by Lisa Carey
When Niall asks him, Austin takes a tin whistle out of his pocket and plays a few tunes, one thigh knocking his chair with the beat. Niall gets up for a brief dance, tapping in the old style, but also spinning and laughing. Emer, who never dances, stays stiffly in her chair. In the lamplight, she thinks she can see the fiery ring in Niall’s eyes grow larger, and that look of remove, and so she pulls him back onto her lap and feeds him the rest of the mug.
Emer can feel the poitín working on him as he drinks it down, with each sip Niall grows heavy in her lap. When he’s done, half-asleep against her, Austin stops playing, takes the mug from his hand and lifts him, walking into the bedroom. Emer doesn’t like Austin carrying Niall at all, she thought she would as he leaned over, that there would be a moment where she imagined that they were married and Niall was his, but it’s not like that. It’s the same as when anyone pats Niall’s head or squeezes his shoulder or asks for a kiss from him. She needs to squeeze her fists to keep from dragging him back. When he was a baby she always made up a reason not to let people hold him. If an auntie grabbed him regardless, Emer would have to sit on her hands, her milk letting down in protest. Those were the moments he was most likely to be stolen: right in front of her, when she let her vigilance be compromised by manners.
Austin closes the door to the bedroom, comes over to the fire, and makes them two more drinks. The rain lashes against the panes, the wind screams and Emer thinks of Brigid and Rose in her cousin’s house, bright-eyed and laughing and enjoying themselves. Trapped on the better side. Austin empties his drink in two swallows and makes himself a third, reusing the lemon rind.
“The dog,” Emer says suddenly, standing up. “Brigid won’t be back to let Rua in.” Austin laughs at this.
“That dog is well able to sleep out in the rain,” he says. “She pays far too much mind to that creature. Just like a Yank.” Emer sits back down. She can’t help wincing at the thought of Rua’s narrow face, and the way it looks back at Brigid when they are walking on the green road, its amber eyes wet with loyalty.
“Fair play to her, though,” Austin says. “She’s able enough.” Emer hides her blush in her steaming mug.
“Sure, she won’t make it through the winter,” he adds. And though Emer once said the same thing, the bitter taste of lemon regurgitates into her throat.
“She may surprise you,” she says. Austin looks at her strangely again. She has no poise while taking about Brigid. She almost wants to rip her collar open to let out the heat that even thinking of her stirs up.
“Sure, with you and Malachy waiting on her all the time she has both a husband and a wife.”
“Stop acting the maggot,” Emer says. Women are meant to respond with disgust at such unnatural suggestions. It wasn’t until she was with Brigid that she discovered how often men made them. It is like a game between them, how crude they can be about women and their intimacy.
“Will yer man in the government give her a house as well?” Austin says. “Or will you just let her share yours?”
When she was a girl she thought Austin was sweeter than the rest of them. Now he has the same cruel eyebrows and mocking voice as the boys from her childhood.
“You should sign on,” Emer says, avoiding his eyes. “You’ll get the best house with all those babbies.”
“Rose would never agree to it,” Austin says. “We’re just after building the house here.”
It’s as if Emer has been struck.
“Would you go?” she says incredulously. “Would you leave the island?” Austin won’t look at her straight.
“You’ve to pay for all those modern conveniences. And the land is desperate. Full of rock.” He seems to get taller suddenly, in his chair. “But would I live in a place where my every move didn’t depend on the swell of the sea? I’m no fool, Emer.”
“Have you told Rose?” Emer says. Austin glares at her, contemptuous.
“Rose. She wouldn’t take a castle in Dublin over this place. She’d live here on her own, like some manky nun in a clochán, if I let her.”
Emer remembers the stories Rose once told her about the year she was boarding for secondary school. The teenagers stayed all week in a rooming house in Galway and snuck porter into their rooms and had quiet parties late into the night. The boys would sneak into the girls’ rooms and take turns snogging each of them in the darkness.
