House of Splendid Isolation Read online

  “Fuck’s sake,” he says as he stands close to her, the breathing now in laboured and hollow groans. The hooves of the calf come prodding out, then recede, then more moans as he grips her and tells her to push, in God’s name to push. He tries holding her hindquarters, but she buckles and thinks to make for the out-of-doors, and the movement, so sudden and unwieldy, makes the youngster inside go berserk. He can hear it kicking, desperate to escape, and holding the mother now he talks to her, says things to her, to silence her moans. The racket inside is like luggage being slung about in a suitcase. It’s tearing at her. Her contractions thick and rapid and agonising make no difference at all. The calf is too big—nothing for it but rope.

  He finds some and coils it around the jutting hooves, then shoves it up inside her so as to grip the shins, all the while saying these idiotic things. From the gate he uses as leverage the moans follow him, something primeval in them, the moans of the cows and cattle of ancient times, for which land and fiefdoms were fought over. She can’t do it. He can’t do it. The hindquarters and the hips are knifing her. He has to be tougher. He pulls the gate back a few more inches, knowing he will either break the legs or manage to haul it out, and when the clatter hits the cobbles he is unable to suppress his joy. “It’s out … It’s out.” A grey, jellyish stripling in her sack of grey. As he begins to wipe the slime off her face she gets up, staggering at first, then feels her legs, flexes herself, hardening to the wonder of life. A brown calf with a white spot on the forehead, the shape of a V.

  “You divil,” he says. The mother starts to lick, licking with a terrible assiduousness, licking then spitting out the glutinous stuff, with such relish, such happiness, and he thinks, After all that agony, the love, the impossible licking love of it.

  They are not army boots but a farmer’s, muddy at the tops, an agitated man rushing in.

  “It was a tough one,” he says. Better to speak first. The man looks at him and he knows by the look that the man has his measure but says nothing.

  “She went out of the house … We were watching but she got out … One of the girls left the shed door open.”

  “She had a hard time.”

  “You did it with the rope?”

  “The only way to do it,” he says, and goes up to the loft to get his rifle, knowing that the man is watching.

  “You’re off,” the man says as he comes down, his holdall bag folded prudently and slung over his shoulder.

  “The afterbirth hasn’t come yet,” he says.

  “It takes at least an hour,” the man says and then, “Far to go?”

  “A fair few steps,” he says, and looks at the cow and gives her a wink, as if to say, “That’s a greedy child you’ve got.”

  “Would you like to come back home and have something to eat?” the man asks in a tentative way.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh … It’ll be fine,” and the words trail away as if he has been throttled.

  * * *

  Except that it is not fine. The woman knows.

  “This is Frank … and he would like something to eat,” the man says to a woman who personifies greyness: grey hair, a wraparound grey apron, and black-grey eyes, like periwinkles.

  “He’d like something to eat”—her voice dry and tart as she muses pitilessly on the stranger’s plight.

  “He delivered the calf for us … A fine wee calf … Isn’t she, Frank?”

  “A big calf,” Frank, as he now is, says, and thinks it a good and harmless name to take with him on his journey, and in his mind he tries out suitable surnames to go with it. He does not know whether to sit or stand.

  “An army lorry went by a while back.” That coupled with a look of bristle confirms that there will be no feed, no anything.

  Her husband follows her to the scullery, where she recommences scraping the paint off a shelf with a chisel. He can see them through the open door. At first the husband whispers, but soon tires of it and tells her to get the chip pan and some eggs and be smart about it, and without deferring to him she does.

  She watches the stranger with a mixture of fear and terror whilst her husband asks if he is fussy about his eggs. She has left it to her husband to do the frying; all she has done is lay the stuff on the side of the stove.

  “It’s grand as it is,” Frank says.

