In Too Deep (6 page)

A day of two dawns, the day when life's road split in two. Now, she had gone and followed her path and I was left behind to stray blindly along on mine. I found or made time to go and stand in my backyard for the better part of an hour, time that I chose to spend watching the sky, watching for the least shift, the most delicate slip of the light. But what does that say about me? The sun, moon and planets did their best to keep me entertained, of course, even if their tricks were all turned behind a wall-thick curtain of cumulus and stratum, but while the whole Syzygy business was undeniably impressive, at least as a notion, it spanned too brief a time to be in any way truly world-shaking. As much as I tend to feel like one sometimes, out of pace as I am with society in general, I am not an ancient. I am me, just one of the innumerable tiny shards of pain stuck on a spinning speck of dust, trying in the only way I know how to exist, and like everyone else, I spend my days and nights denying my insignificance, struggling to think up some vague crumb of worth in order to justify every move I make, every fantastic thought I have. That's what living has become, at least in my corner of the world.

Too quickly, the darkness fell away and the day was bright again. The world was once more content to turn its face away from the whispers of magic and to settle instead for the stoicism of bill-paying and child-bearing, that state where equilibrium is everything and highlights are small and, generally, within reach; highlights such as the swirling beauty of a slow dance in a big room or the pure satisfaction of a steak dinner. If joy and misery are opposite sides of the scale, balance is to be found with the banal. Contentment really is worth its weight in gold.

Like Mel, I found myself free to go where I wanted and to follow my heart's desires. What I chose to do was to go back inside and to sit and eat the sandwich I'd earlier made and then abandoned. The bacon would be cold by now, the fat beginning to congeal. Which, actually, was just how I like it.

In the old days, every village in the country had a man like Paudie O'Reilly in their midst. Standing at just a shade under six feet in height and with the heavy, rounded shoulders of someone well versed in the distribution of casual violence, he was a brutal sort, all John Wayne swagger but without any of the dignity, boorish in everything he did and said.

Before the years slowed his bones, when his tight winding would unravel with the least provocation and his aura of menace was still actively deserved, he played out his rage-games in late-night brawls after the pubs had let out. His blood inflamed by the sting of whiskey, he'd stand tall and wide in the road and draw deep of the darkness, filling his lungs for battle and sucking in murmured words, combing them for the least imagined slight. Everything back then was a trigger, an invitation to war, and his fists chased faces to smash like they were prizes at a funfair.

The passing of time saw his reactions slow and his once-refined bulk descend into a slothful fat, but his bitterness remained undimmed. To compensate for losing his physical threat, he cultivated a technique of verbal intimidation as a means of venting the explosive side of his nature. He was still a big man and hard-earned reputations faded very slowly. He had few friends, but he enjoyed the way people seemed to wilt in his company, the way they offered placating salutes and cleared his path whenever he strolled through the village, the way they paid silent attention when he held court at the counter down in Daisy Forde's public house, laughing like idiots whenever he bothered to crack a joke and cheering him on when, towards the end of the night and after drinking his fill of stout, he'd rock back in his chair and belt out a rendition of ‘The Stone Outside Dan Murphy's Door', the only song he knew all the way through that didn't feature some heroic deed attributable to the IRA.

They talked behind his back, of course. Women especially, but men too, and a single glance at his wife provided evidence enough that his tyrannical ways didn't cease at the doorstep. Maggie was a frail, wizened creature, with large pale green eyes fixed eternally to some desperate middle distance and a West Cork brogue that fluttered in singsong gasps through her whisper of a voice. Everyone recalled how, during the early years of the marriage, the night-time would ring out with screams of pain and a most terrible pleading to please stop, that she was sorry and it would never happen again, whatever it was that she was supposed to have done, however little a thing. The thick pebble-dash walls of the terraced home muffled his growling replies, but that somehow only added to their sense of menace. Passers-by would stop to listen, neighbours would fill doorways and emerge head and shoulders from windows. They'd swap knowing glances and feel a mixture of disgust and helplessness, until finally the screams would subside to the small, heartbroken moans of a thoroughly defeated soul, and unable to bear it a moment longer they'd shrug and hurry on their way or slip back inside their homes, understanding that the situation was beyond their control and there was nothing they could do to help or interfere.

