I stared out at fields turned the color of char. Rain began to tap the window, thrum and clatter on the broken roof tiles. The boreen was turning to muck and everything was rushing into the ditches. I sat on the mattress by the fire and watched the flames dance upon the scorched brick as water trickled down the wall. The fire died down to glowing embers and still rain beat upon the timbers and lashed against the boarded windows. I began to doze when there was a flicker of headlights, and a heavy rumbling engine sounded at the gate. I stamped on the gleed, pulled up the mattress from the floor, and stretched it before the glowing hearth.
The lorry’s doors slammed. Above the sound of the rain, I heard the sounds of men’s voices. They stood before the lorry’s headlights, dark silhouettes passing in and out of shadow and light. Someone worked the gate and then there were footsteps on the gravel, the flickering beam of a flashlight sweeping across the boarded windows, lancing the floor. I squeezed into the corner against the walls.
Through the slats I watched their shapes as the lorry waited for them to reach the shed before rumbling down the gravel, headlights shining across the dark courtyard. It was Brendan and another man talking to each other and laughing. The driver stayed in the lorry. Brendan’s face shone with rain and for a moment his eyes caught mine and I imagined he could see me. Another figure appeared at the gate and both men turned quickly; one of them swore. Lugh came down the gravel with his push-bike. A smile came to my face, and I wanted to call out; I moved forward but then quickly pressed back into the shadows at the sound of another voice asking him what the fuck he was playing at—it was John Delacey.
Lugh greeted them, and he sounded drunk. Their footsteps rounded the cottage. A clatter of the lock at the shed door and muffled conversation. After a moment they returned, their voices loud and angry. They stood before the windows of the cottage arguing but I could make no sense of it. John jabbed Lugh in the chest with his finger as he spoke. Suddenly Lugh’s arm flashed and in an instant he had his fingers squeezed around John’s Adam’s apple, his fingers dug deep into the flesh, forcing John’s head back. Slowly Lugh pressed him to the ground. John choked and sputtered, flailed at Lugh’s arm with his own.
That’s enough! Brendan shouted, but Lugh’s eyes were locked on John. Brendan’s voice became low. I won’t say it again, Lugh. Let go of him.
And Lugh did. John stumbled backward, grabbing at his throat. He turned in circles, glared at Lugh as he wheezed and swore. You’re a fucking dead man, McConnahue, a fucking dead man.
Come on, Brendan said and took John’s arm, but John was reluctant to move. Finally, he relented and they headed up the gravel. When they reached the lorry Brendan looked back and pointed at Lugh. Stay off the drink, you, and keep your head down. He had to push John into the truck. A fucking dead man! John kept shouting. A fucking dead man!
Tiocfaidh ár Lá, Lugh said and saluted, but they had already turned their backs to him. They climbed up into the lorry and Lugh stepped before it, staring at them across the stretch of headlights. Rain washed down his angular face, and he did not move. The lorry remained at the gate, idling. Then its headlights brightened on Lugh and he squinted into the glare, but still he did not move. He stood illuminated and blinded and resolute. Finally the beams dimmed and the lorry backed slowly out into the boreen, its headlights flickering through the slats and momentarily pressing back the darkness of the room.
As it turned, the lorry’s headlights swept the woods before it, and there was Cait, in her hooded mac, standing at the edge of the trees. The woods and Cait faded at the light’s bright edges; the truck rumbled away deeper into the woods. When I looked again, she was gone, and I wondered if I had merely imagined her. Lugh stared after the lorry, hacked phlegm, and spat into the ditch. He took his bike from the wall and stumbled off into the rain-swept night.
I pulled the mattress away from the fire, stoked the embers for warmth. There were remnants of Cait’s clothing there—a sliver of lace-trimmed elastic from her underwear. Rain shattered incessantly around me, coiled and breathed as it ran down the walls. I could see Lugh and Brendan still, staring at each other across the length of the lorry’s headlights, and, in the rain and the dark, the vast distance between them that its lights seemed to suggest.
Just above my head, in the failing timbers, there was a high-pitched squeal followed by another, and another, a frantic scrabbling and then silence. In that silence, I imagined the sound of rats, thousands and thousands of them, devouring each other, invisibly, in the dark.
