The Ballad of Mo and G

by Billy Keane

  The plan was Mo and Maureen would hire a car and then drive along the coastal highway to the resort and the hotel whatsit with the African lagoon, the palm trees, and the cool optical illusion infinity pool that looked as if it was washing itself into the sea.

  A couple of days passed. I spent the time painting our new room. Mam bought curtains and a duvet and told me she would ask Timmy to be on the lookout for work for Mo. I made sure everything matched.

  Mo and Maureen were having a lovely time.

  The weather was warm and the hotel was beautiful. Miss you to bits and all that sort of stuff. I was sort of thinking of asking Mo for telephone sex but was sort of a bit shy, but Mo being Mo made the suggestion before I did. Which was grand but I ran out of credit.

  I went to O’Brien’s shop to buy phone time. I handed in a fifty to Mr O’Brien.

  ‘Hey, G, things are so bad now I’ll have to give you a half share in the business instead of your change. I heard your mother’s news. You’re sound with it?’

  Mr O’B was a G on his mother’s side and he was always looking out for me, ever since Dad died.

  ‘What news is that, Mr O’B?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah never mind,’ he said with a flick of his wrists, as if he was passing the mother’s news like a football.

  ‘I must be after mixin’ her up with someone else.’

  She must have been on the radio again, talking about premature ejaculation or vaginitis. She was getting worse. My Mam, that is. I didn’t want to hear what it was she came out with this time. I hoped people didn’t think Dad had the stuff she was on about. Or me.

  I apologised to Mo for the call-up interruptus.

  We planned to have telephone sex every night of the holiday. A bedtime story, but I just couldn’t get through to her every night.

  ‘Hey, Mo?’ I asked about ten days in to the trip. ‘Is it a nice place for a honeymoon?’ All casual like, because I knew she would love if I asked that way.

  ‘Are you askin?’

  This time I didn’t hesitate. My mind was made up for good now.

  ‘Yeah. Sound out.’

  There was an ‘Oh G, oh my God, G!’

  Mo gasped yes loads of times. Told me she loved me loads of times. Which I sort of knew she would. Then when she calmed down we got back to our usual way.

  ‘Ah, G, I always thought you’d go down one knee, or even on me.’

  That very day I bought an engagement ring with the three grand from the bubble envelope. The jeweller asked the size of my fiancée’s fingers. It was the first time I had heard Mo referred to as my fiancée.

  ‘She has fingers like a concert pianist.’

  The jeweller spoke, ‘Oh my Jesus but you have it very bad.’ I was glad he was a city jeweller and the word wouldn’t get out around back home of how it was I made such a corny remark.

  ‘You can bring it back if it’s too small,’ said the jeweller.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he continued, ‘people madly in love get measurements all wrong.’

  Mo had been in a car accident and was waiting to see a doctor in a hospital near the hotel.

  The radiographer diagnosed a dislocated finger. It would have to be reset under local anaesthetic. Mo was very upset and I tried to calm her down.

  ‘That’s not so bad. A finger?’

  It got worse.

  ‘G, it wasn’t my fault. I swear it wasn’t. It wasn’t really a car crash. More of an accident.’

  I took a deep breath. To make sure I was calm and didn’t make the situation any worse.

  ‘Were other people injured?’ I asked.

  ‘No, just two dogs. Maureen’s okay. She’s trying to get in touch with the Irish consulate in Las Palmas but the cops took her to the police station. G, I was actually arrested. Can you get on to whatever office deals with Irish people in trouble in Spain?’

  Her voice was croaky. I could only just hear her. There was someone speaking Spanish like as if on a radio in the background.

  ‘There’s no need to come down here. It’s going to be okay. Stay home. The flights will cost a fortune if you book last minute. Promise me you will stay at home. Promise.’

  Then her phone went dead.

  It didn’t take me long to get a plan together.

  I would get on the next flight to Gran Canaria and sort out whatever it was that had happened.

  She would do the same for me. This time I would not fail her.

  There was no phone coverage.

