All That I Leave Behind (17 page)

‘Is Dave here?’ she asked the pair of feet sticking out from under a Ford Focus.

The feet slid out from under the car and a freckled face streaked with oil beamed up at her. ‘Well, well, if it isn’t June O’Connor, the Belle of Monasterard. After all these years.’

June stood there for a moment, looking down at Dave O’Leary, before clearing her throat. ‘It’s June Dunleavy now.’ As she spoke, she blushed, not sure why she was insisting on using her married name. After all, she was hardly going to be in a position to be protecting her status, was she? Not when she was about to do what she was about to do.

He scratched his head. ‘Oh, yeah, you married that fellow on Talk FM. He’s quite the man, isn’t he?’ and he nodded in the direction of the radio, giving her that sly grin again, the one she remembered from twenty-five years ago. He hadn’t changed, really. His hair was still black and those eyes still bright blue, and his face still had a youthfulness to it that Gerry’s had lost – too many steak dinners in Shanahan’s on the Green had seen to that.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Dave said, rolling up the sleeves of his overalls to reveal tanned brown arms, the ropes of veins twisting upwards to where she could see pale skin. A workman’s tan. June swallowed, eyes darting around the room. It’s not too late, she thought. You can still leave.

‘Oh, it’s my car,’ June improvised. ‘It’s been making a funny rattling noise.’ And as June said the words, she realised how implausible they must sound. After all, how many garages were there in her neighbourhood? And anyway, the dealership on the Navan Road was the place to go, everyone knew that. ‘I want someone I know to take a look at it.’

Dave looked at her steadily for a few moments. ‘C’mon in for a cup of coffee,’ he said. ‘We’ll take a look at her after. Unless you’re in a hurry.’

‘No hurry,’ June replied, following him into his office, closing the door carefully behind her.

I’
ve
taken to pushing the massive pram down the towpath, watching it rock and sway as I drive it over the bumps and tufts of grass, my little girl gurgling with laughter. We’ve called her Mary-Pat, after John-Joe’s sister, a name which seems to me to be very old-fashioned, like a nun’s, but I gave in to him only if I could name the next baby. I’ve already decided that if it’s a girl I’ll call her June, after Mummy. Mind you, I’m so big at this stage that I wonder if I’m going to have two! I’m six months along now, but I feel so heavy, and the pain in my back and hips is so bad that, sometimes, I worry that I’ve made a mistake and got my dates wrong.

I didn’t intend to have another baby so quickly after
Mary-Pat, but nature had other ideas. Of course I know about birth control, but there certainly isn’t much of it around here, and Dr Meade only gives the pill to married women – and he’d ask for my marriage cert, I know he would. My only hope would be to get on a train to Belfast and come back waving condoms, like those brave women I see on the front page of
The Irish Times
, triumphantly getting off the train, armed with enough contraception for half the country. I look at them and I think, God, I wish it was me. They are marching forward and doing brave and remarkable things, and I’m trudging up and down the canal with one baby and another on the way. You’d never think I’d read Betty Friedan – not that Betty Friedan’s ideas would hold much sway in Monasterard. Father Fathom would, no doubt, denounce her from the pulpit, had he even heard of her – but I can’t help wondering how easily I forgot what the book taught me, that there was another way of life open to me, one of freedom, of self-realisation. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t become like Mummy, content with keeping house and gardening and knowing her place. I’d forge my own path, my own destiny. And yet, children have a way of making your world shrink, making your options just seem that much smaller, so that, at the end of the day, just going into the village for a walk can seem like an achievement. So much for Betty Friedan!

I wonder if she had a husband who pestered her, wore her down with charm and persistence, even during those tricky times of the month: it seems he can’t get enough of me. It’s exciting, I know, and it seems worth it at the time, until I miss a period and my heart sinks to my boots. I suppose I could say no, if I really felt that strongly about it. But I don’t. Because I like it, and because I like the way, when we’re together in bed, John-Joe belongs wholly to me. To me and to no one else. I wonder if that’s why I give in to him so much, because I don’t want him to look elsewhere. And I have a feeling, an intuition, that he would. Oh, he hasn’t so much as given another woman a look, but I’ve seen the way some of the women around here look at
him
, particularly that cheeky Fidelma at the post office – she practically waves her bosom in his face, which he thinks is hilarious. I don’t find it quite so funny, particularly when I look like a hippo nowadays.

