After the lizard sighting my mum claimed she’d heard him calling out for hours, Emma! Emma! Emma! ‘I’m not the better for it,’ she declared, the next morning. I was up at the crack of dawn trying to steady myself, doing things around the house that had been abandoned for some time. ‘It’s understandable,’ I assured her. ‘It’s a kind of guilt, you know, you’re feeling all out of sorts with the way he is, what he’s going through.’ No, she was utterly convinced it was really his bellow she heard. ‘At one point I even heard him knocking on the window trying to get in.’ I thought of their window, the front double bedroom window, climbing out when we had the silly séance with a matchbox as a planchette back in the day. We all legged it from the house in unison, a herd of eleven-year-olds. ‘Move if there’s anyone here! Move if you can hear us!’ Then it flew off the bed, hitting the radiator all the way over at the far wall. It seemed an impossible manoeuvre for one of us with our little fingers and no experience yet of the trickery out there in the vast sickly world. Vickie Cawley laughing as ten crows. Me in pure fright mode. Billie Dunne jumping out that bloody window twenty feet up and running for dear life. It was only two weeks after she found the baby in the plastic bag down the laneway backing onto the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity convent. Same location where they later found twenty-two babies and sixty skeletons of women whose deaths were never registered. Billie stumbled across the bag in 1981, opening it up without really understanding what she was looking at. Though a tiny bloodless hand was enough to send her rocketing. I guess this was how young women got rid of unwanted evidence back then. It wouldn’t happen now with advances in DNA, with advances in social conscience. On the day of our séance my mother was working at the RDS Horse Fair on the Rowntree’s chocolate stall: Munchies, Caramacs, Mars Bars. All the leftovers were piled into a large shopping bag and dragged across the city home to us. It was the first time I was allowed look after the house without Arnold or my sister Lucy in situ. When my mother got home, she slapped me clear across the chops. She may have already met one of the mothers on her way – Billie Dunne’s was particularly hysterical – but if not her trademark intuition told her I had got involved with something unenlightened. Something mischievous and corrupt. She could feel it. The cold throughout the house was cave-like, wet and heavy.
The next visit wasn’t even in the deferential cubbyhole of night. I was sitting on the toilet with the door wide open, staring out into the landing, thinking. It was mid afternoon. Thinking of how to make her life better in the time she had left (she was already eighty years old). Thinking about how to access his funds to do essential repairs to the house, especially the kitchen and damp bedroom walls, which were, after years of neglect, in a dreadful state. Everything was in his name. She was Mistress of Nothing. What I saw next makes me feel like I may have already been a composed and submissive inmate in the Asylum. He thundered up the stairs his head intact as I had remembered it but a spider’s absurd blackened body, eight legs quivering on the carpet in front of me. Darted about turning to stare me right in the face. In a moment’s stampede of panic he was gone again. I jumped so quick off the toilet screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘Mum! Mum! Jesus Christ, help me Mum!’ Back to being a child again.
There was this thing about seeing Frank on stairwells. Around 1986, I was a teenage Mod with a sharply carved Bob, blue bootleg trousers, a round puppyfat face slathered in Rimmel pale-biscuit make-up. I worked the summer months hand-delivering invoices around Dublin city for a pinstripe freak who sold encyclopaedias to people who wanted to show off knowledge on the shelf. Life was good, I was toying with freedom, heading to all-night Northern Soul dances and live music gigs, new people, new sensations. I lived on a diet of space dust and cans of Campbell’s meatballs in gravy. The quays were full of antique shops, musty solicitors’ offices and telephone boxes good for drinking on the hoof when the 7 p.m. witching hour hit. I spotted Frank on my postal rounds early one afternoon climbing up a metal staircase on Ormond Quay fixing his trousers, fixing himself, zipping his life back up. He seemed properly smug and satisfied. Smiling minus that trademark sneer. I honestly hadn’t seen that before, Frank as haphazard man. He stared at me and I at him and we both walked on by without a word. ‘He won’t last like this,’ my mum said when I told her. ‘He can’t go on.’ She was fairly sure she could get him back on track if he just knocked the booze on the head for a few months or more. He’d already been with her friend by then too and in the pitch of night she’d stay up around the smouldering ashes to write him letters her doctor advised would help. She was to make sure to throw them in the fire when her emotions were done. It wouldn’t be fair to expect a man like that to take on all manner of female fragmentary. He had a very important and utterly stressful day job that many men of lesser stock couldn’t endure. That night, after I’d seen him in town on the black basement steps, he returned home with Chinese chicken balls once again, this time for the whole family. Lava-hot balls of scrumptiousness in mini grease-proof bags, snowed in gorgeous lumpy rock salt. When you bit into them the chicken played a strange trick on your tongue, opening out like a new expensive umbrella, pushing suitcases of hot batter around the gum-line. For a few hours, it made us ridiculously happy.
