by Mary Byrne
Contents
Plugging the Causal Breach
Copyright © 2019 Mary Byrne. All rights reserved.
Dedication
Au Pair Girls Wanted in France
What Doesn’t Choke Will Fatten
Righteous Indignation
Old Wood Best to Burn
Nikodje’s Lap of Honor
Musical Interlude
A Parallel Life
Between Men
It’s Not About the Money
I Say ‘Good Morning’ to My Truck
Plugging the Causal Breach
I’m Talking Too Much, Aren’t I?
Mastery
Lightning Strikes Twice
Frank Stands His Ground, in Belleville
A Day on Rue du Faubourg
Acknowledgments
Plugging the Causal Breach
and other stories
Mary Byrne
Regal House Publishing
Copyright © 2019 Mary Byrne. All rights reserved.
Published by
Regal House Publishing, LLC
Raleigh, NC 27612
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781947548718
ISBN -13 (epub): 9781947548725
ISBN -13 (mobi): 9781947548732
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019938901
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Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene
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Cover images © by frankie’s/Shutterstock
Regal House Publishing, LLC
https://regalhousepublishing.com
ed by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
For France, which has put up with me for quite a long time
and
in memory of
Jean-Claude (who remained strong and silent throughout)
my mother (who taught me to read)
my father (who carried reading material home in his pocket
on the bicycle)
Au Pair Girls Wanted in France
He drove me into the town, moving a parcel of meat to the floor at his feet, out of my way.
‘I do live in Machaire Rua,’ he said, as if he only did it sometimes. We passed rusting signs in English and Irish for small towns and villages, and sometimes for deer, or winter-neglected forest parks and picnic areas. Along the roadside new houses with porches and pillars had sprung up, modelled on houses in other countries. He seemed impressed by them.
‘The brick is warmer than the concrete,’ he said.
We got talking of the long darkness before Christmas. He liked it as little as I did.
‘You can’t go out without getting covered in muck,’ he said.
At the hotel, it was lunchtime, and what sounded like an instrumental Ave Maria was coming over the intercom. In the lounge, two girls tucked into their soup, leaning over low tables, carefully eyeing two identical girls who had also come for soup, which would be followed by sandwiches, and tea. These girls ate the same fare every day.
The theme from Exodus came over the intercom.
In the next booth, three voices: ‘She went off—did the interview and went off to Saudi, after marrying an Englishman she met on holidays.’
‘I wouldn’t go near Saudi,’ said a second voice, ‘the culture is so different.’
‘My friend went—I told her she was mad.’
‘I personally would have nothing to do with one of those guys.’
‘Yes,’ said a third, ‘they could be married or anything, they’re not like ourselves.’
‘Sure you couldn’t go nowhere out there.’
Over the top of the booth, the hairstyles of the three (girls? women?)—and the heads—looked like those of men.
Suddenly the pipe exuded music that suggested a continental forest, and a woman in designer clothes—perhaps a fur coat and hat—walking in snow.
The girls across the way were on their sandwiches. New girls arrived, wearing shirts and light trousers at half mast, showing a length of cold leg and ankle. They were not wearing coats, had no coats with them.
‘How are ye,’ they said—rather than asked—those already eating. ‘Not too bad,’ came the answer, as if from old and weary women. All of them huddled their light-clad shoulders against the cold, already taking on the shape of toil-worn grannies.
‘Nothing only tomato soup left,’ the new arrivals said, ‘wouldn’t you know it!’
‘I wish I was in Carrickfergus’, warbled in the background. The girls were joined by one of the waitresses who dipped into the local newspaper with them.
In one part of the bar it was daylight, in another night, with subdued lighting under frilly red shades. On one wall hung an aerial photo of the town’s main street: white building, grey slate roofs, multi-colored cars at right angles.
Near me the blue velvet seating had a cigarette burn, and further along the seat a whole square had been cut out: drunken revels? souvenir? plans for a patch?
‘The Green Glens of Antrim’, played, bringing with it memories of the 1950s.
In the booth, the topic had changed: ‘I was shocked—’
‘Tragic.’
’I couldn’t get over it. I was only, I’d say, about ten at the time.’
‘Oh, stop.’
Thirty minutes to go. I walked up the main street. In a window, a sign said ‘Au pair girls wanted in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Canada.’ Next door, a Christian Fellowship window had its Bible open at Hosea, with a sentence underlined: ‘For the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord.’
A bright blue parrot of synthetic fur sat in a glass cage outside a sweetshop, inscribed, ‘A prize every time.’ Occasionally it burst into speech: ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ and, after an interval, ‘I love the sound of money.’
