Thirsty Ghosts E-Book

Emer Martin

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 470

Beschreibung

Emer Martin's is a radical, vital voice in Irish writing, as she challenges the history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and the mistreatment of women across mid-to-late twentieth-century Ireland. Two families inhabit this immersive polyvocal work, an intergenerational saga announced with The Cruelty Men (2018) and continued here as punk rockers and Magdalene laundries spiral into a post-colonial Ireland still haunted by its tribal undertow. Scenes surface from Ireland's mythological past, Tudor plantations, workhouses and industrial schools, the Troubles laid bare, the transformative pre-digital decades playing out in this propulsive narrative. Thirsty Ghosts is epic in scope while intimate in focus. The Lyons, professionals in a newly independent state, are attacked by paramilitaries in their family home in Tyrone. The eccentric O Conaills of Kerry, traumatized by displacement, find themselves in leafy Dublin 4. We encounter a servant who meets Henry VIII, a Lithuanian Jewish family who become part of the fabric of Dublin, and a wild young girl who escapes the laundry only to stumble into a psycho pimp. Related with dark humour, verve and high literary style, Thirsty Ghosts is a revelatory exploration of Ireland combining themes of power, class, fertility, violence and deep love, forces as universal as the old stories that permeate and illuminate each character's life.

Leseprobe

In memory of Eamonn Martin (1938–2021)

My lovely father, thanks for all the stories, songs, wildly inappropriate limericks and bad puns. Oh, and for the unconditional love.

To my wonderful mother, Marguerite, thanks for all the stories and care.

THE LILLIPUT PRESS DUBLIN

First published 2023 by

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill

Dublin 7, Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Copyright © 2023 Emer Martin

ISBN 9781843518631

eISBN 9781843518792

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Lilliput Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Set in 10pt on 15pt Hoefler Text by Compuscript

Printed in the Czech Republic by Finidr

PART I

For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the sea hags.

– James Joyce (Finnegans Wake)

Hag

The Seed of All Stories

The stories mean the pain will not always kill you. The seed of all stories was coded deep in the first thought. Just as with your children, you began to destroy me as soon as you named me. God became small through you. Vulnerable Gods will do anything. We are inside each other. And all I’ve seen, I have seen through your eyes. We spiral in the beginning of endings.

Before you, endless winter kept me calm and silent and still. It was only ten thousand years ago that you clambered noisily off your boats. But I am not oblivious to the slaughter that you have scrawled on my body. Hate might not be solid to touch but yours has left a fossil trace.

You came from the restless sea. I have seen everything you built fall to ruin.

As millennia pushed on, you shunted me away in corners, froze me into rocks on the shore. And I never stopped feeding you, never stopped washing you clean. Even when you no longer said my name. When you thought you could buy and sell me without seeing me.

The war on me was a battle you never thought to record.

There is never justice when the victim is your only witness.

I am the hag. I am Ireland. I stretch my sinewy arms wide. I open my toothless mouth. Spread my rocky legs. My openings licked and eroded by the salty sea. In them you sheltered shivering. You had to hide from each other in me. Gulping like blind eels up my crevices, crawling through to the womb of the world back to the first thought. Thoughts that became sounds, the sounds that came before songs. A wailing that began when you were only dreaming of beauty.

The first word was a warning, and you were no longer free. Calling danger to your tribe. A sharp wild sound that encased thought like a shell. Wordshells threaded into stories. Your mind adorned – it was beautiful, but it was a weight. Because you loved – you feared. Because you feared, you screamed. Because you screamed, you spoke. Because you wanted a shape to outlast you, you told a story. To send messages to those not yet born. And those stories mean the pain will not always kill you.

Dymphna

I Won’t Go Down to the River Again (1968)

I was born in Gestapo Ireland in the 1950s – where men weren’t allowed to think and women didn’t exist. My name is Dymphna. Patron Saint of the Mad. Yeah. I’ve heard all the jokes. I came to the Laundry at fourteen years old. The others all called me Little Poet, on account of me writing me own poetry when I was little and walking barefoot by the River Dodder.

I used to put me feet in and let the river soak me and I’d suck up the spirit of the water to give me strength.

Ma was told I was always sitting by the River Dodder with me eyes closed. And she found all me poems, scribbled on the backs of bits of paper. Sure, I can’t remember even one of them now. They had always been telling me that if I didn’t behave, I’d go to the Magdalenes and that’s what they done – and they never came looking for me after. All the blame went on them nuns but they didn’t have to come looking for us, it was our own famblies who shoved us in for the most part. Of course, the nuns were there to suit them, and the Guards to send us back if we ran. What a racket.

Me uncle was a small man with a red face. He would disappear on the lash for days and then come back to kip at our house even though he had to squeeze into the other bed with all me brothers. He was a cute hoor and always came back at dinner time, buttering me ma up with his auld plámás and throwing shapes. Me ma adored him, me da was never home. In anyways, me ma sent me to do the messages and, after I’d done them, I went to the Dodder to sink me feet and write some poems in me new notebook. It wasn’t new, but me teacher had seen that I wrote poems on pieces of paper and given me one of her notebooks that was a bit used. I tore them pages out and had it all to meself. Me uncle followed me and bellowed like a bull. I told him he was a dosser and did nothing for us anyway.

