by Jess Kidd
He almost doesn’t see her, on the road up ahead of him, crouched on her hunkers. Her face is in profile and with her upturned nose and heavy-lidded eyes she is as sweet and pale as a graveyard angel.
‘Pooky Snail, put out your horns,’ Ida lisps as she stabs a pale finger through a snail. She tuts, stands up and puts her hands on her hips. ‘Pooky Snail, would you ever put your feckin’ horns out?’
‘Ah, he’s asleep, look it,’ says Mahony, and picks up the snail to show her.
‘He’s not asleep. He’s dead.’
‘You’re right of course.’ Mahony pitches the empty shell over the wall.
They walk together, Mahony in his leather jacket and Ida in her scuffed shoes he can see the road through. She reaches her arms up to him and Mahony’s heart turns over. ‘You know I can’t carry you, chick.’
Ida folds her arms and flutters down at the side of the road with the impeccable grace of a prima ballerina. She takes something out of her cardigan pocket and holds it up. She licks her finger and rubs an imaginary smudge from it. Mahony swears that for a moment the yo-yo glows brighter in her hand.
‘You got it back then?’
Ida nods and Mahony notices that she looks just like her mother. She has the same stiff, serious little smile as Róisín. She starts to wind up the string.
Mahony sits down next to her. ‘Do you remember how you lost it?’
She grimaces. ‘Mammy said I wasn’t allowed to go into the forest on me own, but I did. She said I wasn’t to go near the river, but I did that too. I went up to play acorn boats, but he was already there, drowning kittens at the river. Where I showed you.’ Her eyes widen as she remembers. ‘The island, I saw it! The water had all run away.’
‘You saw Denny’s Ait, near the clearing?’
Ida nods. ‘And the man was on it. He had this sack and this shovel.’
‘How did you know there were kittens in there?’
Ida frowns at him. ‘What else would you put in a sack to go into the river?’
Mahony shrugs.
‘Eejit,’ murmurs Ida, soft and low. She purses her lips. ‘And I shouted, “Don’t kill them, Mister”, and he looked up at me and did a pretend smile, and said, “Come here to me, Margaret”, and I knew I was in trouble because he sounded cross. Then I ran and then there was a flash behind my eyes and then I dropped my yo-yo.’
‘You saw his face?’
She looks down at her shoes. ‘Maybe.’
‘And you knew him, didn’t you?’
‘How do I bloody know?’ Ida jumps up. ‘Jesus fecking Christ.’ She slips her yo-yo back into the pocket of her cardigan and is gone.
Shauna is coming out of the back door with a tea tray. The late sun catches her hair and gives it a reddish cast as she moves into the light. She leans the tray on her hip as she closes the door behind her, with movements quick and unthinking, her lit face familiar and lovely. She negotiates the steps, frowning as a wayward hen scrabbles across her path. Watching her sets up a calm bright feeling in Mahony: here life continues, against the landslide, against the darkness. If he could he’d kiss her for it. Shauna looks up at him and smiles.
‘I’m taking Daddy down his tea.’
Mahony takes the tray off her. ‘Jesus, do you ever stop running with these trays? Can the man not get his own tea?’
Shauna laughs with him. ‘The man would die of thirst rather.’
Shauna leads the way past a series of outbuildings in different states of disrepair, where hens peck distractedly around an overgrown courtyard and a dead ginger cat prowls amongst the weeds.
‘I’ve been thinking, Shauna.’
‘Steady on.’
‘It’s best if I leave.’
She glances back at him. ‘Best for who?’
Mahony watches his step on the cobbles. ‘For you and for Merle.’
‘Where would you even go? I can’t imagine anyone else in town opening their doors to you.’
‘That’s not the point. That’s the second attempt—’
‘And they’ve said their piece. It would devastate that old woman if you left now; she loves the bones of you.’
‘What if one of you gets hurt?’
‘Don’t be thick, Mahony. It’s you they’re after, not us.’ Shauna shrugs. ‘Anyway, those were only warnings. If they’d have wanted to kill you—’
‘I’d be dead by now? Cheers.’
