Himself

by Jess Kidd

  Mahony laughs. ‘I’m having a quiet smoke for meself. Will you join me?’

  She puts down her handbag and takes three cigarettes from his offered pack, tucking two up the sleeve of her cardigan. She accepts a light and strays over to a headstone across the way.

  ‘There’s herself. She wanted a quiet corner away from the bustle of the main drag. Mammy was a thin woman, so they could shoehorn her in just here.’

  ‘It’s a grand spot.’

  Bridget nods. ‘We had to shave a foot off her memorial. It’s lucky she had a short name.’ She rests her backside against the edge of her mammy’s headstone. ‘Do you know, I’ve loved this woman since the day she died. We have great debates now.’

  Mahony watches as the late Mother Doosey climbs up out of her grave and tries to nudge her daughter away with a faint pair of fire tongs. He takes off his jacket and spreads it on the ground next to him. ‘Come and take the weight off.’

  ‘Why not?’ She settles herself next to him, stretching out her short legs. She’s changed out of her overalls into a shapeless dress but has left her boots on. Mahony suspects that they might have steel toecaps.

  ‘So how did you manage to drag your woman into the church?’ she says.

  Mahony reclines on his elbow and looks up at her, paying no attention to his peripheral vision. ‘She dragged me in. She said she had a deal with the devil.’

  ‘Another deal, is it?’

  Ignored, the dead begin to gather and complain. Mahony makes out a hazy clump of them squawking in a nearby yew. Several stand around in the shadow of the church wringing their hands and shaking their heads.

  ‘Father Quinn tried to warn her off me. We’re appearing to play ball.’

  ‘Ah, take no notice of him, the gobshite. I’m destroyed with the effort of being nice to him and not spitting in his fecking cocoa.’

  Mahony laughs and Bridget looks sideways at him. ‘He’s an ignorant man and an intolerant man. Father Jim approached things a different way. You’d be happy to make the effort for him now. Father Jim’s passing was a blow to all of us. Did you see Mary Lavelle in church today?’

  Mahony nods.

  ‘I don’t think she’s ever really got over the death of Father Jim, or de Valera for that matter. But then she’s always been very morbid in her outlook.’

  ‘It sounds like she’s been causing a stir.’

  Bridget shrugs. ‘It’s Teasie I feel sorry for. Yesterday Mary made her fill a hip bath from the old horse trough outside the village. Then Mary got in it and wouldn’t get out again. She said it was the safest place in the house, what with the ghosts circling the ceiling. After five hours of this, and with Teasie worried that her mother’s pharyngitis would flare, Dr McNulty visited and administered an injection.’

  ‘Poor Teasie.’

  Bridget smiles. ‘Of course Father Quinn heard about this behaviour and went round to warn her off it.’

  Old Mother Doosey rambles slowly past. She fixes Bridget with a disapproving glare and tries to polish her headstone with the corner of her apron.

  Bridget screws her cigarette out on the ground. ‘Quinn is an interfering bastard; why he can’t leave people to their own notions I don’t know. Mary told him straight up that water from the old horse trough was nearly as good as that from a holy well formed by the tears of St Brigid herself.’

  ‘What did Quinn say?’

  ‘He told her to pray to the Good Lord for wisdom in the face of ignorance and superstition. Then he threw her water over the buddleia and said let that be an end to it.’

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘Not at all. Mary told him the story of the Protestant sheep washers. You know it?’

  Mahony shakes his head.

  ‘In 1876 there was a holy well up the coast, along Belmullet way. Now one day the Protestants visiting the big house got wind of it and had a laugh about it and they had a flock of sheep brought to it. Then they washed the filthiest animal they could find in the holy well. A sheep with shit up to its oxters.

  ‘Sure enough this angered the well and of course wells can be spiteful as well as bountiful.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The well upped and moved along the coast to Portacloy, where they were very pleased to have it. And every last one of the individuals involved with the sheep was struck down the very next day.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ asks Mahony.

