Breakfast on Pluto Read online

  ‘Fucking scum,’ the men say as they stop the Cortina to dump them on the waste ground and go off to a club for a drink.

  Thinking Far Too Much

  That was what Terence said. That I was thinking far too much about everything and I know he was right of course but what could I say? I could hardly say: ‘You can’t waste life, Terence! Life is precious! If it’s given, you must treasure and protect it! Not throw it away, not turn your back on it and cast it aside! Because then he would have thought I was feeling sorry for myself and bringing it all back to that morning on Whiskers’ step. But I wasn’t – I just genuinely felt that if you bring someone into this world then it is your responsibility to care for and look after them! And if you don’t, then you are wrong and I don’t care who you are!

  I was sorry for upsetting Terence that day I started crying and saying that Mammy was wrong for leaving me and not coming back! I wasn’t blaming her for leaving – but she should have come back! She should have come back or wrote to me or something! She should never have just gone like that! For without her, how can I ever belong on this earth?

  And that is exactly, exactly, what it would have been like for Martina Sheridan’s baby if she had one! Which was all I was trying to say to her. I just wanted her to see sense, that was all – because I knew that no one else would!

  For the simple reason that they don’t understand! No one else understands! They just don’t understand!

  Understand

  The Martina episode, or the, I suppose what you could call: ‘The Incident behind the Creamery’, took place much later – in early 1975, about two months after I arrived back from England. I know I hadn’t been feeling well but you couldn’t have described me as ‘mad’ or anything like that. Terence said that all that was wrong with me was that I was hypersensitive to the things that were going on around me and I think he was right. Perhaps in retrospect it was heedless of me to wear a dress or any other kind of clothes like that, but I was so worried about Charlie and other things that it just never occurred to me. I mean, it wasn’t as if I was swanning about the village like a tart or something – it just wasn’t like that! I had far too much on my mind, for Charlie was in an absolutely awful state because of Irwin’s death, she really was. Had gone completely haywire and been thrown out of the art college, in fact, drinking her head off from morning till night, her skin all blotchy from the vodka, and her clothes – before we moved in together (I started washing them after that) – actually beginning to smell. So it really was appalling, I’m not exaggerating. Close to unbearable, in fact, until she began to slowly calm, sleep coming back to her at nights.

  What had happened with Irwin, I forgot to describe, was that everybody decided he had given enough information – ‘sung enough’ as they said – and Jackie and the Horse Kinnane took him out to the bog to kill him. I think it was when Charlie saw him in the boiler suit with a bit of refuse bag hood still stuck to his collar that she decided she couldn’t be bothered pretending any more. She just went.

  Perhaps, with hindsight, I did behave rashly. But all I wanted to do was explain to Martina. I just wanted her to understand.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Incident Behind the Creamery

  A lot of people said that I slapped her across the face – I did not! I said: ‘Look, Martina! All I want to do is talk to you! If you will only listen to me – all it will take is five minutes, I promise you!’ I know I ought to have had the sense not to ask her that. But now that I’d gone so far, there wasn’t an awful lot I could do. All I remember is taking her by the arms and saying: ‘Martina! There are things you should know about. These people are just using you! You’re only fifteen! Do you think any of them will care if you bring an unwanted child into the world? You know what they want, don’t you? Don’t you? You know all they want!’ I think what probably upset me more than anything was her shouting out Smigs’ name. All I could hear was ‘Smigs! Smigs!’ and that was why I shook her. I mean – you have no idea what he was like! Once – not long after I came back to Tyreelin – I was standing in the shop queue and he lifted up my dress with a bicycle pump. I was sure it was all a joke you see and that the people were well-used to me by now. (I was wrong, of course – I can see that now. The only reason the ‘Hello, honky tonks’ and ‘Ooh, you are awfuls’ had stopped was that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me.) Which I hope explains why I turned around and smiled at him. It was just a big, completely unoffended smile but when I saw the expression on his face, it frightened me, it really and truly did. All I can say is that the eyes seemed dead – frighteningly dead in his head. All I wanted to do then was just run out of the shop and stay locked in the house for days. Not even tell Charlie about it. Just lock myself in my room and try not to think of it, hoping it would go away, the thought of his face. So you can imagine how I felt now when straight away Martina started it again. ‘Smigs! Smigs!’ was all you could hear. I don’t care what lies she told around the village – I didn’t slap her. It was just a sharp, firm tap, that’s all, solely to calm her down.

