The Lost Souls' Reunion (3 page)

When they asked her a question she would not answer them. She did not write well and could barely read.

She would only be seen near the town when the fit-ups came. The travelling theatres brought life and colour and dreams into the grey hours that made Scarna days. The town would see Carmel and Noreen then, slipping into the back row when the performances had started. Dreaming with the town and aching with the town for the stories that happened on makeshift stages – Noreen and Carmel were seen and not noticed. The town had its mind and heart on the stories too.

Carmel watched one woman one year, a woman called Sive who played the leads in plays best forgotten in a way she could never be. Carmel watched her on stage and in the town from a discreet distance.

The woman called Sive had seemed more fine and free than any woman. She had sauntered through the town with men all following with reasons to talk to her, with women all watching their men. She had caught Carmel watching once, out walking on the Shore Road. Her male company was not pleased when she had called Carmel over and touched her hair and said, ‘Like fire.'

From that day, Carmel was allowed to follow her. Until the day when Carmel went to the theatre tent and found it gone.

This was one week in a life which went on in a manner where little changes, until Eddie's eighteenth birthday. His father took him for his first pint to the Slip Inn on the harbour front at Scarna – where fishermen and farmers met in a back bar where no stranger stayed for more than one drink. Too many eyes on them; even enemies in the town of Scarna united against the unknown who entered. The men were talking of Joseph Moriarty, who had just been asked to leave.

If the drinking men did not bait him, and they tried not to, he would rise to imagined insults. That night's had been a concern about the state of Joseph's crop in Stone's Throw Field, which ran right along the shoreline. The only thing that could grow in it was cabbage. The rubbery leaves fought the salt winds well, but the first, tender shoots were not able for the fight in the same way.

The farmer whose family had acquired good Moriarty fields in other years and done well from them, put it to him, ‘No way a cabbage will raise its head now, Joseph. Not after the fourth week of salt winds. This is no summer.'

‘Is that right?' Joseph had spoken back, with a calm they all knew to come before a blow-up.

A good foot or two of space round him cleared, the enquirer drew back also. From behind him, someone who knew his face could not be seen, said, ‘Mark you, everyone loves a bit of salt on their cabbage.'

The laughter lasted for as long as it took for Joseph to rise and belt the initial enquirer. Belt the smugness his fat and happy fields gave him.

It was done quickly – four lifted him and four put him outside and bolted the door as Eddie and his father came through it.

‘Why do you keep him as a customer?' one asked the barman. The barman did not have to answer that Joseph was in most nights and worth the trouble for that reason.

The usual insults were thrown at Joseph's back once he was safely gone. Then the conversation turned to his family and they talked of the daughter, who roamed at will, as they would one of the beasts they farmed.

‘A fine thing, well stacked at the front.'

‘You'd have to hobble her to keep her still.'

‘Don't go getting ideas about Carmel, lads. She has the colouring of a fox and she scrawms like one too!' Poker O'Toole cackled. He was forty if a day.

‘And how would you know?' Eddie asked.

‘Well I tried to get acquainted with the mite once. I went home the beach way and came across her, in her nip, having a wash in the sea. In the dead of night! Took off like that when she saw me,' he clicked his fingers sharply. ‘When I caught up on her she took the arm off me, bit into it she did.'

Eddie was not outspoken on any occasion and did not utter a sound as he smacked his fist home, nor did he say a word, but left with the stunned silence still about them all.

His father looked long and hard at the door his son had just walked out of. The men took no offence and Poker was out cold so could take none either. They all put it down to Eddie being unused to the drink.

*   *   *

On this night Carmel was sixteen years old, sitting over a dinner which she had not eaten. Her father at his full height was two inches shorter than her and took great exception to this. She had been ordered to get him some more meat. As she stood up, he said into his meal, ‘I can't see how she could be mine.'

‘She's yours,' Noreen answered. ‘My side are all tall. She takes after me.'

