Wild Decembers (28 page)

McCann was furious with my brother for having allowed me to see the herbalist, the Dutch woman; he was against her because a lot of his patients defected to her. He said no one with an ounce of common sense would pay for dandelion coffee or thistle milk or a thong of yarrow root. They kept asking things. Why had I got into the crib. Had I my faculties when I did it. Where ‘ was my voice box. Why didn’t I mix more. Why did I cut up a silk neck scarf in two and then sew it back together. All the time I knew they were weevilling their way around to Bugler, because they wanted him nailed. By now I had a pen and a jotter to answer things. My head was fuzzy like glass paperweights with the snow in them, not clean snow, more like shovelled snow. It was after midnight. The ashtrays were bulging with their half-smoked cigarettes. They asked me did I consort with Mick Bugler, and I shook my head. No one knows about the night on the island, only him and me and the waves. They said that there was nothing for it, only to ring the fecker. Let’s ask him, they said. I was sent out to the waiting room. I prayed that he would be sound asleep, or off at a dance with Rosemary. The phone must have rung a lot of times, because I was able to pick up comics and magazines strewn on the floor. They called me back in. I do not know what he could have said, or even if they spoke to him. All they did was to pronounce my condition:
Hysteria ad absurdam.

McCann got out the forms and began to write.

“Your mistake is that you believed,” my brother said, dismayed. He wanted me to forgive him for what he was doing to me.

Dolours is at the end of the bed in a black satin skirt, her thin body atilt, her eyes with the glitter of marcasite. She wants to know if I’d like a tattoo. Her new boyfriend does them, it’s his trade; he warms the needle with a cigarette lighter, pierces the design, and then paints over it. She shows me hers. It is a little serpent. He needs the money. She is hoping to go out on the quiet at the duskies to give herself to him. She’ll sweet-talk the male nurse. There is nothing she loves more than giving herself to a man. She’s had oodles. She says every inch of her body is covered in love bites. She shaves because they like that. All of a sudden, she is clinging to me, breaking, sobbing. Why are we here, why are we here? She’s howling it. Explain. Explain. No one can.

Is it the serpent. Is it that we love too much. Or is it that we don’t love at all.

“A
AGH
!” The young baby calls loudly in the pushchair. Oh no, not again, I fed that baby an hour ago, says mother. “Aagh!” The young baby calls loudly in the pushchair. Poor baby, must be hungry, let’s give it something to eat, says mother.

Two different reactions to the same call from a young baby in need. Two women, mothers. One exemplifying worldly selfishness and the other willing to sacrifice herself for her young.

It is the third Sunday of Advent and the chapel is crowded, the nave, the main aisle, the side aisles, the gallery, all packed; people arriving and trying to steer their children ahead of them, looking around to see where there might be empty seats. Other children already in an orgy of screaming, and Canon Daly, never a patient man, irked by this bedlam, is glaring out at the parents as if that could silence them. Undeterred, he rested his arms on the edge of the pulpit and settled in to that half-slunk stance which he always took before a long sermon.

“We know not the day nor the hour, says the Lord,” he began, stating that his theme for the day would dwell on women, the great reconcilers, women made in the likeness of Mary, the mother of Jesus, her sister Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene, the reformed sinner. He went on to expound on how these women in their several ways knew sorrow and joy through their beloved sons, women of whom the words of the Gospel could be said—“their own souls a sword had pierced.” He moved thus to penance, the penance that was preparatory to the season of Christmas, to the birth of the infant Saviour that would in turn end in his crucifixion as a grown man.

“And. . .” he said, his voice high-pitched now, as with infuriated glances he strove to tell these parents to slap their children to chastise them, to take them outside and give them a good shaking, which they deserved.

“And,” he continued, “the season of Christmas is not only one of love and joy but one in which we should try to put a stop to the hatred and the resentment that is at the core of our society. Why do we hate our neighbour? Why are we jealous if our neighbour has a bigger car or a bigger digger, why all this begrudgement. . .”

O’Dea had kept watching the door, hoping that Bugler would come and remembering that he almost always came towards the end of the sermon. He saw him then, saw them, Rosemary all tarted up, marching up the aisle and looking back at Bugler to follow, which he did not. O’Dea had given him the wink.

They move across near the crib, which due to Breege’s recent maraud has a stout girder of holly guarding it.

“I waited for you last night down at the pier,” O’Dea said.

“What did you want?”

“You were seen out on the lake with her . . . Ye stayed all night.” O’Dea spoke between his teeth, though not exactly in a whisper.

“It’s none of your business.”

“If the brother gets to know this, you’re a goner.”

“Just because I want to cut a road.”

“It’s not only a fecking road . . . And you know that. Did you kiss her?”

“I won’t answer that.”

“That means you did . . . Did you lift the lid?”

“Feck talk is this.”

“That means you did. You pup . . . You blackguard.”

“I did nothing to hurt her.”

“Well, if you didn’t, someone did. She’s in one big mess . . . A young girl that stops talking . . . She doesn’t want to be found out. She’s on the run . . . My wife’s contention is that she has a pod in her.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Maybe you helped with the Immaculate Conception . . . I take it you got your way.”

“Why are you so concerned? You’re a solicitor.”

“I like the girl. She has no one.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Go see her. Talk to her. Listen to her.”

