Solace (37 page)

‘Another granddaughter, apparently,’ Irene said. ‘I told Frankie he should name her whatever he wants. He just told me to be quiet, that he
was
going to call her what he
wanted to call her. I said, I just hope that’s what Michelle wants to call her, too.’ She smiled. ‘I used to despair of Frankie, you know. But I suppose he’s turning out all
right. Eventually.’

The late news came on the television. The newsreader frowned and tilted her chin. There was a moment’s footage of some disaster, some brand-new nightmare a whole world away. Veiled women
beseeched the camera with their hands, with their eyes. Beautiful children stared. The newsreader returned. Irene picked up the remote and switched the screen to black.

‘It’s terrible, what’s happening out there.’ She shook her head. ‘Wherever it is.’

‘I should go,’ Mark said, and he gestured towards the door. ‘It’s late.’

Irene stood, smoothing her dressing-gown. ‘Well, it was really lovely to see you. It was really lovely of you to call around.’

‘I just wanted to say hello.’

Irene looked at him for a moment. She did not smile. ‘You wanted something other than that, I think, Mark,’ she said. ‘But it was good to see you.’

She held her arms out to him. He went to her. She smelt of smoke from the fire and of something perfumed.

‘You go home and look after Aoife, now,’ she said hoarsely, into his ear. She rubbed the back of his shirt as vigorously as though she were washing it on a board. She gripped him by
the shoulders and held him away from her. ‘None of this other rubbish matters, Mark,’ she said, and there were tears in her eyes. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘I hear you,’ Mark said, and she nodded as though he had said something very serious and very true.

‘Now go home to my granddaughter,’ she said, and she showed him to the door.

*

When he left Irene he drove the back way over the lane to Tommy Burke’s old farm. He parked a good distance from it. It was a night of a full moon and a hard frost. The
shape of his breath moved ahead of him on the air. He concentrated on the sound of his footsteps until he saw the light of the new house ahead.

It was a dormer, built close to the lane, the upstairs windows tucked like nesting birds into the roof. A single car was parked outside; Frankie’s van was not there. One light was on
upstairs and two downstairs. He could see the downstairs curtains were not drawn, and as he drew closer, he could see into the room; the side of a blue leather couch, a framed print – a
Rothko – a large television screen. The woman was stretched out on the couch, her bare feet perched on its arm; her toenails were painted; her long fair hair was falling to the side. She was
covered with a blanket. She put one hand to it, suddenly, and stroked it. She reached the other hand out towards a low table, towards a mug.

Mark walked around the darkened side of the house to the farmyard. Where Tommy Burke’s cramped outhouses had been stood two new sheds, their roofs sharply angled, their sides open to the
yard. Round bales were stacked in the higher shed. Mark knew they were the bales he had made the previous summer, the bales he and his father had made. He looked at them and thought of the
afternoon with the panicked girl from over the road, the fright about Aoife, missing from her cot, his father returning from Keogh’s, carrying her, proud as though he had won her in a game of
cards.

*

Silence was what Tom was used to; he barely noticed that it had fallen on the house again. When the child cried out from upstairs, he looked to the radio, startled, before he
realized what the noise was. He stared for a moment into the dark square of the window, seeing first the shape of the hayshed outside, then the reflection of his own stare, his chin leaning hard on
his hand. He waited, and when she did not quieten, he climbed the stairs.

A small lamp was lit on the dresser and a bag was half unpacked on the bed. The room smelt of the electric heater and of something sour. The child was on her side in the cot, her face turned to
the wall, the blanket tangled around her legs. Though she seemed to sense that someone had walked into the room, she did not look up. She kept wailing into the wall.

‘All right,’ Tom said, and something stilled in her, but then the crying started up harder and louder than before, and by the time he lifted her, sticky and damp, she was screaming,
and leaning away from him so that it was hard to get a hold of her.

‘You’re all right,’ he said to her, but she continued to scream.

‘Your daddy’ll be back,’ he said to her, and at that moment she lifted a hand and brought it down – the sharp little fingers and the tiny edges of the nails – on
his face.

‘No,’ he said, and she threw her weight backwards so suddenly that he came close to dropping her.

‘Don’t be bold,’ he said to her, in a warning tone, and she howled as though he had dipped her low into a flame.

He put her into the cot. She sat, and then she stood, and then she lay down and curled herself into a ball, and all the time she screamed, and all the time she looked up at him with a twist of
pure anger on her face. The dripping tears looked almost comically huge. The snot ran into her mouth, and when he tried to reach towards it with the edge of the blanket, the roar of her outrage was
so loud and so overpowering that he could not help it.

‘Jesus tonight,’ he said, and the laughter took him so fully that he almost collapsed.

*

A tractor and a few pieces of machinery stood in the yard. They were not new: Frankie must have brought them from Caldragh. Frozen, clouded with white, the tractor’s
windscreen looked as though it was not one pane of glass but a thousand tiny chips, held together for one last moment within the square of the frame.

He walked to the larger shed. He could hear the cattle inside. The sound they made was simply the sound of their being there, sleeping up against each other, resting on their knees and their
stomachs in the straw, chewing on whatever they still had to chew on, breathing on each other and on the night.

Inside the shed it was much darker; the moonlight did not reach in here. But Mark’s eyes soon grew accustomed, and he could see how Frankie had laid the place out. The stalls were built on
a step up from the slatted ground, so that the animals could sleep on the warmer ground, away from where they pissed and shat. The gates were neat and properly latched. The animals had room to rise
and walk around one another, as some of them, noticing him, now started to do. Behind him, he heard a patter, a low call. He turned. The calf was young, maybe a month old. It was loose. It came
confidently to him, and it looked up at him with eyes that were bright in the half-light. It was a Friesian, white splashed on its forehead and across its back.

