Kavanagh lamented how far from Thailand he was as he leaned on top of a bin and struggled to roll himself a cigarette with his free hand. He thought of the party, making his way to the front door as he trailed blood after him, waiting for the blonde girl in the white top to reappear so that they could leave together. He had been trying to impress her with the bottle trick, but instead had engaged her with his idiocy. It wasn’t his style to chat up girls. Girls were like bees buzzing around at parties. If you sat still long enough, they would come to you. But this girl wasn’t noticing him. Still, he had gotten her attention eventually, and she would have left with him and everything if it wasn’t for Pajo.
An Atlantic breeze whistled through the laneways, and the drizzly rain carried the smell of a lost day at the seaside. It was always like this at the arse-end of summer the weather couldn’t make up its mind – one minute it bathed Galway in sunshine, the next it spat rain. He heard the strains of ‘Galway Girl’ coming from a shop. Somewhere in Galway at all times, someone was playing ‘Galway Girl’. Fucking ‘Galway Girl’. If he heard that song one more time. Been all over this world … ain’t seen nothing like a Galway girl. Yeah, ain’t seen nothing like her tearing the arse out of it, elbowing her way to the front of the queue in Supermac’s at four in the morning. Right about that, Steve Earle. He used to like Steve Earle and all. Jesus, that fuckin’ song. Been all over the world? He had in his hole. Hadn’t been to Thailand, that was for sure. Kavanagh realised that his mistake was coming home. He had been in paradise, sleeping in the beach hut, drinking with the guys from the tattoo parlour. It was all there, this life that he could be living now, and he’d left it. He’d gotten sucked straight back into this bottomless hole. He vowed that he would get the money together. Maybe he could convince Alex to let him sell weed again. If not, then as soon as his hand was out of this bloody sling, he’d find some type of work – any type of work – and save enough money to get the hell out of Galway once and for all.
*
When Stevie woke it was dark. After the party she had shuddered home, crawled into bed fully dressed, and slept through the remainder of the day. The wind howled outside and rain lashed the windows. The wind sounded like it could rip off the roof of the flat. She imagined indifferent children of gods, peering in at her doll’s house, pointing to the tiny books in stacks on the floor and her desk piled high with papers, at her small form tucked up in her doll’s bed. She got up and looked out of the window. She could hear the river but couldn’t see it. The dark waters blended into the black night as the tree cast shadows into the room. The outside was threatening, reaching with gnarled fingers toward her throat, rapping at the window to be let inside. She heard a dripping noise and saw that water was coming in through one of the windows. She would have to call the landlord about that. There was some part of her that wanted to surrender to the elements, to strip off her pyjamas and stand with bare feet squelched in the grass by the river, to feel the jagged, biting rain cut into her bare skin. This thought brought Pam to mind – Pam with her scars on top of scars – and she felt her loss with a sharp pang.
Stevie had never given much thought to her body until it started to change and become an alien entity. She had always been something of a tomboy. Her Christian name, Stephanie, was discarded at a young age and left to gather dust along with the abandoned dolls under her bed. Her body existed as a functional form then. With skinny legs, she ran through fields and played soccer with her brother and his friends. Her freckled arms were thin as matchsticks, but she used them to punch back as good as she got, perfecting the art of dishing out dead arms and Chinese burns.
It all started around her fifteenth birthday. Her breasts began to grow, then her hips and thighs widened. Even her stomach seemed rounder and more pronounced. Whereas before her body was just there, she was now conscious of it. She tried not to think about it, to cover it up, but it was always complaining, telling her that it was too tired, or too hungry, or too fat fat fat. Food became different. It took on a new significance. She couldn’t eat certain things, but she couldn’t explain why. Bread became impossible. On her way to school each day, she began to throw away her packed lunches, lobbing them over a wall into some bushes. At dinner time she moved her food around her plate and put as little as possible in her mouth. She grew to enjoy the empty feeling in her stomach, to ignore her body’s cries for food, instead savouring one apple cut up into tiny pieces and chewed methodically. She could move about now with a new lightness, an airy energy. Not eating had given her this feeling, and she liked it, so she became even more determined to avoid food. She shaved herself everywhere, clogging up the plughole with wet, dark-blonde hair.
