Wild Decembers (27 page)

She waits, listens, opens the door a fraction, and, hearing nothing, decides it must have been wind or leaves that blew in, and so she ventures out, carrying her set of keys on a metal hoop and a broomstick. Slowly she goes down the aisle, and in the dark she hears what might be prayer or might not. Torn between going back behind the altar to where the set of switches are or going on down, she continues on, gropes in the big brass metal sconce for the matches, and relights the candles, which are still smoking, having been quenched only moments before. They are thin candles, halved for economy’s sake, and the pencils of wan light are barely enough to guide her towards the source of the murmuring. She is flabbergasted. A grown body has climbed into the crib, a woman’s body, as she can tell by the shoes. Leaning in, she sees Breege Brennan lying in the straw alongside the donkey, the zebra, the infant Jesus, and the Holy Family. Before shouting out she blesses herself, knowing that something profane has happened in the House of God, and soon she is striking out with the metal keys and the handle of the broom which she brought to defend herself.

“Breege Brennan, if you don’t come out I’ll drag you out,” then receiving no answer she pulls first an arm, a leg, tugs at them to no avail. The hussy burrows herself down in the straw so as to be invisible. Hearing someone outside, she runs shouting for assistance, and presently Miss Carruthers and herself are tackling their stubborn charge. They pull in vain, they slap her face, they tell her the reprisals that will be hers. She has slumped down and is looking through the straw with huge and terrified eyes.

“She’s possessed.”

“With what?”

“I can guess what,” Miss Carruthers says peevishly. “We better get the priest.”

“He’s not there, he’s out on his farm.”

“If he farmed less and paid more attention to the faithful, we wouldn’t have this catastrophe.”

“Miss Carruthers, I won’t hear a word against Father,” Mrs. Noonan says, marching to the outer porch to ring the bell, to summon help from the town. The loud jerky peals ring out in a mighty consternation and Breege knows how everything is listening, outside and inside, the stations of the cross, the sanctuary wick in its bowl of oil, the purple half-curtain of the confessional door, and that soon the townspeople will come trooping in.

They are mostly women who have foregathered. They ask if she is drunk or drugged or out of her mind. They lean in, sniffing her, and then Josephine; wondering if she is
compos mentis,
puts some test questions to her: “Breege, what day is it? Breege, name the President of this country, name the President of the United States of America.” She doesn’t answer.

“She’s doing it for attention!”

“Bold is not strong enough a word for her.”

“Flipped . . . flipped,” Lydia, a younger girl, says, and liking the word so much and her importance in saying it, she repeats it several times, saying shouldn’t a doctor be called. Reaching to lug her out, to end this nonsense, Miss Carruthers pulls Breege by the shoulders, but is sent skidding, her rimless spectacles falling ahead of her on the tiles. Mrs. Noonan, who had shuffled off, has returned with an ewer of cold water, and with a determination that could only be called vengeance she douches her, feet, stockings, coat, and last of all her face. They are laughing now, all of them laughing at how grotesque she is in there, wet stockings, wet hair, hunched up like a wet hedgehog. One remembers how she saw it coming, Breege Brennan going into Mrs. Mac and accusing the poor woman of stealing her ten pounds. They speculate on what she might next do, curse, scream, maybe even bite someone.

“Keep back, keep back” is muttered now, all averring that something deadly has occurred. Hearing them, Breege raises her hand and moves her fingers to speak.

“Sssh . . . sssh . . . She wants to say something.”

“What is it, Breege?”

She tries, but the words won’t come.

W
HEN THEY LED
me in here and showed me my bed with the little plywood chest of drawers for my odds and ends and for treats that I might get, such as chocolate biscuits or orangeade, I wanted to die. Twenty beds in the ward, nearly half of them vacant. The counterpane was of a pale flowered stuff that feels coarse to the touch. A woman came and stood by me and offered to be my friend—Millie. She showed me around.

