19
‘No, write it out,’ Sister Francis Xavier insists. ‘Fifty times till you know it.’ The minute the bell goes all the voices begin at once, and there’s the noise of the chairs scraping, and footsteps running, and Sister Francis saying running’s not allowed. The voices dwindle, floating back up St Joseph’s Hill, until there is silence except for the ticking of the wall clock and a door closing. The maps are still hanging on the blackboard. They should have been put away, the physical and the political they’re called: mountains and rivers, the counties all different colours. Through the window, her father is in the garden, tying up Michaelmas daisies. He doesn’t see her looking at him; he doesn’t know she has been kept in. Is maith liom, she writes, and then the coffin is by the dug grave. Her mother is going into that hole, but Father Kilgallen says to heaven. Peace, Father Kilgallen says, and clay makes a clatter on the yellow wood. Father Kilgallen raises his hand for the blessing, and Carmel is the bridesmaid then. ‘Who’s that?’ Johnny asks, and someone says a nightclub singer. The singer has long black hair and bangles and earrings, high heels that shine, black like her hair. She smiles when she sings, a white flash in her face, the sunshine of Spain she calls it. ‘Where’s Johnny?’ Carmel asks, and Aidan says he came into McGrattan Street Cycles and Prams to buy a pram for the baby, but when she goes there she can’t find him. She looks for him by the old gasworks, but he isn’t there either. She calls out to him because it’s dark. He doesn’t come into the fish restaurant, he isn’t in Mr Caunce’s house. ‘Johnny!’ she calls out, going up in the hotel lift with the children, and the children make a singsong of his name. ‘You’re wanted, Johnny! You’re wanted!’ Connie Jo is laughing, drinking wine with Mr Logan. Rose says it’s a queer thing, Johnny going ahead on the honeymoon. ‘Take my hand,’ the Spanish woman sings. ‘Take my whole life too…’ He’s not in the Spud-U-Like when she climbs in through the window. He’s not in his mother’s kitchen. She opens all the doors in Mr Caunce’s house, where there are people lying down in the rooms, but he isn’t there either. The lavatory water drips down through the ceiling and the Spanish woman is crouched shivering on a bed, her scarlet dress thrown on to the floor. It’s what you’d expect, Miss Furey says, anyone called Johnny would cause you grief; terrible work, anyone called Johnny could get up to. ‘My God, that’s an awful sound to come out of any human being!’ Sister Benedict cries when she hears the Spanish woman’s weeping. He isn’t in Sheehy’s or in the Mandeville woods. He isn’t in the canning factory. She asks in Chawke’s and the Centra foodstore and Scaddan’s. She asks in the convent, but the weeping of the Spanish woman is so loud she can’t hear what anyone says to her. The crying of the Spanish woman is a weight that crushes her, pressing her down. ‘It’s there in your eyes,’ someone else says, sitting on her bed, a heaviness pulling back the bedclothes so that it’s cold. There is the sound of breathing, a catching sound, as though snagged with each emission. ‘What you’re thinking is there, Felicia.’ She tries to wake up, to wrench herself out of her dreaming. But she can’t wake up. ‘Don’t put the light on.’ The breathing becomes deeper, an urgent throatiness only inches from her face. The voice is a whisper. ‘It ruins everything, Felicia. Everything is destroyed.’ She opens her eyes. No light comes from the window, no hazy dawn filters through the curtains. His presence on her bed causes a depression that draws her own body towards him. He talks about other girls, naming each of them, describing them. No one ever knew except those girls, he says; they knew because of the closeness of the association. All he ever wanted to do was to sit with them; he spent a fortune on them, presents, meals, driving them wherever they wanted to go. Beth, and Elsie Covington. Sharon, Gaye, Bobbi and Jakki. It is a private thing that they have been his friends. ‘I’m telling you so’s you understand, Felicia. I never told another soul. We could have continued the association, you could have stayed in my house. No other girl ever came into my house. There was never that.’ It isn’t in any way like a dream now. She says she’s sorry if she did anything wrong. Because he mentions staying in his house, she says she didn’t mean to intrude. ‘You came downstairs in your nightdress.’ ‘I only came down to ask you to lend me the money. Nothing only that.’ ‘I took chances every hour you were here, dear. Every day I thought someone would find out. You occupied a bed. You used the lavatory and the bathroom. God knows what shadows on the glass.’ ‘No one saw me. I did everything you said.’ ‘It was enough what we had, Felicia. Just sitting and talking in the places we went to, you telling me all those things. But when I looked in the driving-mirror it was in your eyes too.’ ‘What was? Could I put the light on? I don’t follow what you mean.’ ‘When you know a thing like that it isn’t easy for any girl to pretend.’ The nervousness she felt at the bus station when he first offered to give her a lift is there again. She was nervous when she looked around the next morning and realized his wife was not in the back of the car. She hadn’t thought twice about it when he explained that unexpectedly his wife had had to go into hospital but now, suddenly, without having to think, she knows he never had a wife. ‘I pushed it away when I saw your eyes in the driving-mirror. I didn’t want to accept it. But then you came downstairs.’ ‘I’m sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.’ ‘No one’s blaming you, dear. Things happen. Things take a turn.’ A hand is placed on one of hers. It’s only a pity, he says, that everything is ruined. No, don’t put on the light, he says; he doesn’t want the light. ‘Leave me alone, please.’ ‘They said they were going and I asked them why, but I didn’t have to, Felicia. You understand that, dear? You appreciate what I’m saying to you?’ ‘I’ll go away. I won’t bother you. It doesn’t matter about the money.’ ‘I was the world to them. In their time of need they counted on me.’ She knows the girls are dead. There is something that states it in the room, in the hoarse breathing, in the sweat that for a moment touches the side of her face, in the way he talks. The dark is oppressive with their deaths, cloying, threatening to turn odorous. ‘I’ll drive you away from my house.’ His whisper comes again, and she senses the blubbery mouth close to her. ‘Dress yourself and we’ll drive away. I have money to give you for the journey. Just walk out of the house and get into the car.’ She knows she must not do that. As surely as she knows about the girls, she is aware that she must not be drawn into the humpbacked car. He has waited for night to come and to settle: the dark is what he chooses, and the car. ‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘Yes, I’ll dress myself.’ The floorboards creak as he lumbers his way to the door. She hears the rattle of the door handle, but no light shows when the door is opened, no silhouette appears. She hears him on the stairs, still in darkness, his footsteps heavily descending. Unable to move, petrified by fear of what may happen next, more frightened than she has been in his presence, she lies where he has left her, doubting that she will find the strength to leave the bed. But in time she does, and shakily feels her way across the room. Softly, she opens the door, to grope for a key on its other side. There is none. She feels a run of blood on her legs, then turns the light on and uses part of a sheet to wipe it away. Her hands and arms are trembling, which makes all movement difficult. She sits on the edge of the bed, looking round the room, her eye finally caught by a broken piece of fire-grate. Soot and specks of masonry have dropped on to the red crêpe paper that has been bundled into the grate; the broken bar has become dislodged and lies on the hearth. It blackens her hand and is too short to be effective in her protection, but at least it’s something. She dresses and drags her coat on. From far below, outside, she hears his footsteps on the gravel. She pulls back an edge of the curtain, but it’s still too dark to see him. The car door bangs softly, and she knows he’s waiting in it now. Cautiously she steps out on to the landing, still gripping the bar of the grate, her two carrier bags slung from the crook of her free arm, her handbag looped about her body. She descends the unlit stairway, pausing every two or three steps to listen in case he has returned to the house. The metal bar makes a clatter on the tiles of the hall when it slips from her fingers. In a panic because she can’t find the latch of the hall door, she feels for a light switch.