John could still hear a tinkle of the nursery rhyme in the distance. ‘I thought I heard something.’ He searched his mum’s face for some clue she had heard it too. She turned away to fill the teapot with loose tea leaves from the caddy. The stench of something putrefied caught him like a kick to the groin, bowled him over and brought the dry boak to the back of his throat. He tried to throw up.
Mary hauled the plastic bowl out from underneath the sink and held it under his chin. His eyes streamed and his nose bled, but worst of all was a mouthful of something corrupt, like decomposing flesh. Just as quickly as it came the stench disappeared and he could breathe again. ‘You don’t smell anything?’ He added wistfully, ‘Cigar smoke?’
‘Jesus, son. You OK?’ Mary’s fag had burnt down to her fingers; she flung it into the sink full of tomorrow’s dishes. ‘You in pain? Concussion? Want me to phone for a doctor?’
He shook his head, ‘I’ll be alright.’ His voice jiggled like a lock with the wrong key in it, but as his mum was watching him so closely, he tried to make it sound normal. ‘I’ll no’ bother with tea. I’ll just go back to my bed. I just need a good night’s sleep.’
Mary put her hand on his forehead. ‘You’re hurt. Seeing things and hearing things?’ He was sweating and her hand felt cool.
‘Nah, just tired.’ He didn’t want her thinking he was turning into another Uncle Paddy.
‘You’re boiling hot, maybe I should get the doctor out?’
His chair creaked and rocked as he stood up. ‘Nah, Ma, I’ll be fine. Just leave it.’
‘We can get you help.’
‘Whit kind of help?’
‘The priest . . . a psychiatrist or something?’ Her tone was light, an attempt at playfulness.
He snorted, forgetting how sore his nose was. ‘Nah, Ma, just leave it.’
She gripped his forearm, her hand digging into skin. ‘You’ll be alright, son.’ Her words were filled with a certainty John didn’t feel. ‘Just promise me you willnae go down that shortcut again for a while. You’ll stay away from that school.’
Her eyes were backlit by tears, but he shook his head. ‘Nah, Ma, I cannae do that.’
Her voice rose in protest, ‘Why not? You’re just being pig-headed like your da.’
‘I cannae, Ma. There’s a wee lassie, waiting for me every day. I cannae leave her standing there.’
Mary’s voice dropped into a confidential whisper. ‘I’ve had that nice Betty Cunningham at the door. She said she was worried about you. I’m worried about you too.’ She patted his hand. ‘If you just leave it for a while, I’m sure things will settle down.’
He kissed her frowning forehead as he passed her on his way to bed. ‘Could you leave a wee lassie Ally’s age waiting for you, standing on the street and not turn up? I cannae. Neither would you.’
‘You’ve grown up, son.’ Mary tamped down a rueful smile and reached for her fags.
Day 13
John lay cocooned in the cosy warmth of his bed. He paid little heed to his mum getting up, trailing up the hall towards the toilet and then into the living room. About fifteen minutes later, he caught the careful tread of her flapping slippers returning to his parents’ bedroom. As she edged open the door, he heard the clink of a plate clip the glaze of the mug. He whiffed burnt toast, just the way his dad liked it.
Joey didn’t believe in silence. Ten minutes later doors banged open and shut. Radio Athlone blared from the kitchen with reports of strikes, inflation and the importance of feedstock. Their toilet flushed so many times he thought it must have been fishing for water and dried up Loch Katrine. The front door slammed shut, shaking the house as though it was made of plywood, the mark of Joey’s hasty exit.
There was a lull when John might have dozed. The girls kept mainly to the warmth of the living room. When he clambered out of bed, the house was on mute. Mum didn’t have time for the radio, or telly, or anything much other than cleaning and smoking and sometimes both. He sought her out in the kitchen and took a seat while she scrubbed the bigger of the two sinks a shade less jaundice with a wire pad.
‘You want eggs with your toast?’ She turned away from housework; her eyes searched his.
Mary stood, taking a minute, her back pressed against the sink, swilling mouthfuls of tea as she smoked. They talked about their neighbours and Wilcock’s pampered Golden Labrador with a forced familiarity. She poked about in the cupboard for eggs and stood at the cooker watching the pot boil and slices of white bread brown under the grill. They chattered some more, with his mum suddenly turning American on him and adopting an encouraging tone, trying to gee him up and hold him in place with small talk. She clattered a plate on the table in front of him.
