by Boyce, Niamh
‘Get out or I’ll fetch the cruelty man,’ she used to shout when we were small.
I used to have nightmares about him, the cruelty man in his shitty brown suit coming to get me, whipping me off in his car. He pulled up into our yard once. Big dusty car, short clean man. He was looking for the Carvers’ place. I wish my father hadn’t told him how to find the house. My father said he took Kay Carver’s baby because she hadn’t any sense. Mam said it was because she hadn’t any husband. Kay used to jump out from the hedge and shout ‘boo’ at us when we were walking the road. She still followed us but she didn’t jump out any more.
Charlie used to laugh when Mam threatened us with the cruelty man. I just ran like hell. Charlie and I were pals. I fished with him. I loved fishing and loved fried trout. Didn’t even mind gutting and cleaning, not when I knew we’d be in for a treat. I didn’t have a weak stomach like my mother. We’d have cold spuds and tomatoes with it.
Charlie was in great form of late, getting letters that made him smile. You should’ve seen him, running to meet the postman like a child, twirling into the barn to lie down and read them. Mooning around, daydreaming. About what, that’s what I’d like to know? Sweethearts, I supposed.
Me, I dreamt of staying on in school, imagined years of correct-marks and ‘Good work, Emily’ written all over my copybook and someone saying, ‘We’ll make a teacher of you yet.’ Birdie said I’d make a fine teacher or dressmaker, that I’d be great at whatever I put my hand to. As if teachers left school at fourteen.
When we got to the town, the market was packed. The chicken and dog man near deafened me as we passed, roaring his prices, half his red hens dead and the other half pecking the ground, and black pups in a barrow, all small and shivering. I leant down and rubbed one: he was the size of my hand.
‘Don’t ask, Emily – you’re not getting a pup and that’s that.’
We were at a standstill then; a crowd blocked our path. Mrs Greaney turned and smiled at us, fag limp and brown in the corner of her mouth.
‘Keeping well, Mrs Madden?’ Her eyes travelled slowly over my mam.
‘The best. What is it, Mrs Greaney? What’s everyone looking at?’
‘The Indian lad – he’s put a spell on them. Don something-or-other he calls himself.’ She coughed and moved aside. ‘Go on, you’d love him, Mrs Madden. Go on, have a gander at The Don.’
‘Thanks but I won’t, we have an appointment.’ Mam yanked me back by the collar. She made me follow her around the edge of the crowd and across the road. A few dicey-looking characters were leaning against the wall of the courthouse. Mam didn’t like being near them either, so she turned on her heel. ‘Home,’ she ordered. I could have cried. We had gotten so close. Was I ever going to see this herbalist, this magician? Why did Mam always have to go the opposite way to everyone else?
‘Are you not curious to see the herbalist?’
‘A rogue. They’re all rogues.’
She was talking about my father again; everything came back to him being a shyster. You’d be sick listening to it.
As we left the square Birdie waved from her doorway.
‘Maureen Madden, you look exhausted – come in and rest those feet.’
In we went, out of the sunshine and into the dark dusty shop with not a sinner in it and no craic. My mam sat on the low bench beside the vegetable boxes. I leant on the counter. Birdie pushed a magazine towards me. Greta Garbo was on the cover. Where did Garbo get those eyebrows? I held her up to the light to check if they were pencilled in. The women started to murmur: mmm and haw and I know, I know and tut, tut, tut. Then, sobs. I turned. Birdie had her arm around my mother; their heads were close together. Mam was crying and talking real low. A few weeks, maybe months. I spotted my chance, tiptoed out of the shop and ran like billy-o towards the market.
The women were still crowded around his stall. His voice was hoarse from all his proclamations about the power of his potions, the strength of his medicine. I stood on tiptoe, glimpsed his hand waving over the sea of headscarves: it held a brown bottle, sported golden rings. I could love that hand, I thought then – my first thought as a woman. I pushed forward between the shoulders in front of me; they were hard to part, but I persisted, imagined that they were the tide and I was a magnificent swimmer. Then came a poke, followed by a familiar tug at my collar. ‘Got you,’ Mam crowed, ‘and not a minute too soon.’ That’s what she thought, but she was wrong. Me, I wasn’t thinking. I was in love.
