"Angelina"
a short story by
Gerry McDonnell
An Irish Quarter Special Event
"ANGELINA"
by
Gerry Mc Donnell
In the house Angelina asked me did I eat here alone at
this table every day? I was embarrassed that I did. She was referring to a bare
formica table with just a rusted bread bin on it. We were drinking tea and I
felt cornered by her question. She was twenty-one and I was a thirty-year-old,
mature student at her college. Her parents were Italian and owned a local
chipper. Her mother was a sensation when she came from Italy to marry Angelo, a
dark, stubby, dynamic man. People said she looked like the movie star Sophia
Loren. She smiled in the chipper with large autumn-coloured eyes and perfectly
even, white teeth. Angelina has her mother’s looks.
I suggested we
go out to the garden. It was more a yard now since I had agreed with the next
door neighbour, a builder, to concrete over it.
“It’ll tidy the place up”, he said.
It used to be a mature garden with yellow laburnum
blossoms, and along the stone wall, there were blackberry and loganberry bushes.
Mercifully a lilac tree at the end of garden was spared. It laid its blooms on
the corrugated-iron roof of an old shed.
I told Angelina that my mother used to love the tree
when she was alive; that I used to break off a branch for her. Suddenly she clambered
up onto the wall and roof to snap a plume of perfumed, bluish petals. She was
unabashed when her skirt lifted in the breeze. I noticed she had dark bruises
on her thighs. I held her hand as she jumped down from the wall. She handed me
the blossoms.
“For the table”, she said.
We went inside to put the lilac flowers in a vase but
a jam jar had to suffice. We sat sipping tea and smelling the petals. In the
silence I felt like touching her hand.
Suddenly she became agitated.
“I had an abortion”.
I didn’t know
what to say. To console her could be interpreted that she had done something
wrong. To say nothing would be to make little of it.
“I got a girlfriend pregnant once. She insisted that I
pay for an abortion in England. None of us had any money in those days”.
What was I saying?
“I haven’t told anybody else”, she said.
We sat simmering. She had a seminar to attend in the
college so she took her bike from the hall and cycled away looking back to
smile.
That evening I went upstairs for something and found
underwear neatly placed on by bed. I was dumfounded. It had to be Angelina’s.
She must have gone upstairs when I was in the toilet. What kind of girl was
she?
The next day I cycled up the avenue to the back of the
college, the route she took. Often I had timed it to bump into her ‘by chance’.
I wasn’t sure how I would broach the subject of the underwear. However, I
didn’t see her, not during the entire day at college, or the next day, or the
next week. I asked her friends about her
but they knew nothing. A month later I got a letter from her from Italy. She
went to get away from an uncle who had been abusing her since she was twelve. She was staying with her grandmother
until she decided what to do.
One evening, when I was eating at the table, there was
a hammering on the hall door. I opened it to find a swarthy man, not unlike
Angelina’s father, in a state, sweating profusely. I guessed it was the uncle
who had been abusing her.
“You know where is Angelina”?
He was aggressive. I tried to shut the door but he had
his foot jammed in it.
“She with you”?
I threatened him with the Guards. He punched the door,
cracking a wooden panel and turned to go. I slammed the door shut and went to
the sitting room window to see him lift the front gate with great force. He
left it broken, sticking in the air. A couple of months had passed when I got a
letter from Angelina from Sweden. She said she was getting married, that she
was pregnant! I felt robbed of a chance of happiness with her. I wanted to feel
her belly with our child inside.
Her uncle paid me a few more, nasty visits. But things
settled down. I saw him once, in a local park, walking, holding hands with a
very young girl. Shortly after that, I read that a man had been badly beaten in
that park and was in a coma. It was him. He recovered, I heard, but went back
to Italy blind in one eye. He picked the wrong girl and messed with the wrong people!
One day in December the phone rang. It was Angelina. She
was back in Dublin. “Could I call over?
“Of course”!
Standing at the hall door she looked as though a smile
hadn’t alighted on her face for a very long time. Her hair was lank and she was
wearing baggy tracksuit bottoms. She had her baby boy with her. We drank some
tea and talked. She told me she was pregnant by her uncle when she left Dublin;
that she couldn’t face another abortion and chose to have Michael. She had met
a Swedish man in Italy and moved to Stockholm. He was kind and loving at first
but he turned physically abusive referring to her as ‘damaged goods’. She left
with her baby and came back home where she wasn’t welcome. Her parents,
particularly her father, didn’t want to know her. He said she had besmirched
the family’s good name by accusing his brother of abusing her.
She was staying
in a B and B, paid for by the government. She had to be out of the accommodation early
in the morning and couldn’t return until evening.
“I don’t know how much longer I can push a buggy
around the city in this weather. We go into a MacDonald’s to get warm. I don’t
want to burden you but I am desperate”.
I assured her that she was welcome to stay with me. She
sobbed and thanked me.
