THE SUN IS stubborn now and won’t give ground to rain. Each morning’s haze is burnt away by noon and all the earth is cracked and baked, and all the grass is brown and yellow, scorched to temporary death. The farmers must be praying for a drop, Daddy says, and checks about for prying eyes while he defies the hosepipe ban to slake his flowers’ thirst. They’ll want to do another cut and there’s no growth. Mary Crothery sits in silence beside me on the patio beneath the shade of the parasol that skewers the picnic table, and she caresses the cross below her throat, and she toes the dust on the flagstones and she swats away the flies with hissed curses, and she asks me over and over am I okay, do I want anything, and once, a few days ago, I snapped at her that I was fine, I was fine, leave me alone, will you, and I didn’t feel my temper rising till the words were out, and she said, Go way and fuck off so, you cow, and her eyes filled with tears and I tried to make it seem as though I was joking, and she said, This heat would wear an angel’s temper, and I said, I’m no angel, that’s for sure, and she looked at me and said, You are, miss, that’s just exactly what you are. You and your father. Two angels that rescued me.
*
Mary Crothery has a phone again and she asks for help with texts. I don’t know who she could be texting. Margaret and Bridget, I suppose. Or some cousins, now her quarantine is lifted, and her sins have been expunged by blood. Spell bollocks, miss. B-O-L-O-X, is it? That won’t go in; the phone keeps changing it. The phone should mind its own business. And she hunches over it and her thumbs work across the screen and the light of it is reflected in her eyes. Mary Crothery calls my father sir. Will you stop calling me sir, he says, and she says, Oh, ya, I forgot, sorry, sir, sorry. And they both laugh.
Travellers are the only true Irish, my father said one day at lunch. Ye never mixed blood with the Vikings nor the English nor the Normans nor any of them. Ye were warriors and chieftains and kings. The Hill of Tara ye came from originally. The royalty of Ireland ye were.
Who were? Mary Crothery said.
Travellers, long ago, my father said. Ye ruled over Ireland and were warriors, and ye fought against every invader that ever took sword against us, and lost all the power and influence ye had for a finish and were set upon the road and never stopped. The very same as the Gypsies abroad in Europe; they’re called that because they used to be the rulers of Egypt before the pharaohs even, and were so powerful that they set out to take over other countries, and got repelled at every border so they stayed moving from place to place in search of conquest and for a finish they never stopped.
I always knew that, Mary Crothery said. That’s why the country people has no time for us. They’re afraid we’ll take over again.
Why do you call people who aren’t Travellers country people? I asked her.
I don’t know in the Hell, she said, and raised her cross to her lips at the mention of that foul place, to rid her lips of the sin of the saying of it, and to protect herself from its clutches.
*
Pat drove into Daddy’s yard today. He met us at the halfway point between the gate and house, Mary and me, just walking out to see could we find the Comerfords’ horse, nosing through the bars of their gate. Mary had a bag of knobby unripe apples for him, picked from one of Daddy’s trees. Twist them off, Daddy told her, as she picked them, the way they’ll grow again next year.
I did, sir, she said, I always does it that way.
And Daddy said, Good girl, good girl, and turned again to his hoeing, whistling and unstiffened, the peak of his cap turned jauntily towards the sky. Two years at least have fallen from his face; his limbs and joints have seemingly unseized. The sun, he says, and the bit of exercise.
The house faces south and so Pat came from out of the sun. I squinted at him and he was stopped beside us before I recognized him. He sat looking up, revving his engine lightly, like a boy racer, his elbow cocked at the window and his other hand lightly resting on the wheel. He could have been eighteen again, if it wasn’t for his bald spot and his lines; he could have been driving his mother’s car, borrowed for an hour of shifting at the Lookout or the lay-by off the road behind the Height. Hello, he said, and eyed my swollen middle, and Mary Crothery, up and down.
Hello, I said back, and Mary Crothery moved a step away from Pat’s car, and in behind me, the way a shy child would when presented to a stranger.
I won’t bite you, Pat said.
You wouldn’t want to, Mary Crothery said in a low voice, barely more than a whisper. I’d knock your fuckin teeth out for you.
And Pat’s face darkened and he said, What’s that, now?
And Mary Crothery said from behind me: Not a thing, sir.
*
Pat asked me to go for a drive with him and I said, No.
Mary Crothery continued towards the gate, saying, I’ll leave you at it, miss. I’ll go down and say hello to the horse. If you scream I’ll hear you.
Pat curled his lip as he watched her walk away in his wing mirror and said, She’s a fuckin bould yoke, isn’t she? Then he looked up at me and said, Come on. Please, Mel.
