Dermot shakes his head, sets his arm over the back of Michael’s chair. “Listen—”
But there’s nothing behind it, just Dermot saying “listen,” the word slurred out and bullshit Dermot’ll make up on the spot to follow.
“What do you know about—” Dermot’s eyes move left to right “—time?” Dermot’s known Eileen McGilloway for twenty-two years. He’d even taken supper with her after her husband died, helped look after Deirdre on more than one afternoon.
Michael looks at his watch without thinking. Dermot shakes his head.
“And so it was,” Dermot says, looking around the room. A woman in track pants and a shiny blue shirt smiles as she walks past him, the last remnants of her lager sloshing around in her glass. Michael turns in his seat and redirects his attention to the coal fire, pulls at the collar of his shirt.
“And so it was,” Dermot repeats, faintly, behind him.
The Bay Road
SEAN O’Riordan steps out onto the main road. The rain has let up, but the street’s slick, a black sheen over it. The construction work that’s started up all over the village is further underway. Yesterday, scaffolding went up in front of Feeny’s butcher shop. The window panes on the second floor of the house were stripped and repainted; Feeny clambered down the ladder whenever a customer walked in to the storefront. By the end of the day he’d finished four windows and had settled on a spot for the B&B sign that was coming from Doherty’s. Sean had watched him that evening, outside with his wife, moving a cardboard version of the sign back and forth before Mrs. Feeny decided they’d put baskets of flowers on either side of the centre windows, and the sign directly between.
In Spiddal, things are being torn down and built up in equal measure. The Allied Irish Bank building that sat on the corner next to Hughes was demolished in a matter of two days and the AIB installed a bank machine at the Spar directly afterwards. A grocery is going up in place
of the bank, although so far it’s just a concrete pit with metal girders sticking out of the walls. Two roads back, Tele Gael is building a sound studio and a set for an Irish language soap opera. The fish and chip shop is remodelling. Only the new church has stayed the same. Sean eyes it from the main junction. The facade lit up by spotlights hidden in the surrounding hedge. A low railing around the garden. Another spotlight shining towards the coast, a life-size statue of the Virgin. Sean shoots her the finger, shoves his hands in his pockets, starts walking.
It takes ten minutes to get to the end of the village if you turn around at the river. Beyond that, there’s nothing except the hotel. There are nine houses between the centre of the village and the bridge, there’s the reading room, the post office. All the lights are off until the Folan house. The telly going from blue to yellow in the front window. Back to blue again. Sean stands there a minute and watches the light flicker on their ceiling. He sees one of the Folans stand up and leave the room. Too dark to tell if it’s a man or a woman. Someone puts their arm over the back of the couch, the empty space beside them. Sean kicks at a few stones on the side of the road. Picks up a rock and wheels it at the tree trunk in the yard. Misses. When the sidewalk ends Sean keeps walking along the roadside. Counts the paces between street lamps. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. And Eighteen. Under the globe again. He kicks a puddle, watches the water run over his Docs. At the end of the houses, a byroad angles down to the beach. Across from the byroad is the seafood restaurant his parents go to. Spiddal River’s a quarter mile beyond, the draining point for some twelve lakes. Sean’s father took him fishing for
salmon there once. They caught ling and grisle too. On the other side of the river, in amongst the trees, sits the Bridge House Hotel. Four storeys painted yellow, bright green shutters framing the windows.
Standing on the bay road, Sean looks up the coast, notes how it closes in on itself in the darkness. But he knows exactly how it goes: a quarter of a mile up the road there’s the river; then, less than a mile on, there’s a bend that curves east before going west again; then, more turns in the road and stone beaches that skirt the shore all the way to Clifden. Weekends he rides his brother’s bike that way. The sound of the waves hitting the pier. Beach on your left, fields to your right, sewn together like a quilt that reaches down to the head of the Atlantic, the whole coast of Ireland caving in. The air becomes different the farther north you go. Wind like a solid wall. Men fishing from the piers or coming in on the boats. Sean’s Uncle Jack in Roundstone took him out one summer to see what it was like. Sean could end up on the boats; that’s what his father tells him.
