Halloran nods to Shamie for another pint. He won’t stay out late tonight; home early and a mug of tea and a sandwich, then half an hour of Sky News before he turns into bed. He has an early start in the morning.
Nevin
I spotted him again today, Halloran. Around one o’clock, he had the van parked in front of the chemist. There he was with the cup of tea and the sandwich up on the dash. I didn’t stop – I just waved the hand and kept going – if you got stuck talking to that lad you could be there all day.
I watched him once, out on his rounds. It was about a year ago and I was back in Altóir delivering a summons to Ja Frazier. It was early in the afternoon when I got there, about two o’clock, and who did I see through the window but Ja himself stretched out on the couch sleeping, the television on – Countdown, something like that on it – and the buck himself snoring his head off in the middle of the day. There was no reason to disturb him – I dropped the summons in the window down on top of him and left him there.
Coming home, I took the high road over Thallabawn bog with the big view out over it. And who was there on the low road, pulling up in the van only Halloran. I pulled over on the side of the road to watch him; I always wondered what it was he got up to out there alone on the bogs.
He got out of the van and took the hi-viz jacket from the seat beside him. Then he went around the back and pulled out a pair of wellingtons and slipped off his shoes and threw them in. There was no rush about him, these things got done in their own time, and, if I were to tell the truth, it was a pleasure watching a man about his work with no hurry on him. Things were allowed to expand to their full weight and measure. He took out his mobile phone and spent a few moments looking at it, then stowed it away in the pocket. Now he was ready. He took off over the bog, a long stride carrying him along swiftly as if his feet hardly touched the ground at all. I watched him walk on, a low winter sun slanting across the day and Halloran walking across the burnt bog. But where the fuck was he going? Nothing ahead of him as far as I could see but red bog all the way out to the slopes of Sheaffrey, miles of it in every direction. And now the rain coming on. Clouds swelling on the horizon, rolling in from the west. If the fucker gets caught out in that . . .
And then he was gone. Disappeared from sight. The sun and a dip of the land and he was nowhere to be seen.
And I was all alone then looking out over the empty land and feeling very foolish in myself as if Halloran and the day had made an eejit out of me, led me here to this spot on a winter’s afternoon so that I might spend my time looking out over a tract of bog with nothing in it. And as I stood there I was glad to be alone, glad that no one could see how ridiculous I was or have any part of my foolishness. And I stayed like that for a while with the sky darkening over the bog and the rain closing in and no sign of Halloran anywhere in the distance.
And then I had to laugh. That was Halloran all right, a law unto himself. Let him off I thought. He’s no worry, the same buck. Out there on his rounds, making work for both of us.
Halloran and the hi-viz jacket on him.
Joyride to Jupiter
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
The year was set up wrong from the start – wavering sun on New Year’s Day and snow on the seventeenth of March that stopped every parade from Malin to Mizen. I didn’t know the whole thing would fall asunder but I knew something was going to go wrong, as sure as I knew west was west.
I first took notice at Easter when Teresa disrupted the plans for our usual dinner.
‘We won’t have any of that yoke,’ she said. ‘What do you call it? Legs, you know. Woolly. It jumps.’ She leapt and laughed; I was startled – it was a move so unlike her. ‘Woolly little fellas,’ she said, and wiggled her fingers.
‘Are you talking about lambs?’
‘Lamb!’ She seized the word like a biblical wolf. ‘Lamb. Yes. None of that.’
So it started that way. Teresa began to change her mind about things that were sacred to her: there were no more fire-and-wine Friday nights. No more wedge heels or skirt suits. And she wanted sweet food to eat above all else: custard, Petits Filous, Jelly Tots.
One Saturday morning I asked if she was going to the hair salon; she had missed two Saturdays by then.
‘Is it salon or saloon?’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to think it’s saloon.’ She made a gun of her fingers. ‘Bang bang!’ She cackled and I sat and looked at her, wondering what was happening to us.
