Colum McCann - Songdogs

That night she stood in the kitchen under the fluorescent lights and pushed her fork through an uneaten plate of food.

I came home from school the next day and she was down by the firepit. She was wearing an apron from Knock shrine, a gift from Mrs O’Leary, the picture of the Madonna with a bit of homemade salsa on her nose. Along the lane on the bicycle, the brakes squeaking, I pulled up to where she was standing.

‘What ya doing, Mam?’

She swung around, a little startled. ‘You are home early,’ she said, wiped her hands on the face of the apron.

‘What’re ya burning, Mam?’

‘Nothing, m’ijo, come on inside, I have something special for you.’

She took my schoolbag from my shoulder as we walked to the front porch. A parcel sat on the table from Dublin, brown and crinkled. She handed me the scissors with long lean fingers — ‘Go on now, hurry quickly.’ The parcel produced a brand-new blue anorak. I laid it on the table but she told me to put it on. It was still hot outside, and I didn’t want to wear it, but I zipped it up quickly to try it on. She was happy then over the salsa pot, looking out the window. I said that I was just going outside for a moment, took the anorak off and left it sitting on the table.

Out in the firepit she had burned herself, made a pyre of her past, a giant cardboard box of books with the ends of flame around it, licking the edge of herself in the same way that the mountain fires did, a wale of fire upridged on the books. I poked around the flamed edges with a stick, around the mosquito net that the walrus man loved so much, around a dozen different bedrooms, around a tumult of skin, a dressing-table photo unburnt, a grove of trees ashy at the edges, a leg prominent from the knee down, a bedsheet disappearing. Suddenly she was shouting at me from the porch, with the coat in her fingers.

‘Come here, come here right now!’

I ran through the farmyard.

‘What are you doing there? You don’t like the coat?’

‘Oh, yeah, I like it, yeah.’

‘You don’t use it?’

‘Don’t want to get it dirty, Mam.’

She nodded her head and beckoned me with a large wooden fork covered in red sauce. ‘Come here and taste my salsa, tell me if it’s good, maybe there are missing peppers.’

But I leaned against the door and placed my muddy foot on the black and white linoleum and said: ‘I hate him, too, Mam. I hate him, too, he’s a bastard! I hate him!’ I had found out in school that day what the word meant — Hey lads, Lyonsy doesn’t know what a blowjob is! Are ya thick, Lyonsy? Everyone knows what a blowjob is! — and I had come home, detesting my father for the enormity of what he had done.

But Mam spun around and pulled me quickly to the chair — with surprising strength — and laid me down over her knee and slapped me, hard, six times on the back of my legs with the fork, sauce splaying around. ‘Don’t say that again never, don’t make me hear it again, don’t say that again never!’ I couldn’t understand her. The back of my legs were stinging, and, afterwards, at the kitchen table, she said: ‘Your Papa should hit you himself, but he never hit anybody in his life, you should be thankful, he never even hit a fly in his life! Your Papa never touched anybody!’ Later that afternoon, with a scarf of dusk coming down over the courtyard, and a smell of slaughter from the meat factory, I saw her as she strode purposefully back out to the firepit, arms swinging down by her side. She finished the job off — burning the books with a small splash of petrol and a match that took ages to light. They were damp and they snapped when she struck them. She didn’t throw much of a shadow anymore.

* * *

He woke up from the lawn chair, unaware I was sitting there, reached into his pocket for his packet of cigarettes. Before he lit up he reamed up from his chest and let a gob out towards the river. It landed near the bank, close to where I was sitting. The spit was strung through with blood. ‘Jaysus,’ he said, noticing me, ‘I must have fallen asleep.’ He saw me looking down. He was silent for a while, then he breathed deeply again through his nose.

‘Too much raspberry jam on me toast this morning.’

I felt a foul revulsion and love for him.

* * *

Us in the kitchen. Her hair thrown back behind her in long rushes of tungsten. She looked up at him as he took a plastic lighter from his shirt pocket, a pack of Major. ‘Living with you is like living with the ashtray!’ she shouted. He rose up from his chair, scooted it along the floor, cigarette between his teeth, pointed at her, shouting: ‘And it’s well you’d know about bloody ashtrays, isn’t it, woman?’

It was the morning after the books had become ash themselves, the wall of the firepit scorched, an aurora of herself amongst it. ‘You and your chip-pans and your books and your fires,’ he said, softer now, ‘would ya ever get a grip on yourself?’

He bravadoed his way out the door, camera bag slung over his shoulder in a motion of boredom — off to take pictures of some cows, corn-fed for the meat factory. He closed the car door, beeped the horn, lifted his finger wearily from the wheel.

Mam stood in the kitchen, awash in thought, by the stove, perhaps recalling fires of such spectacular magnitude that looking at the chip-pan or out at the firepit simply made her shake her head. She wiped her suds on the pocket of the holy apron — ‘Okay, m’ijo, I have been looking at this for a long time,’ staring at the stain above the stove. ‘How do we take it off the wall?’ The car moved away towards the road. Flies landed on the sticky yellow paper hung from the windowpane. I propped myself up on the stove, scrubbed with a Brillo pad. We leaned into the wall, but the mark wouldn’t come off no matter how hard we tried, it had its own stigmata. She stared into space, reached down and twirled the knobs on the radio. After a while I climbed down from the stove, said: ‘Mam, I should go, I’m going to be late for school again.’

She stared at the fire stain for a second. ‘ Quitate, ’ she said, smiling, ‘I will take care of this myself.’

She wiped a smudge of black from above my eyebrow, kissed me gently on the cheek. ‘Your new coat looks great.’ She shoved a bar of chocolate into my pocket. I went outside into the spindrifty air, past the mound of ash in the firepit, hopped on the bicycle, pedalled furiously, brown puddlewater skipping up on to the back of my coat. At the meat factory my father was chatting with a man who was leading half a dozen fat cows out to be photographed — later to be butchered and hung on hooks. Two of the cows were simultaneously letting dung out to splatter on their tails. Crows flew in behind the cattle to feed on the disturbed insects in the hoof marks. I watched my father for a moment, leaned my head down to the handlebars and rode over the hump-backed bridge to school.

Later that week the old man was off in Europe again, and Mam was at home waiting for Mrs O’Leary to come in for lunch. It was the first time that Mrs O’Leary had come for a meal. Mam had cut flowers. I thought that she might even eat something substantial that day, she had prepared tortillas. Jittery, she ran long fingers over one another.

At noon, a taxi swanned down the laneway. Mrs O’Leary sallied up to our door, feeling her way with a walking stick. The taxi driver carried tins of paint, and rollers and brightly coloured vases and a host of exotic flowers — ‘A small gift for you, Juanita,’ Mrs O’Leary said. It was all laid down on the floor of the living room. The driver took off, tipping his flat hat to Mrs O’Leary.

‘Right,’ said Mrs O’Leary, ‘let’s decorate.’