Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [20]
But she had to wait until the mourners and freeloaders had eaten all the ham sandwiches, drained the barrel of porter and finally left, before breaking the news. ‘Mama, I’m going to have a baby.’
‘I suppose you are, alanna,’ Agnes said. She had expected nothing less. She knew the high jinks they got up to in godless places like London and she was stoically prepared to accept the consequences. Her only regret was that she wasn’t able to spend some time in London herself. She hadn’t had any excitement in a long time. Not really since the civil war, once she thought about it.
The child was born in late August 1967. As it was the Summer of Love, Delia was keen to saddle her with a name like Raindrop or Moonbeam but Agnes intervened. ‘She’s the town bastard,’ she pointed out equably. ‘Would you not give her a decent name so that she won’t be the town laughing stock into the bargain?’
Everyone expected Delia to return to London, but she didn’t. She stayed in Knockavoy and no one could understand why, least of all herself. She knew it had something to do with the terror she’d felt when she found out she was pregnant. Fear wasn’t something she was familiar with and she wasn’t keen to renew the acquaintanceship. She lived with her mother, in the house she’d been brought up in, and reared her child. She got piecemeal jobs. Barmaiding during the summer months, driving the school bus – the regular driver was a martyr to the drink – and helping her mother with the hens, cows and crops on their smallholding.
Beautiful, but with still too much of the basket case about her, no local man was interested in taking her and her daughter on. She remained outspoken and difficult, more of an outsider than ever. She practised radical politics from afar. She organized a mass rally against US intervention in Vietnam, to be held one Saturday at four o’clock outside Tully’s Hardware – she targeted Tully’s because Curly Tully had lived in Boston for eighteen months in the fifties. But the only people who turned up were herself and the two-year-old Katherine. (Agnes said she’d love to lend her support, but she was busy milking the cows.) At about five to five, just as Delia was getting ready to call it a day, she saw a crowd of six or seven people heading up the street towards her. Instead of throwing a snide remark and passing her by, as everyone else had done all afternoon, they stopped. Delia was ecstatic. Until it transpired the whole seven of them were there to help Padraig Cronin buy a ladder.
Next, Delia started a petition against apartheid, and nabbed people outside half-twelve Mass to make them sign. She managed seven signatures – her own, her mother’s, her daughter’s, Loony Tommy Forman’s, a Mr D. Duck, a Mr M. Mouse and a Mr J. F. Kennedy.
In the late seventies she became fixated with the Sandanistas, and held a sale of work to raise money for them. Which four people came to, generating takings of two pounds elevenpence.
She dreamt of having a drop-in centre. Sometimes she made noises about setting up a rape crisis centre in Knockavoy, even though no one had been raped for several decades.
She tried to teach yoga, except no one came. She tried to set up a craft-shop, but the crafts were crap.
She dressed in smocks, clogs and wooden jewellery and claimed to have psychic powers. She urged Katherine to call her Delia, told her she didn’t have to go to school if she didn’t want and that she certainly didn’t have to go to Mass if she didn’t want. Katherine ended up knowing the ins and outs of the reproductive system before she’d mastered the ins and outs of tying her shoelaces.
Naturally Katherine rebelled. Which she did by being neat, tidy, quiet, respectful, diligent and devout. She was meek, questioned nothing, did exactly what the nuns told her, knew her catechism backwards (the best way), and told everyone that her first holy communion was the happiest day of her life.
Delia was devastated. ‘Wait’ll that child hits adolescence,’ she wept, hopefully. ‘Genes will out, she’s her mother’s daughter.’