The Jailbird, a short story by Jaki McCarrick

She had the same air about her, a goofiness sort of, and her teeth were the same, too, narrow and overlapping at the sides, so that with her dark hair and fringe she looked just like Patricia Arquette in David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Whenever Martha would smile I had always a compulsion to lick her teeth. The caption said she was home.

‘See Martha Cassidy is back in town,’ my mother said, and I quickly closed the newspaper. She’d have something to say to me if it was I who peeped over her shoulder, there’s no doubt. The customers in the shop looked up. I thought they were listening to the Joe Duffy show Ma had on head-thumpingly loud (as per usual) but obviously they weren’t.

‘They say she done well over there,’ Biddy Hughes said.

‘Josie will be pleased to see her,’ Mrs Barrington said.

‘Did someone die, Connie?’ Coco Conway said, all offbeat, and everyone looked, as he was, and is still, a big thick. Ma turned down the volume on the radio.

‘No one died, Coco. Just Martha Cassidy in the paper as she’s home, ‘ Ma said. If she thought I was going to stand there with the biddies gawping and waiting for a reaction she’d another thing coming. I said, ‘excuse me Ma, but I’m off now for my lunch,’ and I took off the white shop-coat she’d make me wear as if we were a big shop when we weren’t, we were a one-horse outfit, and sloped out from behind the counter with my lunchbox and stripy flask she’d got me the month before in O’Neil’s in Dundalk. On my way out I heard Biddy Hughes say:

‘I hear Michael is feeding the foxes, Connie. Jack Daly won’t be too pleased, he has sheep up there.’ Once out, I stopped to eavesdrop, but the biddies just went back in time to seventeen years ago, to the big dairy scam that Martha’s father had been a part of, and one of the reasons the love of my life left for the big old US of A.

‘He was in with them fellas that’s why he done it. Watering down the milk! What a thing to be doing to make a bit of money,’ Biddy Hughes said.

‘Money for guns, too,’ Mrs Barrington said.

‘Indeed. And it’s he did, Biddy. Did. Sometimes I wonder if you went to school at all.’ Ma would correct other people’s grammar no matter what the topic of conversation nor how prismatic its flow. It was a way of reminding them all in Castlemoyne that she was a cut above, what with her shop, her background as a champion amateur actress who, as she liked to claim, had read all of Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde.

I went up to the bog and waited for my foxes to emerge from their earth, which was deep beneath the over-leaning bank I would sit on. Straight away I thought about Martha and the band, and of the times we would come up here to talk about our futures. Our band was thought of as about the best thing ever came out of this borderland mire. Martha had a voice that sounded sassy, a cross between Patti Smith and the girl from Chromatics. We’d a big following and were raved about once in Hotpress (who’d said we were the ‘Nirvana of the North’). All the Goths and interesting types would crawl out of the local woodwork to see us play. They’d loved us with a passion verging on the maniacal, or so it seemed to me then. I was full of hope that time. A real Pollyanna (or whatever the male equivalent is). Sometimes I wondered if that hopeful part of me would ever return. It seemed to me, as I sat eating my sandwich, no fox in sight, that the paradox of having retreated so far from the world as I had done, becoming nigh on a recluse in recent years, a veritable shut-in (discounting my visits to the foxes), was that during the years of the band I’d had a deeply hopeful and cheery disposition.

*

‘Massage my feet, Michael, will you, Son, while I read this?’ Ma said, seated beside the unlit fire. She already had her stockings off, her feet spread out onto a towel. She smelled powdery, beneath which I could also detect the sour undersmell of sweat. There were bottles of creams and lotions laid out beside her.

‘Give me them,’ I said, and I began to rub. And right there my night was ruined. Not just because there’s nothing like massaging one’s mother’s feet (Ma’s being all swollen and flaky) to quench any romantic feeling gathering in a man’s body but because within seconds of doing it I could tell that what she really wanted to do was to reel me in, have a captive audience while she plotted out the course of our lives together:

‘I was thinking, Michael, about what we might do in a few years when I get the pension. I’d qualify for a free travel-pass as well as one for a carer. You could put in for that you know, and you’d get a free travel-pass, and then we could travel the whole of Ireland if we wanted to on the train.’

‘Who’d mind the shop?’ I said, alarmed (to say the least) that she had me in mind as her future carer.

‘Well, the days we’d be going we could close up the shop. We wouldn’t be going every day. You don’t seem that enthused.’

‘I am, Ma. I love trains. I am enthused.’

‘Not like we can get off to Greece or anything. We’re too busy now and by the time I get my pension I’ll be too old for Greece. So the passes would be great to have.’

‘I can’t wait for you to be getting your pension, so,’ I said. And all warmed from her dreams of availing of free travel, and from the Deep Heat I was rubbing into her shins, she took up her book again, flicked through the pages. I saw this as my opportunity: ‘Do you think, maybe, you’d be alright if I was to go dancing one of these nights, Ma?’

‘Dancing?’ she said, ‘what kind of dancing?’

‘Just in town, maybe the weekend, maybe a disco.’ Of course, I was planning/hoping to bump into Martha, thinking she might be inclined to venture out to one of our old haunts now that she was home.

’I’m afraid my dancing days are long over,’ Ma said, ‘them and the acting.’

‘Well, I was meaning maybe not with you, Ma,’ I said, ‘with Noel I meant.’

‘A disco?’

‘Aye,’ I said.

‘It’s not that you need my permission, Michael. Lord knows, but I’d be glad of a break from running round looking after you. But take a look at yourself, the cut of you, that leather jacket and the hair. And besides, you know yourself you wouldn’t last five minutes with all the commotion around you. Not worth going out for anyway. All gone to hell out there. Drowning in a sea of drink we are and aren’t there lectures advertised every week in the Northern Star for depression and suicide for young people?’

‘Ma!’ (It was ridiculous, I knew, that I should be pleading to do something twelve year -olds were doing the world over. But Ma and me had history. And she never stopped reminding me of it.)

‘After a few drinks wouldn’t you be linking up with all sorts of dubious characters, might not understand how fragile you are, Michael,’ she said.

’I’m not fragile, Ma.’

‘Are. In your own way. My advice is to stay away from the discos.’ Clearly, if I wanted to accidentally-on-purpose bump into Martha I’d have to do it without asking my mother’s permission, for it would never be given anyway.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked, trying to get her off the subject of me and discos and she turned the face of the book towards me: a Methuen School’s Edition of Macbeth, probably Eugene’s.

‘Only for the memories,’ she said. I told her she shouldn’t be reading such books with all the blood and guts that was in them, especially considering what could happen if she were to get upset, but she got defensive, told me to go away from her, even after the excellent rub I’d given her. She said she wished Eugene was here because Eugene was the only one who understood her, and who could massage her feet properly also, as he was going to be a doctor in Trinity College and, naturally, he would be better at massaging feet. (Naturally.) Bad enough that I’d given up my evening of thinking and dreaming about Martha to massage my mother’s feet but then I got shirked off for not being Eugene. I wanted to remind Ma that Eugene was dead seventeen years but I knew the whole thing would kick off then, so I left it.

‘Don’t forget to refill the crisps,’ Ma said to me on my way out. I glanced back at her and saw she was ringing her hands and reciting out damn spot. I wished then I’d gone up to see my foxes for the entirety of the evening instead of having to suffer that old speech of hers (for which she’d won an award), which she would intonate in a sort of clipped and grotesque whisper, her face taking on an alarmed expression that for some reason always recalled to me Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein.

