The Ballad of Mo and G (6 page)

Dermo got into the habit of tagging along with Maureen when she came to visit next door.

Mo was uncomfortable, but because of her relationship with Maureen, she just about tolerated him. Mo didn't speak to Dermo, who was unusually quiet and walked a few paces behind his mother.

Maureen passed the marriage problems off by calling it ‘the silent treatment' and told Dermo ‘you had it coming'. Like as if he was out with the boys and didn't come home until 4 AM. Torture in Olsenville was no more than being a bad boy.

Maureen was a peace-keeping force and so Mo wasn't afraid of Dermo, as long as his mother had him by the hand. Mo knew too, if she left Dermo and the Compound, Maureen wouldn't be around as a human shield. He would find her and take his revenge. Maureen's little boy had a big ego. If word got out Dermo was thrown out by Mo, then the other criminals might sense weakness and try to get
him back, for the horrible things he must have done to everyone and anyone. If Dermo couldn't have her, well then no one else could either. And what would he do to the someone else? Could it be Mo was thinking of me and my safety? That the
schadenfreude
excuse was just that.

Mo figured Dermo would eventually meet someone else and then, under the rules of the game, she would be free to go. Mo would be the one who was rejected. It was a case of hanging in there until he did find the someone else.

Dermo had sworn off the drink, according to Maureen, and he was going to the gym every day.

Then one day, Dermo arrived in to his former home on his own. Out of the blue, as usual. Maureen was in the city getting her hose-pipe varicose veins diverted into a culvert.

‘I'm here for our jigsaw, Missus. I bought another one the same kind on the ferry and I'm takin' the pieces what's missin' and putting em inta our wan.'

Dermo must have thought he had served his time, and that now he was entitled to move back in with Mo.

She asked him to leave but he ignored her. Mo couldn't help herself. It just came out of her mouth before she could stop.

‘And it's not our fucking jigsaw, it's yours. Your jigsaw. Now get the fuck out before I call your Ma.'

Dermo hummed in a bluebottle monotone as he walked non-stop from one side of the living room to the other.

Dermo's eyes were red, bloodshot. She always knew how he was mentally by looking at his eyes. Mo didn't make full eye contact. It was a surreptitious look. No more than a glance but she knew from the way his eyes darted about like a swallow, Dermo was out of his mental mind.

Mo got to thinking it wasn't drink or coke this time. It might have been steroids. Bought in the gym. His arms were huge now, like thighs.' Roid rage was common enough among the Dermos who needed to be bigger and stronger than everyone else.

When Dermo peed in the kitchen sink, Mo knew it was the end of
schadenfreude
in our time. That was how his dogs marked territory, by peeing everywhere. Maybe Dermo had spent so much time with the Dobermans, he had turned into one himself. This was him reclaiming what was his.

There was a tiny window in the bathroom. It worked on hinges and did not fully extend. Dermo could not have suspected Mo might escape that way. There wasn't enough room to squeeze out, but Mo had already loosened the screws on the catch. Weeks before, Mo hid a screwdriver in a plastic bag in the cistern. There was a fifty euro note in the bag, a spare mobile phone and a Stanley knife. She removed the screws quickly.

Mo climbed out the bathroom window. Head first. For a few seconds, she was hanging upside down, with her insteps curled round the window frame, like a circus acrobat swinging off a trapeze. Somehow Mo managed to swivel her legs round and she wedged her left foot against the cement casing surrounding the window.

Bit by bit, Mo crabbed down. She jumped off the windowsill from a standing position. Grey was watching her every move.

The old mongrel walked with her until they reached the gateway out of the Compound. Mo ran the roads until a taxi she called picked her up about a kilometre from the Compound, just off the intersection with the motorway. Mo
spent the night in a hostel for women, who were victims of violence in their own homes.

Dermo kicked in the bathroom door, smashed the cistern top and promptly left for Le Havre. It would be a week before he came back. Or so Maureen reasoned.

Maureen, along with Dermo's brother Mikey, collected Mo in a café near the hostel, the very next day. She didn't call me.

Mikey warned her.

