My Daily Undoing

I hear him screaming as I walk the laneway to his house. The gable wall emerges into view, dull red against the orange evening sky. A dead branch hangs overhead, creaking. Nobody goes by here apart from me, there are easier routes into town. Better roads without madmen like Murtagh raving at the wind. He is wearing the same soiled jumper as yesterday, full of holes and pulled threads. His jagged features hidden beneath the bristling overgrowth of a colourless beard. I lift the handle of the gate and it whines at the hinge. He turns to face me in one swift wolf-like movement and I freeze.

He glares and shuffles forward, mouths the word, “banshee.” He’s talked nonsense of curses and ghosts ever since Cathy’s death and maintains that her blood runs down the gable wall of his house at night. I’ve caught him outside in the early hours, watching, waiting to see her spirit as she tars this place. I’ve looked on from the ditch, hidden by briars, my breath coming out in clouds. 

The plastic bag cuts into my fingers now, carrying the same miserable rations I bring him every day; sliced pan, ham, butter and milk. And his naggin of course. The gravel gives under my boots as I walk past him, his arms flailing. He is roaring curses, screaming at everyone and no one. They say old Murtagh is ruined altogether, that he’s only waiting to die. It would be a mercy for him. 

I’m not the same since Cathy died either, there’s a wickedness inside me I can’t shift. I wonder sometimes if it’s me that’s ruined.

*

It took me a month to grind up the courage to ask Cathy to the dance. All the while I was certain someone would scupper me first. I shovelled the words out of myself standing beyond Davitt’s in the lashings of rain. Her hair dark and flattened, and her blouse slick to her skin.

“What?” she said, droplets falling from her lashes. 

I fumbled worse on the second attempt, and almost turned sour at my own uselessness. She laughed, high-pitched, before finally agreeing. “Yeah, go on,” she said, “I’d love to.” 

My father insisted on driving us to the dance and we were forced to endure the awkward introductions at her house beforehand. I greeted Murtagh at the threshold, and even then noticed the pong off him. The decay. The house was dark and Cathy was only a shadow behind him – so hooded that at first I thought she was wearing a black dress. She emerged slowly, the black turning to wine. As she passed Murtagh I felt something sharp digging at my side, as if being stung by an insect. The little needles of hair from the fresh cut. 

Her hair was tied up, taut and tidy and I almost asked her to take it down, to let it flow. I liked it better that way. I was half turned to the gate when Murtagh grabbed me and said I was to look after his girl. 

Outside the parish hall I opened the car door for Cathy and took her hand, as if to take her weight as she delicately rose to the footpath. “Thank you sir,” she mocked.  We linked arms and walked towards the teachers’ desk that was crammed into the porch. Both ends of the chipped tabletop, only inches from the plasterwork and Mr. McHale somehow squashed in behind it – a green bottle of mineral and a fountain of holy water to keep him company. It all looked as out of place as I felt. 

Inside, the hall was night-blue and thick with music. People stood mostly around the edges, leaning against walls and tables. About a dozen couples moved with trepidation in the centre, swaying with polite distance. Cathy took my hand and led me onto the floor, wrapped her arms around my neck, and brought me into her rhythm.

I could hear the music, but it was indecipherable. If anything, I felt it rattle my ribcage. I eyed the parting of her hair, each strand marshalled into place by a little glittering hair tie. She rested her head to my collar and I could see the vertebrae of her neck as they slid away down the high back of the dress. 

She lifted her head again, and looked right up at me and I knew she wanted me to kiss her. But I wasn’t ready for it, the mechanics of it. She used the weight of her hand on my neck to guide me toward her and her lips were sticky and sweet. 

“I’d like to keep doing this,” I said, eventually. 

“Kissing?” she laughed.

“I mean–” I said, “would you go out with me?” 

We held hands in the backseat of the car going home and I tried to ignore the looks my father was peeling back at me through the rear-view mirror. 

“He’s a lucky man to have taken you to the dance, Cathy,” he said.

“I agree,” she said. 

“You’re awful good to put up with him.”

“I hope to be putting up with him for a while yet,” she said.  

My father kept his gaze to the road, and I rubbed her hand with my thumb while looking out the window at nothing in particular. 

*

“Will you leave off me?” were the first words she said to me in anger. I had been pestering her as we leaned against the tarred fence that ringed Murtagh’s garden. 

“I’m just off,” she said, eyes to the ground. “He’s in there again and there’s no talking to him.” 

Murtagh was prone to fits of rage and bouts of depression. Though it was never clear if it was too much drink or not enough that gave it to him. He had notions of being touched by the cure, of mending things by burning branches and chanting nonsense. It was known that his grandmother could lay touch to a thing and take the harm from it, that she had healing hands. People still came to the cottage to have their warts screamed at and their sorrows burned away. He affected a burden of this gift, play-acting the martyr laid to waste by all he’d seen.

