I ran up the strand to where Mam was headbent staring at the ground, and the old man was standing with his arms stretched out, like Jesus crucified, arguing about no butter on the sandwiches — ‘Ya want me to eat these fucken things dry?’ — so I sat on the edge of the blanket and watched Donnelly and the tinker roll down along the beach again. A sandwich was laid in my lap.
‘Mam, what’s a blowjob?’
The old man suddenly slapped his knees uproariously. ‘Ah, Jaysus, even I’ve forgotten that! Even I’ve forgotten what that is!’ Mam’s face drained slowly, plucked at the tassels on the side of the blanket, ‘I don’t know, m’ijo, ask me later.’
Donnelly and the tinker were down the beach now with two girls on the back of the donkey, another man alongside them with his handkerchief knotted on his head, trying hard to keep up, with a plastic bucket and shovel in his hand. My father grunted and walked down to the water’s edge, pulling lint from his belly button. After a while the beach slowly began to clear. It was Mam’s time — I had seen it before — she was stretching her legs out along the edge of the blanket, her arms moving up to massage the back of her neck. Donnelly and the gypsy moved off from the dune, cigarettes held furtively. Along the length of the beach the other blankets had been lifted, Dunnes Stores bags tumbled, a Fanta can rolled towards the dunes, a cigarette butt bumped into a jellyfish. The sun gave a bow to the sea. Soon there was nobody left on the strand except the tinker, who was pulling his donkey up towards the cross where the life-belt was, red and white. The road curled like a rope away through stone walls built to last an eternity of storms, unlike hers. Not a soul was left save us and a few glad seagulls, bragging with crusts of bread over the sea.
She took off her blouse, unbuttoned it slowly, underneath was her purple swimsuit, like an anemone around her, sea-bound. ‘You come?’ she said. ‘Course I’m coming, Mam.’ The cavernous hollows in around the throat, smokeblue, lines criss-crossing each other moving upwards to a strange smile, aware of her body, tentative, ashamed, and maybe the tinker staring back at us, but she was suddenly cantering ahead of me like a purple tenpence towards the ocean, the old man absorbed by the sight of jellyfish, while her swift skinny arms made butterfly shapes in the shallow edge of the Atlantic, her spraying me with water, leaning in conspiratorially, saying: ‘Conor, I will explain to you that word when you are older.’
That night she stood in the kitchen under the fluorescent lights and pushed her fork through an uneaten plate of food.
I came home from school the next day and she was down by the firepit. She was wearing an apron from Knock shrine, a gift from Mrs O’Leary, the picture of the Madonna with a bit of homemade salsa on her nose. Along the lane on the bicycle, the brakes squeaking, I pulled up to where she was standing.
‘What ya doing, Mam?’
She swung around, a little startled. ‘You are home early,’ she said, wiped her hands on the face of the apron.
‘What’re ya burning, Mam?’
‘Nothing, m’ijo, come on inside, I have something special for you.’
She took my schoolbag from my shoulder as we walked to the front porch. A parcel sat on the table from Dublin, brown and crinkled. She handed me the scissors with long lean fingers — ‘Go on now, hurry quickly.’ The parcel produced a brand-new blue anorak. I laid it on the table but she told me to put it on. It was still hot outside, and I didn’t want to wear it, but I zipped it up quickly to try it on. She was happy then over the salsa pot, looking out the window. I said that I was just going outside for a moment, took the anorak off and left it sitting on the table.
Out in the firepit she had burned herself, made a pyre of her past, a giant cardboard box of books with the ends of flame around it, licking the edge of herself in the same way that the mountain fires did, a wale of fire upridged on the books. I poked around the flamed edges with a stick, around the mosquito net that the walrus man loved so much, around a dozen different bedrooms, around a tumult of skin, a dressing-table photo unburnt, a grove of trees ashy at the edges, a leg prominent from the knee down, a bedsheet disappearing. Suddenly she was shouting at me from the porch, with the coat in her fingers.
‘Come here, come here right now!’
I ran through the farmyard.
‘What are you doing there? You don’t like the coat?’
‘Oh, yeah, I like it, yeah.’
‘You don’t use it?’
‘Don’t want to get it dirty, Mam.’
She nodded her head and beckoned me with a large wooden fork covered in red sauce. ‘Come here and taste my salsa, tell me if it’s good, maybe there are missing peppers.’
But I leaned against the door and placed my muddy foot on the black and white linoleum and said: ‘I hate him, too, Mam. I hate him, too, he’s a bastard! I hate him!’ I had found out in school that day what the word meant — Hey lads, Lyonsy doesn’t know what a blowjob is! Are ya thick, Lyonsy? Everyone knows what a blowjob is! — and I had come home, detesting my father for the enormity of what he had done.
But Mam spun around and pulled me quickly to the chair — with surprising strength — and laid me down over her knee and slapped me, hard, six times on the back of my legs with the fork, sauce splaying around. ‘Don’t say that again never, don’t make me hear it again, don’t say that again never!’ I couldn’t understand her. The back of my legs were stinging, and, afterwards, at the kitchen table, she said: ‘Your Papa should hit you himself, but he never hit anybody in his life, you should be thankful, he never even hit a fly in his life! Your Papa never touched anybody!’ Later that afternoon, with a scarf of dusk coming down over the courtyard, and a smell of slaughter from the meat factory, I saw her as she strode purposefully back out to the firepit, arms swinging down by her side. She finished the job off — burning the books with a small splash of petrol and a match that took ages to light. They were damp and they snapped when she struck them. She didn’t throw much of a shadow anymore.
* * *
He woke up from the lawn chair, unaware I was sitting there, reached into his pocket for his packet of cigarettes. Before he lit up he reamed up from his chest and let a gob out towards the river. It landed near the bank, close to where I was sitting. The spit was strung through with blood. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, noticing me, ‘I must have fallen asleep.’ He saw me looking down. He was silent for a while, then he breathed deeply again through his nose.
‘Too much raspberry jam on me toast this morning.’
I felt a foul revulsion and love for him.
* * *
Us in the kitchen. Her hair thrown back behind her in long rushes of tungsten. She looked up at him as he took a plastic lighter from his shirt pocket, a pack of Major. ‘Living with you is like living with the ashtray!’ she shouted. He rose up from his chair, scooted it along the floor, cigarette between his teeth, pointed at her, shouting: ‘And it’s well you’d know about bloody ashtrays, isn’t it, woman?’
It was the morning after the books had become ash themselves, the wall of the firepit scorched, an aurora of herself amongst it. ‘You and your chip-pans and your books and your fires,’ he said, softer now, ‘would ya ever get a grip on yourself?’