2.
— … Who are you? How long are you here? Do you hear me? Don’t be afraid. Say the same things here as you said at home. I’m Maggie Frances.
— O may God bless you. Maggie Frances from next door. This is Caitriona. Caitriona Paudeen. Do you remember me, or do you forget everything down here? I haven’t forgotten anything yet, anyway.
— And you won’t. This is much the same as the “ould country” except that we only see the grave we are in, and we can’t leave our coffin. Or you won’t hear any live person either, and you won’t have a clue what they’re up to, except when the newly buried crowd tell you. But, hey, look Caitríona, we are neighbours again. How long are you here? I never noticed you coming.
— I don’t know, Maggie, if it was St. Patrick’s Day, or the day after that I died. I was too weak. I don’t know how long I’m here either. Not that long, anyway … You’ve been buried a long time now, Maggie … Too true. Four years this Easter. I was spreading a bit of manure for Patrick down in Garry Dyne when one of Tommy’s young ones came up to me. “Maggie Frances is dying,” she said. And what do you know, Kitty, the young one, was just going in the door when I reached the end of the haggard. You were gone. I closed your eyes. Myself and Kitty laid you out. And thanks to us, well, everyone said that you looked gorgeous on the bed. Nobody had any need to complain. Everyone who saw you, Maggie, everyone said that you were a lovely corpse. Not a bit of you, not a hair out of place. You were as clean and smooth as if they had ironed you out on the bed …
… No I didn’t hang on that long, Maggie. The kidneys had packed up a long time ago. Constipation. I got a sharp pain five or six weeks ago. And then, on top of that I got a cold. The pain went into my stomach and then on my chest. I only lasted about a week … I wasn’t that old either, Maggie, just seventy-one. But I had a hard life. I really had a hard life, and I looked every bit of it. When it hit me, it really hit me, left its mark on me. I had no fight left …
You might say that Maggie, alright. That hag from Gort Ribbuck didn’t help me a bit. Whatever possessed my Patrick to marry the likes of her in the first place? … God bless you, Maggie, you have a heart of gold, but you don’t know the half of it, and a word about it never passed my lips. A full three months now and she hasn’t done a stroke … The young one. She just about made it this time. The next one will really put her to the pin of her collar, though … Her brood of kids out of their minds except for Maureen, the eldest one, and she was in school every day. There I was slaving away washing them and keeping them from falling into the fire, and throwing them a bit of grub whenever I could … Too true, too true. Patrick’s house will be a mess now that I am gone. Of course that hag couldn’t keep a decent house any way, any woman who spends every second day in bed … O, now you’re talking, tell me more … Patrick and the kids, that’s the real tragedy …
It was so. I had everything ready, Maggie, the clothes, the scapulars, the lot … ’Tis true, they lit eight candles for me in the church, not a word of a lie. I had the best coffin from Tim’s place. It cost at least fifteen pounds … and, wait for it, not two plates on it, but three, believe me … And every one of them the spitting image of the fancy mirror in the priest’s house …
Patrick promised he’d put a cross of Connemara marble on my grave: just like the one on Peter the Publican, and written in Irish: “Caitriona, wife of John Lydon …” He said it himself, not a word of a lie. You don’t think I’d ask him do you, I wouldn’t dream of it … And he said he’d put a rail around it just like the one on Huckster Joan’s, and that he’d decorate it with flowers — I can’t remember what he called them, now — the kind that the School Mistress wore on her black dress after the School Master died … “That’s the least we could do for you,” Patrick said, “after all you did for us throughout your life.” …
But listen to me, what kind of place is this at all, at all? … Too true, too true, the Fifteen Shilling plot … Now, come on Maggie, you know in your heart of hearts that I wouldn’t want to be stuck up in the Pound plot. Of course, if they had put me in there, I could have done nothing about it, but to think that I might want that …
Nell, was it … I nearly buried her. If I had lived just a tiny little bit more … That accident to her boy, that really shook her … A lorry hit him over near the Strand about a year or a year and a half ago, and it made bits of his hip. The hospital didn’t know whether he would live or die for about a week …
O, you heard about it already, did you? … He spent another six months on the flat of his back … He hasn’t done a thing since he got home, just hobbling around on two crutches. Everyone thought he was a goner …
He can’t do anything for the kids, Maggie, except for the eldest fucker and he’s a bollocks … that might be the case alright … Like his grandfather, same name Big Blotchy Brian, a total asshole. Who cares, but then, his grandma, Nell … Nell and her crowd never harvested anything for the last two years … That injury has really shagged the two of them, Nell and that Brian Maggie one. I got great satisfaction from that bitch. We had three times as many spuds as her this year.
Ah, for God’s sake, Maggie Frances, wasn’t the road wide enough for him just as it was for everybody else to avoid the lorry? … Nell’s boy was thrown, Maggie. “I wouldn’t give you the steam of my piss,” the judge said … He let the lorry driver come to court in the meantime, but he didn’t allow Nell’s youngfella to open his mouth. He’s bringing it to the High Court in Dublin soon, but that won’t do him any good either … Mannix the lawyer told me that Nell’s crowd wouldn’t get a brass farthing. “And why would he,” he said, “wrong side of the road.” … No truer word, Maggie. Nell won’t get a hairy cent from the law. It’s what she deserves. I’m telling you, she won’t be going past our house so easily from now on singing “Ellenore Morune” …
Ara, poor Jack isn’t that well either, Maggie. Sure, Nell never minded him one bit, nor did Blotchy Brian’s daughter since she went into their house … Isn’t Nell my own sister, Maggie, and why on earth would I not know? She never paid a blind bit of attention to Jack, and not a bit of it. She was wrapped up in herself. She didn’t give a flying fuck about anyone, apart from herself … I’m telling you, that’s the God’s honest truth, Jack suffered endlessly because of her, the slut … Fireside Tom, Maggie. Just as he always was … In his hole of a hovel all the time. But it will fall down on him someday soon … Ah, for God’s sake didn’t my Patrick go and offer to put some thatch on it … “Look, Pat,” I said to him, “you have absolutely no business sticking thatch on Tom’s wreck of a house. Nell can do it if she wants. And if she does so, then so will we” …
“But Nell has nobody at all now since Peter’s leg was smashed,” said Pat.
“Everybody has enough to do for himself,” I said, “everyone has to thatch their own place, even a kip like that prick Fireside Tom.”
“But the house will collapse on him,” he says.
“It can if it wants to,” I says, “Nell has enough on her plate without filling up Tom’s mouth with shite. That’s it, Pat, my boy, keep at it. Fireside Tom is like rats being drowned in a bath. He comes crawling to us to keep out of the rain” …
Nora Johnny, is it? … It’s a queer thing to find out more about her here … I know far too much about her, and every single one of her breed and seed, Maggie … Listening to the Master every single day, is that it … The Old Master himself, the wretch … the Old Master reading to Nora Johnny! … Nora Johnny! … ah, for Christ’s sake … he doesn’t think much of himself, does he, the master … Reading stuff to Nora Johnny … Of course, that one has nothing between her ears. Where would she get it from? A woman that never darkened the door of a school, unless it was to vote … I’m telling you it’s a queer world if a schoolmaster spends his time talking to the likes of her … What’s that, Maggie? … that he fancies her … I don’t know who she is … If her daughter lived in the same house as him for the last sixteen years, as she has here, he sure as hell would know who she was then. But I’ll tell him yet … I’ll tell him about the sailor, and the rest of it …