His jaw still hurt. He chewed slowly, eating only because his mum had made the effort. He finished half a slice and the top half of an egg. Easing up out of the chair, he slumped back down, not sure what to say, wishing the telly or radio was on to fill the silence.
Her cheeks were puffy and she seemed worn and old. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. Tears formed in her eyes.
All his fine talk of the night before washed away like Poohsticks in a fast-flowing burn. She leaned in close enough for the tang of disinfectant and cigarette smoke to make him feel uncomfortable, her white knuckles pinned to the back of the top bar of his chair, as if it was holding her upright. She mussed his hair and kissed him clumsily on the cheek. Her fingers wandered and pulled out a packet of twenty fags, and a box of Swan Vesta matches, from her nylon smock but found no hanky to dab at her eyes. She shook silent tears away and dashed off to get a bit of toilet roll. His Wrangler jacket was hanging on the ironing board in the alcove beside the back door. Getting up and pulling it on, he scarpered out the back door without looking back.
At the shortcut, cumulus hung low on the flat roofs like a stove-pipe hat, and the wind rustled the black fingers of overhanging branches, bending them backwards and forwards. The last of the snow had cleared. He studied the slippery-bowl patch of ground where other people had stepped on the long grass to avoid the muddiest parts of the path. He felt older and out of practice. Going down the steepest part, lurching one way then another, his feet sought the safety of a spongy tussock of grass; he was lucky not to end up on his arse. He climbed through the gap in the fence and dropped onto Shakespeare Avenue.
With no snow on the roads or pavements he convinced himself that the little girl would not waylay him. His feet slowed as he approached Well Street, despite a muddled belief his dad would be ashamed of him. As if his thoughts had taken form, hail, then rain, pattered down. It swept the road in great sweeping gulls of soft water washing clean everything and everybody in its path. And there she stood near Kerr’s knobbly wooden gate, her blazer soaked an unnatural blue, hair flattened to two dimensions around an oval face, her arms folded tight across her chest to keep in body heat. She whimpered, teeth chattering; her bright eyes looked destitute of vision. He wondered if she had spotted him, running the last few yards towards her, watching water dripping barefaced from the end of her nose as she contemplated her black shoes, locked into solipsistic and tear-stained misery.
Mary snatched the hood of a coat off the door of the hall cupboard. She ran down the steep hill outside her gate, her fingers dipping into the side-pocket for her packet of fags before she realised she was wearing her eldest daughter Jo’s worn-out school jacket. Her breath came in razor-edged gasps. It had been years since she had run for anything. The pelican coloured anorak flocked out behind her as she broke into something resembling a trot. Dickens Avenue was shaped like a horseshoe with Shakespeare Avenue curved inside the heel. Her son had a head start. She knew he had taken the shortcut that sliced through the horseshoe, but it was too wild and slippery for her.
Heavy rain dashed her face and made orange blancmange out of the halo of her hair. Her lungs burnt and her legs grew buttery, but when she got to the bottom of Ramsay Street, her prayers were answered – John had been delayed. He was cutting across the ro
ad. His dark bush of hair made darker by the incessant deluge, his Wrangler jacket collar was turned up in spikey protest against the weather. He was hunched over holding nothing as if it was something
Mary was not yet close enough to hear his chit-chatting, but he babbled to himself in the same way he had that night she had disturbed him sleepwalking.
Opposite the school, a police car was parked beneath the shelter of an oak tree. The words of a prayer slipped fully formed out of her mouth. ‘Out of the darkness I cried to you, oh Lord.’ A thin strap of a policeman leaned his bum against the bonnet of the car, his feet planted on the kerb, and Mary followed his gaze towards her son.
Mary was halfway across before the dull thump of the gear change made her turn her head. The bus horn blared, the updraft of wind fluffing her hair in its wake. She dashed the final few yards to the pavement on the church side of Park Road. The policeman standing beside the panda belly-laughed and wagged a finger in mock warning. A squall of wind and rain buffeted her body, halting her progress, but she closed the distance between her and her son.
