Pat swallowed and did his level best to formulate the words he feared would elude him.
“Couldn’t have a wain?”
He felt—although it wasn’t, or to a casual observer would not have appeared so—as though the skin on his face had been drawn unreasonably tightly against his bones.
“Barren as Rogey Rock,” his mother informed him. “That’s what the doctor said, although not in those words.”
Thoughts appeared as randomly intersecting lights in the murkier corners of Pat’s mind.
“Mammy!” he said. “But are you sure? Are you sure all this is true?”
There was no mistaking the pain on his mother’s face.
“And now, worst of all—she’s turned my own son against me. My own son that would not have doubted me in his life. She’s turned him against me too!”
Something leaped inside Pat when he heard his mother say that, as certain as if a pebble or stone had been cast from a catapult. He clasped her right shoulder firmly with his hand.
“No, Mammy!” he cried aloud. “She hasn’t!”
It was hard for Pat to bear the sight of the salt tear that now gleamed in the corner of his mother’s eye. But even harder to bear on opening his own to their optimum width and finding himself gazing no longer upon the mother who had carried him for nine months and cared and nurtured him for so long, but—Mrs. Tubridy! Upon her lips the words, “Paudgeen! What are you doing? It’s five o’clock in the morning!”
Pat felt the back of his throat contract until it was the size of a small seed.
“My name’s not Paudgeen!” he retorted angrily.
“Go back to sleep and no more lip out of you or it will be down to the station with me first thing in the morning. Do you hear me?”
Perhaps Mrs. Tubridy felt it was crucial for her to assert her authority in a firm and unequivocal manner at that time, and it is tempting to speculate as to what might have happened if she had adopted a more conciliatory approach. But she didn’t, and what was clear now was that in conjunction with what had taken place earlier—entirely unknown to Mrs. Tubridy, of course—the otherwise—or what seemed to be otherwise—placid Pat McNab had, although to all intents and purposes unaware of it himself, been set upon a course, the outcome of which could now but spell disaster. Although it is unlikely that an independent observer—as Pat in the days that followed continued to proceed around the kitchen, pottering awkwardly and muttering abstractedly, “Hello! My name is Paudgeen! Paudgeen Tubridy! Do you know me at all?”—would necessarily have drawn such a drastic conclusion. Or surmised that, from sudden cries of, “That’s me! Afraid to go down to Sullivan’s because my mammy won’t let me! She says if I do she’ll get the guards on me! She has me so scared, you see! Why, I’m so scared I think I need a drink!” a state of heartbroken, helpless anxiety might have inevitably ensued.
Far more likely is that the comments on such occasions (from independent observers, that is) would have been more along the lines of, “Poor Pat!” or “Isn’t he a sad case?” But perhaps these rather casual commentators—putative, it is true—might not have been so eager to declare him a sad case if they had observed him some evenings later, brandishing a bottle of Cointreau, the contents of which he had practically consumed in their entirety, donning one of Mrs. Tubridy’s hats (a blue one with a white net) and curtseying in pantomime fashion as he flailed about the kitchen, crying, “Howya, Mrs. Tubridy! How’s Paudgeen getting on? Like I mean—is he born yet? Ha ha! Only coddin’!” as, as before, into the neck of his impromptu botttle-microphone, he began to sing, rotating his arms all the while, his voice attaining the very peak of his register:
Come day go day
Wishing my heart it was Sunday
Drinking buttermilk all the week
Whiskey on a Sunday. Yee-hoo!
It is difficult, perhaps, to describe the suddenness with which Pat lapsed into silence, or to adequately indicate the impact the glowering visage of Mrs. Tubridy actually had as the door opened and revealed her standing there in the shadowy aperture. Suffice to say that Pat felt his lips had been turned to stone, as had most of the rest of his body.
