by Alison Walsh
She even thought about it when she went for a power walk with the girls – her first in ages – and only half-listened to the gossip and chatter as they strode along, out past the creamery and left at Sean O’Reilly’s, her eyes flicking over the outline of Pius’s roof as they crossed the bridge over the canal and then turned left, following a narrow path at the bottom of Sean’s field of corn, now ripe and golden after the hot summer. The stalks were a dull, sludgy brown, the same colour as the earth to which they would return, and the cobs a rich, buttery yellow. Mary-Pat could taste the sweet kernels in her mouth as she walked past, imagined eating them with a nice slab of melted butter, never mind that they stuck in your teeth. The other two, Mary-Lou and Mary-Pat’s oldest friend, Bridget, were chattering away about Christmas, of all things, and Mary-Pat tuned out for a few seconds, enjoying the smell of the rich brown earth and the damp grass. Autumn had always been her favourite season.
‘Did you hear about Frances O’Brien? She’s running for the town council. She came around the other week, canvassing,’ Mary-Lou said. ‘She’s a fierce holy-Joe, so she is – or should that be “Josephine”.’ She chuckled.
At the sound of Frances O’Brien’s name, Mary-Pat suddenly tuned back in again. Rosie had been all gung-ho about seeing the woman after she’d dragged Pi to the parish house. Even the thought of it made Mary-Pat’s heart nearly stop in her chest. She wasn’t sure how she could prevent it, how she could spare poor Rosie the pointless visit, because Mary-Pat knew it would be pointless. Frances O’Brien wasn’t about to tell her anything, not any time soon.
At the mention of the name, Bridget shot Mary-Pat a look and said vaguely, ‘Is that so? Well, it’ll be nice to have a woman’s touch on the council. I’ve had enough of that fat Pat Mooney with his sweating and his greasy handshake. Gives me the creeps, that fellow does.’
Thank you, Bridget, Mary-Pat thought, as her friend tried to move the subject away from Frances O’Brien.
‘Oh, he’s some class of mover and shaker, the same Pat Mooney,’ Mary-Lou agreed, taking the bait. ‘God knows what he gets up to half of the time, and that’s not even the politics – did you hear, he was supposed to have bribed John-Paul O’Sullivan to get the Lidl built on the Dublin Road. “Bringing Jobs to Monasterard” – bringing brown envelopes, more like.’
‘Oh, be careful, Mary-Lou.’ Mary-Pat laughed. ‘He might sue you for defamation of character if he hears you, and you know he has eyes and ears everywhere.’
Mary-Lou was off now, cheeks reddening with indignation. She was a bit excitable, was Mary-Lou. ‘If I thought I could knock the so-and-so off his perch, I’d even vote for that woman, in spite of all her holy-moly. She asked me if I believed in the power of prayer – can’t see what that has to do with voting, but sure it could be worse. Anything’s better than Fat Pat. Do you know, there’s a rumour going around that he’s visiting that young one at the minimarket every night. Can you imagine? He leaves the wife at home and drives up Main Street, bold as brass, and then pulls in to the shop in broad daylight. Doesn’t seem to care who sees him.’
Mary-Pat’s ears were aflame, her throat tightening as she dropped ever so slightly behind Mary-Lou so that she wouldn’t have to walk beside her. She didn’t want her to see the expression on her face. She wasn’t stupid, Mary-Lou, she’d know something was up. And then the story would be all over town.
‘Who is she anyway? Haven’t seen her around here before. Is she a blow-in or what?’ Bridget asked, oblivious.
‘Foreign,’ Mary-Lou said, nodding her head as if that explained everything. ‘I tell you, ever since she got the job, the lads have been flocking to that minimarket like bees to honey. Men: sure they’re pathetic, they’re so obvious.’ And then she turned. ‘Mary-Pat, are you not able to keep up?’
Mary-Pat saw her chance and pretended to huff and puff a bit, putting her hands on her hips and stopping for a few seconds, as if to draw breath. ‘You know, girls, I think I’ll call it a day. I’m knackered. I’ll cut back along the canal and go into Pi for a bit. I’ll be better able for it next time,’ and she turned with what she hoped was a cheery wave and bolted for the safety of home. Christ, it was worse than she thought. Her husband was just a fool, a complete and utter fool. And she was a worse one to let him away with it. She’d have to do something about it, she thought, something that would make him sit up and take notice.
