by Donal Ryan
And I was on Church Road. And I had only one shoe. And one leg of my pants was drowned wet. And my left eye was closed and wouldn’t open. And my mouth was scalded with pain. And the yard of the church was lit white by the moon. And the sapless old trees loomed along it. And Our Lord and His saints were asleep inside. And a man walking down towards the gate in a coat that was tied at the front and pinched inwards looked down at the ground and then up at the sky, and adjusted his path to avoid me. And I was prostrate like a penitent dog who was kicked from a house that he’d shat in. And the man hummed a tune through his thin bloodless lips so the air wouldn’t be still between us. And he could pretend this was something he saw every time he walked out through the moonlight.
HER REAL NAME now is only an echo of an echo in the town. That’s how hard the nickname fastened itself to her. Meryl. As in Streep. Her people were nothing to boast about. Her father was Paddy Screwballs, who was left go from the buses over something only whispered about. Something not known about so it by default became something terrible, and shameful. Sure it must have been. She had one brother a labourer, big-fisted and dark, and another brother who wasn’t all there who went down to Roscrea every day on the free bus to the funny farm, and a sister who was gone years, married to an English fella. Her mother was dead a good long while, from some unnamed thing only women get.
I gave the spaces between orders to looking at her. Go on away and pull yourself, Bofty told me one time. You’re no good to me with your balls bursting full. You’ll be spilling drink and giving out wrong change and making a pure solid hames of things. And he rested his belly on the draining-board of the glasses sink inside the bar and rested his eyes on Meryl. You always got the feeling she didn’t know how lovely she was. You always got the feeling she couldn’t feel you looking.
When you’re young and quiet and you move around softly and keep your eyes cast mostly down it’s easy to hear things. People forget you’re there, or forget you might hear, or don’t care if you hear. I was finished up with school and I hadn’t a great Leaving Cert got and my father was at me daily to go into the buildings, there was a power of money to be got in the buildings, there was lads hadn’t hands to wipe their arses clearing five or six hundred pounds a week. Imagine what the lads in the pantses and shirts and white helmets get! And they only required to stand around the place looking at bits of paper. But I liked the pub and the hum of talk and the safety of knowing where everything was and what everything did. And I liked the looks I got through windows opened by drink into the realness of people.
I often thought of a poem from school when she was in the bar. The one about the planter’s daughter. Men saw her, and drank deep, and were silent. Or sometimes they were the opposite of silent, but it amounted to the same thing: they dribbled and spat words everywhere, and tried to be funny, in a panic of desire. And when she wasn’t there, people talked about her, and I listened.
She wasn’t from land, or from anything. She had no right swanning about the place the way she did. She had no right going up near the tennis club or into the dramatic society, dragging trouble after her. She had no right going with Felim Hackett to Junior Chamber meetings, and sitting up at the front smiling at all the men. What commerce was ever done in the Villas? The quare kind, that’s all. She had no right getting cast as Pegeen Mike by the professional director the dramatic society brought in to make a right good job of The Playboy of the Western World for their centenary. They couldn’t dissuade him. Oh, the money that was spent on that man and that’s what he did to them! That’s the thanks they got.
It was a given thing Noreen Keogh would play Pegeen Mike in the centenary year. It was her great-grandfather, a doctor, who had started the society. Her grandfather had taken the mantle of it, and both her parents had trodden those worn and hallowed boards, and they used to be beautiful together. Wasn’t it a fright to God the way that one blew in and wagged her chest in that Dublin fella’s face and stole the part off of poor Noreen? But it was the great-granddad had done the damage. It was he drafted the society’s constitution and the rules laid down there had been adhered to for a century and a person given casting power in a properly constituted meeting of the society by a majority of members could not be overruled. And they had that power given to the fancy-pants director from Dublin they as good as emptied their coffers for the way their centenary production would be something special, to be remembered across the ages. But it had been unspoken yet agreed by all that Noreen Keogh would play Pegeen Mike. It had been made clear. It had, it had.
