Lark's Eggs Page 17

  The following summer, before the new season, Mr Mahaffy had a heart attack in Blackrock Baths in Dublin while walking on the wall which separated the open air pool from the grey Irish Sea. He’d looked an exultant figure in his bathing togs before the heart attack, standing up there, stretching his body for all the children to see.

  But anyway Mr Mahaffy’s life’s work had become irrelevant in Sheona Barrett’s town. A few years before, on a New Year’s Eve, when snow was falling, screens lit up all over the town with their own snow to mark the first transmission by Irish television.

  Elysium

  It is nearly ten years now since I arrived in London. It is a long and involved story as to how I came here. I married at eighteen. I was, literally, a product of the bogs, but our bogs were close to, hugged Pontoon Ballroom in County Mayo. So from as early as fourteen years of age I was stealing over the bogs on a bicycle and creeping into the ballroom with older sisters. I presented myself, talcumed, usually in pale blue, a ribbon on; a piece of bog cotton, a flower from the meadows, a wrapt fluff of cloud. The men of Ireland looked me up and down. And I began to dance. My teenage years were ones of dancing and giving myself. I think it was my red ribbon that attracted attention to me first but the men always went for me. So there was a price on me. I got a lot of ice creams out of it in Castlebar. My body became worn very quickly because of it, my face became brazen, my tongue unsalacious as I licked ice-cream bowls. I was ostracized among my sisters; my success had swept them out of the scene. But there was Achill Island and bays I was brought to in the summer. In short to the men of Mayo I was a ‘good thing’.

  I slept uneasily on my sexual abandon. I had dreams of future catastrophes because of it. Nearby Our Lady of Knock appeared and she rummaged with my dreams. With St John and sometimes St Joseph she poked at me with a shepherd’s stick and like a nun at school told me—in a broad Mayo accent—‘to cop on’. As with nuns at school I refused her. I gave more of myself. My body turned from white to pink. I was eighteen and I met my man then. He owned a garage in the countryside near Castlebar. The Sheriff, he was called. He went around in American country and western apparel, big boots on him, a cowboy hat, valentine hearts embroidered into his shirt and his crotch always in evidence. I was ‘his gal’, he told me. He had lots of money, a garage in the countryside constantly attacked and mediated over by wild geese. We danced in Pontoon Ballroom for three months before marrying. My mother stood outside the cottage as he made off with me to our new home, a suburban house outside Castlebar. She had got rid of a handful but she had gained a prosperous son-in-law. I was a wealthy young woman now, all because of my body and my looks I told myself. I took trains to Dublin for hairdos. I wrote country and western songs in my spare time. Country and western songs became poems for me. That was the first sign of discussion. Little bits of poetry by loaves of brown bread in our suburban, blankly lighted kitchen, ‘O Lord give me freedom. O Lord give me pain.’What I wanted pain for I was not sure but pain came when the children came, Tomás, Mícheál and Tibby—called after an American country and western singer—I had to fight to keep the pure lines in my body and with my physical beauty flawed by childbirth and the idea of lechery ruptured by marriage, my husband collected girls in the bogs and brought them off to Achill for weekends, making love to them under a crucifix situated high over the Atlantic.

  All this is not telling much about me, my feelings at the time, the woman who walked about the house in country and western boots. I became very lonely. There was a big picture of mountains in our sitting room. I wanted to be buried like Queen Maeve on top of a mountain.

  I realized too at that time that I was an exceptional kind of person. I was pretty, had blonde ringletted hair, did what most women in Castlebar could not do, wrote poetry. I recalled moments in childhood I’d heard voices in my dreams telling me to go to remote hills in the bog to receive messages from God. Maybe I’d missed what I should have been, a virgin, always a virgin, not a nun but a woman who drifts around the town declaring her virginity like a no-man’s-land in war, a place of pain and thoughts and feelings too much to accommodate on any side.

