Irish Revel (2)
In the upstairs room of the hotel the men were taking off their jackets and sitting down to eat. The girls had carried the goose up from the kitchen, and it lay in the center of the table. Mrs Rodgers had closed the public bar, and now she was cutting meat off the goose and putting it onto plates. She kept Mary busy, serving the potatoes and passing the food around. Mr Brogan, as chief guest, was served first, with the best cuts of goose.
Mary was surprised that people in towns seemed so coarse. When one of the men, Hickey, tried to take her hand, she did not smile at all. She wished she were at home. She knew what her family were doing there - the boys learning their lessons, her mother baking bread, her father rolling cigarettes and talking to himself. In another hour they'd say their prayers and go up to bed. The routine of their lives never changed. The fresh bread was always cool by morning.
O'Toole, the young man who worked at the factory, had bright green eyes and hair so blond it was almost white.
'No one's offered me any food yet,' he said. 'A nice way to behave.'
'Oh God, Mary, haven't you given Mr O'Toole anything to eat yet?' Mrs Rodgers said, and she gave Mary a push to hurry her up. Mary gave him a large plateful, and he thanked her, saying they'd dance later. To him she was far prettier than those good-for-nothing town girls - she was tall and thin like himself.
And he liked a simple-minded girl with long hair. Maybe later on he'd persuade her to go into another room, and they'd have sex. She had lovely eyes when you looked into them, brown and deep.
The fifth woman at the party was Crystal, the local hairdresser, who had bright red hair, and who did not like the undercooked goose. She and Mrs Rodgers were talking together when Brogan unexpectedly began to sing.
'Let the man sing, can't you,' O'Toole said to Doris and Eithne, who were giggling over a private joke.
Mary felt cold in her thin dress. There hadn't been a fire in that room for years, and the air had not warmed up yet.
'Would any of the ladies care to sing?' asked O'Toole, when Brogan finished. 'I'm sure you can sing,' he said to Mary.
'Where she comes from, they can only just talk,' Doris said.
Mary blushed. She said nothing, but she felt angry. Her family ate with a knife and fork, she thought proudly, and had a cloth on the kitchen table, not a plastic one like this, and kept a tin of coffee in the cupboard in case strangers came to the door.
'Christ, boys, we forgot the soup!' Mrs Rodgers said suddenly, and hurried out with Doris to fetch it from the kitchen.
After the soup, O'Toole poured out four glasses of whiskey, making sure that the level in each glass was the same. There were bottles of beer as well. The ladies had gin and orange.
'Orange for me,' said Mary, but when her back was turned, O'Toole put gin in her orange. They all raised their glasses and drank to Brogan's future. Long John Salmon, the fourth man at the party, asked Brogan about his plans, and Brogan began to talk about the things he wanted to do to his house and garden.
'Come on, someone, tell us a joke,' said Hickey after a while. He was bored with gardening talk.
'I'll tell you a joke,' said Long John Salmon.
'Is it a funny joke?' Brogan asked.
'It's about my brother Patrick,' Long John Salmon said.
'Not that old thing again,' said Hickey and O'Toole, together.
'Oh, let him tell it,' said Mrs Rodgers, who had never heard it.
Long John Salmon told a story about his brother, who died, but came back a month later as a ghost, walking through walls and around the yard.
'Ah God, let's have a bit of music,' said Hickey, who had heard that story nine or ten times. It had neither a beginning, a middle, nor an end.
They put a record on, and O'Toole asked Mary to dance. Brogan and Mrs Rodgers were dancing too, and Crystal said that she'd dance if anyone asked her.
Mary felt strange - her head was going round and round, and in her stomach there was a nice feeling that made her want to lie back and stretch her legs. A new feeling that frightened her. O'Toole danced her right out of the room and into the cold passage beyond, where he kissed her clumsily.
Inside the room, Crystal had begun to cry, sitting at the table with her head on her arms. Gin and orange always made her cry. 'Hickey, there is no happiness in life,' she cried bitterly.
'What happiness?' said Hickey, who was full of drink.
Doris and Eithne sat on either side of Long John Salmon, talking sweetly to him. He was a strange man, but he owned a large fruit farm and he was still single. Brogan, breathless from dancing, was now sitting down, with Mrs Rodgers sitting on his knees. The record finished, and Mary ran in from the dark passage, away from O'Toole, who followed her in, laughing.
O'Toole was the first to cause trouble. He became offended when Mrs Rodgers prevented him from telling a rude joke.
'Think of the girls,' Mrs Rodgers said.
'Girls!' O'Toole said nastily. He picked up the bottle of cream and poured it over the few remaining bits of goose.
'Christ, man!' Hickey said, taking the bottle of cream away.
Mrs Rodgers said it was time everyone went to bed, as the party seemed to be over. All the guests were staying the night at the hotel. The four girls were going to share one room.
In the bedroom, Mary sighed. Before they could go to bed, they had to move the heavy furniture back to the sitting room. She could hear O'Toole shouting and singing in another room. There had been gin in her orange, she knew now, because she could smell it on her breath. She had broken her promise to her mother; it would bring her bad luck.
'Ah girls, girls,' O'Toole said, pushing their bedroom door open. 'Where's my lovely Mary? Come out here with me, Mary!'
'Go to bed, you're tired,' Mary said. He caught her hand and started trying to drag her out of the room. She let out a cry.
'I'll throw this flowerpot at you if you don't leave the girl alone,' Eithne called out.
'Stupid cows, the lot of you!' said O'Toole, but he dropped Mary's hand and took a step backwards. The girls rushed to shut the door and push a heavy chest against it, to keep him out.
They all got into the one big bed, two at the top and two at the bottom. Mary was glad to have the other girls with her.
'I was at a party. Now I know what parties are like,' she said to herself, as she tried to force herself to sleep. She heard a sound of water running, but it did not seem to be raining outside. At sunrise she woke up. She had to get home in time for milking, so she put on her dress and shoes and went downstairs.
There was a strong smell of beer. Someone, probably O'Toole, had turned on the taps in the bar, and beer had flowed out of the bar and into the kitchen. Mrs Rodgers would kill somebody. Mary picked her way carefully across the room to the door. She left without even making a cup of tea.
She found her bicycle, but the front tyre was flat, so she walked rapidly, pushing the bicycle. The frost lay on the sleeping windows and roofs. It had magically made the dirty streets look white and clean. She did not feel tired, but simply pleased to be outside, as she breathed in the beauty of the morning.
Mrs Rodgers woke at eight and got out of Brogan's warm bed. She smelt disaster instantly, and ran to call the others. The girls were made to get up and help clean the floors. Hickey, who had by then come downstairs, said what a shame it was to waste good drink. O'Toole, the guilty one, had left early.
'And where's the girl in the black dress?' Hickey asked.
'She ran off, before we were up,' Doris said. They all agreed that Mary was useless and should never have been asked.
'And she was the one who encouraged O'Toole, and then disappointed him, so he got angry,' added Doris.
'I suppose she's home by now,' Hickey said.
Mary was half a mile from home, sitting on the grass. If only I had a boy, someone to love, something to hold onto, she thought, as she broke some ice with her shoe and watched the crazy pattern it made. The poor birds could get no food, as the ground was frozen hard. There was frost all over Ireland, frost on the stony fields, and on all the ugliness of the world.
Walking again, she wondered if and what she would tell her mother and her brothers, and if all parties were as bad. She was at the top of the hill now, and could see her own house, like a little white box at the end of the world, waiting to receive her.
- THE END -
