Paddy Horgan looks out the passenger window of the Skoda Octavia as the road follows the River Bandon heading towards Innishannon. He is surprised at all the traffic this early but a lot of people will be going to Dublin today, especially to cheer on Liam Óg O’Callaghan, the pride of Kilbrittain.
He checks again for his little blue backpack at his feet, containing his sandwiches, a bottle of water, a few bars of chocolate and two bananas. He’s always forgetting things these days. He moves the seat forward to give Cora, who is in the back with Willie, some legroom. The car is spotless; the dash is shiny and smells of polish, but Donie, who is driving, always looked after his cars. Donie is all spruced up too, Paddy notices, sporting a bright-red tie.
The last of the fog on the water fades away as they near the bridge. Rich red early morning sunlight drifts downwards from the tops of the trees, the leaves now softened to a tawny brown. The place always reminds him of Sheila; they used to go for walks on the riverbank.
Paddy and Sheila started going out with each other in 1982, after that disco in Actons in Kinsale. He had just turned twenty-six and was working in the Co-Op. They drove to dances nearly every second night that summer, or to play cards over near Mallow – Hazelwood. No: The Hazel Tree, that was the place. Sheila was a tasty card player, everybody said it. Singles or partners, it didn’t matter a damn. His pride when she’d produce a jack or a five to win the game, last throw. She often had one, just at the right time, however she managed it. There was a local man used to call her ‘the deadly ciotóg’.
After hurling training, Paddy would pick her up at home. He had a great Corolla at the time, the one he got from that queer hawk in Drimoleague the year before. They’d go for a walk down by the river and take a spin over to Clon to those summer dances in The Fernhill. They used to drive home by Garretstown and park near the strand. If the tide was in, the sound of the waves draped itself around them, in their own sweet world in the back of the Corolla. The softness of her breasts, the wetness of her mouth and the moans gentling out of her: a thing of wonder.
He thought those times would last forever and a day.
When the car crosses the bridge and turns into Innishannon, the low sunlight hits them full on. Himself and Donie pull down their visors.
‘God, lads, isn’t it great to be heading to Dublin on the first Sunday in September, all the same?’ Willie says.
‘Oh, ’tis,’ Paddy says, though he doesn’t want to encourage him. Once Willie starts up there’s no stopping him.
‘Will we do it, though?’ Willie asks, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together. Paddy thinks he can smell drink off him, but he’s not sure.
‘Faith then, we might,’ says Donie as he slows down the car to stop at the lights.
‘We’ll give it a lash, Willie,’ Paddy says. ‘We’ll give it a right lash.’
‘If we can mark yer man, we’re halfway there,’ Willie says, and he’s off. ‘D’you know what I think?’
Paddy grimaces.
His bad leg meant he could never hurl himself, but in his early twenties he got roped into looking after the Under 12s. Those training sessions were where he cut his teeth. Bright summer evenings, with swallows sweeping to and fro above the field.
Boys are so keen at that age – they haven’t learned to be smart yet. Or at least that’s the way they used to be, those days.
‘Pull on the ball, Jimmy. That’s it. Pull again, you won’t hurt it.’
They were desperate for trying to pick up the ball.
‘Jesus, but ye’re obsessed with picking up the ball. Mickey! Mickey! I don’t know what that is, but it isn’t related to hurling. Are you going to take it home with you or what? Hit the fecking thing!’
It’s where it all began for Liam Óg, too.
‘Good catch, Liam Óg O’Callaghan! Now, clear your lines. Good man, let the ball do the work. Now, Jimmy, over the bar. That’s it, lads. The ball won’t get tired, I keep telling ye. It’ll work away all day.’
‘What age is Liam Óg, now, Paddy?’ Cora says. There is a long tailback at the Bishopstown Roundabout.
‘Twenty-five,’ he replies, amazed that Cora wouldn’t know. But sure what else would you expect from a Skibbereen woman? ‘He’ll be twenty-six in January.’
‘Twenty-five?’ Cora says. She thinks about it. ‘Jesus, Liam Senior and Carmel must have had him fierce young so.’
‘Oh, they did,’ Willie says. ‘There was a bit of a rush with the wedding. Father O’Donovan from Kilmurry had to be drafted in because Father Mac had shingles.’
Willie is a desperate gossip. He’d go up your hole for news. Small Willie, he is known as, behind his back. Initially, he was called that to differentiate him from tall Willie O’Shea, but of course it stuck. Paddy doesn’t like the nickname, and only ever refers to him as Willie.