  I was curtailed, though, during these conjectures by memories of tender caresses from a young boy in a bog; Castlebar faced me, the mountains, the sea, years of suburban houses and masses of adulteries. The money was pouring in. My husband talked of holidays in Spain. It was summer and girls outside ice-cream parlours slouched, looking at me knowingly. A boy from Sweden passed the men’s lavatory, a rucksack caked on his back. The girls were ones who travelled to remote corners with my husband. I was the wife, the mother. There were landslides within me; I walked as erect as possible, how a nun at school had ordained one should walk erect. Without the children—they had become bold, whingeing and brattish now—I found a rubbish dump on a beach by which I walked along, the sluice gates of sewers opening onto the beach and gulls diving down to question old, blackened contorted kettles. There was a face forming within me. It was a boy’s face. I created a boy I wanted to get to know, not sexually, not anything like that. There was a photograph missing from inside me that should have been taken. I created, I invented an area; I wanted to conquer that area. I knew I would not find this boy in Castlebar but I was also sure he existed somewhere; there was the map of these finer things in me, the shape of a green squelching map of Ireland on the wall at school. I wanted a word to set me off wandering; I thought of fleeing with the Tinkers once or twice. Matt, the husband, smelled of semen. But the more I walked by a rubbish dump, the higher the ecstasy, the more suffocating the knowledge that I was trapped. There must have been thousands of Irish women in my position, I thought, millions of women. I did not intend to start the women’s lib movement in Castlebar. Instead I wove wings of fancy. But they refused to fly very far. So I kept my eye on the shop in which I could buy tickets to England.

  ‘Dear whoever you are, I went because—because I could not stand it any more. I could not stand being a lump of—I don’t want to use a rude word. I went to try to salvage my most ancient dignity.’ Words, notes were played with. I needed an excuse. By this time marriage, a husband, did not exist. He took a girl back home one day and made love to her on the couch. I smelt it, under the picture of Connemara mountains. This was just one of the incidents that slided into the sequence of going. I did not know what I was saying goodbye to when I purchased fresh emerald boat tickets to England in a shop in Castlebar in October for myself and my children. I’m sorry I cannot give you a dramatic incident that preceded my going; in fact between the first leaves of autumn and a boat journey to England there is only a blur, a blur on which is written a kind of Sanskrit. ‘I am Mary Mullarney, twenty-four. I possess three yellow ochre cardigans and three children.’That month, in London, my life began, however dazed and erratic was its beginning.

  London, refuge of sinners, of lost Irishwomen; its chief import is people from my part of Mayo. I often feel like addressing it; it is not England, it is not in the demesne of the Queen; it is an invented place. But a place that also dulls one, especially one who can hardly remember her former life.

  ‘Piss off.’ I had a sister in Harrow, 41 Bengeworth Road. I understood I could approach at her door. I was mistaken. She was married now to an Englishman who drove trucks to Aberdeen—she’d converted him to Catholicism—and the Harrow church hall was nearby. On this wall were photographs of herself among church committees. She was the one who when I was fourteen most hated me. I’d broken some rule of the dance-hall floor. I’d appeared in a blue taffetta-effect dress once. There were certain dresses you could wear and certain dresses you couldn’t. She’d never forgiven me and one night—when her husband was probably plunging into beans at a motorway stop near Easingwold—she slammed a door on me and Tomás, Mícheál and Tibby in Harrow. Not before I’d noticed mathematical problems of lines and contortions on her face. She’d have to see Father-something-or-another in the morning to discuss the serving of coffee at the next meeting of the Mayo hurlers’ ass
ociation. The odd thing about families is that they’re illusions. Far from being the closest to you they’re very often the most diabolical of people. There were no ice-cream parlours open in Harrow and Mícheál, Tomás, Tibby and myself ended up in Westbourne Park late one night or early one morning. We had our bags, our rugs, I had my savings and we celebrated. It was a black perky girl who brought us to ‘Elysium’.

  ‘Elysium’ was chalked in white on the right-hand column of a gate outside a generously decaying Edwardian house on a starlit night. Lenny, a scarlet ribbon in the laced strands of hair tied above her head, led us up the path. Tomás clashed against a dustbin and I bid him hush. I was entering a house in the fields of Mayo. The night was dark among the stone walls. I trod tentatively on the doorstep. The occupants were gone; to America, wherever. This house had a secret for me. It was after a dance. A door opened in a house in Mayo onto a house in London. There was a cooker, a fridge, heaters, bedding, everything we needed. The house was deserted, Lenny said, but for an Irish boy who never emerged from his room. Then she disappeared. After poking around a bit we lay down among Foxford blankets.

