It was hard to know which of them was the more shocked.
She was sitting on the edge of her armchair, her velvet robe bound tightly across her chest, her bare feet balancing on the points of her toes. Mick kept looking from her face to her hair, her hair to her face. The face, he knew. Even without her makeup, he knew her face. But the hair belonged to someone else, and he couldn’t get used to it. On the doorstep he had wondered for a second had he arrived at the wrong house. Until she said, “Mick! Jesus. What are you doing here?”
Her face was thrown into shadow by the glare of the lamp she’d turned on in the corner of the room. She had offered to light the fire and he’d said, “Ah, no, sure it’s not that cold. I’d kill for a glass of wine, though.” She had handed him the bottle first, then the opener.
“So,” she said to him, once they’d settled themselves on either side of the barren fireplace. “Why here?”
He’d been asking himself the same question.
“The truth?”
Even as he said it, he was wondering did he have it in him to be truthful. He could tell her that she was the first person he’d thought of, except that wasn’t true. He had thought of his brother first, and then he had thought better of it. His brother would not welcome him arriving on his doorstep.
“The truth is there was no one else.”
She came down off the points of her toes, crossed one leg over the other and sat back into the armchair.
“I’m not sure whether I should be amused by that, or annoyed.”
Mick leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, so that he was looking up at her. He adopted his most earnest expression.
“You were the only one I could trust. I figured you wouldn’t have the heart to turn me away.”
“Trust,” she repeated, following the word up with an inward hiss of her breath. He liked the way she did that, the sharp intake of breath, as if she was taking a drag on one of the cigarettes she had long ago given up.
“You invited me in,” he said. “You could have turned me away.”
She let a reluctant laugh out of her, a laugh like a yelp.
“And miss out on hearing the story from the horse’s mouth? Are you mad? You knew my curiosity would get the better of me. You old bollocks.”
He laughed himself now. Leaned his head back against the headrest, content just to watch her. She had drawn her legs up on to her chair, her bare feet tucked in under her, like a praying saint. She reached her right hand out for her wineglass, gripping it by the stem with her thumb and her index finger.
“Does that cause you pain?”
She hesitated, and he found himself wondering why. The question wasn’t difficult. Maybe she was thinking that he didn’t deserve an answer. Maybe she was thinking, Fuck you, it’s a bit late now to be asking.
She transferred the wineglass to her left hand and held the right hand out in front of her, studying it. From where he was sitting, it looked like she had her two middle fingers clenched in toward her palm—that old trick you play on a child to let on that you’re missing a finger.
“The pain I can live with,” she said, in a voice that sounded a little distracted. “The pain can be solved, with enough painkillers. The look of it is a bit unsightly, but I’m getting used to that too.”
She turned the hand over and looked at it from the other side, as if she was seeing it for the first time.
“It’s the fear,” she said. When she looked up, her eyes were surprisingly unguarded. “The fear is very bad.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. And really, he meant it. He felt an awful swell of guilt rise up in him as he contemplated the ordeal she had been through. He had heard about it, of course, he had heard all about it. But he had not thought about it, not beyond his initial revulsion. He had not thought about the effect it would have on her, imagining that she would weather it with her usual resilience, that she would scorn his sympathy. But a thing like that would change you, how could it not? What was wrong with him that he hadn’t been in touch with her?
“Did they catch them yet?” he asked. “Any arrests? Any idea who they were?”
She shook her head. Over and over again she shook her head at the questions he asked of her, but she did not make so much as a single sound.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” he said.
She continued to shake her head impatiently as she tried to explain.
“Do you know, I never used to notice the sound of sirens before? When I was in the hospital, I started hearing ambulance sirens day and night. And I thought it was just because I was in hospital that I was hearing them. But I still hear them now; there seem to be sirens going off all the time. And every time I hear one, I can’t help thinking about the poor person inside. I’m like one of those old ladies who bless themselves whenever an ambulance goes by.”
She was looking not directly at him but somewhere off to the side of him. Her attention seemed to be focused on something inside herself, and it was only when she had it in her sights that she turned her eyes on him.
“You see, you become aware of all the bad things that are happening out there, and the worst of it is that you know for a fact that the bad thing can happen to you. I will never again be able to live under the illusion that the bad thing won’t happen to me.”
He stared at her, struggling to take in this new version of the woman he’d married. In his mind he had a vision of her on the night they met. Twenty-one years old and precociously fearless, in her knee-high boots and her white skirt suit, an old cravat of her father’s knotted tightly around her neck. She had interviewed him at the count center, the two of them standing high above the crowds on a platform of bare boards, supported by builders’ scaffolding. Once the camera lights had been turned off he had leaned in and whispered in her ear, “Let’s pray the cameraman shot us from the waist up. We don’t want the whole nation knowing that the new TD for Tipperary North had a boner for his interviewer.” She’d thrown her head back and laughed out loud, a shameless laugh that convinced him then and there that she was the woman for him.
“Jesus,” he said, looking at her now. “I’d string them up for doing this to you. I swear to God, Alma, I’d hold them down and cut off their balls, one by one.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes at him.
“Thanks, Mick, but I suspect you’re in enough trouble as it is.”
He nodded. Allowed her the opening.
“So? What have you got to say for yourself?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to call it? A moment of madness?”
“Ah, now. What is it you earn? Two hundred grand? Three hundred grand? What possesses someone who earns three hundred grand a year to steal a five-euro pepper grinder? That’s what all the papers are going to be asking. You might want to come up with a half-decent answer.”
He adopted his most reasonable voice.
“It’s not that easy to find a decent pepper grinder. The one I have in the flat is broken. I keep meaning to buy a new one but I never seem to have the time to get to the shops.”
She was shaking her head in disbelief.
“You’re going to have to come up with something a bit better than that, Mick.”
With the knuckle of his index finger he began to worry at his lip. Nudging the lip with his knuckle, it was a tic of his. An indication that he was rattled.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
“They’re going to have a field day.”
He squirmed in his chair. He put his hands over his face and began to stretch the skin away from his forehead, as if his face was a latex mask that he could pull off. He was talking through the gap between his hands.
“You might try not to sound quite so pleased.”
“It’s not that I’m pleased. I feel sorry for you, Mick, just as you feel sorry for me. So here we are, feeling sorry for each other. Who would have thought?”
He took a long slurp of his wine, resting the glass on his knee while he studied her. “You’re looking good, girl. Despite everything, you look good.”
And she did. To him, she looked bloody good.
“You’re a dirty liar. I look old, is what I look. I look like a washed-up old wreck.”
“You’re barely fifty, Alma, for God’s sake. You’re looking pretty good for fifty.”
“Fifty-three.”
“Ah, come on. You were always able to take a compliment. Don’t stop now.”
He reached out and picked the bottle of wine up off the cold hearth. Poured the last of it out between their two glasses.
