The Death of an Irish Tinker (9 page)

BIDDY NEVINS HAD become Beth Waters from the moment she got off the ferry in Folkstone twelve years earlier. But the Toddler had remained the Toddler, even down to the way he looked. The only difference seemed to be his hair, which he’d lost more of.

And there he was, standing in the doorway of the picture gallery on Dawson Street in Dublin, where a show of Beth Waters’s work had just opened. They were photographs of women as beauty and porno queens, as rockers and gang molls, the color adjusted, the grain of the print exaggerated to obscure the image and make them look more seductive even than advertising models, no matter what they were acting out in the picture.

Having signed the gallery guest register, Desmond Bacon glanced up at the chrome-framed image of a beautiful young woman with a strap cinched tight around her arm and a spike poked deep in a vein. She had just depressed the plunger, and now two seconds later her eyes were half closing in ecstasy, her mouth was open, and her full lips were slightly puckered. One of her young nipples could just be seen in the shadow beneath the vent in her blouse. The cap
tion, which was part of the composition, said, “Diabetes, the trip. Can you handle it?”

It was supposed to be blackly humorous, and was, according to a woman critic from
The Times.
She was standing beside “Beth” and “simply” loved “the macabre mise-en-scène and counterpoint of your comment lines. What tension, what…dichotomy!”

Watching the Toddler now turn her way, Biddy placed the glass of wine that she’d been holding, not drinking, on a table and looked behind her for a door. She tried to remember what the critic had been saying, so she could respond. It would be not on to alert her to any other type of story.

Or for Biddy to act any different from the bored veteran artist, which she now was, suffering through yet another interview that she’d gone through so many times before in London. It was all part of the “opening act” that an artist had to assume to make a success of herself anywhere—London, Dublin, New York, Paris.

Biddy had been to those places in the last few years. You had to appear above it all, as if there were something beyond their enthusiasm, something they could not see. “Once they think they’ve got you sussed,” another artist had once told her, “you become simple to them, and you’re sunk. Keep it all smoke and mirrors. Then they can write what they want, which they like better anyway.”

Biddy now smiled and nodded to the critic, not knowing what had been said or what she should answer. Hoping it was enough. All the while madly thinking what she should do. Would the Toddler recognize her? So much time had passed, and she had changed so much, even the color of her eye. The right one, the blue one.

At Cheri’s insistence she had gone to an optician and bought a contact that could change the color of the eye to brown. Biddy hated the feel of the thing, riding over her eyeball like a filter. But it was essential whenever she was out of the house.

As for the “Beth Waters” identity, it was the name of the English girl Biddy had gone to rehab with who had killed herself the day they got out. “This is quicker,” said the one line of the note she left Biddy. Little could she have known she had given Biddy far more: a way to carry on after the Toddler. The new identity had remained good up until now.

Biddy’s first full day in England, she had gone straight to London, where she knew from a dope run years earlier there were shelters for women. Immediately she used Beth’s cards to get herself on public assistance. Then one lucky turn after another—based on the schooling of Beth Waters and Biddy’s own talent for art—landed her in a small advertising firm where she took over the drawing and helped lay out pages, anything she could do to make herself useful. They loved her drawing, and she’d work around the clock when they had business.

What she liked most was the photographers, getting them props and watching them arrange their compositions when they were shooting, later seeing what came out. It all could be made to seem so real, but unreal. When asked, she would make a suggestion or two, maybe put one thing here and another there. She had only wished to be helpful.

One older woman said, “You seem to have a knack for this. Let’s see what you can do on your own.” And Biddy did, apart from her utter ignorance of cameras, film, everything about the technical side of photography. The photographer—Cheri Cooke, who was rather well known in advertising circles—remedied that, taking Biddy under her wing in the house that she owned near Reigate outside of London. It also contained a large, well-equipped darkroom.

Next, Oney arrived, at Cheri’s insistence. Biddy’s child was delivered over to England in 1986 by her father and mother, who took the precaution of driving up to Swords near Dublin Airport on the pretext of buying a new van. They even got out and talked price with the owner to see if they were being followed by the Toddler or any of his thugs.
Only then did they dash over to the airport and buy tickets at the last minute for Birmingham, where a Traveler cousin was waiting. Immediately he drove them down to London, taking back roads to make sure they weren’t followed. Biddy could not be too careful.

