Animal Needs

Meadowsweet Farm is perhaps not the place you have prepared for. There is no waft of harvest to perfume the air. There is no contented lowing from the fields. These are not happy acres. Meadowsweet Farm is put together out of breeze blocks, barbed wire and galvanised tin. The land is flat and featureless. There are sawn-off barrels filled with rancid rainwater. A snapped cable cracks like a whip and lifts sparks from a dismal concrete yard—the electrics are haywire. The septic tank is backed up. The poultry shed is the secret torture facility of a Third World regime, long rumoured by shivering peasants in the mountain night. Desperation reigns, and we hear it as a croaky bayou howl. There is a general sensation of slurry.

John Martin stalks the ground, with a five-litre tub of white paint spattering a trail behind him. He pulls up short and considers a gate and decides to give it a quick undercoat, and does so. He nods to himself, acknowledgement of a job at least begun. There was an offer on the five-litre tubs, and hasty streaks of white are showing up all over Meadowsweet Farm this morning. He is painting gates and fences and breeze-block walls, barrels, sheds, pallets—if it stands still, he paints it. This is a brilliant white that will glow eerily after dark. It’s as though he’s preparing for an airlift evacuation. He fetches his tool box from the 4x4 and storms the poultry shed. He takes out a screwdriver and has another go at the fuseboard and suffers a mild shock. It leaves a silvery tingle all down his right arm, and to shake this feeling he rotates the arm several times through the air: a rock star guitarist, with an audience of fowl. He goes outside again and puts three lengths of ply across a muddy pathway. He paints another bit of wall. He fetches the hard-wire sweeping brush and goes through the yards, grimly janitorial. You’d swear that royalty was coming and in a sense, it is: the woman from the Organic Certification Board is on her way. He gets a cloth and a basin of water and goes out to the road, where the Meadowsweet Farm signage has lately been erected—cheerful yellows and reds, a cock crowing against a blue Iowan sky—and he wipes it down. He drags some fertiliser bags out of a ditch and piles them for a bonfire. He goes up to the house and into the kitchen and he eyeballs his wife and he says:

‘Mary? I’ll ask you again. How many times did you come?’

This is no rosy-cheeked farmer. This is a gaunt and sallow man, long-armed, with livid, electric hair.

‘Fuck off,’ says Mary.

He stands in the middle of the kitchen floor, with his feet planted for strength, and his neck warily hunched. He is watchful and tense, five foot eleven of peeled nerves.

‘All I’m saying is get it out in the open. Can’t we talk about it now, while she’s at playschool? How many times, Mary? I swear I won’t hold it against you.’

She looks up from the computer. She scrunches her eyes tightly shut and then opens them again hopefully, as if by mercy he might have disappeared. It all reduces down to this thin sour broth: you open your eyes and there’s a nutjob on the floor in front of you.

‘Why are you doing this? Haven’t you enough to be doing outside? Do this much for me, John, okay? Turn around. And fuck off.’

Wounded, his mouth a grey slit, John Martin goes again into the weather, and a filthy breeze has worked itself up, and he retreats to the shelter of the chicken shed. Poultry management is no joke at the best of times. You would be amazed what can go wrong. At present, it is the heating. He has not been able to regulate the heat for five days, and the shed is like Zaire. Unaccustomed to the luxury of such warmth, the chickens have been unpleasantly lively but this seems to be subsiding now to a kind of rattled exhaustion. They screech and gasp in a terrible, grating way.

‘Will ye ever shut up?’ he says, and he wipes sweat from his brow. ‘Please!’