All through the last weeks of June and into July, Molly and I kept a deathwatch as the list of hunger strikers from Long Kesh grew. It was day sixty of Joe McDonnell’s starvation when my mother began wailing from her bedroom. I was shoveling cinders into the ash bucket, my sister was on the settee knitting. Her needles stopped making their noise and we looked at each other. Molly’s face was flushed and it highlighted her freckles. In many ways, although we’d never spoken of it, I supposed our mother’s illness had brought us closer together. I’ll get the towels and the washtub, she said. I nodded and continued to sift the ash for coal.
DeBurgh was up to administer the morphine to mother. He lifted the edge of her nightgown and I stood watch. Her thighs were the color of chalk, skin so pale and bruised I wanted to cry. He shouldn’t have been able to see her that way, he shouldn’t have been able to see her at all. I asked if he would show me how to give her the morphine and if he’d leave the vials, but he said it was too risky should anything go wrong and I give her too much and she die.
DeBurgh was a big man, with battered and scarred hands. He smelled of cow shit and dead animals, and though he’d been here many times before, I’d never gotten used to him. I was prepared to lunge at him, tackle him to the floor to get him off my mother. I thought of the different ways in which I could do it. I saw myself biting his ears, butting his face, scrabbling at his eyes, punching the hard knot of his Adam’s apple and driving it deep into his windpipe. I’d clamp down on his fingers with my teeth and rip them to the bone. From behind I’d drive his testicles up into him with a boot between his legs. I’d climb onto his wide back, wrap my arms around his neck, and squeeze until he was dead.
Michael, he said, and I looked at him, my vision returning from some point just over his shoulder, from the soft skin below his ear, shaved and scrubbed raw. By rights, she should be in a hospital, he said. How long can this go on, giving her this stuff? She needs better care than this. Perhaps in a hospital —.
You know they’ll not look after her in the hospital. Besides, she’ll never let anyone take her back.
I squeezed the door frame; I wouldn’t let DeBurgh see me cry. She always gets better, I said. She’ll get better this time as well.
DeBurgh grunted and rose from his knee; it cracked hollowly like splintering wood. If you say so, he said and sighed. It takes more and more morphine to calm her. I can’t imagine the pain she’s in. Soon, the morphine won’t do anything. It’s gotten to the point now where she has to be knocked out in order not to feel anything at all.
She’ll get better so she will.
Michael. He looked at me entreatingly.
She always does, I said, although I wasn’t sure if I believed it anymore. I stared hard at DeBurgh and was surprised when he looked away.
I can’t keep doing this, Michael. You know I can’t. Your mother will be dead and they’ll have me license.
Molly offered him a cup of tea but he couldn’t stay, he had to go up the road to Tullogher to a sick heifer. He had looked at her last week, and it was a shame but if she hadn’t improved, they’d have to put her down. As he said this he wiped his hands absently on his mucus-streaked apron, as if he were removing dirt from his hands, as if he were making them clean, over and over again.
John Delacey’s old Ford Cortina passed me on the road. I looked down as John’s blurred gaze caught my own. Just the glance and his face looked hard and mean and I wanted no part of it. I slowed and, pretending to be
occupied by something in the ditch, poked at the gorse with my Wellington, but it had begun to rain and there was only the one road into town. The car pulled into the ditch, splashing muck, engine rumbling loudly, exhaust pipe jetting white smoke. I heard him undoing the latch of the door, and it swung open. I hurried to the car, pulling my coat up around my neck against the rain that was falling harder now.
Howya, I said as I leant in and slid onto the tattered vinyl seat. Thanks for the lift.
Not at all, just in time to beat the rain.
A tractor passed on the other side and we waited in the hush of the car’s heater, the wipers, and the low static voices of Radio 1 commenting on the previous day’s hurling matches. It was Milo Meaney on the tractor and we both waved. When the tractor had passed, a wide plow at its rear buoying it up and down like a boat at sea, its wide-channeled tires leaving muddied tracks along the narrow road, John glanced in the side mirror and pulled out. A smoking Woodbine crumbled in his fingers. There was ash on the dash, the steering column, and the gearshift. The car was much too hot and damp and I could smell melting manure. I felt dizzy. Shifting uncomfortably, I tried to control my breathing, make it as natural as I could. I stared out the window at the passing countryside, concentrated on the way the rain broke upon the glass.