Rose and Austin would end up in a corner together long after the others had tired of the game and moved on to something else. She’d lost her virginity one of those nights, as easily, she’d told Emer, as she’d first let his tongue between her lips. I’ll not regret it, she said, even though she gave up secondary school and he gave up university and all those offers from music agents for that first set of twins. For the first time, despite the way he looks at his wife, Emer wonders if Austin regrets it. Or if Rose even asks him.
Austin has stopped talking now, both of them struck silent by what he’s dared to say so far. She is not sure why this realization—that Austin is something other than completely devoted to her sister—makes her heart beat so quickly, with occasional interruption, a skip that feels like both anticipation and dread.
Emer takes a long swallow of her drink. Austin refills her mug with straight poitín now, buoyed by her familiar silence. They drink quietly and, Emer thinks later, with purpose. Until it begins to take effect.
The drink does the same thing to her as an hour with Brigid. She sinks into her body, her limbs loosen, she sits back and crosses her legs, her neck grows long, she runs her hands through her hair. The clenched ball she normally is lets go, unravels and stretches happily, like a waking cat. She is suddenly aware of the wet of her mouth, the heat in her cheeks, the way her chest rises and falls—nothing about her body feels awkward. She smiles, and her smile is not the normal clenched grimace.
Austin likes her like this, she can see it. He has stopped looking at her warily, and started joking with her, slagging Brigid and her early antics with the livestock. When she begins to smile, he imitates Brigid and Rose talking about literature over dinner. Emer actually giggles when he exaggerates Brigid’s American accent, making her sound like an old, haughty intellectual. Still, he seems to remember what books they were talking about. She forgets that Austin used to be scholarly. Now he’s just a farmer and a fisherman, like the rest of them. He pours them each another drink. The jug appears to be bottomless.
Whenever she laughs, Austin widens his eyes, encouraged, expectant. His irises reflect the candles with little jumps of yellow flame.
“Look at you,” Austin says. “Smiling like a basket of chips. You’ve changed altogether. Rose said as much. Has Patch finally copped on between the sheets?” Emer giggles and suddenly they are both laughing so loud and long she is afraid Niall will wake up. But he doesn’t, not then.
Another drink—Austin has two to her every one—and she’s asking for a song. He obliges, closing his eyes, allowing her to watch his face in the hearth light, without once having to look away. He sings another verse of the song Brigid gave them at the bonfire.
A stór mo chroí, when the evening mist
Over mountain and sea is falling
Oh turn around and when you list
Then maybe you’ll hear me calling
The sound of my voice you might hear
Which calls for your speedy returning
A rún, a rún, won’t you come back soon
To the one who will always love you?
Austin’s voice is like a hand reaching deep inside her. She can’t stop herself from looking at him when he finishes the song and opens his eyes. He looks back, really looks at her, she imagines, for the first time in his life. She catches his stare, holds it, pushes it back. Something flashes in there, deep in his eyes. He sees the person only Brigid has seen.
She wants to laugh out loud, at how much she wants him to do this, how inevitable it feels, even though it’s the most inappropriate thing in the world, her sister’s husband looking at
her with lust. She’s not shocked, and it doesn’t even occur to her to pretend to be.
So when he moves into the dying firelight and mutters give us a little kiss, she smiles along with him, like they’re children playing at a harmless game. She can see the ring in his eyes now, like a small fiery circle, but tells herself it is a trick of the firelight. She does not hesitate, she does not want to pause and think perhaps they shouldn’t. This is what she has always wanted and the drink and the storm and her sister’s absence, and her new confidence from Brigid, make it the easiest thing she has ever done. She won’t stop to ponder what it is inside her, inside his eyes and that room and the drink, that makes this vile behavior as easy and natural as letting Niall climb into her lap.
