‘You don’t just die.’
‘In my house you do.’
She reached for the vodka beside the bed, took a slug and passed it over.
‘It wasn’t his house,’ she said. ‘Belongs to my mother’s mother, my granny. She was born in the place, reared there. She’ll die in the place and we’ll bury her under the floorboards.’
Even as she spoke Joanie’s face changed, grew more guarded, vindictive, away from me.
‘He had money,’ she said. ‘He could have bought a house, any house. He’d the one job all his life, my Da, never missed a day sick. Do you know what my granny said when he asked to marry her daughter? “You would take away my only income, Mr Shaughnessy, you would leave me destitute.”’
I reached for her hand in the bed. When I touched it she looked at me and gave a small smile as if remembering where she was.
‘Never told anyone this before,’ she said. ‘Never understood what was happening when I was growing up. Only that my mother ran away, they might never have married at all. She had to be given away at the altar by her boss. If I ran away and got a flat I’d never go back. I’d let her rot in that stinking cottage without bothering a doctor. My granny calls it the time she was sick, but you need blood in your veins to be sick.’
Even though I held her hand, as she talked I knew from her voice that she was gone from me again, wrapped up in that world. Her mother had been pregnant with Joanie when they got the letter. They had been to the bank, got the deposit for a house together. Joanie seemed to have the details of her parents’ lives rehearsed in her heart, their plan to move in just for a few months until her granny was better and how those months became years when her father’s wife remained somebody else’s daughter. Years when a new home was always spoken of just as soon as granny is well.
Joanie ceased talking and shrugged her shoulders. She stretched sensually and pulled the sheet loosely around her. Her voice was suddenly expressionless.
‘It’s all years back now, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Can’t be that far back,’ I said, ‘haven’t you a baby sister?’
I could feel stiffness enter her hand like a speeded-up film of death.
‘Who are you? The fucking inquisition?’
She took a slug of the vodka and put it back down on the floor. I felt cheated a second time, no longer sure what to believe about her. We stared each other out for a moment, both resentful and wary.
‘Some lads get frightened if you tell them these things,’ she began tentatively. ‘They get the impression you’re trying to land them with somebody else’s mistake. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
I understood and I wanted to think it explained everything about her.
‘What do you call the child?’
‘Roseanna.’
‘That’s a nice name. Why don’t we bring her out together sometime?’
‘Do you mean that, mean you really don’t mind?’ She was excited, half sitting up in the bed with the sheet around her.
‘Why should I mind?’
‘Not all men would say that. You’re very special and yet you don’t know it.’
I was silent, giving her the chance if she wished to tell me about the father, but she had gone quiet and unsure of herself again.
‘Do you like me?’ she asked.
‘Of course I do.’
‘But how could you really?’ she said. ‘I’ve small tits and a big arse.’
‘That isn’t how you should see yourself.’
‘But it is, isn’t it? It’s true, that’s how people see me.’
I pulled the sheet back. She pouted, holding in her breath as if to emphasize her diminutive breasts.
‘They are tiny,’ she said and then rolled over, ‘and I mean, just look at this.’
It was a quarter past one in the morning when I woke up after that.
‘Your granny will have the National Guard out,’ I said, ‘and all the airports watched.’
‘Let me stay,’ she said sleepily and snuggled against me. ‘I don’t want to go back.’
It took me half an hour to persuade her to leave the bed. She kept trying, and almost succeeding, to turn my efforts into a form of foreplay. I finally had her dressed and out on the street. We got a taxi as far as the garage on top of the hill overlooking her house.
‘Let me out here,’ she said, ‘I want to walk.’ I paid the driver off and went with her, the stones of the cemetery shaded by yew trees in the moonlight on one side of the road, the bright glow of the factory skylights on the other. She paused at the bridge beside the pub and looked back.
‘Think of the fun we could be having in your flat.’
