Carn (6 page)

But that didn’t happen.

What happened was that one day when she was washing her face at the sink she got a terrible wrenching in her stomach and got violently sick. That was the start for Josie Keenan.

That was the start of Culligan’s little babby.

She broke a glass vase and tried to cut her wrist with the thick shards but they just wrenched themselves from her hands and she lay on the bed wet-faced and shivering.

As the baby grew within her, she felt as if it were a worm or a serpent. She felt its eerie cackle deep in the pit of her belly.

A long time ago. Days and years ago when the old town of Carn was as it had been for a hundred years before that and never dreamed it would be any different another hundred
on.

But it was.

Josie Keenan went to the window and tried to locate the premises of Molloy’s Select Drapery.

It was nowhere to be seen.

In its place there was a hairdressing salon and a dry cleaners. It had faded away. And Molloy. And his wife. She felt a dryness coming into her mouth. She could never forget the shop’s
smell. It came now to her nostrils. And the outline of the dresses on the rails, odd silhouettes hanging in mid-air. Above it all, the moon watching without a word, all that passed, everything that
was in her mind. Everything.

All right,
thought Josie,
so I buried it. Dug the grave all by myself and myself and no Culligan this time, Josie all on her owney-oh, down into the ground it went, into that black
hole with the tears running down my face. I didn’t want to do it but I did it. It wasn’t right what the hell could I have done? I loved it too, I loved its little hands and toes. It had
eyes like beads, like a little black lad’s it said to me,
Don’t bury me mammy
but I did. The clay trickled on his cheeks and I filled it in like a madwoman. After that I became
as cold as stone and I would have killed Molloy and her and all belonging to them and Culligan and every one of them I ever laid eyes on.

As she stood by the window, Josie felt the tears coming but she steeled herself against them. She felt the numbness begin in the side of her face. She took three librium tablets from her handbag
and sat on the bed with her head buried in her hands.

After that, her mind had not been her own. The voices came to her, sat waiting for her every night in her room. They coiled themselves around her head, the voices of the town and the voices of
demons.

Who’s that out there on a night like that? Wouldn’t you think she’d be foundered with the cold? Wouldn’t you now missus? Indeed you would, a night like that would cut
you to the bone. What is she at? Bent double beneath the sky. Up to no good I’d swear. Can’t be. Look at the face of her. Can’t be more than sixteen, shouldn’t be let out at
this hour never mind . . . what’s she doing now—clawing at the clay like a mad thing. Now that’s neither right nor normal now is it, I ask you? Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph do you see
what she’s doing now do you? Look at it, wrapped in a newspaper oh Jesus and his Blessed Mother it’s a little child couldn’t be more than a day old . . . a little shilde, a little
icky babba pale and cold and nota twitch in its bones of course there’s madness in her eyes I could tell that from the start, but there’s bitches and there’s evil bitches
. .
.
let her shake all she likes hanging’s too good for a woman would do the like of that, sprinkle clay on a poor ba’s face.

The voices crawled all over her and sleep left her. She could not banish the sweats and the headaches. She wanted the people of the town to take her and hang her in the square, but she could not
tell them about it. In the small hours of the morning, the voices drove her to the safe where Molloy kept his money and she unrolled several five pound notes from the bundle bound with an elastic
band. She hid them under the floorboards in her bedroom, along with knives and forks and assorted pieces of china she had smuggled from the kitchen. Her visits to the safe became more frequent for
the voices would not let up. When one night she crept down the stairs pulling her nightgown about her, she felt like breaking down and crying out to Molloy and the people of the town,
Yes I did
it I did it
but she did not and when she found herself at that moment standing in the glare of Molloy’s flashlight, she did not say anything, she just collapsed into the arms of
hopelessness.

Molloy caught her roughly by the shoulder. “You’ve been leading us a merry dance, my girl. Five nights we’ve been waiting here for you.” His wife peered from the shadows.
“Well I’ll tell you what you can do. Take us to where you have it. Every last penny of it. Then you can get out on the front street. I should have listened to Kelly—stay well away
from that place—they’re all wrong ones in there. And that young one’s a daughter of the Buyer Keenan that drank himself into the poorhouse. Died roaring. All wrong ones. Or they
wouldn’t be there.”

She removed the floorboard and handed them her treasure trove piece by piece. Molloy’s wife stared open-mouthed.

“That’s what you and Sister Benignus brought into this house, ma’am,” said Molloy bitterly to her. No tears came to Josie’s eyes. She hoped they would kill her
there and then so that she would not feel it any more, any of it.

“Get your things together now. You’re not staying in this house a minute longer, you thieving bitch!”

He spat viciously at her and stormed down the stairs, his wife throwing her a last frightened look as she followed.

In a daze, Josie packed the cardboard suitcase they had given her in the orphanage. She heaped everything she had into it then dressed herself and wandered down the stairs, her limbs weighing
her down like iron. Molloy stood in the doorway with his arms folded. He gestured with his thumb. The door closed loudly behind her and Josie stood outside in the first light of dawn. The first
birds were starting up in the trees. Josie belted her coat. A country road stretched before her.

Molloy watched her until she was well out of sight.

