We present another story from the RTÉ Short Story Competition shortlist 2025 -- read Witness by Lynda McCarthy below.
The shortlisted stories will be broadcast nightly from Monday 13 October on RTÉ Radio 1's Late Date.
About Witness, Lynda says: "I wanted to explore this character who feels barely visible in her own home - what would it take for her to change her circumstances? What would it mean for her to have someone witness how she is treated?"
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In the end, it's the arrival of the French student for the summer that forces her hand. The student himself is unremarkable. Scrawny, in the way that only 15-year-old boys can be, where it looks like their limbs have grown twice as fast as the rest of them. But his eyes unnerve her. They are huge and brown, with straight, coarse eyelashes like a foal. She can feel him watching her, watching all of them, really.
Diane has never experienced herself as pitiable before but when she tries to see what the student sees when he looks at her, looks at her home, she thinks she might be. She finds herself eavesdropping when he's speaking to his mother on the phone. Not that she understands the language, but she’s humiliated nonetheless by the prospect of what he could be telling her - about the furniture that has been chewed by a dog, even though the dog is long dead. About the moon prints of dirt all over the outside of the house where the boys have kicked footballs against the walls. About the grassy, damp smell emanating from gear bags abandoned in the porch and hallways and bedrooms. And about Diane herself – the grey roots, the leggings that have gone saggy from being through the wash too many times. And worst of all, the hormonal acne that persists, even still, around her jaw. She’s glad that nobody had told her as a teenager that she would be in her forties and still dealing with spots, she wouldn’t have coped.
Her own three boys barely look at her now, and the older two have taken to ignoring her when she speaks, or talking over her, like their father. When she walks into their room they don’t look up from whatever video game they are playing and she feels young again, in the worst way, always on the cusp of apologising for her presence. When their friends come over she can feel the heat of embarrassment coming off them in waves if she tries to say hello, ask about their family, or school.
She remembers feeling the same way about her own mother, a shame tinged with fury when she noticed pubic hair poking out of her swimming togs at the beach. In that moment her mother was vulgar and on the journey home, pathetic, for not realising why Diane was angry at her in the first place.
The memory should be a balm, she grew out of that phase after all, and surely they will too. Instead it makes her feel lonely, for her mother but also for her sons as they were just a few years ago, boisterous and rough but also prone to flinging themselves into her body for hugs.
For a long time she thought she wanted another baby, but really she just missed her boys as babies, their hot cheeks on her chest as they slept, the milky, nothing-smell of their sweaty heads. Their constant need for her felt so urgent then, something she was always trying to escape. Looking back, it’s hard for her to remember what exactly she was trying to escape from -- dandelion fluff hair, then soft-lisps, then trucks, trucks, trucks? But she would swap that uncomplicated claustrophobia for this current state in an instant.
Until a few months ago her youngest would still crawl up beside her on the couch and put his head in her lap when the house was empty. She would push curls back from his forehead and pretend to keep reading her book, ignoring pins and needles or a full bladder just to keep him there a minute longer. But that’s all stopped now, the looming prospect of secondary school pushing him toward his brothers and the world of men and away from her. She has her suspicions about him, ones that she keeps to herself, but she tries to catch his eye sometimes, to communicate with a look how much she knows him. The soul of him, as her mother would say.
Most days she moves through the house like a ghost, ferrying laundry from room to room, making meals that are eaten or uneaten but never acknowledged either way. In his first few weeks in the house the student would loudly thank her, as if he could prompt her family into doing the same. He wasn’t long giving that up though and instead he just catches her eye and nods. It makes her uneasy to think about how grateful she is for that small recognition.
Now that she can feel his eyes on her, she finds herself acting in ways she usually wouldn’t – singing along to the radio, putting napkins out with the dinner. It's not that she thinks the boy is judging her necessarily, but in the act of observing her, he has made her judge herself.
It occurs to her that she could just decide to be the sort of woman who does things. She could take up spinning, plant tomatoes, volunteer for something, it really wouldn’t matter what. Decades’ worth of her own inaction suddenly feels stifling. She opens all the windows. Washes the sheets. Cuts fresh flowers from the garden. The student watches her from behind the shed, smoking, which she pretends not to see.
For three full days she steels herself before starting the discussion. She turns over phrases in her mind like she’s preparing for court, chooses an outfit, decides and then rejects the idea of making his favourite dinner.
"I was thinking about what you were saying about St. Jude’s," Diane says finally when her husband gets in from work. The words come out too fast, despite her practicing.
