Himself

by Jess Kidd

By coincidence, it just so happens that right now Mahony is thinking on Róisín Munnelly as he sits in an empty kitchen at Rathmore House with no more company than a dead tomcat and a dozen dusty jam jars. The dead cat stares back at him with an expression of complicated disdain. For Mahony has just informed the cat that he has a powerful liking for the lovely Mrs Munnelly.

  The dead cat looks pointedly around the room. At Shauna’s slippers by the backdoor, her cardigan over the back of the chair, and the pot she’s not long set to boil.

  Then the cat turns the dim lamps of its dead eyes back to Mahony and fixes him with a provoking glare, as if waiting for an answer.

  Mahony shakes his head. Shauna doesn’t come into this. She’s already spoken for by her future. She has the whole thing planned out.

  The cat looks doubtful.

  Mahony lights a cigarette and pictures Shauna’s Future drawing nearer.

  Mahony can see him now, Shauna’s Future, driving into town. Red-faced, palms wet, with his hair brushed flat and a ring in his back pocket.

  First off, he’ll be a wholesome, hard-working lad, a fine upstanding young fella. You couldn’t wish for better. With a good job, a good name, a pure heart and his mammy and daddy’s blessing.

  Even so, he’s hardly worthy of her, he knows that – Jesus, who would be? But he’s solemnly vowed to God and every last saint in heaven that he’ll make Shauna happy, or he’ll die at her feet trying.

  He’ll be walking up the path soon, Shauna’s Future, wiping his hands on the backside of his trousers, ready to say his bit. Maybe he’ll surprise her when she’s pegging out the washing, go down on the knee, do it properly. Blushing to the tops of his ears. Maybe he’ll even cry a little bit when she accepts him.

  He’ll shake hands with her father and Desmond will give him a pen, or a cravat even. Mrs Cauley will pretend not to like him at first, but who could take against a young fella so obviously in love?

  Mahony glances out the door, expecting to see him hovering on the doorstep, hand raised, eyes shy.

  The dead cat softens its glare and lowers itself on its haunches, wrapping its tail around itself. It blinks. And so?

  Róisín is a grown woman; she has ten years on him, Jesus, she knows what she wants and it isn’t a husband. She has one; she doesn’t need another.

  The dead cat looks unconvinced.

  There’d be no risk. They wouldn’t get caught; he’d make sure of it. For how could she hold her head up around town if anyone found out?

  He imagines a thousand opportunities. In the forest, tangled together in the tree roots. Or rolling on a down-coast beach as the gulls scud overhead and the sea rings the shingle. There will be a million looks darting between them: in the street, in the town, at the Post Office and General Store. There’ll be the sudden sparks of a hundred accidental touches as Mahony helps her on with her coat, or carries her bag for her, or hands her up onto the bus. And when he looks at this trim housewife in her respectable dress, with her hair neat and gleaming, he’ll know that he’s loved every last inch of her and that his kisses burn her skin still.

  The dead cat yawns and stretches and jumps down through the table.

  Mahony lights another fag. He’ll wait for the rain to calm down a bit then he’ll take a walk into town and find her.

  Mahony flicks his cigarette into the ashtray on the table.

  It’s a great ashtray, A Souvenir from Mulderrig, with all the local sights picked out in bright paint: the quay, the pub and the River Shand.

  He stares at it.

  Mahony twists out his fag and gets up to find his boots.

  Mahony looks out at the river. Shaded by the overhead branches it looks wide and dark. A tide of scum laps at the edges but otherwise it’s still. Too still.

  He takes off his underpants and drapes them over a bush next to his jacket and his trousers. Now he’s only wearing his socks; when he takes them off he’ll have to go in.

  The questions he’s been asking himself all the way from Rathmore House are still clattering around his brain.

  If the sack wasn’t full of kittens, what then?

  Something the killer had kept?

  Something he needed to lose?

  And why here, all those years later?

  And Ida, surely that was no accident?

  Mahony takes off one sock, then the other, and balls them together. He slaps his arse and his legs a couple of times to get the blood up.

  As he looks around, he feels a bit on display here. Surely it’s only the birds watching up in the trees, or the odd badger or squirrel having a good laugh at his antics?

  They should wait and see his breaststroke.

