New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘He’s emotionally spectacular,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it, love,’ I said. ‘Given you’ve been through the wringer with me.’

  ‘I mean in a good way!’ she barked. ‘I mean in a calm way!’

  We’d a bit of fun coming up the Dee Estuary with the Welsh place names.

  ‘Fy… feen … no. Fiiiif … non … fyff … non … growy?’

  This was Tom N.

  ‘Foy. Nonn. Grewey?’

  This was Everett’s approximation.

  ‘Ffynnongroyw,’ said Billy Stroud, lilting it perfectly. ‘Simple. And this one coming up? Llannerch-y-mor.’

  Pedigree came down my nose I laughed that hard.

  ‘Young girl, beautiful,’ said Mo. ‘Turn around and she’s forty bloody three.’

  ‘Leave it, Mo,’ said Big John.

  But he could not.

  ‘She comes over early in ’86. She’s living up top of the Central Line, Theydon Bois. She’s working in a pub there, live-in, and ringing me from a phone box. In Galway, I’m in a phone box too. We have to arrange the times, eight o’clock on Tuesday, ten o’clock on Friday. It’s physical fucking pain she’s not in town anymore. I’ll follow in the summer is the plan, and I get there, Victoria Coach Station, six in the morning, eighty quid in my pocket. And she’s waiting for me there. We have an absolute dream of a month. We’re lying in the park. There’s a song out, and we make it our song. “Oh to be in England, in the summertime, with my love, close to the edge.”’

  ‘Art of Noise,’ said Billy Stroud.

  ‘Shut up, Billy!’

  ‘Of course, the next thing the summer’s over, and I’ve a start with BT in Liverpool, and she’s to follow on – October is the plan. We’re ringing from phone boxes again, Tuesdays and Fridays but the second Friday the phone doesn’t ring. Next time I see her she’s forty bloody three.’

  Flint station we passed through, and then Connah’s Quay.

  ‘Built up, this,’ said Tom N. ‘There’s an Aldi, look? And that’s a new school, is it?’

  ‘Which means you want to be keeping a good two hundred yards back,’ said Big John.

  We were horrified. Through a miscarriage of justice, plain as, Tom N. had earlier in the year been placed on a sex register. Oh the world is mad! Tom N. is a placid, placid man. We were all six of us quiet as the grave on the evening train then. It grew and built, it was horrible, the silence. It was Everett at last that broke it; we were coming in for Helsby. Fair dues to Everett.

  ‘Not like you, John,’ he said.

  Big John nodded.

  ‘I don’t know where that came from, Tom,’ he said. ‘A bloody stupid thing to say.’

  Tom N. raised a palm in peace but there was no disguising the hurt that had gone in. I pulled away into myself. The turns the world takes – Tom dragged through the courts, Everett half mad, Mo all scratched up and one-balled, Big John jobless for eighteen months. Billy Stroud was content, I suppose, in Billy’s own way. And there was me, shipwrecked in Liverpool. Funny, for a while, to see ‘Penny Lane’ flagged up on the buses, but it wears off.

  And then it was before us in a haze. Terrace rows we passed, out Speke way, with cook-outs on the patios. Tiny pockets of glassy laughter we heard through the open windows of the carriage. Families and what-have-you. We had the black hole of the night before us – it wanted filling. My grimmest duty as publications officer was the obits page of the newsletter. Too many had passed on at forty-four, at forty-six.

  ‘I’m off outings,’ I announced. ‘And I’m off bloody publications as well.’

  ‘You did volunteer on both counts,’ reminded Big John.

  ‘It would leave us in an unfortunate position,’ said Tom N.

  ‘For my money, it’s been a very pleasant outing,’ said Billy Stroud.

  ‘We’ve supped some quality ale,’ concurred Big John.

  ‘We’ve had some cracking weather,’ said Tom N.

  ‘Llandudno is quite nice, really,’ said Mo.

  Around his scratch marks an angry bruising had seeped. We all looked at him with tremendous fondness.

  ‘’Tis nice,’ said Everett Bell. ‘If you don’t run into a she-wolf.’

