Her voice was layered with old things, triumph and bitterness and spite twisted together. I said, “So when Matt was the one who got the girl, he rubbed it in?”
“That wasn’t enough for him. Your da was after applying to Guinness’s, as a driver. He’d been told the job was as good as his, as soon as the next driver retired. But Matt Daly’d been working there a few years, and his da before him; he knew people. After all that with Tessie, Matt went to his foreman and told him Jimmy Mackey wasn’t the kind of fella they wanted at Guinness’s. There were twenty lads applying for every job. They didn’t need anyone that might bring trouble.”
“So Da ended up doing the plastering.” No humor intended.
“That was my uncle Joe got him the apprenticeship. We got engaged not long after that whole carry-on with Tessie. Your da needed a trade, if we were going to be having a family.”
I said, “You were a fast worker.”
“I saw my chance and I took it. I was seventeen by then; old enough to make the boys look. Your da was…” Ma’s lips vanished, and she twisted her cloth tighter into the crannies of the ornament. “I knew he was still mad into Tessie,” she said after a moment, and there was a defiant spark in her voice that gave me a hair’s-breadth glimpse of a girl with her chin out, watching wild Jimmy Mackey from this kitchen window and thinking Mine. “But I didn’t mind that. I thought I’d change that, once I got my hands on him. I never wanted a lot; I wasn’t one of those ones that think they’ll be film stars in Hollywood. I never had notions. All I wanted was a little house of my own and a few childer, and Jimmy Mackey.”
“Well,” I said. “You got the kids, and you got the man.”
“I got him in the end, all right. What Tessie and Matt left of him. He’d started on the drink by then.”
“But you wanted him anyway.” I kept my voice nice and non-judgmental.
“I’d my heart set on him. My mammy, God rest her soul, she warned me: never go with a drinking man. But I hadn’t a clue. My own da-you won’t remember him, Francis, but he was a lovely man-he never touched a drop; I hadn’t a notion what a drinker was like. I knew Jimmy’d have a few, but sure, all the fellas would. I thought it was no more than that-and it wasn’t, not when I first spotted him. Not till Tessie O’Byrne wrecked his head for him.”
I believed her. I know what the right woman, at the right moment, can do to a man-not that Tessie seemed to have got away scot-free herself. Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.
Ma said, “Everyone had always said Jimmy Mackey’d be good for nothing. His ma and da were a pair of aul’ alcos, never worked a day in their lives; ever since he was only a little chiseler he’d be going round to the neighbors asking could he stay for the dinner because there was nothing at home, he’d be out running the streets in the middle of the night… By the time I knew him, everyone said for definite he’d wind up a waster like his ma and da.” Her eyes had strayed off the polishing, away towards the window and the falling rain. “I knew they were wrong, but. He wasn’t bad, Jimmy wasn’t; just wild. And he wasn’t thick. He could’ve been something. He didn’t need Guinness’s, he could’ve had his own little business-there was no need for him to be answering to bosses every day, he hated that. He always loved the driving; he could’ve done deliveries, had his own van… If your woman hadn’t got to him first.”
And there was the motive, gift wrapped and tied with ribbon, to go ever so perfectly with that signature MO. One day Jimmy Mackey had had a top-flight girl on his arm and a top-flight job in the bag, he’d been all ready to paint the future in his colors and give the finger to the bastards who said he’d never do it. Then he made one slipup, just one, and prissy little Matt Daly waltzed in cool as a cucumber and pocketed Jimmy’s whole life for himself. By the time Jimmy’s head cleared, he was married to a girl he never wanted, scrambling for the odd day’s work on a job with no prospects and drinking enough to kill Peter O’Toole. He spent twenty-odd years watching his lost life unfold right across the road, in another man’s home. Then, all in one weekend, Matt Daly humiliated him in front of the whole street and almost got him arrested-in what passes for an alcoholic’s brain, it’s always someone else’s doing-and he somehow found out that Rosie Daly was wrapping his son around her finger and dancing him off to wherever suited her.
And there could have been more to it than that, more and worse. Da grinning at me, winking, daring me to talk back: The Daly young one, yeah? She’s a little daisy. The kegs on her, my Jaysus… My girl Rosie, the sweet spitting image of his Tessie O’Byrne.
