Himself

by Jess Kidd

  By the time Mahony reaches Kerrigan’s Bar everyone knows he’s on holiday from Dublin, loves a fry and is capable of causing a smile on Marie Gaughan’s face, a sight not seen in living memory.

  The pub is heaving; even the plush seats are taken. Here are the farmers and the fishermen, the postman and the shopkeepers of Mulderrig. The dead have been pushed out by the living today. They sulk in the cellar and listen on the landing.

  In the corner sits a bodhrán player. The music will start directly, once the rest of the band is here and the tall tales are toppled.

  Tadhg nods to acknowledge Mahony as he steps in through the door but doesn’t miss a beat; he’s on fine form behind the bar.

  ‘So there we were, me and this whale on the end of the hook, and the line reelin’ out like judgment and this unholy bastard trying to pull me out of the boat and into me death.’

  Mahony catches sight of Jack Brophy in the same place as before.

  ‘So then this fella,’ Tadhg points the nose of a bottle at a laughing man with hair like a wind-blasted bush at the far end of the bar. ‘He says, “Ah, Tadhg, give it a flick of your wrist – isn’t it all in the wrist action?”’

  The pub howls.

  ‘And Tadhg landed a monster of a two-pound mackerel!’

  ‘It was a mermaid, wasn’t it, Tadhg?’

  ‘One with a new perm for herself?’

  ‘Ah, watch it. Half the lies Tadhg says aren’t true.’

  Tadhg grins benevolently at his audience and spreads his hands wide. ‘Ye can all ask me arse. Now, Mahony?’

  There’s a lull and Mahony feels the eyes of Mulderrig upon him.

  Jack raises his finger half an inch from the bar towel. ‘I’ll stand him a pint. Take a pew, Mahony.’

  Mahony takes the seat made free next to Jack, and the eyes of Mulderrig see the big man pat Mahony on the back. It’s a benediction; Mahony knows it and is grateful. Jack smiles at Mahony, then turns back to listen to the man with the swollen face to the right of him talk with authority about the terrible malignity of horseflies.

  A good pint has magical powers. It can solve the simplest of problems, heal surface wounds and cement minor friendships, all in one evening. As Mahony steps out into the soft Mulderrig night he feels as if he’s finally found a place in the world, his own corner. His friends share the same face and he’s unsure of their exact names, but they rate him and that’s enough. He’s been inspected in the smoky light of Kerrigan’s Bar and, despite the Dublin accent, despite the leathers, despite the orphan scowl, they’d judged him to be a grand fella entirely.

  And he’d disarmed them with his stories and the cast of Dublin characters he drew for them. From the boys who can hot-wire a car as fast as a fart, to the women with the broken voices selling black-market fireworks out of prams. Now they know all about the rooftops and the alleyways. They know about the good bars and the quiet doorways, and the grand houses and the wide parks. They have even seen the light on the Liffey as she turns like dishwater through the town.

  As he falls out the door of Kerrigan’s Bar and into the gentle Mulderrig night, Mahony could almost forget what he came here for.

  He walks through the sleeping town, sparking a fag with a tune in his mind. His boot heels spin echoes across the empty streets and he begins to sing low in his fine singing voice. The lyrics are pure, about love and sacrifice and good intent, but the tone in his voice makes the words dirty and hard. Curtains twitch and young girls in soft sprigged nighties with brush-gleaming hair look out dreamily. The dead drift down through floorboards and up through flagstones and through windows and walls and locked doors, listening, yearning.

  Mahony walks alone in the blue-white moonlight, to the end of the village and up the steep road towards Rathmore House. The land exhales the heat of the day and the warm-bellied cows dot the fields in huddled shapes.

  On a night like this it would be easy to forget, with all of Mulderrig soft and easy in its sleep.

  He could forget, first of all, to ask what lit up her eyes, or if she ever laughed, if she liked apples or fucking pears.

  He could forget his own name.

  Francis Sweeney.

  After all, it’s a dead name: a name never taken, a life never lived.

  This town took it from him. He won’t forget that.

  The night is clear from mountain to sea as Mahony climbs the dark ribbon of road. Ahead of him the starlit forest slumbers. Behind him the moonlight skims and breaks over the mild-skinned water of the bay, which is as still as milk tonight. For the wind is lying low, curled into the strong back of the deep-sleeping velvet mountain.

