Carn (5 page)

When they reached home, it all began, as before and before that.

“Meat? Call this meat?” he cried. He flung it from him and spat at her. Then he rose and took Josie roughly in his arms. His spiky chin rubbed against her face. “This is my wee
woman here,” he said, “this is the only woman I care about. Are you my wee girl Josie?” He left her to her bed and the silence took over then. The night hung about Josie as she
listened to the moans of her mother in the next room, the bedsprings creaking until there was nothing but the tapping of a branch on the window pane. Josie tried to rub the feel of his spikiness
from her face but the more she did the more it spread.

Outside in the square, a loudspeaker announced details of a singing competition which was to take place shortly in the primary school. But Josie’s mind could not go back with it or the
sound of the voices passing on the street. Her mind went back to him as she watched him blubbering like a child at the open grave, his hands shaking as he cried out, “Cassie, Cassie come back
to me, I can’t live without you.” Neighbour women soothed him, his wild, drink-fired eyes fixed on her and he clutched her by the shoulders, quivering. “What are we going to do
now, Josie? How can we manage? She knew how to run everything. I can’t be expected to do it, Josie pet, I can’t!”

The house fell to decay. Bluemoulded dishes cluttered the sink. Wallpaper peeled and potatoes sprouted on the scullery floor. The collars and cuffs of Josie’s favourite dress went black.
In the nights he came to her and lifted her from the bed. The drink fumes suffocated her as she felt him draw a line with his finger from her neck to her navel saying, “You always were my
pet. You and me miss Cassie. She was an angel, your mother.” He nipped her on the neck with his teeth and she felt the race of his heartbeat. Josie did not feel like a human being beneath.
She was an inert rag doll. He turned from her and she winced as he spasmed and every nerve in her body tightened as he lay there, crying in the darkness.

When the nurse came and gave her sweets, she brightened and thought of the happy time that the nurse said was coming. She wafted with the stories of pretty dresses and bright airy rooms. The
nurse took her hand. She combed her hair gently and said to Josie, “We’re going to make you a nice little girl. Little Miss Josephine, that’s who you’re going to
be.”

The marble busts stared at Josie with piercing eyes and she walked the corridor with the nun and the huge rooms swept above her and made her dizzy. The room where they slept smelt of horsehair
and rough soap and girls her own age looked at her with lifeless eyes. Her days after that became numbed, they fused imperceptibly into each other, measured by the ceaseless, ominous boom of the
vast metal bell in the chapel corridor. The tiles echoed with the steady click of spartan heels. The smell of boiling cabbage hung perenially in the air. She curled up at night in a long grey
cotton nightdress and sucked her thumb like an infant. The mornings found her in the potato field, bent beneath the sky, her whittled nails ingrained with dirt. Once a magician came and performed
tricks with scarves and cardboard tubes but beyond that there was nothing but the icy hand on the wrist and the deadening chant of prayer.

When Josie stood in the doorway of the orphanage for the last time, she turned back and looked at the rows of uncurtained windows set in the granite façade and she thought how much she
hated the stifling presence of her own sex. Their body smell, their petulance and finicky moods, their feigned, brittle gentleness. She thought of their scattered clothes on the beds, the
relentless exploration of skin in search of new blemishes, their coy deviousness. She never wanted them circling her so closely again.

She found herself standing in Molloy’s Select Drapery in the town of Carn and plucked nervously at the buttons of her coat as Molloy pulled the tape measure to and fro on
the back of his neck saying, “I don’t normally take girls from there you know. It’s only on account of the wife and Sister Benignus being so great. She says you’re not the
worst. I’ll tell you this, mind. Any slacking and you’re gone. And whatever the wife tells you to do in the kitchen, no mouthing out of you. If you do, there’s the door. And no
thieving. One thing I can’t stand, that’s thieving. The wife will give you a shopcoat. Now, away with you. I’ve work to do. What did you say your name was? Josie?”

She was given her own room with faded wallpaper and a Sacred Heart lamp. A blond Jesus held up two fingers as he looked into Josie’s soul and beneath him a small light burned in a scarlet
bell jar.

Old women with musty smells tormented her about brassières and corsets.

As time passed, the taint of the orphanage began to leave Josie and when she donned an ice-cream pink mohair sweater, it was not with either shame or fear.

At first when the men came into the shop, her cheeks burned and her hands seemed to take on a life of their own. But the male voices were so different that she could not help following them, her
eyes falling to the deep black hairs that covered their hands. She began to realise too that there was something stirring in her and when they stole surreptitious glances at her from behind the
suit rack, she pretended not to notice but it filled her with a nervous excitment that all the dead years in the orphanage could not take from her. She lay at night beneath the Sacred Heart lamp
and thought of the nun with the bristled chin who for ten years had waved her fist at them ranting and raving about purity and the pale innocent blueness of the virgin.

She thought about the hungry eyes of the men behind the suit rack. She thought about her breasts and wondered what it was that made them want her there. She thought of the girls in the orphanage
standing in line at the washbasins, their slack breasts beneath coarse nightdresses. They were breasts. They meant nothing.

What did they mean?

