I looked at him and he pointed at the Gardai climbing back into their squad car.
‘Our lady friend has a granny who doubles as an all-in wrestler. Half past two last night she was on the phone to every librarian in the city threatening hellfire if her granddaughter wasn’t immediately delivered home.’
‘Joanie’s granny is in an old folks’ home. She lives with her parents.’
‘Her parents are stiffs up in Glasnevin cemetery. The girl lives with her granny and not in those town houses, according to the police, but that old cottage across from them.’
Joanie had vanished inside. The girls climbing up to tidy Billy’s van grinned as they passed us.
‘Does everybody know where she was?’
‘Come on kid, yourself and Queen Victoria were hardly discreet.’
A big house is like a clerk’s office in a novel by Dickens – to an outsider, high windows and silence broken only by the busy hum of work, but for those within the very walls seem alive with whispered secrets. Bridget’s mother had died in a fire when she was a child, this much I gleaned merely by passing doorways where undermaids stooped at their work. She lived alone with her father in the new cottages near the bridge. He worked nights in season in the new mill at Cross Guns and sometimes took work at Shallon when the milling was slack.
Lingering in a corridor I heard the cook discuss the death of her mother. ‘Only four or five she was, alone with the charred corpse all night. Do you think she was crying when her father found her in the morning? She was just staring about the room, didn’t even speak to anyone for days afterwards.’
Why had her mother taken her out of the bed that night? Was she lonely perhaps, a bride left alone thinking of her husband, his face white as a death mask, hauling sacks of flour to the hoist? Nobody ever knew what had happened, they say her mother must have stumbled at the hearth, perhaps building the fire up with turf. There was a wound where her forehead struck the stone. They could still discern the outline of it though most of her skin was burnt. The hair must have caught hold first, a crackling, licking noise, a sickening smoulder giving way to the first yellow spurt of flame. For some reason her clothes had not taken aflame. Her nightdress was white, untouched, modestly shielding her legs when they found her, her belly betraying the fact that she was six months pregnant. The floor was stone. The fire had flickered its own way out. Bridget could walk but they felt that she had never moved all night, her legs splayed in front of her, her body upright, her eyes never ceasing their orbit of the room. There seemed nothing the cook did not know about that night; Bridget’s father arriving home, the smell in his nostrils, neighbours crowding in the door behind him. O’Rourke was almost upon me before I heard his footsteps. He passed on to the kitchen with the curtest of nods and the cook stopped talking.
Was it coincidence that I seemed to glimpse Bridget every time I passed through the house? Kneeling on the stairs to scrub each step, scurrying down passageways as if frightened of the very furniture, peering out through a window at her mistress preening on the lawn like an elaborate parasolled scarecrow. Always I felt I had just missed a slight raising of her eyes before she slipped away. My mind began to play tricks. I felt that if I did not pass her on each journey some misfortune would befall, began to wonder was she too looking out for me? I could not describe the fevered things I dreamt of at night: her body whiter than white against the grained wood of the master’s study and every thrust of our limbs a desecration of the crystal glass and marble floors built on thousands of deaths. It was like a virus let loose inside me, without reason to it as it took over my life.
Each day I heard some new whisper from the parlourmaids about her, that she was odd, half demented, always whispering to herself. Her eyes looked jaded as though she never slept and that same troubled look never left her like a vague foreboding that could not be shaken off.
My lessons finished early. From four o’clock I was my own master, expected only to keep out of people’s way. Often I would explore the attics; trunks of abandoned clothes and lives, a scamper of rats, the same curious rich melancholy as in a graveyard at evening. I am not sure who was the most startled when I came across her there, and who was the least surprised. She had a trunk open, was kneeling with both arms sifting through the musty garments. She looked back over her shoulder at the noise of my footfall, a slight smile on her face, her eyes staring past me for a moment. Then she coloured as if naked and rose, dusting her uniform as she pushed past. She pushed the door open and ran, the hinges swinging back and forth after her.
