Solace (29 page)

‘Yeah.’

‘They’d show anything on the telly now.’

‘Seems so.’

This time the silence between them seemed deeper. On the television, the foal was already staggering to its feet, black blood still matted to its hair, the man holding it by the back legs,
steadying it, before letting it go. It was much ganglier than calves were at birth.

‘Mark, we’re getting married, Deirdre and I,’ said Sarah. ‘We’re only asking a couple of people to be at the ceremony, and we want you to be there. As our witness.
Would you do that for us?’

He looked at her. She was smiling, she was nodding; she was beginning to cry again. Wait, was that why she had been crying all along? Not out of sadness for him, or about him, but out of
whatever rush of happiness and excitement she felt about what she had just told him? There was no time to think about it, and of course it was not good-natured, good-hearted, to think something so
selfish as one of his friends told him something so good, but still as he widened his eyes and lifted his hands and got up to meet and return her messy embrace, he was thinking it, and chiding
himself for thinking it, and replying that he was damn well bloody entitled to think of it, all at once.

‘Congratulations,’ he said, and held and squeezed and patted Sarah as she laughed and cried. ‘Congratulations, Deirdre,’ he said, over Sarah’s shoulder.

‘Thanks,’ Deirdre said, and came over to hug him too.

After a lot of this, hugging and smiling and laughing and saying the same thing over and over, they all sat down. Sarah was wiping her eyes, and Deirdre was exhaling and shaking her head, as
though what they had all just done together had been strenuous, as though they’d hauled a heavy piece of furniture up a narrow staircase.

‘It’s brilliant news,’ Mark said again, and the women both smiled their hectic smiles.

‘Isn’t it?’ Sarah said, and she clutched at Deirdre.

‘Can you get married here?’ said Mark, and their smiles dipped and wavered.

‘Not officially,’ said Deirdre, and Sarah nodded. ‘It’ll be a commitment ceremony.’

‘Just as good,’ said Mark, and instantly regretted it. Deirdre was regarding him that way again, careful and serious. But she said nothing.

‘Of course I’ll be there,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much for asking me to come.’

‘And you’ll bring Aoife, of course,’ Sarah said. ‘She can be our flower-girl.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Mark said, not knowing what else to say. Maybe it was, once again, the wrong thing to say, but it was good enough, and once again there was hugging and kissing, and
Deirdre went to the fridge and took out a bottle of champagne.

‘Is it . . . ?’ Sarah looked at him, and looked to Deirdre.

‘Is it what?’ Mark said, and then realized what she was asking: ‘Is it OK to open a bottle of champagne?’

The thing was, he didn’t know the answer. The answer he had to say out loud was that of course it was OK to open the bottle, that it was more than OK to open the bottle, that if Deirdre
didn’t hurry up and open the bottle he’d snatch it out of her hands and burst the cork off it himself. And as he nodded, frowning as though there could be no question as to the
rightness of this, and as he watched the bottle tilt and Deirdre’s fingers working at the foil, and as the cork hit the bathroom door, and as the liquid spilled and steamed and bubbled
outwards, there seemed nothing wrong. It could not be wrong to do this, to celebrate with friends, to toast them, his glass held high. It felt easy. It felt doable. He managed it. He drank the
champagne, and kept the panic down.

The mare was now licking her newborn foal clean, her huge tongue sweeping the rough, sodden hair and replacing the thickness of the birth fluids with the bubbled sheen of her own saliva. Mark
glanced at Sarah. She was watching him.

‘You can talk to us, you know,’ she said, smiling sadly.

‘I know.’

‘About anything.’ She leaned in closer and pressed her cheek to his temple.

‘Even foaling,’ he was about to say, but instead he raised his glass again. ‘To the two of you,’ he said.

*

He was woken early next morning by his phone.
Home.
Outside, it was not yet fully bright. In her cot, Aoife was starting to stir. Mark silenced the ringing and took the
phone out to the hall. When he put it to his ear, his father was already saying hello.

‘Hello,’ Mark said. ‘What is it? Is everything OK?’

‘I don’t know,’ his father said, sounding irritated. ‘You were the one ringing me.’

‘What?’