  Great trouble had visited this house; the people were rich; the girls wore red tartan skirts. One of the girls became pregnant, tried to abort the baby among the streams that constantly cleansed the fluff of sheep, the red of her blood had run with the brook—a sign—and the whole family had left for America. But the boy. The father. I could see him against a half-door.

  Raymond was from Belfast. I pulled back the door on him. He had a face, frail and white as Easter lilies against the Edwardian light of the window. Squatting on the floor, he was reading a poem by George Herbert out loud. ‘Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew me back. Guilty of dust and sin.’ I was heading for the shutters that were not quite open. ‘Isn’t it time you were up having your breakfast. Hello there, I’m Mary. Yes, I know all about you. No need for introductions. We’ve moved in. We’ll make a nice household. So you’re from the Red Hand of Ulster. Sweet Jesus, you don’t look like an Ulsterman. Come up and meet the children. The tea’s made. How many sugars do you take?’ I was now at the window, looking outside, my hands grabbing the worn-away cream of the shutters as the visions outside petrified me.

  Already Cormac Fitzmaurice from Dublin was up, a large bottle of Guinness sprouting from his black maggoty coat picked up from a rubbish dump—among the florets of used Durexes and among the heroin syringes—shouting as he eddied to and fro about Synge Street Christian Brothers’ School and one brother who used to ride a piebald pony, bareback, on Sandymount Strand at dawn. Behind him the graffiti on the pub opposite was choice. ‘Come to Ballinacargy for pimples on your prick.’

  Raymond struggled free from his Buddha position and quickly came to breakfast with me and the children. White shirt rolled up on his thin arms he charmed the children; Mícheál, Tomás and Tibby smiled gratefully at him. It was the first time really I realized I had children, not little piglets. I counted the freckles on Mícheál’s nose that morning.

  ‘I was born in a red brick part of a red brick city. There were hills and mountains around the city. My ma inherited a newsagent’s from her dad. The Irish Independent was advertised outside. The front was whiney green. We were Taigs. My dad was jealous of my mother’s shop and tried to burn it down one night. He worked at the station and shuffled along to work in the mornings under low mountains. At the local public baths Catholic and Protestant children swam. At the age of four I was nearly drowned by a Protestant boy of six who looked like a ferocious gorilla.’

  I washed Raymond’s shirts, often dots of darker white on them. ‘Made in Italy’ frequently boasted on the collar tag. Threads of blood disappeared into the water in the big, white, bath-like sink. I scrubbed inches of collar dirt on a washboard. The material was occasionally silk and pleasant to deal with. White shirts hung up in the kitchen like angels.

  ‘Growing up in a city where blood has collected under the houses you have mischievous aunts and uncles. They canonize soldiers. There are wreaths around the pictures in their sitting rooms. Aunts and uncles sit like officers. They command imaginary armies. In another part of the city are other children whose aunts and uncles command different imaginary armies. One uncle of mine had a picture of Patrick Pearse in a frame and because there was no glass on it—they were too poor—Patrick Pearse’s mouth was once stubbed away by a cigarette butt. He looked like Dracula then. Draculas sold Easter lilies outside the public baths. When I was fourteen Protestant children no longer swam at the public baths.’

  In newly washed white shirts Raymond looked like a different person. I washed his hair one night over the kitchen sink and Tibby—aged three—dried it. The kitchen smelt of lavender then. I realized that night my husband or the black-garbed nuns had not come looking for us. We were the Queen’s property now. We had found another country.

  ‘The first time you see death is the worst. I saw a child: its brains blown out. I thought of all the poems by Patrick Pearse blown to nothing. It was a Protestant bomb. You could always tell Protestant bombs because it was always children who seemed to be caught in them. Protestant Gods were different from Catholic Gods; they lived in houses of dark stone and punished children who carried rosary beads in their pockets.’

  Raymond in a white silk shirt, rolled up, stripes of primrose and thrush hair on his shoulders, a cigarette in his fingers, he talking, his lips the colour of lips that have just been moistened by wine. That’s one of the photographs taken in my mind at the kitchen table in November.

