The only reason he took it was to get away from her. Just because she couldn’t have a wain, she didn’t have to take it out on him!”
Pat swallowed and did his level best to formulate the words he feared would elude him.
“Couldn’t have a wain?”
He felt—although it wasn’t, or to a casual observer would not have appeared so—as though the skin on his face had been drawn unreasonably tightly against his bones.
“Barren as Rogey Rock,” his mother informed him. “That’s what the doctor said, although not in those words.”
Thoughts appeared as randomly intersecting lights in the murkier corners of Pat’s mind.
“Mammy!” he said. “But are you sure? Are you sure all this is true?”
There was no mistaking the pain on his mother’s face.
“And now, worst of all—she’s turned my own son against me. My own son that would not have doubted me in his life. She’s turned him against me too!”
Something leaped inside Pat when he heard his mother say that, as certain as if a pebble or stone had been cast from a catapult. He clasped her right shoulder firmly with his hand.
“No, Mammy!” he cried aloud. “She hasn’t!”
It was hard for Pat to bear the sight of the salt tear that now gleamed in the corner of his mother’s eye. But even harder to bear on opening his own to their optimum width and finding himself gazing no longer upon the mother who had carried him for nine months and cared and nurtured him for so long, but—Mrs. Tubridy! Upon her lips the words, “Paudgeen! What are you doing? It’s five o’clock in the morning!”
Pat felt the back of his throat contract until it was the size of a small seed.
“My name’s not Paudgeen!” he retorted angrily.
“Go back to sleep and no more lip out of you or it will be down to the station with me first thing in the morning. Do you hear me?”
Perhaps Mrs. Tubridy felt it was crucial for her to assert her authority in a firm and unequivocal manner at that time, and it is tempting to speculate as to what might have happened if she had adopted a more conciliatory approach. But she didn’t, and what was clear now was that in conjunction with what had taken place earlier—entirely unknown to Mrs. Tubridy, of course—the otherwise—or what seemed to be otherwise—placid Pat McNab had, although to all intents and purposes unaware of it himself, been set upon a course, the outcome of which could now but spell disaster. Although it is unlikely that an independent observer—as Pat in the days that followed continued to proceed around the kitchen, pottering awkwardly and muttering abstractedly, “Hello! My name is Paudgeen! Paudgeen Tubridy! Do you know me at all?”—would necessarily have drawn such a drastic conclusion. Or surmised that, from sudden cries of, “That’s me! Afraid to go down to Sullivan’s because my mammy won’t let me! She says if I do she’ll get the guards on me! She has me so scared, you see! Why, I’m so scared I think I need a drink!” a state of heartbroken, helpless anxiety might have inevitably ensued.
Far more likely is that the comments on such occasions (from independent observers, that is) would have been more along the lines of, “Poor Pat!” or “Isn’t he a sad case?” But perhaps these rather casual commentators—putative, it is true—might not have been so eager to declare him a sad case if they had observed him some evenings later, brandishing a bottle of Cointreau, the contents of which he had practically consumed in their entirety, donning one of Mrs. Tubridy’s hats (a blue one with a white net) and curtseying in pantomime fashion as he flailed about the kitchen, crying, “Howya, Mrs. Tubridy! How’s Paudgeen getting on? Like I mean—is he born yet? Ha ha! Only coddin’!” as, as before, into the neck of his impromptu botttle-microphone, he began to sing, rotating his arms all the while, his voice attaining the very peak of his register:
Come day go day
Wishing my heart it was Sunday
Drinking buttermilk all the week
Whiskey on a Sunday. Yee-hoo!
It is difficult, perhaps, to describe the suddenness with which Pat lapsed into silence, or to adequately indicate the impact the glowering visage of Mrs. Tubridy actually had as the door opened and revealed her standing there in the shadowy aperture. Suffice to say that Pat felt his lips had been turned to stone, as had most of the rest of his body.
How unpleasant it was for him to