The Carnival at Bray (9 page)

“Take it outside if you're gonna fight,” Rosie Horan yelled, flapping her bar rag at them. But they were already upon each other. Kevin swung again and Colm ducked, barreling into Kevin's chest with his bulldog head, and both men fell to the ground, kicking down stools and sending bottles skittering and shattering across the stone floor. The men at the counter yelled encouragement while the women shrieked at them to stop. Kevin was sallow and skinny to the point of emaciation, and Colm outweighed him by at least fifty pounds of thick muscle. It would have been a quick fight, except for the fact that Kevin was as vicious and tenacious as a rat. They grappled and rolled across the floor until finally, Colm was able to knock Kevin to the ground and straddle him, his big thighs clenching Kevin's ribs, while Kevin's legs thrashed beneath him. Blood poured from his crumpled nose, his knuckles scraped against the rough floor, and still he flailed and swung, clawing long, pink scratches across the pale, hairless meat of Colm's inner forearms.

“Are you finished?” Colm yelled, ducking the weak punches easily and holding Kevin's face down with a splayed hand. “Give up, will you, before I fuckin' kill you!” He lifted his hand away. Kevin was panting and silent. The rest of the bar began to relax. But Maggie knew better. Kevin never would give up, not until he or Colm was dead. She heard a gurgling in his throat, and then he bucked his hips forward and hocked a white wad of spit into Colm's face. It hung from Colm's eyelid and swung there while
Kevin managed to squirm free, get back on swaying feet, and pull Colm into a headlock that sent the two men bursting out the front door of the pub, tangling themselves in Christmas lights that snapped and popped under their feet. They kicked and tripped across the wet road until they were on the sandy ground before the tarp-covered carnival and the Ferris wheel, which sat creaking in the wind in silent judgment, snow dusting its highest carriages. The bar emptied out into the street and Kevin, as if the salty air had awakened him, began to scream a maniac's scream, the kind Maggie had heard in the Selfish Fetus song “Nightstick,” a scream that filled the sky and made the crowd glance at each other warily, until it was silenced, finally, by Colm's decisive fist to his face, and Kevin fell, finally defeated, in the sand. In the darkness, his thin body looked like a piece of washed-up kelp.

Maggie ran to him and knelt next to his body. His eyes were puffed into black slits; his nose and lips ran with blood. He reached up a hand, brushed sand into her hair.

“ 'M fine,” he slurred through thickening lips. A siren blared, and the guards arrived in a whirl of flashing blue light, scattering the crowd back. Dizzy with the lights and the wailing sirens and an all-powerful relief that that he wasn't dead, Maggie hiccupped, and the four Club Oranges she'd drunk throughout the night reappeared in a fizzy torrent of tangerine vomit in the sand.

Eoin retreated to the bar to help his aunt clean up the overturned tables and broken glasses while Maggie walked home with Kevin, who said nothing but leaned into her, breathed noisily from his mouth, and dabbed at his broken nose with a red-soaked sleeve. She was in bed by the time Colm and Laura arrived home, and she fell asleep, at last, lulled into nightmares by the persistent murmur of their arguing through the wall.

She was awoken in the predawn darkness by a shaking of her toe. She nearly screamed out when she saw the hideous clown face hovering at the end of the bed. Her eyes adjusted, and she
realized that the clown was Kevin, his pale blue eyes swallowed up in mushroom bruises, his nose cracked at an obscene angle. He had his bags with him.

“Just wanted to say Merry Christmas, Mags,” he whispered. “I'm taking off a bit earlier than expected.”

Maggie sat up.

“But I thought you were staying until New Years?”

He found her hand and held it. It was freezing and clammy, as if he'd just been in water.

“Plans have changed. I can't be under the same roof as your mother and that dude.”

“They didn't kick you out, did they?” She felt hatred and a wild loyalty rise within her.

