Brewery Town
written by: Niall Crowley
@NiallCrowley_
The raw stone of the parapet is cold to her touch. The wind rushes cluttered wavelets across the slow-moving river below. Curtailed by the concrete mass of flood defences, the Feagle’s joyful abandon has been replaced with plodding determination. She mourns that taming, though conscious of the threat the river had posed. To one side, weather-beaten chimney stacks rise high in filigree of red brick, traces of the brewery that once drew from the river. There is an affinity with the scene that troubles her.
The appointed time for morning coffee in O’Donovan’s draws her away. She takes it plain filtered, and without any of the available delicacies. Tucked in behind the clatter of the café, she sits alone. Habit is all important, for routine is kind to one who lacks the wherewithal for a full life. Afterwards, there’s the shopping that needs doing. The essentials these days, as a pension only stretches so far. Sliced pan, milk, and vegetables. Heart and soul might be beyond repair, but the body demands maintenance.
The house is chilled and unwelcoming on her return. Bustle and spirit are markedly absent, even if this was never a place that had overflowed with such. She slams the door behind her for some drama, but it merely echoes hollow through empty rooms. His coat still hangs on the peg beside which she sets her own. That has to go, along with all the rest, but the energy for such tasks never seems available.
Lunch is buttered toast and tea, taken at the small table in the kitchen. A staleness wafts musty around the room. Brushing a hand across the table, she registers a veneer of grime. There had been order here once, but now all that is stalled. A thorough scrubbing would be restorative, with every trace to be removed for additional benefit. However, in the turmoil of change, this house had lost its wife.
The afternoon stretches empty before her. In the past, that role of housewife had offered purpose of a kind. He had insisted on it, and all around her had expected it. She railed against such limiting identity, though only to herself. Pastimes cloaked the monotony that came with the title, time set aside to roam an array of fiction, country roads, and main street boutiques. Always by herself, as strictly charged. Those were days when time was a companion. Nowadays, she wanders from room to room, pausing for periods, as if in thought, but more to press that time would just move on by.
Pastime is as strange a handle as housewife. Just as one has no desire to be an accoutrement to a house, why would one see fit to merely pass time, fritter it away? She had been driven to make use of time, seen it as precious, before being reduced to passing it and then seeking to kill it. Stood before the vacant fireplace in the front room, she arranges and rearranges dusty memories set out along the mantelpiece. Smiling faces to be recalled, events to be marked, and places to be held close. A record of a life contrived.
A scrum of sweaty men hoisting a trophy claims her attention. They had cheered on these ‘Boys of the Brewery Town,’ done so together. Moments of precious harmony, all too rare. She had become an avid follower of the club’s footballing triumphs, eventually a pastime of preference. They had both been enthusiastic contributors as club members, he as a marker of his status, she for such involvement being deemed appropriate to hers.
Neighbours pass along the pathway outside, brisk and enterprising. She watches from the window and waves back cheerily if they spot her, ever ready to assure that all is in order, everything is as it should be. Some imperatives don’t wane, whatever energy levels are left to her. He had sternly demanded the upholding of what he called his standards, the side was not to be let down. Appearance is all, was his underlying and repetitive mantra. Another strange notion. Who gets to define that appearance which is to be deemed appropriate and therefore maintained? Not her, was all she could conclude.
A smile threads thin and disparaging across her face at recall of his pedantic insistence on appearance. It wasn’t off the ground he’d licked that. This is a town that exalts appearance over substance. Those chimney stacks that so beguile her these days, had served the town’s prize industry, source for its identity as Brewery Town. The brewery is long gone, and the chimney stacks stand redundant, a vacant courtyard and a rash of empty buildings spread below. Still they remain prized markers of an identity that, even hollowed out, continues to be embraced and celebrated by town and institutions alike.
She tracks idly through the television channels, the usual trivia that had always held her attention, if rarely her interest. Though, her attention is distracted and diverted now. Unfamiliar for her, there is a matter to ponder and think through. The matter of Ed. Yesterday, he had stood politely bowed before her in the café and inquired attentively after her wellbeing. Ed is a gentleman, as in gentle man. There are few such. That gentleness had not held sufficient attraction when she was young and ambitious, but it had impacted on her with his re-appearance from that other time in her life. Age and experience, it would seem, point her towards a different perspective.
Ed had been a colleague in the Sacred Heart. Both of them had been held in thrall to the dramas of inquiring minds, and, less positively, both subject to the strictures of the Sisters. She had ambition then. Teaching was her love, repository for her future sustenance and satisfaction. Marriage, the promise of children, and the boundaries of family formation, placed a stranglehold on such aspirations. Frosty demand from a future husband confined ambition. Rigid expectation, from both the Sisters and family, redefined duty. She had not seen Ed since those times, a relationship proscribed as a result of her changed circumstances.
There was initial industry in her home-building efforts, ‘nesting’ as she had mocked herself. She took on that identity of housewife with bustling diligence, before its boundaries became ever more impressed on her. Later, once she had been silently deemed unproductive for failure to have a child, that identity had been further pared back to the married state and a clean and upright home. Now even those dimensions are rendered redundant, and her identity is made hollow, rising over a vacant lot.
The callous demands made of her, are a thing of the past, in the grave with her husband. External expectation is withered with the exodus of the Sisters and the death or distancing of family members. She is near untrammelled. There is space opened up to roam, to meet Ed. Only crushed aspiration is left to be addressed for the flood defences to be breached. That is hers to reignite, if boldness were to hand. She frowns, rattled at the comparison sparked with a river confined. What threat she could have posed is unfathomable to her.
Ed’s invitation was modest, undemanding. It was ever thus. He left it hanging in his wake as he lightly touched her hand in farewell and turned to leave. She might like to attend his session the following evening in the Brewery Bar. It would be an easy distraction from her troubles. A fitting venue, she grimaces wryly. He didn’t feel right calling himself a musician, it was more a pastime of choice he had said. No, it was his passion, to tell the truth. He had corrected himself with such feeling that she was gripped.
Ed and Mary? No. Mary and Ed. What promise would that combination hold? How might it affect time and the quality of its deployment? Together with Ed, she could be inspired to find new passions to animate, just as he had found his music. There is an identity to be re-invented and given substance of her own definition. Daunting for sure, but she can’t deny tremors of hope that stir unfamiliar butterflies. Not just of hope, there is more awakened, though she finds herself unable to dwell on that for now.
The relentless compulsion of standards to be upheld and appearance to be maintained, is draining. These, while restricting, do make for a simpler life, and they become ingrained over years of enforcement, even when the insistence behind them wanes. Sat rigid in front of the flickering screen, her mind flails to grapple with choice. Aspiration long frozen, struggles to re-emerge and respond to unaccustomed desires. Identity articulated over years, clings tight despite its emptiness. Time runs disconcertingly fast. The dreary course of the programmes tells her, it is time. It is time. TV drama or the Brewery Bar?
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