  What else could he say, a hungry man, a murderer, a hungry murderer. Violent emotions are battling up in her while her husband hoists the frying pan off the fire, holds it aloft, and fixes her as if he would pour the boiling fat over her feet. With some sort of grizzled smile she tells the stranger that they have children, four in all, two in South Africa and two at home, and how it stands to reason that she is more worried about the ones at home, what with, what with … She does not finish the sentence. She does not have to. Her husband ministers by filling and refilling his teacup and remarking on the size and sturdiness of the calf.

  “They always manage on their own … Cows always manage,” she says savagely, asking both men to think for an instant on the killing instinct of man as opposed to the child-bearing instinct of womankind.

  “This one would not have managed … Except for Frank here … He had to get ropes,” her husband says, and puts the pan directly onto the tablecloth, so that Frank can dip his last bit of bread.

  “Cows always manage,” she says, and goes back to the scullery, making much of her task with the chisel.

  * * *

  After he has gone she looks at her husband with that cold, undeviating level stare of hers, but does not say a word.

  “If you lift that phone…” he says, seeing her dry her hands.

  “Try it,” she says, her back to him.

  “I’ll strike you dead,” and he gives the dresser a series of wallops with his belt so that pieces of crockery, some big, some not, fall about the floor, followed by showers of hard and clayey dust. He breaks what’s there. She stands, her back still to him, and after he has delivered the final blow she turns, kneels, looks at the strewn pieces, and out of them all selects something she loved, a cream jug, with cornflowers on the front, and like a child with a jigsaw, she starts to put the pieces together. The loss of it is the one soft thing he has seen in her in years.

  “It’s you and your like that keep them going,” she says.

  “He didn’t harm us—did he?”

  “No. He didn’t fancy meat, it being a Friday,” and gradually the shattered pieces begin to take the form and shape that they once had, except that there is a futility to it, like putting the pieces of a dismembered corpse back together.

  “I’m not for them, Julia … I’m as opposed to them as you are”—he wants to say it, but he can’t, the words stick.

  * * *

  “You’ll be met at a sawmill beyond Tuam.”

  “You’re going to have to give me some money.”

  They stand at the far end of the car park, away from the dance hall, where a jerky succession of lights, crimson and puce, bounce off the windows and make his eyeballs fritter, used as he is to dark and half-dark. He’ll be blind soon. A girl with a holy sort of voice is rehearsing “The Holy Ground.” She says the same four lines again and again, like she’s pulling them up out of her gut, giving birth to them.

  You will sail the salt seas over

  And then return for sure

  To see again the ones you love

  And the Holy Ground once more.

  Not the usual kind of ditty for a dance hall, something fervent, something desperate in it.

  “I haven’t got it.”

  “What the fuck … You have a fine car … You must have money.”

  “Funds are not my responsibility … That’s not why I came. To fund you.”

  “What the fuck, Iain.”

  “Roger…”

  “I can’t get down there without money … I’m not fucking Cúchulainn.”

  “Then fucking steal it … Go right in there and hold up the Waltzing Jennifer at the till … There’
s only her and the guy and our songstress.”

  “I can’t fucking do that now … Not on my own … I don’t see you as cover.”

  “Then you better be going on and fucking steal it somewhere else … A lonely widow or a lonely widower…”

  “I can’t go on on fucking nothing. I’m hungry … I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

  From his pocket the man takes loose change, says it’s all he has and all he is going to have, and to fucking leg it.

  “I’m going to fuck away off someday and chuck this,” he says, holding the money bitterly in his palm.

  “We’d find you.”

  “Thanks, Iain … Roger … I always knew you were a friend,” and he is over the low wall that leads behind a bungalow and across the immensity of the dark sodden fields, towards the expanse of mountain, whose crests are moulds of black cloud. The song keeps coursing inside his head.

  * * *

  “I’d finished all the lunches and I sat—I always do—in the back of the van to have a cup of coffee, and suddenly there’s this tap on the window, on the side window.” She’s holding her handkerchief, knotting it, because of being afraid of what the Guard will say to her. He’s a middle-aged Guard and he looks stern.