They did their damnedest to get out of the contract with the director. The Foxes even took it to the owner of the chip-shop franchise they’d bought into. He’s a great man for contracts. And advice. Like never pay a person the same wages two weeks in a row. Put fuck-all in writing bar what’s laid down by law. Don’t mind that public holiday bollocksology. Always pay in cash. Let nobody ever get cosy on you.
HERE’S MERYL STREEP! someone shouted in here on opening night, as she walked through the door, and that was it. It went from a compliment to a jibe even before that night was over. Meryl, Noreen Keogh’s crowd would sneer, and laugh without mirth. It stuck. Within weeks her transcendent performance was forgotten and Meryl was stuck on her as a tag of ridicule. Is that her real name? outsiders would ask. No, someone would say, she was gave a part in a play one time and it went to her head! Hahaha! And that was how they took back from her what they believed she’d had no right to. That was the revenge they exacted. She was never again known by her God-given name, only by Meryl, and it wounded her, I knew by her eyes, because of the way it was said, and the feeling of foolishness that became attached to it, and the strong hint of spite that was always there in the saying of it.
Paddy came in with her to the bar on that opening night. It wasn’t too long after the smoking ban came in. Between that and the fact that he’d never before strayed from Collins’s snug, he wasn’t in the full of his comfort. He must have got carried away with his pride in her, the sudden break in his fallings of rain. I watched him from behind the taps, smiling, nodding at people, letting on to be grand. I could see the redness rising slowly up his neck, the beads of sweat on his brow, the way he scratched himself without knowing he was doing it. I watched him try to stand a round of drinks for his daughter and her new friends. I saw the shake in his hand, the fifty tight inside in it. But she was busy being congratulated, and Felim Hackett who played Christy Mahon opposite her didn’t hear him asking, and the director fella with the paisley waistcoat and the roundy glasses didn’t hear him either, so close in conversation were they, and he put his hand on the arm of a man I didn’t know too well, an accountant with an office near the castle demesne, and asked him what was he having, and the man just looked down at Paddy’s hand, and muttered he was in a round, thanks. And old Paddy reached for his fags, and caught himself, and took the excuse to slip out the back door and keep going, across to Collins’s where he belonged. I heard her asking Felim Hackett where her dad was gone a while later. Felim only looked at her and turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head.
Paddy never heard Jack Matt-And’s recounting of the play. Paddy never felt the change in the air after it, the thickening, the seeping hate.
And on she came. And Lord she was lovely. And she made those oul lights seem like sunshine. And not even a breath could you hear. And never before did I see such a thing, the way the whole hall fell away. And there was only that girl on the stage there before me, and only her voice could I hear. And that now I know is what’s meant by transported, for she took me right out of that place. And never before in one hundred years was there beauty like hers on that stage.
And on he went, eyes closed, in a rapture. Ah shut the fuck up, Noreen Keogh’s first cousin said, and a few laughed and a few more sighed. But there was nothing now could be done. She gave Jack Matt-And a kiss when he’d finished his recital and she stepped outside of herself and became Pegeen Mike, every night for a week. This was
no amateur dramatics, she could have been on Broadway. Bofty had put up a right dinky smoking shed in the back yard, open-sided but still cosy, with a free-standing stove in the centre of it. I went out there one night not long after the play finished up and saw Felim Hackett talking to her in an angry whisper, jabbing a lit cigarette towards her face, and she was saying nothing back, just sitting straight-backed on her stool, her eyes bright with tears, an unlit fag in her right hand, her left hand out towards him, palm up, as if in surrender. I saw them shifting that night in the doorway of Bridgeton’s Hardware, one of his hands clamped tight to her arse, the other on the back of her neck, curls of her blonde hair entwined in his fingers. He gave her the road not long after and got engaged to a farmer’s daughter from up around Lackanavea side that had a job in the Galway Clinic as a radiographer or radiologist or something starting with radio.
She took up with a fella from Limerick for a finish, rough-looking enough, shaven-headed, cocky. He had a swanky car. One of them lads. She moved away, to God-knows-where, somewhere she could have her name back, and she was only seen back for Paddy Screwballs’s funeral. And the air in the bar was normal again, even without the smoke.
