Knock Knock, Open Wide

by Neil Sharpson

Shoddy work. A stiff breeze would bring it down. There are questions, in short. And there are questions about the questions. So no, dear reader. It’s not over. Mere preamble, the lot of it.

Did you ever see Punch and Judy? What a little horror. Like they figured out how to stage a nightmare. He beats her, he kills her child. He gets away with it. Punch laughs. Ha Ha Ha Ha. We laugh. Ha Ha Ha Ha. The show only works if you don’t see the hands. It’s all a puppet show. And I saw the hands, my darlings.

Her sister was house-sitting for their aunt, who was away doing missionary work in Uganda. For the last three weeks Kate had been living alone in a tiny cottage in the wilds of Wexford and, by her own admission, being “driven mad by all the fucking peace and tranquility.”

The Irish coast spread out before her in all its wild, rough-faced beauty and she had a mad desire to stop by the side of the road, strip naked, and leap into the sea until she was too cold to think or worry. The sea air made her senses sharpen and she could almost feel layers of Dublin grime and funk lifting off her skin and lungs and eyes. It felt like she was being scoured, cleaned and made brighter.

“You…” His voice was cracking. “You will?” “Yeah.” And she was laughing and crying at the same time. “Yeah. I will. I will. I will, yeah.” And then came a kiss. A kiss bigger and vaster than any kiss that had come before. A hurricane of a kiss. A typhoon. A kiss that could blow you off your feet and knock you to the floor. Or onto a nearby settle bed.

Kate and Mairéad were as different as two people could be, except in one respect. They both held their grudges like misers held their gold, close to the chest and never to be traded or given away.

How was it even possible to get home on a road like this? The road would surely go on forever. Like any city-dweller newly alone in the dark countryside, Etain realized that she suddenly believed in ghosts.

Suddenly, a raindrop splattered on the windshield so large and heavy that it jolted her out of her reverie. Then came another, and another. And suddenly the lit road ahead was a milky haze as a solid curtain of rain fell on the Earth like a reckoning. This was not rain to water and replenish. This was rain sent in fury, to wash away the Earth and all its sin. This was a storm for the ages.

Etain had never liked dogs, not even big, friendly dogs. “You have trouble trusting anything that loves you unconditionally,” Kate had once said, which was no less cruel for being true.

Since he had inherited the farm thirteen years ago from his mother he had been stalked. By debt, by bad weather, by waves of disease and still-births that had afflicted his livestock with a merciless, clockwork regularity. And by the hatred of his neighbors, who had ostracized his family in the last century for some long-forgotten sin by his great-grandfather. It didn’t matter that neither Feidhlim nor his neighbors could remember the details of his great-grandfather’s transgression. Memory was ephemeral. Hatred was a rock.

Tonight’s transaction was not a choice, he told himself. He was not choosing to take this terrible risk. An animal in a trap does not choose to gnaw its own leg off. It does it because it has no choice left. And if he was not doing it of his own free will, then it could not be sin.

Hegarty was selling to no one, and if he had been, Feidhlim was broke, and even if he wasn’t, Hegarty would salt the field before he’d sell it to a Lowney. The Jews and Arabs could hold a grudge well enough, but compared to the Lowneys and Hegartys they were rank amateurs.

He briefly considered saying a prayer, and then dismissed the idea as ludicrous. Like putting on sunscreen before stepping into a furnace.

Her mind felt curiously abandoned. Normally she was a walking cacophony of worries and reminders and inner recriminations. A song her mother had taught her early on that she had never been able to get out of her head. But now, there was only peace.

Oh, I’m going to fall for you, Betty thought to herself wearily. Fuck. I’m already in the air, plummeting down the side of the building.

He slept well that night. It was not that his fears had been alleviated. It was that they had become so immovable and solid in his mind that he no longer had the nervous energy that required hope to feed it. He was a dead man. He was worse than a dead man. Death, he now had no doubt, would not be the end of his terrors but merely the prelude. And so he slept.

With a wan smile, Father Fitt gave the tiny figure a blessing with his right hand, which still held the lit cigarette. The crucifix of blue smoke hung in the air as Father Fitt watched the last moments of Feidhlim Lowney.

