Selected Stories

‘She is, all right. D’you know her? Does she come into the garage?’

‘Ah no, she hasn’t a car. She doesn’t come in.’

‘I’d best be getting back, Cahal.’

He didn’t want to go yet, while the woman was there. But if they waited they could be here for hours. He didn’t want to pass near her, but as soon as he’d paid and stood up he saw they’d have to. When they did she spoke to Minnie Fennelly, not him.

‘Will I make your wedding-dress for you?’ the dress-maker offered. ‘Would you think of me at all when it’ll be the time you’d want it?’

And Minnie Fennelly laughed and said no way they were ready for wedding-dresses yet.

‘Cahal knows where he’ll find me,’ the dressmaker said. ‘Amn’t I right, Cahal?’

‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ Minnie Fennelly said when they were outside.

Three days after that, Mr Durcan left his pre-war Riley in because the hand-brake was slipping. He’d come back for it at four, he arranged, and said before he left: ‘Did you hear that about the dressmaker’s child?’

He wasn’t the kind to get things wrong. Fussy, with a thin black moustache, his Riley sports the pride of his bachelor life, he was as tidy in what he said as he was in how he dressed.

‘Gone missing,’ he said now. ‘The gardaí are in on it.’

It was Cahal’s father who was being told this. Cahal, with the cooling system from Gibney’s bread van in pieces on a workbench, had just found where the tube had perished.

‘She’s backward, the child,’ his father said.

‘She is.’

‘You hear tales.’

‘She’s gone off for herself anyway. They have a block on a couple of roads, asking was she seen.’

The unease that hadn’t left him since the dressmaker had been in the Cyber Café began to nag again when Cahal heard that. He wondered what questions the gardaí were asking; he wondered when it was that the child had taken herself off; although he tried, he couldn’t piece anything together.

‘Isn’t she a backward woman herself, though?’ his father remarked when Mr Durcan had gone. ‘Sure, did she ever lift a finger to tend that child?’

Cahal didn’t say anything. He tried to think about marrying Minnie Fennelly, although still nothing was fixed, not even an agreement between themselves. Her plump honest features became vivid for a moment in his consciousness, the same plumpness in her arms and her hands. He found it attractive, he always had, since first he’d noticed her when she was still going to the nuns. He shouldn’t have had thoughts about the Spanish girl, he shouldn’t have let himself. He should have told them the statue was nothing, that the man they’d met had been pulling a fast one for the sake of the drinks they’d buy him.

‘Your mother had that one run up curtains for the back room,’ his father said. ‘Would you remember that, boy?’

Cahal shook his head.

‘Ah, you wouldn’t have been five at the time, maybe younger yet. She was just after setting up with the dressmaking, her father still there in the cottage with her. The priests said give her work on account she was a charity. Bedad, they wouldn’t say it now!’

Cahal turned the radio on and turned the volume up. Madonna was singing, and he imagined her in the get-up she’d fancied for herself a few years ago, suspenders and items of underclothes. He’d thought she was great.

‘I’m taking the Toyota out,’ his father said, and the bell from the forecourt rang, someone waiting there for petrol. It didn’t concern him, Cahal told himself as he went to answer it. What had occurred on the evening of Germany and Holland was a different thing altogether from the news Mr Durcan had brought, no way could it be related.

‘Howya,’ he greeted the school-bus driver at the pumps.

The dressmaker’s child was found where she’d lain for several days, at the bottom of a fissure, partly covered with shale, in the exhausted quarry half a mile from where she’d lived. Years ago the last of the stone had been carted away and a barbed-wire fence put up, with two warning notices about danger. She would have crawled in under the bottom strand of wire, the gardaí said, and a chain-link fence replaced the barbed wire within a day.

In the town the dressmaker was condemned, blamed behind her back for the tragedy that had occurred. That her own father, who had raised her on his own since her mother’s early death, had himself been the father of the child was an ugly calumny, not voiced before, but seeming now to have a natural place in the paltry existence of a child who had lived and died wretchedly.

‘How are you, Cahal?’ Cahal heard the voice of the dressmaker behind him when, early one November morning, he made his way to the shed where he and Minnie Fennelly indulged their affection for one another. It was not yet one o’clock, the town lights long ago extinguished except for a few in Main Street. ‘Would you come home with me, Cahal? Would we walk out to where I am?’

All this was spoken to his back while Cahal walked on. He knew who was there. He knew who it was, he didn’t have to look.

‘Leave me alone,’ he said.