Carn

by Patrick McCabe

  She thought about the hungry eyes of the men behind the suit rack. She thought about her breasts and wondered what it was that made them want her there. She thought of the girls in the orphanage standing in line at the washbasins, their slack breasts beneath coarse nightdresses. They were breasts. They meant nothing.

  What did they mean?

  At night Josie painted her fingernails but washed it away the following morning for she had not the courage to face Molloy.

  The young man who began to call regularly was not shy like the others. He winked at her from behind the suit rack and once came up to her and said with a grin, “I don’t suppose you could tell me where I’d get a pair of socks—I need a pair of socks bad.”

  Josie had blushed to the roots for she was not quite sure how to deal with this kind of assuredness. But her legs nearly went from under her altogether when he walked into the shop a few days later smoking a cigarette and said to her, “I found out your name—Josephine.” Then he turned and walked out again. He made a few more visits, pretending to inquire about the quality of shirts and jackets but they both knew that they were of no interest to him. His cheekiness made Josie feel warm inside, it was something she had never seen in the orphanage, not once. Women were too afraid, she knew that, they could not have that play in them. None of them wanted to be caught in the spotlight or held up to ridicule. So they trudged along a grey corridor to keep themselves safe.

  Josie began to look forward to his visits. When eventually he said, “I bet you didn’t know I had a motor car. I think me and you should go for a drive in it. What do you think of that now, Josephine?” Josie did not hesitate for a moment for the excitement was too great inside her and the words just leapfrogged out of her mouth and she said, “Oh, yes.”

  Every nerve in her body tingled as she got herself ready that Saturday and she pulled on gloves to hide her fingernails, donning the sunglasses when she was well away from Molloy’s disapproving eye. She met him outside the town where she found him sitting on a stile. Straight away she blurted out, “That’s not a bad day.”

  He laughed and said, “Do you know something Josephine?”

  “What?” replied Josie anxiously.

  “You don’t even know my name,” he said.

  Josie felt foolish.

  “My name’s Culligan. Vinnie Culligan.”

  Then he put his arm around her and she felt as if the cold hand of the nun had never ever been near her.

  They drove to the town of Cavan in his Volkswagen and there they went to the Magnet Cinema where he heaped Scots Clan into her lap and hugged her close to him in the back row. It seemed to Josie that Cavan was on the other side of the world for she had never before been outside her own town. As Navajo Indians swarmed down from the canyon and whooped wildly as they attacked the settlers in their covered wagons, Culligan kissed her ear and she sank into his shoulder. Then he pressed something into her hand and she was afraid to unclasp her fingers. “Go on,” he urged. “Open it.”

  When she saw that it was a small pendant on a chain, her body seemed to melt away; she clutched it tightly until it bit into her palm and she could not get any words to come out of her mouth. She just closed her eyes and wanted that moment never to evaporate for she had never experienced such ecstasy before. After the film they went to the Central Café where their fingers entwined and they listened to songs of love addressed solely to them. She stared lovingly at the smoke that twisted from his cigarette to the yellow ceiling. She felt that no harm could come to her now.

  Afterwards they went for a walk along the river bank and just sat watching the current carrying off small sticks and leaves.

  “You know something, Josie,” Vinne Culligan said, “this should never end.”

  They met many times after that.

  When they went to the guest house, Josie stood by the window staring tensely out into the street, but he acted as if he had known the receptionist all his life. He talked away to her about the hotel business in the nearby towns, they traded neighbours’ names and by the time they were done talking there was nothing further from her mind than whether or not they were man and wife. They went upstairs and he threw himself on the bed saying, “Man dear it’s great to be young.” There was a picture of Maria Goretti on the wall above the bed and beneath it a bunch of dried-out lilac. Outside the dogs barked and the odd passing car threw shadows on the ceiling. Josie lay beside him and as she felt his hand moving along the inside of her thigh she did not care about the pale blue innocent virgin, she wanted them both to melt together and she knew that everything would be all right.

  He was quiet on the way back but that was because he was due back at work. They stopped the car a mile from Carn and kissed. It was hard for Josie to believe that a man reared in the town of Carn could talk like Vinnie Culligan.

  “I love you so much, Josie,” he said to her. She nearly cried when he said it. She took the back lane into town and none of the hawks were any the wiser.

  After that, Molloy could not get over the way Josie did her work. And every time Josie thought of Vinnie Culligan, she fingered the gold pendant nestled beneath her blouse.

  She trembled at the thought of the following weekend when he had arranged to call into the shop. When he didn’t appear she decided she had picked it up wrongly, that he had meant the following weekend. She waited anxiously that Friday but when the shop closed at nine there was still no sign of him. She cried a little that night and made up all sorts of stories that would excuse him. But then the following Monday it all collapsed when Molloy handed her an envelope and looked at her suspiciously as if he expected her to account for her unauthorised receipt of mail. When eventually he had gone, Josie raced up to her room and when she had picked out the three or four most important words that were half-blurred in front of her eyes, she knew for certain then what the world was all about and she swore bitterly there and then that no one she ever met after that would do the like of it to her again. It was Vinnie Culligan all right. From Wandsworth in England and all he had to say after all they had been through was, “Anything strange?” She went white as a ghost and the room turned over on its side. She kept the letter for weeks hoping that somehow its message would change, that she would one day return to it and find that she had interpreted its message all wrong, that the writing had altered itself and that Culligan was coming to take her with him to England.

