Scéalta Read online

  Is Frau Furka walking with you, or has she gone her own way?

  You, Dearest Everyone, who marched against the Bomb, who drank the good burgundy, who stiffened, glazed and wanted to leave, you may not wish to collect me. That is a thought and three-quarters. As you move slowly to and fro between the mountains and the seas, as you cover the great marsh of our Europa, our bull’s back, you may know I’m here and go on past.

  I would be happy to die in a hotel, a room number on my key and my belongings down to a couple of bags. I would like to think your faces will be there, massing sweetly at the window one day, framed by snow, which, I suddenly notice, is now with an ‘s’.

  There’s something I’ve been trying to do in recent weeks. We’ve been having heavy snowfalls. Often as not when I open the shutters in the kitchen in the morning I look out onto falling snow. I’ve read that if you look out onto falling snow you will have the impression that the room is rising rather than the snow falling, in the same way as you can imagine, in a stationary train being overtaken by a moving train, that you are the party moving. I have been trying, waiting for the snowfall to become still and the room to rise, but I do not know if I have achieved it fully. There are moments, and then all is fast flux and anxiety once again.

  In your progress across Europe you will not have gathered up my father. Alone, among the silence and the squalor. He had reached his threescore years and ten, or perhaps not, he did not remember the beginning, he had not known the middle and he would not miss the end of his life. There was a sunkenness in his face by then, though that may have been the drugs. He was well medicated in his later years, whether because his polar pulses were more extreme or for some other medical reason I’ve since forgotten. I haven’t forgotten how they argued over the funeral. What did it matter? I’ve always hated religion.

  You know that, don’t you, we’ve all always had that in common?

  My father was a salesman, small goods, you know, ties, shoelaces, shirts, belts, braces. He too could be the life and soul of the party. Like the flurries that build the Monte Rosa, my father is a man of snow. He had episodes. And the icy truth, somewhere there under the drawer marked Elastic, is that I must have always thought I’d have episodes too. Instead I had all the subterfuge. When I visited him in hospital, there he’d be, holding thin air in front of the TV screen. He stared through me as he stared through the TV. I was not the reason he was being processed like this. I wasn’t any reason at all. He had not journeyed this far to find me, nor would he wave when I left.

  Let’s take mountains and my mother. Let’s take snow shock and my family. Glaciers and my father. Let’s take any two things and discuss the difference between them –

  The phone just rang. It was the shop in the village to say that deliveries were not going to get through today. Ah well. There’s a fair supply of tins still, and I’m working my way through the wine cellar. A glass or two of wine in the evening. I have not found it easy to accept – anything.

  As I take the first few sips of wine I feel better. There’s some slippage, which will take the place of acceptance. There’s the scrutiny that preceded the rock of ages and the first ripple that came after the flood. I am between, rocking in Frau Furka’s chair. They were also asking me, the people in the shop, if I’d heard the latest on Herr Furka’s will. Apparently he’s left the building to the mountain. Some dream he always had, about the rock reclaiming the rock. A shift in tectonic plates, an open maw, sudden warmth and then the Hotel Furkablick swallowed up. This does not gel with the nephews and nieces, we gather. No, it gels with the mountain.

  There’s a lull in the storm and a last grey light soaks into the snow on the windowsill. I like the moments before dark. Absorption at its height, don’t you think? Frau Furka used to say the end of the day was the best of the day, all the aromas had gathered. It will snow again tonight. Already the gap between the hotel and the mountainside is dwindling. By morning the kitchen window could be covered entirely. The snow will be falling and my room will be rising. You’ll see.

  CLAIRE KEEGAN

  Men and Women

  My father takes me places. He has artificial hips so he needs me to open gates. To reach our house you must drive up a long lane through a wood, open two sets of gates and close them behind you so the sheep won’t escape to the road. I’m handy. I open the gates, my father free-wheels the Volkswagen through, I close the gates behind him and hop back into the passenger seat. To save petrol, he starts the car on the run, gathering speed on the slope before the road and then we’re off to wherever my father is going on that particular day.

