A Pagan Place Read online

  Consternation had brought colour to your cheeks. Inside there was only the bed to sit on. You had to sidestep because of the narrow space between the bed and the table which was stationary. He found some spirits. It was the dregs from two bottles and not worth pouring into a glass. He gave you a choice. You wanted neither. He got the very last drop by putting his tongue inside the bottle. The tip of his tongue was very pointed. His arm came around you and sometimes it lolled and sometimes it was on your throat, tapping it. You wondered if he played the chapel organ. You could see yourself in the buckle of his belt, distorted and gulping, but nevertheless you.

  When he went outside to throw the anchor the boat made a scraping sound as he hauled it onto a tiny incline of beach. You looked through the porthole and saw an expanse of stones that were startlingly white. There was something unreal about them as if they had just been showered from heaven. He said he hoped there were no submarines around. He began to undo your buttons. They slipped open. The buttonholes were for a bigger type of button altogether. He spread the dress at either side as your mother might. He lay on you but supported his weight on his elbow. He began jogging up and down. It was like being on a cart at night, being party to nice slow movements and with your eyes closed at that. You were not afraid. It was an honour. You thought of him in his gold vestments and him in his cassock going through the village concealed from the raving of the swooning woman.

  He was more serious than when with your mother and father. You brought out the seriousness in him. That was your drawback. He said it was a moment snatched from all the other moments. He felt your flesh, pressed parts of it, like a doctor who was looking for different responses in you. Your movements got very co-ordinated. You moved together. You were like people dancing only that you were lying for it, supine. He said he could go through you like butter. He put his finger under the leg of your knickers and sought you out and said what kind and what cushy you were and you were moving up and down as if on a seesaw and his finger was not an enemy, not then.

  When he opened his belt and you heard it clang on the table, you strained to sit up and you tried to impede him from opening his buttons because it was nakedness that you feared above all. And you gripped his wrist and he gripped yours and each other’s wrists were locked and he was saying no and you were saying no but you were at cross-purposes. Never had the corneas of eyes bulged so. He opened his buttons, wrenched them open and presented himself and said to touch it. It was grotesque. The flesh all around it pained and raw. He said to touch it. You touched it on the snout. Your touch was fearful. You begged him to stop. You expelled his finger. He tried to part your knees, to prise them open, said it would be lonely for him, it would be unfriendly but you were petrified and you would not yield.

  He caught hold of himself and preened and elongated it and squashed it and treated it like it was dough. Never were you more incongruous, never were you more unnecessary. He caught hold of your knee and ground his face in it and swung out of himself and swore to his Maker that he was doing a heinous and a hideous thing and he strained and he writhed and he imprecated, and begged for it to be over, for his joy and his agony to end. While he yelled a great gout of stuff shot out and there was a ridiculously short span between the first cry that was pleasure and the last that was one of shame.

  It looked like hair-oil, all over you both, but it did not have a cosmetic smell. The smell got in the back of your throat as if you had drank it which you hadn’t. He did not look at you, he lay doubled over and said that God forgave everything and washed everything and made everyone spotless again. It sounded like a snowfall, snow over the land and a mantle over the shoulders of the people.

  You cried. He cried. But separate. He wiped your legs with his handkerchief.

  He stood up and retrieved his trousers and tied his belt snappily. He did his hair both with the flat of his hand and a small black comb. You wanted to stay longer, undo the harm.

  You said you would write to him. He flinched but without knowing it. You could not have said a worse thing. It was over-sweet. It was like the flowers between the pages of a book, destined for putrid. He stood in the water and towed the boat out to where the level was deep enough. The blood rushed to his cheeks.

  You offered to help but he declined that. A tuft of his hair and the smoke from his cigarette ribboned in one direction. A wind had risen. You would have liked a storm.

  You tapped lightly on the open door so as not to give her a fright. Your father’s boots were missing and you were glad that he was not there to cross-examine you. You had a lot of bluffing prepared. She was drawing a chicken. She went on with her task. The kitchen was flooded with sunshine. She had already plucked it and the wet feathers were in a pile on the table. You could tell that something was wrong by the tone of her Good evening. It was astringent. She took out the heart, the gizzard, the miserable little liver and the two uneven-sized kidneys. Those bits that were useless she put on the same pile as the feathers but the giblets she put in a saucepan for making soup.

  She said And did you have a nice time. You said Lovely. She said so you had made your debut. You curtsied, you laughed. She said how dare you be so brazen about it. You said what.

  She looked at you and said What indeed! She said it was the most unkindest cut of all. She was like someone on the brink of a seizure. She was purple.

  You backed away from her in case she should smell you, or smell him through your body. You put your thighs together, folded them like hands. They smacked.

  She said to account for yourself from the time when they so fondly left you. You went into a dissertation about the monkey-puzzle trees, Hilda’s headache, the flavour of the scones and the way he dictated his own dreams. You embellished it. She said that was a grave falsification of the truth. You began to gabble. You contradicted yourself. You were a goner.

  She said to continue. You said there was nothing you had left out. She said it was easily known that the hire car and the two-tone shoes were indicative. The craw that she had been pulling at, burst. The brown tobacco-like content spilt all over the inside wall of the chicken. That was fatal, impaired the flavour, for ever.

