Maeve Mulrennan is 30 years old and based in the West of Ireland. She is currently the curator for Galway Arts Centre. She has studied in Limerick School of Art & Design, NUIG Galway and IADT Dun Laoghaire. She has been published in Wordlegs and has featured in the 2012 Cuirt international Festival of Literature in Galway. She was long listed for the Doire Press Chapbook competition in 2011 also.

Saturday

The people where I’m from don’t age well. They don’t start off being unfortunate looking. They start off beautiful. But their souls are slowly being pulled and parted, a little disintegrating every year. They become hollow. They pretend everything is ok. And on the surface of it, it is ok. They are still alive. They wake up everyday.
The bus heaved over the last hill and everyone started to stretch and gather their weekend bags. The sea said hello. The bus parked opposite my parent’s pub. It was hushed up quiet when I came in. Brown. Dark and cool in the daytime, dark and humid in the nighttime. Johnny Dunphy sat at the bar tracing the dirt and blood embedded into the lines on his hands. He hummed an old Doris Day song under his breath. Johnny was born the year after the big snow: same as me. When we were little no one was afraid of him. We would kneel on the bar stools, doing our homework together. A kind of membrane stained his whole being: like a smoker’s stained fingers except all over. Life had coated him in a residue, thickening each year while his insides crumbled away, leaving a thick-coated void.
“Here’s the tough little woman. Give us another drop there would you?”
I dropped my bag beside the glass washer and poured him a pint. I could have called for my dad to do it instead, but I didn’t mind Johnny Dunphy these days.
“Give us a drop of that mixture there as well would you?”
Eight years ago my dad discovered that a local herbal remedy made by the hippies up on the hill was a great tonic for the greyhounds. Mixed with a drop of Buckfast, it would give them the boost they needed to win. It didn’t show up on any drug tests. I reached under the counter and pulled out a bottle. There was some watery looking picture on the sticker: a swirling cloud over a mountain. Johnny Dunphy shook a greasy twenty out of a hanky and handed it over. Three gulps and the pint was gone. He got up, rattled some phlegm lodged in his throat and went out to his car. Johnny Dunphy drove an old hearse that he claimed was ideal for the transportation of grey hounds. You need to give them room, he always says. None of these special trailers for them where they’re wedged in together and only upsetting themselves with no windows to look through. They need to know where they are going he says. And they like to listen to the radio. There was no radio in the hearse so he bought an old tape deck off one of the lads down the dunes and gaffer taped it to the dashboard.
I washed my hands after handling the money. Johnny Dunphy couldn’t help spreading his grease around the place.
Upstairs. Opening my bedroom door, I could smell drink that had been stagnating in a young sweaty body over night. The heat of the room trapped the smell of last nights smoked cigarettes.
Sadbh lay fitfully on top of my Fraggle Rock duvet cover in her knickers and a sequined top. A bag of chips from Fusco’s next door spilled across the pillow and onto her hair. A can was nestled into her clammy armpit. She was beautiful.
“Fucks Sake Sadbh!” It was the first time I had spoken that day.
Sadbh smiled in her sleep and turned over, into the chips.

I went back downstairs and out the back for a fag. I checked my phone again. Nothing.
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing.
I miss you. You don’t miss me.
You’re too busy riding the head off Callie Ivers to fucking notice.
Callie Ivers was in the year behind me in Art College. At the end of every college year, you can walk around the degree show and point out the same old work that gets made every year. The painter who makes paintings about painting. The weird hyper guy who just wants to dick around with electricity. The angry alpha male who makes ugly sculpture about ‘The System’. And then every year there is the girl that makes work about being a sexy girl. They do shouty performances with no tops on. They make collages out of tampons. They have a strange quasi-sadistic relationship with that strange lecturer who freaked everyone out when he started speaking about his ‘specific sexual needs’ during a lecture on Outsider art. And these girls usually pretend to be a prostitute at some point. At night Callie would hang out with the prostitutes up near the old shopping centre and ‘understand them’. She would give them fags and tell them about her stupid life. She wanted to fix them but she was jealous of them too. She never got into a car: obviously she was too good for that. She would talk to them about gender studies and human rights. They didn’t knife her because of all the free fags she gave them. But she pretended to her tutors and to the rest of the class that she got paid for sex. That it paid her way through college. Truth was, her father gave her everything she wanted.
I stubbed out my fag on the wall and headed down towards the strand. The waltzers weren’t waltzing and the bumper cars huddled together, embarrassed.