*

McDaid’s Grocery Store was left to my mother by hers. (When Ma married she changed the name from Soraghan’s.) The apostrophe before the ‘s’ was a reminder to all in Castlemoyne as to whom, exactly, the shop belonged. It also meant her husband and sons, if and when we worked in the shop, and we all did at one point, were, essentially, her employees. Constance Soraghan then McDaid was once a name to be reckoned with in these parts. Her trophies for acting filled the shelves of the house, a two-storey extension separated from the shop by a door. (And a very important door, too, for once I was in the house I was no longer her employee though she often abused that fact.) From within the shop could be seen a life-sized poster of her with golden, flocculent curls and Clara Bow lips, and the words The Jailbird by George Shiels emblazoned across her. There was rarely a day when someone would not comment on that poster. If they didn’t, then she’d direct their attention to it somehow or stand close by so they would note the resemblance. Sometimes, if she thought she was alone, or I wasn’t looking, she’d stare into it like a mirror. She’d find herself in the features, sweep down the loose skin of her neck, soften her curls, as if about to enter for her pivotal scene.

*

The next day, Coco Conway called into the shop with a packet of fresh steaks sourced from his own private abattoir. This was more or less a weekly occurrence, and always he and Ma would haggle over prices, with Ma flirting, most disconcertingly, in order to get a reduction. Coco would lap this up, probably remembering her as she was in the poster. ‘Moyne’s own Meryl Streep,’ he would call her, and I think she flirted with him not only to get the prices of his produce down but so he would call her Meryl Streep. When she went off to wash the blood of the steaks from her hands (before paying Coco the money) I knew he would take the opportunity to get all ‘man to man’ with me. ‘A fine strap of a woman, your mother, the strength of an ox in her,’ he said, lasciviously, one eye cocked at the poster. I moved over to the morning’s pile of mail. Being no respecter of personal space, Coco sidled up to me: ‘I hear you’re up with the foxes again, Michael.’ I nodded. ‘Don’t mind telling ya, but they’re nothing but vermin.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, and Coco laughed. ‘Don’t believe in “vermin”, anyways,’ I said, ‘apart from the human sort. What’s the point in shooting foxes for the sake of sheep and chickens you’re going to get nothing for anyway? It’s barbaric. Whole lives ruined just so some drunken gurrier can have a burger he’s too pissed to taste,’ and he laughed again, though I don’t think he got what I was trying to say to him.

‘I saw her today, ya know,’ Coco said. I’d a good idea as to who he was talking about.

‘A-ho!’ he said, pointing at me, convinced he’d caught my blush. ‘She’d be sure ta call in on ya boy.’ (I hated the way they all called me lad or boy or boyo when wasn’t I thirty-five years old?)

As Ma completed her dealings with Coco, I noticed a brochure newly arrived from the Postcard Company. I quickly scanned the cover letter. They’d new postcards to send us. Did we want to order a postcard carousel? Have cards with famous faces of Monaghan on them, excerpts of poems by Patrick Kavanagh? The brochure read:

Contemporary & Vintage Postcards

Kavanagh Country images (Inniskeen village; D. McNello’s Bar; Kavanagh’s headstone; the banks of the River Fane; Kavanagh’s portrait by Patrick Swift; excerpts from The Great Hunger, with the poem’s protagonist, Patrick Maguire, depicted sitting on a wooden fence, Tarry Flynn, The Green Fool)

Carrickmacross Lace images

Fishing in Lough Muckno images

Retail price: 50 cent each.

Coco had gone two minutes when the doorbell rang out again. Thinking it was him who’d entered I went to chide him for calling my foxes ‘vermin’ when I saw an apparition, the mid-day light bouncing off her hair so that it looked silver-streaked. Thinner than before, like in the Northern Star photo, Martha seemed even more beautiful than the mental image I’d been dwelling on for the best part of seventeen years.

‘Hello Michael,’ she said. I hoped that Ma, who’d gone upstairs after Coco had left, hadn’t heard the bell.

‘Hello,’ I replied. It wasn’t the right way to say it. But I could see she knew, Jesus, she knew I was glad to see her.

‘Been a long time,’ Martha said.

‘It has.’

‘You look great.’

‘Not so bad yourself.’ I wanted to take off my shop-coat right there, walk out of the place with her, but then Ma clattered down the stairs, muttering away to herself. When she came into the shop I saw she’d half the contents of my father’s wardrobe in her arms.

‘Here now,’ Ma said, without bothering to look up and see who it was I’d been talking to. ‘Been thinking, Michael, these suits of your father’s should fit you. You should give some thought to wearing these.’ Embarrassed by such talk in front of Martha, I replied:

‘Don’t bloody-well want to be wearing a dead man’s suit, Ma,’ and sort of threw a laugh out of myself and Martha laughed in return. Then Ma looked up, saw who it was I was laughing with. It was sheer pleasure watching the blood drain from my mother’s face. Ashen she was, ashen.

‘Hello Connie,’ Martha said, soft and clear.

‘Well, if it isn’t Martha Cassidy,’ Ma said, with the utmost disdain in her voice. Even for her it was a pretty low, sarcastic tone. I was embarrassed for Martha, but also for myself, for it must have been plain as day that in all these years nothing much had changed with me: I was still living under my mother’s thumb. In fact I was sure I could see in Martha’s face something of the look I’d seen on all my friend’s faces, on the face of every girl I’d ever been out with since. The look that said: Norman Bates is alive and well and living in Castlemoyne.

She swept her fingers through her hair. Oh that soft, cold, wavy hair… the bright eyes… the pale skin… the full, pillowy lips…

‘How have you both been?’ she said. Ma was just about to reply with something cutting, haughty. I could feel it coiling round her brain, dipping down into her sack of bile for some relish, working its back legs into the ground, ready to burst out of her mouth, but before it did it was I who answered this apparition on the doorstep of our shop:

‘Everything’s grand, Martha. We’ve been very well.’

‘I heard about your father, Michael.’ I nodded at this, and out of the corner of my eye saw Ma retreating behind me, sort of sadly. When we were alone Martha made a face, her eyes following Ma as she made her way upstairs with my father’s suits.

‘God, I remember the band practices up there!’

‘Do you, Martha?’

‘And her banging on the ceiling at us to be quiet!’

‘There by the grace of God, says you,’ I said, before I knew it. Of course, had we got hitched, as had been the plan all those years ago, there’d have been no chance in hell Martha would have ended up living above and working in the shop. But, standing there, seeing me for the first time in an age, she was polite enough not to question the daftness of what I’d just said.

‘I see the hair’s the same.’

‘Aye. Dirty blonde,’ I said, and she laughed.

‘It’s good to see you, Michael.’ And suddenly seventeen years fell away and we were back to the comfort and effortlessness of each other’s company. We arranged to meet that evening and already my mind was ticking over about what I’d wear, how I’d smell, like some lovesick puppy. I could hear movement again upstairs, the sound of pacing, followed by an impatient shoe-tapping sound on the wooden floor of the landing. Martha heard it too and I could see she wanted to get out before Ma returned.

‘Right then,’ she said, ‘by the bog road at seven.’ Then Ma’s voice echoed down the stairs, all polished and pointed:

‘An awful busy day I reckon it’s going to turn out to be, Son. And a big trip to the Cash and Carry we need to be making, too.’

‘We’ll be grand, Ma,’ I shouted, and waved to Martha as she left. I could hear Ma move to the window, probably so as to watch Martha (with middling-to-strong hatred, no doubt) as she walked away from the shop. When she came down Ma seemed sniffy, busied herself with the newspapers.

‘She’s brave, Ma,’ I said.

‘Who’s brave?’

‘Martha,’ I said.

‘How d’you make that out?’

‘To have come back here after all this time.’

’Tie back your hair will you, Michael?’ she said, as if she sensed already that she was losing her grip on me with Martha’s return, and I, feeling bizarrely sorry for her - and for the loss of that grip - tied back my hair as she requested.

