The Ballad of Mo and G (10 page)

Mo stopped shaving so as to concentrate on what Maureen was going to say.

‘What, Maur? Go on tell me. I'm dyin' to know,' said Mo as she took the top of another of the pink disposable razors when the first one silted up.

‘He used to call me his oul' Clydesdale.'

I got to thinking of Dad and the master class he gave us in the last few months before he died. I used to think, well, they had us, so now it's up to our parents to look after us. It was like, why didn't they just do their jobs? What was all the arguing about? Our parents should be happy together, for us.

I was lying in bed with Dad watching a football game on TV. It was always like this between us. There I was with his arm around me. We never quit on that when I grew up, unlike other Dads who seemed to think it would stop their sons from being manly. Dad was still cramming advice into me now that he had so little time left.

‘G, you know why parents sometimes make such a mess out of bringing up kids, is because we had parents ourselves. It's not a job you can ever rightly master. Just tell the kids the truth, is about the best advice, when you're talking to them. If there's truth you feel you need to keep from your children keep it away, if you think it's best. Not for you, but for your children.'

I grew up a lot in those last few months. My maturing was rushed. I know there should have been more
sinking-in
time.

Dad never bossed the remote but this one time, in the last week of his life, he turned the TV down. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Hey, G. How did I do as a Dad?' It was my Dad looking for his end of term report from me, his boy.

We knew this was one of our last big talks before the rest of the family came back into the room.

‘Dad. you were great. You did mess up sometimes, a little bit, but I always knew you loved us and that was good enough for me.'

‘Thanks old pal,' said Dad.

I always loved it when he called me old pal because he was my oldest and my first pal. I knew he meant every word because my Dad always told me the truth when he
was talking to me. I always told him the truth when I was talking to him.

Mo and Dermo would've been fine, if they had a Dad like mine.

The fer-de-lance was an angry little snake.

Perhaps it was down to the fact he was only 1.2 metres in length and suffered from some sort of small snake inferiority complex. The biggest of the fer-de-lance can grow to nearly 4 metres.

We had something in common, that snake and I.

The man on the banana plantation in St Lucia was angry too.

His beautiful wife had run off with an American tourist. The cheated husband threw the mad snake from a moist cloth sack into the banana box and sealed it several times over in strong plastic wrapping. The angry man thought for a second and, mindful of the snake's welfare on such a long journey, he pierced the wrapping several times with a knitting needle. Or maybe it was a pointy knife, as you would imagine there wouldn't be much call for jumpers in the heat of St Lucia.

The angry man would have his revenge even if the odds of killing the American who stole his wife was a billion, billion to one. The snake smuggler didn't even know if the wife stealer liked bananas, but someone somewhere would suffer.

Maybe that was how it happened. Who knows, but what we do know for certain is there was an angry fer-de-lance in the banana box exported from St Lucia.

Mo was in the newsagents. She glanced downwards at the paper.

It was page one. The headline caught her attention. SNAKE KILLS SOCIALITE. Mo read the story standing up.

The socialite died within seconds. She had already died socially. Her husband, who was nicknamed 3.4, was broke. He was given the handle 3.4, the paper said, because back in the boom, he was in the newspapers for buying this plot for 3.4 million and that house for 6.3 million and so on.

3.4 owed the banks 397 million. Lent for a development in Greece, which is even more broke than Ireland. And another mad scheme in some mountain ski resort in a remote part of Bulgaria where it only snowed diarrhoea snow for a month a year and was within a few hundred kilometres of a nuclear power plant with a slow puncture.

The dead lady had never been to a bargain supermarket before. It was in Hendon. In England. She and her husband had personally guaranteed all of their loans. Now they had to eat pasta in sauce out of a tin. The dead lady and her husband moved to the UK as bankruptcy tourists. The English laws were easier on the broke.

The cheap supermarkets never take the bananas out of the boxes. To spare money.

The lady grabbed a bunch on special offer. The bargain wasn't such a good deal. There was a free snake with every bunch. The fer-de-lance bit the bankrupt lady.

Thousands of fer-de-lance squirm at night on the roads of St Lucia, so much so the cars go bumpetty-bump as if they were being slowed down by speed ramps in a suburban rat run.

But there were no fer-de-lances lying on the roads in
Hendon and so there was panic.

The snake was chopped in two by a butcher. The tail-end was still wriggling. One-legged ‘Hero Gran Hilda' battered the tail end of the dead snake with her crutch. She was brave, the papers reported, and resourceful too. Hilda removed the rubber bit from the end of the crutch with her false leg, and impaled the fer-de-lance on the supermarket floor until the police arrived.

But in the confusion and blood lust for the killing of the demonic serpent, the bankruptcy tourist was left writhing on the floor. She died, it seems, not from poison but from a heart attack, no more than a few metres away from a defibrillator hidden behind half-price Aloe Vera plants and ski wear for keeping out the cold on the pistes of Hendon.