But my baby is my reward. My reward and my consolation. I love babies. It’s a contradiction, I suppose, but I love Mary-Pat’s milky, rusky smell and silky hair, the little murmurs and gurgles. When I look at Mary-Pat, I know that she’s completely mine.

It’s a beautiful summer’s day and I sit down to rest on the canal bank, exhausted from the walk. I put the brake on the huge pram and lift Mary-Pat out, my arms aching, and put her down on the grass. I sit there beside her for a while, feeling the sun on my face, and I thank God it’s summer and that I have a beautiful baby with me to enjoy it.

Bridie nearly ate me, of course, when I told her I was pregnant again. ‘What in the Lord’s name can you be thinking?’ she scolded, as she sat opposite me, looking around her with a sniff, her watery blue eyes taking in every inch of the peeling wallpaper, the grubby linoleum, which no amount of scrubbing would rid of its scuff marks and blotches of old food. Bridie is a big woman, with a broad bosom and greying hair which she ties into a funny kind of sausage roll at the back. She has a face scrubbed raw by the wind and rain and a long nose from which often hangs a drip, which every so often she blows away loudly into a huge white hankie, while John-Joe and I try not to laugh.

‘You need rest and good food and the Lord will take care of the rest,’ she said the first time she asked me to lie on the bed while she examined my bump, her huge hands pushing and prodding. ‘And you tell that husband of yours that this room is to be clean and tidy the next time I come.’ She looked around our bedroom, with the mould clinging to the walls and the condensation on the windowpane, sceptically. ‘I’ll send my fellow down with something for the damp.’

‘Yes, Bridie,’ we both chorused then, like guilty children.

She nodded brusquely. ‘Yes, well,’ and she patted my shoulder absently. ‘A child like you giving birth to a child. You need every bit of help you can get.’

‘I’m twenty-one,’ I protested.

‘What did I say?’ She folded her arms across her bosom, a satisfied look on her face. ‘A child.’

Without Bridie, I really don’t know how I’d manage. She gave me this huge pram, appearing at the door one day with it, an ugly grey thing that bounced and sprang on huge silver wheels. That pram has been my lifesaver, my key to the outside world, to the canal bank and then to Monasterard, across the wheatfield and up the little road, past a lovely Protestant church with a tiny, neat little graveyard, the gravestones like teeth, planted in the ground, then onto a long, straight street – accurately called ‘Main Street’ and, by rights, the only proper street in the village. It’s only about a hundred yards long, but it has six pubs in it – I counted them – as well as a funny little draper’s painted maroon with the word ‘Moran’s’ picked out in white. The pram takes me on then to Maggie O’Dwyer’s grocery, with its single basket of fruit in the window and the flies stuck to the fly paper that makes my stomach heave. Inside, it’s a little dark cavern, with shelves up to the ceiling, packed with what look like very ancient boxes of Lux soap flakes and Brillo pads and big tubs of Bisto gravy mix, for some reason. Maybe everyone in
Monasterard is hooked on Bisto. The thought always makes me laugh and distracts me from the sight of Betty’s husband, Pat, in his string vest, hovering behind the counter, an unsettling leer on his face.

‘Well, if it isn’t herself. How’s the good life, eh?’ and then he laughs, until his smoker’s cough gets the better of him and he has to hack into his handkerchief. He’s revolting and it’s all I can do not to vomit all over him as I ask for a few slices of ham, carefully counting out the money into his greasy hand, then running out of the shop to Mary-Pat in her pram, as fast as I can. And then we’re off again, pushing gently up Main Street, past Joyce’s pub and general goods store, wondering if I dare ask Jim Joyce for credit again, figuring that it’s been a while since I went in last to ask if he had any offcuts of wood. John-Joe has an idea that he wants to make a crib for the new baby.

I managed to get some nice bits of birch from Jim a couple of months ago. I didn’t like having to ask, but he’d been so nice about it, wrinkling his freckled face under his sandy hair and pushing the pencil he’d used to measure the wood behind his ear. ‘Sure you can give me a few of those potatoes when you’re next in. I love a home-grown spud, so I do.’ I change my mind, deciding I’d better dig a bag of potatoes before I cross the threshold. It’s funny, the way things work here in the country. In town, you just go into shops and pay for stuff, and if you haven’t got any money, God help you. They put that sign behind the cash register: ‘Please do not ask for credit, as a refusal often offends.’ Here, people are too kind to turn you away and too clever to offer charity; instead they pretend that a girl like me has something valuable to offer them. John-Joe says it’s because they’re like every other Irish person, afraid to speak their mind, to call a spade a spade. ‘They all dance around things,’ he says, ‘pretending that they’re not the way they really are.’ But I like that about people here. Their kindness.

