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The Lacewing
‘Aren’t they magnificent?’ she said.
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Truly God’s own children like us, Gabriel…Just like us. Praise them, Gabriel…Praise them, son…Just like they praise us with their presence.’
‘I do, Mother.’
‘Say it with me, Gabriel…I praise you, Lord, and your golden children…I praise you.’
I remember how hot it had been in the place where they were kept, how the heat stuck my hair to my neck and brought me out in a prickly sweat. I grabbed her hand. I wanted her to stop, to tell her I was feeling uncomfortable, that I felt sick.
‘Say it with me, son…Let’s hold Jesus to our hearts in the presence of these His finest creations.’
‘Mum…I…’
A couple on the other side of the butterfly sanctuary had stopped briefly and stared as she grappled with me, trying to get me to kneel. I knew that they were thinking about saying something, I could see it in their eyes. I looked at my mother on her knees in front of me, her hair wild and unkempt.
‘Please,’ I remember saying quietly. ‘Please.’
‘Don’t turn away from the holy heart of Jesus…Don’t betray Him as so many have done.’
I looked back to the couple. The woman now had a child at her side; it was a girl of my age, and roughly my height. She was looking at me; there was pity in her eyes.
Eventually I knelt, my mother’s hand on mine as tight as a vice’s grip. I conceded as I did so many times with her, I laid my heart at her door, and told her I no longer had need of it.
‘I praise you, Lord…I praise you, Jesus…’ I remember saying the words, forcing them from my lips.
‘Good boy. Good boy…’
I remember looking at the butterflies as they moved from plant to plant. Some were the colour of a lion’s back, tawny and speckled with gold. Others were the brightest, deepest green I had ever seen, with garish yellow dots. Some were as big as a man’s palm and they moved slowly, their wings bearing them unsteadily from one large leaf to the next. They looked as if they had been hypnotised, fooled into accepting the glass cage that they were in. They reminded me of my home, a hothouse seething with heat and fervour. I felt sorry for them, they seemed tamed, and captivity had made them stupid and lethargic.
On our way out we stopped in the gift shop. My mother bought me a butterfly kite. It was a Malaysian Lacewing and its wings were a clash of reds and yellows, they looked as if they had been drenched in the hot fires of the sun and there were fine white lace markings on their edges.
All the way home I turned its large wings in my hands, marvelling at its colours. It cast a spell on me that day and all the embarrassment of the praying and the kneeling were forgotten as I held it in my trembling hands. I read the leaflet that came with it, my young mind devouring every word. I read how the butterfly could be seen in Indonesia and Malaysia, I remember turning the words silently on my tongue, tasting the hot continents they spoke of. I read about their fragile lives, and how the cost of the glorious garments they wore was two short weeks of life. My mother smiled over at me as I fumbled with the packaging.
‘We’ll fly it together,’ she said.
‘Okay. God is good, Mother,’ I continued.
‘Yes, son, God is good…Never forget that.’
I remember looking across at her and wondering at how quickly my heart could change, only moments before I had hated her and now I looked at her with love, pure and as varied as the wings of the large butterfly I was holding.
Standing in the Mouth of Love
My brother-in-law loved my sister. That was clear. He was her minder, her strong arm. She often told me that she didn’t know where she would be without him, that he was the still point in her heart. Ciara didn’t lack confidence, she had a bloody-mindedness that I recognised in myself, but Seamus gave her the quiet surety that I know she had been looking for all her life. He wasn’t a tall man, but had a presence that belied his height. He didn’t say much but when he did people tended to listen. They had met at a local dance when she was a young woman of nineteen or twenty. At first she had dismissed him as just another local, a hard man without a cause. He had asked her to dance with him and she refused and kept denying him for the next month, but he persevered, telling me later that the first time he had seen her he knew that she would be his wife. I remember being jealous when he told me this, I wasn’t sure why, but now I know. It was because somehow I believed that she was mine.
I envied him his strength. I wanted it for myself. He could see that in me, always looking at me as if I had a part missing and I suppose he was right. In the early days they both included my wife and me in what they were doing. We went on short trips together, shopped together. But I could always feel him watching me in quieter moments when the conversation lulled or when the others were preoccupied with other things. For a long time I resisted looking him directly in the eye. When I did summon the courage to meet his eyes I saw that he had a hold on me, that he knew something, it was apparent in the slight smirk that lay across his gaze.
