Beneath the Earth (23 page)

Once, when I woke too late to see him leave, I returned to my virgin bed in my dead cousin's room and threw myself around beneath the blanket, thrashing like a wild animal, my feet wrapping the pale sheets around my ankles, mummifying myself in their whiteness as I kicked out in self-loathing and buried my face in my pillow crying out his name, spoken with longing, then with vulgarities attached, then obscenities, until finally, spent and soiled, the sheets a disgrace, I examined my thin young body and felt as alone as I have ever felt in my life, the isolation of a boy who feels that an unfairness has been thrust upon him that he will never be able to share, for who would ever understand such a thing or tell him that he is not a monster?

At last he spoke to me, asking why I never went to school. I told him there were plans in that direction but they seemed slow in coming to fruition.

‘You're the lad with the father in the papers all the time, aren't you?' he asked, and I nodded, embarrassed by my father's disgrace but flattered that I had some celebrity in his eyes. ‘Do you play rugby at all?'

‘Not yet,' I said. ‘Maybe when I start school.'

‘Do you watch it?'

‘On the telly.'

‘Sure come up some Saturday morning to the school and watch one of our matches. Half past eleven till just before one. Lots of lads your age do. Bring us an orange for afterwards,' he added, laughing, before running across the road without even a goodbye and leaving me on the banks of the Tolka River, alone and delirious. I wanted him to take more care on the roads than my poor cousin had.

Saturday morning came and my aunt said I was to stay at home until she and my uncle were back from the shops, as there was a delivery that they were waiting on.

‘Can they not leave it next door?' I asked, and she turned, annoyed by my refusal to help, and said that she didn't want to go bothering the neighbours.

‘I don't ask much of you,' she snapped. ‘What use are you anyway if you won't do one simple thing after we've given you a home and food and a bed to sleep in?'

Eleven o'clock came and no sign of the man from An Post. Eleven thirty. Twelve. I could feel my stomach turning in convulsions and once, in a fit of dramatics, I convinced myself that I was going to be sick with anxiety and hung my head over the toilet bowl. I went outside and stared anxiously up and down the street in search of the van. I marched around the house, cursing all those who worked for the postal service, and banged my fist off the bedroom wall until I thought it might bruise. Finally, at twelve thirty the doorbell rang, the parcel arrived and it needed no signature at all despite what my aunt had said and I threw it on the kitchen table in a fury, grabbing the freshest-looking orange I could find from the fruit bowl, and ran through the streets towards the school where the brother of the Mangan girl played his rugby.

I was afraid that the match would be over by the time I got there but no, a crowd of a hundred people or more were gathered on the sidelines on all four sides of the pitch, a sea of blue and white for one team and green and gold for the other. They were cheering the lads on and I looked out for Mangan, whose back bore the number nine, and followed him with my eyes.

A girl was standing next to me with two boys and I listened in to their conversation.

‘That's what I heard anyway.'

‘It's not true.'

‘It is! It happened at the party last Friday.'

‘I heard he was into your one from St Anne's.'

‘It was her was into him.'

‘That's a lie.'

The girl turned and looked down at me and asked me what I thought I was doing, and I blushed and made my way down the field, watching as the ball was thrown from player to player, scrums were formed, lines were drawn, throw-ins were made and tries were scored. I saw the brother of the Mangan girl take the gumshield from his mouth during a break in play and watched the way his upper lip contorted as he released it, his tongue extending for a moment before diving back inside. A line of saliva ran like a wire from his mouth to the lump of plastic in his hand and only when he turned his head to the left and spat on the ground did it disappear and I felt a groaning somewhere deep inside me. He raised his shirt a little to scratch his belly and a fine trail of dark fuzz made its way beneath his navel to within his shorts; his hand followed it in for a moment as he adjusted himself. When the whistle was blown, he threw the gumshield back in his mouth and turned to run in my direction with a grace that belied his bulk, his eyes watching at every moment as the ball made its way above the heads of twenty boys and he reached both hands up, leapt in the air, dragged it into the pit of his stomach before hoisting it back with his right hand and throwing it further down the field to some shadow whose catch I did not even turn to see.