*

Martha stood on the highest hill. The evening was fine, the sun fat and low in the sky. Before us the bog simmered. Everywhere bees and flies swirled about plants that had been growing there for as long as I could remember: foxtail, vetch, purple moor grass, bog-cotton, tormentil, deer sedge, bog-asphodel, bindweed, ling, sundew. The land below us was covered in lush-looking crops and the haze of them breathing filled the air. The rushes shook by the stream behind us. The gorse throbbed with light. Out on the heather I’d lain a flask of tea, the leftovers of Coco’s scraps (for the foxes), and my cigarettes. I lay back and watched the fleet bog wind blow through Martha’s hair, as if pulling it up and out by invisible marionette strings as she leapt from rock to rock. It could have been twenty years ago; it was like no time had passed at all, as if it had been breeched somehow, folded back on, by this tryst at the top of the bog, like those we had had many years before.

‘Lady’s Brae, Devlin’s, Pat May’s, Daly’s, Keady, and over there - Dundalk, Dundalk bay…

‘That’s cheating,’ I shouted, as she was naming places that could not be seen with the naked eye.

‘Fermanagh, Loughill, Mass hill, Shercock, Shancoduff, Ballybay - Cassidy’s and McDaid’s.

‘What’s the biggest hill?’

‘Mass hill.’

‘Who owns the blue sheep?’

‘Henrys.’

She plucked a stem of bog-cotton and said she’d missed the bog flowers. I couldn’t believe how much she’d remembered. Once I’d have won this game we were playing of naming places that could be seen from the bog (which divided McDaid’s land from Cassidys’) but it seemed the place names had stayed more alive in Martha’s memory than in my own, and me living all this time beside them.

‘It’s the details help you hang on to a place, Michael, when you’re away as long as me,’ Martha said.

She had wanted to see the spot where once we would have our chats, our ‘private liaisons’. And I agreed to show her my foxes. After an hour or so, it was clear there would be no detail of our history here together that she would leave untouched. To deflect, I asked her about herself, how life had been in America, but she was vague about it, said her friends had helped her and that she’d ended up in some weird town in California (near Roswell) where she’d had some brainwave-slash-epiphany thing which had launched her forward. The details of this she was not talkative about. I presumed it was only as she didn’t want to be yammering on all the time about how successful she was. Martha had always been a most modest person.

‘Where was it you did it, Michael?’ she said then, as I sort of knew she would, eventually, and I felt my bones chill. I looked at her and knew from the wide earnest eyes of her exactly what she meant.

‘Over there,’ I said, and pointed to a flat stretch of lichen, close to the stream. I was sort of annoyed she’d brought the matter up. I wanted to ask did she want to erect a fucking plaque there or what but of course I didn’t. She turned away.

‘You were a god, Michael. Do you know that?’ she said, her back to me.

‘A wha’?’ I said, mock-incredulously.

‘You heard. Remember you drove into that gig on a motorbike?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. And I started thinking again of our days in the band.

‘Where was that?’

‘Riverside Inn,’ I replied.

‘That’s it. You see, you’ve not forgotten. Like fucking Kurt Cobain, you were, remember? You were so…’ Martha didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. I knew what she meant.

‘Things change, Martha,’ I said. ‘After Eugene…I couldn’t let Ma down…she was…well, she was a bloody mess after it all.’

‘You tried to kill yourself, Michael. And I totally blame her.’ To this, I said the words: it wasn’t because of Ma at all…well, I mouthed them, without volume, because I was nervous, had felt I was hitherto coming across like I suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome so I held back, possibly on the one thing I should have said outright to her. I realised that in all the years we’d been apart she still did not know why I’d come up to the bog that day. She’d thought it was to do with my mother’s usual prodding and poking. I saw, too, that Martha still had the old confidence in me; still saw in me that ‘god’, as she put it. So how could I tell her I’d come up here like a ninny, missing my dead brother, pulled this way and that by my mother’s attempts to wreck my life as she had Eugene’s, stuck between love and guilt and sick with the indecision, at once paralysed and overwhelmed, and taken a blade to my own arms - because of her, because she was going to leave me, here, alone, in this closed and sodden tomb of a county.

*

That night I arrived home to find Ma had bolted the door. I’d had a few jars with Martha in town and had walked her back on the balmy night to Josie’s, her aunt’s place. (In the pub, we’d bumped into a few old faces, including Noel, who ran his father’s butchers on High Street. He’d drummed with us for a while. Everyone was glad to see us. In fact, the whole evening had been rather wonderful. And I was closer to feeling like a god this first night with Martha than I’d felt in a long time.)

‘Open the door, Ma,’ I shouted up at the window. No sound. Then the curtains were wrenched back and I could see her staring down at me, glasses on, chocolate-brown hairnet pinned to her head, no doubt to protect for Coco Conway those grey-golden Meryl Streep-ish locks of hers.

‘Come on, Ma. Open the door,’ I shouted. I could hear her footsteps then, heavy on the stairs, and eventually she unlocked the door making a big ceremonious deal out of the whole lot - the bolts, the mortice lock - and opened it, slightly, with the chain still on, and looked straight at me, her own and only living son:

‘Who is it?’ she said.

‘Jesus fuck, you know it’s me, Ma! You just looked down at me from the window.’ And then this long, black shotgun was being pointed at me, and I screamed. As soon as she pulled back I burst clean through the door, breaking the chain. When I stumbled in, Ma was up against the stairs, pointing the yoke straight at me. I honestly thought she would fire. I could see something dark and cruel in her. In all the years we’d been cooped up in this house together (which was bad enough after Eugene and worse after my father died) I’d never directly encountered this look but I had felt it. In every sarcastic comment, in the way she’d no tenderness for me, not at any time nor in any situation, in how she would mock the music I listened to and denounce my fox-feeding to the worst animal-haters that would come into the shop. Now, in the half-dark of the room, I saw her for real, sort of maskless. I saw with alcohol-derived clarity that there was something caught, trapped between us, that was almost creaturish, like an albatross - weighed down and entangled in net: it was blame. I fucking knew it, I said to myself, as she stood there in her long white nightdress that was shamefully flimsy and bare feet with the rough-skinned toes all painted up in a brash persimmon-coloured nail varnish, her eyes ablaze and narrow like a snake’s, or a fox about to pounce on a rat. She blamed me for Eugene. (I had always the sense that because I was in a band she thought it must have been me who’d dragged Eugene into the scene he was in. But he was well capable of finding his own trouble.)

‘You were out with that one,’ she said.

‘Who’s that one?’

‘That hussy. The Cassidy one.’

‘Don’t talk about her like that,’ I said, quite viciously, near enough forgetting about the gun, though, like I said, I’d had a few jars. I pulled back then, just to be on the safe side. ‘Put. The gun. Down. Ma. For fuck’s sake.’

‘She was never any good.’

I let out a big sigh, went to the door, saying I’d sleep in the barn as I couldn’t stand to listen to her any more, nor be in the same house with someone pointing a gun at me.

‘Come back, Michael,’ she said, seeing me go to leave. When I stopped, she went to the cupboard under the stairs, lodged the gun inside, covered it with a few coats and closed the door.

‘Pretty bloody handy with that gun aren’t you, Ma?’

‘Never know what scum’d be calling these nights,’ she said. ‘And besides, wouldn’t a mother need a gun with a son like you comes in stocious drunk with the big foul breath on him?’ Well, I couldn’t resist. It was like those articles I’d read in the shop when I was bored, which was most days, about people in northern England or southern America who supposedly had ‘out of body experiences.’. That’s what it felt like as I lunged at my own mother and let out an enormous stinky breath directly into her face. She screwed up her eyes and mouth with the repugnancy of it, turned away.

‘Oh, this is what she’s done to you. What she’s always done to you. Makes you belligerent. That’s what it is.’

‘It’s not belligerence! It’s fucking freedom. That’s what she gives me, Ma. Freedom to be myself. Li-ber-ty!’

‘Liberty!’ Ma said, mockingly, and stood there shaking her head, a crafty smile spreading across her face. I was annoyed that she could come so quickly back from the disgusting thing I’d just done to her. I think I would have halted in my tracks, thrown myself down at her feet, begging her forgiveness had she, say, started to cry. But no, she’d gotten a taste for a row and was going to stand her ground, and she did, and she looked just like she did in the poster on the wall by the shop door, and it was then I realised she fucking loved it, the drama, the operatic proportions of things, the rows between us.

