The Whore-Mother Read Free

back now, towards the car. The chattering girls passed them. The solitary girl drew level. McManus moved the car with her. She was pretty and shapely and her bottom swiveled.
    â€œShe’s askin for it,” Kelly said, “look at her wigglin her arse.”
    Her hair was long and auburn, soft and well cared for. McManus wanted to shout to her to run for it. But where would she run? Almost every woman on the street would try to stop her. They were at their doors now, watching and waiting and smiling. Nobody had spoken to the girl for weeks, except to say “hoore” as they passed her. The children had chalked “hoore” on the walls of her parents’ house, and their mothers had painted it back when the girl’s father washed it off, and their fathers and brothers had beaten him when he tried to burn off the paint with a blowlamp. And the McGonigals had nowhere else to go. So they lived with silence or abuse and went a long way from the district to buy their food, where nobody knew them and could not therefore refuse to sell to them.
    Powers and Callaghan blocked her way. She tried to walk around them and Callaghan moved to stop her. “Just a minute, you,” he said.
    â€œWill you leave me alone,” she said and tried to pass around Powers.
    â€œGet into the car,” he said.
    Then she knew. McManus looked the other way.
    â€œYou leave me alone,” she said helplessly.
    The women were leaving their doorsteps, grinning, moving down to the curb.
    Powers reached for her and she screamed and clawed at his face. His grab for her hands came too late. She got her nails to his face and lashed at his shins with her feet. Callaghan came in behind, his arms around her. He closed his hands over her breasts and squeezed as he dragged her back. Her screams tore the street and her father came roaring from his house, a club in his hand. The women were on him from behind, and he went down on his face. A dozen of them tore at him, dragging on his club, kicking and stamping on him. “Run, run,” he howled to his daughter as he scrambled to his knees and was kicked back to the ground.
    But she couldn’t run. The rear door of the car was open and Callaghan and Powers had her halfway in. Kelly took a handful of her hair and hauled on it.
    â€œYou won’t have it long, you dirty wee hoore,” he told her and yanked her through the door.
    They had her across their knees when Powers got in beside McManus. “Away on,” he snapped, and put his hand to his bleeding face. “The last lamp post at the end of the street.”
    She was no longer screaming; only sobbing in terror. The women were running up the street after the car, the father stumbling behind them washed in his own blood, beaten with his own club which had been clawed from his hands.
    Everything they needed was neatly packed in a cardboard box in the boot—a gallon can of black paint and a stick to stir it, a pair of barber’s scissors and a nylon clothes line. Powers and Callaghan held her and Kelly tied the girl’s ankles and wrists to the lamp post. “Shift the motor into the clear and keep the engine goin,” Powers told McManus, and he moved the car forward along the street from the gathering crowd of women and children.
    A twelve-year-old girl stirred the paint, singing into and under the shrieking, laughing turmoil of bodies and voices:
“Oh! see the fleet-foot hosts of men who speed with faces wan, From farmstead and from fisher’S cot upon the banks of Bann. They come with vengeance in their eyes, too late, too late are they, For Roddy McCorley goes to die on the Bridge of Toome today.”
    She might have been busy on some classroom project. She had been reared on songs of this sort, at home and in the church school she went to—her mind was filled with Ireland’s wrongs, for Ireland’s history, her teachers told her, “is a catalogue of wrongs,” none of