"It’s not what I was saying, Di, it’s what I said. End of conversation." Jack is leaning against the back door, fingers splayed, picking at the seashell ridges of the calluses on his palm. He watches her as she prepares the dinner but makes no move to help.
"Fine then, what you said. But all his friends are going to Jude’s and they’ve been a little gang since junior infants. The poor child is upset." Diane pauses but doesn’t look up from the sink. She wipes dirt from the repulsive gills under the mushrooms’ caps and breaks the stalks off with her hands.
"And that’s exactly why he can’t go. A lad his age, crying to his mammy like a baby," Jack kicks his heels against the door, knocking mud from the creviced soles of his boots onto the floor. Diane thinks he must have his suspicions too, he has a way recently of pushing the child toward sports he has no interest in and making comments to him about girls on the estate. It’s probably no coincidence that the Tech is a mixed school and Jude’s is all-boys.
She moves to the hob and back again, draining the boiling water from the potatoes. This is where she’d usually stop. The first years of their marriage were the most volatile, maybe because she was operating under the illusion that if she could just find the right combination of words that he would come around to her point of view. She’d learned to pick her battles once the kids came along and everything ran smoother for a while. She has gotten into the habit of playing out an argument in her head before it’s even happened, putting forward her case and imagining his objections. Usually this is enough to convince her it’s not worth the hassle. But there are no compromises to be made here, either he gets his way, or she does.
"I just think that the Tech isn’t the right place for him, and he has the brains for Jude’s, so why not let him?" she asks.
Jack takes her place at the sink and washes the oil from his pink forearms, which have always reminded Diane of the hairy sides of bacon in the butcher’s window. She can tell by the set of his shoulders that he’s gearing up now. Sometimes she thinks she knows when he’s going to start before he does, the crackle of his moods are like a frequency that she’s always tuned into, whether she likes it or not.
"He’s too good for the Tech, is he?" She should have seen that one coming. He turns around to face her, wipes his still-oily hands on a tea towel. "I went there. His brothers go there. But he’s got so many brains to burn that he’s better than the rest of us? You had brains to burn too and look where it got you." He gestures around the room, as if her whole life could be summed up by this too-small kitchen that always seems to smell of sausage grease. And he’s not wrong, not really. For all of her grand plans going off to college, didn’t she marry a man who anchored her to the town she had just left?
On the radio, Elton John is singing about sons of bankers, sons of lawyers, and Diane suddenly remembers her father taking her aside before her wedding, saying "You could have more than this, Di. You could marry a lawyer." At the time she thought it was pure small-town snobbery, the boring lines drawn between this housing estate and that housing estate. Then again, maybe if he had said that she could be a lawyer she might have reconsidered.
It had all happened so fast that everyone presumed she was pregnant but it was just first love -- potent, silly, poisonous. In Jack’s defence, he hadn’t presented himself as anything other than what he was. She’d worked in his grandmother’s shop as a girl, came home from college for the funeral and had her heart softened by the sight of this broad-shouldered young man crying for the woman who raised him. That error - mistaking grief for gentleness - was all hers.
The first time he put his fist through the wall in temper she had actually laughed. It was only a year before that she had been sitting in her manky college flat, smoking hash and talking about poetry, so how had it come to this? That she had thrown her future away so willingly for a man who could only tell her he loved her after a skinful of pints seemed so unlikely in that moment that laughter was her only option.
"I’m going down to the principal on Monday, Jack. He’s going to Jude’s if they’ll take him," she says.
Jack stares at her for a second, two seconds, three. Then smirks. "He is, is he?"
She nods.
He reaches out an arm and knocks the saucepan of potatoes over, they thud across the tiles. She doesn’t move.
"Well, it’ll be over my dead body then." He walks out of the room, slamming the door, "or yours", he shouts behind him.
In fairness, she thinks, that could have gone worse.
Outside the kitchen window, the student lights a cigarette and looks at her.
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About The Author: Lynda McCarthy is originally from Cork and now lives in Waterford with her husband and children. She is an award-winning journalist and is currently working on a Middle Grade mystery novel. This is her first time putting a piece of fiction forward for publication.
Listen to the RTÉ Short Story Competition 2025 stories nightly on Late Date from Monday 13 October (full broadcast schedule here); tune into Arena for interviews and updates, and join us for the live Arena/RTÉ Short Story finale in the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire on Friday 24 October - tickets are on sale here.