Of course my mother was no longer capable of remembering these golden nuggets. All this harping on about how the stroke was probably our fault. We didn’t give it to him! If he just allowed a bit more of our help at home, we would not have insisted he be removed in the way that he was. Obviously he had a problem with it too. What we needed to know was if he was doing this deliberately. Was he wilfully, determinedly, trying to teach us a lesson for what we had done, when in reality, we were left with no choice by then? ‘Dealing with this is like dealing with a forest fire,’ nurse Bláthnaid said. ‘Even people with the height of expertise cannot deal with this at home sufficiently. There comes a time when you have to let the person go.’ He is talking about old relations long-dead and I asked her, ‘Could he really be seeing them?’ It is a ‘thing’ with people who are sick, apparently. He will not be aware that they have already passed. Is he caught in some foyer between? I wondered. ‘It doesn’t make sense that he would ask about his brother Edward,’ my mother said. ‘God knows he couldn’t stand him when he was alive. Him or his ugly Sligo wife.’ We have to stop this, I told her, we have to accept that he’s getting the proper care and we have a right to live in the house now, the best we can. The kitchen had been fixed up: cream shaker with high-quality Italian stone tiles; a new water tank with titanium coating; floorboards in the front bedroom replaced entirely (as the urine had burnt right through). ‘For a second I thought he was there in the porch late one night,’ she said. No! That was the milkman I told her. At this stage it helped to be stern about the whole ordeal. Such was her slave mentality towards him for so long that she found it almost impossible to disentangle from him in any meaningful way. We painted the bedroom at the back where we both slept a genial grey, with some of the furniture a Provence green to ward off the evil eye. The garage was cleared of his things and the garden tidied up to such an extent that you could now sit on a small stone chantry down the end and draw in the air in long protracted puffs.
At evening time I thought it best to summon him in the mirror to stop any of the nonsense that would no doubt occur later on. She was already so scared of going to bed that I moved her into the spare single room where he wouldn’t think to go. All the years growing up he never bothered any of us in there. I gave her some Ambien along with a few Panadol to aid sleep into the night and sprinkled some valerian and Roman Chamomile essential oils on her pillow. Tucked away in there from early evening until well into the following day, I began to feel that she was not part of this anymore, that I had chaperoned her away from potential suffering or fright.
His presence in the dressing table mirror was amorphous and vague, as if to show his full self to me was not part of the greater plan, that I was somehow not worthy. He would not have been like
this with any of my brothers, had they been alive, but men of his generation were sodden in misogyny whether they cared to admit to it or not. Though I didn’t doubt for a second that he was there, looking back at me, sneering, informing me that no man would come to the door in a rush to take me out, that my skin wasn’t the best, that really I wasn’t the cleverest of them, a few forks short of a picnic basket, and more besides. His seething hatred began to make me laugh, as if any empathy I had left for him and his lousy condition was hidden away in a beanpole storage facility, the type that people use for bundles of clothes they hope will come back into fashion someday. ‘Do you think I don’t remember what happened on Bingo Nights all those years ago?’ I told him. ‘When I pissed the bed and you rolled me out like a sausage roll and said I had to wait in the hall until Mum got home.’ Putting me in that whiskey-fart bed on Sunday evenings because you were too lazy to babysit properly downstairs, when all I wanted was to watch Worzel Gummidge. What a lousy father you were but still you made us feel sorry for you. It was always about you. And what the hell did you do for your parents after they left Ireland? You barely bothered your arse ever seeing them again. When you did you were pissed out of your mind. They rang us here to complain, across the Irish Sea, you with no respect, turning up for funerals two days late. You who demands so much of us now! What a bloody joke! Do your worst, go on, do your worst. Do whatever you think will work at this stage and do it with your sick brain in all its shrinking glory! Oh but if you think it stopped him slinking into those horrible animal forms and darting around furniture at night, my grousing in the mirror only made him worse and brought him nearer to me, instead of up on top of the bookshelves or the wardrobes or the wall. A ferret slinking in and out of the bed bars at my feet, leaving drops of sweat and other depositions for me to see in the mornings.
