by Martin Roper
—You shut up and learn to control your children.
—I’m warning you, I’ll rip you from your cunt to your chin.
—Go ahead.
She stared up into his face.
—Go ahead if you’re so brave. Rip me.
—I’m warning you if you as much as look at my kids.
—Rip me. Go ahead.
He walked away. She followed him down the garden path. He stopped and looked at her and she spat in front of him.
—The state of you with your shirt off. Best part of you ran down your mother’s leg.
He stopped and turned and sneered at her, turned the corner and walked down Bath Avenue, passed our gable and out of sight. She never took her eyes off him.
—Jesus, what did you say that for? He could have killed us.
—You talk that way about them.
—About them, not to them.
We went to the Gards that night and reported him. There was nothing they could do except warn him. They could come when we called if the children were giving trouble but they couldn’t arrest them, they were too young. There was nothing they could do. They advised us to get out. The world was a small place that night, our lives dictated by children.
The next day the bathroom window was broken. We replaced it. When I had finished repainting the frame it was broken again. I replaced it again. When other things happened I stopped telling Ursula. My silence was not stoicism—I was ashamed I had no control, that with each passing day I was less and less of a man.
It happened on a quiet Sunday morning. We were lying in bed, still asleep. A ball thudded off the gable. Then it hit the window by the bed. We had designed a stained glass window that threw pink and green light into the room. A sheet of unbreakable glass was in front of it. The ball was thrown harder and harder against the window. We lay there not talking, listening. Ursula was wiping her hand over her knuckles, slapping the back of her hand, drubbing herself until I couldn’t bear it and I jumped out of the bed, pulled on my clothes and ran out. They were already out of sight. I ran and ran and kept running, the heels of my shoes cutting into my sockless ankles. I ran through Irishtown and on into Ringsend and there they were outside a shop, eating sweets. They all saw me except Alan who had his back to me. I lunged at the child and threw him to the ground. He screamed, defiance in his eyes. I sat on him and held him by the ears. I wanted to lift his head and bang it off the footpath. I wanted to bang it until he stopped moving but I couldn’t do it. If I could have murdered, that was the moment when I would have done it. I hated myself. I hated that the child under me was a child and didn’t really understand how he was tormenting us. He would grow out of it. He would grow up and breed more of his own into the world. He wouldn’t remember the misery he caused us. We would have to sell. I walked back to the house. I sat down on the front step and started sweating and shaking. I took a pack of cigarettes out of my trouser pocket. The packet was crushed but none of them were broken. Little bastards. Little bastards. I lit the cigarette. People passed on their way to mass at the Church of the Star. I flicked the cigarette out into the road. I’d enough of it. She was in the kitchen feeding the cats when I came in.
—We’re selling.
—No way. I’m not letting them win.
You can go if you like, she said. I nodded and I could see I had nothing left then. She didn’t hide her disgust, I was a coward in her eyes. I was a coward. But I understood something she did not about these people. I grew up with their like—she would not win. There was no winning with them.
There were older boys on the corner later that day. Teenagers. They were lining up and throwing stones at the back windows. They were casual about it. They were in no hurry. She telephoned the Gards and they said they would have a car around in minutes. A window broke. Then another. I went downstairs and walked out. I walked slowly towards them. There were about fifteen in all. The local children and these older boys who must have been from Ringsend. They started to laugh. I didn’t care anymore. I stared at them one by one. They waited on me to do something. I suddenly remembered the final scene from High Noon and smiled. They burst out laughing as if reading my mind. I did nothing but stare. As I stood there in the middle of their cul-de-sac I realised that most of their houses looked out onto this road. Their parents would be home from Mass now. They would have had their Sunday dinner and be watching the television. I could feel eyes, other eyes, on me. Some of them must be watching this. I had no idea what to do and as I stood there I knew that with each passing second my impotence was growing in direct relation to their delight. I turned and walked away. The stones started to fly. I walked slowly with every fourth or fifth stone hitting me. There were apples, too. They must have raided an orchard. The apples bouncing and smashing off the road made it more humiliating. I knew Ursula was watching from the window and that like me, she was at a loss. A stone hit me in the head and then they stopped firing briefly, testing the moment. I kept walking, swallowing spittle in my throat. A squad car turned onto the road and pulled up beside me. The boys scattered like startled birds. The Gardaí chased and caught two of them. They were taken to their houses. Both fathers said their sons had been with them all afternoon and closed their doors. A cop told me I should go up to the hospital to have my head looked at and it’s only then I feel an iciness at the back of head. I wipe the back of my hair and it’s wet. Come on, says the cop, we’ll drop you off. I tell Ursula to stay put and finish the article she’s working on.