He follows her down a narrow path by the side of a greenhouse; the remaining panes are fogged with moss and the floor is littered with old feed bags. He picks his way carefully, keeping everything upright on the tray. Shauna smiles over her shoulder.
‘Stay here with us, Mahony. It’s where your friends are.’
Mahony is bowled over. He smiles down at a tea cosy.
Shauna stops outside what used to be a stable; some of the doors have been glazed and it’s been given a recent coat of dark-green paint. She opens a door at the end. She goes to take the tray off him.
‘I’ll take it in,’ says Mahony.
‘Ah no. Daddy won’t have strangers in his workshop.’
Mahony laughs. ‘I live in his house, I’m hardly a stranger, am I now?’
‘Well, just put it down on the table there and come straight out so you don’t disturb him.’
‘I won’t; I’ll stay for a while with him.’
‘Ah no, Mahony.’
‘The man doesn’t see a soul from one end of the day to another.’
‘That’s the way he likes it. Now don’t make him touchy for me, for then he’s the devil to deal with.’
‘Go on up to the house. I’ll be up later. The talk is probably bursting out of the poor fella.’
Desmond Burke is of an unfavourable disposition, until he takes himself down to the old stable. The horses are long gone, although cobwebbed bridles and tattered paddock rugs still hang tangled on hooks in dim corners.
Desmond has it all set up. The stalls are knocked through to make one long room lined with bookcases, and electricity is routed from the house in order to run the lights. He has a wood burner he can use on cool days and an old easy chair he can sleep in.
At the far end is Desmond’s desk, with a lamp arranged, just so, to throw light on a clean wide blotter. Every morning, at seven, Desmond walks down the garden, opens the door and takes his place at his desk. He smiles at the leather-bound books on the bookshelves and takes a paisley cravat from the drawer. He puts on his cravat and opens a book from the neat pile next to him. Then he picks up his pen and starts to make notes, in a good solid schoolteacherly hand, slanted in all the right places.
Lost in his scholarly reveries, Desmond wouldn’t notice if the goat itself brought him his tea, as long as it didn’t bleat.
Mahony sets the tray down on a table just under one of the windows. ‘Evening, Squire, I’ve brought your tea down to you there.’
Desmond studies Mahony for a moment then screws the top on his pen. ‘Can I help you at all?’
He speaks with quiet deliberation but Mahony sees impatience in his pale-blue eyes. He has the same mildly startled look about him as his daughter.
‘I’ve brought your tray down to you there.’
‘So I see.’ Desmond looks at Mahony without interest and Mahony looks back at him with a winning smile.
This is the guest from Dublin then.
Desmond sees the long hair and the leather jacket, the stubble and the dirty trousers. He wonders if Mahony smokes drugs up there in his house. He expects they have a load of drugs in the city, on every street corner, in every bar, in every pocket and pipe. All the people are bewildered out of their minds on it.
Mahony sees that Desmond – once a fine figure of a man no doubt – has been ruined by the books. For too long he’s leant over them, like an old toad nursing a fly. And now, like an old toad, he’s bowed of back and thin of leg.
Mahony holds out his hand. ‘I’m Mahony.’
Desmond looks at Mahony’s hand. ‘If you’ll e
xcuse me.’
Mahony, unperturbed, steps over to the bookcase. ‘You have your books in better order than Mrs Cauley; the woman has to summon a windstorm to find what she wants.’
Desmond snorts.
Mahony traces his finger down the spine of a collector’s edition of the work of Thomas Crofton Croker. But when he leans forward to manhandle an antique Lady Gregory from her place on the shelf Desmond almost swallows his teeth.
‘Don’t touch my books.’
Mahony looks up in surprise. Desmond has his arse half out of his chair and his hand clutching the edge of the desk.
Mahony speaks gently. ‘I’m sorry, pal. Look, I won’t touch them.’
Desmond settles warily in his seat.
Mahony smiles. ‘It’s just that I’ve loved books ever since I was a wee boy in the orphanage.’
Desmond stares at him. ‘The orphanage?’
‘Aye, the orphanage.’ Mahony turns back to the bookcase. ‘Where dear old Father McCluskey read to me every Saturday afternoon; I was his favourite you know? He would bring down a book from the cabinet, sit me on his knee and we’d look at that book together for hours and hours.’