  But that didn’t happen.

  What happened was that one day when she was washing her face at the sink she got a terrible wrenching in her stomach and got violently sick. That was the start for Josie Keenan.

  That was the start of Culligan’s little babby.

  She broke a glass vase and tried to cut her wrist with the thick shards but they just wrenched themselves from her hands and she lay on the bed wet-faced and shivering.

  As the baby grew within her, she felt as if it were a worm or a serpent. She felt its eerie cackle deep in the pit of her belly.

  A long time ago. Days and years ago when the old town of Carn was as it had been for a hundred years before that and never dreamed it would be any different another hundred on.

  But it was.

  Josie Keenan went to the window and tried to locate the premises of Molloy’s Select Drapery.

  It was nowhere to be seen.

  In its place there was a hairdressing salon and a dry cleaners. It had faded away. And Molloy. And his wife. She felt a dryness coming into her mouth. She could never forget the shop’s smell. It came now to her nostrils. And the outline of the dresses on the rails, odd silhouettes hanging in mid-air. Above it all, the moon watching without a word, all that passed, everything that was in her mind. Everything.

  All right, thought Josie, so I buried it. Dug the grave all by myself and myself and no Culligan this time, Josie all on her owney-oh, down into the ground it went, into that black hole with the tears running down my face. I didn’t want to do it but I did it. It wasn’t right what the hell could I have done? I lo
ved it too, I loved its little hands and toes. It had eyes like beads, like a little black lad’s it said to me, Don’t bury me mammy but I did. The clay trickled on his cheeks and I filled it in like a madwoman. After that I became as cold as stone and I would have killed Molloy and her and all belonging to them and Culligan and every one of them I ever laid eyes on.

  As she stood by the window, Josie felt the tears coming but she steeled herself against them. She felt the numbness begin in the side of her face. She took three librium tablets from her handbag and sat on the bed with her head buried in her hands.

  After that, her mind had not been her own. The voices came to her, sat waiting for her every night in her room. They coiled themselves around her head, the voices of the town and the voices of demons.

  Who’s that out there on a night like that? Wouldn’t you think she’d be foundered with the cold? Wouldn’t you now missus? Indeed you would, a night like that would cut you to the bone. What is she at? Bent double beneath the sky. Up to no good I’d swear. Can’t be. Look at the face of her. Can’t be more than sixteen, shouldn’t be let out at this hour never mind . . . what’s she doing now—clawing at the clay like a mad thing. Now that’s neither right nor normal now is it, I ask you? Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph do you see what she’s doing now do you? Look at it, wrapped in a newspaper oh Jesus and his Blessed Mother it’s a little child couldn’t be more than a day old . . . a little shilde, a little icky babba pale and cold and nota twitch in its bones of course there’s madness in her eyes I could tell that from the start, but there’s bitches and there’s evil bitches . . . let her shake all she likes hanging’s too good for a woman would do the like of that, sprinkle clay on a poor ba’s face.

  The voices crawled all over her and sleep left her. She could not banish the sweats and the headaches. She wanted the people of the town to take her and hang her in the square, but she could not tell them about it. In the small hours of the morning, the voices drove her to the safe where Molloy kept his money and she unrolled several five pound notes from the bundle bound with an elastic band. She hid them under the floorboards in her bedroom, along with knives and forks and assorted pieces of china she had smuggled from the kitchen. Her visits to the safe became more frequent for the voices would not let up. When one night she crept down the stairs pulling her nightgown about her, she felt like breaking down and crying out to Molloy and the people of the town, Yes I did it I did it but she did not and when she found herself at that moment standing in the glare of Molloy’s flashlight, she did not say anything, she just collapsed into the arms of hopelessness.

  Molloy caught her roughly by the shoulder. “You’ve been leading us a merry dance, my girl. Five nights we’ve been waiting here for you.” His wife peered from the shadows. “Well I’ll tell you what you can do. Take us to where you have it. Every last penny of it. Then you can get out on the front street. I should have listened to Kelly—stay well away from that place—they’re all wrong ones in there. And that young one’s a daughter of the Buyer Keenan that drank himself into the poorhouse. Died roaring. All wrong ones. Or they wouldn’t be there.”

  She removed the floorboard and handed them her treasure trove piece by piece. Molloy’s wife stared open-mouthed.

  “That’s what you and Sister Benignus brought into this house, ma’am,” said Molloy bitterly to her. No tears came to Josie’s eyes. She hoped they would kill her there and then so that she would not feel it any more, any of it.

  “Get your things together now. You’re not staying in this house a minute longer, you thieving bitch!”

  He spat viciously at her and stormed down the stairs, his wife throwing her a last frightened look as she followed.