It reminded me of the way my father used to look at me, that same penetrating stare that said, I have your number, I have you marked. I knew that there would be trouble between Seamus and me, but then again trouble was something that I was accustomed to.
He was bright though he was at pains not to show it, he had more success that way, he could surprise people, but he didn’t fool me. I knew his game. He worked with brass, fitting out bars and clubs in the area. He had a small foundry just outside the town and worked there five or six days a week. The business was his; he had started it with a friend and then bought him out when they fell out over money. It did reasonably well, but he said that he would rather be his own boss than work for some idiot and earn twice the money. He could do what he wanted, think what he wanted, you can’t fucking buy that, he would say to me. When he’d had a bit to drink, he said that working with brass was just like life, that there was a mould for everything, we could be anything, we could go anywhere but you couldn’t buck the mould, the shape that your heart had to fill. That’s how he had wooed my sister, I remember thinking, with talk of shapes and hearts and the moulds that house our souls.
He was legendary for his obstinacy. He had received a visit from some hard men shortly after he had taken over sole ownership of his business. The ceasefire hadn’t been long in place, and the violence that had gripped the province for so long had mutated into a different kind of threat. Self-appointed vigilantes sprang up like weeds across a wasteland. Gangs of youths roamed the dark, armed with baseball bats and chains, telling anyone who would listen that they had been appointed by the powers that be to keep the peace. As always there was a price, usually a weekly payment made in used readies into one of their grubby little paws. Seamus said that one day he had been pouring molten brass all morning, as he had a rush order to get out, so he wasn’t as aware as he should have been, he was distracted and hadn’t noticed them creep into his workspace until they were almost upon him. They were young, no more than nineteen or twenty and there were about six or seven of them, and they were wearing scarves across the bottom halves of their faces, you know, like the fucking Lone Ranger, he said. He looked up and there they were, like starving dogs with that same desperation in their eyes. He knew it was important to stay calm, and that probably the leader would not be the one who spoke first, but the one who was the quietest, they’re always the most dangerous. So one of the little runts begins yapping about the price of keeping the peace and that they were attached to such and such unit of such and such brigade of the fight for Ireland’s freedom and all that bollocks. There was a price to pay for this new dawn, he was told, a weekly stipend, to be collected by them. Seamus said he didn’t say anything; he just listened and nodded, scanning the eyes of the others to try and find the one he knew he would have to bring down. He said he knew him as soon as he saw him: he was standing at the back of the pack and he was slightly taller than the rest and he quietly nodded as his colleague delivered the speech about freedom and money.
‘Fuck’s sake, boys, I have fuck all money here. I’m behind on my orders. I’m owed money…’
‘When can you get it?’
This time it was the tall one at the back who spoke, and Seamus knew he had been right.
‘I can have it for you tomorrow evening.’
‘What time?’
‘About six.’
‘We’ll be back at six tomorrow evening,’ the tall one said.
Then he made a motion with his head, indicating that the rest of them should leave. As they did the tall one moved towards Seamus and said, ‘Don’t fuck us around.’
‘Wouldn’t do that, son. Wouldn’t do that.’
‘Good.’
That night Seamus made two phone calls. The first one was to a friend of his who was connected. He checked that these kids were who they said they were. Never heard of them, his friend said. Right you are, Seamus replied. The second call was to a mate of his who was a bouncer at a local dance hall. He had a face that even his own mother wouldn’t kiss, Seamus said. He told him what had happened and that he needed his help the next evening. His mate was called Bulldog mainly because he looked like one and he had the neck to go with it. Do you need any more bodies? he asked Seamus. No, just yourself, Bulldog, just yourself. I need you there at five.
There was a small hall at the front of Seamus’s foundry with two doors, one opening out onto the yard outside and the other opening into the workspace. Above in the ceiling there was a small roof space cover, the kind you give a slight push to and slide on and off. That’s where he put Bulldog, crouching up there in the dark, his large body scrunched over, his fists poised. Both doors had strong brass pull-across bolts on them and when the bandits arrived Seamus was sure not to glance upwards as they moved past him.
He watched as they filed into the work area, the tall one as usual at the back, a baseball bat dangling from one of his arms. As Seamus joined them the tall one looked at him and said: ‘So?’
‘Aye.’
‘Good.’
Seamus reached into his pocket and counted out the notes into the young man’s palm. The others gathered around them as he did this like orphans in a soup kitchen at feeding time.
