The Building of Widows

BY EMMA GALLAGHER

THEY'RE COMING to take Shelagh Mooney away today.

Shelagh Mooney who steals my mail. Who does not wash and trails a stink after her. Who tries to pull men into her flat, and who doesn't know the time or the day. Shelagh who this morning takes a walk by the harbour in a storm that comes in from the north and threatens to break our windows and topple our trees – in her red raincoat which she hasn't taken off for over a year. There're full skies and they sit heavily on us.

But Shelagh takes no notice of the weather. I haven't seen her come back.

Lynda and Bert

YOUNG LYNDA'S outside on the landing. She's talking loudly to Bert about getting longer hours for the heating and about the smell of Shelagh's apartment. And what was he planning on doing about it? The smell from Shelagh's was a disgrace. Who's going to clean it, after they take Shelagh away? You couldn't even get in the lift after she'd been in it.

Bert says that she's welcome to go in and clean Shelagh's herself if it worries her so. And maybe would Lynda stop clogging the whole building's systems with her pushing vegetable scraps down the drains.

Lynda wants to know what makes him think it's her.

Where we live

THIS APARTMENT building is on the very edge of a large city, which itself edges a sea. Shelagh Mooney's apartment is two floors below mine. On the ground floor is Mae and her little dog. Bert is our maintenance man and chair of the body corporate. He can be slow on the fixing of things, and thinks we're all in league against him. He suffers both us and the plumbing with a quiet politeness. Lynda is next door. She was left her apartment two years ago, when her aunt passed on, coronary, and believes herself to be our emissary into the modern world. She hides her pity of us with loudness and rare requests for love advice. In return we pity Lynda who's never managed a marriage – good or bad – and what's more, is growing large. So there's Lynda and Bert and us poor widows. There is the smell of the sea, of course. And after a storm the smell of seaweed rotting which gets everyone up in arms with the council. I used to live in a large, old house, with a narrow garden, only a small walk away, but it sold when Tom died.

He died 12 years ago. This place is full of his things.

What i see

THIS WINDOW is mine, is large and is full of tree. In summer it lets slow light through and I look right into its heart. It holds all the birds and each night they destroy the well-kept cars beneath them with their droppings. In winter it's grey, it's all grey, the three-storied houses and the road and the skies. This wind's brought branches down and yesterday one fell across a parked car, which gathered a crowd. On the street below there's some young one kicking at the rubbish bin. Throws his smoke into the gutter and he stays there right amongst the rain and the fizzy cans, staring back into the convenience store, in protest against someone, or the weather. In winter there's only ever Shelagh's red raincoat moving slowly in the mornings, the occasional caw of her laugh.

I don't know where they'll take her. She seems to like the streets and walking. Assailing people. Following them. "How're ya! How're ya!" When Shelagh smiles you see more of her lost teeth and decayed gums and the long hairs on her face.

Family

NIALL VISITS on Saturdays. "Are you in?" he calls. And now he knocks on the hallway wall. "Did you hear someone's coming to take away your woman downstairs?"

"The brother."

"You heard, then." He's shaking the rain from his jacket. "The whole building is in great excitement."

"Lynda's been on tenterhooks all day."

"I'm sure she has." He's looking out the window at my poor great tree. "They need to cut that. Look at it."

Shelagh

SHELAGH STOLE my mail again this morning. The box was empty. Maybe she's taken it with her on her walk, tucked into a pocket of her wheelie bag. It's beyond me how she manages to get her hand in the slot. She'll have been in the foyer in her raincoat with her hand and her fingers and all at my mailbox, with the smell off her.

Last month she took an envelope that had a cheque in it, and I only got it back because Lynda saw the pile of stolen mail sitting on a shelf in Shelagh's bathroom cabinet, when she was getting evidence to petition the Health Board. All unopened. So it's not for the money, it's for pure devilment in her own head.

Despite everything I admire her slyness.

Social responsibility

LYNDA'S INVITED herself in and whacks her own still folded paper on the back of a chair. She says nothing when she sees Niall. She smiles and he doesn't smile back. She looks fattish in those trousers.

"Today's the day!" she says. "Poor Shelagh won't know what's hit her. Poor thing." Lynda puts her hand over her heart as though this hurts. But the truth is Shelagh doesn't know much of anything anymore.

Lynda says that we should have seen the state of Shelagh's mattress when she went in. It wasn't even on her bed. It was up against the wall, stained and destroyed completely. Riddled with holes that looked like mouse nests. She didn't know where Shelagh slept, thought she probably lay down on the floor. Lynda's amazed she manages to eat – first to actually remember to cook herself something and then not to have poisoned herself with all the filth. She's sure Shelagh goes to the toilet on the floor.

Shelagh caught Niall once in the stairwell and said, "What's the time?"