Granted Cheri’s house, Cheri’s tutoring, even Cheri’s money that she gave Biddy as “pay” she called it while Biddy was learning did not come without strings. But as a lover Cheri Cooke was not demanding and seemed to need sharing and companionship most. And after Mickalou and what happened to him, Biddy had given up on men who were always deceiving in one way or another.

Yes, she knew it was wrong to blame Mickalou. After all, he had died, not she, because of a scrape that she had got into herself. But why had he been so foolishly brave with the likes of the Toddler? It was something only a man would do. Women, on the other hand, were dependable.

Once Biddy had mastered her craft, success came quickly for the “Beth Waters” that she had become in the late eighties in London. “Beth” became one of the first “rephotographers,” as the technique of photographing photographs came to be known. Clipping shots from magazines, Biddy would arrange the pictures in ways that were visually interesting or erotic or shocking. Some of her larger works—blown up to wall size—fetched prices up to fifteen thousand pounds, and Biddy was suddenly selling nearly all the photographs she made.

But Ireland beckoned. She missed the tranquil pace, and she yearned to provide a better life for her parents, who had lived rough for so long and were now getting on in years. They wanted most to “retire to the road, travelin’ here and there, like back when we was young,” said her mother, Maggie. But in style and not some old banger of a van. Now they could, since money was no longer a problem, thanks to Biddy.

To be close to them and the rest of her large Traveling family, Biddy—who was now so thoroughly transformed
that she sometimes actually thought she
was
Beth Waters—purchased a large house in Ballsbridge, an upmarket part of Dublin.

In the fall of 1991 she quietly moved back with Oney and Cheri Cooke, who now functioned as Biddy’s “manager” and little else. Because at the same time Biddy fell in love again—with a man who was a Traveler, like herself, and reminded her not a little bit of her father when he was young.

Fully ten years younger than she, Tag Barry was handsome, sometimes capable, always unpredictable, and not a little bit roguish. Now she wished she had brought him along to the opening—to distract the Toddler while she made her escape.

“Amn’t I hearing an Irish inflection in your voice?” the woman from
The Times
now asked.

“Oh, aye,” Biddy blurted out as she watched the gallery owner approaching the Toddler with a wide smile and both hands out; obviously the bastard had been in there before and bought something.

Biddy took two steps away from the critic, so she could see into the office and if there was a door into the alley that would lead where? Into Duke Street. The city, it was her one advantage. Having grown up in Dublin as a homeless waif, she had its streets and laneways etched in memory.

“Me mither is from Galway,” she now added in an exaggerated brogue that the woman found amusing.

“Via?”

“Hunger and poverty, like others in the West.”

After shaking the gallery owner’s hand, the Toddler turned with his arm up, his index finger pointing, and his thumb raised. As though shooting the photograph, the thumb snapped down. And then at the next and the next. Three in all. Quickly the owner moved forward and placed a small red dot in the lower left corner of each, indicating that the pieces had been sold.

“What about your father? Is he Irish too?” The woman placed the nib of her pen on her notepad.

“Christ!” Biddy muttered. Should she bolt? How could she explain it later? A call of nature. Cramps. A panic attack, which would only be the truth.

But the gallery owner had turned and now had his own finger outstretched, pointing at her. That was it; she couldn’t flee now. The Toddler would know. She’d have to face him down, but unlike him—she told herself—she’d changed considerably in the dozen years, having put some weight on her gaunt form.

Also, since her return to Ireland, she had taken the precaution of keeping her wavy blond hair dyed brown and cut short. She wore no makeup. After all the years that she had spent as a child out-of-doors, the skin of her face was creased and lined, like somebody much older. And she now only thirty-three.

Almost as though for practice, Biddy said in the best Surrey tones that she had learned from Cheri, “Actually, he was a Yank.” Which was the truth for Beth Waters.

