PATSY watched a gull land with aplomb then embark on a prison guard-like tour of the cluttered, defenceless table.
Inspection complete and repast time being nigh, the bird settled for the smeared white plate that took pride of place in the centre of his new camp and began pecking ostentatiously at slices of buttered pancake before setting about the removal of the cherries buried in a decapitated scone.
Its ruthless eyes settled on the woman making for return, hand-in-hand with the child skipping by her side. Surprised by the new occupant – one not keen on the delicate etiquette of bathroom breaks and seating arrangements – the woman began self-conscious shooing movements with her free hand. The guard glared at the shoo merchant in a stare that spoke ‘If you’ve a problem, come over here without the child and we’ll settle it like animals’. The woman’s shooing became more nervously audible as she neared the table and its guard. What happened next was abominable. The guard rose erect to its full height, opened its beak full stretch into a deformed egg-like shape and emitted a shrill, threatening squeal more portending than any air raid siren. Its wings extended to their impressive limit. Its head warbled in perverted time to the rhythm of the screech. Beady eyes danced manically to a horrific tune. What lay beyond the open yellow beak was bright, fleshy pink fading to shadow and then to cavernous black, beyond which the source of sin himself might linger.
The girl began to bawl, her mother’s shooing increased frantically until it became a discombobulating whirring movement, but as it did so her feet were taking cautious paces backwards, dragging the girl’s in toe. The guard smelt victory. Its height shrunk slightly. Dominance was polished off with a cherry replete with butter smears lifted slowly from the plate in a pincer movement while eye contact was returned slowly towards the defeated mammal and her crying offspring. The shoo merchant turned her back on the table and ushered the child indoors for some form of consolation. Or more aptly, a bribe that would attempt to smother the exposed parental cowardice in sugar. The victor kept its front to the door while considering what resources to snaffle next.
Patsy grinned. He loved Saturday mornings in the city. From a ragged parcel of bogland five miles from the nearest village, the hustle and bustle of Belfast’s Castle Lane was, to him, a revelation. Both a revelation and a titillation, strictly speaking, since he had found through experimentation that it was best to place himself strategically at the café’s window where he could observe gaggles of university students out on their expeditions and younger mothers with their ankles uncovered. The town was breathing a semi-interested sigh as the war moved ever further away. The black-out curtains could be removed from bedroom windows and the bomb craters took on an air of order as they were swept up and cordoned off. No blood stains and no reconstruction; just crucifixes on graves which awaited headstones, if such a luxury could be afforded, and the official stiff upper lip. Patsy had missed the worst of it.
As he attempted to resuscitate the dying embers of a fast-fading Park Drive and stirred his tea into a murky dark brown, pinning the teabag against the side of the cup with the tip of his spoon and forcing it to give off its last, he observed mother and child emerging from the bakery opposite. As the child attempted to turn towards the site of the lost Battle of the Pancake Plate, her mother jerked her in the opposite direction and sternly poked a finger in her face in an effort to knock the gull off the high perch of authority that had, until so recently, been occupied by mother and father alone… and Mother Church. Or the local pastor and His Royal Highness Albert Frederick Arthur George? Patsy couldn’t be sure. Whoever could be? The gull, oblivious to the demands of faith, fatherland and the primacy of parental prerogative alike, the spoils of war mopped up, took a shit on the white plate and prepared for take-off.
Bernadette was late. He picked the camouflage green paint nervously from his fine bitten fingernails. Every Saturday like clockwork, she’d stroll briskly down Castle Lane arm in arm with Kate. Kate was fine. But Bernadette was grace. Her delicately taut face accentuated her dark brown eyes. A short head of hazel fell to her shoulders with an elegant kick. She walked with intent, talked with precision, looked with knowing.