“What about Nora?” she asked him. “Have you heard from her?”
“The last time I spoke to her, she wouldn’t tell me where she was,” said Alma.
“Oh, I know where she is all right. I make it my business to know where she is. She’s in Egypt. Having failed to get into Gaza by sea, she’s now trying to tunnel her way in through Egypt.”
“Don’t they bomb those tunnels?”
He shrugged.
“From time to time.”
He did not mention that the tunnels had been bombed as recently as December. He did not mention that the tunnels collapse, too. That the plywood that holds up the walls sometimes comes crashing down in a rain of rocks and rubble and shoddy building materials and that people get buried alive under there and that they die that way, unless someone can dig them out in time. None of this did he mention to Alma, even though he had made it his business to know it.
“I take it she doesn’t know what happened to you.”
Again, she shook her head.
“We’re not in the habit of telling each other much.”
“No,” he said, by way of agreement, and they lapsed into silence for a moment.
“Do you think she’s planning on ever forgiving us?” he asked suddenly.
“For what?”
“For fucking up her life. Isn’t that what this is all about? She’s punishing us for what we did to her.”
“I’m relieved to hear there’s two of us in it,” she said. “I always thought it was just me she was punishing.”
She sighed, and he saw something he had never seen in her before. A weariness of spirit; it was the first time he had ever known Alma to be tired.
“I miss her,” she said simply.
“Yeah,” he said. “So do I.”
She rose out of her chair. “Well, her room’s empty. I’m sure she won’t mind you sleeping there. Top of the stairs, it’s the door straight ahead of you. Bathroom’s on the landing. There’s a spare toothbrush in the cupboard under the sink. Don’t even think about using mine.” (That was always a bone of contention during their marriage, her suspicion that he used her toothbrush.)
She yanked her robe even tighter across her chest in a matronly display of modesty. What did she think he was going to do, try and jump her?
“All right,” she said. “I’m off to bed. Good night, Mick.”
He stood up. Leaned in and gave her a peck on the cheek, careful not to lay a hand on her.
“Good night,” he said. “And Alma… thanks for letting me stay.”
She turned out into the hall and, using the banisters to support her, climbed the stairs. The smell of her perfume stayed in the room behind her—or was it just the memory of her perfume?
Mick sank back down into the armchair. He let himself fall against the back of the seat and closed his eyes. It was a long time before he opened them again, and when he did, he realized that his fingers and toes were numb. Barely able to summon the energy to move, he hauled himself up out of the chair and crept upstairs, anxious not to disturb her.
He woke early, not knowing where he was. The bed was harder than the one he was used to, the pillows softer, and he wondered for a moment was he in a hotel? So many hotels in his life. Hotels and planes, hotels and trains; sometimes he had to check his location on his BlackBerry just to remind himself where he was.
Oh, fuck. Now that he remembered, he wished he hadn’t.
He turned over and buried his face in the pillow, enjoying the sensation of smothering himself. His airways blocked, his eyelids forced shut, he listened to the sound of his own struggling breath, heard from inside his own head. At last, gasping for air, he flipped himself over so that he was lying on his side, facing the window.
The curtains were open and the day was dawning a pale, powdery pink. From this angle, the stadium was in profile. The great western rim of it like the edge of a gladiator’s helmet, its glass tiles angled to reflect the sky. Seen from this perspective, it was a beautiful sight.
Outside the window, a telephone wire bounced up and down in the breeze. A row of small birds gathered along it, one of them tilted this way, one tilted that way. Every so often one of the birds would fly away and then return to the wire. Watching them, it seemed to Mick that they were holding a wordless conversation, a dialogue they were acting out without sound. From behind the stadium a train appeared. It crept along like a mouse scurrying under a giant’s sleeping head. A moment later it had disappeared, leaving a new stillness in its wake.
Mick rolled over on to his back and studied the posters on the wall in front of him. There was one of The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara riding pillion with his arms stretched out either side of him. A poster of Alive, which was Nora’s favorite film when she was a kid. She must have watched that film a hundred times, and forced Mick to watch it with her. Staring at the poster, all Mick could think was that he missed his daughter. He missed her not as she was now, but as she was then. He missed all the moments that he had missed of her life, this room of hers that he had never even seen, and this view from the window that was her view every morning when she woke up. He missed all the things that he had missed and that could not now be brought back, no matter how much he missed them.
The smell of coffee brought him downstairs. Alma was standing by the open French doors, coffee cup in hand, facing out into the back garden. She gave no indication that she’d heard him come into the room—for a moment he wondered had she not heard him—but then she started talking, without so much as turning her head.
“I’ve a robins’ nest in my garden,” she said, in a faraway voice. “Yesterday there were only three eggs in it but today there’s a fourth. If you stick your head out the bathroom window you can see them. I don’t like to go out there in case I disturb them.”
He pulled out a chair and sat himself down at the kitchen table. He was wearing trousers and a shirt, no sweater, no socks. The tiles were cold on his bare feet and he nestled the sole of one foot against the other for warmth.
“Good morning,” she said, turning to face him and speaking in an entirely different tone of voice.
“I’m afraid there’s no waitress service in this house. Coffee’s on the hob. Bread in the bread bin. Butter and jam on the counter.”
He smiled in recognition of an old pattern. Any tenderness that ever existed between them by night, it would have vanished by daylight. He stood up, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat back down at the table.
“I’ve some light reading for you,” she said, throwing a copy of The Irish Times down in front of him. “Bottom of the front page.”
He scanned the headline and let his head flop down on to his chest.
“Listen, you don’t have a BlackBerry charger, do you? My phone’s gone dead.”
“Probably just as well. You might want to think twice about turning it on.”
“Sure, but I need to ring my office.”
“Here.”
She passed him her own phone. “Now,” she said, carrying her cup and saucer over to the sink. “I need to get into the shower.”
He made himself two slices of toast that he slathered with apricot jam, the sound of the power shower in the bathroom upstairs like the roar of an aircraft taking off overhead. He had to wait for the noise to stop before he rang his special adviser. It was only when he went to dial the number that he realized he didn’t know it. Didn’t know his office number either, didn’t know any of the numbers. He had them all in his BlackBerry.
“Fuck,” he said, trying to remember how people used to find phone numbers before they had mobile phones, trying to remember how he used to do things before he had advisers. He looked around the room and spotted an iPad on the kitchen counter. He powered it up and with a fumbling forefinger stabbed the icon for the Internet connection. It took him ten minutes to navigate his way through the Commission website to a number for his own office. Another five to negotiate the call answering system. Noises upstairs as Alma moved from room to room.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “How the hell are people supposed to contact us?” Until it occurred to him. Sure, that was the whole point.
“Bonjour,” said a woman’s voice at last. “Bureau du Commissaire Européen pour le marché intérieur et les services.”
