Himself(7)

‘You live alone in there?’

‘I do,’ she frowns. ‘What of it?’

Mahony shakes his head.

Annie Farelly leans in the window and points her finger at Mahony. ‘Move on, bucko, or you’ll regret it.’

She hurls him a look that could stop a strong heart and walks back to the house. Tadhg follows her in the door, his head bent and all hope of a quick feel destroyed.

Mahony sparks up a fag and puts it in the corner of his mouth while he unscrews the front of the radio. A little fair-haired girl skips zigzag down the drive and stops outside the car door.

‘Hello, Mister.’

‘Hello.’

‘Will you play hide and seek?’

The child stands with her hands on her hips and takes turns pointing first one foot then another. Mahony is only just aware of the motion: point, change, point, change.

‘Ah no, not now.’

Mahony takes the cigarette out of his mouth and puts it on the dash while he bites the plastic off a wire.

‘Oh, pur-leeze. The forest is just over there.’

Something in her voice, at once disturbing and familiar, makes Mahony look up.

And there she is.

A little round face and a broad smile showing the gap where her front teeth used to be. She stabs her tongue tip through the gap.

‘Close your eyes and count to ten,’ she whispers, ‘then come and find me.’

When she turns away Mahony sees that the back of her head just isn’t there.

Mahony’s hands are shaking as he puts the radio down on the passenger seat with all the wires and shit hanging out the back of it. He’s not prepared for this. Not now. Five f*cking minutes he’s been here, keeping his shite together, keeping his f*cking cool, and then this.

He hasn’t seen them like this in years.

He rubs his forehead. When did he start looking out for them again? When he hitched a ride out of Dublin? Or when he rode a truck through Longford and slept rough in Castlerea? Or was it when he boarded the bus to Mulderrig? Or the moment he got off and walked across the square?

He didn’t see this coming.

He didn’t see her coming.

A dead kid with a stoved-in head and a sweet little smile.

And it won’t just be that one, oh no, she’ll bring all her little dead friends.

She’s there, up ahead by the trees, all f*cking dead. She runs away a bit then stops to turn around, ballerina style, on the pale toe of one scuffed shoe.

‘I had a yo-yo but I losted it.’

Mock pout, toe stab, she pirouettes back to Mahony and whispers dramatically. ‘I think the forest stole it. It steals everything pretty.’

Her face is perfect; from the front it’s fine, pale only. But it’s not good from behind. No, it’s not good. Her head is destroyed, oddly flattened on the left side with a mulberry seam running alongside. Inside the seam there’s a dark glistening, a sickening sort of softness. Around this deep rift is a halo of fine pale hair, matted with dull blood.

Mahony had forgotten it could be like this. That sometimes the details come vivid and stay etched. The dim sheen on a twist of hair at the nape of a neck severed to the ligaments. Or the luminous curve of a bloodless cheek above lips bitter with poison, or a pale half-mooned nail on a drowned and bloated hand.

And when you look again, gone.

Glimpses, when you least expect it, when you’re by no means ready. Sudden shocks of sharp detail then a glowing smear all the way to fade. Leaving images behind like the sun on your retinas.

Mahony looks away and listens; it’s easier somehow. Her voice is high, metallic: a bad connection on a faraway exchange. He remembers that they sound like this.

The dead sound like this.

‘Do you like my dress?’

He struggles. ‘Aye. You look like a princess.’

‘My mammy made it.’

‘Ah, you’re lucky then. What’s your name?’ Mahony forces himself to look at the dead girl, to smile at her. She stops walking and stands perfectly still, staring hard at her faint hands.

‘How the feck should I know?’ she says, and turns and skips through a tree trunk.

Tadhg got little out of the Widow other than the lash of her tongue, but even so he’s in high spirits when he gets back into the car, for you can’t keep a good man down. He sits propped forward with his nose on the windscreen as they drive up to Rathmore House. He is too vain to wear spectacles, for in his mind he’s still the fine figure of a man who broke hearts at the village dance. Tadhg Kerrigan, with the car and the fine suits. Tadhg Kerrigan, with a good head of hair and a full set of teeth, with an engine full of fire and an eye for the girls. Hadn’t he had his pick? He remembers them, back in his heyday. All lined up at the dances with their hands folded on their laps, smiling up at him in their bobby socks and ponytails. Although he’s not knocking the miniskirts that have come in.

‘Do the women have themselves on display in Dublin, Mahony?’

‘There are a few sets of pins out and about.’

‘Are there now? I’ll have to come for a visit. Is there any free love about the place?’

‘Not as much as you might expect.’

‘No? With all that flower power? Is that good and wilted now?’

Mahony shrugs.

‘Ah well, I’ll come and visit anyways.’