Always, there was a glance through the café window, a shy giggle and a broad smile, a wee wave and a dig aimed at her sister’s arm. Always, it briefly disconcerted Patsy that it was Kate, not Bernadette, who was the glancer, the giggler and the waver. But following the punch, Bernadette would graciously avert her gaze to Patsy’s table by the window, smile faintly and wave confidently, almost sympathetically, towards him. All being again right in the world, he’d grin slyly through the smoke of his Park Drive, hoping to look every inch the Humphrey Bogart to her Ingrid Bergman. And almost before he could return the greeting and carry off his carefully cultivated gentleman about town persona, they were gone; off to stare through the finely decorated windows of Anderson & McAuley and daydream of a future where the hats and dresses on display were theirs to flaunt on Royal Avenue, or at least of a job on the shop floor.
But there was no Bernadette this morning. Maybe Phil had asked her to lock up last night; she was bound to need a lie in after cajoling that shower out into the night and their wives. He’d call in later for a bottle of plain to see how she was. Now he thought about it, she did look tired when she was pushing him through the door at closing time. When later came, his query about her whereabouts, padded carefully in concern about her welfare, was effortlessly turned into her ball with which to play.
‘Ahh, are you worried about me Patsy? Do you hear that Phil? At least someone’s looking out for me around here.’
‘Yeah, like you’d need looking after Bernie.’
Red cheeks, shuffle shoes, shoes shuffling, shifty eyes in bent head settled on shuffling shoes, tell-tale shades of shame. Onto him, the both of them, they were. Say something, recover dignity, don’t be the shy schoolboy all your life.
‘It’s just you looked a bit run down last night.’
‘Don’t be worrying about me Patsy. I’m well used to running about after their lordships in here.’
Exaggeration. She was hardly running anywhere. Patsy’s bottle of stout could be lifted from the shelf and placed on the counter in one swift, graceful swivel of Bernadette’s majestic waist.
‘And you staring at me all night like a simpleton.’
She laughs. I laugh. We all laugh together. A ritual to savour. The way she told him off for spending too much time looking at her from his stool. Patsy carefully moulded this and other throwaway remarks into affection, amorous complicity even, and placed them in a coherent order that made sense of what he regarded as their blossoming relationship. The fun of the hunt before the feast. A rite of passage. Phil behind the bar would give a knowing wink and all the lads on the other side of it would provide digs to the shoulders and tousle his hair every time Bernadette was moved to make a comment about his incessant stares. Tonight was no different; a bottle of plain, a shy grin, melancholy looks, an acerbic comment, acute embarrassment in the midst of hair tousling and another shy grin.
‘Bernadette’s not a girl for lying in, she’ll have had something to keep herself busy with this morning. Isn’t that right Bernie?’
Seanie Fitzpatrick destroys the moment.
‘And what would you know about my habits you louse? Less of the lip or you’ll be out the door.’
Illusion restored, Bernadette knew how to deal with the likes of Seanie Fitzpatrick. But every time he tried to put words in her mouth he’d feel a fat glob of moisture connecting with the broad of his nose. Despite its predictability, the coldness would still startle him as they splashed from there onto his eyelids and trickled towards faint stubble and his cheeks. The limit was five. Five fat globs could fall on his face at roughly equal intervals like well-aimed balls of spit before he would give up on her for another night. Whatever it was he was trying to draw out of her stubbornly refused to come.
Tonight was like the night before and the night before that. When he opened his eyes, there was a dim light emerging through the smudge of sweat on the bedroom window. He checked the time on his paint splattered wristwatch. Nearly there now.
He snorted, tousled his fair-brown hair, rubbed the streak of water from the side of his face with the back of a hand, and peered above himself. Shards of layers hung precariously from the ceiling, giving the water that dripped from it when it rained a faint whitish tint. Beneath the paint, the plaster had turned a mouldy black with the seeping damp. Thrice he had moved his cumbersome iron bed in an attempt to escape the rain, but he was always outmanoeuvred. Neither could he escape the musty stench that wafted off the walls, rose from the carpet and merged with the smell of dead cigarettes that floated in a small pool of ink black water in the tall ice cream glass he’d converted into an ash tray.