5
Carmel’s back ached. In between serving customers she’d taken down all the tins and spent the afternoon dusting and rearranging them, and then she’d cleaned both of the outside windows. Everyone that passed was on about that man. The herbalist this, the herbalist that. Or The Don, as some were calling him. A charlatan, a magician, a fraudster, a saviour, who had appeared in the market to con them or heal them – take your pick – and there wasn’t a one that didn’t have an opinion and every second opinion was contradictory.
Emily had stopped and offered to help. Carmel wasn’t in the mood to listen to her nonsense, the way she repeated other people’s news as if she’d seen it first hand, as if she had actually been there. Carmel told the girl she was expecting, not an invalid. She was sorry for her sharpness afterwards. The child hardly got the time of day from anyone; there was no need for Carmel to join in. Emily was only gone when Birdie hobbled across the road, carrying a kitten, and informing Carmel that she must be ‘nesting’. What would poor Birdie know of nesting? That woman had never known a man let alone reared a child.
‘Would you like a kitten?’ she had asked. ‘It’s a lovely grey one, very unusual.’
‘A kitten is the last thing I’d want, Birdie.’
When the shop had finally shut, Dan went out to the pub; he had to ‘talk to someone important about something important’. That usually just meant a chin-wag with Mick Murphy. Sometimes she listened to Dan’s long explanations of why he had to go out; sometimes she didn’t, and let her mind drift, thought of her baby’s fingers, his toes, and how she would soon hold him and never let him go. She had known it was a boy before Mick’s mother divined it. The face on Dan when he saw Carmel stretched on the sofa, with Lizzie crouched over her wielding a pin on a string, and it swinging back and forth madly over her belly. His reaction later had surprised Carmel. He’d called it witchcraft, said he didn’t want ‘that filthy crone’ in his house.
‘But she’s the mother of your pal?’
‘Doesn’t mean I have to like her.’
‘I don’t like her much either,’ Carmel said, putting her arms around her husband. ‘It was only the once – calm down. Lizzie does smell a bit, but you’re a bit salty yourself.’
He smiled then, and gave her one of his bear hugs.
‘I just didn’t like it.’
‘I know, I know.’
Carmel went up to the baby’s bedroom and opened the window on to the street. She lifted the monkey off the mantelpiece: the cymbals’ edges were rusty and sharp. Sorry, Monkey, she whispered, as she tugged. The cymbals came off easily; she moved the screen and threw them into the fireplace.
As she sat on the rocking chair, she realized the stairs must’ve made her breathless. She leant back and relaxed. There was a nice breeze. The yellow check curtains flew up, fell down and flew up, over and over. It reminded her of being a girl, of playing rope. She didn’t even run nowadays, let alone jump. Or use the bicycle. Being careful had paid off; she’d made it past the dangerous stage this time. Dan called it God’s will. He was never keen on giving any credit to Carmel, but she didn’t mind, not now. She ran her hand over her stomach: it was smooth and f
irm. Babies didn’t move much in the last few weeks. Doctor B said there just wasn’t the space. It was a sign the baby was getting ready to be born.
It was lovely and bright in here, no matter what Finbar said. Completely different to how it was years ago. The walls were papered in pastel stripes and the ceiling was painted ivory. Dan had done a great job, and he’d been thrilled to do it. This baby coming had given him a great lift. Carmel knew Dan had been the subject of jokes for not fathering a child sooner in their marriage, especially as he was such a tall, strong man.
