‘Night on the Lash’ by Therese Cox

A few months before I turned seventeen, before Da passed away and I dropped out of the church choir, I’d been given my first – my only – solo. Our choir director was a hook-nosed Welsh lady named Mrs Hugh. On our first day of practice, after warming us up with scales, she’d given us the sheet music to ‘Suicide is Painless’. She’d said it was the theme song from M*A*S*H but I knew it from the Manic Street Preachers version. The topic of her sanity, whether or not she had it, was a favourite topic of mine and Mary- Kate’s. To the old wagon’s credit, we never had to sing ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ or anything having to do with heroes or love or any of that guff. The closest she’d come was ‘Beautiful Meath’.

It was one of those misty-eyed ballads you expected to see in a commercial for Harp or Jameson or to hear piping out of the speakers outside the souvenir shops. We’d been selected to sing it at a dinner ceremony honouring the Meath football team. Don’t ask why our school choir was going to serenade a football team. Must’ve been a choir shortage. Must’ve found us in the golden pages under Serenades, football. All I could be sure of was that we, a group of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls, would get to stand and sing before the watchful eye of the entire Meath minor football team. And I, Greta Gardner, had been given the solo. Girls wanted my blood.

Waiting for the bus, standing in the queue at Dunnes Stores, walking home from school along the Grand Canal, I’d be practicing my line. For weeks I was picking apart those verses, wondering were you supposed to rhyme ‘Boyne’ with ‘time’ and thinking what a right eejit I sounded when I tried it. I put on what I thought was a Meath accent even though the only person I’d ever known from Meath was the madman with the shorts and socks up to his groin who gave tours of the crypts and mummies under Saint Michan’s. Him and his white cotton socks pulled up to the knees and his ‘Lord … Leitrim … executed!’

On the day of the serenade, a sight we must’ve been: a gaggle of girls draped in flowing white surplices, flat black choir folders tucked smartly under our wings, hair so lacquered with hairspray it crunched to the touch. We filed behind Mrs Hugh, wobbling over the cobblestones of the Trinity campus. The footballers stood as we entered the hall, sizing us up and elbowing each other in the ribs. Stern portraits glared down at our exchanges from the walls, grimacing from their place in the dusty past. Fuck off, schoolmasters.

The one I fancied was a midfielder. He played for Kilbride in the minors.

He was a bit thick but had soft-looking hair and a polished smile. We stood against the wall in firing-squad formation while Mrs. Hugh struck a tuning fork and hummed the note. My mouth went dry as we lurched into the ballad of ‘Beautiful Meath’. I felt the midfielder’s eyes on me and felt sure I was going to pass out but when the solo came, I carried out the task nobly. It was over so fast I was hardly sure I’d sung it. But afterwards all the girls said it was class.

At dinner, the midfielder winked when he passed me the pudding. I still have the joke from the Christmas cracker:

Q: What’s yellow and very dangerous?

A : Shark-infested custard.

One of the footballers said they were headed over to the Stag’s Head for a

couple of pints and that we should head on over later to join them. It may have been a casual invitation, but Mary-Kate Moriarty was not one to see opportunity laid to waste. From a payphone outside the main gates Mary- Kate rang home, then I did the same. The two of us spun a two-faced lie that placed us squarely at the other’s gaff for the duration of the night. We had the whole night ahead of us for whatever adventures awaited. And the night, we knew, was young.

*

There they were, drinking Heinekens. A tableful of fellas with no girl accessories. It wasn’t exactly a bet, it wasn’t exactly a dare. It was Mary-Kate whispering in my ear and saying we should take them home with us. We couldn’t take them home any more than we could take them with us to Sunday Mass. But we could suggest it, as it were, or lead them in that direction, their direction, whatever direction, that wasn’t important. What was important was that it would be our idea. Why? We were liberated.

Hey Mary-Kate, I shouted, and she said What? I pointed to the empty bottles that littered the sticky table and said, Look at all this liberation!

The craic was ninety, the music not too loud. The bar gleamed with bottles sparkly and lovely under warm pub lights. Mary-Kate’s silver bracelets clattered as she tilted her head back and downed a long drink of cider, pressing her knee against mine under the table.

I sidled up beside the midfielder and then Mary-Kate had made her selection. Hers was taller and better looking. The team captain. He drank pints like they were water and I saw where his hand went under the table when he thought no one was looking. Get a room, we used to screech.

