cursed inbred clan. Silent as ghosts a stooped line of its patients appeared slowly around the corner ahead of them, a nurse’s white uniform blazing among the shabby greys and browns of their clothing.
When Hano and Katie reached the first couple they drew back towards the safety of their minder. The line stopped and shied away towards the wall until they had passed. The old men’s faces twitched under caps as they watched. The final old woman had a radiant girlish smile and waved back at them from a drugged stupor. Her eyes were the brightest Hano had ever seen. Beside her a bald man in his forties was turning in a constant circle with a slow and perfected step, like a child trying to be dizzy. The others simply looked old, bemused and abandoned. The nurse smiled and motioned her charges into life again. A middle-aged man was doing press-ups on the lawn in front of the hospital. It was impossible to know if he was keeping count or aware that he was being watched. He stretched face down on the grass, gravely raising and lowering his body as though determined to prove his strength or keep the flame of sanity alive in his mind. Katie shuddered and turned away from the wall.
‘Christ, I hate asylums,’ she said. ‘Always remind me of the one at home. A former workhouse it was, a rambling, rundown ruin. It wasn’t just for the sick, you know. It was a dumping ground for anyone they didn’t want, stuck out on the edge of the town. Whenever we had to pass it, I’d beg mammy to cross the road before we reached the gate. I was always scared she’d leave me there. That was her biggest threat, not dada’s strap or the bogeyman but we’ll send you off to the home.’
In Dublin Hano rarely remembered her mumbling more than a few words, and then they had always been of the streets outside. Now that she had begun to talk of Leitrim it was like she’d never stop.
‘The time the nuns in the school asked my uncle to take me to the psychologist was when I ran away first. Three nights kipping out in an old car by the Tolka. All I could think of was the spinsters locked up in that place because they couldn’t be married off and the backward kids shut away so as not to shame their families before the neighbours. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t be like that, it would be all shagging ink blobs and when d’you start using dirty words, but it was the same fear inside me.
‘There was this woman, our next neighbour after Tomas, called Mary Roche. She was twenty-five years in that home before her mother died and some relative back from England found out and signed her release papers. Mammy often brought her in because she could hardly feed herself by then. She lived on crackers, single-wrapped slices of cheese. Anything that came in plastic was good because it was what visitors had brought in for the other patients. If mammy left the kitchen she’d sit with her arms in front of her on the table for hours on end.’
‘What happened to her?’ Hano asked.
Katie shuddered, looking back down the path as if she could still see the line of patients.
‘She was only twenty when it happened. Some carpenter down from Dublin fitting out the family shop. One night her father found her bed empty and caught them in a shed at the back. The carpenter was in hospital a week before he managed to slip out. She was kept locked up. You know I think it wasn’t just what she was doing but who she was with. If it had been the doctor’s son they would have all been indignant and yet delighted. But it wasn’t, so they beat the skin off her back. Once she escaped to Dublin. Her father caught up with her after five days, famished, still in the same clothes, looking for the carpenter’s digs. Doctor O’Donnell signed the committal papers. He’d have signed over his granny’s corpse for a brandy.’
Katie leaned against the stone wall, staring at the hospital as she spoke. Hano put his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off.
‘The year I was born, Hano, there was a scandal in the town. No papers carried it, nobody spoke to strangers, but people knew. One evening Mary Roche told my mother. They didn’t know I was there, against the side of the dresser, hardly daring to breathe as I tried to make sense of her words. I didn’t understand them all but I understood the terror in her voice.
‘On weekend nights The Railway Hotel stayed open after hours for select customers. When the owner finally got sick of their drunken talk, Doctor O’Donnell would bring a few cronies across to the asylum—the chemist, the draper, a few big farmers with sons at college, the local councillor with his fainne. I could see them all in my mind as she listed them. They’d drag the retarded girls out of the wards to use them as whores. Can you imagine it? The stink of whiskey off their breaths and their laughter billowing down the corridor. Do you want the really funny part, Hano? The punch line? They’d bring in little boxes of Smarties for the girls. The two night nurses stayed quiet, they had jobs and families. It could have gone on for ever only some guard, fresh out of training school, reported the whole thing to his superiors and got transferred to the arse of Donegal for his trouble. The only charges were against the publican for after-hours serving. The doctor got the hint or maybe the inspector got in on the act.’
Hano stood back, afraid to touch her hunched-up shoulders. The man on the lawn had finally stopped. He lay face down, motionless.
‘When I was eight, Hano, they unveiled a statue to some poor wanker who’d been shot at eighteen by the Black-and-Tans. They’d a pipe band, a priest and altar boys, the usual old shite, the FCA strutting round with empty rifles. The organizing committee had a row of seats on a raised platform. As each of their names were called out I could hear my mother trying to hush Mary Roche as she intoned like the response to a psalm, He had me! He had me!’
Katie turned to look at him. Her voice had grown shrill and he saw tears in her eyes.
‘So why the fuck do I want to go back? To that fucking pain? Dada waiting in the square for those bastards to give him a day’s work. You know I worked beside him every evening when I finished school. I can see them still arriving in their cars to survey the lines of workers, their eyes watching me stoop in a child’s frock and a man’s rubber boots to pick potatoes from the muck. I was only eight but I remember the look in their eyes, I knew what it meant. I can still see the leers on the faces of every last bastarding one of them!’
She turned and walked quickly ahead of him, her back hunched as if part of it were broken and all the toughness gone, so that momentarily she looked like the sixteen-year-old child she was.
That first weekend with Shay it was Sunday afternoon before I got home. One event had simply folded into another. I remember lying on the mattress in Shay’s flat after Murtagh’s in the early hours of Saturday morning, the glowing tips of joints passing back and forth. He had the stereo on and the curtains undrawn so that each number was rolled in the street light filtering through the high windows. I remember the outline of his face in the bed above me, the teeth white as he laughed at some joke, the hands folded behind his head on the pillow as he waited for the joint to return. People arrived and departed from the house all night—the strains of music upstairs, the creak of a bed, a girl’s voice on the landing. I don’t recall going to sleep. I just woke next morning, my throat raw, my chest on fire from alcohol. Shay was standing beside the two-ringed cooker near the window wearing only his jeans. He lifted the first pancake on to a plate, smeared it with butter and honey and placed it on the floor beside me.
‘We need food badly,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll be rightly destroyed.’
The house was on the corner of a road in Ranelagh. Across the street a greengrocer piled his goods on to the pavement, the fruit gleaming in the sunlight as he stood in his apron to chat with passers-by. The road curved away in a mass of old trees. The pub on the corner was dark, a Lourdes for quiet men seeking the cure. Shay spread the racing pages of the paper on the table in front of us and accepted whispered advice from the two men on stools at the bar. I drank the first pint slowly, savouring its bitterness on my tongue and I thought of home, my mother in a phone box probably phoning the hospitals.
I knew that what I was doing to them was cruel but somehow it seemed necessary. Every hour away gave me a small thrill of power at making them aware of the difference within me. Maybe I was just afraid to go back and face them, but I think I was so mesmerized by Shay as to be incapable of leaving before he told me to go. I wanted to be a part of the world he moved in, feeling more