by Aine Greaney
“What you said earlier,” Ellen whispers. “About being alone . . . at the end . . . Wouldn’t you like your sister? You sister Kitty?”
Jo turns, follows the sound of her sister’s name.
“I could . . . find her, let her know about you,” Ellen says. “If that’s what you want.”
Jo winces. Then a tear trickles, one tear over the sunken features.
She smoothes her hand over Jo’s forehead. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Honest.”
Another tear comes, then another. Jo’s silent tears.
Ellen pulls the chair up to the bedside. When Jo reaches, she takes the older woman’s hand, holds it tight in hers.
It’s dark when Ellen wakes. She feels the rough bedspread under her forehead, the crick in her neck. Stiff. All down her back, stiff. From the bedside chair, she’s keeled over and fallen asleep on the end of Jo’s bed.
Ellen shifts in the chair quietly not to waken Jo.
She feels the fingers in her hair, long nails scratching, scrabbling, stroking her head. She lifts her head, peeks sideways at the old face on the pillow.
“Sleep,” Jo whispers, the hand still stroking Ellen’s head. “Go on, love. Sleep.”
35
SHE WATCHES THE BOY SLEEPING, his cheek resting against the heifer’s belly. The lantern sends shadows leaping and creeping across the stable walls. The cows shift in their manager. The milk hisses into the galvanized buckets: hss-hss-hss. He’s sporting a teenage boy’s fuzz on his chin, on his cheeks. Soon it will be time for him to bring the milk in and get ready for the school bus that takes him to the secondary school down in the village. This year, at seventeen years old, he’s studying for his final exams, his leaving certificate.
John is dead now. Mother is dead, too. For six years, it’s been just her and the boy.
This morning she had to waken him again, beg and threaten him out of bed for the morning milking.
In the evenings, he tells her he’s staying down in the village to study after school. He says he’s getting tutorials in Irish and English from a Christian Brother who wants Fintan Dowd, brainy Fintan, to get good marks in his exams. But Jo knows he’s telling her lies. Sometimes she goes up to his room and opens his door to the poster faces staring down at her from around the walls and over his bed—Rod Stewart and ABBA and Van Morrison. From his bedside chair, she picks up and smells his discarded clothes—sniffs some girl’s musk perfume on his school-uniform jerseys. Some girl from the village, a girl he’s met at school who causes him to miss the school bus home, makes him hitch a lift home so he’s late for his evening jobs on the farm.
Tonight Jo’s going to wait for him. Tonight she’ll put down her foot and forbid him to linger down there making himself stupid and cheap. No more gallivanting down the village until his schooling is finished and he’s off in college.
But for now, Jo follows her boy’s example. She rests her head against her own cow, a strawberry cow that they bought in the mart in Ballinamore.
The winter dark lingers. The stable shadows deepen. The cow chews her cud while Jo and her boy sleep.
“Hello, Mrs. Dowd,” a girl is calling to her from the yard gate, shouting out an open car window at her. It’s a yellow car. The girl has driven up here herself. Jo, coming in from the bottom fields, stands there on the avenue, squinting into the evening sunlight. “Brilliant weather, isn’t it?” says the girl, sitting there as bold as brass and smoking a cigarette. Music comes from a car radio.
No, Jo thinks. This can’t be the girl he’s courting down in the village. Can’t be the girl with the cheap musk perfume. This isn’t a schoolgirl at all, but a young woman—a cheap, tarty little thing.
“I’m just waitin’ for Fintan,” says the girl, tapping her left hand on the steering wheel and puffing her fag as Jo walks up to the car.
“Who are you?” Jo asks her, this girl with the pasty little face. “Who?”
“Cawley,” she says, laughing. “I’m one of the Cawleys. You know, from the Lane.” Then, the girl nods toward the house. “Ach, here he is now.” Then she laughs and waves through the windscreen at him, at the boy running across the yard in his new bell-bottoms and a shirt with a ridiculous collar. She leans across to open the passenger door and revs the car engine. “Right. Well, we’re off. Enjoy yourself, Mrs. Dowd.”