The vagueness that marked out Maggie from most of the other women in the village was a necessary survival mechanism, her way of dragging herself through yet another day. She'd miss the essence of questions and comments, wander past people without even noticing their smiles of greeting, and was easily startled by even the most friendly touch. ‘Beaten stupid,' was how the women described her condition, and they always spoke of it in sympathetic tones, their way of giving thanks to the Almighty that they had been spared such an existence.

The pairing of Paudie and Maggie was the very definition of opposites attracting, and seemed a mockery, a collusion between the most wicked elements of fate. Silly with youth and headlong in a delusion she had mistaken for love, Maggie's living nightmare had started out as a simple dream of happiness. At seventeen, she knew nothing of life beyond the soothing tedium of rural village ways, of milking her father's cows and feeding the hens, of helping her mother around the house with the endless chores of cooking and cleaning, of filling the little spare time she could find with sewing and some light reading before the hour grew too late and her eyes grew sore and weary from the stammering of the candle's flame as it wrestled to hold its shape against the dozen whistling draughts.

He had bounded into Ballinascarty as part of the Post & Telegraph Company crew, Paudie O'Reilly, ten years her senior, the flesh of his face burnt russet from exposure to a salt-riven sea breeze and the hottest summer anyone could ever recall. The small, close set of his eyes surveyed everything with a calm that veered in and out of scorn. At the céili that first Friday night in September he had been brazen in his approach, elbowing his way through the idling packs of local youths and with the beckoning gesture of an open hand luring her out onto the floor. Trembling with excitement and anticipation, she imagined grace in his lumbering swagger, and she fought against swooning as he danced her to a frenzy, his breath reeking of porter, his strong hands spinning her around until she was light-headed and swept off her feet. He leaned in close again and again so that there was nothing to breathe but his own stale air, and his voice rumbled through the drone of a fiddled reel, telling her she was the most beautiful creature that he had ever seen. Like a flower in bloom, he said, his life's single attempt at poetry. She knew that she wasn't beautiful, because the small rust-speckled square of her father's shaving mirror had told a plain, uncompromisingly truthful story, but that night, dressed in her best skirt and her sister's blue cardigan, and spun until she was dizzy with happiness, she held onto his words and savoured them.

When the dancing was done, he stood to his fullest height and smiled in an open-mouthed way that revealed small grey teeth. His skin gleamed with sweat and even the heavy slathering of brilliantine had not been enough to control the wild flay of his jet-black hair. As soon as they had left the brightly lit hall behind, he wove his fingers into hers, and she felt as small and vulnerable as a bird. They kept a slow pace in the darkness, and he talked in a low grumble that seemed to rise up from the ground, a barely controlled roar that throbbed and ached to be let loose, about his own village, Douglas, and what a grand place it was. He told her about his job with the Post & Telegraph and how it had taken him all over Munster, but that in all his travels he had never yet seen a woman as fine as her. She, who had always been considered a girl, was glad of the night's help in concealing her blushes. They walked slowly, leaning into the hill, and at the front gate there was an awkward moment when he suddenly plunged his face toward hers. A spout of panic threatened to overtake her and she was certain that she'd smother or that she'd scream out in discomfort from beneath the forceful crush of his chin and cheekbones, but she fought hard against the negatives, closed her eyes and told herself how lovely this was, her first kiss, her first romance, and with the strongest man that she had ever known.

A week or so later, he was gone, taken off in some other direction by the demands of his job, but from time to time over the next six months or so he'd arrive unannounced, armed with a bag of boiled sweets or with a small bunch of posies or daffodils wilting in his clenched fist, and he'd say just the right things to feed her addiction. The time that spun between his visits helped their relationship, allowing her to endlessly reconstruct their moments together until they meshed perfectly with her fantasy. And then, early in the new year, he produced a ring, an old sliver of tarnished gold that had belonged, he said, to his grandmother. It hung loosely on her finger but that didn't matter, because the answer was yes. Having spent a childhood so sheltered from all the world's cruel vagaries, she easily missed, or else chose to overlook as insignificant, the first corrupting signs of a dream shifting into the realms of nightmare.

