Jack
GRIPPING MY PINT, I SIT all on my own at the big table in Doyle’s.
A ceaseless rain falls, and with each minute, the pub grows dimmer.
The radio catches a broadcast before losing signal again.
I pretend not to notice it playing ‘I Feel Fine’, coming in and out and in.
All on my own. This evening, I fear things have reached a breaking point. I have reached a breaking point.
No sign of any customers calling in. No sign of Teresa, either.
Maybe she knew the bad weather would put people off and so she decided to stay upstairs.
Maybe she knew I would be in another haunted mood, and she has run out of the patience she thought she had for me.
She could be out in town. She could be upstairs, wandering right above my head, keeping her distance from me. And this evening, I need her.
She will be along soon, I hope, and she will turn off the radio and put on a record. She will light the room up and make the rain stop, and make me feel better. She won’t mind that I’ve let myself in to drink, not to work. She will still like me.
Ger is outside the back, cutting wood in the shed. I know by the metronome of his falling axe. I suppose if I was any sort of man, I’d go out and give him a hand. The sort of man that Teresa thinks I am. That you thought I was.
For an empty pub, the air is awfully close.
I feel the collar of my shirt tightening, choking me.
Sharp and sudden, I stand up. So sharp and sudden, I startle myself, and I sit back down again, where the thick air and shirt collar come back around me, and I stand up once more.
Heaven forbid Teresa was to come in now and find me this way.
Rising and falling to the rhythm of her father’s axe.
Right. Stop it now. Stand still a minute, Jacky.
And then the door opens. The lights come on. And she is here. Just as I first saw her, coming in from the rain. Green dress, close to her body, hair pulled into a ponytail.
‘Only me!’
She looks at me for a long moment. And I look back at her, waiting for whatever she will do next. Then, catching herself staring, she does as I had hoped: turns off the radio and chooses a record.
‘Not a sinner here, on a rainy evening like this! Isn’t that strange? Sure what else have people to be doing?’
She asks, flipping through the records.
‘What is it you’re up to?’
She glances over her shoulder, and I feel I’ve been caught dossing.
But she said it herself, there isn’t a sinner here.
What else is a man to do in the pub all on his own?
I hold my glass up to her. She rolls her eyes as she turns back to the record player.
It’s all too much. Lately, especially with Teresa, I’ve found myself experiencing the thoughts and feelings of a hundred men at once.
‘Anything but The Beatles, Teresa. I can’t hear any more of them eejits.’
She pauses for a moment, and goes back to her selection. I don’t have the energy to consider whether I was rude.
If I could only find a way to tell her that there are feelings from last year that I haven’t touched.
And everything that I’ve felt since then has just been piling up.
All these emotions, building to the point where they are beginning to reach my throat.
That I fear if I don’t start to let them out, they will suffocate me.
And that each moment with her only adds to the pile.
She puts on Roy Orbison. I don’t know why, but it’s the last thing I was expecting. Just as she sits down at the table with me, I move closer to the window. She’s looking down at her hands, it’s clear she thinks I’m moving away from her. I don’t know if I am.
She takes a deep breath and smiles at me again, and I want so much to smile back at her. But I fear that if I move my mouth, it will tremble and I will tumble into tears. I fear that if I open it to speak, I wouldn’t make a sound.
‘Are you alright?’
I’m not alright. Not even nearly. It would appear that I have reached the end of my rope. It’s hard to find the right words to cut me open and let all the dark drain out of me.
‘Grand, girl. I’m grand.’
I wish Teresa would say there is a curse on Doyle’s that brings out the worst parts of a man’s mind and forces him to confront them. The sort of thing my mother would once have said.
But the trouble is, all of this has been before me, ready to be confronted, long before I ever stepped foot in Doyle’s.
The trouble is, I have awareness. That’s the real trouble.
I would give everything to be the sort of man who can tackle his problems head on.
Rather, I am the type of man – that most men are – who knows all of his problems are about to surface, and yet refuses to surface with them.
Why should I be burdened with all of these bulky feelings and not be shown a way to deal with them?
She sighs. She reaches for my hands, but stops herself, unsure of where she stands. How I am tormenting this poor girl.
She gets up to pour us both a drink. As she moves, I take in the smell of her soap. Her patience has not run out. For the first time in a very long time, that I have found somebody who I could trust with my fragilities.
If she would just start with a few of her own problems, to get things going. The cost of nylons, and Mary losing the lipstick she stole from the dresser. The absence of her father, always choosing the pub over the home. The death of her mother. Her unspoken longing for me.
That soap. The sheen of the nylons. I wonder would Teresa handle me well.
Just as I let myself drift into the smell of her, I am reminded of the smell of you. Of your perfume, your living room, your jam cooking on the stove.
There was a time when I would have died for a catch of your scent in the air.
Now, I feel the scent of you is smothering, and I can’t get out from under it.
I can’t get out from under you. Teresa sets two wet glasses of Jameson on the table.
The sky outside is lowering and the rain picks up.
I feel the oxygen is being squeezed out of the town.
Soon, there will be nothing left to breathe but the smell of you.
Sweet suffocation. I fear I will never fully enjoy Teresa.
I don’t think I will ever fully enjoy anything ever again unless I knock it all out of my way.
Darling, please, let me knock you clean out of my way, so that I might move forward with my life.
‘There’s things I never told you, Teresa, about my life before I knew you.’
It looked like an accident, so we treated it like an accident. That’s what I want to tell her.
Come on now, Jacky, let’s admit it. That was no accident. Denial has never brought me an ounce of peace. It hasn’t protected me, and it hasn’t brought you back. All it does is accelerate this cycle of sadness that I can’t get out of.
Okay. Deep breath. Go for it, boy.