The sermon had ended without their noticing. The collection is being taken. Boscoe and Miss Carruthers, going down either side, carrying the knitted purses into which coins and the odd note are being dropped. Canon Daly is sitting on a dais, his hands across his paunch, a satisfied smile now, indulgent of the children who are still crying.

“Who told you we were there?” Bugler asks.

“The usual . . . Gossips.”

“It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“It does . . . If she fell in love with you.”

T
HERE WERE ONLY
six people left in the ward, some had gone home for good and others were allowed out for the Christmas holidays. T.J., a young man dressed as Santa Claus, comes running in, apologising for the soot on his cheeks, incurred from all the chimneys he has scaled.

“Do you accept presents from small men?” he asks. He is carrying tiny parcels wrapped in silver paper and tied with thin silver cording. In his other hand he is holding out a colander of warm mince pies, describing how he soaked the raisins, currants, candied peel, and angelica, first in porter, then in whiskey, then rum, and he reckons that everyone including himself will be well boozed.

For each he has a special word, a special joke. For Kevin, the little boy visiting his mother who is marching up and down in a cowboy outfit, he plays the dumb cop. He has been playing it on his rounds and is now an expert at it: “The kid rises, cop gives chase, the kid spins, comes up with a 12-gauge sawed-off, puts cop square in his sights, there is maybe fifteen feet separating them—the kid pulls the trigger. Wow. Bow-wow.” T.J. falls in a fit of laughter to the floor, his running shoes in contrast with the red crepe of his overall and the straggly cotton beard. Kevin stamps on him, shouting, “I won . . . I won,” while behind the curtain, his mother still weeping, still refusing to come out, is calling to him to behave himself, to be a good boy.

Next it is Millie’s turn. “How’s my girlfriend?” T.J. says, and leads her into a dance. She throws her arms around him and tries to follow the instructions, toe-heel, toe-heel, her hips swaying as she snuggles up to him and says that it is the best day of her life, the best fecking day of her life.

“How do you like my steps?” he asks, to which she answers with a kissing sound. Given it, she starts to cry. He tells her life is too short for tears. He cites only a few weeks back he went with a friend to the hurling finals, brilliant day, brilliant seats, brilliant match, super great, then on down to Kildare, stayed for a week, and guess what—your man Patrick got a heart attack loading cattle onto a lorry a couple of days later. Life is short. He wanted her to know.

“Not in this flipping nuthouse,” she says, hitting out now, punching him and pulling off his glued-on beard. He humours her with the worst joke he knows: “How do you remember your wife’s birthday? Forget it once,” then tweaks her nose until she laughs. Soon she is changing into her high heels and putting odds and ends into a big handbag to go off with him.

With the older woman he does a peasant accent: “What ish my nation, Astoor.” She looks up at him blank, staring, as he hugs her and tells her that he is one of them aul leprechauns from Tir-na-N-og. He unwraps her present then, a teeny miraculous medal, gold-coloured, which he puts to her lips. Kevin is pleading to play cops again, Millie dances by herself, and Chrissie, a young girl still waiting to be collected, turns the sound of her cassette player so loud that the whole ward is deafened by it, the walls seeming to inflate and deflate from the throbbing.

“Are you medium rare or am I medium rare?” T.J. asks of Breege, who is sitting at the end of her bed in a black dress with a white organza collar. Only then does he realise that she is a patient also, and bowing, he gives her one of the Christmas boxes. He watches her opening it. It is a pen, encrusted with mauve and silver filigree, and he tests the colour of the ink by making a small x on the back of her hand.

“I was thinking that if no one sang I’d have to sing myself . . . but now I have you.”

She looks away, then looks to Chrissie to save her.

“She can’t . . . she’s not able,” Chrissie says.

“Just for me . . . go on . . . make my Christmas . . . ‘Jingle Bells’. . .’White Christmas’. . .anything.”

It was the song that Bugler had given her:

October winds lament around the Castle of Dromore,
Yet peace is in its lofty halls,
My loving treasure stored.

Her voice carried, clear and pure and trilling, down the length of the ward, but because she had turned away from the faces and towards the window, Ger was not sure from whom the voice came and he followed it on tiptoe, up close to her, his mouth half open lest she should falter or break down.

Bring no ill wind to hinder us, my helpless babe and me—
Dread spirit of Blackwater banks, Clan Eoin’s wild banshee,
And Holy Mary pitying me, in Heaven for grace doth sue,
Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, lo, lo, lau,
Sing hush-a-bye, lul, lul, loo

Kevin thought to shoot at her, but the others gathered nearer, and a nurse arriving with a tray of lemonade plonked it on a chair in shock.

“You’re cured . . . Jesus, you’re cured,” Ger said, his own voice singsong, charged with excitement and disbelief.

“Well, I never,” the nurse said, picking up the tray to pass the glasses around.

“That was super great,” T.J. said.

“That was super shite,” Millie said.

“Say something, Breege . . . say hello,” Ger said.

“Hello,” she said, looking around, and she smiled, as helpless to tell them why she could speak as she had been that day in the ladies’ room of the hotel when she felt it coming on her, a kind of brainstorm with words tumbling around inside, like clothes in a washing machine, words that were either too loving or too hating or too telling to be said, and her struggling to say them but finding they would not come, like a stone, a plum stone that was stuck there. She ran her hand down her throat, but it felt exactly the same to her.