Himself

by Jess Kidd

  Mrs Cauley searches for her glasses and holds up the envelope. She opens it and takes out the photograph and squints at it.

  ‘Turn it over.’

  She does, reads the back, and whistles through her remaining teeth. ‘Damn it to hell, your mother was Orla Sweeney.’

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘Does anyone else know about this?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Mrs Cauley nods. ‘So you came undercover, thinking you’d case the joint first?’

  ‘Seemed like the right thing to do, given what’s written on the back of that photograph.’

  ‘You’re not just a pretty face, are you, Francis?’

  ‘My name’s Mahony.’

  ‘And what do you want, Mahony?’

  ‘To find out what happened to my mother just.’

  ‘She’s not here, honey.’

  ‘I didn’t think she was. Where is she?’

  ‘That’s something no one here pretends to know.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  She looks at him. ‘Our paths crossed briefly.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Mrs Cauley remembers: a pale, dark-eyed ne’er-do-well. They’d met during her first stage production. Back then Mrs Cauley was a newcomer, but then she always would be.

  Orla had been hanging around outside the village hall, scowling, sneering, kicking the wall. The girl came with a warning, but after a few days of this Mrs Cauley had walked out, in clear sight of the village, to ask Orla if she’d be auditioning for the play. She held out the play script to her, and Orla, her full-lipped mouth sulky, had looked at it.

  Then Orla had smiled.

  My God, it was July after a tempest, the fury was gone and in its place there was bright fire. Orla took the script but she never came back.

  But she had always looked for her. The girl would have burnt the stage down.

  ‘She was like you,’ Mrs Cauley says.

  Mahony nods; that is enough for now. ‘Have I any family here?’

  ‘None at all. Your grandfather left when your mother was a child and your grandmother died ten years ago. They had no other children; Orla was a late blessing.’

  ‘And my father?’

  Mrs Cauley shakes her head. ‘None as would admit to it. Your mammy was sixteen years old when you were born out of wedlock.’

  Mahony finds that he isn’t surprised and neither is Mrs Cauley’s dead admirer, who shrugs and settles in a nearby flowerbed, listening closely.

  ‘So you wound up at the orphanage. Rough, was it?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That an experience like yours could make a man partial to a drop of avenging.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I’m here to find out what happened just.’

  The dead man in the flowerbed shakes his head. He has been trying to blow down the faded petals of a clematis. But the flowers remain unmoved by his dead breath. He gives up and tries to knock their heads off with his cane in a disturbing expression of spectral violence.

  Mahony picks up the photograph. ‘Tell me what happened to her.’

  ‘As I said—’

  Mahony looks at her. ‘If I don’t hear it from you . . .?’

  Mrs Cauley nods. ‘Orla Sweeney was the wild bad girl of the village. She lived at the edge of the forest in a broken-down cottage with a drunken mammy and a long-gone daddy. By the time she was sixteen she was knocked up, unwed and Mulderrig’s dirty little secret.’

  The dead man gives up the fight and stands frowning amongst the flowers. He pulls at his moustache with his cane loose in his hand.

  She speaks softly. ‘Your mother refused to live by the rules, Mahony. She wouldn’t be taken away with a blanket over her head and she wouldn’t consent to being married off to some desperate old farmer. She wanted to have her baby and put it in a pram and bring it into town, and she was prepared to fight them for this.’

  ‘Fair play to her.’

  ‘But think about it, Mahony.’ Mrs Cauley frowns. ‘Can you imagine how the town responded, at that time?’

  Mahony nods. ‘I can.’

  ‘The official story is that one fine day Orla upped and left Mulderrig, taking her fatherless bastard with her and leaving no forwarding address.’

  Mahony shrugs. ‘Everyone gets the hell out of these small towns sooner or later. She must have talked about it, planned it?’

  Mrs Cauley thought about the question Orla had asked her that day. When the big-smoke actress had walked over to the little-village trollop with all the eyes of the town watching. It was a simple enough question. Spoken low, with a sense of wonder, disbelief even.

  How could you leave?

  Leave what – the city, the stage, the man? Mrs Cauley couldn’t give Orla an answer.

