Even while they were happening to him, Pat knew that they were days and nights which would never in his life be repeated. How could they?
“Would you like some sugar, Pat?” he heard Bridie’s soft voice enquire.
It was hard to believe that someone like Pat McNab had ever used the words employed by him some seconds later. But he had. He had said “darling,” all right, and “sweetheart.” And she had not laughed. It was like winning the greatest prize of all time.
They had been sitting on the seesaws in the park for over an hour when the first few tentative flakes of snow began to come down.
“Bridie,” Pat said, “if you were married to someone—would you have a child with them, maybe?”
Bridie’s reply came without hesitation.
“Oh yes, Preppie,” she said. “I’d have lots and lots.”
Pat was somewhat taken aback.
“What did you call me?” he said.
“Preppie,” responded Bridie brightly. “Preppie McNab! Suits you, don’t you think?”
Pat didn’t know what to say. He stared at her with her legs swinging and her eyes twinkling and tiny beads of melted snow all over her polo neck and said, “I don’t know, Bridie.”
She crinkled up her nose in that way she did.
“Of course you do, silly!” she chided mischievously, before leaping off the seesaw and beginning to pelt him cheekily with snowballs. To which Pat duly responded in kind and within minutes they were both squealing and shouting, “Stop!” and “That’s enough!” and “Ow!” before falling across the expansive white carpet (making the snow angel) and onto their backsides in one another’s arms.
It was a happy Pat McNab who made his way home from Bridie’s house that evening, his head liberally sprinkled with snow and his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his long gray overcoat, a wide smile spreading across his features as he realized he was already contemplating both their lives together as man and wife. At least until he turned the key in the lock of the front door, and while closing it directly behind him, perceived (he knew instinctively that it was not his imagination) a scaly anxiety enfolding his entire person and extending (like a living thing!) down the hallway right across the lino and as far as the stairs. To where his mother, clad in gray from head to toe (even her nightcap was gray) stood, her mouth like the slenderest of incisions in her face. It seemed each blink of her eyelids was the shutter of a camera, recording images which would indubitably serve as damning evidence at some point in the future. She drew a long breath before she uttered her first words. Which were: “Well now! Lord, but aren’t you the great fellow?”
It was as though Pat had swallowed a not insignificant portion of an oil slick.
“What, Ma?” he succeeded, with great effort, in replying.
“Making snowmen, I suppose,” his mother said.
The words were hard and uncompromising as the guillotine’s steel.
“Making snowmen, Ma?”
“Making snowmen and her away off to tell Traynor all about your great adventures!”
Pat felt the skin between his eyebrows contracting.
“Traynor, Mammy? Telling ? …?”
The answer this time was curt, arrowhead-fast.
“Aye, Traynor! You’ll find he doesn’t bother with snowmen! Making cow’s eyes at him every chance she gets! Sure any eejit would be fit to see that, if she hadn’t him wrapped around her little finger, and the wee trollop hardly out of ankle socks! Lord save us above, what have I reared! Sweet Jesus and his blessed mother, what have I gone and reared!”
There can be no denying the fact that that night Pat McNab wept bitterly. Adrift in a paper sea of Bridie’s letters (many of which he had read thirteen or fourteen times) copious amounts of tears were to be observed rolling down his cheeks. But in the end he knew—regardless of what people might surmise—that his mother had been only trying to help him. What was to eventually prove tragic was that all she succeeded in helping him to do was make what was perhaps the biggest mistake of his life so far on this earth.
Bridie stood back against the plate-glass window of Linencare Dry Cleaners. Her face was as pale as the snow with which they had been “making angels” only days before and she was clearly having difficulty in getting the words past her lips.
“What are you talking about? Please, Pat—will you please give me some idea what you are talking about!”
There could be no doubt about it now—her voice was trembling.
Pat spun and turned his back on her. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”—he found himself recalling her words, and it was as though his mouth were filling up with recriminatory bile. He snapped, “Nothing! I’m talking about nothing!”
A moistness glittered in Bridie Cunningham’s eyes.
“You know what your problem is, Pat?” she ventured shakily. “You put up a big glass wall to prevent you from getting hurt. But it also prevents you from getting touched!”
Resentment burned in the eyes of Pat McNab. Without turning, he said, “So it means never having to say you’re sorry, huh? That’s a laugh!”
Bridie tore at the knitted woolen cap she held in both hands.
“How can I say I’m sorry for something I didn’t do? For God’s sake, please tell me—how can I?”
Pat covered his eyes with his right hand as he said, “Just tell me one thing—do you like Patsy Traynor or not? Do you?”
Bridie was surprised to find herself staring glassily into space. The zigzag pattern on the black knitted cap began to animate wildly before her eyes.
“Well … I like him,” she began. “I mean, he’s nice and everything but … oh Pat! Pat, what is happening to you?”
Pat looked down at the ground. There were some pebbles there. And a large patch of oil.
“I just keep getting the feeling that something has died inside, that’s all.”
What emitted from Bridie’s mouth could only be categorized as a howl.
“Pat! Pat! Oh God!” she cried.
