by Alison Walsh
‘Contact lenses. Sent away for them.’ As if it was the most normal thing in the world to look demonically possessed at half-six in the evening.
At least she’d managed to persuade him to wear a suit for the wedding. He’d been reasonably compliant about it too, letting her hire a nice grey one and agreeing to tie his hair back and remove the scary lenses. He looked handsome, with his fine features and strong chin. He was a lovely boy. She suspected the whole Goth thing was to look scary for those little shits in St Munchin’s so they wouldn’t pick on him, and she supposed she couldn’t blame him. She’d have cheerfully broken the legs of that gurrier Johnno Falvey if she thought she could have got away with it. She clenched her fists now as she thought of them. No, she wouldn’t think about that right now, she just couldn’t, on top of everything else.
She’d thought she was taking a different tack that morning asking Melissa if she’d thought about wearing that lovely cream lace dress June had bought her for her Junior Cert disco. It was some overpriced designer label, but Mary-Pat had to admit her daughter looked lovely in it. ‘It really suits you,’ she’d said, unable to keep the note of pleading out of her voice.
‘I’m happy with the way I look, Mammy,’ Melissa had insisted, her mouth set in a thin line.
And that had set her off again, a hair-trigger igniting her rage. She’d whipped her head around to Melissa, eyes watering as one of the rollers got caught in her hair, yelling, ‘Do you think I’ll be able to enjoy myself with you there looking like a streetwalker? Because that’s what you look like, Melissa, make no mistake about it – a tramp.’
Melissa had thrown the hairbrush down then, sent it clattering across the tiles, and she’d fixed her mother with a glare. ‘Oh, and you’d know about that, wouldn’t you?’
Mary-Pat had remained absolutely still for a moment. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked finally, without turning around.
‘Nothing.’ Melissa was sulky now, but her voice was quieter.
‘Spit it out, Melissa, why don’t you?’ It was a command, not a request.
‘It was nothing.’ Melissa was more defiant now, as she bent over and picked up the hairbrush, breasts nearly falling out of the halter. Mary-Pat had to close her eyes at the sight. Not for the first time, she wished she hadn’t told Melissa about John-Patrick, about the way he hadn’t exactly been planned, a fact of which John-Patrick himself was unaware. She’d blurted it out once, when she’d come in after WeightWatchers, having had one too many in the Angler’s Rest. It was ironic, to get pissed after WeightWatchers, but it was a bit of a laugh after all the tension of the weigh-in and the lecture on portion sizes and fat-free cheese; the lesson, as if they needed to learn it, that life was just a pain in the ass.
She’d been trying to be Melissa’s friend when she’d blabbed. It was pathetic – she wasn’t her friend: she was her mother – but she’d wanted to bond with her. Melissa had been asking how she’d known that Daddy was the one and she’d said that it was because the minute she’d told him about John-Patrick, he’d asked her to marry him. That yes, that meant that herself and JP hadn’t exactly been married when John-Patrick was conceived. And all she’d got for her trouble was Melissa covering her mouth with her hand, a horrified look on her face. ‘Overshare, Mum, for goodness’ sake.’ Jesus, she’d had no idea that young people could be that sanctimonious. Just you wait, she’d thought. Just you wait until you realise that life isn’t that easy, Melissa. That it isn’t a straightforward choice between right and wrong, good and bad.
‘At least I won’t look like you, like some … some dried-up old hag!’ had been Melissa’s parting shot this morning. Mary-Pat had wanted to hurt her when she’d said that, to damage her, to grab hold of that black hair of hers and pull it out of her head. Her fists were clenched, those two red spots appearing on her cheeks the way they always did when she was agitated.
PJ had intervened then, his mouth set in a thin line. ‘Melissa, don’t disrespect your mother. Apologise please.’
‘Only if she apologises to me.’ Melissa stood there, both hands on her hips, just as she had done when she was nine and didn’t want to do as she was told. Mary-Pat felt ashamed of herself then. If only you knew how much I love you, she thought. And I’m sorry I can’t show you, that I have to spoil it all. Maybe I just don’t know any better. Maybe I used up all my mothering before you were born.
But she didn’t say sorry. That’d be going too far.