  Perhaps the question was enough? Perhaps Orla had glimpsed something, a world where a woman could leave anything and everything behind and strike out, alone. Afterwards, if she ever thought about the girl it was to picture her arriving at some new place, some new city. Stepping off a bus, a boat, a train, with her scowl and her smile and her brutal eyes. With her brand-new baby and her second-hand coat.

  ‘She thought about leaving,’ says Mrs Cauley. ‘I’m sure of that.’

  Mahony nods. ‘So she left town, landed in the city, took a look around, got shot of her bastard.’

  Mrs Cauley picks over her words carefully, soberly. ‘I do not believe that Orla gave you up. Why would she, when she had fought so hard to keep you?’

  ‘People change their minds; she was only a young one herself. Maybe it was tougher than she thought, alone with a kid. So she left me at the orphanage with a note to show she cared.’

  ‘Except Orla didn’t write that note, Mahony, that’s a mature and educated hand. Your mother was on the mitch for years. She hardly saw the inside of a school.’

  ‘Then she got someone else to write it.’

  Mrs Cauley frowns. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘You’re not convinced.’ He studies her face. ‘You don’t think she made it.’

  Their eyes meet; she holds his gaze. ‘I’m sorry, kiddo. But then it’s not what I think, is it?’

  ‘I think the same.’ His voice is quiet, steady.

  Mrs Cauley looks relieved.

  They sit in silence for a while.

  ‘So you can stop asking yourself those same damn questions,’ she says.

  ‘What questions?’

  Her voice is gentle. ‘If she’s living why did she leave me and if she’s dead why can’t I see her?’

  Mahony regards the toe of his boot, his face impassive. On the lawn the dead man throws down his cane and sinks to his knees.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  Mahony pats down his pockets for his cigarettes, slips a fag from the pack and sets to light it.

  ‘I’ll tell you something that I know.’ Mrs Cauley leans forward and touches his arm. ‘Those we have lost return to us in their own time.’ She smiles. ‘You’ve been searching for her all your life, I know. But she’ll come to you when she’s good and ready.’

  Mahony exhales sharply. ‘You know a lot, old lady.’

  Mrs Cauley looks away, out over the forest, into another cloudless day of bleached skies and pounding swelter. For a moment she yearns for the storm that she knows is coming. For when it does she’ll be right here, watching the bright cords rip open the sky, with her old bones thrilling to the sound of hot air.

  ‘Who’s the dead eejit with the moustache?’

  Mrs Cauley laughs. ‘I believe that would be Johnnie.’

  Johnnie takes a bow as he skips faintly along the veranda.

  ‘And who’s Johnnie?’

  ‘Never you mind.’

  Mahony forces a smile. ‘So Mammy caused some trouble?’

  ‘She defied the town and everyone in it.’

  ‘I expect they didn’t know what had hit them.’

  Mrs Cauley nods. ‘At the time people believed, maybe still beli
eve, that your mother was unnatural, evil even. A few years earlier and they would have burnt her as a witch outside the Post Office.’

  ‘Who’s to say they didn’t? According to that note there they dealt with her some way or other.’

  They sit in silence. Johnnie settles on the lawn and muses too, cross-legged, stroking his moustache dolefully.

  ‘You have to ask yourself why St Anthony’s? Why take a baby so far?’

  ‘It’s a fair way to go to get rid of a baby,’ says Mahony.

  Mrs Cauley stares at him. ‘They didn’t take you there to get rid of you, Mahony; they took you to there to save you.’

  Johnnie jumps up clapping his hands.

  ‘Has it crossed your mind that if something happened to Orla you could have been in danger too?’ Mrs Cauley continues, oblivious to Johnnie’s applause. ‘They needed to keep you safe, Mahony. Whoever left you there was giving you the chance to return, to put things right. That’s why they left the note with you.’

  Mahony nods. ‘It’s possible.’

  Her face is grave. ‘And it’s also possible that they knew exactly what happened to Orla.’

  Chapter 5

  April 1976

  Mahony hears the car before he sees it, and it sounds terminal. It pulls up alongside him, ploughing up the dust. Tadhg leans out, unshaven and wearing a woollen hat, despite the heat of the day.

