Foggage E-Book

Patrick McGinley

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

'I'll bet the neighbours see me as an old maid and you as a sapless bachelor. Little do they know that there's more heat in this house than in all the other houses of the townland put together.' Foggage tells the story of Kevin Hurley and his twin sister Maureen, living in rural Ireland with their ailing, bed-ridden father. What makes this story unique, however, is that Kevin and Maureen have been conducting an incestuous relationship for the past three years. With as much twists and turns as a remote Irish boreen, McGinley's novel explores the tragic consequences of a relationship like no other. New Island is delighted to publish Foggage as part of its Modern Irish Classics series, which aims to give a new lease of life to some of the best of Irish writing of the last fifty years.

Leseprobe

Praise for Patrick McGinley

‘An imaginative, expertly turned dark comedy, informed by some splendid dialogue and a sensual feel for the claims of the soil’ – New York Times

‘Patrick McGinley’s gifts for resonant dialogue, sexual frictions, graphic violence, and peripeteia have been well noted for over three decades by readers and critics who relish the extravagances of getting lost beyond the Pale.’ – Times Literary Supplement

‘If ever proof was needed that art is not a meritocracy, and success relies more on luck than talent, you’ll find it in Patrick McGinley’s Bogmail. First published in 1978, reissued by New Island, this is not just a great crime novel but a great work of literature.’ – Irish Independent

‘Patrick McGinley is a very gifted man. He knows his Irish bog as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer does the shtetl, and he can sing about it with something like the same magic.’ – New York Times

‘A perceptive, upmarket memoir, rich in exact recall and with ambition to social history.’ – The Irish Times

‘Mr McGinley is inventive and eloquent, his humour puckish and Paddy-wry; he has a fine command of comic irony … and his evocations of landscape and seascape are successful, not simply as description, but as definitions of a mythic environment.’ London Review of Books

‘A rich and loving novel, Bogmail is full of wonder’ – New York Magazine

About the Author

Patrick McGinley was born in Glencolmcille, Co. Donegal. He was educated at Galway University. Subsequently, he moved to London to work in book publishing. He now lives in Kent with his wife, Kathleen. His Donegal childhood and boyhood are described in his memoir, That Unearthly Valley, published by New Island in 2011.

Patrick McGinley

Foggage

FOGGAGE

First published by St Martin’s Press, 1983

This edition published 2015 by

New Island Books

16 Priory Office Park

Stillorgan

Co. Dublin

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Patrick McGinley

Patrick McGinley has asserted his moral rights

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-436-6

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-437-3

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-438-0

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner. British Library Cataloguing Data.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.

Contents

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Part Two

8

9

10

11

12

13

Also by Patrick McGinley

1

Kevin Hurley was digging a drain. Seated in the narrow tractor cab and wrapped in an old overcoat with a dirt-caked sack on the metal seat beneath him, he cursed the tentacles of cold that explored his legs. Cold gripped the surrounding hedges and the small animals they sheltered, while the gap-toothed January wind that came down from Slieve Bloom in the north broke twigs off trees and hissed at the loose door of the cab. The warmth of his life had evaporated. Summer and autumn had made way for winter, and yet he was only in his fortieth year. Cold weather, cold clothes, cold flesh, cold clay. His father’s legs were also cold, blue-veined shanks frozen stiff from toe to knee. He would fail to wake up from sleep one morning. Then he and his sister Maureen would have the house to themselves.

A solitary crow rose from behind a hedge, dipping twice as it fled before a whirring tail wind. In this same field on a warm summer’s day he had seen a bird he did not recognise pursued by a grey-glinting sparrow-hawk. Something dropped from the small bird’s beak, the hawk swooped, and he realised that the nameless bird had lost its fledgling. He himself lacked a fledgling; he had neither son nor daughter to meet him in the lane on his return. When the time came, the farm would go to his younger sister’s only son, little Breffny Kilgallon, who would see it not as land to be farmed but as collateral.