  Mahony climbs down the bank and lowers himself into the dense silt that smells like sump-water, and dear fuck it’s cold.

  But at least it behaves like water should, for Mahony had half expected a quicksand to grip him and suck him straight down. But the river lets him move into it with no more retaliation than to draw green-flecked tidelines on his thighs and stomach as he wades in deeper.

  He strikes out and swims towards Denny’s Ait.

  And the river changes.

  It’s as if the river is fighting against him. An undercurrent rips below the surface and he cannot swim through it, however hard he tries.

  Mahony steps out of the water, sleek and shaking, pale and cursing. He pulls his clothes over wet skin and picks up his boots.

  As he walks back through the forest he hardly notices the ferns wave and flatten behind him. Once or twice he glances over his shoulder, perhaps sensing something. But seeing nothing, he carries on his way.

  Chapter 27

  May 1976

  Just out of town, up on the brow of a hill, lies a cottage nearly as ancient as the dolmen it has sight of just across the field. Mahony draws nearer to it, carrying a bag that has trailed an unholy stench all the way from Rathmore House. At the gate he puts the bag down to untie the rash of difficult knots, for Bridget Doosey doesn’t encourage visitors and it is testimony to her clean-living lifestyle that she can still throw her leg over her garden gate whenever she herself wants to come and go.

  Hidden eyes watch Mahony’s meandering progress from gate to turnip patch, from turnip patch to runner-bean wigwam. For there is more life in Bridget Doosey’s garden than you can imagine. Maybe it’s due to the nearness of the dolmen, or maybe it’s due to the real love she pours into the good black soil, but a lot more than rhubarb grows here.

  Mahony spots her, headfirst in a flowerbed. ‘Your garden’s a picture, Bridget.’

  Bridget squints up at him. There are stripes of soil across each cheek as if she’s been trying out camouflage.

  ‘Fish heads.’ Mahony flaps the bag at his side.

  ‘You’d better come in then,’ says Bridget, with a feral look in her eyes.

  The house is dark with a foxy musk smell, a smell that rolls out along the hallway in place of a carpet. Luxuriant patches of many-coloured cat fur adorn every surface. Constellations of saucers moulder about the place, showing dried milk rings or licked smears of tripe. Some of the feline residents greet Mahony and his irresistible cargo. Others just watch benignly from a felted card table or a cobwebbed window ledge. Bridget pushes forwards, kicking furry pelts aside as she goes.

  ‘Come through to the kitchen.’

  As she opens the kitchen door Mahony considers burying his nose in the bag in order to save his life. For the smell that issues from Bridget Doosey’s kitchen is antique and complicated, rich and vile. It’s a thousand boiled fish spines and a hundred fossilised cat craps. It’s decades of damp washing, rancid fat and stale dishwater.

  Bridget beckons Mahony past a cracked Formica table, thick with cats, to a cooker painted with grease. She points to a lidded pot flecked with fish scales. Mahony knows this to be the epicentre of the smell.

  ‘Tip ’em in there. I cook ’em up for the creatures to aid the digest. All those lovely salty-eyed fish snouts. Now, I suppose you’ll be wanting
the cup of tea and the bit of softness, won’t you? I have a half loaf of fruit bread that’ll still be decent if I give it a bit of a scrape.’

  ‘Ah no, I won’t need a thing. I just came with them from Shauna. I’ll be off now.’

  ‘You won’t. You’ll sit down there and drink a cup of tea with me.’

  She leans forward and pats his arm. ‘I have the list you wanted.’ She searches amongst the cats on the table and liberates a crumpled piece of paper from under a sleeping tortoiseshell.

  Mahony casts his eye over it. The title reads: Men from Mulderrig (between the ages of 15 and 80) and its Environs with the Use of a Vehicle During the Summer of 1949.

  Mahony nods and, keeping his breathing shallow, folds the list and puts it in his back pocket.

  Mahony has an ashtray at his elbow, a mug of whiskey in his hand and a young white cat with pink-rimmed eyes nuzzling against his ear. It reminds him of Shauna, so he gives it a little stroke, for he’s enjoying his visit now, as Shauna said he would, despite the fish heads.

  Bridget is getting used to him too, for although she continues to break wind extravagantly she has stopped looking around herself in surprise.

