In the Same Darkness
By Jennifer McMahon
January 15, 2023
January 15, 2023
A year falls in, and we’re to have an anniversary mass for Liam at the Church of St. Patrick in the town of Drumshanbo, under the gnarled shadow of Sliabh an Iarainn, the Iron Mountain. I’m small and silent in the passenger seat beside Fintan as we’re driving to it, sucked inside myself like all my tears have dried me out. I’ve got a balled-up tissue in my right hand. My left tugs pieces off of it, rolls them into knotted hunks of white, then drops them like flakes of dandruff onto the carpet at my feet. The day is straining under hounds of October clouds, and over to our left, the Arigna Mountains are scarfed with a spray of dense mist. It'll rain by noon, in time for the mass, a shedding of water for the dearly departed, the sadly missed. People have so many words for what we don’t want to admit.
“God has no mercy,” I say, my voice breaking.
“Not for us,” Fintan says. “Not this day.”
It’s as much as we’ve said to each other all day, apart from the trivialities of living under the same roof. Grief, that silent whore, has come between us. Guilt too, her hungry cousin. The only intimacy I know is with them. Otherwise, I’m alone, and Fintan is alone. We are alone together.
~
I always have tissues with me these days, tucked up my sleeve or buried in my bag under my purse and car keys. I have one balled tight in my fist when Sean pulls his Audi up beside my old Fiesta, in the shadows at the back of the Mayflower community hall. The caller’s voice over the PA is loud enough to be heard out here.
One little duck, number two.
Bingo is my weekly excuse for getting away. When I get home from meeting Sean, Fintan will say, like he always does, that I never seem to win anything. The unluckiest woman in Drumshanbo, he’ll call me. I’ll tell him, like I do every week, that the evidence for that is all around me.
Everything starts to loosen as we get older, but Sean’s face still has the tightness of youth. Our first time, he told me he liked the more mature woman. You mean the elderly, I laughed. I mean the experienced, he told me, his face all serious. A woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it. A woman who’s lived a life, with all its triumphs and tragedies. He often talks like that, like he’s reading words from a script. I sometimes wonder if he rehearses before he picks me up, gazing at himself in the mirror in his hotel room at the Lakeside Hotel. Maybe he feels the need to impress me, to prove he’s something more than most young men are.
I get out and lock my car. He turns the stereo down as I sit into his. A pop song is playing, with a driving beat and a female singer. The lyrics drip with barely disguised innuendo. She wants to, wants to, wants to more than anything she’s ever wanted before, but she never quite gets to the point. We lean across and press our dry lips together. It’s a kiss of sorts. He drives us out of the car park, one hand on the wheel, the other holding mine. The car is automatic, and so quiet that I can barely hear the engine. I want to, want to, want to. You know. I look out the window at the darkening sky, worried I’ll be seen in the car of a strange man, afraid I’ll hurt Fintan, and at the same time wanting to rain nails down on his heart, to hurt him so badly that he’ll leave me, so I won’t ever have to look at his face again. Liam took after him and had the same eyes. I can’t look at one without seeing the other. God has no mercy, and that’s the truth.
I want to, want to, want to, but mostly we don’t, and I’m content with that. We drive out to the village of Keadue in Roscommon, and beyond it to Knockranny Woods, where we park under the trees, facing the lake. The headlights pick out sentry rushes. Silver mist clings to the water like bad memories. At the other side of the carpark, a blue Volvo is rocking on its springs. This is where the adulterers come to play their furtive sports. It’s a select club, and we never get to meet the other members.
Sean’s hand is smooth and soft in mine. It’s the hand of a man who doesn’t do physical labor. Fintan’s hands are different; they scrape across my skin, or used to when he could still bear to touch me. Fintan is a carpenter, but Sean sells things. When he’s in the area, which is usually once a week, he stays in the Lakeside Hotel. I was a waitress, and he was a guest. It started with flirting. I was hungry, once I got a taste of attention, but it was more than that. I needed to escape from myself, just for a little while. To forget my dull and mournful life. It became an irregular thing, then a regular one. Like Bingo, every week. We sit and hold hands, and don’t talk much. It’s enough to not be alone and to be desired in some small way.