When she passed away in the single room I didn’t have her removed straight away because that’s exactly what he would’ve expected to happen. He’d expect her to be lying there, in state, in Massey’s on the Old Finglas Road, a twin set and her navy skirt (always in navy, like a sailor’s wife on a first trip abroad, hoping to appear smart no matter where they would go). I didn’t mention to him either that she was gone as I wanted to see if he’d tell me about it, if he really had the upper hand when it came to using his intuition, his greedy appetite for a good hunch. But he hadn’t a breeze! He did however begin to appear more frequently, more sonorously if you like, in the mirror. I am not sure if this was a kind of latent protest, but the house joined in by breaking even more of itself up. The heating system gave out and the plumbing at the back of the shower fell to pieces completely. Twice I had to get a local hood in to bash things back into place or replace the piping entirely. Black mould broke out on the walls of both bedrooms. Dreadful shapes in butterfly splats and distant familiar outlines (the one of the Eiffel tower was funny, but I made sure not to laugh out loud), which I’d rouge over with the Annie Sloan chalk paint within hours of appearing.
I miss her terribly but part of me is glad she is resting up accordingly. No more, ‘Oh God, do you think we should go back out to him today? Does he have enough dark chocolate? Is there still a problem with his swallow? Are there enough clothes out there? I don’t want them to think we’re not making enough of an effort.’ She had herself tortured to the point where she gave Catholic martyr wives a pitiful name. Sad too that she would never get to go on a Royal Caribbean Cruise ship that I had promised we’d do. Those ships are something else! Ascend three hundred feet above sea level in a North Star capsule! Fine-dining extravaganza that holds more than two thousand merry-makers at a time! He hardly took her anywhere truth be told, not for a long time. Hadn’t the energy, or the self-governance.
Now that it’s just the two of us I feel I have an opportunity to understand him a bit more. I hope that if he sees that I know how he feels, how hurt he is, he might stop his games around the house and reach some sort of compromise. The dressing table was made for them when they first got married by a very talented carpenter, huge money, with the promise that no other identical piece existed in the whole of Glasnevin. The mirror carved in a classic baroque style. It’s good to concentrate on the positive aspects of where we were now, and to forget all the things that didn’t work in the past. He wanted to be a writer, for instance, but couldn’t quite stick at it, not like I am now. ‘There is a lot more to life than jumping at every silly ambition that lands on your mat,’ I told him. He thinks this is a sound observation and one that will ward off disappointment from expectations that are perhaps a bit too high. ‘That’s the problem these days, people want so bloody much,’ he says. Isn’t it so true! We are able to agree, which I feel is genuine progress. To think we were so petrified of him all those years ago when he was the one who was clearly so terrified of us. I get that now. Christ do I get it. That I would hide up here under the scratchy horse blankets during fights. Fingers so deep in my ears they’d be sticky and sore when my sister would eventually burst into the room to reef them out again. ‘He’s gone off to bed,’ she’d say. ‘The coast is clear for now and Mum has yummy shortbread in the oven.’