Old newspapers and an older piss pot cluttered the floor in an attempt to keep the carpet below dry. The papers were now sodden and falling apart under the strain, while the pot contained a noxious brew of urine and paint-streaked rain water. Patsy lunged suddenly from the bed and positioned himself over the pot, calculating that quick movements would outwit the cold. The initial feeling of liberation that came with pissing into the pot in full view of the street was now diluted by regularity and the condensation. Staring at the papers strewn around his feet, he could close his eyes and recite their front pages, including the Newsletter’s from Monday, September 4 1939: “Notice to the Public, Cinemas & Theatres. The government of Northern Ireland do not consider it necessary to apply the Order closing Cinemas and Theatres to Northern Ireland. ALL CINEMAS AND THEATRES WILL, THEREFORE, REMAIN OPEN AND PROGRAMMES WILL BE SHOWN AS USUAL.”; or the Belfast Telegraph’s headline from Tuesday, April 8 1941: “ULSTER AT CLOSE QUARTERS WITH WAR. North’s First Blitz: Night of Thrills”.
He imagined Brigid Brennan had kept the papers as a reminder of a momentous age, but faced with his complaints about the damp, sacrificed posterity on the altar of the impossibility of paying not just a plasterer, but a roofer into the bargain. Patsy wondered whether she could hear him now, reading aloud her once precious headlines in a cut-glass upper-class English accent gleaned from the nightly war news broadcasts on the wireless. Given that her bed was pushed against the wall that divided their two rooms, she could probably hear his piss as it hit the pot or inadvertently added colour to the front pages; she would definitely hear his bed frame creaking as he tossed and turned in a growing frenzy most nights; although probably not the faint plopping sound the rainwater made when it hit his nose.
Brigid Brennan had a three-storey house, but under the pretence that heat rises she had banished herself and her lodger to the two box rooms on the top floor, leaving the more spacious middle one deserted. He knew that heat only rose when it had somewhere to come from in the first place, but he said nothing. She mourned her husband unassumingly. Their room below remained well kept but unoccupied. A couple’s room awaiting the consummation of a longing that could never be quenched. He’d learnt through Phil that Daniel Brennan had died two years before. A blow from above by a dislodged plank on the slipway at the shipyard had left his skull cracked in several places. His soft cap was no protection against wood that hurtled downwards from a forty-foot height. Rushed to hospital in the back of the owner’s limousine, he was dead before a doctor got to see him. Phil had heard the owner had ordered the chauffer to wash the blood stains off the floor and thoroughly clean the seat before he would travel home that evening. One less Papist in the employ of a loyal company was the view of the local Lodge, and there weren’t too many to start with, praise to all that’s Protestant and Proper. Still, the boss sent a wreath to the funeral, although attending was out of the question, passing the threshold of papacy would have ended him.
Daniel left no children, just Brigid with his name and a house that was hard to heat. Through their bedroom door left ajar, Patsy had not long ago lingered on the stairs to witness her go through what appeared a routine of changing the sheets on the double bed no one slept in, taking a small bag from the chest of drawers, applying makeup to her cheeks with a small brush and resting one of them against the work clothes left hanging on the wardrobe door, leaving a new smudge on top of the one that was already there.
He shaved with one eye on the window and the other on the cracked looking glass he’d propped up on the shelf, working the soap off the bar into a white lather for his face by rubbing it fiercely in his hands. He cut himself just the once, where his jaw jutted out to his chin – which was progress – and watched as the blood was diluted by the lather into a small stream that ran towards his jugular. Below him, the first of his neighbours were traipsing up the avenue towards the trolleybus and work; men with black boots, lean jaws and a Park Drive between their lips, who hid receding hairlines below soft caps. He dressed methodically, being careful not to get any of the newspaper that was coming loose stuck to the soles of his socks. He brushed his boots, watched John Thompson shut the front door of the house directly opposite and tried to remember what their argument had been about two nights before. The way he was looking at her – the way he alleged he was looking at her – emerged from the haze.