  A man could almost forget what he came for, when the lovely Mulderrig night is for him alone.

  Chapter 6

  April 1976

  There’s a light on in the library and Mahony decides not to ignore Mrs Cauley’s summons to join her for a nightcap. He finds her propped up in bed, wearing a poker visor and playing solitaire. She has listened all evening for his footfall in the hall, although she’d never admit to it.

  Mahony turfs a pile of papers out of an armchair and pulls off his boots.

  ‘Here.’ Mrs Cauley fishes a bottle out from under her pillow. ‘Pour us a drop of the hard stuff.’

  Mahony pours her a tooth mug and takes a china cup for himself.

  There’s a nice silence just while they drink. The reading lamp beside the bed casts a mellow tent of light over the two of them. The dead and the mice draw in to watch, lulled and quiet. The damp settles in the corners of the room and stretches itself out along the wallpaper.

  Mrs Cauley peers over at him. ‘So how’s tricks?’ She collects up the cards, as quick as a croupier.

  ‘Not bad. I had a good time at the pub with the boys.’

  ‘The boys, is it?’ She shuffles and squares the pack. ‘Watch yourself. There’s not a trustworthy soul in this town. Every one of them has at least two faces.’

  Mahony puts his feet up on the bed and looks over at her. The visor shades her eyes but he’s certain she’s taking everything in. ‘They seem sound enough.’

  ‘Will they still drink with you when they know who you are? Do they know who you are, Mahony?’

  Mahony gets up and pours himself another. He ignores the empty mug in her outstretched hand.

  Mrs Cauley fixes him with her best poker face. ‘So you didn’t ask your new pals at Kerrigan’s Bar what happened to your mammy?’

  Mahony swirls the bad whiskey. It dances up the sides of the cup. ‘I didn’t.’

  Mrs Cauley nods. ‘That’s a shame. They’d have spun you a story about Orla leaving town.’

  ‘It would be no story.’

  ‘So you believe she left town now?’

  ‘If she were dead I’d know about it.’

  ‘You’re right of course. She’d be over there by the fireplace, knitting.’

  Mahony knocks back his whiskey in one hit, before it can take the skin off the roof of his mouth. ‘She could still be alive.’

  ‘Because you can’t see her?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘The dead are like cats, Mahony. You of all people should know that. They don’t always come when they’re called.’

  Mahony shakes his head. ‘They could be holding her somewhere.’

  Mrs Cauley raises herself up on her pillows. ‘For twenty-six years, Mahony?’

  ‘It happens. I read about some kid found in a woodshed.’

  ‘You think that’s possible? A live wire like Orla in a woodshed?’ Mrs Cauley speaks evenly. ‘You think your mother was murdered and so do I. Now I thought we’d established that?’

  Johnnie strolls through the French doors, throws his faint hat down on the end of the bed and disappears. In a moment Mahony sees a plume of spectral pipe smoke coming from behind a large stack of encyclopaedias in the far corner.

  Mahony nods. ‘So what’s next?’

  ‘We play to our strengths, isn’t that how the best detectives work? With my mind
and your unnatural talents we’ll have this case cracked in no time.’

  Mahony gets up, takes her cup and his and puts them on the bedside table. He pours another measure into each and wonders if he’ll ever feel his feet again. ‘All right, Miss Marple, but, first of all, how do you know so much about my unnatural talents?’

  She grins. ‘Husband number four was an eminent clairvoyant.’

  ‘Four, is it? Jesus. So that would be the dead fella with the moustache?’

  She shakes her head and smiles. ‘No, Johnnie was my fiancé. We never married, although he was the most beloved.’

  Mahony puts a drink into her hand. ‘He was the one that got away?’

  ‘Something like that,’ says Mrs Cauley. She frowns. ‘I want to try something, Mahony.’ She takes off her visor and reaches for a headscarf hung over the bedpost. ‘Is there a breeze tonight?’

  Mahony looks at her. ‘God knows. The night is still.’

  ‘We’ll give it a go anyways, although it’s better with a drop of wind to get it started.’