I held her there a while, with the damp fencepost digging at my back and I pretended there was nothing else in the world. I felt her shoulders against me, and I hoped that they would soften but she only grew more tense the more he shouted.

I hear that same wretched voice now as I approach him with his messages. He no longer takes to the bed but wanders about the yard instead, steely-eyed and wired. His eyes, grey-blue like hers, make me question what it is I’ve been doing. 

He comes right up to my face and croaks: “I want to see her do it!” 

He’s talking of the blood again. I say nothing and I hand him his naggin. He stumbles and snatches at it, but unscrews the cap with precision.

*

Cathy and I were a few months together when we went to Westport the first time. She had found work with a bookkeeper in Castlebar and I had started at the buildings with my father, painting and plastering, so we had a few pounds to put together. I told him I’d be away with some of the lads from the GAA and Cathy said she was staying with her cousin in Kinvara. My father was sharp enough to know he hadn’t got the length of it but he let me away anyway.

We stayed in a Tudor style guesthouse up the street from the old mill called Fallon’s. It was run by a woman of at least sixty with a heavy grey perm. She gave us a strange look and we arriving but said nothing untoward, only took our money and showed us to our room. I watched my feet as we climbed the uneven stairs to our second-floor quarters. Entering the room, Cathy was gripped by a fit of laughter and I felt the corner of my mouth lift into a grin. Her face was pointy when she laughed. Her upper lip never seemed to move with the rest of her face, and sometimes she looked as if she were laughing at you when she wasn’t. Mrs. Fallon straightened as we cackled, losing the run of ourselves, and then she slapped the room key down on the bedside table and shut the door. 

We left our bags on the bed and set out walking along the quay, the water glittering under a low sun. About a mile along the front we saw two B&Bs that overlooked the bay and were sickened for having settled on Fallon’s. We bought chips in white plastic containers and scoffed them at the water’s edge, licking salt from each other’s fingers and watching the sky go dark. The clouds opened on us and we sprinted back to the guesthouse. Slick with rain, Mrs. Fallon didn’t know what to do, only handed over another set of towels, her chin angled away from us. 

The brass showerhead spat water and steamed the bathroom as we tore off our sodden clothes, quickly and without thinking. It was the first time we saw each other naked. Cathy’s skin flushed in the yellow light and I was scalded before I even met the water. 

I said I loved her. She said it back. And it was like the parish hall all over again, me knowing what she wanted but needing her to show me. Being thrilled and annoyed at the same time. I wondered would life always be like this, stuck between doing and thinking. 

We lived for those trips but it wasn’t long until my father caught on. He gave me the look, and a talk that was shaped as advice but given as gospel: “you’d be lucky to make a wife of a girl like Cathy Murtagh.” 

At the window display in Fogarty’s I found a small emerald set into a delicate gold band. I stood tall on the carpet as I handed over the sum. My father nodded when I showed him the ring that evening. Kept nodding as he laced his boots and readied himself for his walk. He stopped at the door on his way out, half-turned and addressed the wall, “it’s a fine ring,” he said, “for a fine girl.”

*

I see Murtagh is wearing his hag-stones again, five of them carried on a thread around his neck, one for each of the so-called seers in his line. Their eyelets strung together, linked as a clan. He grips the flat edges of the stones and rolls them one by one between the finger and thumb of his right hand. All the while the left hand keeps working the flow of the naggin. 

Cathy showed me that necklace once, inside the house while he was out. She showed me the broken stone too, the one he’d kept apart from it. The one he’d split with a mallet so the gift would linger with him. I’ve never seen him heal a thing, but I know the man can land a curse. 

*

I hadn’t a notion how to put the words to Cathy. Nothing beyond “will you marry me?” I was still deciding on how to say it to her when I met her that morning outside her house. 

“I have something to tell you” she said, leaned against our weeping fencepost, and for a second I thought she knew. 

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

I let out a groan and regretted it instantly. I knew I looked like a gom, stood there with my jaw open. 

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“Aye,” I managed. 

She looked away then, down to her feet, and I cursed myself for not having had the emerald with me. 

“I love you Cathy,” I almost shouted, “I love you.” 

She turned to face me and softened a little. 

I told her she kept me moving throughout the day, that I was forever wishing to share everything with her and God knows what else I said. I told her I’d be lost without her and eventually I blurted out: “It’s like you’re my compass!”

“A compass?” 

She really laughed then. A big, childish laugh, and it brought her back. 