It was a point of pride with Mick never to speak French. Fucking Frogs; it was bad enough to have to march to their tune without speaking their bloody language too. At least the Germans spoke English.
“Good morning,” he said, with all the authority he could muster. “This is Commissioner Collins speaking. I need to speak to Feargal McCarthy immediately.”
“Un instant.”
She put the call through straightaway. That in itself was suspicious. It was as if they were waiting for him to call in. He imagined the whole office falling silent, everyone frozen in motion as Feargal picked up the phone.
“Mick! Where are you?”
“Never mind that. Now, what’s the score?”
“Well. We’re under siege. We’ve had every media organization in the world on to us already this morning. We’ve had requests for interviews from every TV and radio station on the planet. We’ve got our own government looking for an explanation. And we’ve got the Commission president breathing down our necks.”
Nasal at the best of times, at moments of excitement Feargal’s sinuses tended to seize up on him and his voice took on a distinctly adenoidal pitch. Mick moved the phone away from his ear just a fraction to lessen the impact. The difference this made was surprising and extremely pleasant. Rather than coming out of the handset loud and clear, as if he was in the room with him, Feargal’s voice now seemed much further away and therefore less real.
“We’re putting out a holding statement. You know, it was all a misunderstanding, et cetera et cetera…”
“Good,” said Mick. “Good man.”
“You’ve no public engagements today or tomorrow, so that buys us a bit of time.”
“Good stuff.”
“If we could meet up maybe, somewhere other than the office—”
“Ah, feck it, I think the battery on my phone’s about to go…”
“Is there another number—”
“What’s that? No, can’t hear you. I think the phone must be running out of juice. I’ll tell you what. I’ll try you again later. In the meantime, just keep on doing what you’re doing, good man.”
“But wait—”
Taking the phone away from his ear altogether and using his thumb as you would to flick a switch, Mick closed the call down. When he looked up, Alma was standing in the kitchen doorway in a belted black dress. With her high heels on, and her red lipstick, she looked almost like her old self.
“This thing seems to be gathering a bit of momentum,” Mick told her. “It might be as well if I lay low for a day or two. How would you feel about harboring a fugitive?”
Knowing her well enough to know that the idea would appeal to her.
As soon as the door was closed behind her, as soon as he’d seen her taxi reverse out of the square (waiting a few seconds in case she had to come back for something), Mick set about checking out the house. He patrolled the front room first, taking in objects both familiar and unfamiliar. The print above the fireplace in the dining room, that was one of Sam’s. Mick recognized the motifs immediately—spindly minarets against a midnight-blue skyline, and the outline of a bird in flight etched out in Sam’s signature gold leaf.
He wandered into the dining room, taking stock of the highly polished antique mahogany table and its matching mahogany chairs, their seats upholstered in a deep pink velvet. He wondered who had chosen the table and chairs. Alma had never shown any interest in antiques when he was married to her. Could it have been one of her many lovers? That actor fella she was seeing at one stage struck Mick as a suitable candidate, pretentious fucker that he was, and him out of a butcher’s shop in Mullingar. Mick had met him a few years back, at an arse-licking session in the embassy, and he’d made a point of establishing a bond with him as a fellow Midlands man. Your man couldn’t get away from him fast enough. Oh, he had Mullingar well and truly in the rear-view mirror, that fucker. And Alma too, by the sound of it. Last Mick heard, he was gallivanting around with some young one out of an Australian soap opera.
Mick swept forward to study the photographs on the mantelpiece. There was one of Nora as a baby, looking exactly like herself, her eyes wide with indignation. There was a picture of Alma’s mother on the Abbey stage, a spotlight pooling at her feet. There was a formal portrait of her father at his writing desk, the same portrait that had appeared on the back of his book. At the edge of the mantelpiece was an old snapshot of Alma herself. It showed her sitting on a low stone wall, wearing a white sundress and a pair of huge sunglasses. Mick identified it as one of their honeymoon photographs, and he was as certain as he could be that it had originally been a photograph of the two of them, but now it showed only Alma. Looking closer, he saw the evidence. A blue knee jutting into the picture from the right-hand side. She must have cut him out of the picture and had it reframed.
He headed upstairs, bypassing the bathroom and making straight for her bedroom. The bed was unmade, a pile of pillows on one side, dented still by her head. There were clothes heaped on the ottoman, clothes piled up on the armchair by the window, high-heeled shoes scattered around the floor. It had always been a mystery to him how someone so particular about some things could be so slovenly about others. (“But I like being a slob,” she had told him once.) Before he left the room, he had a peek into her underwear drawer. He had to know did she still wear the same satin underwear. He was thrilled to find that she did.
He stripped off on the landing, taking a visceral pleasure in wandering naked through his ex-wife’s house. Leaving his clothes in a puddle on the carpet, he headed to the bathroom and ran the shower, waiting until it was steaming hot before he stepped in. Afterward, he helped himself to a clean white towel that he found on the heated towel rail. He collected his clothes from the landing, putting the underpants on inside out for the sake of hygiene. He put on the same shirt he’d been wearing yesterday, and the same trousers, for want of anything else to wear. On his way downstairs he stopped off at the bathroom again and gave himself a generous all-over spraying with a deodorant he found on the bathroom counter. An old trick, from his student days, it almost made him feel young again.
He made himself a mug of tea and settled down in front of the TV in the living room, feet on the coffee table, mug on the arm of the sofa. With some difficulty he managed to steer the channel to Sky News. They were showing pictures from Syria, but the crawl at the bottom of the screen made reference to him: Spokesperson for Commissioner Collins says pepper grinder incident was “a misunderstanding”…
As Mick watched, the newsreader appeared full screen.
“You’re watching Sky News,” she said. “Coming up this hour, new footage shows the European Commissioner Michael Collins stealing a pen from the Russian president Vladimir Putin.”
“Oh, feck it,” said Mick, sitting up so fast that his tea slopped all over the arm of the couch.
On the screen, he saw himself in Moscow last year, Putin to the right of him. The Russian president was talking and Mick was listening, or pretending to listen, to the translator in his ear. As he watched, he saw himself reach out and lift Putin’s pen off the table in front of him. He turned the pen around in his fingers and then, unmistakably, he could be seen tucking it into his breast pocket.
“Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
He clutched his head with his hands and, sinking back into the couch, let his legs float upward. Like an upended beetle, he grappled at the air with his feet.
“Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said. Then he righted himself and went looking for his phone, which he had plugged into Alma’s charger.
“It’s a free-for-all,” squealed Feargal. “The things they’re tweeting about you, you would not believe. Former employees, ex-girlfriends, they’re all coming out of the woodwork. I’ll tell you one thing, you’ve really managed to make some enemies over the years. It looks like this is payback time.”
Mick listened, the sound of static filling the air inside his head. He was having trouble concentrating.
