Short Story: The Snake

Short Story: The Snake

I think it was the moment that I first saw Maria Cleary that I began to realise something about myself. As far as I knew she used to live just around the corner from my then girlfriend Maggie’s house, down beside the row of shops where the old cobblers and key cutting place used to be. Right next to the fruit and veg which was run by your man Matt Hennessy, who was seldom sober behind the counter, if he was behind the counter at all.

I was only a lad of eighteen then, taking my first few legal sips of porter, sticking mainly to the locals at first, down in the Submarine mostly, but sometimes I’d venture as far as the Kestrel. Sometimes, if I was feeling particularly energetic, I’d go in the opposite direction to the KCR House. It was a terrible misfortune, you see ( even though at the time it was the greatest convenience a man could ask for) that I used to get dropped off at one of those hostelries every Friday after work, with a crisp, freshly written cheque handed to me by my old gaffer Tommy Smith in the cab of his old Ford van.

As soon as I’d folded the cheque to half its size and placed it ceremoniously into the breast pocket of my old work shirt, as if I was planning on running straight home to my grandmother’s for tea, I’d slip out of the van door, giving Tommy a perfunctory wave goodbye. He’d blow the horn to signal his departure, while I made a beeline for the front door of the pub. I’d amble directly to the bar, patting my breast pocket twice in quick succession to ensure that the cheque was still where it was supposed to be, before duly handing it over to the relevant barman. It might be Mick in the Sub, Gerry in the KCR or Michael in the Kestrel. Any of them would kindly knock the price of a pint of Guinness from the written amount before serving it to me, and returning the balance of the cheque in a crumpled roll of used notes and worn-out silver coins.

It was on the Friday nights when I cashed my weekly reward for hauling blocks and bags of cement across the broken ground of building sites, that I began to notice one particular young girl, sitting in the corner of the Submarine’s lounge. She smoked Silk Cut cigarettes and sipped on sensible numbers of white wine and lemonade. She seemed to be always with a group of women who were much older than her and who I assumed were her colleagues from work, or at a stretch, relatives such as aunties or older sisters, who grouped together for a weekly session of sisterly chat.

I could tell, with that instinctive assurance of a young man of that age, that her years numbered no greater than mine, if even a year or two less. I would sit at the bar, sipping quietly, working hard to acquire a taste for the bitter liquid that flowed steadily, if a little cautiously, down my throat. I would proudly observe my dust- encrusted and tired hands, watching the one or two welts forming on my palms, that signalled my ascent to manhood. I could now afford my own cigarettes and made a point of placing them squarely on the stained mahogany bar top. I’d rest a freshly bought box of matches on top of them, and shift it constantly to make sure they were flush to the sharp cardboard edge of the cigarette box. I surveyed the girl through a shroud of exhaled smoke and racing tips, that cantered from the crooked mouths of my fellow bar flies; men who had reluctantly and begrudgingly begun to accept my presence in their midst.

She had the blackest hair that I had ever seen, and skin so sultry, that she seemed an exotic presence among the pale-faced brood of sun-starved Irish complexions that filled the bar. Despite her darkness, she appeared to shine, luminously, an aura emanating from her eyes, which I suspected were green, although I couldn’t be sure. Her Mediterranean appearance set her apart from her companions and it was for this reason that I suspected the older women of being colleagues and not of her own blood. I would remain there, drinking at the bar, my attention oscillating between the gruff conversations of the elder statesmen who sat beside me. I would continuously glance over their shoulders to marvel at the beauty who had stolen my eyes from their company. I found I was compelled to look away from her magnetism and attempted to end my search to find the shade of her inscrutable eyes.

I would sit in this agonisingly thrilling condition, as I waited for my very own Maggie to arrive. Normally, when we had first begun to spend our Friday nights together, we would alternate between going to the cinema in Rathmines and having one or two drinks in a pub in Terenure. Then in the summer we might take two buses out to Dun Laoighre to walk the length of the pier and eat ice-cream while sitting on a bench that I would have to wipe dry with a handkerchief. Once I had begun to work with Tommy Smith, I found that I would be simply too tired after the weekly toil and I could only manage to go as far as to meet Maggie outside the Submarine after she had made dinner for her family. Eventually, it got to the stage when even this seemed unnecessarily inconvenient, and anyway, she knew where to find me. She now had the confidence, or at least the determination to enter the pub alone, and would bring me ham or chicken sandwiches, carefully wrapped in tin foil as her father always said it was only a fool who drank on an empty stomach. Her mother, who cleaned the church every Saturday morning, suffered terribly from her nerves and Maggie said that she would always have to prepare the sandwiches without her mother’s knowledge, but I could never comprehend the reason for this precaution.