Desmond Burke appears to be riveted. Mahony, heartened by such an attentive audience, could even start to believe his own story and forget the fact that the only time he ever went to Father McCluskey’s office was to have nine kinds of shite belted out of him.
Mahony pulls up a stool and sits down at the side of the desk. ‘Then one day, Father McCluskey said wasn’t I the lucky little fella, because he was going to show me the best book of them all.’
Mahony pauses and looks off into the far distant corner of the stable. ‘It was beautiful, bound with leather and on the cover were these gold deep-cut letters that you wouldn’t believe. Real gold surely?’
Desmond shrugs helplessly.
‘And when I opened the pages the paper inside was as thin and crisp as a slice of fresh cloud. And there were all these pictures of temples and Romans and each picture covered by a tissue wisp to keep it nice.’
This was true. There really had been a book of such beauty in Father McCluskey’s office, in a locked glass cabinet. Mahony remembered it well.
On that particular day, just as the priest was getting into the swing of Mahony’s chastisement, he was called away to give Extreme Unction to Mother Maria Consuelo, who’d been dying for twenty-odd blashted years. Father McCluskey had left Mahony behind in the room with the instructions to pull his trousers up and get the hell out. Mahony nodded with hardly a tear in his eye, for after years of walloping, his arse was as tough as footskin.
Mahony had searched in all the unlocked drawers until he found a half pack of cigarettes. He had pocketed them, taken a book from the bookcase and sat down at Father McCluskey’s desk for a smoke.
‘It was a truly beautiful book and I treated it with the respect I would give to Father McCluskey himself.’ Mahony smiles as he remembers how he’d watched a gentle arc of his golden piss fall on the leather-bound cloud-thin pages. ‘So you see, Desmond, I’d only treat your possessions with the greatest of respect. I wouldn’t even breathe on them.’
Desmond Burke sits speechless. He has taken up his fountain pen again and keeps screwing the lid on and off, unaware that he is in real danger of breaking the thread.
Mahony lights a fag. ‘What are you reading about?’
He holds out the pack to Desmond, who shakes his head. ‘History. Folklore. That sort of thing.’
‘Grand so. Is there anything about the dead in all that?’
Desmond looks confused. ‘The dead? In what context?’
‘In the context of them coming back, having a look about the place and then telling the living who did them in?’
Desmond takes off his glasses and hopes that Mahony can’t see his hands shake. ‘I don’t know.’
‘By the way, that necktie looks well on you, Desmond. Very distinguished. The professors at Trinity College wear those when they’re walking about talking to themselves.’ Mahony smiles at him and against his better judgement Desmond Burke smiles back.
‘So let me get this straight, Desmondo, in the story with the bold boy chasing this bewitched hare up the side of the mountain—’
Desmond downs the last of the dry sherry and nods. ‘Yes, “The Fate of Frank M’Kenna.”’
‘That so, his friends all come down the mountain when the weather turns but M’Kenna stays out hunting because he’s a gobshite?’
‘Because he’s a headstrong young man, yes.’
‘Aye, he’s a gobshite, so he dies running about after the hare in a snow storm.’
‘Well, William Carleton is telling us that no one quite knows what happens to the boy after we lose sight of him.’
‘And the father is beside himself, having cursed the boy to death for breaking his plough on a magic stone.’
‘No, that was the other tale we read. In this story the father remonstrates with Frank M’Kenna for putting his love of hunting over attending Sunday Mass. He warns his son of the dire effects of habitual and unchecked pleasure on his mortal soul.’
‘And then, because the son disobeys him, the father curses the son’s soul to hell that he might come back a corpse from the mountain for his defiance.’
‘He does.’
‘And they find the poor bastard when the snow thaws and bring his body back to the village strapped to the door of his own house.’
‘They do.’
‘And when the ghost of Eejit M’Kenna returns, he returns for one reason and one reason only.’
‘He does, Mahony.’
‘And that’s to tell his friends who should get his good trousers.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No.’
‘Not how he died, or if the hare was a witch after all, or about how she got him?’