‘That she does, which is why she has not worked a day in her life. No child with my blood would miss a day's work if they could help it.'

Noreen finished his sentence off in her mind. ‘I've tried to get her work. They don't want to take on a slow one.'

‘No child with my blood would be slow.'

It ended with him telling Noreen he would give her money to feed only two people in future. And starve some sense and inclination to work into the lazy trollop. Carmel faded from the room. Her mother still told her to leave, always. Carmel had not the sense to realize it was beatings meant for her that Noreen was taking. She had the sense to know the more she stayed away the better it seemed for them all.

*   *   *

When Eddie found Carmel she was asleep, curled up into the trunk of a great oak. He got the sense if he moved nearer it would crush him to protect her. She was more part of this world than his own. And he would have left her if she had not stirred then. Once her eyes opened she held her arms out to him. Her milky white flesh shone in the moonlight on this soft night full of kind stars. He knew it would be better to wait but the salt of her skin drove him to a thirst. He drank more than his first pint that night.

Her legs were strong and she wrapped them around his waist, locking him into her hot darkness and not a word out of her but groans and moans. Not soft whispers but wild, feverish gasps that brought the night sky in around them so that neither could breathe. They could be free with themselves since there was no one around to hear but the woodland creatures.

His head fell between her breasts and he put his hand on a rose pink nipple reaching towards the stars. She grew cold beneath him and shifted, and he looked into her eyes, afraid that he would find a bitter fear in them, but he saw she had been filled in the same way he had been.

Still, when he gathered her, shivering, into him he felt hot tears on his cheek and found they were his own. What he had done with her was what other men wanted and she was not wise enough to the world to stop them.

‘There are other men who want this from you, Carmel,' he said into her soft hair. ‘It's my job to keep them away.'

Carmel did not hear. She had fallen asleep to the drum of his heart.

3 ∼ Roaming Done

A
M
I
RIGHT
to tell them, Carmel? You, loved for the first time in dark-night moments that turned golden.

You gave birth to me and I never knew the inner workings of your heart.

Eddie was the only person for you.

My mother. Her hair is red, her skin as pale as the white-gold rays of the sun. Her eyes glimmer in the dark. Green, with flecks of gold, reminding us that the sun is in her.

Her feet walked her own way from the earliest day; she was not one to be pointed away from her fate. Her toes so broad and flat she had to wear brogues from the men's section of the shoe shop. These big feet looked like they were not part of Carmel, who was tall and thin like a willow.

Once Eddie and Carmel began their loving no power in the world could stop it.

‘Keep away from the woods, Carmel,' he told her. ‘Unless I am with you, don't go near the beach. Don't go anywhere you shouldn't.'

And to please him she stopped her day roaming and waited for night before joining him.

*   *   *

There was some part of Eddie that did not belong with Carmel, but with the narrow town. He would not be seen with the slow Moriarty girl and her big feet in men's shoes. He had been taught that decent girls did not behave in such a way. But he had not been taught that one true to her feelings did. And he felt that true love and it found a way into his bones. It frightened him that his bones were now not his own but called out for her.

Carmel, under Eddie's instruction, stayed close to home. Carmel stayed under the constant eye of her father now. Since no one would employ her she was put to work in his fields.

The glimmering girl was replaced by a deep, mournful shadow that bore sorrow as a friend. A lost, hollow woman with a worn mouth. The only vibrant thing left was her hair. My mother could set fire to the world around her with that.

*   *   *

‘Who would marry this one, the whore from Hoar Rock?' Joseph cut through the heart of the mother and the daughter with these regular words and rants. ‘Who would take on a lazy, idle, useless good-for-nothing trollop, just like her mother before her? It was a sad day the day I got saddled with you pair,' this spat at them with fine, dry pellets of spit that had no moisture or feeling in them above contempt.

The whore of Hoar Rock, the baby in her belly. Her father now adding blows to the words.