A child a year was no bother to some women, but that hadn’t been the way for Carmel. At least now she could serve them their powdered milk and syrup of figs without feeling an envy that nearly floored her. Something had finally worked – be it prayers, devotions, miraculous medals, feet-up, milk puddings, tonics or blessed ribbons, she didn’t care. This time, things had gone as they should have. She went to touch the medal at her throat, forgetting it was missing. A small thing like that, if it wasn’t found at once, was usually lost for ever. She felt guilty – it had been her mother’s – and she had near worried it away in the early days. Now she hadn’t even searched for it, distracted by Finbar’s visiting after so long.
How like him not to explain or apologize. Probably felt he was eternally in the right as someone so badly wronged. It wasn’t just the will; it stretched back further than that, to the day Nancy had cleared any trace of his mother from the house and shop.
Finbar told Carmel everything he had seen, and everything he had heard, then and after. He’d made it her memory too. Frances had died when her son was five. Cancer, they’d declared. Consumption, they’d whispered. When Nancy came on the scene, all photographs of her predecessor were destroyed. According to Nancy, it wasn’t ‘the done thing’ to mention the past, no exceptions. She had wanted to burn all the bedding, sheets and blankets, to get rid of the germs, even though it was over a year since Frances had passed. Her new husband had let her remove the sickbed mattress, but drew a line at the bed itself.
Nancy had hauled the narrow mattress through the back door, past the vegetable patch, and down to the end of the garden, where the nettles and brambles ran riot. It was early autumn; the sun was setting in a pink sky. Finbar remembered how his mother’s mattress had dragged on the ground, making a dark path through the golden leaves, and how Nancy had hummed as she rambled to and fro, building a pyre of dried branches and twigs, blankets, shoes, clothes, books, embroidered tablecloths, paintings, photograph albums and, one by one, the collection of miniature musical boxes. She wound each lacquered box carefully as she set them on the heap, and then she lit a match and dropped it. The music waned as the fire smouldered. It took an age to light up, yet everything was burnt to cinders in minutes. And then there was silence.
Nancy went into the house; Finbar stayed outside shivering, his back against the wall. After a while, he walked over to the dead fire and picked through the blackened remains. He recalled the stench of scorched horse hair, the heat on his face, the search that turned up nothing, but, strangely, he didn’t recall any pain as he burnt his fingers.
But Finbar had been only six years of age, so maybe, maybe in his grief, he’d made it all up? Maybe his hands were burnt some ordinary way, like on the stove? Carmel asked her father once. ‘The stretch of Finbar’s imagination is matched only by his boundless capacity for self-pity.’
What kind of answer was that?
Carmel’s mother wasn’t much clearer when she eventually dared to ask her.
‘Ah, now, pet, use your head. Would it be like me to do such a thing?’
It would be just like her, but Carmel didn’t say so.
Finbar had moved into this room, where his mother had died, when Carmel was born. Mother never went into it herself, because of Frances perhaps, not even to tidy. That made it a good place to be, Finbar used to say. Carmel liked the fact that her mother hadn’t spent time in here. Was that a bad thing to think? It was a peaceful room, so full of light now and perfect for a baby.
She had no memory of any blackbirds. Finbar had a habit of darkening things. And if there had been blackbirds flying from the chimney every June, she hadn’t seen them. No, she hadn’t. Carmel had slept in with her mother, snug and tight, most nights. Then where was her father? Oh, yes, in the box room that was supposed to be Carmel’s, dying in the company of his dictionary. May he rest in peace.
Funny where the mind travels, especially when people return that you thought were lost. Strange what you think, and strange what you see. For, as the soft breeze and the moving curtain lulled Carmel towards sleep, soot marks silently appeared on the walls and ceiling, and wings brushed past her hair, till she heard the frightened trapped beating of something used to freedom. She opened her eyes: there were no soot marks, there was no bird, there was no sound at all except the sound of her heart. No movement except the pain darting through her back. She fumbled around her neck for the medal that wasn’t there.
Carmel adjusted the pillow behind her. She felt panicky. From being woken suddenly – by what?
Settle. It’s all right.
She rocked gently to ease the back pain. The bloody pain. Was it starting? Was this what it was like?