This is Meadowsweet Farm in its fourth year. Previously, it was known only as Dolan’s, her father’s place, until he had a massive stroke, which was much deserved. All that was left of the Dolans then was Mary. They hadn’t exactly been ringing the bells above in Sligo, so they thought, why not? People said from the start there was going to be a problem with the chickens. They were an expensive, high-faluting breed. People laughed at the idea of artichokes, too, and muttered knowingly the second September, the time of the artichoke famine. Orders have been slow enough coming in on the computer at Meadowsweet Farm. This is a scatter of acres outside the town of B_____. There are both organic and traditional operations in the area. There are crisis levels of debt. There is alcoholism and garrulousness and depressive ideation. There is the great disease of familiarity. These are long, bruised days on the midland plain. People wake in the night and shout out names they have never known. There is an amount of lead insult among the young. The river is technically dead since 2002. There is addiction to prescription medications and catalogue shopping. Boys with pesticide eyes pull handbrake turns at four in the morning and scream the names of dark angels. Everybody is fucking everybody else.

An engine subsides in the yard outside. John Martin shakes himself alive and thinks no, Jesus, she can’t be here already. He scurries to the yard but it is not the woman from the O.C.B. It is the grey Suzuki van. It’s Frank Howe!

Howe steps out of the van, displays his palms in a gesture of openness and shucks the cuffs of his jacket.

‘What about you, Big Man?’ he says.

Howe is from the north and has crude animal intelligence. He can smell weakness and need. He steps across the greasy, puddled yard, and he kicks the fire-snapping cable from his path. John Martin raises a trembling hand to stop him.

‘Frank,’ he says. ‘I’m going to ask you to clear out of here now. And I’m not going to ask you twice.’

He takes a wrench from the ground and holds it in threat above his head. He assumes an attack stance.

‘Easy, killer,’ says Howe. ‘Is that one of mine?’

Frank Howe sells combination socket wrench sets at the markets. He also sells copies of Rolexes, pirate DVDs, illicit growth promoters and directions for dog fights. He stands calmly smiling in the Siberian wind. He chews on a scabbed knuckle. His black leather sports coat has its collar turned up. His peanut-shaped head is shaved to bristles. He has put the hours in on the sunbed. He can be no more than five foot two inches tall.

‘It’s too soon,’ says John Martin. ‘Oh it’s too fresh, Frank! Fuck off out of here now lively.’

‘She inside?’

‘I’m warning you!’

‘You’ll warn nobody, John. We’re as well to get that clear for a start. Put the wrench down and come in and talk to me like a good man.’

Mon, a gude mon. Howe strides like a six-footer into the poultry shed. He drags out a pail and sits on it. He sets his face sternly, and hovers his fingers in the air: a kestrel waiting to swoop, or a concert pianist poised to begin.

‘I am a man,’ he says, slowly, emphasising each word.

Aaah… ohmmm… a… mon.

‘And she,’ says Howe, ‘is a woman.’

A wummun.

John Martin considers cranking shut the slide-door. He considers taking a leap through the air and beating Howe all about the head with the wrench. He could wrap the body in opened sacks and drag it to the prep area and put it through the mincer, piece by piece, mix it with the mix for the meatballs, flavour with coriander and lime, put it out to the farmers’ markets, Thai-style.

‘You,’ says Howe, ‘are a man.’

He winks, appreciatively, at John Martin.

‘And Madge,’ he smiles, ‘is a woman.’

Howe shuts his eyes and takes a small bow.

‘End of story,’ he says. ‘I had a go off yours. You had a go off mine. If you like we can put four crosses on St Jarlath’s pitch and nail ourselves to them. Or we can get on with us lives and forget all about it. Be friends still. Look. Come over tonight, John, bring herself. We’ll have a few drinks and relax, for Godsake. Is all I’m saying to you.’

‘You’re trying to destroy my family,’ says John Martin.

The heads of the chickens twist from each to the other, like the crowd at Roland Garros. Howe stands and kicks the pail aside. He shrugs. He pushes past John Martin in the doorway and heads for the van.

‘Take your ease, John,’ he says. ‘I’ll give yez a tinkle later on, soon as I’m done in Shinrone.’

John Martin walks into the fields of the farm. It is all around him, and there is a vague hissing at its edges, as in a sour dream. She is due for twelve and the place is an out-and-out disaster. Meadowsweet Farm is a concern on the brink. The O.C.B. runs a tight ship, and if they cannot get on board, they might as well turn the place over for sites. Be done with it. He notes a rusted gate and fetches a scraper and opens a fresh tub of the white paint and rinses out a brush under the tap in the yard. He sets to. Madge Howe is an attractive lady but mad. The glazed look, the grey tongue. There is going to be hell to pay. What was he thinking?

