Himself(31)

Mulderrig is silent but for the bats that sing in the key of darkest sonar as they spool in and out of the attic of Rathmore House. Where Mrs Cauley sleeps in her magical library, hairless and open mouthed, fat-bellied and spindle-armed. She’s treading the boards again tonight, all night.

In her little turret room Shauna switches her legs like a cricket. She dreams only of Mahony. He’s taking her under the washing line. She watches the hard-boiled dishcloths dance above her as he licks her ear rind, and she wonders what the neighbours will say.

And where is Mahony?

He’s bollock naked in his bed with his boots by the door and his jacket over the chair until morning.

He’s frowning.

He is back in the forest of his memory.

He’s with Tom the bogeyman; they sit in a circle of bracken.

Tom has a bag. He opens it and beetles come running.

The beetles run lightly along Tom’s crossed legs. They thread between his fingers.

Tom has gifts for Mahony. Found in the forest and kept only for him, until his return.

He lays them down one by one.

Look.

He has a sleek tibia, satin to the touch.

He has a pair of eyes like newly split conkers. A deep wet brown.

He has a clutch of molars; they glow in his hand like baby grubs.

He has fingernails, delicate veneers of pink shell.

He has a handful of smooth white knuckles, like the counters in a children’s game.

He has a rope of black hair, as fluid as waterweed.

He has a skull that crumbles like a forest log, with chambers filled by the scurrying of a million insects. Listen.

He has the long-lost blackberry kernel of a heart.

But Tom says he will keep that.





Chapter 13


April 1976


In the first light of morning, with the air from the open window cold on his bare arms, Mahony leans over to his bedside table for his cigarettes. He has the picture of Orla propped up against the lamp so that he can study her face.

Does he look like her? He does.

He recognises the half-smile that plays on her lips and the shape of her nose and chin. She is dark like him; that much he can see. And she is young, too young; he can see that too, a kid really. She stands in a doorway offering up the bundle in her arms with an expression of shy pride; at least that’s how Mahony reads it.

She strikes a pose in her too-big shoes, one foot turned out and pointed; her shoes are ridiculous, heavy lace-ups, which accentuate the frailty of her ankles. They could make him cry, those thin little ankles, if he let them.

He has always believed two things: that his mother was dead and that he had known her. In order to feel her loss he must have known her presence. And he does feel her loss, he always has.

Which is why he has been searching for her all his life: because he had loved her and because he had lost her.

He’d searched but she’d never answered.

Mahony takes a fag from the packet and lies back with it unlit between his lips, remembering right back to the start of it all, where his memories first began: St Anthony’s.

By the age of four he knew the lie of every loose floorboard and squeaking hinge.

By the age of five he knew which corridors were patrolled and which handles were tried.

By the age of seven he was an expert on the enemy. So they moved him on.

Mahony lights his cigarette and inhales as a memory weighs in: himself standing on a chair with a blanket caped around his shoulders. At that time he’d fancied himself a Roman general taking leave of his legion.

‘Hear this,’ he’d whispered in parting to the younger ones. ‘This could save your life.

‘Nuns move fast and make no noise and they have eyes in the back of their habits: the eyes of the invisible saints that ride around on their backs.

‘Nuns wear itchy knickers so they don’t fall asleep at Mass, so when they look asleep they’re not; they still have their eyes open looking at you.

‘They have a lot of help on their side; there’s a patron saint for everything – you name it, bicycles, owls and lost things (yeah, I can fecking name them: Madonna del Ghisallo, St Francis and St Anthony).

‘The soft nuns wear socks inside their sandals. They won’t beat the shite out of you but if you make them cry the hard nuns will beat the shite out of you for them.

‘Don’t look a nun in the eye for any more than two seconds. They’ll say you’re being bold and you will get the shite beaten out of you.

‘You can get onto the roof by climbing out of the dorm window and crawling along the ledge. Up there you can see the whole of the city.

‘No nun has ever been known to check the roof but that doesn’t make it safe from the patrol of the roof saint who reports back to the Mother Superior (yeah, I can fecking name him: St Florian, the patron saint of chimneys).

‘A holy relic is a dry bit of old finger off a saint. This is what the nuns carry in their waist pouches. They rub their relics if they want to put a saint onto you. Then you’re truly banjaxed.

‘All the dinners come with cabbage.

‘There are rubber sheets on the mattresses so the beds creak like ships in the night.

‘The Church and the State are paying for the mistakes of your woeful mammies, who are feckless sluts.

‘The Church and the State are paying for the mistakes of your useless daddies, who are feckless buckos.