OH, YES. I’M going mad, obviously. Or I’ve gone mad. Pat’s mother told me that today. I was always a bad bitch but now I’m a mad bitch as well. A mad, bad bitch. And a whore, by the way. Pat spilt his guts, then. He held out a long time. It’s six weeks since I told him about the baby. Agnes said: Some dirty rotten fella off of the internet, imagine.
I nearly said, It wasn’t, Agnes. I only said that to Pat so he wouldn’t get himself killed. It was the Traveller lad I was teaching to read, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I was helpless before it, like a child standing on a shoreline, back to the water, knocked and grabbed by a rushing wave. You know yourself how it is. Go on now, Agnes, go on away out of it, I’ve enough of you and your progeny. Go on away and don’t be fucking tormenting me.
But I let her rave on, thinking: I owe her this at least, the sadness I’ve brought to her door. She’d let herself in. I think I screamed when I met her in the hall. I’d been sick again, the tail end of the storm, and the toilet wasn’t finished flushing. Her eyes went up and down me twice. She licked her lips, tasting the air, testing it. She crinkled her beak of a nose. She addressed my midriff. She started to speak in a near-whisper.
I said nothing for years after ye were married, though I knew well you gave him a dog’s life. How is it at all we let him marry you? I had Pat well warned, my lady, that you’d be trouble. He married beneath him. I told him he was marrying beneath him; several times I told him when ye were engaged. I done my damnedest to bring him to his senses. Oh, you had your charms all laid out before him from day one, you were wide open for business with my poor gom, I have no doubt. Sure hasn’t the truth of you been well told now? Oh, Christ Jesus, when I think of it! Expecting for some dirty rotten yoke off of the internet! And you not able to keep one safe inside in you for my Pat. Well, do you know what? Thank God. Now! Thank God there’s no child involved, only the thing you’re carrying now, and with the help of God, and if there’s any justice, you won’t be left carry it long. Don’t you dare look at me like that, lady. Don’t you even think of judging me. Lord, isn’t it a fright to God to say my Pat married dirt, after all the years and expense of rearing him?
And she looked at me with her spindly eyebrows raised, as though waiting for me to agree, before reinforcing once again that I was . . .
Dirt.
*
Mary Crothery said: Buzzy paid for rakes of scans and tests and all, to see could they find out what was wrong to say I couldn’t get pregnant. We done it night and day from the very minute we was on our honeymoon to the day I ran from him. I loved him, miss. I didn’t mind one bit doing it with him the whole time. I got fierce sore once or twice, down there, like, but I didn’t say anything the way he wouldn’t be getting vexed. He had a real odd way of showing he was vexed, smoking fags one after the other and sitting in the van watching television, real stiff and straight, with a wave off of him that told anyone near him to not bother opening their mouth, they’d be gave no hop. But never once did he raise a hand to me, or call me a name. I seen girls on that site been drug around by the head of hair and bate stupid over the smallest of things, dinners not been cooked right, or some insult only the man could see and no one else. Buzzy was as hard as iron but still and all he was soft with me and he was good to me.
Like, there was an agreement made before we was wed. I wasn’t bought or sold or anything like that, but there was money changed hands and some agreement was come to as regards the sharing out of work that wouldn’t of been done otherwise. It favoured Daddy and the boys and meant Mommy got a load of things she was wanting for ages. That’s all up in a heap now over me. A fella started talking to me at a wedding of a cousin of mine in the north of Ireland one time and this was before I was ever with Buzzy and the fella was putting his arm around me and telling me I was gorgeous and trying to grab my phone off of me so he could ring himself to have my number and Buzzy come along out of nowhere and told your man I was his fiancée and your man gave one look at him and said he was terrible sorry, he was only talking to me, and asked me wasn’t that right, and I said it was and Buzzy looked like there was nearly steam coming off of him and your man walked off shaking and that was the first I knew then that I was to be married, and I wasn’t yet sixteen, and by the end of that year I was living in a van with Buzzy in a place called Kent, beyond in England. The garden of England, they calls it. There wasn’t too many flowers on that site, though.
*
Agnes said: He had a strong line going, you know, with one of the Walsh girls, and at least one farm of land coming to her, and her father and mother good respectable business people inside in town and she indentured in her uncle’s practice inside in the city and all. Lord God, when I think of it . . . They’d have made a gorgeous little family. Oh, my heart was solid scalded when I saw him bowling up the path with that stupid grin on his face and you hanging off of him and my lovely Barbara Walsh cast aside like . . . like . . . a piece of . . . rubbish! I couldn’t lift my face above at Mass for years after for fear I’d meet her mother’s eye. I had him told you were a tramp. I had Paddy told. I said the dogs on the street wouldn’t sniff you for sport. I told him, so I did, that we’d be a solid show opposite the neighbours having anything to do with the likes of you. I told my Pat. She’s beneath you, I said. You got your way, though. You have him squez out now and pure solid destroyed. You took all from him. My Pat, my poor eejit, you have his heart and soul in ribbons, and his life in tatters, and he hardly able to lift his head. Oh, Lord Jesus, when I think of it . . . Oh, Lord God.
And she sobbed and paused again for breath and to dab her eyes and blow her narrow nose and I opened my mouth to tell her all about her poor eejit, her lovely boy, my golden man, my perfect blue-eyed love, and the hours he gave to watching porn on his laptop, getting all sorts of ideas, going into the city and giving it all he had, giving her a good seeing-to, giving her the beans, buried in her up to his bollix, and afterwards, sweaty and red, panting, putting his trousers back on, waiting for a smile, or a kiss at least, some small mitigation, from the dark-haired pummelled girl spread along the low bed, rearranging herself for the next comer.