Jo crosses to the house. Cawley. Cawley. Oh, yes, she knows the family. She remembers the father, dead now, but she remembers him from her own dancing days. He had Brylcreem hair and Clark Gable eyes. He worked as a chimney sweep, going from house to house like a beggar. And Jo has seen the mother at Mass. A chattery little woman, with little for doing except rambling around the village like a stray dog, gossiping. The pound of sausages and loaf of shop bread for their dinner. Cheap people. No breeding.
A girl in a car. A girl who had the cheek, the bloody gall to talk to Jo like that. Right, well enjoy yourself. And not a school girl at all, but a young clip with a yellow car.
It’s been a hot summer. He’s finished school at last, his school uniform hanging in his wardrobe upstairs. Next month, August, he’ll have his leaving cert exam results and start making plans for college. There’s something maddening about him lately, as if he’s in a world of his own, a wayward world where he seems to think he’s above his own mother. He’s off dancing at the hall to these mad discos and bands, trudging down the stairs on Saturday mornings with his eyes like piss holes.
By the second Sunday in August, the sunshine has given way to heavy, mussel-grey clouds. This morning, the man comes as usual to collect the boy for the sheepdog trials. He drives up the avenue and stops outside the yard gate. But today there’s an extra person, a passenger sitting in the front. It’s the musk girl, Carmel. She springs from the passenger’s seat, stands there shading her eyes to look up at the house, to wait for Fintan and the dog.
She wears denim jeans plastered to her backside, painted toenails in platform sandals.
The boy is in the scullery making noise. Jo hears him pouring the tea into a thermos flask. He’s making a picnic for the Cawley girl.
The girl unlatches the gate and walks across the yard to meet them, clapping her hands at the sight of the dog. Then, laughing, they walk to the waiting car.
That Sunday afternoon, the clouds collide. The wind rises, and Jo goes out to fasten the shed doors. She patrols the house to shut the windows, to unplug the telly and the fridge and the transistor he keeps up by his bedside. Then she finds the candles in a drawer in the scullery.
Bedtime and he hasn’t come home yet. When she goes upstairs to bed, the candle bears her own shadow up the stairs ahead of her. She stops at the boy’s room again. Stupidly, she expects him to be there asleep, the dog at the foot of the bed.
He was down at the dance hall again last night. His room reeks of sweat and . . . something else. She crosses to his bedside, bends to pick up his discarded underpants, sniffs at the crotch. She recognizes the salty smell. Suddenly, though it seems a long time ago now, this smell reminds her of Brendan Quinn, the man she met at the dance on the night she lost her child. In the six years since that night, the night she lay in a lakeside field with him, she has come to think of sex and death in the same breath. One makes just as big a fool out of you—a stupid, whinging fool—as the other. Just like the boy is being made a fool out of now—lured and besotted by that girl from the village.
The thunder rumbles. The pop stars stare down at her from the posters on his wall. In the candlelight, she imagines that they, too, are smirking at her.
From the landing window, she watches the treetops wave and thrash. A streak of lightning lights up the avenue and the front paddocks, where the cattle have gone to shelter in the hazel rock.
Lightning again. It turns Knockduff Hill to sudden daylight. Then it’s dark and silent.
She crosses the landing to her own room, where she watches for the headlights on the avenue.
Of course, she tells herself. The dogs grew frantic with the thunde
r, then the older man with the car stopped along the way at a hotel or a roadside pub where the owner let them bring in the two frantic sheepdogs.
The rain lashes against the windowpanes.
Still no sign. So they’ve taken shelter. Jo blows out the candle and curls up on her bed, fully dressed. She falls asleep to the rain-drum on the roof, drumming across her dreams. She dreams of the boy in the rain, so much rain that he drowns in it, his face blue and bloated.
When she wakes, the room smells of candle grease. The rain has stopped. There’s someone in the house. She tiptoes across the dark landing, down the stairs and toward the distant sound of jazzy music from the kitchen.
The boy is standing there naked, his buttocks shiny in the candlelight, his back is to the door. He is toweling the musk girl dry, moving slowly down her body. “Finney, Finney!” The girl screeches. “Ah, Jesus! You’re tickling!”