He takes rust off the gate. A fine mist of copper-coloured particles lifts into the air and causes him to sneeze. He cannot shake the fear that his daughter has been permanently damaged. She is a spaced out kind of child at the best of times, but she has gone even deeper into herself since. Fear is a black wet ditch on a cold night. It is hard to claw yourself out, your fingers slip in the loam. He puts an undercoat on the gate. He takes a couple of fertiliser bags out of a hedge. He cannot even think about going to have a look at the few cattle. There is a white nervous sky, and magpies are everywhere on patrol, stomping around, like they own the place. He takes one of the phones from his pocket and puts in a call to Noreen.

‘Can I come over?’ he says

‘Oh John,’ she says. ‘No way. I don’t know how long he’s going to be gone.’

‘I can’t stop thinking about you,’ he says.

‘Shut up!’ she says.

‘I want you now, Noreen.’

‘I’m warning you!’ she says.

‘How long is he gone?’

‘No.’

‘Can we not chance it?’

‘No.’

‘I’m in love with you, Noreen,’ he breathes it, a whisper, a husk on the breeze.

‘Park on the L_______ road,’ she says, ‘and come over across by Tobin’s field.’

He climbs into the 4x4. It’ll be chancy on time but what are you going to do? The bayou howl, the bayou howl. He backs out of the yard, goes down the drive, turns onto the road. He will need to stop off in town to pick up condoms. He is in the thirty-seventh winter of his life. The other phone goes, the official line. Caller i.d. says ‘mry’.

‘What?’

‘Where you goin’?’

‘I’ve to head into town.’

‘What for?’

‘I’ve to get rope.’

‘Pick up the dog while you’re there’

‘You’re not serious, Mary? She’s not!’

‘What?’

‘She’s in again?’

‘Yes.’

‘Arra the fuck, since when?’

‘I’d to drop her in this morning. She was bad. You were told this. You were in the back fields. I’m talking to a wall is what I’m talking to. She’s ready since eleven. They rang. They said pick her up.’

‘She’s in again?’

Picking up the dog will not be straightforward. The pregnancy has been a nightmare, she’s even been snapping at the child. When John Martin interfered with her supper one night, pushing it out of the way with his foot, she nearly took his face off. She is a fast-tempered spaniel bitch, high-bred, with taut nerves. He breaches the tearful peripheries of the town. He makes it through to the central square under a tormented sky; he parks. The vet’s clinic is on one of the terraces that traipse from the square. There are feelings strong enough to overwhelm the physical laws. There are feelings that can settle in stone. There is an age-old malaise in the vicinity of this terrace. It has soaked into the grain of the place. The afternoons looking out on sheeting rain… The nights staring into the dark infinities… How would a place be right after it?

The vet’s clinic, however, is ignorant of such desperation. It has by force of will and riches wiped it from the hard-drive. The clinic is styled in chrome and blonde wood, there are slate tiles and extravagant leather couches in a reception expertly wardened by a seething goddess of Slavic extraction: a limbre Svetlana. Matronly ladies on the couches nurse trembling small dogs: this time of morning, the vet’s is poodle terrain.

‘Hiya,’ says John Martin. ‘About the dog?’

‘Name, please.’

‘Martin. John Martin.’

‘Dog name!’ spits the ice queen.

‘De Valera.’

She speaks into a headset. Clearance comes through and he is allowed access to the shimmering depths of the building. How the fuck much are vets making these days?

‘Hiya John!’

A headful of tousled locks emerges from a doorway. The vet has a stevedore handshake and millionaire teeth. He is a tan, highlighted guy of maybe sixty five. Dev reclines on a space-age gurney. She wears an expression of sainted pain. She averts her gaze from John Martin. She has the look of a brittle heiress cruelly sectioned in the ripe years.