“So, what do we do now?”
“Well, wherever you are, we think it’s best if you lie low for a day or two. Where are we now? Thursday. The hope is this will all have blown over by next week.”
“Any word from on high?”
“They’re suggesting the best way out of this may be a treatment program.”
“Treatment for what?”
“Well,” said Feargal, “according to the psychiatrist who’s just been interviewed on BBC 24, it’s a classic case of kleptomania. What did she say? I’m paraphrasing here, so bear with me. The irrational urge to steal things regardless of economic necessity belongs on the spectrum of obsessive—compulsive disorder.”
“For fuck’s sake,” said Mick. “Did it never occur to them that I just fancied the bastard’s pen?”
He spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding the news channels. He hopped around the lower reaches of the remote control, finding nothing but cookery programs. Who would have thought there was so much cookery on TV? You could spend your whole afternoon just watching people cook. He imagined a whole continent, morbidly obese and fed on fast food, sitting on their couches and watching cookery programs on daytime TV.
He discovered that his favorite was a program called Come Dine with Me. He watched with perverse fascination as five strangers cooked for each other in their own homes, night after night, competing for a prize of a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds? he thought, puzzled. Why would anyone want to expose themselves and their pathetic homes for a paltry thousand pounds? He watched, struggling to understand, as they snooped around each other’s houses, making fun of each other’s possessions for the cameras. He watched, appalled, as they cooked meal after gruesome meal for each other. He found himself marvelling at the awfulness of people. The niceness of them, too.
He had the dinner ready for her when she got home, a menu constructed on the basis of what he had managed to find in her kitchen.
“This is all very domestic,” she said, as she deposited a large paper bag on the kitchen counter. He peered into it and saw multiple packs of black socks, white underwear, white T-shirts. He was overcome by nostalgia. She used to always shop for his clothes when they were married.
“Thank you,” he said, touched.
She ignored him.
“So, they’re staking out your apartment. They’ve someone camped outside your office. They’re even keeping an eye on your brother’s house.”
Mick chuckled.
“I’d be tempted to pitch up there just for the hell of it.”
He was standing at the cooker. A tea towel slung over his left shoulder, he was putting the finishing touches to the meal he’d prepared for her with some prawns he’d salvaged from the bottom of her freezer.
“So, when did you learn to cook?” she asked. She was standing against the kitchen counter, holding the glass of wine he’d poured for her.
“When you threw me out. It was either cook or starve. Has Nora not told you about my culinary prowess?”
“Nora tells me nothing, about you or anything else. I always assumed you lived on restaurant food in Brussels. I imagined you surviving on truffles.”
He laughed.
“Yeah, there’s a bit of truffling in Brussels all right. Brussels is all about the truffles and the mussels. Bit of a culture shock for a country lad like me.”
When he met her, he had never even tasted an avocado.
“So, what are they saying?”
“Jesus, Mick, you’ve no idea. It’s taken on a life of its own.”
He upended a pot of boiled rice into a colander, and the steam rushed up at him.
“Come on. Tell me the worst.”
“Oh, it’s open season. Anyone who ever worked for you, they’re spilling the beans. Some press officer with the Commission says you made an inappropriate comment about her legs. The waitress in the café near your office, she says you used to hassle her to go out with you AND you never left her a tip. Oh, and what about the secretary who used to pick up your dry-cleaning for you? She says you didn’t pay her back.”
He had two plates out on the kitchen counter and he was serving the rice up in little mounds, the way he’d seen it done on the telly.
“The dirty cow!” he said. “Once, maybe twice, I forgot to pay her back. But don’t you worry. She used to tape the receipts on to my desk, to remind me. I used to buy her chocolates from Pierre Marcolini, for Christ’s sake. I did everything to cozy up to that bloody woman, bar riding her.”
He paused in ladling out the prawns to look up at her.
“Ah, don’t look at me like that. You know what I mean.”
He carried their plates over to the table, pulling out a chair for her before he sat down himself.
“Prawns flash-fried with butter and brandy,” he announced.
Tentatively, she speared a prawn with her fork and put it in her mouth.
“I don’t know why you’re looking so nervous. It’s not like I’m about to poison you.”
She smiled.
“Not bad for someone who used to eat his dinner in the middle of the day.”
That was something she had teased him about when they were first married.
“Tomorrow’s going to be more challenging,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m down to frozen peas and four eggs.”
“I suppose you want me to do some shopping?”
“Ah, no. That would spoil the fun. I’m quite enjoying this. It’s like that program on the telly. What’s it called? Ready Steady Cook.”
“It’s like the diary of Anne Frank, that’s what it is.”
He raised his glass to her.
“And you, my girl, are the heroine of the Resistance.”
“If they knew you were here,” said Alma, shaking her head at the thought of it. “If they knew you were here, Jesus Christ, Mick. I’d be hung out to dry.”
For two days, Mick was happy enough to hang around the house. Not for forty years had he had a pajama day, not since he was a child and his school had been closed down for a week because of a burst pipe. He lay on the couch for hours on end, eating Alma’s biscuits and drinking tea as he watched back-to-back editions of Come Dine with Me. In his mind, the notion that this was a welcome, albeit temporary, reprieve from the world.
On day three, everything changed. He woke, and before he even opened his eyes, he knew that the buoyancy of the past two days was gone. It was as if the world had turned while he was asleep and now everything was cast in a different light. Outside the window the telephone wire hung in the air, motionless and bereft of birds. The sky was a dense flat white, the tiles on the edge of the stadium sullen and unreflective. Mick lay in the bed, steeped in gloom.
Whereas initially he had chosen to view his predicament as a comical one (the adventures of a sane man in a crazy world), now it began to take on a less cheerful complexion. What at first had seemed a bit of an escapade—a lark, an adventure—now began to take on the appearance of a crisis. His career, everything he had worked so hard to achieve, it was all hanging in the balance. And all because of a fucking pepper grinder. He found himself raging against the injustice of it.
Swinging his legs out of the bed, he reached for his phone and put a call through to Feargal.
“Okay, Feargal,” he said, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m coming back.”
“Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Mick.” Feargal’s voice squeaked with protest.
“Hold on a second. Don’t you think this whole thing is getting a bit out of proportion? I filched a fucking pepper grinder. I’m happy to pay for it. The Putin thing, that was just a mistake. I didn’t realize what I was doing. What would I want with Putin’s fucking pen anyway? Jesus, Feargal, what’s the world coming to when a man gets subjected to a public bloody flogging just because he steals a bloody pen? It’s not like I’m Dominique Strauss-Kahn, for fuck’s sake. It’s not like I’m fucking Berlusconi. All I did was pocket a bloody biro.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“There’s a bit more to it than that, I’m afraid.”