Betty’s first term in UCD passed in a mad rush of stress, drinking too much, eating too little, insecurity, and anxiety that would years later, somehow, bake and cool in her memory as happiness.

Armed with a bulky Ediphone recorder, or sometimes just a pen and pad, Ó Duilearga’s collectors ventured forth into the nooks and crannies of the map like prospectors looking for gold. Rarely were they disappointed. It was true that some towns and villages wanted nothing to do with them, but a man who wants to listen is seldom in want of a welcome.

During one two-hour marathon on the techniques used by the Folklore Commission to catalog different spade types used in the west of Ireland, Betty had experienced boredom so profound that she entered a meditative state and (she would swear years afterward) had an actual out-of-body experience.

“What if I told you that for most of the last two centuries, the rate of infant mortality in this country was one in ten? That is the purpose of Na Daoine Maithe. The awful and arbitrary cruelty of life, reduced to something that can be bargained with, reasoned, or outwitted. A face, put upon that which cannot be faced.”

“So, Gemma,” Ashling said. “Be honest. What do you think of my pussy?” “Darling, I thought you’d never ask,” Gemma deadpanned, not bothering to look up from her magazine.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Ash,” she said. “I feel like I could trust you with a murder confession.” “Really?” “Yeah. Like, I literally feel like I could tell you where I hid the body.” “Right back at ya, girl.” “Thanks.” “Back garden, under the pepper tree.” “What?” “God, you’re easy…”

Ireland hardens as it goes west. The soil becomes bare and rocky. The roads become small and winding. Miles lengthen. Time slows. In fact, there are fields and mountains where it has never moved at all. This is Connemara. Not a county, not a province. A place that existed before counties, before provinces. A land. A stillness. As they left the soft tissue of the Midlands and hit the hard bone of the West, they became silent. It was a landscape that demanded silence. Gray mountains drifted by in monarchical solemnity. Sheep gazed out at them from over drystone walls older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. They drove on.

“What did he say?” Ashling asked the old woman. It was the first time she had spoken since they had set foot in this room. Eilis stared back at Ashling. Betty suddenly felt as if she had walked into the middle of an old family feud. It felt like there was unfinished business between these two, who had never met. The kind of resentment that lurks beneath still waters, deep, dark, and silent, like an alligator. The old woman smiled. A contemptuous, sneering smile. A distant cousin to a snarl. “I don’t remember,” she said simply.

There were tears running down her face but she was not crying. She did not have the strength to cry. The tears were simply bleeding out of her.

“Okay. Do you know what hungry grass is?” “No.” “It’s … in folklore, it’s a patch of grass where someone died. During the Famine. And if you step on it, you feel what they felt. Right before they … yeah.”

It looked so cheap and silly now. Valentine’s cards were for crushes. What she felt for Ashling now was love. It was, she knew, not a particularly healthy kind of love. She loved Ashling because Ashling had cared for her, looked after her, held her, saved her when she most desperately needed her. It was the kind of love wounded soldiers felt for their nurses. It was the love you felt for a fireman carrying you out of a blazing building. Not exactly the foundation for a lasting relationship.

“I don’t know if she even…” “What?” “Visits the island of Lesbos,” said Betty, and then paused to commit the memory of saying that to the part of her brain that would wake her up randomly in the middle of the night to cringe for saying it until the day she died.

An idea started to run naked through the streets of her mind, waving its arms and loudly yelling for her attention. From experience she knew that ideas like that were either very good or very bad and she would only know which after it was already too late.

She was not a regular, and not the kind of patron who would ever become a regular. Brendan Flanagan prided himself on running a reputable establishment, but he was under no illusions that this was the kind of pub that highly eligible young women would flock to. Flanagan’s was an Old Man Pub, and would be until the breaking of the Seventh Seal.

She’s meeting him here to give him the boot because she’s not planning on ever setting foot here again, Brendan said to himself. He made a mental note to stand the intended victim a pint on the house after surgery had concluded.

As Kate had watched the gravediggers work, every shovelful of soil laid on the coffin had felt like it was being scooped off her own chest. As the mother was buried, the daughter was exhumed.

Barry had that effect on paper. Nothing stayed pristine in his company. If Barry Mallen had been charged with bringing the stone tablets down from Mount Sinai, Kate thought, they would have been creased by the time he reached the bottom.

