking, but running, running down in the bright white light, past the cloakroom, towards the door, her hair flailing out like a horse’s tail behind her.

  Out in the car park snow has accumulated on the trampled grass, the evergreen shelter beds, but the tarmac is wet and shiny in the headlights of cars leaving. Thick, unwavering moonlight shines steadily down on the earth. Ma, Seamus and me sit into the car, shivering, waiting for Da. We can’t turn on the engine to heat the
car because Da has the keys. My feet are cold as stones. A cloud of greasy steam rises from the open hatch of the chip van, a fat brown sausage painted on the chrome. All around us people are leaving, waving, calling out ‘Goodnight!’ and ‘Happy New Year!’ They’re collecting their chips and driving off.

  The chip van has closed its hatch and the car park is empty when Da comes out. He gets into the driver’s seat, the ignition catches, a splutter, and then we’re off, climbing the hill outside the village, winding around the narrow roads towards home.

  ‘That wasn’t a bad band,’ Da says.

  Mammy says nothing.

  ‘I said, there was a bit of life in that band.’ Louder this time.

  Still Mammy says nothing.

  My father begins to sing ‘Far Away in Australia’. He always sings when he’s angry, lets on he’s in a good humour when he’s raging. The lights of the town are behind us now. These roads are dark. We pass houses with lighted candles in the windows, bulbs blinking on Christmas trees, sheets of newspaper held down on the windscreens of parked cars. Da stops singing before the end of the song.

  ‘Did you see aer a nice little thing in the hall, Seamus?’

  ‘Nothing I’d be mad about.’

  ‘That blonde was a nice bit of stuff.’

  I think about the mart, all the men at the rails bidding for heifers and ewes. I think about Sarah Combs and how she always smells of grassy perfume when we go to her house.

  The chestnut tree’s boughs at the end of our lane are caked with snow. Da stops the car and we roll back a bit until he puts his foot on the brake. He is waiting for Mammy to get out and open the gates.

  Mammy doesn’t move.

  ‘Have you got a pain?’ he says to her.

  She looks straight ahead.

  ‘Is that door stuck or what?’ he says.

  ‘Open it yourself.’

  He reaches across her and opens her door, but she slams it shut.

  ‘Get out there and open that gate!’ he barks at me.

  Something tells me I should not move.

  ‘Seamus!’ he shouts. ‘Seamus!’

  There’s not a budge out of any of us.

  ‘By Jeeesus!’ he says.

  I am afraid. Outside, one corner of my THIS WAY SANTA sign has come loose; the soggy cardboard flaps in the wind. Da turns to my mother, his voice filled with venom.

  ‘And you walking up in your finery in front of all the neighbours, thinking you won first prize in the raffle.’ He laughs and opens his door. ‘Running like a tinker out of the hall.’

  He gets out and there’s rage in his walk, as if he’s walking on hot coals. He sings: ‘Far Away in Australia!’ He is reaching up, taking the wire off the gate, when a gust of wind blows his hat off. The gates swing open. He stoops to retrieve his hat, but the wind nudges it further from his reach. He takes another few steps and stoops again to retrieve it, but again it is blown just out of his reach. I think of Santa Claus using the same wrapping paper as us, and suddenly I understand. There is only one obvious explanation.

  My father is getting smaller. It feels as if the trees are moving, the chestnut tree whose green hands shelter us in summer is backing away. Then I realise it’s the car. We are rolling, sliding backwards. No handbrake and I am not out there putting the stone behind the wheel. And that is when Mammy gets behind the wheel. She slides over into my father’s seat, the driver’s seat, and puts her foot on the brake. We stop going backwards. She revs up the engine and puts the car in gear. The gear-box grinds – she hasn’t the clutch in far enough – but then there’s a splutter and we’re moving. Mammy is taking us forward, past the Santa sign, past my father, who has stopped singing, through the open gates. She drives us through the snow-covered woods. I can smell the pines. When I look back, my father is standing there watching our tail-lights. The snow is falling on him, on his bare head, on the hat that he is holding in his hands.

  Sisters

  It is customary for the Porters to send a postcard to say when they will be arriving. Betty waits. Each time the dog barks she finds herself going to the window at the foot of the stairs, looking out through the maidenhair fern to see if the postman is cycling up the avenue. It is almost June. The chill has slackened off; plums are getting plumper on the trees. The Porters will soon come, demanding strange foods, fresh handkerchiefs, hot-water bottles, ice.

  Louisa, Betty’s sister, went away to England when she was young and married Stanley Porter, a salesman who fell for her, he said, because of the way her hair fell down her back. Louisa always had beautiful hair. When they were young, Betty brushed it every night, one hundred strokes, and secured the gold braid with a piece of satin ribbon.