  She ran to the tap to rinse it, then abandoned it and left the tap running and shot back so that she could proceed. She said you went to a certain house for tea and behaved like lovers. She said it had been disclosed to her that your eyes met more than once.

  So Hilda was the informer. Hilda had telephoned them. And hell hath no music like a woman playing second fiddle.

  You didn’t know but that she had had you traced. You denied that anything untoward happened. She said with what alacrity you defended yourself.

  When your father came in she threw you into the arena. She said how you had turned on her like a tinker. First he started to shake you, then he began to clout you. You ran behind her, begged of her to shield you but she said you had made your adulterous bed and you could lie on it now.

  He took the ruler from your satchel and gave you a few preliminary strokes. You ran into the hall and he followed, his boot in the divide of your bottom. You ran up the stairs to the first room. Your intention was to get in there and close the door and stay there indefinitely, the way people did in walled cities during a siege. He flung it open and ordering you on to the iron bed, he raised your clothes so that they were bunched over the top half of your body, nearly engulfing you. He dragged your knickers down and you thought for certain he would see it, the smear. You sealed your legs and tightened your body and you were as tight and as taut as a bowstring. Because of that the blows reached home.

  He kept murmuring to himself, saying what he wouldn’t do to you would not be worth doing. The slaps resounded all over the house. Each slap was followed by her plea from the landing that that was enough. She did not come to behold.

  You closed your eyes so that less could penetrate. You counted, to give yourself occupation. You timed them. There were more pauses than strokes. It may have been that he changed the ruler from on
e hand to the other or had to keep pushing his sleeve up. Each onslaught was a surprise because he got more impassioned as he went on. The flap between your legs began to hoise up and down and you encouraged that and the pleasure that you forsook when you expelled the priest’s finger began again, and the tumult that should have been his to witness took place unbeknownst to him on that rattly bed while other parts of you smarted and cried.

  It was after he had gone that your body began to make its grievances known. There were two different hurts, the one on the very surface of your skin like a scald and the other in the very interior where your marrow and your predilections lay. Parts of you shook for no reason at all. You had the rigours. With your eyes closed you saw the approach of dark. The dark got in in the juncture between your lids.

  The room was not wholly quiet, the bits of furniture, the wooden curtain rings and the curtains themselves all stirred, maybe conferring with each other. There was tea being made. They were talking amicably. They were collaborators.

  You set about calming yourself as if you were an outsider who had witnessed what had happened. The pains you visualized as black and blue, shapes you gave them, and little tunes. You got the pillow out. The bedspread was clammy but the pillow was cold. You pressed your forehead on it. You kissed it. It was edged with lace. It smelt of starch. You were not afraid to be alone in that room. That was how you knew something had changed. You prayed to God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

  You pictured them going to his house, battering on the door, his being de-frocked, his being banished to a monastery for all time, his Holy Orders taken away. You sent messages to him to disappear. You sent them in the form of a prayer. You addressed him in the vocative case. You said Oh Father Declan, go this night before they waylay you. You thought of different ways of reaching him, all dramatic, all foolish, all involving the use of the supernatural which you did not have. You begged your guardian angel to tip off his guardian angel. The moment their conversation stopped you listened in case it was crucial, in case it meant the execution of plans.

  On your back and bottom the lumps began to rise. Some were nodules and some had silken skins where they had already decided to be blisters. When she brought you refreshments she brought you no candle. She opened the door slowly to announce herself. She let it creak. She left the cup and plate on the floor beside the bed. There was no bedside table. It was an unused room, a boxroom. You made no gesture to thank her.

  That night they journeyed back and forth and hither and thither, to the lavatory, both for natural causes, and to examine the cistern, to make sure that the ballcock was in its rightful place and that valuable water was not leaking away; they conferred with each other about closing windows and closing the hall door although normally on summer nights it was left open to ventilate the place.

  You held fast. You did not rise to any of that bait. Even when she undressed you you pretended to be asleep and made the sounds of unwillingness that a sleeper would have made.

  She put vaseline on you. You could sense her dismay by the way she gasped when she trained the candle. Your body, like your brain, was crammed with incidents. It had to its credit a seduction and flaying in one day.

  It had no proven memory of when it was born, it had only plenty of hearsay, her enema beforehand, the scabrous shaving, the semi-raw goose and the way they sang Red River Valley. It had all the years of fondlings, and strokings, from him, from her, cramps after the Saturday morning senna, your first sanitary towel, the way she engirdled you each night, the saddles of various bicycles, and capsizements on icy roads on winter mornings. You had never used a loofah but it was something you had an ambition to do. She kissed you on your back.

  One of the girls who was down in the closets ran back and said she saw the priest go away. The closets had half doors like stable doors and gave the sitter a capital view of the world. She said his mother and father were with him and that his luggage was strapped on, on top of the car. That was how it was clear that he was gone for good.

  There was general dismay, even the teacher was upset because he was supposed to have adjudicated a concert. Jewel’s sister bragged about how he had visited them, how he had taken flash photographs, in their sitting room.

