Emerald Germs of Ireland (14 page)

And not what she had been on that beautiful spring day in 1945 when she had first arrived in Ellis Island, clad in a light blue frock and swinging her cardboard suitcase as she strode along Madison Avenue, thinking to herself, “I’m Babbie Hawness! I sure am a long way from Gullytown now, guys!” already putting on an American accent to impress everyone. But Babbie Hawness was soon to discover just how difficult it could be impressing anyone in the city of New York in those dark, lacking-in-opportunity years of the forties. “Hurry up and clear those tables! Your phony Noo Yoik accent don’t impress me, Irish!” was the caustic type of response she found she could expect for her efforts. That and “Get yore ass in here and pull some beers!”

It should hardly come as any surprise that late into those New York nights she might sob herself to sleep and curse the day she ever saw fit
to leave her beautiful, if impoverished, Gullytown. Where everyone looked out for you and where each evening all the neighbors gathered in the kitchen, shifted the dresser, and cheered wildly as the local fiddlers and musicians played wheeling, skirt-lifting music to the sound of:

Memories of which—although it was arguable if any such incidents had ever
actually
occurred, for the Hawnesses had never owned a dresser—drilled into Babbie’s heart with the efficiency of a red-hot needle each and every night she left her miserable job in Sam’s Grill on 1st and 1st (or “foist on foist” as the perspiring oaf of a proprietor habitually referred to it). Added to that were the constant letters she received from her sister Maimie (How she hated her! But even more than ever now!) informing her of how she was “walking out” with a beautiful army captain who had promised to marry her soon and install her in a big old Victorian house on the edge of Gullytown where they were to make a lovely home for themselves and tentatively take the first steps toward rearing a family. How Babbie Hawness loathed those letters! How many times she had scrunched them up and spat all over them there are not enough numbers in any mathematical system to quantify! On occasion, her animosity reached such extremes that she would shove open the window of the damp and dreary hostel and call out to the cacophonous, honking parade below, “The bitch! She gets everything and I get nothing!”

Something which it would be very difficult to deny, for the sad facts are that right from the day she was born, Dodie Hawness (Pat’s maternal grandmother) had hated Babbie with a passion. “Little Miss Barbara,” she would often sneer, “with her knickers around her ankles again. Well, you needn’t think I’m pulling them up! Do it yourself, her ladyship with the snout!” Every attempt the small child that was Barbara Hawness made to elicit affection for herself would be met with a harsh rebuff. Her psychological body was bruised as if by repeated assaults of
a resin-plastered boxing glove. Which may well be why eventually—inevitably, perhaps—a certain iron began to enter the soul of Babbie Hawness. It may be that, to employ the terminology current in this era of high technology and telecommunicadons, such data having been downloaded at an early age, there was a gloomy predictability about its appearance at a later stage. Or, as the Americans themselves might have it, reappearance
and then some!

It all happened quite unexpectedly, on a grand Sunday morning in 1948, with events proceeding as per usual in the cafeteria, Sam taking absolutely no notice of people’s feelings as he flapped his white cotton cloth and barked, You do dis!” and “You do dat!”—absolutely astonished—for there is no word for it—when the girl whom he had taken to be the meekest in the diner—the most cowed, certainly—turned on her heel, suddenly rasping at him with a tongue that protruded serpentlike from her lips, “Why don’t you go and do it yourself for a change, you big fat meaty-jawed Greek bastard!”

Suffice to say that there was no employment available to her at that particular establishment thenceforward. But, in the days that followed, what dignity and sense of purpose Babbie Hawness might have expected as a dividend came close to being almost totally eroded by the hardship she was forced to endure as a consequence of her actions. There were many times when thoughts of self-destruction surfaced ominously, looming ever so logical and sweetly inviting. When, sitting on her suitcase, staring at the mass of rigging and webbed steel that swept out across the Hudson, she would bury her wet face in her fists and cry, “Oh God! How I wish I was dead!”