*
Mary Crothery said: You can come here any day you like. Whenever you’re lonesome. I do be fierce lonesome too. There’s not one bit of shame in it. I’m forever on my own. My mommy don’t bother with me even only to drop in bags of messages and tell me I’m no use. I’ll mind that book for you the way I can say you’re learning me reading if Pappy or Mommy axes. I have it put away there in the top press. I’ll say you’re from the council. That you was sent to make up for the way I was left leave school with neither word nor number inside in my head. The very minute I seen you I knew you was kind. That’s the why I told you all that about Buzzy an’ all. Don’t tell it to nobody, though. When’ll you come back to see me again?
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to, Mary.
Course you will. You’re very pretty, miss. What’s your name again?
Thanks, Mary, so are you. Melody Shee.
That’s a gorgeous name, so it is. And she blushed and pulled the braid across her face again as I left, and said: We’re the same as wan another, you know, you and me.
*
Agnes said: And what about your poor widowed father? I don’t know, you’ll be the death of him, the poor misfortune.
I’m not sure exactly what I said then, but it was something along the lines of: Agnes, you know Pat hates you, don’t you? And Paddy hates you. Fidelma tried to kill herself because of you. You’re a cunt, Agnes. You had all their lives well ruined long before I came along. And the Walshes wouldn’t have let their little Barbara marry one of yours in a million years. The likes of them wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, Agnes. You’re only a laugh to them, with your kow-towing and your crawling. And why would you worry one bit about my father? Surely if I’m dirt it’s dirt I came from. He’d rather see me pregnant by a proper man than by a fucking weirdo like your boy Pat. Look at the search history on his laptop and see what you think of it. He always forgets to clear it. He was still wetting the bed when I started going with him. It was I toilet-trained him. And he still to this day cries in his sleep and wakes in a sweat, saying, Go way from me, Mammy, go way from me, Mammy. What that’s about I don’t know, and it’s no concern of mine any more, thank God. Go on away now and cry into your mixing bowl and finish off the fine job you’re doing of torturing poor Paddy to death. And come to my door no more. If I ever see your face again, I’ll break it.
Her eyes filled then, and she looked ancient, suddenly, and tired. The skin of her face lost the radiance of anger and turned to crêpe before my eyes, shot with creases and tiny lines of red and blue. She turned away from me and the belt of her coat hung long from one loop and dragged forlornly along the ground behind her. She was halfway across to the path where her shit-brown Micra was blocking the neighbours’ gateway when I called her name softly, and she stopped.
I shouldn’t have said that, Agnes. Any of it. I only said it to hurt you.
And she made a low noise, like a laugh of weary scorn, and she turned back to face me, standing on my doorstep, my arms folded across my chest, above my tiny swell, and her eyes rested there a moment, and my right hand dropped in an unconscious gesture of protectiveness, and she said, I know what it’s like to be left without a mother at a young age.
And she stopped, as though to decide whether or not she should continue, but she did, in a low voice, her eyes never on me but fixed on some space behind my shoulder. I always felt that from you, that lost feeling, that weight of sadness, and my heart went out to you. We could have been pals, you know, if you hadn’t been such a flibbertigibbet, forever flouncing about the place and tormenting Pat, and he not knowing from one day to the next what sort of a cut you’d take at him. You could have sat down in my kitchen any time and drank a sup of tea and talked to me, sure I’d have been delighted. But look, how’s ever, we can’t look for water to flow back upstream. What’s done is done and we’ll agree to differ, and I’ll take a promise off of you that you’ll leave well enough alone now and let Pat pick up from where he is and see about living his life, and we’ll say no more to one another bar goodbye.
And I said, Goodbye, Agnes, and she nodded, and I watched as she shooed a cat from the bonnet of her car, and drove away, the belt of her coat flapping out from under her door.
*
So that’s more than I’ve done in a long time. Agnes and I are finished now for good and glory. But there was nothing much there to put an end to in the first place. She only ever tolerated me, and I her. Mary Crothery has told me a story and I feel I should tell her a story in return, but what’s there to tell? I married the first boy I ever kissed. I went through four years of college without kissing anyone else, or holding another hand, or talking in whispers late at night in a sweat of desire with any other boy. I started to pick at him around the end of second year, and would let him stay in my tiny bed in the student village but sometimes with my back to him, and I’d shrug his hand away and wouldn’t return his kisses, and he’d say, What, Melody? What’s wrong? What did I do? And I’d never have an answer he could understand, or that I could understand myself. And he’d leave with the breaking dawn to go to his apprenticeship, washed-out and heavy-eyed, and some mornings I wouldn’t even say goodbye. But still he stayed with me, and I was terrified of losing him, and we insisted on marrying each other, and lowering ourselves onto a bed of terrible, scalding, comfortably familiar pain.
It wasn’t all bad. I’m not all bad. I’m not evil or irredeemable. I’ve read all of this back, a month of it or more, and I don’t recognize myself, but I know I’ve been truthful. That these words are still extant, tucked inside a folder on my laptop screen, means something. Is it you, baby? Are you forcing my hand from the dark inside of me, the only warm part of me? Are you whispering to me that you want me to tell you a story?