  ‘You have the garden lovely.’ Mahony lets the slim white cat slip onto his lap, where she settles, spiralling down to the size of a pair of boot socks.

  Bridget nods, with a terrible glint in her eye. ‘I do, but there’s no getting away from the fairy host issuing forth every night across my rhubarb.’ She lowers her voice. ‘That dolmen is a gateway to the underworld you know.’

  The dead old woman by the back door glances up to the heavens and takes hold of a faint broom. Mahony recognises Mother Doosey from the graveyard; she twitches the corner of her mouth in greeting. Cats scatter as she cuts a path through the kitchen.

  ‘So you leave out a saucer of milk out for the good people, Bridget?’

  ‘Now that would attract the dead. Mary Lavelle knocks the head off Teasie whenever the poor girl forgets to put the milk away. She says that even a dribble of it will have her coming home to find a load of thirsty ghosts drawing up to her kitchen table, rubbing their cold little hands.’

  Mother Doosey sweeps past looking skeptical.

  ‘She has Teasie building a ring of rocks round the house now,’ says Bridget. ‘It’s not so successful with the dead but it’s great against the devil. Interferes with his hearing apparently.’

  Mahony smiles. ‘Do you believe in what she sees?’

  ‘Each to their own, that’s what I believe. If Mary Lavelle wants to see ghosts and bloody spectres hanging from her curtains, that’s up to her.’

  ‘She says that the dead were resurrected when I walked back into town.’

  ‘As if you haven’t enough demons to deal with?’ Bridget fixes him with shrewd eyes. ‘As you know yourself, Mahony, you’ve more to fear from the living.’

  By the back door Mother Doosey nods gravely and drifts out into the garden to stand with her hands pressed into the downcurve of her back, gazing up at the passing clouds.

  Bridget smiles at him. ‘I’ll tell you what though, I’ll worry about the dead the day they work out how to poison a scone.’

  Mahony laughs.

  Bridget picks up a fork and scratches her head with it meditatively. ‘I’ve got something for you, in exchange for your visit.’ She points the fork at him. ‘It takes great strength of character to walk five miles with a bag of fish heads, don’t think I don’t know that.’

  ‘So you were testing me?’ Mahony laughs.

  ‘I know your mettle.’ Bridget narrows her eyes. ‘You’re your mother’s boy.’

  Chapter 28

  May 1976

  Mahony concentrates hard on the flies circuiting the light bulb. The bulb itself is ordinary, naked for a shade; it hangs down on a fifteen-foot cord, to the left of the middle of the ceiling. It has dictated the position of the furniture in the room; it is directly above Mrs Cauley’s bed. The bulb is a hot spot around the clock. Later on, when the flies lay off, the moths will take over.

  Mrs Cauley is propped up in bed wearing an auburn wig, powder-blue crêpe de Chine and a frown. She’s not watching the flies. She’s watching Mahony. Only sometimes her eyes turn to the suitcase on the low table between them. Mahony screws out his cigarette and gets up off his chair. He goes over to the French doors and leans against the frame. Johnnie and Father Jim are drifting up and down the veranda, driven outside by the tension. Father Jim is holding forth, deeply engaged in a sermon of sorts, Johnnie meanders alongside him, looking down at his feet with his hands clamped over his ears.

  Mahony will go out to them. He’ll have a walk and clear his head. He’ll hear what Father Jim has got to say. Then maybe he’ll go down to the bay. Then maybe out to sea, and to America even, keeping Mulderrig, Rathmore House and the suitcase firmly at his back at all times.

  ‘Christ on a crutch, Mahony, will you open the case and be done with it?’

  Mahony pushes out against the doorframe and turns. ‘I will, yeah.’

  Mrs Cauley feels for him, she really does, so she speaks gently. ‘Let’s start by running through what Bridget told you.’

  He sits back down on the chair.

  ‘Inside that case are the worldly possessions of your mother.’

  There is a frayed pink ribbon tied around the handle.

  Mrs Cauley continues. ‘When your grandmother died, Bridget went up to the house and she found these things and saved them. Maybe to prove to herself that Orla and her baby had existed, maybe to keep them in case Orla ever returned.’

  The lock has rusted.

  ‘Open the case, Mahony. You need to know what’s inside.’