She spent that night in a haybarn beneath a hessian sack. The following morning she took to the roads again for she wanted to put as much distance as she could between herself and the town. They
would all be well familiar by now with Molloy’s story, with plenty of his own lies thrown in for good measure. She walked all day without a thought as to her destination or plans for the
future. When darkness fell her legs were ready to buckle under her and when the lights of a small cottage appeared at the top of a lane, there was nothing she could do to prevent herself being
drawn there. Her stomach was turning over with hunger.

The face that stared out suspiciously from the crack in the door frightened her for a split second but then she saw that it was the face of an old man, listless white strands of hair despairing
on a freckled pate. His pupils widened as he looked at her, a young woman come out of nowhere, standing on his doorstep at midnight. He could not take his eyes off her, her clear porcelain face,
the slim whitenes of her arms. A tremor ran through him and his voice stumbled in search of words. He pulled his shirt closed and reddened at the thought of his stained vest beneath it. His body
began its takeover as he stood there and he was filled with fear but there was nothing he could do to prevent it so he opened the door to admit her. He took the suitcase and left it under the
stairs. He felt like he wanted to burst into tears.

Josie drank in her new surroundings, the yellowing holy pictures on the walls, the trousers and braces slung across the back of a chair, the cat sitting on a creel of turf eyeing her jealously.
She became aware of the nervous clattering of the cups. It was then she began to realise for the first time that he was more frightened than her. He heaped sugar from a crumpled bag on to a spoon
and spilt it on the bare table as he struggled to steer it to his cup.

The sat and drank. Outside the inky clouds lolled. She told him that she had been on her way to the town of Carn, having come from Dublin, but had disembarked in the wrong village and found
herself lost in the heart of the countryside. He shaded his eyes with his hand and nodded. Then he cleared away the cups and saucers and rummaged in the cupboard. He took two glasses from the
dresser and filled them with whiskey. When she had taken a long draught, Josie’s cares became slowly submerged and she did not find it difficult to stare the old man in the eye. His fingers
tapped the wet glass. He spoke of his mother and his brother who had both died in the same year. “The worst part of it about here is the lonesomeness,” he said. “It can turn your
mind. The only one I see week about is Maggie McCaffrey from Lisnaw and half the time she’s in her bed. It’s no way for a man to live.”

He gave himself to the whiskey after that and all the trouble within him poured out in a fever. Until that moment Josie had not known that such weakness was in men as well, she had only seen it
before in herself and the girls in the orphanage. As the whiskey dwindled in the bottle, he did not once look at her but gave his life story, paraded it before her and sat slumped in the chair
until his speech no longer made sense and his eyes rolled. When she found his head cradled in her lap and her languid hand stroking the dead tendrils of his hair she tried to decipher her confusion
and cling to the strength his weakness asked her for. “Please,” he slurred, “I never seen a woman like you before. You’re so young. I never seen skin like that. I have
money. I have anything you want.”

He lay crying at the edge of the bed. He looked like a cornered animal. Josie saw now that there was nothing she couldn’t do with him. Her youth took his whole strength from him. She felt
him shivering as he guided her hand to the buttons of his grey working shirt and she let her fingernails tinkle on the white hairs of his chest. The more she felt his fear, the more assured she
became. She removed his clothes as if they were the skin of his body. She eased herself down on him. His limbs twitched. A groan drifted from deep down within him.

Slowly his face became that of Molloy and Culligan, Culligan of the cheery smile. Who leaned over to her in the cinema and whispered, “Put it on.” She held the gold pendant in her
hand. “I love you,” he said. She gripped the old man’s hand so tightly that he whimpered like a child and as she saw Culligan’s Volkswagen cruising down a country road with
him at the wheel sharing one of his bright stories with her, her stomach turned over with bitterness and she stuck her tongue into the back of the old man’s throat like a poison dart. He
jerked then moaned in pleasure and terror. “Oh you love me Culligan,” Josie cried. The whiskey would not let her hold back any of it now and when he began to cry she laughed and
laughed. “I never seen a woman before, that’s the truth. The only one I ever seen was my sister. Don’t laugh at me. Please don’t laugh at me!” She raised herself above
him as he blubbered into the pillow. Outside a dog howled. For the first time, Josie Keenan felt afraid of nothing. For so long she had hated the proximity of her own sex, their pursed lips and
petty vendettas. In the orphanage she had always longed for that moment when she could walk down the avenue, nowhere near her the shadow of the ugly nun with hairs on her chin. She had dreamed
there of men who could stroke her with hard, reassuring fingers, who used the word “pretty” to her.

Now she knew how wrong she’d been about it all. Beneath her the old man jerked like a skinned rabbit. Now Josie saw through it all. She saw their cruelty and their pathetic weakness in the
face of the power of their own bodies.

There was nothing but disgust in the world, whether it belonged to men or women. She felt as if she had turned to stone as she sat above him in the bed. She stroked his back and he groaned
again. “There there,” she said, “you poor little thing. Did you never see a girl before?” She spat in Culligan’s eye and drove a knife through Molloy’s heart as
he stood before her with a face like a death mask above the lightbeam of the torch. Then she softened her voice. She could see that he wanted that. It was alien to him, accustomed as he was to his
own sweat and the smell of the animals. “Your little Josie is going to be so nice to you, oh so nice. You like that, don’t you?”

They lay there inert after that, until the first light of dawn touched the window and his eyes shot open as he reached out into the morning like a drowning man and cried frantically,
“Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”