John faltered and stopped a few feet in front of her. He spoke to someone obscured behind the facing brick pillar of the church grounds. Across the road, the thinner policeman adjusted his cap. As she got closer, surprise and relief choked her voice. ‘Jesus Christ, Joey, whit you doing here? I thought you were at work.’
Joey’s glance took in his wife’s anorak and her dishevelled hair. Normally, he would have smiled, but his deep-set eyes narrowed to slits as he stared across the road at the policemen observing them. ‘I wiz. Now I’m no’.’
‘You alright, Da?’ John glanced nervously at his father.
The bitterness in Joey’s voice and his scrunched-up face were sweetened by the sight of his wife. He shook his head as if he had forgotten something and fluttered his fingers airily towards the school. ‘You take yer wee—’ a splintered laugh escaped through his nose, trying to find the right word as he spoke to his son, ‘pal down to the school.’
Joey took a deep breath, his chest swelled and he seemed to grow a few inches taller. His pupils shrunk further in his head, dark as new-cut anthracite, shiny dots sighted on the two figures on the opposite side of the road. He was deaf to the soft soap of his son’s protracted goodbye-goodbyes.
Mary tugged at the shiny sleeve of the double-breasted dress jacket he wore over his work-worn boiler suit. ‘Don’t do anything daft, Joey.’
He stood unmoved and unmoving. ‘Let a man be a man.’ The skinny police officer looked away first, his eyes growing skittish and unsure as he glanced at his senior officer. Sarge rested his hand on the roof of the car, but looked over his colleague’s shoulder and locked his body into listening to the jumble of messages coming from the car radio.
Joey’s eyes were nailed onto the balloon-white faces above the collars of the dark police uniforms as he stomped forward. He cleared his throat with a rough grogging sound, spitting a slimy frog of a greener onto the slick, glazed tar. ‘Fat lump of shite.’ His voice was low, but a clear challenge.
The lollipop man stood sentinel at the school gates. He stepped in front of John and barred his way. His bristly moustache showed grey, but he had a firm voice. ‘You might be a bit of a long-haired weirdo and a troublemaker, but apart from that, you’re alright. What happened to you a couple of days ago was well out of order. I said to my Maisie that’ll no’ happen again on my watch. Over my dead body will that happen again.’ He tipped his head back, chin strap and smooth chin pointing at the police car up the road.
Day 15
Canon Martin waited in the warmth of the day room for the housekeeper to bring the boy through. He thought of him as a boy – he had christened him John Joseph Connelly, a fine Catholic name, helped him make his First Confession and First Holy Communion. Such a lovely, quiet boy. His fingers fussed with the fuzz at the top of his head to help him remember. He had developed a shameful habit of expecting everything and everyone to remain the same and was perplexed that the boy he was thinking about was the one that he was expecting as a visitor. Now there was this terrible business with his mother, Mary. Sometimes the confessional box is little more than a pit stop for a certain type of woman. On the way to the pictures they rhymed off the usual list of sins and waited for absolution like one would wait for bubblegum to come tumbling out of a half-penny tray.
Mary was different. She was greatly troubled. Post-natal depression they called it. He’d call it a murderous rage. Shades of Herod’s evil. He blinked through his thick glasses at the wooden crucifix above the rosewood cabinet. His eyes drifted down to a brightly coloured bauble, where the gathering dust grew heaviest, a statue of Joseph carrying Jesus. Then she saw the error of her ways. Grew more pious, as often happens. Made sure the boy attended Holy Mass and Novena, even if the father was a bit lax. His arthritic fingers found no comfort in the weight of rosary beads swaddled in his lap. He used his elbows to help him get up and untangle himself from the wing chair near the window. It was cold and wet outside. There was never enough natural light to read and those new-fangled light bulbs never threw off enough artificial light to compensate. It felt like walking through a world of shadows.
‘One mustn’t complain,’ he muttered, his feet trailing as he made his way towards the door. His hearing wasn’t what it had been, but he heard his housekeeper marching up the hallway before he saw her. Such a marvellous, capable woman, simply marvellous. He recognised the contours of her bear-like shape through the opaque glass door, inlaid with the images of swimming fish. Only God-in-creation knew what they would have done without her. She knocked before pushing the door and popped her head through the thin gap.