‘Come on, Ma, let’s go to bed,’ I said, afraid for the thing to get out of hand and all too aware that both of us had easy access to a gun.

‘I’ve heard a few things about Martha Cassidy and her fabulous singing career. Oh, I’ve heard plenty.’

‘Like what have you heard? And from whom? The biddies round this way? They’d make muck of a saint,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t a biddy who told me,’ Ma said.

‘Who told you?’

‘Never you fucking mind who told me.’

‘Don’t swear, Ma, it doesn’t suit you. Told you what?’

‘Just how your precious Martha Cassidy’s been making a living over there, and it’s not by singing. It’s by lying on her back, best way she knows how.’ I looked at my mother, at her mouth all foamy and thin and twisted, and all the horrific stories I would read in the newspapers each day came suddenly into my mind, instantly metamorphosed as stories with me and Ma in the starring roles: Son bludgeons own mother to death in row; ‘Meryl Streep’ mowed down in Castlemoyne; Son of woman-who-ruined-his-relationship-with-the-love-of-his-life-and-caused-her-firstborn-son-to-stop-taking-his-insulin-in-order-to-get-the-fuck-away-from-her turns nasty and shoots his mother’s head clean off. All this zipped through my brain (along with the words Ma had just said about Martha earning her keep in a supine position), as the two of us stood there, simmering with rage in the alcohol-scented room, and way way way back towards my spinal cortex a little thought started up, that just maybe my mother was right (about Martha). This was the terrible, insidious hold Ma had on me: that even when she was spiteful and wicked, a part of me thought she was right.

I could hear her wandering around upstairs. She had the radio on and was pottering about, probably working herself up into a tizzy (as she was prone to do), probably coming on all Elsa Lanchester and launching into Out Damn Spot. Why is it you like that speech, I asked her once and she said it was because she could relate to her, Lady Macbeth. Well, just let her fucking sleepwalk, I said to myself. Ever since my father died it was me who had to watch out for her so she wouldn’t be getting upset and go sleepwalking into the bog behind the house, like she did a few times, after Eugene’s death especially, and went spraining her ankle once with it, too. So I went to the door and undid all the bolts in the hope that tonight she would go out and sleepwalk. I’d a good mind, too, to empty all her Clonazepam and bottles of sal volatile down the sink. I was in such a mood I was inclined to lure her up to the bog myself.

Instead, I went to the long sideboard that housed my stereo and old LPs and took out my favourite album. It felt damp and dusty in my hands. I removed the vinyl from the Nevermind sleeve: between the two hovered the mildew-y, tobacco-y, vaguely semen-y smell of my youth. I placed the needle on ‘Something in the Way’. I turned the volume up, loud, then louder still. I jumped onto the sofa and violently thrummed my air-guitar, louder in my mind than Kurt Cobain had ever played it and sang directly up to the ceiling so she could hear. I had not forgotten the words, which had quartered themselves somewhere in my DNA, like a long-abandoned prayer:

Underneath the bridge

the tarp has sprung a leak

the animals I’ve trapped

have all become my pets

When the song was done, I flung myself down onto the sofa to catch my breath. I lit up a cigarette, rested my two feet on the coffee table (something Ma hated me doing), and started to laugh. Between jumping around to the song, meeting Martha and having a good night out, I was beginning at last to feel more in the world than out of it. I was all sweaty and stinking from the jumping and air-guitaring so I took off my jacket and shirt. And immediately I was hurled back seventeen years, as my eyes followed the curling paths, first on my left arm, then on my right, of the long, deep, milk-white scars.

*

The next day, Ma had me plagued in the shop, giving me this order and that return for the Cash and Carry. I’d been sneezing all morning but Ma was pretending the whole episode of the night before hadn’t happened.

‘Keep some of this chocolate in the fridge, nice and cool it is then. Always the mark of a sophisticated shop when you can get a cold Turkish Delight,’ she said, sort of distant and falsely chipper, as if I was not her son, but a sales rep. or customer. But I wouldn’t let her off with her aloofness; I was determined to cheer her up.

‘See Ma, you’re a hostess type of woman.’

‘I am not. But I might have been a hostess type of woman,’ she replied, ‘if I’d gone to the Abbey, who knows.’ This was ‘the great tragedy’ in our family, the one, at least, that was allowed to be spoken of. That Ma had turned down the Abbey Theatre when they’d asked her to join them due to the pressure of her own mother. Ma always told this story without any words of regret, claming her mother had been right. Though the regret was nonetheless palpable. It may not have contained a single word of regret but the way Ma would tell the story, it had the delivery of Tragedy in which she became St Joan, and so it was for others, her family mostly (of which I was now the last), to observe the terrible wrong that had been done to poor Constance.

‘A family of entertainers we all were,’ I joked, ever so slightly hinting at my own lost career, but Ma did not hear this in my voice. Instead, she took my surface-joviality as permission to hightail it back to the past, once more to Eugene:

‘When he was younger, he used to like sneaking into the shop, stealing away with the sweets.’

‘That was me,’ I said.

‘No. It was Eugene.’

‘No, Ma, it was me used steal the sweets. You have it mixed up. Eugene couldn’t have sweets on account of…’ I stopped short because I could see what she was doing. Changing the past so Eugene would emerge the perfect dead son. Just as she had whitewashed the events that had led up to his death.

‘No. That’s it. He couldn’t. But I used to catch him in here all the same.’

‘That’s because he was at the till,’ I replied.

‘Shut the fecking hell up,’ she said.

‘He was never after the sweets, Ma. But he was after stealing money and you know it, too. I’ll say no more, Ma, but get it right.’ By now she had her hands over her ears.

‘No, you get it right. Eugene had the big brains that would take him to Dublin to Trinity College to be a doctor with the best Leaving Certificate results a boy could get in the whole of Ireland, and coming out of this wee dot on the map of the world. MOYNE BOY WONDER, the papers said, knocked down in his prime by a weakness in his blood. That’s it, Michael, and that’s all it is with Eugene.’ I wanted to vigorously argue this vigorously but I hadn’t the energy or courage so I let it go.

We spent the morning stacking and pricing tins in silence. People came and went, and we kept the radio on loud so no one would notice we weren’t speaking. After lunch I thought I could hear the far-off purr of an engine, increasing in power as it came close to the shop. Eventually, the doorbell rang and Martha came in, head to toe in bike leathers, a glossy black bike helmet hanging out of her hand. She looked unbelievable.

‘Connie,’ she said, greeting my mother, who grunted a reply and went to tear the plastic off a new delivery.

‘I found your motorbike, Michael. The Norton,’ Martha said. ‘I was wondering if you’d like to give her a test run.’ I felt a combination of adrenalin and lust course through my veins and was unbuttoning my shop-coat before I knew it.

‘Sure, look at the cut of him. Hasn’t he a cold from being out half of the night?’ Ma said.

‘We won’t be long,’ Martha said.

‘I’ll get you a jumper,’ Ma said, and was almost off to get it and me letting her when I saw the horror at that sentence on Martha’s face.

‘A jumper? Don’t be getting me a jumper. My jacket’s fine, sure,’ I said. I took off the shop-coat, threw it on the counter, took my jacket off the coat-hanger and put it on. ‘I won’t be long, Ma. I just want to see the bike again, that’s all, ‘ I said. To which Martha added, ‘aren’t we only going for the wee ride, Connie,’ and she winked at me in quite an alarming, exciting way, and I turned and saw that Ma was not disgusted by this, but sad, and so help me I felt sorry for her. Then Ma had to go and spoil even my ridiculous pity:

‘Tell me this, Martha.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘How is it, if you’re so big in America, no one’s heard of you here? You’ve never been on the radio, or in the Irish Times. Northern Star is the only place I’ve ever seen you. And sure Josie could say anything to them and they’d print it. Josie’s always bigging you up. Ever since your father, she…’ and then Ma stopped short. Martha did not look happy.

