Need

by Nik Cohn

  Terribilis est locus iste …

  Some one or thing was falling.

  He had been jumping frogs for pennies with Juice Shovlin, and his frog had kept winning. The frog was called Alan Rudkin after the fighter, and like the fighter he was undersized, not quite balanced right. One of his front legs was malformed, causing him to stagger and sometimes keel over on landing. Juice Shovlin kept calling foul, claiming he was drunk or doped, but such was not the truth of it, he was simply a born champion, he had a champion’s battling heart.

  On this afternoon Rudkin had won five straight rounds in a breeze, never raised a sweat. Four pennies sat beside John Joe’s mark, but Juice Shovlin wouldn’t come across with the fifth, he was a bad loser. “You have that frog jazzed to the eyeballs,” he said. Even in those years he was big for his age and red, with wet red lips, that’s why they called him Juice. “Fecking chancer, fecking cheat,” he said. “I should have your guts for fecking garters.”

  They were playing in the road outside the national school and it came on to snow, so they ran home. When they reached the Shovlins’ gate, Juice spat on John Joe’s shoes, a fat gob like a white worm. “Wait here till I fetch you your penny. Your fecking blood money,” he said, and ran away indoors.

  The snow came harder then, and it brought on the dusk. Rudkin was taking little hops by the roadside, just to keep in practice. Then Juice Shovlin was running back, carrying a copper pan held out before him at arm’s length. His knuckles were clenched tight round the handle, red and raw, and the copper pan was full of boiling milk. Without breaking stride, he scooped up Rudkin and threw him in. The milk seethed and bubbled. “Here’s what I owe you,” Juice Shovlin said, and his red knuckles flicked, the pan turned over, Rudkin flew out sprawling on a thin white sheet. It glimmered in the dusk, this hissing sheet, and flew into John Joe’s face. Then he was stretched on the ground, a coin was in his mouth.

  What he remembered was not pain, not then, but the Brasso taste of the penny, the velvety taste of the snow, the bile-bitter taste of black mud. Then a thin sour smell like piss gone cold. He lay five weeks in his mother’s room, in the hollowed curve of her bed like a boat, his head bound up in dock leaves. “How much does it hurt?” his mother asked.

  “How much is it meant to?” he said.

  Rising ten he must have been, his second winter in Scath, the winter his Uncle Frank bought the colour TV, and his Cousin Niall played half-back for Donegal, and his mother, when John Joe vacated her bed, set up house in it herself.

  The sickness that ailed her had no name. “My trouble,” was all she called it, and the only cure was rest. On good days she might take a turn around the kitchen garden or sit at her window embroidering. Certain Saturday nights she’d feel strong enough in herself to go dancing at the Hollywood Ballroom. But the payback was always deadly, she’d be prostrated for days. Dr. McGill brought her red pills and pink and green. They sat in rows on her bedside table; they were no help. In the evenings John Joe carried up her tea on a tray, fish fingers or a ham salad, tinned peaches with processed milk, but the effort of chewing overstrained her, she could only manage the yellow cling peaches that took no work, slithered down all by themselves.

  Together they listened to records; foxtrots, quicksteps, paso dobles. When the rhythms got too vivid, her breathing hurt and she had to rest. Propped up like an effigy in her fluffy pink bed jacket, she sucked on Black Magics to calm herself, or sipped that dyed-orange drink with the funny smell. She said it put the roses in her cheeks, dabbing perfume behind her ears and in the hollow of her throat, sometimes Jasmine Blossom, sometimes Almond Temptation Plus, while John Joe read to her aloud.

  The books came twice a month in the travelling library that stopped outside the schoolhouse. Barbara Cartland, Virginia Holt, Georgette Heyer. And Rebecca; of course, Rebecca. They had ploughed through that so many times, whole passages were stuck to him verbatim, he never could prise them loose: There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of the hand.

