She spat when working — a continuation of the habit she had picked up working with the chickens in Mexico, when dust got in every pore.
The wall made some sort of crease in her boredom — there wasn’t much else for her to do, the washing fluttering out over the bog, dishes piling up in the sink, ham and cheese sandwiches to be made for my school lunchbox. She was in her late forties by then. The world was growing older. The wall helped her whittle away the days until she could return to Mexico. They argued a lot, she and the old man. They stood in the kitchen and waved their arms, pointing fingers at each other. Shouts rang around the house. Sometimes he thumped a fist into the cupboard — a little row of indentations appeared like puckered stabwounds in the wood. He saw no use for the wall — except as a place to crouch down to light a cigarette, or to take a quick clandestine piss. Maybe they were still in love, but it was a different quality of love than I imagine they had in the beginning — a pathic love, a brusque love, no magic there. When he was away on photographic jobs, a great grey silence descended around the house, and Mam sat me down and told me things. If she began in her native tongue, which I didn’t understand, she’d reach up to her grey hair and sweep it back, begin again in English. Bits and pieces of stories that began to mesh and merge for me, stories told to a child in a childish way, and Mexico became a country just down the road.
In the kitchen she scrubbed pots and pans, watched the passing of the world through the window. Cars trundled by, women in headscarfs on their way to coffee mornings, the postman’s van eddying past without stopping, herds of cattle driven along with sticks.
Her only friend was Mrs O’Leary. Mam went to her pub a few afternoons a week — it was a ship-pictured pub, old and creaky at the joints, much like its customers. Sometimes, in the summer months, she took me along. Mrs O’Leary kept chickens out the back, about a dozen of them pecking around. And Mrs O’Leary was not unlike an old chicken herself — with a great red face, a long beak of a chin and a wizened wattle abandoned underneath it. She must have been eighty years to heaven at that stage, a gigantic woman in chalcedony-coloured dresses, huge billows of breasts, a deep voice, always on the verge of a laugh. But her eyes were giving way, so that she could hardly recognise the labels of bottles anymore, sometimes mistaking Jameson’s for Paddy’s, Bushmills for Irish Mist, causing an uproar of universal sorrow among the men who stuck to whiskeys like limpets to sea-rocks. She couldn’t see the clock moving on the wall, walked into doorframes, could only read the headlines of the Irish Press, which served well for moppinig up brown spills on the concrete floor. What devastated Mrs O’Leary most was that she could hardly tell the sex of a newborn chicken anymore — a skill that required the eyes of a hawk, the patience of years, an awareness of the whimsical vicissitudes of nature. She sauntered up to our house one summer afternoon and said to Mam: ‘I hear you have a way with the nether regions,’ and, after a moment’s explanation, they both burst out laughing.
Mam said: ‘Of course, I will look at the chickens.’
Mam filled in for Mrs O’Leary, examined the undersides of the chicks. They would sit together on wooden stools at the back of the pub, feet swinging beneath them, chatting, laughing. Their cackle rose up and swung its way through the bar, where the men pounded their fists every half an hour to the chime of the headless cuckoo on the walclass="underline" ‘Another glass there, Alice, make it snappy.’ She sold the eggs to the men, who lay like dormant rags on the bar counter all day long, staring at the dusty mirrors, a musty smell pluming up from their jackets, handkerchiefs peeping from trouser pockets. But Mam and Mrs O’Leary ignored the men most of the time, sat out the back and whiled the time away, swapping bits and pieces of their lives, José with the Sewn Lip, Rolando, Miguel, fires in that far-off place, the peculiar Cici, the chicken opera that had developed in my grandmother’s yard in Mexico.
After a while Mam and Mrs O’Leary began to invent their own opera, using the men in the bar as their actors.