Which was, coincidentally, the very same sentiment she had just uttered in a small Forty-second Street cafe (“Dino’s”) precisely at the moment she found herself being joined by a man with the softest and most soothing voice she had ever heard. He, too, it transpired, had some relatives in Ireland, a McGurty from Dublin and some other acquaintances in Mayo. He was a filmmaker, he informed her, and that was how it all began, with the touch of his olive, signet-ringed hand and the words, “Would you like another milkshake, honey?”

The first time—long after it had all ended—Pat at last located within him the courage to insert one of the “blocks of black sin” (which
was not how they had appeared to Pat’s eyes initially, of course, the salacious tides underneath cleverly obliterated by strategically placed stickers trumpeting the delights of
Babbie’s Annual Vacation, National Geographic,
and
Natural Wonders of the World!
) into the machine—expressly rented for the purpose—he appeared to take leave of his senses entirely. There can be litde doubt but that he expected to encounter something which might distress him a litde, but he had been thinking along the lines of animated holiday snaps with a former lover, perhaps, or footage, even, of her performing a litde dance on a beach in a colored swimsuit. But such apprehensions were as nothing, nothing to what met his eyes on that first, dark, curtain-drawn day of 1982. There was a certain innocence about how it all unfolded, with a simple cardboard card displaying the words
Double D Productions Presents: Bun Crazy starring Babbie Bazoom.
But before three minutes had elapsed, the library in which Pat McNab had settled himself to “investigate” or “discover” something about the woman he had—even now, despite himself!—loved so much, had come to resemble the aftermath of Hiroshima. There were lampstands in the corner which had been snapped in two, cushions out of which the filling was now spilling like innards, as well as walls with jam and assorted dairy products smeared all over them. And, somewhere amid the devastation, the finger of a bent-over Pat McNab, sobbing his heart out in a way he remembered only from the earliest, most vulnerable years of his life. “Why?” he cried helplessly. “Why?” as he beat his fists against the arm of the rocking chair.

The sad fact is that up until that moment—effectively until the second in which he flicked the television button to “on”—Pat McNab had been in what the psychologists call “delusionary incapacitation,” and had succeeded in firmly convincing himself that there was a very strong possibility that he was about to witness educational documentaries regarding deserts, natural rock formations, and wildebeests, as well as uplifting travelogues with humorous commentary from the early years of Babbie Hawness’s sojourn in one of the world’s most wondrous cities. It is no wonder, then, after
Bun Crazy
—a lighthearted piece of anodyne froth, really, to all intents and purposes, with little to offer, perhaps, apart from a sequence involving revolving silver tassels (which appeared to delight his aunt no end)—that
Domesto Sexo
(in which his
aunt involved herself, willingly, with a superfluity of hirsute, leather-clad Hell’s Angels, piling, in absurd numbers, through the various windows of what seemed—in comparison to that of the McNab household—an ultramodern kitchen, complete with every available mod con) socked him brutally in the solar plexus with the solid persistence of a large demolition hammer.

The following morning, a large bonfire appeared at the back of Mrs. McNab’s house, delivering up a plume of smoke which could be observed from quite a distance. Smoke which had as its source, not the “pile of old papers” which Pat had decided upon as his intended explanation should some inquisitive neighbors come dropping by, but a small holdall full of black plastic rectangles whose casings and titles bent and curled as melted toffee in the flames. Tides including
Martin and, Olga, Depravos,
and
Love Camp 11.
All of them, at various stages of her life, featuring the woman Pat had known as Babbie.

Babbie Hawness, aunt and lover.

Who, he now reflected, raking over the remains of the ashes, would now no longer be either, because she was gone. There seemed a parched, arid quality to his voice as he paused by the laurel bush on his return to the house and remarked to the carpet of leaves beneath his feet, “Gone. And it breaks my heart.”