On the way out the front door, PJ had pulled her aside. ‘Could you not have apologised first, Mary-Pat? Would it have killed you?’ And the look he gave her, of such intense disappointment, had made her hope a hole would open up in the ground and swallow her. Of all people, for PJ to comment. But she just couldn’t give in. ‘I don’t have to apologise to her for wanting to protect her, PJ. I’m her mother, that’s my job, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ she’d said and tried to keep her head high as she walked towards the car.
PJ was sick of it all, she knew that. He’d never said a word, through all the years with Daddy, even when he was living with them and would wander in at all hours of the day and night, insisting on waking the kids so he could tell them one of his Tall Tales, stories of fairies and goblins that they loved. ‘But it’s four o’clock in the morning,’ PJ would explain patiently, appearing in the kitchen while Daddy clattered about, deciding he wanted a big fry. ‘Let’s leave the stories until they wake up – what do you think?’
And Daddy hadn’t even been that nice to him. ‘Pee-Jay,’ he’d say, with a slight sneer. ‘How’s the fishing, Pee-Jay?’ He’d thought he was better than him, that was it. Thought he was a more exciting kind of a man. Less of a lump. But PJ was a better man than Daddy would ever be. Mary-Pat knew that. But now there was a tiredness to their exchanges, an unfamiliar look in PJ’s eyes that took Mary-Pat a while to decipher. Eventually, she’d worked out what it was. Boredom. He was bored with her.
The realisation made her feel lonelier than ever. PJ had always been there for her, putting up with her sharp tongue, pulling her back into line when she went too far, but now he just seemed to drift away, hiding behind the Daily Star or announcing that he was going out for a walk at eleven o’clock at night, a man who didn’t walk the half-mile to the shops if he could possibly help it. They used to joke that PJ had no legs, because they hardly ever saw him use them.
She couldn’t blame him, she supposed. He’d had enough to put up with over the years, but there was something different now. Mary-Pat could sense it. And the real giveaway was that things in bed weren’t right. And they always had been. There’d been no complaints in that department. You’d never think it, Mary-Pat supposed, with the two of them. They didn’t look like sex machines, but they enjoyed it. It had been such a discovery when they’d started going out together, maybe because Mary-Pat had been asked out so little that she didn’t even know about this part of her. This capacity for passion. And then one day, it just happened. Love.
And now, it seemed, that love was over. Somewhere along the line, it had just faded away.
‘Where are we going?’ Daddy’s voice broke into her thoughts, sounding petulant. I shouldn’t have brought him, Mary-Pat thought. But she had no choice. Pius had been right, even though she wouldn’t admit it in a million years. If he didn’t turn up at Rosie’s wedding, it would look downright suspicious. She’d have to keep him away, mind. Make sure he stayed in the background, in case he said anything.
One of the nurses at St Benildus’s had dressed him in a suit that was two sizes too big for him, but he was neat and tidy, his snowy white hair combed smoothly back off his forehead, his clothes stain free. And yet he looked as if he was ninety, not sixty-seven. A man old before his time, all that swagger gone, that vitality that had been so magnetic and so destructive at the same time. She didn’t know whether to be sad or happy about it. He was lost: to them all and to himself.
‘We’re going to the wedding, Daddy, don’t you remember? I told you about it,’ Ma
ry-Pat said now, twisting in her seat to look at him.
‘The wedding?’ He looked blank and his hands made that scrabbling motion on the blanket that was covering his knees, another sign that he was getting agitated. Mary-Pat clenched her fists, a bead of sweat dripping down the back of her neck and repeated, ‘Yes, Daddy, the wedding.’ Hoping that neither of the kids would intervene, would mention Rosie’s name. It might set him off. And God knows what he’d be like when he saw the house. Please God it wouldn’t trigger anything.
Something had caught Daddy’s eye outside now, the deep green hedgerows, the canal flashing by, a silvery blue, the vivid green and yellow of the lilies that filled it at this time of the year. It felt as if the whole earth had burst into life: the hawthorn in the ditch, the thick blanket of gorse. As they drove over the humpback bridge, the heron slowly lifted himself up from his perch by the water, flapping in a stately manner, his grey-tipped wings spread wide. The blue sky and the small fluffy clouds were reflected in the mirror surface of the canal, its edge alive with dragonflies. It was beautiful, Mary-Pat thought, distracted from Daddy and from everything else, just for a moment.