The tears came then. Pat remained, as though ossified, with his back to her, staring blankly at irregular arrangements of pebbles and crushed, discarded cigarette packets frozen into a variety of beer trails which found their source directly beneath the doorway of Sullivan’s Select Bar.
It was later the same evening, and Pat sat blankly at the table. It was as though he had been imprisoned in a sarcophagus chiseled out of purest blackness. His mother’s slippers flapped as she put his dinner in front of him and said, “You’ll get sense yet, my lad! The likes of her is out for only one thing—all they can get!”
It was more than her son could bear. He slammed his fork down on the table and cried, “What do you know! All you can say about her is bad things! You can never leave her alone! You haybag! For that’s all you are!”
A shadow the shape of Australia passed across his mother’s face. It was of no significance, having simply been cast by a passing bird outside. But it chilled Pat.
“Don’t you talk like that to me,” he heard then, each word as a slender serpent poking its head out of the tiny aperture that was his mother’s mouth.
In the days that followed, the Lido Grill became as a world painted battleship gray by some unseen misanthropic hand. Pat’s eyes were glazed with sorrow as he sat across from the woman he loved and thought, ‘You try to say something. You can hear the words. But what comes out bears no resemblance to them. What comes out are words so far away they might as well belong to a stranger.”
“Bridie?” Pat began.
Distorted in the prongs of a fork, Pat could see how raw-red his eyes now were. They appeared more as wounds than eyes. And he could see already what was written behind those eyes, wounds, call them what you will. Words which, he knew, would haunt him till the day he died. Words which said, “It’s dead, Pat. It’s dead forever. And both of you know who killed it.”
Employing the word “abject” to describe the state Pat found himself in at ten o’clock that
evening as he lay upon his pillow—saturated with perspiradon—issuing from deep within him cries of pain and grief the like of which he had never known would be essentially inadequate. The language does not exist which can encapsulate such sorrow. Which leads a man to cry, You murdered it! My love! You murdered it! You murdered it, you hear?” to his own mother.
All, in the end, to no avail. For Mrs. McNab, patiently waiting until exhaustion did its work, made no secret of her feelings toward what she considered, although she did not overtly state as much, a meretricious display of the crudest emotion. “Oh, would you shut your mouth and stop making an eejit of yourself! Shut your trap if you know what’s good for you!” she snapped eventually.
The sound of the bedroom door slamming obliterated the renewed cries which issued from a torn and bereft soul, further rendered anonymous by the clattering and banging of plates and dishes downstairs.
It was to be some weeks before the folly of his response on that occasion became wholly clear to Pat. Because, of course, it had not been his mother who was to blame at all! And all that he had been witnessing was yet another example of his blaming her for absolutely everything! “How could I have been so stupid?” he chided himself remorselessly. He shook his head. “Phee-oow!” he said and looked out the window of his bedroom. It was like the sun was coming up. A lovely, hard, twinkling, and shiningly optimistic sun. For one split second, he felt like doing a kick in the air. Now that, at last, everything had become clear to him, as it had once and for all the previous day.
He had been coming down from chapel (it was his aspiration that religion might provide him with some succor) when the street rang out with the sound of a familiar voice.
“Oi! McNab! Get over here!”
Instinctively—despite the fact that he was now nineteen years of age—he complied.
“Well, McGush!” barked Patsy Traynor. “What do you think of this fellow?”
“Oho!” snorted Henry McGush. “I’ve been hearing queer stories about this boy! Oh, indeed and I have! Oho, he’s been some baby lately, the way I hear it!”
Patsy Traynor winked and elbowed his colleague in an exaggeratedly conspiratorial fashion.
“And me as well, McGush! Bad tales too, I tell you! What have you been up to, McNab, you rascal you?”
“Twanging a certain lassie, I hear!”
“Twanging her, eh? Twanging her now he has the tie off!”
“Is that what you’re at, McNab? Giving her the twang? Oo, be cripes I’d say she likes it. I’d say she’s fond of it, Pat, would you?”
“Yelping for the twang is what I’d say! That’s what I’d say now, Henry!” grinned Patsy Traynor.
“Yelping for it, cripes I’d say she is!”
“Yelping for it! There’s no two ways!” cheered Henry McGush.
“Yelping for it, begaw I’d say!”
“And McNab’s the man to twang it!”
“Except for one thing,” said Patsy Traynor.
It was the moment before the lethal thumb hovers above the button. And then—the cataclysm.
“Except I got there early! The bould Patsy twanged her first!”
Twin faces exploding into florid laughter rendered Pat dumbstruck.
“And the bucking eejit never knew it!”
How many letters (pink and many of them doused in perfume) Pat was surrounded by as he sat cross-legged upon his bed it is impossible to say. A “clatter” or “an avalanche” might go some way toward approximating the number. Perhaps it may not even be relevant. What certainly is relevant is the single thought which pulsated relentlessly now inside his mind—had he been wrong all along? Had he (no, it couldn’t be true!) perhaps, even dreamed all those times they’d had together? The candy floss, the snow, the laughter by the river, her cries as he pushed the swing ever higher—had, all along, he imagined the most precious, impervious, glistening stone when what he held in his hand was but a dead ember such as he could randomly pluck from the fireplace and disdainfully crush beneath his heel? It seemed a bony hand had taken hold of his stomach bag and squeezed, perhaps with an acidic bitterness, certainly without pity.