Today I’m going to see a farmer who has hens to sell. Bridie told me about him, Sean O’Reilly. I imagine him to be another old man, as I place Mary-Pat back into the pram, in spite of her protests, and push on, until I see the big red corrugated iron shed of his farm, from which seems to be coming an alarming sound of squawking and clucking. At the neatly painted white gate, I call, ‘Hello?’ and after a few moments there’s a shout from the shed and a man appears and strides across the yard. He’s huge, like a barn himself, with bright blue eyes, red cheeks and a thatch of black hair standing upright on top of his head. He’s wearing a pair of battered corduroy trousers and a blue shirt which is open to his chest and through which I catch a glimpse of black chest hair. For some strange reason, I find myself blushing.

‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you above the din,’ he says, reaching out a large red hand and shaking mine so vigorously I think it will fall off. He eyes the pram then, and my bump, and I think I must look such a fright.

He scratches his head before saying, ‘Come in and have a cup of tea before we look at them, will you?’ He’s being kind of course and I accept gratefully, glad to rest my swollen ankles in a comfy armchair by the huge, shiny range in his kitchen, which is also spotless. I sit Mary-Pat on my knee, where she babbles and plays with her feet before bursting into a peal of laughter when a black-and-white collie slinks into the room and comes up to her, giving her an experimental lick on her toes.

‘Get out of it,’ Sean orders, and the dog darts away, tail between its legs. ‘It doesn’t do to get too close to animals,’ he says, as he takes the hissing kettle off the range. ‘They need to be themselves, without having to please humans.’

‘That’s very philosophical.’ I smile, accepting the steaming cup of tea he offers me and taking a grateful sip.

‘Ah, well, we have to respect each other as species.’ He smiles back, taking a seat in the opposite chair before getting out of it again and coming towards me, arms outstretched. For a second, I think he’s going to embrace me, and I shrink back in the chair, but instead he says, ‘Here, let me take this little miss while you have your cup of tea.’ I’m about to object, but before I can, he’s lifted her high into the air, swinging her up almost to the rafters, while she gives another gurgle of laughter.

‘You’re very good with her.’

‘That’s because I’m the eldest of nine. I had plenty of practice.’ And then he sits down, bouncing Mary-Pat gently on his knee. And for a second it flashes into my head. What if I were married to him and not to John-Joe? What if this lovely kitchen, with its dresser packed with delf and the shining flagstones, was mine, and this handsome man was sitting opposite me every night? Almost as soon as I have the thought, I push it out of my head. It must be the pregnancy, I think to myself: it’s making me think all kinds of thoughts. I love John-Joe: I love his laughter and his singing and the way he lights up the room; I love the way that he thinks every day should be lived to the full, should be an adventure. And there was bound to be a Mrs Sean O’Reilly anyway, a grand country girl with big hips and a way with livestock. The thought makes me giggle and he looks at me for a second before asking, ‘So how’s John Dermot’s place shaping up? Bridie tells me you’ve worked wonders with it. Mind you, it needed it.’ He grins sheepishly. ‘John Dermot was a singular man, that’s for sure.’

‘Well, the garden’s coming on,’ I say. ‘I’ve planted quite a lot for the summer and I haven’t had too many disasters, bar a patch of leeks that ended up tasting like soap! But the house …’ I give a little shiver.

‘I’d say there’s not a lot you could do with it all right.’ He nods. And Mary-Pat nods too, then, her little head bobbing up and down as she imitates him. His face lights up. ‘My word, who’s a clever girl?’ he says, and he gives her a little tickle under the arm, and she responds with a squeal. ‘Sure, maybe Mammy would leave you behind, would she?’ he coos gently. ‘Would she?’

‘She would not.’ I laugh. ‘Sure, I couldn’t leave her for five minutes, never mind with a stranger – oh, sorry,’ I say, covering my mouth. ‘I didn’t mean …’