‘Clearly, yes, it’s a moody little thing we got on our hands,’ says the square-jawed vet, and he flicks at his bleachy flop of hair.

‘I imagine the pregnancy would be…’

‘There are hormonal events, absolutely, but from what I’ve been told, things are cutting a little deeper with Dev. I’ve done bloods, they’ll go for checks, and what can I say? We’ll play wait-see.’

‘And, eh…’

‘Now maybe a lot of this stuff will resolve itself in the very near future.’

‘Once she has the litter?’

‘It should do an amount for her temperament, John, but even so I feel things have got to a stage where I’m going to prescribe an additional treatment. At least for the time being.’

‘Oh?’

‘To be sure to be sure. Belt and braces.’

He presents John Martin with a small white packet containing forty-eight sachets of K-9 Serenity.

‘You sprinkle it on her dinner, just the one a day.’

‘What is it, exactly?’

‘It’s an anti-depressant.’

‘The dog is depressed?’

‘It would seem so, John, yes.’

John Martin settles with glowering Svetlana; cash, as he no longer holds an account at the vet’s. Dev’s treatment costs about the same as a week in France. He is not in a position to grizzle about this, as he has a more pressing concern. De Valera is refusing to walk. He tugs on the leash, but there is venomous resistance. He tugs again, and she yelps. The matrons on the couches mutter. De Valera moans. He drags her across the slate tiles. He bends to pick her up and finds there is an unpredictable amount of spaniel to deal with, and the thought of the litter inside is queasy. On the street, she snarls at him. He has to hold her at arm’s length to prevent blood being drawn. He puts her down on the pavement with more force than is necessary.

‘For fucksake, Dev! Behave!’

An assault of fresh rain is carried slant-wise from the west. A tuneless brass band strikes up inside. Nervous agitation works like water on stone. It is a slow, steady dripping that can meet no answering force. Over time, it washes everything away.

With De Valera livid in the passenger seat, John Martin drives out the far side of the town. He stops at Lidl and pops in for some German condoms. There is a twilight beach scene on the pack: a big blonde couple, arm in arm, up to their eyeballs in it by a dusk-marooned sea.

The town recedes in the rear-view mirror. He pulls onto the bare, desolate stretch of L_______ Road. He parks at the usual place. He is about to set off when Dev begins to rave and foam again. The dog might be heard, might draw prying eyes to this quiet place. He rips open two sachets of K-9 Serenity and sprinkles them on the floor in back—it is a greyish mica dust, and De Valera is drawn to it like love.

John Martin slips away, and cuts across by Tobin’s field. He feels a familiar guilt—not two weeks previously, he had dosed also his daughter.

It was a Saturday evening, at the hotel bar. It was the usual run of things.

You’d do a few bits in town, and then hit back to D_____’s Hotel for a feed of drink. All the other couples would be around, all the old familiars. John and Mary Martin fell in as always with Frank and Madge Howe. Frank had been making cracks about it for months. He said they’ll be talking, John, they’ll be asking questions, mark my words. Who’s with who, they’ll say. He had brought it up, again and again, and it seemed less jokey each time. Then he took John Martin aside in the gents.

‘What about it?’ he said. ‘Grown adults so we are?’

John Martin blushed, and chuckled, but Howe continued.

‘No objections on our side,’ he said. ‘Sure yez could come on up after?’

John Martin tried to laugh it off but there was a tension. In the lounge, he told Mary, and she smiled and said:

‘Arra. They’re lively at least.’

‘I don’t think he’s messing any more, Mary. I think he’s full in earnest.’

‘Sure what harm in it?’ she said.

Then they were back in the front room of the terrace house the Howes were renting. Curry boxes everywhere, vodka and beer. Frank was messing with the stereo and singing along, red in the face. Madge and Mary were skitting and whispering. Frank went up the stairs and came back down with a huge pile of sports jackets in bright colours.

‘My new line,’ he said, ‘they’re selling like hot dogs so they are.’

‘Cakes,’ said John Martin. ‘Hot cakes.’

‘Will you do a spot of modelling for me, Johnnie boy?’