Leitrim Flip
I would never tell a hound like that I’d done it on purpose. You can’t predict the ‘switch’ and though he seemed more cuddly-do than spanky-don’t, the army background was a clincher. It was also the only time that I’d get to test him properly in all this, the juncture where I cradled the dynamism, not him. Oh he hadn’t managed to keep his eyes open wide enough at all. Like most men, he’d stupidly underestimated me. I dumped him before we’d begun to see how he’d jerk and crawl. He texted back quite surprised with a simplistic ‘I understand’. I hadn’t expected that smack of humanity, it made me feel contrite, for a nanosecond. Then I considered he may have done it on purpose to achieve the desired effect, to manipulate. He was a Dom after all. It was the first day we’d met in person. He’d be discarded hours later for being a mindless superficial twat. And a hypocrite. I couldn’t stomach a man inside me who hadn’t the ability to think things through beyond the half-baked one-dimensional. Stick your fucking brain in me first before you stick your cock in! Truth is, I wanted to see how he’d react given that he’d be playing me like this in my role as a sub into the near future. I wanted to witness how he’d jump, psychologically. It’s hard to find people on those kinky websites who’d go the whole hog. I was also just out of a long-term relationship and I felt like fucking men over big time. Could I bear being back in that grimy white work van of his horsing through the streets of Dublin with my huge tits bobbing and the lyricism of his voice swinging around his Adam’s apple like a Satanic hammock? ‘You think so slave, can I stop you there, have you any idea what you’re whittling on about, are you totally clueless, have you any notion of the world you’ve stepped into?’ Mouth mouth mouth. He really didn’t shut the fuck up. There was hilarity in it too, but a lot of latent aggression for sure. The wanker thought he was so smart. An ex-Marine no less. All that vicious training, all that PTSD, all that crying alone in stone bathrooms in foreign places with too much sand.
When we got to the hotel room he was anything but smart, flying around in a Dickensian mania (Mr Bumblefuck). He had his gut unselfconsciously splayed in full view and his leather play kit glory-holing itself on the dressing table where the slick menus and tourist bumf usually sit. The words were farting from his ginger gob, doing a very good bluebottle impression he was, buzzing to the bathroom, then back out again – ‘Oh, see, I like you slave, you’re just my type’ – circling the bed with a creepy half-smile, back to the bathroom again, talking like a pirate turkey stuffed with amphetamines. Then the runny shite came, endless diarrhoea sentences as he tried to get a grip on what he was actually doing. Was he capable of squirming into the dark at all? Though as I’d soon learn, the one thing he could do without having to concert-direct himself with hot air was tie me up. To tie my hands behind my back shrewdly and roughly (and even then he lost the key,
still stuck in the handcuff, the gobshite!) and there I was with his fat cock in my mouth hurting my jawbone. My carefully applied whore-red lipstick smudging all over this stranger’s pasty skin, the idea of having to chomp on it interminably until he shot a bad-diet-load down my gullet. To be totally fair it was a nice sensation being restricted in movement with his warm flesh in my gob like that, a first for me. I felt properly submissive in this moment. Up down up down slurp slurp all around trying to use my mouth to piston and position him so I could make him ‘orgasm’. He was enjoying that I couldn’t quite manage it, laughing at me, chortling, so cheap to do that but I understood the effortless humiliation in it for him. Two-pissholes-in-the-snow blindfold cemented on which meant I genuinely couldn’t see a damn thing. Not one of those sex shop synthetic pieces of crap but a proper patch-per-eye medieval yoke which he’d bound very tight. My arms were really hurting yanked behind like that; I hadn’t bothered telling him I had back problems caused by the fucked-up hips and afterwards of course he’d blame the fat. A brute like him doesn’t wait around for explanation. ‘You nearly had me there slave but you let it go!’ he announced. ‘Fuck’s sake I almost came!’ As if I was supposed to read his twitches like a basket of braille bundled by the cottage fire. I moaned loud for him to remove the cuffs from behind my back. My tits were preventing me from grabbing his cock and working it with my hands and tongue simultaneously so we could get out of this kip he’d booked and pour some pints down us like he’d promised. When he released me I grabbed hold of him like a boat part I’d no interest in but had to rough-house to get on with the boating holiday regardless. ‘You nearly had me there again, fuck’s sake slave get a move on!’ I wondered how much the sound of his own voice could stop him from coming. Even his cock must be totally sick of hearing him. I imagined him at home fighting at the dinner table with his Debenhams-clad wife. She’d be good-looking enough given that he’s a big ego. Good-looking in the conventional sense of looking OK in a swimsuit for her age, but a head like a horse, with too much make-up splattered all over. I could imagine him swinging the breeze not letting her away with a stray consonant during arguments. Sitting room bully. Bedroom bulldozer. The only way she’d be able to get her own back would be to stop fucking him, which is probably why he was here with me. He’d be one of those slow-release tormentors who could be sappy when convention required (important calendar dates: anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day). His need for control a driving force both blinding him and shoving him forward.
Room Little Darker Page 2
