The Whore-Mother (16 page)

Would they? With a poet?

“Whee!” she said aloud, and startled a priest walking too carefully to his room.

He felt even better in the morning, almost cheerful, not alone, not bereft. There was company, free from taint or ill intent. They had breakfast together and he felt the censure in the eyes of the old ladies who watched over Brendine, passed the table, asked her how well she had slept, and did not ask him how well he felt. They'd been on foreign tours before. They'd seen foreign smart-boys after the maidenheads of young American girls before. This one had new tricks and she was falling for them.

“Isolationists,” Brendine said, and sat with him on the coach.

In the hard light of day and the bumping back seat of the coach, McManus sickened and there was no relief in the thought that the girl would be useful to him. He was ill, he was hunted, and he had to lose himself in the southwest, and he had to get to a country doctor who would think no more of him than a vet would think of a sick cow.

When they stopped in Bantry and Brendine went to buy her pack and sleeping bag, McManus said he would wait for her, and rest. He watched her walk down the hill from the tour hotel towards Wolfe Tone Square and the shops, with St. Brendan the Navigator reaching his arms towards the bay. She was taking her hop-skip and giving him the thumbs up. She was nice, fresh, open, and a tremendous relief from the flowering shrews he knew in Ulster, but he couldn't think about her, couldn't be burdened by her; hadn't the energy to be burdened with her.

“I want my stuff,” he told the driver, and hauled it out of the baggage hold, and hoisted it with difficulty on his back, and took his blackthorn stick and walked, as fast and as steadily as he could, out of the town and into the West.

He was sick. The pains were back and the coughing, and the chills, and the sweat. And the fears and the overbearing guilt.

For three days McManus walked his lacerated body and spirit in the West; to Sheep's Head on the Atlantic where he hadn't thought of going and didn't know he was. He knew very little of what he was doing. He scrambled and fell and scrambled and did not break his bones. The wind burned him, the squalls from the ocean washed him. He slept on small beaches and behind dry-stone walls, sometimes on and sometimes under his unerected tent, sometimes in and sometimes on his sleeping bag: coughing, sweating, chilled to the marrow and wandering in his mind and aware now and then with a frightening but helpless clarity that he was very ill.

Asleep and awake Maureen was in his mind, drifting free and beyond reach or tormented and terrified and beyond his power to control; his father wailed and lamented, his mother comforted and accused; and his demented guilt built within him till his screaming woke him and he saw a farmer and his wife bent over his pack, going through its contents. The man had the gun in his hand. He dropped it and ran, shoving his frightened wife before him. McManus repacked with the police in his fears and shambled away.

There was nothing in his mind now but the guilt of his sister's death and his parents' anguish. With fearful imaginings and fevered distortions, the long sequence of events rehearsed themselves in his mind, from the day he went to the Falls until he heard his father's demented wail and his mother's desperate strength on the phone. He was talking to his mother, begging her forgiveness, when he walked into the half-door of a cottage and fell across it. His pack shifted sideways and he hung over the door, too weak to get up.

He heard the distant voice, “Merciful God, you're dying, child,” and felt the arms drawing his floating body through the air; he was lying now on a soft warm cloud, a warm wet cloud, and there was a drifting face above him, muttering, with glasses and monstrous eyes that grew like starfish and shrank; enormous hands reached at his face and blotted out the day, trying to smother him and he couldn't wrench his head from them or move his hot, wet, leaden body. “Maureen, Maureen,” boomed in his head and all things ended and returned. Two faces now, moving and merging, and a voice that writhed in the air like a flying whip, “Pour it into him,” and there was no strength for his defense and no more will. Poor Maureen. Maureen. She was at the Parkers' back door; she was sprawling on the street red and riddled; she was calling him to help her. He ran, and flew and floated and was always out of reach, too far to help her. He gave himself up. . . . What right had he to live . . . ? It was his blame and guilt that Maureen died. . . . He consented to his own death, gratefully, and sank away gently, into the cold, wet, enveloping mass.