“That’s the dining room, that’s the painting room, that’s the television room, and that’s the Quiet Room.” When she said the Quiet Room she made faces and stuck her tongue out. If anyone roars or screams, or smashes windows, or hits out, or goes effing and blinding, they’re for the Quiet Room. In there, alone, to scream their guts out. There’s a mattress on the floor. A room waiting for roars. The lamentations it has heard. If I were put in there, and I might be, there is no knowing what would transpire. Would I scream or recant? At the end of it something would have been hauled out of me. I don’t know. And they do not know either—the nurses, the doctors, the psychiatrists. They ask questions. Are our minds racing? Do we think other people are reading our thoughts? They write down what we say; then three times a day someone comes with a plastic eggcup of pills and stands over us to make sure that we swallow them, to make sure we don’t grind them between our fingers and put them in the potted plants. There are male and female nurses. Other staff sit in offices by their electric fires with sheaves of notes on their desks, trying to unravel the pickle of our lives. Country people. City people. Young and old. Strays. A woman across the way has not once opened the flowered curtain around her bed. Her meals are brought to her. We are of all ages. Two of the girls have teddy bears, they are studying for their exams in the summer.

Millie, who showed me around the first day, took against me on account of my not speaking to her. I tried my vocal cords in the bathroom and a sound came, but no speech. In the mirror, I saw the terror jumping in my own eyes. Terror of what. Terror of everything. Millie thinks I hate her. She is in love with a doctor, paces up and down in her loud paisley trousers that are much too tight for her, and says that she will write to him for Christmas and he will come. She can wait until Christmas, but not a second longer. She’ll burst then. She called me Loretta the day I arrived and asked me to hold her, said no one ever held her, not even this doctor of whom she dreams, to whom she sends her voices. Often she curses. Her nails are bitten and so are the stumps of her squat fingers. All bloody, all bloodied.

“I’m like that inside,” she said, and held them up for me to kiss. Minutes later she erupted, said that I did not like her, that I told stories about her, dirty things.

I prefer being out in the grounds, at least I’m outside, I can breathe. Therese is in charge of us. One day she’s all over me and the next day she’s shouting. Commands, commands. She dug up the pansies that I put in. They lay on the ground, their little purple faces shrivelled, their clayey roots dead. Another of the gardening brigade is called Nancy. She’s not a local. Her husband went up in flames in his own house, in his own wheelchair. She laughs, splits her sides telling it. Took the house with him. Fuck him, she says. Left her nothing. She tells it to everyone, even the young man who delivers the trays of cakes and bread and sausage rolls. She tells him and others how the phone call came to the office, how a nurse had to break the news to her, and soon after the two of them got into a posh car to go home for the funeral. Nothing to bury, only this small pile of ashes. She laughs. I don’t know whether she’s telling the truth or not. You never know. Sometimes out in the grounds someone will whisper, “What did you do?” They like to exaggerate. The men are dying for a kiss, even the old men. They sit on the wood benches and make slobber sounds. They try to get us into conversation.

No one will tell me how long I am to be here, and I haven’t asked. There are some who have lost the will to go home because they have company here, even if it’s company they fight with. The meals all taste the same—the stews and the roasts and the bacon and cabbage, all identical. The sweet things have a bit more flavour. I am never hungry. The opposite.

My brother put me here. Dr. McCann and himself did it. When he saw me looking back at the house and “my little plantation, he turned and said, “Don’t hold it against me, Breege.” He was in the front with the driver, Tom Liddy. They talked to one another the whole time, as if everything was tiptop. They said that it was different to the old days, people were no longer in straitjackets. It’s not that different, it’s still locked up. We had an uncle here, but my brother did not mention it. He stayed in our house once. He chain-smoked and would laugh for no reason. Tom Liddy said that March was the month when most people went loopy, like the March hares.