Stevie felt her cheeks flush when the girls in school joked about their periods. Hearing them say they were ‘on the blob’, or ‘on the jammy rag’, made her stomach turn. By the time she was 16, she was always cold. She started wearing two thermal vests under her school uniform, a pair of tights and two thick pairs of socks. She no longer played soccer with her brother and his friends. Her periods stopped.
With each successive year of secondary school, student numbers fell as teenage mothers-to-be dropped out. Stevie’s mother tutted and shook her head when she heard about them. ‘You have to be so careful. It’s different for girls. Your whole life would be ruined.’ Stevie wondered what it would be like to have young parents. Her mum and dad still called the radio ‘the wireless’ and insisted the family eat fish on Fridays. Her friends didn’t have parents like that.
When Stevie collapsed one day at school, her mother came to collect her and brought her to the doctor. Then there was a conversation that she couldn’t follow. To her, it was just noises falling out of mouths, sounds reverberating off walls, and yet she knew that this conversation meant that everything was at risk. Her private territory, this secret that belonged to her, was now public. It had been given a name and now they wanted to take away this thing that had kept her company, made her feel strong. The doctor sent her into hospital, where they told her parents they would have to keep her in overnight and arrange a psychiatric evaluation.
‘We just want you to get better,’ said her mother. ‘Your poor father is heartbroken.’
That night Stevie dreamt of the bushes on the way to school. They glowed a septic green, oozing months of uneaten sandwiches, lovingly prepared and wrapped in cling film.
It was in the psychiatric unit that she befriended Pam, a strawberry blonde with an upturned nose and a sprinkling of freckles on her face. They sat together in the day room, smoking cigarettes and drinking cup after cup of black coffee. They talked about everything except the reasons they were both there. Stevie couldn’t figure out why Pam was in the unit until the day she reached up to get a book from the shelf and Stevie caught a glimpse of the inside of Pam’s left arm – a messy patchwork of scarred skin, old wounds faded to white intertwined with newer red marks. She had an urge to leap from her seat, grab the arm and cover it in kisses.
One day, Pam said she wanted to do Stevie’s hair. ‘It’d look lovely in an up-do. You know, like for a debs.’
Stevie wasn’t that keen on the idea, but she allowed Pam to sit her in a chair as she laid out a hairbrush, hairspray and clips on a small table beside them.
‘You’ve gorgeous hair, do you know that?’
Stevie shrugged. ‘Yeah?’ She had never given much thought to her long dirty-blonde hair, and kept it that length more out of laziness then vanity.
‘It’d look lovely with some highlights. Bring out the blonde more.’ Pam started to brush the tangled mane. ‘Do you know what you want to be, Stevie, when you finish school?’
‘Dunno really. I like history.’
Pam wrinkled her nose. ‘You mean like wars and stuff?’
‘No, like really old stuff. Ancient artefacts and things like that.’
‘Yeah? That’s deadly, Stevie. You could work in Dublin Castle or some
thing. I want to be a hairdresser. I want my own salon some day.’
‘Are you sure that’s a good idea, being around all those scissors?’
Pam set down the brush and her right hand instinctively flew to adjust her left sleeve, although it already covered her scarred skin. Stevie was about to apologise, tell Pam it had just come out, she didn’t know why she’d said it, when Pam surprised her by snorting with laughter.
‘Yeah, Stevie, and you should be a chef.’
They both erupted into a fit of giggles then, which they couldn’t stop. As one trailed off, the other let out a hoot and the two of them started again.
‘Oh my God!’ Stevie clutched her stomach. ‘I’m gonna die.’
Tears were streaming out of Pam’s eyes. ‘Oh Jesus, stop. I’m gonna piss myself. I’m gonna tell Dr Doyle on you, Stevie. You’re a bad influence, so ya are.’