P
OWERS
went up to bed, but not to sleep. He needed something pleasant in his mind to keep Clune out of it. When he sank into a half-sleep he could not control the things that crawled, crept, and leapt into his head; half-dreams and terrors, and all with Clune in them: Clune with that menacing eye patch, snarling at him from behind a kitchen table, Clune orating in a roomful of men, and the words in his mouth like long tangles of seaweed which he used as whips to beat Powers' face. Powers firing at Clune and all that came out of his gun was a thin water-spray, Clune firing at Powers and all that came out of his gun were leaping frogs that clung slimily round Powers' neck and filled him with clawing, horrified disgust. And people laughing, in a strange way, a coming-and-going sound like an ebb tide over pebbles.

He tossed himself up out of it, half-rising, wide awake. Callaghan was standing by his own cot, in his shirt and shorts and socks, staring down at him. “What's up w'you?” he said.

“Nothin. Put out the light.”

And for Christ's sake, thinka some thin pleasant. Like Maureen McManus? She'll do.

He spent a lot of waiting and waking time on women-fantasies. Now that he looked back on it, Maureen wasn't all that much. As a matter of fact, she was a bit of a bloody nuisance. He'd have got a lot more out of it if he hadn't had to waste so much time and energy keeping her down and getting into her. Getting at her was awkward.

Still, he got in and he could feel it. It wasn't bad. No picture in the head of Maureen white in the water, her long hair floating away; only Maureen spread, her face distorted, her teeth bared, and her fists clenched, as he rolled off her. Not much hair on it, either. He liked hair. Next?

Yes. It was a pity about the one from the Malone Road he met in the Europa Bar the night before they blew it up. Middle-aged, plain, expensive clothes. Alone and willing to talk; husband on a business trip across the water in England, she said:
Can I drop you anywhere?
she said. Up Divis, for God's sake, on the green grass was where she dropped him. He went over the details—this was better than Clune—re-enacting them. The way she laughed when he put her on the grass and
no no no-ed
when he was pulling off her knickers.
Don't
, laughing and pushing weakly:
I'm a married woman
. She couldn't have stopped him with a bulldozer, the state he was in.
I'm cross with you
, she said laughing,
don't put it in
and whoof! Who fucked who? Jasus! And after, her cryin and saying
that was rape that was rape that was rape
and
I suppose now that you've raped me once, you'll do it again? You wild animal
. The things she called him as if she liked the sound and feel of them:
You stallion, you bloody timber wolf, you big bull
. . . . And,
I'm afraid to go into the empty house. The least you can do is see me safe inside
and then, with a bottle, pouring:
I suppose now that you're in you'll tear every stitch off me and rape me on the bed
. Six in the mornin, when he was tryin to leave, in the porch, without a stitch on her:
If you're going to rape me again before you run off have the decency to do it on the couch, not on the porch floor
. . . Jasus!

It was a pity. He could have done with more of that one.
Get out of my house
, she said,
get out, get out, I suppose you're in the Europa often?
I'll be there the morrow night, he said. That was a laugh! So was she, with her head under a big hunk of ceilin. She smelled nice too.

Still, she was gone. Did her husband ever wonder what the hell she was doin dead in the Europa Bar? He got up quietly and took his clothes downstairs. The key was in his pocket and Mary Connors was in number twenty-five. It was one o'clock. He'd be back for Callaghan at six to get the bus for Strabane and the Border. Mary had an oul alarm clock that never failed.

She was asleep. The light didn't wake her. Her room smelled of paint. White paint. She'd done the job herself and the window was closed. He opened it. That smell would make you sick and he didn't come here to be sick. White was better than the dark brown and piss-house green in all the other houses around here, but those colored pictures of the country she'd cut out of magazines and stuck on pasteboard backs—what'd she want them for? Dropping his boots didn't wake her. When he was naked he pulled down the bedclothes. That didn't wake her. No nightie. She slept with her mouth open. So did Callaghan, breathing a kind of haugh-haugh-shhhooo-phhhooo sound. Mary's head was on its side, a wet patch on the pillow by her mouth, where she dribbled. Great diddies. Great rump. Good strong thighs she knew how to use. So she should; who taught her after her man died? Not as white as Maureen; thicker; more muscle than the woman from Malone. That one's thighs flapped about a bit. He flicked a pubic hair out of Mary Connors. She jerked, opened her eyes, and whooping whipped her strong legs over the edge of the bed and round his. He fell on her. Maureen and the woman from Malone were destroyed altogether and their remains beaten through the bed.