The dead and only slightly poisoned woman was identified as Sorcha Mabelson.

The very same Sorcha Mabelson who told the school Mo was wearing her hand-me-down uniform in Clandeboyce.

Mo called to tell me the news and she was very distraught. Definitely she had wished Sorcha all the bad luck in the world, but that was ten years ago.

Mo was sobbing softly.

I promised to go see her the very next day. I had to. I couldn't bear it when Mo was crying.

The Dobermans were staring at me.

They were now fully grown now and had been moved out of the runs to a temporary holding area where they would be collected by North Koreans for use as gulag guard dogs and dissident eating.

This was the last time I would ever visit this place, or at least that was the way I looked at it back then. I was there for Mo, not me. A mission of mercy to help her recover from the shock of the fer-de-lance killing of Sorcha Mabelson, or so I convinced myself.

The dogs were barking like mad. I stopped for a second to take a look at the hounds. They were huge now. Bigger than their mother.

I put my hands on the wire and called the dogs over. ‘Here, boy. Here, boy,' and I made spittle klich sounds by pushing my tongue up against a grinder.

I barked at the dogs just to get them going.

The Dobermans went completely crazy.

The second Doberman came from out of my eye line and snapped at me through the fence, almost biting my
fingers off. The smaller hound charged at the wire and then tried to climb over but he couldn't get a paw hold on the narrow diamonds in the fence.

The dogs' ears had been cut and the stumps were standing up. Dermo did the cutting, because it made the Dobermans look more ferocious. Floppy ears were droopy which maybe had some connection in Dermo's mind with impotence.

I stood and watched the fury.

Saliva dripped from their mouths. The dogs' eyes were all white. The barking was loud and didn't stop even for a second.

I couldn't believe how high they could jump but then again I should have remembered the hanging rabbit in the runs. The bigger dog leapt almost horizontally from his powerful hind legs, catching his paws on the very top of the fence, almost pulling it down with the force of his body weight.

His pads were scratched and bleeding from the sharp, thorn-shaped steel ends on top of the fence.

The dogs must have weighed about seventy kilos each. Their thrust carried a force of three times that of a human. The dog equivalent of six rugby players were crash-tackling the wire fence. The fence began to shake and then slacken. It hadn't been attached to concrete poles in a sound foundation, which was standard practice. The Olsens didn't do standard practice. The fence was nailed onto a shaky lean-to shed on one side and was tied by wire cable to a timber electricity pole. The once taut fence was now slack on the shed side end and the dogs concentrated their efforts there.

I walked quickly towards the house, anxiously looking back.

The fence was slackening with every jump but I still felt safe enough as the house was only about 150 metres away, at the far end of the Compound.

One of the dogs became hopelessly entangled in the wire and his fish-in-a-net frenzy weakened the fence even further from the base up. The horseshoe-shaped nails holding down the fence were coming up out of the cement yard.

Now there was a danger the dogs could escape under the wire.

I ran. But I was slow as I was wearing my new heel-
for-height
patent leather shoes with shiny slippery soles of silky leather.

The smallest Doberman piggybacked on his pal and jumped out over the half-fallen fence on to the other side. I ran as fast as I could.

I slipped on grease or oil. The mad dog was gaining ground. He ran like a greyhound. His big shoulders pumping, his muscled neck sticking out and his head
looking
straight ahead, fully focused on his target.

I fell again, like a drunk, on the wet decking in front of the porch.

Mo dragged me along the decking. The dog stopped for a second when one of my shoes fell off and he snapped it in his mouth, most probably having mistaken if for my leg. That slight delay saved me.

She barely got me in the door and slammed it shut, almost catching the Doberman's snotty snout. The dog was jumping at the door. Trying to knock it down. Every jump
was a thud. Mo pulled across the bolts Mikey put in to keep Dermo out.

‘Jesus, what happened?' asked Mo, out of breath. ‘They're going nuts.'

By now the second dog freed himself from the wire tangle and the two were laying siege to the door, jumping at it in turns.

Mo had left the living room window open. The first Doberman spotted the weakness in the fortifications and jumped at the window but he too slipped on the wet decking surrounding the house. For a few seconds the dog was winded and disorientated. I hobbled to the window, as one leg was shorter than the other because of the missing shoe, and slammed the window closed. The dog got back on his feet and jumped at the pane of glass without any consideration for his own safety.

The force of the Doberman's attack left a hair crack on the double glazed window.

The dogs scratched the paint off the front door through the mesh. After a few minutes, the Dobermans gave up trying to huff and puff and blow the house down.

‘My heart, it's pounding. I thought you were finished.'

Mo took time to get her breath back.

‘I … I heard the barking and I rushed out of the shower. I just had a feeling you were in trouble. You got here early – it was just so lucky that I opened the bathroom window. I barely heard the barking above the water.'