  Sometimes it’s the scrapyard where he’s looking for a spare part or, scenting a bargain in some classified ad, we wind up in a mucky field pulling cabbage plants or picking seed potatoes in a dusty shed. At the forge I stare into the water barrel whose surface reflects patches of the milky skies that drift past, sluggish, until the blacksmith plunges the red-hot metal down and scorches away the clouds.

  On Saturdays, my father goes to the mart and examines sheep in the pens, feeling their backbones, looking into their mouths. If he buys just a few sheep, he doesn’t bother going home for the trailer but puts them in the back of the car and it is my job to sit between the front seats and keep them there. They shit small pebbles and say baaaah!, the Suffolks’ tongues dark as the raw liver we cook on Mondays. I keep them back until we get to whichever house Da stops at for a feed on the way home. Usually it’s Bridie Knox’s because Bridie kills her own stock, and there’s always meat. The handbrake doesn’t work so when Da parks in her yard I get out and put the stone behind the wheel.

  I am the girl of a thousand uses.

  ‘Be the holy, Missus, what way are ya?’

  ‘Dan!’ Bridie says, like she didn’t hear the car.

  Bridie lives in a smoky little house without a husband but she has sons who drive tractors around the fields. They’re small, deeply unattractive men who smell of dung and patch their Wellingtons. Bridie wears red lipstick and face powder but her hands are like a man’s hands. I think her head is wrong for her body, the way my dolls look when I swap their heads.

  ‘Have you aer a bit for the child, Missus? She’s hungry at home,’ Da says, looking at me like I’m one of those African children we give up sugar for during Lent.

  ‘Ah now!,’ says Bridie, smiling at his old joke. ‘That girl looks fed to me. Sit down there and I’ll put the kettle on.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Missus, I wouldn’t fall out with a drop of something. I’m after being in at the mart and the price of sheep is a holy scandal.’

  He talks about sheep and cattle and the weather and how this little country of ours is in a woeful state while Bridie sets the table, puts out the Chef sauce and the Colman’s mustard and cuts big, thick slices off a flitch of beef or boiled ham. I sit by the window and keep an eye on the sheep who stare, bewildered, from the car. Da eats everything in front of him while I build a tower of biscuits and lick the chocolate off and give the rest to the Jack Russell under the table.

  When we get home, I find the fire shovel and collect the sheep droppings from the car and roll barley on the loft.

  ‘Where did you go?’ Mammy asks.

  I tell her all about our travels while we carry buckets of calf-nuts and beet-pulp across the yard. Da sits in under the shorthorn cow and milks her into a zinc bucket.

  My brother sits in the sitting room beside the fire and pretends he’s studying. He will do the Inter-cert next year. My brother is going to be somebody so he doesn’t open gates or clean up shite or carry buckets. All he does is read and write and draw triangles with special pencils Da buys him for mechanical drawing. He is the brains in the family. He stays there until he is called to dinner.

  ‘Go down and tell Seamus his dinner is on the table,’ Da says.

  I have to take off my Wellingtons before I go down.

  ‘Come up and get it, you lazy fucker,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll tell,’ he says.


  ‘You won’t,’ I say, and go back up to the kitchen where I spoon garden peas onto his plate because he won’t eat turnip or cabbage like the rest of us.

  Evenings, I get my schoolbag and do homework on the kitchen table while Ma watches the television we hire for winter. On Tuesdays she makes a big pot of tea before eight o’clock and sits at the range and glues herself to the program where a man teaches a woman how to drive a car. How to change gears, to let the clutch out and give her the juice. Except for a rough woman up behind the hill who drives a tractor and a Protestant woman in the town, no woman we know drives. During the break, her eyes leave the screen and travel to the top shelf of the dresser where she has hidden the spare key to the Volkswagen in the old cracked teapot. I am not supposed to know this. I sigh and continue tracing the course of the River Shannon through a piece of greaseproof paper.

  On Christmas Eve, I put up signs. I cut up a cardboard box and in red marker, I write THIS WAY SANTA with arrows, pointing the way. I am always afraid he will get lost or not bother coming because the gates are too much trouble. I staple them onto the paling at the end of the lane and on the timber gates and one inside the door leading down to the parlour where the tree is. I put a glass of stout and a piece of cake on the hearth and conclude that Santa must be drunk by Christmas morning.

