2004 - Dandelion Soup

by Babs Horton

  He hurried across to the bus. The folk in these parts were an odd, whimsical lot. The sooner he got to Santa Eulalia the better, then he would be on his way south again with the monk safely in tow, and not a moment too soon as far as he was concerned.

  Father Daley was waiting in the lobby when Miss Carmichael came downstairs just as Padraig came hurrying in through the door, breathless and excited.

  “Good morning, Miss Carmichael. A good night’s sleep, I trust? Ah, Padraig, there you are, have you been out exploring?”

  “Yes, Father. I found an old church and a statue of a naked boy and I saw the Old Pilgrim but he got away before I could speak to him.”

  Miss Carmichael gave Padraig a withering glance. It made her feel tired and irritable just looking at him.

  “Great stuff, Padraig,” Father Daley said with a smile. “You must tell me all about it over breakfast. Now, I’ve just spoken to señora Hipola, and she has very kindly laid out breakfast in the courtyard as it’s such a beautiful morning.”

  Miss Carmichael’s heart sank. She thought of flies and bugs and the smell of donkey muck.

  “Where is Miss Drew, by the way?” Father Daley enquired.

  “I don’t know. I heard the church bells ringing earlier so maybe she’s gone to mass,” said Miss Carmichael, who was a little aggrieved that Miss Drew had gone out without telling her.

  “Doubtless shell join us in a while,” Father Daley replied cheerfully.

  Señora Hipola had set up a table and chairs in the courtyard beneath a canopy of vines. In the far corner, a washing line was strung between two trees. On the line a wedding dress blew gently in the breeze. Padraig stared at the dress in amazement. It was huge. Gi-normous. Bloody massive. It was the biggest dress he’d ever clapped his eyes on in all his life.

  “Blimey,” he said, pointing to the dress and giggling, “you could fit the bride and a half-dozen bridesmaids in there and still have room to dance a jig!”

  “Don’t be so rude, Padraig. It’s beautiful material; it looks like Irish lace to me.”

  The breakfast table was covered with a bright blue and yellow checked oilcloth and set upon it was a basket full of golden bread rolls and a large red coffee pot.

  “Shall I play mother?” Father Daley said.

  He poured coffee and milk into large white bowls and handed them to Padraig and Miss Carmichael.

  Miss Carmichael sipped her drink and winced. The coffee was really quite good but there were no handles on the cups and it was like drinking out of a chamber pot; it was enough to turn a decent person’s stomach.

  It was a beautiful morning, though, and she had to admit that she’d had one of the best night’s sleep she’d had in years. She had not been troubled by too many bad dreams and she felt an enormous uplifting of her spirits.

  Padraig helped himself to bread and munched away happily. Miss Carmichael declined anything to eat.

  Padraig thought the courtyard was a very pretty place to eat breakfast. Birds flew down and perched in the lemon tree and sang gaily. Way above their heads the sky turned a deeper shade of blue and the sun warmed their faces.

  “Who is this Old Pilgrim fellow you were talking about, Padraig?”

  “Ah, just an old feller who roams about all over Spain wearing funny clothes. Mr Leary said he was maybe an axe murderer or a defrocked priest. Mr Leary was dead keen to meet him because he knows all sorts about history and that.”

  Father Daley raised his eyebrows.

  “He doesn’t sound the sort of man you should be speaking to, Padraig.”

  “He looked harmless enough to me.”

  “The devil himself would look harmless to you, no doubt,” muttered Nancy Carmichael.

  “Anyhow, how about we make a plan for today? How about we do a bit of sightseeing, maybe have a meal out in the town? They say the sardines down at the port are wonderful. Miss Carmichael, I know, loves sardines.”

  “Only Irish sardines, Father.”

  Father Daley laughed.

  Miss Carmichael bristled and blushed.

  “Miss Carmichael, the sardines we eat in Ireland have probably been fished in the waters round here, canned here and then shipped to Ireland. Instead of eating them from a tin, we have a chance to eat ones caught fresh today.”