And the two of them paraded up and down, in the jackets, and pushed the sleeves up, play-acting.

‘Crockett and Tubbs!’ roared Madge.

And ‘The Best of The Eagles’ was put on and they all danced and Frank said, what about it, Tubbs?

Then it blurred, and Frank and Mary walked out of the living room.

‘Come on, John,’ said Madge, and she grabbed the car keys, ‘we’ll head for yours.’

You imagine the whole wife-swapping business would take four decisions but really it only takes three.

He moves across the low dip of the bottom fields, rat-faced with need and longing. His long arms swing with intent, one then the other in slow pendulum. He mutters onto his breath as he walks. He climbs over the fence and onto the Flaherty land. An old horse they keep, spared the knackers out of sentiment, regards him with due suspicion, with a knowingness, and returns to its cud with patent disgust. The Flaherty house arises, and he squints towards the yard to make sure there is no Rover jeep there. Lit with nerves and excitement, priapic in the sour light of noon, he approaches the kitchen window, and taps, and she comes to it at once. He blows a fog onto the pane. She unlatches the door, with a scowl, and he steps inside, with a quick squint over his shoulder, and he goes for her.

‘Back off!’ she says.

‘What are you talking about, Noreen? You told me come!’

The long arms swing out, beseeching.

‘I made a mistake. You can take off from here now and don’t mind the old shite talk. He’s only gone in for diesel.’

‘Don’t be telling lies! You wouldn’t have told me come if it was diesel. I have yokes.’

He shows the condom packet.

‘You come around here sniffing like a mutt!’ she hisses, and begins to cry. ‘I made the mistake before, I won’t make it again! Out!’

‘An hour ago, Noreen! Park by the L_______ Road, you said. Cut across by Tobin’s field. Am I making this up?’

‘You’re under stress, John. This isn’t the answer! Just go, okay?’

‘I see,’ he says, ‘I see what you’re trying to do here. You’re trying to turn it back on me. You’re…’

The Rover jeep pulls into the yard. Noreen freezes, then goes into convulsions, her breath rolls through her system in heavy gulps, and she grips the fridge to keep the feet beneath her. John Martin almost smiles: ah not this old dance again. From the window, he can see big Jim Flaherty pounding across the yard. This Flaherty is no gentle giant. He is carrot-topped, with a hair-trigger temper, and a specific distaste for John Martin on account of a previous situation involving lambs. Now he fills the kitchen door. Now he lays his eyes on John Martin.

‘Jim! The very man. I was only in looking for you. What I wanted to know, Jim, was had you the loan of a wire-cutters? I’ve only an auld bevel-edge below, no use at all for the job at hand. It’s a new boundary I’m putting up for the chickens, give them some bit of a run at least. They’d reef themselves if I went at it with the bevel-edge. What I’d need would be a semi-flush. Of course it’s a last-minute job, as usual. I have herself from the O.C.B. coming around to me. Today, would you believe, and I’m still at it. So would you ah… would you ah… The last minute man! Dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight.’

‘God, John, a semi-flush? I don’t know. I… don’t think so. No, John, no. I’m afraid not. Apologies. Nothing I can do to help you out there. Have you thought of Mangan, or Troy?’

‘True, I suppose, I could nearly ah… I could nearly… I could knock in, I suppose?’

‘You could, John. Especially given they’d be five miles nearer to you. Given they’d be neighbours.’

‘I ah…’

‘And tell me, by the way, while we’re at it,’ and Jim Flaherty takes a dainty step back, a little dancing step back, and he blocks off the door with an arm to the jamb, an arm with the reach of a mid-sized crane. ‘Tell me, John. Where you parked?’

‘Oh, I ah… I left it down by L_______ Road. Actually.’

‘I see. You decided to park twelve hundred yards away. At a spot that is hidden from the open view. I see.’

‘Listen, anyway, folks, I’ll knock away out of it. I’ll see ye.’

‘I’ll tell you now, John, we can do it easy or we can do it hard. Which way would you want it to be?’

‘Easy.’

‘Good man. So how long have you been sleeping with my wife?’

