Solace (14 page)

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I tend to talk a lot of crap about it when I have a few jars in me. I’m a bit bogged down in it all at the moment.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said brightly. ‘That’s another thing you were telling me about. How her father was obsessed with the bog. How he went digging in it for dinosaur skeletons
or something. Or did I imagine that?’

‘Oh, God,’ said Mark, his hands over his face, and she laughed.

‘Well, it all sounds pretty interesting,’ she said, with a magnanimous little shrug that made him want to kiss her, and he realized that he could, that there was nothing to stop him,
and so he did, putting his lips gently to hers, not taking too many liberties with his tongue, which was probably closing the gate after the horse had bolted, given what he remembered of Saturday
night, and when he pulled back again she touched his cheek, and said she was going in to get them another round.

*

He was coming around for dinner, and she was nowhere near ready. She was just in from work, she had nothing in the house. It had been a stupid idea, inviting him to come around
this evening; it had been a drunken idea, something that had made sense while she was sitting with him on the footpath outside the pub the night before, watching the sky change colour with the
sunset, talking to him and kissing him and noticing the way his eyes kept flickering down to where her bra showed. But it was not an idea that made sense now. For a start, she was not a cook. She
sat heavily on the couch in the sitting room and moaned in Sarah’s direction. Sarah ignored her. Her attention was fixed on the television screen.

‘Tasha’s meant to die in this tonight,’ she said solemnly.

‘She doesn’t die,’ Joanne said. ‘She just gets lost in the bush for a while.’

‘Ah, fuck you,’ Sarah said. ‘I was looking forward to that. Can you stop telling me spoilers from the Internet?’

‘I’m fucked,’ said Joanne. ‘How the hell am I going to come up with something for dinner?’

‘I’ve had mine, don’t worry about me,’ said Sarah, gesturing to an empty plate on the coffee-table. ‘But I’d murder a cup of tea.’

This was how they lived. A Boston marriage, Sarah called it, and then Joanne’s part of the gag was to tell her she should be so lucky. Since their last year of college, when Sarah had
moved into the house in Stoneybatter, their evenings and their weekends had melted into a comfortable routine; dinner in front of the television Monday to Thursday, sometimes, they went for a pint
in Walshes down the road. Always, they went into town on Fridays and Saturdays, usually with different sets of friends, but always, at some stage, crossing paths with each other. After the pub on
weekends, there was often a house party somewhere. And then on Sunday nights, as they grimaced and brooded in the face of the coming week, they’d have an Indian takeaway and a bottle of
wine.

‘I’m making dinner for Mark,’ Joanne said, and Sarah gave a whoop of innuendo.

‘Don’t,’ Joanne said. ‘Did you hear anything from Deirdre today?’

Sarah shook her head. Deirdre was the girl she had got together with at the party on Saturday night; Joanne knew that Sarah had been out with her again on Sunday night, and the next night. She
had just qualified as a solicitor; Joanne knew her to see from Blackhall Place. Sarah had been into her from the first time she had met her with Joanne, in the Stag’s Head one night after
Christmas, when a load of trainees had met up for a drink; Sarah was tagging along, and clearly bored, until Deirdre arrived and squeezed in at the table beside her. After that, Joanne had been
under orders to text Sarah whenever a trainee get-together was planned. There weren’t that many – everyone was usually too exhausted – but there had been one about a month ago,
when Sarah had been talking to Deirdre for hours. And then there was the party, when one or the other of them had finally made their move. Which was something about which Joanne was still not quite
clear.

‘So, wait,’ she said now, and Sarah looked at her warily. ‘You never told me the full story about how it happened the other night. Who kissed who?’

Sarah shrugged and pointed the remote at the television. But she did not change the channel. ‘It was a mutual decision,’ she said. ‘We both wanted to.’

‘That was handy.’

‘I could say the same thing about you and Farmer Joe. Handy. The two of you were definitely handy.’

‘Shut up,’ Joanne groaned.

Sarah stretched. ‘I’m only messing. So, he’s coming around tonight, is he? Do you want a hand with dinner?’

‘No, you’re all right,’ Joanne said, as she got up to go to the kitchen.

‘Good,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m knackered after those bloody Koreans.’

