Solace (12 page)

Work. Tom knew what work was; knew what the work really worth doing was, too. Work in rain or shine, the work of keeping a good farm on the go. He knew Mark liked to read, liked to write, and
Tom liked to read, the odd time, himself, but there was no way you could think of that, truly, as work. There was pleasure in it, sure, but not like there was pleasure in the work he did every day:
the pleasure of seeing a field well fenced, or freshly baled under a clear blue sky – or of a whole herd of cows come safe and well after a calving season. Tom knew that, and Mark would know
it, before too long. Things would sort themselves out in the years ahead. You could say no to a car, but you couldn’t, not really, say no to your own place. The thought of it gave Tom a glad
feeling, a safe one. When the back door banged, he started at the sound. In all of his thinking he had almost forgotten that Mark was actually there. It was nearing evening. They needed to
begin.

It was after ten when they finished work that night. Though it had not seemed dark in the meadow as they gathered the last bales, the view from inside the kitchen showed that
night had come. Mark could see his reflection in the glass against the darkness; he looked hard-faced, he thought, wild-haired, his shoulders hunched. He looked like what he was, a farmer’s
son, and he looked, too, like a farmer’s son who was himself becoming a farmer. He looked like one of the farmers his own age who lived nearby. John Flood, or Noel Flynn, or, he thought with
a start, Frankie Lynch, boys who had grown up as he had, driving tractors before they were out of primary school, knowing every dip in the land, every drift on the wind, every eye in the herd. Now
they all looked the same, no matter how much or how little money they had behind themselves and behind their farms. The same way of walking, the same way of standing, the same way of looking up
slowly and assessing whatever met their eye – a woman, an engine, a sky. The eyes were always slightly hooded, the shoulders always slightly tensed, and the mouth hung heavy; the lips looked
weighted, somehow. In the window’s mirror, Mark saw that young farmer staring back at him, one big hand clamped to the edge of the sink, streaked with muck and oil, and the other slamming a
delicate cup down as heavily as a stake, exhaling hard to push the strain of the whole long evening away.

‘Now,’ said his mother, putting a plate of chicken and chips on the table behind him.

‘Thanks,’ Mark said, and walked to the place she had laid for him across from his father.

It had been a beautiful summer’s evening. It had been hard to want to be anywhere else, looking out at the meadows stretching golden against the sunset, and at the small lake beyond them,
and at the bruised blue and grey of the hills on the horizon. But then one of the chains on the baler snapped, which meant that Mark had not been watching the feed of grass closely enough. It would
set them back an hour. From the tractor cab he could see his father’s face as he stood, watching, with the pitchfork in hand.

There had been an argument. Mark was accused of laziness and sloppiness and, finally, of ignorance – in his father’s book, a truly unforgivable trait, though also, Mark suspected, a
word whose meaning his father did not precisely understand. Tom was asked, again and again, to get out of the way; out of the
fucking
way, actually, which did nothing to calm his temper.
Mark was asked to stop cursing, Tom to stop roaring – that had been the contribution of Maura, who had come out to help rake the hay into rows. Maura had been asked to stay out of it. The
chain had been repaired, the clumps of hay raked into another row, and the evening had looked just as beautiful, still, but filtered through a gauze of unease. Inside those houses on those hills
were people, and people made everything difficult; tripped over one another and tripped one another up. So, it didn’t matter how beautiful the place was, or the evening. It was just a rare
few hours of sun in a place where, usually, the bogland would suck you in up to your sorry knees. That was all.

Over dinner, his mother asked questions about the ground and the hay and the forecast for the next day, his father gave short answers, and Mark devoted his thoughts to a steady stream of images
of Joanne Lynch without any clothes on; to what she might whisper, what she might urge. He caught his father looking at him as though knowing exactly what was running through his mind.

‘I’m going to start on those last two fields as soon as the sun is up tomorrow morning,’ he said, and his father shook his head.

‘There’s not that much rush on them,’ he said, filling his glass with milk. ‘A normal hour of the morning will be time enough. Anyway, you want to wait for the sun to
take hold.’

‘I want to get through them,’ Mark said.

‘So you’re in a hurry,’ his father said sullenly, and beside him at the table his mother sighed.