How unpleasant it was for him to end up in the cellar is equally difficult to convey to the reader. What is certain is that a stratagem which had been pitilessly devised to serve the purpose of ultímate punishment, to effectively cripple Pat’s spirit to the point where he would in future pursue his broom throughout the length and breadth of the house like a hapless ghost for the remainder of his mortal days, can be said to have failed utterly in its purpose. Had the independent observers referred to heretofore been calmly evaluating Pat at this point, however, this is the last thing they would have concluded from his general demeanor as he sat crouched in die dankest of corners. Their conclusion—if his wide, extended grin and happy, dancing eyes, were to be considered any indication—could but be that here was a man very much at ease with his surroundings, and indeed—aside, perhaps, from the whitish skin which stretched across the bones of his face which seemed about to snap at any time—deriving nothing less than great pleasure from them. And which, they would undoubtedly feel, explained the intermittent chuckles into the twins of his bunched fists and the occasional address to a visiting mouse who considered him insouciantly from a nearby air vent, along the lines of, “Putting me in prison now, if you don’t mind! Well, boys O boys! Have you any idea what next, mouse? For I’m afraid I don’t!”
There may be a school of thought which subscribes to the theory that periods in confined darkness must inevitably result in the mind drawing on its infinite resources—even in hopelessly adverse circumstances—and ensuing in creating, imaginatively, of course, surroundings of a much more congenial nature; I cannot say for certain. What is certain, however, is that it was the course of action decided upon and most emphatically followed by Pat McNab, as became plainly evident when he woke up one morning to find himself, not burdened by damp and dark and the asphyxiation-inducing aroma of crumbling plaster, but bearing witness to one of the brightest of sunny days that it is possible for the mind to conceive, sitting within that very cellar with his mother—seeing them both beneath a spreading elm, chaining daisies. Such was his happiness at being with her once again that he was as giddy as a young goat you would see prancing about any mountainside.
“But what I can’t get over, Mammy,” he continued—they were discussing Mrs. Tubridy—”is the big hole in her chin!”
His mother shook her head.
“Aye! With the hair coming out of it, I declare to God, for all the world like a coiled spring! God help poor Mattie Tubridy, Pat! Having to look at that every morning of his life!”
Pat nodded and wiped the tears from his eyes.
“Aye!” he said. “But sure he’s dead now, God rest him!”
Just then, his mother opened the lid of the picnic basket.
“Pat?” she smiled. “Would you like a sup of lemonade?”
Pat beamed.
“Yes, Mammy,” he replied.
He was a litde unsure as to whether he had noted a litde twinkle in his mother’s eye. But this was confirmed as she continued, “Or maybe something a bit stronger?”
“Now you’re talking, Mammy!” cried Pat, slapping his hands together as the bottle of Johnnie Walker gleamed golden in the afternoon summer sun.
He smiled as his mother ran her fingers through his hair.
“Now who’s good to you!” she cried. “It’d be a long time before that old haverel, that old haybag you-know-who’d let you have a little glugeen, Pat! Am I right?”
“Now you’re talking, Mammy!” Pat cried, filling his mouth up with whiskey.
“Just because you’d need a hose to get it down her auld tight gob!”
Pat nearly fell over when he heard his mother saying this. He certainly spilled whiskey all down the front of his coat!
“Ha ha, Mammy!” he cried helplessly. “A hose! Oh, God bless us!”
“Have another drop, son!”
his mother encouraged him. “Get it down you!”
Pat shook his head and rubbed whiskey beads off his chin with his sleeve.
“Oh, Mammy, you’re an awful case!” he cried.
Then his mother went and spilled some whiskey.
“God bless us, I think I’m stocious myself! Get up out of that, Pat McNab, you boy you!”
“Wo-ho! Mrs. McNab, fine girl you are! Cripes but you’re powerful! C’mere out of that till I give you a dance!”
“Bejapers now make sure and mind me corns!” yelped his mother as she took his hand and rose to her feet.
The sunlight was like a shoal of arrows cast by some invisible medieval army showering through the interlocking boughs of the trees, and it was difficult for the birds not to display some twinges of jealousy as he and his mother sang together:
Come day go day
Wishing my heart it was Sunday
Drinking buttermilk all the week …
Pat rounded off the verse with a sweep of his arm and a declamatory: “Whiskey on a Sunday!”
It may be that if he had been forced to remain in his place of confinement for even one more single day it would have had the required effect on Pat McNab by Mrs. Tubridy, but opening the door and revealing herself standing in a shaft of light in an almost apologedc manner was not perhaps, in retrospect, the wisest course of action for his self-appointed behavior modifier. As indeed neither were any of her repeated insistences that it had been incumbent upon her to embark upon the course she had.
