Gráinne Forrest is a writer and teacher from Co. Mayo. Her work focuses on themes of community, family bonds and home. Her writing often explores the lasting effects of childhood trauma. She holds a Masters from Trinity College and has screenwriting credits with RTE. Her debut collection of short stories Keepers is set to be published in 2025. She lives in Dublin with her husband and two children.

Cursed

By Gráinne Forrest

Seanchaí (shan-khee): traditional Gaelic storyteller.

The only time Joxter Cullen felt safe was when his arse was warming a corner stool in Matt Molloy’s. At all other times, his senses were cocked for danger, mishap and misfortune. With his side to the bar and his back against the butter-yellow wall, a metre up from the tiled floor, his feet sat snug on the support pole, the exact and proper distance from his hips. This compounded Joxter’s certainty that the stool was made for him. It was a blustery Tuesday in October and he was busy explaining to the latest American couple to descend on the town, in a bid to find their ancestry, that the Cullens of Westport were cursed, and he, the heir, the self-named keeper of the damning pox, was next in line.

The woman across from him had dark corkscrew curls, a short, thinly pinched nose and heavy breasts. She was giddy with marvel, having come upon a true and rare seanchaí. Her fiancé, a bearded, stocky man with round facial features, the kind women found safety in, was less enthusiastic about Joxter but enjoying the woman’s fixation on him. His anorak speckled with still wet-raindrops, shining fluorescent like slug trails. His backward baseball cap affirming his Americanness. Joxter loved Americans because they found him exotic and that, in itself, was a great feat in Mayo. And better again, they had fresh ears for him. He could tell by her gawk she found his storytelling mesmerizing− eyes like moons, lips nimbly parted. The only thing he considered a fault in this particular couple, was their lack of encouragement in buying drink. Getting Americans to buy him a pint was a skill he’d worked harder at than anything in his life. It required him to nudge without asking because the act of asking would spend his allure. Instead, he’d leave them on the cusp of a climax, and with a slow turn of his head, look longingly at the pull tags of Bacon Fries behind the bar.

‘It was a banshee, you see,’ he began, ‘the west was once upon a time full of them. A haven for them. It was a night as cold as blue ice and wild as a tethered stallion, when she landed in on my great-grandfather’s home, the finest farmhouse in Mayo. His wife was in the throes of a wicked labour. The banshee rolled her sleeves and delivered the child safely into the world. A boy. She rescued the new-born from certain death and what did my great-grandfather do? He sent her out into the storm.’

The woman’s shoulders dropped so far forward, her breasts folded onto her knees and wibble-wobbled like half-filled water balloons. ‘Oh, wow,’ she trilled, in a lusty middle-American twang. ‘And, what happened?’

‘Put another pint on the bar and I’ll tell you. It’s thirsty work,’ he hummed, ‘bringing up the past.’ She elbowed her fiancé who lifted a finger to the barman. Joxter’s good eye monitored the Guinness tap− the handle drawing back, the black stuff slipping obediently down the inseam of the glass− and, satisfied, continued. ‘When they denied her a meal and a bed for the night, she screeched until every window shattered. Each generation, she told them, was to be cursed with three, deadly tragedies. By the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Cullens would bear no daughters, just one, colourless son a piece, each one with worse luck than the other. That man, lost a finger, an eye and his wife in a tussle with a bull. His son, the one born that fateful night, lived to eighty and was struck three times by lightening, each bolt taking a limb off him.’

‘And your father? Is he still with us?’ she cooed.

‘Aye.’

‘And?’

‘Lost his fortune. The shock of it took his speech. Hasn’t said a word in six months.’

She inhaled sharply and pulled back. ‘That’s two,’ she whispered to her lover.

‘Aye,’ said Joxter. ‘Aye.’ The barman popped the glass on the counter− Joxter’s favourite sound: thick glass meeting old wood. He twisted his body away from his audience and curled it around the glass. ‘I can say no more and I’ll bid you goodnight.’ The Americans took the hint and their leave. They scuttered out the door, holding one another, tipsy on the deceptive romance of hot whiskey.

‘That’s the last I’ll serve you tonight, Joxter.’ Aidan, the barman, had the luck of dimples and symmetry. His face was a pleasure to look at. His tar-black hair spiked up behind his ears, like Dennis the Menace, and to add to his boyishness, a thin, steel, bar laced through a brow. A tattoo peeked out from the sleeve of his faded ACDC t-shirt: a thick, swishy Chinese symbol. Joxter asked him once what it meant but Aidan skirted it. He had a talent for not giving anything away.

‘Right you are, Aidan.’ There’d be no debate. The barman was right, eight pints would see him home in one piece. Joxter wrapped his grip around the glass− baby finger first, the others in rhythmic follow: tap, tap, tap. Soldier in the thumb and ready for lift-off. He opened his mouth wide. At this point in the evening, sipping would be a lie. Creamy froth landed on his tongue, followed by a cold gush of liquid, the bursting of a dam. A respectful, mindful swallow. Tasted as good as the first.