Nearly time. Back in the hotel lobby, it was early afternoon and the TV was functioning loudly: ‘Don’t call the police, honey, save your dime for the kid’s father.’ The heroines looked like men in drag, with bouffant hair and thick make-up. They wore, at work and on the street, dresses that would be risqué in any circumstances. A young man near me sighed hopelessly.
It was time. A scattering of people began to collect at the hotel door.
‘It’s dead.’ The young man was here too. He was not speaking to anyone in particular. He looked down the main street: ‘These places are dead. But then Dublin is no great shakes either.’
And finally the bus came, and no word was spoken as we all mounted the vehicle which was lined with carpet. On the windscreen fluttered a selection of small plastic flags from different countries.
We moved off, under grey skies and around green hills. Every peak was a ring fort in which were hiding na Tuatha de Danann and na Sidhe, waiting for better times.
Outside the town a late passenger boarded, waved off by an old lady with white hair.
‘Lovely day,’ the passenger said.
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‘Great,’ the driver replied, keeping his eye on the road.
RTE Radio 2 rattled overhead, neither soft enough to be ignored nor loud enough to be heard properly. Wrong answers to a quiz filtered through.
‘What’s a marsupial?’ the presenter asked.
‘A squid,’ replied the caller.
‘Who built Hadrian’s Wall?’
‘The Chinese.’
We passed a sign declaring ‘Bull calves for sale,’ and a man paused from his gardening to gaze over his hedge at us. In one of the towns, a bakery door announced ‘Birthday cakes always in stock.’ It would be my birthday soon. I was leaving this landscape where I had spent all of my years. And we had just passed a house modelled on Dallas’s South Fork.
What Doesn’t Choke Will Fatten
I bought escalopes de dinde for the four of us, as per Marguerite’s instructions. She likes stuff that’s easy to cook and easy to eat for people who haven’t much left to chew with.
The butcher’s fat brother sat in the little kiosk dividing the mouth of the shop in two. He was wearing his white coat over a big pullover.
‘Cold enough for you?’ he enquired. ‘They say it’ll get worse and stay like that for weeks.’
‘No one’s making you sit out here,’ I said. ‘Go back where it’s heated; maybe do a little work with that brother of yours. What makes you such a traditionalist?’
‘Happy New Year to you too,’ he said.
When I got home, Marguerite was talking about the weather too.
‘Cold is forecast. Check all doors and walls—the rodents will come knocking tonight,’ she said.
‘Night of the long tails,’ I said.
‘Enough,’ said Marguerite.
It was that kind of season. The cat thickened up his fur.
On days like these I test whether I am still capable of pity. There are plenty of opportunities. Last night a man died of cold in Grenoble. Pretending he had a night job, he was sitting in his car all night. Welcome to the new France. I try to compare minus 5°C with the minus 30°C that winter of ’42, but I can only relate it to concrete things like food and toes and the injured hand that made me walking wounded and worth saving. I remember the doctor, an Austrian, but not the pain. The body doesn’t want to remember. We all ended up in France. The Austrian was later billeted with a family in the south. He got the girl of the house pregnant and stayed forever.
It was getting near lunchtime when Denis walked in with this specimen I knew was wrong from the start. Denis was smiling and talking too much, his stutter worse than usual. Marguerite closed her face in that Norman way of hers and put another log on the fire. Gives her time to think.
The new one warmed her hands at the fire before she sat. No taller than Denis, which is not tall at all. Dyed hair, busty. I presumed the latter was an advantage far as Denis was concerned, but the way she went after him he may never even have had the time to notice.
All that was fine, allowing for Denis’s past history of getting hurt and Marguerite’s history of looking out for him. She never adopted or stood for him in any office or church, but he still called her Marraine, to the point that everyone who knew and loved her called her Godmother too. His own mother died an alcoholic slob—I never found out what drove it—in a shambles of a house above the village. He’d fallen out with most of his family. All either sharks or wife beaters, it was hard to see where Denis the meticulous housekeeper came in at all. The new busty one was fine too if you didn’t know about the money Denis had stashed away from shift work in the car components factory over twenty-five years, and the odd jobs he did the rest of the time to keep himself from getting depressed. Gardening, chopping wood, anything requiring a strong arm. Gardens as meticulous as his house. You’d meet him at high speed anywhere in the region, some machine or other sitting in the bed of his truck.
So why was this busty American interested in our hard-working stuttering Denis? It seems she found him in his usual campsite over in Brittany, where all our ageing bachelors go each year to drink greater than usual quantities of whiskey and Coke, for some reason eschewing the local taste for Calvados. Their way of breaking free, maybe. Education or money can help you break free, but even they are not enough sometimes. These guys had neither.
‘She smells of smoke,’ I said to Marguerite on a turn in the kitchen to get drinks.
‘It’s the open fire over at Denis’s,’ said Marguerite.