‘Right. Knew you had sense,’ the young one said as he pocketed the cash.
‘Who wants any more trouble. We’re all sick of it,’ Seamus said.
‘That’s why we are here,’ the youth said.
Seamus said it was laughable the way he said it, as if he was in some daft American movie. He said he wanted to rip his face off, but he knew he had to play the stupid older man, make use of his smallness by standing close to him so that the kid would feel empowered by his greater height.
‘Next week?’
‘Right you are. Next week, son…’
‘Good man. Let’s go.’
Seamus watched as they began to file out, the leader waiting until the end before starting to leave. He stayed on his shoulder and moved with him towards the front door. As the others cleared the threshold Seamus waited until the tall one was about to leave and said: ‘You’re Owen McCarthy’s son, aren’t you?’
He said it was comical the way the kid swivelled on his heels to meet his gaze, the look of surprise in his eyes was powerful. Before he knew it Seamus had bolted the front door, trapping him one way and at the same time Bulldog had dropped from the attic, like a stone of doom was how Seamus put it, and had locked the other door leading back into the workspace. He was trapped both ways. His mates were on the outside looking in, and he was inside about to have his skin rearranged.
‘Let’s talk fucking freedom now, son,’ Seamus said.
They took back the money and kicked him all over the fucking place, bouncing him off the walls like he was a child’s football. Seamus said you could have heard his screams in Fermanagh they were that loud. When they had finished, Bulldog picked up the youth’s baseball bat and smashed it to smithereens on the concrete floor. Then they hauled him to his feet and delivered him to his friends outside. They didn’t say much, they looked kind of sheepish as they took him from the two men.
‘One more thing,’ Seamus said as they walked away. ‘My fucking generation invented violence, son. Don’t ever forget that.’
The Room at the End of the World
I am being led. I no longer think about resisting them, the drugs they have given me have seen to that. My mind swims with the images that I know have broken me. I realise that my salvation now lies with them. I no longer have any choice in what happens to me. Somewhere I welcome it. I am weary. There are two of them and their hands are clutching my arms so that I don’t go anywhere. A man walks ahead of us; he is wearing a suit and now and then throws glances back our way. We reach a door at the end of the corridor.
It is reinforced with steel slats that run all down its sides and there is a codelock on it. Beyond is a small holding area that connects to another door. Both have tiny windows in them. The suited man punches a code on the buttons beneath the door handle, and after a moment I hear a click and the door snaps open. He pulls it wide and beckons to the two men holding me to place me inside. I step into the small space between the two doors and watch as they shut me in. One of them raises his hand and makes a gesture as if to say it’s okay, you’re okay. I nod back and see them retreat down the corridor. After a moment I walk to the other door and try it. I don’t expect it to be open, and it’s not. A voice inside me laughs and says, so this is it, this is what has become of you.
Now and then someone comes and peers through one of the windows at me. They look at me dispassionately as if I was a specimen in a Petri dish. I mustn’t panic. I must stay calm. My sweats are beginning again. I try and remember what the doctor had said to me, she had said that they were just episodes, that they would come and go and that my mind needed rest, that’s all. I slide down to sit on the floor. My brain is racing. I try to ignore it and breathe deeply. Then I wonder if anyone will come and save me, then I realise that they won’t, that’s why they have put me in this room at the end of the world.
The First Man
I am lying on the living room floor of my house, willing my eyes to open. A vicious headache sears across my thinking. My mouth is dry and my hair stuck with sweat. I try to remember the events of the night before but all I see is the taunt of my father’s walk. He moved as if it was a challenge to the watching world.
It is the first thing I remember, it’s the image I always see when nothing else will come, and sometimes it forces its way through like a jilted lover breaking down his ex’s door. He is by a river; I hear its throaty rush, swollen from the spring floods. I see his bare midriff, blue-pink from the cold, his braces hoisting the waistband of his trousers high across his belly. I hear his snorts in the cold morning air, as he looks for a place to wade in. In his left hand is the carcass of a freshly killed rabbit, its head nodding lifelessly against his legs. I see him take on the water, pushing his body against the current, until he is almost thigh deep in it. He looks like a prophet, his head proudly tilted towards the heavens, his eyes fixed on some better place. He dips the rabbit into the water and then produces a long thin knife from his pocket. He holds the rabbit up to look at it one more time and then plunges the knife into it just below its sternum and draws it down its body, leaving a crimson line. I can see the gum-coloured entrails peeping out. He then shoves his hand inside and pulls at the shit and the intestines, ripping them free. I see them squelch and squirm in his grip, he then lets them drop and they are taken by the current.