Which it did, and never a day went past afterward when Pat would not sit by the window and look out thinking he could see her again as large as life, disembarking from the bus in her lime-green pantsuit, waving excitedly toward him and shouting, “Pat! Is that you! I’m home!” upon her face not the slightest trace of the duplicity destined to pollute all that was good and wholesome and true. Except that he would be wrong about that too, wouldn’t he? For it would be there all right. Invisible to his credulous eye, perhaps, but nonetheless present—a thick gray web of lies surreptitiously and cunningly concealed behind her skin. As it had been all along. “Oh, hi Pat!” ought to have been the words she spoke that day. “Hi Pat, honey! I’m home to cheat you out of house and home! Because I know your mother’s gone!”

Or perhaps, “I’m home to show you how to make a movie, Pat! Yeah! To show you all my goddamned Hollywood tricks!”

“Yes, that would be a good one! Indeed, why don’t you show me that
one!” thought Pat as he sat there with a certain willfulness in his eyes,
“How to Make a Darn Good Movie!
by Babbie Hawness!”

Just like the one herself and McCoy had made the time they thought he had remained overnight in Dublin. He had telephoned to say that he would be delayed because of an unexpected bus strike but had been fortunate enough to secure a lift home—quite unexpectedly!—in Tommy Caffrey’s coal lorry. It would have been better had it never happened, however. For the music which reached his ears as he closed the door behind him, having prepared him for a scene of romantic farmhouse jollity—she often liked to dance alone, as herself and his mother had done when young girls long ago—might just as soon have reached in and removed his innards, the open door admitting the rollicking banjo and jaunty, jigging fiddle as two pistons—which later revealed themselves to be legs—scythed the air and large drops of perspiration smacked the kitchen table as Bullock McCoy (his voice
in excelsis
a high-pitched shriek) gave himself fully to the scratch-pocked tune

before collapsing, with mammalian indecorum, upon the floor. As Pat’s aunt, now turning pink, now deathly pale, faced the door and, raising herself upon one elbow, gasped when she saw him, chokingly declaring, in shrill alarm, “Pat!”

There is a dream which sometimes comes in the quiet gloom of what can only be the McNab house, in which a soft green light in the distance glows, revealing itself as a beautiful, high-cheeked woman who turns with open arms and calls a name. A name which belongs to a young boy who moves across that hay field, eyes as bright as the sun that shines, before being swept at last into the welcoming arms of Babbie Hawness. But mostly there is another vision, one which is forever blurred and indistinct, with the infuriatingly low definition of poor quality video, lost somewhere in the gray snow a single waving figure of familiar, peroxided capaciousness pleading ceaselessly, but hopelessly, for mitigation.

And there is the final one, in which a lone figure in a long black coat stands by a dying fire watching a black rectangle of plastic burn until at last it melts away, and with it a browning, peeling sticker which names a song once beautiful.

Standing now with Pat outside the window of the greengrocer’s, Bullock McCoy stared one last time at the piece of paper he held in his hand. There was no mistaking the words—for the message was clear and absolute. But it still made no sense. He clearly remembered Babbie saying she would telephone him on Tuesday so they would go to the hotel for a meal. “I was to have mate,” he said to himself, “and she was to have chicken curry.” He scratched his head and tried to understand it—to no avail. He turned and called after Pat, “Maybe you could tell her to drop down to Sullivan’s tonight—say around nine o’clock? I’ll be in there having a few pints! She could have a Manhattan! She likes Manhattans, Pat!”

But Pat was already gone, Bullock’s entreaties aching and orphaned. Lost in the smoky light of an evening which now too was dying, as though to emulate the performance of a perfumed creature so revered, beneath a laurel bush now finally at rest, eyes once full of hope freeze-framed beneath the stars.

