An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger)
on hedonism, disordered eating, the act of consumption, self indulgence and the underpinnings of girlhood
A gnawing hunger dwelled in the pits of her stomach, Mariann hadn’t eaten for days and at school, she would pretend to chew morsels of her porridge and spit it out immediately when her peers left. It had been four days now, Mariann leaned against the wall, the taste of a cheap Windsor blue in her mouth, she pulled out her handkerchief to cover her mouth as a bout of phlegm made its way to the back of her throat, Mariann coughed a blot of blood into the muslin cloth and tucked it away in the deep end of her leather bag. She had picked up smoking from the sophomore girls behind the school, they had offered her a ‘fag’ – as they’d called it and she did not like it. Eventually, she did. The older girls dressed differently, their skirts rode up their knees and Mariann would run to the tailor after school to shorten her hem. Sean was seldom home. Ever since Celia’s passing, Sean would spend most of his mornings on the farm and then the country market, Mariann would see him carry sacks of their potatoes in the back of their truck right before dropping her to school. That was six years ago, Mariann now sixteen, would walk to school and back. She would sometimes take a turn at Murphy’s to catch a glimpse of her father with a pint, before heading home. The man had made a tavern of the sin house, he would frequent the brothel nearby, and Mariann would rub the cheap makeup off of his linen sometimes. He wasn’t particularly a bad father, just an absent one, and it worked in Mariann’s favor as she would dash away behind the farm’s barnyard to light the cigarettes she had stolen from the girls at school. It was one such evening.
Mariann stared at her watch, it was one of the few things Celia had left behind for her, there wasn’t much except for the silver trinket and a pocket knife. Mariann would sharpen her pocket knife every fortnight, not that she had ever used it, it felt like such a waste to stash away a knife and let it rot in the cascade of bluntness. She dug out the pocket knife to pop open the can of beer her father had left behind in the fridge, the throes of hunger were swelling in her stomach like an expectant child. She glanced at her watch and the passage of time had cut through her like the butcher’s saw. It was three hours past the hour Sean was usually home. She kneaded her knuckles into the hollow pit of the dining table, it was a dilapidated little thing, the beer was nearly over and she still had the hunger pangs quelling and tugging onto her insides, she almost let herself take a bite into a rotting apple in the basket by the sink. ‘I wouldn’t have to see the girls for another week’, she thought to herself, the winter break would free her from the clutches of masochism. Instead, she decided to take a stroll outside. She stubbed the leftover cigarette against the windowpane and watched the ash trickle down the edge, which would leave a mark. It was chilly outside, and she had to look for her father, there were only two places her mind could conjure. Kilkee was a rather small town, snuck away in the west coastal nether of Ireland. Mariann and Celian would take the train to Dublin when she was a child, but as years passed, Mariann was squared off to the bay and the pollock holes. Sean had taken Mariann to the pollock hole to swim for her first birthday after Celia’s passing, he had taught her to swim and Mariann had tugged at her swimming shirt because ‘all the boys aren’t wearing one’, she had chided in her father. All of it seemed like a distant memory to Mariann as she dragged her feet across the cobblestones of her neighborhood’s sidewalk. Mariann’s relationship with Sean was queer and devoid of proximity, in blood, he was the closest she knew yet she couldn’t make sense of the bridge between the father she knew as a child and the man she didn’t. She wasn’t particularly troubled by it either, they would speak at the break of dawn as she scurried down the stairs of her bedroom and he would knock on her door every night solemnly before he turned the lights off, it was a knock of a man who was almost afraid of chancing upon his daughter’s interiority. To him, Mariann was his daughter, any deviation from the role that he had set in stone would metamorphize their relationship for the worse. In a way, Mariann was still the child in the photograph from the pollock hole, full of whimsical wonder and quiet.
Mariann pushed open the door to Murphy’s, it was dimly lit in red and yellow with crowded tables. She recognized Patrick from school waiting on a couple, the noise of chatter from grown-ups clocking out of their jobs was reaching her in faint whispers, maybe it was the beer or the queerness of an ale house that washed over her like a wave, the walls adorned with faded posters and peeling paint caved in on her. The floorboard creaked underfoot as she walked up to an empty table and sat down, she rested her arms on the table for a brief moment before placing them on her lap, the tablecloth smeared in spill stains and grease made her increasingly nauseous, the stale starvation from before jumped into flesh and blood and made itself present, now more than ever. Mariann’s eyes searched for her father, the nooks and crannies of the pub were festering with the lover’s breath and filthy jean jackets. She watched a man stick his tongue down someone’s throat and her hunger for a fleeting second made itself home in the midst of unwilling voyeurism.
“Your ID, miss?” an unfamiliar voice intruded her sight.
“There won’t be any need for that, but have you seen my father here? Sean? He’s a regular here, I think”
“Ah Sean, course, you know the old fella, ey?”
“He’s my Da, he wasn’t home, so I figured he’d be here”
“Nay, he hasn’t been here all day, last I saw the old chap was yesterday, I’ll tell ya if I see him”
Maybe he had wandered off to the brothel, Mariann thought to herself, looking disinterested.
“You buying anything ere, missy?”
“I can’t drink”
“We serve ginger ale”
“One to go, then, please.”
.
