The Whore-Mother Read Free Page A

them Irish. The child felt nothing for the now still and silent girl at the lamp post. Mavis was suffering no wrong; she had been found wanting in loyalty and solidarity; she was engaged to a soldier; Mavis was a hoore, and that was neither Irish nor good.
    A large fat woman took handfuls of Mavis’s soft auburn hair in her big fist, slapped the girl’s head back against the lamp post, and snipped the hair off close to the scalp. The girl’s eyes were shut, her hair was tossed in the air; children fought for it as it fell.
    When that work was done an angular woman with the face of a bitter man took the can of black paint from the stirring, singing child and upended it above the bound girl’s head. It oozed thickly down her face and head onto her summer shoulders, blackening her pretty blue-and-white dress, draining over and between her white little breasts. Wiping out her self. She was a rag doll, slumped forward and down, her head lolling, her knees bent, without speech. She was nothing.
    On the edge of the ring her father fought the furious women to reach his child and was battered again with his own club. They tore at his head, clawed his face, and gathered his flesh under their nails, beat him again to the ground, kicking him in the stomach, the back, the face, the groin, jumping on his feet and ankles, hooting, howling, screaming in deranged triumph. The man lay still.
    The circle danced; fat women jigged around the lamp post and the girl, their skirts hauled high, big putty thighs bouncing and jiggling like sows’ bellies. They jeered, sang, chanted, “The soldier’s hoore, the soldier’s hoore the soldier’s hoore,” and their children danced with them, chanting.
    The father crawled on his hands and knees through the ring and they kicked him as he passed. He hauled himself to his feet and took his child in his arms to ease the pain in her wrists and ankles. His face was blackened by her painted head and he moaned, “Oh ma wee darlin ma wee darlin ma poor wee darlin . . .” and she could not look at him or speak to him for fear her eyes and her mouth would be filled with the paint.
    The shotgun blasted like a cannon and some of the dancers were down, screaming, not chanting, bleeding, not drawing blood. They were on their faces in the street, their crying quick like panting, or long-drawn wails, or out-of-pitch foghorns on Belfast Lough. Their fat legs were torn, their fat backsides full of shot.
    The discharge almost knocked the girl’s little crippled bird-mother onto her back. She staggered backwards, her steel glasses tossed down to the tip of her nose, the stem dislodged from one ear. She knocked her glasses back onto her nose and the gun’s barrels dipped, too weighty for one thin arm. She grabbed it quickly again with both hands.
    Powers and Callaghan and Kelly were standing to one side. They moved together towards the woman.
    â€œI’ll take the gun, missus,” Powers said in his leader voice.
    â€œYou dirty cannibal,” she yelled. “Come near me and I’ll kill you.” The idea pressed in her mind and she screamed, “Kill you, kill you, kill you!” She looked around wildly at the frozen women on their feet and the moaning women on their faces and the gun swung with her look, “Filthy, filthy, filthy muck,” she screamed at them and swung the gun back to the three men.
    â€œYou, you dirty wee turd,” she shrieked at Kelly, “you tied her. You cut her loose.”
    Kelly did it quickly. “Take her home, Sam,” the maimed little kestrel said to her husband.
    â€œOh mammie, mammie,” he wept and half-carried their child out of the malignant ring.
    â€œYis kin get up off yer fat bellies and git away from me now,” the little woman said. “All but you, ye filthy dog-dirt,” she said to Kelly.
    Moaning and crying and bleeding and wronged the women backed and limped and bled away, and