Unable to bear neither the thought of Breffny nor the numbness in his toes, he jumped down from his tractor and set off briskly for the Three Acres to check the earliest of his winter barley. A flock of cantankerous starlings descended in a hail shower from the sky, settling noisily on the bare lea land with jerky movements. He detested starlings, the yobs of the open fields. Luckily, they were small. He felt certain that if ever birds took over the planet, the starlings would be in the van of destruction. One of them pulled a long earthworm out of a poached track and flew into a hedge to consume it alone and in secret. Suspicious and selfish, they did not even trust one another.

At ten to one by his watch he returned to his tractor and drove home to dinner. As he swung into the rutted lane, a moulting hen, the very picture of misery, dashed headlong in front of the wheels and Pup lolloped towards him, his hindquarters slewing as if he were about to keel over. Pup was the silliest dog he had ever had – good for nothing except chasing the hens. He had tried to train him on wet days, but all tutelage was lost on him. At first he had thought of calling him Bosco after all the other dogs they’d had at Clonglass over the years. Sadly, like some men, he was too stupid to learn; he decided that to dignify him with a proper name would be unforgivable, that simple ‘Pup’ was too good for him.

The kitchen reeked warmly of potatoes boiled in their skins. His sister Maureen had laid a joint of cold beef on a platter in the centre of the table and a bowl of marrowfat peas and steaming parsnips at the end where he usually sat. The peas were overdone, a glutinous mess that emitted a cloud of steam and mingled with that of the parsnips, making his nostrils twitch in expectation of warmth and nourishment. As Maureen never troubled to lay the table, he went to the dresser and got out a worn knife and fork and a breadknife to carve the beef.

‘Will you get me an onion?’ he said, letting a dollop of mustard fall on the edge of his plate.

She reached up, pulled an onion from the string above the range, and placed it next to the mustard pot.

‘Go easy on the English, it’s all we’ve got,’ she advised. ‘I cycled down to Carroll’s for more this morning but all they had was French. They hadn’t got any in Killage either.’

‘French mustard’s no good. I hope you didn’t waste money on it.’

‘I only bought a six-ounce jar. I thought you might mix it with what’s left of the English to make it less obnoxious to your pernickety palate.’

‘You know bugger all about my palate,’ he grumbled, peeling the onion. He was concerned about the lack of mustard – so concerned that he decided to drive the eleven miles to Roscrea after he had eaten to stock up for the rest of the winter.

Maureen poured herself a mug of vegetable soup from the big black saucepan and took her place beside him while he carved three thick slices of beef for her. She always made vegetable soup for dinner, thick creamy soup with large cubes of carrot and turnip floating in it and an inch-deep layer of pearl barley at the bottom. She never began with soup but used it to wash down the meat and vegetables, making a sucking sound as she drained the mug before licking the last of the barley off her spoon. As usual, she offered to pour Kevin a mug of the nourishing liquor, and as usual, he refused with the comment that ‘for the working man, dry packing is best’.

For a while they were silent. Kevin smeared the cold beef with mustard, peeled six good-sized potatoes, cut the raw onion into half-rings, and fell to. He liked potatoes, cabbage, carrots and parsnips, especially on winter days when their steam took the frost off his chin, but he liked beef even more. A favourite saying of his was, ‘Bacon is meat and so is mutton, but beef is beef.’ He killed his own beef, choosing for the knife the best bullock of the herd. After long practice he knew the joints as intimately as the local butcher, whom he did not trust. Once, when he was pressed for time, he asked the butcher to slaughter a bullock for him, but afterwards he couldn’t help thinking that the beef he got back had not come from his bullock. He kept the freezer in the dairy well stocked. He and Maureen ate beef in various forms six days a week and fried pig’s liver with onions on Sunday. He always bought the liver in Killage on Saturday evening, and while other people were busy with their Sunday roast, Maureen would fry the liver for dinner, and they would have any that remained again at teatime. In this way Sunday always felt different from any other day of the week.

