Fifteen

Days on the farm felt more like a series of tests engineered to exhaust Robbie’s patience. John had struck an unhappy medium between complete bed rest and full-time farming. He chose to prop himself up with an old walking stick and loiter in the doorframes of the house, barking orders at his son. More drill sergeant than father, John seemed determined that Robbie complete the tasks to as high a standard as possible.

Robbie inherited several incomplete projects that his father had ambitiously begun: a half-built chicken coop, a structure for a compost heap and a complicated pigeon decoy to lure the birds into the yard where they could be shot. His father gave him detailed instructions as to how the projects should be completed and put the pigeon decoy as top priority.

‘I’ve drawn a diagram for this one,’ his father said, grunting in recognition of the cup of tea Robbie had set in front of him.

‘Which one?’

‘The pigeon decoy. It’s on your list.’

‘What do I need a diagram for?’

‘Those birds aren’t stupid,’ he said, setting the piece of paper down to stress his point. ‘They’ll be sitting up in that tree just laughing at our contraptions. It has to be convincing.’

Robbie reached for the diagram.

‘What is that?’ he said, pointing at the scribbles on the top of the structure his father had sketched.

‘Feathers.’

‘Pigeon feathers,’ he explained as if to a child. ‘I told you, it has to look believable.’

‘And where do you expect me to get those?’

His father lifted his arms to hold an invisible gun and, pinching one eye closed, mimed pulling the trigger.

‘No way,’ Robbie said.

‘You were a pretty decent shot back in the day.’

‘I was a child. I shot a few pheasants from close range. I don’t think that qualifies.’

‘Don’t be modest.’

Robbie’s hand twitched around his cup. He could remember the feel of the trigger beneath his finger and the heavy weight of the gun. He was only fourteen when he hit his first target, a pregnant rabbit that used to wreak havoc in their vegetable garden. Two years later his father took him to his shooting club on Saturdays where pheasants were reared to be shot.

As a youth, plucking a bird from the sky gave him a sense of accomplishment. He would stand for a moment with his gun pointing at the clouds where the bird had flown only seconds before and then lower it slowly, savouring the moment. When the dog had sniffed it out, Robbie would force himself to stand perfectly still beside the thicket until the dog emerged with the bird in its teeth and dropped it at his feet. It was amusing to remember himself, small and thin at the table of the sports club beside the other men shovelling spoonfuls of stew down their throats.

He couldn’t have been more than fifteen when shots were fired in the night and he found himself standing in his pyjamas at the other end of his father’s gun. It must have been during the winter months because he felt the cold cobblestones beneath his feet despite his thick bed socks. Opening the door of the shed to see his father slumped in an old armchair with a gun in his lap had felt like a dream.

The whiskey was strong on his breath and two empty bottles quivered on the shelf, despite his best efforts to shoot them down. Margaret had sent Robbie out, with that weary tone of voice that had long since given up hope of anything changing. As he padded down the stairs, pulled on a coat and unbolted the back door, he blamed himself for not hiding the gun better. His mother had given him the task of concealing it several weeks before and he had half-heartedly slid it behind the empty jam jars in the utility room cupboard. With one hand gripping the door handle, Robbie stood silently as his father raised the gun to his shoulder, the barrel bobbing in the direction of Robbie’s face as though the gun were afloat.

He had lifted his hands to declare his innocence. It was a silly thing but there seemed little else to do in the moment. John started shouting and swearing, most of it incoherent, and his eyes were so red-rimmed that Robbie wasn’t sure what he was seeing.

‘You’re not man enough to hold a gun until you can stand at the other end of one,’ he had shouted, half-closing his eye to get a better aim.

The rest of the provocations blurred in Robbie’s memory but the realisation that he might die was clear in his mind. He was definitely frightened but not in a sweaty, panicked kind of way; it was more like an acceptance of something that he could do nothing to change.