“How long has it been?” Sean asks.
“Nearly eighteen months.”
“Does it get any easier?”
I shrug, then shake my head.
“Tell me about him again,” he says.
“Are you sure you want to—”
“Tell me. Please.”
A banshee screech startles me, but it’s only an owl, wings flashing white as it swoops from a nearby tree. I puff out my cheeks in a draining sigh. “He played the drums and wrote songs. He’d wake in the morning with a new one in his head, then he’d sing it to me over breakfast. The girls at school loved him for his softness, the boys for his hardness. His eyes were blue, and I swear he could see things that others missed.”
Sean bows his head, and shifts in his seat. “Like what?”
“Patterns, I suppose. He saw patterns in things. In the sway of the seasons, the coming of the swallows, the falling of winter’s first snow. They revealed things to him, and him alone.” I turn to look at Sean. His shoulders are shaking, and his free hand is up to his face, covering his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“No one can cry forever,” I whisper, pressing a tissue into his hands. “No matter the fault, no matter the wrong.”
We walk in the same darkness, Sean and I.
Two little ducks.
~
Fintan sees shapes in wood, the things it has yet to be. In the morning, I go into his workshop at the back of our house, to bring him a cup of coffee. He has a piece of wood clasped between his knees, and he’s kissing it with a plane. Each stroke is a lover’s caress. The shavings curl up like sleepy kittens at his feet. He doesn’t look at me as I set his coffee on his workbench. I make to leave, but the plane stops its whispering.
“Mick Darcy called me,” he says.
“The detective?”
He looks up at me then, and his eyes are hungry. “They might have a lead on the car.”
“A local?”
He shakes his head. “A visitor to the area.” He sets wood and plane on the bench and comes towards me. “They might catch the bastard.”
“After all this time?”
His hands curl into fists, and he shakes one at me. “If I find out who he is...”
Fintan sees the shapes in more than just wood. He sees patterns as Liam did, and it’s enough to tell me that he hoards suspicions about my Bingo nights. I leave his workshop and go through the fragments of my day, the washing and cleaning and baking and all the other needless things. I try not to think about Sean, for fear my thoughts will betray me. It’s cruel, this life, to take a son from his mother. It’s cruel, to take the comforts we find, to leave us empty and wanting.
~
Sean doesn’t come to Drumshanbo the next week, or the one after that. I sit in my car in the car park at the back of the Mayflower, facing the dark and ancient lump of Sliabh an Iarainn. The Bingo numbers roll across the PA, and there’s banal randomness to them, the way they fall with no sequence or pattern. To pass the time, I try to guess which ones will be next, but I get them all wrong. No one can ever tell what’s coming down the road, good or bad, and in the end, we all find ourselves living in the cold shadow of something. When I go home, Fintan asks me if I won anything.
“No,” I say, “but there was nothing worth winning.”
He smirks at my lie. “Does he know who you are?”
I sense the tight anger in him, barely restrained. I want to run, but at the same time, I know he’ll chase me, and it’ll be worse that way. I lift my head, and look him in the eye, brazen as a goat. “Now you want to play husband, do you?”
His hand lashes towards my face. I flinch and duck my head between my shoulders. Just before the blow lands, he pulls to a halt and pats my cheek with the tips of his calloused fingers. “It’s your own sins you need to look to,” he says with a laugh. “They should be more than enough to occupy you, without the need for... other distractions.”
He walks away, into the living room to turn on the television. A wildlife program, one thing killing another, then devouring it. I go to bed, in the spare room where I’ve been sleeping for the last year. I want to, I want to, I want to have Sean beside me, to hold onto him. Just that, and no more. Not for my comfort, but to ease the pain I know he feels. To absolve him of what he did. To consume his sins and put them with my own. He’s too young to bear the gravity of them, and I’m too old for the weight of them to matter to me anymore. If there’s a judgment to be made, then it has already been passed down. If there’s a sentence, it's already being served. There are many types of prisons. The ones we make for ourselves are the hardest of all to escape.