Sarah taught English to Korean students in a language school on Dawson Street. She had studied English at Trinity, and every year she made noises about going back to college to do a
master’s in something related to her degree, but she had just watched another round of application deadlines pass by. She complained incessantly about the students yet always warmed to a few
of them, and they seemed fond of her, piling her with gifts of flowers, or packets of biscuits, or magazines they thought she would like. That she was considered the target readership for magazines
filled with real-life stories about broken marriages and botched surgery caused Sarah real dismay, but she ate the biscuits, and she placed the flowers in vases around the house.

There was a particularly gaudy arrangement on the kitchen table now.

‘Can grass
be
blue?’ Joanne shouted back to the sitting room. There came no reply. She plugged the kettle in. As it boiled, she looked through the cupboards over the sink and
then through the fridge. There were eggs, and noodles, and a head of broccoli that looked past its time. She scanned a recipe book, but everything seemed to require ten different spices and at
least one type of vegetable she doubted it was possible to get in Ireland, let alone in the Centra around the corner. The kettle clicked. She made two cups of tea and brought them to the sitting
room.

As she walked in the door Sarah gave her a doleful stare. ‘You didn’t tell me that Maxwell was going to die instead,’ she said.

They watched the ads in silence until the next show began. It was a regional news round-up, opening with an item about how another Viking settlement had been found on the site of a motorway.
Bare-chested men in mud-caked trousers flung clay up from a deep trench into a wheelbarrow. A woman with streaks on her face drank from a bottle of water. Three yellow excavators crawled over a
vast brown field, a valley of dirt scattered with barrels painted like barber poles.

‘The diggers will win,’ Sarah said, as she reached for the remote. She found another soap, an English one, and she lay out on the couch.

It was time, Joanne knew, to start cooking if she wanted to have dinner ready for eight. But she found herself resisting: she didn’t want to shop for food, didn’t want to cook,
didn’t want to go upstairs and shower and change before Mark arrived. She wanted to flop down on the armchair and watch junk television with Sarah all night. She wanted to drink tea and eat
biscuits and not bother with dinner.

‘Get moving,’ Sarah broke into her thoughts. ‘Lover boy will want to get his hands on more than that mouldy broccoli.’

‘I’m going,’ said Joanne. ‘I just want to see how this bit ends.’

‘He finds out about the brain tumour,’ said Sarah, through a yawn.

*

As Joanne returned from the Centra she met Clive Robinson. He was thinner now, and his hair had gone completely white. As soon as she saw him she felt herself blush: he had been
one of her favourite teachers in Trinity, and in front of him she had always felt shy. But when he smiled at her and exclaimed her name, she relaxed and felt glad to see him. They stood in under
the awning of the butcher’s shop and he showered her with questions, asking about her job, her exams, her friends from college. When she told him that she was working on the Lefroy case, he
looked at her in surprise. ‘That’s the woman in the house up on Baggot Street?’

‘Fitzwilliam Square,’ Joanne said. ‘Yes.’

‘But she sounds like a wonderful woman!’ Robinson said, with a slow shake of his head. ‘I’ll tell you, there aren’t too many women like her around any
more.’

‘She’s really fascinating,’ Joanne said.

‘Indeed,’ said Robinson, carefully. ‘I honestly don’t know how your employers can live with themselves, lending an ear to that hooligan of a son of hers.’ He was
smiling again, if only faintly. ‘But you like the work?’ he asked then, coming back to meet her gaze. ‘You think you’ve found your trade?’

She wanted to tell him everything then. The way she could hear the old woman’s voice coming through the transcripts, her diction, her strange formality, her old-fashioned words –
words that nobody bothered to use any more, words that nobody Joanne knew had bothered to use in the first place. She wanted to tell him about the nights she had stayed late over the case notes,
and the afternoons she had had to grit her teeth and listen to Rupert’s bullshit, and Mona’s drivel, and Eoin’s and Imelda’s comments on Elizabeth.

‘The work is fine,’ she said.

‘I’m done with my trade now, of course,’ Robinson said.

‘You’re not teaching any more?’

‘A whole year without it now, and I don’t miss it at all.’ He gardened, he said, and he read, and he went almost every day to the Markievicz pool; it was nice and quiet in the
afternoons. His children took him abroad on holiday twice a year. His grandchildren lived nearby, and they called to see him.