‘He's gettin' worse. He's goin' to explode. Can you go? D'you know, for a while like you know, until the polis comes? I'd call them if I was you. You can get him barred out of the house. Official like. Mam dunnit to Dad wance and it quietened him.'

Mikey looked over to his Mam for support.

‘For a while. He was quiet for a while, Mikey,' added Maureen.

Then Maureen took over.

‘We have a good friend. He's Sergeant Matt and he will come here to fix things. Dermo respects Sergeant Matt. Doesn't he, Mikey?'

Mikey nodded.

Maureen put her arms on Mo's shoulders and looked at her in the eyes as she spoke.

‘The Law of the Wish could kill Dermo and maybe you too. There's nottin in the book that says no one can't kill you, love.'

Maureen convinced Mo that Dermo was definitely away in France and he wasn't coming back. She spent the night in the Compound.

Mo asked, over the phone, if I would help her to escape.

I hesitated for a few seconds. To figure out what I was going to do. Well maybe it was a bit longer than that. It was my move but I didn't move. If we were to live together, I would have had to have time to figure it all out. Pick the apartment. Pay the deposit. Sign up for the electricity. Alarms. CCTV. Random stuff. Check if we could afford Sky TV and make sure the bins were collected weekly. And I hadn't even asked her. I was just assuming. Crisis management wasn't my strong point.

Mo was a quick person. She waited for me to respond and must have figured the delay was a no, or a can't-
make-up
-his-mind. She was instinctive, and I tossed ideas around in the mixing bowl in my head forever.

Mo made the decision for me.

‘No, wait a couple of days. I'm in terrible pain. Just can't move. Complications, from losing the baby and climbing out the window and the shock.' Or so she said. But so often Mo told me she was fine physically.

‘Okay,' I said. Too easily.

‘Anyway,' she said, before I could put my thoughts on a list, ‘the police are coming in the morning to take a statement.'

Mo was out of ammo now. Her short-lived scaring of the beast was over and forever. She had to leave. Staying was impossible. Leaving gave her a chance. For a while anyway. A head start.

‘But where will I go?' She sounded like a kid lost in the woods. Scared of the Big Bad Wolf.

Mo was just a little older than a little girl.

‘Don't worry. We will find somewhere safe. Another hostel or something. I might be able to organise someplace
safe. Soon enough. Or I'm sure the police have safe houses.'

Safe. Yeah, through a witness protection scheme, organised by me, who wasn't cut out for conflict. And the victims of family violence aren't exactly likely to be given new lives and a permanent pension in Tahiti.

Fuck but Tahiti wasn't even safe. All those places with palm trees and golden beaches eventually get overrun by tsunamis, dictators, homicidal jellyfish and sex tourists.

And ‘soon enough' was something like the plumber would say and you both knew he had no notion of calling for ages, if at all, and only then if the chimney was the only part of the house that wasn't covered in water.

All the while, there was the constant and real dread of Dermo. Fear was really keeping me away from her.

What if the Olsens threw a petrol bomb in the window of our house?

Or stuck a firelighter at the end of a knitting needle through the letter box that didn't have a stiff moustache for protection?

It was on the net. About a bomb attached to a toy chopper that was piloted in through the chimney pot by a mobster who must have been an expert in cybernetics and he blew the whole fucking gaff to smithereens and the people in it too.

The fact the police were coming gave me some comfort. Surely Dermo would be charged with manslaughter of the baby, the savage attacks on Mo and maybe even cruelty to the dogs. If Mo's evidence alone would be enough to convict him on that one.

That would be the end of the danger for a good few years, or so I persuaded myself at the time. If some day in
years to come he did get out, the odds were prison would have emasculated him and his rage and the madness would be either decreased or gone. That was how I saw it, or wanted to see it back then.

The police called to the Compound, as promised.

The main man went by the name of Sergeant Matt and the omission of his surname gave him that kind of trusted friend of the family handle like Father Tim, who was probably grooming the kids, or Doctor Harry, who was pumping antidepressants into the mother because he couldn't be arsed listening to her and there was a queue in the waiting room. I didn't trust any of them, any of the same old guys who ran the show into the ground. Any of the guys who used words like ‘decremental' when the country was in freefall and jobs were getting cut by the day. They were all such a bunch of fucking conmen and liars.

