The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘You could be arrested for that,’ she said. ‘I’m only fifteen.’

  After she went in he stood in the shadow of the wall till the light came on in her bedroom. As long as he was surrounded by that scent of trees and earth her presence seemed to remain there with him. An hour later he walked home, clenching his fists to prevent himself from singing as he passed the remaining couples pressed into the shadows of back lanes and hidden corners.

  From then on he rarely went to visit Turlough, the old man. It was his mother who had often sent him down there when he was a child. See if the old man needs paraffin for his stove, see if the old man needs messages. Since her death he had found himself going back there, often just standing across from Turlough as he sat on the stone on the grassy bank beside the road, but occasionally going down into the small gully where rusting corrugated iron glistened on the roof of the old man’s cottage. He did not go there to talk of his mother’s death but to get away from it, from the spaces in neighbours’ conversations, their cloying sympathy, the way her name was avoided like a taboo.

  But instead now most evenings found him with Joanie, their heads pressed close over copy-books and exam papers in her granny’s kitchen, and later talking with their arms round each other till her grandmother banged on the kitchen wall from her bedroom next door in the early hours. One clear and mild night in late March they lay out on a blanket on her shed roof, sharing cigarettes illicitly and following the slow orbit of satellites through the stars. Behind them a grey meadow stretched down to the stream that bordered the carriageway. Johnny could hear the sound of water as he inhaled, his stomach slightly sick at the unfamiliar taste of smoke. The back door of the house suddenly opened and they could see the outline of her granny.

  ‘Joanie,’ the woman called and then, when the girl stubbed out the cigarette and ignored her, she called the name again with a sharp edge in her voice.

  ‘I’m here. What do you want?’ Joanie called back reluctantly.

  ‘Are you with that boy?’

  ‘We’re just talking.’

  ‘That’s okay. I thought you were sneaking in to your father.’

  The door closed. Johnny stared at her in the moonlight. Her face was expressionless, her eyes staring up.

  ‘You said your father was dead.’

  ‘He might as well be,’ she said at last. ‘Alone in that room. It’s no business of yours, Johnny.’

  ‘You mean he lives in that house with you and I’ve never even seen him?’

  ‘He’s a recluse, like Howard Hughes. Now, I thought we came out here to get away from them and be by ourselves.’

  One by one the lights went out along the estate of houses across the road as Joanie opened her blouse and then her jeans. Her skin was greyed, mysterious in the starlight before they drew the blanket over them.

  ‘You’re only fifteen,’ he said.

  ‘I want to be older,’ she said. ‘Much older. A Victorian woman wrapped up in bodices and stays. Close your eyes. We’re lying on an old Chesterfield couch. Touch me.’

  After a few moments she gasped and caught his hand.

  ‘Not here, Johnny, not now, I’d scream, I’d have to bite into something to stop myself.’

  He trembled against her flesh as she held him tight.

  ‘Soon,’ she said. ‘It will happen soon.’

  A gruff fucker with a goat, scruffy from the filth of the roads. Patric or Patrgh or some such name, prophesying out of him down by the steam. His three gods that form the one god, his riddles and his trickery. Too many bloody foreigners pass this way and this blow-in not even bothering to hawk or trade with us. His own scrawny goat given to him by some raggedy king up in the arse of Tara. The gods would piss on you if you sacrificed the like of it to them.

  People are too gullible in this place, taking in every showman and tramp. Baptizing them is what he calls it, his huge feet splashing around in my stream. I’ve to drink that water when it comes down past my hut. It’s bad enough without his dirt and the head lice of half the village. I blame the druids, that lax shower of bastards. The ones in my father’s day would have set their hounds on him at sight or cut out his tongue. Down there now arguing the toss with him, their gods against his god, their laws against his claptrap.

  There’s only one set of gods in this place and any thickhead knows that. Down where the two streams meet at evening, the branches leaning across the beryl trout pools. Often I sit there for days, not needing food or drink or even to shit, not knowing if it’s light or dark, not feeling cold or rain. I can smell murder there and that’s a fact. And I’ll welcome it, just see if I don’t. One more face for someone else to glimpse when the water is as clear as its name. Water and fire, fire and water, they are the only gods that are renewable. That knacker with his cross which some foreigner died on for us, it will never catch on here, just like all the other fads.

  This morning I wandered into the thick of the crowd. His lips were white with dust, his eyes half mad. Himself and the druids were at it blow for blow. Nobody even saw me slipping away. A scrawny goat but the winter is coming. His master will never find the tracks up through the great wood. I’m partial to goat’s milk just before dawn, squeezing the teat down, letting it run over my beard. A fool and his goat are easily parted and it serves him right. The gods were here long before the likes of us and they’ll not be shifted by all his tricks and taunts.

  Every morning before dawn I pause at this last spot. Concrete and metal between the ghosts of water and me. The skylights of the factories glowing like a distant city. His coarse voice merging with the Abbot Flann, successor of Duibhlitter, Caencomhrac and Faelchu, preceding Fearghus, then Cuimneach, then Bran. The hoarsest of whispers and the faintest, like old machines in those factories, grinding away by themselves for eternity after somebody forgot to switch them off.