When he was off her he lay on his back, his arm stretched tightly over his head, his legs reaching and his belly drawn in.

“Aaawwww . . .” he said with gargantuan satisfaction and a huge grin. “That's the stuff, that's the stuff . . . by Jasus. . . .”

“Great, just great,” she said, still on her back, still rutting, handling her splendid breasts. “There's plenty more when you're ready. . . .” Maybe this was her time? She watched him side-long, wallowing in his immense gratification, and decided it was. “Know somethin, Pat?”

“By Jasus, I do! By Jasus you're great!”

“Somethin else.”

“What?”

“It's about six months' time that you stopped com in out.”

He felt his satisfaction fade a little. She was a barren woman, for God's sake. Her man couldn't give her any thin. If he'd thought there was a chance, he'da been down to the chemists. So why lose half the good of it when she can't catch? Or was she tellin him somethin? He ran a hand over her belly. It felt the way it always did. “Are you tellin me somethin?”

Should she? Smiling, she turned and ran her hand over him. He looked a bit doubtful. Her instinct told her it would be wiser to wait. “Aye,” she said, “I like it better every time.”

“There's nothin?”

“Aye, there's somethin. I want more.”

There was nothin wrong. There was plenty right. “You came to the right quarter,” he said, and relief roared in his groin. “Here it comes.”

She was whimpering when he tried to wrench himself from the strong grip of her arms and the vice of her thighs held him in. “No, no. Don't, Pat. I'm startin. . . .”

“Shut your gub.” He was on his knees, listening.

“What's up, Pat?”

“Listen, for Christ's sake.”

“Ferrets,” she said.

“Get the light off.”

They crouched on the floor by the window and listened. “Bugger them,” she whispered. “I was just startin the biggest one you ever gave me.”

“Shut your gub.”

The big engine of the armored car throbbed down the street. It went slowly past the house with its hatches closed, its machine gun swinging.

“Just one,” he said.

Two. The second one was coming. It stopped before it reached the house. The first one stopped well beyond the house.

“Put your nightie on. Go and see what they're after. Hurry up.”

He heard the front door open. “Inside,” said a voice on an amplifier. “Inside, please. Close your door and stay inside.”

“Pat,” she said at the top of the stairs. “It's you they're after. There're at seventy-five.”

“Put your clothes on. Gimme mine.”

“Yes, Pat.”

They scrambled into their clothes in the dark. “Where's my boots?”

“Here, Pat.” He'd be hard to live with sometimes, if he lived at all. But he was a good baker and there'd be plenty of work after this was all over, and she had to get him. But she had to do it right. She was a month gone anyway. The way he felt her belly, he wouldn't believe her if she told him now. He'd think she was tryin to trap him. She couldn't tell him till she could show him her belly and it a bit more swole up.

The amplifier crackled and a clipped English voice said politely, “Number seventy-five. You are being given thirty seconds to come out. Come out with your hands out in front, your fingers wide open. Any attempt to carry or reach a gun—the slightest quick movement—and you'll be shot. Your thirty seconds start—NOW. The clock is running . . . twenty-eight . . . make yourselves heard . . . twenty-six . . . and when the time runs out . . . twenty-three . . . there'll be no warning . . . twenty-one . . . we'll blowout the door and the windows . . . eighteen . . .”

There was nothing left to hear but the throb of the two engines. Powers counted the seconds . . . the people in the houses were almost visible. No lights went on but men and woman were sitting up in bed, sitting on the edges of beds, hurrying children into little back rooms, pulling on trousers and knickers and shoes and shirts. . .

The machine gun raked the door; the lock, and up the inside edge, blasting off its hinges. The door fell inwards, pieces flying. Glass from the windows was still falling and tinkling on the street, coming down from the air, after the coughing echo of the gun in the narrow street passed between the houses, dying.