And then she caught sight of him. His lips were moving and she realised that he was humming that tune under his breath, ‘The Rose of Tralee’. ‘She was lovely and fair, as the rose of the summer, but ’twas not her beauty alone that won me …’ He’d loved that song, playing it over and over again on an ancient gramophone in the living room, standing on the sofa, one arm pressed to his stomach, the other outstretched, pretending to be Count John McCormack, Daddy’s baritone wobbling around the opera singer’s fine tenor. He’d always enjoyed the ending particularly: ‘But the chill hand of death has now rent us asunder, I’m lonely tonight for the Rose of Tralee.’ At the word ‘death’, he’d throw himself onto his back on the sofa in a parody of dying and send them all into convulsions of laughter. Ah, Daddy, Mary-Pat thought, how we loved you. And then you went and ruined it all.
She looked at him again, humming under his breath, and then he looked at her as if he really saw her, his face lit up with a huge smile. ‘Home,’ he said suddenly, looking at her. ‘Home.’
Mary-Pat reached out and patted him on the hand, a tight knot forming in her stomach. ‘That’s right, Daddy, home.’
He was mercifully silent then, as they lowered his chair out of the car. He didn’t even seem to register where he was. They all stood there for a moment in front of the house and waited, but he’d gone inside himself again, humming a tune under his breath. Mary-Pat realised she’d been holding her breath and expelled it in a rush.
She looked at the place and had to admit Pius had done a great job, him and the Yank. The tatty wooden sign on the front gate that said ‘Private’ had been removed, and they’d painted the front of the house so that you couldn’t see that awful line of plaster, a relic of another one of Daddy’s grand schemes, when he’d decided one day that he’d replaster the front of the house and had run out of mortar two-thirds of the way up, never quite getting around to finishing it. The place had looked as if it had a dirty big tide mark on it after that. Now, the three windows above the front door, with its pretty fanlight, and the window on either side were clean, glinting in the sun. The door had been painted a bright red and the brass knocker in the shape of a leaping trout, that had always been a grimy grey, was now a shiny yellow.
And Rosie must have leaned on Pius to tidy the garden up a bit. He’d gone for a cottage-garden look, probably because he had half the stuff growing wild anyway: the beautiful grape-like flowers of the tufted vetch and the lacy fronds of wild carrot. And she hadn’t seen granny’s bonnet or hollyhocks in years – they looked just right in the border in front of the house. Somehow, he’d managed to coax a lawn out of the mucky soil, a twisting path of bark leading to the gazebo, which was no longer a mouldy green but a gleaming white, draped in white begonias and dusky pink tea roses. Christ, Rosie must have spent a fortune on the place. The Yank must have money, so, because Rosie couldn’t have earned much at that social working she did.
‘Is that girl wearing any clothes?’ John-Patrick’s voice broke into her thoughts and they all turned to look at Tracy O’Malley, that knacker, who was striding across the lawn in a dress that looked like a bandage and fuck-me heels. How the hell had she been invited? Oh, well, like mother, like daughter, Mary-Pat thought. She could see her son’s gaze following the girl and she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow – it was bad manners. And then she looked at Melissa, with the caterpillars on her eyes and the boobs announcing to all and sundry that they’d arrived, and she felt like crying all over again.
She managed to lower her bum onto a cast-iron white garden chair, relieved that it hadn’t collapsed under her. The two men relaxed in stripy deckchairs, PJ’s face turned to the sun, absorbing every single ray of it. She wondered if she should tell him to be careful, that he’d have a face like a tomato later, but decided to keep her mouth shut, to try to relax for a moment, closing her eyes and listening to the hum of chat and expectation, which was broken by a gentle tinkle on the piano, which Pius had lifted all the way out of the living room to sit under the apple trees.
