by John Lynch
‘Be careful what you say. Be careful what you think because they are always listening,’ she would say, her head upturned, her mouth slightly parted. When I was a child, she told me stories of old Ireland, the one that grew strong on the meat of poetry and the spoken word, the one that gave the world its dreamers and magicians. She looked as if she had been moulded from the woodland that surrounded her, carved into being with bark as her spine and moss for flesh and a bird’s nest for a heart. At night as I lay in bed I could hear her as she moved across the fields searching for a lost cat, using a high-pitched feeding call to try and attract it.
My sister and I accepted her as only children can, whole-heartedly and without prejudice. My parents were not so accommodating, believing she was mad, or worse just plain evil.
I would often sneak off, running the distance to her house, my heart longing to see her.
‘Who is it?’ she would demand as I stood at her front door.
‘Me,’ I would say.
‘Which me? There are a lot of mes in this world.’
‘Gabriel me.’
‘Ah…’
Her door had an old cross on it, with a peeling Jesus nailed to it. He looked so forgotten and so tired. Every time she opened it either to let herself out or to usher someone in she would touch him gently on the wounds of his feet and pause for a second, her eyes closed, saying something I couldn’t quite hear.
‘Why do you do that?’ I asked her one day.
‘Because it only takes a moment,’ she said. ‘And besides, he’s in trouble.’
It was dark in her house; the windows were so grimy and dirty that they only let in a pale wash of daylight. Her sitting room was a muddle of broken chairs and discarded clothes. The floor was covered with old newspaper and magazines, and everywhere there was movement, small shapes lurked in the corners, their eyes flashing in the darkness. The place smelled of stale piss and warm bodies. Ashes from the fire were strewn in front of her fireplace like a grey beard. I remember the first time I went a small tawny cat sidled up to me and ran its tail across the tops of my knees. It only had one eye, and its good one ran with yellowy pus.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said to me. ‘He’s only new here. I found him on the mountain a few days ago, he has a cold in his eye, but it will be alright. All he needs is a bit of love like the rest of us.’
I was mesmerised by her, by this child-woman who lived in the cracks of life that the rest of us avoided. I could see what had once been a beautiful young woman beneath the coat of filth she seemed to wear like a suit of armour.
I felt comfortable with her and her troop of sick and wounded animals. I would watch as she spoke to each of them in a language made up of coos and tuts. Sometimes she would break into a strange banshee wail, beginning softly, her head thrown back, her tongue disappearing in and out of her grimy mouth then building to a screech which filled the whole house. Her animals would stand pert with attention and as the noise built would move to her, quietly circling her, rubbing her with their bodies, their heads upturned and their eyes glowing.
She talked to me as if I was a grown-up, as if I had something to say. I would listen to her as she spoke of the magic that lived in the hills around us, how each breath of wind had its own message. She told me that on every hand we were being watched, that God had filled the air with spirits that noted how we were doing, and that animals could see what we couldn’t see, that they held a key in their souls that we had lost a long time ago.
I would walk the countryside with her, watching as she stopped now and then to sniff the air, her hand raised, her head stock still.
‘There’s a wee one in trouble,’ she would say.
I would stand beside her and look around me, desperate to see what she saw, scouring the hedgerows and the ditches. Sometimes she would say: ‘He doesn’t want to be found. It’s his time and he wants to go on his own and in peace.’
Now and then on the way back from school we would see her, as we sat in the back of Dad’s Hillman Imp. He would shake his head as we passed her and mutter something like no good lunatic under his breath. We would watch as she raised her hand to us in greeting as if she was conducting some unseen choir.
It was only later in life that I discovered that she had lost her brother when she was in her early twenties. He had been taken out and shot nearly thirty years before; local men had arrived in the dead of night wielding a rusty gun and iron bars. She had answered the door. They pushed their way past her and dragged him from his bed out into the front garden where they beat him senseless and then shot him twice in the head. His blood seeped into the grass and onto her nightshirt as she held his broken body. He was an informer, or so a man told me, running titbits of information to the local police in return for a few shillings, for blood money, was the way the man put it.
The man also told me that when she was younger she would have broken your heart with her beauty. She had many suitors, him included; they would follow her like the strays that she subsequently collected. When her brother was shot the young men looking for her hand fell away, melted back into their own lives. The world shut her out, banished her to the wild scrub and the fluttering heather of the mountain behind her house.
She stopped washing maybe out of protest, maybe out of shame, maybe rage. She shoved herself into the face of an indifferent world, the stains on her face put there by the good people of the parish. She buried her brother and stood in the wind alone as he was put in the earth, and an anger must have begun in her, it must have moved within her with the force of a detonating bomb shattering every dream, every hope, every prayer. Maybe as she stood there watching the coffin being lowered she thought about leaving, setting out for England or America. Instead she looked to the night; she moved to peer through the cracks that border this world, the place where fury lived and where the lonely spin in eternity, friendless and without love.
