Carn (8 page)

She wanted no pretence and soon they understood. They did not smooth it over with the respectability of trust and warmth. They pressed five pound notes into her hand and loitered outside the bar
after closing time.

She worked in Liverpool for ten years after that and did not leave for Manchester until it transpired that the Bunch of Grapes was to be closed by the brewery. She was given a week’s
notice and a fortnight’s money. She found herself in a pub in Moss Side, following up an advertisement in the city’s evening paper. The black faces that stared at her from the shadows
did not bother her and the next day she found herself talking across the counter to bright-shirted men from Trinidad and Tobago who rambled at length about tobacco leaves and their children, their
eyes falling to her breasts as the alcohol robbed them slowly and steadily of their fragile restraint.

She remained there for six more years, lying on the bed above the pub, listening to the sound of singsong accents as children played on the dilapidated playground in front of the high rise
buildings. Then she was told that the pub had been purchased by a supermarket consortium. She was unemployed once more. She went on the hoof again with her adverts ringed in red marker but this
time a replacement position did not surface with ease. “We really wanted someone younger,” they said.

She searched for over a month without success and then she began to worry. She had saved very little money. She had no home of her own. She could not live forever on the bit she had put away.
One day, after a particularly fruitless day’s searching, she was amazed to find herself crying. “There’s nothing here for me now,” she said to herself but fought off the
dark feeling of helplessness that was moving in on her. As she lay in bed that night, she thought of Carn over and over again. She thought of Phil Brady, his face muscles jerking as he heaved above
her. She went to the mirror and examined herself. “I’ve got to live somehow,” she said to herself. “In Carn the old men would have nobody. The nuns and priests have seen to
that. I don’t care about them now. They’ve had their day with me. I’m no sixteen-year old child now. Let them try to tackle me now.”

The following day she went to a department store and bought herself a selection of satin underwear. She laid it on the bed then tried it on. She examined her skin again, for blemishes.

“There’s nothing else for me to do,” she said.

The following day she went down to the booking office in Deansgate and bought herself a one-way ticket to Ireland.

And now she found herself standing in the lounge bar of the Railway Hotel trying to make sense of what she saw before her. Middle-aged women argued over the most appropriate
dressing for a salad niçoise as their well-nourished children cavorted brashly. Above the entrance, flags fluttered gaily and announcements crackled from loudspeakers in the main street.
Long lines of parked cars stretched for a mile outside the town.

It seemed as if the town of Carn, the town in which she had been born and reared, a huddled clump of windswept grey buildings split in two by a muddied main street, had somehow been spirited
away and supplanted by a thriving, bustling place which bore no resemblance whatever to it.

She left the hotel and walked to The Diamond where a young girl in dancing costume tightened her thin body and kicked her legs high in the air as a row of adjudicators on the makeshift stage
consulted their clipboards judiciously. Many of the old shopfronts had been replaced. Any that she remembered had been completely repainted and refurbished. Josie could not believe her eyes when
she found herself standing outside the pub where her father, the Buyer Keenan, had spent many of his waking hours. Once called the Greyhound Bar, now a neon sign spread in an arc above the door
read the
TURNPIKE INN
. A poster advertised
Crazy Crazy Nites
.

When she came to the graveyard she felt the pain growing inside her again as she stared at the gravestones of her father and mother.

For a split second she saw her own death, a gunmetal face fixed on the sky, all around the faces and voices of Carn as she had known it. The graveyard overlooked the town. Below her, she could
see the crowds streaming from the dancehall, The Sapphire Ballroom.

The fields about her were specked with forget-me-nots and a long-forgotten day came into her mind, her mother with a basket bending down to pick them in the same fields, Josie by her side in
white socks and a pink check dress.

Josie Keenan had come home to the town of Carn, the only home she knew.

V

“Are you going to lie there all day? Do you think I have nothing better to do than run up and down after you—is that it?

Sadie Rooney’s mother shut the door loudly behind her and with that the Aston Martin in which Sadie and her companion Steve McQueen had been splicing the wind together, dissipated like
smoke and Sadie’s eyes travelled the red flock wallpaper before coming to rest on the weary face of the Infant of Prague on the mantelpiece. She shook her head and moistened the dry roof of
her mouth with her tongue, then tumbled onto the floor and stood at the window scratching her arm as she waited for some sort of order to come into her mind.

Outside the town was cranking into life. Indeed, thought Sadie, life is right.

The words of the butcher came to her. “Do you know,” he said, “this is the best wee town in Ireland. I mean, you have everything you want here. You have a picture house. And
the dances. You couldn’t meet friendlier people. And what about the celebrations last year for Matt Dolan? No other town has anything like that! The bands and the parades!”

Carn, thought Sadie, Carn, Carn, Carn. Nowhere but Carn. Carn—the beginning and the end. Nothing else in the whole wide world but it and its cramped streets.

