The Ballad of Mo and G (5 page)

Mo told me of her ordeal in the Den
. In the way you might tell a scary ghost story on the night of a power failure by a flickering candle.

Butterflies with razor blades for wings flew round my stomach as she spoke.

If she broke down and told him I was there when the Papi was slaughtered, Dermo would have tracked me down.

We planned her escape and hiding. Maureen, unwittingly, set us up for a meeting.

Maureen, who was hoping Mo would never leave,
organised
it with Dermo that Mo's college friend could call. Me that is.

‘They were only butties,' Maureen told Dermo, and I was ‘only a small, little country lad who might talk a bit of sense into her. He's a friend only and he might be a small bit gay.'

There could be no jealousy of someone as small as me. Or as gay as me, even though I wasn't in any way gay. Not that there's anything wrong with being gay, just for the record.

Eventually he gave in.

Dermo was at home in his mother's house, where he was now living after a truce brokered by Maureen. He must have been watching out for me all day.

Grey ran up to the door of the car. He licked my shoes. I was afraid he would bite me.

Dermo was laughing.

‘Don't worry, Runt, he won't ate you. There's not enough flesh on you. He must like polish. Why did you polish your tiny shoes anways? Sure they'll only get dirty again. Are you tryin' to ride the wife by any chance? Is that it? Dat why you're all dressed up?'

Dermo went down on his knees and smelled my toes. ‘I'm on my way. That polish has me buzzin.'

He stood up. Sniffed me all over like a dog.

‘Oh you smell like a chemist shop. Fucking hate pillow biters. You wanna dem lads? Ha? Ya?'

He caught my head in a vice grip, as in the TV wrestling.

‘Smell that. That's a real man.' I was suffocating. The sweat was sickening. Luckily I was so nervous I didn't eat before the visit.

Dermo grabbed my hand and walked me to the door as if he was bringing a child to school. It was humiliating. He squeezed so tight the tips of my fingers turned white as a dead man's.

White as my dad's in the coffin.

I needed my Dad. What am I doing here, Dad? In the middle of all this shit. How did I ever get into this?

I prayed to my father.

‘What's in the bag, Runt?' Dermo asked.

We were on the porch by then. He was still squeezing my hand. I didn't tell him stop. Mo came out.

‘Let go,' ordered Mo.

Dermo squeezed even harder. I went on my knees with the pain. I have small hands. My mother wanted me to become a vet.

‘Let him go. And call off the dogs. Now.'

Whatever it was she did to him in the Den was still working in some part. Or maybe he was trying to get back in with Mo and beating me up definitely wouldn't help.

Dermo went away somewhere in a big old Mercedes.

Mo showed me into the house.

She rubbed my sore hand gently. Already there was red bruising. The hot tea she made helped and the warm cup brought the colour back to my crushed fingers.

I brought Mo a laptop and an iPhone.

She cried and I was sort of glad there was no ‘ah you shouldn't have' or ‘I can't possibly'.

‘Thank you so much, G. This is freedom.'

‘It brought down governments.'

When Mo moved in, the Olsen house smelled of
dried-out
wet dogs and syphilitic cats.

Mo scrubbed and cleaned until her hands went raw and numb.

There were fresh flowers in every room and eventually Maureen persuaded Dermo not to bring the dogs into the house.

Mo never had any money of her own to do it up. But it was very clean and had Mo touches everywhere. There were bookshelves with books on them and nice matching prints of happy kids shovelling sand on a sunny beach.

Mo spread out the drawings she'd made of her dream kitchen.

‘There will be an island in the middle and the paint will be warm like a kitchen should with a big table and eight chairs, so all the family could sit around and talk.'

‘Eight? Wow!'

She laughed.

‘Yeah, G, eight ‒ six children plus two parents. I was
always
on my own. A latchkey kid. Like in the song ‘Nobody's Child'.' I started to sing the first verse of the maudlin ballad. Dad used to sing it for laughs in the pub, just to get the oul wans bawling.

‘No, G don't, it makes me too sad.'

Mo stapled pictures from magazines onto the kitchen design sheets. There were kids everywhere and rocking horses, baby chairs and toys scattered all over. Some of the mag pages were old and faded. One was dated ten years ago and I asked Mo if she thought six kids was enough.

Mo laughed. ‘Stop, G, I'm serious. Six children would be just right and we could spread them out so there would always be a baby in the house and all the older kids could look after the younger ones and learn parenting skills.'