‘”Ever since your father” what, Connie?’ Martha said. I tried to sort of push Martha out the door then but she was determined to get to the bottom of Ma’s dig.

‘Ma meant nothing.’

‘Oh yes she did.’

Martha probably didn’t know it but this is what Ma had been waiting for. Ma would always want to be led up to the big dramatic speech (the précis was never her forte; she needed expansion, brewing room for venom). It was her modus operandi. I should know. And sure enough, Martha had pressed the right button and Big Dramatic Speech was delivered: ‘I meant, when he was caught mixing the milk with the water, and the dairies were all closed. Do you remember that, Michael? Of course we know now it was because he was thick with them fellas with their big politics and bigger drug rings. A lot of people lost their jobs over that scam; lots of retailers got caught out by it, too. Do you not remember, Michael, when we were shocked to hear the likes of them fellas would even think of bleeding money from a clapped-out Monaghan dairy when they could be at your glamorous, lucrative crimes like, I don’t know, robbing banks or post offices.’

‘You fucking bitch,’ Martha said.

‘Didn’t I always say she had a foul mouth?’ Ma said, looking at me. I squared up to Ma and made a ZIP IT gesture to my own mouth. Then Martha burst across me, her years in America ringing out in the cadences of every sentence:

‘I bet you were glad to see the back of me, Connie, eh? And you know what? I still didn’t get an explanation. What reason do you have for stopping Michael and me marrying that time, huh? You’d think you’d have backed off by now. Because didn’t he have to go and pay a heavy price for it, and hasn’t he paid up big time, Connie?’

‘He’s got a good life,’ Ma said.

‘Eugene had a good life too and looked what happened to him! Seems the action in this house is so fucking spectacular all the men can’t wait to be getting away from it! And now we’re on that subject, I’m sure you know about Michael’s little heart-to-heart with Eugene at the hospital that time. I’m sure by now Michael has told you all about it…’and then she looked at me, at my big vacant face. She looked from me to Ma. It must have been obvious I’d not told Ma a single word of my last conversation with Eugene.

‘No more, Martha!’ I said.

‘Whist, will you, Michael,’ Ma said, as if I wasn’t even in the room.

‘So you listen to me,’ Martha continued, ‘because me and him are going on that bike right now and we’re going to tear up this fucking road, do you hear?’ Ma backed off. I grabbed Martha, pulled her out of the shop. Outside, I revved up the Norton for the first time in nearly two decades, and sped off with Martha sitting behind me, her arms wrapped tightly around my waist.

*

The last time I’d seen the Norton was the summer of 1993. It was the last night Martha and I were a couple; the night she said it was her or Ma and that she believed I would never get up from under my mother’s feet, and that after Eugene died, Ma had me good and proper and it was crucial I get away from her (‘cut the fucking umbilical cord’ were Martha’s exact words); the night she said she would be leaving for America, leaving the band, leaving Castlemoyne, and that if I wanted her I should go with her; the night I ran like a frightened little girl into the bleak bog, running for home. And so the bike stayed all these years at Josie’s. Because I’d not had the courage to go back for it. Not after the split with Martha, and not after I’d split open my two arms and near enough emptied them of all life up on the bog. I was glad to be on that bike again. I was ecstatic. But despite Martha’s hair blowing forward into my face and the black softness of it, I could not get Ma and her sad, defeated look in the shop out of my mind. I dropped Martha off at Josie’s and rode as if I’d never been off that bike - straight for home. I reckoned then that I was a hopeless case, and was probably much worse than Norman Bates, who at least had madness as an excuse, whereas mine was a warped, utterly misplaced and unrelenting sense of filial fucking duty.

*

There’s a picture in Ma’s room of me and Eugene as kids. She’s in the middle, sitting in a chair in the garden. He’s sort of behind her, like he’s in charge or something, and I’m standing beside her, chest out, grinning, my legs apart like John Wayne. Eugene is holding a turquoise-coloured ball. The way he holds the ball always would pull me into that photo. Up to his chest, firmly, as if he’d been fully involved in his game of ball-playing before being called to sit for the photo, probably by my father. Most kids would have let that ball go, run off to the new adventure of having their picture taken, but Eugene was never like most kids. He brings the ball. It’s his thing. The call to the photo has interrupted him. He is saying, as he stands there behind my mother, his already manly hand around the ball, that he is a private person with his own world, that he is not available. I look different. Though only a year younger, I don’t have that sense of purpose, of self-possession, of interest in anything other than smiling stupidly at the camera. Three or four years after the photo is taken, Eugene is diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. And everyone says it was then we sort of lost him. First, he would retreat into his books, then show up late for the shots (in the days of hypodermic-administered insulin) that my mother would give him, and when he was older he’d stay out with his glue-sniffing friends in the town (a crowd worse even than the grunge-heads I knew, who at least were making music, creating stuff). But I think differently. In the photo I can see it: the distance from us has already started. I can see it in the way he holds that ball; he’s apart, chosen his own company. And I sometimes wonder how my mother and father could not have noticed this earlier about their strange but beautiful boy, that he was always playing his own game, and would never let anyone else in.

*

It was Josie’s birthday. She was sixty-five. Martha said that this was why she had come home: to do something nice for her aunt, who had looked after her all those years when her father was busy with his ‘politics’ (since the scandal with the dairy he had moved to Dundalk and Martha had seen little of him). Martha invited me to the bash which, she apologised, was to consist of a séance of some kind followed by drinks and snacks al fresco. She said she thought I might think the affair too hokey. I didn’t think it too hokey at all. It wasn’t as if I’d been to anything much that wasn’t hokey in about seventeen years. Josie was glad to see me. I had bumped into her a few times in town, always making my excuses, rushing off somewhere. In seventeen years we’d not had a proper conversation, and I never once asked her how Martha was doing, though I’d read all the features about Martha’s singing career in the Northern Star. Now, sitting out on the long lawn in front of Josie’s cottage, the sky’s blueness fading to the grey bruised colour of early moonlight, I turned and saw Josie, Coco Conway, the large bleach-blonde medium, a few others, all gathered round the table in Josie’s front room, and I was sorry I’d not been friendlier all those years.

Martha and I were sipping slowly at our glasses of wine, our seats placed before a crest of blue hydrangeas and southernwood while we listened in to the séance. (It sounded like a lot of fun that séance and I half wondered if I should go in myself and ask for Eugene to be ‘got in touch with’ so I could tell him what a cunt I thought he was for doing what he did.) It felt fine to be out in the moonlight with Martha. I looked at her sitting in her deckchair, her legs crossed, her top leg swinging slowly back and forth, so that when it was forth it was nicely inclined towards me. Sometimes she would look up at the sky, trying to make out the constellations, and this would give me occasion to consider the situation. For I kept having to remind myself that no matter what strange notions I had about time, about not being able to feel correctly its passage, knowing other people could feel time more correctly, more conventionally somehow, but that I could not, seventeen years had actually passed since we’d been ‘a couple’. Because I was tempted to believe that what had really passed was just one continuous day. This one day where I open my eyes in the morning, get up, brush my teeth, work, eat, go to bed, sleep - with her not there. And as I more or less did that every day for seventeen years, it did not feel like 17 x 365 days, it felt like one day. Which is why I could not fully feel that it was over between us. Because the thing that had separated us, time, I was not able to experience. Of course, I kept such thoughts to myself.

‘This place you said you went to in California, where you had your awakening thing, what did you say it was named after?’

‘A TV quiz-show.’

‘Jesus. Strange name that, Truth or Consequences.’

‘It is, I suppose.’

‘Who wouldn’t have an epiphany in a town with a name like that?’

‘It has these lithium-rich waters. Maybe that’s what did it. The lithium,’ she said. I smiled at that, thinking of ‘Lithium’, the Nirvana song we’d both loved once.