Good old Sergeant Matt made a big speech about
respecting
women. He happened to be the very same Matt who played Dermo, his pet stool pigeon. By an amazing coincidence. My arse.

‘First we will get you a Protection Order, pet,' announced the Sergeant, who was probably surprised Mo didn't puppy lick his fingers in thanks.

Mo wasn't a bit impressed.

‘My name is Mo.'

Sergeant Matt was that fond of himself, he wasn't even listening. He slid his wide, cow's tongue around his swimming ring lips and into the far-off corners of his mouth, to get a taste of his own wonderfulness.

‘Then in a few weeks,' he continued, ‘we can get a Barring Order. Which means, per se, Dermo cannot, under no circumstances whatsoever, enter into the house or the cartilage thereof. If he so much as looks at you, looks at you,' and he peered out at her over the tops of his glasses, ‘we can bang him up in a cell. Forthwith. So to speak.'

There was shine off Big Matt. He was red. The light reflected off his florid face. He wasn't as big as the name suggested and Mo suspected the ‘Big' bit in Big Matt was put in by himself.

He spoke in a formal voice, as if he was taking an oath.

‘Sorry, Maureen, my dear, we are aware of your admirable maternal instincts but the law is the law and Big Matt tells it straight, straight as a pencil. Big Matt will keep the peace. So help me God. That's what we are there for. Garda Síochána means custodians of the peace and Big Matt, who was once a rookie, believe it or not, many years ago, and when he was in that humble state and still a young man, he swore an oath. A sacred oath, in the presence of the Commissioner of an Garda Síochána and the Minister for Justice to uphold that sacred duty, without fear or favour, from that day forward, all the days of his life, until death do him part. Big Matt would not forsake his oath from that day on. Thus, most definitely, he would not. Big Matt would take a bullet for those under his protection. Oh most certainly he would.'

Big Matt looked at Maureen with eyes as round and bulging as pool balls attached to tooth picks as he thanked her for the little drop of whiskey she handed him at the end of his speech.

Maureen swore her Dermo was still out of the country.
‘It wasn't just pretend,' she said. He left France for the Isle of Man motorbike races.

The first thing that came into Mo's head was the high number of deaths among the bike tourists who attended the TT races. Stupid gits who got their kicks from scaring the shit out of blue tits and farmers on country roads and ended up killing themselves and whoever happened to be unlucky enough to get in their way.

‘You were right to go to the Guards,' Big Matt opined assuredly, as he sipped the little drop which went up to the rim of the tall Slim Jim.

‘No woman deserves that, whatever the provocation.'

‘Provocation?' asked Mo. She stood up now. Mo was livid.

‘It wasn't me who was the violent one. Hello.'

The officer straightened himself. Back went his
shoulders
and out went his big belly.

‘Hello to you too,' greeted Matt and he continued. ‘In the course of my preliminary enquiries, Dermo steadfastly maintains you did threaten him. With death my dear. With death. The ultimate sanction. It is his word against yours. If we follow through with criminal charges, then a file will, in the normal course of events, have to be sent, after due diligence, and proper forensic dissection, to the Director of Public Prosecutions himself, or to one of his lawyers properly invested with his authority. It won't be up to us by jingo and I often wish it was. It all comes down to what's in the file. The file never lies unless there's lies in it and Big Matt don't tell no lies nor write them either.'

‘How can I be brought up?' asked Mo, who was overwhelmed by the fact she couldn't even trust the police.
‘For threatening his life, my dear girl. A serious offence indeedy my deary and punishable by a long term of incarceration in the 'otel with no carpets.'

Maureen had been nibbling away at her red-tipped, bitten-down finger nails, as she always did when she was nervous. Playing for both sides was placing a terrible strain on her nerves

‘Listen to Sergeant Matt. You will be safe now,' comforted Maureen.

‘Mikey is very fond of you,' she continued, ‘and sure he's well able for Dermo. If Dermo ever touches you, he'll never darken my door again. I told him as much. On my life. Mikey isn't that right? Mikey.'