They were a curious bunch — men scared of living, even more scared of dying, afraid of ghosts that rose up and tiptoed through their kidneys. One sported a walrus moustache and wore shiny grey trousers, and he often slid off the end barstool, finishing his Guinness while sitting on the floor, a hedge of white cream above his lip. There was a misanthrope with a face like an oven-fresh roll, taking tenpenny pieces from behind his own ear. One man smelled of vinegar when he sweated. Another slumbered in the slop-house of his own giant Smithwick’s stains. All of them seemed to cough together in a choir, blowing their noses into the palms of their hands, bleary-eyed over newspapers, exhausted over whiskeys. ‘Who in the name of Jaysus stole the racing page?’ ‘Give us another jar there, Alice.’ ‘How about a lift home?’ ‘Well, there’s cars in the family but they’re all in America.’
From what I can figure out, they treated Mam fairly well at first — the odd swoop of the hat when she walked in, the shadowy wink, the quiet suggestion of lechery with dentures moving up and down in their mouths, a hailing of her new dress, a compliment on the shade of lipstick. But there were whispers of curiosity as well, and soon rumours abounded like storms. Storms, too, brought in strange birds — hadn’t a peregrine falcon arrived all the way from Nova Scotia once? She was a former lover of Che Guevara. She was Jack Dempsey’s girl. She was an orphan from the slums of Central America. She had failed in Hollywood. She was a daughter of Franco. She was in flight from a revolution. She had once owned a hacienda in southern Mexico, lost it all in a game of bridge. Or maybe she was a model for the old man’s camera, perhaps even posed for him, nude. The latter rumour — the one they eventually embraced — may have caused a peculiar quickness in their dentures, the shaky lifting of a glass to the mouth.
I came to the pub late afternoons, after school, swinging my satchel. Mam’s eyes were decked out, rocking back and forth in a curious sort of happiness that I didn’t recognise from home. Looking back, I can see that they could have been sisters, she and Alice O’Leary. They could have been in love with one another — sometimes sitting with a hand laid on the back of a hand, Mam’s mud-coloured fingers on Easter-lily white. Mrs O’Leary would run her fingers over my face. ‘He’s the spit of you, Juanita, feel the head of hair on him.’ Occasionally a gargantuan bottle of stout passed between them as the chickens pecked around in the garden. Mrs O’Leary would miss her lips with the drink, and a necklace of black would spill down the front of her apron, ‘Ah, Jaysus now, I couldn’t hit a barn door, used to be I could pee through a wedding ring, and now I couldn’t even hit a bucket!’
The Angelus was always Mam’s cue to go home and make dinner for my father. When it sounded out in the pub smoke, a rat-faced comedian began a recitation: ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us drunkards now and at the hour of eleven, amen.’ We walked home along the narrow roads together, Mam and I, seagulls over the bog, rainbows, winter stars rising early in the first darkness of the east. She was always wondering what to cook for him, and she’d stop by the wall, lodge in a few more rocks before she went to the kitchen, sometimes muttering quietly to herself.
The old man was freelancing for some agricultural magazines. His life had whittled down to fields of barley, gleaming red combine harvesters, cows with splatterings of shit on their tails, formal committee meetings, product launches, brand-new packages of bacon, shots of serious men in grey suits shaking hands at conventions. Banality at its finest, it meant little or nothing to him, it had no art, but it held him here. He took the sort of shots that appeared in the unread sections of newspapers. Or the type of images so indistinct that a byline underneath them embarrassed him. The world had come down to this — he was a father growing middle-aged and bored in a grey Mayo farmyard, patient as a draft-horse for a new season of grass. His wife built walls and spent afternoons in a strange pub. She talked and dreamt constantly of her homeland. He would slump his way through the front door in the evenings, smelling of old milk and cigarettes, sigh, kiss her brusquely on the cheek, ask her how much stout she had drunk in O’Leary’s. He’d wander around the table, put a hand to the back of my head, rub my hair: ‘How’s my young fella today?’ I’d tell him that I’d scored a hat-trick in a schoolyard football match. He’d put his hands into the pocket of his waistcoat and say: ‘Good on ya, lad, good on ya,’ and then lean his head down to his plate of food, every now and then looking up and winking at me, saying, ‘Hat-trick, huh?’ Moments like that, I loved him hugely, admired his bigness, but Mam sat at the end of the table and said nothing, all the time knowing that I hadn’t played football after school at all.