  Mrs Cauley sidles to the edge of the bed. ‘Help me to get standing.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Did you know, Mahony, that literature can be very illuminating?’

  Mrs Cauley reaches for her walking frame and with Mahony’s help moves her legs off the bed and puts on her slippers. With great effort she stands and Mahony sees how small she is, not quite five feet tall and the weight of dry hide and honeycombed bone alone.

  She sways, curved and calcified by time, smiling up at him. ‘Open the doors, Mahony.’

  The French doors are stuck fast and blossoming with mould but eventually they give and the night air falls in around Mahony as if it’s been waiting with its face pressed against the glass.

  ‘That’s it. Throw them wide.’

  The night air stalks into the room and starts to tease the dust along the skirting boards.

  Mrs Cauley takes a step forward, stumbling a little in her carpet slippers. ‘Look around you,’ she whispers. ‘The room is changing. See? The lights are burning brighter? Can’t you feel it? The books want to tell you something. They want to help.’

  And then Mahony feels it.

  The books, the papers and the magazines: all of them pulsing with a faint heartbeat. They’re watching him, holding their breath. Mahony suddenly wants to shout against the pressure of all of these waiting words.

  Mrs Cauley turns to Mahony and lowers her voice. ‘I last did this when Shauna’s mother left for England. I knew exactly what she was up to when Lady Chatterley’s Lover started snapping at my ankles. To say nothing of the fact that Ibsen flew across the room and nearly took the head off me.’ She knots her headscarf grimly. ‘It was A Doll’s House, so I know she won’t be back.’

  Johnnie emerges from a dark corner. The ghost of a smile teases the ragged curtains of his dim moustache; with a nod to Mahony he lies down on the floor and glides under the bed.

  The breeze whisks a flurry of play scripts up into the air where they drift in graceful arcs. As Mahony watches, their movements begin to change. They start to circle the room, slowly at first, then picking up speed until they whirr past with the dedication of Wall of Death bikers. Soon light pamphlets of philosophical thought start to join them, skidding across the floor and fluttering up into the whirling cloud of paper. Slim volumes of difficult poems come next, scuttling out from dark corners and flapping headlong into the swirling gyre. Even the most aloof classics join in, shedding their covers and flinging themselves, one after the other, into the vortex.

  In the middle stands Mrs Cauley, clinging to her walking frame.

  Then all at once the cyclone stops and the wind rushes out of the French doors.

  And everything falls down to the ground.

  Johnnie springs out from under the bed and, with a look of profound effort on his face, blows a sheet of paper through the air and into the outstretched hands of Mrs Cauley.

  ‘Close the window, Mahony,’ she says. ‘We’ve got something.’

  Johnnie collapses, flickering.

  Mrs Cauley studies the sheet of paper. ‘Now that’s some class of a hint.’

  Johnnie curls up at her feet like a dying beetle. Sometimes twitching out one long limb, sometimes moaning soundlessly.

  ‘What is it?’ Mahony wades through drifts of papers.

  ‘It’s a playbill, Mahony.’

  He reads her name on it. ‘You were in this play?’

  ‘I’m right there.’

  Mahony looks at the playbill. In the photograph a dark-haired girl stands smiling with her head tilted and her hands on her hips. Johnnie stops twitching and gets up off the floor. He straightens his waistcoat and tries to put his arm around her.

  ‘That’s you?’

  ‘That was me.’ She puts her hand up to her head and touches the few white hairs remaining on her naked little head.

  Mahony spots her wig, caught on the leg of an upturned hat stand. He brushes it off and hands it to her.

  She takes it and smiles, her eyes bright with checked tears. ‘Pour us a drink, kiddo.’

  Back in bed with a whiskey, Mrs Cauley watches the dust settle. She sucks at her teeth. ‘Shauna will be hopping. She’ll have to run the broom around the corners. She won’t like that, the idle mare.’

  The room is demolished; many of the larger stacks remain standing but the floor is littered with piles of papers and broken books.

  Mahony hands the playbill back to her. ‘The Playboy of the Western World, by John Millington Synge.’

  ‘A great play by a great man,’ Mrs Cauley says, smoothing the edges of the paper gently.

  Johnnie smiles at her from the end of the bed.