  It could be the Spanish cops confiscated the mobiles. I was pretty sure there was a flight out the next day from somewhere either here or in the UK. My mother took everything in and while I was booking a flight she made a few enquires of her own.

  Funny thing was that when I came back in to our lounge she was on Skype to the twins.

  ‘Who switched you on?’ I asked.

  ‘Myself,’ she replied.

  The flights were booked and Mam said if I didn’t mind she would call Timmy, and ask him to make enquiries as to what was happening over in Gran Canaria.

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Well,’ said my mother, ‘I partly guessed you’d be alright with that suggestion so I made the phone call to Timmy while you were booking the flights.’

  You couldn’t be up to her.

  By the time I reached the hotel on Gran Canaria, it was nearly ten at night.

  The hotel lobby was the size of a football pitch, with chandeliers hanging down off the ceilings like huge costume jewellery earrings.

  At the desk I made enquires. Mo and Maureen were staying in a large suite, which must have cost a fortune in a place like this.

  There was no reply from their rooms. The mobiles were still powered off.

  I didn’t really know what to do or where to go at that hour of the night.

  I walked by the banks of the African lagoon until I came to a huge thatched area where several hundred people were drinking and dancing to middle of the road covers from an out of tune band singing in bad English accents. Dads twirled small kids and even smaller kids danced short steps and half twirls without a care in the world. I thought it would be a lovely place to go on a family holiday, if we could afford it.

  There I was wandering around, dirty, tired and hungry with my bag hanging off my back among the men in shorts and the tall, tanned ladies in the summer dresses and high heels.

  When I asked for a water, the waiter muttered something like you have to have a room card, which I clearly didn’t have.

  By then I was so thirsty I could have taken a drink out of the chlorinated lagoon.

  I was making my way to Mo’s room, even though there was no reply on the phone, but at least I would be somewhere she might be.

  The background set was tall palm trees covered in hundreds of tiny white lights. The moon was a crescent and a shiny star was attached by an invisible spider thread. And then I thought, in a place like this, it could’ve been a satellite masquerading as a star.

  There were full-sized elephants standing in the lagoon down below and it took a second look to figure they weren’t real. I knew my elephants. I was an elephant expert from the time I was a kid. They were Indian, not African. But the island was off the coast of Africa. The statue of the camel had one hump. At least they got that much right.

  It was all so touristy, except for the moon and star that is. If it was a star, but it was beautiful and strange to find an African Vegas on a remote rock in the middle of the Atlantic.

  I was so thirsty, so worn out. Worried sick. Alone. Didn’t have a clue what to do next. I felt too young and inexperienced. Mo was right. Maybe I should have stayed at home. Would she and Maureen think I was crashing their party? What would Maureen’s reaction be when she saw her daughter-in-law’s new fiancée? But I felt I had to be there for Mo. I swore I would always be there for Mo from now on.

  The hotel was playing euthanasia mood music in the corridors.

  Distracted, I took a wrong turn – there must have been a thousand
rooms in the place – and soon found myself in a bedroom area on a balcony. I looked down from the open stairwell and scanned the floor below.

  There was Mo, between the African lagoon and the thatched kraal, with her finger sticking up in a plaster at right angles and her arm in a sling. This guy, a blond-looking big guy, was walking beside her. They didn’t notice me as he key-carded the door and she walked into a room behind a huge Roman column. I ran through the corridors and down the stairs to the next level. I couldn’t be sure but I figured out it was either room 5643 or 5645. How is it the numbers in hotels are never consecutive?

  Was the big man her bedtime story?

  I wanted to see the good in her. Trust her. I knew her for nearly six years and surely she wouldn’t do this to me. There had to be an explanation. The man might just have been a friend she made on holidays and his wife might have been in the room.

  This was the woman with whom I was going to spend the rest of my life. I proposed to her over the phone just a day and a half ago. The jeweller said she was my fiancée. I had an engagement ring in my pocket but the ring finger was dislocated. Was it some sort of Law of the Wish omen? Not that I believed in the Law of the Wish.