“This doesn’t reflect well on the Commission, Mick. Surely you can see that. What with everything else that’s going on—people going hungry in Greece, half of Spain out of work—the Commission needs to be seen to take this seriously.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Feargal?”
“They’re putting you on paid leave while they decide what to do with you.”
“What!” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You know what this is, Feargal? It’s a fucking witch hunt!”
“Mick,” said Feargal. “Can you please stop bombarding me with expletives. I’ve had about enough of listening to your foul language.”
And that was the moment. When Feargal McCarthy—Feargal fucking McCarthy, whom Mick had hired as a spotty kid straight out of UCD—when Feargal fucking McCarthy pulled the PC card on him, that’s when Mick knew it was all over.
He ventured out wearing his overcoat and his dark glasses, a woolly hat of Nora’s pulled down low over his ears. The first person he met was Alma’s next-door neighbor, bald as an egg, in a bulging diamond-pattern jumper.
“Howrya,” said the neighbor, coming out of his house.
“Howrya,” said Mick, wondering had the neighbor recognized him.
“Grand day,” said the neighbor. And he pulled a rolled-up towel out from under his sweater.
“Thinking of a swim?” asked Mick.
The neighbor stood for a moment looking up at the sky. Then he turned to Mick.
“That’s what I was thinking. High tide’s about now.”
“Looks like we’re in for some rain.”
“Ah, sure that won’t hurt me if I’m wet already.”
The neighbor turned and looked at the upstairs window of his house.
“Don’t go telling on me now. If she found out, she’d kill me.”
Sure, who would I tell? wondered Mick, walking with the neighbor toward the corner.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” he said, as he and the neighbor parted ways. “Enjoy your swim now.”
The neighbor put his index finger to his lips to reiterate the need for discretion. And Mick thought, hang on a minute, who’s the fugitive here?
In the Spar, he filled a basket with groceries. He scanned the front pages of the papers, afraid to bend down to study them properly in case he aroused any suspicion. With his sunglasses on he could hardly see, but he was afraid to take them off for fear of being recognized. He placed himself in line for the checkout, looking straight ahead of him. When his turn came, he marched forward and hefted his basket up on to the counter.
“Hiya,” he said to the young man at the till. A stocky, mahogany-skinned man, he was Malaysian by the looks of him, or maybe even Mauritian. Mick prided himself on being able to guess these things.
“Where is it you’re from,” he asked. “Malaysia?”
“Me?” said the young man, surprised. “I’m from Brazil.” He jerked his head to the man working at the next till along, “He’s from Malaysia,” he said, laughing as if it was all a big joke.
“Good stuff,” said Mick, wondering to himself when it had come to pass that the only people doing an honest day’s work in Ireland were the foreigners.
“Do you have a loyalty card?” asked the young man.
“What?” said Mick. “A loyalty card? No. I don’t have a loyalty card.”
“Would you like one?”
“No. No, you’re all right, I don’t need a loyalty card.”
“You should get one,” said the young man, his brown eyes full of concern. “It doesn’t take long. You fill out this form.”
Already he was producing the form from under the counter.
“Honestly,” said Mick, waving it away. “I don’t need a loyalty card. I’m not here for long.”
“Okay,” said the young man, putting the form back under the counter. He looked disconsolate, as if he’d just failed to save a soul. Even as he was scanning Mick’s groceries, he was ruminating over it. “You can save a lot of money if you have a loyalty card.”
Mick emerged from the Spar with a plastic bag weighing down each arm. The rain had started and he had no raincoat. No umbrella either, and no means of holding one. There was nothing to save him from getting a wetting. He lingered in the doorway, looking hopelessly out at the rain, and it was then that he spotted Alma’s father’s car. It was definitely Manus’s car, a powder-blue 1962 Mark 2 Jag—sure, who else would drive a car like that? It was stopped at the traffic lights, with Manus’s mad head in proud silhouette above the steering wheel. Mick stepped out on to the street, ready to wave him down, a sudden rush of affection unfolding inside him for his former father-in-law.
The lights changed and the car began to move, prowling through the intersection.
“Manus!” called Mick, arm in the air.
The car cruised toward him, and Mick had to jump back on to the pavement to avoid being mowed down. Alma’s father was in profile now, detached from the world like an old sea captain at the wheel of a great ship out on the open sea. Oblivious to the furious wake he was generating, he splattered Mick with mud as he passed.
“Manus,” called Mick again, setting his shopping bags down so that he could wave with both hands.
The car moved slowly past the Spar, blithely occupying the center of the road so that other cars were forced to pull in just to let it pass.
“Manus,” called Mick, a third time. Even though by now it was clear that Manus hadn’t seen him.
Majestically, the car moved off down the avenue, cresting the bridge and disappearing the other side of it. Mick picked up his shopping bags again and continued on his journey, feeling sadly invisible.
“Are you the fella from the Corporation?” asked a very old woman he met at the corner of the square. She was wearing a transparent plastic scarf knotted under her chin, and a large transparent raincoat, even though the rain had stopped and the sun was out again.
Mick put his shopping bags down and pointed at himself.
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you. The Corporation said they were going to send someone round to look at the drains. The drains is all blocked, I’ve been trying for weeks to get them to send someone round.”
“No,” said Mick, sorry to disappoint her. “No, I’m afraid I’m not the man from the Corporation.”
The woman took a step toward him.
“Only, there’s more rain forecast and I’m worried those drains is going to flood. They don’t clean out the drains,” she said, confiding in him now. “Years ago, there used to be always fellas out cleaning the drains, but nowadays you never see them.”
Mick could feel dried mud splatters caking on the skin of his ankles. His clothes were damp and hung heavy on him but still he had a desire to linger. A desire for human contact.
“How long are you living on the square?” he asked her.
“Oh, I’m here all my life.”
She turned and pointed to a house behind her. Mick wasn’t sure if she meant the one with the yellow door or the one with the white door.
“I was born in that house,” she said. “My mother had six of us in that house and then she died. My father only lasted three months after her. It was my grandfather who reared us.”
Mick found himself surprisingly affected by her story.
“How very sad,” he said.
“Ah, sure that was the way of it in those days. Times was harder then. People had to manage as best they could.”
“Yes,” said Mick thoughtfully, and his own misfortunes suddenly seemed very feeble to him.
“Well,” said the woman, “we live in hope.”
“Of what?” asked Mick, thinking for a moment that she had some answer to offer him, something that would show him the way out of the predicament he was in.
She looked at him like he was simple.
“We live in hope,” she said, “of the man coming about the drains before the place gets flooded.”
“Oh, that,” said Mick, bending to pick up his bags. “Yes, indeed. We live in hope.”
With the shopping bags weighing him down, he made his way along the last stretch of the square.
“You wouldn’t do me a favor?” asked the bald neighbor. He was standing out in front of his house. “You wouldn’t take me towel? Stick it on a radiator for me. I’ll get it back off you later.”