  ‘But you’re wondering,’ she murmurs, ‘what this play has to do with our investigation?’

  Mahony looks outside. It’s nearly dawn and he’s buckled on the worst kind of whiskey and in no fit state for guessing games. Somewhere in his flittered mind he marvels at Mrs Cauley’s tolerance of cheap liquor, for, apart from the jaunty slant of her wig, she’s as bright as a blackbird.

  ‘And here it is.’ She taps the playbill on her lap. ‘The St Patrick’s annual fundraising production presents a premium opportunity for the amateur detective.’

  Mahony fights a wave of nausea. ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Every man and his mother rolls into town for it – they all come, it’s an event.’

  Johnnie gets up and rambles through a knoll of pamphlets to the French doors to watch the sun rise behind the trees. His face is glowing. Mahony has never seen a dead man appear happier.

  Mrs Cauley looks thoughtful. ‘First off, we’ll use the auditions to quiz the hell out of them. They’ll be there in droves, lining up ready for a good interrogation.’

  Johnnie nods primly and straightens his tie.

  ‘Then we use the play to flaunt you, kiddo. To keep you right under their noses, in their line of sight,’ says Mrs Cauley, jubilantly. ‘We put you centre stage.’

  Johnnie takes a bow.

  Mahony stares at her. ‘Ah now – Jaysus, I can’t act.’

  ‘Think about it, Mahony.’ She leans forward in the bed. ‘It won’t be long before they work out who you are, if some of them haven’t already. You’re the spit of your mother: the same big wounded eyes and damaged little smile.’

  Mahony squints at her; he hasn’t the strength to argue.

  ‘You can only remind them of Orla and, no offence, Orla is the last person this town wants reminding of.’

  Mahony nods. ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘So you parading about on that stage as large as life will wind the bastards right up.’ She pats her quilt gleefully and chuckles. ‘Then we sit back and let them give themselves away. Get them rattled enough and someone’s bound to point the finger.’

  ‘So I act in the play?’

  ‘You do. Have you another plan?’

  Johnnie twitches his moustache in Mahony’s direction in an attempt a
t a sympathetic smile.

  Mrs Cauley narrows her eyes at Mahony. ‘Are you the kind of cowboy to run from trouble?’ There’s a bad kind of delight in her voice.

  Mahony laughs and shakes his head.

  ‘So let’s ride headlong into town with our guns blazing.’ Mrs Cauley holds out her mug. ‘Set ’em up.’

  Mahony reaches forwards and pours out the last of the whiskey, wondering if the feeling will ever return to his fingers.

  ‘A toast to you, my leading man. And to our investigation.’ Mrs Cauley downs her drink in one, her eyes hardly watering. She grins, wickedly. ‘And to the straight-up joy of getting Mulderrig’s bollocks in a twist.’

  Chapter 7

  May 1948

  Orla sat on a log squinting one dark eye against the smoke that rose from the cigarette in her mouth.

  The man stood, tucking in his shirt, watching her. The man knew that she didn’t care whether he was there or not. She wouldn’t sit prettily like other girls. Look how she sat with her legs open. The slut. She was more like an animal than a little girl.

  The man wanted blushes and shy kisses.

  He wanted her to take his money with a bit of gratitude.

  He walked over to her and took the cigarette out of her mouth. Her face was filthy and so were her clothes. Her body always smelt sour. Every time the man went home he was shaken with the fear that he couldn’t wash her off him and that his wife would come to know what he had done, what he couldn’t keep himself from doing.

  The man finished the cigarette and threw it on the ground. He knew he wasn’t the first. He knew he wasn’t the only. He knew not to go empty-handed to the forest behind the cottage. He knew that for extra she’d fight back. But sometimes he had to beg. And he always had to pay.

  When she was distracted, when her eyes were fixed on the light through the trees behind you, that was the time to look at her. Because when her hard black child’s eyes were staring back at you, well, you just couldn’t think.

  When she was distracted she was a doll. Then she lay quiet under you with her chin tilted back and her mouth open. Then you could follow the faint trace of her veins, blue beneath the white of her skin. Then you saw all the details of her. The freckle just under her lip, her upturned nose and the way her baby finger sat crooked on her right hand.