The Shelter of Neighbours (2 page)

And – to his own surprise – Dermot performed the amputation like some millionaire surgeon in the Blackrock Clinic. And off they all went to the graveyard. But just before they reached it, a big blast of wind came and swept Dermot off his feet. And he was blown east and blown west and north and south. And when he was finished being blown all over the place, down he fell at the well, where he had gone to fetch the water. The bucket was full to the brim with sparkling clean water. He picked it up and brought it into the house.

‘Well now, Dermot,' said the woman of the house. ‘Can you tell us a story?'

‘I can,' said Dermot, pleased with himself. ‘Indeed. I am the man who has a story to tell. You'll never believe what's after happening to me …'

‘This tale seems to tell us that if you just let things happen to you, you can make a story out of them,' says the professor.

God, these guys! thinks Finn. So patronising. As if that isn't obvious to anyone.

‘Basically the story is saying, get a life, then tell your story.'

‘Yes,' says the interviewer. ‘And get confidence in yourself, so you can make things up? Play the fiddle, even if you never learnt.'

‘It's saying that, too,' agrees the learned one thoughtfully.

Because how can you play the fiddle if you haven't learnt, is probably what he's thinking. Every eejit knows it's out of the question. Anyone can have a go at hacking off a leg, for sure, but nobody without the gift can squeeze a tune out of a violin.

But the professor says, ‘Yes, Dermot has never played the fiddle, and yet he can play a good tune, when requested.'

‘And he has never amputated a person's leg,' says the interviewer. There's a critical edge creeping into his voice, a hint of a sneer. ‘That's a bit weird, isn't it? How did your man feel, minus a chunk of his legs? I mean, he's not even a corpse, he's alive as you and me and,
whap
, off with half his leg! Nothing about anaesthetic.' The interviewer chuckles and so does the professor. Both sound uneasy.

‘Of course, the fairies have given him the gift,' says the professor.

‘The gift of being a surgeon?' asks the interviewer, in a dangerous, neutral tone.

‘The gift of imagination,' says the professor emphatically. ‘Imagination,' he repeats. ‘What they are telling Dermot is that it doesn't matter if he's a fiddler or a priest or a doctor, he can make believe that he is. In a story. He can make it all up.'

‘That's it, I suppose,' says the interviewer. He cheers up. ‘It's just fiction! A pack of lies. Blame the fairies for it, folks!' He's nearly singing, the interviewer. ‘And now we'll go east and go west and east again – to a commercial break.'

Get a life. And use your imagination. It's the sort of thing Finn tells his own students. In fact, he could give them this story, as a sort of insight into the history of story in Ireland – they might like that. As for him, well, he's had as much life, interesting life, as he's ever going to get, and he doesn't believe in the fairies. In the old days, the storytelling days, they were always there. To frighten ordinary, decent people. And to give the gift of music, or story, or song, to the other ones. To the artists in the community.

The mouse was, as Finn had suspected, a rat. ‘And they usually aren't alone, my friend,' said the rat-man. He kept addressing Finn as ‘my friend', which was nice – the kind of thing he might mention in ‘Bella Kerry', although the rat and the rat-catcher were in a suburb of Dublin – the pest control company was, in fact, just around the corner from Finn's house, a thing he had never known before, and which he did not find reassuring, even if it was convenient. He could shift everything down the country, though, for the purposes of the story. The rat-man put plastic bags of bright red poison down various holes. The skirting boards were full of little holes, which Finn had never noticed before. The rat-man promised to come back in a week and do another round of poison. ‘We'll get them, my friend,' he said. He was a small wiry man, with a sharp face and smooth, iron-grey hair. An intelligent, cheerful manner. He reminded Finn of some character from Chaucer. The Pardoner? ‘They're everywhere. You're never more than six yards from a rat. See you later, my friend,' said the man. Three hundred euro for the basic job. About an hour's work. But who'd want do it? He was a hero, the rat-man, all things considered. These people were the real heroes.

Finn could be a hero, too. Especially since he wanted to escape from town and get back to the country and to his writing. He'd help the Pardoner. He'd back up the bags of poison with traps.

