Emerald Germs of Ireland (25 page)

“Look at how small your hands are!” he cried aloud. A man and his girlfriend turned from an Audi 1100 to look at him.

“What, Pat?” said Bridie.

“Nothing, Bridie,” Pat replied. “I’m sorry.”

Bridie reddened a litde and took Pat’s hands in hers, her smaller ones.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she intoned.

Pat coughed and said, “Bridie—would you like to come to the dance with me again next week?”

Bridie nodded and squeezed one of his fingers a litde.

“Yes, I will!” she said, adding, “Pat—do you know that I’m going to Dublin in a wee while?”

The startled reply leaped unbidden from Pat’s parted lips.

“What?” he cried.

Bridie lowered her eyes.

‘Yes. I’ve been accepted into college. I’m going to be a teacher, you see.”

Pat’s head reeled.

“Teacher? What? Sums and all—?” he cried—a tension as though steel wire had been abruptly strung all about it—manifesting itself in his chest.

Yes. I’m going to be a primary teacher. I’ve always wanted to be one ever since I was a litde girl. Oh! I can hardly wait!”

Pat trembled involuntarily. He could barely contain his excitement. Now he was squeezing her hands!

“Why! That’s wonderful!” he cried. You’ll be the best teacher ever, Bridie! I know you will!”

Bridie moved in closer to him and put her litde cold hand behind his neck. There was a lovely smell of cream off it.

“Oh, Pat,” she said, “you’re so nice.”

It was all Pat could do not to take off into space when he found her lips touching him ever so softly on the cheek.

It may have been that the months which followed constituted the most beautiful summer ever enjoyed by a young couple in their teenage years. It also may not be the case, for such things must surely be difficult to quantify and notoriously open to dispute. But there can be no denying
that the days enjoyed by Bridie Cunningham and her boyfriend Pat McNab were among the most enjoyable ever experienced by two human beings. For never a day went by now but they kept their assignations in the Lido Grill, staring into one another’s eyes and selecting innumerable popular hits on the jukebox. Bridie placed her tiny hand—for all the world a bird of intricately carved china—on the Formica as she said, “Pat—do you like that one?”

Pat’s reply—he remained ever eager to please her—continued to be hopelessly equivocal.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Yes! I love it! I hope it goes to number one, in fact!”

“So do I! I think it’s fantastic!”

Sometimes they walked over to the old water mill where Bridie would sit on the stone and hug her knees to her chest, lost in thoughts and the future’s innumerable possibilities. Whenever he could pick up the courage, Pat would say, “I’ll miss you when you’re in Dublin, Bridie—do you know that?”

As Bridie chewed on a grass stem, saying:

“I do, Pat. I’ll miss you too.”

“What’ll it be like, do you think? Dublin, I mean?”

“I don’t know. I hope it’s exciting!”

“They say there’s something to do there every night.”

“Yeah! I’ll bet there’ll be some great bands!”

“I bet there will! You’ll probably forget all about me.”

There would be a sad twinkle in Pat’s eyes whenever those words left his lips.

“Pat—don’t ever say that,” Bridie would sharply reply. “You know I couldn’t. As a matter of fact, I’ll write to you every day.”

It was a sentence Pat was never to forget.

“Every day?” he said.

He could not believe his ears.

“Every day,” Bridie said, “I promise with all my heart.”

Standing by the window now, Pat remembered those letters. He smiled as he thought of himself reading them. “Dear Pat,” he recalled, “The lectures are very good but I find French a bit hard. The food is—yuk! I miss you so much! Pat, did you ever hear tell of a film called
Love
Story
? Me and the girls were at it last night. I’ll tell you about it when I get home! See you, Pat. Love you, Bridie.”

Letters which continued to arrive with heart-inflating regularity until that magnificent day she returned home on the bus and Pat was the most delirious youth in the whole town! His very legs going weak at the knees when he perceived the vision that presented itself to him. For a vision is what the woman he loved was as she stood there before him on the steps of the bus in her striped scarf, knitted woolen cap, tartan kilt, and black tights. He could barely release the sound of her name from the pit of his throat.

“Bridie!”

“Pat!”

In slow motion, Pat McNab found himself crossing the square and melting into the arms of Bridie Cunningham.

