“Not even a bit?”
He kicks a pebble with his foot; it rolls twice over gravel before skittering onto the road. “Well, if I did, I’d probably believe in my own before another’s.”
——
Later that night Dermot wakes up to the sound of Abbey saying something in her sleep. He leans over her in the dark, tries to make it out, but all he can hear is a sob welling in her chest. He puts his hand on her cheek to wake her, just a bit. Turn the dream around.
“Hey,” he whispers, wondering if it’s the old business with the father. Wondering if he’s there, in her head.
“Abbey?” he whispers again, gently pushing her hair off her forehead. She turns towards him, eyes still closed. In the moonlight he can see her pupils moving back and forth under her lids. He strokes the fine hair over her left temple with his thumb. She feels cold.
The world, Dermot thinks, is a changed place. Abbey’s come home and he’s still at sea. It might as well be him with the restless dreams. Somehow he thought her return would right things. But it’s like he’s slipped through the cracks anyway, as if the boat he was sitting in had turned over. The secretary in Galway did not know him. Michael is over at Maam doing work that Dermot could be involved in. And Rory is still in his head, a fiction he’s constantly spinning.
So here we are
. Dermot runs his finger over the arch of Abbey’s brow.
The two of us going under together. And I don’t even have the wrongs I’ve done to hold onto
.
Isle of the Dogs
AT the south end of the Isle of the Dogs, there’s a green space called Millwall Park. When he was a boy, Michael and his parents lived five minutes away. The spit the Park occupied narrowed towards the Thames and ended in another park called Island Gardens. The gardens led to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel which led to Greenwich Pier. These were the boundaries of Michael’s childhood. Never allowed on the docks unaccompanied, never allowed to cross Manchester Road. When he saw Crossharbour, he was meant to turn around. By the mid-sixties all that changed. Michael was old enough to ride the train into London alone. The area modernized, and development brought the police in. The only dangers left were the construction zones. Then his father lost his job and there was no reason to stay by the docks. By 1968 the family had moved to Wapping.
Now, standing in the pit at Maam, it occurs to Michael that he’s always done exactly as he’s been told, that he never goes beyond the perimeters set for him.
Never went to the Quays to mix with the dock hands, never stopped to talk to the old drunk who raised a chess piece in Michael’s direction when, as a boy, he marched past him on his way to school. He wonders if he should regret this. If it’s diminished him in some way. Lifting the tarp that covers the east bank of the pit, Michael looks at the orange flags, touches the peat beside them with the flat of his hand. The outer layer is dry even though they’ve kept it covered, even though Michael has brought jugs of water to keep it moist. It’ll be five days before they’re ready to dig. But every pore of Michael’s being is ready to start in now. To break the rules. Just once.
There was a point in time on the weekend when Michael thought the paperwork would never end, that he’d be dead and buried himself before the Maam body was ever cleared for excavation, but now, at least, the forms are done. Hopkins has taken them to the Minister, to Dúchas, himself. First, there were the methodology statements, then the arrangements for the body fridge from St. James’, then assembling the team, tracking down the paleobotanist from Clare. Then getting Bord na Móna and the Museum to agree on the size and scope of the excavation. All Michael’s patience is exhausted. At least the Garda had assessed the hand and the site, agreed it wasn’t a crime scene, allowed the work to go forward.
Michael sits on the west bank of the pit and looks around the bog. Tomás and his crew are off for three days, having harvested both sets. The sound of another team’s tractor comes across the field from the north. Everything else is quiet. No birds, no frogs sounding out in the nearby trench. The strata of the pit goes from dark to light brown, depending on
the level of moisture. The tarp beside Michael catching the glint of the sun, like a glass held up to the light. It occurs to him to call Janey. He could ask her down from Clifden; invite her out to watch the excavation. But maybe she’d bring Simon. Michael weighs it out—why would he want her to come? Would it matter to him if Simon came with her? He was over it now. He was. Would only ask her along because she might find it interesting, because, in those years they were together, she could never wrap her head around what he did, that archeology involved the lab, involved writing papers, as much as it involved digging in the ground.