There is a man in a long coat standing by a graveside. The day seems fashioned for the purpose or made for such a solitary vigil, with veils of rain sweeping up the hillside and getting lost in the maw of gray light that settles on the evening countryside. It might be expected that this man would weep but such is not the case, for he is someone long since past sorrow and all its kin. Indeed, somewhere within him sdii burns a glow of what can only be described as hope. For, as he gazes upon the elegant calligraphy upon gray limestone expertly hewn, Bridie Traynor—Deed. 1980, he permits a smile to come to his lips as he considers that somehow it might have come to pass that his worst fears had not proven true. That, all along, she had been his and his alone. And that maybe, had things been otherwise, he might somehow have made her happy.
“Happier than he ever did,” thinks Pat McNab as his eyes light upon her name once more and at last he turns to leave. Acknowledging the greeting of a fellow mourner, he sinks his hands deep inside his pockets and makes his way now toward the gate. A passing car douses the cemetery wall with dank puddle water. Turning his face toward the town, those words come to him again (“Come on, luvvy!”), lodging close by his tonsils like the coldest nuggets of ice, orchestrating the familiar tableau that played before him each and every night, threading their eloquence through the days that had been hers with Patsy Traynor but denied to Pat McNab.
There was no one in the playground now and the swing was his alone. Neither was there snow, simply the relentless hiss of the rain and the almost infantile gurgling of the gutters. A sweetpaper blew across the grass, fought with a litter bin for some moments, and flew on. Pat clutched the chains of the swing and tried not to think of her face the way it would come when he tormented himself; the lights gleaming above the ballroom door, Traynor emerging out from behind the cars, her small sculpted hand in his. As a soft but eerily cheeky voice cried, “Poor old innocent Pat’s gone home at last, Patsy! Now we can have ourselves a decent coort!”
There was a lump in Pat’s throat now as he made his way home. There could be no denying it. Just as there had been on that first night—when he had hovered beneath the window (three weeks after Bridie had married Traynor) in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. A wave of revulsion had swept through him as his eyes assimilated the sight that met them. There had been blood upon that gentle face of alabaster as “the Brute” Traynor raised the melodeon anew and spared her not once with it, its horrible, undulating cacophony seeming to articulate Pat’s inner pain as once again its weight bore down upon her, the ogre—for what else was he!—snarling, “Where’s my dinner? I told you to have it! Didn’t I tell you to have it?” as his boot caught her plumb in the stomach and his wife collapsed at his feet in a state of exhaustion.
Pat turned from the window and made his way to the kitchen to prepare himself some supper. Soon it would be time to retire to bed— alone. As he spooned the cocoa into his mug, he reflected how it had, in the end, been merciful. It hadn’t lasted long. With bitter irony, raising the striped mug to his lips, he murmured, “Probably as long as our love.”
Before sleep came to Pat that night, he construed a marble statue standing all alone in the middle of a cemetery. A statue that reminded him of pale white sculpted hands. And then he saw a frail, hunted creature bruised black and blue as a shadow stood above it, a tattered, would-be musical instrument cast aside, blood-spattered. And there can be no denying that in that instant, Pat McNab harbored hatred in his heart. But, as the soft fingers of sleep eventually stroked him toward its peaceful boudoir, another thought came into his mind. And with it, soft flakes of snow as gentle as thought itself on green and rolling parkland now silently floating down. Until the world seemed covered in it. And it is as if there is no one there but him, until he looks again and sees her, emerging from its pale pure haze, the words she whispers clear now in his ears, “It�
��s not true, Pat—about our love. For what we had will last forever, no matter what—I know it will find us again. Just like, one day, you’ll find me.”
Pat cried out but when he looked she had gone and there was nothing remaining but the snow, pale and unbroken and stretching to infinity. But when he awoke, Pat McNab knew for certain in his heart that one day when he closed his eyes he would look up and there she’d be again. In her knitted woolen cap, as large as life, and when he’d say, “How long this time then, Bridie Cunningham?” she’d smile and reply, “Forever, Pat,” and that there they’d stand, with lacy flakes gathering on their shoulders, the softest touch of their lips bringing tinkling notes, like the tiniest drops of falling milk, as if by magic from the air.
The garden Where the Praties grow
Have you ever been in love, me boys, have you ever felt the pain
I’d sooner be in jail, me boys, than be in love again.
For the girl I loved was beautiful and I want you all to know
That I met her in the garden where the praties grow.
Chorus
She was just the sort of creature, boys, that nature did intend
To walk right through the world, me boys, without the Grecian bend
Nor did she wear a chignon I’d have you all to know
And I met her in the garden where the praties grow.
Says I, “My pretty Kathleen,
I’m tired of single life
And if you’ve no objection sure
I’ll make you my sweet wife.”
She answered me right modestly
And curtsied very low
“O you’re welcome to the garden where the praties grow.”
Emerald Germs of Ireland Page 24