  His second winter only. The day they’d reached Kilmullen first it had been Fair Day, the Diamond was wedged so solid with livestock that the bus couldn’t force a way through, and they were set down between three sheep and a heifer. It was raining, a thin damp that seemed to seep, not fall, and roped animals swarmed the gutters. In the alley between Chique Fashions and the Eureka Cinema they passed a cow lowing for its lost calf. That was the most awful sound.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, but the street lights were already turned on. They glowed like foglamps through the mist, merging men and beasts into a shapeless black mass, impervious to the wet. Amber strips of light gleamed from the pubs, an old man reeling fell down at their feet. Taking John Joe’s hand, his mother snatched him inside the Hotel Regina, where she had once worked as a chambermaid.

  This was a place of darkness—oak panelling stained the colour of brown Windsor soup, stuffed owls in cases and the Death of Robert Emmet in oils looking down on holed linoleum. Drinking men were lined three-deep along a dark mahogany bar, trading flesh under a dead TV, their gumboots clogged with mud and their sodden coats steaming.

  One of them, a hawk-faced man with avid blue eyes and a hooked nose, had five yellow teeth in his head. “This is your Granpa Maguire, say hullo to your Granpa Maguire,” said Bernadette, and the man turned his head to look. To see this yellow boy with a runny nose, his free hand clutched at his crotch. “God’s curse on me,” said his grandfather. “I should have died before.”

  In Scath itself, up the gap, there were eight houses lived in, twenty-seven abandoned, the schoolhouse, a ruined chapel, three standing stones, a megalithic tomb, and forty-one souls. Every house had its own dog; only the Maguires had none. Uncle Frank, sometime away in England, had gone allergic.

  He had owned two betting shops in Burton-on-Trent, he’d married a woman who drank dry sherry, and when she died, he came home rich with two working sons. Team-handed, they built a square concrete house like a white barracks with plate-glass windows and indoor plumbing, and moved Granpa Maguire down the hill from the cottage where six generations had lived and farmed on nineteen acres cleft from rock and mountain bog.

  In that dogless house Bernadette was given the upstairs back bedroom and John Joe the closet below the stairs. From his mother’s window you could look out on a grove of rowan and beech, and the Shovlins’ new piggery with its sterilized metal pens beyond. “Manderley, our Manderley,” he read, and read again.

  Downstairs in the kitchen where the family fed there were glossy framed pictures of Pope John XXIII and the Kennedy brothers. Granpa Maguire and Uncle Frank and Cousin Declan and Cousin Niall and Auntie Phyllis that wasn’t really his aunt at all ate off white plates with pale-blue rims, but John Joe’s plate was speckled like a soiled brown egg. “To save confusion in the washing-up. To save fuss and bother,” Auntie Phyllis explained.

  It was understandable so. In Scath there were many who would not have fed in the same room with John Joe, many more who would have locked him away from sight. Dermot Blaney, that mooncalf boy, was kept shackled to his bed; at nights you could hear him howling. But the Maguires only saved fuss and bother. In the hour of their affliction, they suffered disgrace without complaint. “We are rightly punished so,” said Granpa Maguire. “Though we cannot guess our sin, yet we welcome our correction.”

  If only John Joe would agree to eat his blood pudding. If he would just swallow it down and thankful, no bitter word would be spoken. But in his pride he refused to submit. Ever since Juice Shovlin told him that the casing was made of used French letters, wrapped round swine guts and maggots, he thought himself too grand.

  The portraits of fallen heroes looked down on him where he sat in front of his speckled plate, faced by one slice of white blo
od pudding, one black. “John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” said Uncle Frank. “That was a godly man.”

  “A child of grace,” said Granpa Maguire.

  “A man that ate blood pudding any time it crossed his plate and welcome, you’d hear not a word or belch.”

  “A man that knew the word Gratitude.”

  “I’d say he was,” said Granpa Maguire.

  Picking up the frying pan off the stovetop, Cousin Declan circuited the table and poured fresh grease sizzling on each plate. Where it hit John Joe’s puddings, the grease bubbled up like raw sores. “A man that died a martyr with his head blown off,” Cousin Declan said. “Brains and matter all over the shop.”

  When John Joe cut up the puddings into bites they made fourteen cubes on his plate, and he forked them inside his mouth one by one, filled his cheeks till he could feel them bulge out, elastic as rubber balls. “And his fair bride beside him,” said Auntie Phyllis. “And her in her nice, laundered suit.”