Sean circles back and stops at the main junction, looks in the chip shop window. They rent DVDs and videos out of the back room now. There’s an internet station set up in the alcove by the pay phone. Flynn, the owner, is leaning over the counter in his paper cap, reading a magazine; no one else is around. Sean walks across the road and takes up a position on the low concrete wall of the would-be grocers. The music coming out of Hughes just reaches him, the din from inside getting louder whenever someone walks out the door to straggle home.
After ten minutes of not much happening, Sean sees Jenny Welsh and her mother come up the road and head over
to Flynn’s. Jenny has a big red hand-bag tucked under her arm. Sean watches as she steps into the light cast by the square of the window. The two women are the same height now; their shoes clip-clop on the pavement, water splashing up onto the back of Jenny’s tights. Flynn looks up when they enter. Sean is seventeen, the same age as Jenny, but she looks older—her face, her clothes; something he can’t quite put his finger on. When they first met she was thirteen, had moved with her family from Donegal. She was the first girl Sean ever got off with. Out by the pier. If her father, a solicitor in Galway, knew, he’d probably have Sean killed. They were supposed to be in school but Jenny had sent him a note in Maths telling him to meet her by the breakwall after lunch. His hand up her shirt two seconds after he put his tongue in her mouth.
This summer half the kids Sean knows will be going off to college or moving to the city. Jenny’s going to UCD for economics. Clancy’s doing IT training in Dublin. Sean’s grades haven’t left him much of a chance to go on. His father talks about the boats by way of a threat, but sometimes he asks Sean to think about apprenticing, becoming an electrician.
Jenny and her mother come out of the chip shop and Jenny looks across the street to where Sean is sitting bundled into his black duffel coat. She calls “Hiya Sean,” waving. He wishes she hadn’t looked over, caught him glomming around, but he lifts his hand and waves. Jenny’s mother, noticing it’s Sean, waves as well. Then Mrs. Welsh opens up her umbrella, even though the rain has mostly let up, and she and Jenny crowd together to walk under it as they head towards home. The smell of chips and vinegar trailing behind them.
When the rain starts in again Sean gets up, heads for the side street. Seven houses in is the new two-storey his father bought last year. The door was bright red when they moved in, and Sean’s father painted the trim and shutters to match. Wood planters are starting to sprout under the sills. It’s a big change from the stone house they had on the coast road. There are neighbours on either side of them now, so in the summer, when the windows are left open, Sean hears their radios, their arguments, their children crying. Even in the winter there’s noise from the village junction, the church bells, people tumbling out of the pub after last call, car alarms whooping and honking on the main road.
As Sean heads home, Dermot and Michael make their way up the side street to the Big House. They’ll climb the wrought iron gate and go in, walk the property to the river. Take the tunnel that leads out under the road and then start back from the beach. It’s the fresh air they’re after, the adventure. At the top of the road they eye the gate. Michael pulls at it. The lock and chain rattle back and forth on the crossbar. Dermot puts a hand up towards the top rung, to the finial. He hangs there a second and then drops down.
“There’s dogs. Two dogs.”
They listen for the dogs but hear nothing. Crickets sound out from the hedge.
“What’s to stop us?” Michael asks. The top of the gate two feet above him.
“The dogs,” Dermot says again.
When they turn around to go back to the coast road, Dermot stops to light a cigarette. Michael looks left and sees
Sean. He’s sitting on the top step of his porch, under the overhang, out of the rain.
“Right there?”
“All right.”
Michael sits down on the step. Dermot turns around to see where Michael’s gone.
“We were just up the road.” Michael nods to the top of the street.
Sean smirks. The guy’s accent is pure BBC1. “I saw ya’s. You can break in through the tunnel. There’s a gate at the end. Just take a pen. It’s an old lock.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sean.”
“I’m Michael, and this is Dermot. We’re just,” and he tosses his head in the direction of the pub.
Dermot lifts his hand, then crosses his arms over his chest. Sean nods at both of them.
“What do you do?”
“Sorry?”
“With your time,” Michael clarifies, belching once but managing to keep his mouth closed.
The boy looks at him, a drunk English man in baggy trousers and wet loafers.
“What’s it to you?”
“Do you need a job?”
Sean shrugs.
Dermot looks at Michael and staggers back a bit. Michael doesn’t even know the kid, and he lives in Galway for Christsake. What kind of work could he give him?