He was upstairs trying to read shortly afterwards when a knock came on the bedroom door. He closed the book.
Belinda
. It was not difficult to close. It was the one
Edgeworth book he had never been able to get into.

‘Come in,’ he said, though his father was already in.

‘You’re working,’ his father said, nodding to the book.

‘Not that hard,’ Mark said, and cleared his throat just as his father did exactly the same thing. Mark began to crack a smile at this synchronicity, but stopped himself: it was
pointless; his father would not have noticed the coincidence, he would wonder why Mark was smiling. It was best to wait for his father to say what Mark knew he was going to say.

‘Would you be interested in going down to Keogh’s for a while?’ Tom looked directly at Mark for just an instant, then to the book where it lay on the bedspread. ‘If
you’re not too busy with your studies.’ He did not wait for Mark to reply. ‘You’re hardly working this late, anyway, are you? That’s bad for your eyesight.’

‘No, that’s something else,’ Mark couldn’t stop himself saying. His father gave a short laugh, but looked uncertain.

‘I’ll be going in a few minutes,’ he said, and closed the door.

Mark picked up his phone.
Down home
, he typed.
Thanks for this morning
. He deleted that.
Thanks for the weekend
, he typed instead.
Give you a call
later in the week?
He signed off with his initial, though it was hardly necessary: she had his number, she would know it was him.
Just thought about you long and hard
, he
typed in then, just for the sake of seeing it on the small grey screen; he deleted it, and sent the rest of the message. Immediately, he panicked that he hadn’t deleted the last line; it was
stupid to worry about it, but it would have been just his luck.

There were only the regulars in Keogh’s. Tom and Mark took the usual spot at the bar, beside Charlie McCabe the postman – or the retired postman, as he was now.
Charlie shook hands with them both and asked Mark what he was up to in the city, these days.

‘This and that.’ It was the same answer Mark had given Charlie the last time he had met him in Keogh’s, and probably, he thought, the time before that as well. It was all that
was required. If he had launched into a description of what he was really doing, or of what he was supposed to be doing – his thesis, his supervisor, the manuscripts, the letters –
Charlie would look uncomfortable very quickly, and his father’s evening would be ruined.

‘You’ve a good loch of those meadows taken care of, by the looks of it.’ Charlie turned to Tom instead.

Paddy Keogh himself was behind the bar, and as he placed three fresh pints in front of them he came easily into the conversation; he had saved his own meadows the previous week, he said, as soon
as the first sign of the good weather had arrived.

‘
Ara
, I should have waited like yourselves, lads,’ he said, ‘but I’m not near as brave or as patient as the two of yous.’

‘Bragging prick,’ Tom muttered, as soon as he was out of earshot, and Charlie laughed.

‘He hasn’t a whole lot to be bragging about when it comes down to it,’ Charlie said. ‘There was hardly a blade of those fields dry when he sent the sons in to get hay out
of them. Sure, that rain there the week before last.’

Tom nodded. ‘Greedy.’

‘Greedy. They have the meadow destroyed, dragging bales out of it before the ground was hard enough.’

‘Aye.’

‘Better to do it like you done it, Mark, not a bit of hurry on you at all.’

In reply, Mark gave Charlie the vaguest of nods. It was an established rhythm. There were set subjects, set questions, set responses; a set way to move your head, to shrug your shoulders, to
turn slowly towards the door and keep an eye on whoever was coming in. When you laughed, when you really laughed, you turned your whole body in on itself, hooped over, like you were trying to keep
the laugh where it was, trying to keep a hold on it. Even after several pints, these rules stayed in place; those who did not observe them were outsiders, or troublemakers, or drunks. Those were
the people who were likely to shout, or to sing, or to send a pint glass clattering to the ground; to make a show of themselves. There would always be someone to see them to the door and, more
often than not – what else were you going to do with them? – to their cars.

Mark had been coming here with his father since he was five or six years old. Younger, even. You didn’t bring a child into the pub at night, but on Saturday and Sunday afternoons his
father would drop in for a pint, and would bring Mark with him, buy him a mineral and a bag of crisps. There was a video game underneath a screen set into a low table, and when Mark was a teenager,
Keogh had put in a pool table, so that it became the place to spend as many nights as you were let, swaggering in front of local girls. Girls he wouldn’t even look at now.