‘It’s proximity to hell,’ I said. ‘She’s so near hell you can see sparks.’
‘Get out of my kitchen and go pretend you’re a host,’ said Marguerite.
‘Your kitchen, your house, your country.’
‘Your fault.’
‘Every house needs a scapegoat.’
I knew she was smiling and waving a kitchen utensil at my back as I headed off with the drinks.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said, ‘I have eyes in the back of the head.’
Sitting in front of the hot stove I rememorize the stifling heat as they kettled us into the Falaise pocket that final summer, the welcome sounds of Polish and Canadian voices that meant it was over at last. I can still smell it, and hear the flies buzz. Women fed their children under muslin for months afterwards, so they wouldn’t swallow the flies congregating on the dead—especially the horses—and the living.
The camp at Damigny to which the Americans delivered us was better than all that, no matter how much work the French made us do or how many of us died every day. Some of us were even DOA—the Allies handed over those they thought in the worst condition, then blamed the French for not looking after us. Some of the guys complained that we were paying the price, being punished, while those responsible got back to Germany or away to South America.
Getting out of that atmosphere—even to clear mines—was fine with me. I was teamed up with a Croat and a Pole. Escorted by an armed Frenchman day and night, we got clogs, better rations and lived among ourselves in pitch-roofed huts near a village. After clearing mines all day, the Croat played harmonica in the evening. Kids passed twice a day herding goats. We became almost human. In the camps further east, the thing was far from over, and the process of becoming human again hadn’t even started. Our equipment was lousy, and men on the coastal dunes were getting blown up by the hour. The constant risk of death kept us from thinking about our homes and families. I’d had no replies to my letters for eighteen months.
Denis’s new woman was called Diana. Huntress, definitely. She praised the escalopes, the way foreigners do, even before they’ve tasted the food. Things were going well enough until she started poking at our backgrounds. My new hand is always an excuse for this. You’re sitting there feeding and watering someone and they start quizzing you. For sixty years researchers have been coming here asking war questions. Marguerite and I mostly manage to avoid them, and we never volunteer for interviews or films. The locals don’t suggest us either because she and I, we’re kind of off the scale—pariahs. Brits who buy houses here now have the decency never to mention the war. Most locals never talk about it, to officialdom or anyone else. We live from day to day, savoring each one for what it is. Marguerite and me and Existentialism for Dummies: freedom and choice and how to live your life. Oh, when drink is consumed I’ve heard the occasional outburst: about girls raped by soldiers, Allied bombings of the towns and cities, Germans coming to farms demanding food. Then they remember me and shut up.
And now here’s this dyed-hair flibbertigibbet who wants to know.
‘And who are you?’ I asked, leaning over the table. ‘We live here, you’re visiting; tell us your story first.’
She looked surprised.
‘A-a-a-a-lex…’ Denis stuttered.
‘Can I presume you’re all finished with those plates,’ said Marguerite, getting up and giving me her strictest eyeballing.
‘Well, I teach English now,’ Diana
said obligingly. ‘I was a masseuse back home.’
Her French pronunciation was awful. A ma ssouss, she made it sound.
‘A ma ssouss,’ I repeated. I looked at Denis. Denis looked awestricken. A masseuse. I had visions of semi-prostitution. He’d dragged some hopeless cases in for our approval, but this one knocked them all into a cocked hat.
‘I’m from Washington State.’
She said something about three cities and a nuclear power facility that was the main employer. She was honest enough to admit that she was teaching English only because she could speak it.
‘They don’t ask for any other qualification. Butts on seats,’ she said. ‘The French get the real jobs and we fill the gaps. We don’t get paid for holidays; we’ll never get a pension. No one cares if anyone learns English anyway—it has to do with public money going around in circles. You can make a living at it,’ she added, ‘the problem is getting the right paperwork.’
She had come on some temporary exchange deal, but her time was soon up. She looked lovingly at Denis.
That’s when the penny dropped. She needed papers. She was white, so the police wouldn’t stop her in the street, but she needed papers to have the right to work.
‘This is the world upside down,’ I said, ‘Americans coming to Europe to look for work.’
‘I want to set up my own business,’ she said. ‘Herbs and spices. I can run it from home.’
I wondered where home would be. Marguerite gave me a black look that said: Give it up, now.
I gave it up. I have been following Marguerite’s orders since the day I met her.
We walked into the farmyard, me and another POW—the Croat—a few paces behind someone from the Service des Prisonniers de Guerre. He’d explained that it was a big farm that was short of hands. We all knew it was short of hands because the hands had been taken away to Germany ages before, and only God knew where they were now. Like my mother and brothers. Like chocolate biscuits today, hands were shipped all over Europe, crisscrossing each other on roads and trains.
