Short Story Winners 

2024 inaugural Ennis Book Club Festival Short Story Competition – 3rd place 

Derelict
by Ronan O’Halloran

– adjective – left or deserted, as by the owner or guardian

I often walks the dog here of a fine day. Pull up at the council barrier, one of them tall ones to stop the tinkers bringing in caravans. There’s a grand path leading all around the hospital, back behind by the chapel and across the fields. A half hour loop, long enough for my knees. Same for my poor dog. Funny, I’m gone from here nearly 40 years, and I still get an chill when I arrive. But I think it’s good for me to come here. I feel alive. They own it now, the Council, God knows what they’ll do with the place. T’would take millions to make anything of it. None of the big boy developers want it. Cute hoors. And shur who would live in it anyways. The place just stands. An odd old blind flapping in the wind, or a window shutter rattling somewhere. I suppose they took it on for the walks. A public amenity, again. Some people think I’m pure odd for taking a walk here, after all that went on. Maybe they’re right. It was nearly ten years after I got out, before I could face coming back. The place was still open then, just about. I was half-shcared that I might be grabbed and pulled back in. There was many that had that happen to them, and that’s the truth. But now, it’s different here, there’s a peace to be found. It’s settled. Any nurse or doctor, man or woman, who worked here, never showed me anything but kindness. Without the kindness, the place would have been hell. I have no hate in me for this hospital, or the lovely people that worked in it. They had their job to do, and I have to say they did it well. I’m just glad that I got out of it, finally. No, the only person I hold hate for is me brother, Tommy.

It’s in an awful state these days. As I walk on up the main driveway, overgrown trees reach across the tarmacadam, like arms. I kick at them as I pass. Feckers. I look up at the front. The tinkers have robbed all the lead off the roof. And sure, once that happened, the rain got in. Now most of the timbers are half rotten, and the roofs are collapsing. Slates fall most days, like tears. Fragments of them smashed all around the outside. By God one of those big slates would take the head clean off you. It’s a shame. And there isn’t a pane of glass in the place that isn’t smashed. Young fellas. I do often joke to meself, that the place is now wide open, for everyone to see in. I like the crunch of the broken glass under my boot. Smashing those blasted windows after so many years looking through them. I remember the fine summer evenings. Young lads going the road on their bikes out towards Ballyalla Lake for a dip. Christ, what I wouldn’t have given for it. Even though I’d sink like a stone. I’d see their heads floating past just over the top of the high stone wall, plain as day. But nobody could see me. I was invisible. Years ago, people wouldn’t even dare look over the wall. The fear of God in them that they might see a waving relative or a neighbour looking back at them. Calling them. Nobody wanted to see that. They might have been right. The wall was taken down after my time. Shur only a prison would have high walls they said. From twenty foot to four. Nothing to hide, except the patients. Manys the hour I spent looking out the ward window. Longing to be outside. I’d see boys kicking football. I’d see mammies pushing prams, and old men walking, and motor cars driving fast, and I would get sad. I never really did those things, except the old fella walking mind. On past the main block, round the side, where all the work went on. Boiler houses, laundries and kitchens. The doors are all boarded up. The windows here smashed as well. I never look in. I wonder what state the ceilings are in. I’d stare at them for hours. I’d lie there all day sometimes, staring up, following the hairline cracks in the plaster. They would join like rivers, and split again. Like a map. To nowhere. And the spiders up there. Their webs were magnificent, but they made me worried. All the flies trapped, some alive, some dead. Done for. The ceilings too high to clean. And shur who else was looking up there anyways.

I push on towards the farm. The stone boundary walls all marked with graffiti now. Lovely grey limestone still peeping out here and there. Capstones knocked. No bit of care at all. Abandoned. The dog loves to run all over the place here. He sniffs and chases, God knows what he smells. I wonder are they new or old smells. Can he tell? Down past the chapel and then the creamery. All that remains is the tiled floor. Walls levelled. It looks odd, in the middle of the scrub. The diamond patterned tiles, all yellows and reds, with wild grass woven over them. You’d nearly pass it. But I know the place like the back of me hand. The dog gets a shock when the grass stops, and the hard tile starts without warning. The shed was for storing the milk churns. In later days, I used help out here. The empty churns would ring when they hit the floor. We used to compete to see who could drop them from the wagon the quietest. On to an old hession sack. There was a knack to it, and great craic with the lads here. It’s quiet now, I like it. I bring the dog on up to the fields. Big open spaces, freedom. They have goal posts now and walking paths. Gangs of women talking. In my time, it was all farmland. The hospital had over two hundred acres of pastureland. The finest of land. Fields of spuds and cabbages and carrots. All needed. The land, the cows, the pigs and the chickens, had to feed the three hundred patients in the hospital. Thanks God the farm was here, I wouldn’t have gotten out otherwise.