"Two," he said.

She nodded, considering. "In the morning or the night?"

Attracting a man

LYNDA'S TOO loud for Niall. It's as though she's an affront to him. Her loudness, her size. He's squeezed himself into the corner chair of the table with a cup of coffee. He's taken to sitting there lately, morosely with his Saturday paper. He has settled comfortably into, and is further cultivating, his moroseness since his wife left him.

Lynda's left standing, with no invitation from Niall.

She asks loudly if we've been down to see the waves. She says they're about ready to pick you off the walk and carry you away. The yachts and the fishing boats will be wrecked, by the looks of it. There were policemen down the country there shooing the surfers away. It'd be suicide, they said on the radio.

Niall says, "Let them." He will not look up from his paper at her. "What's a few less stupid people in the world." He will not apologise.

Marriage

THERE WAS no one else, they say. She wanted to be alone, so she's left him and their three boys who are mostly grown, and has got her own apartment in the city somewhere, and comes back when she feels like it to see the dogs, or the boys, or make sure the garden's being kept up. One of the boys isn't talking to her, which is sad. She's very quiet. Niall's wife. And still beautiful, even though she's nearing 50. Her looks have always seemed out of place with her quietness. What does she do in that apartment – I imagine her being quiet and reading and enjoying the quiet and walking around the half-lit rooms looking out at the city lights. I don't believe it's about any sex. I imagine it's her very own place, where she can breathe.

Family

LYNDA SAYS that the brother is due at two this afternoon to take Shelagh. That he's promised to do something about her this time. For good. "It was like a holiday last time and then she was right back. How're ya? How're ya? We were right back where we began."

"She'll have us all killed."

"Burn you in your sleep."

"She will. She's a liability."

"A menace."

"She is that. Oh, what will we do? She has to go. For her own good. We can't be expected to ... " Her hands rise and fall.

No one asks where the brother's taking her. Lynda doesn't know and she doesn't care at this stage. She's done all she can and more and she's wiping her hands of it.

All our futures

WE ASSUME there will be TVs and plastic-coated lounge chairs, thick-ankled nurses, imitation pot plants and Saturday visits.

Shelagh

THREE TIMES she's nearly burnt us down.

She left a rubbish bag outside her door and somehow lit it. Niall was passing and saw the smoke and stamped it out. There's a great, big, black mark on the carpet outside her door which everyone who walks up the stairs can see.

Twice she left a pan on the stove and the alarms went off and we were all sent outside to wait in the cold.

Niall asks Lynda how she got hold of the brother, who is somewhat important and well-known, and she says that she has her ways and taps her nose.

He's in a knot, now, that she won't tell him.

Middle age

NIALL AND Lynda think there are always good years ahead, always waiting for them. They pity us who cannot avoid knowing we are at our end. But perhaps they, too, have passed that good stage completely, or are wasting it – thinking that by waiting they will get what they want.

Family

LYNDA SAYS, "I'm awful. Aren't I really awful?" She has her hands smothering her mouth and her laughter as she says it. "I told her that her brother was coming to see her. You know, for a visit, for a cup of tea. And you should have seen the face on her. She was delighted. She's down at the shops every day stocking up for him coming. Telling the whole world. My brother, my brother! She'll have spent her whole pension on fancy biscuits that no one's going to eat." Her hand over her heart again. "I had to say something, she's so cunning. I'm going to hell, aren't I?"

Shelagh will stand at her door and wait for you to pass up the stairs. Catch your wrist in her hand, pull your face close to hers. "The brother's coming for tea," she'll say. "Now. Is it today he's coming?"

"No, Shelagh, it's next week."

"Ah." She opens the door a little wider and there are twenty or so biscuits still in their packets scattered on the hallway floor. "I'm ready for him, anyway."

Youth

WHEN WE moved here from downcountry we were not connected to the city and it was lovely and it was the seaside. The Kingston lights across the bay. The children were half-grown and would come and go with their tennis and their schools. Back then Shelagh Mooney was a Lottery Girl. She was lovely looking, not everyone could be a Lottery Girl, which proves it, and you had be of a certain class of family. Shelagh would walk around the streets in her little suit with some of the other girls and their smiles and their lovely legs during the war and sell their tickets and be photographed with the politicians and business men to raise the spirits.

I once saw Shelagh heading off to a club with a politician from the city. I was walking one of the babies, because it wouldn't sleep. They didn't talk, they barely seemed to be together, keeping at a certain distance. Shelagh and the man got into his car and she didn't even look around as they drove off. She wasn't wearing her stockings, which wasn't alright at the time.

On selling out your own to save yourself

MAE'S COME up. All hip bones and knees and tailoring. Dog in her arms. Asks if they've taken Shelagh away yet.

Lynda says we're still waiting on the brother. He needs to sign the documents, before they can get her off.

