Digging Deep
By Elaine Maguire O'Connor
When he said he would be focusing on the Buddhism, I knew there must be trouble with the wife. There was no way Sadie would put up with that auld shite. Sure enough, word filtered around the town that she’d upped and left him. He’d been writing poetry, she said, and sure I thought she was joking since Skinner Flynn was ‘bout poetic as me old Granny, and her an illiterate who couldn’t so much as spell her own name. But no, Sadie said there’d been a poem about the soil and its stain on his soul which she couldn’t make head nor tale of. Another about his father and the temper on him when Skinner and the brothers were nippers. But he’d be forgiving him now for his fondness for the strap. Big on forgiveness, were the Buddhists.
‘I thought you’d have talked some sense into him,’ she says to me when I ran into her down the town, blonde hair down around her shoulders, still lovely as she ever was despite the extra few years and pounds. ‘I was thinking to myself, Davy’s the man to make him stop this nonsense,’ and she smiled at me, and I felt myself grow two inches that she was thinking of me at all.
Me and Skinner have been diggin’ the graves together since as far back as I can remember. Some think it morbid - depressing even - to be surrounded by dead bodies, rotting and festering in the ground beneath, but I always found it to be a gentle, peaceful sort of place. It’s quiet, at least when Micheál isn’t giving us one of his stories about his former glory days as a motorcycle cop in Maryland. Micheál joined us a few years back when he came home to Ireland for reasons unclear. There were rumours of a relationship with a simple-minded woman and an angry father with a gun, which is how they say Micheál’s limp came about. Anyways, things had gotten busy on account of the plague sweeping through and he’s been with us since, stoppin’ things comin’ to blows between myself and the other fella. A right contrary prick he is, winds me up something terrible does Skinner.
The first ‘Namaste,’ he gave, I just brushed it off, but then he turned down the offer of a pint.
‘Just a Ribena for me, Davy,’ he said, and myself and Micheál looked around to see who was speaking, certain we were, that it wasn’t Skinner Flynn.
It was a Sunday in late-September and the whole town was sucking the last rays of light from the week autumn sun, like a dying man’s last gasp. We were in Nolan’s’ beer garden which is really just two picnic tables, a beer barrel and some torn tarpaulin strewn between the trees in the pub’s carpark. Aidan Nolan had quickly thrown it together back when you weren’t allowed to drink indoors and now even a hint of sunshine has everyone crowded in, young wans slathered in orange lookin’ tan, grown men with the tops off and bellies out. So, I comes back with the pint of Ribena, wondering to myself what he was up to, but I didn’t say nothin’ since that’s what he wanted. Tryin’ to wind me up again, no doubt. But Sadie’s words were ringing in my ear, ‘bout how I could put a stop to it. I just didn’t know how.
A few hours later as the cool air hit and Monday morning loomed, an argument broke out when Micheál began chattin’ up a gaggle of girls, all shimmering and shivering, at least two decade younger than himself. A boyfriend of one of them – a stocky man with a shaved head and the puckered pink cheeks of a man who’d spent too long in the sun – called Micheál an old perv and then it all kicked off. There were fists flying and girls screaming and before long Micheál was collapsed on the ground, winded and wounded. Got a few digs myself but nothing life threatening. Skinner though, he just sat at the table, sipping his fifth Ribena of the night, a look of simple contentment replacing his usual snarl.
‘What the fuck Skinner?’ Micheál wheezed, cause usually Skinner would be the one to have his back, not because he was loyal or gave two shites about Micheál, but because he was a man who liked a fight. Got it from the old man, they said, the streak for violence.
‘If you truly loved yourself, you could never hurt another,’ he says, and everyone just stopped and starred and the stocky bald lad looked ready to raise his fists again and sure I couldn’t blame him, with that kinda talk.
For most of that week, we worked in silence, days spent slicing at the hardened soil, death a constant companion, circling like a foggy mist. Wasn’t an easy week, having buried Mags Shanahan on the Monday, her only thirty-four and the baby not yet born. We’d seen it all. The child who’d been knocked from his bike on the Athy roundabout. My old grandfather– ninety-eight years old and still supping pints in Nolan’s ‘til the night he died. Ger Mullen who’d been shot in the back of the head when he’d got in too deep with them drug dealers from up in Dublin. And women like poor Mags, diagnosed not six weeks ago with pancreatic cancer – a real cunt of a cancer -and left a clatter of kids and a cheating husband behind. But you couldn’t let it get to you, cry for one and the tears may never stop.
When we took a breather for a bit of lunch on the Thursday, Skinner sat cross legged and closed his eyes.
‘Not hungry, Skin?’ Micheál asked.
‘I’m fasting,’ he replied.