  ‘If you haven’t gone ten rounds with Edward bloody Scissorhands,’ said John Mosely.

  We came along the shabby grandeurs of the town. The look on Mo’s face then couldn’t be read as anything but happiness.

  ‘Maurice,’ teased Big John, ‘is thinking of the rather interesting day he’s had.’

  Mo shook his head.

  ‘Thinking of days I had years back,’ he said.

  It has this effect, Liverpool. You’re not back in the place five minutes and you go sentimental as a famine ship. We piled off at Lime Street. There we go: six big blokes in the evening sun.

  ‘There’s the Lion Tavern?’ suggested Tom N.

  ‘There’s always the Lion,’ I agreed.

  ‘They’ve a couple of Manx ales guesting at Rigby’s,’ said Everett Bell.

  ‘Let’s hope they’re an improvement on previous Manx efforts,’ said Billy Stroud.

  ‘There’s the Grapes?’ tried Big John.

  ‘There’s always the Grapes,’ I agreed.

  And alewards we went about the familiar streets. The town was in carnival: Tropic of Lancashire in a July swelter. It would not last. There was rain due in off the Irish Sea, and not for the first time.

  Winter

  Dermot Bolger

  THE DRIVER OF THE TOW TRUCK was unsure if he would make it up the overgrown woodland avenue to the old woman’s former home. Luckily the day was so cold that last night’s frost had never fully thawed. It was setting in hard again with the approach of dusk. So although the wheels were churning ugly tyre marks from the grassy avenue they had not yet become stuck. A branch broke off an overhanging tree, leaving yet another long scratch mark along the side of the mobile home the truck was towing. Walking behind it, in her seventy-second year, Eva threw the branch into the undergrowth. This secondhand mobile home and these few acres of Mayo woodland were the last two things she still owned. The wood had become neglected during the three decades since anyone last lived here. Fences were broken, with damage caused by cattle wandering through the trees and farmers freely helping themselves to fencing stakes. The trees – many of the new ones planted by her son, Francis, where he was an idealistic horticulture student – were silent in this November twilight. The quietude, unbroken even by the cry of a solitary bird, made the engine sound loud as the driver switched gear, preparing for a particularly steep bend ahead.

  This was the third time in fifty years that Eva had come to make her home here in Glanmire Wood. On the first occasion in 1927 she had been a young bride from Donegal, unwisely marrying into the haughty Fitzgerald family who then still owned half the local village and had once owned half of Castlebar – a family who had still expected locals to lift their caps and step off the road whenever a Fitzgerald motor passed.

  The woods had rarely been silent in 1927 because her husband was happiest when stalking through them with his Holland ejector twelve-bore gun and a dog at his heels. At dusk Freddie would bring his daily bag of slaughtered woodcock and pigeon for display on the front step before she was expected to pluck the carcasses and cook them for the few guests they managed to entice here. He had used whatever money she brought to the marriage to convert the house into a shooting lodge in the unshakeable but mistaken belief that Glanmire Wood would be thronged with like-minded hunters from what he termed ‘the mainland’. He had not factored in a depression, an economic war and how drink would take possession of him in almost equal proportion to how loneliness took possession of her, with no money, few guests and two small children; with the county bailiffs drinking in a local bar for Dutch courage before venturing cautiously up this avenue to serve writs on them. Their hesitancy was partly related to the four hundred years’ residency of the Fitzgeralds and partly to do with the twelve-bore gauge of his Hollan
d ejector.

  Poor Freddie, who had longed for a son who was a replica of himself. He hadn’t needed Francis to be a genius or a statesman once the boy was someone who understood the best cover for shooting woodcock, the merits of retrievers over red setters, the measure of good whiskey and how to deal firmly but fairly with an ever-decreasing number of servants. Eva remembered Freddie buying Francis his first gun when the boy was barely nine years old and helping him to wedge it into his shoulder. It was one of the rare occasions when Freddie had not seemed awkward in physical contact with his son. Francis’s first lucky shot had killed a rabbit on this avenue, causing Freddie to rush off to the guests, boasting about his son, while she held Francis in her arms, letting him cry for the dead rabbit as they hid in the woods like hunted creatures whose slightest movement might betray them.

