Himself

by Jess Kidd

  Mrs Lavelle doesn’t quite catch the question. A muscle twitches in her face and her hands grip the armrests. She is watching the sideboard. Her tea is getting cold on the table next to her.

  Mahony turns to Teasie. ‘Have you any honey to sweeten the tea?’

  ‘I have of course, in the pantry,’ she says. She leaves the door ajar behind her.

  Mahony leans forward and pats Mrs Lavelle’s hand. ‘You have something to tell me, don’t you?’

  All at once, as if automated, her eyes revolve in her head. She glares at him, as unblinking as a tomcat.

  ‘Take it with you,’ she hisses. ‘It belongs to you. Take it with you.’

  Mrs Lavelle looks away as Teasie comes back into the room.

  ‘I’ve no honey. Will treacle do?’

  ‘I’d prefer the honey, if it’s all the same.’

  Teasie peers through her smudged glasses with an expression of great uncertainty. ‘I could pop along to Mrs Moran and borrow a spoonful.’

  ‘That’s the plan right there! You could so, Teasie. I’ll sit with your mammy. She’ll be fine with me, won’t you, Mrs Lavelle?’

  There is no response from Mrs Lavelle; her eyes are riveted to the pot plant in the corner.

  Teasie hovers.

  ‘You’ll be no sooner gone than back again.’

  ‘Right so, I’ll be a minute just.’

  ‘Take your time,’ Mahony smiles.

  Teasie goes out into the hallway and takes down her overcoat from the hook, pausing only to inhale Mahony’s jacket once more.

  There’s a shadow in Mrs Lavelle’s front parlour, she says. It’s stretched out there along the sideboard, watching them. It fidgets the hem of the tablecloth and fingers the china plate. It shakes the curtains and pinches the cat. Its breath flutters in the empty grate and fogs up Teasie’s glasses. The shadow let itself in the day Mahony came to town and now it’s taken up residence.

  Mrs Lavelle tentatively brings her hand up to wipe the corners of her mouth with the handkerchief knotted in her fist.

  The shadow kept to the corners at first, she says. It hid behind the dresser, under the bed, in the hatbox on top of the wardrobe.

  It waited and it watched.

  Soon she began to hear footsteps on the stairs, a naked little patter, sticky wet. Watery footprints began to appear, on the lino and on the carpets, up the walls and along the windowsills. The place developed an underwater smell.

  They found silt on the doormat and gravel on the hearthrug.

  Mrs Lavelle took to wearing a nail tied around her neck, for such shadows can’t abide iron. But each morning the shoelace lay empty at her throat and the nail was gone. Soon the footsteps were iron-shod; they rang out on the kitchen flags and fell heavy up the stairs.

  Soon her prayer cards were missing, and her crucifix, and her blue glass rosary beads. All gone. The shadow had eaten them.

  The shadow grew braver and began to lick up the holy water she put around the place. It banged doors and left handprints in the butter dish. It threw saucers and howled down the hallway.

  Mahony looks around the room. A framed portrait of the pope, with one hand raised in blessing, hangs over the fireplace. A few parched pot plants hang on grimly in the corners, and a pair of ugly ceramic dogs grace the mantelpiece. Anything that can be covered with an antimacassar is wearing one. A good layer of dust shrouds everything else.

  There is not one dead person in sight.

  Mahony speaks to her very gently. ‘You mustn’t upset yourself, Mrs Lavelle. Sure, there’s nothing here but us two. The only dead thing in this house is that moth in your sugar bowl.’

  Mrs Lavelle clenches her handkerchief to her mouth and cries, ‘That’s because it frightened all the others away.’

  Mahony’s heart jumps. ‘Who is it, Mrs Lavelle? Tell me.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Where are my pills?’

  ‘I’ll get you your pills now, Mrs Lavelle. Just tell me who you see.’

  She starts to rock herself with her hands balled to fists at her sides. ‘The dead pay back. You shouldn’t cross them. You mustn’t cross them.’

  ‘Who did you cross, Mrs Lavelle?’

