The Ballad of Mo and G Read online

  You made for home, head down, no eye contact. The bad boys and girls were on their rounds in their souped-up cars or taking up both sides of the pavement with hoodies up.

  There were many more ordinary people who just got on with living their daily lives.

  I was never there. No one ever did go, bar the people who lived in Mo’s home place, and people who worked for the government.

  Mo told me how it was.

  The people there did the shopping, brought the kids to school, went to work and made every effort to play the hand they were dealt. On the news the area was described as working class, but hardly anyone living there had a job.

  The good people lived in the war zone, not of their making. Sometimes the innocent got caught in the crossfire while the rest of us parked our fat arses on white horses high on the hill overlooking the battlefield. And the generals always say, ‘It will all be over by Christmas.’ But decades of neglect, poverty and relative poverty have gone in too deep. Their troubles are layered now, like an archaeological site.

  It’s as if there were two countries, divided by a border, defined by postal addresses. If you were born in 4 you were fine, and if the number that came out of the pot was 12, well then that was you well out of luck. This was the second partition of Ireland.

  Employers would give you the time of day and then lash off a quick email to say how impressed they were with your interview. Thanks but no thanks. We’ll keep you on file. Just in case something comes up. Under F for Fuck Off.

  But we were fine. Dad described the way it was back in the seventies when the war was full on in the North of Ireland. The people in the deep south, where we lived, ‘Might as well have been on Mars.’

  Dad told me, ‘Some story might have come on the news about twenty people being killed in a bomb but even though the north was only three hundred miles up the road, it might have been in Afghanistan, for all people were prepared to do about it.’

  Now the distance in the city between the safe places and the dangerous places is no more than a bus stop or two, but Mo’s home is still in another faraway country.

  Mo was even more unemployable because she dropped out of college when she became pregnant. The chances of Mo getting a job were somewhere between none and slim. But I didn’t tell her that when we talked about the future. She knew. Mo knew, but she didn’t complain. Because it would do no good.

  ‘I took back the bit about Dermo dying. It was probably an accident alright.’

  Ah well, forgive and forget that’s what we always say when someone is the cause of killing a baby. But I didn’t say that. It was in my head now, she would never leave him.

  Mo spoke about the Law of the Wish.

  ‘I know the Mrs D thing was probably only a mad coincidence anyway. But she did wish my baby dead and I wished her dead. And now they are both dead.

  ‘Maureen kept going on last night about Hitler’s astrologer who forecast the death of Mussolini and even his own death at the hands of the SS and Hitler’s death in a bunker. It was all in The Law of the Wish. Maureen had a premonition she would be killed by an Olsen unless there was what the wish book called “an intervening event”.

  In the book there’s a bit where Hitler’s astrologer wrote out on a letter to his next of kin that he was going to die at the hands of the Nazis and one morning they called to his house and took him away. And, well, killed him. Just like that.’

  ‘Jeez you’re losing it completely now.’ I turned the speaker on my iPhone all the louder. I just loved listening to that voice.

  It was girly hoarse, sang too much, smoky and very gentle. Sometimes her voice broke and went less croaky and a little high. But her tone was always soft and kind. The kind of voice you would like to wake up to in the morning, even if you were really tired.

  Her accent was a strange mix of inner city and posh. She could move the accent in either direction when she concentrated, depending on who she was talking to. Mo kept a special voice for me. An even softer and more gentle voice with a slow and easy rhythm, all of its own.

  ‘Hey, G. Guess what dude? I was at his jigsaw again.’

  Mo had prized away part of the wheel of a Ferrari from the framed jigsaw glued together by Dermo. The masterpiece was hanging over the mantelpiece on permanent exhibition. Dermo was very proud of his work. Dermo thought he not only put the pieces together, but designed the car as well. Every now and then he would ask what happened to the missing jigsaw piece and Mo would say it must have fallen into the fire when the glue melted.