His imagination was running so vividly on winter barley and the profit from last year’s winter fattening that he had cleared his plate before he’d had time to take in the taste. Feeling cheated, he peeled another six potatoes and carved himself two more slices of the beef. He would have carved three if he’d had enough mustard; a quick look in the pot had told him that he had only enough for two. When he had finished, Maureen said that the postman had brought a letter from Concepta, their younger sister, who was married to a bank manager in Roscrea. She had asked once again if Kevin had any intention of marrying and was threatening to come to see them next weekend. Kevin detested Concepta even more than he detested her dandified husband. He peeled another potato and said nothing. Encouraged by his silence and fortified by the postman’s gossip, Maureen began a roll-call of the sick, the dying, and the newly dead. He listened patiently, noting her unerring ability to draw comfort from each separate piece of news, from illness as well as health, from death as well as life.

‘Will you get me my beer?’ he said when he had finally cleared his plate.

She went to the parlour and returned with a tumbler and a bottle of ale. He levered off the cap with his pocket knife and drank straight from the bottle so that the rising gas might tickle his nostrils. Maureen knew his ways, but still she placed the tumbler before him. Afterwards she would wash it even though he had not touched it. Women were like that, he reasoned. Their way of thinking and working was different from any man’s, and when you came to think of it, that was how it should be. After all, if women were the same as men, there would be no need for them, and it would be a dull and indeed boring world without them. For that reason he’d never said a wrong word to Maureen. He accepted and respected her different way of going on.

‘Will you be having your tea upstairs?’ she asked.

‘I’m going up to lie down,’ he replied without looking at her.

He kicked off his mud-caked wellingtons, and in stockinged feet climbed the dark stairs, tiptoeing along the corridor so as not to disturb their bedridden father. His sister’s room was small and bare, with nothing between the walls except a double bed, a kitchen chair, and an old bureau with a statue of the Infant of Prague in the centre. He got out of his trousers and long johns and got into her bed in his shirt and vest. It was freezing between the sheets. He faced the wall and closed his eyes, wishing that he had installed central heating when things were cheap.

After a while Maureen came up with his tea and placed it on the chair beside the bed. Kicking off her unlaced shoes, she drew the curtains and slipped into bed behind him. He could hear her heavy breathing as she put a muscular arm round his waist, pressed her chin against his shoulder, and ground her hard little mound into his bony backside. They lay wordless in the semidarkness as he waited for the sheets to thaw. In his mind two images struggled for supremacy: the white roots uncovered in the drain-digging and a warm day on the bog with Maureen as a little girl clinging like a mischievous monkey to his back. She was the fitful flame that radiated what warmth he enjoyed in his life. She was his twin, a big handsome woman with a freckled face, heavy breasts, strong thighs, and a bottom that overflowed the edge of her chair when she sat down. In some respects she reminded him of their dead mother, a big capable woman with a stomach that spilled over the rim of her steel-ribbed corset. Maureen was more sensuous than her mother, though. She had dancing, wide-set eyes and red lips that became sweetly slippery when he kissed them. She was an earthy girl who never gave a thought to style and appearance, capable in bed and equally capable in running the house.

In the farmyard she would shuffle about in an old pair of shoes, mindless of the splashes of slurry on her bare calves. As she stooped over a tub to mix the hens’ feed, she would place her feet wide apart, and her uncombed hair would hang down in thrums about her face. Like her mother, she was a worker. She never left the farm except to go shopping in Killage on Fridays and to accompany him to early Mass on Sunday mornings. The house and yard were her life, just as the farm and the tractor were his. If her horizons extended farther afield on occasion, she had to thank the garrulous postman, and Monsignor McGladdery, who came once a month with the comfort of Communion for their senile father.

When their bodies had warmed the sheets, he turned round and embraced her. A lock of her hair, smelling of turf smoke from the range, fell on his cheek. Her breath came in little puffs, warm and comforting in the freezing room. He pulled up his shirt under his arms and then her loose dress while they kissed mutely with bare legs entwined. His thought was of a bull that is slow in service; he told himself that if he did not get a move on, his tea would be cold. He had been doing it too often of late, more often than was good for his health. He had done it on Monday and on Wednesday, and here he was doing it again on Friday. He was going against his cherished Foggage Principle, which was first and foremost a principle of conservation. Maureen was ready, and still his tardy blood refused to rush to his sleeping member.

