LEGS MCSKALLY

She danced, every St Patrick’s Day, the jig, for the soaked and sodden men gathered in the low-lit snug of her father’s public house, The Crock of Gold, their eyes bleared with porter and longing alike, and her legs, ah yes, her legs, though not what they had been, faltering more frequently in their silent betrayals, yet carried her still, for what did they know of it, those men, far gone beyond noticing, whistling and hollering as though no girl had ever stepped before them, no red-haired colleen to set the floor alight.

And she felt it then, the lift of them, their gaze upon her, each step answered by their crude devotion, and she danced the harder for it, the brighter, a nod here, a tilt there, as though she conducted them, a queen among her crooked-looking courtiers, and took from them what remained to her, yes, the last bright shreds of youth, gathered up like coins from a table sticky with stout.

It would end, of course it would, the dancing, everything ends, but not yet, not on this night or the next, for there were steps still in her, a turn or two yet unspent. And how it came back to her then, sudden as a draught through a cracked door, that first dance, Barry O’Reilly, God save him, with his fine face and his fool’s feet, a prince in the standing and a stone in the moving. She had tried to carry him through it, to lend him her grace, for the watching girls and their sharp eyes, but then, ah, his arm, flung out without thought, catching her in the midst of her flight, and down she went, the world tipping, the boards rushing up to meet her.

Blood, the taste of it, bright and iron on her tongue, and the black swallow of Guinness to wash it clean, and the laughter, always the laughter, and in that turning moment something slipped, some thread drawn loose, never to be knotted quite the same again.

Legs, they called her after. Legs McSkally. Not for the dancing of them but for the failing, the splay of them across the floorboards before God and everyone.

“Legs! Legs McSkally!”

And the name clung, as such things do, and each year she gave it back to them, the fall and the flourish of it, some poor drunken soul dragged forth to play the part of Barry, Barry who would not come, who could not come, his own legs taken from him in the war, gone clean as if they had never been.

And she thought of it, often enough, the cruel turn of it, that she with her failing limbs yet stood, while he did not; whether it was shame or silence that kept him from the door she could not say.

But tonight, tonight of all nights, when her knees trembled as they had never trembled before, a quivering not of muscle alone but of memory and the gathering weight of it, she saw him, did she though? Or perhaps only thought she did, there at the far edge of her seeing, a shadow among shadows, as she stood poised again upon that old brink, the remembered fall waiting in the wings, the music climbing, the room drawn tight as a held breath.

And then, no. Not this time. Not for them, not for him.

A hand lifted, slight but final, and the band, startled, faltered into silence, cut short as a beast struck lame mid-chase, the tune collapsing in on itself. A murmur passed, low and puzzled, through the drunk-thick air.

She did not wait for it to rise. She turned, quick as the thought that drove her, and fled, past the tables, past the reaching hands and half-formed calls, out through the door and into the night, the dark of it deep and close as stout in a glass, her breath catching, her heart a wild, ungoverned thing.

Away then, away from the eyes and the echo of them, away from the fall that would not be danced again, away from the man who was and was not there.

And so she was gone.

Legs McSkally, gone with the night, with the music stilled, with the last turn of the step unmade, and no telling after where she went, nor what became of her, only that she was not seen again, nor heard, nor called back to the floor that had once taken her and named her.

Happy St Patrick's Day! 🍀✨