Over the boy’s shoulder, the girl sees Jo standing there. They face each other across the shadows, the Cawley girl and Jo Dowd. The girl cocks her chin in a jeer.
I’ll kill her before she kills him, Jo thinks.
36
THE BOY IS PUMPING UP the front wheel of his bicycle, propped against the gable wall. These days he has grown even more secretive. He resents her every intrusion.
Two days ago, the school exam results came. Fintan Dowd was top of his Gowna class. The local newspaper, the Mayo Journal, rang the house to interview this brilliant local boy, Gowna’s star pupil.
So he feels confident of getting his first college choice: a new, European Union–funded degree program in international business offered at University College Galway. Long before he took his exams this past June, he has talked of nothing else. International business. It’s what he wants.
Since that night of the thunder storm, Jo Dowd has made inquiries. The Cawley girl is already turned twenty-one. For three years, she has worked at the hospital in Galway as a hospital aide—one of those girls who wheels the tea trolleys around, doles out bowls of porridge to the sick and infirm. She lives in a staff room behind the hospital but now, with her younger boyfriend moving to the city, she wants to set up house and live like a whore with Jo Dowd’s son.
Now Jo walks toward the gable wall. She forces her gait, her voice to stay calm, even-tempered, like approaching a skittish foal.
“Where are you off to now?”
He doesn’t answer. She listens to the air filling the tire, hss-hss-hsss. “I’m going out,” he says, without looking up at her. “Down the village. Carmel and I have things to arrange.”
Earlier, Jo heard him on the phone in the hall, making plans with that girl—plans to look for a flat together for when he moves to Galway City and the university.
“At your age, things change. Things come and then they go again. You’ve your whole life ahead of you.” She forces the words out. And the other words are there, just there in her head, but she cannot say them aloud to him: And I’m proud of you, my child so bursting with brains, escaping to the city, leaving this cursed parish, where all my life I have been a laughing stock—the woman married off just to keep the family farm. They have all been laughing. But who’s laughing now? My boy the top of the school? Who’s laughing now?
Oh yes, how strange those words would be now, spoken out loud to a boy who seems to resent her very existence. Spoken between a mother and her son for whom things have somehow escaped, gone. Died.
He tightens the cap on the bicycle valve, then turns from the bicycle with his arms folded. He pushes his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. Since he finished secondary school he’s bought himself new spectacles with little gold rims that make him look like a young professor. He has that know-it-all look. Like she’s some busybody maiden aunt—harmless, but definitely needing to be put in her place. “Mam, why don’t you say what you actually mean? And no, sorry to disappoint you, but your little speech changes nothing between Carmel and me.”
Then he wheels his bike across the yard, the spokes tick-tick-tick.
By September, Jo has grown demented with the vision of them tucked up in some student flat together, like rats in a nest, like tinkers in a caravan.
On the Saturday night Late Late Show, some woman is bellyaching for the right to live with her boyfriend and claim herself as a tax dependent, to be put on his health insurance. “We are a country with our own, government-sanctioned apartheid,” the woman bawls into the camera. “Apartheid against the thousands of couples who want a divorce. Against the thousands of Irish girls who have to travel to England every year for an abortion—and all because of some church we don’t even believe in.”
Jo switches off the telly and goes to bed.
In bed, the woman’s words echo. Some church we don’t believe in. Laughable, so laughable. There are people—in the towns, in the cities—with all this blathering and jabbing your finger at your fellow panel members on a television program. A church we don’t believe in. As if believing had a thing to do with it. The church is the building down in the village, opposite the newsagent’s shop. It’s where you get married and bring your child to be baptized. For years and years, it’s where you go every Sunday, a hackney car driving up the avenue, on the dot, to collect yourself and your husband and your young boy dressed in your Sunday best. It’s where they brought your husband’s and your parents’ coffins. Church is like your Saturday-night bath.
So why give a hoot? Why begrudge the boy and that girl their fornicating? Like dogs in heat? She doesn’t. She wouldn’t grudge it. If it was some other girl.