The hide is next; he strips it from the body and then begins to pull it free. The rabbit is now unrecognisable, its furry bobtail look gone forever, in its place a long veined mass of sinew. Its eyes are large black opals, shiny and unseeing. Then he douses both himself and the rabbit, tilting his body forward so that his head and neck disappear into the swirling current. I remember the slight panic that ran through me the first time that I saw him do it, but then both he and the carcass would reappear, the water falling from them both, his large head shaking it free from his hair and his neck.
‘Bring that in to your mother,’ he would say, handing me the rabbit.
Then he would piss in the water, taking his dick out and watch as the yellow liquid arced into the river’s rush. He would grunt with relief, and his shoulders would drop as he relaxed. I knew that sound; it usually lived in the dead of night when the world was asleep, when his hands took another piece of goodness from my hide. I remember looking away, forgetting about his order to bring the rabbit indoors, my body quivering as the last drops of piss left his body. Then he noticed I was still there and quickly zipped himself back in, his face bloodying with anger.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you bloody perverted or something?’
‘No, Dad.’
‘Then do what I told you to do.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
Later that morning he punched my mother. It was so swift like a striking snake and suddenly my mother was flat on her backside, blood spreading across her chin, her eyes glazing over from the force of the blow. They had been arguing, or rather my mother had been trying to argue, my father just ignored her. We had crept to the doorway of the kitchen, my sister and I holding on to each other’s bodies. We watched as the scene unfolded, my mother criss-crossing back and forth across the kitchen after my father, hectoring and badgering him. I remember the slight flinch in his face as she shouted and postured around him. It was about money or the lack of it and the fact that my father had only just returned home clutching the skinned rabbit, having been missing all night.
The hills beyond the kitchen glowed with the beginning light of day. Neither parent saw us lurking in the shadows of the doorway. My mother said my father smelled of another woman, she said he was disgusting like all Irish men, a waste of time and space, and then he just turned and unleashed his fist, driving my mother’s body across the kitchen floor, her nose busted, and her eyes wide with surprise. For a moment I thought that she was going to laugh, her mouth made the shape, but then it turned downwards like a doll’s face being eaten by fire. My sister pissed herself. I looked down and could see it pooling on the floor between her legs. It spread to my feet and then a trickle began to work its way into the centre of the room.
To this day my sister will query the events of that morning; she buried it deep inside of her, like so many things in her life. When I have pushed her, she only pays lip service to it, leaving the meat of what happened on that kitchen floor where her piss mingled with our mother’s blood. For me that morning is a brand seared on the flesh of my heart. I carry it with me. I wear it. I honour it. I drink myself sick to it. It tells me that the only prayer that works is violence. That one action, my father’s fist on my mother’s face that one moment sits like a lion in the jungle of my thinking.
Pieces of the Day
My eyes are asking them to tell me even though I don’t really want to know. I’m afraid. I can see that it’s bad because they are looking through me, not engaging with me. I turn my head away from them and begin to cry because I realise that I have nothing left to pray to. My face hurts, it stings and I wish I was dead. I am in hospital, I have no idea how I got here, or why I feel this shame, it sits on me like a curse. I can taste it. My brother-in-law asks me how I feel but I don’t answer him, my sister looks away. A nurse bends over me and tinkers with the bedcovers, I think she’s embarrassed. I put a hand to my face and can feel the long thin scabs running down my cheek. A man comes in and stands for a moment, looking at me; I can’t read what he’s thinking so I know that he must be a doctor.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asks me.
I look at him but don’t answer.
‘The police are here. They’ve been waiting for you to come round.’
Still I don’t say anything. He bends down so that he’s within touching distance of my face.
‘Listen to me. You need help. At the moment we have you on Librium to keep you calm, but you can’t go on like this.’
He looks to my brother-in-law as if to say it is his turn to speak.
‘She says she’s going to press charges.’
‘Why?’
‘What do you mean why? You fucking bounced her off every wall in the house.’
‘Seamus,’ my sister says. ‘Losing it is not going to help anything.’
I close my eyes and her face is there, her eyes widened in terror, her mouth open and screaming. I shudder because I know as the day goes on the image will grow and that snatches of the previous night will shoot into my consciousness like sparks from a bonfire.
