So I take the bus up to Drogheda
By David McGrath
Oliver Cromwell put the sword to two thousand men, women and children when he breached the besieged walls of Drogheda in 1649.
Drogheda, they’d always said down in Wicklow. Lot of ghosts up there.
Melissa collects me in her car. It’s odd to see her driving. We park up outside her parent’s house and she says, just quickly, before we go in, my brother doesn’t talk to me.
Does he live in here, too?
Yes.
But he doesn’t talk to you?
No.
And this has been going on a decade?
Longer.
What?
I had bulimia when I was a teenager. It caused my mother a lot of stress and pain. My brother doesn’t speak to me because of it—because of the harm I did to her back then.
The harm you did to her? What? Melissa, that’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever fucking heard.
Don’t say anything.
Well, I’m a guest in your home, Melissa. I’m not going to just go in, roll up the sleeves and ask what’s the problem here, guys?
Please don’t.
I wouldn’t. Nobody would I don’t think. OK maybe I would.
I know you would.
Well I won’t I don’t think. But you’re saying when we go in here your brother will be pretending you don’t exist and your parents are fine with that?
Yes.
How does he ask you to pass the salt at dinner?
He doesn’t sit at the dinner table with me.
Jesus Christ. Will he talk to me?
He’ll talk away to you. He just won’t talk to me or about me or acknowledge me in any way.
Because you once suffered from bulimia? That’s it? You didn’t drown his puppy in the river?
No.
You’re not leaving out some fucked up part?
Because I had bulimia. And the stress it caused our Mam. Melissa takes off her seatbelt and grabs her bag. All good?
No. Melissa. That’s the most immature, psychotic, most dysfunctional, misplaced, ignorant shit I think I’ve ever fucking heard. The man has serious problems. Is he all there mentally?
600 points in the leaving.
So why are your parents allowing this behaviour in their home?
Melissa has reset. She has this vacant smile I’ve never seen before. She’s like a woman at a perfume counter. A lobotomised smile. Melissa?
All good?
You say all good one more time like you’re some robot and I’m running the fuck away.
There’s a beat. A moment to change everything. It passes.
All good? she says and the smile doesn’t flinch.
When you are witness to some deep-rooted, trauma-response autopilot, you think you can snap the person out of it. Melissa, I say and click my fingers in front of her face. But you can’t. I realise I’m here for a showdown.
We go into the house and I have the gist of Dad in about two seconds flat. He’s a dope. A Wicklow man, he says and gets back to the television. I’ve just witnessed his entire contribution to the day.
The mother is sitting on the couch but she is not looking at the television. Those were some postcards you sent, she says. Postman was mortified handing them over to me.
Your postman reads your postcards? I ask. They should give him more work.
She knows now I’m weird. Not monosyllabic like the dope of a husband she kidnapped thirty years ago. Not easily shamed. She looks at Melissa because she’s already disgusted with the cut of what she’s brought home. It’s a no win scenario. No matter what I say now will be trounced. Are you the one convinced her to get the tattoo? She got that in Thailand of her own volition.
Do you have tattoos?
I do.
Melissa looks at me like no you don’t.
I have the Virgin Mary giving birth to Baby Jesus on my back. Baby Jesus has horns and a tail though. Everyone’s screaming and reaching for the shotguns.
What? the mother asks.
She can’t believe what’s unfolding. She looks to her husband but he hasn’t heard a word.
He’s messing with you, Mammy.
Messing? the mother asks, about people shooting Jesus with shotguns?
Baby Jesus I say. Shooting Baby Jesus with shotguns.
Are you OK in the head?
The brother finally comes in and I’ve been dying to see this. The brother is the cut of the mother. The same sharp face. The same hate. He says something about something he’s been doing and sits on the couch by the mother. From Wicklow?
I am, I say.
He’s been talking about shooting Jesus with shotguns says the mother.
The brother is not acknowledging Melissa at all. He’s trained himself perfectly. There’s not a side glance. Nothing. She doesn’t exist to him. Are you right in the head or what?
I look at the mother and she squints a smile. And I know she’s done this, Melissa never to have a boyfriend, the brother never to have a girlfriend, the two of them hers until her dying day.
I’ll play the game. Why am I here? I ask the brother.
What?
Why am I in your house?
You’re from Wicklow.
Yes but why am I in your house? What circumstance has brought me here? Who has brought me here?
The brother clicks like I’ve short-circuited him.
Melissa looks at me and says, all good? And the father not with a thought in his head since the early nineteen eighties.
Fuckin hell, Missus, I say. You’ve done some job on them.
The mother just looks at me like I’ve already lost—this knight in shining armour who fell at the first hurdle.
Haven’t I? she says. The work of a lifetime.
And the brother is talking to himself about something that needs doing in the shed, the Dad is changing the channel because the football will be on soon and Melissa is looking at me in floods of tears, wordless, but begging me to do something.
Tell me this—Melissa tells me your father was a drinker.
You can beat nurture, I say.
But not nature, she says.
Melissa examines the exchange of blows to see who’s taken a hit. And it’s me. I’ve lost footing and I’m taking blows. I’m to die bludgeoned in this sitting room if I stay a moment longer. The whole future is now laid out before us. We see the whole thing and Melissa asks now what?
I say you’ll have to leave, Melissa.
I can’t she says and looks at her mother. Mammy’s sick.
I promise you now. This woman is not sick.
The mother gives a pain in her back a squeeze.
She needs me.
She doesn’t.
I can’t.
This house is fucking haunted, Melissa. I’m not staying one more minute.
Melissa cries like she understands.
I’m gone without so much as a cup of tea and as I walk back to the bus station I hear Melissa cry. I still see her looking at me crying, asking for help and me not giving it. I still see the mother, the father and the brother pretending not to notice. The oddball who sent the postcards that time. The postman still can’t look me in the eye over it. And when I’m back in Wicklow they say Drogheda? Did you see any ghosts?
And I say I did.
How many? they ask.
One, I say. Only one.
David McGrath is an Irish writer residing in East London. Renowned for a singular style that evokes the anarchic energy of Kevin Barry and the pitch-black wit of Martin McDonagh, McGrath has built a formidable reputation in razor sharp short fiction. He is the winner of the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Competition, The Bare Fiction Prize, and the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Competition, with further shortlists from the Galley Beggar, the Manchester Fiction Prize, and the Edinburgh Short Story Award. His work has been widely published in journals and anthologies including The Stinging Fly and The London Magazine.
His novel, Donkey Christ, will be published by Peninsula Press in September 2027. A wild, irreverent, and beautifully blasphemous epic, the publisher describes it as Uncut Gems meets The Banshees of Inisherin—a provocative vision that has already drawn fierce condemnation from the Catholic Church.