‘Or to see the cats.’ He smiled. ‘I’m never sure which it is.’

‘It sounds like life is good.’

‘Well, it is.’ Robinson nodded, but then he stopped, and looked out to the traffic on Manor Street. On the footpath beside them, a boy passed on a bicycle too small for him. As he
pedalled, his knees were almost hitting his hands.

‘I find, though, that there are still things I wish I could do with my days. Still things I wish I had the time to do.’

Joanne hesitated. She knew it was important to look at Robinson as he spoke to her now – he seemed to need to tell her something – but, like an itch, she felt the urge to check her
watch. She forced herself to smile into Robinson’s eyes instead. ‘Like what?’ she said, and he shrugged.

‘Oh, whimsies,’ he said. ‘I’ve started out on another book, if you’d believe it.’

‘That’s great,’ Joanne said, hearing in her voice a note that was too bright, too eager. ‘What’s it about?’ she said. She had tried for seriousness, but this
time the words came out sounding wary.

‘About discordance,’ Robinson said, sliding a hand into his jacket pocket. ‘About how we deal with discordance, within experience, I mean. How we reshape our world of
experience when things within our experience turn out not to be what we’d expected. Our lifeworlds, and how we reconstitute them when we’re in that bind. You remember all that nonsense,
about lifeworlds?’

‘
Lebenswelt
,’ Joanne surprised herself by saying. Where had that surfaced from? She remembered hardly anything of Robinson’s philosophy classes, much as she had loved
them at the time. But
Lebenswelt
:
Lebenswelt
she could remember, for some reason. Probably, she realized then, because he had said it in English five seconds ago.

‘You’re driving home, and it’s night-time, and suddenly a car comes around the corner with its headlights glaring, and you’re blinded for a second,’ said Robinson.
‘Or you drive around the corner yourself, and instead of the clear way home you were expecting, there’s a roadblock, and you have to find your way back along an unfamiliar route. Or you
ingest some santonin – ever heard of that?’

Joanne shook her head.

‘Turns everything yellow. Not to be recommended. Or, say, you burn your fingertips, and suddenly nothing feels the same. And what I want to know is, how capable are we, really, of dealing
with it, of taking it up and synthesizing it into a new concordance, a new idea of what’s normal? Not only on these small scales, but on much larger scales – on a global scale, if I
have the guts and the longevity to get around to addressing that.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Here I am again, rattling on.’

‘No, no,’ Joanne said. ‘It does sound fascinating.’ And the way he glanced at her then, with a half-smile, and the way his eyes fell away again to the ground made her
want, for a moment, to cry.

‘It’s something to do,’ he said, and he looked down to the plastic bag she was carrying, the groceries and the wine she had bought in Centra. ‘But I can see you are
busy,’ he said. ‘I won’t keep you any longer from your night.’

‘It was really lovely to see you,’ Joanne said, and they shook hands, and he offered to see her as far as her door under the shelter of his umbrella, because it was raining now. But
Joanne said there was no need, that it was only a drizzle, that she lived only a couple of steps away. At the house, as she opened the front door, she could hear Mark in the sitting room, talking
to Sarah. She found herself impatient for the sight of him. Her heart was jumping in her chest as she came down the hall.

*

‘I thought about joining a monastery once,’ Mark said, as they had dinner. Somehow, they had got to telling each other the hymns they’d been forced to learn in
primary school, and he’d made a joke about how he hadn’t expected to spend their third date talking about ‘Ave Verum’, and how maybe for their sixth they should go to
Glenstal Abbey for a mass at dawn. And now this. Which was presumably another joke. But he wasn’t laughing, and he didn’t seem to be expecting Joanne to laugh. All of his concentration
seemed to be focused on getting an equal amount of meat and potato and mushroom on to his fork. He chewed slowly.

‘I’m serious,’ he eventually said.

‘Fuck off,’ she said, and it came out sounding harsher than she had meant it to. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I read a piece about a monk from Glenstal in the paper, when I was an undergrad, and I thought it sounded pretty cool,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to bother with the
religious side of it. I just wanted to be somewhere where nobody could reach me. Where I could just get on with doing what I wanted to do. I liked the idea of this very silent, steady
routine.’