~
Fintan isn’t a hard man or a cruel man. He’s just hurting, like me, and what I’m doing is multiplying his pain. I want him to feel every ounce of it, so I can hate myself for doing it. It’s not him I’m hurting at all.
I need to talk to Sean, to warn him, but I don’t have a number for him, and he doesn’t have one for me. It was one of our agreements, to keep things secret and safe. Every evening for a week, I drive around the hotel carpark, looking for his Audi. It isn’t there. I could go in and ask the receptionist, but then she’d know. Soon after, everyone else would know. I go home again, and Fintan throws jabs at me. I’m a disgrace. A shameful woman. Liam would disown me if he knew what I was up to. I’ve dishonored his memory. They fall around me like dirty snow and accumulate in freezing drifts around my heart. And then he casts his last stone, coming close to me to say it, his hands in gnarled fists at his chest. His breathing is fast and hard and blows heat at my cheeks.
“If you hadn’t been so selfish,” he says, “so wrapped up in what you wanted, then Liam would still be alive.”
I meet his eye and see murder there. “You’re right,” I say, but it does nothing to defuse him.
“All you had to do was to give him a lift home, but you were too busy. You left him to walk that dark road alone...”
The accusations rain down around me, and I imagine them curling up like wood shavings at a carpenter’s feet. He can’t hurt me, because I’ve already hurt myself so much, I’ve become immune to it. “Even then,” I say, “there were two cars in this home. Take your share of—"
The force of his blow sends me reeling against the wall, dazed and my face burning where the back of his hand landed. I taste iron in my mouth, the vital tang of blood. Fintan isn’t a hard man or a cruel man, and he’s never struck me before. I get up and go to the spare room, to lie on the bed. My head is pounding, and my cheek stinging. The pain is essential, and I want to absorb every fiery ache of it, every icy jolt. Pain is the only pure thing in this life.
~
The next week, I’m back at the Mayflower. A dull mist has fallen from the mountain. The lights around the hall make bruised halos of it, but there are no saints here tonight. A car pulls in, swings around, and then Sean is there. My breathing is tight as I get out, lock my car, and sit into his.
“You can’t be here,” I say before he can kiss me. “Leave. Make for the border.”
He nods, and his hand finds mine. “A detective phoned me. Mick Darcy.”
“Just go.” I look towards the car park entrance. Two cars are approaching. “Please.”
“I had to see you one last time. When I spoke to you at the hotel that first night, did you know who I was? What I’d done?”
I shake my fists before him. “Please, Sean, go now.”
“I asked the receptionist about you, but I’d already guessed who you were. You wore your grief like a veil, and I wanted to take it from you.”
The cars turn in and prowl past the parked ones. It’s too dark to see their faces, but I don’t need to. “You can still have a life.”
“Maybe I don’t deserve one.”
“It was an accident.”
I let my breath go, knowing it’s too late. The squad car pulls up in front of us, and Mick Darcy gets out the driver’s side. A uniformed man unfolds from the other. Fintan’s car blocks us in.
“I don’t think that really matters,” Sean says. He waves to Darcy, then leans over and kisses me on my drenched cheek. “Thank you.”
I can barely speak. “For what?”
“For not hating me.”
I remember the owl and how it moved against the darkness. Swift and deadly. Like a car on a night road, and a young man who was driving too fast. “I tried to, but I couldn’t,” I say, squeezing the words out of my gut, and pushing them past the lump in my throat. “It helped to see how you suffered. It helped to not suffer alone.”
It all happens quickly then. They take him out, cuff him, and put him in the back of the squad car. Fintan looks on from his car, a sneer drawing his face into an ugly shape. He gets out as they drive away, and we stand side by side, watching it go.
Two little ducks, the PA calls.
Two little ducks, walking under the same cold shadow, lost in the same darkness. Alone together. Hurting together. Hating together. I see the shine of victory in his eyes, but there’s something else there too, the yawning pit of loss, a mirror of my own. God has no mercy, and that’s the truth.
THE END
“God has no mercy,” I say, my voice breaking.