  “Go on,” he says to her, thinking what dopiness kept her from reporting it for twenty-four hours. Everything about her is getting on his nerves: her stupid glasses, the crop of pimples on her forehead, and a hairband more suitable for a kid.

  “‘What’s your name?’ he said, and I said, ‘Teresa,’ and he said, ‘We’re going towards Limerick, Teresa,’ and I thought he was joking. And I said, ‘I’m finished serving lunch,’ and then he slipped back the side of his jacket and showed me the gun.”

  “And then?”

  “I didn’t scream or anything … He was very soft-spoken. All I did was put the cup down and climb over into the driver’s seat, and he got in beside me and we started out and he asked me where I lived and if I was married, if I had brothers and sisters, things about people belonging to me.”

  “You told him?”

  “I had to.”

  “It’s Byzantine … It beats all.”

  “He didn’t touch me. Said he was hungry, and I told him that there were cold sausage rolls in the tray.”

  “And a hot sauce to go with it.”

  “What could I do … He wanted a drink … Orange or Coke. He said we’d stop in the next big town and I’d go in and get Coke and cigarettes … Silk Cut.”

  “Why didn’t you alert the girl in the shop?”

  “I wanted to. I’m sure I showed it … I’m sure I was snow white … But I was afraid … I didn’t know what would happen … A shoot-out, anything.”

  “You could be arrested for this … For complicity.”

  “That’s what my mother said. She said don’t tell anyone … Don’t tell the Guards,” and again she starts to cry and begs not to be arrested, because the fast-food van is their livelihood, seven children and her father on the dole.

  “You won’t be arrested if you tell us everything … Everything.”

  “He was drinking the Coke and all of a sudden we heard a siren and he sat up very concentrated and he said, ‘Take the next turn,’ so I took the next turn, up a side road, and we heard the siren going past on the lower road, and then he made me take back roads for about twenty miles and made me rehearse what I was to say if we were stopped.”

  “Say it.”

  “My name is Teresa … This is my boyfriend, Frank … He lives with me and my family … We’re going to Limerick to a birthday … It’s not Limerick City, it’s up the country and they’re not on the phone.”

  “You should be an actress.”

  “He said I should learn Irish … That it is a most beautiful language.”

  “You’re going to night school?”

  She looks up, teary, cowed, and asks if she can go to the toilet.

  “In a minute, in a minute.”

  “I’m going to be sick.”

  “Oh, go to the bloody toilet,” he says, and flicks back the pages to see what little he has written.

  “You did nothing whatsoever to let him see that you were opposed,” he says as she returns, her mouth a cake of lipstick and the headband off.

  “I did,” she says defiantly. “I asked him why he’d picked me and he said, ‘(a) I was a woman and (b) the car registration suited his purposes, and I asked him which was more important, the woman bit or the car registration, and he didn’t answer. He chain-smoked … Lit one off the other … Said he hadn’t smoked for three days or eaten, but that he rarely got hungry, he only got thirsty and he never drank liquor.”

  “Why didn’t you report it at once?”

  “I don’t know … Frightened, I think … He said when he was getting out, ‘I know where you live … I know your name … I know all your family…’ So all I could do was drive back off up home. Wondering what I’d tell my mother … afraid she wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Why wouldn’t she believe you?”

  “Because I’m always acting the fool … I put stones and frog spawn in the kids’ beds…”

  “You could have been useful, Teresa, you could have been the vital cog in the wheel of detection, and what did you do, you played ball with him.”

  “But I’m here.”

  “With nothing concrete; ten times nothing is nothing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’ll have to keep the van.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few days.”

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “Go on.”

  “Will he come after me?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They do … Once they know you, you’re marked for life. You’re knee-capped or you’re torched.” And here she begins to cry, big cumbersome tears dropping onto everything, onto the miserable notes he has made, and he thinks, Torched … She hasn’t a clue what the word is, but she knows what the fear is and she re-encounters it every time she steps out of her house.