She began collecting strays, broken beings who knew the taste of disappointment just as she did. She held them to her as the world lay sleeping and told them that she was one of them, that she had left her own kind behind. She would shield me too when I was with her, her grimy features following every move I made. She made me listen to the whisperings of nature at work, from the heavy hum of bees seeking pollen to the flick of a trout leaving the water to take a fly.
Sometimes we would just sit there on a hill, the clouds hovering above us, and hold the silence between us, believing that we were close to unearthing some secret that lay hidden just beneath the wings of the breeze.
I would look at her in profile and see the fine beauty she once had, the ghost of it still lying across her bones and in the corner of her green eyes and in the gentle plunge of her long neck.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ she asked me one day as we sat there.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe you could be my gardener.’
Then she laughed, throwing her head back.
‘Would you like that?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Then you could listen every day to the worms and beetles moving in the ground, happy and free in the wet muck, eh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Or you could be a wizard or a warlock. Do you know what a wizard is?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about a warlock?’
‘Not sure.’
‘A warlock is a male witch. He has powers that can frighten a man and bring him weeping to his knees. What about that for a notion?’
‘What?’
‘You…A warlock. That’d be something.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘What are you a man or a mouse?’
‘I’m frightened,’ I remember saying.
‘Of what?’ she asked. But before I had a chance to answer, she said, ‘They’ve put that there.’
She waved her long arm at the middle distance as if an army rose on the crest of the hill in front of us, poised to take us apart.
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�The world and its wife.’
I remember nodding, unsure what she meant.
‘No-one listens anymore. They only plot and fiddle with other people’s happiness. They take and take. Everyone says they’re owed…Don’t you think?’
She plucked up a long stem of grass and put it between her teeth and sucked at its end.
‘There’s goodness in these. Try one.’
She handed me one, and I put it in my mouth.
‘The thing to remember, wee one,’ she said. ‘It’s they who are frightened, not us.’
As the sun set that day, throwing up long threads of fire as it disappeared, I remember looking at her and her lioness profile, part animal part woman, and my heart was calm and full of love for her.
Locals from the town, young boys fed on a diet of Republicanism and sheer fuck-you hardness, used to circle her house in the dead of night like wolves scenting the weakness of a fallen prey. They would call to her and taunt her, throwing rocks at her doors and windows. Inside, her animals would howl and beat the deadness of the night with their cries. Sometimes one of the boys would force a window latch and try to climb in screaming abuse at her, but none of them ever made it in, the largest and strongest of her dogs would always be there, fangs at the ready, his eyes blazing with fierce loyalty to his owner.
Stories began to circulate that one of the youths had caught a glimpse of her lying naked in front of her fire, a fine ridge of animal hair running down the length of her back, her eyes glowing with wildness, her teeth bared, as she was mounted from behind by one of her dogs, an old grizzled Alsatian called Ahab after the sadistic captain in Moby Dick.
One night they came armed with baseball bats and chains, one had an axe, a kid called Hardface. He was known for it; at dance halls up and down the country he would produce this small wooden axe to impress and frighten, to let the world know that he had come prepared. They were about twenty strong and this time they were determined to get beyond the threshold of her small house and her pack of loyal guard dogs. Four or five of them led the charge, rushing at her door, busting it down with a blow from their boots, swinging their baseball bats at anything that moved, catching dog and cat in equal measure, their barks and shrieks filling the house. Old tables, chairs and pots were thrown to the ground; kittens scurried between their feet like rats caught in a flood. The youths wore heavy combat jackets, thick motorcyclists’ gloves and balaclavas. One after another they poured into her house, thumping and kicking their way down her small hall. They heard her calling to her animals; she was in the room at the back where she lived most of the time by the guttering fire. Ahab was the last animal they met; he stood by her, growling at them as they burst into the living space. He looked like a lion of the savannah, proud and ferocious, daring any of them to make the next move.
Hardface, who up until now had been using a baseball bat like the rest of them, pulled out his small axe from inside his coat, it glinted like a devil’s eye in the gloomy candlelit room. Youth after youth squeezed into the tight dark space. One of them spat on the floor as he looked around. Their heavy violence filled the air and for a moment they just looked at her, as if she were some kind of soiled queen about to be deposed, being given one last moment of deference before her execution.
Ahab inched forward when he saw the axe, his coat bristling, his eyes filled with hatred.
‘Ssh, Ahab,’ she said. ‘Ssh.’
She stood slowly and faced them, her eyes shining with a quiet defiance. One by one she looked at them.
‘At least have the decency to show me your faces,’ she said. ‘Let me see who I have the pleasure of welcoming into my house at this late hour.’