I felt the heat of my cheeks and the hammering of my heart and the damp gorse soaking my right knee and yet I didn’t even remember kneeling down. 

“Are you asking me to marry you?” she said.

And of course I had forgotten the actual proposal. I’d managed to say so much yet not ask the question. Then I spoke the only words that ever came easy to me, and she said yes. I still remember the smell of that morning’s rain.

My father was delighted and us telling him that evening. He fetched the brandy and Nana’s good glasses and we toasted to what lay ahead. 

I walked Cathy back to Murtagh’s and we met him at the gate, his nostrils flaring like a bull. Cathy had been to see a doctor in Castlebar to confirm her situation and word got back to Murtagh that his daughter had fallen to sin. We tried to explain the engagement but he was committed instead to blackening her with slurs. He slapped her and when she shrieked he only yelled louder that he would knock the hellish baby out of her. 

Murtagh turned his heels and made for the door of the house. I stalked the laneway behind him. Barged through to the kitchen and shouted words that came quickly and cut like thorns through my mouth. I roared until my throat gave blood and my voice was stripped to cracklings. He stood there, silent, sipping from a flask.

I panted and felt my ears throb. But I didn’t move. 

“Are you finished?” he said eventually, holding the table to steady himself. His knotted fingers curled around the edge. 

I made no reply. 

“You can keep that rotten girl,” he said, his voice low. Then he kicked the door, which sprung back from the wall with a wobble. He threw his arms up and stumbled. 

“Get out!” he shouted.

I took one step forward and spat at him. The thick clump of saliva landed on his chest and jiggered down through the threads of his jumper. 

His lip curled. 

“You’re a cunt,” I said, and slammed the door behind me. 

Cathy stayed in our house that night, in my bed and I slept on the couch in the kitchen. She returned home each day in the weeks that followed, determined to make amends. But Murtagh had no taste for reconciliation, each time lashing out at her again. She would arrive back disappointed, head down, hair curtained and eyeing the ground.

We spent evenings by the fire as November crept in. Cathy’s face would slowly return to itself as she settled in the chair by the mantle. Sometimes she laughed, at an oddball story or one my father’s clean jokes. But it took all evening to set her back to herself, to raise a smile, to coax a laugh. Some days were lost altogether.

One evening by the fire she turned to me and asked me to apologise. 

“What for?” I asked.

“He said you called him–” she trailed off.

“Your father?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to apologise to your father?”

I couldn’t look at her, so I lifted two more sods into the fire. I watched the embers start around the base and fixed my gaze there until the scent of burnt earth scalded my nostrils.

“It’s the word you used,” she said.

I stood up so suddenly I knocked the cradle with the poker and Cathy jumped with the clanging. 

“I called him a cunt, Cathy,” I said, “I called him a fucking cunt because that is what he is.”

And that was the first and only time I made her cry. 

*

The pregnancy became complicated, at first she began to swell everywhere. Her hands and feet were the worst, and grew painful. The emerald ring had been a little loose at first but now she could no longer wear it, it cut into her so badly. We had to thread a string around it and encourage it free under the kitchen tap. The water running cold to help shrink her flesh. She fought not to cry as my father and I worked at it, my hands holding hers steady as he prized the band free. After the knuckle it went quickly and landed in the basin with a clink. 

Things didn’t improve. She began vomiting after every meal. It all grew more and more disastrous, she could spend hours retching. Forced almost to give up food altogether. But she wouldn’t go to the doctor, convinced instead that it was Murtagh. She said he had cursed the child and that he wouldn’t lift it. She pleaded with me to apologise to the man, convinced that her guilt wasn’t sufficient without mine. She began lighting ash twigs and various herbs in the grate and humming soft incantations. My father felt I was being pig-headed, that she’d agree to see a doctor if only I’d let up and apologise. In the yard one evening, he told me to say sorry to the man. He said he knew I wouldn’t mean it, but to do it anyway, that things couldn’t continue as they were. And so I walked the laneway to Murtagh’s that night, after Cathy had gone to bed and left my father at the back door. 

“Go easy,” he said. 

Barren branches swung about me in the dark and I found Murtagh stood out front of the house as if waiting for me. His head cocked up to the stars. 

I stopped at the gate and announced myself. 

“I know you’re there,” he said, as if to suggest he knew I was coming. Like he might anticipate my every move. 

“That’s Orion,” he said, “the old man, the old ghost.”

He refused to look at me, staring up at his Gods instead, trying to make whatever point it was he was trying to make. 

“I’m just here to apologise for what I said before,” I said.

The wind whistled through the bare limbs of the trees and came sharp at my neck. I rested against the fencepost, as much to show Murtagh I might settle into this silence. That he wouldn’t disturb me with his withholding.