In the meantime, though, there was that question. The answer had only occurred to her when she was back in Graham’s sitting room the next day, looking out the window at the trees, their leaves now russet and yellow. They’d been sitting there in silence for a full twenty minutes, Graham perched on a cream armchair, like a bird, eyes bright, Mary-Pat half-disappearing into his squashy sofa, when she said, ‘I’ve thought about your question.’
He didn’t say anything, just gave her that watery smile, and when the urge to beat him over the head with one of those masks had passed, she said, ‘Do you know, my husband is seeing another woman?’
He raised an eyebrow and leaned forward slightly in the chair. He cleared his throat and said, ‘I see.’
‘Yes, this blonde young … young woman at the minimarket.’ It sounded so silly when she said it out loud, as if she were hanging around at the till in a pair of denim cut-offs, the way they did in the movies, offering people fill-ups in a sultry southern accent, instead of behind the counter wearing a green check pinny and doling out breakfast rolls. But Mary-Pat knew that appearances could be deceptive – she’d seen it often enough with Daddy.
Graham said nothing, merely nodded, and Mary-Pat took this as a signal to continue. ‘He goes in to see her every day at lunchtime …’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because,’ Mary-Pat cleared her throat as the hot flush of shame crept up her neck, ‘because I follow him.’
Graham’s face betrayed no evidence of judgement as he asked, ‘And what do you do then?’
‘I wait outside in the car and I watch through the window.’
His features softened and Mary-Pat thought she saw an expression that looked suspiciously like pity on his face. ‘You don’t have to feel sorry for me,’ she said.
‘Is that what you think?’
‘What?’
‘That I feel sorry for you.’
‘You have a look on your face.’
‘What kind of look?’
‘A look like –’ and Mary-Pat did as polite an imitation as she could manage of his sympathetic gaze, which, by the look on his face, he seemed to find terribly amusing, the flicker of a grin twitching at the corners of his mouth.
‘Do I look that bad?’ He half-smiled.
‘You’re all right,’ Mary-Pat said gruffly, looking down at her shoes. She had never been as mortified in her whole life. She was used to speaking her mind and not giving two shits about it, but this was different. She didn’t want to upset the man, to cause offence. He seemed so fragile, as if the smallest thing would make him disappear in a puff of beige smoke.
‘It must be a very busy place, the minimarket,’ Graham said neutrally.
‘Oh, God, yes, sure the whole town goes in there, the Centra at the other end is too expensive altogether.’
‘Aha.’ And then, as if he’d only just thought of it, ‘So would there not be other people going in and out, as well as your husband?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose …’
‘Particularly at lunchtime?’
‘Are you saying that I’m imagining it?’ The cheek of it, Mary-Pat thought as she attempted to pull herself upright on the sofa.
He smiled, and his brown eyes were soft. ‘No, Mary-Pat. I’m not.’
‘Because I’m not, you know,’ Mary-Pat huffed, crossing her arms as best she could, given that she was half-buried in a cream sofa. ‘I know what I saw.’
‘I just think that you should talk to him.’
Mary-Pat shook her head, tears blurring her vision as she reached in her handbag for a tissue, to find tha
t a box was gently pushed under her nose. ‘Thanks.’ She blew her nose, honking into the tissue, trying to collect herself. ‘Look, I want to talk to him: it’s just that I have no idea where to begin. It’s not just him going to the minimarket, it’s just … she makes him laugh. I can see it through the window. She says something and he throws his head back and roars – I can hear him from the Jeep. And it really upsets me, because he used to laugh like that with me. He used to find me funny.’ And sexy and gorgeous, all of that, she thought, not knowing if Graham was quite ready for her sex life just yet. There were some things you couldn’t discuss with a strange man, she thought. ‘It kills me, knowing that I’m not enough for him.’
Graham leaned forward onto his knees, the fawn of his jumper crinkling as he did so. There was another long silence, after which he said, ‘Have you ever felt you weren’t enough for someone before?’
Mary-Pat shook her head, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, is this the first time you’ve felt like this, that you’re not enough?’
Mary-Pat opened her mouth but no words came out, and so she shut it and then opened it again, like a goldfish. She shifted slightly on the sofa and looked at her feet in their white bulky trainers, at her legs in their navy tracksuit bottoms, so solid, so strong, as if they anchored her to the ground.