  “Not laundered for long,” said Uncle Frank. “Not when yer man’s head had landed in her lap, and the blood pouring off him in buckets.”

  “Like a geyser,” said Granpa Maguire.

  “Like a pig with its throat slit,” said Uncle Frank.

  And the puddings blew up. They flew like a black curse and then a white curse from John Joe’s stuffed mouth. Fourteen neatly cubed turds on the laid table. “I’d say that would be a hard way to go,” Auntie Phyllis said.

  “I’d say it would,” said Granpa Maguire.

  Up the hill in the abandoned cottage the thatch was gone through, the windows were all knocked out, but the fire still sat laid and primed, and unraked ashes still bedded the hearth.

  Scaith-na-Tairbhe the hillside was called, the Shelter of the Bull, where years ago St. Conall himself had sought refuge from a storm. Rods of lightning like spears had pursued the saint across the moors, striking closer with each shaft, and the only refuge the saint could see was a fastness in the rocks. This fastness was home to a murderous white bull that could turn any man to chaff with one blast from his nostrils. The hillside was scattered with scorched flesh, bleached bones, but St. Conall had no fear. Raising high his pilgrim’s staff, he knocked once upon the rocks and was transformed into running water. Then the white bull, thirsting, drank deep of him and a great gladness coursed through the beast. With one heave of its massive shoulders it overthrew the domain, rocks, glen and all, and channelled the stream into a haven, out of the lightning’s path. When St. Conall returned to his own body, he found himself in a grove of rowan and beech with the white bull stretched sleeping at his feet, as peaceable as a fireside mutt.

  That was the tale told, at least. And the running stream still ran, flowing into the Shovlins’ cesspit. But John Joe had no white bull dreaming, all he had was a male stoat called Win-stone with one ear missing and a crushed paw that he’d found half-killed behind a sack of Banner seed.

  At first sight of John Joe the stoat had hauled itself onto his hind legs with front paws clawed, a fighter’s pose. One of his eyes was damaged even worse than John Joe’s, the fur above it ripped out in tufts, the eye itself filled with blood. Brambles barbed the torn fur, and where whiskers should have been, only broken stubs were left. Still the stoat bared his fangs, ripe to scrap again.

  Standing there with his snout oozing gore he had looked just deadly, a warrior fit for Kid Ojeah or any other hard man. When John Joe strayed too close, the stoat drove him back with a spew of musk from its rear end, a smell like rotted mothballs. So he sat by the unraked fire and worked his jaws on a caramel chew, and in due time the stoat subsided as well, went back to licking its wounds. It was Saturday morning, there was no school. They were silent partners, so.

  Winstone was a champion’s name. A featherweight; a Welshman from Merthyr Tydfil, slender and sleek as any stoat might be, beautiful in motion. W. Barrington Dalby on the radio said he had an educated left hand. But he was fatally flawed, he had no power. Time and again he’d fight Vincente Salvidar for the world title, and Salvidar would give him a pasting. Still nothing could daunt his fighter’s heart. As soon as he was healed, he’d be back for one more shot.

  But the stoat healed clumsily. His ripped pelt grew back in tufts, his bad paw was permanently twisted. Worse than Rudkin, he was. Hunting rabbits he pitched and ricocheted, a helter-skelter blur of limbs, like a four-legged Keystone Cop. Afterwards, mud-caked and dripping blood, he would shamble back inside the cottage, sink down, spent, in the yellowed nest of old Donegal Democrats he had built beside the fire, and dispatch his prey with rigid jaws, flinching at each bite, as if breaking in dentures.

  The travelling library fetched a dog-eared paperback titled Ferrets and Other Fancies by Finbar O Riain. It said that the stoat in other lands was called an ermine, mustela erminea, a class of overblown weasel, but in Irish it was an easog. Sixteen inches from point of snout to tip of tail, it was faster than any man born of woman, could squeeze through the narrowest of crevices and chinks, and climb the most inaccessible tree, swinging over and under its branches at jet speed. A hunter of deadliness nonpareil, its piercing eyes endowed it with radar vision, while its rounded ears half-buried in fur could detect the faintest creak in crisp dry leaves or flirt in the wind. “Then speedily comes the quietus,” wrote Finbar O Riain. “A coup de grâce to the nape of the neck, the long sharp canines or fangs drilling upwards through the prey’s cranium directly into the brain. This leads to fast death indeed.”