* * *
I lie in bed stunned by the fear that has overcome me. Ursula offers me a drink but I want nothing except silence. The stitches are tightening in my scalp. I stare up at the sloping ceiling overhead and close my eyes. I am nine years of age and walking home from dull, stupid school. I will be nine years of age forever. I’m walking on the side of the road that the houses are on, glimpsing at each window in case I can see something shocking—a man doing the fox trot with an Irish wolfhound, an old woman shooting heroin, a baby painting itself purple, a couple smiling at each other. Anything but dead curtains. I light a cigarette off the tip of the one I’m about to throw away. I’m getting the hang of inhaling. The railway, high on the embankment, runs along the other side of the road. A rock bounces off the ground in front of me. I keep walking. Another rock whacks off the footpath. I put my schoolbag in my right hand as a shield. The rocks come faster now. I look up. There are two boys walking along the tracks. They are skimming the rocks down off the railway and onto the road as if there is an ocean there. They seem bored, as if they don’t care whether they hit me or not. I keep walking. The road is a mile long and whether I turn around and go back towards school or go on for home makes no difference—I’ve about the same distance to go either way. We’re doing Macbeth in school. So steeped in blood. I walk slower. Never let anyone see your fear, my father has always told me. The inner city in the seventies is a no-go area and showing courage is not so much a mark of foolish heroism as it is a way of survival. It’s normal. A rock hits me on the hip. I keep my pace. I can sense their excitement. They’re wondering how far to go, each rock flying out further into an infinity of malevolence. Something hits me on the side of the head and I fight the urge to lift my hand to the soreness. I keep walking as if I feel nothing. They are running now, running down the tracks away from the edge of hate.
* * *
I don’t know why they picked me. Perhaps because I walked home alone. Perhaps because I didn’t make friends. I liked poetry and I wasn’t going to run into school with a Dylan Thomas poem as if I had discovered a two-headed frog. Nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice my integrity to be in the club. My integrity. Nothing was as pure and absolute as the stubborn integrity of my childhood self. But later I would get over that. To join the club, not a named organisation but a constantly shifting but predictable world children invent. One had to go with the craze of the moment—go on the mitch, set cats on fire, break windows, force younger children to drink a jam jar full of piss. All of this inter
ested me in theory. I liked to think about the boy drinking the urine, what was going on in his head. And what was going on in the head of the boy who forced it down the throat. But I despised them for their vindictiveness and never would be a part of it. Be your own man, my father always said. I wasn’t sure what being my own man entailed. I thought it meant I had to be alone. My father took good care of us and I never doubted his word. So I joined no clubs. I stayed out of the gangs and that made me different. Inside, I wanted to be what every child wants to be: the same.
* * *
My father didn’t believe in fighting. He told me a man’s job was to show that men could be men without behaving like wild animals. One day in school Mooney picked on O’Reilly. O’Reilly was always picked on because he couldn’t stop sucking his thumb. McNally, the science teacher, came in to the classroom and broke the scrap up. But we all knew what it meant. Four o’clock outside the back gates. About sixty of us stayed back to watch. Mooney started right into it. He shoved O’Reilly on the ground and kicked him in the head. He kept kicking him in the head and O’Reilly made no sound. We watched. Usually there was pushing and shoving and name calling and a bit of a punchup and everyone cheered until someone stopped it. This was different. Blood was coming out of O’Reilly’s mouth and out of his ear. I couldn’t bear it and jumped in. I woke up in Temple Street hospital. Mooney had pulled out an iron bar from his jacket and hit me with it once on the side of the head. I lost the hearing in my left ear. I never got in a fight after that.