Back at the house, he told me ma that I was at the river. She grabbed the basket off me and started rummaging around in it; she was livid that the bread was wet at the bottom. She found me notebook. Me sisters were screaming at me and me brothers pushing. ‘She’s a feckin eejit,’ they said. ‘The bread is soaking.’ They all crowded in on me, pulled out me notebook of poems. ‘What’s she writing?’ ‘Who does she tink she is?’ I was mortified, and me uncle started to read them, and two of me brothers came at me.

I took up a chair and held it up like I’d seen a picture in a book of a lion tamer do. ‘That’s it!’ me uncle said, ‘I’m going to the Cruelty Man.’

‘The Artane Man?’ me brother said, swinging his arms like an ape, dancing in front of me and me chair held up.

‘No, that’s for ye. The nuns will take the girls for the Laundry,’ me uncle said, as if it was all decided.

I was gobsmacked and shouted, ‘What did I do?’

Me uncle said it to me ma, who was already turning away, looking like a tired sack as always, ‘She’s always acting the maggot. And her going down to the river and with the writing of the poetry. She’ll bring disgrace to us one day. Only a matter of time.’

Me ma sighed, ‘Yizzer all wrecking me head.’ She turned to me and it was as if she couldn’t see me, as if I was already gone. That’s when I knew I was done for.

Me uncle marched out of the house on a mission. I set the chair down thinking I was safe. I saw where me ma had put me notebook, on the top shelf beside the Virgin Mary, so I made me mind up to get it back as soon as I could.

In anyways, the Cruelty Man was only too delighted to come back with me uncle. He had short grey hair and loomed in the door like a mountain. He and me uncle tore me out of the house – dragged me barefoot down our street, women leaning against their doorways with children teeming all over them, childer at their feet, in their arms, growing in their bellies, stray and starving. The Cruelty Man stopped at the corner – he and me uncle were having a disagreement as to where I could be brought.

‘I won’t go down to the river again,’ I pleaded. Looking around thinking I could leg it. ‘I’m only always taking off them shoes because they don’t fit any more. Me toes are turning black in them and me nails are sore.’

Me uncle grabbed hold of me arm. It was as if I didn’t exist, a piece of shite to be scraped off their shoes. I don’t know why me uncle wanted me gone. I shared a bed with me sisters and ate the same as the rest of them. Which wasn’t much.

The Cruelty Man said he would take me to Golden Bridge, and I liked the sound of that. I imagined a bridge like those I had seen on a blue-and-white china plate in a shop window on Clanbrassil Street. I liked to wander there where the Jews were because it was just that bit different to the other streets and the people had dark eyes and hair and more of the world in their glances. Some had foreign accents and softer ways, and the men weren’t all drunk like me da and me uncle. The Cruelty Man and me uncle decided on the Laundry instead.

I squirmed away from me uncle when I heard that, I wasn’t as green as I’m cabbage. The Cruelty Man grabbed me by the wrist and tightened his grip. He looked at me for the first time and said, ‘Steady on now, pet. You’ll have food where yer going and they’ll straighten you out. You have no idea what could happen down by the river.’ But there was no concern or kindness in his voice.

‘And they’ll clear out them notions of yours,’ me uncle laughed. So they dragged me to the Laundry; I left me family and the wet bread behind forever. The nuns opened the door and eyed me uncle and the Cruelty Man. We were poor and they could smell that off us. I didn’t know much about money, but I knew it changed the way people looked at you. A beardy nun called Sister Paul asked if I could work and they said I could.

‘She can read and write,’ me uncle said, almost with pride. ‘She can write in rhymes.’

‘The only rhymes she’ll need here are her prayers,’ Sister Paul said and pointed to another room. I walked in and I turned around quickly, but the door slammed shut and I never saw me uncle again. They shaved me head and gave me new clothes. They said Dymphna was a good saint’s name. The Patron Saint of Mental Illness and all. You can keep your name, they told me, that was the first real shock I got. I had thought I would be punished for a day or so and have to do a job but come home at nights. Why would they want to take me name?

That night I sat at a long table with the Laundry women. Half of them were baldies and the other half had wispy hair under their bonnets. There was one who stood out. She had glowing blue and grey and green eyes and looked as if she had been waiting for me. The nuns and everyone called her Teresa, but she said it wasn’t her real name. When I told her I was writing poems and putting me feet in the river she called me the Little Poet, and everyone started calling me that. I liked that. In the night she told one of the old stories of the childer who were turned into swans and banished for hundreds of years on wild seas and cold lakes. She crawled into me bed to hold me when I cried for the world. I didn’t cry for me family, cos they sent me there, but I cried for the long wet friend of a Dodder who would suckle me feet and settle all the thoughts in me head. Once, when we were together, she told me a poem that she said was written a thousand years ago and was why we were all here.

I am Eve, great Adam’s wife,

I that wrought my children’s loss,

I that wronged Jesus of life,

By right ’tis I had borne the cross.

Bogman

Yestreen I Went Under (1000 BCE)

Yestreen, this night was my last night, onion-layered dark and tight around me like a thousand eye-stinging cloaks of fright. Moon drowned, I sat bound and shivering on a stone chair. The hag was watching. The only one waiting.

I was gasping. My foster parents dissolving with grief. I don’t remember being given to them as a small boy, but they had raised me with affection. Children were swapped from tribe to tribe to quell the constant warfare. For who would go kill their brothers?