At first I thought she must have found another man and she was changing for his pleasure, but she was never missing, never anywhere but at work or at home. Then she left work abruptly and gusted about the house putting things in odd places – loo roll in the drinks cabinet, frozen peas under the stairs. And she hummed high, pointless tunes all the time. She talked less, too, as if words didn’t hold weight anymore.
The push-me-pull-you of married life, all the compromises and stand-offs were waning. We became separate and distant but I was not going to give up on Teresa, not at all. I got a girl to come in – Marguerite – and she’s gentle with Teresa, a gift.
‘How’s the form, Mr Halpin?’ Marguerite says, bustling in the door in the mornings, all wide-hipped and capable.
‘You make me feel old with your “Mr Halpin”,’ I tell her.
‘The thing is, Mr Halpin, you are old.’
That’s the way Marguerite is. But she cherishes Teresa, keeps her voice low and coaxing with her, and Teresa smiles, accepts her firm, friendly help in a way that is contrary to the woman I married. My Teresa never wants help; she’s a one-woman show.
Before her mind sagged she was bad at being sick – a play actor. She took pleasure in her performance as Disgruntled Patient. She luxuriated over tablet-taking – lined them up like gems to be admired. Each headache foretold a brain haemorrhage, every leg creak was bone cancer. She endured but enjoyed hospital visits, complaining non-stop. Now she is truly sick and she neither knows nor cares. My poor, wandering girl.
This morning I found Teresa standing by the chest of drawers in a vest and nothing else. She had taken off the pants and blouse I’d dressed her in an hour before.
‘What are you doing, sweetheart?’ I said.
‘I can’t find my tracksuit.’
‘You don’t have a tracksuit.’
She wrinkled her nose and made slits of her eyes. This we called her angry koala face, and, when I used to say, ‘Oh, the angry koala is here,’ it melted things, and the koala went back up its tree. But Teresa continued to frown, thinking – if she thinks much at all – that I was thwarting her.
‘Tracksuit,’ she said.
‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t I go to Penneys and get you a tracksuit? When Marguerite gets here.’
‘Marguerite? Who’s that?’
And then she laughed because laughter falls from her now as it never did; it falls and pools around us, the one good thing. I knelt and stepped her feet into her knickers and pulled them up. I put her arms into the sleeves of her blouse and fiddled with the tiny buttons. She was doll-like in her pliancy. I kissed her forehead.
‘You’re my dolly,’ I said.
She put her arms around my neck and we held each other for a long time.
*
I started my jaunts, on the little train that snakes up and down the shopping centre, shortly after I found Marguerite. She said I should get out of the house. ‘Out from under my feet’ was what she actually said. Today Marguerite isn’t here so I have to bring Teresa with me to the shops. The train driver sees us; he waves and stops the engine.
‘All aboard,’ he says, tipping his head towards the carriages. He asks where we’re headed and I tell him. ‘I’ll spin you down so.’
Teresa sits with her hands folded in her lap, staring regally at the shoppers sloping through the centre. It is the same expression that shy children wear when they sit on the train – they want to be there, enjoying the trip, but it embarrasses them too because people turn to look. These are the kids I lo
ve the most. They are rooted in themselves and they shoulder the world warily, like I did as a child.
We sit in our tiny compartment and I sing a verse to Teresa, from a song we knew as youngsters: ‘The Dingle train is whistling now / ’Tis time to make the tay / That’s what they said in Tralee town / When evening came the way.’ She looks at me like she has never heard this before, so I sing it again, trying to plunge the tune into her mind, willing her to sing along. ‘The Dingle train is whistling now / ’Tis time to make the tay . . . ’
In Penneys Teresa stands in front of the make-up rack, picking up lipsticks and pots of eyeshadow and blusher; she is contained, at a distance from everything. She never did have that Irish capacity to linger, after dinner or at pub closing time – when she was done with a place she was done, and we were always the first to leave a gathering. But, in her new state, she lingers over everything, examining and waiting, with stores of patience that weren’t hers before. I leave her and do my bit of shopping with one eye clamped on her. She stands, studying the make-up containers with care. I come back, and, when Teresa sees me, she hands over the little pots one at a time. I read out their names to her, before pressing them back into their slots.