Matt Molloy’s walls were lit with old photographs of musicians and celebrities. There was no photograph of Joxter, who spent more time there in the last fifteen years than anyone in the county. He often wondered if it was his appearance that denied him a frame. His face was home to blonde spikes, in the places you’d expect− his chin, upper lip, lower jaw line, and the places where nothing should grow, like across the narrow bridge of his nose, the high part of his cheekbones, the thin skin below his eyes. One of them drooped, the bottom lid curled outward like a wet lip, exposing a shock of pink flesh and red, trickling veins. In his school days, when he was sensitive to the winces and shudders girls so easily offered him, he thought himself grotesque, but his mother tenderly assured him− then, and to this day− that he was perfect in her eyes and the eyes of God and that was all that mattered.

Aidan took the empty glass and quipped, ‘That scéal of yours gets more brilliant by the day.’ Joxter lowered himself from the stool and shook out the tightness from his legs.

‘I only tell it like it is, Aidan, I can’t help it if I have a gift.’

‘You have a gift alright, Joxter.’

The back roads of Westport were nothing to him. Sharp corners appeared like ghosts in mirrors− abruptly, no warning. He had to be ready to drop a gear, hit the break, make the corner and gun on for several seconds, braced for the next. The bushes licked past the window− whirr, whirr, whirr. Roll it down, extra special: snips of wind lashing his eyes, drawing tears. Nothing to it but to bang up the beats and foot the floor. They were the good days, when Joxter had a license and considered himself famous for going fifteen pints, eighteen on a good day, and spinning home in the ninety-eight Opel Vectra. Not two years ago, word of his legendary must have gotten out because the car was yielded off him by Tony Doyle, the town’s oldest serving guard. A monolith of six-foot-six, slow-moving on account of his considerable gut and wide arse, and feet that pointed north-east and west. His face was once home to an aristocratic moustache, thick enough to make people take him at his word. It came away with the cancer, along with every strand of hair from his head. The town had a whip around: table quizzes, car boot sales, a singing competition. There wasn’t a crime committed in Westport for six months. He came back with the all-clear and a curious habit of correcting people’s grammar. He’d been given a dictionary as a gift from his colleagues down the station, to occupy his mind during treatment, and he’d taken to the distraction like an assignment. It was his responsibility now, in his second coming, to defend and preserve the English language in the west of Ireland.

Joxter was lucky he only had the car taken off him for his roguery. There could have been a stint in a jail up east and that would have been the end of him. The day in court wasn’t far removed from a long mass: malign coughs and sniffs, the air a stuffy blanket of decades’ old wood. Harsh lighting scowled and taunted him, nowhere to hide. When he stood in the box, his cheeks stung like hot coal. In his too-big suit. It fit him three weeks prior, when his mother marched him to the tailors with an envelope of cash in her jittery hands, but the nerves got such a hold of him in the run up to the day, he lost eight kilogrammes off his already slight frame. He didn’t like all the eyes on him, the attention, hearing his mother’s staccato whimpering from the middle of the crowd, a tissue yoyoing from her drenched eyelashes to her open mouth. His father, no longer a big, tall man, but a shrivelled, boney thing, hunched over the bench. His face the same colour as his hair: Antarctic-white.

Garda Tony took the stand− hair freshly cut for the day. ‘He’s no danger to the community, Judge. A fool and an eejit if you don’t mind me saying. But not a dangerous one. He’s a bit special, if you know what I mean.’ Joxter ordinarily would have found that insulting but the judge and his beady, badger eyes gave him a special dispensation on account of it. No sentence but no car for the rest of his days. Joxter was advised to invest in a bicycle.

‘Is he able for a bike?’ the judge asked.

Tony looked over at Joxter who’d just gotten sick in his mouth with relief, and sighed, ‘You’d have to hope.’

On this occasion, he abandoned the bike about a half a mile from the house. He’d collect it in the morning. No one would rob it because they’d know instantly it was under the ownership of Joxter, by identification of a fuzzy toy rabbit his mother had spancelled to the handlebars on the day of its purchase. Inside, cosy in the supple company of cotton fluff, she’d sewn a miniature bottle of holy water, purchased at Easter in Knock. It had a queer effect on him, giving him the power to recognise the pint that would see him over the handlebars and headfirst into the bramble-covered ditch. Wisdom was something he would have to get used to because, on this day, Joxter Cullen turned thirty. His mother had a black forest gateau waiting for him on the countertop in the morning. She must have forgotten he was allergic to cherries, and Joxter, the good son that he was, said nothing. The sun pierced the curtains and hit the plastic box and glossy, half-price sticker like a laser.