  Other gifts noted were an aptitude for acrobatics, also a clairvoyant foreknowledge of fire and flood, impending drought. “Due to its telepathic potency, the easog is viewed with awe, nay dread,” the article finished up. “It is a species apart, noble, dignified and incorruptible.”

  The stone floor of the cottage was carpeted with bird droppings and rotted newsprint. Under the holed thatch where loosestrife bloomed, dead men’s fingers they called it, John Joe gorged on Sam Spudz crisps in the sunburst packet, and Red Hots that sizzled his lips and made his mouth pucker like a wet willie, while Winstone polished off two field mice, a hooded owl. Then they walked the hills, they scaled the high rocks behind Scaith-na-Tairbhe. They were the Lone Ranger and Tonto, they were masked marauders, they were one-eyed jacks. They were wounded warriors both.

  Whin bushes tore at John Joe’s legs, fieldspar stained his clothes. From the cliffs above Malinbeg he watched the bald wet dogsheads of the seals tossed like black caps on the tide. Across a swirling channel was Inishconnell and its fallen-down church, the burial ground riotous with wild garlic and purslane, easy for the picking. If they reached that place, they could rest safe. Winstone would catch birds and fish for feed, John Joe would teach him how to jump frogs, and they’d never be caught unawares by fire and flood, they would always see drought coming.

  The only problem, stoats shrank from the touch of salt water. At the lap of the waves Winstone hissed and snarled, spat like a scalded cat. John Joe, to show him the way, waded three steps in the channel, and was suddenly sucked thigh-deep. Something white and live grappled at his knee. Seen through water it looked like a link of white blood sausage. Or maybe it was a woman’s arm, plump and pampered. Whirling on the tide, he cried out for help. But Winstone kept backing away. He must have heard the dread in John Joe’s cry, smelled the funk. There was no honour in those. So he hid himself in the gorse.

  In the night John Joe woke up in his blankets sweating. Barefoot in his pyjamas he snuck out of the closet and up the hill to the back cottage but Winstone was not gathered there. Not a pile of chewed bones spoke of him. Not even a dried bloodstain was left.

  The night was still and warm, choked with scent. In the ash grove behind the cottage, St. Conall’s stream ran glittering in moonlight. John Joe knelt down to bathe his hot face. When he looked into the water, the reflection was full of stoats.

  They walked upright on their hind legs, moved in single file, a crocodile of a dozen or more. Their leader carried a small female, dead and stiff, balanced cross
wise in its mouth, while the others formed its cortège. The moon turned their white fronts to silver, their dark furred heads looked like monks’ cowls. Treading stately, treading slow, the procession passed in silence through the grove and over the freshwater stream, into the shelter of the bull, and disappeared.

  Winstone, limping, walked fifth in line.

  And John Joe himself? On this morning in Ferdousine’s Zoo, he washed himself at the bathroom sink, still breathing the odours of those stale sheets, the bedpans, the Almond Temptation Plus. When I awoke the next morning, just after six o’clock, and got up and went to the window there was a foggy dew upon the grass like frost … Here at Manderley a new day was starting. Outside the door, there were noises of shuffling and bludgeoning, a rhythmless jarring.

  Some one or thing was falling.

  When he looked downstairs he saw a large indefinite shape wrapped in a lime-green sheet and slung over a man’s shoulder in a fireman’s lift.

  “Gangway,” said Crouch. “Death coming down.”

  Even doubled over and stumbling, he seemed possessed of grace, an innate elegance. But the lime-green sheet had fallen away to reveal a naked foot, a shapely calf. “Cold and getting colder as we speak,” said Crouch. “Every body has its day.”

  “Not on my stairs, it doesn’t,” said Miss Root, emerging from Ferdousine’s room, and gave him a straight-arm shot with the heel of her hand, sent both man and his burden spinning.