Visions & Revisions: An anthology of new writing by Junior Cycle Teachers [selected extracts]

Mary-Elaine Tynan
UNDONE [EXTRACT]
2018
I am good but not an angel. I do sin, but am not the devil. I am
just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love –
Marilyn Monroe.
The day they came to take me away was just an average day. It
didn’t start out as one of those mornings when you awaken to an
ache in the pit of your stomach. A sense of something. Something
you can’t quite put your finger on. Something ominous, perhaps
dark and dangerous. I’ve had that feeling before but not on that
that particular day.
It was an otherwise unremarkable windy, if not deceptively
warm, Monday or Tuesday in Autumn 1962. The day I came
undone.
For so long since I’ve wondered what if … What if I’d
been more alert? Less self-righteous? If I’d pleaded with them.
Reasoned. Explained myself. Run? What if I’d just done something
different? Instead of kicking and gnashing and cursing? Like
the madwoman they believed me to be. The madwoman she’d
convinced them I was. If I’d reasoned with them, would it have
made a difference, I wonder?
That day, all I could think was that this wouldn’t have been
happening if Alfie were around. Surely they’d be listening to my
educated, reasonable husband and not that thundering bitch
who was standing with her arms folded and head bowed meekly,
wouldn’t they? Sighing softly, her victorious smile visible only to
me from the cold tiles where my furious head thrashed.
Alfie would never have let it happen. He wouldn’t have
UNDONE
watched them half-drag, half-carry his already broken wife from
the comfort of our kitchen range, where moments before I’d sat
in a soft chair, steaming cup of tea and thick slice of homemade
bread in hand, and pull me along the shiny wooden floorboards
of our hallway – past the sullen, judgemental eyes of his ancestors
– to the front door. My Alfie would have stopped them banging
my already splintered pelvis and my aching spine down every
concrete step – from the austere front door to the street – for the
aproned housewives and bending golden leafy trees to witness.
He’d have intervened as they told me I was lucky I wasn’t going
to the gaol.
Alfie wouldn’t have let that happen because I was his wife
and the mother of his daughter. He would have explained to
them why I did it. Made them see that I had no choice. He’d have
made them understand.
That’s what I told myself for so long. That had something
been different, then maybe the priest who’d married us and the
guard who had been in school with Alfie wouldn’t have taken me
to that place. Locked me up to stop me from doing it again. From
leading a good man astray and from corrupting my innocent
child. I told myself that if something different had happened, I
would be still with Alfie and my little Eliza. A broken woman,
but safe.
But that’s speculation now, isn’t it? A desperate attempt to
rewrite the truth. Because there are, of course, several versions
of the truth. It is as fickle as water sliding through your fingers.
But what is incontrovertible is this: I was always going to fight
because that’s who I was. And Alfie was never going to stop them
because that’s who he was. And even though I wanted to believe
that they came because they knew he wasn’t there, now I know
that he wasn’t there because he knew they were coming. When I
realised that, that’s when I came undone.
* * *
I want to tell you a story. You don’t need to know it all. Just the
parts that matter. It’s my version of course, so you’ll have to trust
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