When you grow up beside the sea, you end up being really good at the amusements. The girls in my class were always mad for the boys who arrived with the fairground, propping up the waltzers with stolen cavity blocks and world-weary smirks. These boys always had fags and they were always 19. I’m sure they have sired half of the current young population. I didn’t want the amusement boys. I wanted the surfers. I wanted to drive off with them at the end of the summer to Galway or Dublin or wherever they were going, away from here.
Home.
Sadbh had woken up and had carefully arranged her hangover in her own bed. The chips were gone and replaced with a milkshake from Fuscos that she must have manipulated my mother into getting for her. She was talking on the phone while instant messaging three different people on her laptop and flicking through a magazine.
“You know Mum never left out the money for my fucking highlights? What am I supposed to do now?” Flick Flick Flick through the magazine she went.
I didn’t look around; I was trying to get the flick of my eyeliner just right.
Flick Flick Flick “There’s feckin feck all in these magazines!” She threw it across the room.
“Ring me back I’m running out of credit”
I’m sure if I had to give Sadbh a kidney or something I would do it but Jesus Christ I hated that girl from the day she got home from the maternity ward.

Downstairs.
As the evening progressed into night, the customers had changed from the likes of Johnny Dunphy and tourists with double-barreled children to the surfers. They lolled by the fire while our men, the locals, caressed the bar, red faced in too tight GAA jerseys. Sadbh, made up and dressed, was in the middle of the surfers, laughing and getting hit in the face with dreadlocks.
The party.
I hadn’t meant to go to the party, I really didn’t. A bottle of rum taken straight from the storeroom gave me personality and wit, so I was invited. I had to be up the next morning for the anniversary mass. Oisin was there.
Nothing.
I am sick of nothing. I am in the dark. I led myself into this darkness to escape the world and now it won’t let me out.
I didn’t like to use the main bathroom because I could never stop staring at a sticky tube of anti fungal cream so I went into the en suite. Coming out, Oisin was waiting to enter.
“Hey Nuala” Oisin always exhaled my name, expelling it softly.
“Do you want some can?” He thrust his can out to me. I looked away.
“You can’t ignore me forever Nuala”
“I think I should though”
He grabbed my left arm and pushed my other shoulder into the doorframe, crushing his can on my collarbone.
His breath.
“Fucking try it Oisin, just fucking try!” I looked straight at him. “I told you I don’t care. Just fucking do it.”
My breath. His fist no longer wrapped around my arm, it was now digging in under my chin, forcing me up.
“You’re a fucking crazy sick bitch. You’d prefer to be on your fucking own for the rest of your life. You’re not well Nuala. When I hold you, you stay.”
I didn’t want to speak. He could do what he wanted he couldn’t get me. I’ve already done worse to myself.
My breath. He released and threw his can at my face. Away, down the stairs.

My body refused entry to any feelings. There had been an eviction long ago. Instead, I leeched emotions from others. I shut my eyes and squeezed the coldness in my belly. It was strange to be myself. I had no idea what I actually looked like.

