Solace (10 page)

‘You’re used to seeing bellies like that, of course, lassie,’ said Paddy Keogh, and Maura heard, as though on a crossed wire, the echo of the gossip about her that must have
been exchanged in this very room. She imagined the snatches of information: how she was from Dromod, was a nurse in the manor; her father was dead; her mother entered knitting and embroidery into
the summer shows; her brother ran the farm. She imagined them talking about how she and Tom had met at the dance in Newtown, and they had been to dances as far away as Athlone and Drumshanbo since
then, as though the local dances weren’t good enough for them.

Maura knew the drill: it was the same in Dromod when someone from around started going with someone from somewhere else. The particulars were quickly gathered and gleefully spread. Bits were
tacked on to the stories, extra details added, regardless of their distance from the truth. She didn’t care. Tom was a good man, and a good-looking man, and she was proud to be seen with him.
Still, she wished Paddy and Breda Keogh would stop looking her up and down with their small little eyes.

‘And you’ll be gettin’ used to bellies like that yourself, Tom, be the looks of it,’ Keogh spluttered with laughter.

‘We’re not all poor cornered bastards like you, Paddy,’ Tom said. Taking up his shopping, he nodded to Maura to follow him, and she said an awkward goodbye to Keogh and to the
woman, who were both now red in the face and looking out after Tom. In the car, the two of them laughed like children, and it was a relief to Maura to laugh over it, because it stopped her having
to think about how else she should take it, what Tom had just said. Anyway, he proposed to her the next month, so whatever he’d meant by it, it couldn’t have been what she’d
feared. Probably he had just thought of it on the spur of the moment. Probably it had meant nothing at all.

Mark had begun to slouch when he walked; that was something Maura noticed about him now. He carried the batch loaf under one arm as though it were a newspaper, and he had the thin plastic bag of
ham bunched up in his hand. She thought about saying something to him about that slouch, but then she was wondering, instead, about those worn-looking canvas runners he had on his feet. She tried
to think about when she had first seen him in those shoes, when the soles had been bright and white instead of yellow and scuffed. It seemed like years. She didn’t think it was lack of money
had him going around with his shoes falling off him like that. She hoped not. He had his grant coming in, and he said that was enough to live on, and he had been with Mossy in that same house for
six or seven years now, and the rent, he said, had hardly gone up at all. He never seemed to be wanting for money, and apart from the shoes, which really were in tatters now that she looked at them
more closely, he was dressed smartly enough. A hooded top, like he was always wearing, and his jeans looked new, and he had a nice-looking watch on his wrist.

‘That Annie McGurk is a nosy bloody bitch,’ Mark said, tossing the groceries into the back of the car.

‘Where are you after pegging my good bread?’

‘It’s batch. It’s meant to be hardy.’

‘You wouldn’t know what kind of junk your father had on that back seat when he took the car this morning.’

‘It’s fine,’ Mark said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t interested in talking about bread, or back seats, or his father.

She drove out past the petrol pumps, past the parked cars she recognized and put faces on as instinctively as though they were their owners themselves and not her neighbours’ Almeras,
Mondeos, Hilux jeeps. Even at this time of day the traffic was heavy: not for a few moments was it clear enough for her to pull out on to the road for home.

‘First she wanted to know how long I was back for,’ Mark said. ‘Then she wanted to know whether I liked being at home. Then she wanted to know if I preferred being at home to
being in the city. Then she wanted to know how I could stand living up there in the city, because she could never stand it herself, living in the middle of all those strangers and hooligans and
junkies, and she wanted to know did I live in a house by myself or in digs, and when I said neither, she wanted to know how I could be sure of the people I was living with, and would I not be
worried that they’d steal from me, or be ’ithin in their bedrooms doing drugs or something, and then did I hear what happened to Jimmy Flynn’s niece ’ithin in the town, and
did I ever see drugs myself, and did I know anybody who did drugs, and did I think that the judge would go hard on Jimmy’s niece for what she did, sorry, what she done, and were you glad to
see me, and wasn’t Dad doing a great job around the place without me, and would I ever think of moving home and . . .’ He shook his head and looked out the window. ‘Jesus Christ,
she’s a bag.’

