A Mad and Wonderful Thing (3 page)

‘No story at all.'

I removed the scarf. I put it around her and pulled her to me.

‘Do you know something, Cora Flannery?'

‘What, Johnny Donnelly?'

‘It's time to go.'

When we arrived at Cora's house, we sat on a low wall that separates the small front and rear lawns. We watched a few other late-night travellers making their way home, some unsteady on their feet. We watched cars pass — some travelling too fast for the small road — as young men and women drove home from Dundalk to the outlying townlands in North Louth and South Armagh. I took the Dunn & Co off and put it over Cora's shoulders, closing the coat tight and lifting the collar up. She rested on me and I held her easy in my arm. It was joy itself to hold her. She moved closer. I could feel her breath on my throat. I raised my hand and touched the side of her face, and I could hear my own heart as I kissed her. And under the fall of the blue scarf, she rested her fingers on my chest.

‘You are unbelievably wonderful, Cora,' I whispered to her. ‘You are a mad and wonderful thing altogether.'

‘A mad and wonderful thing,' she whispered back. ‘Thank you. You are not too bad yourself, Mister Donnelly.'

We reach the serving of communion, the climax of the Catholic Mass. Those who stand around me at the back of the church are on the move — one or two toward the great altar to consume the body of Christ, and the rest out and away. I hold my place. To pass the time I lift a copy of
Parish Monthly
from the magazine rack on the rear wall of the church. I read about arrangements for daily Mass, weekly confessions, novenas, devotions, and a holy triduum; and news of baptisms, marriages, new choir members, a cake-and-bun sale in the parish hall, and a scheduled bus trip down the country to see a moving statue. ‘I saw it sway a little,' Dad had said after the latest trip. ‘It definitely moved all right. Didn't it, Kathleen?'

‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.' The priest brings the Mass to an end, and I skip down the front steps to where Éamon is waiting. We buy newspapers from the Sunday stall at the church gate and we walk together the short distance to the junction with the Ramparts Road. We both scan the headlines.

‘God-sakes,' Éamon comments. ‘Listen to this, Johnny.
IRA SNIPER WITH NEW DEADLY WEAPON AT WORK IN SOUTH ARMAGH
.' Éamon has the same habit as Dad of reading aloud from a newspaper. ‘Aren't you glad we don't live in the North, Johnny? Five miles away — it might as well be five hundred, it's such a different place. Thank God we live in the Republic.'

‘Up the Republic,' I say, and we both laugh.

‘So how's it going with Cora?'

‘Great. She is a wonderful girl.' The thing is out and said before I have time to consider it.

Éamon flicks his head and gives me a look that carries both surprise and question. But he says nothing. Instead he produces a couple of cigarettes, and we stand and smoke and chat. We separate after the smoke and agree to meet up later, and as I walk away from my friend I consider the girl. That's what they do to you, girls — they're an unmanageable species. And once they make it into your thoughts, it can be impossible to think of anything else.

‘John.'

I turn to the call. Behind me is a tall, elderly man buttoned up in a double-breasted charcoal-grey long coat. The man is Ignatius Delaney, and Delaney in the open is all John le Carré. Or so he thinks. The whole show is a bit Starsky & Hutch to me. Though the day is warm, he's wearing gloves, and as he approaches he's adjusting a gentleman's trilby. Two dark eyes peer out below the trilby, and a thin sneer is held beneath a greying, trimmed moustache. A Burberry scarf, neatly knotted, is offered through the lapels of the coat. Delaney, if needs be, is pure Hollywood.

‘John, I thought that was you.'

‘Hello, Mister Delaney,' I answer, playing along.

He extends one leathered hand. With the other, he gestures behind him. ‘John, have you met my daughter Loreto? She's home from California.'

I am surprised — this is unusual. I look to the tall woman. She has a white powdered face and dark eyes. Her painted red lips roar against the pale background. She wears a long, black coat with a cranberry-red scarf draped across her shoulders like a shawl, and a cranberry-red velvet cloche hat. This woman, literally, is a doll.