‘Jimmy!’ she cries. ‘This is crazy talk!’

‘Noreen, love, would you ever go upstairs and lock yourself into the bathroom and put the key out under the door for me? I’ll deal with you in due course. John, you might take a seat by the fireplace, please.’

Noreen trots for the stairs. John Martin sits down on a straight-backed chair. Jim Flaherty takes a length of rope from beneath the sink. He comes across the floor, smiling softly in a pair of well-pressed denims.

‘I was wondering all along who it was,’ he says, ‘but you know I never once thought it’d be a Clare man! Then again, you’re nearly always surprised at what looks up at you out of the trap.’

He winds the rope gently but firmly around John Martin’s thin waist, around and around, and he knots it quickly and precisely. He takes a clean, ironed tea towel from a drawer and presents it to the bound farmer.

‘I want you to use this as a gag, John,’ he says. ‘It’ll stop you swallowing your tongue.’

‘And what, am… what am… precisely?’

‘What I’m going to do, John, is I’m going to dislocate your shoulder. It’ll give you something to remember the day by.’

Sometimes, in the slow drag of winter, terrible sounds will pierce the calm of the midlands air, and we look up, and our brows gather in knit nervous folds, but we persuade ourselves that it is otherwise, that these are not the cries of humankind. But we know! In our hearts, we know.

John Martin comes back across the bottom fields, walks with a drop-shouldered jerk, and he’s had thumps in the mouth as well, and they took teeth with them. Oh the terrible spittle of revenge that formed on the grey lips of big weeping Jim Flaherty! But he must leave it go. The woman from the O.C.B. is due ten minutes since. He gets back to the 4x4. De Valera is gone apeshit on the K-9 Serenity.

‘I swear to God to you, John, I didn’t! Not at all. Not even close.’

‘How many times, Mary?’

Half eleven in the morning, the Sunday after the Saturday, and she stood there, and she lied to him! He was sat in the kitchen trying to eat a sausage sandwich. And there is no bite to eat he likes better in the week than the sausage sandwich of a Sunday morning. And he couldn’t eat it.

‘No, honest to Jesus,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t the same. It was just… different. All I wanted was to be back at our usual auld thing. Never again!’

He tried to believe her. He gripped himself inside and squeezed hard, and he felt a little better. He took a bite out of the sausage sandwich, chewed it, remorsefully, and shook another lash of brown sauce into it. He was man and boy a martyr to the brown sauce. His head wouldn’t let him be.

‘I’ll ask you again,’ he said. ‘Did you come, Mary?’

He does not believe that his wife is a malicious woman. He is no fool and he knows that there are women who have malicious streaks. His mother, now, was a malicious woman, you could even say an evil woman. He would never forget the night he went into her room after she’d unbeknownst to him been with O’Donnell and the way she was lying on her stomach and the way she turned around to him and the way she kind of… writhed, is the only word, like a serpent, and the look that was on her face. Pure hate. But Mary, no, he didn’t think she had that streak in her.

He had to believe her, somehow. There were walls in the house painted more often than Mary came, and he wanted to be sure it was her, not him.

He didn’t know how he finished that sausage sandwich but by Jesus he finished it. Then he went out to the chickens. He walked through the yard. A Sunday, and he gave an impression of slitheriness, like a stoat.

Driving a 4x4 with a dislocated shoulder is no picnic, not when the white sear of the pain waters your eyes and blurs your vision. But it is nothing at all compared to driving a 4x4 with a dislocated shoulder while a manic-depressive spaniel, in manic phase, answerable only to the tides of the moon, makes repeated assaults upon the area of your crotch. Blood streaming down his face, raging against it all, tears streaming from the sheer physical agony, spitting teeth—it is in this state that John Martin pulls into the yard of Meadowsweet Farm. He is awaited there by his wife, and by the woman from the O.C.B.

Mary comes running.

‘Oh Jesus!’ she cries. ‘Oh Christ! Oh Dev! Are you okay?’