  ‘They were out riding their horses across the fields, having a splendid time, when a blinding bolt of lightning came out of the blue and melted the lot of them on the spot.’ Bridget purses her lips. ‘For years the outline of the riders was seared right there on the ground. You could even see the horses, hooves raised mid-gallop. To this day no crops will grow in that field and no animal will feed in it. Even the rain won’t fall there; I swear to God it slants away before it hits the ground.’

  Mahony smiles. ‘So Father Quinn should look over his shoulder now?’

  ‘He should. I’m away back to the house to put some nails in his pockets. He’s a marked man as soon as there’s a hint of a storm. Now, talking of looking over your shoulder, Mahony.’

  ‘No further attempts.’

  ‘Well, keep your wits about you, son.’

  ‘Have you any ideas?’

  ‘I’ll keep you posted.’ Bridget squints up at the clouds. ‘I have my suspicions.’

  Mahony watches Bridget Doosey thread her way back through the graveyard with old dead Mother Doosey following behind her, waving a dim set of fire tongs.

  Mahony must have slept, because it’s cold when he wakes and the church is empty. Even the dead have gone. He wipes saliva from the side of his mouth and gets up off the ground.

  As Mahony heads round the side of the church he sees her standing with her back to him. She’s wearing a dress so faded that for a moment he’s not sure if she’s dead or alive. But when she turns to face him Mahony knows that she’s alive, for the pain is real and raw on her face and Mahony has to fight himself from reaching out to hold her.

  Róisín Munnelly gives him an apologetic smile and searches blindly in her bag for a handkerchief. Her face is delicate, honed by grief, so that her fine cheekbones show below the grave brown eyes that look into his.

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ she says.

  Without a thought Mahony smoothes a loose strand of hair behind her ear as gently as a mother would and whispers, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’

  They sit on the ground, one each side of the grave, and Róisín tells Mahony about her daughter. While she talks, she absently plays with the little white chippings spread inside the marble kerb. Róisín tells him that at first she found it very hard to leave her daughter up here in the graveyard. That she still feels an urge to tuck her in when she leaves, for the ground is cold all year round. But on a nice day it’s not too bad, if the sun is out and the birds. And recently she’s had a growing feeling that her little girl is no longer down there.

  When they told Róisín, it took her feet right from under her. She has a scar above her eyebrow where she hit the dresser on her way down.

  Her daughter had been missing for two days when the guards found her on the Carrigfine road. Her injuries were compatible with a hit-and-run. They never found out whose car it was. The ground was too dry and the tracks had all blown away.

  Her husband tells her that she shouldn’t keep coming up here, because it can’t bring her back. He says that she has the boys to think of now.

  When Mahony bolts the gate behind him he can still make out a little speck of colour. It’s a yo-yo, balanced carefully on the top of a small, white, heart-shaped gravestone that reads Margaret Ida Munnelly, 20 November 1961 – 12 May 1968.

  Chapter 17

  May 1968

  Mammy told her to keep to the fields nearby only and she could take her toy. It was round and yellow and perfect. Uncle Eamon brought it out from his pocket with a smile. He showed her how to flip it and trick it and w
alk the dog with it and Lord knows what. Mammy laughed and put her hands on her hips and Ida looked at her face and knew that Mammy had forgotten all about the pots on the stove and the Sunday dinner and the smell of cabbage lifting the lids and the steaming potatoes splitting their skins in the bowl ready for the butter to go on. Maybe they were laughing too. Laughing potatoes. Daddy was in his armchair behind his paper.

  ‘That’s grand, Margaret,’ he’d said. ‘That’s grand.’

  No, she thought, I’m not Margaret. I don’t want that name. That’s not what I call meself.

  She had seen a great deal already that day.

  She had seen all the hairs on Mrs Lavelle’s top lip as she bent forward to shake hands with Mammy at Mass.

  ‘Peace be with you.’

  She had seen Ruth Quigley’s new sailor coat from England, navy blue with little anchors on the brass buttons. Mrs Quigley said Mr Quigley had sent it over; he was there working ever so hard and ever so successfully.

  ‘I have a yo-yo,’ Ida told Mrs Quigley. But Mrs Quigley didn’t hear on account of her getting stuck into telling Mammy all about Mr Quigley’s important work.