“Sure,” said Mick, putting his shopping bags down again so he could take the towel. “Afraid you’re going to be busted?” he asked, weighing the wet towel in his hand as if he were trying to guess how heavy it was.
“Something like that,” said the neighbor. “It’s the cancer,” he said, by way of explanation. “I’m in the middle of me chemo. If the wife knew I’d been in for a swim, she’d kill me.”
Mick nodded, not sure what to say.
“I’ll throw it in the dryer,” he said. “Come and get it whenever you want.”
“Nice one,” said the neighbor. And he slipped into his house, pulling the door shut quietly behind him.
Mick took Alma’s spare keys out of his pocket and tackled her new triple-lock system. Two Chubbs, one Yale, all of them put in the day she’d come home from the hospital, she’d told him. Just as he was losing his patience, the door gave in.
He unpacked the shopping, humming away to himself happily. He was thinking about the people he’d met, and the feeling it gave him to talk to them. He liked talking to people. That was something he’d missed, all the years he’d been living in Brussels. It only occurred to him now how much he’d missed it. Now that he was back among his own people.
“I met some of your neighbors,” said Mick, once they were sitting down to dinner.
Risotto with baby peas; before adding the stock to the rice, he had thrown in a generous glass of a fine Spanish sherry he’d found in Alma’s drinks cabinet. The result was sublime, a dish that was more than the sum of its parts. The peas as sweet as gumdrops, the stock neither liquid nor solid, and the rice offering just the right resistance on the teeth.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been drawing them down on me,” she said. “I’ve spent years studiously avoiding them.”
Rain falling on the skylight, like handfuls of small pebbles striking the glass. It had been raining for hours.
“Well, I met the man next door,” said Mick. “The man with the cancer.”
“I didn’t know he had cancer.”
“He’s doing chemotherapy. He still swims in the sea, though. He doesn’t want his wife to find out.”
“That pair,” she said. “They drive me mad. He insists on sticking a parking cone outside his house so no one will take his space. On Sunday mornings they cook cabbage and the smell of it seeps into my house through the fireplace.”
“There’s an old lady across the square. I got talking to her too.”
“Not Dolores?”
“I didn’t get her name. Nice old lady…”
“Invisible hairnet, lipstick on the teeth?”
“As I said, a nice old lady. She’s concerned about the drains.”
Alma smiled. Very slowly she began to shake her head from side to side.
“You’re unbelievable! You’re canvassing my bloody neighbors! Where are we? Three years from the next election? So what are you thinking? Time to reinvent yourself?”
She was still shaking her head.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’ll snatch that seat right out from under your brother’s nose.”
He stared at her, shocked that she had guessed what he was thinking before he had even formulated it himself. His brother’s seat, lost at the last election, it would be ripe for the picking next time round. The thought had been percolating at the back of his head. Not even a thought yet, more like mild vapors, conspiring to take ahold of him.
“Ah, come on,” he said. And he lowered his face to look down into his risotto. “Come on,” he repeated, digging around in the rapidly congealing rice with his fork. “What do you take me for?”
When he looked up at her again she was still staring at him. She had one eyebrow raised, her eyes twinkling at him and her lips clamped shut to suppress a smile. She saw right through him—always had done—and yet she liked him all the same. That was the thing about himself and Alma, he thought, they had always liked each other.
“What happened to us?” he asked her. “We were so good together. We brought out the best in each other.”
She snapped her head to the side, looking out into the garden. In her throat she sounded a dry little laugh, or an expression of indignation, he didn’t know which.
“You know what happened, Mick.”
But did he? It seemed to him that they had never talked about it. Not then, and not since. Not properly.
“The thing with Acushla,” he said. “I still don’t know if you believe me. You can ask me a hundred times and I’d give you the same answer over and over again. Nothing. Happened. Between. Me. And. Acushla.”
“It wasn’t just that,” she said, looking down at her plate now. “It was all the others, too.”
“They didn’t matter.” Was there a way of saying this without making it sound like a broken record? He tried to put extra feeling into it, tried to make every word ring true. “Not a single one of them mattered to me, Alma.”
She looked up at him as she answered in a throwaway voice.
“They mattered to me.”
Suddenly he felt very, very bad. Not just because it had cost him his marriage, not just because it had cost him his home and his daughter, but because he had hurt her.
“I didn’t take it seriously enough,” he said, and it was a revelation to himself as much as it was to her. “I took it for granted, what we had. I was a gobshite.”
“In fairness,” she said, softening, “we neither of us did. We neither of us knew what it was we had.”
And it was typical of her, thought Mick, to be so just.
He dropped his shoulders forward, lowering his head so that he was looking up at her. Eyes narrowed, he ventured to ask, “Do you think you’d ever be able to give me another chance?”
She grimaced, the way you do when you’re breaking bad news to someone.
“I don’t know, Mick. The honest answer to that is, I simply do not know.”
The flood came at nightfall.
A wet, dark, silent thing, it slithered out from under the gates of the stadium and coiled itself around the gutters, expanding until it had filled the streets right up to the top of the curbs. Noiselessly, it spilled over, flooding the pavements. It seeped into the grass and began to rise like a sponge cake, the water levels steadily climbing the inside walls of the square. It crept up the pathways of the houses, slipping under their front doors without anyone noticing. Its stealth was a living, breathing thing, silent in the night.
The first Alma and Mick knew of it was when the neighbor banged on their door. Two dull thuds that bore the sound of a fist rather than a row of knuckles. Alma and Mick were waiting for the start of the nine o’clock news, when they heard it.
“Jesus,” said Mick. “What the hell was that?”
He looked over at Alma. She had not moved from where she was sitting. Hands in her lap, head held high, she had closed her eyes, as if by doing so she could make herself disappear. For a second, Mick had a memory of Nora as a child. Whenever they played hide-and-seek, Nora would put her hands over her eyes, imagining that if she couldn’t see him, then he couldn’t see her either.
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
When he opened the door, the flood poured in. The neighbor was standing outside in his pajamas, his wellies deep in the water. The street outside was moving but the sky was still. The rain had stopped, leaving behind an eerie silence.
“What is it?” asked Alma, coming up behind Mick.
“It’s the river,” said the neighbor. “The river’s gone and burst its banks.”
Behind him Mick could make out dark figures wading through the water with buckets and flashlights. On the doorsteps, backlit by their brightly painted front halls, children stood in their pajamas watching. Above them loomed the stadium, dimly lit from within. It looked sheepish, as if it was trying not to draw attention to itself.
“Hold on a second,” said Mick. “I’m coming.”
He reached back into the hall for a raincoat, grabbing a bright yellow mac of Nora’s that was hanging on the coatrack. He just about managed to squeeze himself into it. There were no wellies in his size so he took his shoes off, rolled his trousers up over his knees and stepped out into the floodwaters in his bare feet. He was thinking about broken glass. About rats and Weil’s disease. Underfoot, he could feel sharp stones. Uneven tarmac. A manhole cover.