Those Christmas holidays glittered in his memory. Bridie chewing a pencil and poring over her folder. Behind her a blazing fire burning in the grate. And, from the speaker of the Reynolds three-in-one stereo which her father had purchased (“Prezzie for you, Bridie!”) in Dundalk, the first few dnkling treble notes falling like milky rain, announcing the soundtrack of the film which she most adored in the entire world of celluloid. Memories such as these for him simply had no peer.

“I have to have this essay in in two weeks or they’ll kill me!” his girlfriend would say then.

“Kill you, will they, Bridie?” Pat would reply hesitantly (for the groves of academe, in truth, were a source of almost impenetrable mystery, if not intimidation, indeed, to him). “What is it about?”

“It’s about Mallarmé and the French symbolist poets,” Bridie explained, with the tiniest hint of impatience.

“Oh,” Pat replied, as though he understood completely. He didn’t, however. He looked away and felt his saliva thicken up inside his mouth, just as the door opened and Bridie’s mother put her head around it (it was beautifully permed—her head) and said softly, “Now. Would you two young people like a litde cup of tea, perhaps?”

Even while they were happening to him, Pat knew that they were days and nights which would never in his life be repeated. How could they?

“Would you like some sugar, Pat?” he heard Bridie’s soft voice enquire.

It was hard to believe that someone like Pat McNab had ever used the words employed by him some seconds later. But he had. He had said “darling,” all right, and “sweetheart.” And she had not laughed. It was like winning the greatest prize of all time.

They had been sitting on the seesaws in the park for over an hour when the first few tentative flakes of snow began to come down.

“Bridie,” Pat said, “if you were married to someone—would you have a child with them, maybe?”

Bridie’s reply came without hesitation.

“Oh yes, Preppie,” she said. “I’d have lots and lots.”

Pat was somewhat taken aback.

“What did you call me?” he said.

“Preppie,” responded Bridie brightly. “Preppie McNab! Suits you, don’t you think?”

Pat didn’t know what to say. He stared at her with her legs swinging and her eyes twinkling and tiny beads of melted snow all over her polo neck and said, “I don’t know, Bridie.”

She crinkled up her nose in that way she did.

“Of course you do, silly!” she chided mischievously, before leaping off the seesaw and beginning to pelt him cheekily with snowballs. To which Pat duly responded in kind and within minutes they were both squealing and shouting, “Stop!” and “That’s enough!” and “Ow!” before falling across the expansive white carpet (making the snow angel) and onto their backsides in one another’s arms.

It was a happy Pat McNab who made his way home from Bridie’s house that evening, his head liberally sprinkled with snow and his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his long gray overcoat, a wide smile spreading across his features as he realized he was already contemplating both their lives together as man and wife. At least until he turned the key in the lock of the front door, and while closing it directly behind him, perceived (he knew instinctively that it was not his imagination) a scaly anxiety enfolding his entire person and extending (like a living thing!) down the hallway right across the lino and as far as the stairs. To where his mother, clad in gray from head to toe (even her nightcap was
gray) stood, her mouth like the slenderest of incisions in her face. It seemed each blink of her eyelids was the shutter of a camera, recording images which would indubitably serve as damning evidence at some point in the future. She drew a long breath before she uttered her first words. Which were: “Well now! Lord, but aren’t you the great fellow?”

It was as though Pat had swallowed a not insignificant portion of an oil slick.

“What, Ma?” he succeeded, with great effort, in replying.

“Making snowmen, I suppose,” his mother said.

The words were hard and uncompromising as the guillotine’s steel.

“Making snowmen, Ma?”

“Making snowmen and her away off to tell Traynor all about your great adventures!”

Pat felt the skin between his eyebrows contracting.

“Traynor, Mammy? Telling ? …?”

The answer this time was curt, arrowhead-fast.

“Aye, Traynor! You’ll find he doesn’t bother with snowmen! Making cow’s eyes at him every chance she gets! Sure any eejit would be fit to see that, if she hadn’t him wrapped around her little finger, and the wee trollop hardly out of ankle socks! Lord save us above, what have I reared! Sweet Jesus and his blessed mother, what have I gone and reared!”