‘Too fuckin’ good for food now, is it?’ I muttered under my breath but loud enough so that he could hear.
No response.
‘Too fuckin’ good for food now, is it?’ I repeated, raising my voice this time.
‘Namaste,’ he said, and I could see the flicker in his eye, daring me to continue, same one he gets when the lads do be makin’ comments about Sadie and what they’d like to do with her. Good lookin’ woman, so she is. But I let it go, bit into my ham and cheese sandwich, and crunched loudly on my Taytos knowing full well the bollix would be droolin’ at the mouth, dying for a bit of grub.
When I got home that evening, I pulled out the phone and started a bit of research for myself. Sounded like a right bunch of boring pricks to me now, with their ‘passivism’ and not drinking and sitting around all day doing sweet fuck all but praying to some fat aul China man. Lookin’ down their noses at the rest of us just cause we enjoyed a breakfast roll. Mairéad was tutting and asking what it mattered to me if he was Buddhist or Muslim or even a Protestant, sure he wasn’t hurting anybody. A lot less people, in fact, than he was hurting when he was down Nolan’s, drinkin’ every night. But see, I’ve known Skinner near all my life and he’s no Buddhist no matter what he does be chanting and I knew he’d reveal himself soon enough.
‘What about the poetry?’ I asked her, and she just rolled her eyes and told me to leave her alone while she watched the soaps. Phil Mitchell was off the wagon again.
He’d always thought he was a cut above the rest of us, had Skinner, and him no reason to think that what with the mother leaving them and that brute of a father never working a day in his life. But none of that ever bothered Skinner, and he carried the air of a man who overestimated his own place in the world, helped I’d say by all the women who he had some sort of magnetic pull on. And then he went and got Sadie, the best-lookin’ girl in Gilstown and the one all the fellas were after, myself no exception. To this day I feel the red heat of shame creep up on me when I think back to me asking her out all them years ago and that look of confusion and pity that came over her pretty features.
‘Ah no, Davy.’
And then I found out soon after that her and Skinner were together, no doubt laughing at the poor little fat fucker who thought he had a chance with her. Mairéad came along a year or so after that. I’ve never told her any of that though.
There was no sign of him in the pubs that weekend after his ‘fasting,’ but he was spotted in the library near the school, shoulders hunched over a book titled Luminous Darkness. And that’s how it continued, him chanting and fasting and reading. There was talk of him going up to Dublin to a poetry night where he’d stand on a little platform at the back of a bookshop and read out them poems, about the father and the soil and probably ones about Sadie too, when we all know what he really likes doing is getting rat-arsed, same as everyone else. I’d say now if those lad-dee-dah Dublin ones knew the truth about him, they’d have him on the first train back to Gilstown.
As the weeks turned into months, people got used to Skinner and his new ways. Talkin’ ‘bout his ‘transformation’ and a begrudging acceptance of how they didn’t think he’d keep it up but sure lookit, wasn’t he making a great effort and the town was a lot more peaceful now. Himself and Sadie remained apart though, and it was if we were the only two who could remember the man he really was. Danny Maguire said he might look into the Buddhism now himself, seeing the great change it had brought on Skinner, though it turned out he’d confused the Buddhists with some other crowd who took psychedelics and had ten wives and when he discovered there was no drink or drugs and no free pass for cheating on the wife, he quickly backtracked on his conversion.
It was when he started the talk about reincarnation that I decided enough was enough. Not a few hours after Jim McNally was lowered into the ground - God rest his soul - we were in Nolan’s for the soup and sandwiches and sorry for your troubles, when Skinner says sure we should be happy for Jim since he’d be coming back soon in some other body to some other life. A man who’d spent his life digging eternal resting places for men who met their maker, and this is the kind of shite he was spouting.
‘And what is it you’ll come back as?’ I said to him. ‘A man who can hold onto his wife?’
‘Says the man who never got her in the first place,’ he replied, and I heard some sniggers, and a spasm of shame rippled through me followed by a bubbling fury that I couldn’t swallow down. Before I knew it, I was on him, a solid right hook meeting his nose and a gush of blood hitting the pair of us. That flicker in his eye flared and Skinner Flynn’s rage was unleashed, snarlin’ like a rabid dog, teeth, fists and feet hitting at such a speed that I was sure it would me they would be digging a hole for next. Micheál and Danny Maguire pulled us apart, cut up and bruised like we’d just come out of the ring. An eerie calm prevailed, and then we were snapped back to reality by the sound of poor Jim McNally’s weeping widow. Sadie rushed over, eyes filled with worry but also pride. It wasn’t for me though, she only had eyes for the one man.
Elaine Maguire O'Connor is a writer from Dublin.