‘She says you raped her.’
‘Fuck off,’ I say.
‘No, you fuck off. What the fuck is wrong with you?’
As he says this my brother-in-law lunges at me, my sister grabs him and the doctor stands up, blocking his route to me. They calm him down. I watch as they put their hands on him and soothe him. He leaves the room, he doesn’t look at me. My sister comes and sits on the edge of the bed.
‘This is what we’re going to do,’ she says. ‘We’re going to talk to the police and tell them everything…everything we can remember, after that there is someone else who wants to talk to you, who could maybe help you. He runs a place just outside Dublin where they can help people like you. You can’t keep this up, Gabriel, it’s tearing us apart…Then you can sleep.’
‘I don’t want to talk to anyone,’ I say.
‘Gabriel, this is not a playground where someone has grazed their knee or tripped over a ball. This is grown-up serious stuff. We’re all worried sick about you. Seamus is at his wits’ end, he loves you, we all do…but this can’t go on.’
She stops suddenly and for a moment just sits there gulping quickly as she tries to stop herself from crying. I watch the battle in her and admire her for her strength, always the strong one, always the pragmatist. When I was younger I used to marvel at how she sewed together the threads of her life, how she marshalled her children and steered her husband’s every move. Nothing was a problem; all were only solutions waiting to happen. I often joked with her that we couldn’t have come from the same womb. She didn’t seem to have the same echo of defeat running through her brain that I had. I reach out to take her hand, and for a moment I can see her debate whether to take it or not, but in the end she does.
‘I just want to sleep,’ I say. ‘Sleep.’
‘First we have things to do. People to talk to. Gabriel…Gabriel…’
I open my eyes. For a moment I try and remember where I am. I look at my sister and realise. She still has that look in her eye, the one that said trouble.
‘The police are here to see you.’
I think about my father and the curse he slipped to me one day when I wasn’t looking. He hid it in my mother’s milk and watched as I downed it in one greedy gulp. I wonder at the insanity, at the violence that sits brooding in me like a spurned lover. I know that I have nowhere left to go, that I have backed myself into a corner, and that I stand on a cliff edge and below me is the black sea where the lost fall, never to be seen again.
‘Gabriel O’Rourke?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gabriel O’Rourke of Temple Avenue?’
‘Yes?’
‘I need a statement from you, sir, concerning the events of yesterday evening.’
There’s pity in his eyes and a faint glint of disgust, but he is doing his best to hide it. I shift in the bed, my sister lowers her head, and the doctor quietly leaves, nodding in my direction as he does.
‘You don’t like me, do you?’
‘It makes no difference what I think, sir. I’m here to take your statement, I already have your wife’s.’
‘She lies.’
He takes his cap off and places it on the bed beside me and runs a hand across his forehead. I can see the line where his flesh has been dug into. He is balding and what’s left of his hair is the colour of straw. He looks at me and waits.
‘Talk to him, Gabriel. It’s for the best,’ my sister says.
I tell him what I can, I describe the screaming and pushing, I talk about the anger rising in me and about the hate I felt for her, but no, I didn’t rape her, she’s my wife, for God’s sake, how can a man rape his own wife. He tells me that doesn’t make any difference, that sex between two adults has to be consensual, married or unmarried. When he tells me this he talks to me as if I am a child. He also says that my wife believes that I have some kind of personality disorder, that she was genuinely worried about my sanity. This stops me and I feel a burning begin inside me, I feel it start in my gut and it begins to spread until it has me by the throat. He asks me if I’m alright, but I can’t answer him. I feel the tears begin to fall; they rush down my face. I want to tell him about the blackness that surrounds my thinking, how it eats into any image my heart offers to my mind.
My head feels heavy. He asks me again if I’m okay and this time gestures to my sister. A sound comes from my mouth, a grunt of defeat. I curl up in the bed, pulling the bedclothes to me like a beaten child, my knees up by my chin. The cop stands and for a moment hesitates, unsure how to react or what to say. Suddenly the doctor is there, I can make out the white coat and the glisten of sweat on his face. Something is stuck into my arm, it stings and for a moment I try to fight it but then a wave of soothing washes over me and I am lowered down to sleep.
‘Son?’
‘Yes, Daddy?’
‘Has Ciara been talking to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I…’
‘It’s alright, son…It’s alright.’
‘A little bit.’
‘A little bit?’
‘Yes…A little bit…’
‘Well she mustn’t do that…’
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