‘Mrs Shields.’ The canon’s voice was high and whiny.
The housekeeper took this as permission to step into the room, bringing with her a whiff of cleaning fluid and beeswax. She wore a plain, acrylic blue dress, with gathered three-quarter sleeves and a round neck. Her breasts hung safe at her stomach and a black belt encircled her waist in case they got any lower. Teeth warred with each other at the front of her mouth, but with God’s grace she didn’t smile much. ‘The Connelly boy is here,’ she whispered.
Canon Martin peered over her shoulder. The boy looked like any other from that distance, apart from his hair, which gave him the appearance of a mangy lion. ‘Best bring him in.’ He turned, retreating. A Chesterfield with seats that sagged in the middle was positioned opposite his wing chair. He liked guests to sit there so he could see them properly.
‘I’ll bring a pot of tea and some nice digestive biscuits for you to dip,’ said Mrs Shields.
The priest, once settled in his chair, gestured with his arm towards the seat opposite him but the boy, who had been at his back had already ensconced himself on the high pillows of the couch, suggesting a certain cockiness or nervousness. Canon Martin leaned forward to see if he could detect which it was. He decided to be direct.
‘Your mother told me you’re consorting with demons.’
The boy angled his head sideways as if he was talking, but also listening to what he said. ‘She wouldn’t say that.’
‘She said, every day you meet with ghosts.’
The boy squirmed on the edge of the seat, his voice whiny. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘What’s it like then?’
‘It’s not like anything.’ He pushed his back into the shine of leather and sat up straighter.
‘Your mother’s a good woman. She said she’s tried to stop you, but you meet a demon every day and some nights . . .’ the priest’s voice trailed off.
Pink mottled the boy’s neck and rose flushed his cheeks. He felt betrayed, and he felt he had to justify himself. ‘It’s only a little girl.’
‘Ah,’ said the priest. His mouth stayed open as he scratched at the loose flap of skin around his eye, up and underneath a lens of his glasses. His voice dropped and he spoke in a confidential tone. ‘You admit it then?’
‘It’s not like that,’ said th
e boy. ‘I didn’t want to meet her. She was just there. And now . . . And now . . .’ He looked at the lustre of the gold bands on the white china plates in the cabinet and shook his head before continuing. ‘I just don’t know what to do. She’s waiting for me every day. It doesn’t matter if I miss a day, two days, or even three, when I go back she’s standing waiting for me. And when I don’t go I beat myself up about it and feel like a coward – and worse, because I know she needs my help and is all alone, at least I’ve got a family – and then I need to go back just to see that she’s there. Just to see that she’s OK.’
Canon Martin clacked his teeth together and wondered if Mrs Shields would be much longer with the tea. He harrumphed, clearing his throat before speaking. ‘And what does your mother think of this distasteful business?’
The boy’s face screwed up as he considered this, before blurting out, ‘She doesn’t think anything.’
‘She thinks exactly the same as me,’ Canon Martin said emphatically. ‘That’s why she asked me to have a word with you. The best thing for you to do is to stop this nonsense and get on with your life. You should take up a hobby like football or fishing, so that when you’re not at school your days are filled. Then you’ll be tired at night and be able to get a good sleep. Try and attend Holy Mass. Read your Bible every day. Say the Novena to our gracious Virgin Mary. Attend Confession at least once a week.’
‘I left school about six months ago, Father. I’ve not been able to get a job yet.’
‘Shame. Shame. That a young fellow like you has his life blighted like that.’ He looked across at the boy and for the first time there was commiseration in his voice. ‘I’ll pray for you. But then again, if you’re not working that means you can go to Holy Mass every day and pray for a vocation. Have you ever thought of becoming a priest?’
‘Whit about the little girl?’
‘What little girl? Ah . . . the devil can take many forms. He is the great deceiver. He can quote scripture at you, but girls are naturally tricky beasts and little girls the trickiest of all. You are being tested, but through the Lord’s Prayer you shall find strength and forgiveness. It asks for His mercy and not to be led into temptation.’
Lily Poole Page 3