For this ceremony everyone had come. My blood father’s eyes were black holes, obscure as the starless gloom. I barely knew him. Was he proud? Repulsed?

Trembling men held my arms. The hoods up on their cloaks. Iron knives glint in fire. They stutter-danced towards me. Faces painted, straw hair. I couldn’t tell who was who. I played with one of them as a child. I’m sure. We hunted over the bare mountain, through woods full of wolves. A poisonous roar of wind whipped into the stone circle. The men descended on me, they pulled my head back and sliced off my nipples. My blood flowed. I saw the whites of their eyes – wolf-eye white. Stars were sucked back into the flesh of the nothing sky. The drums went inside me drumming.

A bloody slit opened in this world, and I slipped in through. It is worth something – this sacrifice.

Yestreen, breath stolen, heart surged, stomach lurched, one starless deep night slowly slid to an ancient cypher. This frantic solemn pummelling to protect the world. Embedded in the folds of the old hag’s bog skin.

I was brave. I was willing to go down. To live beneath you, to feel your feet pounding on the roof of the underworld. I agreed to this. I longed for it. Do you even know I’m below you? That something is holding you up?

Oh, hollow hag, I sink into your wound and it closes over me until I’m sealed, trapped like a stone in a scar. Yestreen my blood river in the grasses, drowned underground. They sink me down. Over before I was over.

I had to become nothing for you all.

Dymphna

A God Who Became So Small (1972)

Teresa, she was a pet, she took me under her arm, she was only thirty-nine when I went in but she looked older – they all did. Worn out from work and starvation. She weighed about six stone and she was tall too. But she was a real darling to me. She protected me. I would have been at the mercy of them bitches, them nuns. The other girls were all a bit soft in the head, or at least they’d gone soggy with the washing and drying. Their minds steamed out of them. Outside people had got washing machines of their own and we weren’t so needed except for the big orders from the state, like hospitals and prisons and orphanages and all that.

Am I rabbiting on too much?

One of them girls padded after Teresa like a little lost duckling down at the Dodder. The nuns called her Bridget, but Teresa made everybody call her Bright. Bright was a divil for the stories. She would moon after Teresa and only came to life when Teresa was telling us all about the swans, or the princess who looked into the mirror of all wishes and demanded to marry a bull, or my favourite one about the fairy queen Etáin who was turned into a fly. Bright had it out daggers for me since I was Teresa’s new pet and she wanted her for herself, but there was no self there. And there were no mirrors for us, no wishes for us, but we had Teresa who, to tell the truth, the nuns tried to tame but couldn’t. She had a streak in her and a mad rough laugh. She moved fluid like the Dodder.

Once, Teresa and I plotted an escape in the laundry van. She had got in with the dirty fella who drove it. But Bright would live in yer ear and she slimed off to them nuns and ratted us out. Teresa said it was all her and didn’t squeal on me. Swore till she was blue in the face that it was her only. They beat her with a hairbrush in front of us all. We all stood in a line, wincing from every wallop. After that Teresa never spoke to Bright. Bright sat on the side with a face on her like a pig licking piss off a nettle, and a longing that only settled when Teresa told them stories at night. Bright would lick her lips when she listened, eating up the words, wringing her hands and giving out small grunts now and then at the parts that would make the rest of us weep for our own sorrows.

‘Two men have to sign you out.’

‘Your family has to come and get you and they have to be your brother or father.’

‘The family has to go to the priest who goes to the bishop to get you out.’

I knew no one would be coming for me. Me sisters were probably glad of the extra room in the bed. Me ma for one less mouth to feed. Me da wouldn’t notice when he fell in from the pub. I was sure me uncle got some kind of deal from the Cruelty Man. I didn’t know what the Cruelty Man got. I had not been told how the world worked but I knew it wasn’t working for me.

Teresa was a tonic. She was me guardian angel, all she wanted from me was that I’d listen to all her bleedin’ stories, and sure I was only delighted. There was nothing else to do. She told me her name was once Maeve and that she’d be Maeve again when she got out, but in here she was Teresa. Them nuns loved St Teresa and let us read her stuff. They had put up a poster on the wall with a picture of Baby Jesus in his crib and the words: ‘A God who became so small could only be mercy and love – St Teresa.’

Them nuns had a telly. But do you think they’d let us look at the yoke? Ya must be joking. But we loved the telly because once The Riordans came on every nun in the place would scarper off. We could do what we liked during The Riordans.

Then one day they came rushing into us and told us to stop work and come look at the telly. The whole flock of auld nuns were crying.

‘Wha, has the pope died or something?’ I asked.

It was the first time I seen telly.

‘The Brits, I mean the British Forces, shot dead thirteen unarmed marchers in Derry,’ the Superioress said, her face flushed.

‘Civil-rights marchers,’ Sister Benedict said slowly, testing the phrase.

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ I asked. And she shut her gob – she wouldn’t have known a civil right if it crawled up her leg and into her knickers.

We were told to get down and pray in front of the television, and we saw people running around screaming and bleeding and the army coming on all heavy and murdering away to their heart’s content. Ye’d think them nuns were going to get out the hairbrushes and go tearing up the North to free Ireland once and for all.

This was when Teresa pulled me out the door, with poor Bright looking helplessly at the two of us. I’d give her a right puck in the gob if she so much as looked sideways at me.

