Johnny stood up and stepped back against the wall. He said nothing, his eyes fixed on the door. I scrambled up to try and run out but Daddy pushed me back.
‘Right, come on then, you young buck, let’s see if you can fight men as easily.’
Daddy’s face was red and he was trembling. I could see that Johnny didn’t want to fight. He kept backing away as Daddy circled him. Then he put his guard down, lowered his head and simply took the punches as they swung at him. What I remember most was the silence in the room, me in one corner crying quietly, Johnny with his head bowed and blood running down his face, and only the sound of Daddy’s breath and his hand thudding against flesh as the sweat rolled over his forehead.
It seemed to last an eternity until Daddy stopped, all the anger drained from his body and his face looking the way it had when he came down the stairs eight years before to say that Mammy was dead. He turned and walked slowly back up to his room. We heard the door slam and still Johnny didn’t raise his head. I stood in the corner and it felt like a thousand miles lay between us. Then he said, ‘I’m sorry, sis, I’m sorry,’ and walked past me into the kitchen.
I followed him to where he held his face under the cold tap in the huge white sink and tried to help him as he had once helped me, but he shrugged away from my touch when I put my fingers to his forehead and said in that quiet voice, ‘Just go to bed, sis, please.’
When I came down the next morning he was gone. The old suitcase that used to be under the stairs was missing and none of his clothes were in the hotpress. In a drawer in the kitchen I had a cake hidden with eighteen candles. It would have been his birthday that Sunday.
‘She must be in love,’ they say, noticing her silence in the factory. ‘Eh, Sandra, is it Daithi Lacha from the west? Did you give him a nibble of your cheese?’ they shout across the loud machines and she smiles back and says nothing. She often thinks of how he must have stood that Wednesday at the corner of Parnell Street, his hope evaporating as the last person climbed from each bus. Yet thoughts of him always lead her back to the image of Johnny’s bleeding face held beneath the tap, and the isolation she is now trapped within.
Infinite afternoons when Radio Caroline blares out the Rolling Stones and the Marvelettes, and naked electric light strains her eyes as she sits, carefully stitching at her machine while the factory echoes with shouts and laughter. Her friends, imagining a failed lover, grow protective and cluster around her. On her way home she pauses by the rivulet which glints like a silver needle stitching together her life. The sting of a single nettle in an overhung glade whose poison darkened both their blood.
For over a year and a half her father accepts each meal in silence and never speaks unless to request something. She washes dishes in the small kitchen while he stares through the window at the garden becoming overgrown since the spring before when he last touched it. One evening she walks through the bare remains of the wood to the fields where the new estates are being built. Children run through the open buildings, dodging the old watchman in the corrugated iron hut.
In the hallway on her return she hears the radio, Ceili House echoing from the dining-room. She opens the door to bring in his tea and finds him sprawled out beside his chair. His pipe had burnt a small hole in the rug that his eyes appear to be staring at in disbelief. A white smear had dribbled from his lips and the newspaper covers half the floor.
She makes the phone call from a neighbour’s house who returns to the sitting-room with her. She kneels beside him when his mouth tries to form words, but all she can catch is a faint choking in his throat. She takes his hand in the ambulance, feeling the sides sway as they zig-zag through the traffic, and after an hour sitting in the corridor a doctor confirms that he’s suffered a stroke.
That night is the first she ever spends alone in the house. She leaves the light on in her bedroom and tries to pray, but all she can hear are the tiny creaks and tappings of the beams settling like clay around her.
The hardest thing to watch was his helplessness. In my childhood he had overshadowed everything so that my whole life was centred around pleasing him. But now he could do nothing for himself. Every evening I would visit the hospital and he’d lie there trying to speak. One side of him was paralysed and the lip hung down without support. From the other side of his mouth he could mumble words, though after he had spoken them, the horror in his eyes showed you they were not the ones he meant. His tongue would curl up trying to explain and then lapse into baffled silence.