  One of the hinges will break as he opens it. It has held on for such a long time.

  Some things are too much.

  Inside there are baby clothes. Little vests, a knitted cardigan with ducks on the buttons and a pile of folded nappies, yellow with age. There’s a pair of shoes, black patent and worn at the heels. Mahony cradles one in his hand and looks inside. The shape of her toes is still pressed into them. There’s a dress made of shiny fabric, with the ghost of a stain under each armpit, a few blouses in differing sizes and a coat with a badly ripped lining. At the bottom of the case they find a purse with money in it, a play script and a silver-backed hairbrush, deeply tarnished. Caught in it are several long inky hairs.

  Mahony doesn’t feel Mrs Cauley’s hand on his arm. He doesn’t hear her say his name.

  He kicks over the table and walks out of the room.

  There’s beauty today in the changing landscape. The sky is a freshly washed blue and the wildflowers along the road bend their bright heads, dipping through the long grass. Birds spin through the glass air to land on washing lines and survey lawns sprinkled with breakfast crusts.

  It’s the time of the day when mammies shake out the dead with the doormats and set about making the dinner. They catch sight of Mahony from a casement window, or an angled mirror, or a propped-open back door. Then the housewives of Mulderrig patter out to stand on their doorsteps with a dustpan in hand, or a bowl of peelings, or a clutch of eggshells. Mahony strides past without a nod or a smile, with his hair whipped back off his face and his gypsy eyes burning.

  They’ve never seen anyone like this: a Mayo Heathcliff. All curses and windstorm, black passion and fury. The women watch him until he is out of sight, for he’s as compelling as the weather.

  If they saw what followed him, well, they wouldn’t wonder at the speed of his feet. For the dead are drawn to those with shattered hearts. They flit down from barns and outhouses, and dart out from attic rooms and cowsheds to join in the march.

  ‘Róisín, always a pleasure.’

  ‘What’s happened here, Mrs Cauley?’

  The contents of the suitcase are strewn across the floor. From the bed Mrs Cauley is endeavouring to hook a nappy rag with a back scratcher. She sinks back into her pillows.

  ‘An autopsy; would you be so kind as t
o put all that back, Róisín?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Róisín kneels on the edge of the rug and starts to fold. ‘Is Mahony here?’

  ‘He’s not. He went out for a walk.’

  ‘Do you know where he was heading?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Róisín nods. She hesitates to reach out for a little white knitted cardigan.

  ‘Where did all this come from?’

  ‘It belonged to his mother.’

  Róisín recoils slightly. ‘You ought not to keep this in the house.’

  ‘Why not?’ says Mrs Cauley reasonably.

  Róisín continues folding the piles into the case. ‘It can’t do Mahony any good. He needs to move on.’

  Mrs Cauley’s smile drops a notch. ‘Mahony needs to find out what happened to his mother – that’s why he came here.’

  Róisín shakes her head. ‘No disrespect, Mrs Cauley, but this is someone’s life you’re meddling with, someone’s feelings.’

  Mrs Cauley licks her lips slowly. ‘Meddling?’

  Róisín gets up off the floor and brushes her knees. ‘I know you mean well, Mrs Cauley, but you’re upsetting people, stirring up all these bad memories. Can’t you let the past alone? Can’t you let Mahony lay this to rest and get on with his life? This is certain to cause trouble for him.’

  Mrs Cauley’s eyes are arctic. ‘What did you want with Mahony?’

  ‘I’ve heard something he needs to know. That’s all.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Róisín doesn’t like the look on the old lady’s face. ‘I’d rather tell him directly.’

  ‘We have no secrets between us, Mahony and I.’

  ‘Well then, he can tell you after if he wants to.’

  Mrs Cauley’s smile doesn’t falter. ‘As I’m sure he will. Isn’t he lucky to have a friend like you taking care of his interests?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say—’

  ‘But still, you ought to remember your place, Róisín. You’re a married woman and people gossip.’

  Róisín laughs a little too loudly. ‘I don’t think of him like that.’

  Mrs Cauley smiles up from the bed; dressed in the softest blue she’s as harmless as a soapsud. ‘Of course you don’t, dear. You wouldn’t compare a man like Mahony to your Noel, would you? Isn’t Noel the only man for you?’