The Secret Scripture

'What do you want, Roseanne?'

'What do I want?'

Then that dry retching. Then people were looking at me. Probably thought I had downed a half bottle of gin too quick, or the like, like nervous dancers did, or dodgy customers as Tom called them. There was nothing to show for my retching, but that didn't stop my grievous embarrassment. Close on the heels of which was a deep deep feeling of something, maybe remorse, maybe self-horror, that bored down into me.

Jack hung back from me as if indeed I were a cliff, or something dangerous that might crumble at the edge, and send him plummeting to his death. The cliffs of Mohar, Dun Aengus.

'Jack, Jack,' I said, but meaning what, I didn't know.

'What's going on with you?' he said. 'What's going on with you?'

'Me? I don't know. I feel sick.'

'No, not now, not fucking now, Roseanne. What have ya been up to?'

'Why, what's they saying I was up to?' Now, that didn't even sound like English to me. What's they saying. Like some old Black song from the Southern States. But Jack didn't say. 'Can I go back and see Tom?' I said. 'Tom doesn't want to see you.' 'Of course he does, Jack, he's my husband.' 'Well, Roseanne, we'll have to see about that.' 'What do you mean, Jack?'

Then suddenly he wasn't icy any more. Maybe he remembered other days, I don't know. Maybe he remembered I was always friendly to him, and respectful of his achievements. I liked Jack, God knows. I liked his sternness and his queer quick gaiety now and then, when he would suddenly shake out his legs, and do what he called an African dance. At a party as may be, just all of a sudden, no warning, an enormous gaiety that would seem to get a hold of him and sweep him all the way to Nigeria. I liked him, with his nice coats and his even nicer hats, his thin gold watchchain, his car that was always the best car in Sligo, bar the big saloons of the toffs.

'Lookit, Roseanne,' he said. 'It's all very complicated. There's a book opened for you up at the shop in Strandhill. You won't starve.'

'What?'

'You won't starve,' he said.

'Look,' I said, 'there's no reason for me not talking to Tom. Just to have a word. This is what I came down to do. I don't expect to – to play in the band, for God's sake.'

This was not very logical, and I do believe I shouted the last few words. This was not a good move with Jack, who was so extremely selfconscious, and hated a scene above all else. I don't suppose his precious Galway girl ever made a scene. Nevertheless Jack kept his cool, and came a few inches closer to me.

'Roseanne, I've always been a friend to you. Trust me now, and go back to the house. I'll be in touch. This whole thing may blow over yet. Just calm down and go back to the house. Go on, Roseanne. The mother has spoken on this matter and there's no going against the mother.'

'The mother?'

'Yes, yes, the mother.'

'And what in the name of God does she say?'

'Roseanne,' he said, fiercely, quietly, 'there's things about the mother you don't understand. There's things about her I don't understand. She's had her own vicissitudes when she was a child. The result is, she knows her own mind.'

'Vicissitudes? What vicissitudes?'

He was almost hissing now when he spoke, seemingly in a ferment not to be heard, but also, to impress something on me that was maybe impossible to impress.

'Old stuff. She's determined that Tom will make good, because, because – ould reasons, ould reasons.'

'You're talking like a lunatic,' I shouted. I might have burned him with a burning stick.

'But look, but look, the whole thing may blow over,' he said.

Somehow in my heart of hearts I knew if I turned about and left that dancehall that 'the whole thing' would most certainly not blow over. There is a moment to speak to a topic, just like there is a moment for every song, no matter how rare. This was a rare moment in a life and I knew that if I could just see Tom, or rather, just let him see me, the woman he loved so greatly, desired, revered and loved, everything would be all right, eventually.

But Jack was barring my way. No doubt about it. He was standing just a little sideways to me, like a salmon fisherman about to cast out across the stream, leaning his weight on his left foot.

Jack wasn't a bastard, he wasn't a cruel man. But in that instance he was a brother, not a brother-in-law.

He was also a mighty big obstacle. I tried to surge forward, to go past him by mere force of will, a substance much softer than he was trying to go through him. He was hardened by his sojourns in Africa, it was like hitting a tree, he put his arms around me as I tried to break away down the hall, and I was screaming, screaming for Tom, for mercy, for God. His arms closed around my waist, closed tight tight around, hamma-hamma tight, to use the words he had learned in Africa, the pidgin English he liked to mimic and mock, he drew me to him, so that my bottom was fastened into his lap, docked there, held tight, fast, impossible to get away, like a weird love embrace.

'Roseanne, Roseanne,' he said. 'Will you whisht, woman, whisht.'

Myself roaring and caterwauling.

That's how much I loved Tom and my life with Tom. That's how much I baulked at and hated the future.

Back in the corrugated-iron hut I didn't know what to do with myself. I went to bed to sleep but there was no sleep. A cold creeping feeling came into my brain, lending a physical pain, as if someone were opening the back of my grey matter with the sharp sharp blade of a tin opener. Hamma-hamma sharp.

There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures. The pain of childbirth is said to be one, but I cannot agree there. And the pain of whatever had happened to me is certainly not one either. Even as a sere old crone in this room I can still remember it. Still feel a shadow of it. It is a pain that removes all other things except itself, so that the young woman lying there in her marriage bed was just all pain, all suffering. I was drenched in a strange sweat. The chief part of the pain was caused by the enormous panic that nothing would ever arrive, no circus, Yankee cavalry, human agency, to relieve it. That I would always be sweltering in it.

And yet I suppose it was of no importance. In that I was of no account in the world, in a time of dark suffering much greater than mine, if the ordinary history of the world is to be believed. This comforts me to think of now, curiously enough, but not then. What would have comforted that writhing woman in a lost bed in the lost land of Strandhill I do not know. If I were a horse they would have shot me out of mercy.

It is no small thing to shoot a person, yet in those days it seemed to be considered a thing of small account. Generally, in the world. I know Tom was gone shortly with the General out to Spain to fight for Franco, and there was a lot of shooting there. They drove men and women to the edges of scenic abysses and shot them, and let them fall away into those fathomless places. The abyss really was both history and the future. They shot people into the ruin of their country, into the moil and the ruin, just like in Ireland. In the civil war we shot enough of each other to murder the new country in its cradle. Enough and more.

I am speaking for myself, as I see things now. I didn't know much about such things then. I had seen murder though, with my very eyes. And I had seen how murder could travel sideways and take other lives all unbeknownst. The very cleverness and spreadingness of murder.