“Yeah. Great.”
Fenton takes her by the hand, and holding their pints close to their chests they weave through the throng of bodies. Somewhere towards the middle of the room Fenton drains half of his pint and nods at Abbey to do the same. “So you don’t spill it,” he shouts in her ear. She takes a few sips and then tries to swallow a mouthful. They start to dance. Two hundred kids bob up and down to techno music around them; the coloured lights over the DJs turntable arc across the walls and ceiling. A flash of a yellow light flicks across Abbey’s arm. Fenton, eyes closed, accidentally knocks into her, shouts “Sorry!” And Abbey shouts back, “It’s okay.”
——
Abbey’s dream that night is so real that she wakes up with her heart pounding against her chest. A noise in the kitchen, a dish settling in the sink, something Abbey can’t place exactly, wakes her up. She looks around to get her bearings, sees the TV set in the corner, the other couch on the far wall, the door to Ange’s bedroom. In the dream, Frank’s coffin was empty. Abbey closed it and turned around to find a bear behind her, rearing up on its back legs. The maw came down towards her head and then she felt a sharp pain and then there was darkness. Her mother somewhere inside it, so that even though Abbey knew she was dying, she didn’t care, because her mother was in there too. And Frank. Outside Abbey could hear Dermot. He was looking for her, talking the bear down, using a gentle voice, using reason. But maybe somewhere in the body of the bear, beyond all the pain, maybe Abbey and her mother could find each other. A choice had to be made. Then the sound in the kitchen woke her up and Abbey, scared out of her wits, thinks that Frank is there beside her. She can see him for a second, his hair pressed up against his head as if he too has been sleeping. Abbey wants to ask, “Why are you doing this to me?” Knowing that he isn’t really there, that she won’t get an answer.
Abbey wakes up a second time to the sound of Angela’s alarm clock going off in the next room. The dream was so vivid it’s like a film she could play over and over again. Part of her wonders if she ever really fell back asleep. She remembers pulling the afghan down from the back of the couch over top of her, she remembers taking off her skirt because after the dream she’d
realized she’d fallen asleep in last night’s clothes. They’d stayed at the Fiddler until three and then come back to Ange’s for a last round of drinks. They’d had Bailey’s at the end of it, on top of all that beer. Abbey had finally gone to bed at four, after checking the machine to see if Dermot had called. Now Abbey looks over at the clock on the microwave. It’s eleven. She sits up, pushes the heels of her palms against her eyelids. Everything goes black. She drops her hands, looks over to the living room window instead, the cut of light between the curtains.
The year her mother left, Abbey was eight. They’d just taken the apartment on Ridge Street and Frank was looking to go back to work for the city. One minute Karen was there, in jeans and a T-shirt, carrying in boxes, lugging them from the U-haul truck to the elevator, then into the apartment at the far end of the hall. And then she was gone. Nowhere. Frank took Abbey out to the near-empty truck and the two of them drove up and down the street, trying to find her.
A month after they’d unpacked, after Frank had finally found work and put Abbey back in school, Abbey woke up in the middle of the night to find him climbing onto their tenth floor balcony, his right foot on the top rail. For a whole minute she thought she was dreaming and so she stood there, unsure if what she was seeing was actually happening. Then Frank instructed her to get back to bed, go to sleep, and something in his voice told her “this is real.” Abbey remembers she had to take his hand to get him to come down. That she was the one who said not to worry, that everything would be okay.
Getting off the couch and going into Angela’s bathroom, Abbey wonders if that’s how Frank would have remembered
those years. Or if he’d only remember how every so often, while walking with him in the city, Abbey thought she saw her mother. Sometimes it was a stranger, or a woman with peroxided hair, or a woman who happened to be wearing a red t-shirt like the one her mom was wearing the day they moved. There was no reason behind the thought—just a trait, a detail that made Abbey want to go up to the woman, force her to turn around. Once, though, Abbey was sure. They were on Ouelette Avenue and it was late. They’d just come out of the movie theatre. Across the street a woman walked out of a bar and headed down towards the river. And even though it was dark, something about her was so familiar. Abbey tore at Frank to let her go, scratched at his hands as he gripped her shoulders. Choking out “mom,” as if that might make her turn around.
