Lark's Eggs (17 page)

The performances were cancelled that year. There was a
mysterious
silence around the players. The probable reason was that Cathal Mahaffy had opted out of the main parts in two Jacobean plays that weren't Shakespeare's. He'd made off on that motorbike of his after seeing Sheona in hospital, to mourn.

A rape, a job of teaching someone a lesson, had gone wrong. There had been an excess of brutality. The youths who'd run away from Sheona through the thickets by the river had probably been put up to it by nameless and sinister elders in town. That was the hazy verdict handed down. There'd been many accomplices and people, in a Ku Klux Klan way, kept silent about the event, kept their lips sealed as if it had been a figment of someone's imagination and there were often irritated howls years later when the event was referred to.

Sheona Barrett ended up in a home in Galway and she is still there; someone who saw her says her hair is still as red as it was then.

Cathal left the players permanently after the tragedy of October 1959, which months later still spread disbelief. He continued in the
theatre in a ragged kind of way for a few years, his most celebrated role being as a black, scintillating cat in one of Dublin's main
theatres
at Christmas 1960 but after that his appearances became fewer and fewer, until eventually he was down to secondary roles in
discontented
American plays in the backstreet and basement theatres of the city of Dublin.

But his good looks flourished, that appearance of his became seraphim-like, and he was taken up by a rich American woman who'd moved into a top-floor flat in Baggot Street, Dublin, and he lived with her as her lover for a few years in this bohemian spell of hers, seen a lot with her in Gajs' Restaurant over its tables regulated by small bunches of red carnations or in narrow pubs packed with Americans and Swedes craning to hear uilleann pipes played by hairy North-side Dubliners in desultory red check shirts. He nearly always had a black leather jacket on as if he was ready to depart and move on and it was true that no relationship could really last in his life so haunted and fragmented was he by what had happened to Sheona Barrett; he felt irrefutably part of what had happened.

One day he did leave the American woman but she was already thinking of leaving Dublin so there was some confusion about his leaving her; no observer was sure which of the pair it was who
sundered
the relationship.

He spent a few months on people's floors, often on quite
expensive
antique carpets, around the Baggot Street, Fitzwilliam Square, Pembroke Road area of Dublin. The antique carpets were no
coincidence
in his life because he was actually working for an antique dealer now who had a shop on Upper Baggot Street and in Dun Laoghaire. The job was kind of a gift, kind of decoration for an aimless person and one Saturday when he wasn't working he did what he'd wanted to do for a long time, drove west on his motorbike to Sheona Barrett's town to try to find the answer to a question that had beleaguered his mind for so long: Why, why the evil, why the attack, what had been the motivation for this freak outrage, what had been the forces gathered behind it?

But in the town he discovered that there were other
explanations
for Sheona's state as if she'd been ill all the time. Una
Barrett
was a housewife, a guesthouse keeper, a mother, the wife of a
man who had Guinness spilt all over his already brown jacket and waistcoat. The day was very blue: in the square there was an
abundance
of geraniums being sold; the sky seemed specially blue for his visit. All was happiness and change here. The past didn't exist. He was an exile, by way of lack of explanations, from the present.

But the more he stuck about, wandering among the market
produce
, the farmers made uncomfortable by the fact he wasn't
purchasing
anything, the more he knew. People did not like happiness. They distrusted happiness of the flesh more than anything. The coming together of bodies in happiness was an outrage against the sensibilities. It not only should not be allowed to exist but it had to be murdered if it wasn't going to unhinge them further. A swift killing could be covered up, it could be covered up forever; only the haunted imagination would keep it alive and that imagination would, by its nature, be driven out of society, so all could feel safe. There was no home for people like Cathal Mahaffy who knew and remembered.

With money he got from an unannounced source he purchased a house in a remote part of County Donegal in the late 1960s; the house up on a hill overlooking the swing of a narrow bay. There was much work to be done on it, a skeleton of a grey house peculiar and abandoned among the boulders that all the time seemed about to tumble into the sea.

On the back of his motorbike he ferried building materials from Donegal Town. These were the hippie days of the late 1960s and blue skies over the bay seemed arranged to greet visitors from Dublin. Often people got a bus to Donegal Town and then there was a liberated jaunt on the back of a motorbike around twists by the sea. There were benevolent fields to one side, the green early Irish monks would talk about, and stone walls dancing around the fields, finicky patterned stone walls.

These fields stretching to one side of him like a director's hand Cathal was killed on his motorbike one June day, a Lawrence of Arabia in County Donegal, all his motorbike gear on at the time, helmet, black leather jacket and old-fashioned goggles—a caprice? You felt he was being relieved of some agony he could no longer
bear, that the day in June was the last he could have lived anyway, what with the pain in him people had noticed, a pain that scratched out phrases by the half-door of his house, into the Donegal air
outside
when he was under the influence of fashionable drugs transported from Dublin.

One of these last phrases, these last annotations had been—a woman about to play in a 1930s comedy revival in Dublin had sworn it, her lips already red for the part—‘I don't know why they did it. Why? Why? Why? The innocent. The innocent.'This was mistaken as a premature eulogy for himself and because of it all the young rich degenerates in Dublin who saw themselves as being innocent and maliciously tortured by society gathered by his grave in County Wicklow for the funeral, making it a fashionable Dublin event, a young man later said to have epitomized the event, a young man who wasn't wearing a shirt and was advertising his pale, Pre-Raphaelite chest in the hot weather, a safe distance up from the grave, his chest gleaming, under a swipe of a motorcyclist's red scarf, with sweat and with a hedonist's poise.

Among the crowd from Dublin there were some strange rural mourners but no one identified them and anyway they were jostled and passed over in the crowd so awkward was their appearance, so nondescript was their floral contribution. But someone did, out of some quirky interest, get the name of the town they were going back to out of them. It was Sheona's town and the name was said almost indistinguishably so heavy and untutored was the accent.

Ultan Mahaffy did go back to the town a few times after 1959. The company was smaller but the spirit was still high despite losses of one kind or another. The players were greeted in the town with solicitude rather than with reverence. They were tatty compared to what they had been and the marquee in the fair green came to look almost leprous, unapproachable.

In October 1963 Ultan Mahaffy had a strange experience in the town, one which made him shudder, as if death had sat beside him. A man approached him in Miss Waldren's hotel, a tall man under a yellow ochre hat, in a weedy, voluminous, almost gold coat—the colour of the coat evoked stretches in the middle of bogs, slits of beach in faraway County Mayo; it was a kaleidoscopic bunch of 
national associations the coat brought but its smell was very
definitely
of decay, of moroseness.

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Mahaffy,' a voice said. ‘We respect you. You brought art to the town. You'll go down in history. You can't say anything to history. You can't say anything to history.'With that he turned his back and went off. What had he been saying? That Mr Mahaffy could not be impugned because he was part of history. Part of the history books like Patrick Pearse and Cúchulainn. But there had been others who were not quite so fortunate. Mr Mahaffy looked after the man and knew that he would not be coming back to this town again.

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.

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' association. 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.