by Jess Kidd
Mahony had forgotten it could be like this. That sometimes the details come vivid and stay etched. The dim sheen on a twist of hair at the nape of a neck severed to the ligaments. Or the luminous curve of a bloodless cheek above lips bitter with poison, or a pale half-mooned nail on a drowned and bloated hand.
And when you look again, gone.
Glimpses, when you least expect it, when you’re by no means ready. Sudden shocks of sharp detail then a glowing smear all the way to fade. Leaving images behind like the sun on your retinas.
Mahony looks away and listens; it’s easier somehow. Her voice is high, metallic: a bad connection on a faraway exchange. He remembers that they sound like this.
The dead sound like this.
‘Do you like my dress?’
He struggles. ‘Aye. You look like a princess.’
‘My mammy made it.’
‘Ah, you’re lucky then. What’s your name?’ Mahony forces himself to look at the dead girl, to smile at her. She stops walking and stands perfectly still, staring hard at her faint hands.
‘How the feck should I know?’ she says, and turns and skips through a tree trunk.
Tadhg got little out of the Widow other than the lash of her tongue, but even so he’s in high spirits when he gets back into the car, for you can’t keep a good man down. He sits propped forward with his nose on the windscreen as they drive up to Rathmore House. He is too vain to wear spectacles, for in his mind he’s still the fine figure of a man who broke hearts at the village dance. Tadhg Kerrigan, with the car and the fine suits. Tadhg Kerrigan, with a good head of hair and a full set of teeth, with an engine full of fire and an eye for the girls. Hadn’t he had his pick? He remembers them, back in his heyday. All lined up at the dances with their hands folded on their laps, smiling up at him in their bobby socks and ponytails. Although he’s not knocking the miniskirts that have come in.
‘Do the women have themselves on display in Dublin, Mahony?’
‘There are a few sets of pins out and about.’
‘Are there now? I’ll have to come for a visit. Is there any free love about the place?’
‘Not as much as you might expect.’
‘No? With all that flower power? Is that good and wilted now?’
Mahony shrugs.
‘Ah well, I’ll come and visit anyways.’
‘You’d be welcome.’
Tadhg squints at the road. ‘I love a full woman. Did you see Annie? She’d just had a perm done, all those little curls, a head on her like a dandelion. Was she sharp in her greeting of you?’
‘I’ll cut my hair and she’ll love me like a son.’
Tadhg laughs and drums on the steering wheel to Bill Haley. ‘Well, you’ve worked a miracle here, Mahony. God, I love rock and roll. And I’d love to rock and roll Annie Farelly, Jaysus I would.’
‘Then you’re a brave man.’
Tadhg looks at him. ‘You all right? You’re a bit pale around the gills.’
‘I’m grand.’
‘Right so. Then we’re here.’
Chapter 3
April 1976
Rathmore House is the highest inhabited place in Mulderrig. On a clear day you can lean out of a top-floor window and see for miles. Out past the trees to the patchworked fields beyond, studded with tiny houses glowing white. On a clear day you can see the bay and the fishing boats coming in and out of it, and the lobster pots on the quayside, and the gulls rolling above them in the blue glassy sky.
Shauna Burke is in the big cave of a kitchen with her foot up on the draining board shaving her legs in the sink with her daddy’s razor. She can’t explain it but she’d felt, getting Mrs Cauley to bed, a definite change in the air. Mrs Cauley had felt it too and had been murderous. She’d taken hours to settle, demanding endless glasses of Pernod and asking Shauna to style out her good wig and wanting cream slathered on her leg sores.
Shauna is wearing little more than her drawers, so the sight of Tadhg’s big face pressed up against the window gives her more than a subtle fright. She grabs a tablecloth to hold around her.
‘Now then, Shauna, I’ve a guest for you,’ roars Tadhg through the closed door.
‘I’m not open.’
‘Ah now, don’t be like that. You’ve the room and the man’s melted with tiredness.’
Shauna wants to stab Tadhg with the bread knife. She opens the door, clutching the tablecloth to her bosom, and looks blackly at Mahony.
‘Is that my guest?’
‘Aye, it is,’ Tadhg nods enthusiastically.
‘You can pay?’