You’re Moira’s young one, he said, and I nodded.
How’s your mammy?
She’s all right. I breathed slowly and stared out the glass.
Last time I saw her, God when was it at all? Must have been the spring. She was having an awful hard time of it.
She’s not so bad now, I lied. The doctors say she’s in remission.
That’s good to hear, so. And Cait, do you see her around at all?
Once in a while, I do. More Martin, so.
He grunted at this, dropped the filter of the Woodbine into an overflowing ashtray. I can’t keep track of them these days, especially the girls. He squinted through the glass. You know the way they go when they get to a certain age. He shook his head and dragged heavily on his cigarette. I nodded again, unsure of where they went or what way they were when they got there, and tried instead to evoke a sense of Cait. The car felt warmer as it rattled along the road. A faint odor of dog and alcohol, and bitter, pungent sweat emerged from clothes bundled in the back. Something else that I could not place. Something smothering and dank, and rank as if the sea had just washed in. I forced myself not to crinkle my nose.
He turned up the volume on the radio, and I thought it would be to listen to news of Joe McDonnell’s death.
Are you a hurling man at all? he asked, and I opened my mouth to say not since my father left but he hushed me with an upraised palm upon which calluses formed a bridge of stone. I looked for some sign of suspicion, of crime and culpability, of deceit and maliciousness in what he said, how he said it, in the way the ashes fell from his fag, in a speck of breakfast egg at the corners of his mouth, in a whisker he missed while shaving, in the still fair hair, or in the large pores of his aged yet surprisingly handsome face. What kind of man was John Delacey? What kind of woman had Cait’s mother been—the woman my father had fallen in love with? Did John Delacey’s features bear the secrets? Could they tell me anything about Cait?
Whisht, he said, listen . . . listen . . . Aahh, go on you cats—up Kilkenny! His hand turned to a fist. Gleefully he looked over at me, staring wide-eyed. Oh, boyo, we’ll give Galway a sound thrashin this Sunday. He thumped the top of the cracked dashboard and ash scattered.
And how’s your father? Have you heard from him? He grinned and, for a moment in the dim, gray light of the car, his eyes sparked blue, as bright and young and murderous as I imagined they must have been on his wedding day.
Every evening, poised over my dinner plate, I waited for the sound of Lugh’s bike clattering on the lane after the Angelus had sounded on the telly, that sound which had so become a pattern of my day—and it was with this absence that I sensed his loss and missed him. I assumed he must be sick and after a week of not seeing him I asked my mother for the leftover stew so that I might bring it down to him.
She was preparing the supper and had her back to me. She’d been busy around the house and in the field preparing things, putting things in order as she always did before her next spell. These were the times when she seemed most herself, but it was also when Molly and I were most anxious and did not sleep. We knew that her wellness would not last, and we were waiting for everything to go wrong again. It was as if she had convinced herself that she was no longer ill, and we didn’t mention it. All three of us pretended there was nothing wrong. Molly and I had scrubbed the walls, washed Mother’s clothes, removed the soiled bedsheets and the empty morphine vials.
My mother turned from the counter and stared at me, a large ladle poised in her hand. What? For that old drunk? What do you want to bring him stew for? He won’t eat it unless there’s whiskey in it. All he’s good for is the two arms up at the bar.
I haven’t seen him for days. I think he’s not well.
I don’t know how that man can work a day at all with all the boozin he does and not a speck of meat on his bones. She turned back to the counter and waved with the spoon. Go on then, sure it’s a waste, so, but go on, I hate to think of the poor crature down there in that hovel all by hisself. She shook her head and returned to her cooking, began to shred rosemary over a pan of potatoes, then grunted. I’m sure the food will go to waste, God forgive us for it, but, well, what can you do.