At the bottom of the two flights of stairs, Mrs Brennan – a woman Patsy estimated to be in her early 40s, of thin but not fragile build whose few strands of grey in her head of coal-black hair she obscured with a red shawl when she left the house – was lingering in the hallway that was permanently cold due to the lack of sunlight. She had a bright yellow cloth for polishing in one hand and a floor brush in the other but didn't appear to be doing much with either.
‘That letter's still sitting there for you Patsy. Are you not going to open it?’
Patsy looked at the solitary scuffed brown envelope that lay on the hall table, marked with two green stamps in the top righthand corner bearing the distinguished, bushy moustache of Dubhghlas de hÍde, complete with the legend ‘An Chéad Uachtarán’. In the middle of the envelope was his mother's tiny, neat writing and her little act of defiance ‘BELFAST, IRELAND’. He lifted it and put it in the inside poacher's pocket of his black donkey jacket.
‘I'll read it on my break Mrs Brennan. I didn't get a chance yesterday.’
Mrs Brennan – oh so formal Mrs Brennan – emitted a short nasal snort which she castrated almost as soon as it rose.
‘I wouldn't suppose you'd get much peace to read a letter in the pub. Especially when it's from your mammy – you'd have all the lads laughing at you. And what have I told you about addressing me like that? It’s Brigid. I’m not old enough to be clinging to the altar rails just yet thank you very much.’
‘Sorry, I keep forgetting… Anyway, how do you know it's from my Ma?’
‘I'm only messing with you Patsy. For all I know, it could be from one your lovers.’
Brigid Brennan – young enough for a laugh Brigid Brennan – let her thought hang and made to go through the door with her brush and cloth into the living room.
‘Aye, well, maybe it is. Anyway, I'm late Brigid, I better go.’
Brigid lingered in the doorway, ‘I'll have dinner ready at six... If you're not too busy with one of your floosies.’
Patsy said nothing but closed the hall door and joined the trickle advancing up the hill. He kept his head down and hid his mouth and his shaving scar behind his turned-up collar. He checked his watch and decided he'd time to walk and save the trolleybus fare for a bottle of stout to kill the time between six and when Mrs – What Have I Told You About Addressing Me Like That – Brennan would leave him to his own devices in the scullery. He passed the corner of Cavendish Street and the tidy void left by eight households which were obliterated by a single German bomb five hours after the all clear had been given by the air raid wardens. His gaze remained fixed firmly on the pavement and the feather that was stuck to the path by the lollypop stains that ran in a dry trickle, like fingerprints, from the discarded stick. Further on, lay a dead pigeon on its back. About two yards away was a dismembered wing.
Outside Saint Dominic's grammar school for girls the elm trees had long since shed their summer dresses. Patsy trudged through the brown, red and yellow detritus, careful to avoid the dog shit that inevitably lay hidden in the undergrowth like so many vicious booby traps. He noted the effect the different leaves had on the soles of his boots, some crisp and satisfying to the ear underfoot, others soggy and disappointing. As he neared the town centre, pigeons too fat for frantic take-off loitered on cobbles and kerbs, full with the chopped heels of plain loaves and the remnants of Belfast baps smothered in lard. Absent-mindedly, as one waddled by in front of him, he drew back his foot and connected with it square in the chest, the pigeon deflated like a beach ball as it performed an irregular somersault and continued for about six feet under the momentum of Patsy’s boot before managing to put its wings into action and beat a hasty retreat. Patsy guffawed, more out of shock at what he’d just done than anything and, as the thrill subsided, looked quickly around him to make sure no one had seen.