“I had to be cruel to be kind, Pat,” she said softly as Pat set down some hours later the piping hot meal she had requested he prepare for her.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Tubridy,” he replied, the combination of sadness and marble-cold stoniness in his voice tragically inaudible to her ear.
Mrs. Tubridy sliced some meat and placed her fork at an angle to her cheek, looking upward and smiling in the way she did before saying, “You know—you’re a very handsome boy, Paudgeen. I mean, Pat, of course!”
“Thank you, Mrs. Tubridy.”
The smile slowly metamorphosed into a smirk as she laid down her fork and said, “Come here.”
Very gently, Pat felt her fingers close about his upper arm. They reminded him of a pound of Castlebar sausages.
Mrs. Tubridy coughed—politely, of course—and said, “After you’ve cleaned out the yard, we can have biscakes and tea in the parlor. Just you and me. All right?”
“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” Pat said, “after I’ve hosed down the yard.”
“You’re hosing it down, are you?” replied Mrs. Tubridy. “Well—after you’ve that done, we can sit in there together.”
Had Mrs. Tubridy been possessed of telepathic powers, it is highly likely if not even more so that things would have worked out much differently. For she would have clearly seen that what Pat was thinking as he was discussing the hosing of the yard and the repairing to the parlor with her in reasonable, civilized tones was, “Yes! And after we have those two things done, what you can do is drive me mad the same as you did your dead husband!”
And would have attached a logic, and, perhaps, a meaning, to the six words of his succeeding statement, which, as it stood, made absolutely no sense at all. The statement being: “Except that you won’t, Mrs. Tubridy!”
Initially, its seeming eccentricity elicited a tiny flicker of amusement from Mrs. Tubridy’s cheek. As she nibbled her meat and said, “What’s that, Pat?” satisfactorily receiving the reply, “I said except you won’t be hosing the yard, Mrs. Tubridy, because I’ll be doing it all by myself!”
Would it have ended significantly differently if the aforementioned “telepathic powers” or even the slightest approximation of them had been in evidence? Who can possibly say? All that must remain, for posterity, in the realm of pure conjecture.
What is not in the realm of conjecture, however, is that, as he was removing Mrs. Tubridy’s plate to ferry it in the direction of the dustbin that evening, her eyes twinkled with an unusual abandon and gaiety as she said, “You know what I was thinking, Pat? I was thinking that maybe—why, one night, we could get ourselves a litde brandy? Or whiskey, maybe? Just the two of us!”
The sight of a postmenopausal if not indeed elderly lady inflating steadily—to the point of absurdity, in fact—to a degree where she is a palpable danger to others is not immediately what we would expect to be the direct consequence of what is essentially an unremarkable suggestion, or would be in other circumstances. But these were not other circumstances, as the glint in Pat McNab’s eye as he hoarsely cried, “Mrs. McNab! I don’t know what to say! How can I ever thank you, Mrs. McNab!” ought to have indicated to the older woman, and most certainly would have if had she been alert. Which she wasn’t, perhaps due to the quantity of food she had consumed, but for whatever reason, a shortcoming which was now about to lead inevitably to what might be called “The Fate of Dolly Tubridy,” soon to be formerly of 36 Mounthelmet Gardens, Gullytown.
If anyone, a neighbor, or anyone just casually passing by, had encountered Pat sitting on a rock in his garden puffing on a Major cigarette and smiling, what they most likely would have thought to themselves would have been, “Now there’s a fellow looking happy and contented with himself. I suppose that’s what making a good job of hosing down the yard does for you!” Which would have been diverting and amusing but would have absolutely no connection with the actual reasons behind Pat’s undeniably broad and sunnily engaging smile. Or indeed any of his thoughts at that particular smoke-puffing moment, which were more along the lines of, “What a time we had last night!” and “I hope you’re happy down there, Mrs. Tubridy—or should I say, Mrs. Whale!”