‘Come on quick.’

‘What? Are we off to fight the Brits?’

‘Don’t be a thick. At least the Brits don’t lock their women up for writing poems by the river. That’s where ye have to go. Get to England and never come back here. The van is coming from the prison and the fella there owes me a favour.’

They usually watched Teresa like a hawk, but with all the commotion, the nuns were now kneeling and wailing in front of the telly. We ran out the back, and sure enough the van was unloading the last stuff. And getting ready to close the doors.

‘Mickey!’ Teresa said.

A man turned around. He wore a cap and had two front teeth missing.

‘Jaysus, haven’t seen you in years, wha?’ He scratched his head and gave me the once over with his eyes. ‘I can only take one of ye.’

‘Why?’ Teresa hissed.

‘I’m not codding ya. One can fit into the empty hamper at the back. The others are all packed in.’

‘I’ll ride with ye up front,’ Teresa said.

‘Ya will in yer hole. I can’t afford to lose me job. I don’t know if this is even worth it.’

‘Ye got your payment.’

‘That was years ago, love. An old grope every now and then wasn’t much.’ He looked at me. ‘There’s not much to ye now, Teresa. But she’s a fine thing. How old is she?’

‘She’s seventeen now. Been here three years, but she still has some life in her. Get her out and don’t mess with her.’

‘I, I, I haven’t got any of me stuff.’ Me tummy was doing loops and panic vomit was rising in me throat.

Teresa grabbed me. ‘Get out of here before you become like one of them in there. You’ll end up like poor wee Bright. Scared of her own shadow. Not knowing what life is without walls around you. Never speaking to anyone except a hairy nun and Laundry girls. If I escape, I can go to my sisters, but then there’s no one to rescue you. My sister knows the priest, and the family she works for will help her. If I get out, I can’t help you. But you can go to my sister, and she’ll get me out. I know she will. Mary would do anything for any of us; she’ll sort you out too.’

‘I’m scared of him. He seems like a right bollox.’

Teresa glared at me. ‘Get in the back, just suck him off or something or let him feel your tits. Don’t let him put his thing in or you’ll end up back here before ye know it.’

She pushed me up into the truck and he opened a smelly basket and I climbed in.

‘Janey Mack, Teresa, I don’t know about this …’

‘Don’t come back here or they’ll have yer guts for garters,’ Teresa warned. ‘Listen to me, Child of Grace. Don’t let me down.’ She was peering at me with her hand on the lid of the basket. ‘You’re to go to Kilbride in Co. Meath, just beyond Trim, and ask for Mary O Conaill. She’s in a house with the Lyonses, the local schoolteacher and a solicitor. She’ll help ye, and tell her to come get me. Mary in Kilbride. Then get yerself out of the country on the first boat to Liverpool.’

And that’s how I was bundled off from the Laundry.

435

Only You Can See This Light

She was gone. The one we called the Little Poet, on account of her being put in by her uncle because she wrote poems. Teresa lost something then and a weariness seeped into her, from waiting for the Little Poet, from waiting to go to her sister and her sister to come. The waiting dragged her down like the dirty wet water from the river of a floor we worked on. Not because they beat her, they didn’t this time. Instead, when they suspected she had helped with the escape, they made her stand on a stool till she fainted, so they did. She stood in the steam under the glass roof of the laundry. When she fell, none of us dared to run to her. She lay in the torrents of suds always swirling at our feet – her bottle-green uniform soaking up the water, until two nuns dragged her out, her cropped hanging head. And years suddenly gathered. Though she became even thinner, her body moved with an unseen weight. The stories still told but heavy. Her swan wings clipped. Behind the steam, the iron, the water, the heavy detergent, the dryer, the row of beds, she grieved for a child, for a dark daughter – even though she boasted that it was she who had freed her from this iron trap. And the tiny bit of hope was draining from her.

I had never been outside. Teresa’s cold eyes looked through me – I’m still here, tell me the tale. I couldn’t go because I was scared, and she couldn’t go because I told them she was going to escape and so now they watched her like hawks. What could I do? I had kept her here for me. After that she wouldn’t talk to me. But I knew what love was. I knew. But she didn’t know that’s why I done it. I like to think back to the first evening I came to the Laundries. They marched me through a tunnel from the Industrial School into the church and then another tunnel that led to the Laundry. I never had to go out into the air. My name in the school was 435. That was my real name. The nuns said the Laundry girls could have actual names and they named me Bridget. Teresa said a poem to me, a poem about Eve. Teresa named me Bright, and only she could see this light, so she could.

Prince Alfrid

The Tongueless Bell (ACE 680)

I, Prince Alfrid, travelled throughout Ireland looking for teachers. I spoke to the famed poet Ruman, the vegan St Fintan – who smashed the vessel with my offering of milk as the monks hoed the land and touched no flesh nor dairy. Ita, the foster mother of all the saints, told me the tales of Brigid.

Respectfully, I, Alfrid, took instruction from thin and softspoken ascetic monks, living among them as they made their fine books. I rose with them at the strike of the tongueless bell. The dry stone beehive huts with a simple cross over each door. The school, the refectory, the small oratory. I was thirsty for knowledge; I sat with my fellow travellers from England, people of noble and of ordinary birth all wanting to understand. They taught me to transcribe. Finally, one of the monks told me I had learned enough formally and advised me to go wandering deeper into the woods.