I’d bring him shirts he couldn’t wear and books he couldn’t hold and sit at the end of the bed feeling foolish as I gibbered away to fill that silence. I’d watch the nurse trying to feed him, patient and always good-humoured. His mouth would clap shut before the spoon reached it and the bite would be scattered all over his chin.
‘Now, just relax and open your mouth,’ she’d say, and I’d watch the lips press tightly shut.
‘Now close it,’ she’d say, and thrust the spoon between the lips when they opened while his eyes registered amazement. I could feel those eyes never leaving me, even when the nurse had been round for a fifth time and all the families had departed. As I kissed him and walked towards the door, I could sense his head trying to turn and follow me as if terrified at being abandoned.
On the last night I saw him, he seemed to have recovered. He managed a smile when I sat on the bed. Behind us, the nurses had drawn the curtains around a man who was moaning in pain. I remember how spring was trying to break through. Fresh flowers stood in the vase beside his locker and the light was soft when it came through the window. There was power in his fingers as he gripped my hand and during the whole hour, we never once spoke.
We just stared at each other like we shared a secret and after a time I realized both our eyes were filled with tears. It was as if the pair of us were learning how to forgive without needing to understand. When I was going, he wouldn’t release my hand until I took the little silver miraculous medal I wore around my neck and pressed it down into his palm instead. As I kissed him goodbye, I put my arms around his neck for the first time since I was a child.
That evening I walked home from town, up Gardiner Street where old ladies were leaning out of windows, and followed the railway tracks along by the canal past the high walls of Mountjoy jail. I felt a lightness I hadn’t known for months as I made plans about how I would fix the house for his return.
It was one o’clock when the policeman woke me from my sleep and the squad car took me back into town. I kept thinking this was a dream, I’d wake up and it would be morning again. Four nurses knelt around the bed, being led through the decades of the rosary. A nun in white robes whispered to me.
‘He had a second massive stroke. It happened so suddenly we couldn’t prise the medal out of his hands.’
Only the altar is lit in the dark church. She kneels in the pew nearest the locked gates of the alcove where the coffin rests. The ivory limbs of the crucified figure hang in shadow now. Mass-cards and wreaths from neighbours and workmates line the coffin. She knows, for his sake, she must be strong till it is over. In the morning it rains. She travels in the black car alone with Mrs Whelan and an uncle who had come from London. A handful of friends from Rutland Street and some neighbours shelter under umbrellas. The priest intones in Latin, the gravediggers lower the coffin slowly with ropes.
Standing back among the tombstones without a hat in the rain, she sees Johnny alone, hesitant to approach. He comes back to the house and helps to dispense sandwiches. The uncle leaves for the boat; individually the neighbours file out until there is only the pair of them on each side of the fire listening to the April rain blown against the house.
‘I was afraid to come back,’ he says, ‘afraid of what I can’t control.’ She doesn’t reply and, for the first time since the funeral, begins to cry.
‘Stay, Johnny, don’t leave me tonight. I couldn’t bear it alone.’
The words are committed to the darkened house and it is she who l
eads him up those high stairs, as though grief were a pain that some greater anguish might eclipse.
‘Anything,’ is all she says, ‘do anything,’ and when he penetrates her for the first time ever, all she can think of is the clay capsizing as she feels each sharp thrust. Pressing down on her in the darkness he is stranger, brother, father, lover, all coming together in this single agonizing act. His lips drown in her hair again as he cries out in a muffled gasp, but this time she knows instinctively that she will never see him again. Yet over and over in the darkness she gives her body to him as though cutting loose all the barriers of grief in a final desperate gesture of loyalty.
Later, when she hears the bed springs creak, she holds her eyelids closed over the film of tears and pretends, for his sake, to be asleep as she lies among the tumbled blankets with the streaks of blood dried into her thighs and listens to him furtively dressing to leave. Just this once she wishes him to be strong as if it would somehow justify her sacrifice. She listens and is disappointed when he pauses uncertainly at the bedroom door, a timid, hesitant young man stripped of all childhood bravado.