She barely feels the first few kisses, still reeling at the thought of them, then she starts to kiss back, and his lips are as luscious and foreign as his voice. She had expected, with the drink and the pipe and the memories of Patch, that he would taste like a man—ruined—but his breath is as sweet as a child’s. Austin cups her face with his rough hands, the fingers, like Patch’s, cracked with work and embedded in soil, and she opens her mouth. She knows now from being with Brigid how to step into him, how to press, how to arch her back and show she is willing for more. He grabs her waist and grunts gratefully. She thinks briefly that perhaps he, too, has been waiting for this moment all along. For the time it takes to start it, she believes wholeheartedly that Austin is kissing her for the same reasons she is letting him. A rún. My love.
Then it gets rougher. Slightly, like abandonment to passion, then more so, becoming something else entirely. His tongue thrusts deeper than is comfortable. She feels the drink glug up from her stomach. She pulls away to keep from burping in his mouth, and to break the pressure that has quickly moved from tender to rude and demanding, and mostly because she has a brief image of her sister actually seeing them at it, the same way Emer once watched Rose and Austin through a hole in the stone.
“Austin,” she says. “That’s enough, so.”
He coaxes, that voice swooning whispers just at the side of her face.
“Rose wouldn’t mind,” he insists. “She never minded in the boardinghouse. She shared me with her friends, so she did. Surely she’d share with her sister as well.”
As ludicrous as this is, somehow during his whispering he has half walked, half pushed her to the hearth bed, which is deep and soft and warmer than any bed in the house. He pushes her down and lies straight on top of her, kissing her into the softness, and her throat clogs in fear. Lying down was not the right thing to do, she can see that, but she isn’t sure how she will arrange getting up again. When she tries to sit up, the look in Austin’s eyes so unnerves her—for an instant there is no blue left in them, or even darkness, it is like looking into the orange heart of a fire. Though it fades when he turns his head away from the light, the scowl he gives her so reminds her of the way he has always looked at her that she can’t bear it, so she kisses him again. Each kiss takes her farther away, like she’s caught in a current and it’s clear she can’t make it back and that she never should have gone swimming in the first place. She’s doing this all wrong. She started bold and now she wants to take it back.
She tries to use her hands. She puts them flat to his chest, willing whatever misery is in them to stop this. It doesn’t work. Her hands on him are not the horror they usually are to Patch, nor do they stir up the bliss she elicits from Brigid. Something else rises to her touch. She tries to put her hands beneath her instead, but he pulls at one, pressing it to where he is hard and demanding. She wonders briefly if it is her hands making him do this or something else, something that was in him all along, but it hardly matters. She can see now how impossible it will be to stop, whatever it is.
He pushes her blouse aside and dives at her breast, taking her nipple into his mouth. She inhales sharply, and he takes this for encouragement, and sucks harder. With Brigid this had felt good. With Austin it is horrid.
“No, Austin,” she manages and he looks up at her, his mouth circled in saliva, loose, lecherous, grinning. As if they have some secret language, as if no is the most welcoming word he can hear. He fumbles quickly, freeing himself from his trousers. He grabs up her skirt and yanks down her drawers.
“No,” she says again, but it only eggs him on. He moves up toward her face and presses his mouth to hers again, hard, not a kiss, more like a gag.
“Hush,” he says. “You’ll wake himself.” She goes cold at this, silent, realizing all of a sudden exactly what she has put at risk.
“Austin,” she pleads in a whisper. “In all fairness. Stop now.”
He gets a look then that does more than disappoint her.
“Sure isn’t this what you wanted,” he says. “Isn’t this what you planned?” He is slurring. She realizes, with a drop in her stomach, that he is very drunk, as drunk as Patch after days on the tear. Why did she not wonder, before now, what was in that jug?
“I planned nothing,” she says. She’s not sure what he means. Hadn’t he come over here?
“Aren’t you the one Rose came back here for?” he says between clenched teeth. She is not sure she has heard him right.
She can feel him on her thigh, nothing between them, a hot threat. Like he is holding a weapon there. She doesn’t want to move for fear it will puncture her. He moves a hand down and pushes her legs apart. She is shaking now, the muscles in her legs are useless to defend her.