Mary-Pat let the gentle notes soothe her for a bit. She could hear Melissa shifting around on the seat beside her, saying ‘hi’ to a couple of the girls she knew from the town – perhaps it was best that Mary-Pat couldn’t see the looks on their faces. And they were such nice girls – Mary-Pat just couldn’t understand why she’d want to stand out from them that much. She willed herself not to think about it, or about Daddy, whom PJ had settled in the shade under a willow tree beside the house. June had said she’d keep an eye on him for once, even if she had managed to make it sound as if it was a huge bloody deal, as if Mary-Pat had asked her to part the Red Sea or something. When Mary-Pat opened her eyes, she could see her sister flapping over the man, talking to him in a too-loud voice, draping his blanket over his knees while he stared into space. That eejit Gerry was hovering nearby, wearing one of those cream Panama hats, like the sort you’d buy in the Sunday newspapers. When he saw Mary-Pat looking, he waved, and she had to wave back.
PJ sat down beside her, squeezing her shoulder as he did so. ‘Daddy’s fine,’ he said.
‘I can see that.’ She half-smiled, closing her eyes again. ‘God help him.’
‘Jesus, but Pi’s done the place proud.’ PJ was trying to talk in a whisper, but the result was a more penetrating than usual rumble. ‘He’s even draped some sort of a canopy over his cannabis plants, have you noticed?’
Mary-Pat’s eyes flicked open and she glared at PJ. ‘Shush, PJ, you never know who could be listening.’ She’d made her feelings clear to Pi on his little money-earner. Where the hell was he, anyway? She turned her face to the sun, all the while telling herself that she really shouldn’t. Her skin would only get even redder. How was it that Junie, who had spent her entire adolescence frying herself in the sun, had perfect porcelain skin, while she looked like an overripe tomato? Junie had inherited Mammy’s skin, the lucky bitch, while she’d got the complexion of some bogger throwback from centuries ago.
‘Here we go, kick-off,’ John-Patrick said beside her, as the tinkling formed itself into the wedding march. Mary-Pat turned her head to see her little sister walking up through the small crowd on the lawn to the gazebo on Pius’s arm in that lovely dress. She felt a lump in her throat, which she wilfully swallowed. She was not about to bawl at her sister’s wedding. They’d think she’d gone soft. Her sister walked slowly up the path to the gazebo, to gasps of appreciation, and Mary-Pat had to rummage in her handbag, pretending to look for a tissue, so that PJ wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.
He nudged her in the ribs. ‘You OK, MP?’
‘I’m fine,’ she barked back at him. ‘I just have something in my eye.’
‘Right.’ He sounded as if he was trying to smother laughter and she wanted to hit him a belt. She wanted to keep her feelings to herself, not blurt them all over Monasterard. Was
there really any harm in it?
The rest of the ceremony passed in a blur of affirmations of love. Father Naul, that new priest, who looked a bit like Sam Shepard, just did a bit of praying and handwaving, because they’d got married in church the day before, with only the Yank’s parents, Daphne and Pi in attendance. Mary-Pat told herself that it didn’t hurt, that, sure, she wasn’t a Catholic anyway, not like her baby sister, for reasons Mary-Pat had firmly blocked from her mind, but it did hurt. It made her heart feel heavy in her chest, like a stone.
The priest and the church had been the Yank’s idea, as his family were devout Catholics and Rosie had gone along with it because, even though Mary-Pat was sure the girl hadn’t been to Mass since the day she’d insisted on making her Holy Communion, it mattered to him. ‘It’s a compromise, MP, and that’s what marriage is all about,’ she’d told her.
And what would you know? Mary-Pat had wanted to ask, but hadn’t. Instead, she’d just nodded her head and bitten her tongue. She’d had to get used to that, with Rosie back. The new and improved Rosie, who didn’t seem to need any help with anything. Oh, she’d thrown them a bone with the dress fitting, but apart from that, she had it all ‘under control, thanks’. She’d given Mary-Pat an apologetic look then, a ‘what can you do’, spreading her hands wide, and Mary-Pat hadn’t been able to hide the hurt that her sister had excluded her from her biggest day. More than that, she’d have to admit that she was surprised that her sister could manage such a thing. Time was, Rosie couldn’t manage to get out of bed and get a breakfast into her without a palaver. Mary-Pat could still see her standing at the door on her way to school, humming a little tune to herself, half a slice of toast in her mouth. Her eyes were ringed with the previous night’s mascara and she was looking at her books as if she didn’t quite know what they were for. And that coat – that godawful specimen she’d insisted on wearing constantly, just to give me a hard time, Mary-Pat thought. To punish me for having brought her up the only way I knew how.