  Teasie hears the screaming as she lets herself in at the gate. She runs into the parlour to see Mahony on the floor in front of her mother’s chair. He has hold of her mother’s knees and her mother is looking down at him in stricken horror. When Mahony sees Teasie he lets go of the old woman and immediately the screaming stops. Mrs Lavelle slumps back in the chair with her eyes closed, twitching. Teasie hears herself asking him to leave in a voice that isn’t her own. In the hallway Mahony turns to her.

  ‘I need to talk to your mother again, when she’s feeling better. It’s important, Teasie.’

  Teasie shakes her head. ‘Get out. Get out. Get out!’ She is still holding the pot of honey in her hand as she locks the door behind him.

  In the parlour Mary Lavelle stares, her knuckles white on the arms of her chair. Her nightmare is crawling towards her, all along the skirting boards.

  Chapter 34

  March 1950

  The fire was nearly out when Orla heard the sound. It wasn’t one of the night sounds she knew: an owl hunting over the fields, or the mournful cry of a vixen; these sounds were familiar to her.

  This sound was different. It was muffled and heavy with threat.

  In a moment they were inside. Men with their caps pulled down low, stark patterns from their lanterns, shouting, knocking over chairs.

  She ran to take up her baby.

  A man grabbed hold of her and tried to put her arms to the sides but she was too quick. She twisted herself free and took up a bottle and broke it against the wall. She turned and pushed it into him. She saw him stagger backwards.

  She looked around for her boy.

  A woman stood holding him across a sea of people, moving shapes in the light. How could she swim through them?

  She was outside. There was blood in her mouth. They’d split her lip for her. She was running into the trees. When she reached the heart of the forest she slowed and stopped and started to feel by degrees.

  She would curse them all to hell for this.

  She came out of the forest just before dawn and circled the town, silent and iron-eyed. By the time the sun alighted on the rooftops Orla was standing in a dew-wet garden. The back door of the house was open. In the heavy silence of the morning she heard a baby cry and went to claim her son.

  Chapter 35

  May 1976

  ‘I just wanted to say fair play to you.’

  Mahony, sitting outside the village hall, running through his lines and smoking, glances up.

  Noel Munnelly is standing over him, tall and apologetic looking, with his right hand outstretched. His forehead is angry with blisters and his hair is badly receding. Behind him two curly-haired boys wearing matching sweaters are jumping on and off the kerb.

  Mahony puts his fag in his mouth and stands up.

  ‘For the production an’ all,’ says Noel.

  Mahony shakes Noel’s hand and manages a smile.

  ‘Róisín hasn’t been the same, since, you know. But since you’ve come an’ all this.’ Noel gestures at the empty car park. ‘It’s given her a new lease of life.’

  The boys spin off whooping into a far corner where they slap each other and run back again.

  Noel shrugs. ‘That’s all I wanted to say.’ He nods and turns and walks away. The younger boy runs to put his hand in his father’s, and Noel smiles down at him. The older boy lags behind, looking back at Mahony without curiosity.

  Mahony lights another cigarette. He’ll go back inside in a minute just. He runs his fingers through his hair.

  Around him the dead are crowding into the car park, drifting through the low wall to line up by the dustbins. They stand watching him with pale faces.

  Mahony can make out Miss Mulhearne trailing through a parked car. She hovers near the group to the right of him, steadfastly
studying her own shoes.

  A hushed silence falls.

  Mahony recognises a courtroom when he sees one.

  A dim figure pushes through the crowd and staggers towards the steps, his right sleeve blood-soaked and flapping.

  ‘Here, Gobshite.’

  Mahony looks at him.

  The dead farmer glances around him and licks his lips. ‘Didn’t I tell you to get your own?’

  In the empty car park the dead clap and jeer.

  The dead farmer shuffles a little and grins. ‘Time to mend your ways.’ Mr McHale fondles the sodden end of his vacant shirtsleeve thoughtfully. ‘And that’s coming from a rotten one-armed bastard like me.’

  The gathered dead agree. Their murmured assent echoes around the car park, metallic and distant, like a recording played backwards.

