She almost seemed to leaf her way into the lens, a brooding silence of body, an acceptance of danger, an ability to become anything that he wanted her to become — and never once the feeling that she didn’t want to do it. The photos revealed a peculiar fascination with a beauty mark on her lower right hip. Even now I shudder to imagine her with her head thrown back in laughter, in some dark room sealed to mosquitoes and Peeping Toms, light reflected off a cheap umbrella, licking her lips at the camera, her dress in a formless puddle at her feet, while outside white hydrangeas closed their petals in a row underneath a woodwormed window.
Just before they left town, José with the Sewn Lip broke into my father’s darkroom and found some of the prints, somewhat underexposed. He ran around screaming — he finally got his voice back, the people said — flinging the photos of my mother around the town courtyard like so many pieces of confetti. A picture of her was found — impaled on a hitching post — down by the courthouse steps, and the joke was that there was a new candidate around for mayor. But the poppyseed priest wasn’t happy, and the women in town weren’t happy, and although the drunks and the men in the poolhall were delighted, they all pretended that they weren’t happy either, so my parents left next morning, very early, before the café was open, before truculent rumours jumped out from the white-shuttered windows and the thick walls. They didn’t have a lot to leave behind — a few wooden chairs, a couple of hair clips, the red geraniums, vats of photographic chemicals, a few chickens pecking at the ground as they cranked the front of their car, poultry feathers flying up from the back seat, dirt filtering off the wired-up runningboard as they drove, birdshit still patterned on the roof.
* * *
He dribbled egg down the front of his chin this evening at dinner. I made sure they weren’t ‘sunnyside up’, cooked them on both sides so he’d eat them. The yoke was still soft inside, and it streamed down amongst the stubble. Wiped it off with the edge of his sleeve. He says the tops of his fingers are a little bit numb. Every now and then he pinched his thumb against his forefinger to bring them back to life. The fork slid through them anyway, and it took him an age to push back his chair and pick it up from the floor. A clump of dust and hair stuck to it. ‘Not too hungry,’ he said to me, putting the fork back on the plate beside the eggs. He looked down at the slick of yellow drying on his sleeve. ‘I’ll suck it out later.’ Then he cracked the edge of his lips in a smile. At least his mind is still there, churning away in the skinhouse. He sat back in the chair and lit a cigarette, smoke rising up to the ceiling. But his fingers were jittery around his mouth, all sorts of liver spots moving in a blur. He sat in silence and gave me one of his old winks. Left his cigarette in the ashtray to burn all the way down to the filter again.
The kitchen seemed to have been sunk in formaldehyde, laid down in some vast tub of years. The black and white linoleum was as cold as ever, the copper pots hung on the same nails, and even the wall was still streaked above the stove from the time Mam set the pan on fire. A jamjar — one from the sixties with a picture of a golliwog on the front and mould flowering on the inside — sat in the cupboard above the sink. ‘How about we open a museum?’ He nodded and smiled, although I’m not even sure he heard what I said. I walked around the kitchen. The black skillet all sloppy with grease. The jar of flour. Mam’s woollen cosy with embroidered trees all out of proportion, the upper limbs fatter than the trunk, a sewn picture maybe reminiscent of her world, always about to topple. The teacups with all sorts of stains near the rims. One or two tins of cat food. A slab of bread and a box of tea in the pantry. A couple of slices of Michelstown in the fridge. I moved them around on the shelves to make the pantry look fuller, but it didn’t matter. It’s no wonder he is so thin. I suppose he just eats bits and pieces, although he told me that Mrs McCarthy brings him dinner some days.
I set about cleaning the place when he went down to hunt out his big salmon. ‘Going to catch that bastard, tonight,’ he said. Off he went with the rods on his shoulder after he fluffed out his flies in a stream of steam from the kettle, rejuvenating the hair and feather dressings.
Some spiders were living in the mop when I got it from the cupboard. Took it outside and ran it under the spigot. They scuttled away. Strange to feel the drizzle settle on my hair. The wind blew it in from the bog as I rinsed out the bucket. That’s a smell that has always lived inside me — the pungent black earth all slashed through with turf-cutters, although I could smell the factory belching out its slaughter, too. It left a scent of offal in the air, fanning out over the land.
It was when the factory came that the old man and I stopped our swimming in the river, our dawn race against the current. One morning we were out there shivering on the bank — I was eleven years old — when bits of offal from slaughtered cows starting floating down past us, blotches of blood in the water, stringy ligaments and guts spinning away on the surface. They came in spurts, a punctured vein on the river. The old man stared at it and ran his fingers along his body, walked away from the river, disgusted. Mam collected some pieces in a bucket and went up to the factory and dumped them on the factory floor. We never went swimming anymore after that. Mam got up in the early mornings and walked down to the water’s edge by herself, sat and watched the pieces flow by. She was silver-haired by then and I suppose much of the bitterness had settled in.
But they’ve cleaned up their act these days, and I don’t see any scum on the river, although the gates have slowed the water down to its pathetic trickle.
I saw a few men in their blue uniforms moving down past the end of the laneway on their bicyles, back from the meat factory. I went and got one of the old man’s cameras with a zoom lens to get a closer look, couldn’t make out any of the faces. They were trudging along. A few kids were out playing, too. Every now and then their heads bobbed up above the hedge. Four boys came down along our laneway and stopped to pick up conkers from under the chestnut tree. They were all fighting with each other, fooling around, throwing big punches that missed. From the distance one of them looked like Miguel’s son — hair in a black ramble on his head. I moved away from the window into the kitchen, put some washing-up liquid in the bucket, swirled it around with the handle of a wooden spoon, started cleaning the floor while the evening rolled on. Otherwise this place’ll be swimming in filth and he’ll just wade through it for the rest of his days. Swirl the mop in a circular motion. Let it glide through your hands.