‘No.’
‘Stop the lights! That’s just like the fuckin’ dead.’
‘So then, Desmond, the purpose of folklore is that it has no fuckin’ purpose at all?’
Desmond takes a cigarette from Mahony; he won’t remember that he doesn’t smoke until tomorrow. He adjusts his glasses with a very serious kind of deliberation.
‘Now concentrate, Mahony. Folklore is the record of a dying civilization, romantic Ireland, the ancient untarnished imagination of the pure and noble peasant making sense of the harshness and beauty of their life and the landscape.’
Mahony hits the table, narrowly missing Lady Gregory, who sprawls open next to an empty bottle of whiskey.
‘Imagination, me hole. Who says this stuff doesn’t happen? There’s a lot of truth in folklore.’
Desmond frowns.
‘Can you not see the dead roaming about the place? What about that old fella sitting on that armchair over there?’
Desmond squints across the room. ‘That’s a commode.’
‘A commode?’
‘We got it for Mrs Cauley but she refused to use it.’
Mahony laughs. ‘I’m not surprised – there’s a priest already hatching on it.’
‘What does he look like?’
Mahony peers across the room. The dead priest sits with his head sunk to his chest, rolling his thumbs one over the other, round and round. A haggard bulk of a man, he’s the most impressive-looking priest, dead or alive, that Mahony has seen.
‘He looks like you wouldn’t mess with him.’
Desmond leans forward and whispers in Mahony’s ear. ‘It’s fitting, it came from the parochial house.’
The dead priest hunches over his dim hands, oblivious, grinding his big square jaw.
‘A priest haunting a commode.’ Mahony sways gently on the stool with an unlit fag in his smile. ‘It’s the place to be if you’ve a bit of time on your hands.’
Desmond smiles back at him. ‘You have your mother’s eyes.’
‘I do? Now, did I tell yeh who I was?’
‘You didn’t need to.
I’d have known you anywhere.’
‘An’ what about me daddy? Do I look like me daddy?’
‘I’ve no answer for you there, Mahony.’
‘My daddy was anyone and no one, was he?’
Desmond looks down at his hands. ‘You were a bye-child; there wasn’t anyone that could have made her decent.’
Mahony lights his cigarette. ‘What was she like?’
‘I don’t know. She never said more than four words to me.’
It’s a soft lie, badly delivered. Mahony wonders if Desmond would have had the nerve to try it on him if they were both sober.
‘Jus’ tell me something about her.’
Desmond studies his knuckles. ‘Orla was from another world. As I said, I didn’t really know her.’
Chapter 20
May 1976
In the comfortable library of the parochial house Father Quinn wakes to a gentle parade of droplets on his nose and face. He had fallen asleep after a passable chop in front of the fire, and now, opening his eyes, he sees a playful spring bubbling up in the approximate centre of his hearthrug. Father Quinn watches it in a rapt sort of amazement, becoming aware of a strong smell of leaf mould all around him. Soon the air is thickly glazed with mist and the water is rising with a purposeful gush. When a jet of it spurts directly into his chest, knocking the breath out of his lungs, Father Quinn is galvanised into action. He leaps up from his chair and sinks to his ankles in the boggy substance of a wool-mix shagpile.
Bridget Doosey and Michael Hopper have been passing the evening peaceably in the kitchen. Michael has been flirting with the idea of applying putty to a windowpane he replaced last Thursday. It’s a pressing job. But having considered the failing light and the location of the putty in relation to himself (in the shed at the bottom of the parochial garden) he has almost decided against it. What’s more, he is enjoying the comfort of the kitchen and his current view of Bridget Doosey’s womanly proportions as she half-heartedly scours the burnt cooking pots.
The terrified wailing that begins to emanate from the library brings them both running, Michael with his heart in his mouth and Bridget clutching the soapy handle of a frying pan.
Opening the door to the library they find Father Quinn sunk to his knees in the carpet and clinging on to an occasional table. Afterwards, Bridget will remark that it’s lucky the priest is a tall man, given the considerable delay they had in laying hand on a coil of rope to haul him out, for otherwise Father Quinn would almost certainly have drowned in his own home.