Tarnished by Anna Foley
Standing in the filthy garden, I longed for the heat of a June sun. As I threw the dog-shit over the back wall, I tried not to imagine the mountain growing, fermenting and putrefying beyond. It was too much for me to unlock the side-gate and bring it out to the bin today. Such a fuss ensued as February arrived, but there was scant trace of Spring here today, save for the tiniest of tendrils of the potato vine grasping the wire mesh dividing us from next door. I knew it would be a few months yet before I could train the new shoots to grow through my side, instead of rewarding that lot with flowers, should they even arrive. That once new garden bench stood like a corner boy against the faded shed, taunting me. I know I’ll never again sit on it after seeing that rat scurry up its length, gorging itself on peanuts from the bird feeder last week. Just another thing gone from varnished to tarnished. Two big dogs out here every day, and still that diseased fucker could come and go as he pleased. Still, it wasn’t fair to starve the birds because of that, so the feeders remained. I kicked a bucket at my feet that was once a tub of Rosewood outdoor paint. It landed in the ruins of the flower bed I had created after I first left my job in the factory, where roses, lavender and aster had briefly lived, then died.
A pang of dread struck me when the lunch bell rang out from across the road, reminding me that my children would be home in two short hours. It was handy living so close to the school. They could walk home alone, and I could avoid the inane chatter of the school-gate mothers, but at night, the darkness of the playground’s corners was a haven for anti-social behaviour, a central point for the disaffected local youths to get drunk and smoke weed, a nightly reminder too, that my youngest brother Peter was no longer among them, his so-called friends. Perhaps they were real friends to him? Maybe they even visited him in the Midlands prison? I never did.
At the end of our driveway, I greeted Tom and Emily, avoiding the probing eyes of the other parents. I shooed them inside and they stomped up the stairs. A door slammed, Emily. My chest tightened and I fought the urge to run up there and pull the door off its hinges, but bent and rested my forehead on the counter top instead, waiting for the rage to subside. Even on the maximum dosage of a generic Prozac, I couldn’t get my head clear. I had never felt so lost in the fog of my own thoughts.
I dreaded homework every afternoon. The process was more tenuous since my GP had refused to prescribe anymore Valium. Dependant, she said. What would she know? Sometimes when it was finally finished, I would lock myself into the bathroom until I calmed. For hours after, I could still hear the hot rush of my boiling blood pumping in my ears.
Emily was in a strop about her maths homework, whining about some classmate or other.
“And why do you hate her?” I asked.
She shrugged, stared at the floor.
“Jesus, I can’t help if you won’t tell me,” I snapped.
She fled the dining-room.
“Tom, finish that page. Let her go”, I said, “she’ll get over it”.
“She has no friends,” he muttered. I didn’t answer.
The rain beat against the window and the two mongrels sat getting soaked, despite the presence of their huge kennel. In the kitchen, I unlocked the back door, letting them inside but locked them there amongst the whirring appliances.
“Finished,” said Tom, and hopped off the chair before I could reply. We both knew the reading wasn’t done, but neither of us cared to endure that. He ran out to the hall and up the stairs to his room. I picked up Emily’s abandoned test copybook and leafed through it. She rarely got less than full marks in anything. Her everyday copy seemed less neat. I looked backwards through it until I came upon an entry from October;
My uncle Peter is gone away for a long time. We are not allowed to visit him. I miss him because he plays connect 4 with me.
*****
On Friday, Henry came home after his week of working in Kilkenny. He unloaded his smelly laundry, and complained about how sore he was from lifting weights in the hotel gym. Stale socks and gym shorts littered the kitchen floor as he made his way upstairs to get ready for running club.
“I’ll have my dinner when I get home.”
“Suppose you won’t be walking the dogs then,” I muttered under my breath.
When the kids were settled on the couch watching Johnny Depp fall about on a pirate ship, I sat at the dining table and impaled the cork of a bottle of Chianti. Yanking it out with a pop, I tilted the bottle, savouring the glug of liquid meeting glass. The door behind me flung open and Bonnie sloped in. She was truly idiotic in every way, yet had mastered with great ease the opening of all doors. Hank was different. He preferred to nestle in on the couch between the children. She sat before me and pleaded with her eyes to stay. I stroked her neck, pulling her close to my leg, where she dropped to the floor with a heavy sigh.
Next morning, I awoke to see the digital clock exclaim 9:30, much later than I usually slept. The TV echoed behind the closed living room door downstairs, Tom was up. Henry stirred beside me. He turned to face my back, placing his hand on my waist. He slid it down and I flinched, shuffled away, closer to the bed’s edge. I used to go along with this charade, but now the idea of his pawing at me was repulsive, and when I explained repeatedly that it wasn’t any fault of his, he became moody and punished me later in sly ways. His iPhone beeped and I was saved. He chuckled at whatever message had come through, gently tapping his reply on the screen.
*****
That afternoon, when first I heard the woman screeching like a banshee in the supermarket, Tom was pulling biscuits from a neat aisle display. I edged toward the end of the aisle, dragging him with me, and it was then that I spotted Emily, fused to the spot on the tiled floor near the tills, before the screamer; Nuala Dennehy, busybody supreme.