  Over the days that followed he hardly slept, his grandmother having to force him to eat. Joanie’s face came between him and every thought, her voice constantly into his mind. He couldn’t bear being in the garden after rain because the scent of damp earth brought back the night they met.

  The weekend came and after midnight on the Saturday they cycled out past the final street light, down the slope by the old ruined barn at Jamestown and away into the countryside. The noise of cattle breathing in the fields, the scurry of claws in a ditch, the steady hum of bicycle wheels as they rode through Dubber Cross and Pass-If-You-Can, beneath the single street light of St Margaret’s with its holy well and out along the twisting lanes towards the airport. Joanie stopped by the gateway of a field of wheat. They hid the bicycles among the briars in the ditch and climbed the three-bar gate.

  With the stalks reaching up above their waists, it felt like being cast adrift in a grainy ocean. They stumbled for their footing and clasped each other’s hands as they waded towards the ruin of a tower set on a headland in the centre of the field. It had no roof and smelt as if cattle had often sheltered there. The earth was flattened in one corner where they laid the blanket down. Johnny had a naggin of whiskey which burnt against his throat as he raised it and gazed at the moon-grey crop encircling them. Never had he been so alone with her, cut off on this small island of dry mud and old stone. A wind shivered the wheat. He knew the cold had not caused the goose pimples on his flesh.

  ‘A couch,’ he said, feeling the blanket under his hand. She knelt down beside him.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘A serving girl driving her Daddy’s cattle home, waylaid by a gentleman and lured here against her will.’

  He mounted her slim limbs nervously, uncertain of what to do next, and when he felt the sheathed tip begin to enter her he twisted and bucked frantically. Joanie laughed and calmed him though she seemed nervous herself, taught him how to enter her slowly and find his rhythm, till he forgot the fear that he would grow limp or come too soon.

  When he came he cried out, swamped by the sensation. After a few moments she put his jacket over her bare shoulders and reached down
to take an old cigarette case from her jeans. She lit a cigarette and walked over to the tower entrance. The fantasy seemed forgotten. He felt suddenly cold and wanted to sleep.

  ‘My granny says she often sees you going down to the old fellow who lives in that cabin below the road. She says he’s half mad, has been since she was a girl. What are you talking to the likes of him for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Johnny said. ‘Been calling into him since I was a kid. I suppose I used to find him interesting, talking about the way things used to be here. He’d know everything about this tower if I asked him.’

  Joanie turned and her face seemed hurt and bewildered.

  ‘All that matters about this place is what we’ve just done here. Before that it was only stones and muck and cow shite. It’s our secret now. Why would you want to spoil it by telling some old knacker like that?’

  Johnny went to stand beside her. Thinking back he couldn’t even remember when he had first seen the old man. Turlough had just always seemed to be there, a lost figure outside the new shopping centre or leaning on his stick at the crest of the main street to watch Johnny march past to early mass beneath the tricolour and papal flag in his green cub scout uniform. But somehow the old man had become linked with earlier memories, standing at the bottom of the long garden with the girl from next door shouting to scare him, Look, the Bogeyman’s in the hedge. And as he turned to run he had always imagined that he caught a glimpse of an old face watching, shaped out of twigs and crooked branches.

  The fact that the old man never treated him as a child had attracted him first. At nine or ten years of age he would sit in the dim rooms of the cottage, listening to the old voice talking about things which had occurred in the village once, with a half-bored and half-fascinated sense of importance at being there.

  The two grey photographs of Turlough’s dead father on the kitchen wall, the four tiny panes of glass in the thick wooden frame set deep in the narrow windows, the bare flagstones and blackened wall above the fireplace. The cottage was set on a small incline below the road, a useless patch of land that had somehow escaped the planner’s designs. Nearby a small stream rushed from an underground pipe to meander its way down, brushing past the gable and on for a few hundred yards through the gully by the playing fields until it vanished again, back into another pipe.

  Often, if he was bored, Johnny would stand on the weathered plank above the stream to the cottage and call Turlough’s name. He’d balance there on one leg over the water, as if flaunting his youth and energy, until the old man limped out. He would sit inside while evening, through the bushes which tapped against the window, grew dark over the playing fields and the lights in the distant houses came on. Back then he had been excited by the power he felt at the old man’s need for company, by how Turlough would invent new twists in each story to spin them out and keep him there.

  Now Joanie’s arm was drawn around his shoulder, smooth and warm, enclosing him. Those evenings came back to him again, the old man leaning across to whisper like a conspirator, their bodies almost touching in the narrow confines of the darkened kitchen. She pressed the cigarette against his lips, her young upright breasts shifting inside his open jacket. He inhaled deeply and put his arm around her waist. He was flushed and exhilarated after the loss of his virginity and yet felt a curious let-down as if somehow he had expected more. He felt a man at last, his hand moving down his jacket to rest on her flesh. She was his future and everything that had happened to him before this was dead ash which had fallen away. He shuddered, remembering the old man; his dark lined face pressed close to his, the glimpses of brown teeth as his mouth whispered urgently, the red streaks in his eyes, the stubble, the sores that could be seen on his neck beneath the filthy shirt.