Cold.
I went downstairs. Callie and Sadbh were in the front hall.
Callie was gathering her things.
“Are you going home already?” Sadbh leaned into her and took a drag on Callie’s fag.
“Yeah. No. Kind of”
She held her bag of drink in front of her braless chest and smiled up at me. They laughed and murmured. So it had been decided. Ok. Grand. She went out the front door and into Oisin’s car.
So this is what life is supposed to be. We are all trying to fight it. Some are more successful than others. I am threadbare. I am discarded.
It was time to go before I lost all sense of my soul and could not retrieve it. When I got to the dunes I saw Dunphy’s hearse beating down the road towards the bog. I phoned him.
“Well, girl”
“Where are you going? Can I come?” I shouted into the phone, over the sound of fuck knows what he was playing on the radio.
“Grand. On the dunes?” In the same way that you can always tell if someone is smoking when they are talking to you on the phone, you can always tell if someone is on the dunes.
“Yeah. I’ve cans”. I hung up and waited. Lights appeared on the road again. I’d never been in the hearse before.
Johnny Dunphy tried to impress me with a handbrake turn but the car cut out instead. I slid in.
“Fuck Johnny what the fuck is that smell?” That rum from earlier was circling my stomach looking to come up.
Johnny pulled away onto the bog road. “Ah I was getting meat for the dogs and a bit of it must have leaked out down the seat somewhere.”
He sprayed a can of Lynx at me. He threw over a box of fags. “Here smoke a fag you won’t smell it then”
My stomach folded over “I can’t” I shouted over, who was it? Janet Jackson on the radio. “I can’t smoke if I’m moving I’ll vomit”.
Johnny Dunphy forced the hearse through the darkness, down the bog road. He drove straight down the middle, as our Dads taught us. No one had ever accidently driven off the side but the fear had been instilled in us at an early age. In this place, you were safe in the middle. It only got dangerous when you went to close to the edge and stared down into the darkness. I had been traveling too close to the darkness lately. It took a living carcass like Johnny Dunphy to bring me back to the middle.
We got to the bungalow that he lived in with his parents. The hall was boiling hot and clammy. Mrs. Dunphy’s commemoration plate collection was curated tastelessly around the glowing Sacred Heart picture. Did all bungalows come with an electrical outlet specifically for Sacred Heart lights? I greeted each plate in turn. The Pope (the good one, not the new one), Holy Mary, Princess Diana on her wedding day and then again after she died, JFK, Johnny Cash and Padre Pio.
“Do you want beans on toast? Or spaghetti hoops on toast?” Johnny was taking off his workman’s boots. In the same way the surfers in town wore glasses they didn’t need because they were in fashion, Johnny Dunphy wore work boots when he’d never had a day’s work in his life.
“Beans. And tea.”
“No toast?”
“Course I want toast Johnny, you can’t have beans without toast.” I rolled my eyes at Princess Diana.
We ended up outside, sitting on an old couch that was destined to be burned at the next bonfire. We played with the greyhound pups, drinking cans. Jonny Dunphy looked like a man that had accepted that his soul was rotting very fast. He never spoke to the other men, never went out with any girls. Not since he punched his girlfriend in the stomach so hard last year that she lost their baby. He had accepted the brown stain creeping over his organs and into his soul.
We talked about Shamie and Whitey. We used to go down the bog with them and get stoned. When we were 17 Shamie was allowed drive his Da’s van in the evenings. Shamie would have girlfriends, girls from the estate who went to the convent. The girlfriend and her best friend would squeeze in the back of the van with us. Shamie would bring your wan down the bog for a shift and we’d stay in the van with the friend, who was always way more craic and always had fags.
I missed Shamie and Whitey. They never grew old enough to become sad, they never got the chance to bitterly rot their way through a life. They were better off.
I woke up with 2 greyhound pups nestled in behind my knees on the old couch.
“You have to bring me home now Johnny, it’s getting bright, I’ll be locked out”
Johnny was lying on the damp ground with another 2 pups.
“Promise you won’t be slagging off me car like?”
“Promise.”
I got home, no Sadbh in my bed, just me. I had made up my mind while playing with the pups that the men in this town were not for the likes of me. We were supposed to make husbands out of the boys we went to school with. They weren’t ever going to leave us alone, even after they died. We didn’t want each other though.
I woke up half an hour later with my Da standing over me.

“You’ve to go to mass” he said, relishing the bad news so early in the morning.
“WHAT?”
“MASS!” He laughed, going back down stairs. I cobbled together an outfit from the various bits of black on the floor and sprayed the fuck out of my hair with dry shampoo. Deodorant under and over clothes. My Da gave me a bottle of water from the bar on my way out. I swapped it for a naggin of rum from the off license shelf once he went back into the kitchen.
The Church of the Holy Misery sat at the top of the strand, its steeple giving the finger to the village. Of course I was late. Johnny Dunphy was outside smoking the fuck out of a rollie.
“Come on will ye” He gave out to me as I walked in. He followed. I strode up to the top and sat behind Whitey’s sister Hazel. Half way through I gave Johnny Dunphy the naggin. It got to the point where the priest go’s “Well this mass is in memory of Seamus Devaney and Colin White” and I swear he saw us with the rum. Sure what does he expect?
After mass we went up to the cemetery in the hearse, listening to the GAA results. I shook hands with Shamie and Whiteys mams and got sick behind a Cyprus tree on my way out. I made Johnny Dunphy go home and leave me to walk.
I felt glorious in my mortification that morning. I relished feeling it. It was one of the few feelings I knew what to do with. It bolstered me and I breathed in the sea air as I strode back into town.
I walked in the middle of the road.