‘Sparkling Miracle. Glamour Queen. Mystic Purple. Yes Eye Can! Nude Candy. Fairytale. Disco Diva. Joyride to Jupiter.’ Joyride to Jupiter makes her laugh like a girl – a sweet gurgle from her throat – and I hold it up and ask, ‘Would you like this?’
‘Can I have it?’ She takes the small tub of eyeshadow and clutches it as if it’s a jewel from Derrynaflan. ‘Joyride to Jupiter,’ Teresa says, looking at it in wonder.
I am the worm in the dementia apple; I will tunnel through it, I will not let it get the better of us. Things are different, and will be different, but there are things I can hang on to.
I take Teresa to our bedroom. The room smells of talc and dirty socks; it has always smelt like this. I undress her with care, tumble out of my own clothes, and we tuckle under the duvet. Her skin is buttermilk soft, and I hold her close and caress the neat hollow in her back.
‘Chancing your arm, as usual,’ she says.
‘You love it,’ I say.
She presses her breasts to my chest and heat rushes through the length of me. I have long treasured the honesty of our lovemaking; we could always look each other in the eye in the middle of it all and grin, heated up though we were. That hasn’t changed, though she gazes at me with bewilderment sometimes now. But she looks happily bewildered, because I know what to do to make her feel good and she responds as she always did, with grunts of pleasure and fierce kisses.
Afterwards we eat. This has been our ritual for fifty years. Today I have a bowl of cherries beside the bed and I de-pip them one at a time with my lips, and, like a bird, I drop the soft flesh into Teresa’s mouth. She sucks and chews the scarlet pulp and smiles up at me. It pleases me somehow that she is childlike; she is the girl I courted and won. Gone is the snappy, impatient Teresa she grew into. Back is good-natured, sunny Teresa.
*
The children on the train in the shopping centre are often plump. I love that slight pudginess that most kids have, their hands ‘swollen with candy’ as the song goes. Sometimes, when they are struggling to board, I lift them into their seats and their cushiony flesh amazes me. How so soft, so wielding? If my hands stay a little too long on their fat waists they shrug me off, impatient to take their seats. A mother gives me a sharp look from time to time. But it’s worth it for the sweet feeling imprinted on my hands.
I travel up and down on the train for hours at a time. The driver doesn’t mind; he only ever charges me one fare. Once, instead of going to the shopping centre, I went to Heuston Station and took a real train as far as Portarlington. I squinted at the views from the window – a hump in a field was either a very small cow or a very large rabbit; either way I didn’t care, it didn’t interest me. The muffled tannoy announcements were irritating; it took me ages to figure out what the announcer was saying. I heard ‘sex and savages’ for ‘snacks and beverages’. I drank caramel-tinged tea from a paper cup and paid €2.10 for the experience.
No, all in all I prefer my little shopping-centre train to the real thing. There are better things to see, like the balloon man and the sweetie cart and all the children with their families who trundle about together, lost in a fug of shopping and fast food.
Our daughter comes to visit; she doesn’t come much – some long-nursed wariness of me keeps her away. She turns up less and less since Teresa began to flounder, since she began to forget things and wander and dress strangely.
‘Seven walnuts a day, that’s what she needs,’ our daughter says to me. ‘Seven walnuts a day, Mam, OK?’ she half-shouts at her mother.
‘Oh, yes,’ Teresa says, as if this makes sense to her. She blinks at our daughter, trying to place her.
‘Walnuts?’ I ask.
‘For her memory,’ she says. ‘They have polyphenolics or something. Anyway, they help.’ She plucks at the hood of Teresa’s tracksuit with her fingers. ‘What in God’s name is she wearing? It’s beat onto her; she’d be mortified if she could see herself.’
‘Your mother asked me for it. She wanted it.’
Our daughter pokes through the things on the top of the chest of drawers, to distract herself from Teresa, who is perched on the bed in her pink velour tracksuit, looking ridiculous and wrong but content.
‘What’s this shite?’ our daughter says, holding up the pot of Joyride to Jupiter. ‘This stuff is total crap. It’s for teenagers.’