‘Now, Pamela,’ said Stevie in a man’s deep voice, ‘we can only help you if you want to help yourself.’ She raised her hand to her face and mimed adjusting a pair of glasses. ‘You must commit to recovery, Pamela. Are you committed?’
‘We’re all fuckin’ committed around here, Dr Doyle.’
*
Stevie filled her pipe with tobacco and lit up. Wide awake now, she flicked through the pages of a history book, but couldn’t focus on it. The fridge hummed. She felt like an intruder in her own home, like she could be caught at any moment and chastised for trespassing. But this is my house, she thought.
‘This is my house,’ she said aloud, and the voice that came back to her in the dark was strange. She began to hum a song, but her voice sounded odd and tuneless. Stevie stood up and walked over to the map of Ireland on the wall. One of the first things she had done when she moved in was to hang it up. It was the type of map that hung in primary school classrooms around the country so that children could learn the names of the provinces, the counties, the mountains and the rivers. The map served a dual purpose. Not only could she plan the sites she would visit for her research, it also hid a patch of damp that stained the peeling wallpaper. As a child, Ireland had looked alive to her. A mutated entity with straggly limbs bent backwards: the watery eye of Lough Neagh, the button nose of Downpatrick. When she had seen a map of the world for the first time, she was surprised at how tiny Ireland was: a dot of an island, off another island, off Europe.
When she was 17, Stevie went on a class trip to the National Museum and looked in wonder at the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara Brooch. She had learnt the story of the brooch in primary school, how a little girl had discovered it when playing near her home. It had inspired the 10 year-old Stevie to go out and dig the soil near her house, but all she uncovered were rusty nails and snail shells. Standing in front of the brooch at 17, she felt so far removed from her 10 year-old self as to be looking back on another person’s life, or remembering a scene from a film. Most of her classmates were bored by the museum tour and barely looked at the exhibits. As the guide led them around, they whispered to each other and tried to make each other laugh, silenced occasionally by the icy glares of the teacher that promised retribution. Stevie didn’t join in the giggling or elbowing. Since coming back from the psychiatric unit, she was no longer part of the group. Nobody said anything to her face, but she knew they talked about her. She could tell from the way they would fall silent sometimes and throw meaningful looks at each other when she walked into the classroom. She was marked now, separate. The guide led them to an exhibit, a stone carving of an emaciated female form with an oversized skull, legs splayed, and genitalia on display.
‘Jaysus, what’s that thing?’ a girl in her class said.
‘It’s your ma,’ said another classmate, and laughter erupted followed by an angry shushing from the teacher.
‘This is a sheela-na-gig,’ said the guide. ‘They were primarily found on churches from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Then there was an expansion of their use on castles and other stone structures during the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.’
Stevie listened, enraptured, as the guide pointed out some more examples, and explained how the sheela-na-gigs had only come to the attention of historians relatively recently, as many of the carvings had been destroyed or hidden away in the seventeenth century, following an order from the papal authorities for their removal.
‘However, many sheela-na-gigs were found buried in graveyards or concealed in walls or gate pillars, suggesting local people held the figures in high esteem, and were unwilling to follow the orders of the Church to destroy them.’
This had planted the seed of interest for Stevie, and over the years, the more she learnt about them, the more the sheela-na-gigs appealed to her – the seeming anomaly of these lewd stone carvings reclining brazenly over the entrances to churches and sacred buildings, pagan fertility symbols in houses of God.
Standing in front of the map, Stevie traced her finger over the red marks she had drawn onto it. She had stuck small red stickers on the places she planned to visit for her research. Each dot represented a sheela-na-gig she would catalogue. Standing back, she surveyed the map – a mutant child with measles. There were clusters of dots in certain areas. She had joined up some of the dots with lines, plotting a trajectory for the trips she would make. Eventually she would visit them all and duly cover the walls of her flat with photographs, maps and notes on index cards.