  I had heard them saying that Smigs had been in a fight in the Sports Centre and had opened some person’s face with a straight razor. That was what kept going through my mind as we stood there behind the creamery, both white, facing one another.

  ‘Please listen to me, Martina! Stay away from Tommy McNamee! Listen to me, please!’ I pleaded, but she wouldn’t. ‘Let me go,’ she said, ‘you get your hands off me now and let me go, you fucking queer!’

  All that I could get to come into my head then was the thought of Tommy McNamee (her ‘boyfriend’ – he was twenty years married, for God’s sake!) slowly pulling his jeans down and whispering into her ear: ‘You’re the nicest girl in this village, Martina. That lovely wavy blonde hair of yours is enough to turn any man’s head!’ and her cheeks flushing scarlet with all his flattery – because, of course, she didn’t know any better. How could she? How was she to know that all he cared about was pleasuring himself and walking away then to boast about it?

  While she would be left there – abandoned – for what other word is there for it? – worrying herself sick whether or not she was going to miss her period. And then, worst of all, discovering that, already growing inside her, there was a tiny little baby – the father of whom she would probably never know. On one particular evening, after seeing McNamee leaving his house to go and meet her, it had been all I could do not to run out and cry: ‘Leave her alone! Why can’t you leave her alone!’, heartbroken by the thought of that innocent, credulous face.

  I knew for a long time the covetous way he and others had been looking at her. Once, when I went into Mulvey’s for change, I saw her leaning across the pool table and one of them publicly feeling himself. She didn’t know this, of course, just like so many young girls of her age don’t. Can’t possibly, I suppose. Until it is too late. The estate in Tyreelin is full of them. Barely over fourteen, some of them, already pushing buggies and looking years older than they are. And their children. Who can say it’s fair the way some of them are treated? You can tell by their complexions – the pasty, porridgy skin colour that they all seem to have, left outside bars with the mucus on their noses, chewing at their fingers and staring with those sad old, empty eyes. Eyes that say: ‘Who will love me? Why will no one love me?’ And not with the sort of emotion that Martina Sheridan had been duped into accepting as genuine. A few groping strokes and a stab between the legs behind a dilapidated creamery! That wasn’t what they meant and it wasn’t how it was supposed to be! Life is pure! Precious! To be treasured! Why couldn’t Sheridan see that? ‘Why can’t you listen, Martina!’ I cried. ‘If not for your own, then for your baby’s sake!’

  There was so much going through my head that although we had only been standing by the shed for over a minute or so, to me it seemed like eons. I had managed – I know now it was silly – to get myself into quite a state and if I did shake her again or call her names – I’m sorry, I truly am.
r />   Another thing I will admit to that was silly and I don’t even know what made me to it – I asked Terence but he wasn’t sure either – (‘Perhaps seeking the source of life?’ he said. ‘To protect it, do you think?’) – was going down to the creamery after dark and crawling around on my hands and knees with a flashlight, looking for traces of semen. I suppose I thought that if I didn’t find any, I could feel relieved that perhaps he had used a condom and that, if I did, I would feel, perversely, somewhat better because at least I knew the truth. Why I broke down after putting my hand directly on some which had spilled on a dockleaf I’m not really sure – I think it was because it seemed so ridiculous that such a minuscule amount of liquid could cause so much heartache. But which it did, as I’d always known, and consequently belonged in a world thousands of miles from the one I’d written of and dreamed for Terence. Of which he spoke so highly, saying that never before had he read anything like it.