‘I had a girl at home. In Kilmarra, not Miltown. I never heard of Miltown before Tom started saying that’s where we came from.’
She looks confused, but she’s listening. And I think I need to speak to both of you now.
‘Lillian Kealey was her name. I had asked her to marry me.’
Teresa’s face falls, but she tries to keep it up. As though this doesn’t bother her. As though she isn’t disappointed.
‘Are you going to marry her?’
She asks. And I have to heave to get a breath into me. I shake my head.
‘She died.’
Her mouth falls open.
I’d like to tell her it’s fine, and that you’re in heaven, and that I’ve made my peace with it.
But I can’t truthfully say that I believe in heaven, or that god that’s running it.
I can’t bring myself to believe that there is anything but the brief time that we are alive, and the eternity where we are not.
I never questioned any of it until you died. But now that I’ve woken up from the numbness of the last year, I realise that god isn’t available to take issue with. And so I can’t comfortably blame anything on him. And so I have to face the reality of everything. This troubles me deeply.
What a strange thing it is, to be questioning heaven, when I’ve known it.
Heaven was the pink of your best dress, and your knuckles on my door.
Heaven was butter melting into bread made by your hands and laughter from your mouth.
I knew Heaven every day, every time you looked at me.
Maybe we don’t go there when we die, maybe we live there while we are alive.
I stammer my way through what I’ve started saying to Teresa.
‘I never faced it, you know? When she died, I never processed it. It’s always been too awful to think of.’
As suddenly as I felt nothing on the drive into Ballycrea, tonight I feel distraught, enraged, lightning cracking within me and no god to point it at.
I’m hit with the realisation that my life was ruined, and I never got an apology.
It looked like an accident, so it was treated like an accident.
Maybe the reason I’ve never been able to move forward is that I’ve been trying to grieve an accident, when I know it all happened on purpose.
‘When I met you, I realised I can’t ignore it anymore.’
I take her hands, hoping that she is still with me.
‘I want to move forward with you, Teresa, but a lot of me is still in the past. With her.’
It might have been fine to go on ignoring things.
I might have gotten away with it for years, for the rest of my life.
But the inconvenient loveliness of Teresa has awakened something in me.
I am reminded of what it is to be wanted, and to want another person.
I am reminded of my body, of my heart and what it once meant to me to be a person.
She looks at me, eyes wide, with bated breath. How long will she wait?
‘What happened to her?’
Let’s stop pretending it was predestination. It wasn’t an accident, or a divine plan acted through her. It was something she decided to do all by herself.
‘It was all covered up, you know? Made to look like an accident.’
As easy as breathing. Easy as loving you. As easy as comparing all the rest of the world to you. Those narrow little stairs. The stone slabbed floor that I wince to think about. No, it was no accident, was it, dear? I’ll say it if you will, Lillian.
‘She was pushed down the stairs.’
Teresa gasps, puts her hand to her mouth. And then blesses herself and swallows her drink. We are quiet for a minute, and then, just as I think she is going to get up and leave, she squeezes my hand.
‘What happened? Who pushed her?’
For many nights afterwards, I heard Tom talking things through with Anna while they thought I was asleep.
Piecing it all together, writing the story.
Walking through the whole thing without me.
As though it had nothing to do with me. As though you weren’t my girl, just somebody I knew in passing.
An accident, that’s always been the official line.
That you slipped and fell. Sure it was easy enough to come up with. But I know that isn’t true.
‘I only know what I was told.’
‘What were you told?’
‘That it was Anna.’
Teresa is shocked. Of course she is.
‘Jealousy, I think it was. That’s what I was told anyway.’
She sits back in her chair, and probably won’t even hear the rest of what I have to say.
‘The guards believed it was an accident. The coroner didn’t.’
That’s the only reason that Tom told me what Anna had done.
The coroner insisted it was foul play, and I suppose Tom knew that it might end up in court.
He said it wouldn’t be fair to your father or your sisters, to drag them through all that.
He was keen to protect Anna. To eliminate any chance of questioning.
He only told me what she did so I wouldn’t push for an investigation.
‘The whole thing was handled all wrong. The guards in Kilmarra weren’t trained for that sort of thing.’
They moved you before anybody official had come to have a look at you. In the end, it was easy enough for Tom to convince everyone it was an accident. The whole thing got thrown out. Nobody even looked at Anna.
I have chosen to believe that it really was an accident. And although there are times that it builds up within me near the point of violence, her involvement is something that I try to keep in my back pocket. Unsaid, unacknowledged.
‘Everything happened very fast. I think I was in shock until after the funeral.’
Tom insists that we have to look after Anna, that she’s fragile.
When I was waist-deep in grief, I agreed without even considering it.
But it doesn’t make sense anymore; my life revolving around her, submitting to her.
You know, I would walk out on her in the morning.
Let Tom look after her. I would take Peggy and never come back, if I only had the means to do it.
Money, and a house, and all of the other things a child needs.
All of the love I have for Peggy has trapped me at home, with Anna.
I always thought that facing this would break my heart beyond repair. But now I’ve faced it, and my heart isn’t broken at all. And I’m not sure what to do with that.
‘Oh, Jack.’
Teresa says, and for a second I see her hesitating, perhaps even afraid. But she moves closer.
I always hoped that admitting this would set me free.
But now I’ve admitted it, and I’m not free.
Now, I’m a man without his woman or his god or his sister.
I wish I could take it all back. I wish that I could believe in Anna’s innocence, in Tom’s good intentions, in heaven and the soul; because if anyone ever had a soul, and if anyone ever deserved salvation, it’s you, Lillian.
There is a hesitation between us. Teresa wants to kiss me, but isn’t sure if she can. Somehow, I want to do the same. She leans her forehead on mine. A moment of stillness.
The telephone shrieks, and she gets up to answer it.