He recalled going to a wedding in London as a young man, a rampageous Irish wedding with fiddle and melodeon music, drink, dancing and singing that horrified the lower-middle-class English neighbours, a wedding that filled him with sexual longings and drove him to solitary masturbation in the roofless garden shed. He came back from Holyhead on the mail boat, and on the crowded train from Dun Laoghaire to Dublin a lovely young girl came in and stood between his legs. Her long white dress reminded him of a field of snow at dawn before man or beast had time to poach it. He wanted to get up and offer her his seat, but she really was too beautiful. If she were one of those modern girls who thought herself stronger than any mortal man, she might spurn his offer and shame him before the whole company, and he would have to sit down again like a country bosthoon. Her legs responding to the swaying of the train caressed his knees while he counted the tucks in her dress below the belt. As they came into Westland Row, she raised her arm to grip the rack above his head and he glimpsed her bra through the armhole of her dress – an off-white bra that had been discoloured by the sweat of long wearing. The train stopped. The door opened and she was gone. He scrambled out, only to find that she had vanished. Like a vision, she had faded before his eyes, but he had not lost her. Again and again she returned to him on Saturday nights when, after a few drinks in Killage, he would seek his bachelor bed for self-given solace before sleep. She would slip in beside him in her lily-white dress and off-white bra as if it were their wedding night and their bodies would flow and mingle till they both found rest and sleep. Before he had known Maureen, she was his only woman and she had kept him warm through many a midland winter. And now, once again, she had returned to help him in his need.

When he finally got under way, he did not indulge in fancy meandering but made for the ordained destination with such directness that any woman except Maureen would have accused him of breaking and entering.

‘Am I a good ride?’ she giggled at the end of their abrupt but satisfying struggle.

‘You shouldn’t ask me questions like that. It isn’t right to tempt Providence.’

‘I want to know,’ she persisted.

‘Well, you’re asking the wrong man. You’re the first and only woman I’ve lain with.’

‘You’re not doing it just to please me, are you?’

‘I’m doing it to please myself. Now are you satisfied?’

‘Do you ever think about us?’

‘No.’

‘I was thinking about us this morning in bed. I’ll bet the neighbours see me as an old maid and you as a sapless bachelor. Little do they know that there’s more heat in this house than in all the other houses of the townland put together.’

While she was drawing back the curtains, he drank his tea at a draught. When she had finally gone downstairs, he got out of bed and examined his scrotum. His dangling bag looked the same as usual, wrinkled and asymmetrical. He weighed it in his hand, aware of the slight throb somewhere inside it. For the past couple of weeks, the pain always came after a tussle with Maureen. Perhaps it was one of those pains that come and go, like the pain he used to have in his rectum after masturbation with the girl in the off-white bra. A question surfaced at the back of his mind and forced its way to the foreground. Was there such a thing as cancer of the scrotum, and who could tell him the answer?

A thumping sound from the adjacent room roused him from his reverie. His father was a terrible nuisance. He was senile and childish with an all-consuming ambition to outlive Donie Dunne, a once-litigious neighbour who was three years his junior. He insisted on telling everyone that he was ninety-nine, though everyone knew that he was only ninety-six. He lay in bed all day with his blackthorn at the ready and a thermos flask of Bovril tea laced with whiskey on the table beside him. Whenever he felt in need of sustenance, he took a swig from the flask; whenever he felt in need of attention he pounded the floor with his stick.

He ate little now, only porridge in the morning followed by two cups of Bovril. For lunch and dinner he took shop bread dunked in hot milk and sweetened with sugar. This dish he called ‘goody’, a word he had resurrected from his childhood. He was full of fads. He wouldn’t put cow’s milk in his tea for fear of brucellosis, and he stored tins of condensed milk by his bed so that he could keep an eye on stocks. However, he insisted on cow’s milk for his morning porridge, claiming that the germ of the oats was so strong that it would kill the brucella germ in the milk before he had time to swallow it.