‘Forty years teaching, Loreto,' Ignatius Delaney says to her. ‘Forty years. So many boys, so little talent. But there was one. One who could fly higher. One light in the dark.'

I ignore the story. I have heard it before.

‘And do you know, Loreto? Do you know what he chose to do with this talent? Which higher school of learning does he attend? Which university, do you think?'

I look again to the dark eyes of the woman. She's watching me.

‘What he chose, Loreto, was carpentry. Isn't that right, John?'

‘Like I said before, Mister Delaney, I thought I might get a skill in when my hands are still young.'

‘Yes, well, never mind, John. You were always the incorrigible. Good to see you. God bless.'

We part at the fire station where the road forks. What was that about? Why was she there? This is not the Chief's form. But I've got the message — I will make a visit. I watch them as they walk away from me. I ponder on the woman below the velvet cloche hat. I know there is something there, but I let it fall from my thoughts as I walk home. Around me the air is bright and warm, the sunshine reflects off the ground, and I think again of Cora at the post office, at the nightclub, on the road home, and on the small wall in her garden. I skip along the footpath; secretly, I dance on the edge of joy. I bubble like milk on the stove just before the boil. I could break into a Michael Jackson routine at any second.

My old friend Bob appears beside me, keeping pace and in step.
We're in great form altogether,
he says.
There's no stopping us now.

I pass an elderly neighbour I hardly know. She looks to me with a curious regard as I greet her.

‘Hello, Missus Byrne,' and, unable to stop myself, add, ‘How's the ould sex life this weather?'

‘Not as busy as yours, by the look of things,' she shoots back.

Damn, that was quick. I can't think of a follow-up, so with a laugh and a wave I continue home. And I'm thinking things are looking up. Yes, indeed they are. Things are looking good for Johnny Donnelly.

The dinner

‘WILL I POUR YOUR TEA?'

‘Are you going to the match, Son?'

‘Did you shift last night, Johnny?'

I have joined Mam, Dad, and Anna at the kitchen table for Sunday dinner.

‘Please.'

‘I might go up for the second half.'

‘I sure didn't,' I answer, moving my cup across the table to within Mam's reach.

‘Thanks. Where's the other fella?'

‘Declan was away early,' Mam answers, pouring the tea. ‘Peter collected him. Off to the Mourne Mountains, if you don't mind. Up at the crack of dawn, he was, making sandwiches. I had to hide the good ham.'

I don't say anything. My two brothers often take weekend mountain hikes. It's a harmless-enough activity, I guess. But they can get puritanical about it — you'd want to listen to them going on and on about it, as if not doing it were the vice of the Devil himself. It's the type of thing people do to help them feel better about themselves. I understand that.

‘They'll be here later with yon one,' Mam continues — yon one being Aunt Hannah. ‘I'm doing a pot of homemade soup.' An old pot rattles on the cooker behind her.

‘Well, Johnny, spill the beans,' Anna persists. ‘Did you?'

‘And I've brown bread in the oven,' Mam says, continuing the account of her preparations for high tea.

‘It should be good,' Dad insists. ‘Derry will bring a great crowd.'

‘I'd say you did. Who was she, Johnny-boy? Do I know her?' Anna probes again.

‘Hey, nosey parker, eat up,' Mam admonishes. ‘And eat them sprouts, they're good for you. I don't like them myself, but I eat them.'

I look across to my sister. ‘Yes, Anna, come on, get them into you. There's a good girl.'

Anna Donnelly is twenty years old. She's a good-looking girl; well, she is my sister. She has long, dark hair the colour of old oak, and green eyes — forest green fading to an edge of azure blue. She has the same eyes as her brother, the brother who's sitting across the table from her. With the minimum of months between us, Anna and I had a shared childhood, and for all our young years we were often mistaken for twins. Through threads of her long hair, she gives me a warning.