Into the Muck
MICHAEL makes his way across the bog, looking ahead to where Angus said he’d find the orange flag. At the end of the fourth field, with the workmen behind him, he comes to a trench. It’s six feet deep and about four feet across, murky brown run-off in the bottom. The Bord na Móna men wait for him to cross over. Propelling himself forward, Michael feels the weight of his stomach pull him down, his boot slip on his heel. He lands with a thunk, his legs taking the impact. Looking behind him, he catches his breath. The trench looks like nothing; still, he feels like he’s just hurdled a river bed. Michael walks over towards the slope of the fifth field, where Angus has directed him. The lough starts at the end of the field like an estuary, the wind rippling the water. In the middle of the small lake is a well-treed Island, a ruckus of birds. Then the bog starts again in all directions, mostly stripped save for the area along the lough, a narrow plain of gorse and sedge.
Midway across the fifth field Michael finds the orange flag and bends down, conscious the workmen by
the trench are watching. He shakes his head. The flag is sitting on its side, not even pole down in the peat. A big enough wind, a curious bird might have moved it.
“Here?” He shouts over to the foreman, a paunchy balding man with a sour look on his face. Tomás mock salutes him, which Michael assumes means yes. He picks the flag up and plants it, pulls the survey map out of his bag, studies the notes his team made last time they were here. Nothing. Five years before, the WU did a preliminary dig in field three. This was before Michael’s time. He was still helping out in the office then, overseeing the conservancy process when material was brought in. And he liked the office better, was never a digging man. He didn’t have the back for it. Last year was meant to be a one-off, a field supervisory position that would mean four trips to the bog over the course of the year and six assistants who did all the real work. “A favour” was how the Superintendent had put it.
A man of your expertise
. Maam had been a big zero on the find scale and no one, including Michael, expected that to change. He’d only renewed his contract with the WU because the money was good considering the workload and he thought it might help him get a permanent position at the University or at the Museum. He was tired of the contract work, the bits and pieces. He wanted something whole he could sink his energy into. Things in Ireland had changed in the past ten years. He could get the work—the WU, the University, the conservancy stints at the Museum. But they weren’t changing fast enough. He still couldn’t get a position. Last year he told Dermot that he’d give it one more year, that if things didn’t get better he’d go back
to London. But he didn’t really want to live there. He liked it here on the coast, he liked the people, his students. He even derived a certain amount of pleasure from the fact that he was different. He appreciated the small bureaucracy that was the Irish archeological community. In London you could never get by on knowledge alone, you had to prove things, loudly and in public, you needed a platform. Knowledge—intelligence for that matter—came second to position. Position came from backstabbing your peers with a degree of civility. And that didn’t sit well with Michael. Excavation. Ex cavare. Cavare, to make hollow. That’s the way things were seen in the UK. But that wasn’t how they saw it here. In Ireland it’s about making history, wrenching history from the ground.
Kneeling, down, Michael sweeps his fingers over the soil, moves them lightly, drags bits of roots and peat crumb around. He pulls four wood stakes and a ball of twine from his bag, looks over his shoulder. The foreman Tomás, and the blond-haired kid Liam, are over by the trench, smoking. They watch Michael as he gets up, pushes a large spike into the ground with his boot, takes a tape measure out of his pocket. He marks out a two metre square, jams the other smaller stakes into the peat, reels out the twine as he goes.
Once the base line, datum point and perimeter are set up, Michael pulls out his camera and notebook. The lads watch him and Michael signals that they can go. They’re off work today, the four days between harvests, but apparently they decided to come down anyway, to see how much of a disruption the WU might cause. Michael knows some of them from Maam. Last year he worked with Angus on a different section
of the bog. And two weeks ago Michael and his team did a survey of this block of fields though they didn’t talk to the workers and didn’t find anything interesting. Maam wasn’t like Ballybeg in Offaly. The Wetland Units there are working around the clock. Every twenty metres in Ballybeg there’s a trackway or some rise in the field surface that indicates an underlying structure. Annie, the supervisor there, spends more time in the peat than anyone Michael knows.