He often used to wonder what Willie had to say about Sheila going away. The same as what everyone else said, he supposed. Not that it matters now; sure, it’s old news.
That Neil Diamond concert in the RDS. The fourteenth of May 1989. He’ll never forget the date. Sheila was clean mad about Neil Diamond; she knew the words of every single song. She had booked a room in Jury’s in Ballsbridge. She was nursing in the Bons in Cork by then, earning more than he was – a fact that rankled with him.
In hindsight, she’d been tense all night. He should have known something was brewing. She’d been tetchy with him a few times that spring too. Normally, at concerts, she’d be singing along and buzzing afterwards. Not this time, though. They had a couple of drinks at the hotel bar after the short walk from the RDS. It was quiet for a concert night.
Later, he kissed her and moved against her on the hotel bed, but she stiffened and pulled away. She lay back and looked up at the ceiling.
‘I’m thinking about going to England, Paddy.’
‘What?’ he said. ‘You’re what?’
She faced him.
‘This isn’t enough for me. I want to make love to you in my own bed. Our own bed. In our own home. I want us to get married, to have children, the whole thing, but you don’t seem to want that.’
‘I do. I do, Sheila. We talked about this. I told you I do. And we will.’
‘You say that, but when? If you were serious about it, we’d be well married by now. We’ve been going out for seven years, Paddy. I’m thirty. My time is running out.’
He sighed and rubbed his forehead. ‘I just, I can’t leave Mammy on her own.’
‘I’m not asking you to leave her on her own. We can build a house. A nice new house and she can live with us. Uncle Seamus will give us a site. I can take good care of her, even with my job.’
‘I don’t want his fucking charity.’
‘I’m his niece, Paddy. He has no children of his own. Tim will get the farm; the least I can get is a site. It’s not charity.’
‘I don’t like this kind of blackmail.’
He sat up in the bed and faced away from her. His gut instinct was to get out of the room. To get away. His heart was racing.
‘It’s not blackmail, Paddy. I want to be with you. All the time. Not just like this, but I can’t wait forever. I won’t.’
She turned away from him and cried.
Now, enclosed by the dank walls of the Jack Lynch Tunnel, as Willie gives out stink about the County Board again, he tells himself that he’d wanted that too. In truth, he had. If only she’d given him more time. A small bit more time.
There is another tailback at the first toll, near Fermoy. Cora (who doesn’t have her glasses on) gives out to Donie for coming too close to the car in front. Donie tenses but he doesn’t fight back against the false allegation. There was a good six feet to spare and Paddy would have backed him up if Donie had asked him. He wouldn’t dare get involved otherwise.
She isn’t the worst, of course, and she was very good to his mother, at the end. You’d have to be happy for Donie too, meeting somebody and getting married at his age. He never gave up hope, in fairness.
But talk about non-stop. And hen-pecked Donie will be sour now until that Topaz forecourt in Cashel, when he can get a cup of tea and a scone into himself. The talk turns to the Clare forward line and how Cillian McMahon is impossible to mark.
‘I tell ya. The only man for him is Sean Culloty; he’s as cool as a breeze that fella, wherever he got it,’ Willie says. ‘Did his father hurl at all, Paddy?’
‘I heard he was adopted, Willie.’
‘Was he so?’ Willie says. ‘Well, whoever the filly and sire are, I hope there’s a few more foals in the stable.’
‘Jesus, Willie, you can’t say that,’ Cora says.
‘Why not? Sure we need more fellas like him, don’t we?’
‘Because you just can’t. You can’t say things like that any more. Sure you can’t, Donie?’
Donie pretends not to hear and adjusts the air conditioning. Cora doesn’t approve of air conditioning since she found out it uses up so much diesel, but when there is four in the car on a hot day, sure it’s vital. And you can’t open the windows on the motorway as it makes a terrible racket.
‘Anyway,’ Willie says. ‘They should definitely put Culloty on yer man.’
‘I’d say they will, Willie,’ Paddy says. ‘Sure young Cashman is too loose altogether, he couldn’t mark his own shadow. I still don’t know why they dropped Paul S. Wright.’
Of course there’s no adoption now, Paddy thinks. All those girls keeping their own children even though they can’t look after them and there isn’t a father to be seen. And all those poor couples crying out for babies in their big houses. No wonder the prisons are bursting. Of course you can’t say that either, these days.
He thought they had made up, the day after the concert, on the drive home. That Sheila had seen sense. But when they stopped for petrol in Josephine’s in Urlingford and he came back to the car, he could see that she’d been crying again. As they approached Cork, she grew silent and her responses were monosyllabic.