  ‘Settle down,’ urges Mr McHale. ‘One good woman and all that.’ He narrows his eyes and leans forward, so close that Mahony feels the dead man’s breath on his face, as stale as the crypt. ‘You’re gone on her anyway, son.’

  Mahony closes his eyes. When he opens them again the car park is empty apart from a crisp packet skittering across the tarmac, filled momentarily by the breeze up off the bay.

  Chapter 36

  May 1976

  Mrs Cauley and Bridget Doosey are amusing themselves in the kitchen with a game of cards and the last nippings from a bottle of Irish. Mrs Cauley is clad in brushed velvet and is wearing an alarming cascade of dark curls. Shauna is washing up at the sink. Now and again she scowls over at Bridget, who has her boots up on the table and is smoking a cigar.

  ‘I have a hand like a foot,’ says Bridget.

  Johnnie, peering over her shoulder and pulling at his faint moustache, nods in agreement.

  Mahony sits down at the kitchen table and declines Bridget’s offer of a Dominican.

  Mrs Cauley glances up at him. ‘Where’ve you been? We have developments.’ She puts down her cards and pushes a folded piece of paper towards him.

  Mahony picks it up and the two women grin at him.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘The name of your generous benefactor,’ says Mrs Cauley. ‘The kind old soul who put up the money for your bribe.’

  Mahony unfold the paper and looks at it. ‘You’re serious? I thought it was the priest’s money.’

  ‘That tight bastard?’ Mrs Cauley shakes her head. ‘He’d pull the socks off a dead man.’

  Bridget blows smoke up to the ceiling. ‘You have to ask yourself, Mahony, what kind of an innocent bystander would put up that kind of money to buy a body out of town?’

  Mrs Cauley pushes forward two coins and a matchstick. ‘And she had a motive.’

  Mahony frowns. ‘Which was?’

  Bridget deals another card. ‘Who would Orla really annoy?’

  ‘The sanctimonious, the bigoted and the pious.’ Mrs Cauley folds, pushing her cards across the table pettishly. ‘The Widow Farelly has always been head of that department.’

  Bridget points with her cigar. ‘Full marks to old King Charles there.’

  Mrs Cauley tosses her black curls and narrows her eyes.

  ‘But do you really think that the Widow could commit murder?’ asks Shauna. ‘I know she’s a bit sour and all that.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think it was hands-on. It think the Widow was most likely the brains behind the operation,’ says Bridget.

  At the sink, Shauna raises her eyebrows.

  Mahony smiles grimly. ‘Either way, I think it’s time I paid my generous benefactor a visit.’

  Chapter 37

  May 1976

  Mahony stands on Annie Farelly’s doorstep with his finger on the doorbell.

  A dead old man zimmers out through the wall and into the flowerbed; he leans on his walking frame and fixes Mahony with a charming toothless grin.

  Mahony nods his head. ‘She’s in there hiding, is she?’

  The dead old man laughs soundlessly.

  Mahony bends down to roar through the letterbox.

  ‘Annie, will you open the door? I know you’re in there.’

  Silence.

  ‘Do you want me to say my piece in front of the whole town? At the church maybe? I’ve the kind of voice that carries. Or at the General Store? I could even shout it across the square to you, Annie.’

  Mahony hears the scraping of bolts and the door opens. The Widow Farelly stands before him with a face that would curdle the milk inside a cow. She has put on a clean apron and has a syringe, with enough sedative to drop a carthorse, cocked and loaded in the dresser drawer.

  You can forgive a lone woman for taking precautions.

  Otherwise Mahony is quite safe. For Nurse Farelly has hung up her uniform in the empty wardrobe in the never-visited guest room.

  For over forty years she was dedicated to efficiently dispatching her duties at Kilterhill Nursing Home. A place where she cared for those who repulsed her more than anything else in the entire world: the old and infirm.

  Even as a child, poor Annie was monstrously horrified by old age. It was her job to wash, change and feed Grandma, a fine upstanding woman, who, at the tail end of her life, wound up mewling by the milk pail and flashing her bits at the postman.