  ‘I was only a kid back then. Suppose I’ve kept visiting him out of a sense of guilt. You know all that stuff about people being lonely and you feel you should help them. But you’re right. Don’t know what it is but there’s something not right about him.’

  ‘It gives me the creeps, you seeing him.’

  ‘I know. I’m not going near him again.’

  Matthew was found in that scraggle of water, below the bridge where the carriageway is now. Cigarettes and matches scattered beside the parapet, his old body face down, floating in a shallow pool. This time of morning it was when my father discovered the corpse, fished him out with another labourer who borrowed a horse and cart.

  I said nothing to nobody, went to drive cows that morning in my bare feet to a meadow beyond Dubber. I remember in the field wondering if I was going crazy, the cows shifting away in fright as I banged my skull against a tree trunk to try and stop the words that were racing through me. The RIC from the barracks by the convent cycled round, an inspector came from Dublin in a motor car with children running behind it all the way up the village. They never discovered if it was an accident or murder.

  Once in winter this stream used to flood, now it goes on fire on choked summer evenings, full of oil and shit, a tiny current pulsing through the build-up of rubbish. It will be dawn soon, the first cars and the footsteps of the day shift above on the road. My legs ache but I can rest now, kneel by the stream to break its slick rainbow of oil and watch my features slowly float back into being. They blend so easily with the muck now after ninety-two years of washing.

  A last gaze up at the road where the first bus has appeared. The driver will wait between stops at the gap in the wire for the men from the night shift. I helped to build those factories when the jobs here dried up on the land. Protestants owned them, there were disputes about time off for early mass on holy days. I was fifty-seven then, hard to learn new skills, the taste of dust and heat of machines after half a century out of doors. Coming home when the girders were going up with the jangle of nails in my pocket. My father waiting for me half blind on the step I still sit on outside. The pair of us alone with the new names and tunes on the wireless; me walking for half the night while he fumbled with his beads and muttered in and out of sleep. I knew he took it bad, the fact I never married. No voices of children, just the pair of us growing cranky and silent like bachelor brothers. Rickets are an awful curse on a man, the legs gone on him those final three years. Unable to walk to the old village they were knocking down, and up the steps to the little graveyard where my mother lay. I went in his place and answered his questions; was I keeping it the way he had always kept it for her? Both of us knowing what he was really asking: would I keep the grave up for him when he was lowered into the soil?

  The day they poured the concrete for the shop-floor I found him half on the bed and half off it, his body already cold. He lies with my mother twenty paces to the left of where the old cross was buried. I remember the bus loads of men looking for work as the hearse paused for a moment outside the Duck Inn, the new estates going up in the east as we turned right towards St Patrick’s Well. The last of the old neighbours crowded into this kitchen, nobody older than him, no person able to remember as far back. And the sound of a radio in the new houses across the road, dance music playing as each old face crossed the plank over the stream, the darkness of the roadside waiting to claim them. And when they were gone there I was left, never able to follow, climbing up to the road each morning for work, the endless casks of telephone cable around which I hammered planks to seal them off, dreading the call to the office and the brief speech to mark my retirement.

  Tonight, like every Hallowe’en, they will descend on the stream. For days now every youth in the place has been gathering the wood and tyres for their bonfires. There are five of them, like stakes for witches, awaiting petrol and matches within sight of my house. All Saints’ night, All Souls’ and Hallowe’en, the night for ghosts to walk. He took it bad I never married, no young voices to pray on All Souls’ as he had prayed all day for his own dead. I have the two half crowns still that I pressed over his eyes. The four candles that I set around the corners of the bed and the white sheet that covered him, grown musty in the drawer.
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br />   It covered my mother and my grandfather as well. But why have I kept them, there will be nobody left here to wake me? No bottle of whiskey passed around the room, just the trundle of lorries on the road above and Johnny or the police or a burglar breaking in, overcome by the smell that will have built up over the weeks. I must sleep now and when I wake in the afternoon I feel Johnny will come again, his young face troubled, asking the same questions. I cannot fail them, Johnny, I cannot break faith. How can I find the words to warn you when a secret is a secret and a vow can never be broken? Two cold half crowns for my eyes when I would love your fingers to press them closed. A musty sheet for my body when the touch of your hand could make me young. Four candles for my feet and head when the only light I pray for is when your eyes grow clear again.

  That morning in April his grandmother found Johnny seated on the top step of the stairs in the woman’s house. He was staring straight ahead as though looking through her. ‘Is the boy all right?’ one of the women standing below asked, and when Mrs Whelan reached out to touch her grandson’s shoulder he flinched and ran past her to be sick in the overgrown garden outside.

  All that morning and afternoon while his grandmother waited for him to come home, he wandered through the housing estates, now knowing why he felt so dazed and confused. Joanie called for him at four o’clock and his grandmother shook her head, trying to explain what had happened. At five o’clock he broke his vow and returned to the old man’s cottage.

  Turlough sat on the small window-ledge beside the stream. It had rained earlier and now slugs had hauled themselves up the flaked whitewash on the walls. Johnny stood uncertain on the roadway for a moment before climbing down the clay path.