“Dermot here needs a fence around his property. Four pound an hour.” Michael looks over at Dermot. “Or Euros. Christ. What about six Euros an hour?”
Dermot shakes his head, steps forward. He no more needs a fence then he can afford to build one.
“You’ve been complaining about the bungalows all night. It’s all you’ve been saying,” Michael explains.
Sean recognizes Dermot—the ex-professor from Dublin. His property backs onto the stream near the old church. A couple of times he’s seen him out in the back fields and he’s seen him come and go from Hughes.
“I’ll do it for four-fifty an hour.”
Dermot, his grey hair wild about his head, looks at the boy. Then he looks at Michael. Conneely goes by on a rickety bicycle and rings his bell. The kid wipes his nose with his coat sleeve.
Why not? A fence. Everyone should have one. And at that moment Dermot believes it, thinks that his problems might be solved, solvable, if he can contain them, separate them. Mine and yours. The bungalows over there, the cottage over here and Dermot and Abbey in the middle of it, drawn together by a patch of land, wood and wire around them. He looks at Sean again. The kid can’t be more than sixteen.
“Should have tried for five.” And Dermot can’t believe he’s saying it.
“Okay, five Euros an hour.”
“Too late.” Dermot puts out his hand. Looks over at Michael. “You’ll get yours.”
The kid stepping forward. Takes the hand, shakes it.
Going Out On the Town
ABBEY wakes up twenty miles outside of Dublin. The bus droning along, the other passengers asleep or staring out the windows into the darkness. In the back a man and a woman talk quietly. Abbey has been dreaming about the funeral. That she opened the casket and there was no one there. In the dream she turned to Jane and said, “Where is he?” And Jane took off her shoes, the black pumps she’d had on at the service, and threw them at Abbey.
The Shaws had come to bury Frank. That was a surprise. And Jane made a big show of welcoming them. Abbey was just off the plane; she’d rented a car at Pearson in Toronto and drove two hundred miles through the flat expanse of Southern Ontario to get to the church in Merlin. On the front steps of St. Pat’s, Jane stood with Isabelle and Robert Shaw, introducing them to the city workers who’d had shifts with Frank. “These are relatives of Frank’s,” she’d said to the city employees and Abbey had to give her credit for that. But when the coffin went
into the ground, the Shaws stood on one side of the grave and Jane and Abbey stood on the other. Abbey looking at Isabelle the whole time and seeing herself there, the same height and build, the same dark hair. The Shaws were mostly in their fifties, and Frank was the spitting image of one of the younger brothers.
Midway through the service Jane put a hand on Abbey’s arm, was watching her watching the Shaws. Then the priest threw a clump of dirt on the grave. Jane stepped forward and did the same. People turned to Abbey. She bent forward and scooped up a handful from the mound of earth near her feet. Let it go over the casket. A small stone skipped over the mahogany. The Shaws did nothing, as if they had no right, despite being Frank’s blood relations. Four brothers and a sister. The sum total of all their parts. Even though they were standing next to the grave, even though they’d driven for over four hours to get to his funeral, making the effort to show up in pressed suits and polished shoes, Isabelle fingering her pearl necklace, Frank wouldn’t have forgiven them. One last affront—that’s how he would have seen it. As if this was their way of saying “you were never one of us.” All of his life Frank had talked about how he thought they blamed him for their mother’s death. As if he’d done something in the womb. His father giving him away to punish him. And not so much as a word of acknowledgement from the Shaws all those years. Not even a look that said “we know you.”
The twelve who’d come to see Frank off went over to the church hall for the reception. The city workers looked longingly over at their cars. Abbey’d stayed to watch the backhoe push the dirt onto the grave, the driver wary of her presence. After he left she walked over to the headstone and traced the
letters of her father’s name. Felt nothing. Tried to picture him in her mind in better days. But every thought led her to the last time she’d seen him, the night of the fire. Over by the church the crows swooped around the red-brick bell tower, cawed in the nearby trees. The sun was out but the air held onto the cold. It was mid-April but it didn’t feel like Spring. In three days’ time, she’d be on a plane heading back to Ireland. She’d be back with Dermot, trying again to find work on the west coast. Jane had asked her to go through Frank’s apartment, to take anything she might need before it got hauled away. But Abbey didn’t want to go back there; she didn’t want to be here now.