There can be no denying the fact that that night Pat McNab wept bitterly. Adrift in a paper sea of Bridie’s letters (many of which he had read thirteen or fourteen times) copious amounts of tears were to be observed rolling down his cheeks. But in the end he knew—regardless of what people might surmise—that his mother had been only trying to help him. What was to eventually prove tragic was that all she succeeded in helping him to do was make what was perhaps the biggest mistake of his life so far on this earth.

Bridie stood back against the plate-glass window of Linencare Dry Cleaners. Her face was as pale as the snow with which they had been “making angels” only days before and she was clearly having difficulty in getting the words past her lips.

“What are you talking about? Please, Pat—will you please give me some idea what you are talking about!”

There could be no doubt about it now—her voice was trembling.

Pat spun and turned his back on her. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”—he found himself recalling her words, and it was as though his mouth were filling up with recriminatory bile. He snapped, “Nothing! I’m talking about nothing!”

A moistness glittered in Bridie Cunningham’s eyes.

“You know what your problem is, Pat?” she ventured shakily. “You put up a big glass wall to prevent you from getting hurt. But it also prevents you from getting touched!”

Resentment burned in the eyes of Pat McNab. Without turning, he said, “So it means never having to say you’re sorry, huh? That’s a laugh!”

Bridie tore at the knitted woolen cap she held in both hands.

“How can I say I’m sorry for something I didn’t do? For God’s sake, please tell me—how can I?”

Pat covered his eyes with his right hand as he said, “Just tell me one thing—do you like Patsy Traynor or not? Do you?”

Bridie was surprised to find herself staring glassily into space. The zigzag pattern on the black knitted cap began to animate wildly before her eyes.

“Well … I like him,” she began. “I mean, he’s nice and everything but … oh Pat! Pat, what is happening to you?”

Pat looked down at the ground. There were some pebbles there. And a large patch of oil.

“I just keep getting the feeling that something has died inside, that’s all.”

What emitted from Bridie’s mouth could only be categorized as a howl.

“Pat! Pat! Oh God!” she cried.

The tears came then. Pat remained, as though ossified, with his back to her, staring blankly at irregular arrangements of pebbles and crushed, discarded cigarette packets frozen into a variety of beer trails which found their source directly beneath the doorway of Sullivan’s Select Bar.

It was later the same evening, and Pat sat blankly at the table. It was as though he had been imprisoned in a sarcophagus chiseled out of purest blackness. His mother’s slippers flapped as she put his dinner in
front of him and said, “You’ll get sense yet, my lad! The likes of her is out for only one thing—all they can get!”

It was more than her son could bear. He slammed his fork down on the table and cried, “What do you know! All you can say about her is bad things! You can never leave her alone! You haybag! For that’s all you are!”

A shadow the shape of Australia passed across his mother’s face. It was of no significance, having simply been cast by a passing bird outside. But it chilled Pat.

“Don’t you talk like that to me,” he heard then, each word as a slender serpent poking its head out of the tiny aperture that was his mother’s mouth.

In the days that followed, the Lido Grill became as a world painted battleship gray by some unseen misanthropic hand. Pat’s eyes were glazed with sorrow as he sat across from the woman he loved and thought, ‘You try to say something. You can hear the words. But what comes out bears no resemblance to them. What comes out are words so far away they might as well belong to a stranger.”

“Bridie?” Pat began.

Distorted in the prongs of a fork, Pat could see how raw-red his eyes now were. They appeared more as wounds than eyes. And he could see already what was written behind those eyes, wounds, call them what you will. Words which, he knew, would haunt him till the day he died. Words which said, “It’s dead, Pat. It’s dead forever. And both of you know who killed it.”

Employing the word “abject” to describe the state Pat found himself in at ten o’clock that evening as he lay upon his pillow—saturated with perspiradon—issuing from deep within him cries of pain and grief the like of which he had never known would be essentially inadequate. The language does not exist which can encapsulate such sorrow. Which leads a man to cry, You murdered it! My love! You murdered it! You murdered it, you hear?” to his own mother.

All, in the end, to no avail. For Mrs. McNab, patiently waiting until exhaustion did its work, made no secret of her feelings toward what she considered, although she did not overtly state as much, a meretricious display of the crudest emotion. “Oh, would you shut your mouth and
stop making an eejit of yourself! Shut your trap if you know what’s good for you!” she snapped eventually.