What had happened was Pat had arrived in to find Mrs. Tubridy dressed up to the nines, with a lovely litde chiffon scarf knotted gaily around her neck and a definite whiff of quite expensive perfume emanating from her person. Not to mention a litde glasheen of whiskey cradled mischievously in her hand! So it wasn’t long before herself and her landlord—for what else was Pat, if not that!—were getting along like a house on fire as if to say to the bad times they had put behind them: “Bad times? What might you be doing loitering about this vicinity? I think you had best be off about your business, don’t you?”
“Oh, Pat!” was all you could hear Mrs. Tubridy squeal after they’d had two or three drinks, “Pat but you’re an awful man!”
Quite what Mrs. Tubridy must have thought when she woke up some hours later with her face wreathed in shadow and her wrists securely fastened to the head of what had once been Pat and Mrs. McNab’s bed, it is impossible to say for certain. One thing is for sure, it was shot through with a considerable measure of anxiety, for if it wasn’t, why would she bother to shriek, “Pat! Pat, what are you doing to me, for the love of God?” Which was of very litde value, for Pat did not even appear to hear this—he certainly made no effort to acknowledge it—as he busied himself attending to her ankles with some cord and repeating, with what must have been, to Mrs. Tubridy, a devastating irreverence, “Paudgeen! Sure, call me Paudgeen, Mrs. Tubridy! Paudgeen will do just fine!”
It could not have been pleasant for Mrs. Tubridy to perceive Pat approaching her—a matter of moments later—bearing a tundish and insisting that she open her mouth, all the better for him to insert the rusted zinc implement correctly. “Open up now!” were his exact words. “Open up now for Paudgeen like a good girl!”
Her resistance—what there was of it—was quite useless. In any case, her trepidation, when she witnessed the length of blue hose being uncoiled through the window from the yard, had effectively rendered her entire body weak and bereft of any form of physical strength or mental resolve. Her psychological reaction to Pat’s “After all—we can’t have you taking whiskey without water!” can only be imagined.
Initially, haste as regards the replenishment of the tundish’s contents was not a major concern of Pat’s, but this was not to last, and within a matter of mere minutes, the dazzling array of b
ottles—such a stupendous catalog of disparate brands: Johnnie Walker, Glenfiddich, Grouse, Bell’s, and Paddy of course!—were being utilized to form what was a veritable amber whirlpool which was subsumed with speed-of-light rapidity into the system of the prone and inert—however wide-eyed—Mrs. Tubridy, to be followed by a liberal dispensation of the natural mineral H20—a very liberal dispensation indeed, it has to be admitted, what might be termed “The Irrigation of Dolly Tubridy” having already begun, not to mention continuing apace. As Pat—feeling it appropriate at this advanced stage—lightened the proceedings by quipping, “Perhaps you’d like a drop of water, Mrs. Tubridy? You would? Why certainly, Mrs. Tubs! We have some right here!” The hose leaping into his hand as some well-trained, dutiful house snake.
There were all sorts of rumors to be heard doing the rounds in Gullytown for the few weeks following—but then, there are always rumors. One even led to Smiler McAlpine, a part-time laborer who was working on the roads near the McNab house (pruning bushes, mostly), leaning over the hedge and observing through the curling horns of smoke that unwound from his pipe to Pat who was yet again enjoying a Major cigarette upon what might be considered his litde rock throne, “I’m damned if I can make out what happened, Pat! It hits me bet. A woman her age—disappearing like that! Is your mother inside by any chance? A lot of people have been saying they haven’t seen her about lately. Maybe she could throw some light on the subject!”
“No. She’s gone away to America. I mean England, for a week. She’ll be back in a month.”
“I see,” replied Smiler, his hand making a rasping sound against the bristles of his chin as he rubbed them reflectively.
“It’s a mystery—that’s all I can say!” replied Pat, an image of the persistently inflating whale-woman appearing at the back of his mind, rising from his rock and stretching himself as the remains of his cigarette twisted and spun in the air. “It’s like these fellows who never took a drink in their lives, laying down the law for everyone else, and before you know it they’re down in Sullivan’s rising trouble and roaring and shouting and driving everybody half-daft with their stupid songs! What I mean is—you think you know somebody and then they go and do the opposite of what you expect. When all’s said and done, life never really does tend to conform to expectations, does it, Smiler?”