THE THURSDAY

Ballinamun Clinic

The whole lot of them were cranking of cramps today, even the old crone. J, but did she have to moan in Mary’s direction, expecting sympathy from Mary of all people? You’d think she’d be humiliated at her age that something came dripping from out between those purply, veiny pegs. And Mary, she hadn’t passed ten words with aul Eilis in the dozen months they’d worked in the same damp warren. Mary’s American, if he’d heard yer w’an moaning at Mary, would be coughing: “t. m. i.” and “thank you for sharing” with his squintchy look through his Bono frames.

If ever the new digs were finished Mary would have her own little wedge where she could close the door and have some peace from the lot of them. From the incessant nattering of Niamh and Padraig and the screeching of the poor crippled and addled bits that she – thank God – wasn’t made to treat.

Mary had a mind to ask Padraig if his cramps were as bad and all that as the rest of theirs. She’d half expect him to say why yes, that spasm he’d got in March picking up Eoin Fitzmaurice had come back with a vengeance just this morning. Thinking himself so clever, he’d stick out his tongue glinting with the pustulous stud he’d had punched in it. He’d those ashy thick tattoos on his shoulders and calves as well, and his hair spiked backward like Sonic the Hedgehog from those 90’s video games. The only male in the place and none of them the better for it, so.

She’d accomplished nothing this morning save clearing duplicate memos about the new building, and budget reviews from her in box, and making lists of the children she should be seeing but were on hold due to “scheduling difficulties” or “social services issues” that Savannah would be handling once she returned from her third maternity leave. The standing still of the forward planning. But there was a glimmer of hope for the dispersal of benchmarking that would be adding 7% to their pay packets, retroactive to a year ago last May. Rumour was that it would appear before the start of term.

The racket in the portable structure she had to share with seven others left her with a clenched, aching jaw against the assault. Mary pressed the heels of her hands into her temples as she counted to five under her breath, then gathered the necessary files and the rest of her kit and negotiated the maze of desks, presses, and filing cabinets.

Taking care to avoid Clíodhna’s gaze, she scrawled “Arklow PM” by her name on the board, and dashed for the door. As the door groaned and scraped shut behind her, she heard Clíodhna call out a suspicious “Going?” after her. Lorna did sod all at her desk but was always finding others wanting to Gizelle when she came in from Dublin. She also thought the “young gels” (Mary in particular) depraved, and was jealous of their lives. Not that she’d cod on to the truth of it. No, Mary was so her favorite so she was. So clever and capable, so she was, really, if you took a bit of notice.

The sky was bright and blue at least. Mary popped the roof of her Megane and pulled the one arm out of its sleeve before she reversed out of the lot. On the N 11, she squirmed her other arm free and didn’t mind the downward stares at her skimpy sleeveless cami from the leery lorrymen passing her by. She wanted no strap lines to her tan and she was showing no more than is shown on the strand. The scant sun had to be got where it could and guaranteed the weekend would be soft again, or lashing down, more likely. The bottle tan gave her hives and all as well.

The cotton plug had shifted in her fanny and was poking at her every time she raised her knee to clutch. Would it just be grand? A great damp flower blooming between her legs, she having nothing but her gym shorts in the boot unless there was that pink jumper she could tie around her waist. Or did she toss that to the cleaners last time she was in? “Whatever”, as the Yanks are saying and the clots in the secondaries as well, thinking they’re all so …… was she ever that t’ick herself? Or would she be so once Eilis’s age? Not a thinkable thought at all. It was the curse that made her so irritable, but knowing didn’t give it rest. It made her mood all the fouler that her body could do such as this to her mind.

The Statue

As she took the turn, the sight of it, the shtone t’ing jolted her yet again. Every last time, her skin crawled at the sight of it. How ever did that light land on it from nowhere and why did she always notice it? Stupid, sodding, moulting statue. She’d called it to Antje’s attention. Antje, the locum physiotherapist, the Dutch one, who took the same route twice a week as well, but Antje, didn’t recall the church, never mind the thing in the overgrowth beside. She’d given Mary a look the second time Mary brought it up, so Mary dropped the stone. Antje was the foreigner, but was the one giving the Irish the look, like they were mad. Anyway, Mary kenned Antje’d be off on another contract before this one was up. Her like was searching the appointments the week after signing the latest contract or never stopped at all.