  Daddy takes his good hat out of the press and looks at himself in the mirror. It’s a fancy hat with a stiff feather stuck down in the brim. He tightens it well down on his head to hide his bald patch.

  ‘And where are you going on Christmas Eve?’ Mammy asks.

  ‘Going off to see a man about a pup,’ he says, and bangs the door.

  I go to bed and have trouble sleeping. I am the only person in my class Santa Claus still visits. I know this because the master asked ‘Who does Santa Claus still come to?’ and mine was the only hand raised. I’m different, but every year I feel there is a greater chance that he will not come, that I will become like the others.

  I wake at dawn and Mammy is already lighting the fire, kneeling on the hearth, ripping up newspaper, smiling. There is a terrible moment when I think maybe Santa didn’t come because I said ‘come and get it, you lazy fucker,’ but he does come. He leaves me the Tiny Tears doll I asked for, wrapped in the same wrapping paper we have and I think how the postal system is like magic, how I can send a letter two days before Christmas, and it reaches the North Pole overnight, even though it takes a week for a letter to reach England. Santa does not come to Seamus anymore. I suspect he knows what Seamus is really doing all those evenings in the sitting room, reading Hit n Run magazines and drinking the red lemonade out of the sideboard, not using his brains at all.

  Nobody’s up except Mammy and me. We are the early birds. We make tea, eat toast and chocolate fingers for breakfast. Then she puts on her best apron and turns on the radio, chops onions and parsley while I grate a plain loaf into crumbs. We stuff the turkey and sweep the kitchen floor. Seamus and Da come down and investigate the parcels under the tree. Seamus gets a dartboard for Christmas. He hangs it on the back door and himself and Da throw darts and chalk up scores while Mammy and me put on our anoraks and feed the pigs and cattle and sheep and let the hens out.

  ‘How come they do nothing?’ I am reaching into warm straw, feeling for eggs. The hens lay less in winter.

  ‘They’re men,’ she says, as if this explains everything.

  Because it is Christmas, I say nothing. I come inside and duck when a dart flies past my head.

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ Says Seamus.

  ‘Bulls-eye,’ says Da.

  On New Year’s Eve, it snows. Snowflakes land and melt on the window-ledges. It is the end of another year. I eat a bowl of sherry trifle for breakfast and fall asleep watching Lassie on TV. I play with my dolls after dinner, but get fed up filling Tiny Tears with water and squeezing it out through the hole in her backside so I take her head off but her neck is too thick to fit into my other dolls’ bodies. I start playing darts with Seamus. He chalks two marks on the lino: one for him and another, closer to the board, for me. When I get a treble nineteen, Seamus says ‘fluke’. According to my brother anything I do right is an accident.

  ‘Eighty-seven,’ I say, totting up my score. I’m quick to add even though I’m no good at subtraction.

  ‘Fluke!’ he says.

  ‘You don’t know what fluke is,’ I say. ‘Fluke and worms. Look it up in the dictionary.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he says.

  I am fed up being treated like a child. I wish I was big. I wish I could sit beside the fire and be called up to dinner, lick the nibs of special pencils, sit behind the wheel of a car and have someone open gates that I could drive through.

  That night, we get dressed up. Mammy wears a dark red dress, the colour of the shorthorn cow. Her skin is freckled like somebody dipped a toothbrush in paint and splattered her. She asks me to fasten the catch on her string of pearls. I used to stand on the bed doing this but now I’m tall, the tallest girl in my class; the master measured us. Mammy is tall and thin but the skin on her hands is hard. I wonder if someday she will look like Bridie Knox, become part man, part woman.

  Da does not do himself up. I have never known him to take a bath or wash his hair, he just changes his hat and shoes. Now he clamps his good hat down on his head and looks at himself in the mirror. The feather is sticking up more than usual. Then he puts his shoes on. They are big black shoes he bought when he sold the Suffolk ram. He has trouble with the laces, as he finds it hard to stoop. Seamus wears a green jumper with elbow patches, black trousers with legs like tubes and cowboy boots to make him taller.