Michael was with Janey for two years. He’d commuted between Clifden and Dublin the first year, a ridiculous and impractical move, but one that seemed completely natural at the time. In the summer he’d stay in her house on the coast but in the autumn he was driving back and forth again. Finally he just threw his hands up in the air and moved in with her. Took a sabbatical for research, worked a few sites freelance on the islands. The fact that she wouldn’t give up her job at Mahones, her uncle’s pub, never really bothered him, though he saw the humour in it. His twelve years of education, his career, having to accommodate her desire to stay in a small coastal village at a pub that paid her five pounds an hour, in a house that was near falling down. But he loved her. Really did. And they were happy. And after a while her family got used to having Michael around. The father was a Nationalist, the uncle more or less the same. And maybe that was part of it. Janey asserting her independence, taking up with an Englishman. And Michael asserting his place in
Ireland, saying
Okay, maybe I’m not one of you, but don’t assume that makes me one of them
.
Simon had come into Mahones just as Michael had done. Sat down for a drink. He was even Michael’s age, and no better looking. Probably gave her a decent tip. Went off down the coast on business but came back again. Michael was on Inishbofin for the weekend, getting a hard time of it from the locals. Simon worked in exports: “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” buttons, Connemara-stone key chains, Sláinte t-shirts, pint glasses bearing the tricolour, tiny ceramic houses that came with impossibly small bricks of Irish peat. He sold mostly to the US. Everything made in China and shipped from Belfast. Janey mentioned him the day Michael came back. “Had a drink with Simon. Was a good laugh.” Making fun of his line of business.
Two weeks after Michael moved out of Janey’s house in Clifden, Simon moved in. Michael found a flat in Galway and sat on a chair with his back to the window, reeling from the blow. And just when it seemed like he was ready to start over, weighing the idea of returning to London, she started to call him again. At night mostly, from Mahones, or in the early evening when the pub wasn’t too busy. “Just to see,” she’d said, “how you’re doing.”
“Fine.”
“That’s it? Fine.” Her voice uneasy.
“What did you expect? That I’ve become engaged to be married?”
“No.” Followed by silence. Followed by, “Michael? Don’t hate me.”
If there was anything he could take back, it would be the fact that he never gave her that—never allowed for the possibility that he didn’t hate her. He liked her unhappiness then, the guilt he knew she was feeling. Janey became the conduit for everything that had welled up in him all those years in Ireland—the times he’d had to suffer the looks; the talk, the flat-out racism heaped on an Englishman living in this country. Fair enough, he’d think when it happened. But he was convinced even then, that things could be different if the Irish got to know him. So he thought: let the guilt get to her. He’d done everything by the book. She was the one who’d left him. She’d brought it on herself in the end.
Settling
SEAN walks over the rise in the back field and heads towards the cottage. If Dermot’s in he’ll ask him something about the fence, about payment, maybe ask him for a first installment. But what he really wants is to see Abbey. The past three days, since the fight on the beach, he’s been thinking about her. And this morning, up at the house to collect the wheelbarrow and the wire, she was out in the garden watering the plants. Saw him and said hello.
When Sean enters the back yard he sees that Dermot’s clothes are up on the line now—three pairs of men’s pants, a white shirt, some underwear, a sweater. The line sags with the weight.
Knocking on the door Sean goes over what he’ll say. Shoves his hands into his front pockets. After a minute Abbey answers. She’s wearing a tight red shirt and jeans. There’s a bruise on her neck he hadn’t noticed. An old bruise turned yellow.
“Hiya.” Sean looks down at the floor.
“Hi.” Abbey hesitates, unsure why he’s there.
“Is Mr. Fay here?”
“No, Dermot’s in town.”
“I wanted to ask him about the fence.”
“He’s due back in an hour or so.”
The two of them stand there a second and then Abbey asks, “Do you want tea?” Turns to go to the kitchen.
“Thanks.” He steps into the cottage, closes the door behind him. Something savory is cooking on the stove.
“I’ve got black tea and …” Abbey reaches for a tin in the cupboard above the sink, her shirt lifting at the back. Sean watches the swathe of her bare skin shift above the top of her jeans, “… lemon.”
“Yeah, grand. Lemon. Can I use the loo?”
