6
DOLLY MORAN KNEW STRAIGHT OFF WHO THEY WERE. SHE HAD SEEN them before. She had heard tell of them, too, around the neighborhood, and knew what they did. She was sure, although she could not say why, that she was the reason they were there, standing at the corner of the street, pretending to be doing nothing. Were they waiting for it to be dark? She spotted them first when she started to go out for milk and the evening paper. She had her coat and hat on but stopped on the step when she saw them. One was thin, with dirty black hair coming down in a widow’s peak on his forehead; his cheeks were a peculiar, high shade of red, and he had a huge hooked nose. The other one was fat, with a big chest and a bigger belly and a head the size of a football; a rough mop of hair hung down to his shoulders in rats’ tails. It was the one with the hooked nose that frightened her most. They deliberately did not look in her direction, although there was not another soul to be seen in the street. She stood there, frozen, holding the door partway open behind her. She did not know what to do. Should she shut the door and just walk down past them, not giving them a glance, showing them she was not afraid? But she was, she was afraid. She would retreat back inside-in her mind she saw herself, as if she were doing it already, slamming the door shut and locking it-and wait to see if they would go away.
She had not been surprised to see them; shocked, and frightened, too, but not surprised, not after Quirke had come knocking at her door again demanding to know what had become of Chrissie’s child. She would not let him in-she thought he might be a bit drunk-and would only speak to him through the letter box. She could not bear to see his face again. She knew she had said too much already, that day in the pub when he had poured all that gin into her and soft-soaped her into talking about Chrissie and the rest of it. Today he got angry when she would not tell him what he wanted to know. He thought the child had died, and asked her where it was buried. She would say nothing, standing behind the door with a knuckle pressed against her mouth, shaking her head to herself, her eyes squeezed shut. Had those two been there already, at the corner, had they seen him, had they heard him asking about the child? By then he was shouting at her, almost, and they would easily have heard what he was saying. In the end he gave up and went away, and after a while, when she was calm enough, she had started again to go to the shop for the bottle of milk and the paper and there they were, waiting for her.
Now she was upstairs, at the window in the front room, still in her coat and hat. She had to put her cheek right up against the casement and look out at the edge of the curtain to see down to the corner. They were still there. The fat one was holding a match cupped in his hands and the other one, the one with the nose, was leaning down to get a light from it for his cigarette. She could feel a pulse ticking in her temple. She heard herself breathing, with a flutter at the end of each breath that she could not control. She went downstairs to the poky kitchen, where there was always a smell of damp and gas, and stood for a long time motionless beside the oilcloth-covered table, trying to get her mind to work, to concentrate, to tell her what to do. She took down an enameled tin marked Sugar from a shelf behind the gas stove and opened the lid and extracted a rolled-up school jotter with a yellowy-orange cover, and took it into the front room and leaned down at the fireplace and put it into the grate. She could not find the matches. She closed her eyes for a moment, and in the dark behind her eyelids felt a sudden blaze of anger. No! She thought of poor Chrissie throwing her head from side to side on the pillow and crying for her mammy, with blood and stuff everywhere, and no one to help her. No, she would not let Chrissie down a second time.
The post office closed at five, she knew she would have to hurry. She could find no envelope except the old one she kept her Tontine Society books in; it would do. The glue had worn off the flap and she had to seal it as best she could with a bit of sticking plaster. She could barely write the address, she was in such a rush and her hands were shaking so badly. For all her haste she was dreading the moment when she would have to open the front door again and step into the street. What would she do if that pair was still out there, loitering at the corner, pretending not to see her? She was not sure that she had the courage to walk past them. Maybe she could go the other way, up the street, away from the corner, and around by Arbour Hill? But that would take longer, the post office would be shut when she got there, and anyway there was nothing to stop them following her still.
She drew open the door and stepped out, hardly daring to look in the direction of the corner. But they were gone. She scanned the street from end to end. There was no one, except the old Tallon one opposite, who opened her front door an inch and stuck out her nose, pretending to be looking to see what the weather was doing. Nice calm evening. That was the thing to be, calm, nice and calm. Ma Tallon withdrew inside and shut the door softly. Would she have seen the pair on the corner? Not much happened in the street that Ma Tallon missed. But so what if she had seen them? No help there. She bit her lip and tightened her grip on her bag. She saw the dung stain on the path outside No. 12 and remembered her walk home through the soft darkness when she had linked her arm with Quirke’s. Should she call him, as he had urged her to do? For a second she considered it, her heart lifting. But no: Quirke was the last one she would call.
She got to the post office five minutes before it was supposed to close but the young fellow behind the grille was already shutting up shop, and scowled when she came in. He was like the rest of them around here, and she was used to being scowled at; sometimes they even called her names, muttering the words out of the sides of their mouths as she was going past. She did not care twopence for any of them. When she put the envelope in the box it was a weight dropping from her conscience, and she felt better; it was like going to Confession, although she could not remember when she had last done that.
She decided she would go to Moran’s and treat herself to a gin and water, just the one. She had three, however, in quick succession, and then another, more leisurely, and then a last one, for the road. As she walked home through the smoky dusk she began to feel a doubt: had she been too hasty in posting the envelope? Maybe those two were not who she thought they were, and even if they were, maybe it was not her they were watching. There were always things going on around here, thieving, and fights, and men found lying in the street with their teeth kicked in. If it was all no more than her imagination, Jesus, what had she done? Should she return to the post office and see if she could get back the envelope? But the place would be shut and the scowling clerk long gone, and anyway the post had probably been collected from the box by now. She belched, and a fiery tang of gin flooded the back of her throat. So what, anyway, if the thing was delivered? Let them suffer a bit, she thought, let them see what life is like down here.
Because of the gin she had drunk she had to search with the key for the keyhole. In the hall she felt a draft from the back of the house but took no notice. Even when she heard the wireless playing softly in the kitchen-the Ink Spots crooning “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie”-she supposed it must have been on when she went out and in her hurry she had forgotten to turn it off. She hung up her coat and went into the living room. Here, too, the air had an unaccustomed chill; she must think of getting an electric fire put in before the winter, one of those ones with the red light in them that looked like logs burning. She was on her knees on the hearth, stacking up kindling in the grate and wondering where she could have put those matches, when she heard them behind her. When she looked over her shoulder they were standing in the kitchen doorway. Everything slowed down suddenly, as if a huge engine that she was inside of had switched into its lowest gear. She was struck by the things she noticed-that the fat one’s hair was a coarse, rusty color in the electric light and that his shapeless sweater was hand-knitted, and that the one with the hooked nose was redder than ever in the face and that the cigarette he was holding between a tobacco-stained finger and thumb was a roll-up. She saw too, perfectly clearly, what she knew she could not be seeing, the smashed pane of glass in the corner of the back door just above the latch, and felt the cold black night air pouring in through the hole. And why had they turned on the wireless? For some reason that was the most frightening thing, the wireless playing, those black fellows singing in their falsetto voices. “Evening, Dolly,” the hooked-nosed one said affably, and she felt what was at first no more than a tickling sensation between her thighs, but then the sudden, scalding gush of liquid ran down the insides of her legs and spread its dark stain around her on the rug where she was kneeling.