Michael writes the location of the site on a slate board and sets it by the stake that will act as the main data point. Then he loads a roll of film into the camera, looks up at Peter and the one with the shaved head they call Egg, who are standing by the trench with the others. The film loaded, Michael takes photographs of the cordoned-off area from a few different angles and then turns and snaps a photo of the lads for a laugh. They look suddenly uncomfortable. Tomás stubs out his cigarette and stares at the ground; Liam wipes his mouth with his coat sleeve. To make them feel more at ease, Michael extends the camera directly out from his face. He smiles big and the flash goes off.
Michael loops the camera strap around his neck and opens his note pad. Then he sits down on the driest part of the turf, a few feet outside his newly formed square, and he starts with the notes. Maam Bog, 9:20
AM
. He photographs one view from the north, then the east; he photographs the bog from every direction and after each click he scrawls the exposure number and the directional information in his book. Dirt from his hands falls down the page.
The whole process takes an hour. By noon Una and
Gerry, two of the younger WU members on his team, should be out with the shovels and brushes to start digging. They’ll work six hours today and get back to it on Monday. Michael briefly wonders if that’ll mean he can go home early and leave it to the youth. Una is especially keen, although arguably too careful at times, too full of trepidation. Gerry is the first one to pick up the shovel and haul out a pile of soil. Michael chose the two of them for this site in the hope that they might temper each other, find a middle ground. Still, Michael decides he will have to stay with them, pull his fair share of the load. A “find,” no matter how insignificant, requires a supervisor and a preliminary dig, and this, for better or worse, is one of Michael’s sections at Maam.
Michael looks down at the survey map and then east to the edge of the bog, where it meets the open bell of the lake. He checks his compass and guesses the distance. He’ll have Una measure it later to make sure the site’s location is accurate. Pointing the camera towards the lough Michael snaps another two pictures, thinking that an underlying contour or structure might be more apparent in print.
Tomás and Liam watch for an hour. Debate whether or not Michael will need more than a preliminary dig.
“I’ll give ya ten he’s here the week,” wages Liam.
“Two weeks,” Tomás says. “He looks a right prick.”
The whole Bord na Móna crew watch him go through a roll of film, and then another.
“So that’s archeology,” Liam says, wishing he’d brought some weed so he could, at least, in the light of absolute boredom, get stoned.
“ ’Fraid so,” Tomás yawns. His mouth opens wide enough for Liam to see the gap where a bottom tooth should have been. “Shall we?”
“Why not?” And the two of them head off in the direction of the train. Peter, Angus and Egg fanned out along the trench, waiting for the Englishman to dig.
Going Under
THE phone rings. Dermot gets off the couch, puts his book face-down on the slim mantle that juts out over the fireplace and watches it flip over, onto the floor.
“Hello?”
“It’s Michael.”
“What time is it?” Looking out the window Dermot sees it’s gone dark. He turns to Flagon, who’s lying on the floor by the couch; she looks up at him, but doesn’t lift her head.
“Half-eight. Listen, I’m just back from starting a dig at Maam. Thought we’d go out.”
“What’s at Maam?”
“A Bord na Móna crew found a strip of leather in the peat.”
“Bord
na
Móna,” Dermot corrects his annunciation.
“Right.” Michael waits for Dermot to say something about drinks. There’s only the faint hum of the line.
“Where are you?” Dermot finally asks. He can hear noise in the background.
“The pub in Gortmore.” Flagon rolls over onto her back. Dermot watches her lay there, eyes to the carpet. “Thought you might come up.”
“I’m for bed,” Dermot says.
“Suit yourself.”
“Ta.” And Dermot hangs up the phone, watches it set there in its cradle.
Dermot pours himself a glass of whiskey and sets it on the bedside table. The smell of Abbey is gone from the sheets. He pushes his face into her pillow and there is nothing, no hint of her left. If she’d been true to her word she would’ve been home this evening. But somehow he knew better. He’d called her last night, got Angela’s voice mail and hung up.
Pulling the blanket under his chin, Dermot turns to get comfortable, kicks at the knot of sheets around his ankles. Turns back to the bedside table. Picks up his glass. In the other room he hears the click of Flagon’s nails on the kitchen linoleum.