‘She’s full of questions, anyway.’

‘Fuckin’ bitch,’ Mark said, and Maura wondered if she should say something to him, but he was past that a long time now and, anyway, he was probably right.

‘Jimmy’s niece was caught dealing Ecstasy or something, I don’t know,’ she said, trying to change the subject.

‘I don’t know her.’

‘She’s younger than you. Poor Jimmy had to bail her out. I think the case is up next week. They say she’ll probably be all right unless she gets Naughton.’

‘Naughton is the woman?’

Maura nodded. ‘She’s the one is always being given out about on
Liveline
. The one that said things about Africans hanging around the shopping centre and girls dressing up like
they wanted to get raped.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Mark said, but he was barely listening to her now, she could tell: he was looking at his phone. He wiped the screen with the pad of his thumb and clicked through the
keys. Wondering who he was making contact with, or who was making contact with him, was an old instinct Maura had learned to bat down in herself as quickly as it bubbled up; still, it did bubble
up, and her mind flicked, as it used to do when he was a teenager answering the phone in the house, through a rapid list of possibilities. She knew some of his friends, heard him talking about
others, had a gallery of imagined faces for the rest; the kinds of friends he must have now, the kinds of women he might be associating with, going with, sleeping with, which was something she
still found strange to think. At nearly thirty, how many women would a man have slept with, these days? Was it really like the television programmes made it out to be, that parade of one-night
stands, that stumbling from one hurried, noisy affair to another? No problems taking their clothes off in front of each other nearly straight away, no problems looking each other in the eye
afterwards, no problems doing it at parties or in toilets or in public, even, girls not even blinking about going down on their knees and opening their mouths in the corner of a nightclub? She
couldn’t imagine. Before Tom, other men had slid their hands between her thighs in the front of a car, and there had been the backs of cars, too, but there were things everybody got up to and
there were things you knew it wasn’t permitted to do, and that night in the Abbey Hotel had been her first time, Tom her first man, and what people Mark’s age did with each other now
she regarded with a mixture of envy and exhaustion.

Mark’s hands were freckled, already growing brown, though the summer had only just begun to suggest itself, and there was a bony strength to them, a gnarled, awkward kind of strength. For
a moment Maura tried to imagine herself as a girl, looking at those hands; tried to think would she be drawn to them, would she look at them and feel herself feeling a certain way, and for that
moment she thought she would, and then she realized that Mark was aware of her eyes on him.

‘Mossy,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Mossy, texting to know if I wanted to go to a gig this evening.’

‘Did you not tell him you were coming down here?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mark said, and it was exactly as he had tried to lie to her when he was a child.

Mossy had a real name. She tried to think of it. Thomas, it must be. Or more than likely Tomás, the Irish, with the end of it sounding so much like
moss
. He was a nice lad,
friendly, but watchful, from what she imagined as a wild sort of family down in Kerry or somewhere. Wild partly because Mossy had huge tumbles of curls, and a face too craggy for his age, and
partly because there were a lot of them in Mossy’s family, as far as she could remember, eight or nine of them, she thought. And it wasn’t even that Mossy was the youngest, that he came
from parents of that generation, from a mother who would do nothing to stop herself falling pregnant every twelve months; Mossy was nearly the eldest, and the youngest few were still in primary
school, and Mark said they all looked alike, hair like that and hard little faces like that, all running around speaking Irish and not giving a damn. As far as Maura could gather, it wasn’t
religion that had had Mossy’s mother going around pregnant so often: it was the enjoyment of it, of every bit of it, the bit with her husband and the bit with the child in her and the bit on
her back in the hospital, even, and the bit with a whole straggle of youngsters traipsing around under her feet.

Maura would have had more. But more hadn’t been possible for Maura, and that was what she had had to get used to. She was thankful, at least, that there had been one of each.