  Freddie’s exasperated expression for his young wife in those years was that she ‘lived in the ether’. Before her marriage Eva had tried to paint and write poetry. During her marriage she had tried to simply survive. Survival had meant emigration for Freddie and her to find work in England in 1936, with all the furniture in Glanmire House being sold to appease the bailiffs but its crumbling mildewed rooms being retained in her husband’s tight grasp.

  Those high-ceilinged rooms had been freezing on the winter night in 1939 when Eve came home here for the second time. She had been bringing her two young children to safety three weeks after Freddie enlisted in the British Army. Despite her apprehension that Hitler’s war could spread to Ireland or that they might starve here in Mayo, she had shared her children’s sense of excitement on that night. Coming home had felt like an adventure. They were not just running away from blacked-out streets and the threat of bombing raids: Francis and Hazel had been escaping the rules and strictures of English boarding schools, and Eva had been fleeing from having to confront a floundering marriage. The war years had allowed her to hide away in this closeted wood, with just her children and Maureen, a young maid from the village who became a best friend to each of them in turn.

  But tonight, as she returned here for the third time, Eva was running away from nothing. She was returning simply because this wood was the last place left from which nobody could evict her. Freddie had disinherited her in his will; just like he had disinherited Francis after discovering that his son was homosexual. He had left these few remaining acres to their daughter, who had married a rich coffee planter in Kenya, the sort of vigorous outdoor man whom Freddie had admired. Freddie could never have expected that his nomadic wife would eventually inherit this wood; the estranged wife in the ether who talked rot about people’s yearns to be fulfilled; the woman who – after years of separation – tracked him down to the hospital where he was dying and insisted on nursing him, even though his dying words were to remind Eva that he would leave her penniless.

  Glanmire Wood finally now belonged to her, but at what a price. Eva doubted if she would ever feel warm again or know hunger or any other sensation except numbness. Since hearing the news from Kenya two months ago she had rarely bothered to light the small stove in her mobile home. Whenever she remembered to do so it was only for the sake of the three cats who had found their way to her as strays. This malaise perturbed the two younger cats who incessantly rubbed against her legs, wanting Eva to stroke them. But Eva had spent most of the past two months sitting motionless indoors in the small caravan park where she had been living in Wexford, only venturing forth to get cat food. When her news emerged, local people had started to bring her beef stews. They possessed no understanding of what a vegan ate and imagined that she only abstained from meat because of her poverty which was obvious to everyone since she moved back to Ireland two years ago.

  Old married couples had kept shyly appearing in the muddy field when nobody else was around, pleading with her to take some nourishment. They had talked about how isolated she must feel with the makeshift caravan park empty where her berth was the only one still occupied in winter. These neighbours meant well, and, after they left, her cats had feasted on the hot food, while she broke up the proffered biscuits and cakes to scatter as crumbs for the small birds who flocked around her home.

  A caravan park was an odd place to call home, but she had lost track of the places she had called home since leaving this wood at the end of the Second World War, when there were no more uniforms and military postings to provide a buffer zone in her marriage, when Freddie arrived back with his MBE and diseased liver and hastily arranged discharge for drunkenness in the officers’ mess, when Maureen had emigrated to America and Eva had left Mayo and left Freddie.

  Home briefly became a house in Dublin where she taught joyful art classes in her kitchen to children who seemed too cowed at first to understand that they did not need permission to express themselves. It was fulfilling, but, after giving up her happiness for so long to make other people happy, and with her children grown, she had needed to know if she could fulfil her dream of being a writer. Home had become a succession of cheap pensions in Tangier in Morocco and rented rooms in mountain villages in Spain where she had nurtured her dream until it was extinguished, taking encouragement from any faint words of praise in the neatly typed rejection letters that took weeks to reach her.