“You stay here,” he shouted back to Alma. “Get a brush and try to sweep the water out. I’ll find out if there’s anything we can do to stop it rising any farther.”
Together with the neighbor, Mick waded out into the middle of the street, up to his knees in the cold black water.
“Where does the water drain to?” he asked the neighbor.
“It doesn’t. The drains are all blocked up.”
“All right. We’ll need to open a manhole, so. Has anyone got a crowbar?”
“I do, in the house. I’ll go and get it.”
“Wait,” said Mick. “I don’t know your name.”
“Maurice,” said the neighbor. “My name’s Maurice.”
He held out his hand to shake Mick’s.
“Maurice, I’m not sure whether you should be out here. I’m worried you might catch something.”
“Ah, well. It’s a bit late for that,” said Maurice. “And anyway, nothing this exciting has happened round here for years. I’m not about to miss it now.”
Maurice waded back into his house, his pajama bottoms sagging under an inadequate drawstring. A moment later he returned with a crowbar.
“I came across the manhole cover here somewhere,” said Mick, walking around in the pitch-black water. He was scoping out the ground with the soles of his feet. Every so often he would touch on something slimy, or something that moved. At one point something scurried between his feet and he scrambled, comically, to lift his legs off the ground, hopping first on one foot and then the other. At last his right toe made contact with the dimpled metal surface of the manhole cover.
“Here it is!” he shouted. “Here it is, Maurice, I have it!”
“Good man,” said Maurice, and he waded over to Mick with the crowbar. Taking it from him, Mick blind-guided it in through the opening on the cover of the manhole and leaned on it with all his weight. The cover didn’t budge.
“Give us a hand here.”
Maurice came around behind him and together they grabbed on to the crowbar.
“All right, are you ready? One, two, three.”
The two of them leaned down on the crowbar and gradually, with great reluctance, the manhole cover lifted. Carefully, Mick hefted it to one side, and he and Maurice stood peering down into the black flood waters. In both of their minds was the possibility that whatever was down there might make its way up—a geyser of raw sewage—to add to their troubles.
As they gazed into the impenetrable depths, slowly but steadily the manhole began to draw on the flood water. From all around them it was being sucked downward until, unbelievably, the water levels began to fall.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Mick. “It’s working.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Maurice, looking up at him. His strangely hairless face was shining in the moonlight. “We did it,” he said, and he slapped Mick on the back.
The water was hovering around Mick’s ankles, and still falling. A festival air about the place, all around the square people were squelching about in the puddles. Children had ventured out, dressing gowns lapping around the rims of their wellies. The old lady Mick had befriended came out of her house in a quilted robe. Plastic bags tied around her feet, she began handing out mugs of tea that she poured from a giant flask. Someone else passed around biscuits and they all stood about in the dull glow of the stadium, enjoying a neighborly midnight feast. And into this happy atmosphere, into this almost magical gathering of people brought together by their combined efforts to avert disaster, arrived Mick’s brother. With his rain jacket open at the neck to reveal a shirt and tie, and his suit trousers tucked into his wellies, he peered down into the open manhole, just as the last slops of the floodwaters were being swallowed up.
“You might want to put the cover back on that,” he said. “That’s a danger to small children the way it is.”
“You should have seen your face.” Even now Mick was heaving with childish laughter; he had to clutch a hand to his ribs to contain it. “Fuck me,” he said. “It was worth anything to see your face.”
“You looked like Paddington Bear in that raincoat,” said Liam drily. He picked up his water and sipped at it.
“Would you not have a pint?” Mick had asked him.
The two of them were standing at the bar; Liam was looking anxiously around him, alert to the potential damage of being seen in his brother’s company. Three years out from the next election, but already he was shaping up for it. Even after the beating he’d taken, even after the ritual humiliation of his recent defeat, he couldn’t wait to get back in the ring. Mick could see it in his eyes.
“Ah, have a pint with me,” said Mick.
“I’m happy with the Ballygowan,” said Liam. “I’m watching my glucose levels. You know yourself.”
Mick looked at him. Noticed that he was thinner. He looked older, too. His cheeks slack, like an empty hammock, his complexion gray in the yellow light of the pub.
“What prompted this?”
“Ah, I’ve been seeing this dietician. She has me off gluten. Dairy, you know, the usual.”
“And when you say seeing?”
“Jesus, Mick. Is that all you think about? I’m seeing her for my cholesterol levels. I’m trying to get the cholesterol down. Our father died of a heart attack at fifty, or had you forgotten that? It’s time we started minding ourselves.”
“Well in case you hadn’t heard, Liam, my cholesterol is the least of my fucking problems.”
So there they were, back to square one. Fighting each other for space in the back of the car. Measuring their MiWadi glasses against each other, using an upended ruler to mark out the slightest discrepancy in the levels. Setting the alarm to be the first to wake on Christmas morning so as to plunder the other one’s stocking. From the moment they arrived into the world, seventeen minutes apart and roaring the both of them, from that moment on they had been out to get each other.
They collected their drinks from the bar and carried them over to a table in the corner.
“So, are you not going to ask?”
Liam shrugged. Took another sip of his water.
“I don’t have to ask. I saw it on the telly.”
“Oh, and that’s it?”
“Well, you might let me try and explain.”
Liam dipped two fingers into his water glass and drew out an ice cube. Putting it into his mouth, he crunched on it.
“I don’t need to listen to you explain. I’m your brother, Mick. I know you. You’re the guy who used to steal robins’ eggs out of their nests just for the crack. You’re the guy who used to nick bottles of milk off old ladies’ doorsteps. You’re the fucker who robbed my hurling medal, for God’s sake. You robbed it out of my school bag and you let Tommy Mangan take the blame.”
Mick let a deep breath out of him.
“I did not rob that medal.”
And in so far as he knew, it was true. He had no memory of ever robbing that bloody medal.
Liam was staring at him, staring right into his eyes.
“I’d still love to know what you did with it. You must have hidden it away somewhere, somewhere you knew I’d never find it. It had my name engraved on the back of it, so you couldn’t even go showing it off to anyone. Why would you bother? That’s what I never understood. Was it just for the pleasure of knowing that you had something that belonged to me?”
Listening to him, Mick found himself wondering was it possible that he had robbed the medal? Was it possible that he had robbed it and didn’t remember?
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “I don’t even remember the bloody thing. It seems only to exist in your memory.”
“You see? You’re still denying it.”
Mick picked up his pint and took a gulp, trying to keep a lid on his rage. It was ridiculous for them to be fighting over this. Jaysus, it was embarrassing at their age.
“Would you listen to us,” he said. “And us in our fifties.”