"He should have taken care of her years ago. Hasn't he got money coming out his ears? It's a disgrace, really. The smell downstairs. When people come in, that foyer smells to high heaven. This used to be a nice place. Wouldn't you say." Mae turns to Niall and Lynda as she leaves. She nods the dog's head at them like it's the one asking. "And are you young ones off out, tonight? Will you paint the town red for me? My old bones."

They're neither so young anymore.

Mae will lurk in the foyer with the dog, watching everyone pass. To anyone who will stop she will talk of her famous niece, give intimate sexual details of the marriage to the film director which ended spectacularly – and of which she cannot know. She trades another's disaster for your time.

Complicity

I DO not tell them that Shelagh has not come back from her harbour walk this morning. Has perhaps chosen her means of escape, her final dignity.

On being caught out

LYNDA SAYS do we know it's Mae's dog that pisses in the foyer? You can see the marks on the brick under the mailboxes. The cheek trying to pass it all off on Shelagh – there'll be no hiding it once Shelagh's gone. Something will have to be done. "Do you think the poor woman could get any more makeup on her if she tried? I think she's losing her sight."

On keeping a man

LYNDA DOESN'T wear makeup, but maybe she should. She's not getting any younger, herself. Shelagh's still got a lovely pair of legs on her, which seems obscene. There was a man who came up to me in a queue at Butlers and whispered that he wanted to put his hand up my skirt if only I'd come outside.

Outside my tree burns and raves, as the poet said, against the storm. The noise from it. I used to climb trees just like it and watch everything moving past, above and below, until someone would call me down for being unladylike. In the beginning there was Samuel Clowe. With his thin hands and his own way of leaning against a corner softly calling for me to come out. We'd take his father's car to deserted beaches and once down to the left, past the rocks we saw an old man walking naked to the water, which was too hilarious to us and Samuel had his fingers trapped between my knees. But we fought over some thing and he went to Wales so I refused to write and I married a friend's older brother in spite. And after I'd married, Samuel asked me to dance at his cousin's wedding and I nearly killed him, they were all looking at us and saying get an eyeful of the two of them. Where is he now? Does he look like that old man, naked?

But in the end there is only Tom, who grew old and died.

Family

THERE'S A painting Tom bought above the sideboard of two women in their cloaks and hoods looking out to the sea and sky that are grey, grey, grey. The long, black line of the wharf before them, the two of them seem to be set against the wind, and waiting. Niall has claimed both this and the sideboard, once I'm gone. He wears his father's watch. Niall hasn't yet mentioned his wife has left him. Though it was seven months ago. He knows word gets through this family quick enough and he's ashamed and thinks I will not understand. The world today. What would he think of his very life stemming from a temporary argument, a point proved over and over again for 52 years and counting?

The wind's got up again. The power lines sing.

I ask Niall if his wife has been around to see the boys.

"Look at the time!" says Niall, standing. He's making a show of looking for his keys. "And I'm calling the council about that tree before it comes down on all your heads." There's talk that he's been seeing someone from the local pub. He will punish himself with un-pretty women for losing his beautiful wife.

Shelagh

WE'RE LISTENING to Lynda and Bert and the brother moving around downstairs. They're knocking on Shelagh's door. Their voices drifting upwards over the rain.

"She's not answering," the brother says.

"I'm sure she's in there. I've been waiting for her to come out all day," says Lynda.

Bert's saying someone thought they saw Shelagh walking down by the water, early this morning. And no one's seen her since. Bert likes to lets his silences grow.

"She never did," says Lynda. "Not in this." She'll have her hand over her heart.

"God willing she'll fall in and get clean," says Niall, he's fitting keys and phone and things back into his pockets.

What we want

WHEN NIALL was small he said he had a truck coming for us all. It was filled with gifts for everyone, the aunts, the uncles, the cousins and us. He'd remember everything that everyone wanted and every time we'd say, "Niall, where's that truck at? It's very behind schedule. Aunt Pigeon's waiting on her new hat. Her heart's set on it." Niall would patiently explain that the truck had run out of petrol, had to detour through the middle of the country to pick something up, but it was on its way. Only a few days' delay, which isn't much to ask when you are waiting on everything you ever wanted.

That tree might come down all by itself. And perhaps Shelagh has gone fighting into the bay.

 

 

What the judge thought of The Building of Widows

"This story had something of the languid, overheated American South in it. The spaced-out excerpts (like spaced-out Shelagh herself) work well and were not just a device. I was moving around in it, as though I was a resident, enjoying its many angles, its chaos, the biscuits Shelagh gets in. Accomplished and atmospheric."     - Elizabeth Smither

Don't miss Focus over the coming weeks as we publish the secondary school winners in our Short Story Awards.

- © Fairfax NZ News