That night I dreamt that I woke, knowing she was there kneeling before the trunk. I walked from my room down the unlit corridors. I opened the attic door without speaking. I told myself it was a dream, tried to wake myself up but I could not. The grey moonlight slanted through the narrow skylights. The only noise was that of bats whirling between the rafters above us. I bolted the door behind me. She lay across the trunk, her knees on the bare boards, the white promise of calf exposed. Her face was serious but yet again I felt I had just missed a smile, that if I turned my eyes away her gaze would mock me. She never raised her head as she followed my instructions mutely, the garments slowly taken from her shoulders, the dress and then petticoats lowered and stepped from, the stays loosened, the skin revealed. When she was naked we stood facing each other. Her long hair obscured her face as she knelt before me, drawing me out briefly into the moonlight and down the shafting tunnel of her throat. Her teeth were sharp when she touched against it, her tongue seeming to buckle against the head, driving back the foreskin to cling against the knob, exposing the curved glans to her hot saliva. Often the shaft was buried in her throat, my hands in her hair as she almost choked on its length, then only the tip of her tongue would run lightly over the head. My legs began to go from me as I felt the spasm begin and suddenly it had become her turn to play master. She pinched the base of my penis sharply and held it between her finger and thumb on the throbbing vein as I tried to dislodge her. I put my hand down to block hers and she squeezed my balls tightly, forcing me to cry out. I sank to my knees till we were even, face to face. Downstairs it was suddenly daylight. I could hear the household moving about their duties. She was not smiling. Her mouth opened under mine and she bit my tongue when it slid in.
‘Fuck me,’ she said, ‘but fuck me when I tell you. Fucking Johnny tutor. Fucking Sligo dirt. You get me pregnant, Johnny tutor, I’ll come after you with a knife, I’ll cut your balls out. Remember that, tutor.’
She reached out and with her nails suddenly ripped the skin below my left eye. I could feel a tearing pain and hear her laugh at the blood on her fingers. The slap sent her reeling back on to the floor. She lay with her back turned, both hands held up to her face. I could not tell if I heard sobbing or laughter. She half rose on her haunches as if to crawl away but when I touched her hips with my arms she knelt as if frozen, her forehead pressed against the floorboards, her knees a bare foot apart. As I began to enter her she turned her head, sinking her teeth into the flesh just below my thumb to stop from crying out. We were sharing that pain now, the more I pushed into her the sharper her teeth clung to my flesh. There was blood on my hand, blood on my prick. It was like pushing my way into an impassable future, like piercing the weight of nothingness. My penis felt that it would snap. She lifted her head from my bleeding hand to shriek once – I did not know from pleasure or pain – a long drawn out howl like a dying animal. It seemed loud enough to fill the house and yet in the silence that followed with only the sounds of our breath and hearts, we could hear from below the same unconcerned noises of the house, a maid climbing the stairs in short obedient steps, men unloading wood in the courtyard below. The attic was cut off from its time and its world now, nothing we did or said in it could ever penetrate into the ordered twilight of those landings and stairs. When it was over I lay across her body and neither of us spoke. The bats blundered against the window. The light came and went as if days were flickering past like trees from a ca
rriage window. There was the aftertaste of both pleasure and pain and yet I felt strangely numb. It was as if neither of us were the people we actually were, as if we were puppets forced to act in some child’s game. The figure who lay beneath me, who had howled like some primeval animal, was this the girl whose vulnerability had attracted me just mornings before? And was I myself that timid tutor who had passed his days like a half-ghost half-monk wandering through those rooms below? I gazed down at our bodies and felt an overwhelming sorrow for us both. She stirred below me, dislodging my shrivelled penis, turned her face towards mine and whispered in that normal frightened voice of hers.
‘It’s still there, haunting me, it’s not gone. God help me, oh, God help me, Sir.’