I, Alfrid, traversed the dark woods where hermits lived with animal flocks. I met the humble monk, Mochua, who had no wealth but a cock, a mouse and a fly. I heard the cock wake Mochua to pray in the morning. I saw the mouse lick Mochua’s ears if he slept more than five hours without praying. I watched the fly walking each line of his book of prayers as he sang the psalms; this fly would wait upon the line so he would find his place again.

Later I learned that Mochua’s three friends died and that Mochua had written to Colmcille in terrible grief. Colmcille wrote back: ‘My brother, marvel not that thy flock should have died, for misfortune ever waits upon wealth.’

I sought out the hermit St Ciarán who had built a dwelling deep in the forest out of light wood – whose fellow monks were a boar, a fox, a badger, a wolf and a stag. The woods of this country were full of hidden hermits, women and men who lived with the mad and rejected and found ways to talk to God and to hear God talk. They wrote their poems about birds and trees.

Under the protection of the chieftains, I wandered. Often I drank from the holy wells – from silver cups that hung on silver hooks pushed into the stones, marvelling that no one would dare to take the cups home.

When my father, King Osuniu, died in 671, I, Alfrid, returned to England to become King of Northumbria. I ruled, fluent in the Irish language, Latin theology, Greek grammar, poetry, sagas, histories. I composed my own poetry and spoke of the time when I wandered through my neighbour’s land, a forest land of strange saints. And forever in my head I missed the sound of a tongueless bell calling me to the clarity of prayer.

Dymphna

The Burning of the Embassy (1972)

Mickey stopped the van after a while, and I felt the basket open. I wanted to run off because I didn’t want to suck him. I didn’t even know what to be sucking.

He grabbed me arm and hissed in me ear, ‘Yer a virgin, are ye? Or what kind of messing got you in with them nuns?’ He was a big lad with a solid belly on him and a red face, I hadn’t seen a man in so long I couldn’t even tell if he was old. He put me down in the back of the van and after he shut the door he split open me legs and stuck himself in. He was sweating and panting. I put me hands up to me face and howled, and he told me to shut the fuck up and banged me head off the floor until I saw tiny white specks spin round in front of me like demon flies, and he stuck it in like Teresa said he shouldn’t do. It was so sore I thought he was putting a knife in. So I had let her down already. After he finished, he growled at me: if I told anyone he’d track me down and murder me. He said no one would take me word, a dirty whore from the Laundry, against his. Then he threw me out and the van roared off.

I was left standing in a city laneway with no money, in the middle of winter, and no place to go. After when they called it Bloody Sunday, I always thought of meself there with the blood running down me leg under me Laundry uniform. Maybe I should just go back and get into me bed for the night. That them nuns mightn’t have noticed me gone. But I thought I must be pregnant now and they’d know it, and I’d get such a beating and an I told you so. What was I like? Barely out a few hours and already pregnant. That’s the first words I said out loud to myself. Rabbiting on to meself, so I was.

I walked out of the laneway, and them buildings were unlike any I’d seen before. They were lovely and grand, just like palaces in dreams. The houses had red bricks and steps up to painted doors. There was a park with railings, and I wandered until I found a gate and went inside. I was thinking to find the Dodder and get me bearings. I had missed that river. But I knew I couldn’t show up to me ma and da, as they would see I was pregnant and not a virgin anymore and put me straight back to them nuns. It was always foretold I would let down the family, on account of the poetry writing.

For two days I hid under a bush in Merrion Square. I had nothing to eat and the pain between me legs was something else. I didn’t know how long it took, but I was waiting for the baby to come so I could get rid of it and bury it and go back to them nuns and beg for forgiveness. If they didn’t check me down there they mightn’t know what I done. I was almost frozen to the ground. It was only the fear that kept me alive.

During the days I sat on a bench in the park. I hadn’t been out of the Laundry since I was brought there by me uncle. And I’d never seen a city like this. This was a different part of town altogether. Women walked by in trousers that were wide at the bottom. They were laughing and talking loudly with men who had big hairy things coming down the sides of their faces and huge chunky ties.

All of a sudden, I heard a big commotion. Crowds started coming from all over the place and the Guards with them. Tons of people yelling poured into the park and beyond. They shouted and pumped their fists in the air. They were holding painted signs and chanting. There I was standing just outside the park, and men were running around with their faces covered in black masks and the Guards were pushing and shoving everyone, and one of the buildings was on fire. The Guards were running around bashing heads in and everyone had gone ballistic. I stood still as a statue and some young fella grabbed me and pulled me behind a lamppost as a swell of people galloped past. I pushed him away cos I thought he might stick it into me like Mickey, me knight in shining armour.

‘Are you OK, love? Hey, hey …’

I struggled away and made me way through the crowds. People were crying now, shocked and scared – running in every direction trying to get away from the burning building. I got as far as the canal and sat down to put me feet in the water by the lock. But the water was so far down, me legs just dangled blue from the cold. I closed me eyes. A couple of women came up behind me. They were dressed so nice. In short skirts and high heels, and all shiny and sparkling.

‘What have we got here?’

‘Jaysus, Mona, I think we’ve got a runaway Magdalene.’

‘That’s a Laundry smock, alright.’

‘Is that what y’are, pet?’

I nodded. I closed my eyes again and tried to reach me feet down to the water to get the canal to make me strong.