“Who met your mother where?”

Slowly, torturously, the Toddler was moving down the wall of photographs toward her. The owner—a tall, thin man dressed in a tawny stovepipe suit just the color of his hair—was bending to him, pointing to details in Biddy’s work, which he was explaining. And praising lavishly. It was his job.

Biddy pulled in a large breath, squared her good shoulders, and let the air out slowly. Her bosom, which in her youth had been considerable, was now formidable and heaving. And suddenly hot, biting, visceral anger, which—she knew from her recovery program—was the flip side of fear, coursed through her.

To think of who and how many mainly young, confused, misguided, or simply—like herself—abandoned people he had ruined and killed. Quickly, like the man under the bus and Mickalou up in the tree. Or ultimately, like Beth Waters,
who couldn’t face a life without his drugs. Hundreds, no,
thousands.
He was a vulture, a viper, a prick.

And watching the miserable, round, little, bald fucker—drug pusher, multiple murderer—waddling toward her, Biddy’s eyes snapped to the desk, looking for a letter opener or a scissors. Anything sharp.

She wasn’t the same Biddy Nevins who’d allowed herself to be run out of the country twelve years earlier. She’d slit the bastard’s throat right there in front of everybody and then tell why. She didn’t care. She’d go to prison. Why not? Dublin and Oney, her daughter and her daughter’s generation, would be rid of a death-dealing leech.

“In a pub,” Biddy said to the reporter. “They had a pint; then they had each other in a snug. Nine month later there was me. It’s why I feel so at home in bars.” It was her standard brave answer, even though false. Biddy never went into bars. She was afraid of them, categorically. Alcohol, like the gear, could and would kill her. “We didn’t see my father again, never cared to entertain the possibility. I hope we never will.”

“Why’s that?”

“I hate fucking men.” The Toddler was nearly close enough to hear.

“Are you a lesbian?”

“Whenever I fancy a woman. Not often, mind. Not always. But you have a look about you, you do. Busy tonight?”

The reporter’s pale eyes widened. She looked away, color appearing in her face. “Well, I fancy you too, but not in that way.”

“Aw, shucks, and there I thought we might get something off tonight.” In spite of her nonchalant pose, Biddy was feeling reckless. “You change your mind, give me a shout. You have my card.”

“What about your mother?” the reporter managed.

“Was she a lesbian too?”

The woman shook her head slightly; it was not what she meant, but she would hear the answer.

“It would have been better had she been.”

“Why?”

“Males suck. Which is the only good we’ll ever get out of them.”

The reporter’s laughter was nervous. “May I quote you?”

Biddy nodded. “With your editor’s leave. She a woman?”

Now the reporter was truly confused. “Where was I?” She consulted her steno pad.

“Me mither.”

In tow with the gallery owner, the Toddler now joined them.

“Oh, yes—is she still alive?”

Biddy looked straight into the Toddler’s face, making sure his hard black eyes met hers. “Thankfully she’s dead as well. It’s curious being dead, you’re just never heard from again. It’s like taking the ferry to England. But for keeps.”

“Beth, excuse me, are we interrupting?” asked the gallery owner, knowing he damn well was but wanting to announce to the reporter that the photographs were selling briskly. “I’d like you to meet a patron of yours, Mr. Des Bacon, who just bought
three
of your prints. Des—Beth Waters.”

The Toddler’s hand came out, and for a moment Biddy only looked down at it, still furious, wanting to snub the bastard but knowing she would only be calling attention to herself. She touched her fingers to his, then glanced up at him again.

With a slight smile, he was studying her. “I’m a great admirer of your work, Ms. Waters. I’m only after telling Mal, here, that I wish I’d arrived earlier—so much has been sold.”

“Well, there
are
several pieces left,” the owner, Malachi Jordan, put in. “In particular there’s the footpath shot, which I think is the most spectacular work in the show.”

“I agree,” said the reporter. “It’s almost cubist, the way the footpath flags are arranged so that the images fuse into one another. Or is it a collage of those postcards you can buy in the Trinity College Library, Beth? The ones that are pages from the Book of Kells.”