Himself(83)

Annie tries, really she tries. Whenever her eyes close or she looks away he bangs her head against the wall.

‘Didn’t I tell you to look at me?’

He tells her, over and over, that he didn’t do it for the f*cking village.

He did it for himself.

‘Have you got that, Annie?’

She asks him if she can go home, please. Her lips don’t seem belong to her any more, so she speaks slowly. ‘Can I please go home?’

‘You can’t,’ says Jack. ‘You talk too much.’

This time she hardly sees his fist move.

She looks up at him. He is rifling through a drawer, whistling. She is curled in on herself, lying awkwardly on her shoulder. Pain rinses her mind of thought and keeps her breathing shallow.

He shuts the drawer and comes over to her with a sheet of plastic. He kneels next to her, looking down in dismay at his uniform trousers as the blood blotches and flowers on each dark-blue knee.

He wraps the plastic around her face, tucking it closely in at her throat and up under her chin, ignoring her body moving under him. He tightens the sheeting until her eyelids are splayed, then he secures it at the back of her head with nylon cord. Her breath starts to fog the plastic.

He leans over her, stroking her back with his face close to her. He’s telling her something she can’t hear.





Chapter 47


May 1976


In Mulderrig Village Hall the audience sits silent and blinking, their attention fixed on the stage curtains lit by a single solitary spotlight. The curtains undulate gently, although there’s no breeze to speak of, for the windows are covered with black card and the doors are closed against the afternoon sun.

A figure steals into the hall, ticketless and uninvited. It pads into a far corner of the room and curls up in the deep shadows there.

Backstage the cast are waiting. They grin and point and stifle laughs to see themselves all together, ready in their costumes.

Soon the cast too quieten down.

And everyone begins to feel it.

Even the sharpest of them would struggle to describe what they are feeling.

It isn’t love, or nostalgia, or peace, or even excitement – not really. It isn’t the sense that something remarkable is about to happen, although that is there, in the feeling.

In the shadows at the back of the hall a figure unties her scarf, shakes out her hair and leans back against the wall.

Eddie Callaghan’s nephew trains a light on the band at the front of the stage. A slow ripple thrills through the audience as Pat Nolan takes up the uilleann pipes.

The first notes come sweet and harsh and a lament of riveting beauty spreads over the room. It’s felt in the spine and in the soul, in the mind and in the gut. The pipes sing about a land lost, about forgotten honour and wasted bravery. They sing of sedge-edged water and wide skies, of the mountains and the sea, of those who are gone and those who never even were.

As the last strains of Pat Nolan’s pipes echo, the curtains open.

The actors are amazed to find that the words fall naturally from their mouths, as if they have just thought them up themselves for the first time. So that Mrs Moran forgets to turn over the pages of her prompt book.

The audience watch bright-eyed and open-lipped, and everyone knows for sure that real lives are being lived on the stage today.

But it is Mahony that they are waiting for and when he walks onto the stage the room sighs.

At the back of the hall the figure in the shadows lifts up her head and smiles.

During the interval the lights go on and the doors are propped open. The daddies go out into the late afternoon sun for a smoke. The babies, who have stored up their crying, start wailing in chorus for rusks and dry nappies. Finding it impossible to settle, Teasie Lavelle rubs the hairs on her arms back down and looks over her shoulder.

Bridget Doosey is handing around lemonade and biscuits. ‘Will you have a drink, Teasie?’

Teasie pushes her glasses up her nose and takes a paper cup.

‘How’s Mammy?’

‘I’ve locked her in the house. I think I’ll go back and check on her.’

‘She’ll be fine for a bit. Have a break for yourself, now.’

Teasie shakes her head, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you managing, Teasie?’

Teasie shrugs, her eyes filling.

‘Would it help if I came over to see her?’

Teasie nods. ‘It might.’

‘Then I’ll be over later. Take a few biscuits for yourself there, Teasie.’

Teasie finishes the lemonade too quickly, so that it catches in her throat, but Bridget has turned away before she can give her the paper cup back.

Backstage the cast hug each other and mock-scream. They’re holding up. They’re loving it. Mrs Cauley’s told them to stay out the back for the interval and Shauna brings them a tray of drinks, beer and lemonade if they want it. Mahony kisses Shauna through his stage make-up and she laughs to see him with more lipstick on than she has. As Mahony walks on to take his place she puts her hand on his arm and undoes another button on his shirt.

‘For the mammies,’ she grins.

The curtains open and the audience watch Mahony, as Christy, delight in the luck he has to be a hero remade, and when he throws out a wink the room hops. The audience watch with a shared smile, riveted by every glance from Christy and foot-stamp from Pegeen and waft of the Widow Quin’s shawl.