When he parked the car outside her house on the Curragheen Road, she looked straight ahead in the passenger seat: ‘I won’t be seeing you again, Paddy. I’m sorry, but …’
She turned to him and burst into tears. Then she was gone.
His shock transformed itself to temper in an instant. He gripped the steering wheel rigid and stared down the street as she got out of the car. The car boot slammed and he drove out of the city at breakneck speed, very nearly killing himself twice on the way home.
He assumed she’d come around. He phoned and phoned and called to the house in Cork and to her parents’ farm above in Rathclaren. Her father, scruffy in old dungarees, leaned against the door of the Passat and said: ‘Paddy, boy, she doesn’t want to see you.’
‘Look, Joe, we had a row, that’s all. If I could only have a word.’
Joe shook his head.
‘Paddy, she’s on the phone every night, crying to her mother. She doesn’t want to see you and that’s that. I’m not going to say it again.’
Joe stepped back from the car and stared the younger man down. Paddy backed out of the yard, his wheels skidding on the concrete. He never returned.
He heard a few months later that she was going out with one of the Whites from Timoleague. He saw her in The Emerald one Sunday night, after Christmas, but she was with Joe and Mary, so he didn’t approach them.
Willie arrived to the house a few days later, and, over a cup of tea, when Paddy’s mother had gone to bed, he broke the news that she was gone to London. She’d gotten a big job in a hospital there, apparently.
‘Lord save us, all the traffic,’ Cora says. They are nearing Portlaoise, at a standstill with the volume of cars after the two motorways meet.
‘That’s the Clare gang now. They’ll have a big crowd up today, they’re cocksure of themselves,’ Willie says.
‘Lave ’em at it. They might be in for a surprise,’ Paddy says.
‘Ha ha de, they might, so,’ says Donie, shuffling. He looks in the mirror and changes down the gears to another stop. ‘Lads, I wonder will we take the next exit and head over towards Maynooth and in by the M50?’
‘No!’ Willie and Cora say simultaneously.
‘I’d say it won’t gain us much,’ Paddy says. Donie can’t stand traffic at all. ‘I think there’s a crash up ahead; once we get past that, we’ll be moving again.’
They drive slowly past the two crashed cars. One had obviously rear-ended the other. Six sheepish-looking young Clare fans stand beside the cars. A big, heavy-set lad has some kind of towel or tissues pressed against his nose. His shirt is covered in blood and he is wearing old tracksuit pants covered in mud, with long pointy brown shoes. A guard takes notes.
‘They won’t be in such a rush the next time,’ Cora says, tut-tutting.
‘At least there will be a next time,’ Paddy says, and immediately regrets it. There is a silence. He knows what they are thinking about.
They are thinking about his younger brother, Denis, who was driving his van on the Bandon Road one night in 1998 after a feed of drink, when he proceeded to wipe out a young couple from Newcestown who had just gotten engaged and were on their way home in their little Toyota Starlet to tell their families. Denis had been arrested at the scene and charged with manslaughter, and was all set to plead guilty and to do his time, until he got off on a technicality because the guards had botched the breathalysing. He went to Australia soon after and never came back. Their mother hardly left the house after that and died three years later, a shadow of the fine, strong woman she had been. She was buried with only one son at her funeral instead of two.
Everybody stopped asking Paddy about Denis after a while, when he let them know that he didn’t want to talk about him and never would. He had to tell Jamesie O’Halloran to shut up one night in The Sportsman’s Arms. The pained silence that followed and the shock on everyone’s face drove him out of the pub.
But now, as he looks out at the wide-open rolling plains of the Curragh, he wonders if Denis is well and what it would be like to talk to him again. They were great pals, once. He wonders if Denis will watch today’s game in some Australian pub surrounded by other Irish people. He hopes that he will – that they will both watch the same match and cheer on the same team wearing the blood and bandage.
They pass a Ford Fiesta with little red and white flags clipped onto its front windows. A couple in the front, a boy and girl in the back, all wearing Cork jerseys. The fair-haired woman has turned in the passenger seat and is explaining something to the solemn-looking children. The man grins and watches their rapt expressions in the rear-view mirror.
As Paddy looks at the grin on the face of the man driving the Fiesta, the knowledge seeps its way through him with a bitter familiarity: he hadn’t needed more time with Sheila at all. She would have granted him all the time in the world if there had ever been a chance that he’d have found inside himself the courage to step into the unknown with her.
He watches the man in the Fiesta until he can bend his neck no further.