  There were several gaps in the huge jigsaw and the red Ferrari was badly in need of spare parts. Schumacher, the German driver who was standing by the car, had lost his crotch and Dermo coloured it in with a marker.

  ‘Maybe I am losing it but I just can’t leave. Not for a while. But I will go and soon. I still have nowhere to call home. It’s going to take time for me to get well. Maureen gave out yards to Dermo. She swore it was really an accident and that he just kicked out and happened to get me in the worst possible place.’

  I didn’t know how to react to that. He kicks a baby out of her and she as good as forgives him other than to remove a wheel from his Ferrari and emasculate a cardboard German racing driver.

  I would never have given her any excuse to forgive me for something bad because I wouldn’t do anything bad.

  Dermo would always be nice to her after acts of ignorance and violence. This time he sent an expensive voucher for a makeover. There was no way he would have thought of that all by himself. It had to be Maureen.

  Did she think Dermo would reform?

  Maybe Mo was always and forever about to give him one more chance.

  The answer was in the future, but how much time can you gamble on someone beyond redemption?

  There was a dependency in her too, I think.

  The broken home she came from was better than no home and maybe the Compound was the same. And I didn’t exactly jump in with an offer of a bed in my apartment.

  But who knows what’s going on in anyone’s head. The only way human behaviour makes sense is if you accept we are all mad in varying degrees, with the Dermos right up near the top of the scale.

  Western Europeans are descended from four or five explorers out of the Rift Valley in Kenya who made their way across the world, via a few million years, to the Compound. So it says on the TV.

  Everyone is everyone’s cousin. We are interbred and mutants of ourselves. Well that’s my theory and some are madder than others. In time and with training and practice it’s some bit sortable out. For most.

  How we help each other out defines us.

  But I feel so small, scared and useless. I don’t really know what to do, to make us safe. It was sort of like trying to keep out the tide with a plastic chip shop fork.

  Maureen is now Mo’s closest woman friend.

  One night, not long before the baby died, Maureen made drinking chocolate with marshmallows. She patted Mo gently on the belly.

  ‘How is my little my grandchild and it swimming away without a care in the world? You must play nice music. Elvis would be lovely. ‘Love Me Tender’.’

  Maureen put her head on Mo’s tummy and hummed a few verses of a lullaby.

  ‘They can hear music in the womb you know. And later, when they gets older, they remembers it.’

  I wondered what sweet music Mo heard in the womb. Shouting and drunken fighting I would guess, for certain.

  Dad used to take me down to the river when I was a small fella and one day he brought home an orange-coloured toyshop net attached to a slender bamboo pole. We travelled hand-in-hand from our house to the Owenalee, over a timber style, and through two green meadows dotted with little yellow flowers.

  I netted darting salmon fry in the lukewarm pools under the weeping willows at the lazy bend.

  My Mam washed out a jam jar.

  ‘In case the little fish get diabetes,’ said Dad.

  Mam laughed. She used to laugh at all his jokes back the
n.

  I took the fry carefully from the net. They wriggled about tickling my palm as I closed my fingers into a tunnel, in case the fry fell off and were lost in the long grass. Carefully I placed the babies in the jar.

  The salmon fry died after a few days. I blamed myself for taking them away from their river.

  ‘Ah, little G,’ explained Dad, ‘some are meant to perish and more are made to go. Only a tiny few grow up to be big salmon anyway. They have so many fish and bird enemies and they live in a very dangerous place.’

  I grassed from an internet cafe, so deep in the inner city, it was an independent republic. A place where the citizens were allowed to get on with whatever it was they were doing, provided they didn’t bother anyone on the outside.

  Cameras owned every street. The police could trace an email sent from a laptop or an iPhone. I wore a hat and dark glasses at night. Like a rock star.

  I was the only white person in the cafe. Walk into a shop in some other part of town and there was always the chance you would meet someone from home, or work, or wherever. In Ireland, there was only one or two degrees of separation. Except in Ethnicland.