  By the entrance to the two rooms, just behind the fibreglass Roman column, was a huge rain forest plant with giant fronds. Lying in the middle of one of the leaves like Thumbelina in Dad’s stories, was a key card. It was obviously a hiding place for whoever was staying in room 5643 or 5645. Possibly Mo left it out in the frond for Maureen. I could always say I was given the key at reception, but that would be a lie and I didn’t tell lies to Mo.

  I had to think now. Would I go into the room without knocking? There was no number on the key card. Again I tried Mo’s phone. This time there was a dial tone but it stopped after a few seconds.

  I entered 5643 with the frond key card and yes there was a couple in bed. An old couple, full of sleep, after a long day in the sun. He was thin and his skinny, almost emaciated arm was wrapped around the old lady. She had long blonde-grey hair and the two were entwined in a soft embrace.

  The sliding door of the balcony was open. I tiptoed across the room.

  The man stirred ever so slightly in his sleep and took his arm away from his partner who responded by moving closer to him until her shape and his merged into one. I watched and waited for a moment to check if they were sound asleep. And I was sad. Mam and Dad never had this. They used to sleep in different rooms, because she said Dad snored after a few pints.

  I walked out onto the balcony which was separated from 5645 by a high green block-work wall. If I stood on the plastic table on the balcony, I would have been able to spy on the next room, which was probably the one Mo and the big blond man walked into just a few minutes earlier.

  I was ashamed of myself all over again. For doubting the woman I loved.

  I thought I heard a whisper from the old people’s room. What it was I couldn’t make out. It might even have been the end of a snore or an exhalation. There was the faintest ruffle of a duvet. A wind from the Sahara blew softly through the open patio doors. That might have been enough to wake the old couple, if they weren’t awake already. An intruder in their room might give them a terrible shock or a heart attack.

  I climbed on the plastic table on the balcony and from there I managed to scamper up onto the dividing wall.

  There, in the shadows of the room, two entangled lovers were making out on the huge bed.

  He was on top of her. Mo opened her eyes and saw me on the wall.

  I jumped off on the old people’s side and ran through the room.

  The old lady came out of the bathroom.

  She too was naked and hurried to the bed where her husband was now stirring himself.

  ‘I’m very sorry. Wrong room.’ I was halfway down the corridor before the door closed.

  The running and the shock made me sick. I vomited into a huge urn, the sort of container they used to store grain, in the Old Testament.

  The security men were making their way to the old couple’s room. I said a Hail Mary for the old people. That they wouldn’t get a heart attack. I ran over towards the lagoon, and slipped into the water.

  The plaster alligators and white rhinos gave me safe passage. A potbellied pelican with a dust bin beak had a Mars bar wrapper stuck in his lower lip. A flotilla of plastic pink birds with thin legs stood motionless in the middle of the flow, looking up at a winking plane overhead. For a moment I thought this was another dream and I was on the set of a movie.

  The security guards scanned the lagoon from a rope bridge. I slipped under the hands-out leaves of a palm tree. The men left the bridge and I dipped my head under the water. Like the dusty ostrich on the far bank, my hidden head would make me the rest of me invisible.

  The security men were walking down the banks of the lagoon in between the baobab trees and parallel lines of closed, decommissioned sun umbrellas.

  They lifted me out of the water like I was some sort of big fish.

  My head was crazy now.

  ‘Are you going to measure me,’ I asked ‘and throw me back because I’m too small, like they do in the angling on TV? No one eats the fish in them programmes anyway.’

  The bigger of the two men put me in an arm lock.

  ‘He on drugs,’ said the other.

  The police came to the hotel and I was taken into custody. The old people in the room didn’t press charges. Mo told them the truth. I signed forms and Mo was waiting for me outside the police HQ.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered in a sad and tiny voice.

  Mo had either a love bite or an insect mark on her neck.

  I looked at Mo for a few seconds, not in an angry or a spiteful way. I stared at her coldly as if she was a human experiment. Mo was silent. Her eyes were frightened. Like she was when Dermo was on the warpath.