“Not for us,” Fintan says. “Not this day.”
It’s as much as we’ve said to each other all day, apart from the trivialities of living under the same roof. Grief, that silent whore, has come between us. Guilt too, her hungry cousin. The only intimacy I know is with them. Otherwise, I’m alone, and Fintan is alone. We are alone together.
~
I always have tissues with me these days, tucked up my sleeve or buried in my bag under my purse and car keys. I have one balled tight in my fist when Sean pulls his Audi up beside my old Fiesta, in the shadows at the back of the Mayflower community hall. The caller’s voice over the PA is loud enough to be heard out here.
One little duck, number two.
Bingo is my weekly excuse for getting away. When I get home from meeting Sean, Fintan will say, like he always does, that I never seem to win anything. The unluckiest woman in Drumshanbo, he’ll call me. I’ll tell him, like I do every week, that the evidence for that is all around me.
Everything starts to loosen as we get older, but Sean’s face still has the tightness of youth. Our first time, he told me he liked the more mature woman. You mean the elderly, I laughed. I mean the experienced, he told me, his face all serious. A woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it. A woman who’s lived a life, with all its triumphs and tragedies. He often talks like that, like he’s reading words from a script. I sometimes wonder if he rehearses before he picks me up, gazing at himself in the mirror in his hotel room at the Lakeside Hotel. Maybe he feels the need to impress me, to prove he’s something more than most young men are.
I get out and lock my car. He turns the stereo down as I sit into his. A pop song is playing, with a driving beat and a female singer. The lyrics drip with barely disguised innuendo. She wants to, wants to, wants to more than anything she’s ever wanted before, but she never quite gets to the point. We lean across and press our dry lips together. It’s a kiss of sorts. He drives us out of the car park, one hand on the wheel, the other holding mine. The car is automatic, and so quiet that I can barely hear the engine. I want to, want to, want to. You know. I look out the window at the darkening sky, worried I’ll be seen in the car of a strange man, afraid I’ll hurt Fintan, and at the same time wanting to rain nails down on his heart, to hurt him so badly that he’ll leave me, so I won’t ever have to look at his face again. Liam took after him and had the same eyes. I can’t look at one without seeing the other. God has no mercy, and that’s the truth.
I want to, want to, want to, but mostly we don’t, and I’m content with that. We drive out to the village of Keadue in Roscommon, and beyond it to Knockranny Woods, where we park under the trees, facing the lake. The headlights pick out sentry rushes. Silver mist clings to the water like bad memories. At the other side of the carpark, a blue Volvo is rocking on its springs. This is where the adulterers come to play their furtive sports. It’s a select club, and we never get to meet the other members.
Sean’s hand is smooth and soft in mine. It’s the hand of a man who doesn’t do physical labor. Fintan’s hands are different; they scrape across my skin, or used to when he could still bear to touch me. Fintan is a carpenter, but Sean sells things. When he’s in the area, which is usually once a week, he stays in the Lakeside Hotel. I was a waitress, and he was a guest. It started with flirting. I was hungry, once I got a taste of attention, but it was more than that. I needed to escape from myself, just for a little while. To forget my dull and mournful life. It became an irregular thing, then a regular one. Like Bingo, every week. We sit and hold hands, and don’t talk much. It’s enough to not be alone and to be desired in some small way.
“How long has it been?” Sean asks.
“Nearly eighteen months.”
“Does it get any easier?”
I shrug, then shake my head.
“Tell me about him again,” he says.
“Are you sure you want to—”
“Tell me. Please.”
A banshee screech startles me, but it’s only an owl, wings flashing white as it swoops from a nearby tree. I puff out my cheeks in a draining sigh. “He played the drums and wrote songs. He’d wake in the morning with a new one in his head, then he’d sing it to me over breakfast. The girls at school loved him for his softness, the boys for his hardness. His eyes were blue, and I swear he could see things that others missed.”
Sean bows his head, and shifts in his seat. “Like what?”