Soon, the game ended and there was cheering on the pitch. I gathered that Mangan's team had won but it had been a close thing and a good-tempered game, for the colours intermingled and there was a clasping of fists and quick hugs, hands to the back of each other's heads.

I dared to call his name as he trotted off the pitch with one of his friends, and he turned to look at me, uncertain at first before a moment of recognition made him smile.

‘You made it,' he said, tousling my hair as if I was a child before running on, running past me, running away, turning to his companion and laughing about something as they disappeared back towards the changing rooms and out of my sight. I stood there as the spectators started to disperse, hoping that he might come out again. He had told me to bring him an orange and I had done so, but I hadn't given it to him. He hadn't even noticed it in my hand. Finally, a group of them emerged, an excitement of boys, pink-faced and wet-haired, talking and laughing loudly, sports bags slung over their shoulders, drinking cans of Coke and devouring bars of chocolate in one or two bites. Mangan among them, at their very centre.

I waited until they were all gone and walked slowly down the driveway, making my way back towards North Richmond Street, where I had no desire to be, the orange still in my hand. I was a boy uncertain where he was going, abandoned and left wandering in a part of the city that was unfamiliar to me, a place that would take me years to understand and negotiate.

That part of me that would be driven by desire and loneliness had awoken and was planning cruelties and anguish that I could not yet imagine.

It was no easy task to dig the child's grave. The ground down here grows firm in the wintertime, the loam forming a solid shell above the subsoil and bedrock that pack together like hibernating animals in fear of a seasonal predator. When I was a boy, I took an interest in the land and wanted to grow peppers and sweet potatoes in the small corner of the farm that had been designated as my own but my father said the earth wasn't for wasting and I should plant crops that could put up a fight against the unremitting cold. Cabbage, he said. Leeks. Broccoli. All manner of green vegetables that I hated.

You said this was my land, I told him. To plant whatever I wanted.

Cabbage, he repeated. Leeks. Broccoli. Maybe a little spinach if you want to try something different.

I pressed my foot down on the shoulder of the spade, forcing the blade into the obstinate soil, and knew that I had a job of work ahead of me. Circling the burial ground, the desiccated trees formed a tribal boundary, their stripped branches rustling in the breeze as they whispered tales of the crime they were witnessing.

My father was long dead, of course, and the land was mine now. I could do with it what I liked. I could bury whatever I pleased inside it.

Much further away, a corner of the north field housed the grave where I had buried my wife two years before. Flynn, the priest, refused to consecrate the ground at first, saying that Niamh should be laid to rest in the church cemetery beside her family, but I told him that I was her family, that Emer was her family, and that we wanted her nearby.

Do you not think you isolated her enough during her lifetime, he asked me, without abandoning her to such a solitary resting place?

What's that now, I asked, stepping closer to him, but he didn't dare repeat the slur. I have reason to believe that Niamh sought his counsel over the years, speaking to him of matters that were private between us, a brazen act on her part that no man could excuse.

I went to the bishop on that occasion, an older man who had been a friend of my father's, and told him what I wanted.

It's a most unusual request, he said.

If it's a matter of money …

This has nothing to do with money, he told me, picking a scrap of something green from between his teeth and examining it before flicking it to the floor. We don't sell favours in this diocese. On another subject entirely, however, you may have seen the sign outside requesting contributions for the renovation of the episcopal house. I wonder whether you might be able to help us out with that?

I wrote him a cheque there and then.

The next day, Flynn came over with a scowl on his face and drizzled holy oil over the plot of land I had designated for the girl he tried to persuade away from me. He said a prayer at each of the four corners before standing in the centre for his final supplication while I stood nearby and smoked a cigarette, never taking my eyes off him. When she was buried later that week, he shook the incense over her coffin and speckled the wood with holy water before giving the signal for her to be lowered down. He offered not a word of condolence to me but I gave him his envelope anyway and of course he took it.