Dermo bought a stolen to-order flat-pack kitchen for a grand and a mate of his, who learned carpentry in prison, installed it for two hundred euro, while Mo looked on helplessly at the botch job. Maureen had the taste of a whorehouse decorator. The sofas were mock leopard skin, matched with orange curtains and wall prints of motorbikes and
The Last Supper
in cheap plastic frames.

‘I want teak and granite,' she said. ‘Something that will last forever. Like my marriage. The next one. Obviously.

‘I'd love an Aga. I would keep that stove so clean and shiny and bake my own soda bread. And I would leave the windows open so the kids could run in from the garden when they got the smell of a freshly baked loaf and I would give them a slice and the butter would melt on it making it extra delicious. Oh yeah and G, the garden would have trees and a swing. But the kitchen is the centre of the home. There would be an old style country dresser with blue and white delf in every press and we'd keep a special set for Sundays and visitors. And a comfy sofa with room for everyone to snuggle up under a blankie on cold winter nights. And teddies everywhere. For hugging and comforting and not just looking at. And a man who will love me even when I'm doing stuff I shouldn't and forgive me after, without going on too much about it.'

I was going to say her dream home was close to mine, but I didn't. And that I was that man who could make her happy, but I didn't say that either.

Mo made a broccoli bake and garlic bread. After we had coffee and homemade apple crumble with whipped cream. I thought it was a really good dinner from a woman who never had a proper mother.

She told me the flat that I helped arrange for her was still there. Social services held it over but only for another week or so.

I had to get her out. Somewhere in the background was the thought that there was no escaping from him. But if it was dangerous to leave, it was even more dangerous to stay. The only long-term solution was to get Dermo locked up.

‘Have you ever thought about going to a solicitor? Dermo will have to pay alimony. The cops will send him
away for years after what he did to you.'

Mo turned away as she walked back into the kitchen with the dishes.

‘I know, but I have stuff to do. And some day he will get out. If I did shake him down, he would just kill me or have me killed. He knows people who do hits for a few grand.'

I followed her in with the plates.

‘What stuff have you to do?' I asked.

‘There's Maureen. I like her. Love her.'

Maureen made the truce, but Dermo was only a door away. He promised never again to touch her but he hadn't kept his promises up to this.

‘But you can't stay just because of her. Dermo will go back to his old ways soon. The fear of being killed will wear off, the longer he stays alive. You don't believe in that wishing by killing crap anyway? Do you, Mo?'

Dermo sent a new dishwasher by way of reparation. Mo filled the dishwasher as she spoke. She accepted the peace offering because the dishwasher was the only part of her life ‘where everything has its own place.'

‘The knives went into the knife section and the big plates slid into spaces like the ones they park bikes in at school. The cups and mugs were suspended on spikes. And at the end of it all, the cups and the knives and the plates were clean and ready to be put back in the drawer. So there.'

Dermo saw what had happened as just one of those little marital tiffs, like in his own home life as a kid, and he promised Mo a tumble drier as soon as one fell off the back of a lorry.

‘Come on, Mo, surely you know the wish-killing is just nuts.'

‘Not really. Well maybe just a bit. I don't know. It's the same as not believing in ghosts but being afraid to sleep in a haunted house. If you know what I mean?'

Then she showed me a torn-out newspaper piece.
The Law of the Wish
was at number 1.

We talked. Mo told of the night her mother came home drunk with a friend and the light bulb swayed in Mo's bedroom. The force of the sex sent the headboard of her mother's bed banging against the walls. I was honoured she told me such a personal thing. I could see Mo never had any grace in her life and she was trying to talk out the bad memories to make room for new ones. Happy ones. I never loved anyone as much ever. I wanted to make her dreams come true.

I told her about Dad's singing fish, which beat the shit out of
The Law of the Wish
.

His name was Big Mouth Billy Bass. The fish was real looking, well to a kid anyway. Billy twisted in time with the music and his mouth opened wide into a perfect O as he sang slow and hoarse.

You could sum up all the self-help books in the world with the song Billy sang – ‘Don't Worry Be Happy'.

‘It's as easy as that, isn't it, G?'

I told her before she asked. Or it could be she trusted me to tell her in my own time.

