Bonfires studded the north inner city as if it had been shelled. Some of them were as tall as double-decker buses. The locals had been constructing those bonfires for weeks. They had so little to do, and so much to burn. I steered close to the streetlamps and clear of the corporation flats. Lines of washing waved frantically from the balconies as if the rooms behind them were on fire.
Two teenage boys ahead of me on Sean MacDermott Street were carrying a large cardboard box. They ducked behind a gap in a construction-site hoarding. Shouts of excitement greeted their arrival. I stopped and pulled the loose board open a fraction. It was difficult to say how many children were on the building site. Forty or fifty at least, leaping in silhouette against the flames. They swarmed around the two boys with the box.
One of the boys reached into the box and pulled out a black and white cat. He held it up by the scruff of its neck, brandishing it so that all the children could see, before placing it on the ground. The children descended. Whatever procedure they carried out made the animal scream. They released it and stood back.
The cat shot free, but a fizzling spark was attached to its rear. I squeezed through the hoarding and ran for it. The creature raced along the base of the far wall, then the banger exploded out of it. The rocket scudded along the rough ground like a stone skimming the surface of water. The children laughed as they jumped out of its path.
One of the teenage boys started cursing. ‘Yiz were supposed to put it in the other way around,’ he shouted. ‘Yiz were supposed to blow it up, ya stupid fucken spas. Here, show us it.’ He gestured at the cat, which cowered beneath a wall too high for it to scale.
We dived at the creature, a pack of foxhounds. The children were more agile than me. They brought the flailing animal back to the boy, who seized it by a hind leg. The cat, a thrashing mass of terrorised muscle, must have bitten or clawed the boy, because he cried out in anger and pitched it on the bonfire. The small body twisted in the air before landing in the flames. Each of us fell still to watch. Every last child was quiet.
I was seized from behind and my face rammed against the hoarding. ‘Ya fucken perv,’ came the voice of an adult male, his teeth close enough to bite my ear. I hadn’t noticed any men on the building site. I tried to get a look at him over my shoulder, but he kneed me in the kidneys and threw me down on the ground. I got onto my hands and knees. The cat was screaming.
A kick under the ribs flipped me onto my back. The two of us were face to face then. His head was shaved and leathery, burnished orange by the bonfire. He bent down and took hold of my collar. ‘Filthy bollocks,’ he spat, ‘spying on the kiddies.’
His knuckles connected with my face, just beneath the eye socket, slamming the back of my head into the stony ground. There was a crunch. The stars floating in my eyes merged with the fireworks in the sky. ‘Please,’ I whispered. A girl was shrieking hysterically, but not for me. The wail of a siren approached.
The man punched me a second time, with greater force. ‘Here, youse,’ he called over his shoulder. There were more of them. I wrenched out of his grasp and scrambled for the hoarding. ‘Get back here now,’ he commanded me.
The sirens were almost upon us by then. The children rushed off the building site, and I joined their number. We flowed like rats through the gap in the hoarding. A stolen car screeched sideways around the corner, a garda van with lowered riot shield in close pursuit. Locals were out banging dustbin lids against the pavement. The children dispersed into the back lanes and flats, but three men were chasing after me. There was a loud phht not far from my ear, like a huge cat spitting, then a shower of sparks as the rocket collided with steel security shuttering ahead. A fire engine came hurtling along Gardiner Street, followed by an ambulance, and when next I looked over my shoulder, the three men were gone. I was running down a dark empty road on my own.
9 Amongst Women
The four, my four, the Square of Pegasus, the Northern Cross, were there ahead of me when I arrived at the workshop the following Wednesday. The furniture had been rearranged, on whose instructions, I never asked. The small individual tables had been pushed together into the centre of the room to form one large desk, around which nine chairs were placed. At the head of this expanse of reticulated tabletop, the bulky desk with the drawers was set. Glynn did not register surprise or even awareness of these modifications when he finally darkened our doorway, twenty-five minutes late. Two of the chairs were still empty. They were to remain empty for the duration of the class, and for the duration of the academic year. Already we were down to six in number: the four girls, myself and your man with the ponytail — Mike.
Antonia was first to read from her work. She’d written a disconcertingly ambivalent short story about a middle-aged man in the numbing wake of his mother’s death. The man returned after a prolonged absence to his childhood home, which, since he was an only child and his father had passed away some years previously, had now fallen to him. He barely recognised the place, it was all so long ago. The son, unnamed (‘The son scratched his head …’, ‘The son belched softly …’, ‘The son suddenly realised he was an orphan’), hadn’t been close to his mother during her lifetime, had barely known the woman in fact, but after her death he kept finding dressmakers’ pins around the house. This came as a surprise to him. He hadn’t known that his mother sewed.
He encountered the first pin sticking out of the armrest of her favourite chair, and as he rolled the narrow metal cylinder contemplatively between thumb and forefinger, it occurred to the son that this unanticipated memento should move him to tears. He hadn’t cried at the news of his mother’s death, or at her funeral. Tears, however, did not come, and the son carried on watching The Late Late.
Antonia’s prose entertained a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether the pins were intended as a symbol of the mother’s creativity in the female domain, as in the burgeoning North American patchwork-quilt genre, or of her cunningly remonstrative spirit railing against an ungrateful and emotionally inert male; see Carter, Angela. My guess is that it was a gender thing. Glynn definitely looked uncomfortable. The pins appeared with increasing frequency, and in places the son was adamant they hadn’t been the day before: a scattering of them on the mantelpiece, a sprinkling in the box of tissues, a lone embroidery needle lying in ambush between the sheets of his unmade bed. Mostly, the son located the pins by sitting on them. No matter how carefully he checked the cushions before lowering his apprehensive backside, a pin would surely prick the seat of his pants until one day his arse was pierced so deeply and so deliberately that tears of confused pain sprang to his eyes. The son dropped his head into his hands and wailed. ‘Oh Mammy,’ is what he said. Dialogue was never Antonia’s forte.
Once the tears started, there was no stopping them. The son wept until day became night became day again. His head changed colour several times (I’m paraphrasing). The pins stayed put in their pincushion after that. You had to hand it to Antonia. It was a very dramatic climax.
Aisling read aloud a poem, the content of which I recall in no detail — it seemed to erase its own shifting nature as soon as it was spoken, a palimpsest, I suppose you would call it — but each of us, Glynn included, registered the roiling aftershock of its dark inaccessibility, its staunch brevity, its confident deployment of the word apotropaic (adj. supposedly having the power to avert an evil influence or bad luck), introducing to Aisling’s dynamic a radical element. She scared me, that girl. I think she scared herself.