“Austin,” she tries again. “Don’t. Think of Rose.”
That’s when he puts the hand to her neck. His hand is broad enough that it fits across the front, the callused space between his thumb and first finger resting just on the hollow spot that always tightens when she is afraid. He doesn’t grip, just holds it ready, and looks her straight in the eye. His eyes are burning now, they are dark pits of fire, there is nothing left that she recognizes. His face is moving in and out of shadow and for a brief, horrifying instant he looks like someone else, something pinch-faced and slightly feminine, and she hears, though the mouth in that face does not move, a shrill voice chanting, go on, go on, go on.
The decision is left to her. If she moves, or gets up, because suddenly she wonders why hasn’t she just gotten up before now, walked to the door, and told him to leave, the hand will tighten. She knows it as sure as she knows what his other hand is doing as he positions himself between her legs. Whatever is inside him now, whatever she let in here with the drink and the music and her blasphemous desire, has no intention of letting her go.
Later she will remember making a choice, firmly, completely, like the shutting of a door. But in the moment it happens without her consideration. She opens her legs, and lets him, surprised at how easily he slides inside, with none of the discomfort or resistance she remembers with Patch. It used to feel sometimes that her husband was forcing himself into places that weren’t meant to open, tight bony places that bruised and chafed and were sore all the next day. Something is bigger inside her now, or gone, and it barely hurts, not even at the back when he thrusts. It seems she is deep enough to absorb it all, whether she wants it or not.
“Ah, you’re well ready for me,” Austin mutters and she cringes but doesn’t argue with him. This is no longer a body she recognizes. The only familiar thing is the vise around her neck, the threat that a movement or word or swallow will crush her. She could care less at this point what happens below, with the threat of that hand focusing everything in her throat. That hand has been there her whole life; the only difference now is that it’s attached to something.
It takes ages. Much longer than Patch ever took. She closes her eye and tries to go somewhere else. While Austin is thrusting, driven by something within him, but also outside of them both, unable to be stopped, she yearns to be carried away, like when she was a child, when she could turn her head and see something, a curtain, a cliff’s edge, an invitation to another world.
She opens her eye and she sees Niall. He is standing quietly in
the center of the almost dark room. The tears that are running down her face into the bedclothes are also falling on Niall’s flushed face. She can’t shake her head without Austin noticing, so she widens her eye in warning. Niall sees it, turns around and walks quietly from the room. Austin seizes on top of her then, gripping her neck to the point of pain, then falls down next to her. He leaves one arm draped across her neck and keeps it there for a long time.
There is a terrible moment later on, where she tries kissing him again. Partly she does it to stop looking at him; the face, next to her in the bed, otherworldly, the eyes not yet returned to blue, partly like asking for an apology she won’t get, mostly because she wants to turn it all back to the beginning, when it could still have been just a curious kiss. They’re too far gone for that. Austin turns his mouth away. He doesn’t want to kiss her anymore.
The next day the weather hasn’t cleared and Niall sleeps later than usual with no sun to pierce through the curtains and rouse him. Emer moves carefully around the kitchen trying not to strain. She goes to the privy and wipes away viscous, rank liquid with a cloth until she feels scraped raw. She is fiercely itchy and longs for a bath. Though she expected Austin to slink away once Niall wakes, he stays with them the whole day, mends a few things Patch hadn’t gotten around to—the hearthstone where it broke away, a wobbly table leg, shows Niall how to bait hook with baby eel wrapped in leaves and mummified with a wrap of string, leaving the hooks on the windowsill until the fishing weather returns. He jokes with the boy, and Niall, showing no loyalty whatsoever, smiles and follows instructions willingly. At one point, while she is tidying up the hearth bed, stripping the linens off to put in a hot wash, one of the poitín mugs rolls out from underneath and falls onto the stone floor and cracks into two thick pieces. She almost starts to cry, the reality of last night coming at her like the pottery has been thrown in her face. Niall and Austin look up at her.