At night Josie painted her fingernails but washed it away the following morning for she had not the courage to face Molloy.

The young man who began to call regularly was not shy like the others. He winked at her from behind the suit rack and once came up to her and said with a grin, “I
don’t suppose you could tell me where I’d get a pair of socks—I need a pair of socks bad.”

Josie had blushed to the roots for she was not quite sure how to deal with this kind of assuredness. But her legs nearly went from under her altogether when he walked into the shop a few days
later smoking a cigarette and said to her, “I found out your name—Josephine.” Then he turned and walked out again. He made a few more visits, pretending to inquire about the
quality of shirts and jackets but they both knew that they were of no interest to him. His cheekiness made Josie feel warm inside, it was something she had never seen in the orphanage, not once.
Women were too afraid, she knew that, they could not have that play in them. None of them wanted to be caught in the spotlight or held up to ridicule. So they trudged along a grey corridor to keep
themselves safe.

Josie began to look forward to his visits. When eventually he said, “I bet you didn’t know I had a motor car. I think me and you should go for a drive in it. What do you think of
that now, Josephine?” Josie did not hesitate for a moment for the excitement was too great inside her and the words just leapfrogged out of her mouth and she said, “Oh, yes.”

Every nerve in her body tingled as she got herself ready that Saturday and she pulled on gloves to hide her fingernails, donning the sunglasses when she was well away from Molloy’s
disapproving eye. She met him outside the town where she found him sitting on a stile. Straight away she blurted out, “That’s not a bad day.”

He laughed and said, “Do you know something Josephine?”

“What?” replied Josie anxiously.

“You don’t even know my name,” he said.

Josie felt foolish.

“My name’s Culligan. Vinnie Culligan.”

Then he put his arm around her and she felt as if the cold hand of the nun had never ever been near her.

They drove to the town of Cavan in his Volkswagen and there they went to the Magnet Cinema where he heaped Scots Clan into her lap and hugged her close to him in the back row. It seemed to Josie
that Cavan was on the other side of the world for she had never before been outside her own town. As Navajo Indians swarmed down from the canyon and whooped wildly as they attacked the settlers in
their covered wagons, Culligan kissed her ear and she sank into his shoulder. Then he pressed something into her hand and she was afraid to unclasp her fingers. “Go on,” he urged.
“Open it.”

When she saw that it was a small pendant on a chain, her body seemed to melt away; she clutched it tightly until it bit into her palm and she could not get any words to come out of her mouth.
She just closed her eyes and wanted that moment never to evaporate for she had never experienced such ecstasy before. After the film they went to the Central Café where their fingers
entwined and they listened to songs of love addressed solely to them. She stared lovingly at the smoke that twisted from his cigarette to the yellow ceiling. She felt that no harm could come to her
now.

Afterwards they went for a walk along the river bank and just sat watching the current carrying off small sticks and leaves.

“You know something, Josie,” Vinne Culligan said, “this should never end.”

They met many times after that.

When they went to the guest house, Josie stood by the window staring tensely out into the street, but he acted as if he had known the receptionist all his life. He talked away to her about the
hotel business in the nearby towns, they traded neighbours’ names and by the time they were done talking there was nothing further from her mind than whether or not they were man and wife.
They went upstairs and he threw himself on the bed saying, “Man dear it’s great to be young.” There was a picture of Maria Goretti on the wall above the bed and beneath it a bunch
of dried-out lilac. Outside the dogs barked and the odd passing car threw shadows on the ceiling. Josie lay beside him and as she felt his hand moving along the inside of her thigh she did not care
about the pale blue innocent virgin, she wanted them both to melt together and she knew that everything would be all right.

He was quiet on the way back but that was because he was due back at work. They stopped the car a mile from Carn and kissed. It was hard for Josie to believe that a man reared in the town of
Carn could talk like Vinnie Culligan.

“I love you so much, Josie,” he said to her. She nearly cried when he said it. She took the back lane into town and none of the hawks were any the wiser.

After that, Molloy could not get over the way Josie did her work. And every time Josie thought of Vinnie Culligan, she fingered the gold pendant nestled beneath her blouse.

She trembled at the thought of the following weekend when he had arranged to call into the shop. When he didn’t appear she decided she had picked it up wrongly, that he had meant the
following weekend. She waited anxiously that Friday but when the shop closed at nine there was still no sign of him. She cried a little that night and made up all sorts of stories that would excuse
him. But then the following Monday it all collapsed when Molloy handed her an envelope and looked at her suspiciously as if he expected her to account for her unauthorised receipt of mail. When
eventually he had gone, Josie raced up to her room and when she had picked out the three or four most important words that were half-blurred in front of her eyes, she knew for certain then what the
world was all about and she swore bitterly there and then that no one she ever met after that would do the like of it to her again. It was Vinnie Culligan all right. From Wandsworth in England and
all he had to say after all they had been through was, “Anything strange?” She went white as a ghost and the room turned over on its side. She kept the letter for weeks hoping that
somehow its message would change, that she would one day return to it and find that she had interpreted its message all wrong, that the writing had altered itself and that Culligan was coming to
take her with him to England.