‘You should burn for what you have done,' he told Carmel, who the heron had saved for this fate. They were in the kitchen. Carmel's hair full of the cooked food she had not eaten the night before.

The night before Joseph had gone from the table into the pub. The night before Noreen asked her daughter if there was something she should tell her mother. It could not be hidden on such a thin frame. Carmel did not know, so Noreen had to tell her. The pair might then have held each other tight against the near future and what it held, but with Joseph near and between them, they had not held each other in a long time.

Noreen now only felt despair that the daughter had allowed another man to take the only thing she had been able to make sure Carmel kept. She thought of the nights when she had stood between Joseph and his daughter's door. For one moment she wanted Carmel to have suffered as she had suffered, to learn that to give willingly is to give foolishly. For willing women of that time were led to places where only the foolish go.

Then she cried out and she did not wish it any more, she did not wish for her flesh and blood to know all that she had known and she knew she would once more put herself in the way of the punishment.

When Joseph came home, she told Carmel she would tell him and Carmel lit out the back door.

‘Whose is the dinner?' he wanted to know when he came in.

‘Carmel's. She was not hungry.'

‘Then let it sit there and she can have it for breakfast. I don't put good food on the table for it not to be eaten.'

Noreen, knowing that every moment they waited was a moment in which he might realize for himself, told him why he had more reason to be angry than a dinner.

She bowed her head and waited. He said nothing, took the belt off his trousers and went to sit, in this spot that I am sitting in now, by the fire. By morning he had not let the belt out of his hand. Noreen was out looking all night for her daughter, to tell her not to come home. But she was not used to the night and was afraid of it and could not go into its darkest places where Carmel found most comfort and Noreen felt most fear.

Noreen had returned, grey faced, at dawn, only minutes before her daughter. Joseph saw her at the end of the lane and roared.

‘Come up to the house and get clear of me.'

She had gone to wait in the good room she kept up only for the visitors who had never come. The door to the house had been left open, so Carmel could be seen by Joseph coming up the long lane.

Not by her mother who could not help her now. Her mother was in the good room, with the radio turned up loud to drown out the squeals. She rocked back and forth, crying slow tears. Joseph was roaring between thrashes, ‘Who's the bastard's father? Who did you spread your legs for, you little whore? Was it Poker O'Toole? I have heard the way he talks about you. Or young Nolan with the motorbike, or McGuinness, the little weed with his big talk? Or … was … it … all … of … them?'

The blows becoming heavier now, taking the breath out of him.

Noreen could not see, but she could feel the spittle rain from the corners of his mouth, the chewed lower lip and the bulging eyes, the veins on the back of his neck hard and prominent.

Carmel did not tell.

Afterwards, Noreen dressed her daughter's welt-covered back and bruised face with ointment and combed the fibres of food from her matted hair. She listened to the dry, soft sobs and felt the thin trembling bone and flesh.

‘I have money, Carmel,' she whispered as she smeared the cool ointment over the roaring, opened skin. ‘I've been saving out of what he gives me. Needless to say it isn't much. But it would be enough to get you away from this house, child. If you stay, the baby or yourself will be injured.'

They could not afford to wait until the bruises had healed. He would come back worse from where he had gone. Before that happened, Noreen Moriarty packed a few things in a small cardboard suitcase that she had kept hidden in the barn and she walked her limping daughter to the bus stop.

*   *   *

Noreen pulled the black hat down over Carmel's face, casting a shadow over the swollen features. She asked again who the father of the child was, but her daughter made no answer and in some ways Noreen was glad not to know. She had enough men in her life to blame. The conductor urged them to get on, or miss the bus.

The mother and daughter held each other then and the holding could not make up for all the times they had not held each other before and would not hold each other in the future.

As the bus disappeared over the brow of the hill, Noreen could not stop herself thinking that it was her who should have been on it, resenting her only daughter's escape. Then she thought of what the price had been.