  Ida tried to touch the white piping on Ruth Quigley’s hem. It was made to look like real rope twined all about but Ruth Quigley said to leave off with her filthy dirty fingers. On the way home Mammy told Uncle Eamon that Mrs Quigley was always blowing her own coals. Ida imagined Mrs Quigley with her head in the fire and her big arse sticking up behind and her mouth full of air. Puff. Puff.

  The priest had shaken Ida’s hand and smiled at her with all his teeth.

  ‘Peace be with you.’

  ‘Peace be with you, Golden Margaret,’ said Uncle Eamon.

  ‘That’s not my name,’ she’d whispered. ‘That’s not what I call meself.’

  There were five girls in her school with yellow hair, but she had the finest. Mammy didn’t know where she got it from, for hers was brown and Daddy’s was ginger.

  ‘Look it. Like spun gold. Goldilocks.’

  Golden Ida. Hop, skip, point, down the lane on a good-weather day in her best dress with a cardigan for the nip in the air. Mammy had wanted her to get changed into her day clothes. Then Uncle Eamon started talking to Mammy and winked at Ida so that she could slip out.

  Slip out, like her tongue through the gap in her teeth. She hissed over to the cows and climbed up on the gate. She made her hand go like a snake. Snap. Then she felt sorry for the cows and she showed them her toy, taking it from her pocket, shyly uncovering it.

  ‘It is a yo-yo.’

  She rolled the sound in her mouth and made big shapes with her lips as she said it. She opened and shut her jaw with the saying of it. Yo-yo.

  The cows looked impressed, as well they should, up to their hocks in shit with no entertainment.

  Hop, skip, point, to the Gallagher’s.

  Eileen and Phyllis had a biblical case of head lice. They’d be in there with their hair heaving and their mammy having a good rake around with the nit comb. Their hair was dead straight, so you’d think the nits would just slide off. Ida wondered if their mammy had cut all their hair off like she’d threatened she would. She said she’d see them scalped. Ida thought about them with their eyes all red and their hair all tufted and shorn, like baldy baby birds. She laughed and climbed up on the gate and showed her toy to the outside of their house.

  The empty windows blinked back at her.

  ‘It’s a yo-yo, don’t you know?’

  The shut front door listened but didn’t comment.

  Ida danced off up the road.

  She had seen a great deal already that day.

  She had seen the tidemark in the breakfast jug where the milk had gone sour in a little ridge. She had pushed it with her nail then wiped her nail on the tablecloth.

  She had seen a web as big as a piano. Although she felt it more than she saw it when she ran through it. It brushed her face and got in at her mouth. Ida spat on the ground for ages. For she knew that if you swallowed a mammy spider the babies would grow all inside you and would crawl into your ears and make you as deaf as a hedge. All you’d hear was the rustling of spider feet as they ran about your skull.

  When Ida got to the forest she got her toy out of her cardigan pocket and showed it to the trees.

  ‘This,’ she announced, ‘is a yo-yo. Don’t you know?’

  She showed them how to flip it, trick it and walk the dog with it, and although the trees were impressed, Ida knew better. She’d seen it done for real. She wound the string up and the yellow moon fell straight down again. She wished for it to bounce and run back up the string again. She glared at it.

  It took ages and ages and ages to wind the string up. That was the boring part. You had to get it right. She poked her tongue through her tooth gap as she concentrated, breathing through her nose.

  There.

  It was shiny and round and perfect and yellow. She licked it but it didn’t taste of yellow, although she didn’t know what yellow should taste like.

  Her yo-yo had come with her to make boats and sail them on the water. She’d use anything: a leaf or an acorn cup, a raft of moss and a weave of twigs. Passengers sailed too, on awful cursed kinds of crossings. Across wild uncharted seas to savage shores. The captain was a woodlouse and the passengers were ants, but all were condemned – God bless their souls! She would wave bravely and sob into her hankie as they sunk all the way down to the silty bottom of the Shand.

  Hop, skip, point.

