Read Online In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan - Free Book Online Page B

of casual violence, he was a brutal sort, all John Wayne swagger but without any of the dignity, boorish in everything he did and said.
    Before the years slowed his bones, when his tight winding would unravel with the least provocation and his aura of menace was still actively deserved, he played out his rage-games in late-night brawls after the pubs had let out. His blood inflamed by the sting of whiskey, he’d stand tall and wide in the road and draw deep of the darkness, filling his lungs for battle and sucking in murmured words, combing them for the least imagined slight. Everything back then was a trigger, an invitation to war, and his fists chased faces to smash like they were prizes at a funfair.
    The passing of time saw his reactions slow and his once-refined bulk descend into a slothful fat, but his bitterness remained undimmed. To compensate for losing his physical threat, he cultivated a technique of verbal intimidation as a means of venting the explosive side of his nature. He was still a big man and hard-earned reputations faded very slowly. He had few friends, but he enjoyed the way people seemed to wilt in his company, the way they offered placating salutes and cleared his path whenever he strolled through the village, the way they paid silent attention when he held court at the counter down in Daisy Forde’s public house, laughing like idiots whenever he bothered to crack a joke and cheering him on when, towards the end of the night and after drinking his fill of stout, he’d rock back in his chair and belt out a rendition of ‘The Stone Outside Dan Murphy’s Door’, the only song he knew all the way through that didn’t feature some heroic deed attributable to the IRA.
    They talked behind his back, of course. Women especially, but men too, and a single glance at his wife provided evidence enough that his tyrannical ways didn’t cease at the doorstep. Maggie was a frail, wizened creature, with large pale green eyes fixed eternally to some desperate middle distance and a West Cork brogue that fluttered in singsong gasps through her whisper of a voice. Everyone recalled how, during the early years of the marriage, the night-time would ring out with screams of pain and a most terrible pleading to please stop, that she was sorry and it would never happen again, whatever it was that she was supposed to have done, however little a thing. The thick pebble-dash walls of the terraced home muffled his growling replies, but that somehow only added to their sense of menace. Passers-by would stop to listen, neighbours would fill doorways and emerge head and shoulders from windows. They’d swap knowing glances and feel a mixture of disgust and helplessness, until finally the screams would subside to the small, heartbroken moans of a thoroughly defeated soul, and unable to bear it a moment longer they’d shrug and hurry on their way or slip back inside their homes, understanding that the situation was beyond their control and there was nothing they could do to help or interfere.
    The vagueness that marked out Maggie from most of the other women in the village was a necessary survival mechanism, her way of dragging herself through yet another day. She’d miss the essence of questions and comments, wander past people without even noticing their smiles of greeting, and was easily startled by even the most friendly touch. ‘Beaten stupid,’ was how the women described her condition, and they always spoke of it in sympathetic tones, their way of giving thanks to the Almighty that they had been spared such an existence.
    The pairing of Paudie and Maggie was the very definition of opposites attracting, and seemed a mockery, a collusion between the most wicked elements of fate. Silly with youth and headlong in a delusion she had mistaken for love, Maggie’s living nightmare had started out as a simple dream of happiness. At seventeen, she knew nothing of life beyond the soothing