‘Joanie, you haven’t been here for two days. If you want to leave home you should leave home, but you can’t have it both ways. Come on, just put in an appearance.’
I tried to kiss her goodnight but she pulled away.
‘You don’t own me,’ she said, ‘I’m not some ornament. What are you waiting here for?’
‘I want to see you go in.’
‘No, you just go on now, then I’ll go in.’
I turned and walked back past the mill of youths talking outside the long-closed pub, then waited a moment and returned to the corner. Joanie was walking up the hill without looking back, her eyes fixed on the new town houses with bright cars parked on the sloping driveways. Across the road on both sides of the single cottage I could see the outline of what had once been walls. She was almost past it before she slipped across the road and in the gate. There were no lights on in the cottage and none came on. I felt suddenly relieved to be rid of her and yet inexplicably alone.
I was a virgin then. Perhaps I should have mentioned that. But it still does not explain the obsession that, in the following days, seemed to border on madness. I could not wake without thinking of her. Bending down to a bored pupil I would suddenly be suffocated by an image of her. It was as if I had only to put a hand out to touch her hair, as though I could hear her breathing, the whisper of her voice. I was perpetually tense, ready to snap without reason in the schoolroom. Often in the course of reading aloud my voice would trail off as the briefest memory of that dream came back. To my horror I’d grow erect, sit at my high desk petrified somebody would enter and I’d have to stand up to greet them. My youngest pupil would stare at me inquisitively from behind her mass of curls. I’d take deep breaths, clench the book before me and try to continue.
I was due my monthly afternoon off. I walked through the wood towards her cottage, turned left up by it and took the tram into the city. Passing a pawnshop window I stared for half an hour at a row of cigarette cases before hurriedly entering to purchase one. I kept it hidden in my pockets, changing it from suit to suit as though it were stolen. I no longer ventured out on the road in search of her but spent my evenings in the Jolly Toper at a rough deal table away from the muttering locals, no longer caring that word of it could threaten my position. I was left to myself there, an outsider between classes and homes. Occasionally if I called for more drink someone at the bar might mimic my voice. They grinned in their shabby clothes, knowing they had my measure.
I’d go out and leave them to their gossip and skittles when the evening grew dark enough. I’d turn for home up past the Protestant church, waiting till I was alone before cutting across the fields towards the wood. The rich lunatics were cloistered in high rooms out of sight behind the ordered trees and shrubs I could glimpse through Farnham’s Gates. I’d cross Savages Lane and listen, always convinced I could hear an old man’s footsteps dogging my own. Below on the road the light of a cart might pass.
I’d keep well back among oak and yew trees, ragwort and day lilies. Field wood rush, quinach leana in my mother’s tongue, luzula campestris in Hegerty’s. I had the words for everything except what I was searching for. The stuttering child of poverty, the orphan, the classical scholarship boy, the tutor with a pressed handkerchief in his breast pocket. I was none of them any longer. I was only a
man with passion, with lust. My behaviour was madness but the things Hegerty had craved for me no longer made sense. The room with a brass bed and the maid who brought water. A place above the footman who could look down on the gardener. Even his cold perfection of Latin seemed as empty as my father’s roofless hovel in Sligo.