Maggie was a pretty and good-natured girl, who had been fortunate enough to find a full-time position in the post office, only a year after she had left school. Her father, who had worked in the post office himself, doing the round in Harold’s Cross for twenty years, most of them on the same bicycle, had obviously been able to pull at least a string or two in order to aid his daughter’s application. But no matter how she had acquired the job, she was a very diligent worker, and I think she had begun to feel a great excitement about her life at this time. She carried wherever she went, a great sense of optimism and cheerfulness, and had lost the girlish shyness which I had found so endearing when we had first begun to go out together.

I first met her at the afters of a funeral of the mother of a common acquaintance. As the mourners assembled in one of the pubs in the village to dry their mist-sodden clothes and moisten their grief–desiccated mouths, she had seemed so unsure of herself that I sat down beside her to engage her in conversation. She was sitting with a friend of hers, who was also called Margaret and whom incidentally, she fell out with soon after. I was buoyed by the inebriated confidence of boyhood and I found myself enjoying the moment in a way that was unknown to me. This pleasure in the joy of female interaction became even more intense, as I began to appreciate her growing receptiveness to my intentions and that pretty smile of hers became as though it was an immovable feature of her spirit. For many months, that smile continued to enrapture me with its radiant glow, drawing me towards it, like a beacon of truth, enlightening my ignorant mind. But now, as I reflect in my advancing years, the light of her love banished my inner darkness and that youthful need for discovery. I found myself longing for a new state of ignorance.

As our life together continued, I began to find it increasingly arduous to spend time with Maggie. My worries were exacerbated when I realised that she was aspiring to a future for both of us which required promises from me that I felt unable to fulfil. I took to drowning my worries among the drinking elite in the local pubs. I aspired to be among them; the Big Jims, the Seanie O’ Neils, the Charlie McCarthys and the Dick Mooneys; men whose red faces bore testament to their long service, as the esteem in which they were held by publicans and patrons alike proclaimed them as men of fidelity and venerability. Their presence became the only human company I desired and being in the warming glow of the bar my sole ambition.

Maggie seemed oblivious to my apathy towards her, but maybe this was because I had unknowingly perfected the dubious art of deception. She even began to bring me to her home and I made the acquaintance of both her father and mother. She advised me that she had informed them I was an apprentice bricklayer, as it was simply easier than explaining the casual nature of my employment, and I was a willing part of the conspiracy, making insubstantial assurances to Maggie and myself that I would start an apprenticeship the following year.

Maggie’s mother and father were good people, I could see that. She had two younger brothers who at the time were mere children, and three sisters, twins of sixteen and an older girl, named Grace, who was simple. Maggie, due to Grace’s condition, was effectively the eldest, and I could see that her assumed seniority carried with it, a great deal of responsibility. It appeared to me that Maggie had an enormous amount of duties in the house, between cooking and cleaning, and caring for her younger brothers in particular. Although it was not apparent to me at the time, Maggie informed me that her mother had her own issues and Maggie always appeared keenly aware of her responsibilities and seldom complained about her daily tasks, which she dutifully did before and after her shifts in the post office.

Despite Maggie’s stoicism and devotion to her filial duties, I sensed somewhere in the glimmer of her eyes or maybe in the occasional silent sigh when she stared briefly into the sea from Dun Laoighre pier, that she had a longing for something new, something to take her away from the toil of her daily existence, and her focus was on me.