T
here were, indisputably, those in Gullytown who, as regards Pat’s “eccentric” behavior, continued to vociferously express about it, their views concerning it, generally along the lines of, “Ah sure what would you expect?” and “You’re not going to tell me that you’re surprised? Sure the whole effing tribe of them is mad!!” But such callous estimations must surely be unfair, for, if anything, Pat’s valiant efforts to remain on what might be termed “terra firma” were worthy only of praise. That forces outside his control conspired to make this impossible ought to be considered no fault of his. For how many times had he attempted to restrain himself in the face of yet another verbal barrage from his mother—”Look at the cut of it! Small wonder the whole town’s laughing at you!” or “Go on to the dance, then, for all the luck you’ll have at it, you dying-looking scarecrow on legs!”—before, at last, his endurance came to an end? One single blow of the aluminium saucepan eventually felling her, rendering her prone and silent at his feet, as some stuffed large, life-sized doll. No, there may indeed be many cases in the history of the world’s criminology where the bard’s chilling observation from the pages of
Macbeth—
“I am in blood stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er”—are more than applicable, but it should have been impossible to consider “the McNab affair” as one of them. For the plain truth is, readers, that Pat was simply one of life’s unfortunates. And was such right from the very first day when he laid his dear beloved—and make no mistake about it, he did love her!—in the
earth beneath the laurel bush (even on occasions, going so far as to disinter her and ferry her—again—into the “warmth” so that it would be “just like old times”), events moving with a rapidity that pitched a perfectly innocent young man into the very heart of a black and swirling cosmos, the inevitable outcome of which could only be the inclusion of Pat McNab among the sinister pages of a tome endded, perhaps,
Great Murderers and Sociopaths of History.

But what great murderer wants simply to don RayBan shades, sing songs, and imbibe a few social glasses of Macardles Ale in his local hostelry? What sociopath? None—for such a description of Pat McNab is surely as inaccurate as asserting that the town of Ballynahinch is situated in the middle of O’Connell Street. No, Pat was no sociopath, and in the fullness of time the truth will emerge and the enormity of Pat’s heart and generous nature be finally revealed to the world. As it might long ago have been but for the occurrence of what he himself liked to term “saucepan day,” and one or two other unfortunate “days” which might be considered a direct consequence of it. Readers, who would have dreamed that the insignificant actions of some innocent young girls in a “caring institution” literally miles from Gullytown would prove to have such a devastating effect on Pat’s mental condition, eventually being almost single-handedly responsible for propelling him toward that state which would make the deaths of his old schoolmaster Butty Halpin and the officer of the law Sergeant Foley hopelessly inevitable? No one, but such did indeed prove to be the case. Ironically, upon a day when Pat found himself waking, stretching, and observing to himself, in tones of buoyant optimism which he felt had been lost to him forever, “Today, Pat old bean, is the day when everything is going to be different. I just know it! I can feel it inside in my very bones!”

Such were the thoughts that continued to inhabit Pat’s head as he pottered about downstairs, searching for tea bags and doing a hundred and one different things at once, humming to himself in the manner of one who has just scooped the jackpot in the Lotto. As, right at that very moment, in the St. Teresa of Lisieux dormitory of a nurses’ home over seventy-five miles away, a young girl whose complexion was as soft as fresh flowers shot suddenly up in her apple-festooned nightie and cried aloud, “It’s today!”

“Today!” cried her friend Ann, also shooting up in bed.

“Today!” squealed Jo, already up and standing by the wardrobe with a toothbrush.

“Today! Today! Today’s a holiday!” yelped Mary (the nightie girl), clapping her hands together.

“Hooray!” the three friends cried in unison as the second bell began to ring.

How best to describe the three—”friends for life!” as they classified themselves—now cleaning their teeth with bewilderingly synchronized precision? “What a fabulous triumvirate of life-loving fluffies they make!” is a phrase which might come to mind, perhaps.

“Oh, I can’t wait!” cried Mary.

“I’ve been waiting for this day all term!” gasped Jo.