‘It was me who tipped off the police about the dogs. I am so sorry, Mo. I should have known it would come back on you but I was just so upset about the cruelty. And you didn't tell him it was me, even though you must have suspected.'

Mo was almost flippant.

‘I sort of guessed it was you.'

Mo walked me to the front door. It was dark by now. The moon was a cradle for a baby. Mo's hanging flower baskets swayed gently in small arcs like a kiddies swing. Chinese bells tinkled a tune composed by the soft wind.

There was a pause. Not for long, because I was edgy there, out of doors, or half out of doors.

Dermo could be hiding out behind one of the old cars the Olsens used for spare parts. The dogs could be crouching, hidden anywhere. Waiting to pounce.

She sort of looked at me in that special way they look at you.

‘Hey, G. I'm nearly better. Everywhere. You know …'

Her eyes not looking to see my reaction. Shy almost.

Mo slipped out of her shoes, elegantly.

‘Look, G, look, we're the same height. As good as.'

We were but I still had my shoes on.

I was shy. Didn't know what to do or say.

‘Call to see me soon and don't be scared.'

There was an awkwardness for a few seconds.

She kissed me on the lips.

As I left and was walking towards the car, delighted with the kiss goodbye, but ever wary of the wolf's cousins, she called out:

‘Hey, G, forgot to ask, what's
schadenfreude
?'

I kept on walking backwards or sideways on my toes, in a circus horse movement. All the while scanning.

‘Some German expression to do with revenge. Something like that. I think.'

I could have checked straight away on my iPhone but
Alsatians can be sneaky, being related to wolves and all that.

‘You can Google it now,' I advised, from the safety of the car, with the window down, but not all the way. Just open enough to hear and speak through, like the gap in the cashier's counter in the bank.

She waved goodbye. In the wing mirror I could see her standing there in the porch.

I drove out the cattle-gridded exit and past the new sign that read ‘Bewear of Dermo'.

There was a quiz for retards on the car radio.

Yipee G, you win a weekend for two in your own house.

The old man would swear if he ever won a weekend for two on the mother's radio show, he would ask to change it to two weekends for one. Not that he would ever ring in. But he will not be calling up. Will he? Sometimes I forget my Dad is actually dead.

I wished I didn't think so much. Wished I was in an automaton's job, like putting toys in a cornflake packet.

Wished I could just have savoured the kiss without worrying about the consequences or the intent.

Wished I was answering easy questions on the radio phone-in, like spell CAT.

I sang a song aloud. About me.

That's it, the song that is, and you sing the same verse over and over again. For the sad verse you just sing it slowly.

The car was held up at the lights.

I Googled Schadenfreude.

It means taking pleasure out of other's misfortunes.

Mo was playing a very dangerous game. Dermo failed playdough in Junior Infants but his instinctive hunter's instinct would instruct him when it was time to strike out.

And as for poor Mo, well she was afraid to go and afraid to stay.

Mac Sorley Homes went bust without warning.

Owed millions. They were our biggest builder clients. But I held onto my job. Just. Mostly everyone in the construction business felt this was what was called an ‘adjustment'. Whatever that meant.

Mac Sorley's collapse was the beginning of the worst recession in decades, but it wasn't a recession, even though the building industry was falling in on its own foundations. At the start the experts called the recession ‘a soft landing'. As if the recession had the landing gear of a cat.

Whatever it was, I might soon have to look for work abroad.

The boss tendered for a job in Saudi, which never appealed to me due to the heat and lack of pubs. Then I got to thinking, and the upside was we would be safe there from the Olsens, who surely wouldn't try it on in a country where they chop off your hand for wanking. I wondered if we would be kept in a Compound guarded by dogs. There
was no way I could live in a place with mad dogs and no pubs.

The owners of big mad dogs have a want in them.

As if they needed the dogs to scare people and not because they loved the dogs, like say a sheep farmer who loves his Border Collie and who might even go on the telly with him, on one of those sheep herding programmes, with whistling, and the owner and the collie on first name terms. No one ever heard of anyone going on the telly showing off a Doberman. Unless alone they hired him out as an extra in a prison break movie.

I had these terrible fears Dermo would set the dogs on me. On the news there was a story about a little boy who was ripped apart by savage dogs. I had seen what had happened to the Papi. It was a phobia now.

Dermo told Maureen I was a threat when he came back from the horse races, just a few days after my visit.

