when Pete Clancy’s gang started picking on Cormac. They were doing my work for me. I would slip away into a corner of the yard and experience a guilty thrill at hearing the distant sounds of him being shoved and kicked. Only when a teacher’s whistle blew would I charge into their midst, always arriving too late to help.
That ruse didn’t stop me being blamed to my face by Phyllis and blamed to my father when he came home from his new offices in Trim, which seemed to have been deliberately set apart from the main Navan Council headquarters. The outhouse lay idle, with his private practice gone. The box-room had been filled with my father’s old records and papers, ever since the morning, some months previously, when Josie and I found the outhouse door forced and the place ransacked. My father had dismissed it as a prank by flyboys from down the town, refusing to phone the police. But that night after Josie was gone Barney Clancy and he had spent hours down there clearing boxes out.
Any extra paperwork at home was done from a new office in the box-room now, though generally he preferred to work late in Trim where he had a small staff under him. News of an outsider being parachuted into this new position – created in a snap vote by councillors at a sparsely attended meeting – had surpassed even his second bride in making him the talk of Navan. Some claimed that the two in-house rivals for the new post had built up such mini-empires of internal support that a schism would have occurred within the planning office had either of them got the job. An honest broker was required, without baggage or ties, to focus on new developments. But others muttered begrudgingly about clout, political connections and jobs being created to undermine the structures already in place.
These whispers went over my head. I just knew that he came home later, seemed more tired and was more prone to snap. Joey Kerwin stopped one Saturday to watch Phyllis’s hips sway into the house ahead of us as though wading through water. ‘You know what they say about marriage, Eamonn?’ he gibed. ‘It’s the only feast where they serve the dessert first!’ My father ushered us in, ignoring the old farmer’s laugh. But sometimes I now woke to hear voices raised downstairs and muffled references to Cormac’s name and mine. Once there was a screaming match halted by a loud slap. One set of footsteps rushed up the stairs, followed some time after by a heavier tread. Then I heard bedsprings and a different sort of cry.
But I experienced no violence, at least not at first. Perhaps the unseen eyes of my mother’s ghost still haunted him from the brighter squares of wallpaper where old photos had been taken down. Once I woke to find him on the edge of my bed watching me. This isn’t easy, you’ve got to help me, son. I didn’t want to help. I wanted Cormac beaten up so badly by Pete Clancy that Phyllis would pack and leave. I wanted my father to myself, like in the old days when we’d walk out along the Boyne or I’d stand beside him as he swapped jokes in shop doorways in the glamorous male world of cigarettes and betting tips. But Cormac merely dug in deeper, accepting Clancy’s assaults with a mute, disarming bewilderment that was painful to watch and was countered by an increasingly strident assertiveness at home. Why can’t I drink from the blue cup? Why does Brendan say it belongs to him? I thought you owned everything now, Mammy? Why can’t I sleep in the proper bed?
Why couldn’t he? The question began to fixate Phyllis. If her own son wasn’t good enough for the best, then, by reflection, neither was she. Why didn’t her new husband take her side? Was it because he did not respect her as much as his first wife who had been the nuns’ pet, educated with the big shopkeepers’ daughters in the local Loreto convent? I can only imagine what accusations she threw at him at night, the ways she found to needle him with her insecurities, the sexual favours she may have withheld – favours not taught in home economics by the Loreto nuns.
I woke one Monday to find two bags packed in the hallway and raised voices downstairs. I pushed the kitchen door open. Startled, my father turned and slapped me. ‘Get out, you!’ I stood in the hallway and stuck my tongue out at Cormac who was spying through the banisters.
My father silently walked me to school that day while Cormac stayed at home. It was the last year before they stopped having the weekly fair in the square, with fattened-up cattle herded in from the big farms at 6 a.m. and already sold and dispatched for slaughter by the time school began. I remember the fire brigade hosing down the square that morning, forcing a sea of cow-shite towards the flooded drains, and how the shite itself was green as if the terrified cattle had already known their fate.
I was happy when nobody came to collect me after school. I walked alone through the square, which shone by now although the stink still lingered from the drains. I didn’t know if anyone would be at home. On my third knock Phyllis opened the door. Her bags were gone from the hall. Cormac was watching television with an empty lemonade bottle beside him. Upstairs, his coloured quilt lay on my bed, his teddies peering through the brass bars at the end. My pillow rested on the smaller camp-bed in the corner. Two empty fertilizer bags lay beside the door, filled to the brim with shredded wallpaper. Scraps of yellowing roses, stems and thorns. On the bare plaster faded adult writing in black ink that I couldn’t read had been uncovered. I changed the beds back to the way they should have been. Then I locked the bedroom door, determined to keep it shut until my father returned home to this sacrilege.
I don’t know how long it took Phyllis to notice that I had not come down for my dinner. Furtively I played with Cormac’s teddies, then stood by the window, watching children outside playing hopscotch and skipping. I didn’t hear her footsteps, just a sudden twist of the handle. She pushed against the door with all her weight. There was the briefest pause before her first tentative knock. Almost immediately a furious banging commenced.
‘Open this door at once! Open this door!’
The children on the street could hear. The skipping ropes and chanting stopped as every eye turned. I put my hand on each pane of glass in succession, trying to stop my legs shaking. Cormac’s voice came from the landing, crying for some teddy on the bed. Phyllis hissed at him to go downstairs. A man with a greyhound pup looked up as he knocked on Casey’s door. Phyllis was screaming now. Mr Casey came out, glanced up and then winked at me. He turned back to the man who held the puppy tight between his legs while Mr Casey leaned over with a sharp iron instrument to snip off his tail. The greyhound howled, drowning out Phyllis’s voice and distracting the children who gathered around to enjoy his distress, asking could they keep his tail to play with.
I desperately needed to use the toilet. I wanted my father to come home. I wanted Phyllis gone and her red-haired brat with her. Lisa Hanlon came out of her driveway, nine years of age with ringlets, white socks and a patterned dress. Watching her, I felt something I could not understand or had never experienced before. It was in the way she stared up, still as a china doll while her mother glanced disapprovingly at Mr Casey and the greyhound and then briskly took her hand. I wanted Lisa as my prisoner, to make her take off that patterned dress and step outside her perfect world.
Then Lisa was gone, along with the man and his whimpering pup. Mr Casey glanced up once more, then went indoors. I had to wee or it would run down my leg. There was a teacup on the chest of drawers, with a cigarette butt smeared with lipstick stubbed out on the saucer. Smoking was the first habit Phyllis had taken up after arriving in Navan, her fingers starting to blend in with the local colour. But I couldn’t stop weeing, even when the teacup and saucer overflowed so that drops spilled out onto the lino.
Phyllis’s screams had ceased. Loud footsteps descended the stairs. I wanted to unlock the door and empty the cup and saucer down the toilet before I was caught, but I couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t crept back upstairs to lie in wait for me. I was too ashamed to empty them out of the window where the children might see. Ten minutes passed, twenty – I don’t know how long. My hand gripped the lock, praying for my father’s return. I had already risked opening the bedroom door when I heard her footsteps ascend the stairs. I locked it again and sank onto the floor, putting the cup and saucer down beside me.
‘Brendan. Open this door, please, pet. You must be starving.’ This was the soft voice she used when addressing Cormac, her Dublin accent more pronounced than when speaking to strangers. ‘Let’s forget this ever happened, eh? It can be our secret. Your dinner is waiting downstairs. Don’t be afraid, I promise not to harm you.’
Sometimes in dreams I still hear her