‘Aye, he can.’ Tadhg pushes Mahony into the kitchen. ‘Get the kettle on, Shauneen. He’s destroyed by travelling. How’s Mrs Cauley?’
‘An old bitch.’
‘Ah, the poor woman’s afflicted.’
‘Don’t I know it?’
Shauna has the look of a rabbit about her, soft and compact, with light-brown hair and pink-rimmed eyes. She moves like one too, with quick dashes and small dazed pauses. Mahony finds her comforting to watch and his dark gaze trails her about the untidy kitchen. She’s young, in her early twenties maybe, but she has the manner of someone much older. So that she fusses and mutters as she goes about her business, punctuating her tasks with sharp comments and sudden groans. She has changed out of the tablecloth into a dress and has pinned her hair half on top of her head. Her face has a clean, scrubbed appearance. A practical face: responsible, rushed and more than a little tired. She puts an ashtray down next to Tadhg’s elbow with a pointed look. Tadhg ignores her as he sprawls at the end of the table with the whiskey bottle. Mahony sits at the other end with a cup in his hand. In the middle of the table, between empty jam jars and piles of dusty china, a ginger cat blithely licks its arse.
‘I was having a spring clean, Tadhg.’
‘You should see the cleanliness down at the Widow’s, it’s godly.’
‘Don’t talk to me about her, Tadhg. I’ve enough dealing with one bitter old wagon today.’
Tadhg smiles benevolently and tells Mahony that Mrs Cauley is both Shauna’s finest patron and biggest curse. Mrs Cauley has the strong belief that she was once one of the greatest actresses to grace the stage of the Abbey Theatre. And of course wasn’t she the muse of a multitude of highly talented writers and poets? She’d descended on Rathmore House twenty-odd years ago, when Shauna’s mammy had run it as a premium hotel for English salmon fishers, and she’d stayed ever since. Mrs Cauley had paid very well for many years, keeping a roof on Rathmore House, a fire in the hearth and glass in some of the windows. Mrs Cauley had even stayed after the standards dropped when Shauna’s mammy ran off to England with a guest, leaving Shauna’s daddy hermited with grief in his workshop, reading about fairies and talking to himself in a Protestant accent.
‘Don’t tell lies now.’ Shauna flicks Tadhg with the edge of a tea towel. ‘Mammy is in Coventry helping Auntie with her angina. And there’s nothing wrong with my standards.’
Tadhg winks and, clutching heavily at the side of the table, he bids them goodnight.
‘Will he be all right driving back? He’s three sheets to the wind.’
‘He’ll survive if he keeps on going past Annie Farelly’s and doesn’t chance his arm for a nightcap. God love him, that woman’s steel and bolts.’
Mahony grins. ‘All right, well, take me up to bed then, Shauna.’
Shauna warns Mahony to tread carefully in the hallway so as not to wake Mrs Cauley, who lies in state in the library. In its prime Rathmore would have been imposing; its bone structure still mutters about good breeding. The ceilings are high and the finishings are fine, but the house seeps with damp and is ravaged by dry rot. The woodworms sing in the skirting boards and the moths hang out of the curtains. The mice have the run of the guest rooms, shredding blankets, skating in the basins and nibbling the soaps.
They almost reach the foot of the staircase when a voice rolls out into the hallway and along the faded carpet. It’s the sort of voi
ce honed to turn corners, vault walls and open door handles.
‘Is that someone with you there, Shauna?’
‘No, Mrs Cauley.’
Shauna puts a hand on Mahony’s arm to stop him walking forward but he’s already held by the speaker’s spell. It hardly matters what the voice says; Mahony would stop and listen to it anyway.
‘Am I actually a fecking idiot?’
‘No, Mrs Cauley.’
‘Bring them in here then.’
‘There’s no one here.’
‘If I have to get the leg out of this bed . . .’
‘All right, I’ll bring him in.’ Shauna turns to Mahony. ‘Come in and say hello to her or I’ll have no peace.’
Mahony follows Shauna through a heavy door wedged open with an umbrella stand full of walking sticks. Inside is a corridor constructed from complicated strata of books, magazines, periodicals and papers. Some of the stacks are waist height but others reach up to well over ten feet high. Shauna stops to pick up a drift of pamphlets. She stuffs them into the cracks between piles.