“Your words mean nothing to me,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he meant my apology or what I had called him. 

“Nothing,” he repeated, before growing silent again.

It was a waiting game. Every part of me was unwilling to yield to him, to proffer false regret. I would not give this to him. And he wouldn’t give anything to me. 

A set of crows picked at something in the yard and clacked their nasty beaks. I watched them as I waited for the old man to speak but they opened their wings suddenly and swooped unseen into the night. 

As the birds departed it began to rain. Still Murtagh kept on with his watch, facing upwards and away. Soon nothing could be heard above the rain and its pattering against the barn. My shirt became heavy and thick. I was being pulled down by it, shrunken. Then the rain stopped, quickly, and he turned to face me. 

“Go away now,” he said and made for the door. 

I kicked at the fence, and grunted, sickened by the damp clothes and his fucking grin, as if he had made it rain. As if he had some power over me. I kicked the fence until the thing came down and kept on kicking. 

The vomiting got worse. Cathy became delirious with dehydration. She would cry and erupt from nightmares, weak and shivering. One night, sweating in the chair by the fire, she began to convulse. I felt her forehead and it was damp and cold. Her eyes were open but unreachable, like she was looking beyond me. “The hospital, now!” my father shouted and we lifted her between us. I lay with her in the back of the van as he raced through narrow bends and out onto the main stretch. Cathy was slipping in and out of sleep, waking for a moment only to drift away again. 

“I love you. I love you. I love you,” I said over and over again, as if an incantation.

The nurses took her straight away and my father detailed the entirety of it to them. I could feel them watching Cathy and I, but I didn’t dare lift my eyes from her. Not until she was taken away behind the double doors and we were told where to sit and wait. 

I’ll never understand exactly what happened, only that the doctor said there was too much vomiting and she had bled internally. That it was a common risk in first pregnancies, that it should have been dealt with sooner. Even still, it didn’t seem real when he said she didn’t make it, his hand heavy on my shoulder, squeezing.

We weren’t the next of kin and so we weren’t allowed to see her body. My father grew angry then, which is something in itself and I made matters worse by punching through a wall before being taken out of there. The knuckles of my right hand dripped blood onto the passenger seat of the van but neither of us cared. We drove, facing forward, quietly into the night. Our faces intermittently lit by passing headlights, until all became dark as we came up the laneway to the house and saw Murtagh’s gable glowing white in the distance. 

In the bedroom I saw her emerald resting on the side table and realised she had died without it. The next morning I took a length of string from the dresser and looped it around my neck. My father saw this but made no word of it. Moments later, I don’t know how long, he arrived with two mugs of tea and some toast. The tea went cold and neither of us ate. 

Cathy’s funeral was on a Saturday in December and there was no mention of me or our child. I sat three rows back from the front, in a hard wooden seat. Meanwhile, Murtagh was perched up top as if he hadn’t renounced the right to do so. It took all of me not to leap forward and murder the fucker there in the pews. My father kept grip of my arm, clasped tight for the full length of mass, like he knew I might pounce. 

Without enough men in her family to bear her, Cathy was wheeled from the altar on a cart. The rubber wheels squealed along the tiles. We followed the procession down the aisle of the church I should have married her in and I watched her coffin, and thought of the hell I would visit on Murtagh.

So I knock in on him daily. I say it’s to see if he needs anything, to help him with the house. I don’t know what people think, perhaps they believe we share memories of Cathy, that we reminisce. I don’t care what they think.

Yesterday I whitewashed the gable wall for him again as he circled me, with a smouldering ash branch in one hand and a school bell in the other. Still convinced of his enchantments.

“Away. Away. Away!” he shouted with each ring of the bell, conducting some sort of ritual cleansing. 

“No more blood!” he screamed. 

Today he is pointing furiously at the gable wall again. I watch him now as he swallows half of the naggin without stopping for air and I see it wash through him. The urge to set light to his house rises in me. I want to strap him to a kitchen chair, tie him down and have him burn there, to melt the flesh from his guilty bones. I want to ruin him. 

“The blood is back,” he croaks, arms out in desperation. 

I drop his messages by the backdoor and I smile. And it rises in me again, that wickedness I can’t shake. It takes flight and begins to roar. 

The weight of the emerald hangs around my neck and I want to tell him that it’s me who paints the gable wall red each night. That I hide the paint in the ditch beyond the yard and use a roller to make quick work of it. But I won’t tell him yet. 

I walk to the shed and pick up the brushes and the whitewash and I drag the stepladder along the gravel to the gable. I watch him get his bell and set his wood alight, and I start to cover over the red with the white, my daily undoing.

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