Royal Blue
I GOT THE IDEA off a big fat tinker. He took the council for millions. I wanted no millions, only enough, and a bit more for a cushion. I walked up to Walter’s Lane the same night I seen his story in an Evening Herald I lifted off a café table. I wanted to see a king in the flesh. The campsite was at the end of acre after acre of horses and scrapped cars. He was staggering around like a man on a ship’s deck in a rolling sea; there was drink glopping out of a bottle in his massive hand, there was a bonfire behind him, a halo all round him. He was the same as Our Lord to them people, what he done for them, the riches he brought them, the salvation. They danced around him in a ragged ring, screaming and roaring and laughing. He got them a home, too, that they didn’t even want. He was drowning in glory. He eyeballed me as I stood at the entrance staring in; he bared his yellow crooked tinker’s teeth and I turned and ran as his people’s quick eyes fell on me. My ma was an Amazonian, or something. I run wicked fast.
Mary Heffernan came and got me when I was eleven. Time for you, Heffer, I said. Heffer, I always called her. Cow wasn’t none too pleased. Called her it the whole time, every time I seen her. Ah, howya, Heffer, I’d go, and the odd time I’d throw in a moo or two for good measure. She dragged me down the concrete steps from the flats that first time, Da following behind, keening out of him, drink-breath wafting from him. Jaysus, Da, will you relax, I told him. Cop on to fuck, you’re not able to look after me. He was roaring how he loved me and I was all he had as Mary Heffernan strapped me into a booster seat in the back of her tiny car. HSE rules an all. I’m a tall girl now, leggy, but I wasn’t quite one point five metres that time. Rules is rules is rules.
My ma got deported before I could walk. Sometimes I think I remember her, but it’s probably just a dream I’m remembering, or a picture I have of her made of Da’s memories. I don’t know how she and my da made me. It must have been like a lioness getting mounted by a mangy oul tomcat. Loads a them wans done that, Da told me. Come over an rode the first poor bollix they seen. Trying to get up the pole to get a passport. But something went wrong with the plan, he said. He wasn’t ever great on specifics. They got some hop the day they come for her, he said, when they seen she was actually there, waiting for them! She told him don’t worry, she’d be back in a few weeks. Right in front of the coppers an all. They only rolled their eyes and asked did she need help with her bags. She spat on the ground at their feet and walked down all them steps with her suitcase balanced on her head, just to spite the fuckers. Lift wasn’t even busted that time. Elegance of her, Da would say, making the wavy shape of the outline of her in the air with his hands. Like a fucking queen. Like a fucking queen. Lord God, he fair loved her. He loved telling me that story. I took what I got.
I got put with a family in Blacksmith’s Walk, down at the shady end of the East Wall. I had it in my head I’d get a fucking Barbie if I got in with a real family for a while. I hadn’t bargained on how much I’d miss my da. Started crying for him an all, first night out. That crowd had only sons, two smelly yokes, looking at me with hungry eyes. Keep them boys away from me, I told the woman of the house once Heffer had fucked off to chew the cud somewhere. Her oul fella laughed and smiled at me kindly but she showed me no gentleness. Called me young lady the whole time. Any fuckin Barbies, missus? I asked her, through my tears. She had no way at all about her, that one. She wasn’t bad, I’d say, but she sure wasn’t good either. A big nothing, sucking the cash for giving hot meals and warm beds and cold shoulders to the children of people from a few cuts below her. Put her hand on me roughly once or twice. I legged it after less than a week. Them manky-looking small fellas gave me the creeps. Snotty and silent, they were. Animal eyes. Probably rapists by now.
I learnt all the streets’ twists and turns and sometimes when the cold stung me too much I’d turn myself in for a while. No house could hold me long. I first seen the house on a stint I done in the wild when I was fifteen. I had found Da that day, thrown down at the foot of the spire, nearly expired. I got all choked up over the bollix. There was a vulture or two circling, swooping, their shadows moving in and out around him. Someone got him on the junk, smacked him up, strung him out. He probably thought he had to. Probably apologized to the dealers for not getting on the hard stuff years ago, for never having given them a turn. I dragged him up the street as far as the Garden of Remembrance and plonked him on a bench and slapped him and kissed him and cried tears over him that stung my eyes coming out. And I left him there to burn in the afternoon sun, protected by a small army of Japaneses armed with cameras as big as their heads.