  “The van is our life … I trained over in England … In Surrey.”

  “There’s a woman in there will give you a cup of tea.” Anything not to have to look at her, and now this orgy of tears.

  * * *

  Almost night. That dimness when the objects in a room grow shapeless and glide into one another soundlessly.

  “Let there be light,” Nurse Morrissey says proudly, and holds up the bell for her charge to see, a metal bell with holes in it, and through these finicky perforations a thin, tinny sound can be summoned. She has not rung it, not yet.

  The nurse has helped her to transform the gaunt, draughty room into a makeshift kitchen. There are cups and saucers, biscuits, a tea caddy, condensed milk, a kettle, and a little stove.

  “You’re much better off here than in that home,” the nurse says.

  “I don’t know why I ever went.”

  “You had pneumonia, that’s why.”

  “They waken you at all hours to wash you or take your temperature.”

  “You know what they say—a man’s home is his castle.”

  “Don’t go yet,” Josie says. The nurse answers with a grunt, then recites her several calls—a young woman scalded herself and a child with boiling gruel, worse than boiling water; a widower with two lots of ulcers, his next-door neighbour raw with shingles; people wanting, wanting poultices and dressings and tablets, everyone wanting, every single one. Mad for talk too. The nurse muses why, the older they get, the madder they are for talk: their past, their present, their futures, anything, everything, afraid of death too, as if she was not afraid of it herself.

  “We never know,” Josie says.

  “Now-now,” she is told, and reminded that she can ring the bell, ring it like billy-o.

  “Who’d hear it?” she asks, yet rings it wanly, and the sounds come out in stammers.

  “Keep you company,” the nurse says. “The tinkles are kind of nice.
”

  “A tramp could break in,” Josie says.

  “He wouldn’t stay long without grub,” the nurse says in a bluff voice, then reaches to the chair for her oilskin and dons it, snapping the zipper up with haste.

  “Well, missus,” she says, and tries to sound cheery, as if she was arriving rather than leaving. To think that once this woman wouldn’t wipe the floor with her or her kind, this woman with her style and her finery, flashing eyes that matched the deep blue glass of her rosary beads which she dangled in chapel, eyes that brought shame on herself, her departed husband, and another, no longer so; eyes now as insipid and watery as boiled tapioca.

  “Allow the tears to fall,” she says by way of comfort, and then she is gone. Josie thinks she might come back, because of having forgotten something or pretending to have forgotten something, to soften the parting, but she doesn’t.

  Alone, Josie scans the room, fixing the objects: the electric kettle, its spout, the biscuit packet, the dreamy sprays in the flowered wallpaper laden down with rose and rosebud, the worn curtains and the curtain pole lopsided on one of its brackets. She tells herself that she is safe, upstairs in her house, in her castle. But are we ever safe?

  “Lola … Lola,” she says. Her butterfly has returned and is fixed in a niche of the wall, folded, like a soft brown pleat; Lola, her only companion, her friend. She thinks of her as female because when Lola spreads her wings her little pube of dark brown hair glistens and contracts and reglistens. She had thought Lola was gone, escaped between the space and the sash of the window, but now all of a sudden she emerges from under the pink lampshade, circles the lamp, and then whishes onto Josie’s face, skimming it in quick patters. It means something. A death, perhaps. She has never given much thought to old people or sick people, but now she does. Her mother’s death she effaced from her mind. Her mother dying in the hall of the hospital in a feud about land, a field of theirs that a neighbour claimed as his and which neither family could use because of this ongoing vendetta. It got that tinkers used it, made it their own; caravans parked there night after night, lit fires and drunk people quarrelling or calling their dogs or begging for milk. Yes, in the hospital her mother told her father he was not a man but a weakling, and her last utterance was the field, their field, their rights.