  Miss Carmichael was not convinced, but she did allow herself a half smile. Padraig thought she looked quite nice when she smiled. He noticed that her nose, which was usually white and pinched, was peppered now with freckles, as if someone had got into her room at night and dappled her nose with a fine brush.

  The donkey began to bray loudly over in the stable.

  “It sounds as if something is spooking him,” Padraig said.

  “How do you mean, Padraig?”

  “They pick up things animals, like they have an extra sense.”

  “Go on,” Father Daley encouraged him.

  Miss Carmichael raised her eyebrows.

  “We had a dog, a black and white collie called Sequana.”

  “What sort of a name is that for a dog?” Miss Carmichael said, turning up her nose.

  “I think it’s a lovely name; it’s the Latin word for the Seine.”

  “What do they call the insane?”

  “The Seine is the river that runs through Paris. Sequana was the goddess of the river.”

  “Heathen nonsense,” said Miss Carmichael.

  “Anyhow, Sequana took to her bed, wouldn’t eat her breakfast even though she was a greedy beggar; she knew, you see, that something awful was going to happen.”

  “Don’t be so silly, Padraig,” Miss Carmichael said with irritation.

  “It was true, though, because that was the day she died.”

  “The dog?” asked Father Daley.

  “No,” said Padraig. “They took Sequana away while I was at the funeral and put a bullet through her head.”

  Miss Carmichael didn’t like dogs. They licked their own behinds and rooted up your skirt and tried to do unthinkable things to your leg.

  Miss Carmichael sipped her coffee and wondered where on earth Miss Drew had got to.

  Padraig went on.

  “The clock had just chimed eleven when Sequana started howling…She’d only gone round the corner for a loaf of bread.”

  “What is this nonsense about?” Miss Carmichael asked.

  The birds held their song.

  The wedding dress flapped like a schooner with the wind in its sails.

  “She was knocked down by a lorry and killed.”

  “Who was, Padraig?”

  “My mammy,” he said quietly.

  Miss Carmichael sucked in her breath.

  Father Daley put a hand on top of Padraig’s.

  “It was in the newspapers and everything. It was two days before they realized who she was and came and found me and the dog.”

  Father Daley looked hard at Padraig. Dear God. The poor little mite.

  A smattering of dust drifted down into the stable from the room above. The donkey sneezed.

  Suddenly there was a noise. First a rustle and then an enormous cracking sound as though a huge tree had been felled and was falling close by.

  The donkey stamped its hooves.

  Sefiora Hipola appeared in the kitchen doorway looking agitated.

  It all happened in a split second, but afterwards it seemed to Padraig like slow motion.

  “Dios mio!” yelled Señora Hipola, and made the sign of the cross.

  Suddenly claw legs slipped through the ceiling above the donkey’s head.

  The breakfasting pilgrims stared in frozen fascination.

  There was a muffled scream.

  The donkey bucked.

  “What the fuck?” said Father Daley.

  Miss Carmichael opened and shut her mouth like a frog after flies.

  Then came the sound of rushing water and the smell of lavender.

  The donkey disappeared beneath a deluge of water.

  Then the bath and Miss Drew descend
ed into the stable like an apparition in a Christmas pantomime.

  But there was no laughter or clapping.

  A cloud of dust blotted out the stable and the donkey. Señora Hipola was hissing and spitting.

  “Imbecil! Dios mio!”

  The donkey was roaring.

  Miss Carmichael was trembling violently and slopping coffee all down her clothes. A brown stain widened across her white high-necked blouse.

  Señora Hipola was pawing the ground with her foot like a mad bull.

  The donkey was kicking his hard heels against the wood of the stable.

  Padraig was hot on Father Daley’s heels across the courtyard.

  Dust settling like dirty snow.

  Señora Hipola trying to quieten the donkey.

  Padraig on tiptoe looking over into the stable.

  Miss Drew with a face like a startled corpse.

  The bath rocking like a fairground swingboat without the ropes.

  “Cover your eyes, Padraig! Someone run for a doctor.”