Mariann turned the light on in the farm shed, the bulb hung down from a thin wire illuminating the room between its four grey walls, the walls had chalk writings preserved from when Mariann was a child. She practiced her alphabet back in the shed while Sean would move the sacks of produce in and out of the storehouse. The alphabets were lopsided, the B’s looked like clunky barnacles and the Q wither away into an open crevice, Mariann had gotten a beating that day for ruining the walls of an already dilapidated shed. The photograph of which had been entrenched in her memory, the chickens clucking away had borne witness to the edges of her childhood rotting in plain sight. Mariann made her way to the back of the shed to sharpen her nails against the wooden creak, her eyes met the steely gaze of a black dog. He must have wandered in from the field, she thought to herself. The light bulb did not penetrate its way to the back, a blotch of blood stained the wood of the shed, and the hound was ravenously eating away at an open wound. Mariann dug her bag for her torch, the dog hadn’t moved. His eyes were fixated on the corner of the shed, Mariann confused the hound’s grunt for her own, the rumbling in the pit of her stomach had only grown louder on her way back home. She shone the torch to find the rotting carcass of what looked like a spazzing rabbit. His eyes had convulsed and dilated into headlights, his fur seemed to have been trimmed short and his ears were twitching, convulsing on the floor, Mariann’s eyes shifted to the hound. His eyes glimmered in the green of the night and she could now see the inside of his mouth, the rabbit’s leg had been chewed off the hound hadn’t swallowed the last morsel. Before Mariann could register this act, the hound with a swift stroke bled into the rabbit’s ear, putting an end to the convulsion. The rabbit foamed at its mouth before being snatched into the prison bars of the canine.
Mariann stared intently at the scene of the crime, her eyes did not waver from the hound brazenly devouring the rabbit’s flesh, the head had been left decapitated while his teeth bit into the mound of flesh, the carcass started resembling the festering wound Mariann had sewed open a year ago when she had had the big fall. Closeted in her room and having skipped dinner, she had been impatiently fiddling with the stitches on the bulb of her knee, cutting them open with her scissors the bulb now lay bare and exposed, the interior of a wound staring back at her. The blood tasted metallic and before she let herself go; she had slapped a band-aid on. The doctor had been perplexed about how it had happened, prodding Mariann with questions, he had asked her father if she had hurt herself again. Eventually, they went home and nobody found out. A similar sense of depravation overcame Mariann at the sight that had unfolded before her eyes, in a trance-like state, the hound had scurried away with his prize hanging from his mouth. Mariann was crouching on the floor and hadn’t realized she was on her fours intently observing the hound. The hound’s departure had snapped her out of her daze as she pulled herself up and looked around the shed. Her hands searched and tore through the sacks, she clenched her fists and scratched her nails into her nagging stomach, she heard a loud rupture outside and pranced to the doorway to look if her father had come home, instead the air was cast in the shadow of a tight-lipped silence, Mariann for the first time in the day looked addled. She glanced downwards at her legs, she wanted to press her ear against the source of the rupture, and as she fixated on it, she realized the call was coming from inside the house.
Her heart pumped raggedly as she rushed back into the shed, she had never felt a throbbing hunger consume her like the one she had just felt, a desperate tug on her insides. She had gone without eating for days before but there was something ubiquitous about the hankering that rung through her body, the flesh, and blood had coincided like a circle and it felt like a thousand morgues uprising within. Mariann’s hands inadvertently searched the shed for sustenance, there had to be something, she muttered to herself as her now dilated pupils opened up . She heard the bushes rustle outside, the black hound was resting its paws. She felt like she was on the brink of being purged out of her body, on her fours, she dug through the back of the shed until she found an ice box tucked away. It was freshwater salmon, Sean had brought them in from the farmer’s market and this would last them a month. Mariann dug her hand inside as the salmon’s eyes widened, the vision shifted, the scalers were icy and intact. At that moment, Mariann wanted for a brief moment, to step away and retreat to the house, to leave everything she had seen, the guttural noise that was holding her captive, and simply drift into the transient arms of sleep, instead, she bit into the raw salmon. The putrid stench emanated across the shed, it was the rotten odor of death, mixed with the mortuary Mariann had birthed in the underbelly of her stomach. The pungent stench penetrated the pensive of her nostrils as she ravenously disemboweled the salmon. It was not enough to chew, Mariann threw her bag onto the floor and yanked out the pocket knife, cutting open a gash in her finger, the knife glistened in the gleam of the night. The knife had been sharpened, it was handsy albeit small, and in no time, Mariann plunged the knife into the midsection gutting its entrails, she gathered them in the palm of her hands before swallowing them whole. The floorboard was stained in blood, and the salmon’s insides had spilled onto the wood. Unlike the tablecloth at Murphy’s, Mariann could not keep her hands away. She tossed the fishbone aside, remembering to bury it in the mud. Mariann hung her head, looking at her open toes, the consciousness of what she had done slowly perched above her shoulders. The hanging shame flooded her nerve endings, tying a gripping knot of dog-shitting-on-the-floor shame begging to be undone. What if the girls at school found out, what if her father had returned, seen her in the act, and left? The absence of her dead mother hung over her like a hovering bird hunted in its prime.
And yet, the wantonness of her hunger had exponentially grown, she hadn’t paid heed to it until after she was done. Her stomach was eating away at her organs and she was in two places at the same time, she was both the hound and the rabbit. There’s always more salmon in the ice box, Mariann thought to herself. Her eyes hungrily looked across the shed, looking for something palatable, something that would do away with the looming gluttony that was making its way to the back of her throat, like God itself on the day of resurrection. The black hound stood outside the doorsill, Mariann stopped dead in her tracks, the clock hung up in the shed stopped ticking, and Mariann and the hound transfixed into each other, for a short juncture, the two were one, infused in the warm embrace of carnality and hedonism. The asinine writing danced on the wall, and Mariann sharpened her knife one last time.