It was after I got into the crib that Joseph put two and two together. A piece of paper that he found on the dashboard of the tractor. The rain had run onto it, but he guessed it, my secret, my rained-on plea. I asked Bugler to see me just once. I begged, I hate that I begged. My brother said it was a sickness. McCann and himself said that it was a child’s crush inside a twenty-two-year-old woman, a daftness. Maybe it was, maybe it is, but how can you stop liking someone, even loving someone, how. I would have got into the tabernacle that day if I could have fitted. It was a loneliness to get closer to Jesus or the Holy Ghost. Or else to disappear, to vanish. Bugler opened up some vein in me, and it is not his fault no more than it is mine. I will know him again, I will be the one to hold him when dead, the one to bury him. I know that. Hard ground, ground as hard and knotted as people, including him. You can go years and years of normal life, all day, every day, milking, foddering, saying the given things, and then one day something opens in you, wild and marvellous, like the great rills that run down the mountain in the rain, rapid, jouncing, turning everything they touch into something living; a mossy log suddenly having the intent and slither of a crocodile.

Down in the surgery, Dr. McCann and my brother tried to pluck it out of me. They couldn’t. I had gone silent. That was my way. It was not the first time. Years ago, a different doctor, a lady, operated on me in our kitchen, no anaesthetic, no nothing, men holding me down while she dug the knife. Weeks after, she called on us and I was asked to say her name. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. They stood me on a chair so as to be level with her face and her velour hat, but I wouldn’t. She was livid.

So were they, McCann and my brother. In between coaxing me they thumped me, and McCann put a tiny torch down my throat, then a spatula on my tongue, forcing me to say A’s.

“Unreal . . . fecking unreal,” he said, and got out another encyclopaedia. Joseph gave me a cough lozenge to suck, thinking it might do the trick.

Leaving the world you see it more clearly. It is like things lost, earrings or brooches, they loom up in the mind’s eye. People too. The way I see Bugler in his many guises: on that dance stage in the red shirt with the dappled patterns, his throat soft but stretched, emotion in his eyes.

It was a beautiful winter day that I left home, the trees bare, their trunks so sleek and damp, the sky all pageant, clouds of every denomination, their pink-frilled edges overlapping, like the waves of the sea. Sunset like a monstrance, spokes of light forking out from it, white white gold. I thought how in summer all the trees are twined together by foliage but in winter they stand alone, stark, leafless. The same with people. In happiness they seem all one, but in misfortune they are apart. It would have been useless to defy them. And I had nowhere to go. Certainly not to him. I will not be listening for the sound of a tractor in the future.

As we were passing the big power station, the pylons glistened, wires taut with messages, messages of love and hate and pity and condolence. Goodbye, Bugler.

There were no entrance gates, just a wide gap where two gates would have fitted, and my brother turned to me and there were tears in his eyes: “I’d do anything to see you better.”

“Fine place,” Tom Liddy said. He could not have meant it. The stone and the plasterwork of the main building looked dilapidated, slates had fallen, the gable wall full of cracks, with ivy growing out of them. That was when I first saw Therese. We all saw her, going across to the single-storey chapel. She holds the key? to the chapel and keeps it locked as it suits her. When she saw us driving in she put her shovel down and came across and asked us for cigarettes and money. Liddy said we hadn’t any and she told us to fuck off, fuck off. A stubby woman in black boots with a shovel. If you did a drawing of her it would be that.

They encourage drawing and painting. One of the young girls, Dolours, does it. She draws pop stars with a single eye. The third eye she calls it.

Always coal black and slanting. She signs her name in flowery lettering. Otherwise she is a fashion plate—jeans, tight bodices, and very high platform shoes. Tall as a flamingo. She carries her makeup kit with her wherever she goes: to the bathroom, to the painting room, to the dining room, wherever. Her eyeshadow is a pale lilac, which makes her look in mourning. She was due for release, but not now. She went into the bathroom a few evenings back and cut her wrist, at least grazed it. With a broken bottle. Her friend Chrissie had done it, so why not her. Chrissie had told her that seeing the blood and watching it drip was brilliant, gave her a fantastic sense of release. They are supposed to be studying, but boys are all they can think of. Chrissie says there’s not nearly enough men in the world; she’d do anything for a snog.