So the weekly routine continued, probably for far too long, looking back. I saw Maggie when I could, and she was always free to meet me in the evenings. The daily drudge on the sites was ceaseless also, save the occasional day when the rain poured down too heavily to permit the work to continue. On days such as these, I would have a hearty lunch with my grandmother before setting off to the Kestrel or even the Cherry Tree, to pass a grey and rain-soaked day amidst the flowing taps of blacks and ambers and reds. Big Jim took me under his wing and taught me everything I needed to know about the horses. He showed me how to calculate the winnings from an each way bet and to always check your winnings at the counter to make sure that you hadn’t been short-changed. He taught me how to study form in The Post and what horses to choose when having a stab at a trio or an accumulator. Some days, we would pool our money together and take turns running in to the bookies, while the other remained in the pub with the form and slips spread across the bar. Big Jim was almost forty years my senior, but I felt quite content in the warmth of his almost fatherly affection.

And so we went on, Maggie meeting me on Friday nights and me sitting in my usual spot, one stool to the right of Seanie and two to the left of a countryman by the name of Terence Steele, with an empty stool to my right for Maggie to sit on when she arrived.Maria Cleary had become an ever-present fixture also, and my fascination with her grew even more intense. I stared at her like a child. She was the first woman whose beauty had ever thrust itself upon my callow consciousness. I had begun to ask about her at the bar, confidently using my new found status as a reliable regular to uncover the smallest details of her life, which to me seemed as mysterious and unknown as the nature and existence of heaven itself. I perceived that her attire and make-up were becoming more glamorous by the week and in my eyes I saw her altered appearance as being akin to provocation. I learned that she was the daughter of a former regular who was now on the dry, and who used to own a small corner shop down in the Barn, before selling the lease for a small profit. Big Jim had it that he beat the wife, but Seanie refuted these claims and assured us that the man wouldn’t hurt a fly. Maria apparently worked in a women’s boutique in the shopping centre, and the crowd she drank with were a mixed bag of women from the boutique, and two groups of sisters of two of the boutique’s employees, who all played bingo together on Thursday nights. It seemed strange to me that a girl such as she should spend her Fridays with a group of older women, and I resolved to make her acquaintance, feeling again the pull of her magnetism, letting it take hold of my desires.

It was also around this time that I began to make my first real, physical advances towards Maggie. One Friday night in November while walking her home as the last beleaguered stragglers stumbled out the double doors of their adopted home, she was complaining about some of the girls in the post office and I comforted her with a multitude of amorous, full-lipped kisses on her cold, white cheek. I put my arm around her narrow waist and told her not to worry about them and that she had everything she needed in me. I drew her face close to me and kissed lips which felt coarsened by the sharp winter wind.

I ushered her into a quiet lane half way between her house and the church that her mother would be cleaning in a matter of hours. I felt my breathing beat like a drum, as if it had taken on a life of its own and I had lost the capacity to control any of the unconscious parts of my being. Her breath too felt heavy, but it seemed to beat in a different rhythm to my own racing heart, somehow more syncopated, and less erratic. At first she was unwilling, or at least reluctant, before she acquiesced in a stoical silence. When I felt myself inside her, I told her that I loved her and she said the same to me. I searched deeper for that warmth inside her body, as the cutting wind continued to blow its fiery coldness over our entwined figures. As we found shelter among the falling stars of the black night, I knew that I had found the safest place to rest my burning desires. My searching lips could still sense the barrenness of winter, as they traced the salty tears that trickled along the meandering streets of Maggie’s still, cold face. When it was over, I walked Maggie to her door.As I walked home alone, I didn’t feel the sense of fulfilment that I had expected, but instead a gripping and beguiling certainty. The vision of the path which my life would yet take, came slowly but clearly into view.

Although work at that time was hard and demanded a certain energy from me that I often found difficult to muster, I generally enjoyed the daily toil for many reasons. I found that I could throw myself at my assigned tasks with an all-consuming vigour, as the physical effort involved cleansed my mind of its meandering and sometimes torturous thoughts. I lost myself in the pain of physical exertion and could more than hold my own in the inhospitable world of the morning tea-break. But images of those two young girls were always hovering around my mind’s eye. As I remembered being with Maggie, the sublime moment of her ultimate acceptance and the expression of pleasure in her eyes that I wished I’d seen was wrenched away by the malevolent force of Maria Cleary’s face, drifting into my soul like the spectre of a life I’d never known, promising to haunt me. Although I had never even spoken to her, I felt a painful pleasure in summoning Maria Cleary’s ephemeral form from some unknown place inside me and I realised for the first time, the tragedy of myself.