There was another route to Begnachgar and Mary vowed to take it from here on, had intended to do so for the past few weeks, but somehow always found herself face to face with the creepy sight. Cursing aloud, and praying she’d mind her route the next time, Mary drove on, grinding gears on the next turn in the journey.

Her tyres gnashed at the gravel in the car park to the crumbling gatehouse they called Begnachgar. The Oirish name they’d invented for the decaying building was loosely translated as “almost near” on the charity’s flyer. When Mary explained this to her Yank he snorted “almost only counts in horseshoes.” He then tried to explain this apparently clever Americanism to her, and she feigned understanding and amusement, because he was touchy, often flushing red when he suspected she (of all people) thought him foolish, ignorant, inferior. For didn’t she know Ireland was smaller than Kentucky, and had fewer people as well. They were very touchy, the Yanks, and not very quick to catch on.

Unfolding herself from the car, Mary pulled her magic from the boot. The pink jumper was there as well, a small miracle to be thankful for. And Begnachgar was empty today, but for Mary and Finnbarr (were he to come). A reprieve.

She didn’t wholly hate her work, and couldn’t think of anything better to do, except find the billionaire, of course. One just old enough and ugly enough to be grateful. But not so that it’d require the biggest effort on her side of the bargain. And he should have some hair, on his head. Dream on.

Her work did not inspire her. She had been a very clever student and could remember all the lobes and vessels and ventricles in the brain, the twelve cranial nerves, their courses. How a trauma here or an insult there could, in theory, disrupt the pathway from thought to speech, from hearing to understanding. She could recite the expected pattern of language and speech acquisition in various populations. She could offer explanations of Chomsky’s d-structure and Skinner’s operant conditioning. It came so easily to her, understanding it and explaining it in statistical, theoretical, metalinguistic, metacognitive, even psycholinguistic terms. The ever-popular Uta Frith’s “theory of mind”…. Talking about how it was all supposed to work and what happens, or appears to happen, when it breaks down. Gossiping about strangers scrambled lives and sorting them out with other sparklingly clever wits over finger sandwiches and consommé was exhilarating.

It was a great deal less pleasant a topic of conversation with the terrified wife of the man who’d just stroked out or the bone-weary mother of a child without words but with fists and flailing and gnashing sharp teeth for communicating.

Mary’s job was to fix these things, not talk about them. That hadn’t sunk in during the years she was studying. She couldn’t circle the day it dawned on her that it dindn’t suit her, or she it. Though neither did it appear that her colleagues were any more adept than she. Or any more amenable to it. So, though fixing the differences in the traditional ways, (or trying to, since often progress was slow or negligible) was no joy for her at all, she supposed she was doing some good and no harm. She didn’t especially like children, and she liked the elderly less, but she didn’t hold it against them, and they appeared not to hold it against her. But there was the magic part, and when it worked, she liked that very much.

The magic happened, or didn’t, at Begnachgar. When she came to this crumbling gatehouse, it was to work with the ones with what was currently called “auditory integration” difficulties. Noises set them off, or they appeared entirely deaf and exquisitely disinterested in the world around them, but there was nothing measurably damaged about their cochleas, tympanic membranes, eighth cranial nerves or auditory pathways to explain their fits. At one time they were considered schizophrenic, then autistic (still autistic in many places) but more and more it seemed that they might be fixed, retrained to tolerate the sounds around them and enter the world the rest of us inhabit. This was the magic Mary performed.

Here, in the cramped and smoky-glassed conservatory, Mary would assemble her kit: a little lean-to built of plastic pipes and connectors with a soft-light lamp fastened, pointing downward from the top.

She’d learned this from an Australian woman who’d come over last summer to train three therapists in Ireland for a Ph.D. thesis she was completing. The Aussie’d a grant from both governments and a software developer whose son was ‘healed’ by this therapy. Mary was one of those recruited to learn this technique and collect data on four to eight clients. She had been paid to train (in the West of Ireland for a week) and received a stipend with each completed case study. The two others who trained had abandoned the project as soon as they could. They thought it preposterous, ridiculous. They assumed Mary’d only continued for the stipends, and she let them think as much. She herself wasn’t at all sure about any of it, truth told.