  ‘You’re kicking your heels up there, Mahony. On the way into town, is it? Get in and I’ll bring you down with me. Watch me jill.’

  Mahony gets in, minding the ferret in the footwell. A length of string is looped in a harness around her long back and tied to the gear stick.

  ‘We’ve been catching wabbits for the Widow.’

  ‘Has she given in to you?’

  Tadhg resumes his driving position, with his nose just short of the windscreen. ‘She hasn’t, but I’m wearing her down. Her resolve is weakening. Soon me slippers will be under her bed and me teeth will be in the glass next to hers. If only the church biddies would stop putting a bad word in. Mind you, Father Quinn is the top one there, advising her against me.’ Tadhg throws Mahony a look of disgust. ‘He’s a teetotaller. Would you credit it? Not a natural vice in him.’

  ‘I met him today – a sly cast on him like your ferret there.’

  ‘Jaysus, don’t insult the creature. Was Mrs Cauley dancing rings around him?’

  ‘She was.’

  Tadhg accepts a cigarette and Mahony leans in to light it for him. Tadhg’s two hands grip the steering wheel and the fag bounces in his mouth. He murmurs through the smoke. ‘Mrs Cauley has Quinn in her pocket, lulled by the clink of her gold.’

  Mahony puts his hand down to the ferret; she shudders all down her back but she lets him touch her. Under her oily fur she is muscle, roped and hard. She turns her head to him and shows him one long fang.

  ‘What are you doing in town now? Come by for a pint?’

  ‘I will. I’ll take a wander first, make myself known about the place.’

  Tadhg looks at Mahony closely, as if he is burning to say something, then thinks better of it and switches on the radio.

  The old ones are still where Mahony left them by the pump, but today there’s a bit more life about the place. Vehicles roll up and down the main street; the doctor’s black car passes twice alone. Villagers stand chatting outside shops and on corners. Babies sit on hips or in prams where they drool over pounds of sugar and babble at tins of cocoa. Some of the younger women nod and smile at Mahony, the older ones just nod.

  Beside them stand their dead shadows, gossiping well into the afterlife. They squint at Mahony with mild interest before turning to call out to the frocked children who run hoop and stick through delivery vans and bicycles. A dead man in shirtsleeves passes by with his hat pulled down low over his eyes. He is singing, he tips his brim at Mahony and is gone, leaving the ghost of a song behind him. Mahony picks it up and whistles it as he walks.

  A gaggle of girls sit on the edge of the pavement sucking aniseed balls and spitting the pips across the road. As Mahony walks by they get to their feet and scatter laughing, each with a wide red grin of stolen lipstick.

  ‘Have you a girlfriend, Mister?’ says the ringleader, a big girl wearing the last goodness out of an ugly dress.

  Mahony shakes his head. ‘Didn’t I tell you I’m waiting for you? When you’re grown we’ll run away together.’

  And he goes on his way, leaving her a queen in the eyes of her friends.

  Today the shop doors are propped open, welcoming sea breeze and custom. Commanding the best view of the quay and spilling its wares freely onto the surrounding area, the Post Office and General Store sits back on its haunches and disregards the competition. For here Marie Gaughan will sell you anything: from rat traps to knicker elastic, from duck eggs to feather dusters.

  Outside, reels of chicken wire jostle against sacks of potatoes with turned-down tops. There’s spades and buckets hung up for the children to eye. Measuring the merits of colour and function, round turrets over square ones, pale blue over space-dust pink. Here Marie Gaughan will cut you a yellow ice from a thick block and sandwich it in wafers. Here rabbits are sold in cardboard boxes, along with water butts and garden hoes, banned books and jam made from hedgerows.

  Mahony steps in off the street. Just inside the doorway a dead woman is standing on a pile of newspapers leaving neither print nor wrinkle. From her basket black beetles fall. They spiral through the air to melt, wriggling, into the floor.

  ‘I wanted carbolic,’ she whispers, near to tears, and disappears.

  Mahony looks around him.