It’s a long time since he last called me Mel. It’s a long time since he drove into my father’s yard. It’s a long time since I wanted to go with him, and have him press his lips against my skin, and squeeze my hand against his chest so I could feel his pounding heart, and hear him say, Do you feel the way it’s pounding, Mel, do you feel it? That’s what you do to me. You make my heart beat out of my chest. It’s a long time since the time before the festering, the regime of nicks and cuts, the terrible and savage war of attrition that I ended with my neutron bomb of happy news.
Come on, Mel, please, Pat said again, and suddenly I was walking around to the passenger side, and he was drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel, and he was leaning forward and smiling, adjusting himself for the spin, and he had a devilish look on his face that used to always weaken me, and make me have to remind myself to be strong and to not give in to him, to not be melted by the heat between us, to stay good. And I never would.
Fuck it, you’re after getting quare big, he said, as I got in and he started to reverse out to the road.
Fuck off, I said, and he laughed. And a twist of dust rose up from the roadside ahead, like a mini cyclone in the stillness of the day, and Mary Crothery looked over her shoulder and met my eye as we passed her, and I couldn’t read the expression on her face, and Pat and I drove on along the road.
There was a Happy Meal carton squashed on the mat, and a Dinky car and a chewed straw, and I asked Pat what child had been in his car, and he said his nephew, Fidelma’s little lad; they’d been home from Canada a few weeks ago. I brought him away over to Kilmastulla, he said, to give a hand drawing silage with the uncle, and he sat up beside me in the tractor and, Lord, he got some kick out of it. He was a pure pleasure so he was, that little man. They’re gone back now. He’ll be big the next time I see him, I bet you. I’ll probably never see him as a child again, imagine. Only on Skype, maybe. You can’t draw silage on Skype, though, that’s for sure and certain. And Pat put on his sunglasses to try to hide his tears from me.
And all the words I had for him were Oh, Pat, and even they suffered death as they crossed my lips.
Fidelma was going to call out to you, he said, after a mile or so of silence, but Mam told her she was on no account to set foot anywhere near you. That one is poison, she said, and this family has no link to her any more. And I sort of panicked when I heard that, Mel. I got a fright to think this might be really it.
There was one other car at the Lookout, parked at an angle from the kerb at the bottom of the long narrow car park. The lake was still and silvery-blue below us; the Clare Hills seemed only the throw of a stone away. Wakes of motor boats were stretched across the water like scrapes on shiny metal. Pat parked halfway down and nudged me as he pulled the handbrake. Watch the two below, he said. In the Clio. Do you remember the girl of the Donnells that was killed out the Limerick Road a few years ago? That’s her mother in that car, and the boy driving is the boy that was driving the car that crashed. That boy must think they can’t be seen from the road if he parks the car crooked like that. Misfortune. He done time and all. Jaysus, he was a great hurler, too. It’s an awful shame. They go off driving together the whole time. The whole place has it they’re doing a line. He calls out to Ballinaclough Cross to pick her up. I think they think they’re doing a great job of staying on the QT but every fucker has them well clocked. And she having a husband at home, and he the boy that killed her daughter. Imagine that. The husband fell hard into the drink, though, by all accounts. And Pat shook his head in censorious resignation, and he breathed in deeply and looked at me, and smiled, and said, Ah, sure. What about it? It takes all sorts. We can’t judge anyone anyway, me or you. Can we? And it hit me fully then just where I was, the ludicrousness of the situation I was in, sitting in a car with Pat, at the Lookout, where teenagers come to shift, where we used to come to shift, and boy racers come to make circles of rubber on the tarmac, and tourists stop to look at the greenness of the mountains and the blueness of the lake, or, more often, the misting rain and the ghostly hulking shapes behind it, the infinite variations of grey.
And I nearly let him kiss me, imagine. And worse again is I’ve felt a kind of regret rising unbidden from inside me these last few days since we went for our drive that I didn’t let him kiss me. Can’t we call it quits, he said, and start again from zero? Can’t we call the books balanced and close them and throw them all away and forget about them? Look it. I done the dirt with the prostitutes. You done the dirt with the internet cunt. You got caught out, fair enough. That could happen anyone. I’ll get my works put back together and we’ll try and try again. A little brother or sister for . . . And he hadn’t a word for what was inside me, to put a name on this alien life. They have great strides made now, you know. Your man told me that inside in the clinic the time I went in. I went private so he was mad for chat. An Arab he was, of course. I’d say he charged me an extra bit for every word out of his mouth. Lasers, they use now, and micro yokes and all that stuff. They could undo what they done as quick as they done it. I could be firing live rounds again by next week. Jesus, your tits are gone massive.