  By the mid-1960s, home had become the small attic of a lodging house in London so that she could be near her son whom she loved with a protective passion. She had been intoxicated by his radiance when he was happy and felt a desperate foreboding when forced to witness his despair. Being written out of Freddie’s will hurt him, though many things hurt him because Francis had felt everything in life intensely, leaving himself so open to love in the clandestine underworld in which he was forced to live that the final rejection by his older lover had proven too much. It was eight years since Eva found him with blue blotches on his skin and his limbs arrayed as if he had tried to rise from the floor one last time to get more pills from the bathroom in case the first overdose was not enough. It was Eva who had cradled his body and said, ‘My precious darling, I’m just so glad they can’t hurt you any more.’

  She thought that she had known the true depth of despair amid the grief that followed his death. She had survived only by finding herself a bolthole as the caretaker in a Quaker hostel in Portobello populated by anxious young Americans whose families disowned them as draft-dodgers. Her duties involved rising at 6 a.m. to wash down the long hostel tables and tiled floors. She had loved this back-breaking work, although her arthritic joints had ached in the cold, because it had allowed her no time to grieve. Her grieving had been done alone in the evenings and walking alone through London at night, unable to let go of the consuming anger she felt at this death.

  Eva still felt guilty that her daughter’s death in Kenya four years later did not cause her the same anguish. Her love for Hazel was always different because Hazel never needed her in the same way. At times, Hazel’s exasperated affection for her carried an echo of Freddie’s impatience. Hazel had definitely been a Fitzgerald. She was the practical one in the family and such a headstrong fighter that Eva had never believed the police reports from Kenya that Hazel had also killed herself. Eva had only caught glimpses into Hazel’s life in Kenya: a world of servants and heavy drinking in the club. Eva knew that she would not have liked that life, and she had not liked what it did to Hazel. Hazel must have been drinking heavily the night that she decided to race the night train, determined to reach the level crossing first. Hazel the daredevil, the blonde beauty whose photograph always featured in the Irish Times when she rode at the Dublin Horse Show. What level of despair causes a woman to race along a red dirt road in Kenya, determined not to be beaten by a train or by anyone. She had never sent her mother a photograph of the map of scars that lined her face after the train tipped her back wheel and the car spun as out of control as her life. Yet a fighter like Hazel would never have left behind a daughter just ten years old, would never have fed a pipe from a car exhaust into the back seat of her car and – in such a hot climate – would n
ever have wrapped herself up tightly in a blanket, like the police report detailed, in a way that replicated the way that she loved to lie in her bed as a girl in this wood during the freezing winters in the war years.

  Eva would never know if anyone had placed Hazel’s body, already dead, in that car. All she had known was that she had a granddaughter on the far side of the world who needed her. She had put aside her grief and suspicions to make it clear that if Alex was sent to a good Protestant boarding school in Dublin, like Hazel had talked about, Eva would return to Ireland. It was for Alex’s sake that Eva bought this mobile home two years ago so that the child would have somewhere to go when her classmates went home at midterm, so that there could be somebody close by who made her feel loved.

  The only person who had not called to her in Wexford in recent weeks was the farmer who owned the field where the caravans were parked, the man who wanted her gone so that he could rent her berth for more money to some rich Dublin family who would only disturb him on sunny weekends. Eva had resisted his subtle innuendos to leave because it was important to be somewhere within reach of Alex’s school, but that Wexford field held too many memories now. She had been surprised at the most unlikely neighbours who called in Wexford when news spread that she had hired this tow truck to transport her to Mayo: people with whom she had only exchanged a few words when proudly wandering with Alex along the beach at Curracloe or last year when she walked for days in search of her old tomcat, Martin Buber, after he ventured out on a night hunt and never returned.

  The tow truck slowed to a halt now, blocking the avenue. Eva picked her way carefully around to the cab door, which opened.

  ‘There’s a chestnut tree overhanging the path,’ the driver explained. ‘I just might be able to swing around it.’

  Eva walked past the truck and onto the daffodil lawn where she had scattered her Francis’s ashes eight years ago. The boarded-up house looked in the same condition as when she had come here last spring on a day trip with Alex to show the child where her mother had been born. However, the sun had been shining on that day, with the wild flowers into bloom. Eva sat on the front step to watch the man manoeuvre past the chestnut tree and park her mobile home in front of the ivy-covered main door. He switched off his engine, climbed down and looked around, concerned.