She would never have been one of them. The Lynches never came in here; her parents went only to the hotel in Edgeworthstown, and the sons went drinking there too, in one of the bigger pubs.
Joanne would have gone to Longford, to Fallon’s, maybe, or Valentine’s, or Eamon’s, if she had gone through that grunge phase, which everyone around the place had. She would have
looked much the same at sixteen or seventeen as she did now; in a way, she still looked that age. It was hard to believe she would be a solicitor in two years.

‘Charlie’s in bad form,’ his father said.

Mark was surprised to see that Charlie was gone. ‘It’s early for him to be off.’

‘Ah, he’s a bit depressed, I think,’ said his father, with a gravity that made Mark want to laugh aloud. In his father’s mouth the word ‘depressed’ sounded as
though it were being tried out for the first time. His father was eyeing him now as he waited for a response.

‘I suppose he could be. Retirement’s meant to be very hard,’ Mark offered.

‘Ah,’ his father shook his head impatiently, ‘it’s not the retirement. Sure he’s still out in the car the whole day long. He’s still driving the same route,
chatting to the same people, having the same crack, and then in here for his few pints in the evening. Only thing that’s missing is the letters. I’d say if the post office got wind of
it they’d give him the letters to hand out too.’

‘It’d be cheaper for them,’ Mark said.

‘It’s not the retirement, you see.’

What is it, Mark knew he was meant to ask, but something about his father’s tone made him wary: it was too careful. It was the tone he used when he was trying to lead the way to a
conversation that was more about himself than about anybody else.

‘It’s the son,’ his father said, and Mark could have laughed out loud. So this was where it was going. This was what the conversation was to be about. Charlie McCabe ran his
farm by himself, too; he had one son, too, who was hardly ever down home, who was high up as an engineer with Google, Mark had heard. He seemed like a nice guy. Charlie talked about him all the
time, about some promotion he’d been given, about a trip he was taking, about the restaurants he took his parents to when they visited him in Dublin. There was no way that Charlie’s son
was ever coming down to work the farm, and there was no way, either, that Charlie expected it. For Mark, resentment began to settle in its familiar grooves. He was tired, he had worked all day; he
was not in the mood for his father’s guilt trip, and even less so for one that was bowled at him sideways, pretending to be something else, pretending to be concern for poor old Charlie, who
tipped around that farm fine on his own.

‘What’s the problem with the son?’

‘Ah.’ His father shrugged. He seemed to have changed his mind.

‘Go on, you’ve started now,’ Mark said forcefully, and gestured to Keogh for another two pints.

‘Jesus, don’t call Keogh over here,’ Tom said quickly.

‘He’s not coming over. He’s ignoring me like he always does, the fucker,’ Mark said. ‘And anyway, what’s so terrible that you don’t want him to hear?
Brian McCabe is sick, is that it? He’s dying?’

‘No, but Charlie thinks he’s a gay.’

What washed over Mark was strange and not exactly soothing: guilt and mirth and sadness and relief. Guilt at having jumped the gun so much; relief at escaping the conversation he had thought he
was in; mirth at the image of his father and Charlie mulling together over the question of what Charlie’s son was or was not. And, too, Mark couldn’t believe he hadn’t copped it
before now about Brian McCabe; of course he was gay, of course he was, and happy as fuck about it too. Living the life. Always well dressed. Always well groomed. And always with that gaze, Mark
thought now, with a jolt of self-satisfaction, which was a bit more interested than it ought to be. Well, fine. Mark wasn’t going to object to being eyed up, no matter who was doing it. He
knew he wasn’t as safe in his own looks as he had been a couple of years ago. He told himself again that he’d have to start going to the gym – he told himself this a couple of
times a month now, but never acted on it. He’d have to. He had seemed for a while to be getting away with the pints and the chips and the kebabs, but the signs were starting to show. He had
the beginnings of a gut. Already, there’d been more than one grey hair. That was the road to thirty. Brian McCabe was thirty-four or thirty-five, and he looked a hell of a lot better than
Mark.