The frame in place, Mary would toss over it a virgin-mary-blue sheet and slip tiny speakers into a few special pockets stitched in the folds. She’d turn on her doctored music hooked up to an amplifier and equalizer and then the magic would begin. She specially picked the sounds, sometimes music, sometimes not, always to suit the child. When rushed, she would guess at it and was troubled that it was then, in the rush of it that she was frequently right in her guessing. For when she went about it analytically, methodically, she was most always dead wrong and the session would be a disaster. She’d gotten more and more into the habit of being offhand in her therapy sessions and it was no comfort to her at all. It seemed blasphemous to do better unprepared than prepared.

Though Niamh was her manager, from the first, Mary had been disgusted by the slovenliness of Niamh’s sessions with the babies and Niamh’s insistence that she just appeared unprepared. And if she allowed herself to think about it, Mary feared she was becoming the same. At least she had a protocol to follow. That much was more than Niamh claimed to do.

With the right music or sound set to the middle levels, she’d go collect the child from reception, making no comment at all. Once in the room, she would shut the door behind the two of them. Only then, she’d let go the child’s hand and go sit quietly in the corner at the controls. Presently, sometimes after crying fits, sometimes after running and heaving himself against the door (it was only the boys who did this) the child would succumb to curiosity and peek under the tent to investigate the sounds within.

With luck, like a pupa in a chrysalis, the shadow of the child would undulate as it turned to attend to the sounds skittering from one side to another and changing in pitch and volume unexpectedly. Her fingers on the slides, and eyes on the shifting shape under the sheet, Mary would move with the shadow, the sounds, the child.

When asked about this nonsense, she’d mutter bits from the very few peer-reviewed articles of the scientific theories for what she does. And they’d all, especially the grannies, want to know how she knows to do what she does. And she does not know what or how she does this, just that she can, and that it seems to help, and it is frightening to think about too hard. And she never tells anyone that it’s terrifying sometimes, because you’d have to be mad.

But today she was coiled with the cramps and out of sorts. She hoped the music would serve her as well. Heaving the our-lady-blue pile onto the step she shouldered the heavy listing door as she stirred the great lumpen key until the lock unfastened with a plomp. Trailing her pink jumper, she left the sky blue pile of fabric and clatter of plastic pipes where they’d falenl to attend to the tampon that had pivoted inside her, hoping the flood had not yet let loose.

The outer walls were falling down upon them and the rats scampered between the roof and the ceilings, and the staff toilets were in bits, but the hydro room and the client’s toilets were wallboard, immaculate stainless steel, porcelain, and polymer. Mary headed into the smaller one, the one without the hydraulic lift, but still bigger than her ensuite, and, squatting, she pulled on the string between her legs. Warm blood and clots of tissue fell onto her hand and into the bowl. Dropping the cotton along with her flow, she watched the spidery pattern in the water and the pink spongy goo of the endometrial tissue, the lining of her womb, dispassionately. She’d never had a scare, because she’d never bothered to count days between her periods, though now her Yank hinted she should. He probably did know she didn’t take the pills he gave her, since she’d gotten fat on them and complained and then lost the weight. She didn’t know exactly why she wasn’t worried, but she wasn’t. And neither was she relieved today, except that she had not stained her knickers after all.

The cascade of flushing water reverberated against the white tiles and set to chattering the stainless steel shelving chock-a-block with all sizes of nappies, pads, towels, and non-latex gloves. Mary cadged one of the pads and tucked it between her thighs. For just a moment, Mary admired her bold self in the mirror as she washed her face and pulled back her hair in a scrunchy. Her hair was her worst feature, thin and crinkly, but her eyes were grand, as was her jaw. She thought her jaw quite striking, but she couldn’t say why. Her hair and pasty Irish skin, those could be sorted, if she had the time, the funds, and the inclination. She wondered what Ted’s sister would think of her when they met. She wondered did the sister look like him at all? And then she heard a rat scutter over one of the air ducts overhead and she saw the time. The boy would be here or would not in the next few minutes. And she had a bit more to do.