She stayed over Christmas. In spring I came home one day
and saw her sitting in the back garden
with Michael who was absorbed with piling up coloured cubes. I had made an attempt to recreate the garden,
planting a laburnum tree and loganberry bushes. Daffodils lolled in the breeze
around the sapling. I called her name but she didn’t answer. When I walked up
to her she turned away and lowered her head. She was holding a letter. I
hunched down beside her. When she looked up I was completely shocked. Her
forehead was scratched with red lines, there were wipes of blood on her cheeks
and she was shaking.
“I don’t know what happened. I must have blacked out”!
The letter trembled in her hand. I helped her inside
to the bathroom to wipe the blood off her face. The scratches looked like
letters. She stood looking into the bathroom mirror. I could see the words I love you on her forehead. Who did she
love? I picked the letter out of the sink. It was written in Italian but I
recognised the heavy hand from the ugly notes her uncle had dropped in the
letterbox from time to time.
She was mumbling as I led her to her bed to rest.
“Don’t call a doctor. I am too ashamed”.
Gradually she felt up to going out, wearing her hair
in a fringe. Neighbours said hello, while trying to get their heads around this
apparently, sudden, family. We walked out by the sea in the summer. I hadn’t appreciated
before how close I lived to the sea. When the tide was out there was a pungent
smell of mud and seaweed but if we walked far enough along the coast we came to
a wooden bridge to an island which brought us closer to the sea. I pushed the
buggy, with Michael asleep in it, over the warm, lumpy sand barbed with bunches
of sun-dried seaweed and empty beer cans. After eating sandwiches in the afternoon
sun, we would walk along the cool, dark strand. Sometimes her eyes would well
up.
“It’s nothing really, just small things now, just
small things”, she said.
As if to demonstrate her growing freedom, she slipped
her feet gracefully from her sandals. I
was attentive as she balanced lightly on the hurting, hard-ribbed sand. She
inhaled in surprise as the wind blew wavelets over her feet.
“Let’s go for a swim”, she said.
“But we’ve no togs or anything”.
“We can skinny dip. Look, there’s nobody around”.
Only a couple in the distance who were walking their
dog.
“Come on”, she said.
She took off her dress and waded out. She swam about
and floated silently with the tide, her breasts exposed to the evening sun.
“Come back, you’re going out too far”.
She stayed floating, her eyes closed before she turned
and swam back with ease. She dried herself with a blanket and put her clothes
back on. She was invigorated, spontaneous.
“I’m going back to Italy and I’d like you to come with
me, with us”.
I felt dizzy and hunkered down. The incoming sea crept
over my sandals. I looked at the sand shifting under the water.
“It’s a bit sudden, isn’t it? It’s a lot to take in”.
“I think it is the right thing to do. I want Michael
to grow up in Italy, to feel the light and the sun and not end up drinking in
gloomy pubs”!
The light was dimming turning the sea grey and the
sand had lost its sparkle. I looked at her settling Michael for the walk home
and wondered how much love she had against all the odds.
“Angelina, I want to go with you, I will try but will
you forgive me if I fail”?
“Yes, but you won’t fail”!
We strolled back in silence, along the beach, back to
the wooden bridge, under the jaded sky. END
End of Guest Post
Gerry, thanks again for allowing me to publish this great story. Stay tuned for more stories from Gerry McDonnell.
Mel u
Official Biography of Gerry McDonnell
GERRY MC DONNELL was born in 1950 and lives in Dublin. He has had five collections
of poetry published. He has also written for stage, radio and television. His play Making It
Home, a two-hander father and son relationship, was first performed at the Crypt Theatre at
Dublin Castle in 2001. A radio adaptation of this play was broadcast on RTE Radio 1 in 2008
starring the acclaimed Irish actor David Kelly as the father and Mark Lambert as the son.
His play Whose Veins Ran Lightning, based on the life and work of the Irish poet James
Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), was performed at The New Theatre in Dublin in 2003. His
libretto for a chamber opera, The Poet and the Muse, (music by composer John Byrne) also
deals with Mangan. He has written for the Irish television series Fair City.
His interest in Irish Jewry has resulted in the chapbook; Jewish Influences in Ulysses
and a collection of monologues, Mud Island Elegy, in which Jews of 19th century Ireland
speak about their lives from beyond the grave. His stage play Song of Solomon, set on the
Royal canal in Dublin, has a Jewish theme. Mud Island Anthology, concerning ‘ordinary’
Dublin gentiles who lived in the latter half of the 20th century was published by Lapwing
Publications in 2009 and is a companion collection to the ‘Elegy’ poems. His latest collection
of poetry, Ragged Star, was published in 2011.
He is a member of the Irish Playwrights’ and Screenwriters’ Guild and the Irish Writers’
Union.
Gerry, thanks again for allowing me to publish this great story. Stay tuned for more stories from Gerry McDonnell.
Mel u
Lovely story. I want to know more about these characters and how things turned out!
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