The entrance to the shipyard always took on a grim grey shade in early morning. Patsy clocked in and took the letter from his inside pocket, turning it over and over again in his hands. Anyway, he thought in an effort to consolidate the argument that had been ongoing in his head since he’d left the house, opening a letter with the provocative moustache and the offending address might not go down too well if observed by the yard's appointed grandees of loyalist Ulster. Better leave it for later. In the shipyard, he was from Armagh, not Monaghan, precariously perched – but perched nonetheless – on the right side of the border. An Armagh catholic was there on sufferance due to his unquestionably dab hand with a paint brush and the need for enlightened pragmatism in deference to the war needs of the Empire. A Monaghan catholic, on the other hand – a citizen of ‘Era’ – would be too great a risk, no matter how dab the hand might be: A potential spy, a traitor in the midst, a sinner surreptitiously penetrating Gomorrah engaged in reconnaissance for the apocalypse.
‘Morning Paddy!’
‘Yeah, morning.’
He’d grown tired of correcting them. ‘It’s not Paddy pal, it’s Patsy.’ ‘Ah, right, sorry about that, keep getting the two mixed up. I’ve got you now.’ ‘Morning Paddy’ would still be there to greet him the next morning – all lessons forgotten. Patsy, Seamy, Micky, Seany, Paddy and his shillelagh coming to take a big black Guinness shit on the sash my father wore. Have you heard the one about the Irish man and his goat? No, tell us again. Give the sons of Ulster a good laugh. God knows we could do with one at this time of greatest peril for all we hold dear and true.
He allowed ‘Morning’ to suffice and went on his way to the paint-shop. Alone, he closed the door and set about emptying large globs of dead black into pots, stirring springtime green into a more threatening hue. He cleaned white spirits off brushes that had been left to soak overnight and cut pieces of sandpaper into manageable squares to purse between his lips when both his hands were busy.
His mind drifted back to Monaghan. A worrying tone of madness had crept into his mother’s writing. ‘Monster in the loch,’ she wrote. ‘Father fishing and granda sat smoking his pipe when a thing that looked like it was sent by Satan himself rose up in front of their eyes’. Since he’d seen her last, he began to suspect the madness that had infected his grandmother in the two years before her passing had come home to roost in his Ma. He’d often be startled awake before dawn by a high-pitched singing coming from the direction of the loch. Pulling on trousers as he half fell through the open backdoor and stumbling towards the water, he’d find Granny on her knees shovelling muck into blob-like infant forms and giving full throat to,
‘They took her away and they put her in the jail, weile weile waile.
They took her away and they put her in the jail, down by the river Saile.’
In her more lucid moments, she’d spend her time picking nettles and water weeds, frying them into a thick gruel with rabbit liver and kidney which she would place in front of her husband on the kitchen table. Patsy’s grandfather would smile, pat his wife on the hand and, explaining he would eat it in the sun, take the plate outside, leave it on the ground for the dog to devour and amble off towards the loch with his pipe. And now his Ma was going the same way – penning letters about loch monsters and getting up to God knows what else he hadn’t heard about yet. A letter in reply was no good. What would he write? He’d have to go see her and take the chance he might not be allowed back north. At least then he’d be face to face with the madness. A laughing stock they were, a grandmother buried from the mad house at St Davnet’s and a father lucky to escape the firing squad for opposing the Treaty in what was proud Blue Shirt country. The Republic had hung itself and gone to hell and Da was off in hot pursuit of it.
As he prepared his pots to leave the shop, he attempted to picture normality in Dromate; before the other letters started arriving. His normality – their normality – our normality. We’re all normal together. Like that his brother had maybe finally shown his face, exhibited all his fine limbs and both his eyes and ears to hush his mother’s fears and generally acted the prodigal son – until his father learnt of his return. Da chasing him up the lane with the shotgun loaded and the safety catch off, he thought, was the likely outcome. In his father's calculations, a couple of bits of buckshot in the backside would be lenient punishment for John's running about with the Blue Shirts, his decision to join the Free State army and – no one was sure whether this was better or worse on the scale of treachery – his unexplained desertion and disappearance a year later. Da might also have shot the bull due to the fact that its periods of heat lasted anything up to nine months of the year and was therefore next to impossible to contain. Ma's letters would not unregularly entail his father opening fire on something or someone.