“Sure. Over there.” Abbey points around the corner. Sean takes his jacket off and drops it on the floor by the door, heads through the front room, rounds the corner and closes the door behind him.
“Fuck off.” Sean looks at himself in the bathroom mirror and says “fuck off” three times to his reflection. He runs the taps and puts cold water on his face. A sunburn under his eyes, over his forehead. The nose peeling.
When Sean comes out of the bathroom Abbey is standing at the sink looking out the window. The kettle is whistling. Stepping behind her, Sean reaches out and turns off the burner. When the tea’s poured Abbey sits down at the table and Sean takes the seat across from her.
“How’s the fence coming?”
“All right.” He slouches down in the seat. Drums his fingers on the edge of the table.
“So what kinds of things do you like to do when you’re not building fences?”
Sean lifts his right shoulder up, an exaggerated I-don’t-give-a-shit gesture.
“Do you like music?”
“Yeah. Ska mostly.”
Abbey takes a sip of her tea, burns the roof of her mouth. “Do you speak Irish?”
“Yeah. Fuckin’ hate it.”
“That’s too bad,” she smiles. Sean’s sitting across the table with a tough look on his face.
“Do you speak French?” he thrusts his chin at her.
“Un petit peu.”
For the next half hour, it works this way between them. Abbey asks Sean a question, studies his face, and then after he answers her, with one word or two, she asks him something else, something more personal, until he starts telling her things he doesn’t talk about with anyone. And Abbey’s interested, wonders how his mind works, what it’s like to grow up on the coast in Ireland with six brothers and sisters and two parents. What it’s like to know almost everyone in the village. She tells him about Ontario when he asks, about a whole childhood spent in front of the TV. Confesses that she couldn’t name a bird or a tree to save her life but she knows the plot of every episode of “Charlie’s Angels” that aired in the 1980s. Sean telling her how his father’s always riding him to get his shit together, his mother pawning Mary off on him when she’s too busy with the baby. Every now and again Sean kicks the heels of his Docs down on the rug under the table, and then
aware that he’s doing it, both legs nervously bouncing up and down, he looks up at Abbey and stops. When he asks her what happened to her neck, she tells him. Then she gets up and takes the tea cups away, starts wiping the table.
After Sean goes back to the fence, Abbey walks around the cottage waiting for Dermot to come home. She picks Dermot’s sweater up off the couch, puts it on a shelf in the bedroom closet. She does the dishes from tea, washes the plastic cutting board. Throws out last week’s
Irish Times
which was still occupying the far corner of the big table. Then she runs her hand along the front of the bookshelf in the bedroom, trying to find something to read. Back in the living room Abbey touches the frayed wool blanket on the couch, the petals of the iris Dermot brought in two days ago. She picks up the photo on the side table then sets it down, happy to be settling in again. And when Dermot comes home, he puts his arms around Abbey and heads into the kitchen, tests the chili and tells her, with tomato sauce on his chin, how wonderful it is. He pulls two bowls and two glasses down from the cupboard, opens a bottle of wine. Turns the radio on to music. Proclaims lunch. And for a minute or two, for an hour, everything is perfect between them.
All that afternoon, Dermot stays in and watches Abbey move from room to room as if she is a product of his imagination, a quirky manifestation out of his control. Just when she is standing in a square of sunlight, her hand to the window, just when Dermot is struck by the simple beauty of the image, Abbey will turn and laugh, say that Flagon is out in the yard chasing a gull, that it’s close and she almost has it. It amazes
him that she is so much a woman and then sometimes a girl; the way her face opens in amazement at things she’s never seen. After lunch they had gone for a walk to the beach and talked about her father, and talking about him made Abbey feel better. Dermot had made a joke about ghosts, had opened the door after coming home, had stepped across the threshold before her, saying he was checking to be sure the cottage was clear. And if he is here, Dermot reasons now, if by chance Frank is watching, if he’s not just some byproduct of Abbey’s grief, let him look at this woman, let him see her as Dermot does. Let him see her the way the dead should see the living, as something apart from themselves. Dermot has his own superstitions, has seen his fetch come across the field to call him father. Everyone haunted by something.