  ‘Don’t trip up in your high heels,’ I say.

  We get into the Volkswagen, me and Seamus in the back and Mammy and Da up front. Even though I washed the car out, I can smell sheep-shite, that terrible smell that always drags us back to where we come from. Da turns on the windscreen wiper, there’s only one, and it screeches as it wipes the snow away. Crows rise from the trees, releasing shrill, hungry sounds. Because there are no doors in the back, it is Mammy who gets out to open the gates. I think she is beautiful with her pearls around her throat and her red skirt flaring out when she swings round. I wish my father would get out, that the snow would be falling on him, not on my mother in her good clothes. I’ve seen other fathers holding their wife’s coats, holding doors open, asking if they’d like anything at the shop, bringing home bars of chocolate and ripe pears even when they say no.

  Spellman Hall stands in the middle of a car park, an arch of bare, multi-coloured bulbs surrounding a crooked Merry Christmas sign above the door. Inside is big as a warehouse with a slippy wooden floor and benches at the walls. Strange lights make every white garment dazzle. It’s amazing. I can see the newsagent’s bra through her blouse, fluff like snow on the auctioneer’s trousers. The accountant has a black eye and a jumper made of grey and white wool diamonds. Overhead, a globe of shattered mirror shimmers and spins slowly. At the top of the ballroom a Formica table is stacked with bottles of lemonade and orange, custard cream biscuits and cheese and onion Tayto. The butcher’s wife stands behind, handing out the straws and taking in the money. Several of the women I know from my trips around the country are there: Bridie with her haw-red lipstick, Sarah Combs who only last week urged my father to have a glass of sherry and gave me stale cake while she took him into the sitting room to show him her new suite of furniture. Miss Emma Jenkins who always makes a fry and drinks coffee instead of tea and never has a sweet thing in the house because of something she calls her gastric juices.

  On the stage, men in red blazers and candy-striped bow ties play drums, guitars, blow horns, and the Nerves Moran is out front, singing My Lovely Leitrim. Mammy and I are first out on the floor for the cuckoo waltz, and when the music stops, she dances with Seamus. My father dances with the women from the roads. I wonder how he can dance like that and not open gates. Seamus jives with teenage girls he knows from the vocational school, hand up, arse out and the girls s
pinning like blazes. Old men in their thirties ask me out.

  ‘Will ya chance a quick-step?’ they say. Or ‘How’s about a half set?’

  They tell me I’m light on my feet.

  ‘Christ, you’re like a feather.’

  In the Paul Jones, the music stops and I get stuck with a farmer who smells like the sour whiskey we make sick lambs drink in springtime, but the young fella who hushes the cattle around the ring in the mart butts in and rescues me.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ he says. ‘He thinks he’s the bee’s knees.’

  I imagine bees having knees and think it queer. He smells of ropes, new galvanise, Jeyes Fluid or maybe I’m just imagining it. People say I imagine things.

  After the half-set I get thirsty and Mammy gives me a fifty pence piece for lemonade and raffle tickets. A slow waltz begins and Da walks across to Sarah Combs who rises from the bench and takes her jacket off. Her shoulders are bare, I can see the tops of her breasts like two duck eggs. Mammy is sitting with her handbag on her lap, watching. There is something sad about Mammy tonight, it is all around like when a cow dies and a lorry comes to take it away. Something I don’t fully understand is happening, as if a black cloud has drifted in and could burst and cause havoc. I go over and offer her my lemonade, but she just takes a little, dainty sip and thanks me. I give her half my raffle tickets but she doesn’t care. My father has his arms around Sarah Combs, dancing slow like slowness is what he wants. Seamus is leaning against the far wall with his hands in his pockets, smiling down at the blonde who hogs the mirror in the Ladies.

  ‘Cut in on Da.’

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘Cut in on Da.’

  ‘What would I do that for?’ he says.

  ‘And you’re supposed to be the one with all the brains,’ I say. ‘Gobshite.’

  I walk across the floor and tap Sarah Combs on the back. I tap a rib. She turns, her wide, patent belt gleaming in the light spilling from the globe above our heads.