‘Roswell is due east, close to the Mexican border,’ she said. ‘Now that’s a really interesting place. Still dining out on the whole alien thing, of course, and why not? People move there for the dry air. It’s good for the bones. Unlike the Monaghan damp which makes cripples of everyone. Josie’s destroyed with arthritis.’

‘What else do you remember about life here,’ I asked, sort of hoping she might think of the old days, or else maybe remind me again what a ‘god’ she thought I was.

‘I remember our gigs,’ she replied. I nodded. ‘I remember Dalty O’Hanlon sleeping in a coffin, jumping off the balcony of the Adelphi Cinema, thought he was a vampire. At A Fistful of Dollars and wearing a cape.’

‘He broke his legs doing it,’ I said.

‘Castlemoyne was like the Wild West back then,’ Martha said.

‘Remember Dinger?’

‘Dinger Ward?’ As she tried to put a face to the name, I got up and did an impersonation of Dinger Ward’s walk, which was like that of a tight-arsed penguin.

‘He walked with his fists clenched, like this.’

‘Just in case?’

‘Just in case.’

‘They were violent times,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘Hard young men with no jobs on the borderlands. That’s what it was, Martha.’

‘I thought there’d be better people, better men. You know, not long after us, me and men didn’t work out, Michael.’

‘There must have been someone,’ I said. Martha shook her head. And just as things were starting to get interesting, the séance party broke up. I could hear raised voices. I glanced back at the house and saw Josie and Coco on the porch but ignored them as the moment between Martha and me was far too electric to disturb.

‘Mother of Jesus,’ Coco said, rushing towards us. Dogs were barking from the yards of nearby farms so eventually I stood up to see what all the commotion was about.

‘By the roads, look,’ Josie said, pointing to the lane. A female figure was walking towards us with her arms out. It was a startling and unsettling sight, for the woman was completely naked. Across her legs were wisps of grass, bracken, cuds of the thick black mud of the bog. Her figure was strong and full, her breasts heavy, the nipples dark.

‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus,’ I said, upon recognition.

‘Oh dear Christ,’ Martha said, upon recognition.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Josie said, as the figure of my mother came towards us.

‘Is that…is that…’ Coco asked, his jaw dropping further and further so that if he had finished that sentence and said my mother’s actual name I would have punched him.

‘Get some slippers for Christ’s sake,’ Josie said, ‘and some clothes. Coco! Stop gawping will ya and get Connie some slippers and a blanket!’ Coco hurried to the house. Martha looked at me, nodding. I knew what she was thinking: there she goes again, Constance McDaid and her marvellous acting, about to hijack the show, wreck the party she has not even been invited to. This was the kind of thing Martha had often thought, and said, about my mother.

‘Did you ever see such a thing in your entire life?’ Josie said, with utmost compassion in her voice.

‘She should get an Oscar for this performance,’ Martha said, with none.

‘She’s sleepwalking. Usually only does it when someone dies, or she gets nervous,’ I said. I went to my mother, wrapped my jacket around her. She shrugged it off.

‘Wake up, Ma. You’re out. At Josie’s. It’s her birthday,’ I said.

‘I’m looking for my son,’ Ma said, plaintively, so that I wanted to hug her, tell her everything would be fine.

‘Here I am, Ma. Come on now and we’ll go home.’ But then she looked at me with a great sourness in her face.

‘No,’ she said, ‘my son Eugene.’ Her words stung me with a scorpion-like precision, not least because they had been heard by all present.

‘Come on,’ Josie said, ‘I’ll drive you both home.’ I turned to explain to Martha, to let her know that I’d to deal with this, bring Ma home, give her her pills (get some clothes on her at least), and to communicate that I was sorry to leave the wonderful reminiscing we were having, but Martha had left already, was about to enter the house, her head bowed, evidently no longer prepared to give my mother any more of her time, probably as she considered Ma had taken up enough of it. As I watched her go in, more slumped, more the Martha who had lived here before, unfree, smaller than the apparition who had entered the shop a week or so before, I knew then that I’d lost her. For the second time.

Now it was Ma who was sneezing and going round the place all sheepish. I had still not worked out what had caused her to go so far with the sleepwalking, or why she’d had no clothes on her at all, except that with the warmth of the night she had probably gone to bed without them. These were not thoughts I wanted to dwell on. Anyway, I didn’t tell her where I was going. ‘A fag break,’ I said and she nodded. When I got to the bog road, Martha was waiting, all zipped up in her close-fitting jacket. As we walked, both a little breathless, I sensed a tension between us. Eventually she came out with it: ‘I changed my booking, Michael. I’m heading back Friday.’

‘Right,’ I said, coolly. I could straight away feel myself shutting down a little inside (due to the thought of returning to that Norman Bates-type creature). But I’d no claim on Martha, no claim on her whatsoever. ‘You should go back,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing for you here now.’ Then we walked quietly up to the bog. What we saw when we got there knocked all thoughts of Martha leaving out of my head. For lying in a great awful heap by the rock where we would sit, were three, four dead foxes. I recognised them immediately as the mother and her cubs that I’d been feeding. The sight of them there, bullet-riddled, was something to behold. They lay slack-jawed, their eyes closed, side by side, as if they’d clung to each other in their final minutes.

‘What. The. Fuck.’

‘Oh, it’s awful!’ Martha said. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ I could think of several people, their faces immediately collapsing in my mind into a single face, a single set of cruel dead eyes peering down the barrel of a gun.

‘Oh God!’ I kept repeating. ‘They’re supposed to get permission. The gun clubs. This side of the border alone there’s Castlemoyne, Tullycorbe, Castleshane…’

‘Gun clubs?’

‘Or Jack Daly, worried about his bloody sheep.’ As soon as I said Daly’s name it was he I saw (in my mind) shooting the foxes. ‘Bastard! He’s been saying he wasn’t happy I’d been feeding them up here. I’ll fucking kill him!’ I was about to run down to Daly’s cabin when Martha held me back by the arm. Just her touch seemed to make everything melt inside me and so help me I started to cry.

‘Oh, Michael. Don’t make it worse.’

‘I loved them, Martha.’

‘There’ll be no sympathy for you here, Michael. Not with foxes.’

‘Aren’t you the only one ever understood me here?’

‘How do you live in such a place? You, who’s so sensitive, the sweetest man. How do you live with these people who don’t, won’t, understand you? Who would kill your foxes, knowing they were yours?’

‘It was probably the gun club.’

‘It was probably your mother, Michael!’

‘She wouldn’t.’

‘She fucking would. Oh, when will you wake up? Eugene couldn’t stand her. Everyone bloody knows he stopped taking his insulin on purpose except her.’ Then I turned from her, my head (and heart) reeling, and scooped up the plump bodies. I brought the fox and her cubs to a small bog pool, thick with duckweed, and buried them in the dank and stagnant water, covered the mass of fur with stones. As I placed the last stone on the pile, Martha sighed and went and sat on the long rock. After it was done, I wiped my hands in moss and lit up a cigarette. Martha was looking out at the land below, and I could tell by the way she looked, with a strange blend of love and disgust and rage, that when she would leave here she would never return.

‘Your mother will be wondering where you’ve got to, Michael,’ she said. I got the sarcasm.

‘Come on, we better go,’ I said.

‘Look, I haven’t been entirely honest with you,’ she said.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘I didn’t just come home for Josie. I thought, maybe, here, I could… Josie’s been exaggerating my success, is what I mean, Michael. At singing. I did a few good gigs, got good reviews. But you see…’ and I noticed she seemed again as she had the night before, smaller, less angelic.