‘You were ringing me. Weren’t you?’

Mark sighed. This had happened at least once a week since he had bought a mobile phone for his father. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said, sitting on the top stair.

‘Sure who else would be ringing me on this thing?’

‘I don’t know. It wasn’t me.’

‘You must have hit the number by accident. You must have had it ringing in your pocket. Didn’t you tell me the phone could do that? And use up all your money?’

Mark opened his mouth to explain, but thought better of it. ‘Yeah,’ he said, rubbing his eyes.

‘You’d want to be careful of that.’

‘I know,’ Mark said. ‘Thanks.’

‘So what did you want anyway?’

In the bedroom, Mark could hear Aoife starting to whine. He stood, but did not move from the landing. ‘I didn’t call you, I’m telling you.’

His father said nothing for a moment. ‘What are you at up there anyway? Are you up?’

‘I am now. So is Aoife.’

‘And what are ye at for the day?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mark said. ‘I haven’t thought about it yet. What are you doing yourself?’

‘The usual,’ Tom said. ‘Only I’m headin’ up to Stewarts’ for the lunch later.’

‘Lunch?’

‘Yeah,’ his father said. ‘Didn’t I tell you I have the lunch with them every Sunday now?’

‘Right,’ Mark said. He had not known it was Sunday. He had not known what it was.

‘Helen says I’m welcome up there for my lunch every day if I want it.’

‘You hardly want that,’ Mark said.

‘Indeedin I don’t. She’d make you feel like you’re at confession. Never fuckin’ stops with the questions.’ Tom drew breath suddenly. He rarely swore in
conversation, and Mark knew that he was uneasy now in the echo of his own language. The kindest response would be to laugh. He stayed silent.

Tom cleared his throat. ‘So are you doing anything yourself for the day?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t even know what day of the week it was, I’d betchya.’

‘I did know.’

‘Aw, now. I’d wager you weren’t too sure.’

‘Near enough.’ Mark was quiet again for a moment. ‘You’re getting on all right down there, so.’

It was Tom’s turn to be silent. ‘Flynn has red water in the herd,’ he said eventually. ‘There’s an awful amount of them with it, he says.’

‘That’s a nuisance.’

‘Bloody curse.’

Down the line, as his father sighed, Mark heard what sounded like a car passing. ‘Are you outside?’ he said, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

‘Down at the road.’

Mark took the phone away from his ear and checked the time. It was just past six o’clock. From the bedroom, Aoife’s whining grew more insistent. He walked to the door, and she seemed
to sense him: she began to howl.

‘I’ll have to go,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

‘That’s Aoife I can hear, is it?’

‘I’ll talk to you.’

*

His father was coping. Adapting, that was the word. Fitting himself to the shapes of things; steeling himself to the day. Moving through the world – his world – as
though he recognized it. As though it recognized him. He seemed to be up every morning at dawn. He called Mark twice a day. His voice always sounded calm. It always sounded sure.

All summer, Mark had watched him. He had spent the first months after the funeral in Dorvaragh with him because he knew he had to be there. Nuala could get away from her job in London for only
so long, and the two of them had decided – during one of the very earnest, very focused conversations they seemed capable of during those first weeks – that Mark should stay around.
There was no other way, they agreed, of knowing how their father would manage once the shock of what had happened began to fade. There was no other way of ensuring his well-being. He was a man
alone in a house in which he had not been alone for more than thirty years, and he could not be expected to face that. It was a change, and he would have to be eased through it. Carried through
it.

As for you, Nuala had said to Mark, and Mark had told her not to go there. Not to go on. He was staying at home for their father, he said. He was staying at home because there was a summer of
work to be done. What he did not say was that the house in Stoneybatter was not a place he could be. Not yet. Dorvaragh was familiar in some way he did not have to think about. And there was Aoife.
Around the work of the farm, a steady routine for Aoife began to mould itself, and for a long time Mark could not imagine having to start with another. So, for almost three months, he stayed.