“Patterns, I suppose. He saw patterns in things. In the sway of the seasons, the coming of the swallows, the falling of winter’s first snow. They revealed things to him, and him alone.” I turn to look at Sean. His shoulders are shaking, and his free hand is up to his face, covering his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“No one can cry forever,” I whisper, pressing a tissue into his hands. “No matter the fault, no matter the wrong.”
We walk in the same darkness, Sean and I.
Two little ducks.
~
Fintan sees shapes in wood, the things it has yet to be. In the morning, I go into his workshop at the back of our house, to bring him a cup of coffee. He has a piece of wood clasped between his knees, and he’s kissing it with a plane. Each stroke is a lover’s caress. The shavings curl up like sleepy kittens at his feet. He doesn’t look at me as I set his coffee on his workbench. I make to leave, but the plane stops its whispering.
“Mick Darcy called me,” he says.
“The detective?”
He looks up at me then, and his eyes are hungry. “They might have a lead on the car.”
“A local?”
He shakes his head. “A visitor to the area.” He sets wood and plane on the bench and comes towards me. “They might catch the bastard.”
“After all this time?”
His hands curl into fists, and he shakes one at me. “If I find out who he is...”
Fintan sees the shapes in more than just wood. He sees patterns as Liam did, and it’s enough to tell me that he hoards suspicions about my Bingo nights. I leave his workshop and go through the fragments of my day, the washing and cleaning and baking and all the other needless things. I try not to think about Sean, for fear my thoughts will betray me. It’s cruel, this life, to take a son from his mother. It’s cruel, to take the comforts we find, to leave us empty and wanting.
~
Sean doesn’t come to Drumshanbo the next week, or the one after that. I sit in my car in the car park at the back of the Mayflower, facing the dark and ancient lump of Sliabh an Iarainn. The Bingo numbers roll across the PA, and there’s banal randomness to them, the way they fall with no sequence or pattern. To pass the time, I try to guess which ones will be next, but I get them all wrong. No one can ever tell what’s coming down the road, good or bad, and in the end, we all find ourselves living in the cold shadow of something. When I go home, Fintan asks me if I won anything.
“No,” I say, “but there was nothing worth winning.”
He smirks at my lie. “Does he know who you are?”
I sense the tight anger in him, barely restrained. I want to run, but at the same time, I know he’ll chase me, and it’ll be worse that way. I lift my head, and look him in the eye, brazen as a goat. “Now you want to play husband, do you?”
His hand lashes towards my face. I flinch and duck my head between my shoulders. Just before the blow lands, he pulls to a halt and pats my cheek with the tips of his calloused fingers. “It’s your own sins you need to look to,” he says with a laugh. “They should be more than enough to occupy you, without the need for... other distractions.”
He walks away, into the living room to turn on the television. A wildlife program, one thing killing another, then devouring it. I go to bed, in the spare room where I’ve been sleeping for the last year. I want to, I want to, I want to have Sean beside me, to hold onto him. Just that, and no more. Not for my comfort, but to ease the pain I know he feels. To absolve him of what he did. To consume his sins and put them with my own. He’s too young to bear the gravity of them, and I’m too old for the weight of them to matter to me anymore. If there’s a judgment to be made, then it has already been passed down. If there’s a sentence, it's already being served. There are many types of prisons. The ones we make for ourselves are the hardest of all to escape.
~
Fintan isn’t a hard man or a cruel man. He’s just hurting, like me, and what I’m doing is multiplying his pain. I want him to feel every ounce of it, so I can hate myself for doing it. It’s not him I’m hurting at all.
I need to talk to Sean, to warn him, but I don’t have a number for him, and he doesn’t have one for me. It was one of our agreements, to keep things secret and safe. Every evening for a week, I drive around the hotel carpark, looking for his Audi. It isn’t there. I could go in and ask the receptionist, but then she’d know. Soon after, everyone else would know. I go home again, and Fintan throws jabs at me. I’m a disgrace. A shameful woman. Liam would disown me if he knew what I was up to. I’ve dishonored his memory. They fall around me like dirty snow and accumulate in freezing drifts around my heart. And then he casts his last stone, coming close to me to say it, his hands in gnarled fists at his chest. His breathing is fast and hard and blows heat at my cheeks.