She was flushed from the terror of the dogs as she sat beside me in a black and red silk kimono.

‘Oh God, if something happened to you.'

She made tea with sugar for the shock.

Long, wet tangled ringlets fell down like catkins on her breasts and printed her erect nipples through the kimono. Her knees and a little above to her thigh showed her long brown legs.

Mo stroked the tips of her fingers gently and slowly across my forehead.

‘Come on,' I said, ‘I need a big hug.'

‘Keep the hug. I'm so horny.' And she pushed her pelvis into my face.

I didn't respond, because, well because I didn't know how to respond.

Mo sat beside me on the couch. Her face was pale now.

‘So sorry, G. I'm so embarrassed.'

‘No. No it's okay. Don't be. I've always wanted you, Mo but I was afraid if I told you I loved you, it would end our friendship.'

Mo waited for a second and loosened the silk belt but somehow the Kimono stayed closed.

‘I was thinking of … you when I was in the shower.' In that slow, low hoarse voice.

‘Oh, Mo if you only knew how many million wanks I dedicated to you.'

We kissed.

The silk kimono opened like curtains. I saw all of her naked. The beauty of her, the raunchiness.

I sort of felt duty bound to ask, even though I wanted her there and then. But I had to say it, out of politeness.

‘Will I do foreplay?' as she masturbated silently before me, watching my every expression.

‘Just pull across the curtains. That's all the foreplay I need.'

I jumped up, grabbed the curtains and pulled so hard the one on the left came off the tracks. There was no sign of the Dobermans.

‘Do it to me now.'

I was unbuckling my belt.

‘Are you sure about the foreplay?'

Mo pulled me to her.

‘We've had five years of that.'

We made love, at last.

There was no going away from her now.
It was meant to be from the first time we met in the club.

The ideas came quickly. Dermo would be in the hospital for another month at least. She had to be out of the Compound before his return. The city was too near the Olsens. Everywhere in Ireland was too near the Olsens. We decided it was Oz. The twins were settled and the Australians were looking for guys like me down in Perth where the mining boom was still in progress. Mo would go back to college in Australia and finish her degree.

Mo asked what would happen to my mother, who would be on her own with all her kids far away in Australia, and we started to plan all over again.

Tough decisions were going to have to be made.

For all her bravery and women's groups, my mother hated being on her own. My mother needed someone to boss. My mother had to be busy.

There was leaving Maureen. There was leaving Ireland. Leaving Ireland didn't bother Mo, but leaving Maureen did. We made love again. This time in a bed. Not the marital
bed but in the spare room, in the candlelight. Slowly. Mo gave a master class.

My car was marooned in the middle of the Compound. It was dark now. Mo warned I had better be out of there before Maureen came home from the city.

It seemed as if the dogs were well gone. Mo would call the cops when I left. Tell them the Dobermans had escaped, and were dangerous and armed. The Compound was as quiet as it had ever been. Mo drove me over to my car just in case the dogs were hiding out, ready to pounce.

‘That was the first time I ever made love to a man I truly loved,' she said holding my hand, as we sat in the car making our goodbyes, and setting up our next move.

‘I suppose,' I said, ‘we always loved each other.'

We kissed.

‘Did you know, G, you're a very gentle type of person?'

We checked again for Dobermans.

I howled like a wolf out of the window of the car. I had seen just how fast they were, and thought it might be as well to flush them out. We waited silently, listening, in the car, with the windows half open and the doors locked.

Mo kissed me goodbye.

The back door of my car was still open. There was a commotion but it was only a pigeon clattering and cooing out of one of the sheds.

I back-heeled the door closed without looking behind me, still scanning the Compound out in front.

I didn't know why, but I just couldn't savour the day for the whole way home.

I had a sense this was all too big for me. Now that we were going to be together forever. There would be kids.

We might have to go to Oz. Live there for the rest of our lives. For our own safety.

All this was happening too fast and too unplanned, for me, who worked at making sketches and measurements of buildings, each of which was strictly adhered to and validated by the clients and the planning authority.

How was Mam going to work Skype without me? My mother couldn't even figure in which direction to point the TV zapper.

There was a full moon and it seemed to follow the car as I drove along. It was the same old moon that lit us all the way home when Dad drove back from the big football games in Dublin.

Most of my serious thinking is done in the bubble of the car. It goes back to school days when we used to say our prayers in Dad's old Escort.

‘I'm the only Dad in the school who shifts a twenty-
two-year
-old Escort every day.' He was always joking and I always laughed. Dad was very funny.

Dad an' me. That was our quality time. Mam was always interrupting when we were on our own at home. It was if she was checking up on what he was saying to me. Censoring his talking in case I turned out like him.

