‘If nothing happens tonight …’ said Mrs Maguire and the way she looked at Mrs Hanratty made it seem like a question.
‘I am crucified,’ said Mrs Hanratty, ‘by these shoes. I’ll never buy plastic again.’
‘You didn’t,’ said Mrs Power, wiping the window with unconcern.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Hanratty. ‘There’s something astray in my head. I wouldn’t let the kids do it.’
Nothing in her tone of voice betrayed the fact that Mrs Hanratty knew she was the most unpopular woman in the coach. She twisted 1 foot precisely and ground her cigarette into the plastic mica floor.
When Mrs Hanratty was 7 and called Maeve, she had thrown her Clarks solid leather, solid heeled, T-bar straps under a moving car and they had survived intact. The completion of this act of rebellion took place at the age of 55, with fake patent and a heel that made her varicose veins run blue. They pulsed at the back of her knee, disappeared into the fat of her thigh, ebbed past her caesarean scars and trickled into her hardening heart, that sat forgotten behind two large breasts, each the size of her head. She still had beautiful feet.
She kept herself well. Her silver hair was rinsed and set and there was black jet hanging from her ears. She was the kind of woman who squeezed into fitting rooms with her daughters, to persuade them to buy the cream skirt, even though it would stain. She made her husband laugh once a day, on principle, and her sons were either virgins or had the excuse of a good job.
Maeve Hanratty was generous, modest and witty. Her children succeeded and failed in unassuming proportions and she took the occasional drink. She was an enjoyable woman who regretted the fact that the neighbours (except perhaps, Mrs Power) disliked her so much. ‘It will pass,’ she said to her husband. ‘With a bit of luck, my luck will run out.’
At the age of 54 she had achieved fame in a 5-minute interview on the radio when she tried to dismiss the rumour that she was the luckiest woman in Dublin. ‘You’ll get me banned from the hall,’ she said.
‘And is it just the bingo?’
‘Just the bingo.’
‘No horses?’
‘My father did the horses,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t touch them.’
‘And tell me, do you always know?’
‘Sure, how could I know?’ she lied — and diverted 126,578 people’s attention with the 3 liquidisers, 14 coal-scuttles, 7 weekends away, 6,725 paper pounds, and 111 teddy bears that she had won in the last 4 years.
‘If you ever want a teddy bear!’
‘Maeve …’ she said, as she put down the phone. ‘Oh Maeve.’ Mrs Power had run across over the road in her dressing gown and was knocking on the kitchen door and waving through the glass. There was nothing in her face to say that Mrs (Maeve) Hanratty had made a fool of herself, that she had exposed her illness to the world. Somehow no one seemed surprised that she had numbered and remembered all those lovely things. She was supposed to count her blessings.
There were other statistics she could have used, not out of anger, but because she was so ashamed. She could have said ‘Do you know something — I have had sexual intercourse 1,332 times my life. Is that a lot? 65 % of the occasions took place in the first 8 years of my marriage, and I was pregnant for 45 months out of those 96. Is that a lot? I have been married for 33 years and a bit, that’s 12,140 days, which means an average of once every 9.09 days. I stopped at 1,332 for no reason except that I am scared beyond reason of the number 1,333. Perhaps this is sad.’ It was not, of course, the kind of thing she told anyone, not even her priest, although she felt a slight sin in all that counting. Mrs Hanratty knew how many seconds she had been alive. That was why she was lucky with numbers.
It was not that they had a colour or a smell, but numbers had a feel like people had when you sense them in a room. Mrs Hanratty thought that if she had been in Auschwitz she would have known who would survive and who would die just by looking at their forearms. It was a gift that hurt and she tried to stop winning teddy bears, but things kept on adding up too well and she was driven out of the house in a sweat to the monotonous comfort of the bingo call and another bloody coal-scuttle.
She was 11th out of the coach, which was nice. The car parked in front had 779 on its number plate. It was going to be a big night.
She played Patience when she was agitated and on Monday afternoons, even if she was not. She wouldn’t touch the Tarot. The cards held the memory of wet days by the sea, with sand trapped in the cracks of the table that made them hiss and slide as she laid them down. Their holiday house was an old double-decker bus washed up on the edge of the beach with a concrete block where the wheels should have been and a gas stove waiting to blow up by the driver’s seat. They were numberless days with clouds drifting one into the other and a million waves dying on the beach. The children hid in the sea all day or played in the ferns and Jim came up from Dublin for the weekend.
‘This is being happy,’ she thought, scattering the contents of the night bucket over the scutch grass or trekking to the shop. She started counting the waves in order to get to sleep.
She knew before she realised it. She knew without visitation, without a slant of light cutting into the sea. There was no awakening, no manifestation, no pause in the angle of the stairs. There may have been a smile as she took the clothes pegs out of her mouth and the wind blew the washing towards her, but it was forgotten before it happened. She just played Patience all day on the fold-down table in a derelict bus and watched the cards making sense.
By the age of 55 she had left the cards behind. She found them obvious and untrustworthy — they tried to tell you too much and in the wrong way. The Jack of Spades sat on the Queen of Hearts, the clubs hammered away in a row. Work, love, money, pain; clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades, all making promises too big to keep. The way numbers spoke to her was much more bewildering and ordinary. Even the bingo didn’t excite or let her down, it soothed her. It let her know in advance.
5 roses: the same as
5 handshakes at a railway station: the same as
5 women turning to look when a bottle of milk smashes in the shop: the same as
5 children: the same as
5 odd socks in the basket
5 tomatoes on the window-sill
5 times she goes to the toilet before she can get to sleep. and all different from
4 roses, 4 shakes of the hand, 4 women turning, 4 children, 4 odd socks, 4 tomatoes in the sun, 4 times she goes to the toilet and lies awake thinking about the 5th.
The numbers rushed by her in strings and verification came before the end of any given day. They had a party all around her, talking, splitting, reproducing, sitting by themselves in a corner of the room. She smoked them, she hung them out on the line to dry, they chattered to her out from the TV. They drummed on the table-top and laughed in their intimate, syncopated way. They were music.
She told no one and did the cards for people if they asked. It was very accurate if she was loose enough on the day, but her husband didn’t like it. He didn’t like the bingo either and who could blame him.
‘When’s it going to stop?’ he would say, or ‘the money’s fine, I don’t mind the money.’
‘With a bit of luck,’ she said, ‘my luck will run out.’
On Wednesday nights she went with Mrs Power to the local pub, because there was no bingo. They sat in the upstairs lounge where the regulars went, away from the people who were too young to be there at all. Mr Finn took the corner stool, Mr Byrne was centre forward. In the right-hand corner Mr Slevin sat and gave his commentary on the football match that was being played out in his head. The women sat in their places around the walls. No one let on to be drunk. Pat the barman knew their orders and which team were going to get to the final. At the end of the bar, Pauline made a quiet disgrace of herself, out on her own and chatty.