By the gates of the lower madhouse at the bridge I would hear my blood pumping so loudly that it drowned out whatever inexplicable screams came from behind the high walls. I would think of starved uncles and aunts as I stared at the overgrown famine mound across the road, of names my father had kept alive, names that died in his final breath of cholera. I’d cross the stream where cattle shied away in the darkness and wait where I could see the lights of the cottages. Above at Cross Guns her father would be working in the mill, his face whitened by dust like a spectre’s. It was on the third night that I saw Bridget emerge through the back window. She glanced behind her in terror as though looking at someone, then turned and plunged down the grassy slope towards the stream. I drew myself into the shadows, frightened of being seen by her. She wore a long linen nightdress and had a rough blanket around her shoulders that spread out like a cloak as she raced into the trees. My heart thumped and I was soaked in sweat. Had she guessed at my nightly vigil, was she somehow offering herself? Or was there somebody in her room who had been terrorizing her? I glanced towards the open window waiting for a body to appear. Bridget had vanished up the steep wooded slope behind the small dairy. I approached the cottage cautiously. The rooms were in darkness. I crept to the open window and knelt down. There was a small bed in the corner with the clothes thrown back. A bluebottle that had bumbled its way in was bashing itself against the glass. Its buzzing grated on my nerves. I wanted to enter but was too scared. I glanced behind and reached one hand in. It touched a piece of cloth on the floor. I drew it out and found I was holding a petticoat. I pressed my face against its cool folds, closed my eyes in a white bliss and breathed in the scent of her. A door opened in a neighbouring cottage, a man letting out a dog who began to bark. I dropped the petticoat back inside and, reaching into my pocket to take out the gold cigarette case, let it fall on to the cloth on the floor with a muted thud. The dog was jumping at the stone wall between the gardens. ‘Rabbits,’ the man said, cursing him, and closed the door. I turned and as I ran back down the slope I thought how someone watching would think that it was I who was the chasing figure Bridget had run in terror from.
After that I found myself drinking with Joanie most evenings, going to bed before closing time, having to struggle later on to get her home. One or two mornings a week a phone call would come in to work that she was sick, but I knew I’d find her in a doorway down the lane when I left the yard. For six weeks it lasted, awkward breaks in work sitting at different tables from each other in the scabby canteen, drunken pay-day nights when we would be flush with cash, other evenings when I had barely food in the flat. I liked that about her, how she didn’t care when money was tight. We’d just take to the bed earlier, walk out past the cemetery after midnight to her house.
Her dreams were simple, a flat anywhere near town, trips down to the Red Corner furniture shop to fit it out with cheap mock antiques. Heavy curtains and a dim red bulb in the corner. She kept that room in her mind, brought it out in a softer voice when we were alone in bed, changing the furnishings around, the colour of the carpet, describing some table she had seen in a window.
‘And an old-fashioned wooden cot in the corner,’ I whispered once and then regretted speaking. What landlord in Dublin would want to know a single mother with a child? If she left home we both knew what would await her, the ninth floor of a Ballymun tower block or a house out in the foothills of Tallaght.
‘Bring the child out,’ I said. ‘Saturday. We’ll take her up to the Phoenix Park.’
She smiled and nodded her head on the pillow but I knew by then that on Saturday she would arrive by herself. Her excitement at my acceptance of the child was gone. She had never mentioned her again, as if no connection was allowed between her life with me and the world of that house. I had never glimpsed her granny or her child. All I had ever seen was her sister running for videos at night and the light that never seemed to go out when I lingered in the shadows of the old wall on the hill, not wanting to go back alone to the flat with its crumpled bed still warm from our flesh, not wanting to lose the curious tacky magic which remained with me after she had left.
It was two weeks after we met that a youth passed us one night at the traffic lights. He was around twenty, with that puffed up, glazed look which comes from medication. Joanie stared after him.
‘That’s the creep who found the room where the girl was locked up,’ she said. ‘Johnny Whelan. Lives with his granny up the North Road. The fellow’s been a spacer ever since.’
I had no idea what she was talking about. Joanie pointed up at the last of the old Corporation houses on the hilltop overlooking the cemetery.
‘You see the house at the end of the street where the light is still burning,’ she said, ‘that’s in the room where the girl was locked up. You remember, it was in all the papers about three years ago?’
I did remember now. The photographs of the room came back. It felt eerie standing among the crowds spilling out from the pub with nobody even bothering to glance up at it.
‘You mean someone lives there now?’
‘It’s been bought from the Corporation and done up and sold again. Why wouldn’t someone live there? Worse things have happened. Used to play nicknacks on her when I was growing up and she’d chase us down the road with a black knife. There were stories about her but it was just like the films, you didn’t have to believe them when the lights came back on.’