  In a daze, Josie packed the cardboard suitcase they had given her in the orphanage. She heaped everything she had into it then dressed herself and wandered down the stairs, her limbs weighing her down like iron. Molloy stood in the doorway with his arms folded. He gestured with his thumb. The door closed loudly behind her and Josie stood outside in the first light of dawn. The first birds were starting up in the trees. Josie belted her coat. A country road stretched before her.

  Molloy watched her until she was well out of sight.

  She spent that night in a haybarn beneath a hessian sack. The following morning she took to the roads again for she wanted to put as much distance as she could between herself and the town. They would all be well familiar by now with Molloy’s story, with plenty of his own lies thrown in for good measure. She walked all day without a thought as to her destination or plans for the future. When darkness fell her legs were ready to buckle under her and when the lights of a small cottage appeared at the top of a lane, there was nothing she could do to prevent herself being drawn there. Her stomach was turning over with hunger.

  The face that stared out suspiciously from the crack in the door frightened her for a split second but then she saw that it was the face of an old man, listless white strands of hair despairing on a freckled pate. His pupils widened as he looked at her, a young woman come out of nowhere, standing on his doorstep at midnight. He could not take his eyes off her, her clear porcelain face, the slim whitenes of her arms. A tremor ran through him and his voice stumbled in search of words. He pulled his shirt closed and reddened at the thought of his stained vest beneath it. His body began its takeover as he stood there and he was filled with fear but there was nothing he could do to prevent it so he opened the door to admit her. He took the suitcase and left it under the stairs. He felt like he wanted to burst into tears.

  Josie drank in her new surroundings, the yellowing holy pictures on the walls, the trousers and braces slung across the back of a chair, the cat sitting on a creel of turf eyeing her jealously. She became aware of the nervous clattering of the cups. It was then she began to realise for the first time that he was more frightened than her. He heaped sugar from a crumpled bag on to a spoon and spilt it on the bare table as he struggled to steer it to his cup.

  The sat and drank. Outside the inky clouds lolled. She told him that she had been on her way to the town of Carn, having come from Dublin, but had disembarked in the wrong village and found herself lost in the heart of the countryside. He shaded his eyes with his hand and nodded. Then he cleared away the cups and saucers and rummaged in the cupboard. He took two glasses from the dresser and filled them with whiskey. When she had taken a long draught, Josie’s cares became slowly submerged and she did not find it difficult to stare the old man in the eye. His fingers tapped the wet glass. He spoke of his mother and his brother who had both died in the same year. “The worst part of it about here is the lonesomeness,” he said. “It can turn your mind. The only one I see week about is Maggie McCaffrey from Lisnaw and half the time she’s in her bed. It’s no way for a man to live.”

  He gave himself to the whiskey after that and all the trouble within him poured out in a fever. Until that moment Josie had not known that such weakness was in men as well, she had only seen it before in herself and the girls in the orphanage. As the whiskey dwindled in the bottle, he did not once look at her but gave his life story, paraded it before her and sat slumped in the chair until his speech no longer made sense and his eyes rolled. When she found his head cradled in her lap and her languid hand stroking the dead tendrils of his hair she tried to decipher her confusion and cling to the strength his weakness asked her for. “Please,” he slurred, “I never seen a woman like you before. You’re so young. I never seen skin like that. I have money. I have anything you want.”

  He lay crying at the edge of the bed. He looked like a cornered animal. Josie saw now that there was nothing she couldn’t do with him. Her youth took his whole strength from him. She felt him shivering as he guided her hand to the buttons of his grey working shirt and she let her fingernails tinkle on the white hairs of his chest. The more she felt his fear, the more assured she became. She removed his clothes as if they were the skin of his body. She eased herself down on him. His limbs twitched. A groan drifted from deep down wit
hin him.

  Slowly his face became that of Molloy and Culligan, Culligan of the cheery smile. Who leaned over to her in the cinema and whispered, “Put it on.” She held the gold pendant in her hand. “I love you,” he said. She gripped the old man’s hand so tightly that he whimpered like a child and as she saw Culligan’s Volkswagen cruising down a country road with him at the wheel sharing one of his bright stories with her, her stomach turned over with bitterness and she stuck her tongue into the back of the old man’s throat like a poison dart. He jerked then moaned in pleasure and terror. “Oh you love me Culligan,” Josie cried. The whiskey would not let her hold back any of it now and when he began to cry she laughed and laughed. “I never seen a woman before, that’s the truth. The only one I ever seen was my sister. Don’t laugh at me. Please don’t laugh at me!” She raised herself above him as he blubbered into the pillow. Outside a dog howled. For the first time, Josie Keenan felt afraid of nothing. For so long she had hated the proximity of her own sex, their pursed lips and petty vendettas. In the orphanage she had always longed for that moment when she could walk down the avenue, nowhere near her the shadow of the ugly nun with hairs on her chin. She had dreamed there of men who could stroke her with hard, reassuring fingers, who used the word “pretty” to her.

  Now she knew how wrong she’d been about it all. Beneath her the old man jerked like a skinned rabbit. Now Josie saw through it all. She saw their cruelty and their pathetic weakness in the face of the power of their own bodies.