The midfielder’s name was Eamon. He worked at the airport at the Hertz rental car counter. He said he had to be at work at eight the next morning. So you’ll want to go to bed early, I teased. I whispered in his ear that it was past my bedtime. He said I looked so innocent, then tugged out the rubber bands that held my hair in bunches. I laughed. Mary-Kate looked as young as I did, but when they asked, if they asked, the answer was always the same: eighteen.

By the time I realized I might be on my way to drunk, I was already meeting myself coming back. We drifted into a pub off Grafton Street to catch a few songs by a band called The State Pathologist Dr John Harbison. It was too loud to talk so we ended up in another pub with a dark sticky basement and Thin Lizzy on the jukebox. When we wobbled out into the lane with our fellas, I didn’t know where we were headed. I only knew I was still too drunk to go home. And then I remembered: we weren’t going home.

The streets were streaked with the grease and neon of the takeaway, the smells of vinegar and kebabs frying. Talk turned to a night bus home. We asked where they were headed and they said Bray.

– Bray! said Mary-Kate. I’ve always wanted to go to Bray!

We missed the last DART and that’s what condemned us to the Nitelink. Stagecoach of the sloshed and sledgehammered, your last chance out of Dublin on a late night weekend. We bought our tickets out of the bus parked on Westmoreland Street, then found our bus and staggered up to the top deck. There were burger wrappers and beer cans rolling up and down the aisle under the seats. There were lads absolutely locked and cross-eyed girls screeching at their antics. Then the aggressive and sweaty ones who didn’t get lucky at the pubs and clubs and thought they’d get lucky on the Nitelink. If you got onto the Nitelink and found you had to vomit, you were not alone.

We lurched up the spirally stairs, fellas on our arms. The bus was jammers. It was revellers all, not a single aul wan in a headscarf clicking her tongue. As the bus pulled away from the stop, Mary-Kate handed me a brown paper bag. The whiskey burned a path down my throat and was swiftly dispatched through my body, working its way down the arms and all the way out to the fingertips.

On the upper deck was a drunk man in a patriotic mood serenading passengers. Mary-Kate shouted at him to shut the bloody hell up but then I called him the Rebel Song Jukebox and she decided that was gas. If we gave him a coin, any coin, he’d sing any song we asked him to, so long as there was a spate of brave souls dying for Ireland. After two and half songs, the body count was already up to seven. We had to stop our body count during the Jukebox’s rendition of ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ because no one could decide whether dismembered body parts counted as dead bodies.

– Of course they bloody well count, Mary-Kate said. Where do you think the body parts come from?

Then the Jukebox had a change of heart and gave out with a rousing

rendition of ‘Wild Rover’ to lift the spirits. No dead soldiers, no weeping widows, no rifles of the I.R.A. Just a load of roving and rambling and whack- fol-the-do to take us home. Or away from home.

The sky stretched out over the sleeping houses as the lit-up bus rattled along the dark N11. It was well past midnight when we arrived in Bray. The last thing we heard was a rambling chorus of ‘Piano Man’ swallowed up into the suction of the closing bus doors. Then it was dead quiet.

We made our way down the dark side alleys till the boardwalk stretched out before us. Down onto the squishy sand we went. Come on said our fellas. Or we said to them. I forget now who said what. A drink too many but only one too many. Could still see the sand, still knew my name. Mary-Kate unlaced her boots and wriggled out of her socks, stalking across the cold sand in bare feet. A hard white moon gleamed above. An abandoned ice cream booth stuck out in the middle of the no-man’s land, a livid-eyed seagull pecking about its splinters. We were all four of us strewn out in the sand looking up at the stars. Eamon put his arm around my waist and pulled me in for a long, lager-heavy kiss. What was it like? It was like this: goal.

Mary-Kate shot up and said they were going out for cigarettes. I asked where were they going to get cigarettes at that hour and she said the Superquinn. I said it was the Superquinn not the Miraclequinn and did she think they’d be open? She laughed and they left. I don’t think she went out for cigarettes. I don’t even think there was a Superquinn.

My head sunk in the damp sand. I looked over the horizon at the sideways water and rolled over on my side. The midfielder pushed his hand in my hair and kissed what was left of me. The night went up in smoke.

They call it blacking out. But what do they call it when there are flashes of light in the shadows? When you can see it wasn’t you at all but someone who only looked like you, who’d broken into your wardrobe and, yes, your life? When you can remember some details and not others: the zipper but not the face, the ash but not the cigarette, the punishment but not the crime?