I woke drained and felt the dampness of my legs. I was filled with a terror I could not explain and yet filled with an excitement that was even more terrifying. If I believed in ghosts I would have sworn something evil was in the air. I pushed the window open. The air was cool, reassuring. Through the trees I could see the figure of Matthew, an old man who often slept out in the woods, staring towards me.
I wanted to avoid Bridget next day as if afraid to face her and yet I knew I would keep pacing the corridors, backtracking, trying to fool myself that I needed things in rooms until I finally caught a glimpse of her. I was at a bend in the stairs when we passed. She blushed, lowered her eyes, hurried on. It was the trunk, I told myself, being caught going through it in the attic. She was ashamed, frightened I’d inform on her. Yet I couldn’t shake the thought of what if her haste was more than that, if she knew of my dream, the thoughts in my head.
I couldn’t sleep that night; lighting the candle, blowing it back out, listening for noises as though the room was unknown to me. I knew what I would have to do but kept trying to pretend that sleep would come instead. Eventually I rose and dressed, moved stealthily up the stairs to the attics, paused at the door as if uncertain whether to knock. What did I expect inside: answers, an end to this fever, a frightened girl waiting for me with her hair let down, a creature of breasts and claws luring me towards some unknown terror? I was no longer thinking straight. I pushed the door open. Dust, a filter of grey through the skylight, the solemn bulk of heavy trunks. I waited for hours there. I was no longer who I was, all the learning had slipped from me. Hegerty’s language, the ice palace he had taught me to live within, the words priests had whispered in my ears, all of it had evaporated and what was left was that starving boy, bewildered in a street of screaming faces, knowing only an overwhelming hunger.
My work began to suffer. I knew it would not be long before it was noticed. But I drifted each evening from the house to the village. Being the occasion of excessive fighting and drinking the Humours of that village have long been banned. In May of each year a shaved and soaped pig had been let loose for men to try to catch, bell-ringers were caught by blindfolded men, yokels held grinning contests through horse collars, and smock races for serving girls were run. Only the May Pole remained now, a battered strip of wood with flaking blue and red stripes of paint. Outside the tavern where I drank the local youths threw pebbles at it as they crowded around the horse trough to leer at the serving girls coming in from the farms.
In the unlit smoky room inside the older men grunted their respect as I passed but they knew I was not gentry. Language was all that kept me above them, pull that magic rug of words and I would land beneath them, a cottier’s son back in my proper station. The local ale was filthy, the local speech, at times to an educated ear almost a broken English, pronounced in a short and guttural manner. I’d wipe my lips and move out through the doorway, pausing at the bridge on Church Street to gaze down the valley past the woods to the city. There is good hunting there for rabbits and birds, often the trees were thick with shouts below Savages Lane. The young boy Turlough, who sometimes helped at Shallon, was often to be glimpsed, earning a farthing for carrying this or running with that. Old Matthew squatted among the trees in the dusk watching the young men at their sport. Some years back he was said to have brought the new rector to the very spot in the old graveyard where a local cross had been buried. I had tried to talk to him once but he just stared at me hunched down among the branches like an animal. Sometimes children stone him or a farmer stuck for labour has him stooped in a field. Mostly the villagers pay him no more heed than if he were some ancient plant rooted there in the ground.
I was biding my time, like a lover pacing the floor before a rendezvous. I’d check my timepiece, watch for the road to clear, try to saunter casually down through the summer dust of the road through the woods to the city, quickening my step when I was beyond the village, terrified she might leave early, then slow again, equally nervous at being seen waiting at the gap between the whitethorn hedges that bordered the gully down to the stream. I would stand back among the bushes and wait for her step, then dart forward and be climbing back up the road when she rounded the bend. I lived for that brief moment, knowing both ignominy and elation, catching my breath as her hair came into view. I never spoke, hurrying on as if going somewhere in haste. She would pass with a blush, lowering her head, her feet hastening beneath her petticoats till she was safely away.