‘This was a beautiful room until she made it her lair.’ Shauna points up at the thick cobwebs that trapeze the spaces between the books.
The smell is so strong that Mahony can taste it; a thick damp prowls into his nose and mouth, settles on the back of his tongue and starts to paw his throat closed. It is the smell of a million mould-blossomed pages, of a thousand decaying bindings, of a universe of dead words.
‘She calls it her literary labyrinth,’ says Shauna, kicking an avalanche of play scripts out of the way. ‘I call it a bloody hazard.’
They emerge into a clearing. A bed, ringed by a low wall of books, is set before curtainless French doors. The night sky is captured in its topmost panes.
The bed is carved from dark wood and is horribly ornate. At the head of it stands a dead man holding his hat against his chest. The dead man looks up at Mahony with his eyes low-lidded and full. Mahony sees the famished hollow of his cheeks and the sad drape of his moustache. The dead man lifts his eyebrows imperceptibly then his gaze sinks down again to rest on the floor.
A reading lamp throws a web of light over the occupant of the bed: a very old bald woman who is reaching for a wig slung over the bedpost. Constellations of age spots pattern the waxy scalp.
‘Wait until I am seemly, Visitor. I am preparing a respectable facade.’
She straightens the wig with some difficulty and a voice emanates from under it, mock sonorous. ‘Come.’
Mahony draws closer and is staggered that such a body can hold such a voice. Clad in a silk kimono, with her legs half-covered by blankets, the formidable Mrs Cauley is no bigger than a child. Her chest is startlingly concave in contrast to her distended belly. This rounded abdomen, together with her long, very thin arms, gives her the appearance of a benign geriatric spider.
‘Now there’s a face,’ Mrs Cauley whistles. ‘Sit down here, handsome.’
She gives Mahony an unsettling smile, revealing a set of teeth like a row of bombed houses. ‘You’re a fine-looking individual.’
Shauna pushes a pile of crumbling music scores from a footstool and hands it to Mahony. ‘He’s only staying a few days but.’
‘He’ll stay longer than that, sweetheart. Go and put on a teacake, lightly tanned with a knob of butter.’
‘You’ve not long had your tea.’
‘And I the overpaying guest here? Get on, a bit of exercise for those fat legs of yours.’
Shauna tuts and disappears into the maze.
Mrs Cauley edges upright in the bed. ‘Good. Now we can talk. You can’t trust her, the slinkeen. That girl would steal the eyes out of your head. I’ve had many personal effects gone missing since I came here. Emerald-set jewellery and bank notes and suchlike. There was a fox stole with glass eyes, which was very fetching. That went.’
‘Why don’t you go elsewhere?’
Mrs Cauley scratches her scalp, moving her wig to a new rakish angle. ‘I like the forest around me, and all the things that live in it, badgers and owls and fecking squirrels running about. That one pushes me out onto the veranda and I languish there all day listening to the trees sing. Hold my hand; I want to feel some male warmth.’
Mahony takes her hand and holds it gently. He can feel her knotted bones through her fragile skin. ‘What do your trees sing about?’
‘All the lowlifes who inhabit the village.’
‘So you know the villagers well?’
‘Through the trees I do. I hear all the tales of illicit affairs and nasty actions. And what the trees don’t know Bridget Doosey fills in with her slanderings. God, without her this place would be even more of a morgue. She’s forensic, that one. Doosey could take this village apart and tell you what killed it in the time it takes you to break a girl’s heart.’
Mahony frowns.
Mrs Cauley grins. ‘Shauna hates having Doosey in the house; she says we’re a bad influence on each other. That girl chews the ears off me with her relentless bloody nagging.’ Mrs Cauley shoots him a mutinous glance. ‘As soon as she patters off down to town I get Doosey in for a bit of hell-raising.’ She leans forward and speaks low. ‘We have a signal. I hoist my harvest festivals out of the window and Doosey stands on the quay with her binoculars.’
Mahony looks confused.
‘I wave me knickers, boy. Harvest Festivals. All is safely gathered in?’
Mahony laughs. He puts Mrs Cauley’s hand back on the bed and searches his pockets for his cigarettes.