I helped fill in the ground with the excavated earth. To be honest, I was glad to be rid of her for she had been little use to me as a wife and her looks were long gone.

I had no reason to pay attention to Emer until after her mother died. Before that, she was little more than a silent, long-haired creature with a room upstairs and a habit of staring at me as if I was an ogre. Whenever Niamh did something to provoke me and needed to be disciplined, the child would run off in tears, a racket I could not abide, for her sobs would catch in her throat and make her sound like a chicken whose neck was being wrung. There were times when I thought she was a bit simple, for she almost never spoke to me, but Niamh said no, she was just frightened, nothing more.

Sure what has she got to be frightened of, I asked. If she behaves herself, she has nothing to worry about. Neither of you do.

I hadn't wanted a daughter; I knew men with daughters and they seemed to be of little use to anyone. A son was what I needed, a hard-working, obedient son, like my own father had, who would toughen up at his founder's fists. I felt irritated when she was born. And humiliated. For a time, I told no one.

Worse news was to come when the doctor, a young lad, new to the parish, said that Niamh could have no more children, that after giving birth her womb had had to be removed.

And why is that, I asked, feeling a knot forming in the pit of my stomach, for I did not like the idea of another man investigating my wife's anatomy; it was bad enough that he had been there for the birth.

I couldn't control the bleeding from the uterus, he told me.

You couldn't, could you not, I said, nodding slowly.

No, typically the womb will contract post-partum and unfortunately, in your wife's case, it was rather stubborn. I had no choice but to perform the necessary procedure. She would have died if I hadn't.

Is that right, I said, looking him in the eye, and I could hear the low growl I was making through my nostrils, like a goaded bull getting ready to charge.

At first I tried not to blame Niamh for her failings but it wasn't easy. I was still a young man and it was unthinkable to me that my entire family would consist of an infertile woman and a silent daughter who was neither pretty nor intelligent. I wanted to set her aside but the scandal would have cost me. My produce would have been blacklisted at every market fair in the province. And so the years passed, fourteen of them, and only when Niamh was planted in the ground did it occur to me that I might find another woman to give me what I needed.

I tried courting again but there was talk in the town that I had been unkind to my wife, that I had treated her poorly, and because of this the girls kept their distance. The gossips said that I hit her whenever the mood took me and that whatever spirit Niamh had once enjoyed had been beaten out of her by my fists. They said worse things too and when the sergeant came to call I told him to undertake his investigations and let me know the outcome. I have nothing to fear from you, I told him.

It's unclear how she died, he said.

Is it now, I replied.

We have concerns about your daughter, he told me.

Do you now, I said.

There was one girl, her name was Shannon, like the river, and I thought of her often, for she was a fine thing. I followed her one day down by the stream when she was walking her dog and she spun around and glared at me, her hands on her hips, doing everything she could to look strong but the expression on her face told me that she was fearful.

That's a grand dog you have there, I told her, and the mutt cocked his leg against a tree in defiance of me.

I'd say you're proud of yourself, are you, she shouted at me. The way you treated that poor girl.

You don't know a thing about it, you tramp, I replied.

We all know what you're like, she said. You're not just pig ugly but you're cruel. And if you take another step towards me I'll set the dog on you.

I laughed. Sure what was he, only a little spaniel. But still, I left her alone when I might have just taken her right there up against one of the trees and not a jury in the land would have convicted me for it.

Her father and brother knocked on my door later that night and issued threats. They said I was to leave Shannon alone. They said if I came within spitting distance of her again, they would burst my head open. The brother grabbed me by the shirt and made ready to hit me, only stopping when he saw Emer standing at the door of the kitchen in her nightdress, her hands pressed to either side of her face, her feet bare against the stone floor.