‘If dem little jockeys can ride a thousand kilos of a horse travellin' at forty mile an hour, well then the Runt might be able to ride my missus lying on the flat on her back.' Maureen just laughed it off, but the story made me more scared of him than ever.

I think Maureen told Mo the jockey line, to let her know Dermo was jealous of me. And that he was very witty or humorous as well. Jealous meant he still fancied her and wanted the marriage to work. There was no way we could've figured that at the time. With some people, and Maureen was one, you have to examine their every move and every word as there's always a motive or a plan.

Safety pushed me for Saudi. Mo would be dressed up like an old nun. Except for me. Exclusivity. She was
wearing see-through knickers and bra. You could hang wet crombie coats on her nipples. I was driving when the image appeared in my head but I could still see the road. The car swerved as I drove and the fantasy died.

The kiss put the stamp on it. It tasted of longing and love.

It was then I decided not to leave Ireland. Messed up and all as it is, I kinda like it.

We were touring Brittany in a hired out motor home, with Mam and Dad, on our summer holidays. It was about ten at night in this big town called Pont something with eight eyes in the bridge. All the lights were off in the houses and even the pubs were closed. Dad said there must have been a curfew.

Then he came out with, ‘It's no wonder the French have the name of being such good lovers. They're in bed half the night.' He was a journey shortener with gags and quizzes and stories. The twins didn't get it. They were too young, but even Mam laughed at that one.

Dad explained he used to bring us on foreign holidays to show us how good Ireland was and that we should try to stay at home when we were big. Make a go of it. He used to say it would be great if we could live near each other when I grew up. I was delighted Dad wanted me to be near him always.

I'd miss calling to his grave if I left Ireland.

He died at fifty-three.

My mother was probably an accomplice, or guilty of murder in the second degree. Everyone is a killer. We all kill each other. Either in one go or incrementally. Mam killed Dad with her constant nagging. Our mother was very
good to us and to everyone else but she didn't really like my Dad. I think they fell out of love through being bored with each other and getting annoyed by small things, like Dad putting his feet up on the coffee table and her smoking in the house. We didn't live in a Compound but Dad and Mam did.

At first I used to pray at his grave with a flurry of Hail Marys, said so quickly they blended into each other like a closing concertina.

He died when I was nineteen. Now I go to talk to him. Bring him all the news.

I look up at the hill behind his grave, as if he's sort of up there, wandering about in some form we have yet to figure and then I look at his new Compound and sometimes I think it's not really a compound at all, and Dad is free at last. Maybe I just imagine those messages from him are coming into my head. I suppose it is a kind of hereafter when the thoughts of those who die are with us. In that sense part of them is in us. My Dad lives on through me and his influence on me.

I visited Dad's grave the morning after the kiss. We got to talking, or maybe I was a ventriloquist talking for the two of us, but I do believe he is present when I tell him my story. One of his sayings was never judge a man until you walk a mile in his moccasins. I was scared of the Olsens. So. Then I thought I shouldn't be too hard on myself. Walk in my shoes and see if it's easy.

My mother didn't really like Mo. It went back to my twenty-first. The morning after the party, Mo was sitting cross-legged on the sofa in what my mother called ‘the lounge'. My mother was like a bitch as someone got sick
the night before in the sink of the en suite.

‘Get your feet off that sofa. You wouldn't do that at home would you? Then again maybe you would.'

Mo wasn't even wearing shoes.

There were half-awake, half-asleep partygoers, my friends, scattered all over the floor and on the chairs. Mam had an audience and Mo was so embarrassed and isolated, she turned scarlet.

But that was my Mam. She just came out with horrible statements and then she forgot all about whatever wound she inflicted five minutes later, but the object of her rant didn't. Ah man, but when my Mam humiliated Mo, it was like a nail scraping glass.

Mam was on local radio, on this discussion about women's issues. I was never so embarrassed. Mam said an educational movie should be made for Irish men, because all the Irish women were buying dirty books, not so much for the porn content, but as sex manuals. The ladies on her show laughed hysterically and so a star was born. Mam was given her own show.

‘The set,' she said in a different accent to the one she used at home, ‘would be a giant vagina and we could get Sir David Attenborough to walk through it pointing out erogenous zones and G spots in that educated, excited but whispery voice he puts on when he spots a stripeless zebra or a new species of armadillo.' Her guests were in stitches. I switched stations.