“Oh no. Not this time. This time, it's my decision. I gotta get back anyway, got some things with this new band I'm starting that I gotta take care of.”

“But—what about us? What about spending Christmas with us?” She was aware that she was whining, that her lip was trembling and she was close to tears. But she couldn't help it. She was so sick of everything being decided by the adults in her life, who only acted like adults when they felt like it.

“Next year, honey,” he said. “You really think this marriage is gonna last? This time next year, you'll be back home in Chicago, and we'll have Christmas like normal people.” He smiled at her then, his teeth a broken row of tombstones, kissed her forehead, and left the room.

The front door opened and closed, and she watched her uncle limp out to the street, a short-brimmed hat his only defense against the wind. He hitched his backpack on his shoulder, turned once to wave at Maggie's window, then disappeared down the hill and was gone.

Maggie lay awake for a long time after Kevin left. She thought about him, about the demise of Selfish Fetus, about her messed-up family. But mostly she thought of Eoin. What was the meaning behind the inscrutable way he smiled at her as he cleared ashtrays and wiped down tables? Around eight she heard Ronnie's quiet footsteps, the static click of the television. An hour later, Nanny Ei's lungs hacked into consciousness, a toilet flushed, and then there was the snap of a lighter and the sighing inhalation of the morning cigarette. The murmur of conversation between Ronnie and Nanny Ei, the sizzle of eggs in a pan. Then, on the other side of the wall, the awful creaking of Laura and Colm. If they were loud when they were drinking, they were almost as bad when they were hungover. Maggie could hear her mom loudest of all, the moaning, the panting. She yanked her pillow over ears.
You'd think that after last night, they wouldn't be in the mood.
The headboard banged one final time, so hard that the pile of CDs on Maggie's dresser trembled.
Why can't Mom be discreet about anything?
She wondered.
Why is it that everything she feels, she has to make everybody else feel, too?

The family ate breakfast quietly, heads bowed, while Nanny Ei forced the conversation along between gaping silences. Maggie could smell the booze coming off her mom's skin, the stale cigarettes off her stepfather. They guzzled tea through cracked lips.

“Sausage, Mags?”

Maggie took the plate, smiling pointedly at her grandmother to indicate that Nanny Ei was the only adult in the room who she did not want to disown. She bit into the meat, the rich, greasy taste filling her mouth and making her want to vomit. Johnny Cash still played on the record player, but in the gray morning light, with a family-wide hangover, the deep bass of his voice felt alien and threatening. Even so, it was better than the sound of rumbling throats and dry mouths chewing and swallowing.

“Well. Should someone go and wake up Kevin?” Nanny Ei said his name carefully, bleaching out any hint of reprimand she might be directing at Colm as she cleared plates.

“Sure, wake him up,” he said, his mouth full of eggs. “No hard feelings here.”

Laura smiled tightly and reached for his arm.

Maggie bit into her toast. She wanted to savor this moment until the time when the secret no longer belonged to her and Kevin alone. She waited until Nanny Ei was nearly to the hallway before she made the announcement.

“He left.”

Everyone looked at her.

“What do you mean left?”

“I mean, he's gone.”

Maggie glanced up from her plate at Nanny Ei, whose face had taken on the same perplexed, fearful expression it had at the Quayside, when she'd held a forgotten cigarette between her fingers and watched her son play “Fairytale of New York,” those pale fingers coaxing out of a guitar emotions that he himself would never express. It was a look that wondered how a mother could give a child life and still find herself, more and more as the years went by, locked out and estranged from that child's inner life. Since they'd moved to Bray, Maggie had often caught her own mother looking at her in the same way.

“He left for the airport a couple hours ago,” she said, leveling her gaze at Colm. A dusting of dried blood clung to his knuckles. “He said he doesn't want to stay here, under this roof, with you people.”

Ronnie began pushing the eggs around on her plate with great concentration. Colm, looking supremely weary, pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose and sighed. Laura got up and threw a handful of dirty silverware into the sink.