Meaning she was thankful that one of them, at least, had been a son. For Tom’s sake. But for her own sake, as well. She had wanted a son. She had cried tears of real gratitude when he had
arrived.

They were nearing home now. Mark glanced at each house as they passed; habit. Tom always did more than glance: Tom always stared, and from her own kitchen window she had seen others do the same
to her porch, her shrubs, her freshly tarmacadamed drive. She saw them taking note of what was new, what was changing, what was theirs to mull over or to mock as they drove on. She herself glanced
now at the last few houses before the lane: Bradys, with the trampoline at the back of the house for the grandchildren; Healys, with the pebbledash and the tiny windows; Murtaghs, with the
beautiful curve of flowers all along the path to the door. As she turned into their own lane she knew that Mark was tensing; knew that Tom was likely to be at a gate or in a shed door now,
listening for the sound of the car, readying himself to look busy and unbothered as it passed him by. All weekend he had been needling her with questions about when Mark was coming, when she had
last called him, what it was that could have been keeping him away this long. He asked the same questions over and over, twice a day the same questions, maybe three times. That was habit, too, a
habit she should have tried to get him out of a long time beforehand; if he asked about something often enough, it would happen. She would take steps, behind the scenes, to make it happen, for the
sake of peace, for the sake of being able to go about her day. And when he asked again and again whether Mark was coming down, he was not trying to torment her, she knew: he was reaching, rather,
with a muscle that had worked so often before. He was saying the words, and waiting for them to work. And now they had worked. Now she had brought him his son.

In the kitchen, Mark sat with his parents over a lunch of cod and potatoes and salad, his mother pouring orange squash into the crystal tumblers she had started to use for
everyday. The dog, Scruff, sat by the table, hoping for scraps. All through the meal, Tom kept up a steady delivery of local news, much of which Mark had already heard from Maura. But neither he
nor his mother let on, listening and nodding and coming in with the right questions, at the right time. Now his father was talking about how Farrell, the vet, had become unpopular lately, how fewer
around were using him any more, and how they were calling a new vet, a woman, instead.

‘It’s that or go to one of the foreign lads,’ Tom said, laying butter thick across the potatoes he had peeled and crushed on a side plate. He smirked. ‘There’s
nobody left to look after the poor fuckers of cats and dogs now that she’s taken the cattle and the sheep off of Farrell.’

‘Couldn’t Farrell look after them?’

Tom snorted. ‘Look after them with a grocery bag and a shotgun.’ He tore off a small piece of fish and dropped it on the floor. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,
lassie,’ he said to the dog.

‘Tom,’ Maura said, and she rolled her eyes at Mark.

They talked on through lunch and through the slices of the apple tart Maura had made that morning, and when they had drained their mugs of tea, Tom got up from the table and said he would see
Mark outside. No mention of work was made. They would talk about the work as they were doing it, and with as few words as possible – words shouted from a tractor cab, nodded over quickly in
the lean-to beside the barn. There was a language, and as long as it was spoken fluently the work always got done, but in fact it was less a language than a convoluted dialect, easy to slip into
and almost impossible to translate. Mark watched from the table as his father stepped into the back kitchen and knew it was only a matter of hours before they would be roaring at each other, each
of them unable or unwilling to understand the meaning of the other. He knew the rota, knew what needed to be done. To his father, it was a week’s work; to him, it was something he intended to
have over with in a couple of days. He reached for the pot and poured himself the last of the tea, and took the mug with him as he went up to the bedroom to change.

He pulled on old jeans and a flannel shirt, soft from years of washing but still stained with the shadows of cowshit. The shirt was years old, from when he was in fourth or fifth year at
secondary school; everyone had been wearing them then, along with the kind of runners that were in that photograph of Kurt Cobain’s sprawled feet, Kurt Cobain’s dead feet. The kind of
runners, come to think of it, that Mark was still wearing now. He pulled them off; they stank of sweat worn into dirty rubber. He rummaged in a drawer for a thick pair of socks.