  When Grandma finally died from the head injuries she sustained from beating herself repeatedly with a copper bedpan, Annie was sent to nursing school to develop her vocation of care. Annie returned to Mulderrig with a second-hand fob watch and a solid reference. Within a week of her return, her daddy, a practical man, had won her a position at Kilterhill Nursing Home. With Annie as the family’s new breadwinner, her daddy could dedicate himself to the full-time occupation of sitting on his arse.

  All Annie’s hopes and dreams ended the day she walked in through the front door. It was a daily horror of ripe bedpans and clotted dentures, rivers of incontinence and weeping bedsores. Every evening poor little Annie would go home and cry herself to sleep, for the smell of the old people was still on her. It was in her nose, her mouth and her lungs, in the pores of her skin and the fabric of her hair. She breathed in age and swallowed decay.

  But Annie was very good at her job. She saw things the other girls wouldn’t: the unlocked medicine cart and the soiled sheets under the bed, the smears on the teacups and the stains on the nightdresses. Within a month Annie had received a pay rise and the offer of more shifts than her daddy could dream of.

  And then came the first death.

  On an ordinary Kilterhill morning Annie found that Mrs Kiernan was uncharacteristically unresponsive to her morning cup of tea. Annie felt Mrs Kiernan’s grizzled neck for her pulse. Then she patted her hand and smiled at the woman for the first time.

  Later, as Annie stripped the bed and opened the window to let in the fine grey rainy day, she felt a profound sense of completeness. It was just how she felt when she had finished all her tasks neatly and well, but it was stronger, clearer. As if she were entirely secure in the knowledge that things were exactly as they should be.

  The manager was glad that the next five residents all died on Annie’s shift, for she dealt with things so marvellously. She was indeed a grand girl. Little Annie always had the facts and figures ready for the duty doctor so he hardly needed to throw his eye over the corpse. Annie would even have their coffin clothes picked out, pressed and ready for them.

  How Annie lived for those days. She would wake up in the morning with a calm sort of feeling, a happy anticipation. She would eat a hearty breakfast and cycle joyfully to work. She would smooth down her immaculate hair and pin her white cap in place. She would tie her apron and check her fob watch. Then she would go up into their rooms and close their doors gently behind her.

  Annie dealt first with the Problem Patients, those who scampered naked down corridors or moaned half the night and sang half the day. Then she tackled the ones who complained that their beds were too hard and their eggs were too soft. Then she fixed the ones who talked to her, or touched her arm, or tried to make her return their sm
iles. But even as she sent them out the back door in a casket there were always more crawling in through the front door to replace them.

  And Annie’s patients still plague her, even in her retirement. Her house is filled to the rafters with them; they haunt her every corner. Poor Annie isn’t to know it but they are the cold breath on her porridge and the tapping in her loft, the whistling in her chimney and the static on her rug. They crack her china cups and fog her crystal vases. And they take turns staring at her as she sleeps badly every night.

  Mahony follows Annie into the parlour through the crowd of dead pensioners orbiting the hallway. As Annie draws near they flinch and scuttle through the walls into well-vacuumed corners.

  He flings himself on her settee, puts his feet up on her table and takes a good look at his sparring partner.

  The Widow appears benign enough in her pastel cardigan and pleated skirt with the gold cross over her spotless blouse. But then there is the grim line of her shoulders and the iron tilt of her chin and the spite in her eyes. Mahony sees that she is locked down and bolted. If she were a castle she would have wound up the drawbridge and woken the archers by now.

  Mahony smiles. ‘Well now, Annie, this is nice.’

  Annie speaks softly. ‘I told you to leave town, didn’t I? You’re filth, just like your mother was.’

  ‘Away with you! That’s just who I want to talk to you about. So you knew her well? Me mammy?’

  ‘Your mother was a whore.’

  Mahony lights a cigarette and inhales fast and deep. ‘That’s no news to me, Annie. I came for something fresh. Let’s start with what happened to her?’

  ‘Your mother left town, that’s all there was to it.’

  Mahony’s face sets hard. ‘Come off it, Annie.’

  ‘Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you.’

  ‘But you put up a lot of money to bribe my arse out of town. That tells me you must have a very guilty conscience.’

  Annie narrows her eyes. ‘I’m saying nothing.’