Mary M and Barry were quiet now, watching. Barry was still holding his bum. She wiped Mary L’s face, and kissed her cheek, and said Good girl, Mary L, now look at you, aren’t you the great girl to eat your lunch after all, and they all saying you’re only a bad bitch? You’re not at all, you’re a great girl, so you are. Eat up the rest of it now. And she walked around the table and over to the kitchen area where she ran hot water over her hands and scrubbed them with anti-bacterial soap, and dried them slowly, her eyes meeting Barry’s all the while. He knew. He pointed towards the toilet door, and raised his eyebrows. Yes, Barry, she said. Get in there right now and do your poo, or I’ll fucking kick it out of you. Get in, you little bastard, and shit. And you can wipe your own arse. Mary M, sit down on your seat and watch your DVDs and mind your own fucking business.
And that way the evening was set, and everyone knew to be quiet and good, and it was not too bad, and she was able to Google the weather forecast, and watch Emmerdale, and Corrie, and they ate nearly all of the fish-fingers and waffles and beans that were delivered from the kitchen, and the nurse came in around eight with the tablets, and she passed no remark on Mary L’s livid cheek, and after the second Corrie the three put on their jim-jams no bother and toddled off to their beds.
The air was clear and still as she drove home, the low-pressure front had moved away. There were stars winking down from the gaps between clouds. She hoped her husband had cooked the meat properly. She hoped he hadn’t had a stressful day. She hoped in the morning she’d hear the skylark sing.
Sky
THE ROAD OUTSIDE this house is the same one my mother and father walked together each morning of their married life to Mass. Hand in hand, then arm in arm as they got older. That now is nearly seen as being sinful. Daily Mass-going is a thing to be suspicious of. Have you nothing better to be doing? No, faith, I have not. It’s not as though I sink too deeply into it; I only do it in memory of my dear parents. I only stay on nodding terms with Christ, just in case. What harm can it do to send a prayer or two skyward?
Suspicious also is living where you were born, on the road your parents walked. Did you never want to have a look at the world? No, faith, I did not. This road is as good as any, or as bad. The crows that blacken the sky above my yard each night are descended from the ones my mother watched. The same squawks and caws in the same prickled sky. What business have those crows in the hills east of here? Something important takes them there with each dawn, anyway, to Pallasbeg and Pallasmore and Ton Tenna. They process home with the fading light, an hour or so of staggered returning, weighed down and weary. And I stand beneath them, wondering, the way my mother and father did.
Crows have great notions. They perch before bed for a nightly confab on the ridges of the roofs of all this town’s important buildings: the courthouse and the town hall and the bank. They never grace the grocery shops or townhouses or any of the lesser structures, only relieve themselves on them as they pass. Then they shout across at one another all the news of the day. There’s three gangs, as far as I can make out, with a HQ each, triangled around the square, shouting over Our Lord’s stony grey head. Three factions, one murder. Once they’ve all their arguing and organizing done they turn their arses to the town and peel away to the dark insides of the giant evergreens in the grounds of the two Saint Marys. They’re fixed as firm to their home as I am to mine.
The houses of this road are strung with sorrow, like rows of old houses anywhere. A map of loss plotted all down it. Children taken, a preponderance of boys, accidents and sickness and other things. All those people would presume the stab of their sorrow to be unknown to me, occluded from me, but they’re wrong. I well know the freezing grip of it, the way it can steal the breath from your lungs, the jagged thumping of a broken heart.
I saw a light like a moving star one night in early winter. Right the way from east to west it floated and it was back again a while later, and hurled itself across the vaulted sky in two or three short minutes. My neighbour told me it was the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth, and there was men and women inside in it. He was out watching it too. He’d heard on the radio it was going to be clearly visible that night. Spacemen and spacewomen, flying in a space station. What separated them from me? The line of the sight of my eye, nothing, everything. I’ve seen that speeding light since, a good few times, and others like it. Satellites, my neighbour said, and he even knew the names of some of them. I started reading up on science after seeing that spacecraft, in books and magazines, at the library mostly, and I learnt a lot about things. The names of the parts of the heavens known to man and visible to man’s naked eye. I read about the Very Big and the Very Small and how there’s nothing to bind the two but the ideas of mankind, his fistful of imaginary strings. What things are made of, the particles of us.
My sister’s child was named after my father, as I was. William. I always called him Billy, as I never was. He was as good as reared in this house because my sister was leaving her husband for most of the years of his childhood. A slow departure, a long and gently sloped vale of tears. My mother and father hardly once took their eyes off of him. Then they departed this world nearly as one when little Billy was only barely four and I wasn’t long turned thirty and it was hard for me to tell him where they’d gone. So I pointed at the sky at night and told him they were winking down at him from there and he seemed happy enough with that. My sister was more settled in herself by then and her husband had gone abroad somewhere and she took to doing college courses and bettering herself and I was always here waiting at the gate for Billy, for nights and weekends and weeks at a time. And I’d make him scrambled eggs and sausages in the mornings and look at cartoons with him warm and sleepy on top of me on the couch and take him to the park and the pictures and the swimming pool. And I’d stand at his bedroom door at night and look at him and listen to his breaths. And I’d kiss him on the cheek and wet his hair with tears as he left and I held him to me once until he wriggled free of me and one morning shortly after a letter came in a light blue envelope and it was from my sister and it was to tell me Billy wouldn’t be visiting for a while because he had to study for his summer tests and he had hurling training twice or three times a week now and he’d have adventure camp all summer and they’d see me probably before Christmas.
That Christmas came and went without a sign of them or word from them and as spring neared and a fierce longing had grown inside in me for just a look at Billy, for a day with him, for an afternoon even, or an hour of the sound and sight and nearness of him, I wrote a letter to Lourda and a reply came shortly after declaring that there was good news and more good news: she had met a lovely man and he wanted to set up home with her in England and Billy was so fond of him and he so fond of Billy and they wouldn’t be tormenting me any more because Lourda had her master’s degree got now and the promise of academic work in an English university and after I had all that good news read and read again I made a cup of tea and set it on the kitchen table before me and sat down to watch the sun disappear behind the Arra Mountains and I was still sitting looking out at the sky as it reddened with the same sun’s rising and my tea was cold, undrank before me.
My Billy is well into his manhood now and I haven’t seen him since that last embrace.
There’s a man walks up and down this road most days with makeup smeared and daubed onto his face and a string of pearls across his bared and hairy chest. He has several of the signs of the zodiac fandangled from his blue-veined earlobes. He never talks to me nor would I want him to except the once he stopped outside my gate and asked had I the loan of a tenner because he was fierce stuck for a box of fags. I told him I hadn’t it and he asked had I a fiver so. And again I shook my head and he hawked and spat on the path outside my gate and stomped off towards the corner in a pair of dirty runners with his ruffled skirt swishing around his pale and knotted calves. And I envied him, I’m not really sure why. The freedom he’d granted himself, maybe, to be only missing a smoke.