The house was only ever meant to be a temporary thing, a place to put my da a while, the way he’d be out of the eye-line of the vampires that wanted his dole money and whatever he made from the robbing and the welfare strokes in exchange for packets of dust that they hid in the cracks of themselves. There was a long narrow jungle to the back of it, grass the height of my chest, twisted crab-apple trees, giant rhubarbs, a tiny toilet in a broken shed that must have been for servants one time. There was running water, somehow, but no juice. Da came clean of the gear after a terrible fortnight of screaming and sweating and vomiting and had wits enough back to lift a car battery and a circuit breaker and a coil of wire and a few other bits, and we were able to listen to the radio and run a tiny fridge that was got from the Clarion Hotel. We had a camping stove and sleeping bags and some pots and pans and a knife and fork each and all that summer we were cosy and happy. That’s when I seen the story in the Herald about the tinkers.
The house was a three-storey redbrick island in a sea of grey concrete and wild grass. Boarded and crumbly but built for the centuries. There was nothing in front only road, and nothing behind only field that stretched away to a hump with a posh school beyond it. You could often hear roars and shouts of matches being played coming across the breeze. There was a petrol station with a shop to the left as you stood at the door, across a half-acre of scrub, and a pylon and a mast in a fenced-off square to the right. I often wondered was it healthy to be living in the shadow of that yoke. Then I’d think again about what healthy was, what good for you meant, what bad for you could mean. Da done a powerful job that late autumn, his crowning glory, the best thing he ever done. He dredged up his talent from where it had lain soaked in the dark inside of him and painted a mural on the downstairs walls of the inside of the house, of a line of children, dancing, running, happy, being led along a flower-strewn path towards a forest, by a tall, slender woman with a suitcase on the top of her head, and her arms out a bit from her sides, her long fingers beckoning to the children behind. Then he bust in one night to the shop and run a sealed wire out from it and along the back wall and through the scrub and into our house and we had proper power. And he sat at the end of that week of work in the glow of a bulb and
the flickering television light, warmed by a three-bar heater and he smiled and looked along his line of painted children and up at his painted Amazonian love and said Now, sweetheart, didn’t I do something? And I kissed him on his rough forehead and said Yes, Da, you surely did.
A fella from the shop copped us. He spotted Da’s tidy drill-hole and the plastic-covered wire run out from it and followed it along the wall and the scrub and through our back fence and up the crab-apple forest to the back of our house. He burst in through the back door I had only barely barred. Da was out, doing a bit. He had a bulgy belly and bulgier eyes and wet lips. But still an all there was a kind of a pleasantness about him, or something. Jaysus, wha? I asked him. I’ll pay you for the juice, sir. He only stood looking, licking his tacher with a darting tongue. I read him like a fuckin book. The second time he come I recorded it on a digital camera Da picked up somewhere, perched and aimed on a high shelf, and the third time I played it back for him and he nearly shat himself. I have copies made of that, too, I told him, and he went from pink to white to purple and I thought he might fall away in a heap, dead. Ah here, I told him, go easy, just drop us in a bag of messages once a week and look after my da’s wire and we’ll all stay friends. And the years rolled on and bit by bit we lined our nest, my da and me.
I walked back up to Walter’s Lane last night, just for the one look, to see were they still there, or people like them at least, cousins or clansmen or something. There was houses there now, low affairs, chalets, I think they’re called. There was cars and vans, big ones. No sign of the king, or his band of followers. A dog stood sentry near the same gateway I looked in from twelve years ago. We won’t go as wild as them people did, Da and me. We’ll probably be in the papers the same way, the solicitor has me told, people do go mad for these rags-to-riches tales, these adverse possession stories, squatters getting given proper rights. The untitled, the unentitled, getting gave title. The poor becoming rich at the stroke of a pen, the fall of a judge’s hammer, because rules is rules is rules. Land is a finite resource, he says, and the courts abhor its waste. Da will be a king tomorrow, and I’ll be a princess, and we’ll take the boards from across the front door of our castle and we’ll sand it and paint it a deep royal blue.