“If you hadn’t been so selfish,” he says, “so wrapped up in what you wanted, then Liam would still be alive.”
I meet his eye and see murder there. “You’re right,” I say, but it does nothing to defuse him.
“All you had to do was to give him a lift home, but you were too busy. You left him to walk that dark road alone...”
The accusations rain down around me, and I imagine them curling up like wood shavings at a carpenter’s feet. He can’t hurt me, because I’ve already hurt myself so much, I’ve become immune to it. “Even then,” I say, “there were two cars in this home. Take your share of—"
The force of his blow sends me reeling against the wall, dazed and my face burning where the back of his hand landed. I taste iron in my mouth, the vital tang of blood. Fintan isn’t a hard man or a cruel man, and he’s never struck me before. I get up and go to the spare room, to lie on the bed. My head is pounding, and my cheek stinging. The pain is essential, and I want to absorb every fiery ache of it, every icy jolt. Pain is the only pure thing in this life.
~
The next week, I’m back at the Mayflower. A dull mist has fallen from the mountain. The lights around the hall make bruised halos of it, but there are no saints here tonight. A car pulls in, swings around, and then Sean is there. My breathing is tight as I get out, lock my car, and sit into his.
“You can’t be here,” I say before he can kiss me. “Leave. Make for the border.”
He nods, and his hand finds mine. “A detective phoned me. Mick Darcy.”
“Just go.” I look towards the car park entrance. Two cars are approaching. “Please.”
“I had to see you one last time. When I spoke to you at the hotel that first night, did you know who I was? What I’d done?”
I shake my fists before him. “Please, Sean, go now.”
“I asked the receptionist about you, but I’d already guessed who you were. You wore your grief like a veil, and I wanted to take it from you.”
The cars turn in and prowl past the parked ones. It’s too dark to see their faces, but I don’t need to. “You can still have a life.”
“Maybe I don’t deserve one.”
“It was an accident.”
I let my breath go, knowing it’s too late. The squad car pulls up in front of us, and Mick Darcy gets out the driver’s side. A uniformed man unfolds from the other. Fintan’s car blocks us in.
“I don’t think that really matters,” Sean says. He waves to Darcy, then leans over and kisses me on my drenched cheek. “Thank you.”
I can barely speak. “For what?”
“For not hating me.”
I remember the owl and how it moved against the darkness. Swift and deadly. Like a car on a night road, and a young man who was driving too fast. “I tried to, but I couldn’t,” I say, squeezing the words out of my gut, and pushing them past the lump in my throat. “It helped to see how you suffered. It helped to not suffer alone.”
It all happens quickly then. They take him out, cuff him, and put him in the back of the squad car. Fintan looks on from his car, a sneer drawing his face into an ugly shape. He gets out as they drive away, and we stand side by side, watching it go.
Two little ducks, the PA calls.
Two little ducks, walking under the same cold shadow, lost in the same darkness. Alone together. Hurting together. Hating together. I see the shine of victory in his eyes, but there’s something else there too, the yawning pit of loss, a mirror of my own. God has no mercy, and that’s the truth.
THE END
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A winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2023, Jennifer McMahon’s words appear in The Irish Independent newspaper (New Irish Writing – upcoming, Feb 2023), the Oxford Prize Anthology, Heimat Review, Empyrean Literary Magazine, Books Ireland Magazine, Loft Books and the Retreat West Anthology (upcoming, 2023). She has won both the Bray Literary Festival and the Books Ireland Magazine flash fiction competitions, and was a Top Ten Finalist in the Oxford Prize.
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Her stories have been shortlisted for the Anthology Short Story Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, the Retreat West Short Story Prize, the Wild Atlantic Writing Awards, and the Women On Writing Flash Fiction Prize. Jennifer was also shortlisted for The Literary Consultancy Scholarship in 2022, and was longlisted in Fiction Factory’s Novel First Chapter competition, the Retreat West Flash Fiction Prize. She lives in Co. Wexford, Ireland.