  Betty’s own hair is, and always has been, an unremarkable brown. Her hands were always her best feature, white, lady-like hands that played the organ on Sundays. Now, after years of work, her hands are ruined, the skin on her palms is hard and masculine, the knuckles enlarged; her mother’s wedding band cannot be removed.

  Betty lives in the homestead, the big house, as it is called. It once belonged to a Protestant landlord who sold up and moved away after a childless marriage ended. The Land Commission, who bought the estate, knocked down the three-storey section of the house and sold the remaining two-storey servants’ quarters and the surrounding seventy acres to Betty’s father for a small sum when he married. The house looks too small for the garden and too close to the yard, but its ivy-covered walls look handsome nonetheless. The granite archway leads to a yard with stables, a barn and lofty sheds, coach houses, kennels and a spout-house. There’s a fine walled orchard at the back in which the landlord grazed an Angus bull to keep the children out, seeing as he had none of his own. The place has a history, a past. People said Parnell had a tooth pulled in the parlour. The big kitchen has a barred window, an Aga and the deal table Betty scrubs on Saturdays. The white, marble fireplace in the parlour suits the mahogany furniture. A staircase curves on to a well-lighted landing with oak doors opening into three large bedrooms overlooking the yard, and a bathroom Betty had plumbed in when her father became ill.

  Betty, too, had wanted to go to England, but she stayed back to keep house. Their mother died suddenly when Betty and Louisa were small. She went out to gather wood one afternoon and dropped dead coming back through the meadow. It seemed natural for Betty, being the eldest, to step into her mother’s shoes and mind her father, a humoursome man given to violent fits of temper. She hadn’t an easy life. There were cattle to be herded and tested, pigs to fatten, turkeys to be sent off on the train to Dublin before Christmas. They cut the meadow in summer and harvested a field of oats in autumn.

  Her father gave instructions and did less and less, paid a man to come in and do the hardest work. He criticised the veterinary bills, insulted the priest who came to anoint him when he was ill, belittled Betty’s cooking and claimed that nothing was as it should have been. Nothing was the way it used to be, he meant. He hated change. Towards the end he’d put on his black overcoat and walk the fields, seeing how tall the grass was in the meadow, counting the grains of corn on the stalks, noting the thinness of a cow or the rust on a gate. Then he would come inside just before dark and say, ‘Not much time left. Not much time.’

  ‘Don’t be morbid,’ Betty used to answer, and continued on; but last winter her father took to his bed, and for the three days preceding his death he lay there roaring and kicking his feet, calling for ‘Buttermilk! Buttermilk!’ When he died on a Tuesday night, by willing himself to die, Betty was more relieved than sorry.

  Betty kept track of Louisa’s progress through the years; her wedding, which she did not attend, the birth of her children, one boy and one girl, what Louisa had wanted. She sent a fruit cake through the post every Christmas, home-made fudge at Easter, and remembered the children’s birthdays, put pound notes she could not spare in cards.

  Betty had been too busy for marriage. She had once walked out with a young Protestant man named Cyril Dawe her father di
sapproved of. Nothing ever came of it. The time for marriage and children passed for Betty. She became used to attending to her father’s needs in the big house, quelling his temper, making his strong tea, ironing his shirts and polishing his good shoes on a Saturday night.

  After his death she managed to live by renting out the land and cautiously spending the savings her father had left in the Allied Irish Bank. She was fifty years old. The house was hers, but a clause was put in her father’s will that gave Louisa right of residence for the duration of her lifetime. Her father had always favoured Louisa. She had given him the admiration he needed, whereas Betty only fed and clothed and pacified him.

  When June passes without word from the Porters, Betty becomes uneasy. She pictures the lettuce and the scallions rotting in the vegetable patch, toys with the notion of renting a guest house by the sea, of going off to Ballymoney or Cahore Point; but in her heart she knows she won’t. She never goes anywhere. All she ever does is cook and clean and milk the cow she keeps for the house, attends mass on Sundays. But she likes it this way, likes having the house to herself, knowing things are as she left them.

  An overwhelming sense of freedom has accompanied the days since her father’s death. She pulls weeds, keeps the gardens tidy, goes out with the secateurs on Saturdays to cut flowers for the altar. She does the things she never had time to do before: she crochets, blues the lace curtains, replaces the bulb in the Sacred Heart lamp, scrapes the moss off the horse trough and paints the archway gate. She can make jam later on when the fruit ripens. She can pit the potatoes and pickle the tomatoes in the greenhouse. Nothing, really, will go to waste if the Porters do not come. She is getting used to this idea of living through the summer alone, is humming a tune softly and weighing candied peel on the scales, when the postman wheels the bicycle up to the door.