As Ahab leapt I saw the axe move past my head in a downward swoop, its blade gleaming. It struck the dog across the muzzle, drawing a long line of blood across it and almost separating the nose from the snout. I let out a cry and May’s head snapped in my direction and her eyes burned into mine. The dog managed to get a hold on Hardface, biting into his wrist, causing him to drop the axe. He tried to shake his attacker from him, but Ahab just bit deeper. I grabbed the axe and swung it high above my head, bringing it crashing down across the dog’s back. I could hear the dull thud of steel on bone and fur. Its body buckled but still it held on, its teeth shining, its blood mingling with that of its attacker. In I struck, my breath coming in quick grunts.
‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Fuck.’
I remember fumbling with the handle, how it slipped in my gloved hand. I felt May’s eyes on me, I knew that I had crossed a line, that I had committed a treason against the beauty she had laid at my feet, that I was taking an axe to the strong tree of poetry she had grown in my heart. I wanted to explain to her that the stain had always been there. Even when I first came to her, my small hand beating on her door to let me in, the mark lay across my heart like the shadow of an upturned cross.
He had put it there. He had placed it between my legs where all good things come from. He had put his hand there and in doing so he had taken any chance I had. He had told me it was alright, that the night was made for secrets and that this was just one more to add to the ocean of secrets that the world was made up of. The seed was already in me as I stood in her front room for the first time; I was lost to her even before she began to talk to me of the world of magic and wondering. I was a hard ball of hate and so immune to her. I was one of those she had spoken about, who felt that they were owed.
As I killed her dog that night, pounding it until its carcass was a mass of fur and blood, that’s what I was trying to tell her, that she shouldn’t have bothered with me, that all along I was a spy, sent to peer into the workings of her soul, and that like my father I was built for betrayal.
All of this and more rose in me that night as she watched me smash her last friend into the earth. I pounded his hand on my balls, his mouth on mine, and the seam of sweat he brought to my skin every time I thought of him.
The dog was dead and with it any hope I had of crossing back from the wasteland I now found myself in. I no longer cared. I remember removing my balaclava and looking at her and that was the moment I put my signature to the crime, not caring that the moon had dimmed and that the lights that guided me had begun to fade. She didn’t say anything and made no sound as we dragged her into the front garden and stripped her. Then we hunted her, giving her a head-start, listening as she crashed through the hedges and fields that surrounded her house, her dirty nakedness flashing through the moonlit night. We chased her, calling to her, taunting her, making animal noises. I remember revelling in the power of my hold over another human life. We spread out, calling to each other in owl hoots when we spied her, the cider we had downed only hours before giving us madness and a violent clarity.
Higher and higher up the mountain we pursued her, the grassy hills giving way to scrub and tufts of wiry heather. Through pools and brackish water, past half-slumbering cattle and bearded silhouettes of goats, eventually she gave up, collapsing only minutes from the top, her breath leaving her body in a little pleading whine, her arms lying about her.
When we reached her we stood in a circle around her. I ignored the look in her eyes that told me she knew me. I tried not to pay attention to it because I was someone else; I had worked very hard at it, day and night, minute to minute, and hour to hour. I had killed the dreaming child, the one who had talked of the courtship of butterflies, who had opened himself to the world like a daisy reaching for the sun.
The rest of the gang wanted to rape her, but I put myself between them and her. I knew that as an act it was complete, it was pure. We had taken everything from her, and that what was left of her dignity was hers, and not ours to brutalise. Some of them said I was chicken but I challenged each of them to back what they said with action but none of them did. They had seen what I had done to her dog.
So we left her there, in the pool of her sweat and her misery, her strong profile broken by the shadows that grew up around her, her eyes a mist of confusion and sadness.
Blue-grey
‘Your episodes will come and go, that’s normal…You will panic like you did yesterday…We will have to restrain you…That’s normal too…You have divorced yourself from reality…And these dreams…notions that you have are not unusual for someone in your state…At the moment I believe you can hear and understand me though you are still refusing to speak…So I am taking this opportunity to let you know what’s happening…You must try and trust us, we deal with cases like yours all the time…We are set up for it and have a great deal of experience…The most important thing to remember is that you are not alone…In spite of what you may think there are a great deal of people who care about you…As the days pass it will be our job to see that you sleep…That’s where your mind will repair itself…And if you trust us gradually you will come back from where you’ve been until you will wonder if it ever happened at all…My name is Doctor Rush and I will be in charge of you while you are here…Any questions?’
It is the young doctor from before, the one with the syringe. She is sitting on the side of my bed. I look at her and want to ask her if she is real but I just lie there and shake my head.
‘What’s wrong? Tell me. I know that you understand what I’m saying to you…By not communicating you only make this process longer and more painful for yourself.’
She waits. Her eyes are blue-grey like the sky on an October morning. She wears a wedding band and her fingers are long and slender.
‘Very well,’ she says.
As she moves to get up I take her hand and hold it. I see a slight fear rise in her eyes. I watch as she decides what to do. Eventually she sits back down.
‘You don’t want me to go…’
I don’t say anything.
‘My first name is Moira.’