She sees Carmel Cawley on that stormy night, down in the kitchen, naked and laughing at her.
On Tuesday afternoon, the postman comes in his green van, brings a letter with an official university stamp. Yes, the boy has been accepted to the university program of his choice—international business studies at University College Galway. His second choice was a bachelor of commerce degree in Dublin. “Congratulations,” says the letter with the official stamp. Then, “Please accept or decline.”
They must send a fee to secure his place. So her son has the brains and she is asked to send along the check or a postal order. With a hundred acres, the Dowds don’t qualify for a student grant. Which makes Jo proud. The Dowds are not scroungers, not for government handouts. She can well afford it.
Jo sits at the kitchen table, lights a cigarette.
Since this summer, this last year of his at school, he has become two boys—at least in her mind’s eye. He is the little communion boy who blushed red when he was asked to show his new pup to Kitty’s new husband. And now, just this summer, here is this wayward young man. The swagger and the condescending, professor’s voice. And no, sorry to disappoint you, but it changes nothing between us, between Carmel and me.
Outside the light is already mellowing in these late August days. The apples in the orchard are ripening. This year, when he’s off in college, she’ll pick the apple crop alone, hunt through the grass after crab apples by herself.
The boy and Rosie the dog come in from the fields. He sits at the table for his late lunch. She takes the university letter from her cardigan pocket, drops it on the table in front of him.
He grins at that first “Congratulations” line. His eyes glitter. “Great! Well, that’s that sorted.”
“Ring them tomorrow and tell them you’ve changed your mind. That you’re taking Dublin instead, not that international thing. Not Galway.”
He’s peeling a freshly boiled potato, holding it high above his plate on his fork.
Then it registers with him, her steely tone, exactly what she’s telling him: that she’s refusing to pay, to send in the fees. He drops the peeled spud on his plate, reaches for the salt with that smug smile, that maddening voice. He can make her see, change her mind. “No, Mam, you’re not going to bully—”
The rage surges into her throat. The bloody gall of him! And of her, that girl. Then her fury explodes across the table at him. “Not our type, not our class. Making a sho
w of yourself, of me, of our family before the whole parish. So if you think you’re spending my and your dead father’s money, well, you’ve another think coming.” She reaches across. Thwack, thwack. Across his face. His man’s face with the hippie spectacles and the stubble of whisker along his jawbone.
He sits there, stunned. There, on his cheek, are the imprints of her fingers. The sight goads her. She wants to slap him again. Hah! Where’s all his smug bravado now? Where’s his little girlfriend with the cheeky puss on her?
His lower lip trembles. Good. Let him cry and whinge, just like he did when he was a small boy.
“Please, Mam,” he whispers. “Please don’t do this. I . . . I really want to do that course. All year . . . all my studies; it was for this. It’s what I wanted.” His voice falters. He clears his throat to try again. “I just wanted . . .” He looks around the kitchen with its small windows, the dishcloths drying on the clothesline strung above the range. He glances toward the ceiling and the bedrooms—the bedroom where his father died, where he himself was conceived. “I wanted something different, something happy.”
In those early winter months, he arrives home from his Dublin university on the train, then the bus to Gowna. On Fridays, it turns six o’clock and Rosie the dog goes to wait for him by the kitchen window, ears pricked as if the dog knows the time, the hour. From Gowna he thumbs a lift, then walks up the hill to the yard and the house where Rosie is already scratching at the back door. His green knapsack bounces on his back as he races across the yard to her. “Rosie, Rosie, Rosie. God, my little Rosie. How I’ve missed you, missed you.”
In the house, he stays in his room or he’s gone off with the dog. When Jo and him are together, he watches television or he keeps up a strange, staged conversation, as if she’s a person that he’s just met on a bus. He says nothing about his Dublin university and little about his Auntie Kitty or her house in a housing estate on the north side of Dublin. This is where he lives now, with his aunt and her husband, Brian. In exchange for his room rent, he mows Kitty’s lawn and trims the hedges in a garden that Jo has come to imagine as something out of a child’s storybook—everything doll-like and frilly.