Free In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan Page B

she had made and earned, her small, brutalised frame propped up with pillows and surrounded by days-old unread newspapers, and they told her not to let this get her down, that she was little more than a child herself and there’d be plenty of time for bearing children. They meant well when they said that these things happened sometimes and that questioning them was flying in the face of God, but by then Maggie had learned more than her share of lessons, and she knew in her heart that God was just as much a fable as the hellish joke of love or happiness.
    The chore of ironing could induce a trance that was often close to unbreakable. Paudie was very particular about his shirts, and Maggie knew better than to rush the process. The humid air created a different world, one that almost begged of her to dream. Lately, her mind was quick to find direction, dreaming up a home on a hill, a place for her alone, with high ceilings, thick carpet on the floors and paintings on the walls. Maybe a couple of acres so that she could keep a horse, an old bay gelding that, for no particular reason, she’d name Cooper and who wouldn’t be much to look at, certainly no thoroughbred, but who’d have the heart of a warrior. On a place like that she’d need no one, not Paudie, not her family.
    The banging at the door seemed miles away, a flutter no more noticeable than the small ceaseless clapping of a bluebottle bounding over and over against the glass of the pantry window, and easy to ignore. Easy until it became more pronounced, and until the voices carried through from the road. Carefully, she set down the iron. A sense of unease washed through her, but that may have been nothing more than reflex, the reaction she had developed upon hearing her husband’s nightly return, and she had long since braced herself against the impact of such feelings. He’d be drunk again, of course, too drunk to even manage an unlocked door, and she hoped that whoever he had brought home with him from the pub would be the kind of men that knew, even in that state, how to behave themselves.
    There was a moment, upon opening the door, when she actually believed that he was dead. It looked that way, his great frame sagging between the set of two struggling men, the thin white ropes of his remaining hair corkscrewing wildly from his lowered head, his knees bent with weakness, his boots dragging on their toes.
    â€˜We all thought he was just drunk,’ one of the men was saying, pronouncing the words slowly as though he was fishing them from distant memory. ‘He fell off the stool with an awful clatter and we couldn’t wake him.’
    Maggie pictured the scene; Paudie holding sway on some favoured topic, a pint of stout clenched in one sweeping fist, those eyes blazing, daring anyone to interrupt or contradict him. Maybe the grumble of his voice as he broke into song. And then the fall. On sleeping feet, she shuffled aside and watched the men as they struggled to carry her husband up the step and into the house, stumbling to navigate the narrow hallway, one groaning with the strain of such a weight, the other through clenched teeth hissing a few slurred words of comfort meant probably for anyone who wanted them. They stretched him out on the bed and Maggie thanked them, not really knowing what else to say or do. Both of these men had, over the years, been regular visitors to her home, guests of Paudie’s, usually after the pubs had shut, hangers-on eager to slake the last of their thirst from the dregs of a whiskey bottle, but neither of them were from Douglas and at that moment, try as she might, she could not recall their names. For a few seconds they stood there staring at her, trying to weigh the situation through the fog of their drunkenness. Then, instinctively aware that there was to be no offer of further drink, they took their leave, reluctantly, muttering the usual promises that they’d call in tomorrow to see the