  In the dirt with her best shoes on – Mammy would roast her!

  She wasn’t allowed near the river. Sometimes the edges were thick with slime. You had to break it to launch the boats; you had to poke them through, leaning right over. Maybe even step in a bit, even if you were wearing your school shoes, or else you were a baby.

  But you always had to be careful that the river didn’t grab you.

  Ida had already seen a great deal that day: Uncle Eamon’s gleeful green eyes as he promised to marry her, the potatoes laughing their skins apart and steaming up the rim of Mammy’s good blue bowl. She had seen the dog nosing in the garden heap, a line of wet around his snout, and her school shoes filled with paper by the fire, drying.

  Ida skipped through the trees with her toy in her hand and there he was.

  A man with a sack and a shovel, kneeling on an island in the middle of the river.

  Ida stared and stared. The island was longer than a fishing boat and as wide as a bus. The wet silt sparkled. It was all true – it had been down there all along, just hiding under the water watching the old bones swim round it!

  And now it had a man on it.

  The man wasn’t a stranger, she knew him all right, although he wasn’t wearing his cap or his smart coat. He looked up at her, unsmiling, then he glanced down at the sack by his feet.

  The sack moved, she was sure of it – a sack full of kittens, Ida just knew.

  With ears too big for their little pointed faces and tails so small they’d wrap only once around her finger.

  She would take them all, really she would, on her life she would. They’d never bother him again, the kittens. She would feed them milky tea with a spoon and kill mice for them. They would ride to school on her shoulders and sit in her desk all day. At night they would sleep around her head like a furry halo. They would be brindled and tabby, grey and white, ginger and black. They would be tiger-striped and leopard-spotted. With combed-out whiskers and pink paw pads. She imagined herself smiling down at them. All the nearly drowned kittens in the world looked up at her and purred gratefully.

  But when she opened her mouth to tell him, the words got stuck.

  The man pretended a smile.

  Ida had seen a great deal that day: the light on the water and on the green branches, drowsy bees in the wood sorrel and glossy beetles in the moss. And a low-tide island you’ll see once if you’re lucky and twice if you’re blessed.

  But Ida wasn’t lucky and the man wasn’t blessed. He had waited for e
ighteen years. He had studied the weather and the tides. And now he would shore up his troubled lover’s grave and return the things he had taken from her. He would hold her in his arms again if he could, there in the middle of the river, with the water shrinking from him and the stones shifting under him.

  For nightly, still, she came to him: she rose up out of the Shand, shrugging off her cape of silt. A river goddess, worn as smooth as an ancient carving, wearing waterweeds and dropping diamonds with every step. Her footprints dented rocks.

  On the riverbank the little girl stared and stared.

  He picked up his shovel.

  ‘Come here to me, Margaret,’ he said.

  As Ida turned to run she dropped her toy, but it was only as she hit the ground that she realised her hands were empty.

  Chapter 18

  May 1976

  ‘Now, I’d say this one was more of a warning,’ says Bridget Doosey. ‘Gelignite, you see. A drop more and we’d have seen some real damage.’

  Mahony surveys the letterbox. The wire has blasted out and the plastic coating has melted onto the doormat. There’s a plume of smoke damage along the wall and the coat stand is charcoal. Skeletal umbrellas lean in a blackened umbrella stand.

  ‘Poisoned cats and letter bombs are a strange field of expertise.’ Mahony offers her a cigarette.

  She takes one and he leans forward to light it. ‘The field of attempted murder is more commonplace than you think.’ She exhales. ‘Call it a hobby of mine.’

  ‘So Mrs Cauley did right to call you?’

  ‘Of course, I know my onions.’

  Bridget picks up a charred piece of paper from the blackened tiles. ‘Guess who.’

  It has his name typed on it.

  Chapter 19

  May 1976

  Mahony has walked for hours, keeping out of the forest and circling back up to Rathmore House by way of the open fields, for he needs time to think. The clouds are blowing in from the Atlantic, so that when Mahony sees Rathmore House, behind an ancient horse chestnut and just over a stile, the light makes the stone as colourless as rain.