Kate had never thought of herself as someone who was afraid of dying. But she knew now that was because she had always assumed she would die in her sleep, in a warm bed. There was death, and there was death.

As was often the case in theater, The Girl on the Wall had needed to fail before it could succeed.

With a hot mug of tea in hand, Betty mused, what can the Irishwoman not face? A good cuppa made the world safe and normal again. It brought you back to reality, and made the horrors of life seem like fiction. Unpleasant, but fundamentally unreal and unable to inflict true pain.

“Right, come on,” said Gemma, hooking her arm in hers and marching her toward the stairs. “Where are we going?” “George’s Street. Laser Video. Tesco. We’re stocking up on crap movies and ice cream and then heading back to your place.” “Ugh. That’s so cliché.” “So’s penicillin for pneumonia. Take the damn cure.”

Because I love you so much that not being with you feels like a slow, aching sickness. Because I can’t stop thinking of stupid little things like how your cheeks get so cold on winter days that my lips get slightly numb when I kiss you. Or how your hair gets caught in my rings when I stroke your head. Or how every so often the light will hit you just right and you will be so beautiful that you will leave me speechless. Because you changed the shape of the world and made it fit me for a little while. Because I could never be good enough for you but I could do this, at least.

You were both at once and I didn’t know things could be scary and nice at the same time. Then I heard your voice and I thought to myself, “Oh. He’s something scary pretending to be something nice. He’s something that’s very good at pretending.”

“Do you hate me, Ma?” she asked. “I do,” said Etain. Ashling burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. The casual way it had been said. The utter, total lack of hesitation. The perfect, if unwitting, comic timing of it. You had to laugh. You had to laugh. Even Etain gave a husky chuckle. “I did try,” she said wearily. “I tried to love you. But you weren’t made for loving, Ashling. You didn’t come from love. Not like…” She left the name unspoken, hanging in the air like a dagger. “I did try,” Etain repeated. “It never came easy to me. Love. And now everyone I ever gave my love to is dead. Or took it and ran. I don’t have any left for you, see? I gave it all away.”

But silences did not work on Kate. Kate had been trained by experts in the art.

There were bouncers, but it seemed that the only criteria being applied to those queuing to get in was that they be bipedal, and even that seemed more like a loose guideline.

“The family,” he said. “The Mallens. Leave them be. They’ve suffered enough. Leave the family alone.” Ah, there was the word. “Family.” It was an old Irish word. It meant: “Do nothing. Challenge nothing. Change nothing.” Ireland was a rocky garden, dig a few inches deep and you found stone; solid and impassable. And carved into its face, as like as not; the word FAMILY.

She hated giving condolences. It always felt like adding to someone’s suffering, not taking away. Forcing them to acknowledge you. To thank you for the gift of useless, meaningless words.

The house where she had been raised looked smaller and tamer now. She had precious few happy memories of this place, none since her father had died if she was honest. And yet, she felt something like happiness to see that door again. Or perhaps happiness was the wrong word. Satisfaction. The contented pride of looking at an old scar and remembering something that had tried to kill you and failed.

She then took the rest of the newspaper and threw it out into the hall, where she knew Betty would find it and pick it up and complain to Etain about leaving newspapers in the hall, which would give Etain the opportunity to completely ignore her. It was a poor substitute for gin, but she took what she could get.

She looked up at Betty. Love changed how you saw a person. The woman sitting across from her now, she never saw her in pictures or mirrors. That was someone else. This Betty, so beautiful, so full of love and goodness and fierce, loyal protectiveness. This was someone who only Ashling could see in the flesh, before her eyes.

Instead, she felt only what the pigs must have felt when they began their journey to this table. Weary, numb resignation in the face of a world too unknowable, too unchangeable, and too cruel.

“Because that’s how it’s always been,” he said. “When people turn on the light they think, ‘That’s because I paid me electric bill.’ And when they see the roads they think, ‘That’s ’cos I paid me taxes.’ But when they wake up in the morning. And they’re alive. And there’s shape and meaning and order to the world. They never ask themselves, ‘Who paid for that?’ Deals, deals, deals. Nothing gets done in this country without someone getting paid under the table.”