Then, as I thought it all through in the analysis after ecstasy, it was as if that pivotal moment when I made love to the woman of my dreams was the end of the carefree student and first job days.

Here I was all grown up, ready to have kids of my own and me just a few years out of adolescence. It was like the time I said to Dad when I was a kid that the white sliced sandwich bread was all dirty. He explained when the
bakers changed from making brown bread to white, some of the brown flour was still in the machine and it blended into the white sliced pan. That was me. In between a boy and a man with bits of each in the mix.

It was scary and exciting all at the same time. Mo was dying for a kid. I was certain she would be the best mother ever. All that woman ever wanted was a happy home with babies, to make up in some way for the one who died inside her. To make up for her own lost childhood.

She said I was cute. I was dapper. I always knew that. Possibly I was the only one of the boys, here at home or gone away, who owned a dentist's mirror. Every morning I checked if there were rogue hairs sticking out of me, like the old men with enough wax in their ears to grow spuds in.

The windscreen started to fog up. I thought of the dogs and worried they might attack someone. A movie clip came into my head. A real one this time, from an actual movie. There was a mad dog hiding in the back of car, in the film, and when the driver looked in the mirror there was the mad dog staring at him.

I was singing this song I used to sing for Mo, for laughs. It was a parody of Caledonia

There was an erotic flashback to when Mo placed her finger underneath me.

‘That's the way I do it to myself when I'm thinking
about you,' she sighed hoarsely, as she licked and gently held and bit my nipples.

I felt a sudden extreme unstoppable spontaneous sensuous pleasure move me to an immediate road safety hazard of a hard erection. There should be penalty points for driving with an erection, I thought. The temptation was to head back to the Compound and risk death and mutilation. It went through my head that if I crashed the coroner would console my loved ones with an ‘At least he died happy.'

Very much in love with myself, I looked in the mirror.

The sad-eyed Doberman seemed calm enough. As if he was a family pet out for a drive in the country. He had the resigned aura of a Buddhist monk who came back to earth as a dog. The erection melted as quickly as snow in the Sahara. The Law of the Wish struck again. ‘Thinking brings being.'

He saw me looking at him and I saw him looking at me. There wasn't a bark or a word between us. The huge dog took up the whole of the central inside mirror like he was filling up a canvass. But I did see the dog's flanks in the twisted left wing mirror. He was torn to pieces.

The dog lunged and bit my ear off. I have large enough ears and I suppose the one on the left, nearer the passenger seat, was less protected and presented an easier target. Blood pumped out and I crashed into a ditch but not fatally. Well I wouldn't be writing this would I, if I was killed. No one writes books posthumously.

The Doberman must have been bollixed from his injuries. He just couldn't get up and at me a second time. I managed to get out of the car, this time remembering to
close the door, and to bring my mobile phone, but I forgot my ear. I called 999. The lady who answered seemed so calm. I was already mentally deranged.

She asked, ‘Where did it happen?'

‘Where do you think?' I answered somewhat annoyed at her lack of professionalism.

‘Behind my head, opposite my other ear,' stating the obvious.

The nurse from the hospital was on her way home from the 2 to 10 shift. The Doberman was barking like crazy and was looking out the window at me. The back window began to fog up from his breath. Calm as could be, as if it was an everyday occurrence, the nurse asked, ‘Where is your ear?

‘Which one?' I asked.

‘The one that's missing.'

‘In the car,' I said, bleeding but not as badly as you might think.

I was completely nuts by now from the shock.

‘I have to phone the lads in Oz. Jeeez they'll never believe this one.'

The nurse looked in the window and the Doberman was still there, it being a well-known fact Dobermans can't open car doors or kick them out from inside. Although in light of the break-out from the Compound, I wouldn't put it past them.

‘Is he your dog?'

‘I don't even know if he's a he. Has he a willy?

The nurse asked me again.

‘Is he yours?'

‘No, I just gave him a lift.'

By now she must have guessed I was gone loopy. The nurse opened the door of the car and the injured dog, revived from a rest and juiced up with adrenalin, jumped up at her. He took a bite out of the headrest, which must have had a smell of me off it.

The nurse found my ear on the front seat and managed to grab it quickly while the Doberman was trying to get through the gap between the driver seat and the passenger seat, but he was too big and he was too badly injured.

She got me into her car and put my ear in between a bag of frozen American Collection Buffalo Wings and Bird's Eye peas. She was the one and the same nurse who saved Dermo. Dora would surely write about it all when Maureen let her in on the series of events.

‘Don't go cooking my ear,' I ordered.

‘Don't worry. I'm not that hungry.'

We were in A&E within ten minutes. It was full of the maimed, the half-dead, the infirm and those with fuck all wrong with them.

It's amazing how quickly you can get through the queues when your ear is bitten off.

‘Come with me, Van Gogh,' requested the junior doctor, and less than hour later the ear was sewn back on by a plastic surgeon.