  Padraig kept his eyes wide open. He gawped at Miss Drew in wonder.

  There was another loud cracking sound and more plaster falling, and then something else fell through the broken ceiling and landed with a clatter beside the bath.

  It was an ancient chest, like a treasure chest.

  Father Daley stared at the ancient chest that lay in the straw.

  Padraig couldn’t take his eyes off Miss Drew’s chest. Miss Drew’s titties were as pink and soft as a puppy’s belly. There was a bird’s nest in her lap, but sadly no eggs.

  The Old Pilgrim took his breakfast in the Café Cristobal down on the quayside. The British boat was still berthed and would sail again in the early afternoon. He remembered vividly stepping down off the boat that first time years ago. He was a young man then, a reckless man whom he hardly recognized now. Then he had been an ill and broken man, his nerves shot to pieces, a desperate man on the run with a trail of misery left in hiswake.

  He’d boarded the boat in England without any concern as to where it would take him. All he’d wanted was to escape from the past.

  Spain had been his salvation.

  Now he spent several months of each year in different parts of Europe, occasionally he returned to England and Ireland, but only when he had to.

  He sighed, dipped a sugary churro into a bowl of hot chocolate and ate it slowly. After breakfast he was going to go up into the mountains for a few days, explore a few places he had never been to before.

  Last night he had stayed in old Antonio’s house near the church. He had woken early and left, the old man’s company he could stomach but not his breakfasts. Pigs’ trotters and bread fried in lard was more than a man could cope with first thing in the morning.

  He watched the early goings on in the port but his mind was mostly consumed with thinking about the little boy he’d seen earlier.

  After he’d left Antonio’s he had found a quiet place to sit near the church in the square to enjoy an early morning smoke. He’d been there quite some time before he’d looked up and seen the boy.

  He’d watched the little lad with fascination as he had completed his imaginary tightrope walk round the wall of the fountain. He loved the way that children could become so engrossed in their own imaginary world, completely absorbed and unselfconscious in what they were doing. It was a childhood gift and didn’t last long.

  He had sat quite still in the shadow of the church hoping the boy wouldn’t see him and stop what he was doing. He’d only just stopped himself from applauding when the boy had taken his final bows to his imaginary audience.

  Then the boy had copied the pose of the statue. That was when he’d sat up in surprise and really taken note. The resemblance between the statue and this comical little boy was quite absurd. The likeness, albeit between tarnished metal and warm flesh, was quite remarkable. It had to be just coincidence, a trick of the light maybe. After all, the statue had been in Camiga for as long as he could remember and couldn’t have been modelled on this funny little fellow. And, yet, something stirred in his mind…a half-thought, confusing and somehow important.

  This child wasn’t a local boy, that was for sure. His skin was pale; he wasn’t a child who had spent long hours playing under a hot sun. With his dull grey clothes and skinny white legs he looked out of place in Spain, a scruffy sparrow in a cage full of exotic birds. The Old Pilgrim smiled; he was a chrysalis of a boy waiting for his transformation into a butterfly.

  Now he drained the last of his hot chocolate just as the cannery siren blared out across the quay. He’d better get a move on if he was to make it up into the mountains by nightfall. He paid for his breakfast, left a generous tip and then strode across the cobbled quay, aware of but unconcerned by the curious eyes of the market traders who watched him go.

  Part Three

  Donny Keegan stood alone in the cave they called the Giants Cakehole. It was cold and dank inside the cave, just the echoing plop of water dripping from the stalactites into the rock pools.

  Plip

  Plip

  Plip.

  He pushed his hands down into his pockets and whistled softly.

  He wondered had Sister Immaculata stood right here where he was standing now when she’d decided to do herself in? Had she just sat in the cave and waited for the tide to come in and swallow her up?

  He shivered violently. She must have wanted to die real bad to do a thing like that. He wondered did she maybe start to panic and change her mind but by then it was already too late?

  It couldn’t have been an accident because everyone in Ballygurry knew that the cave was dangerous when the tide was coming in. The fishermen had shaken their heads and said that her body might not be washed up for many months, or maybe not at all.