  *

  Was I chuffed when he said that? How much I cannot tell you, because it meant so much to me too. Do you know what he actually said?

  He said it was beautiful, my little piece about home.

  Chapter Thirty

  Chez Nous

  It was a nice, quiet evening in the townland of Tyreelin. Up above in the sky, the stars are out and in each and every house that dots the village square, there are little rectangles of amber and from the chimneys, tiny curls of smoke both blue and grey. Here in this one small cottage, there is a feeling of peacefulness. Which is so overwhelming that it appears as if this is how it has been right from the beginning of time. What we see before us is a fine, stone cottage, built by the labouring hands of a gentle, strong man who is husband to the woman who now softly reads to her bright baby boy whose name is known to all as Patrick. Is this Patrick – Pat Puss of the girly doodle dandies, son-of-priest and naughty nipple-licker of a Mum called Louise Ward – fame? No – this is simple, ordinary Patrick – son of the man called Daddy, who with great big shovel hands this cabin proudly raised. And look upon his lady now as each page she slowly turns. Sweet Eily who perhaps once made breakfast for a lascivious, hungry cleric?

  But no, my friends. Eily it may be, but not that one. This is Eily Mammy, indeed one of the most beautiful that ever was. Who, with her magic, sweetens every page she turns. ‘Listen to me now,’ she whispers, ‘as I speak of a little fellow who went to travel, walked the world, up hill and down dale, but always with his mammy by his side.’ Are Patrick’s eyes star-bright? And do his thoughts they not run thus?: ‘This is my mother. She is the most beautiful that ever was and I would die if anything happened to her.’

  But, of course, nothing will happen to her! Look at her now as she approaches the oven of the blackleaded range, her hands covered with a bluecheck cloth, out to whip a tray of steaming apple cakes! ‘Hooray!’ cries Patrick. ‘Apple cakes! My favourite!’

  As in comes Daddy, hardy brow sweatbeaded as he licks his lips and, with a flick of his black-haired, handsome head, declares: ‘H’ho! What’s this? Well, whatever it is – it’s smelling good!’

  And then to the table all – Daddy, Patrick and Eily, wonder-mother of the world.

  — Do you love your mammy? says Daddy then and smiles.

  — I love her millions, Dad, his son replies.

  — And why is that, now tell us!

  — Because she’s my mam!

  — Because she’s your mammy!

  — Who bakes bread!

  — Bread!

  — And buns!

  — And scrubs the floor!

  — And loves her little Patrick!

  — The finest mam in the whole wide world!

  And now, at last, small Patrick sleeps. The soundest sleep of any toddler since this world of ours began. In the corner – the shadowy figure of a parish priest with his soutane raised and his great big angry tootle glaring out? Of course not, sillies!

  The silhouette of a silky man with a silk garrotte who smiles to the strains of a summer song as your last ebb of life chokes out? For heaven’s sake!

  No, nothing only silence, and upon the walls a picture with the words Chez Mous, embroidered with blue entwining flowers. This is our little home. As family now it snoozes and over all the night sky closes.

  And Patrick in his dreams, he thinks: ‘I am so happy, and I thank God for giving me this, but most especially for my mammy.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Running Out on Louise

  Why I had to go and do a stupid thing like blab it all to Louise instead of keeping it to myself like the most private, intimate secret that it was is still beyond me for she didn’t have to know it, it wasn’t going to make the slightest difference to her, for up until then we’d been having the most fantastic time, we really had and if you’d said to me that I was going to turn against her, never mind run out of the house shaking and shouting, absolutely high as a kite, I simply wouldn’t have been able to believe you.