Running up the gravel and out the gate with the covered bowl warm in my hands, I thought of how good it would be to see Lugh, and how grateful he would be for the stew I was bringing him.
I remembered when old Mrs. Flaherty was alive; the laborer’s cottage always gleamed with fresh whitewash, but now it was tinctured green from mildew and moss, and the ivy had run rampant through flower beds where only the brindled husks of bushes and rotting flowers remained. Dried dung heaps pressed against the side of the house. A sheet of rusted corrugate and the remains of an old cast-iron tub, two large-ridged tractor tires. The arched window lintels were cracked and split, the glass so dirty and dark with soot I doubted any light penetrated at all.
Back in the time of the landlords and the big houses, this had been the gatekeeper’s cottage, but Flaherty’s farm was a small fraction of those early estates, and Lugh had once laughed at the irony of that. He’d gestured with his chin toward Flaherty’s pastures and then his farmhouse, its wide Georgian columns, its large windows full of dim burning light. Filthy rich, Lugh said, and so miserly he thinks everyone he meets wants to take it from under his nose. I don’t believe the man sleeps at all, and if he does, it’s not sheep he’s counting.
I knocked on the door of the cottage but there was no answer. I tapped on the window, lifted the flap of the letter box, put my mouth against it, and shouted his name. Squinting through the narrow opening, I smelled him before I saw him—a bundle of frowsy blankets moving on the sofa. Go away, he groaned. Go away, I’m not well.
I brought you some stew, I called. It’s still warm, it will do you good, sure you have to eat.
I stared through the letter box but the shape upon the sofa didn’t move. I could have left the bowl for him, but I knew Mother would have a fit if it was broken or lost. Lugh, I said again and watched as he drew the blankets tighter around himself. The odor of urine piqued my nose.
I stood in the courtyard holding my bowl, the light changing over the roofs of the sheds and barns, and blackbirds stirring loudly in the trees, my toes growing numb in my Wellingtons and the chill of night coming on. From the shed off to my right I heard the rattle of Bran’s chain. He gave one long mournful howl and then was quiet again.
It was the end of the week and the evening news was almost over. Martin Hurson was dead; he was the sixth hunger striker to die. On the telly they showed his coffin coming out of Long Kesh, and then the football scores—it was almost as if no one cared anymore, or as if we were all too numb to feel.
&n
bsp; When do you think it will all stop? Molly said as we watched the telly.
I don’t know, I said, unbelieving. I never thought they’d let Bobby die.
Turn it off, would you? she said, and when I didn’t move she shouted, For God’s sake, would you just turn the blasted thing off!
I was slouched on the sofa when I heard the clattering chain, the loose spokes and sprockets, the angled and bent rims on the macadam. I tugged on my Wellingtons in the scullery and ran up to the gate. I saw the shape of him coming up the slope of the road, the bike weaving from side to side as he stood on the pedals to get momentum to make the hill. I waited, and when he came into view, I grinned and stepped forward, but he passed without slowing.
The next evening I sat upon the wall in the dark picking the pebbles from the mortar, throwing sticks into the ditch, until I heard the sound of Flaherty’s hounds and then Lugh’s bike coming toward me out of the dark. He emerged from between high sycamore and beech, his old Raleigh glittering in the purple twilit shadows, and I waved and called, Lugh! but then, in the same manner as before, he was past me once again. I stood in the center of the road watching his bike recede until he was no more than a speck, while somewhere, deep in the gloaming woods, a pheasant throbbed violently.
There was no traffic on the road, and every so often I had to step into the ditch when a car’s headlights came hurtling around a bend. I passed the black gates and gabled walls of silent farmhouses and empty cottages. A dog barked, then silence. Animals scuttering like darts through the hedgerows at my side mile after mile. In the town, I went from pub door to pub door and peered in. He wasn’t at Shay’s nor the Viking. I looked up Mary Street, in the Three Bullet Gate, then in the Tholsel Bar. Men stumbled from alleyways adjusting their zippers. Dirty-faced children from the Estate were selling copies of An Phoblacht, and when they noticed I wasn’t from the Estate as well, they jeered and threw stones at my back.
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