‘You’ll freeze yer feet if they get to the water, pet. You’d better come with us. We’ll get ya cleaned up and out of those clothes, so the Guards won’t take yiz back to them nuns.’

‘There won’t be much business tonight,’ the other agreed. ‘The place is crawling with army and Guards. They just burnt down the fucking British Embassy.’

‘Where?’

‘Up dere, in fucking Merrion Square.’

‘Yer codding me?’

‘No, it’s a fucking revolution, 19-bleedin’-16 all over again.’

They took me by the arms and pulled me up away from the canal. I wanted to slowly slip into it, to go down into the water and sink. One of them had a fur jacket and put it round me.

‘Is there anyone we can take you to, love?’

I touched the fur.

‘Don’t run off with that now. It’s only rabbit, but I like to think it’s hare.’

The other one laughed.

‘I have to get to Mary O Conaill in Kilbride in Meath,’ I said. ‘I have to tell her that her sister is in the Laundry and wants to come out.’

‘We can take you up to the Coombe and back to our place and get ya sorted.’

‘I have to get to Meath.’

‘Meath? Ya poor frozen craytur. Yer a long way from Meath.’

Deirdre

All Extremists Should Be Shot (1974)

Everyone called my mammy ‘Baby’. Which was funny because she wasn’t a bit like a baby. We were trying to rent a telly in a shop in Capel Street. The man told her, ‘You can’t rent one without your husband’s permission.’ Mammy shouted and told him she was earning money and he was a disgrace.

The man looked terrified. ‘Those are the rules. I have to obey the rules. If you were a single woman, it would be no bother, but you put down “married” on the form. I have no choice.’

I felt sorry for him because, though her name was Baby, my mammy was fierce. She pulled me out of there in a fury. That’s my first memory.

I was cursed with memory. I never forgot things that happened.

In all the details.

A lot could be learnt behind the couch. I was the eldest child. Orla, my sister, was a year younger. Mammy was pregnant again. She let us touch her tummy and we could feel the baby kick.

All the grown-ups were in the living room as always, talking and smoking and singing, and my sister traversed the hairy green-and-orange swirly carpet, crawling from gin and tonic to gin and tonic, dipping her soother in each drink and sucking it. I guided her away from one of those big silver ashtrays that stood up from the ground. I brought her behind the couch with me and shushed her. We could listen in and not get sent to bed if they forgot about us.

Mammy and Daddy played badminton, and the badminton crowd were always over in our house smoking and drinking till the wee hours. Mammy’s voice rose and fell. They laughed a lot. There were lots of letters – not ABCs, but IRA and UVF and RUC and SAS. My daddy had a soft voice and when he talked about stuff everyone hushed and listened. Mammy had to talk through people until they gave up and paid attention to her.

Uncle Iggy was over lots with his son Cormac, who was nearly my age, and Fionn his little brother, and their mammy was pregnant.

Mammy called him a ‘permanent fixture’. But she said he was family, kind of. He was Mary’s nephew or something. Mary was my grandma’s housekeeper and we all loved her. She wasn’t like a housekeeper; she was part of our family too. She was more important to us than our grandparents. She was the heart of the family.

From behind the couch, I heard that we joined the EEC. Uncle Iggy and Daddy claimed it was another loss of sovereignty, but Mammy said it would bring in equal pay for women, and that she could rent a telly without her husband’s permission or take them to court. Daddy said Ireland was now even further away from a socialist republic and Mammy said the people don’t want anything of the kind.

‘And now women don’t have to give up their jobs when they get married,’ Mammy said. ‘That’s a great thing.’

Uncle Iggy said that if women work it takes away jobs from men and the men are the ones who have to support the families. And everyone agreed with that except Mammy, who got annoyed and asked Uncle Iggy who supported his family. That was after the third gin and tonic, and she could be mean.

Most of the mammies didn’t work. They said that their job was their children, and Mammy told them that they were cossetted at the expense of power.

The other mammies didn’t like that, I can tell you.

I learnt all this from behind the couch.

When they all left, Orla and I crept up to my bed, and in the morning I got up and played with the cigarette butts in the ashtrays. I took out the ones that were not smoked down to the end, and I put them in a box in the shed for me and Cormac. We smoked them a bit, but they were yucky, so we took out the yellow spongy bits from the ends and chewed them.

Cormac and I were going to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with the daddies. The mammies were staying with the babies. The buses were on strike, and even worse for the daddies was that the Guinness Brewery was on strike too.

It was summer and I loved the smell of Dublin City.

‘That’s the hops from the Guinness factory,’ Daddy told me. I held his hand and we walked through the city centre. We all stopped and took a sniff.

It was a great smell. Better than the Liffey, which was really stinky in summer. It was green and full of rubbish. Even the bin men were on strike, so there was stuff all over the place. The daddies were stopping in the pub, and Cormac and I raced around eating Taytos and peanuts and drinking cokes and I got sick from it all outside. Uncle Iggy was always singing songs and telling stories, and Daddy loved to listen to him. The whole pub listened to him. When he told a story, everyone was quiet. They were all having another beer because of the strike.