The shed was poorly lit by a single bare bulb, which dangled from a beam in the roof and caused shadows to lengthen on the stone walls around them. When their aging German Shepherd stirred in the corner, it took Robbie several minutes to register what it was, too late to prevent his father from spinning round with the gun and sending a bullet into the darkness. Deaf from old age, the dog had not minded the ramblings of its owner as he drank himself into a fury. It was not until it registered Robbie’s presence that the dog roused itself. Up close, the noise of the gunshot was deafening as it ricocheted off the walls and lodged itself as an echo in Robbie’s head. He had been unable to move but kept staring into the corner, his heart beating faster as his eyes adjusted and he was able to piece together the howling with the bloody body of the dog. John dropped his gun on the floor, attempted to stand up and then thought better of it, sinking into the chair and closing his eyes. Looking from his father to the darkened corner where his dog lay, Robbie had started to cry. Unable to see where the animal had been shot, he knelt on the floor and cradled it while the blood made a paste on the dusty floor.

For years the memory of the dying dog haunted him. At the time it must have happened quite quickly but it played out in slow motion now any time he thought of it. It had been up to him to transport it in a wheelbarrow to the back of the orchard. It was Robbie who dug the grave by torchlight beside the apple trees. It was his responsibility to concoct a likely story of the dog’s disappearance, for years suffering his sisters’ wrath for allegedly leaving the cattle gate open for him to escape. He wondered did his mother know. Did she hear him scrubbing at the blood stains in the laundry room, or crying himself to sleep after half-carrying his father onto the sofa?

Now, as he watched his father add pen strokes to his sketch of the pigeon decoy, he considered the likely possibility that he too believed the dog had run away.

‘Whatever happened to Tess?’

His father didn’t look up from the page.

‘You know what happened to her.’

Robbie stood to clear the breakfast dishes and listened while his father explained the exact dimensions of the wood he needed to buy and the tools he should use.

The town centre was quiet, apart from the men hanging bunting for the Twelfth of July parades. On one side of the square, scaffolding was being used to to erect a large wooden arch that straddled the road; fake bricks had been painted on it to give the impression of a wall. A portrait of the Queen eyeballed passersby and Robbie stood awhile under her watchful gaze, wondering what she made year in, year out, of the uniformed flute players, orange flags, baton twirling and lambeg drumming that went on beneath her.

‘Well I’ll be,’ said one of the men hammering together the structure. ‘I’d know those ears anywhere. Robbie Hanright, how the fuck are you?’

‘Adrian Green? Good to see you.’

Robbie stepped closer to shake his hand and was able to recognise the features of his high school friend in a much fatter face. He was wearing paint-spattered overalls and heavy work boots. His hair was thin and cut short and spiky.

‘What are you like gaping up at this here arch? Long time no see.’

Adrian had stepped away from his workmates to light a cigarette and Robbie turned one down when offered. His last memory of Adrian was of seeing him sitting outside the school gates in a Fiesta, the car waxed to a shine with wing mirrors that the girls looked into to apply their lipstick. He had dropped out after GCSEs to work in his father’s shop and was one of the first boys Robbie knew to own a car.

‘I moved to Dublin a few years ago—’

‘I heard that, aye.’

Robbie hesitated.

‘Oh aye. Sure you can’t keep much secret around here.’

‘No, I’d say not.’

Adrian drew sharply on his cigarette.

‘Sorry to hear about your da.’

‘That’s why you’re home then, aye?’

‘Yep, just a passing family visit.’

Adrian threw his half-smoked cigarette on the pavement and slapped Robbie on the back as he exhaled.

‘Good man. I won’t be bumping into you again then, I’d imagine.’

He looked at Robbie as though it were a question.

‘Like I said, Adrian, a passing visit.’

‘Right. I’ll be getting back to work. Take care.’

He tugged at his overalls and gave Robbie a mock salute. As the men went in opposite directions, Robbie looked back over his shoulder to see Adrian explaining something to his workmates.

