Himself(14)

‘So, now we’ll have the chat for ourselves, Mahony. And I’ll start by asking you what you are doing here in Mulderrig.’

He takes a corner of cold toast and swirls up egg yolk. ‘I’m on holiday.’

‘And that’s a crock of bollocks.’

Mahony shrugs and mops the plate.

Mrs Cauley smiles at him. ‘I recognise your type, honeybee. You’ve had it tough, haven’t you? You’ve been eating leftovers all your life?’

‘I’m grand.’

‘That you are. But when are you going to trust me? I trust you.’

Mahony glances up at her and, without expecting to, sees that she has the same kind of honesty that he does. The twisted kind: when something gets so wronged it gets righted.

She smiles. ‘I can’t vouch for anyone else in this town, for they’re mostly a shower of shites, but I can tell you that I’m upright where it matters. So now, Mahony, I’ll ask again: what are you doing here?’

Fuck it, he thinks, he has to start somewhere.

Mahony licks his fingers, takes his wallet out of his back pocket and a folded envelope out of his wallet. He hands it to her. ‘That was left alongside me twenty-six years ago at St Anthony’s Orphanage in Dublin.’

Mrs Cauley searches for her glasses and holds up the envelope. She opens it and takes out the photograph and squints at it.

‘Turn it over.’

She does, reads the back, and whistles through her remaining teeth. ‘Damn it to hell, your mother was Orla Sweeney.’

‘It looks like it.’

‘Does anyone else know about this?’

‘Not yet.’

Mrs Cauley nods. ‘So you came undercover, thinking you’d case the joint first?’

‘Seemed like the right thing to do, given what’s written on the back of that photograph.’

‘You’re not just a pretty face, are you, Francis?’

‘My name’s Mahony.’

‘And what do you want, Mahony?’

‘To find out what happened to my mother just.’

‘She’s not here, honey.’

‘I didn’t think she was. Where is she?’

‘That’s something no one here pretends to know.’

‘Did you know her?’

She looks at him. ‘Our paths crossed briefly.’

‘What was she like?’

Mrs Cauley remembers: a pale, dark-eyed ne’er-do-well. They’d met during her first stage production. Back then Mrs Cauley was a newcomer, but then she always would be.

Orla had been hanging around outside the village hall, scowling, sneering, kicking the wall. The girl came with a warning, but after a few days of this Mrs Cauley had walked out, in clear sight of the village, to ask Orla if she’d be auditioning for the play. She held out the play script to her, and Orla, her full-lipped mouth sulky, had looked at it.

Then Orla had smiled.

My God, it was July after a tempest, the fury was gone and in its place there was bright fire. Orla took the script but she never came back.

But she had always looked for her. The girl would have burnt the stage down.

‘She was like you,’ Mrs Cauley says.

Mahony nods; that is enough for now. ‘Have I any family here?’

‘None at all. Your grandfather left when your mother was a child and your grandmother died ten years ago. They had no other children; Orla was a late blessing.’

‘And my father?’

Mrs Cauley shakes her head. ‘None as would admit to it. Your mammy was sixteen years old when you were born out of wedlock.’

Mahony finds that he isn’t surprised and neither is Mrs Cauley’s dead admirer, who shrugs and settles in a nearby flowerbed, listening closely.

‘So you wound up at the orphanage. Rough, was it?’

‘What do you think?’

‘That an experience like yours could make a man partial to a drop of avenging.’

‘I’ve told you, I’m here to find out what happened just.’

The dead man in the flowerbed shakes his head. He has been trying to blow down the faded petals of a clematis. But the flowers remain unmoved by his dead breath. He gives up and tries to knock their heads off with his cane in a disturbing expression of spectral violence.

Mahony picks up the photograph. ‘Tell me what happened to her.’

‘As I said—’

Mahony looks at her. ‘If I don’t hear it from you . . .?’

Mrs Cauley nods. ‘Orla Sweeney was the wild bad girl of the village. She lived at the edge of the forest in a broken-down cottage with a drunken mammy and a long-gone daddy. By the time she was sixteen she was knocked up, unwed and Mulderrig’s dirty little secret.’

The dead man gives up the fight and stands frowning amongst the flowers. He pulls at his moustache with his cane loose in his hand.

She speaks softly. ‘Your mother refused to live by the rules, Mahony. She wouldn’t be taken away with a blanket over her head and she wouldn’t consent to being married off to some desperate old farmer. She wanted to have her baby and put it in a pram and bring it into town, and she was prepared to fight them for this.’

‘Fair play to her.’

‘But think about it, Mahony.’ Mrs Cauley frowns. ‘Can you imagine how the town responded, at that time?’