His dim imagination was now permanently lodged in the l930s. He talked mainly of the Economic War, herding on horseback, the villainies of De Valera, and the potency of a long-dead Aberdeen-Angus bull called Henry; he talked about them with such passion that Kevin often came away wondering if the present-day world of the farm was the real one or a figment of his own imagination. His father’s opinions were those of a man who had lost the balancing gift of reason, but Dr Blizzard said that on no account must he be contradicted. He’d had a heart attack during the summer, and now the thread of life was so weak that it could snap at any moment.

‘What’s the weather like out today?’ his father asked as he entered the bedroom.

‘Good for January. Cold but dry. A day for a pullover and a heavy pair of long johns.’

‘I’ll bet there’s shelter in the Grove, though.’

The Grove was a twenty-acre stretch of woodland his father had sold to Murt Quane’s father thirty years ago. He sold it because he was short of cash at the time, and the shame of it had eaten so deeply into his heart that he imagined Kevin had bought it back.

‘Have you been down in the Grove today?’ He spoke slowly with a slur, his jaws grinding the words like those of an old ram grinding the cud.

‘Not yet.’

‘You should walk the Grove every day to let the world know it’s ours. People forget. Some might think it still belongs to Quane. I hope you’re giving the mare her oats. It’s time she had a rest. It’s not right to work her with spavin at her age.’

They hadn’t had a horse on the farm for nearly twenty years, but that made no difference to his father. Yesterday the mare had angleberry; today she had spavin; tomorrow she’d probably have glanders.

‘I’m done enough on this side,’ his father said. ‘It’s time you turned me over.’

He gripped the old man under the arms while he vehemently shook his birdlike head.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he objected. ‘I want to sit up and look out the window for half an hour.’

Kevin got an extra pillow and propped the small tufted head against it. His father’s breath, an evening wind blowing over decayed cabbage stumps, struck him like a truncheon in the face.

‘My cardigan!’ He pointed irritably to the foot of the bed.

Kevin helped him on with the threadbare garment and surreptitiously switched off one bar of the electric fire. The waste was a disgrace, the electricity bills sky-high and mart prices down on last year. Moving to the foot of the bed, he felt his father’s toes under the clothes, cold like wet clay on newly dug potatoes in November. He ran his hand up the shinbone to the knee, but his father was so intent on opening his thermos flask that he failed to notice. The bed sagged in the middle. His old man looked like a castaway in a canoe drifting aimlessly out to sea.

He visualised him in his days of strength thinning turnips, clawing the dark-brown clay of the drills with both hands. Now the same hands looked as if they had been washed ashore on an incoming tide, sea-scoured to fragility with wrinkled skin and big-branching veins. The narrow head was too small for the still-wide shoulders, the pale skin drawn too tightly over jutting bone, accentuating the hollow temples. His father had slid down in the bed and closed his eyes. The head poked out above the coverlet, an egg that threatened to crack and spill its yoke. Kevin turned towards the door with a sense of reeling in his head.

‘ “I’ll starve John Bull,” said De Valera. “I’ll starve him till he bellows for Irish beef,” ’ his father shouted after him. ‘Dev, the bastard, promised us a land flowing with milk and honey, and the hungry and the ignorant believed him. The hoor’s son murdered Michael Collins. It’s a judgement of the Almighty that he ended up blind as a bat.’

In the kitchen Maureen was mixing the hens’ feed. He carved a thin sliver of beef and rubbed it round inside the mustard pot with his forefinger. It was a nuisance having to go all the way to Roscrea just for mustard. There was no alternative. Mustard was not merely a condiment but a preserver of life.

To give him his due, his passion for mustard had more to do with his idea of medicine than gastronomy. The first glimmer of light came to him in a Dublin pub after the 1970 All-Ireland hurling final, when an old man, pale as death, asked him to buy him a pint of stout.

‘Sure, I’ll buy you a pint if you promise to buy me one back.’

‘I’ll do better,’ said the old man. ‘I’ll give you the secret of longevity, but I’m so parched that I can’t say another word till you’ve wet my whistle.’