  The email gave the police the exact location of the Olsen place and a detailed account of the death of the Papillon.

  More than a week passed before the cops got around to calling to the Olsens but by then the dead donkey had galloped off. The runs had been cleaned up. Bones were buried, or maybe Dermo made consommé for the flask he brought on lorry trips.

  Dermo must have had the captured dogs killed in one last savage waste not, want not orgy.

  He produced state dog licences and breeding papers from the Kennel Club. There was no proof. No one ever exhumed a donkey or a Papillon and so it was, the Olsens walked. The Olsens were always breaking some law. Some were small laws like driving without silencers and more were big laws. The family sold stuff from their vans. Dodgy smokes and fake DVDs. You’d never know what they’d be up to. Maybe Dermo smuggled in drugs but Maureen hated drugs, so maybe not.

  There must have been a tip-off.

  Most likely the police made a judgement call. Which was more important to the law? High-quality intelligence, or a few stray dogs waiting to be torn apart on death row?

  The Olsens were giving the cops information in return for immunity. Mo was sure of it. She often overheard Dermo talking to a Sergeant Matt. Dermo used to tell Big Matt, as he called him, about the criminals he met on the road, the stuff they were up to, where they were going, and why.

  I was petrified and wished I hadn’t sent the email.

  But if they did trace me, would I be forced to testify against the Olsens behind a screen, wearing a bulletproof vest, with a new nose, and a digitally altered had-a-stroke voice?

  I was truly horrified over what happened to the little dog. But I wasn’t going to testify against Dermo. Not for a dog. Maybe not even for a human.

  The stress of it all fuelled the mad dreams and worries.

  Would I finish up on a witness protection scheme, somewhere in the Deep South of the USA? In a place where there were no Irish, and catfish gumbo stunk the house. With fuck all to do all day only swat flies with rolled up newspapers and flick the zapper until I get epilepsy or go blind from jerking off at porn channels.

  In the end I give myself away with the emigrant’s corny longing for home by going up to an Irish pub in El Paso and singing ‘The Fields of Athenry’ and asking for Chef Sauce with my corned beef and cabbage and saying top of the morning or whatever crap it is mock Irish people say when they greet each other in Hollywood movies.

  Thor Olsen, a long-lost Swedish American lumberjack cousin, spots me from the pictures circulated by the clan all over the world. He cuts my head clean off with his axe. And sticks it on a barbeque fork, as a warning to the others.

  Although on the positive side there would hardly be too many lumberjacks south of El Paso. Unless he was a cactus lumberjack.

  As ever and always I began to lose it under stress. I saw all this in my mind.

  The wide awake dreams were back.

  Ridiculous as the odds were, I just couldn’t turn off the stupid images, especially in waking time. It’s like watching your operation on a TV monitor. There’s no end. At least with nightmares they stop when you wake up the next morning and you say thank God, it’s only a dream.

  Which makes me the living dead. But my dreams are all action. I’m a frenetic zombie.

  My Mammy told me I was always talking about ‘pictures on my pillow’ when I was a kid. She and Dad assumed these were my happy kiddies’ dreams about Disneyland and stuff.

  Mam thought it was kinda cute, but they were terrifying head movies of people being killed. Maybe it was brought on by the murderous TV we watched from the age of four.

  Mo didn’t know it was me who tipped off the police.

  Even though I trusted Mo, you would never know what she might say to Dermo in the heat of the moment, just to hurt him, and not in any way to get me into trouble. Married people say stuff to each other they wouldn’t dream of saying to anyone else in a million years. Sometimes I could hear my parents arguing late at night.

  I used to pull my head under the bedclothes, until I nearly smothered.

  Then one night my Dad pulled back the duvet, gently, and found me with my eyes closed and my thumbs in my ears. I never heard my parents argue again. Love left but courtesy stayed. For the kids’ sake.

