The temperature gauge in the car read 25 degrees. Traffic was at a standstill on the Drumcondra Road and wound like a long, shiny snake through the northern suburbs, to the Holy Child Church on the outskirts of town where the motorway started. It was Friday and the sun was shining at an awkward, afternoon angle that Robbie could not block with his sun visor. With one hand on the steering wheel, he used the other to shade his eyes so that he could negotiate the congestion. The pavement baked and students found shade under the cherry blossom trees while they waited for the bus. Robbie was suffocating from the warm, stagnant air in the car and the traffic’s lethargic pace. Forcing himself to sit back, he rested his elbow on the open window and tried to relax.
Once he was on the motorway and had passed the airport, the traffic thinned. He tried to imagine he was following signs for Drogheda and the tightness in his chest subsided. He played through the scenario in his mind: he was going to interview one of the finalists for Ireland’s Got Talent for the paper. She would be a gymnast, or an opera singer, or a young ventriloquist who spoke through a puppet ostrich. Her family would be gathered in the two up, two down council house and there would be plenty of plated custard creams to go round. It would be a one-hour job, including time to snap a few pictures of the girl and her puppet in front of the neighbour’s hanging basket.
The turn off for Drogheda branched to the left and he distracted himself by fiddling with the iPod Hannah had bought him for Christmas. Whether his fingers were too big, or the buttons too small, he never ended up listening to the song he wanted. He thought wistfully of the days when his CDs were stored in a pocket on his visor, and there was no messing around with cigarette lighters and radio transmitters. With the device on shuffle, a Spanish guitar twanged from a set of albums designed to provide European background music for social get-togethers. Robbie cringed at the thought of dinner parties with Hannah’s friends where she served Moules Marinière as a viola sounded from the hallway; or the time they had eaten gnocchi to the dulcet tones of an Italian opera. The guitar started to annoy him and he turned the whole thing off.
Friends had told him how much the road to the North had changed. It now bypassed Dundalk, where traffic had once crawled through the town centre, and skirted the feet of the Mourne Mountains in dual carriageway all the way to Belfast. He thought it would make it easier if it felt like an entirely different road, but the closer he got, the worse he felt. Even the weather seemed to conspire against him, with great, grey clouds gathering in the distance and the sun of the city fading in his rear view mirror.
The newspaper he worked for had recently hired a journalist from Northern Ireland, who had come into Robbie’s office one afternoon to work out if they knew any of the same people. Robbie immediately disliked him. He talked about Belfast as if it were New York, calling shopping centres ‘malls’ and flats ‘apartments’.
‘The best part is,’ he had said, oblivious to Robbie’s attempts to ignore him, ‘that all that religious, political stuff doesn’t faze people as much any more.’
When he laughed, his top lip caught on his two front teeth, which jutted out from his gums. Robbie later regretted how he had stared the youth down and refused to share the joke.
By the time he reached the roundabout in Newry, the sky looked ready to burst. People were running across car parks; women gathered their dresses at their sides to stop the wind from getting beneath them and men looked knowingly at the clouds. Within several minutes, the rain fell so fast that even with his windscreen wipers on the highest setting, Robbie still found it difficult to see where he was going. Glad of the distraction, he sat forward and concentrated on the road ahead. Cars were moving so slowly that he calculated his journey from door to door would be just shy of four hours, as long as it would have taken before the new road was constructed.
As he passed the blue towers of Fane Valley, he marvelled at how very little seemed to have changed. Aside from a few new developments, the houses were as squat and unsubstantial as he remembered, some with small gardens and many with none at all. A sign for Banbridge Portadown Tandragee was mounted at the roadside of a new junction and he squinted through the rain as he passed a car garage. A small man in overalls hunched under the corrugated iron roof of his shed talking to a young couple.
The rain was starting to ease when he turned off the dual carriageway. The old ruin stood in the corner of the field and he could picture his younger self poised with plastic sword in the archway. It looked as misplaced as it always did, with the Stevenson’s double-storey mansion on one side and the busy A1 on the other, but Robbie could remember well that once you were inside the crumbling walls, the noise of traffic and the view of houses disappeared. In that damp, secluded space he had become an explorer, a knight, a king or a hermit, and everything else became much less real or important.
With the car purring on the verge, he stepped out to get a closer look. The rain had stopped and for a brief second the clouds parted and watery sunlight escaped, exposing the gaps in the walls, as well as the graffiti that had not been there when Robbie was a boy. With his ankles wet from the grass, he leant on the gate that led into the field. He was taking deep breaths, enjoying the country air laced with the faint staleness of the nearby chicken farm, when half of a rainbow took form in front of him. It was difficult to make it out, and if he had not been staring at that exact spot he might never have noticed it, but it was unmistakably arched from the grass beside the ruin towards the road. The violet edge was faint and the colours ran into one another and smudged across the sky.
Back in the car, Robbie adjusted the rear view mirror to face him. Never quite satisfied that he was a good-looking man, he had allowed his hair to grow out so he might at least be mistaken for an interesting one. He pulled at his fringe until his cow’s lick had been tamed and it curled neatly behind his ear, then ruffled the back of his hair, which was soft and wavy from being washed that morning. One last scan of his face confirmed that he was clean-shaven and the puffiness had gone down from around his eyes. He turned his attention to the shirt he had deliberated over that morning, buttoning and unbuttoning it at the top before making sure it was tucked neatly into his jeans and not too strained around his stomach. His grandmother had often remarked that carrying a bit of weight was a sign of good health and he hoped that his mother would not take as negative a view of his expanding waistline as Hannah did.
He kept his eyes straight ahead as he passed the farmhouse, swerving to avoid a long branch of the cypress hedge that had broken free like an unruly lock of hair. At the crossroads he was forced to glance briefly towards the western edge of the farm where the front gates blew in the wind and the overgrown verge made it difficult to negotiate the junction safely. In his absence, a new bungalow had been built on the opposite corner to the farm. It was whitewashed and plain, with a tarmac driveway that bent steeply to the road and a young crab apple tree starting to blossom over the entrance. A tractor was approaching from the right and Robbie watched it go through the junction and continue past the farmhouse, the driver bouncing around, a flat cap tight on his head. With one last glance to his left, he caught sight of the sign, rusted around the edges and almost completely obscured by ivy: Larkscroft Farm.