And he stretched his arm across and I thought he was going for my breasts, and I slapped his hand hard downwards, and said, Jesus, Pat, and he looked hurt at me and said, No, fuck’s sake, Melody, I only wanted to put my hand there a second. And he looked down and slowly laid his hand across my stomach, and he left it resting gently there, and the warmth of it soaked into me, to us. I only wanted to see what it would feel like, Pat said in a whisper, and he sat and looked across at the Clare Hills and so did I and we were silent for a while, and all the years of wounding seemed in those moments to fade, and to lose their form and realness, like an ungraspable dream, dissolving in the moments after waking. And a summer breeze rolled down along the slope of the hills and out across the water and made ripples there that danced for a second with the light and then were gone.
*
Imagine my mother’s face, Pat said, as he drove me home, if I arrived on with you now. It was probably she put the brick through your window, you know. Hey. Will we go for one spin down through the village, for the gallery? Just so everyone knows we’re on good terms? So smartarses know to watch their fuckin jaws?
And I said, No, and he said that was fair enough, and he drew his car along by Daddy’s outside wall and stopped there. I won’t drive in, he said. And I don’t know how it took me so long to figure this out, but I saw then, maybe because we were out of the sun’s glare, in the shade of the willow that sentries the lawn, the slight dilation of his pupils, and the shrill light in his irises, and the slight yellowness of the sclera of his eyes, and the mad weave of bloody lines at their edges. I said, Pat, are you on something? And he looked at me in silence and he opened his mouth, and there was a lie on his lips, I knew, and he seemed to think better of the lie and so he closed his mouth again and he looked away from me and he said nothing for a minute, then he whispered: Yokes the doctor gave me. My nerves came at me a bit. I couldn’t sleep or eat for a good long while. I took my father’s gun one day and walked along the river path down towards Ballyartella and the time got away on me and when they saw the gun gone and me gone too they panicked and my father ran the whole way down and when he met me at the end of Stack’s Lane at the bend of the river he could hardly breathe and I had the gun loaded but I was only hoping for a shot at a duck, that’s all, but my father took the gun off of me and he took the cartridges out and fucked them into the river and he started crying and saying, Jesus, son, Jesus, son, there’s no woman worth that, and it gave me an awful hop to see him that upset and so I went to the doctor to please him, really. To please them all. The way they wouldn’t be worrying about me and fucking mithering non-stop.
I thought of Paddy and his envelope of cash, and his plans for my exile. All fathers are the same in extremes, all parents. They’ll do anything they can to save their young from pain.
*
My father met me at the door and he said, Well? How’s the boy? The boy, he always called Pat. I’d forgotten that. He hasn’t called him that in years. I know how fond he always was of Pat; he never could disguise it. They often stood together at the school wall to watch a match in the hurling field. I wouldn’t please the fuckers hand over a fiver to go into an underage match, Daddy would say, and Pat would agree, and they’d both come home half blind from squinting across the distance to the field and they’d often be sunburnt from standing in the open when they could have sat in the cool shade of the stand. They footed turf together in Cloughjordan bog and bagged it and drew it home on a borrowed trailer and divided it equally between our houses. They each agreed with everything the other said on hurling, and cars, and politics, and which fella was stone useless and which fella would be the saving of us all, and it was hard sometimes to figure out what they were talking about, but they always seemed relaxed together, and words flowed back and forth between them easily. Pat is a man that’s liked by men and so is my father.
He’s fine, Dad, I said. There’s no fear of him.
And how’s his parents, and the girl, Fidelma? Did she have a child, ever?
And I said she did, a little boy, remember? They went to Canada shortly after he was born?
And Dad inspected the ceiling as though scanning the whiteness there for some clue as to the whereabouts of the memories of these things, and he said, Oh, yes, of course, I have it now. And how is she getting on over there?
And I lost my temper then, suddenly, with no sign given to me beforehand of its imminent departure, and I shouted, Jesus Christ, Dad, for fuck’s sake, how the fuck would I know how she is? Do you think she fucking rings me and tells me or writes to me or something? That family think I’m shit, Dad, and they always did. And I stood fuming, waiting for the cooling, breathing deeply in and out.
And my father took his glasses off and wiped them on his sleeve and said, I was only asking, the way anyone would. Go easy now, lovey, don’t be vexed. Please don’t be vexed, now. Come in and sit down and I’ll make you a bit to eat.