“I know what you tried to do,” she squawked for all to hear.
Emily cast her eye toward Tom and I, and the whites of her eyes flashed for a split second as she spotted us. She looked once at Nuala Dennehy, and then turned her eyes only to me. Noticing this, the woman craned her neck and looked me up and down, a smirk creasing her face.
“Oh, isn’t this just lovely now, is she yours Mags? That makes sense.”
I approached, then dropped my metal basket with a clatter. I was close enough to see grains of beige powder clustered on the hair of her upper lip.
“What’s going on here?” I croaked.
“This one put her hand into my bag to steal my purse, only I caught her, that’s what.”
My daughter looked at my face and I saw my own. My heart jumped up my throat. Her jaw was set, mirroring mine. It was only then I was aware of the crowd gathered by the tills. I glanced from face to face at the local spectators, then back to my child, whose focus remained unmoved.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I just told you what she did!”
“No, my daughter wouldn’t do that. I’m sure of it, Mrs. Dennehy.”
“Look, I felt a tug on my bag and when I turned around, she had her hand on my purse, Mags.”
“Emily, what do you have to say?” I asked.
She scowled, and opened her mouth to speak but the ignorant old bitch interrupted her.
“I just told you what she did, you’re lucky I don’t call the Guards!”
I nodded toward my daughter, enticing her to speak.
“Her purse fell on the floor and I put it back in the bag,” Emily muttered.
“Bullshit,” she hissed.
“Don’t you use that language in front of my children,” I said.
“I’m sure they’re used to far worse, coming from your crowd.”
“Shut your ugly face,” said Emily.
Everybody froze for a moment. I knew that this was one of those make or break parenting moments, right and wrong and respect all teetering like a spinning top that could fall on any point, and I began to laugh. I couldn’t help myself. As surge of maternal instinct so basic and primal overwhelmed me. It rose from my gut to my spine and I swear I felt myself grow taller, stronger. In the background, the old woman was roaring, her words unrecognisable. My little girl looked me straight in the eye and her mouth was set in a line, so that she appeared to have no lips at all.
“Did you?”
“No, I only picked it up and tried to put it back.”
“Ok love, let’s go.”
I pulled her close to me, forgetting how tall she really was now. I buried her tensed head in my scarf as I held her. When she pulled away, I kissed her on the cheek. Then, woman in an ill-fitting trouser suit that I knew to be the manager was gesturing to Mrs. Dennehy. She caught my eye as I stood up.
“She’s just a little girl, and no harm has been done, after all, you’ve got the purse back,” she said in a calm voice.
“Hah, you don’t know what sort she comes from, you’re not even local,” Mrs. Dennehy said.
Trouser suit just stood there sulking after that.
“We’re leaving,” I announced. My children followed as I strode through the automatic doors. Once outside, I focused my eyes on my car and willed my legs to get me there. Tom and Emily opened the back doors themselves and climbed into their booster seats without a word and I drove off, revving the engine.
When I pulled up outside our house, I sent Tom inside on his own. Turning to look at Emily in the back seat, I steeled myself.
“Why did you do that?”
She eyed me, her mouth opening slightly.
“Why did you take it?”
She shrugged.
“Don’t ever do that again. Do you hear me? Don’t ever, ever do that again. Or I’ll let them call the Guards and take you away. Do you hear me? This stays between us, but only this time.”
She nodded her head. I could tell she was shaken, but her brazenness unsettled me. There was a glint in her eye that told me this would not be only time I would have to cover for her.
Henry opened the front door and called out into the driveway, “Where’s my hot chicken roll?”
“Let me inside, will you,” I hissed.
“Where’s the shopping?” he asked.
“Go upstairs, both of you.” The children complied.
“What the fuck is going on, Mags?”
I walked right past him as if he was not there and made for the kitchen, where I took the Marlboro Lights from their hiding place behind the egg cups and told him what had happened.
His jaw hung limp as he watched me go out to the back garden. I smoked a cigarette without once looking in the window. The dogs skulked in the kennel, avoiding me. I heard Henry shuffle out behind me in his slippers.
“I want us to go down and see that CCTV,” he said.
“Leave it,” I answered.
“But we’ll have proof that she didn’t do anything wrong.”
I didn’t answer. I leant against the back wall of the house and surveyed again the carnage of our Winter garden. Henry sighed and went back inside but I remained there, gazing absently across the grass. Bonnie emerged from the kennel and avoided my eye as I watched her squat by the back door, her favourite toilet spot. I went to grab the shovel in anticipation, but something else caught my eye, a movement along the base of the shed. In plain sight, the rat brazenly gorged himself on the peanut crumbs dropped by the careless birds.
“I first wrote this piece about 8 years ago, and over the following years I workshopped it with several groups. I subsequently submitted it to some literary journals but it was always rejected. After this, I put it to one side and forgot about it. I came across Trash to Treasure and thought it a wonderful concept for a literary space, and so I dusted off this story and decided I would give it one last shot.”
Anna Foley lives in East Cork and has had fiction, poetry and memoir published in many print and online literary journals, including The Lonely Crowd, The Honest Ulsterman and The Incubator. She completed the MA in Creative Writing at UCC in 2016. @annaonf