  Marie Gaughan is behind the counter pretending to price dishcloths. Mrs Lavelle and her daughter Teasie are pretending to buy a tin of peas, and the lovely Róisín Munnelly is pretending to help them.

  Here is a handsome stranger.

  And here is more than one woman with the hairs rising on her neck nape and an unwanted memory shifting in the back of her mind. Past the place where old songs go to pass the time of day with forgotten hymns and nursery rhymes. Where long-ago cats are put out along with lost schooldays and expired coupons.

  Later it will hit them. When they are waiting on the kettle or turning down the bed sheet.

  His dark eyes are her eyes, the shape of his face, hers. The way he stands with his weight shifted back on his heels and his nose in the air, hers.

  Then they will start up and call out, drink a hot cup of tea or something stronger and firmly tell themselves to cop themselves on.

  But right now this memory is jumbled deep, tucked firmly behind the shopping lists and the ironing, the Friday fish and the Monday-morning gossip.

  ‘Now,’ says Marie Gaughan when Mahony gets to the counter. She spreads her arms out over the folded newspapers and squares her jaw.

  Mahony asks for fags and a local rag. ‘What’s the news about the place?’ he says in his hardest Dublin orphan voice.

  You are.

  Marie takes his money and gives him change. ‘Ah, not much happens about the place. Sure, there’s not much to keep a body here.’

  ‘There seems to be a lot going on.’

  ‘Not for those such as yourself, from out of town.’

  Mrs Lavelle watches from behind the dry goods, where she’s been having a scratch of her scalp, salting her shoulders with a fresh cascade. Marie has advised her to seek out a medicated shampoo and avoid black to lessen the effect, but Mrs Lavelle has been in mourning since the death of de Valera.

  Mahony smiles at her and she draws nearer, followed by her daughter, Teasie, who clutches a can of peas to her narrow chest as if it would stop a bullet. Teasie’s eyes flitter in the far-off depth beyond the surface smear of her spectacle lenses.

  Mrs Lavelle tries out her voice. ‘You’re the fella from Dublin staying up at Rathmore House?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Is it comfortable there?’ Mrs Lavelle breaks the long word into separate syllables, for she is speaking poli
te.

  ‘It’s grand.’

  ‘And the breakfasts?’

  Mrs Lavelle ignores Marie’s little headshake. Mrs Lavelle had helped Shauna with the housekeeping for years only to be dismissed after a misunderstanding over a silver-plated cruet. She would like to know the place has gone to the dogs without her. Although she doesn’t blame Shauna; it’s the other one. Either way, it drew on an attack of her nerves, which put her in her bed for nigh on a month.

  ‘Breakfast is grand too. Shauna does a good fry.’ Mahony takes up his paper and pretends to read. ‘I’ll be staying on for a bit. I’m taking a holiday for meself.’

  The women glance at each other.

  Mahony looks up and smiles so brightly that most of them smile back. ‘It’s a breath of fresh air to be out of the city.’

  He speaks low and kind about the lovely trees and the sea so that Marie’s hands start to stroke the corners of the newspapers and Teasie Lavelle puts down her can of peas. Then he’s asking if any of them have been to Dublin.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Marie, you have.’

  Mahony gives Marie a soft kind of look. ‘Then you’ll know what I mean better than anyone else. It’s not a patch on here, is it?’

  Marie finds that she is leaning halfway across the counter gazing into the hot dark eyes of an unwashed stranger young enough to be her grandson.

  ‘It was busy, the streets were dirty and you couldn’t get a decent cup of tea,’ she says, entranced.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Mahony gives her an impossibly slow smile and Marie Gaughan is astonished to find the corners of her mouth responding of their own accord. She coughs herself red and begins to thumb through a copy of Ireland’s Own.

  Mahony folds his paper under his arm. ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you around the place no doubt, Marie.’

  Marie nods, speechless. Behind the counter her toes are curling in her carpet slippers and the locked cash box of her heart is opening.

  Words are capable of flying. They dart through windows, over fences, between bar stools and across courtyards. They travel rapidly from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And as they go, they pick up speed and weight and substance and gravity. Until they land with a scud, take seed and grow as fast as the unruliest of beanstalks.