Chapter 2
Chapter Two
I ’d had my breakfast, I’d done my morning routine – I’d made it down the stairs without thinking anything wildly inappropriate – and I was going to work early because Mrs O’Callaghan had called me in last minute.
But I didn’t mind. For someone like me, with OCD, O’Callaghan’s makes life easier. It is small but sells everything a person could ever need. There is even a sex section, hidden at the back, next to the wet wipes and tissues, for convenience I guess. Not that I needed it. I hadn’t slept with a man for nearly two years.
I’ve only ever seen Mr Keele linger there – his wife left him after she walked in on him having phone sex. He’d found a card in the phone box down the lane from us. I was convinced it belonged to Maggie Ryan, who is married, by the way, and lives in the village, because I recognised her handwriting from when she advertised her cleaning services on the shop noticeboard, back before she turned her hand to sex work.
I had locked the front door, yanked the handle three times because two means death and one isn’t a safe number. I had ticked off my list, and set off for work – on foot because it is only a stone’s throw from my house – though I had to turn around before I’d got down the path to the gate because I couldn’t get the thought of my hair straighteners burning a hole into my bedroom carpet out of my head.
I have thick, black, curls (and blue eyes – a true Irish woman , in the words of my grandmother) but I’ve always wanted my hair to be straight, like my best friend Una’s. I used to straighten it with my mum’s iron when I was younger because Una told me that was what she did. Only she forgot to tell me to put a piece of paper over my hair first, so I went to school looking like a bird’s nest, much to Una’s amusement.
I still got to the shop early – despite going back to check on the hair straighteners that were unplugged and cooling on my windowsill where I had left them – as I wanted to leave enough time to open up. Mrs O’Callaghan usually opens the shop as they only live upstairs, but Mr O’Callaghan was in hospital for a minor operation on his spleen so she had asked me to do it. She was just getting ready to leave as I arrived.
‘I’m sorry to call you in at such short notice, Pearl,’ Mrs O’Callaghan said as she picked up a carrier bag full of things for her husband. ‘You know how much I appreciate your help.’
‘I really don’t mind. Please give my love to Mr O’Callaghan.’ The moment I said his name, his wrinkly old penis popped into my head (Mr O’Callaghan is seventy by the way), but these are the sorts of intrusive thoughts I have. I’m not sure why I am so obsessed with penises, but I tried to push Mr O’Callaghan’s from my brain. ‘Tell him to get well soon.’
‘You’re a dear girl.’ She smiled as she pulled the door closed behind her, and then I heard the bell again as her head popped out from the side. ‘Niall will be in later, just to give you a hand.’ She winked and closed the door again before I could tell her I really didn’t need one.
Niall O’Callaghan is their only son. I think they thought they could marry us off and we’d take over the shop – when they were dead and buried – and have lots of babies to keep the O’Callaghan legacy going. I had tried to politely tell Mrs O’Callaghan that I didn’t want to do that with her son, but how do you tell your boss that the thought of having babies with her son makes you want to curl up and die? And I don’t know why it does that. There is nothing wrong with Niall really.
It isn’t that Niall is a bad-looking lad. He’s all right you know. It’s just that we have nothing in common – except perhaps that we are both an only child and as strange as each other – but I could never imagine kissing him or doing anything else with him for that matter, so how could I marry the guy and have his babies? It just isn’t going to happen.
The thing about Niall is that he is nice and quiet and polite and kind, but I find him a bit bland, really. Like, I just want to go up to him and shake some life into him, you know? Put a firework up his arse and give him a sparkler.
My mother would scorn me if she heard me talk like that about someone as nice as Niall because Niall is the sort of bloke who would put up with my ways .
Niall doesn’t live above the shop. He lives just down the road in a cottage with ivy green wooden windows that Una and I used to break into when we were younger. Not when Niall lived there, it was empty back then. There was no heating, just an old wood burner, and the entire downstairs had a black stone floor. There were only two bedrooms, well, one and a half because the second bedroom was a box room. But the amount of work it needed would have taken years to fix up and more money than I could ever earn at O’Callaghan’s.
I don’t actually know how Niall had bought the house in the first place because he doesn’t work at the shop full time, and I am pretty sure Mr and Mrs O’Callaghan hadn’t bought it for him. If it was mine, the first thing I’d change would be the windows – I would get rid of that depressing green and paint them ocean blue so that I could imagine living by the sea. I told Niall that once, but he’d said he’d paint the windows when the rest of the house was finished. I couldn’t be doing with that. I couldn’t be living in a house so green.