* * *
Medbh calls to visit. I am out in the back chopping wood. It is a quiet day and I am loving the freshness of the air, the joy of being alone, the silence, the happiness of doing a bit of physical work. Each split of wood the skull of Darina, Alan, all of them.
—That’s very macho for you, she says.
—How’s it goin’?
—You’re sweet. Ursula is lucky to have such a sweetie.
I invite her into the house and we sit by the fire and talk. I don’t know her well and don’t particularly like her. She is too certain of life. After a cup of tea and a bit of chat about the delights of having a home, she tells me why she is here. She is lonely. She misses being a single woman. We look at each other both of us thinking the same thing, thinking about Brefini, her husband. She knows by my eyes that it’s the wrong thing to say to me. I am sad for her, and feel I am getting old, learning to know that sharing such intimacy is not intimacy, it’s nothing but a slide into collusion. I am learning slowly. She asks for my advice about a man her sister is interested in and I tell her I don’t know. I don’t know how to get a rawl plug in a hole without bending it, how would I know about this man her sister wants. She thanks me for my advice, warms herself a moment longer by the fireside, rubbing her hands on her thighs, lingering to dispel the awkwardness between us, and then she leaves. She has no idea that she has offended me. It is nothing to do with Brefini; it is my own frail ego. Why should she think that a lighthearted comment about macho—or the lack of it—would be hurtful? Why would she think that calling me skinny or boyish or sweet could ever be construed as offensive?
For a woman to say she is envious of a man’s skinniness is like complimenting an obese woman for her jolly nature. I get the message—it translates from compliment to insult in a finger click. To be called boyish translates as hormonally undeveloped. To be sweet is the trickiest one of all to handle because it seems innocuous. Here’s the rub: women tell me men are not sweet. Women tell me men are bastards. So, somehow, even though sweetness is a virtue, one is less of a man for possessing it. My head begins to ache as if cold air is being forced through the healing wound. It was stupid to start working so soon.
This time Ursula agrees we should sell. I am worried for our safety. I want to protect her and know I can’t. Besides, the truth is she is not the one in danger. If someone is going to be hurt it is going to be me. There is enough decency in this scum not to hurt a woman. We agree to work extra hard on the house to get it finished and put it on the market quickly. My attitude changes overnight. We had taken care to do everything as expertly as possible, staining the skirting boards four times, varnishing them four times. Now I take short cuts. She doesn’t. She is still attached to the house; it has become her love. I grit my teeth when I hear her still sanding the downstairs skirting boards, the obsession with smoothness of door frames and windows and walls. I tell her again and again to hurry and not worry about the fine details. We have finished everything except the papering and painting. The paint tins sit in the kitchen waiting to release their colours. I open them and stir them into life. Yellow, pink, blue, green. Happy colours. I size the walls in the living room and watch the paste dry in. I plumb the wall over the fireplace.
—What are you doing?
She is standing in the doorway, wiping dust off her face.
—Lining the walls.
—They’re not ready.
Her anger takes precedence over expertise.
—If you think they’re not ready you can do it—you can do all of it. Wouldn’t that be fun?
—Fine.
—It’s not fine. You want to help? Stop being a know-all expert and just get it done. Now fuck off.
—Fuck off you.
—I should never have married a woman who couldn’t say fuck off properly.
—And I should never have married a man who couldn’t fuck properly.
—Maybe if there was someone worth fucking.
—She left your father a long time ago.
