and caught them in a shed at the back. The carpenter was in hospital a week before he managed to slip out. She was kept locked up. You know I think it wasn’t just what she was doing but who she was with. If it had been the doctor’s son they would have all been indignant and yet delighted. But it wasn’t, so they beat the skin off her back. Once she escaped to Dublin. Her father caught up with her after five days, famished, still in the same clothes, looking for the carpenter’s digs. Doctor O’Donnell signed the committal papers. He’d have signed over his granny’s corpse for a brandy.’
Katie leaned against the stone wall, staring at the hospital as she spoke. Hano put his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off.
‘The year I was born, Hano, there was a scandal in the town. No papers carried it, nobody spoke to strangers, but people knew. One evening Mary Roche told my mother. They didn’t know I was there, against the side of the dresser, hardly daring to breathe as I tried to make sense of her words. I didn’t understand them all but I understood the terror in her voice.
‘On weekend nights The Railway Hotel stayed open after hours for select customers. When the owner finally got sick of their drunken talk, Doctor O’Donnell would bring a few cronies across to the asylum—the chemist, the draper, a few big farmers with sons at college, the local councillor with his fainne. I could see them all in my mind as she listed them. They’d drag the retarded girls out of the wards to use them as whores. Can you imagine it? The stink of whiskey off their breaths and their laughter billowing down the corridor. Do you want the really funny part, Hano? The punch line? They’d bring in little boxes of Smarties for the girls. The two night nurses stayed quiet, they had jobs and families. It could have gone on for ever only some guard, fresh out of training school, reported the whole thing to his superiors and got transferred to the arse of Donegal for his trouble. The only charges were against the publican for after-hours serving. The doctor got the hint or maybe the inspector got in on the act.’
Hano stood back, afraid to touch her hunched-up shoulders. The man on the lawn had finally stopped. He lay face down, motionless.
‘When I was eight, Hano, they unveiled a statue to some poor wanker who’d been shot at eighteen by the Black-and-Tans. They’d a pipe band, a priest and altar boys, the usual old shite, the FCA strutting round with empty rifles. The organizing committee had a row of seats on a raised platform. As each of their names were called out I could hear my mother trying to hush Mary Roche as she intoned like the response to a psalm, He had me! He had me!’
Katie turned to look at him. Her voice had grown shrill and he saw tears in her eyes.
‘So why the fuck do I want to go back? To that fucking pain? Dada waiting in the square for those bastards to give him a day’s work. You know I worked beside him every evening when I finished school. I can see them still arriving in their cars to survey the lines of workers, their eyes watching me stoop in a child’s frock and a man’s rubber boots to pick potatoes from the muck. I was only eight but I remember the look in their eyes, I knew what it meant. I can still see the leers on the faces of every last bastarding one of them!’
She turned and walked quickly ahead of him, her back hunched as if part of it were broken and all the toughness gone, so that momentarily she looked like the sixteen-year-old child she was.
That first weekend with Shay it was Sunday afternoon before I got home. One event had simply folded into another. I remember lying on the mattress in Shay’s flat after Murtagh’s in the early hours of Saturday morning, the glowing tips of joints passing back and forth. He had the stereo on and the curtains undrawn so that each number was rolled in the street light filtering through the high windows. I remember the outline of his face in the bed above me, the teeth white as he laughed at some joke, the hands folded behind his head on the pillow as he waited for the joint to return. People arrived and departed from the house all night—the strains of music upstairs, the creak of a bed, a girl’s voice on the landing. I don’t recall going to sleep. I just woke next morning, my throat raw, my chest on fire from alcohol. Shay was standing beside the two-ringed cooker near the window wearing only his jeans. He lifted the first pancake on to a plate, smeared it with butter and honey and placed it on the floor beside me.
‘We need food badly,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll be rightly destroyed.’
The house was on the corner of a road in Ranelagh. Across the street a greengrocer piled his goods on to the pavement, the fruit gleaming in the sunlight as he stood in his apron to chat with passers-by. The road curved away in a mass of old trees. The pub on the corner was dark, a Lourdes for quiet men seeking the cure. Shay spread the racing pages of the paper on the table in front of us and accepted whispered advice from the two men on stools at the bar. I drank the first pint slowly, savouring its bitterness on my tongue and I thought of home, my mother in a phone box probably phoning the hospitals.
I knew that what I was doing to them was cruel but somehow it seemed necessary. Every hour away gave me a small thrill of power at making them aware of the difference within me. Maybe I was just afraid to go back and face them, but I think I was so mesmerized by Shay as to be incapable of leaving before he told me to go. I wanted to be a part of the world he moved in, feeling more alive in his presence than ever before in my life.
I’d promised myself I’d go home after the last race when we stood on the steps at Leopardstown that afternoon. Then Shay met a friend who had won a share of the tote. Out of obstinacy he’d refused to take a cheque and we waited to escort him back to town by taxi with a plastic bag full of small notes and coins. Again I swore to leave after we had a drink with him, then after we’d eaten and then on the last bus.
The party was on the far side of Rathfarnham, a girl from the office’s twenty-first. In the hallway of the house she rented with four others Shay found a bottle of whiskey and one of gin. He emptied them secretly into the basin of punch and went round with a spoon ladling it out. A bonfire blazed in the backgarden. Mick sat on a swing, a six-pack between his legs as he rocked back and forth, the glow of a roll-up sweeping in an are through the air. Figures fluttered in the semi-darkness. I collapsed into a hedge and fell asleep. Shay and Mick must have carried me inside to the living-room floor. I woke next morning stiff as a cloth left out on a line in winter, the blanket placed by Shay still over my shoulders. I found him asleep upstairs, his arm around some girl. He woke and winked, untangling himself discreetly.
Scowling, we wandered through street after street of new homes, completely lost in that new suburb at the foothills of the mountains as remote to us as our own had been to our fathers. The brickwork on each house looked too new, too consciously trying to be old, not to seem like Noddy houses. We grumbled in the clean air, among the brightly painted doors and privet hedges, speaking of the poetry of rusting steel, our favourite old factories, crooked laneways decked with glass and graffiti. Families were climbing into cars for Mass, a dog came proprietorially out to investigate and fled to the sanctuary of his porch when Shay knelt to bark at him. After an hour a bus came. An old tramp sat across from us in the back seat playing a mouth organ and banging his feet in time to the tunes. I knew I finally had to go home. I left Shay in the city centre looking for his car abandoned on Friday night and nervously got a bus. I tried to rehearse words to myself, remembering the speeches I made to my father in my mind about the old woman. Now the same phrases come back again five years on. This time I swore I’d say them.
But in the end I said little and they said less, though I could see the hurt in their eyes. My young brother told me they had gone to the police earlier that morning. I kept wanting to explain but as soon as I stepped back inside their house I knew that, like trying to talk about the old woman, it was impossible to bridge our worlds.
But this time I think my father wanted to tell me he understood. I had sensed his attitude to me change the first day I returned from work, but to my mother I was still a child. I could hear her scolding