There was a time she’d bake. Sultry smells of almonds and butter bathed the kitchen, flour dusted the air like fireflies, the heat off the range like the desert in a Western. All morning she’d be at it: rolling, kneading, mixing, the low hum of the mixer and Radio One keeping her company. She’d pause for the Angelus at midday and, after her prayers, she’d start lunch. Parsley soup, leeks and potatoes. Fresh cream. Say what you like about the Cullens, they were well-fed. Once upon a time, they were, and then the curse sank in on them and they lost all their money. And the fighting started. Joxter hated the low, cruel cadence of his mother’s voice when she argued with his father. It was so at odds with her customary warm lull, it was as though she’d been possessed by an evil spirit. It would rise slowly and move through rooms like an early morning November mist and when it caught Joxter’s ear, he would skulk off to a corner like a dying cat.

The father would shout, the mother would cry, both would scream and Joxter thought it was the worst of them, until one day, they stopped arguing altogether. He learned quickly that there’s something fierce lonely about a silent house. A silent, dark house. They weren’t allowed a light on in the place, not even in the thick of a winter night. Joxter was given a candle for going to the jacks, but was ordered to be careful not to use more than one match. If he was feeling bold and thought he’d get away with thirty seconds of light, she’d be up behind him with a knuckle between the shoulder blades.

‘Hold up there, son.’

The shadowy outline of Tony was moving fast towards him. His hand out like he was looking for a high-five. It wasn’t the first time Joxter’s initial thought was to leap over the hedge and bolt like a hare in the beeline of a fox, straight into the fade of the trees beyond. Uncatchable. The Jessie Owens of Westport. The Usain Bolt of Connacht. But something weighted his ankles and stiffened his calves. A queerness was stirring outside of him. It was on the press of the next step he noticed the lights and scolded himself for his blindness. Down the slope of the road, through the lolling branches of young and old ash, the farmhouse was ablaze with life. All five windows at the front: upstairs, downstairs, blasting electric luminesce. The mother would be losing her mind. It was like Christmas− a festival of brightness. Something new was born. There should have been a choir. The doorway light twinkled− punched by moving bodies. Scattered in front like sleeping cattle, half a dozen garda cars, neon beacons splitting the night air like bat signals, car doors wide in a hurried, fractious manner that belonged in a city crime scene.

Tony’s heavy boots crunched and scraped off the wet stones as he moved closer to Joxter. Hot breath streamed from his nostrils, hitting the cold, turning to steam.

‘Alright, Guard.’

‘Alright, Joxter.’

‘Am I in trouble, is it?’

‘It’s the parents, Joxter.’ Tony lifted his cap and the moon shone down, revealing his spotted scalp’s striking likeness to a planet. Three centimetres of white fluff did its best to stand erect. Good for him, thought Joxter.

‘What about the parents?’

He watched Tony lift his cap into his armpit, vanishing clear out of sight under the behemoth limb. The guard stepped from foot to foot. In dramatic slow-motion, he lowered his face and tilted it to one side, like a starlet auditioning for her big movie debut. With a flutter of his lash-free eyelids, he sighed.

‘I’m sorry, lad. O’Shea heard the gunshots. One after the other. Came right over. It would appear they were self-inflicted.’ Joxter put two fists on his hips, himself now moving from foot to foot, his feet suddenly hot. His mouth filled with saliva. O’Shea lived two fields over. The nosy bastard must have had a glass to a window.

‘O’Shea has some hearing on him.’

Tony scrunched his face. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you, son?’ Joxter had heard about levitation− the body lifting up and away without explanation or sense. He’d seen it in The Exorcist. Never thought it would happen to him and here he was now, suspended about eight inches off the ground. There was no weight in his bones. He was hollow.

‘Joxter, son. Do you understand?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I understand, rightly.’ Tony sucked in his stomach and patted his gut.

‘Had they been having problems?’ Joxter shrugged, his attention focused on drifting higher, higher, off into the belly of the universe. Everything below him small and illusory now. Meaningless. Tony chucked his elbows out like a child imitating a chicken and raised the bridge above his eyes so far up, his forehead rippled. He chuckled nervously.

‘The curse strikes again, eh?’ Joxter’s feet came back to land and a voice he hardly recognised emerged from his newly dry mouth.

‘There’s no such thing as a curse, Guard. Only a stream of bad choices made by a bunch of fuckin’ eejits.’ He held Tony’s gaze and knew, for all the shite that came out of his mouth, it might have been the wisest thing any man from Westport ever said. His certainty cemented with the awe projecting from Tony’s face. They stood two feet from one another, eyes locked, in magic silence. The most lucid moment in Joxter’s thirty years. Tony stroked his chin.

‘Decisions, Joxter,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘A series of bad decisions. A choice is the point at which a decision is made, not the decision itself.’ He went up on his toes and cleared his throat. Joxter looked past him to the grand farmhouse, lit up like a spaceship. The mother in there somewhere, losing her mind.