When we were heading up to the concert, the bombs went off and all the street was flying at us. The boom and the shake, I remember. We were running and screaming with the daddies taking us in their arms, and we got to a telephone in a pub and called home to say that we were OK but there were bombs going off in Dublin. Daddy and Uncle Iggy ordered two brandies at the bar. We never got to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Cormac and I sat under the stools and played zoo monkeys. Everyone was talking about who did the bombs. We got out onto the street for a while and at first no one noticed we were gone, but then my daddy took the two of us home and Uncle Iggy stayed in the pub. Cormac didn’t mind, since he liked our house. We had central heating and a soda stream, and everything was new and clean and warm.

A day later, behind the couch, I learnt that a family and their two baby daughters were killed instantly. One of the babies was discovered in the cellar of a pub close to the explosion. There were three bombs in Dublin and one in Monaghan that day, and thirty-three people were dead and loads injured and maimed.

‘It was the UVF,’ Daddy said.

They’re all as bad as each other,’ said Mammy. ‘The IRA, the UVF, the Brits, all men, all thugs. All extremists should be shot.’

‘Until we have a united Ireland there will never be peace. Colonization is still a factor here.’

‘The Brits won’t leave by themselves. They’ve been here eight hundred years,’ Uncle Iggy added.

‘It will have to be solved at a conference table,’ Mammy said.

‘But the Brits will have to be brought at gunpoint to the conference table.’ Daddy’s voice was shaking. ‘This country is descending into anarchy. We’re going to lose all chance of peace unless there’s a united Ireland.’

‘At what price? What price do you men put on life? Sure, we’re all ruled by Brussels now, thank God. The Brits and London don’t matter.’ When Mammy said this a big row started. Mammy usually won since she could talk the longest.

She swiped Orla away from dipping her soother into the gin and tonic, and I reached out and pulled my little sister behind the couch.

Orla needed to learn that the secret to staying up late was to blend in.

Fionn

Monstre Sacré

There was a story I’d ask my father for, the story of Etáin. My mother loved to hear it too. For she knew how Etáin felt, not being in the right world, always restless, changing shape but never getting back to where she belonged. But in the end, she does. So, my mother, Esther, called her one daughter after her. Born prematurely in 1975 and weighing only four pounds, my lovely little sister, Etáin.

She told me all of this years later when I was a child, sitting watching her drink in a café in Leuven. My mother heard my father before she saw him. Monstre sacré, he was. And she in a corner of the party. Relieved to be out of the family home for the night. Paddy and Baby MacInespie, the hosts in their suburban home. She usually never ventured this far from Pembroke Road, but Paddy had been persistent. He was a PhD student and had interviewed Bubbe and her friends for a project he was doing on Jewish folktales. My grandmother, Bubbe, was always urging her daughter to get out more, she took a liking to Paddy immediately and enlisted his help. My mother was moping about the house after Paris with her heart, a mixed metaphor, in tatters at half mast, the love of her life staying with his wife after all. Her painting career stalled in Dublin where the arts was such a boys’ club. My quiet mother had the talent required but none of the bluster, and besides she was a woman. So that was that.

I always imagined the other guests were bemused by my father. A young and feral Behanesque character, like an ancient bard, telling his tales in the other corner. His eyes kept finding hers. After his stories, people took up guitars and earnestly started strumming. She thought she’d scarper. Bubbe would be pleased she had at least made an effort. He blocked her as she went to slip out the front door.

He went to shake her hand. His hands like sculptures, twisted marble monstrosities. She could not help but take both his hands and study them. Were they hands? Each finger twisted away from the other. She thought she could paint them. It wasn’t love at first sight. It probably wasn’t even love. They were both just odd. She was ten years older than him, a loner, intense, given to bouts of depression. He was a man–child. Never fully coming into himself. Always avoiding his own centre, playing a part. She brought him home to our big rambling house, knowing her mother would be asleep. She stupidly got pregnant that first night. She was arranging to go to a Mother and Baby Home and put the child up for adoption, but Bubbe was aghast. Her grandchild wouldn’t be raised properly as a good Jew. They wouldn’t know they were Jewish. They married quickly in the synagogue. Only Paddy and Baby and Bubbe as guests, then lunch in the Shelbourne. Iggy and Paddy went off on a pub crawl and left the women behind. That’s how Ireland worked.

My father told my mother some palaver about his family having land in Meath and getting an income from that. It was a year after Cormac was born when she realized Ignatius stood on Essex Bridge and told stories for money, and that was his only source of income. That half of the poor of Dublin knew him as Zoz. That he was really their bard. That he was shambling around in the dimness of their smoky pubs as their teacher. He was keeping the world alive with his telling of it. Strangely, he was as loved by the poor of Dublin as one of their own, just as he was tolerated at the university parties. But she wasn’t welcome in that rough world. And then I was born, and she realized with resentment that she would never be able to get back to Paris. The Irish art world would never think a woman could do anything more than dabble as a hobby. She was stuck on the rock of doom. She would never paint his hands.

435

Walking Without a Sound (1975)

I grew up all me life here and never been out once. They put me in as a babbie because me mother was a harlot. And I killed a wee three-year-old girl putting her in the scalding water, even though I said to them nuns that it was too hot and it was, so it was. Me and another girl had to push her in that bath screaming. Me own hands were burnt and red. She just went all limp so quick. I was eight and they didn’t put me in prison, but I thought of that wee girl every day and reckoned that’s why they never let me out. I didn’t mean it but I did it, so I did. I wondered would I meet her when I died and I could say sorry sorry so so sorry to the little scrawny snot face with the thin hair. I’m so sorry. I didn’t tell the other Magdalenes about my murder and they didn’t tell me about any of their shameful stuff. We were not allowed talk to each other, but on Sundays we whispered after dinner.