  Not that we weren’t capable of such high jinks in other ways, not half we weren’t, her coming in with that look in her eye and then crooking her finger until off I’d go like a lamb, up on her knee then in shorts with her going: ‘Mr Wonderful’ and the glimmer of a tear in her eye as she ran her fingers through my hair. That, of course, was when it happened – me letting it all slip, I mean. Allowing myself to get carried away as I thought of Eily in that dancehall long ago, the way Benny Lendrum had told me she’d been, with her gorgeous bubble-cut hair, check blouse in yellow and capri pants in white, not a fellow in the place able to take his eyes off her. ‘The most beautiful girl in the town,’ Benny said. ‘The one and only Eily Bergin – give your woman out of South Pacific a run for her money any day, they used to say!’

  Which had really excited me when he said it for no one could say: ‘Oh, that’s just Braden again – making up stupid fantasies about his mother just because she was rode by a priest and then dumped him on a step in a bloody Rinso box!’ That was one thing they couldn’t say for as I sat there on the summer seat on that day in 1965, I had heard the words fall right from Benny’s lips, one by one watching them fall and sparkle there like gold.

  *

  ‘Oh, Louise!’ I cried and threw my arms around her neck (delirious, which was how I let it slip). ‘How beautiful she was I just cannot begin to tell you!’ as she said: ‘Hush!’ and stroked my neck – making me go on and on, of course! And tell her everything – everything!

  *

  ‘Why did I have to say it, Terence! Why did I have to say it!’ I begged him to tell me over and over. But Terence just nodded and said: ‘Keep going.’

  What I wanted him to understand was that I did love Louise, not in a pure way maybe, but in one that was sort of special because she had been so good to me and me being Shaunie of course had made me close as well (not to mention all the outfits she ran up for me – Audrey Hepburn, Dusty, Diana Ross – there isn’t even any point in going into the work she put into those!) – but what she didn’t understand, why couldn’t she understand?, that there are certain things you do not do, should not do – even begin to think of doing them. How could she not see that this was different to Shaunie and Dusty and everything else we’d done and that what I’d told her was mine and never meant to leave my lips. Why could she not see that, Terence? I said. It was after I’d begun to explain all that to him he asked me was that the first time you felt whatever it is that holds you to the ground beginning to slip away? and I said yes it was, for up until then I felt solid as a rock. Which was something I’d always wanted. To be able to say: ‘This is where I belong – right here in this place, blasted by wind and weather and never to be moved.’ Instead of the very opposite which was about to happen now.

  *

  When she came into the room first, I didn’t believe it was her. I felt my legs turning to string and I moved back against the wall in case I’d collapse. Then my face flushed scarlet and I could feel the saliva in my mouth thickening up into something like jam. ‘Like m
e?’ she said, and began walking across the floor shaking invisible maraccas and batting her lashes the way she did. All of a sudden it was as if I hadn’t washed in weeks as I thought: ‘Why did I tell her about Mammy? Why did I have to tell her?’

  Whiskers used to have this habit of lighting cigarette papers and sending them flying up the flue to the light, to go spinning off across the stars as far as Pluto or wherever else they wanted to go and that was what I felt like now as I watched the blur of yellow that was the check shirt and the beautifully starched white Capri pants as she ran her hands over them singing: ‘I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair! I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair!’

  I might have been a ball of fluff blown harum-scarum by her breath as she moved in close still singing it, but would never have floated quite so far if she hadn’t uttered the words that left her lips then when I said: ‘What are you doing? Louise, please – what are you doing?’ as she raked her fingers through her bubble curls and tossing her head back, cried: ‘At last I’ve come for him – my little Rinso baby!’

  Terence told me it all dated back to then. ‘You’ve never been quite with us since, have you?’ and in a way I have to agree. I tried to explain to him what it was like when me and Charlie waltzed like we were two tiny birthday cake figures out in the cosmos, way out among the distant planets, ‘watching the earth down below’, except with the one difference that it had been so beautiful – like it all belonged to you.