‘No,’ she finally said, her voice no more than a whisper.
There was a long silence, and when she looked up, Graham was looking at her expectantly. She sighed and reached down into her handbag and pulled it out, the shell. It filled her hand, its matt black surface marked with bumps and craters. She turned it over and looked in to the lovely mother-of-pearl centre. It felt warm in her hand, solid. ‘My mammy gave me this,’ she said, and when Graham didn’t reply, she added, ‘I never knew about it until a few weeks ago. All these years, I thought she’d left without a single word. I could never make sense of it, you know, the way she left like that. But she didn’t. She left me a message.’
‘What kind of a message, Mary-Pat?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mary-Pat said. ‘I suppose I’ll have to find out.’ And with that, she felt the tears come, a tidal wave of them, which she didn’t have the will to stop. So she just let them come, flowing down her face and onto her hands, splashing onto the surface of the shell, then sliding off. She didn’t even bother reaching for a tissue or wiping them away, she just waited, wondering as she did if they would ever stop, or if she would simply cry for ever.
June 1974
Michelle
The funny thing is that it was only when we moved to the house, the place I’d imagined so often in my dreams, that things began to go wrong. That the unhappiness began to take a grip on John-Joe. The unhappiness and the fear. I suppose it’s hard not to succumb to it when you suddenly realise that you’re not living in a dream any more. When the reality is ten draughty rooms that need heating, three tiny children that need feeding and a vegetable patch that stubbornly refuses to yield more than a few rotten potatoes. How ironic that it was the soil in the old hovel that produced the best crops; this stuff is awful: big hard lumps of clay that stay waterlogged and are impossible to dig. John-Joe says that it’s because we’re closer to the canal so the soil is damp, and I’ve managed to settle it now, but it’s taken me almost two years of hard work, adding compost and not over-digging. I have a fine crop of leeks and cabbages laid down now and even garlic, and I’ve sewn some hardy lettuces, including lamb’s lettuce, under a big sheet of polythene.
I’m not a fool and I know that we can’t live on lettuce over the winter, so I’ve got a little job at Sean O’Reilly’s; he says it’s because he could really do with a hand, ‘and you have a gift for the land’, but I think he’s just being kind. He can see how difficult things are, how hard it is to keep afloat; honestly, sometimes when I wake up on a dark winter morning, my breath misting into the bedroom, I wonder if I really want to face the day at all. Sometimes the weight of it just pins me to the bed, the sense that if some little thing fails, we’ll starve, but then I reason with myself that at least I’m living the life I’ve chosen. I’m totally free, and if this is the price of freedom, well, I’ll just have to pay it.
After I’ve done my morning jobs, I leave the babies with John-Joe, kissing him on the top of his head as they clamber over him while he sits in front of the range, feet up, cigarette in hand, and I try to suppress the flicker of resentment that he can sit here, relaxed as you like, while there are logs to be chopped for the fire and potato drills to be dug. But he’s a good father, I know that. He loves the babies and he just seems to know how to talk to them, how to get down on the floor on all fours and let them climb all over him, while I feel myself quickly grow bored of it; he doesn’t mind spending hours in the one spot on the canal with them in their tiny little wellies as they dig around in the mud and pick up snails and worms between finger and thumb. Only Pius seems to try him. He doesn’t like his son’s restless nature, the way he learned to pull himself up and over the bars of his cot as soon as he learned to stand up. ‘That child was sent to try me,’ he’d often say. Ironic, I thought, seeing as he resembles you to a tee.
I put on my wellies and I walk the thirty yards or so and push the gate into Sean’s yard and, as I do so, I feel my heart lift. A whole afternoon to talk about plants and hens and seedlings; to pick up a fluffy hen and to feel her little body in my hands, as her head gently turns to one side and she fixes me with a beady eye; to help Sean fill the rows of feeding troughs and to check their claws for any sign of disease. And then, when the work is done, to follow him into the kitchen and munch on the batch of scones I left in the range to stay warm, and to drink tea and to talk about world events, the end of the war in Vietnam, the boat people and how terrible their suffering is. Sean is full of curiosity about the life we’re leading; he asks me the kinds of questions I should probably have asked myself. Like how we plan eventually to do without money at all. He scratches his head. ‘Do the ESB accept eggs in payment of bills?’