It was best when no one else was here. She loved it when the mam or gran just dropped the child and went for a couple of smokes or pints in the meantime. Mary’s Yank was one to comment incessantly on the fags in the mouths of the pregnant girls and the pints in their fists. “In AMERica,” he says, “they wouldn’t be caught that way.”

“Pregnant or living?” Mary’d asked. “Sure the AMERicans can scrape them out of themselves and off you go. The poor sorry gels here haven’t the luxury, have they? It’s their only one life and they’re stuck in.” Mary had heard her mistake before she’d finished, but out was out and true was true. She saw he’d never before considered that happening to the two of them. Nor did she, though, really. And she saw that now it did be clearer to him, the Irish piper and the tin whistle tune. A sea change in the journey with the Yank for sure.

She’d known him a handful of months and he was not the first nor best nor worst. His smell was nice, cucumbery. His teeth were straight. They were too white, but in America, he said, they all bleached them whiter than his. Nothing a strong cuppa repeated daily couldn’t cure. He was over for his American company and could stay if he wished, or go. She didn’t have a cent on whether it suited him or not. He was a salesman, after all. Wouldn’t say yea or nay. She didn’t press.

His name was Teddy Baronowski and he hadn’t any Irish in him. He claimed he worked for one of the multinational pharmaceuticals companies, (to make himself seem less American, she guessed). He’d add immediately that he didn’t have access to any interesting drug, alas. Except for viagra, of course, though he himself didn’t need it. (He gifted her with contraceptive samples unasked and no discussion.)

His standard introduction was both joking and defiant. And first off he’d say Ireland was the first foreign country he’d lived in (if you don’t count California) and that he was thinking of learning Chinese or maybe Arabic. As if to say, “don’t be thinking you’re the only, now.” Mary, doubting he’d the patience to learn a new language, and feeling bold, and a bit offended, would add, “ and that’s after the Polish and the Oirish are up to snuff.” And he’d now wink at her and blurt out a string of Polish and Irish gibberish all in a jumble. Sharing her joke or turning it back on her, trying to make himself all Paddy begging his t’erapish to sort out his shpeesh for him. He found her job ‘wicked weird’ and she couldn’t disagree.

But he did have a way about him and the fit of the back of her (or the front of her) against his chest and thighs, and that cucumber salty smell of him suited. It did suit her of a night. And the whiskey-beery breath on him asleep was warm and sweetish, not ashy bitter sour like the smokers’ stouty ones were. But there wasn’t the first thing that he understood about Ireland and the Irish and at work he was with enough Americans they kept themselves ignorant. Except for the odd realization. She sees it in his face now and again when he spots the young gals with the double prams and big bellies at the bus stops in the rain. And when he watches the ones with the magenta-platinum-turquoise streaks in the hair and the tribal tattoos and pierced brows and lips and noses on them. Or when he is stepping over half digested piles of Paddy’s Sunday late night dinner of chips and cider on the footpath on the Monday morning. He remembers he is in Ireland.

The boy she was to see today was named Finnbarr. She called him Barry, but gran said no it’s Finnbarr he answers to. The last two times that they managed to show – out of seven appointments, but no worse than others – he answered to nothing but the singing whales in the fabric cave. He sat in the pale blue depths, his personal sea, and crooned along with the humpbacks for the whole session. When she stopped the sounds, he swam out from under the sheet directly up to where Mary sat, pressed his nose against hers and brow to brow let loose a thin vibration from deep inside that resonated throughout her body. In a blink, he dropped back and stood patiently by the door waiting to be let out. He hadn’t come for his last appointment, but his mother had called this morning to say they would be here today.

Mary’s mobile chirped with another text message from her Ted. His sister was coming for a visit and he wanted to show Mary off to her.

At airport. Flight debarking.

She shut the phone off without replying. It annoyed her that he still spelt out every word and full-stopped his texts, sentences or not.

Mary was no cook but he’d decided they were eating in and then clubbing. The sister had been two days in London, so she’d be done with the jet lag. Mary was to grab some Chinese or Indian at the curry house if it wasn’t busy or at Tesco if necessary and some flowers or chocolates. She’d been careless listening to his orders, so she hadn’t refused.