‘Hello there!’ calls John Martin, and staggers from the jeep, and falls to his knees. ‘I’m afraid I got caught up in the town. I’d a bit of am… a bit of an auld am… whatchacallit.’

The woman from the O.C.B., a tall, thin matron in a green wax jacket, takes a couple of nervous steps back.

‘Bastard!’ cries Mary Martin, and she runs screaming to the house, with the small howling dog in her arms.

The worst of it was that he had crushed two Valium into hot milk and then poured it into his crying child to conk her out. It was Madge’s idea, and they were her tablets, but what kind of a father would do that? And for what turned out to be a five-minute special. And Madge lay there, for the rest of the night, yapping nonsense out of her, smoking her fags.

‘That young miss will sleep now sweet as a dream for you, John, you have nothing to worry about there. These are the English Valium, you see, these are the Valium we used get all along. Until they starts making them below in Clonmel. Clonmel! They’re not the same at all and I’m not the only one that’s saying it. Honest to God, John, you might as well be eating Smarties. But I have an arrangement about the English Valiums with the man in the chemist, the man of the McCaffertys. Have you ever noticed, John, the way every single last one of the McCaffertys has the big teeth?’

He had never put down a night like it.

He came from a town himself, it wasn’t as if he had background in poultry management. It was not a pleasant setup, not by any stretch, not when a smother of them would go on you, all the disease. There was a young fella in town wore one of the long coats with the badges and he was forever buttonholing John Martin with rants about cruelty. What about the quality of life, he’d say, getting himself all worked up. What about my quality of life, said John Martin. Do you think I’m outside in a palace?

The poultry shed was bad now. It was bad. But he had mixed feelings about the poultry shed. He had mixed feelings because it was the one place his daughter was calm, it was the one place she never cried out or skittered. She would pull at him to take her there and he’d go. She’d sit there on a pail in her red coat and it was like she was in a chapel.

He couldn’t get it out of his mind all the following week. Slugging around the place, trying to look after chickens, and it haunting him. First thing in the morning, last thing at night. Madge was handsome but crazy, and he didn’t need any more distractions. There was already the situation with Noreen. There was also the situation with Kelli Carmody at the sports centre, though that was most definitely over. Kelli was nineteen, for Christ’s sake, and they are unpredictable as snakes at that age. He had changed the hours of his workouts to avoid her, and he fully intended to continue doing so. There is only so much a man’s heart can take. He was still getting over Jenna. He knew whenever he saw her at the till in Lidl that he wasn’t fully over her yet. And Yvonne, too, Yvonne Troy was a heartbreaker. So no, there would be no more messing, there would be no situation with Madge. Even if she did have legs that went up to Armagh.

The woman from the O.C.B. is polite but firm.

‘No way, John. I mean, seriously,’ and she half laughs. ‘You’re not even in the ballpark here. We have to maintain standards, you know?’

‘I realise,’ he says, through gritted teeth, because the pain is if anything increasing, ‘that there needs to be an improvement in the poultry shed.’

The woman from the O.C.B. climbs into her jeep. She sits for a moment with her feet held out the door, and yanks off her Wellingtons, one then the other, and flexes her toes in the stockinged feet, then reaches in for the driving shoes. A slight colour comes into her cheeks from the exertion of this.

‘I realise,’ he says, ‘that I need to regulate the heat and get a decent run marked off. I realise I need to invigorate the feed.’

She wears streaks in her hair and the faintest trace of lipstick and her left eye turns in slightly to regard a haughty nose. She isn’t bad at all.

‘John,’ she says. ‘This isn’t really about the chickens.’

The child is home from school. She is at the upstairs window, utterly blank-faced, looking out at it all. She pulls the heavy curtain shut, tottering with the weight, and the room becomes dark as night. The heels of her trainers light up as she crosses to the bed. She climbs in and pulls the covers over her head to thicken the dark. She flashes her torch, on and off, again and again. It is night-time in a secret world. There are dancing bears on a frosty rooftop as the happy music plays. She walks the twinkling streets. The good witch waves from a high window. The postman cycles across the sky. She turns up the music still louder. A bulldog barks a yard of stars.