Carmel didn’t know. It felt like the agony of the curse, not like a baby coming. Oh God, oh God, she was alone, and with no breath to shout out. The pain around her waist was like a brace tightening, again, and again, and again.
She was on the floor panting – she couldn’t get up. Someone passed outside the window; a high laugh rose up. Birdie. Please. Please.
She moaned.
It’s too quick, not like this. Oh, Dan!
If only longing could bring a person home.
Don’t be afraid – you’ve waited a long time for this. Don’t be afraid.
It was hot, too hot, yet she was shivering. The pain had eased. Everything was still for a second. She took her bearings – she was on the floor by the chair, on her hunkers, rocking back and forth. Her underwear was drenched; she must take it off. She tugged it free.
She never knew it would be like this. The unbearable urge to press down, the soiling. A roar came out of her. And another. She didn’t care that she was hunched on the floor, she didn’t care. She let instinct guide her and bore down. She screamed.
The baby slithered silently from between her legs. It glistened. A beautiful baby boy, so perfect. His hair sleek and dark, his face round and calm, eyes closed and delicate lashes sweeping over his cheeks. His tiny mouth pursed into a cupid’s bow, his fists closed tight, each fingernail a pearl. Carmel held him to her breast. Could a baby be born sleeping?
6
One of the best days of my life was the one when Carmel nearly fainted in the shop and I was the only customer. It got me the part-time job.
‘I’ll have to close.’ She was grey in the face.
I stepped up to the mark.
‘No need, Mrs Holohan. I’ll take over. You lie down.’
‘Can you add and subtract?’ she asked, not a bit embarrassed.
‘I’m quick at my numbers and can read as well as most.’
I hadn’t left school because I was slow. A well-off woman like Carmel Holohan wouldn’t understand that. I had been on my way to the market to get a proper look at the herbalist and give him an opportunity to catch sight of me, so I was done up lovely for what turned out to be my first day of work. I wore blue serge with a deep sweetheart neckline, all made from a pattern out of my own head. And what did Carmel do, only tie a big old apron around me? Said my homemade dress was a bit ‘showy’. What would she know? Practically living in a shapeless gansey since the previous week when she�
��d taken badly.
After a while I realized that Carmel wasn’t coming back down. No wonder: she looked atrocious. After all her swooning these past months, didn’t the babe go and die on her? So much for ‘I’m not an invalid, Emily.’
The shop was quiet and I decided I might as well have a good look around. I’d been coming to Kelly’s since I was a tot, but I’d never been in the back. I couldn’t wait to see the decorating Carmel was always boasting about. ‘Dan’s a Trojan – he never stops. You should see the kitchen extension he’s built.’
A short hall led from the grocery, so thick with cerise wallpaper you could press your thumb into it. There was a wedding photo on a what-not facing into the shop. As if Carmel wanted everyone to accidentally see her looking young and pretty.
‘Oh, yes,’ I’d heard her say, edging the door shut with her foot, ‘that’s my husband and me, the day we wed.’
Plums in her mouth, shite on her shoes.
I examined the picture up close. Dan hadn’t changed a jot. Carmel had. Her face was heart-shaped then, not square like now. Her hair was waved back as if she was facing a light breeze. But I knew those lovely soft waves were stiff from setting lotion. She wore a dark suit, single breasted, with a cinched-in waist.
The living room was dim and stank of turf and laundry. A clotheshorse laden with sheets hunched over the hearth. The walls were painted olive-green. Good-quality tan lino was laid right to the wall. A plush armchair with wooden arms like paddles had a pile of books slipping out from under it. I sat and sank almost to the ground. The ceiling above me was yellow from nicotine. Carmel’s mother had been a wicked smoker. Three embroidered cushions on the settle bed caught my eye: Home Sweet Home, God Bless This House and Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin. The stitching was loose and careless; the colours were dire, browns, mustard and violet. Carmel must’ve decorated in a fever, or maybe it was her mother before her. There were knick-knacks on every surface; the sideboard and mantelpiece were crowded with china and brass, there wasn’t a saint or politician left out.