Rat-traps: big versions of mousetraps. Like the holes in the skirting, he'd never seen them before, but there they were, in Woodie's. Down in the garden section, next to the weedkiller.

Before going to bed, he set two of them near the fridge, where the rat came out, he was pretty sure.

Ten minutes later, Mattie came up.

‘The mouse is in the trap,' he said, in a thick voice. His blue eyes had darkened since childhood. The colour had not changed, but the light had. They didn't sparkle any more. It was not a thing Finn had noticed before, but he saw it now, and wondered, as he went downstairs, when that had happened.

Death had been instantaneous, Finn guessed – though he didn't care one way or another. Broken neck. Long brown body. Surprised expression in the eyes. He picked up the rat, in its trap, with a plastic bag wrapped around his hand, and dumped the whole thing in the wheelie bin. To his surprise, he felt suddenly queasy, as if he might vomit. But he gritted his teeth and set another trap before going back to bed. He was going to get them.

Three rats in two days.

And he could hear them eating the rat-man's poison.

By the third rat, he still felt sick after disposing of them. But by then he was feeling sorry for them, too. Their little pointy faces looked so shocked in the trap – a vicious machine. They just came up from their home under the floorboards for a bite to eat. And snap. Guillotined. He was beginning to know the rats now – their habits, their points of ingress. They'd been under his house for quite a while, was his guess, and they'd eaten lots of things. Mostly cat-food, but other stuff, too. They loved plastic. He cleaned out the cupboard under the sink, one of those cupboards that gets left, uncleaned, for years and years, and found heaps of shredded plastic bags in at the back, behind the old tins of shoe polish and dried-up window-cleaner. They were also very fond of electric wires – that's what had happened to the fridge. The cable to the dishwasher was well gnawed, too, but was holding out for the minute – apparently they preferred the poison to electric cables. Poor things. They'd probably watched their nearest relatives, their mother and dad, their brothers, getting electrocuted. Death Row in the O'Keefe kitchen.

Finn stayed in Dublin for a week. A whole week out of his precious ‘month in the country', his writing summer. The Pardoner had made a return visit and pronounced himself well pleased. He'd come back in another fortnight. Finn arranged with Mattie, who was sickened at the thought of dead rats (Mattie was a vegetarian, and a sort of Zen Buddhist), to let the rat-man in, and only to call him, Finn, back to town if it were absolutely essential. He'd tried to start a conversation with Mattie a few times in the course of the week; he'd seldom been alone in the house with him before. But nothing doing. Mattie got that stony look in his eye and left the room whenever his father tried to talk to him.

Six hours later and he's back in the cottage.

Gráinne is sitting in front of the fire in one chair, Pangur in the other.

Pangur miaows when Finn comes in, which is more than Gráinne does. She doesn't even look at him.

Finn sighs.

Pangur is thin. Now that he's been away for a week he sees her with clear eyes. He sees that she's not really getting that much better, even here, in the country. He's been deluding himself.

Also he sees that there's no dinner on the table. He'd been imagining. A nice bit of marinated lamb. Mint sauce. A bottle of Chianti. Candles. Gráinne had had no car, of course. She could have got the bus, though – there's one on Fridays, bringing the old folk into town to collect their pensions. Anyone can use it if they pay the fare.

‘You look tired', is what she says, in an accusing voice, when she finally looks at him.

That means, you don't look sexy. You look old.

Of course I'm bloody tired, he thinks. I've spent a week catching rats instead of writing my story. I've driven two hundred and forty miles across Ireland in the rain.

He says nothing.

‘Rats,' she says with a sigh.

And then it blows up.

A full-scale row.

His selfishness. The rats. The way he never cooks or cleans anything. His fathering. He's bad at it, that's why Mattie is the way he is, which is too closed in, too involved with his own hobbies, just like his father. His stupid writing. His diary. She'd snooped, she'd read it when he was away. Fantasies about Frances in Tuscany. When he never had sex with her (her choice, but of course she conveniently left out bits of the story in this version, the quarrelling version).

It's over.

She wants out.

And on and on.

The rows.