“Me too!” nodded Ann.

“Why, the three of us are going to go absolutely mad!” they shrilly chirped in unison, as though a single person replete with three heads.

Some hours later, they found themselves sitting excitedly and expectantly at the back of the bus which was already nosing down the driveway as it negotiated its way toward the open road, in the mirror the driver rolling his eyes as he contemplated the riot of flared skirts and shoulder-draped lamb’s wool cardigans, a sense of “sisterhood” and “house spirit,” he could tell, being ostentatiously displayed before himself and the sad-eyed sheep and cows who bewilderingly contemplated the world outside.

“Come on, girls!” squealed Mary, tugging her cardy and conducting with a flourish, as her companions cleared their throats and began:

They had just drawn breath and were about to sally forth with zest into the second verse when, suddenly, Mary’s extended hand froze in midair as she cried, “Stop!”

“Huh?” replied Jo and Ann as with one voice.

The stark gray limestone structure rose up out of the trees, its crudely painted sign
MCNAB’S B&B
(a recent innovation of the cash-strapped Pat’s) visible from the road. A wry, mischievous smile began to play about Mary’s lips. The mischievous Jo gave her a naughty push.

“You can’t be serious!” she chuckled.

“Serious—you can’t be!” chimed Ann.

“Stop the bus!” called Mary, cupping her hands for the purposes of amplification. The driver cast his eyes toward heaven as he chucked the hand brake.

“We want to make a stop here, drivey-pips!” cooed Mary as she undulated along the aisle, presently drawing a litde line with her fingernail across the driver’s forehead.

“You can’t!” he protested. “It’s more than my job’s worth!”

“If you don’t,” countered Jo, “we’ll say you—did certain … bad things!”

“We’ll say you …”

The color drained from the busman’s face.

“Whatever you say, miss,” he agreed, shamefacedly.

“Tee hee!” laughed Jo as she tipped his cap down over his eyes and they began to disembark, cacophonous as a flock of starlings liberated from a cage.

Their laughter rippled out across the countryside now as they weaved their way through lines of cow pats, combating untamed foliage the greater proportion of which seemed as clusters of living rhododendrons.

“Never mind her!” yelled Jo. “She’s mad!”

“Come on, O’Boyle!” yelped Mary. “You silly cow!”

Some distance away, the driver’s head rested wearily on the steering wheel, on the verge of virtual collapse, he murmured, “It’s the parents I feel sorry for,” before, inexplicably, rallying and crying, “Get back, you bitches! I don’t have to take this from you! Get back here, I say!”

But his cargo had all but vanished as had, within seconds, the bus, furiously speeding on down the road, piloted by a purplish-faced fifty-year-old who, in his own phrase, was no longer intending to “effing well take it anymore!”

Jo giggled, Ann giggled, and Mary giggled as they went past a big hedge linking arms and singing:

“Tee hee!” chirped Jo.

“Tee hee!” laughed Mary.

“Tee hee hee!” added Ann.

They stood—not a little curious—beneath the large red wooden B&B sign. It swung a litde in the light wind. They considered the crudely painted inscription (it dribbled in quite a few places) beneath the towering twin letters.

“It says what?” said Mary.

“What?” said Jo.

“It says what?” said Mary.

“No girls,” laughed Ann, as they all squealed mirthfully together. “It says—
No Girls.!”

“Oo!” chirped Mary.

“Ha ha!” laughed Jo.

“Ha ha!” squealed Mary as slowly the door opened and they looked up to witness Pat McNab standing directly before them on the step. His hair was uncombed and he was attired in his long black coat. He found his cheeks flushing a deep crimson as he was formally addressed.

“We’re on holiday, you see,” went on Jo in what were reasonably convincing “adult” tones, “we’re on holiday—”

“And we thought—” interjected Jo.

“We thought we’d go on a little mystery tour—,” said Ann.

“Hop on the bus,” said Mary.