“Yeah,” said Liam, but he was determined not to let it go. “Fifty-seven years old, but some of us still have some growing up to do.”
And it was a mark perhaps of the doldrums that Mick found himself in that he let his brother have the last word.
“Well,” he said. “None of this has turned out exactly how we planned it, has it?”
Liam shrugged, his face grim as he answered.
“We’ve been thrown a few curveballs all right.”
“Ah, come on. We dropped the fucking ball, Liam. We stood on the shagging thing and burst it. We took it and stuck a pin in it.”
Liam’s eyes took on an opaque quality.
“It’s been a tough time, I’m not denying that. It’s been a tough time for the whole country. But we need to look on our present troubles as an opportunity. There’s a great opportunity now for a fresh start.”
“Jaysus,” said Mick, with a bark. “You’re starting to sound like a fucking politician.”
Liam turned his face to look at his brother head-on. Defensive now. Accusatory.
“What else am I going to do, Mick? What else can I do? Head up a charity? Go and write a crime novel? Politics is my trade, Mick. It’s what I do. It’s the only thing I know how to do. I don’t see any other options out there for me. There isn’t exactly a queue at my door for my services. I can hardly retire at fifty-seven. I have to find some way of filling the next ten years.”
There was panic in his voice and Mick almost felt sorry for him.
“I hear you,” he said. “Sure, aren’t we in the same boat, the two of us? Two washed-up old farts.”
But Liam didn’t like that. He didn’t like to think their predicaments were in any way comparable.
“Speak for yourself,” he said, the fucker.
Mick let it go.
“So, what’s your plan?” asked Liam.
“I don’t really have one,” said Mick. “Sure, my term was up soon anyway. They were only dying for an excuse to get rid of me.”
Liam weighed that up.
“Yeah,” he said. “But at least while you were in Brussels you were still inside the tent, instead of outside it pissing in.”
Mick laughed, a laugh that stayed trapped inside his chest.
“Have you not heard?” he said. “The tent has been blown away in the storm. There is no fucking tent!”
“So, we pitch a new one,” said Liam, with grim determination.
Where was he getting this shit from? Some counselor? Some overpriced life coach? Some change-management guru that he’d signed up to?
“Do you know what, Liam? I think I’d prefer to sleep out in the open.”
Mick picked up his pint and drained it, his eyes on his brother the whole time. He beckoned to the barman for another.
“Tell me,” said Liam, as they waited for the pint to arrive. “How’s Alma doing?”
Mick dropped his head to the side. Thought about it for a minute.
“Physically,” he said, “she’s grand. She went and chopped all her hair off, but otherwise she’s grand. Mentally, though, I think she’s very fragile.”
Liam raised his eyebrows.
“That’s not a word I’d ever have associated with Alma.”
Mick laughed.
“Fierce, yes. Fearless. Ferocious. All the F words. But not fragile.”
“Yes, it was always Acushla was the fragile one.”
And they were both of them silent for a moment, thinking not of Acushla as she was now, but Acushla as she was when they first met her.
Mick remembers her in her pale pink bridesmaid’s dress and her gold strappy sandals walking across the lawn at his wedding. She was holding her sandals by their straps in one hand, the way a poacher carries a brace of game birds. Later, when she was dancing barefoot, he saw that the soles of her feet were stained green by the grass. He saw his brother watching her and he knew instantly what was going to happen. Two brothers marrying two sisters: it seemed like it was meant to be.
“How is she?” asked Mick. “Acushla.”
“How’s Acushla?” repeated Liam. “The truth is, Mick, I’d be the last person to know. We live in the same house but we hardly have a word to say to each other.”
Mick looked at his brother as if he was only seeing him for the first time.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “I really am.”
And it was true, he was sorry. He was surprised at how sorry he was. He had assumed that Liam and Acushla were happy. Despite everything, he had imagined their marriage to be a success, holding it up against the very public failure of his own. To find out now that it was not what he had imagined it to be, there was no satisfaction in it for him. He felt only sorrow.
As his brother looked back at him, Mick made a conscious effort to hold his gaze. Eyeball to eyeball for five seconds. Eyes open wider. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Just like that game they used to play when they were kids: the first to blink would lose. Staring into Liam’s steady blue eyes, it seemed to Mick that he could see his brother’s feelings moving like dancers behind a screen. Resentment, self-pity, suspicion.
Liam blinked and Mick spat out a laugh in triumph.
“You fucker,” said Liam, picking up his water glass.
In the far corner of the pub, unbeknownst to either of them, a man was holding his phone up in the air to take a photograph of them. Bending down low over his lap, the man posted the photograph on Twitter, wondering with a happy burp of warm hops how long it would take someone to pick up on it.
Her name is synonymous with understated glamour, so it’s no surprise to find Acushla MacEntee Collins immaculately clothed in a gray silk shirt-dress and simple gold jewelry on a Monday morning in early summer. Welcoming Style magazine into her home in Dublin 4, the 45-year-old wife of the former Minister for Justice says the key to her look is simplicity. “I think the most important thing is to dress for yourself. At my age, I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I’m very comfortable in my own skin.”
Acushla has a grown-up daughter and two small grandsons but she hardly looks old enough to be a mother, let alone a grandmother. So what’s her secret? “If you’re asking me whether I’ve used Botox, then the answer is no,” she replies, with disarming candor. “I’m afraid I’m too squeamish to allow anyone near me with a needle. I’m terrified of going under the knife. So the only alternative is to grow old gracefully. I try to drink a lot of water, and I stay out of the sun. Apart from that, it’s all down to genes. I have my mother to thank for that. She’s about to turn eighty and she still has the complexion of a teenager.”
Of course, Acushla’s mother is none other than Deirdre O’Sullivan, star of the Abbey stage and a legendary figure in Irish theater. “From an early age, my mother instilled in us the importance of presenting your best face to the world. We were always taught to walk with our heads held high and our shoulders well back. You might be wearing rags, but if you walk like a queen, then that’s what the world will take you for.”
It’s salutary advice for the times we live in. And Acushla MacEntee is no stranger to hardship. Two years ago, she was the wife of a senior member of the Cabinet. Now her husband is fighting to win back the seat he lost in the last election. “Politics is such a tough game,” she says, “and it’s very hard watching someone you love take a knock like that. But Liam is a remarkably resilient person. I’m so proud of the way he has picked himself up and started again. He really cares about the future of this country and he wants to be a part of it.”
For her part, Acushla is content to support him. “I’ve always been more comfortable playing the supporting role than the lead. Even when my sister and I would put on little plays as children, she always took center stage and I was left with all the bit parts! Since I married Liam I’ve been very happy to let him occupy the limelight. My job is in the wings, but it’s an important job, the job of wife and mother. Now I’m a grandmother as well, so I find I’ve plenty to keep me occupied!”