The Woman’s Daughter

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Dermot Bolger. The Woman’s Daughter

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DERMOT BOLGER

The Woman’s Daughter

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The street riddled with porches and extensions. Hedges are gone now, front gardens cemented for cars. The top windows overlook the cemetery and the rivulet joining the Tolka beneath a new bridge. One house is grown derelict. Two women wait inside it in the hours before dawn, one huddled on the cold lino beneath the torn curtain, the other leaning forward on the single chair, her fingers constantly intertwining. One speaks in a low voice, urgent but indistinct, one stares back as if not listening and living only in her own thoughts.

Everyone was talking about him in school then. How he stayed there for three days buried alive in his coffin. There was a tube leading down into the earth through which he was able to breathe, and he had taken along books like Dracula to read. I couldn’t understand anyone wanting to stay down there. For three nights the pair of us stood at that window, thinking of him breathing out there alone among those ranks of crosses, surrounded by decomposing bodies. His picture was in the paper when he broke the world record, clutching a bottle of champagne with the cemetery railings behind him. But I could not get him out of my mind.

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