I do a full lap of the fields. It gets the blood flowing. I’m still bitter and angry when I think back on it. Very angry. It was the early 70s. I was living at the home place with the mother and my older brother, Tommy. Our father had died young of a heart attack some ten years earlier, so Tommy and meself looked after the farm. I had been good in school. Mr. Byrnes always said I was a clever young fella. I even got my Group Cert and an honour in Mathematics. That was rare enough in those days, the mother was delighted. But I went no further, as the father died the same year. There was a farm to be worked. Tommy is eight years older than me. Never a nice big brother. He made me feel less. He was vexed at having to grow up fast, and look after me. That was how it went for ten years. The mother didn’t have great health. She missed the father something awful, and never got over his passing. He was a lovely man and very good to her, which was unusual in those days. He’d bring her wildflowers because he could afford nothing else. I always got on well with the mother. We would walk the fields and she’d tell me stories about her and my father in their youth. The good times and the bad. She’d tell me what field was good for what. And don’t waste my time with the sheep, nothing but hardship. She told me to make use of my mathematics, run the farm well. The secret is in the numbers she would say.

In ’71 Tommy took up with one of the Cassidy girls. Maureen, a lighting bitch. They weren’t long getting engaged, and they made it very clear that I was under their feet. I kept my head down and worked the farm. Planning for the years ahead, and how I would make a right go of it. Then one summer’s morning, I woke up to a quiet house, and found my poor mother dead in the bed. It was sudden. No warning. She had baked one of her apple tarts the night before, it was still sitting on the kitchen table. Tea towel laid over it. I remember sitting at the side of her bed after I found her. I told her that I’d do my best and be a good farmer. A good man. I was awful sad. Lost. Mammy was always very kind to me. She knew how cross Tommy was. But she was gone. For good. The grief hit me something desperate. I just couldn’t get my head around it. The finality of it all. Tommy had no sympathy for me. Never said a thing. He even ate the apple tart. On a Monday morning shortly after, he took me off in the car and dropped me at the front door of Our Lady’s Mental Hospital, the asylum. He told the nurse that I was very troubled and depressed, he wasn’t wrong. And that he was worried for me. I knew that was wrong. I saw the high stone walls. It all happened so fast, and before my feet could hit the ground, I was in the ward.

From the top of the back field I can see the chimney stacks of the hospital. Straight up, defiant. But covered in ivy now, and even a small tree sticking out of one. This used be the furthest point I could get from the ward. Nearly six hundred steps. Tommy, me own brother, had me committed. I was a danger to myself, and others. God knows what I could do. With me gone, himself and Maureen took over the homeplace. They got married. Never visited. I was awful sour with Tommy, how could he do that to his own brother. Maybe I had brought it on myself. The farm wasn’t big enough for the two of us. After about three months in the hospital, it struck me that I might be left there forever. It clicked. And between that, and the death of my mother, I went into a deep depression that lasted nearly six years. Six long years, looking out the window, staring at the ceiling. I don’t think I uttered a word. I was sad and tired. Didn’t want to do a thing only die. They tried all kinds of things on me; pills, injections, shocks, I didn’t know what they were. It felt like I had no say in my life. My head and my body hurted. None of the so-called treatments worked, and I was very sad for a long, long time. Even though I was alone, I was never left alone. Always a nurse or doctor checking in, chatting away like mad. How was I and did I want tea. They never gave up. Then one day a nurse, a big bear of a man, Sean, asked me if I would give a hand on the farm. Something registered in me, and I nodded that I would. I remember poor Sean’s jaw nearly hit the floor. I had woken. And that saved me, it brought me back, slowly mind.

I get back on to the road at the back of the hospital, last leg of the loop. Along by the new industrial park, used be all woods. Changed completely forever. I remember chopping timber there. All gone now. For six months, I milked cows, shovelled shit and picked spuds. I said nothing, just got on with the work for the day. The doctors and nurses were amazed at the change in me. I loved the farm work. Eventually, I started to speak again. Whispers. Words. Then sentences. Then you couldn’t shut me up. I wanted to shout. So much so, they suggested that I work for a local dairy farmer during the week for a few pound. I’d go off in the morning with my lunch in a bag. Walk the three miles there, and three miles back. My legs and arms and back got strong again, after years thrown down on the bed. I loved nothing more than being out in the fields. I’d think of my mother, and still miss her. The farm. And I’d do my best. After another six months, the farmer asked me if I wanted to come and live and work on his farm full time. And that was it. I finally had somewhere to go. I was wanted. So the hospital could officially release me. I was able to leave.

Out on to the main road at last, where I have parked my small car. Even though the council barrier is nearly seven foot high, I duck, thinking I am that big. I worked that farm for another twenty five years. Glad of every day of it. I even got my own caravan in the back haggart, where I still live now. That farmer, the kindest soul you could meet. I’m not able for the pulling and dragging now, but I help out with the books. Good with the numbers all the time. Every evening I walk the two miles to The Grove. I have two pints of Guinness and my dinner. One before, and one after. And maybe a slice of apple tart if it looks nice. The simple things.

I see Tommy around the town sometimes. He’s as ould as the hills now, and fat as a puddin. His walk is bad. Someone told me his wife Maureen had died of the cancer a few years back. I didn’t care. I don’t think he sees me. He never lets on anyways.

I sit in the car with engine ticking over, warm up the hands on the heater. Clear the windscreen. It’s good to be able to leave. I never married. Even though I got better, it wasn’t in me to love someone. I didn’t have enough to give you see. I’m lucky to have kept meself going this long. I feel a bit like these ould buildings, still standing, just about.