Two Lives

9

Memory is sometimes perfect, clear as a light. First thing when she wakes she wallows in it, assisted by the dusky tranquillity of dawn. The morning after the visit she wallows in the favourite year of all her life, the year the Russians put a dog into space, the year of Bill Haley, the year De Valera proclaimed a state of emergency. A nun in the Sacred Heart convent, expected to live to be a hundred, died at ninety-nine. A sewage problem occurred in Conlon Street, necessitating pneumatic drilling, new pipes and re-surfacing. A fawn-coloured tomcat, property of the gasworks manager, attacked a neighbour’s birdcage, detaching it from its hook and provoking threats of legal action. Tyrell’s the vegetable shop closed. Humphrey Bogart, Letty’s favourite – plastered all over the bedroom at Culleen – died. 1957 it was.

‘Mary Louise,’ she whispers in the dawn that comes after the upset of her visitor. ‘Mary Louise Dallon. Mrs Quarry as is.’ He is old now, the sisters older still. He could live for a dozen more years, fourteen or fifteen even, the sisters endlessly. He pays for her keep in Miss Foye’s house, and always has. Years ago the sisters tried to make her father pay but of course there was nothing to spare for that at Culleen. ‘Your husband’s good,’ Miss Foye says often, because not everyone here is paid for. The bigger dormitories are bare; the unpaid-for have enamel mugs and plates. He’s a decent man, driven to drink. It isn’t his fault that they’re closing down the houses. They’ll bundle the obstreperous together, somewhere else will be found for them. She’s never been obstreperous herself.

A figure emerges from the gloom and sits on her bed with a blanket around her: Mrs Leavy from Youghal come over to tell her dreams.

She listens and then she tells her own.