‘You see, Michael, that town I was in… the epiphany thing… I’d been at music for years, not getting anywhere. And then I was invited to do a gig in this hotel, and when I got there, about two people showed and the gig was cancelled. But it was there, I suddenly realised something. That it was all a sort of con. Ambition. Getting where? Where’s the top? Where is it? And that’s the moment I started to relax. To sleep properly. A lot of the cares I’d had before just vanished, and I’d bathe in the healing waters they have there every morning. In 38 degree centigrade, lithium-rich water. I made friends there, too. One of these - we call her the Countess - has bought a bar. Not far from Truth or Consequences. Between there and Roswell. She wants it to be a music-orientated bar, a few alien dummies, maybe, but she wants me to run it. For a couple of years. I think you should run it with me. You’d be good at that, Michael. What do you say?’ Martha lay back on the rock, facing the sky. I wondered if I should mention the thing that Ma had hinted at, the rumours about how Martha had been earning her living (i.e. supinely) but suddenly I didn’t care one way or the other. ‘Michael,’ she said, ‘just think about it, OK?’

‘OK,’ I said. I saw in her eyes then that her life in the States had not been easy, and I felt pity for her. I could see, too, that maybe this Roswell bar thing was, as far as she was concerned anyway, her last shot at a vaguely interesting life.

‘Once I asked you to choose,’ she said, ‘between me and Connie. It was probably too much to ask, after Eugene, I see that now. So I won’t ask you to do that again. But this day, Michael, after all that has happened: your beautiful foxes, herself ruining the party, give me this day and not her, will you? Before I go back, huh?’ For a split-second I did actually think of getting back to the shop. Then my eye drew up on something lying in the grass. I kicked at it, picked it up: a two-inch, cinnamon-red, gold-rimmed cartridge shell. I brought the shell to my nose. The former liveliness of the foxes I had come to know and love haunted the cold, indicting smell of sulphur. I put the shell in my pocket and walked towards Martha who was lying back on the rock like some kind of terrific ancient sacrifice. I went to her, my face wet with tears, cupped my hands around her hair and she came towards me.

*

We were to leave the following week. Martha made all the arrangements. She changed her booking, made a new one for me. I spent three days sorting myself out with appropriate clothes, suncreams, US dollars; filled several rubbish bags with junk and in so doing revealed a bedroom that looked to have been the room of a child or teenager. (Posters of Bruce Lee, skateboard-themed wallpaper.) It felt enormously gratifying to take all that old stuff from walls and drawers and plunge it into rubbish bags. Also into the bags went my comics, my stash of Men Only magazines and all the touristic tat Ma and I had bought on our trips to Donegal, Cork and Kerry. (Including the framed photo of us outside Blarney Castle, where Ma had refused to trust the man responsible for holding visitors as they bent backwards to kiss the Blarney stone, saying she could smell alcohol off his breath and that he was bound to drop us all to our deaths down the unguarded opening, and a ruckus had broken out so they’d asked us to leave. As well as the watercolour from Letterfrack where, in a corner of that lonesome wilderness, we had bumped into the British MP, Robin Cook, the year before he died.) So by the end of my dumping session all that was left were my more modern clothes, a few books, CDs, select mementoes. My old life was over and my new life was about to begin. So why did I feel so confused? Was it because I had secretly (really secretly) loved these days in this house with my mother? The years of our sometimes-humorous bickering; watching rented films and bringing the two of us cocoa; blackberry-picking in September so she could make jam; meals on the first Sunday of the month in the Shercock Hotel and everyone knowing me and Ma, knowing she was once Meryl Streep and had a great talent and that I wasn’t so bad either. Hadn’t it secretly made me feel all sort of safe and warm inside? And what was this I was about to do anyway? Take a one-way flight to L fucking A. Not Boston or New York or Chicago, but LAX, California, to shack up with Martha in the desert. Thoughts of all of this new stuff jingled around my head like loose change. I started to sweat. Maybe, I should hang on, a day, two. I’d boasted (a lot) about the new life I was about to have with Martha and the plans we had to do music again (slight exaggeration) but still I sensed Ma did not believe me somehow. As if she could read my mind and see my conflictedness and understand it better than I could myself. Not once did she ask me to stay. And though I’d spent an entire day trying to get it out of her: was she sleepwalking or ‘acting’, was it her who killed my foxes or some other, I believed her when she said she was sleepwalking and that she’d never kill my foxes. She was my mother for god’s God’s sake, no matter what Martha thought of her.

We were both in the shop when Josie entered. I could tell something was wrong.

‘Martha’s gone, Michael,’ Josie said.

‘What do you mean “gone”?’

‘She didn’t wait. Went this morning. She asked me to give you this.’ I took the envelope. As I opened it I could feel the tension between Josie and my mother, once pals, once passionate participants in the local am-dram scene. Ma had said terrible things about Martha’s father, Josie’s brother, all those years ago, and Josie had not spoken to Ma since. And Ma had maintained the moral high ground on the subject, though this had been largely conceded since she had somnambulated without a gobbet of clothing (in front of several witnesses) across the bog to Josie’s.

‘Shop’s looking good, Connie,’ Josie said.

‘The work never ends, Josie,’ Ma said, and I returned to Martha’s letter, which was not strictly a letter, more a one-way ticket to LA with a Post-it note on top that read: only when you’re sure.

‘That girl’s not changed,’ Josie said. ‘As impulsive and flighty as ever.’ I put the envelope in my pocket, carried on refilling the crisp boxes. I was at once relieved and annoyed with Martha that she had read correctly my hesitancy.

‘So what did it say?’ Ma said, nodding away to Josie, both of them bug-eyed, trying to divine by my movements what Martha might have communicated to me. When I shook my head, Josie pressed her lips together and looked at Ma as if to apologise for her wayward niece and the effect she’d had on my life. On her way out, Josie turned and said:

‘Connie, guess what they’re putting on in the community centre this year?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The Jailbird.’

‘That’d be a bit dated now, wouldn’t it?’

‘I hear they’re looking for an actress to play Mrs Kelsey. You should give that group a call.’

‘My acting days are long gone, Josie.’

‘You were the finest Mrs Kelsey ever seen outside Dublin. They couldn’t judge you unless it was by professional standards, you know that. You should call that group.’

The bell rang out after Josie and a heavy silence followed between Ma and me. I knew she was embarrassed for me, but she needn’t have been. Martha had detected my uncertainty and was giving me a chance to be sure. That’s how I saw it anyway. To be sure I wanted to run a bar with her in the desert, a life I might come to hate soon enough. So before Ma had a chance to grill me about the letter, I said, ‘it’s a ticket. To America. One-way and open. She says I’m to use it when I feel like it.’

‘And do you feel like it?’

‘I do.’

‘Do you feel like it now?’

‘Ma,’ I said, exasperated, ‘show me that postcard brochure that came in, will you?’ And I could feel her step quietly, like a bird, towards the place where she kept the brochures and catalogues.

*

Days and weeks passed and I didn’t hear again from Martha. Meanwhile, I established a mobile shop, two fellas driving a van selling our goods up and down the housing estates of Castlemoyne and its environs. I put chairs outside so people could sit and eat what they’d bought in the shop. I placed the carousel of postcards by the door, took charge in a way I’d never done before. And Ma let me do it. I had a one-way ticket to LA hanging over her and I could have done anything I liked with that power. She didn’t resist, even seemed to enjoy letting me have the upper-hand. She never once asked me to massage her feet and I wore what I liked in the shop. When the biddies came in they nodded. They had respect for me. They spoke quietly to Ma and didn’t stay long, as if they were a little afraid of me. Coco would come in and nod so much I thought his head would drop off.

Autumn arrived, this time wet and damp. The junk from my room remained in the black bags. Though things had gone well (with the changes I had made) at first, I nonetheless began to think that Ma took no particular triumph from having (more or less) trounced Martha Cassidy. It was me who seemed happy, not Ma. In fact, she seemed less flirtatious with Coco, generally more distracted, a little slow and depressed in the manner she would be before she would sleepwalk, like they say the warning sign is of one who has epilepsy. One day, when we were in the shop, the rain pelting down outside, I could see Ma looking sort of dejected, a raggedy piece of paper in her hands.