“Hop off the bus,” smiled Jo.

“Hop hop hop,” laughed Ann.

“And go where we like!”

“Go anywhere we like!” said Mary.

“Just get on the bus and go!” chirped Ann.

“Whee!” laughed Jo.

“Who cares where it takes you?” Mary said.

“Not me!”

“Nor me!”

“Nor me!”

“For we’re three lovely lassies from Bannion!” erupted Jo at the top of her voice, making little wriggly waves in the air with her fingers.

“Ssh!” chided Ann.

“I’m sorry, but like it says above on the sign—there’s ‘no girls,’ you see,” stammered Pat, staring at the step, his face an even deeper shade of red than before.

There was a pause. During it, birds sang unremarkable melodies.

“Is that your final word, then?” asked Mary.

“I’m afraid it is,” said Pat, regretfully.

“Very well, then,” said Mary.

“McKenna! What are you on about?” hissed Jo behind her back, giving her a litde push.

There was another pause. The birds were sdill singing. Mary cleared her throat. She smiled as she turned to Ann and Jo and said, “Look! Goodness gracious me! There’s a button come loose on your coat!”

Pat swallowed, the saliva seeming to take an age to get past his tonsils.

“Loose?” he replied, pinpricks of sweat pushing through the flesh of his palms. He experienced the sensation of wearing gloves fashioned from barbed wire.

“Yes, loose!” continued Mary. “It looks like it’s about to fall off! Look, girls!”

Her two friends moved in closer as they inclined their heads the better to inspect said garment and its faulty accessory. Mary’s fingers curled about the button as she began, ever so slowly, to rotate it clockwise in what might be considered a “suggestive” fashion.

“Gosh! You’re right, Mary!” exclaimed Jo in husky tones.

“It’s about to fall off!” said Ann.

“Imagine what we could have done with it if we had known about it in time,” said Mary.

“We could have sewn it right back on!” said Ann.

“Right back on like it had never been off,” said Jo.

Mary fluttered her eyelashes and said to Pat, “Because that’s what we do, you know!”

Pat sneezed and a litde silver drop of mucus appeared below his right nostril. Considerately, Mary turned away and said, “We look after people!”

“We look after people!” said Jo.

“Take them under our wing!” said Ann.

“And look after them, right, girls?” said Mary.

“Like nobody else!” they cried in unison.

Mary coughed, placing the back of her hand delicately against her lips.

“If you have a cold—”

“Or heartburn,” said Ann.

“Or if your appendix burst,” said Jo.

“Or if you had cancer,” advised Mary.

“We’d look after you,” three voices said together.

“Just like we’d sew on a button,” Mary’s soft voice told him.

“Or blacklead a range,” said Jo.

“Or iron your jammies,” said Mary.

“We’d do it,” said Ann.

“Because we’re—” said Mary.

“Because we ‘re—” said Jo.

“Because we’re—” said Ann.

“Three lovely lassies from—” said Jo.

“Now, girlies—ssh!” chided Ann.

Mary’s tongue touched the dp of her teeth as she said, “So—where’s your thread?”

A large bead of sweat splintered over Pat’s left eyebrow.

“Where’s your thread?” asked Jo.

“Where’s your thread?” asked Ann.

Pat’s lip trembled as three voices—husky, beguiling—seemed to call to him from far away.

“Where’s your thread?” one said.

“Where’s your thread?” another said.

“Where’s your thread?” another said.

“Where’s your thread?” another said.

As the final one, with a rapid flutter of eyelashes, shrilly remarked:

“Well then! We’ll simply have to find it for him, won’t we?”

Pat was sitting in his chair by the fire fingering his newly sewn button,
feeling as though he were a pile of old clothes abandoned in this sparkling, recently feminized environment, redolent of air freshener and potpourri, as at his table three “visitors” sipped from china teacups and nibbled on snack fingers, annihilating colleagues with great gusto.