‘Forgive me father for I have sinned, it’s been two years since my last confession.’
Jesus, no, he’d have me here all day if I told him that.
‘Forgive me father for I have sinned, it’s been two months since my last confession.’
Too precise, has it been exactly two months or a day or two either way?
‘Forgive me father for I have sinned, it’s been six and-a-half weeks since my last confession.’
That’ll do rightly. Outside St Paul’s, Jesus on his cross of woe and those knelt in prayer around his feet were hidden beneath purple quilts while Lancia cage cars rumbled up and down the street, their occupants’ eyes peeled for signs of another Easter resurrection. When stopped by the ever-vigilant men of proper order, Patsy was again from Armagh; the same logic being at work that, while a Patrick from Armagh was probably possibly, maybe even possibly probably a subversive, a Patrick from Monaghan was, by definition, definitely a rebel.
Inside St Paul’s, all was cool and quiet. He waited in the aisle and knocked his kneecap off the bench in front until it ached as he watched grandmothers and grandchildren complete the Stations of the Cross. When it was time, ‘Forgive me father for I have sinned’ knelt and offered up his six and-a-half weeks’ worth of abominations to Father Thomas McManus, defender of all that’s right and holy in a parish besieged by the agents of reformation, settlers all, men determined to complete the horrible conquest of the church of Patrick.
Pride, gluttony, touching himself… do I have to tell him that? Jesus, it’s been so long. Is it less of a sin if you can’t finish? Lust, that was it, lust was a suitable compromise. Lusting after Bernadette’s tender thighs with his left hand. Hardly the time or the place. Cut it out. But then to the business end of things: ‘I haven’t been very good to my mother.’
‘A common ailment, unfortunately, my child. Mothers suffer for our sins long before we are held to account for them.’
‘I send her money and all but I don’t write as often as I should, I haven’t been down to see her since I moved up from the country and I feel sort of ashamed about what she writes me.’
‘Ashamed?’
‘Well, you see it’s kind of difficult to explain father…’
Deep breath, in, out, out, in. Open your mouth and give him both barrels.
‘She thinks there’s a monster in the loch beside our farm.’
Silence. Contemplation. Leaving a priest speechless in confession, now there’s one for the brethren at the shipyard.
‘Monster, you say. You mean like the Loch Ness monster?’
‘I don’t know father, I haven’t seen it. I suppose so, yeah, something along those lines.’
‘I see. Is it aggressive?’
Patsy’s turn to be silent. Is the monster in my Ma’s mind aggressive? Very, Father.
‘I don’t know. She hasn’t said.’
‘Does it have big teeth, would you say?’
Patsy’s head bowed further than it had been.
‘I don’t know father.’
Father McManus was warming to his task: ‘And do you think I’m some sort of idiot that you can be coming in here with your tall tales of monsters? Do you think I would fall for these things like some sort of thick culchie schoolboy?’
Things. He knew then. The unmistakable scent of familial madness had seeped through the dark wire partition of the confessional like cow shit.
‘Do you think this is a circus or a confessional? And on Holy Week too!’
Patsy mustered a response, ‘Father, I, I wasn’t trying to make fun of you… I, I was being serious.’
Stammering stuttering Patsy. Patsy the stammering stutterer.
‘Get out of my confessional before I come round there and put my toe up your arse. God forgive me and pardon me.’
Patsy fled from the black box, out over the cold clay flag stones, past Father McManus’ queue of curious penitents and into the street, not even pausing to bless himself on the threshold. Cage cars rumbled in the mid-distance, Jesus feigned death beneath his purple blanket.
Part Two to follow…