  One of the fishermen, Archie Cullinane, had found some of her clothes here in the cave the day after she’d disappeared. The grey habit and veil caught up in a tangle of seaweed and flotsam and jetsam amongst the rocks. Further down the beach one black sodden lace-up shoe lay half buried in the sand, and a woollen grey stocking was discovered hanging across the bows of one of the barnacled boats.

  Donny struggled to hold back his tears. It was strange in St Joseph’s without Sister Immaculata. After Padraig had gone she used to bring him clean sheets in case of accidents and he’d hidden them under the floorboards just like Padraig had shown him. There were hardly any sheets left now, no escape from night-time terrors and beltings for a wet bed.

  The attic room where Sister Immaculata had slept had been cleared, scrubbed, disinfected and locked up. It was as though she had never been alive at all.

  Sometimes at night he woke up and thought he heard her up there still, pacing the boards restlessly.

  A gust of wind blew inside the cave and Donny felt the goose-pimples prick through his tight skin. He imagined the icy water reaching up over her feet, her ankles and knees. Then the awful bit where it came over your mickey…she wouldn’t have had a mickey though. Women didn’t. What they had down there was a mystery. Up and up the water would have risen, up to her neck. Oh God, he felt sick at the thought of it. Higher and higher until her mouth and nose were full of salty water and she couldn’t breathe!

  His nose began to run and he wiped away his snot and tears on the ragged sleeves of his pullover. The wet shrunken wool made the bits where he’d wiped sore and itchy. He wished that Padraig were here with him now because he felt afraid and Padraig had always made him feel so much braver. He stifled a sob. He couldn’t believe that the old nun had taken her own life. He knew that it was a terrible sin to do that. Now, she’d never be allowed to be buried in a Catholic graveyard even if they did find her body, and she’d go straight to hell where the really bad people went, swearers and spitters, murderers and thieves.

  He thought that was wrong because she had been a really good person while she was alive. She was the only one at St Joseph’s who was kind to the kids. If she went to hell then he didn’t want to believe
in God any more. If Sister Veronica and Sister Agatha went to heaven what sort of a place would it be?

  He kneeled down on the floor of the cave and wrote carefully in the wet sand with a trembling finger.

  SISTER EMMAKULARTA. RIP. RISE IF POSSIBLE.

  Then he leaped back in alarm as a wave broke with a resounding crack at the jagged mouth of the cave. Another followed swiftly and white foamy water surged up over his sandals and melted away the nun’s name as if it had never been written at all.

  A third wave swirled up round his knees. He waited for it to be drawn back, judged the timing and ran out of the cave. He raced headlong along the beach until he reached the boats. He rested against one to catch his breath. Then he took off his shoes and socks, tipped the water out of his shoes and wrung out his socks. As he dug his toes into the dry sand to warm them his big toe caught against something sharp. Pulling his toe back quickly in case it was a lurking crab, he bent down and dug in the sand with his hands. He lifted the necklace up, shook off the sand and looked at it closely. It wasn’t a necklace at all but an old battered rosary. He swallowed hard. He’d seen Sister Immaculata holding it in her hands when they were in church. It wasn’t like a normal rosary, it was a clumsily made thing and looked like it had been hand made, the beads were heavy and a milky blue colour, like blind people’s eyes. He slipped it into the pocket of his shorts. He would keep it for ever and have something to remember her by. Like a good-luck charm.

  He put on his socks and shoes and made his way across to the slipway and then along Clancy Street.

  As he came level with Dr Hanlon’s house a voice startled him and he jumped with fright.

  “Jeez! You frightened me then,” Donny said, and breathed out with relief. He stared in fascination at Siobhan Hanlon, who had stepped out suddenly from the doorway of her house.

  “Wett, what do you think? Gorgeous or what?”

  Siobhan was dressed in a baggy grey gymslip that reached almost to her ankles, a blue stiff-collared blouse, a blue blazer with a red badge, grey tie and a grey pudding-basin hat.

  “N-nice,” he stammered.