One evening she must have taken a short cut through the woods. When I reached my spot she was there at the gap before me, staring at the cattle standing in the water below, their tails chasing the flies that bothered them. For all my obsession with her I never gave much thought to how she viewed me. I had felt myself somehow invisible to her, now I was shocked to see her there. I was almost past before her gaze stopped me. I was a tutor and she a serving girl, I told myself. I tried to hide my anxiety in a mannered voice.
‘Who are you waiting for, child?’
‘A gentleman with a gold case to offer me a cigarette.’
I laughed, waiting for her to smile, but her face was serious.
‘And who would he be?’
‘I do not know, but that is what I have always dreamt of.’
An old woman appeared from the cottage beside the stream and, with a glance up, scattered feed to the hens in her yard. Bridget’s eyes followed her.
‘What else do you dream of?’
‘Things. I don’t always understand them. Is your name Johnny?’
I laughed.
‘Sean I was christened, but Johnny was what my father always called me. How did you know that?’
‘I didn’t but it suits you. Johnny I hardly knew you.’
She sang the line of the song with a curious childish lilt. I have always been used to guile in a young girl’s voice. Bridget’s openness frightened me somehow. A hay cart was coming up from the bridge, its driver unknown to me. She turned her head and stared at me.
‘Why do you always wait here until I pass, Sir?’
I felt exposed suddenly, wanted to deny it. The cart creaked past us, the driver giving the horse the slightest flick of his whip. I could hear the sound of male voices shouting in the woods and a girl’s laugh.
‘Why don’t you answer? I answered your questions. Have you read all the books up in the master’s library?’
‘All of them, no.’ I laughed. ‘Many are just minutes of civic meetings.’
‘But you read, you know things. You’re a tutor.’
‘I know some things, I …’
‘Are there ghosts?’
Those troubled eyes frightened me.
‘In books, yes. Stories.’
‘Are there ghosts? Real ghosts, tell me.’
‘Why do you ask?’
She looked across the field towards a pile of blackened stones on the hilltop that rose above the row of labourers’ cottages near the bridge and suddenly began to walk.
‘Go to hell, Johnny tutor, go to hell.’
I was due out that morning and Joanie was not. A girl down for another route had phoned in sick and it would have been easy for me to switch the schedules so we could be together but I didn’t. All that afternoon as I dispensed Westerns and Mills & Boons l
ike Valium in a half-finished housing estate I could imagine Joanie with her pile of torn covers sitting among the girls, vulnerable now to their slights, or sulking alone in the book store, gazing up at the rows of old volumes with a half-mesmerized, half-bored look.
The van got stuck in traffic and it was after six before we got back. The yard was empty with just the drivers locking up. At the corner of the lane Joanie stepped out from a boarded-up doorway and began to walk ahead of me. I had to hurry to catch her. She looked straight ahead as we walked beneath the flags along the river. We were like children, overtired and resentful.
‘You lied to me,’ I said.
‘I was open with you, honest. You were holding back as if I couldn’t give you pleasure.’
‘You lied to me about your parents, about where you lived. You lied to me about who you are.’
She stopped, as if all the pent-up fury of those captive hours in the office was about to explode.
‘Don’t you tell me who I am. If you came from the house that I come from you’d wish you were someone else as well.’
She strode on ahead. She looked puffy, slightly ridiculous in her black lace with her shoulders stiff but her head slumped. Alone with her again, my reservations from the afternoon seemed unjust. She hurried over the bridge as I went after her.
‘What has a house got to do with it? Do you think I care where you’re from? You’re just yourself, that’s all.’
She was silent, unsure if she should be offended.
‘Listen, Joanie,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink before you go home.’
That was how we wound up in bed again together. That summer the light never seemed to want to die. At a quarter to eleven there was still a grey hint of daylight, enough for me to see her face as we lay under the sheet.
‘My mother died in childbirth,’ Joanie whispered. ‘It still happens you know. My father just died some time afterwards.’
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