He drank the pint in what seemed like one gulp and, laying the tumbler on the counter, whispered in Kevin’s ear, ‘Tell it not in Cork, publish it not in the streets of Rosmuck, lest the daughters of Erin rejoice … I’m a doctor, an unfrocked doctor, struck off the register by the Minister for Agriculture more than twenty years ago because of my brilliance as a biochemist. In the course of my research into the role of bacillus cholera suis in swine fever, I discovered that bacon is carcinogenic. Do you know what that means?’

Kevin shook his head.

‘It means that bacon bears the seeds of cancer, and that, my friend, in an agricultural country, is political dynamite. As you know, ninety per cent of Irish farmers eat bacon and cabbage for dinner. If the truth about bacon became known, the bacon industry would be as good as dead. You can imagine the rest. The Minister for Agriculture put pressure on the Minister for Health, and before you could say “bacon” I was struck off the register. I was willing to take my case to the highest court, but no barrister would look twice at me. They all thought I was a raving lunatic. I promised to tell you my secret, and I will. Apart from beef, all meat is cancer-bearing, especially bacon. The only part of the pig that is safe to eat is the liver. If you take my advice, you’ll eat no meat, beef included, without the accompaniment of English mustard and a raw onion to kill the bucko. A boiled onion is no good, and neither is French mustard – they’re both too mild to overcome the seeds of destruction. And now I’ll have another pint if you’re buying.’

Kevin was enjoying his company so much that he bought him a second pint and then a third.

‘You may be a poor chemist for all I know, but you’re a grand talker,’ he said, rising to go.

The old man caught his sleeve and winked. ‘When did you last hear of a rabbi dying of cancer?’ he asked, nodding his head as fiercely as if he’d said the last word on the subject. Kevin forgot their conversation until five years later, when soon after the death of his mother it came back to him as he read a report in the local paper making the same claim for English mustard and raw onions as had the ‘unfrocked’ doctor. He had been an eater of boiled bacon all his life. Now his thoughts turned implacably to beef, which at first he found flavourless. Like many a late convert, he soon became an enthusiast, disowning his past tastes with a fervour denied even to his mentor.

‘There is something I didn’t tell you, Kevin,’ Maureen said without looking at him.

‘You can tell me now,’ he said when she failed to proceed.

‘I’m afraid I’m pregnant.’

‘You’re sure it isn’t cloudburst?’

‘What’s that?’

‘False pregnancy in goats. The nanny swells up, and after five months she releases a cloudy liquid and the “pregnancy” goes away.’

‘Don’t make fun of me, Kevin. Can’t you see I’m dead worried?’

‘For God’s sake, have a bit of sense. How can you be pregnant now? Haven’t we been doing it day in, day out for the last three years?’

‘And I always took such care, flushing out your seed when I felt more like sleep. I’ve no idea how it could have happened. All I know is that I’m a month overdue. Soon I won’t be able to go to Mass on Sunday without the neighbours noticing.’

‘We’ll have to do something about it,’ he said slowly.

‘What can we do?’

‘You’ll have to go to London till it bursts. I’ll send you money every week, and you can come home in two years’ time with no one any the wiser.’

‘And what am I to do with the baby?’

‘Leave it in a home with nuns in England if it’s a girl, and bring it back with you if it’s a boy. You can tell the neighbours you got married and that your man died in an accident. If it’s a boy, it will be the best thing that ever happened to us. I won’t have to leave the farm and my tractors to Concepta’s little brat, Breffny.’

‘I’m not going to England. I’ve never spent a night away from home, and you hear terrible things about London on the news every day.’

‘Well, you can’t stay here. If you drop a baby, the neighbours will put two and two together because you haven’t been seen with any other man. You know what that means, don’t you? Incest punishable by imprisonment, not to mention the disgrace.’

‘The child may not look like you. How is anyone to know?’

She looked haggard and friendless with worry lines showing round her kindly eyes. He wanted to comfort her but he did not know how.

‘You think I’m not a colour-marking breed, then?’ he said.

‘What are you talking about, Kevin?’