She'd been foolish, but all in the name of love, and plenty had made that irrevocable mistake. The first time he hit her he'd been drunk, had stumbled in late from celebrating a great Douglas hurling victory over the Rockies. He hit her the same way that he hit men outside Daisy Forde's pub and only the fact that she had been rising from the chair and was therefore off balance at the moment of impact saved her from a broken nose or possibly worse. Still, the blow had been enough to streak the late hour with flames of pale light, and her sinuses flushed so quickly with the cloying tang of blood that she was certain she'd choke. She cried out and cupped her hands beneath her face in a futile effort to staunch the spill and protect her blouse from staining. He followed her as she stumbled through to the bedroom, his lumbering gait careening off walls and furniture, slurring threats about someone named Burke and that next time he'd kill her stone dead if he caught her so much as looking crooked at anyone. When he fell on her there was nothing to do but let him finish and try not to annoy him too much by crying. And when, the following day, he apologised for what had happened, he sounded so sincere and so strangled with guilt and self-loathing that she really wanted to believe it was the influence of the drink which had caused him to hit her. Many before her had made that mistake too. Love was stupid as well as blind.

Years passed slowly and there was no salvation to be found in anything except retreat. She learned to sleepwalk through her days, to pack away her grief and to take the bruises and the broken bones as penance for her foolishness in walking so blindly into this life. On the single occasion that she tried to seek solace by confiding in her mother, she was told that she had made her bed and there was nothing to be done. That day, seated at the kitchen table of the farmhouse in which she had been reared, she sobbed while her mother looked on without sympathy for her predicament. When her father came in from the fields she had wanted to tell him too, but even when her mother went outside to the well for water to make tea the necessary words just refused to offer themselves.

Less than a fortnight later, she suffered a miscarriage. She was thirteen weeks into her pregnancy when she collapsed in the garden and the new life that she was carrying flushed out onto the dirt of the yard. Lying in bed during the days and nights immediately after, she let her mind vie between competing lines of thought: the fantasy of how her child would have been, how beautiful and perfect once born and fully grown, and the reality of precisely which punch or kick had committed the heinous act of murder. Neighbours who visited told her that no one was to blame. She did her best to smile because she understood that they meant well, but there was blame here and everyone knew it. This was all her fault. She had married a brute, too stupid to know better, stupid for believing the notion that love was not the world's biggest and filthiest lie. In her hunger to be wanted, she had looked at yellow and saw only blue. Paudie had led her on a merry dance, had filled her head with nonsense and had made her feel alive. Now it was Paudie's hands that had dragged her by the hair from her place at the table, Paudie's feet which had kicked her unborn baby to death as she lay curled in a protective ball on the cold flagstone floor. But it was she herself who had embraced a life sentence. Unaware of the damage that had been caused to her insides, the neighbours patted her gently on the shoulder as she lay in the bed that she had made and earned, her small, brutalised frame propped up with pillows and surrounded by days-old unread newspapers, and they told her not to let this get her down, that she was little more than a child herself and there'd be plenty of time for bearing children. They meant well when they said that these things happened sometimes and that questioning them was flying in the face of God, but by then Maggie had learned more than her share of lessons, and she knew in her heart that God was just as much a fable as the hellish joke of love or happiness.

The chore of ironing could induce a trance that was often close to unbreakable. Paudie was very particular about his shirts, and Maggie knew better than to rush the process. The humid air created a different world, one that almost begged of her to dream. Lately, her mind was quick to find direction, dreaming up a home on a hill, a place for her alone, with high ceilings, thick carpet on the floors and paintings on the walls. Maybe a couple of acres so that she could keep a horse, an old bay gelding that, for no particular reason, she'd name Cooper and who wouldn't be much to look at, certainly no thoroughbred, but who'd have the heart of a warrior. On a place like that she'd need no one, not Paudie, not her family.

The banging at the door seemed miles away, a flutter no more noticeable than the small ceaseless clapping of a bluebottle bounding over and over against the glass of the pantry window, and easy to ignore. Easy until it became more pronounced, and until the voices carried through from the road. Carefully, she set down the iron. A sense of unease washed through her, but that may have been nothing more than reflex, the reaction she had developed upon hearing her husband's nightly return, and she had long since braced herself against the impact of such feelings. He'd be drunk again, of course, too drunk to even manage an unlocked door, and she hoped that whoever he had brought home with him from the pub would be the kind of men that knew, even in that state, how to behave themselves.

There was a moment, upon opening the door, when she actually believed that he was dead. It looked that way, his great frame sagging between the set of two struggling men, the thin white ropes of his remaining hair corkscrewing wildly from his lowered head, his knees bent with weakness, his boots dragging on their toes.

‘We all thought he was just drunk,' one of the men was saying, pronouncing the words slowly as though he was fishing them from distant memory. ‘He fell off the stool with an awful clatter and we couldn't wake him.'