With various lengths of wood poking out of the boot, Robbie arrived back at the house with a steely determination to build the pigeon decoy. The care he took in working out the measurements of the structure his father had described and the thought he put in to the choice of wood and fixtures was so consuming that he had time for little else that day. The conversation with Adrian did not come back to him until much later that afternoon. The light was starting to fade and he took one of the beers he had hidden in the shed out to the orchard. The apple trees were green with new leaves and the long summer days gave the impression that it was much earlier than it seemed. He walked to the perimeter of the house and sat on the gate that opened into the field beyond. The beer was not cold enough and Robbie felt his spirits low as the sun hovered on the horizon. Adrian’s father was in the UVF. It was inevitable that Adrian would learn the ropes, settle in Dromore, drink in Boyle’s, and become good at issuing subtle threats.

He remembered his form one class, seated that first day in alphabetical order, wearing blazers several sizes too big and short, smart haircuts. The class was an odd mix of boys who had raced towards puberty and those whose mothers had held them back a while; girls who had discovered make-up and those who bought horse magazines to collect the posters.

Robbie was still very naïve but not intimidated by girls because he had grown up with sisters. That became his passport to cool, with boys like Adrian using him as their go-between while they found hideouts to smoke and swap pornographic pictures. Something in Adrian had always scared him. He would make a statement and then eyeball his listeners so that it was impossible to contradict him. He told the rudest jokes, showed no fear of teachers and seemed to spend the majority of his time in the chair outside the headmaster’s office looking bored. But there was something attractive about him that Robbie could never quite walk away from. His proper friends were not impressed by Adrian’s bravado and did not understand Robbie’s fascination. They wanted to walk into town to buy sandwiches on their lunch break and get together at the weekends to play computer games or go fishing. Robbie enjoyed that too but whenever Adrian called, Robbie went to him, driven by curiosity and awe.

As the years passed and the boys grew into their blazers, Robbie realised he was smart and started to listen to his teachers when they told him that if he worked hard he would be able to get any job he liked. This was around the same time Adrian was befriended by older boys and he started showing less and less interest in school. When the GCSE results were handed out and Robbie caught Adrian’s eyes across the hall, he felt that something was understood between them. It should not have surprised him when, six years later, Adrian Green’s name cropped up in some correspondence that Martin received and it was passed on to Robbie to investigate. He did not even bother to claim a loyalty to his former school friend, such was the thirst of his journalistic youth.

How had Adrian shaken his hand and asked after his father with such a convincing look of concern? He had even offered Robbie a cigarette, as though it were a Friday afternoon in 1999 and they were waiting at the bus stop. Robbie shivered. Their meeting had unnerved him. He tried to turn his thoughts to the pigeon decoy and the work that would be completed in the morning. Once the basic structure was finished, he would have the unpleasant task of sourcing feathers to make it look believable. His stomach gurgled and he suddenly jumped down from the gate, threw his beer can into the hedge and ran towards the house.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ his father hollered from the living room.

‘Sorry, I lost track of time.’ Robbie washed his hands in the kitchen sink.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Yes, I know. I said I was sorry.’

‘I thought your being here meant I wouldn’t go hungry and nor would the animals. By the sound of that cow, I’d say her dinner’s been forgotten an’all.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

Robbie heard in his father’s voice a delight at being proved right and suddenly he wanted to take a hammer to the decoy under construction in the shed. The volume went up on the television and Robbie pulled the kitchen door over to put some distance between them. After feeding the animals, Robbie searched the cupboards for food. It had been a long time since he had cooked. Hannah normally disappeared into the kitchen while he was filing his stories and emerge later with curry or soup. The tins and cartons Wendy had delivered the previous day did not inspire any ideas for a meal and he began to panic.

‘Wendy, it’s me. No, no, nothing’s wrong. Well, yes I suppose something is wrong but it’s not serious. I was just wondering if you could help me out, I’m in a bit of a pickle. Are you busy? Sorry, yes, I’ll spit it out. It’s just … I don’t know how to cook.’

There was silence on the other end of the phone, then a deep sigh.

‘I really am sorry to— Really? I wasn’t expecting that, I just thought maybe… Well I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, I just needed help. Right, very well then, I’ll see you soon.’

He put down the phone and ran his hands through his hair, wishing there was something stronger in the house than the orange juice Wendy had left in the fridge.