Niall walked in not long after Mrs O’Callaghan had gone and, if it wasn’t for the bell, I’d not have noticed him at all. I studied him for a moment, as he took off his coat and straightened his clothes. He had on mustard-brown corduroys, which made him appear older than he was – he is my age for Christ’s sake – and a brown woolly jumper, which was OK, I suppose, but still a bit beige. Niall is basically Mr O’Callaghan, but with hair. It is chestnut brown and as thick as mine.
Mr O’Callaghan’s penis entered my head again then, just as Niall made his way towards me, and I felt my cheeks stain beetroot at the thought of it in my hand. I didn’t want to wank Mr O’Callaghan off.
‘Trees, trees, trees,’ I muttered to myself, and though I don’t think he heard me, I can’t be sure.
‘Morning, Niall.’ I smiled as I lifted a delivery of Vaseline off the counter. ‘You know you didn’t have to come in, I would have been fine today.’
‘Thursdays are busy,’ he said.
‘Are they?’ I cast my eye around the empty shop.
‘Deliveries and stocktaking.’
‘I can do both.’
‘I don’t mind helping.’
‘Don’t you want to go and see your dad?’
I had always found Niall’s relationship with Mr O’Callaghan to be strange. They don’t really speak much, it's as if they are colleagues not father and son. I didn’t notice it so much when we were younger. Only that Mr O’Callaghan was strict on Niall but I’d assumed that was just his old school ways. I had asked Niall once if they’d fallen out but he’d brushed it off by changing the subject, which is what he always did when he didn’t want to talk about something.
But I suppose it had always been like that between them. Mr O’Callaghan isn’t particularly affectionate and when I think about it, he is the same with Mrs O’Callaghan too. I can’t imagine them having sex, although they must have done it, at least once, to have Niall.
He shrugged. ‘He’ll be home soon enough. Have you stocked the shelves?’
‘I was just about to make a start.’ I tapped the box under my hand.
‘Do you need some help?’
‘No, thank you, Niall I’ll be fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, thank you, Niall,’ I said curtly.
I knew why he had asked me. The last time I stacked the shelves after a delivery he had walked in right at the moment I was on my knees saying The Lord’s Prayer – doing the cross motion and everything – over and over again. I had no idea how long he had been watching me on my knees chanting Our Father, who art in heaven … on repeat, but it was one of those moments when the only thing I could do was pretend it hadn’t happened.
He hadn’t said anything to me, either; he never once asked me what I was doing, or why. But I could see in his green eyes that he thought I was totally crazy. And he was probably right. I probably am.
I’ve never been religious, even though we went to the village church when we were younger. I hated Sunday school – why would anyone want to go to school on a Sunday? I loathed it, especially when Father Michael used to make me say The Lord’s Prayer twice – once when I arrived and once when I left. It seemed silly to ask the Lord to forgive me my trespasses when I’d never bloody trespassed (apart from Niall’s house when it was empty, but that didn’t count).
The thing is, I had to say it all without having an intrusive thought, which was impossible when I constantly had intrusive thoughts. And they aren’t all sexual. Sometimes it will just be a number I don’t like or a shape or colour that represents something bad – like black triangles, for some reason they mean death. Don’t ask me why. I don’t have anything against triangles personally and I don’t mind the colour black.
My OCD stretches far and wide. I can’t shut my gate for example, without checking that I haven’t squashed the woodlice that gather between the latch and the catch they sit in. And I have to count them too. (There are always twelve). Every night I use my phone light to brush them off before I can close it. It doesn’t make a difference that I probably squash a hundred of them when I walk from my house to the gate.
I can’t sit on public toilets seats and if I have to – like if I need a poo – I have to put toilet paper around the entire seat, flush it with my foot (another reason for spraying my shoes) and open the handle with my elbow going in and a sheet of loo roll coming out. If any bit of my clothes touches anything in there, they go straight into the wash when I get home, and I go straight into the shower.
The other stuff is harder to hide. The intrusive thoughts and compulsive urges. I have to be really careful no one sees me doing that stuff.
But how do you hide the fact you’re kissing a tree in a park full of kids because if you don’t then one of them will fall into the river? How do you explain something like that to a mum that’s just walked by and seen you do it?
I don’t know where my fear of dying comes from, or my fear of intrusive thoughts, or my fear of penises or why I can’t just allow myself to think and feel it all and carry on. Or why my life has to go on hold until I grasp control of it by counting or washing or visualising trees or rafts and rivers.
I made my way to the back of the shop in the hope that Niall wouldn’t follow me. I’d already decided I would move the Vaseline down a shelf so I didn’t have to help Mr Keele reach it – and after that I’d check every shelf to make sure all the products were faced forwards and tidy. It was the perfect job for me really. Left alone to put everything in its place, I would end my shift feeling like I’d had a therapy session.
Like I didn’t really need Mairéad at all.