  Mo knew it was him. From the sounds made by the dogs. He was a day early. She tried to hide her cases, but there wasn’t enough time. Dermo always drove right up to the door at speed, as if he was trying to catch her at something she shouldn’t be doing.

  The dogs recognised the revs of Dermo’s engine.

  The Alsatians barked a series of warnings when an ordinary car drove into the Compound, but for Dermo they sang in a high manic pitch.

  Grey, the leader, started the yodel. His pals joined in. The Doberman pups down in the far-off amphitheatre, led by their diva mother, sang ‘welcome home, Dermo’ in a howling wolverines’ chorus.

  ‘You’re home early.’ She forced a smile.

  Dermo was almost always cranky after a long drive. Some c— drove out in front of him and he nearly jackknifed, or the pigs pulled him over to check mud flaps and tacographs.

  Dermo’s road rage kept going when he wasn’t driving. One wrong sentence could trigger him.

  She was hoping he wouldn’t notice the labelled cardboard boxes full of books on the kitchen table or the half-filled open suitcase on the floor of the utility room. Mo was getting ready to leave Dermo. Her plan was to be well gone by the time he came home.

  Dermo walked past her on the porch, through the kitchen, to the back of the house.

  She hid a suitcase in the broom cupboard.

  ‘Dermos Den’ was painted on the door of his private room in a large-lettered red daub. The letters bled into the door and dripped down in long, thin lines.

  Mo was often tempted to stencil in an apostrophe, but thought better of it. The door was padlocked. Dermo nailed on a steel frame for extra protection. Mo always wondered what was in there.

  A deep freeze for sure.

  Dermo brought frozen bags of minced meat from the Den. I joked that Dermo put hitchhikers to death and butchered them for dog meat and kicks.

  Mo knew Dermo kept his stash of cash in the Den. Once when Dermo was out-cold drunk, Mo went through his pockets and found nearly six grand in fifties and hundreds. Supposedly thick people can add, multiply and subtract with the brightest, provided you substitute x, y and z for dollars, pounds and euros. Dermo had plenty of money.

  ‘Strip, bitch!’ he shouted in a weird, high voice. Mo dived on the sofa for her mobile. Dermo got to it first. Mo was sent flying to the floor.

  Dermo squashed the phone under his big boot. The one he killed their baby with. He undid his shiny belt buckle.

  ‘Not now. It’s my period.’

  And she smiled at him again. Then with a shrug,
she said casually, ‘You know how it is with us women.’

  He put his face in hers.

  ‘I don’t want to shag you,’ he whispered softly, forcing his revolving tongue into her ear as he squeezed her slender wrists so tight she felt pins and needles on the tips of her fingers. He moved back a little and looked her up and down. Still holding her wrists in a tight grip, he whispered again.

  ‘I wants to torture you.’

  Dermo tied Mo’s hands with the cowboy belt and dragged her roughly across the hard, tiled kitchen to the Den.

  Mo tried to scream, but he got his hand over her mouth and muffled words into mumbles. There followed a vicious punch and Mo’s left eye started to swell up almost immediately.

  Dermo ordered Mo to stand up.

  Mo was choking.

  ‘Will you shut up if I let you breathe?’

  She nodded. Mo stole a breath. She felt absolutely helpless and under his power. Mo kept on thinking her way through the ordeal, trying to figure out how she could escape unharmed.

  ‘Swear on your dead baby you will shut your big fuck-faced mouth.’

  Your dead baby. Your dead baby.

  That ate her up. The ‘your dead baby’ bit. Your. Your. Your. Your. But she kept quiet. Mo was screaming inside but she nodded again, barely able to propel her head forward.

  He took away his greasy black hand from her mouth. Mo drank in the air in big gulps. The breaths tasted of diesel and sweat.

  Dermo opened the door of the Den.

  The door was stiff and stuck. The timber had contracted from the damp and cold of the Den. It made the hoarse throat noise of a door opening in a haunted house movie. Dermo kicked the reinforced door with such force, he knocked flakes of caked black paint off the wall.