They have them periodically – every few weeks, over a stretch of time. Then months might go by. Half a year, more. They have a spot of rowing, it finishes, they struggle on. He believes marriage is like that for a lot of people. But of course how would he know? And does that make it right?

Frances and her second husband in
Bella Tuscany
never seem to have a row. They have candlelit dinners, long walks, holidays. Outings with friends. He wonders what it was like with her first husband. How could a marriage to someone as lovely and charming and pleasant as Frances come to an end?

‘I want some peace and happiness while there is still time.'

That's Gráinne.

He's heard the words a hundred times before. He's even said them himself, once or twice, and thought them much more often. Some peace and happiness. How wonderful it would be, how wonderful. But would there be peace and happiness if they split up? He can't imagine life without Gráinne. He could hardly say he loves her, not in the old sense, the erotic sense. Eros and Agape. Maybe Agape, hardly any Eros – infatuation, being in love, lasts for eighteen months, he's read somewhere. It's over before you even marry, apparently. Still, he missed Gráinne when he was in Dublin catching the rats. Trying to talk to his silent son.
Is fearr an troid ná an t-uaigneas
, he heard on the radio another day. The fighting is better than the loneliness. They'd a proverb for every situation, the old folks. Finn wonders who made them up in the first place, and if anyone does that any more. If he was making one, it would be this: Life is a matter of balance. But they have one for that, too. You've to take the good with the bad. Only the very young, like Mattie, believe it should be all good and that, if not, it's not worth living. But Mattie's wrong. A balance is as good as it gets.

He thinks he should kiss Gráinne, now, here in the dark kitchen. That would, he is ninety-five per cent sure, calm her down, put a stop to the row. But he's afraid to. She's still really angry. So instead he says, ‘I am very tired', which is perfectly true. ‘I'm going to get some sleep.' And off he trundles to bed.

His laptop is on the table in the window, its blue light still on. On standby, which is what he hopes Mattie is on – someday in a year or two he'll switch on and talk again, stop being a Buddhist and climb off the sofa and back into ordinary life. He looks at the laptop, and out the window at the dark, blue-black sky, milky with stars. He considers writing a few lines, but he's too tired. Tomorrow he'll sit down. He'll stare out the window at the green island and the green ocean and start telling his story.

He gets into bed. The sheets are cool, the room fresh and uncluttered. It's a nice cottage, this place they've rented for their summer in the country. But when he closes his eyes, he's back in the messy Dublin kitchen. And the rat is there, in the big trap beside the fridge. A puzzled look in its eyes – death surprised it. Its long rat body, long tail, sticking out behind. Mattie is standing silently by the kitchen door, looking at the rat. His eyes are as sad as sad can be.

Nausea grips Finn. His stomach heaves with that queasiness he got when he tossed the dead rats into the dustbin. Even as he lies flat on his back between the fresh, cool sheets in the room that looks out on the dark beauty of sea and sky and stars. He is filled with terror.

He makes a supreme effort. He pushes the rat out of his mind. Because everyone knows what dreaming about rats means.

Near Exit 13, which is where the Dundrum shopping centre is, on one side, and the Dublin Mountains, on the other, he saw from the corner of his eye this thing: a bank of wildflowers. Long, golden grass. Buttercups splattered through them, brilliant yellow. And a profusion of poppies. So scarlet, so scarlet. At that very moment the sun broke through the massed grey clouds and drenched the wildflowers of July in its warm summer light. The rock of the mountains appeared on his left then – the very heart of the mountain, which they must have blasted away to make the road. He passed the bank of flowers – you weren't allowed to stop – but tucked the picture away, stored it safely, to take out when he wanted to. Next up was the sign that appeared like magic at odd intervals along the motorway and that always lifted his spirits: ‘In Case of Breakdown, Await Rescue'. The only road sign that does not try to frighten you, or nag you and make you feel guilty. The road sign that made him remember his mother, who died two years ago, whom he still missed, especially when he was leaving home to go on a journey.

And then – because the motorway was still slicing through the mountain – came the yellow sign with a picture of a deer on it. A black deer, springing carelessly into the bright air.