I followed Teresa around because she named me Bright, and she used to look out for me until I ratted her out. After, she sighed when she saw me behind her, so she did.

‘What’s a hare?’ I asked when she told us a story of the hare. I couldn’t imagine what most animals were like. The nuns allowed her to tell her stories to us and they sometimes listened too. She answered sometimes, if I spoke my question to everyone and not to her.

‘A hare has three traits: a lively ear, a bright eye and a quick run up the hill.’ She didn’t look directly at me when she said this.

‘But is it like a cat?’ I asked everyone. The nuns had cats at the back door on account of mice. I saw Teresa make a fuss of them when she could. She loved them cats, I watched her hold them like I wished she’d hold me.

‘It’s like a fecking rabbit but bigger,’ one of the other women snapped. She’d also been given the name Big Bridget, but no one called her Bright. That’s mine alone, the name Teresa gave me when I first came.

‘And longer ears,’ Mary said.

‘Is a rabbit like them cats?’ I asked.

They all laughed at me. The nuns didn’t like to see us convene like this so Sister Paul clapped her hands as she always did, as if to squash us in the sound. I could see Teresa stare at me, her forehead creased in a line down between her eyes.

‘The cat has three fortunes: the housewife’s forgetfulness, walking without a sound and keen sight in darkness.’

Even the nuns liked when she told us harmless things of a Sunday. They didn’t pay her mind. She wouldn’t escape now, though she was so thin she could slip through a crack under the door like a mouse. We were shuffled off to bed at seven in silence. I tried to walk behind her like a soundless cat. Some of the others snickered.

‘Look at Bright,’ Big Bridget whispered to another one. ‘There’s a want in her.’

‘Jesus tonight, she doesn’t know what a bloody rabbit is.’

My hands were sore, raw from the ironing and carrying the hampers. I clenched and unclenched them. I lay in bed and tried to start with a cat and imagine what the animals have that are different from the cat. In me head I made the cat’s ears long and straight. There were some animals in the church. The Virgin Mary statue was standing on a lizard. There were sheep in the stained glass. The Lamb of God. And there was a twisty picture of an eagle and a lion and maybe a calf on the Bibles. But I know they weren’t really what the animals could look like. I’d seen birds come by the windows. What I’d seen I didn’t forget, so I didn’t. One night a bird bashed itself off the window and I got to see it dead close up. Another time a rat ran across the yard by the kitchen. I imagined a hare like a bigger rat.

I kept track of me age in my head. I was twenty-five, so I was, and I could see pretty well in the dark, so I could. I was seeing rats become hares until I was sure I got it.

I dreamt we were all sleeping, and a thing comes and dies against the window. The outside coming in like a bulky shadow. When I awoke, I looked to the top window to see if there was a smudge. A mark.

Caitríona

Thus Was the End of Their Feast (1574)

Once the cattle were driven into our fort away from the wolves, we sat in lime-washed rooms as the stories of the great feats of the legendary Fianna were told. At night we would all gather as a clan, and I would be close to the centre as it was my duty to pour the ale into their golden cups and horns. The noble men and women would lie down as the harp played, their cloaks drawn around them, and the poet would tell the long, long stories that reached right into the past until we were not just ourselves but everyone who had gone before. The wolfhounds settled down with their long shaggy legs stretched out as the reed-and-butter candles lit the back of the hall. The fire burned in the middle of the great room, the roof open to the sky. We lay on beds of straw. The bards were as powerful as the kings in those old days, and they had been trained for years in the bardic schools. I had no schooling, but I knew the words to the stories and would whisper them, learning them from the old blind poet that the king always kept by his side. One story that hushed us all was the terrible tale of the great warrior–hero Cúchulainn’s warp spasm. The poet would boom out:

‘When the great Cúchulainn entered the warp spasm, he became a strange and terrible beast unlike anything ever seen. His whole being shook in a mighty fit and inside every organ and muscle twisted and pushed against his rippling skin and his elbows and knees and feet spun and twisted to the other side of his body until he was a spiral of angry brutishness. A killing machine.’

I was born to a family of churls. When you are on the bottom, you can see right up through the arsehole of the world, through the shit tunnels, the soggy intestines and past the tangles of guts, until the heart suddenly appears as a pulsating slippery mass of veiny pulp, then here are shuddering lungs – nothing is too special, it’s all grotesque but functional. You know the thoughts of the kings and nobles because they speak out loud and you have to listen. Servants throughout time have always known everything before it happened. The nobles do not hide anything from us because they think we exist only for their convenience. They can’t imagine that we have thoughts inside our heads. They never see us, but we see them. Strangely, the view is more revealing from the bottom than the top. The worms have no majesty, but they know the land better than the great elks. And we survived underground when they were hunted to their last end. For a churl, the world is revealed as it is, and we as we are – ravenous and calamitous.

From time to time, when a guest was at the feast, I was called on to tell a story. Because I had some fame as a servant who had met Henry VIII of England when I was a wee girl. That was many years ago. Truth was I had told it so many times I wondered if I had made half of it all up in my head, but I kept telling it.