Then one Friday night, when the black sky, encrusted with distant stars, stared down upon the world, my resolve to meet Maria Clearly became too strong to tame. Remembering now, it is strange how every imaginable portent seemed to steer me towards my fateful course, but perhaps that is merely a part of me searching for an invisible malefactor to blame, to relieve my conscience from this tremendous guilt.

It was the Friday before Christmas, and Tommy had given me my full week’s wages, bonus and all, in cash. I decided to celebrate by drinking whiskey chasers with every pint, and I made sure that Big Jim and Seanie didn’t go without. I remember reaching a level of drunkenness that night, that I’d never felt before. I felt an animalistic aggression surge through every vein in my body, but this on its own was nothing new, as I’d often become rowdy by the end of a night, although never in a physical way. What was different about how I felt that night was that I realised I had complete control over that burning energy inside me. As I poured the drink into me, I could feel that powerful rage brewing, as I laughed into the face of Seanie and put my strong right arm around Big Jim, pulling him close to me with such suddenness that he almost toppled off his stool. And when I moved my face close to the faces of those two men, I saw how they lowered their eyes and exhaled resignedly through their tightly pressed lips and I knew at that moment, the turning away of their eyes from mine was not a sign of disinterest or embarrassment-it was a beautiful acknowledgement of submission.

I remember I felt as light-footed as an angel, up out of my stool and dancing between the men sitting at the bar, putting my right arm around them and holding my drink with my left, whispering menacing compliments in one’s ear while staring down at another with my wide black eyes. When the phone rang behind the bar, I could see as soon as Mick had picked it up that he was looking in my direction. Maggie wasn’t feeling well and wanted me to know that she wouldn’t be coming down tonight. She also wanted me to call into her when I was ready, it was important. Mick relayed this message with what seemed to me an unintelligible smile on his face, while holding the receiver tight to his chest. Ironic cheers and wolf whistles from the bar. I told Mick to tell her I’d be there in an hour, feeling slightly diminished and even wounded by this phone call.

It was then that she appeared, Maria Cleary, through a veil of rising smoke. She sat in her usual corner with her usual friends. Usual. At that moment I experienced a deep dark epiphany as I realised that Maria Cleary was not a divine being that could not be sullied by the hands of someone like me. In fact she was the same as me, and I was as entitled to touch her as anybody else. I remember at that moment it also struck me that I hadn’t noticed her up until that point, so enrapt was I by my own performance at the bar.

I ordered another “bacon and egg”, as Terry called it, and for the next few minutes my eyes remained almost continuously fixed on Maria Cleary, as her eyes danced between the faces of her companions, and her hands clasped together in glittering moments of girlish laughter. In those few moments, I looked at her face and wondered how something so beautiful could exist. I found that the powerful energy that I had felt inside me was being displaced, subverted by a new and even stronger sensation that almost choked me with its suffocating inexorability. I wondered how she might smell and how her skin might feel to touch, about how her voice might sound and if her neck was supple and soft as the silken hair that draped over her narrow shoulders.

And I decided at that moment, as I could sense that feeling of control begin to ebb away, that I had to uncover the mystery of Maria Cleary, before it began to enslave me forever in its enigmatic thrall.

I sought the sanctuary of the Gents to compose myself and it was only when I stumbled through the swinging door that I began to feel an uneasy dizziness in my head and a stinging pain in my stomach. I wretched over the sink but managed to retain the contents of my stomach, unwilling as I was to surrender the fortifying effects of my night’s drinking. I composed myself with long, deep breaths before splashing cold water over my face and onto the top of my bowed head. When I stood up I saw myself in the mirror, like a pilgrim raising his head to a miraculous shrine. I saw the water dripping down my face, in sanctifying rivulets of tearless weeping and I heard the laughter of the bar, streaming through the toilet door with the insidiousness of an invisible venom, seeping into every part of my being until it began to weather the wall which separated my body from my soul.

But what struck me most of all as I smiled at my reflection in the mirror, was the unnerving blackness of my eyes, lifeless, as those of a snake. As I stood there alone, I did not worry whether anybody would enter the room because I knew that nobody would. I thought of Maggie and I thought of Maria Cleary. I looked at the blank walls around me and the ceiling above me. And although I opened my hand and reached to open the door, I knew that for me, there would never be any way out.