The days that followed are all blurred together. I was allowed time off work and couldn’t bear to be alone in the house. At one o’clock each night I had to get out, it seemed as if every room was freezing. I’d walk the streets for an hour or two and when I’d come home, the atmosphere was gone. Often in the evenings I would forget and lay out the table for two. I’ve his suits of clothes in that wardrobe still. I’ve never had the courage to throw them out. One night I dreamt I found his leg beneath the bed and I was carrying it in a box around the cemetery trying to find his grave.
The Corporation confirmed that I would still have the house and I forced myself to try and think of other things. Some evenings I’d go out as far as Broom Bridge and walk back along the canal towards town. It had become the coldest spring for decades. Although there was sunshine by day, each night a heavy frost gripped everything, so that long stretches of the water were frozen over.
Gangs of children smashed the ice and threw it across the stiff surface. I bent down on the bank and broke a piece off. It skidded towards the far bank with a shrill, tinkling sound, sliding away into a hundred pieces. It was a lovely sensation, like the past breaking up. I broke piece after piece off, not caring if anybody looked. Lovers stood against the huge wooden locks where the water beneath the ice sprayed out in wild thundering foam.
I felt like a patient convalescing, gathering strength to begin my real life. I was nineteen years of age and had never been outside my native city. The Friday after I went back to work, the Dixielanders were playing in town. I joined the girls once again at the bus stop.
When I missed the first one I tried to put it down to grief. The shock was too much for my body. Always it had been at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t believe it would happen just from that one night. Every morning for the week before I was due again I’d be standing outside the church in the dark at twenty-past seven with a handful of pensioners. After Mass, I’d hurry to work not daring to think of the future.
One morning the sickness came over me as I was coming out the church door. It was as though fate was laughing at me. I had to run to the wall at the back of the car-park and endure the stares of the rest of the congregation. It didn’t come the second time and I panicked. I searched Drumcondra for Johnny’s digs and could find only a forwarding address for Manchester.
That night I crushed up forty aspirins in a bottle of lemonade. I went out walking in the street, hoping to be discovered collapsed in a doorway. I don’t think I was right in my head. I felt that the neighbours were watching me, they didn’t approve that I lived here alone. They had always done my father down, but I would not disgrace him. I put two fingers down my throat and spewed up the tablets. I would not give way to anyone. This was my home and my Daddy’s before me. I went straight to work to earn money to keep it, having watched the sun rise over the cold industrial estate.
She wears a small black star on her overcoat and always the same loose dresses. They put her silence down to delayed shock and mourning, in the canteen of the factory. On Friday evenings the girls ask her out, but she always smiles and refuses now. Sometimes they see her, walking around the streets near her home. One says she often stands on the bridge over the Tolka, oblivious to the people or the traffic around her. Later on, she never removes her thick coat even though she is sweating at the machine. Experienced eyes watch her walk in and out of the toilet.
‘She’s pregnant, and that’s a fact,’ they say, ‘and that fellow she was going out with must have left her.’
She shifts uneasily when they approach her after work and runs without speaking out of the gate. She pushes past the neighbours with her eyes kept down, and keeps the door locked and the curtains pulled. When Mrs Whelan and the others call, she only shouts at them from behind the closed door.
You were like some kind of strange invader. You were just there, beating within me all the time. When I was by myself I would talk to you inside, just like I am talking to you now. Two letters went to Johnny and the second was returned, marked not known at this address.
All I could think of was the house being taken away from me. I sensed my father still trapped here, as if his ghost was burdened by this new disgrace. And I knew I could not fail him now, the way that I had failed him in life. All the time I kept thinking, something must happen, it just can’t go on like this. At the same time every month I returned to pray in that church. The funeral had cost almost all my father’s savings. I hadn’t a penny to my name, and I knew that my job was gone from me the moment I confessed.
At night I would imagine that Johnny was about to board the boat from Liverpool. He’ll be here at dawn in a taxi, I’d whisper to you in my mind to help me sleep. He was strong and defiant. He would take us away from here. Every morning I’d watch from this window as the postman on his bicycle passed the house. By December I was huge and overdue.