‘I might take a walk up for the second half myself,' Dad says with some finality, and rises. With his knife he pushes the scraps off his plate into a bowl set aside for the dog, and he carries the plate to the worktop.

‘I'll wash them later for you, Kathleen,' he says. ‘After a wee read of the papers.'

I also rise.

‘I'll throw on some eggs,' Mam says to no one other than herself. ‘I could do a bit of a salad.' She, too, rises and begins to clear the table.

I follow Dad to the living room and sit on the couch, with a newspaper in hand. I can hear the opening lines of a familiar tune as Mam sings as she works. She is singing ‘Lizzie Lindsay'.

‘If she had ever got her hands on Danny Doyle, I'd have been given the door,' Dad says from behind his newspaper.

‘I think we'd all have got the door,' I say, laughing. I can't remember a day when I have not heard Mam singing a Danny Doyle song.

Kathleen Reynolds had already been working in the shoe factory for four years when she married Oliver Donnelly in the town's Saint Nicholas's Church in September 1959. She was just seventeen. Nine times she would feel the tightening of her belly and the nausea rush of early pregnancy. Those nine conceptions carried to just four births. I am the fourth-born of her four children. Mam was a bright student as a young girl: smart, capable, top of her class at reading and mathematics, and with the catechism. She had a sweet voice — the nuns had her to the front for visiting inspectors, priests, and bishops. In another time and in another place she could have been something. However, the end of primary school was the end of her education, and the end of her childhood.

Mam grew up in a house of twelve children, the youngest of eight girls. Granddad was a tradesman in the brewery — a good job at any time — but he suffered the schizophrenia of the Irish: generous and magnanimous in the pub, cruel and spiteful in the home. Mam says that her mother fought an endless war just to keep them all fed and clothed. And so, as her sisters had done before her, Mam took her small body from the schoolyard to the shoe-factory floor. Only five of the twelve children were to remain in Ireland, and two of them are dead and buried. The other seven left for work in England. Mam never saw the two eldest boys — they had been and gone by the time she was born. They never came back.

As I settle on the couch, a girl arrives at the back door, lets herself in, makes her way to the living room, and jumps up beside me.

‘Caitríona Begley is calling me names again,' she sighs.

‘Hello, Clara,' Dad says, without lowering his newspaper.

‘Hello, Oliver.' She tugs at my arm.

I drop my reading and look to her. Clara Mulligan is seven years old and the youngest child of a neighbouring family. The Mulligans run a bar in the town centre, and Clara's parents are too busy with work to be busy at home. Mam has taken on the job of child-minding during after-school hours, school holidays, and weekends. Clara has known more child-minding than she has parenting, and she has adopted here as home, and me as big brother. And that's okay with me.

‘Don't worry, baby. She's probably just mad jealous,' I say, putting my arm around her.

‘Because she's fat?'

‘No,' I laugh. ‘Probably because you've such a handsome big brother and all she has is that Paddy Begley to look at. A brother with a face like that would upset anyone. He's not allowed pass the creamery, that fella, in case he'd turn all the milk sour.'

‘That's true. That's it, isn't it?'

‘Indeed it is. If I had to look at that ugly contortion every day, I wouldn't be too happy either.'

‘Okey dokey,' Clara says, leaping off the couch. ‘I'm going to tell her that.'

‘There she goes,' Dad says.

I watch the girl skip out the door and I look over to my father. Dad can spend a large part of any day behind a newspaper, and I am never sure when he's beyond those pages whether he's reading at all or just taking cover to drift off to some other private world. I ponder on him for a while as he sits and reads. But sometimes it is impossible for me to think about Dad and not to remember the gun.

I don't have a good memory for most stuff, like what they try to teach you at school. I learn things, and they go in and linger a while, but they never stay any distance. It seems I can only hold on to the peculiar. I could never have been a great student, despite Delaney's hopes. And I don't remember much of my early childhood, the first five or six years or so. But I do remember the gun.