‘But is it a family living there now?’
‘How would I know?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t go near that house. Who cares anyway?’
I crossed into a small park by the stream while Joanie lagged behind, upset at my interest. I could discern the outline of a row of toys and the poster of a pop star in the window.
‘How can children sleep there?’ I asked. ‘In that same room?’
‘Why the hell shouldn’t they?’ Joanie almost shouted. ‘The past is the past, you’re the guy who is always saying that. No connections, no ties, eh. Well, it’s their house now, they can do what they like in it.’
I looked around. Joanie was sulking, yet I knew it was more than just her usual quickly forgotten tantrum. She was genuinely upset about something.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked gently.
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘It’s done enough damage that house. I should never have shown it to you. Gives me the creeps up there.’
‘Were you ever in it?’
For a moment I didn’t think she was going to answer.
‘I knew someone who was.’
The almost angry abandonment she normally possessed was gone. It was like she was deflated, like somebody had let the air out of her. I smiled to try and cheer her.
‘Is this the girl who watches horror videos every night?’
‘It’s all right in films, it’s sick in real life.’
The next morning in the house Bridget looked distraught and haggard. I glimpsed her down a corridor kneeling beside a cast-iron bucket. She leaned back on her knees holding the floor cloth in one hand as she wiped the back of her wrist across her brow. She lowered her hand and noticed me watching her. Her eyes were glazed, terror filled. She rinsed the cloth in the bucket and stretched her shoulders forward, scrubbing the cold marble without once looking back up. I climbed the stairs and leaned out across the banisters to gaze down at her, her body thrusting forward with the cloth, the outline of her buttocks through the uniform jutting higher than her head. What did I feel? A sense of unexplained power. Whatever secret she carried she carried alone. I was suddenly dizzy, that boy again running around the Black Church to meet the devil. I thought I had missed him but he had been inside me all along, wai
ting to envelop my limbs. I wanted Bridget, I wanted her fear, the smell of sweat and other moistures I had never known. My knuckles were white on the banisters, my legs trembled. She straightened her shoulders and arched her neck back, her eyes rising up to stare straight at mine. She never flinched from my gaze. It was I who drew back and stumbled down the corridor, still seeing her in my mind, arched there like a swan, as motionless as some obscene Chinese statuette.
Was she scared and needing help or trying to snare me in some trap? Below the windows of my room the rich got on with their jaded, pathetic lives; carriages drawing up, a gentleman and lady on horseback, the dull thud of croquet in the distance like skulls being cracked open. I snapped more violently at my pupils, not caring what they reported back. The little girl was near tears, her fingers, trained for a life of ringing bells, dug so tightly into her arm that they left slender red impressions on her skin.
I lay in my room till evening. The pillow might have been a rock under my neck. I twisted and tried to reason with myself but I was in the grip of something that was no longer rational. I heard the voices of maids leaving by the back door. I could imagine her running through the woods, knew she would be waiting at that gap in the hedgerow. Just when it seemed I had won I began to shiver as though I would die if I stayed there. I pulled the door open and ran through the corridor. I told myself I just had to escape into the air to clear my head but I knew where my hurrying boots were going.
I watched her through the trees anxiously entwining her hands, turning her face away when a carriage or a man passed on the road. She stared across the low meadow towards the smoke of the cottages and did not look at me directly when I found the courage to climb down and join her.
‘Were you here last night?’ she demanded. ‘You must tell me, I must know.’
‘Why do you think I was here?’
Bridget produced a white cloth and unwrapped the cigarette case. It looked cheap and battered in the dull evening light.
‘I told no other man, no living soul about my dream, my joke. My father will be due home from the village. He must leave again for work in the mill soon. He’ll beat me in the morning if I should miss him. Tell me, Sir, be honest I beg you, is this yours?’
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