Already, she had stuck up some photocopied pictures of sheela-na-gigs so she could compare their similarities and differences in appearance. They were as individual as people with their variances in size, shape and expression, but they were all unmistakably the same, unmistakably connected. Carved from stone, they were for the most part bald with large skull-like heads, some smiled, some grimaced, and others had neutral expressions. They stood or squatted in an act of display with thighs spread and one or both hands pointing to or touching exaggerated genitals. Most either had no breasts or the drooping breasts of old women. Some had been carved to show emaciated ribs, others displayed scratches on the head and body.
Stevie made a cup of tea and sat down. As she surveyed the map and the pictures, she felt her unease start to retreat. There was something reassuring about seeing her work surrounding her: a constant visual reminder of what was done and all that was left to do, and her incubated within the walls of it like a womb.
Chapter 6
‘I brought you some milk.’ Kavanagh stood scanning the coffee table for a space that wasn’t taken up by overflowing ashtrays, Rizla papers, chocolate wrappers or empty cups. There wasn’t one. He placed the carton on the floor.
‘Ah sound, thanks, man,’ said Alex.
Alex seemed to survive on a diet of tea and chocolate. Kavanagh couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him outside. He was watching a film that was projected onto the white wall in front of them. A lady in a ball-gown sat beside a man wearing a monocle at a candlelit dining table.
‘Which one is this again?’ asked Kavanagh.
‘Smiles of a Summer Night.’ Alex’s curtains were always drawn, and he was always watching some film or other, invariably something by Bergman. He seemed to be in one of his quieter moods tonight. Sometimes you couldn’t stop him talking. An armchair philosopher, he would theorise and pontificate for hours to his rapt audience of one. Other nights they would smoke quietly, and Alex would look surprised to see that Kavanagh was still there when he stood up to leave.
‘Cup of tea?’ said Alex.
‘Sure, thanks.’ Kavanagh began removing a pile of books from the sofa with his free hand so that he could sit down.
‘Stick on the kettle there so,’ said Alex, without taking his eyes from the film.
In the kitchen, Kavanagh cursed his sling as he struggled to fill up the kettle. He found two cups in the sink and gave them a cursory rinse under the tap. Squeezing the teabag against the edge of the cup was tricky, and h
e nearly knocked over the cup with his first attempt. Trying to carry the two cups of tea in one hand turned out to be a mistake. One tilted downwards and tea splashed onto both his jeans and the floor.
‘Ah, fuck!’
He set one of the cups down on the counter and brought them in one at a time.
‘Thanks,’ said Alex, as Kavanagh placed the cup beside him. ‘I fucking love Bergman.’
Kavanagh smiled to himself. ‘Really, Alex? You don’t say.’
‘Here, skin up there if you like, Kav.’
‘Ah, I can’t really.’ Kavanagh took a sup of tea and nodded towards his sling.
Kavanagh knew that there were a few others like him who called up and chatted with Alex and left with wrapped packages to distribute to friends. He didn’t know who these people were. They were never there when Kavanagh arrived. Alex juggled his friends like a seasoned adulterer, making as little reference to the others as possible, and referring to them only in the vaguest possible terms.
‘You know there’s a drought on. You could make a killing, Alex.’
‘Hmm?’ Alex continued to look at the film.
Kavanagh sighed. Alex wasn’t motivated by money. He didn’t need it, or seemed not to at any rate. So Kavanagh tried flattery.
‘You have no idea, Alex, of the shit these poor Galwegians are smoking. The dregs of Spain and Amsterdam. Yours is the best stuff in the whole country.’
Alex laughed at that and looked at him. ‘Come off it, Kav.’
‘You’d be acting in the national interest.’
‘Too risky …’ Alex turned back to the film. ‘Since … you know. I’ve heard things about that lad. You should stay well out of his way.’
When Kavanagh had the run-in with Pajo and his goons, he had tried to lie about the black eye, but Alex had seen straight through him.
‘Look, Kav, let’s just keep it small, yeah? A cottage industry, isn’t that what they call it?’
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