I climb the ladder, hold the roll of paper to the ceiling, let it drop until the roll hits the space between my toe and the wall, feel the precision of my father working in me. I measure the first length, lay it on the table and run the other lengths of paper off it. I am happy in my anger. Success lies in letting her go one better in insults and leaving silence the job of cutting her down. I paste the paper and let it soak in, then paste it again. She is still standing there, waiting for a reply. I start to whistle, the happy whistle of my father when he had to deal with customers looking over his shoulder. In his heyday he would have a room this size done in three hours. The door slams, and the house, empty of furniture, echoes with her hostility. I am halfway around the room when I notice I’m going the wrong way—the joins in the paper will show. No matter, they won’t rise for months. We are decorating the house for someone else now. We are fighting more and more, the arguments only a break from the bitter silence. Despite her independence and staunch feminism she feels let down by the man in her life. I am a coward. I am running away. These are the things we don’t talk about, the unsaid words that widen the gap in the bed.
She wants to ensure all the floorboards are secure before we put the last of the skirting boards down. I keep going with the lining paper, running it down to the floor. We work in inverse proportion to each other, the more corners I cut, the more care she takes in the details. I watch her comb her hair at night, as I have done every night for years. The slow rhythmical brushing, the decisive centre parting that I loved to watch irritates me. We would come to blows if it wasn’t for exhaustion. She is still fighting the children in her head. The house is papered now, dressed from head to toe. One evening I come in and she has written poems on the walls in pencil. Sexton, Plath, Ozick, Rich, Bishop, Glück, Levertov. Poems pencilled neatly all over the house. The pencil will burn through the paint and I sit down under the weight of resentment. But she hasn’t done it on purpose I suppose. Three coats will cover them, and then slowly, over the winter months, when the new occupants turn on the heating the poems will bleed through and reveal their past. I want to write poems too but can think of none. I caught this morning’s morning minion. Dappled dawn. I go up to bed. She is already asleep.
I wake to the smell of paint. She is rolling the walls in the room that was to be her study. Bright yellow. Rolling wet sunshine. She should have done the ceiling first but I say nothing. All advice is accusation now. I go down and start the kitchen ceiling. Conte
ntment settles in our working. I shout up if she wants tea and her yes sounds like the first casual word she has spoken in months. I go out and get fish and chips and we sit on the stairs eating them out of their bags. We talk about how much longer it will take. The papered walls insulate our voices; speech heavier now. I think about telling her how ashamed I am of my fear but don’t. Work is the only refuge left in our marriage.
We go to Brefini’s and Medbh’s house on a Sunday afternoon to talk about books, a dull Dublin version of the Bloomsbury set. About a half dozen of her friends (only later would time teach me the sundering of friends) talk and talk, and the only aspect that appeals to me is the decadence of drinking wine in the middle of the afternoon. I hate the way they tear books apart for the sake of it. Everything for effect. They are like young barristers cutting their teeth. Today they are discussing Cormac McCarthy’s latest book. Ursula and I had read it in bed together the night before. Rather, she read it and I occasionally read over her shoulder. We both hated it. Man’s struggle with the Universe against an imponderable sunset. She finished the book late into the night. I remember listening to some of the locals coming home drunk. The next day battle ensues over the book. The men are attacking Ursula. I have learned to be careful and not to defend her for two reasons: I do not want it to seem I am defending her because we are a couple who have lost our intellectual identity for the sake of coupledummydom; and she has told me she is more than capable of taking care of herself. Lately, though, she has mentioned that I am too distant and so I decide to defend her. It is turning into the great tedious gender debate—the men liking the book and the women not—and I hope my erudite opinion will turn the argument around.
—Horseshit and sunsets in an America that doesn’t exist.
—You haven’t even read the book.
Everyone looks at her and then me. I smile my finest roguish smile. It doesn’t hide a thing. I go silent and the men all laugh. On the way home I think about other times she has disappointed me, all of them as petty as this one. She asks me why I am silent and I can say nothing with the anger in me. She sighs, resigned to silence.