“That's just fucking great!”

“Laura Lynch!” Nanny Ei said sharply. “For Christ's sake, will you watch your language in front of your children?”

“Well, I'm sorry, Mother, but here's another family holiday he's ruined. He just
had
to make me and Colm look like the bad guys. It's like he's always trying to pit me against my own children! And it works every time! Because of course, whose side is a teenager gonna take? Her mother's, or her twenty-six-year-old rock star uncle's, who sends her care packages every once in a while?” She pointed a dirty spoon at Maggie. “And let me just say that if you are mad at me or Colm—if you blame us for
any
of this—then you're being incredibly unfair.”

“I'm being unfair?” Maggie could feel the hotness at the back of her eyes.
“You're
the one who—and
Colm's
the one who practically
killed
him—” She stopped and looked up at the timber-slatted ceiling. She would never forgive herself if she started to cry now. It seemed that whenever she was gaining ground in an argument with her mom, she burst into helpless tears.

“He didn't start that! And you know it!” Laura was standing behind Colm now, her hands pressing into his thick shoulders.

“Well, we can all sit here and fight,” Nanny Ei interjected, “or somebody can drive out to the airport and see if we can go get him. It's only 11:00, he surely can't have left yet.”

“Oh, let him go,” Colm said, pushing his plate away. “He doesn't want to be here, that's his business. Why do ye always let
him ruin things? That's why he does this shit, because somebody always runs after and tries to fix it. He's twenty-six fuckin' years old! He ain't a fuckin' cripple is he? He ain't a retard, is he? So let him be!”

“Stop yelling!” Ronnie shouted, and then ran off to her room, her blue nightgown trailing behind her.

“Who cares what
you
think?” Maggie slid back from the table and stood facing her stepfather. “You think you're part of our family now? You're just some guy my mom met at a bar.”

“Met and married,” Colm said. “I think that counts for something.”

“You were just the first one to come along who was dumb enough,” Maggie snapped.

“Margaret Marie!” Laura lifted the dishrag to her eyes.

“Mom, I didn't mean—” She looked down at the table full of empty plates. She had intended the words to have an effect, but she hadn't exactly meant to make her mother cry.

“Sweetheart, your uncle is a bleeding fuckin' druggie.” Colm smiled at Maggie, a mean smirk that showed the top row of his white, square teeth. “Thought you should know that. So at least when you stand here and defend him, you know what you're defending. Or haven't you ever looked at the crook of his elbow? No wonder he's such an admirer of Kurt Cobain. He's just like him, except for the talent part.”

Maggie shook her head. Suddenly, it all made sense: the bulging eyes, the boiled-out skin, the emaciated frame. Self-destruction had a look, a smell. He wore his addiction like a loose cape, as close to the surface as blue veins. That's what had scared her so much, under the garish lights of Harry and Rose's, not his quitting the band. She felt both enraged and impotent. She hated that all her good days had to be followed by bad ones, and she was furious, too, because she knew that Colm was right—that loving Kevin meant always having to defend him. She felt a hand, cool and dry, on her bare shoulder.

“You shouldn't have told her that,” her mom said quietly.

“I already knew,” Maggie said quickly, shaking Laura's hand away. Maggie would be damned if she'd let Colm think that he could tell her something about Kevin that she didn't already know herself. “I'd still pick him over any one of you, any day of the week.”

She walked out of the room and into Ronnie's bedroom, where her sister cried softly under her blankets, her Christmas ruined. Maggie sat at the edge of Ronnie's bed, put her hand gently on her sister's thin back.

“I'm sorry you have to be a part of this crappy family, Ron,” she whispered. Ronnie curled tighter into her ball beneath the covers and heaved a sob. Maggie got up, grabbed her Discman and her jacket from her own bedroom, and walked past the table of stunned adults, out into the cold morning. She could still hear Johnny Cash singing as she headed up the road.