She could see it all unwinding from her bedroom. Jacko the grocer taking out his cabbage crates whistling. Mrs Wilson screwing up her nose. “Are them cabbage fresh?” She looked at
him as if she suspected him of injecting them with a deadly poison. “Fresh? Fresh, Mrs? Did you ever know me to sell bad cabbage? There you are.” He heaped two fat-headed cabbages into
her arms and off she went, beaming. Then along came Grouse Monaghan and urinated on a lampost. In the doorway of the supermarket, Mrs Reilly and Mrs McKenna swopped domestic tales. Sadie knew their
style. “I have awful trouble with Declan and this constipation. He was on the pot for nearly a whole hour last night, nearly a whole hour I waited—and do you know what I got for my
trouble?”

“No—what?”

“Wee hard balls.”

Then they stood looking at each other as if they had just overheard the announcement of world war three.

As Sadie pulled on her dress, she caught a glimpse of a bin on two wheels coming around the corner. It was Blast Morgan—who else could it be?

Regular as clockwork, the cap parked askew on his head and half an inch of ash dangling from his lips as he made his way through the morning blinking at the light. He took off the cap and leaned
against a wall to relight his cigarette.
Blast this, blast that, blast that cold
, blast that heat. Then he donned his cap once more and set off again. After that they all did their turn, the
minute hand of a clock pressing predictably onward. Sadie knew them, every one, their time and their place, where they were coming from and where they were going to.

At the top of his garden, just beneath the window, Mr Galvin began his day’s work with the snip of a garden shears.

The meat plant horn hooted.

Lawn mowers began to whirr.

Carpets were beaten in the lane.

The churchbell went ding dong four times an hour.

The chickenhouse fan hummed.

On it goes, thought Sadie, on and on and on.

The tick tock days of Carn, a market town half a mile from the border.

She clipped on an earring and said to herself in the wardrobe mirror, “Wotcher, gel! Going down the Old Kent Road, then?”

Through the markets of Portobello she sauntered and then home to the flat in Walm Lane Willesden, armed to the teeth with trinkets.

“That’s wot I want, innit?” she said to The Infant Of Prague. “Oh, Carn’s okay, but I ’aven’t started living yet, ’ave I? Do you get my drift,
Infant Of Prague?”

She sat on the edge of the bed and wiggled her toes. Sandie Shaw Sadie. Mr Galvin came into her head. “You’re all the modern girl,” he smiled, “that’s what you are
young Rooney. All mad for the pop orchestras and the short skirts. What would the likes of us around here know about the like of that? We went out with the ark.”

Sadie shook her head. “Well one way or another, I’m getting out Mr Galvin. I’m not staying here to spend my life waiting for Blast to come around the corner every
morning.”

“I don’t blame you one little bit,” he replied, “that Blast would drive anybody out.”

Sadie tidied up her room and went downstairs where her mother put her breakfast brusquely in front of her villifying a guitar-playing priest she had heard talking about teenage parties on the
radio the night before.

“That’s what we’ve come to expect,” she said acidly. “But not in this house, I can tell you.”

Sadie finished up her breakfast and set off for the packing shed of Carn Poultry Products where she was due to begin work at two.

“They’re coming today.”

Una Lacey put down the phone. “We’ll have some action now Sadie,” she said.

So they were coming. All the way from London. There were two girls. Carol and Jane. And a boy. A fella. A bloke. All Una’s cousins. From redbus London, with tales by the score of mods and
rockers and with-it princes in clubs and discoes that stayed open the whole night long. Sadie could not wait.

They both lay on the fairgreen looking up at the blue glass of the sky. “You just want to see their clothes,” said Una. “They have everything they want. They get far more money
that we ever see. But they’re good crack. At least the girls are. I don’t know what he’s like.”

Sadie tried to imagine what he looked like. She thought of a thousand faces but could not choose any single one. “What does he work at?” she asked Una.

“He doesn’t work. He goes to art college.”

Art College. John Lennon had been to one. They lived a wild life in those places. There were girls there. Girls who were not afraid to speak their mind and live whatever way they wanted. He
would be well used to girls.

So that’s that
, she said to herself resignedly.

They lay there until it was time to go and meet them. Sadie’s spine tingled as they watched the vehicles from the distant towns and the more remote hamlets of the hinterland unload.

Then Una stood on her tiptoes and waved. When Sadie saw them appear, she instantly felt as if she were dressed in rags. She wanted to rush into the public toilet and bar the door. They wore
pearls and their slim wrists jangled with bracelets. Their lipstick was bright pink, their faces made up to the nines. Their London accents seemed to soar high above the rooftops and sit in the
clouds like magic. Their perfume filled the air. A farmer on his way home stopped dead in the middle of the The Diamond and stood staring with his mouth open as if he were hallucinating. They set
down their suitcases and lit cigarettes. “Oh girls—this is my pal Sadie.” They smiled broadly and shook hands. Then Sadie heard another voice, a male London voice. He had hair
like George Harrison, a moptop cut above the ears. He wore a brown corduroy waistcoat and a striped shirt. She followed his bright hipster trousers all the way down to his elasticated suede boots.
She was so overwhelmed she didn’t know what to say and was glad of the distraction when Una thrust a case into her hand.

They set off down the road together, alive with chatter, and when Sadie Rooney set off for home, she felt as though she were cruising six inches above the road.