Page 127 of To Hell With It
‘They were having an affair,’ Niall kept his eyes from mine. ‘I knew about it before we saw them that day – and my mum knew too. It destroyed her. Do you remember when she went away afterthe break-in?’
I thought back.
‘To that retreat in Kilkenny?’ I asked. I only remembered because my mum had told me Mrs O’Callaghan needed to relax and the shop shut for a week, which we all found strange given Mr O’Callaghan was still there – but now it made sense. He didn’t want people asking questions. He didn’t want anyone finding out what he’d been up to.
‘Yes, only it wasn’t a retreat,’ Niall said. ‘It was because she’d had a breakdown. She found out about their affair, she saw them kissing one night, outside the shop when he thought she’d gone to bed. I’d hear them arguing about it every night. It destroyed her.’
‘Jesus, Niall.’ My anger subsided when I thought about Mrs O’Callaghan’s heartbreak, of Niall being just a boy and keeping it all in. ‘Why did she stay with him?’
‘I don’t know, for me, maybe? And she loved him, she wanted to forgive him, and he promised her that it had stopped––’
‘But it hadn’t.’ I finished Niall’s sentence for him because I could see the pain behind his eyes.
We were both silent for a moment. It wasn’t an awkward silence; it didn’t need filling. Niall was doing his thinking and I was doing mine.
But the only thing I could think of was that maybe Mr O’Callaghan’s penis had been hard when he died, because maybe Mrs O’Callaghan had strangled him after all?
ChapterSixty-Two
I’d seen Maggie Ryan three times since I’d been home. It was like she’d been manifested into my life since Niall’s confession. I had tried, for the first time in my life, to visualise Mr O’Callaghan’s hard penis and Maggie Ryan sucking it because I wanted to see if I could remember. I imagined the video camera, the cupboard under the counter, Niall pushing me in and not letting me out – but I wasn’t sure if what I was seeing was real or just because I’d been told it was.
It must have been there, somewhere locked inside. I hadn’t told anyone about it, I couldn’t do that to Niall, or to Mrs O’Callaghan. I would tell Una at some point but for now I was going to keep it to myself, apart from Mairéad. I was definitely going to tell Mairéad. She’d spent so much time trying to make me better; she deserved to know what I had found out.
I came to the conclusion that what had happened with the cupboard and Mr O’Callaghan and Maggie Ryan hadn’t given me OCD. But it had triggered it. I believe it was always there, lying dormant, waiting to come out.
I personally think my brain is just wired that way and that something had to set it off. And if it wasn’t Mr O’Callaghan and Maggie Ryan’s homemade porn, then it would have been something else.
And as it turned out, Mr O’Callaghan’s penis had given me some peace. It had freed me from the questions that swirled in my head and given me some – not all – of the answers I’d been searching for over the years. It hadn’t cured me of my OCD (that was for me to do) but it had helped me.
So thank you, Mr O’Callaghan’s penis – for always showing up, even when I didn’t want you to. And thank you Jack for being a liar. And thank you Shaun-did-everything for showing me that I should always trust my gut. And thank you Carmel, for proving that. And thank you, Maggie Ryan, for being, well for just being Maggie Ryan.
Mairéad sat down at my kitchen table. I’d made her a cup of tea and put it in the same mug I always gave her – the one with the fairies blowing the dandelion seeds from its stalk. It was mine from when I was younger. I kept it at my grandmother’s house for when I’d visit her, not because of OCD or anything like that. It was because I liked to keep a little bit of me there when I wasn’t.
My grandmother always said that blowing the seeds off a dandelion made a wish come true. When she died I used to find as many dandelions as I could and wish that she’d come back, but of course she never did.
Mairéad had a cold. She told me when she rang the doorbell, and usually I would have sent her away, but she looked so downcast I didn’t have the heart to do it. Instead, I watched Mairéad from the safe distance of my kitchen sink. When she took out a tissue to wipe her nose, I looked out of the window and focused on anything but her. The old piggery across the lane that probably should have been knocked down before it fell on someone, the flowerpots that used to burst with wildflowers when my grandmother lived here, Slievenamon, in all its wonderful glory. I kept my sanitiser in my pocket – usually it would have been on the table. Mairéad must have noticed but she didn’t say anything.
‘I want to tell you something, Mairead, but you can’t tell anyone.’
Mairéad looked at me with a frown.
‘You know I’d never do that – unless it involves something that puts you or others in danger,’ she said. ‘Does it?’
‘No.’
‘OK then, go on.’ She took a sip of her tea.
‘Well, I don’t really remember it, but Niall said something happened when I was younger – to both of us actually.’
‘OK.’ Mairéad looked serious.
‘He said that when I was eight, he locked me in a small cupboard under the shop counter.’
‘Right, why did he do that?’
‘Because we’d snuck into the shop to steal biscuits and Mr O’Callaghan came in with another woman – Maggie Ryan from the village, the one I’ve told you about.’
‘The phone-sex lady?’