  ‘Then came the real armies. In a city where the houses were armies, the eyes of houses in the hills, to encounter the real armies was to meet a ghost. Faces were painted out. It was all part of a logic; the grave too was part of a logic. Wreaths were wrapped in newspaper that would otherwise have held fish and chips and placed together with the news of local commandants in the paper, by wet grave slabs in Milltown cemetery. I remember one wreath of flowers, little pink and red flowers, miniature flowers, almost plastic flowers. It was a woman with a scarf on her head who laid this wreath for her son, a schoolfriend of mine. We were given berets and flags to compensate for the dead.’

  Once or twice I pulled Raymond up, asking him what he meant by something or another and that stopped him really, so to fill in the gap, his white shirt catching the gleams of a candle we considered appropriate for the occasion, I mustered everything I had and took off where he stopped, in a mustard cardigan, arms folded, telling my life story as I concentrated on a pound of butter that had slipped into the shape of Croagh Patrick on the table.

  ‘Where do I begin? Let’s see. Let me rack my brains. Brown bogs. Creaking, spinning bicycles. Milk churns. Girls were solicitous about scapulars. Geese were coy. I shared a secret with the heavens. I was to be sainted one day. Girls rummaged through bogs. Girls were friends until men came along. Girls stooped and lacquered their shoes with rival cream. There was a picture of Maria Goretti in our sitting room among millions of seashells and small pigeon feathers glued on the wall, and despite the fact that she was sainted for resisting the advances of a man, girls in newly laundered dresses and with new hairdos, before going to dances, fell on their knees in front of her and hands raised high in prayer begged her not to allow them to be shipwrecked in the jostle for a good man on the ballroom floor of their fledgling years.’

  Funerals at first seemed to be the only point of contact between my discourses and Raymond’s; hearses galloping through the brown marshes of Mayo, hearses, piled with their fill of flowers, languishing through Belfast. But the point of contact widened to an abstract and unstated notion which united us. This house was like the Irish flag. It brought a part of the green and a part of the gold together. It was the peaceable white between. I’d never before spoken at length with someone from the other part of my island. This city with its sleeping November dustbins afforded me the opportunity to do just that. This house was like a cavern of lost history lessons; nuns squawked with news of imminent invasio
ns. In my dreams Raymond kept coming towards me. He came out of the white of the Irish flag. Reflections of water rippling on his face. Cowslips somewhere in the vicinity and the winnowing of the Irish flag sometimes wringing the sound of classical music. He came out of the tender things of my childhood. Like the fluttering of the flag he was caught in the act of motion; the expectation of his arrival was never met by his arrival. He was a part of me caught for years in the act of approaching and with all the attendant vagueness of line that entailed.

  ‘A lad brought me out of a dance one moonlit night and confessed to me his ambition was to be a missionary priest in a Central American republic where the people would have to come to him for advice about revolution and sewers but first he had to do you-know-what with a young lady. So he asked me if I’d oblige him and lift my skirt. I said “No thanks, Father,” slapped his face, pushed him into a moonlit brook and wished him luck with the holy revolutions in South America.’

  London was the lifting of a weight; it was shuffling the Concise Oxford Dictionary at Maida Vale library; it was acquainting myself with the linear lonely hearts columns; it was paying a visit to a family-planning clinic and having something stuck in me. There I baulked. I returned to ‘Elysium’ and in the tradition of my mother baked a loaf of brown bread and kept repeating a phrase I concocted for Raymond a few nights previously: ‘No white stale bread here as in Central America, Father. No white stale bread here as in Central America, Father.’

  Gulls lolled over the grey Edwardian houses as if waiting for white bread. They got graffiti. Some of the graffiti was by my fellow countrymen. ‘Life to those who understand and fuck the begrudgers.’ My own language had become less auspicious. Black girls were trapped in red telephone kiosks. My children had improvised a seesaw among the syringes outside and I ordered them in once or twice. But there was more than just the grey outside to rescue them from. A creature halfway between the bygone hippie and the punk who was to come a few years later pulled himself along; the backs of Afghan coats had become lathery and polemical ex-public-school boys enlivened the world of Marx with candy-pink shoes. But confronting the grey outside one day I knew I could easily accommodate myself to it and all its ensuing threats; ‘for better or for worse’ as a green-toothed priest had spat at my white, backswept crown of a veil once—it was to be home.