‘Not that bad is it?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The weather.’

‘?’

‘The weath… look, what’s wrong with you, Ma? What’s with the bit of paper?’

‘Oh. Just the number for the community group.’

‘What community group?’ I said.

‘Group doing The Jailbird in the centre. Apparently they still haven’t found their Mrs Kelsey.’

‘Oh, is that it?’ I said, assuming she’d wanted to apply and hadn’t.

‘Give them a call,’ I said, and for a second or two her mood lifted. But the furrowed brow remained. She had the look of someone who had left something very important undone.

‘Michael,’ she said, then, ominously, sort of spitting it out, ‘time is dragging.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Well, the ticket, is what I mean. You’re still here.’

‘I know I am, Ma. Isn’t that what you wanted?’ And as I scanned her face I saw to my horror that maybe I was wrong, maybe she hadn’t wanted me to be at home with her at all.

‘Well, maybe you should have gone before, is what I meant.’

‘Before what?’ Now I was getting panicky, probably because I knew deep down that she was right. Wasn’t she always?

‘Aren’t we doing well now?’ I said, and she nodded.

‘Michael, I’ve something to tell you.’ She went to the door, closed it, pulled the shutter down, turned the sign to CLOSED. She stood suddenly taller than usual, her hands folding over in rapid ODS rinsing movements, and she was all breathy.

‘About the foxes.’ The mention of them hit me with force. I’d not gone up to our bog or thought of my foxes in weeks. I had only to think of them and I’d feel sick and my hands would shake.

‘What about them?’ I said, unable to hide the emotion rising up in my chest. I watched the colour drain from my mother’s face. Without replying, she turned and kept her back to me.

‘Ah you… don’t say you… you didn’t, Ma… did you…? don’t say it…’ and as if from nowhere I started to sob, deep hungry sobs, and from the rattling of her shoulders I could tell she was sobbing too.

‘I’m sorry, Michael. I’m so sorry. It was an awful business and I wasn’t in my right mind.’

‘Why are you telling me now for fuck’s sake, why now?’

‘Because I don’t want you to make a mistake.’

‘Mistake about what?’

‘Martha. America.’

‘Why Ma?! Why?! I loved them cubs, the fox. I loved them.’

‘How else was I going to get you up from under my feet, Michael, huh?’

‘Doing everything to keep me one minute and the next - everything to make me go! Make up your fucking mind will you, Ma?’

‘It was a drastic step, and one too far, but I was just trying to give you a little push,’ she said. I looked at her then, the paper trembling in her hand.

‘A little push?’ I said. She nodded. Straight away I took off my shop-coat (which, I am ashamed to say, I’d begun wearing of my own volition), and ran upstairs. I went to the place where I kept the envelope and saw I still had time on the ticket. I lay down on the bed, scoured the room for the few things I’d bring. I’d go as soon as possible, in the morning, for I felt now that everything was ruined with Ma and me. I could never travel around Ireland on the trains with the person who had killed my foxes (whether she was my mother or not).

The next morning I was ready to leave. I was tempted to go without saying a word. I looked around the living room, at the shelves with all her plays, books, trophies, my ancient stereo, then over towards the shop where I could hear her clicking away at the calculator. The shop door was open and I could see the poster, all leathery and swollen-looking in the soft morning light. I saw for the first time, I think, that Coco was right: she had a strong, haughty look, just like Meryl Streep, and an intensity, an immersiveness in her role that suddenly reminded me of Eugene (and his turquoise ball). She was talented. As he had been. As I had been. How had the entire talent quotient in one family gone down the toilet, I wondered? How had that happened? As I looked at her so poised and fierce and direct, I wondered if she could possibly have been lying about my foxes. I wasn’t sure she was capable of such an act. Not really. (And not my foxes.) I had every intention of leaving via the front of the house but I didn’t. I went into the shop. She was by now starting to get the coffee and sandwiches ready for the truckers who would be passing. The radio was off and I could tell she was deep in her thoughts. She looked up at me and smiled.

‘What time’s your bus, Son?’

‘Eight,’ I replied.

‘Well. Good luck. Here, have a few plums and sandwiches for the journey,’ and she took up a small paper bag that she had filled, rolled it down by the cuff and handed it to me.

‘Good-bye, Ma,’ I said, and I was about off when she called me back.

‘Michael?’

‘Yes, Ma?’

‘There’s something I want to ask you. Something Martha said when she was here. About what Eugene said to you in the hospital.’

‘It’s nothing. You don’t want to hear.’

‘Tell me, won’t you?’

‘You know.’

‘Tell me yourself, now you’re going. Please.’ Her voice sounded weak.

‘Ah, you do know. You do. It’s not like you always say, Ma. Eugene didn’t forget to take his insulin. He knew what would happen if he missed that shot. Eugene wasn’t ever going to be a doctor, Mam. It’s not what he wanted. Tell her it’s not for you, I said. But he couldn’t hurt you, he said. Couldn’t let you down with all you’d sacrificed. He was hanging round that crowd in the town, drinking the head off himself, and I worried because if he wasn’t careful he’d miss the insulin. He knew what would happen if he missed that shot. The kidneys would fail and he’d go blind. And it did happen. And he told me it was because he saw the rest of his life before him and none of it belonged to him. So he let it slip. Do you have any idea what it’s like not to own your own life, Ma? Well, I’ll tell you. All there is ahead of you is time, and for Eugene it was endless time, time and needles. He felt he had no life. And I knew he would do that one day.’ It felt good to tell her the last words Eugene had said to me. She had no clue, I think, just how much her own squashed dreams had shaped, and warped, her sons. No fucking clue. Until, maybe, she saw that I would not take my last chance out of Dodge.

‘Good cut on you that suit.’

‘I’ll send it back when I get settled.’

‘No need.’

‘Don’t want to be wearing a dead man’s suit, Ma. Only it’s a change. I’ll send it.’

‘Did Bucky Lawless cut your hair?’ I nodded.

‘Stylish it is.’

‘I’ll go out the house way.’

‘Good luck to you, Son.’

‘Goodbye, Ma,’ I said. I did not kiss her.

*

It was a dark, frosty morning as I walked to the bus stop. There was a long queue already formed. A few men in suits; some women, one in an ultramarine stewardess’ uniform; quite a few young men in twos, mostly with big duffle bags; a whole family (all of them quiet and downcast) with a ton of suitcases. Every man and his dog is getting out of Moyne, I thought to myself. Once the bus had left the towns and was onto the motorway, I gazed out the window at the bumpy Monaghan landscape. It looked just as it did in our postcards. Lots of sheep and cattle and big houses (though the postcards, naturally enough, missed all the houses I saw that were now empty, or for sale, or unfinished, some of them almost fully returned to nature) all surrounded by lush deep-green fields. And until we reached Louth, a scattering of lakes, some covered in a thick blue mist with swans on them. The hay in the fields was all still and sort of smug-looking from having been recently gathered and baled. The hay done, the farmers were now at the barley and it was short and blunt where it had been cut already. The land was busy with autumn activity and was full of harvesters and tractors. Some of the farmers I saw I knew. I felt a lump in my throat as I looked out at the morning light, all frail and black-tinged over the fields, and I tried to tell myself it would be the death of me that land (I knew well that Maguire in Kavanagh’s Great Hunger ends his days a ‘hungry fiend’ who ‘screams the apocalypse of clay’ and that if I were to remain I was destined to have much the same kind of half-buried existence; even Kavanagh himself had gotten out and he’d loved the place) and not to get too upset about leaving it, though tears rolled down my face nonetheless. As the bus approached Dublin airport, I felt a shift, a loosening (my breathing deepened), as if all of a sudden I could feel time and its passing, and those years with Ma in the house and shop, when I thought I’d be stuck forever in Moyne (and half wanting to be stuck there), were somehow laid to rest, and I felt ready for whatever lay ahead.

[ The Scattering (Seren Books) ]