*

I could tell something was wrong straightaway from the taste left in my mouth, tar and stale beer and ashtray. I was covered in damp sand on a beach when I should have been in my bed, waking up to the smell of my ma’s rashers and eggs. This wasn’t home and it wasn’t a hostel. It wasn’t, as far as I could tell, even Dublin. The boy from Meath, the midfielder with the leafy, lager smell? Gone. My hair was a mess. There were bits of sticks and seaweed stuck to my coat sleeve. In the sand I hunted for them. Clues, that is. Where were you, Greta Gardner, on the night of. Eyewitnesses? Only Mary-Kate. And she didn’t see a blink of it.

I turned my stiff neck to the rolling waves and looked out over the craggy black rocks. Slowly, without much conviction, dawn was forcing its way in. A rusty sign riveted to the wall nearby informed me that we were being watched by CCTV. Some show it was. Hi Ma. Hi Da. My neck felt stiff. I shook the sand from my hair and smoothed down my skirt. When I opened my eyes again there was Mary-Kate standing over me like a surgeon. The clumped mascara, the lips chapped and tinted slightly blue. She looked lost, ruined. She looked like something dumped off the back of a lorry.

– Where are we? I managed.

– Where are we? Christ, Greta. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.

– Remember what?

– Remember what?

Before me in the sand was a green plastic bucket with a crack in it.

Reminded me of what we used to take with us down to the seaside. Holidays on Bray. Nothing to do but kick round collecting shells, keeping our eyes peeled for a jellyfish, those were the days.

– We took this bucket to the beach, I said, feeling tears rise up. We’ll build sandcastles with it!

Beside me in the sand a red triangle on a bottle blinked at me like a hazard sign. Warning: Bass Ale Approaching. A melody was scratching around in my head, rolling from side to side like a stray can on a bus, and a memory along with it. I knew what it was. It was ‘Beautiful Meath.’

In the palm of my hand I was holding a coin the midfielder had placed there, telling us to get home safe, telling us to take the first bus in the morning back. But when I opened my hand I saw what the sharp edge was all about.

– Put that down, will you?

– No!

– Drop it, Greta. It’s trash.

– I want it. It’s mine, it’s mine.

That’s what I was going on about. That and the sandcastles. No wonder

Mary-Kate smacked me. It didn’t hurt as much as it surprised me.

It did make me drop the bottle cap. That hit, I had coming to me.

The first dirty white light of day came crawling up the chimneys. Soon we

would be in church singing the Latin: agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi and listening to the gospel of Matthew, the one about the five wise virgins and the five other ones. But now we were on this beach. The dim lump of Bray Head loomed in the distance, a cross stuck into its peak like a syringe.

According to my piece-of-crap watch it was 7:44. We had exactly one hour and fifteen minutes to get back to town and into our Sunday clothes and show up for Mass. Mass, then bed to conk out. A bed was a faraway, magical thing, unthinkable as a unicorn.

Up we walked. Up streets so vast and deserted in the early morning light. A bent man in a yellow vest was sweeping up last night’s leftovers. All of town to clean up, and just him and that bristly broom. A wrecked black umbrella was sprawled upside-down in a dustbin, nothing left to it but the skeletal silver spindles. There were cans and bottles, a soggy cardboard French fry shell with the golden arches. And the red pinstriped straw from a strawberry milkshake, you know the one: post-pub, 2 a.m., on a stomach of five pints of cider.

Churches all over town were ringing out with bells clanging, doors flung wide open begging: please come in, good people of Dublin! O not today my Lord, I’m afraid. A bit indisposed, outdid myself unfortunately, not up to the task. The only god you’re praying to this morning is the deity in the porcelain bowl, who shakes His I-expected-so-much-more-from-thee head and says: not you again! Only come to me when you’re in trouble!

All the church bells were ringing out, calling us to Mass. Calling us to confess. What is Sunday for but to repent for the sins of the night before? Should carry a notebook and pen to keep a running tab: sins I’ve done and sins to do. Always some sins you forget about. And then the ones you don’t. And it’s no, nay, never, no nay never no more, will I play the wild rover, no never no more.

I watched a wave as it came coasting over the seaweed and stones and swept away a Tropicana drink box. It was something to behold! All that trash! That rubbish making its way bobbing out to the Atlantic! We used to sit for hours on the beach along Sandymount Strand, sticking out our toes and dipping them in the cold summer surf. Can you believe this water’s connected to the ocean? I remember saying to Mary-Kate once as we gazed out over the bay, thinking of the unthinkable future, awestruck to believe that in this dirty old town there existed such beauty, such water.

From issue #1: autumn/winter 2015

About the Author
Therese Cox lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, gorse and The Anti-Room. She is pursuing a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.