  I think she was hoping I would give out to her and lose my temper. Get it all out in one big blow out and that would be that. But I didn’t. I studied her as you would a character in a book, who might come up in an English exam. There was a chasm between us even though she was only two metres from me. Mo looked small now in her sandals and sarong, as if what she did to us diminished her.

  I was her best chance. There would have been a proper home with kids. Where, I didn’t rightly know but somewhere safe and okay and if something bad happened, it wouldn’t be caused by me.

  Some inner voice was telling me this was only sex, which was no more than a physical act for Mo. That she was one of generation sex and it was no big deal.

  As if echoing my thoughts, and it often happened between us, Mo said, ‘It meant nothing to me. It was just physical, a last fling thing. Look I’m some sort of addict I know but I swear on my dead baby. I will never do this to you again.’

  I knew what she was saying was true. Knew she wouldn’t swear on her little baby unless she meant it. It wasn’t the sex act that got to me. This much I made up my mind about in the waters of the lagoon. It was the realisation that this woman whom I loved more than any woman ever and would die for, was beyond hope. Bad stuff would always find her and she would always find bad stuff.

  There were no parting words.

  I turned and walked away up the road.

  Mo followed. Desperately pleading, ‘I love you, I love you, G. I’m so sorry. Wait up, G. Please wait up’.

  But I couldn’t speak. There was no working this out with Mo. There was the shock of it all. The fall from what we had. I broke into a run and she couldn’t keep up.

  ‘I’m so sorry, G!’ she cried after me in a shriek that seemed to last forever.

  The pounding of my feet on the fragile timbers of the ocean boardwalk and the distance I put between us muffled her cries. I could hear the thudding rhythm of my running on the boards. It was as if I was listening to my own heartbeat on a hospital monitor. Slap Bang. Slap Bang. I shut everything else out. Every few seconds there was a whoosh of the incoming waves. Slap Bang Whoosh. Slap bang, slap bang, sl
ap bang, slap bang whoosh. No room in that rhythm for incoming thoughts or listening to Mo.

  I counted the waves. The seventh was the deadly wave. It was bigger than the others but it didn’t sweep me off and the seventh wave licked the shore like a puppy.

  The night diners looked out at me as I ran on, and back at Mo, flapping after me with her flip flops slapping. But I shut it all out. Counted the waves.

  The boarded walkway ended at a rocky stretch of shore. I ran up a narrow laneway by a mock Irish Bar with one of those stupid names nobody ever uses back home, like The Liar O’Shea’s, or something like that. Past there, I found myself in a street of outdoor bars, restaurants and stalls selling every sort of rubbish.

  Three large women bathed their feet in fish tanks with small tiny fish eating away at all the hard flesh on their soles.

  I stood on a bench and scanned the street, but there was no sign of Mo.

  A red toy insect buzzed above my head. And it hit me. The street vendor apologised and offered me two for the price of one.

  The woman who ran the flesh-eating fish stall asked if I wanted a treatment.

  My left eye was stinging from the chlorine in the lagoon. There was a chemist sign at the end of the street. I risked going back, parallel to the direction I had been running from. My eye was burning a hole through my head like some sort of creature was trying to burrow inside my brain.

  The Irish lady on the plane coming over warned me not to eat any salads in the Canaries.

  She told of the young Irish girl, on her honeymoon, who thought the tiny crunchy seeds nestling in her lettuce were linseed pips. They were in fact lizard eggs and they hatched inside her.

  The woman told me the young honeymooner was in excruciating pain as the lizards tried to eat their way out through her stomach. She didn’t know what was wrong, until the most ambitious and hungry baby lizard stuck his head out through her navel for a peep. Like a kangaroo kid checking the weather in Oz.

  Yeah that was the lowest point. There was only one person I wanted desperately to share that with and it was Mo. She would have loved the urban myth. I could imagine her throwing back her head and surrendering her body to the laugh. For over six years all my jokes, all my thoughts, and all my intellectual output was written for Mo.