The work was his father’s succour. It was his centre. The hay and the cattle and the machinery seemed not just to ground him, but to fill him with some kind of optimism, to fuel him with
something like zeal. In the mornings he was like a child as he chattered to Mark about what needed to be done, what approach would be best, what problems might arise. As they worked he consulted
Mark on everything. He came to him for the kind of advice that, before, he had always been the one to impose. When relatives and neighbours came to visit, as they did often, Tom talked to them of
the farm, and the men nodded and gave their own stories of work finished and unfinished, and the women talked of how good it was to be busy, to have something on which to focus the mind.

Mark watched. He worked, and he did everything that needed to be done, but more than that, he watched. For the first time in his life, he realized, he was trying consciously to learn from his
father. He was trying to understand how to manage in his father’s way. But the work kept failing him; the work kept leaving him with himself. It did not take him over the way he needed; it
did not burn his thoughts away. Almost every day after he came back in from the farm, he would take Aoife up in his arms and carry her out to the car. He took her to places he had been as a child.
To the wasteland of Barley Harbour. To the bog lakes at Currygrane and Gurteen. To the old farmyards at Carriglass, where the developers had started work on the new hotel. To the low peak of Corn
Hill. Outside the building that had once been Edgeworthstown House, he sat in the car and watched the old people shuffle between the smoking hut and the porch.

When they returned to Dorvaragh, his father would have some kind of dinner on the table. It usually involved black pudding and potatoes and baked beans. Mark ate it. Aoife ate some version of
it. If his father asked where he had been, he told him he had been to Longford, or to some other town. At night, while they sat in front of the television, his father would talk about the farm. He
would look to Mark for answers. Mark would try to watch the programmes, but the storylines always seemed impossible to grasp.

In August, the house in Stoneybatter began to press itself on his thoughts. He began to feel guilty about it; he imagined its rooms growing dusty, growing stale. And he imagined, sometimes, that
Joanne was in those rooms, waiting for him, somehow. Confused about where he and Aoife might be. When he left for the city, he told his father he would return to the farm every weekend that he
could. His father had nodded, and tapped his stick against the ground, and gone down to the lower fields to check on a fence that the cattle had been breaking through, a fence they had repaired
together the previous day. ‘Call me when you get there,’ he said to Mark, as he went. Mark had been on the road five minutes when his father phoned to tell him that the fence had
held.

*

Later on Sunday Mark took Aoife to the swimming-pool. It was something he had been meaning to do. He found the tiny swimsuit someone had given her as a gift long before she was
big enough to wear it, and he found his own trunks, baggy and grey. He stuffed a couple of bath towels into a bag. They walked into town along the quays.

In the changing room, a single long bench faced the showers. Under the flow nearest the door, an elderly man stood with his back turned, his head facing down, sodden trunks clutched in his right
hand. The water slapped onto his freckled shoulders, the paps of his elbows, the bumps of his spine.

As Mark got her into her swimsuit, Aoife shouted and pointed to the old man, to the water leaping off his skin. While Mark undressed, she wandered closer to the showers and stood watching, her
hands loosely clasped behind her back. When beads of water hit her skin, she flinched, but she did not come back to Mark.

Mark inflated the plastic armbands he had bought at the entrance desk. ‘Come over here,’ he called to Aoife. She shook her head vigorously and pointed again at the old man.

‘Aoife,’ he called again, and in the same instant, the man turned. He was cupping his dick and balls – washing them, Mark thought, he hoped. He dropped both hands by his side
now, and he gazed at the child. His beard was full, though narrowed and pointed now by water, and his heavy eyebrows, too, were slicked down. He was almost bald. As he stood watching Aoife, the
flow from the showerhead stopped.

‘Hello there,’ he said. Aoife continued to stare. Mark stood and brought her back to the bench where he had laid her clothes. She let him carry her, but when he tried to get her into
the first armband, she snatched it from him and threw it to the floor.

The old man stepped forward and picked it up. ‘You need to let some of the air out,’ he said to Mark.

‘Thanks,’ said Mark, taking it from him.

‘Once you get it up to the elbow, you need to open the little valve there, and let some of the air out so that it’ll go over,’ the man said, squeezing water out of his trunks.
‘Then you blow it back up the whole way.’ He shook the trunks briskly and walked to the other end of the bench. ‘You’ll pull the arms off her otherwise,’ he said, and
wrapped a striped towel around his waist.