He’s bound to come for Christmas, I told you, and placed a burning candle in every window on Christmas Eve. All night I waited alone in the sitting-room, watching the bobbing yellow flame flicker on the sill.
The waters broke at two o’clock and she staggered from one bedroom to the other. The pains came closer and closer together as she boiled water in the kitchen. She carried the saucepan up to her old bedroom, spilling most of the boiling water on the floor. When the child came, she seemed black as if touched with the mark of the devil. As she cut the cord and pulled her up still covered with the slime of birth to hold her in her arms, she cried and felt the pain would never end. The afterbirth came like a pulverized misshapen twin on the cold squares of lino. She washed the tiny girl carefully, pausing to check if she had stopped breathing. One moment she held her like a prize and the next she wanted to kill her. The little fists were clenched up towards the eyes, as if the child was protecting herself.
Before dawn came, she suddenly longed to be rid of her. The child lay on the bedspread, sickly looking and never crying as though it were about to die. She couldn’t bear to look at it, like a ghost that had crawled from her stomach to haunt her. The woman’s nails bit into her own skin. Still crying, she searched in the attic for old newspapers, and carefully wrapped the infant she feared in them.
A small room, lit only by the streetlight shafting through the ripped curtain. Two women, one huddled beneath the window without moving, the other seated in a chair constantly talking. Between them, the light slides across the dirty lino. Every story the girl knows by heart. They are the faces who populate the room. She sleeps with her eyes open and dreams. The park is a vast expanse of concrete filled with trees the colour of wallpaper. A boy and girl run forward from their parents towards the river that stretches into the horizon. The parents turn to watch them. All four have the face of her mother, the heads too large for the small frames of the children’s bodies.
As they throw white flakes of paper into the water the red worm slithers out on
to the bank, her hero, the only colour in the dream, fleshy muscles contracting as it slithers towards her, brushing through the people in the park, coiling between the grey headstones and onward through cavities and partitions along the row of houses, its blind mouth chewing life out of life, the red flesh contracting as it crawls to claim her. She wakes, unnoticed, and hears the voice continue.
It was after four o’clock and the streets were empty. I stepped over the wall so as not to squeak the gate and went down the road in the shadow of the hedges. There was nothing I could feel any more. My legs were unsteady, my body hurt. You never cried or stirred and I hoped that you were already dead. I was just so scared, I didn’t know what to do. They’d put me out of the house, I knew they would. They’d drive me from this street and from my job. I had nobody that I could trust. I was just too frightened to bring you into the world.
I climbed down the steps beside the green and waited in the shadows by the pile of rocks till a car went by. Across the road I could see a light still on in a bedroom of the parish priest’s house set back in the garden with the old trees and tall grass which always looked so inviting. I ran past and when I came to the side of the church I grew terrified. I stood as though expecting Christ himself to come out from that granite wall and confront me.
It must have been fifteen minutes that I waited there, holding you wrapped in those old papers and then I heard footsteps, like an old man’s, from the roadway and I started forward to leave you on the step of the side porch and ran off up the main street of the village, past the post office and the pubs. I hid in an alley-way for a few moments to see if anyone was following me and then, when old Turlough passed, I raced back down the hill on to the side of the new carriageway and slipped down into the gully by the stream.
I could hear the twigs breaking as I rolled down the bank and feel them snapping into my flesh when my skirt rode up. I came to rest against the base of one of the old trees and could see the stream murmuring just a few feet from my head. There was no sound anywhere, nobody would see if I just kept rolling. It was such bliss to imagine myself lying face up in one of the rocky pools to be found in the morning by the schoolchildren playing there. And you know, I could see it so vividly that it wasn’t me floating on the water. It was somebody else who had all my sins and my flaws and I was watching up above her, free for the first time, no longer feeling any grief or pain but just a sheer, soothing numbness.
The Woman's Daughter Page 6