  You held your tongue. You were like Emma, with a secret sewn into you. You were not going to dwell on it, not even to yourself, you were not going to reinvoke it, go back and forth over it, picking out the pleasure bits, the peaks. It was a bud that got nipped in the bud for sure. You were both like characters at opposite sides of the Hellespont.

  They made no comment about his going away but you knew they knew because your mother said that the ladies might stop pluming themselves and be clad for Mass demurely. Your father asked you to convey him over the fields. He bought special Pentecost water to sprinkle on a yearling. Her skin was like suede, like a doe’s and she was roan in colour, a roan filly who was cutting milk teeth. Her lineage was in a stud-book and he worshipped her. He admitted that he was hot tempered but said he meant no harm, that it was for your benefit and was to instil into you good conduct. He said one prodigal in any family was enough. Maybe you had wanted to compete with Emma in iniquity.

  The marks made different headway. Some began to vanish. You put puce pencil around them to chart where they had been. At school they thought it was eczema because that’s what you told them. It was known that it ran in your family. Scabs fell off.

  The thing you had to be was fervent and more fervent and most fervent. You gargled with salt and water. You used lukewarm water because it tasted vile. You endeavoured to be sick then. You couldn’t put your finger down your neck but you could put a goose-quill down there, and you did, and after you had been sick you covered it with leaves. It took time for your stomach to settle before you could eat a piece of cake and begin the penance again. You meant to put wire in your throat, the way she poked wire down young chickens when things got in their wind pipe but you failed to achieve that. Another terrible flavour was sulphur and you ate it dry and it got behind your nose and throat and nearly suffocated you. But the moment you heard from Lizzie that it was good for the complexion you gave it up because that was a vanity and so was putting curlers in your hair or papers, to make ringlets. Lizzie was friendlier to you, gave you a piece of advice, said never to eat mackerel because mackerel were a very dirty fish and ate mice. She said to you that she had knitted a few matinée coats in case the baby needed them. You said it didn’t. You told her it was taken care of. She said Ssh . . . and put her fingers to her lips though there was no one listening.

  Later they invited you to sit by them, to sit, in the gloaming, to see the long dull day out. You never refused, you just never sat with them. That was your resistance.

  You raged against captivity. You declaimed Robert Emmet’s epitaph. You stamped and recited verses in a paddock. You scanned lines, then separated the dactyls, the diphthongs, the similes, the puns. You put them in little compartments, were as methodical about it as if you were a cashier in a bank sorting money.

  You consulted creatures as to what you should do, asked frogs their opinion. Frogs had learnt the knack of being stealthy. Frogs had very good camouflage, were the colour of surroundings, a greeny brown. You skipped, enumerating all the possible professions, although at heart you wanted to be a domestic economy instructress. You no longer skipped to see if you would marry a man called John. You grew an inch. There were ridges on your summer dresses where she had to let them down. Ridges that did not wash out and could not be totally ironed out. She had an idea about getting a knitting machine so that you could knit socks for people but immediately she abandoned that because none of you had business acumen.

  Emma wrote and said there was no scope for you in the city, suggested a correspondence course. He was optimistic. He said something would turn up. The creamery manager said you could go there and train to be a butter-maker but your mother said that was too agricultural and that you were not strapping enough.

  You were
sent to the Nigger’s with some dinner. Your mother took pity on him because he had lumbago for weeks and couldn’t stir. She covered the plate with one that was exactly the comrade of it, to ensure that the food kept hot. When you got there he was up and frying something on the primus stove. He was talking. He was coaxing someone, a girl. He was coaxing her to eat. First he whispered. Then his voice gathered momentum. He said Come on now girl, eat up, good for you, peg away girl, sample the gravy, two fat sausages frying upon the pan, one for Michael Flannery and the other for Bridget Ann, Bridget Ann you’re so excited you’ll soon eat up the plate, Ah, bad luck to me, ah Michael, there isn’t half enough to ate. You thought how you’d tell at home that he had a girl, called Bridget Ann and you peeped through the window before knocking, to get a glimpse at her. There was no one there at all only the Nigger himself and his belongings and the tossed bed. You couldn’t fathom it. So you just dumped the dinner and ran off. Your mother scolded you because you didn’t wait for the matching plates, said that would be the last she’d see of them. Michael Flannery was the Nigger’s real name and he must have written that poem for himself. You mused over it.

  You made yourself at home on the branch of a tree. That was your broomstick. You kept one of her best cushions here. It got matted from the rain. You went flying it. The dogs presided at your feet which meant the cows couldn’t. The dogs took the opportunity to lick themselves, to scrutinize themselves for ticks and fleas and stand on their hind legs and proposition each other.

  There was an overall smell but you could separate them out the way a prism separated light. There was a smell of bark, of green branches, of nettles, of dung, of fresh earth, and stinking earth, of fungi and the Elder flower that grew profusely and was one of the chief components for the home-made wine.

  The fungi looked like fritters but were a poison. For what had nature made them, or for whom? You thought of Marie Antoinette and how she had to carry her own little phial of poison in case she was set upon by barbarians. Local people used Lysol.