It was three months before I came home from college with the shame of it. Dad ignored
The Woman's Hour
, other than to say it kept Mam from asking him to lift up his feet when she was hoovering, while he was watching the racing
on TV. I felt really sorry for Dad. Would everyone think Dad was bad in bed? The sex talk still goes on in
The Woman's Hour
. Dad isn't alive to stick up for himself now that he's dead. If Dad was alive he could put anyone down with his gunslinger repartee.

And then it upset me even more that all the locals would be listening to what should have been private. But at least he was dead for most of the shows.

Mam never left Dad alone, constantly controlling and bossing him. He usually gave in and kept quiet, but every now and then it all became too much and the arguing started. Mo and I never argued and we told each other everything. If Mo was having a bad day I just backed off and gave her time to sort out whatever it was that was bothering her.

Dad used to dodge Mam at every opportunity. ‘Your mother repeats more than the worst case at any
gastroenterologist
clinic.' Mam maintained Dad couldn't face reality.

Dad said he could but not all the time.

They only spoke when she corralled him into one space, which was usually at meal times. Dad would have won a prize at a quick-eating competition. He horsed back his food and was gone before Mam could get stuck in properly.

Mam never tortured me much, except maybe around the time Mo came down to stay, or in small ways like asking me if I knew the facts of life. Mo took my mother's dig very much to heart. I apologised with a take-no-notice-of-
the-mother
. Mo was self-conscious of being who she was back then, and coming from her part of the city.

My mother kept going on and on with ‘like in any man's language' and ‘I don't know the half of it' and ‘in my day' and ‘what's the world coming to'. That was Mam. Torn between being a modern mam talking about sex on the radio, and an old-fashioned one, who was liberal for
everyone
except her sons. Looking back on it now, I think she wanted another her for me. Which I'm sure is against some law or is at least seriously unhealthy. But that's what she wanted. My mother.

Mam meant well.

She worked hard at keeping the house going and when the twins left for Perth she gave them seven K, which was probably most of her ready cash.

Dad the philosopher had a theory. ‘There's only one frontier left and that's the mind and it's the only place where you can escape to.'

Mo was trapped and now I was too. We could dream all we wanted but we could never dream away Dermo.

There was always Oz. Dermo might not bother to go to the trouble of following us there. He might just see it as an expulsion from the land of our birth, and that was a strict enough punishment in itself.

Overlooking the cemetery was a low hill, with the ditches knocked to make more grazing for cattle. There was one tree left in the middle of the mini-prairie. I always looked up there to mark time, to remember when last I was here by reference to the leaves on the tree.

That tree was a remembrance of my Dad. More so than the gravestone.

Mam wanted a dice-throw of white marble pebbles on Dad's resting place. Dad asked me to make sure only grass
grew over his grave. It was the only time I got the better of her. I told Mam I liked to smell the grass when it was cut for the first time in the spring. I'm not sure what would've happened if I told her Dad wanted the grass, so I made up that line about the scent in the spring.

I stood there, talking away to him. Not aloud but in my head.

Dom Dooley came over to Dad's grave to say hello.

Dom was dad's pal from school. Dad used to call him Dom Pérignon because he had a very bubbly personality.

‘Tough times, G but if the good times don't last forever, neither will the bad.'

I just nodded. Everyone knew everyone's business in our little home place. Dom knew my job was down to three days a week.

‘Do you know what your oul fella said about six months before he died? We stopped right here to say a prayer at your grandparents' grave. “Pérignon, you go along without me, sure it's hardly worth my while going home.”'

That was him alright. Dad laughed at death as well as life.

I left the grave with the implanted thought from my Dad that it wasn't my mother who would be going out with Mo. It was me, so Mam would just have to deal with it.

The oul fella looked at life as if it was bewildering and totally random, but very funny at the same time.

That did it for him but I had to figure it all out. Try to sort it in some way. He was an observer and that was easier. Dad was always positive. The fact that I had a special drawer for my socks meant that I would be okay and wouldn't lose things like the deeds of the house, which
he did, much to my mother's annoyance.

My mother was strong and opinionated. Dealing with her would not be easy and I was wondering if the El Paso lumberjacks would lend me a chainsaw to cut the umbilical cord.

Maybe I'm not being fair to Mam and Dad. It wasn't that we were unhappy growing up. It was just that it wasn't perfect. But we had a chance, a very good chance of turning out alright.