‘Of course I have to be careful Annie Farelly doesn’t see or she’d report me to the priest for immoral behaviour.’
‘I crossed paths with the Widow today; she’s a charmer.’
‘She’s an article.’
Mahony watches as the dead man attempts to hang his hat on the bedpost. He gives up with a pained expression, puts it back on his head and drifts across the room, pulling his moustache morosely as he goes.
‘That’s a tall mouse you’re watching there.’ Mrs Cauley’s voice is warm honey but the set of grey eyes she has clamped on him are splinter sharp. ‘Have you always seen them? You do see them, don’t you?’
Mahony takes out a cigarette and taps it on the packet. He refuses to meet her eyes. You’d need to know him well to realise that his hackles have risen, for his forehead is entirely smooth and there’s a relaxed sort of smile on his face.
‘You mind?’ he says, holding up the fag and setting to light it.
‘Not at all.’
They sit for a while in silence, two poker players waiting on the next move.
Shauna appears with a lap tray. ‘Now, say good night to Mahony, Mrs Cauley.’
‘I haven’t finished with him.’
‘You have of course; eat your teacake.’
Mrs Cauley puts her head on one side and sings back Shauna’s own voice to her. ‘I could take a little package of crisps, Shauneen, for something salty.’
‘Good night, Mrs Cauley.’
‘Good night, Shauna, good night, Mahony.’ Mrs Cauley fishes up a teacake with her puckered fingers.
As they reach the foot of the stairs her voice careens out after them.
‘Don’t try it on with him, Shauna. He’s way above you, both spiritually and in terms of his looks. And, Mahony, mind she doesn’t get her hands on your gooter; she’d give you an awful dose. Just look at her: she’s sex-mad.’
Shauna shows Mahony to a large room at the top of the stairs. It’s powerfully musty despite the night air coursing in through the open windows. Mahony can hear the insistent chant of an owl, and some other noise, a panicky high-pitched bleat. Moths cast dancing patterns around the single ceiling light.
‘You can leave the windows open for air, although it’s noisy with the creatures in the forest murdering each other half the night.’
Shauna turns down the bed covers. Her movements are deft and assured when she doesn’t know she’s being watched.
‘I’m sorry about Mrs Cauley,’
she says.
‘She’s a handful, isn’t she?’
Shauna nods. ‘She’s that. Don’t listen too carefully to her, Mahony; she’s a little touched.’
‘I noticed.’ Mahony folds his jacket onto the chair and puts his cowboy boots squarely underneath it. He walks to the window and leans out. The air is cooler now and filled with the elemental smell of earth and trees and sea and sky. Out past the cries of foxes and dying birds, if he listened, he would hear the black waves lapping against the quay and the owls hunting over the fields. Or the sound of the houses as they settle and sigh in their sleep, all the way down to the bay.
‘I’m not really sex-mad,’ Shauna says as she hangs a towel on the ring next to the hand basin.
Mahony laughs over his shoulder at her. ‘You just haven’t met the right fella,’ he says.
Shauna gives the sink a quick wipe, blushing scarlet at the taps. ‘Breakfast is at eight. Night-night, Mahony.’
‘Night, Shauna, and thanks.’
‘Sure, you’re welcome.’
In the quiet room the night air steals in through the open window to whisper the soap dry in the dish. Mice bob around the boots corralled between the chair legs, stopping to nose at the worn heels and blunt toes, sniffing distant cities and a million steps from there to here. Inside the wardrobe a few crumpled shirts absorb the incense of mothballs and waxed wood. On top of the wardrobe a rucksack, heavier than it ought to be, is pushed back out of sight. Socks rest balled in a drawer, odd in their pairings.
Mahony is sleeping.
Come closer. Close enough to inhale tobacco and sweat, road dust and whiskey, sunlight and hair oil. Close enough to follow the swell of his shoulder all the way down to his inked and rounded bicep where a big-breasted mermaid swims. She blows you a kiss and fans her tail.
Come closer. Close enough to plot the lines on his forehead, the fine slope of his nose and the long-lashed crescents of his closed eyes. Now, hold your breath for this, slowly trace the teasing curve of his lips, open a little in sleep.