‘No.’ I laugh. ‘John-Joe’s working on a generator at the moment that runs on diesel oil, which is much cheaper than electricity.’ At least, he says he is. He pulls out the big rolls of wallpaper which he found behind the wardrobe in the bedroom, on the back of which he’s drawn elaborate plans which look rather like Leonardo’s drawings for some of his gadgets. I pray that he knows what he’s doing. And I pray that he finishes the job this time.
‘I’m thinking of getting some livestock,’ I say then.
He thinks for a bit. ‘Well, a cow would be a bit of a challenge just yet, with the milking and all; and you’d be needing the vet every so often – the badgers are a divil for passing on TB, and there’s brucellosis and ringworm – but you’d get all the milk and cheese you need.’
‘I was thinking of a couple of goats, actually,’ I say. ‘They produce milk too and they’re easier to mind.’
‘As long as you don’t mind them eating all the crops you’ve lovingly tended.’ He smiles. ‘And the stink of them; and then there’s the slaughter, I suppose …’
‘The slaughter?’ I turn to him and I see that he’s grinning at me. ‘You’re teasing me.’
‘Well, I am and I amn’t,’ he says. ‘If you get any kind of livestock, you have to be prepared for that possibility. I used to keep a few pigs myself, and it nearly killed me to slaughter them because they’re intelligent creatures. I could see it in their eyes, the day I was going to do it. They just knew.’ He sighed. ‘But that’s the way of the land and you have to accept that.’
‘I didn’t think you’d be soft-hearted about it, Sean. I thought you farmers were all far too practical for that.’ I smile.
‘Well, maybe I’m more soft-hearted than you think.’ And he smiles and his eyes crinkle up at the sides and I get the sense that he likes me, maybe more than he should. And I know I should feel guiltier about it than I do. I should probably make more of my status, drop John-Joe’s name into the conversation more,
but I tell myself that I’m making money to support my family, accepting the few eggs that Sean hands me or the sack of spuds that he says is just going to waste, and giving him an extra big smile and seeing his eyes melt. He’s a friend, and friends are hard to come by in this life.
‘You’ll make some woman a fine husband,’ I say now, watching his face flush a livid red. He doesn’t answer me, just fills another cup of tea from the pot on the range, and I know that I’ve offended him in some way, making light of his feelings. I’m about to apologise, when he says, ‘I’ll find out about the goats, if you like. Some mad eejit or other will have a pair, I’m sure.’ And before I can answer, he’s gone out the door to the henhouse. When I leave, he’s still there, the door closed. I don’t open it to shout goodbye, the way I normally do.
When I come home, the kids are sitting up having their tea, little hands grasping carrots and slices of apple, the bread I made that morning. John-Joe is sitting at the table, and opposite is a woman I’ve never seen before, a girl. She’s pretty, with long brown hair and a dusting of freckles on her nose. She’s also young, sixteen if she’s a day. I have no idea what she’s doing in my kitchen. There’s no reason for her to be here.
‘Hi,’ I say.
She blushes and mutters something into the cup of tea sitting in front of her.
‘This is Aileen, Paddy Mitchell’s girl. She came down to see about giving us a hand with the kids,’ John-Joe says. ‘Is that right, Aileen?’ and he winks and she blushes again, but I catch the look he gives her then, a sly flash of the eye that makes my stomach flip. Oh, I think. There’s something about that look that I don’t like. All I know, and I can’t even voice it in words, is that it isn’t the kind of look a man of John-Joe’s age should be giving a girl of hers. I feel queasy, and I need this girl to leave.
‘Well, that’s a great idea,’ I manage, ‘but we’d probably need to have a think about it to see if we can afford it. I’ll discuss it with my husband, and then we’ll be in touch, Eileen, is that OK?’ The mispronunciation of her name is deliberate, and as I say it, ‘Eileen’, she winces. She opens her mouth and I know she’s going to correct me and I cut her off. ‘We need to put the babies to bed now, so let me show you out,’ I say brightly, lifting the thin coat she’s draped over the chair, a child’s coat, in my hand and leading her out to the hall. The girl clearly has no choice but to follow me, but not before saying something under her breath to John-Joe. I don’t hear his reply.