Teresa barrels across the room and slaps our daughter’s cheek, phwack. She grabs the eyeshadow and pockets it. The three of us stand, suspended.
‘Jesus, Mam.’ Our daughter holds her cheek and moves towards Teresa but I wedge myself between them.
‘She was a good mother to you,’ I say. ‘A good mother. She needs your respect.’
‘What she needs is to be in a home. A hospital. Somewhere.’ Our daughter grabs her handbag and heads across the room. She turns. ‘But you, you selfish old prick, you have to have it your own way, as usual. She needs help!’ She slams the door.
‘She has help,’ I say, pulling Teresa close to me. ‘You’re OK, aren’t you? My girl, my love.’
*
The pub is not the kind of pub I like; it’s manufactured, unorganic. Even the barmen look plastic. I sit, feeling stiff, on a green leather banquette, under a television screen the size of a car. But the pub is here for the convenience of the shopping centre, and, today, it is certainly convenient. I sup a lager then gulp another. I crunch through a bag of bitter nuts and read a discarded Herald. More lager and then a Jameson, to pile sour upon sour.
Very little makes me happy anymore, and, conversely, it takes very little to make Teresa madly happy. It is all topsy-turvy. Teresa was a terror, really; the girls she worked with were afraid of her and probably didn’t like her much. Not one of them has come to see her since she left work. Not one.
I down the last of the whiskey. By the time I take my place on the little train, my ears are buzzing and my stomach doesn’t feel the best. A slender girl with huge grey eyes takes the seat beside me.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Hi.’
‘And what’s your name, little lady?’
‘Mary-Kate.’
‘You’re not serious?’ I place my hand on her leg. ‘I had a dog called Mary-Kate once. A big fucking ugly wolfhound. A horrible bitch, she was.’
The girl’s face contorts, and I put my arm around her. ‘Not to worry,’ I say. ‘She’s dead now. Dead as doorknobs, Mary-Kate.’
‘Mam,’ the girl says, a plaintive squeak as she looks over her shoulder for her mother.
The train lurches forward, and my belly gets left behind until it lands in my throat, and I throw up, all over myself and the train and Mary-Kate.
‘There’s a crow I want to pick with you, Mr Halpin,’ Marguerite says, meeting me in the hallway.
‘Oh, yes?’
I have a wogeous headache; the hangover is already pounding through my body and it is barely two o’clock. I can still feel the pinch of the security guard’s fingers braceleting my arm.
The train driver came to my defence.
‘Leave him go,’ he said, putting his hand on the security guard’s chest. ‘Are you all right?’
I swayed and retched, muttered, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ over and over. I tried to wipe the sick from my jacket.
‘You’re barred,’ the security man said. ‘Do you hear me? Don’t let me catch you near the place again.’ He walked me to the exit.
A single coral rose bloomed from a patch of dirt at the shopping centre’s door. I plucked it.
‘You can’t take that,’ the security man said.
‘Watch me,’ I said. He lunged for the rose and I ran. When I got near the bus stop I slowed to a trot. I walked home, carrying the flower for Teresa in front of me like a chalice.
‘Mr Halpin? Are you all right?’ Marguerite says, taking my arm.
‘I’m grand, grand.’
She puts her hands on her hips. ‘You never told me Teresa was going into Emerald Sunsets.’
‘She isn’t.’
‘Well, that’s not what your daughter says. She was round here earlier looking for Teresa’s pension book. She says Teresa has a place in the home from next month.’
I sit on the bottom of the stairs and weep. I know already that I will acquiesce.
The driveway up to Emerald Sunsets is a blood valley of fuchsia. Teresa and I sit in the back; our daughter drives, glances at me in the rear-view.
‘It’s just to orientate her. Give her a feel for the place,’ she says.
I grunt.
The three of us walk around the home behind the owner. I gag on the faecal smell and hang back when we intrude on the rooms of sleeping residents. There is a horrible calm to the place.
‘We’ll make sure Mrs Halpin gets the best of rooms, the best of care,’ the owner says, a line she spools out for every family no doubt.