‘Where did you come from?’ Mark said.

The calf gave a warbling grunt and butted his hand with its small, hard head.

‘Take it easy,’ Mark said, kneading its crown, his eyes searching the darkness behind for its mother.

*

Or he had thought he was laughing. Or he had meant, at least, to laugh. It was only when the child stopped her own crying and changed the way she was looking at him –
changed from a screaming fury to a curiosity that caused her to pull herself up on the cot bars and stare – that he realized that he was not laughing; he was crying, and he was crying hard.
He was sobbing, and he was shaking, and he was getting snot on himself, and he was covering his face with his hands, and he was trying to get a hold of himself, but it was something outside himself
that had the hold on things; it was something outside his power that was pushing up from his gut and his heart and his lungs. He tried to think of what was causing it, and all he could think of
were the last words he had said, and then in the same moment he understood it, because they had never been his words. They had been Maura’s. They had been Maura’s way of letting out
anger, or frustration, or sometimes a loud, long laugh at the ridiculousness of the day or the night or the world.
Jesus tonight. Jesus tonight. Jesus tonight.
She had said it to herself.
She had said it to Tom or the children. She had said it to the empty air. She had said it while she was cursing whatever it was she was cursing, but at the same time she was always fixing or
settling or sorting out the same thing: she was dressing a child, or closing a door, or knowing what to do with a form, or turning to Tom and making him feel less angry or less worried or less
frightened about whatever it was he had on his mind. She had said it, and he had never heard anyone else saying it, and she had said it in a tone and a voice that were only her own. And, for a
moment, that voice had been with him in the room.

The child let him lift her out of the cot when he calmed himself. He took her downstairs. Mark had left new food in the fridge.

‘Otherwise you’d be eating rashers and sausages,’ he said to the child, but when he looked more closely, nothing seemed like the kind of thing you would give to a child who had
woken up crying at midnight: grapes, and a few pots of yoghurt, and a pack full of thick strips of cheese, and two cartons of juice. Surely something warm was better for her, he thought, and so he
closed the fridge and opened the cupboard. He opened a can of beans, and he put her down to play on the floor. While she threw her arms around the dog’s neck and tried to get up on its back,
he warmed the beans in a saucepan, and all the time he talked to the dog in a friendly tone, sympathizing with her, praising her, in the hope that she would not get impatient and snap at the
child.

‘That’s the girl, now,’ he said, and the child looked up as though he had been talking to her.

He fed her with a teaspoon. She frowned, at first, at the taste of the beans, but soon she wanted him to feed her more quickly, to feed her the whole bowl, and she swung her legs and bounced on
his lap as though to hurry him along.

‘That’s nice,’ he said to her, and she blinked at him. ‘Isn’t that nice?’

She took a bean from the bowl and offered it, on the palm of her hand, to the dog. The dog tipped the bean with its nose and then took it on its tongue. It looked at her, ready for more, but she
offered the next bean to Tom, balancing it between her fingertips and putting it to his lips. When he took it from her she laughed at him and pointed to the dog.

‘The doggie gets her own food,’ Tom said, and offered the child another teaspoon of beans, but she shook her head and once again pointed to the dog.

‘All right, whatever you say,’ Tom said, and he rose with her in his arms and went back to the same cupboard to take down the can of food for the dog. He sat the child on the
counter; she reached a hand to the brown mixture he spooned on to a side plate. He lifted it up out of her reach. As he gave the plate to the dog, the child shouted at him; she gave him a name he
could not make out.

‘Come on,’ he said, and he took her up again and brought her to the couch. She would not sit with him, but stood beside him, bouncing unsteadily on the cushions, gripping the couch
like a drunk holding on to a wall.

*

The calf called out again. From behind Mark, one of the other cattle answered it, or echoed it; several of them had gathered now at the feeding rails, nosing through the
scattered hay and tearing clumps away with their teeth. But some were not eating: they were just standing, staring at him, waiting to see what he would do.

Now he could make out the section in the opposite corner of the shed where the calf had come from. It was a small, gated-off rectangle away from the slatted ground. There were other animals in
there, he saw, as he moved closer; two cows and another, still smaller calf. He wondered at the calves being born so late in the year, so deep into the winter; he was surprised at Frankie’s
carelessness – until he realized it could not have been Frankie’s carelessness. Those cows would have been heavy with calf when Frankie brought them here.

He looked down at the calf. Though it was too young yet to fodder, it was sniffing at the open end of the trough, looking up at the older animals as though to taunt them. They responded with
indignant noises as it nudged through the rustling whorls of hay.

‘All right,’ Mark said, and reached for the calf ’s tail, twisting it gently, so that the animal jolted for a moment but then allowed itself to be guided away from the
trough.

‘That’s you done now,’ he said, and he moved it slowly back towards its pen. A long, demanding bawl sounded from one of the cows; she was up against the gate, pacing now within
the small enclosure, but she could not get out.

Even standing right up against the pen, Mark could not see the gap through which the calf had escaped. It could only have slipped through the lower gate rungs, or slid out between the gate and
the wall, but that was impossible; both spaces were too tight. He unlatched the gate quickly and hurried the calf back into the pen, still holding the tail, tapping the toe of his boot gently to
the back shins. When he latched the gate again every animal in the place seemed to call out at once, and from somewhere he heard a dog. The calf, ignoring the attempts of its mother to nose it
sharply backwards, stuck its head through the bars of the gate and watched him as he moved away. The eyes shone. Mark could not help himself: he raised a hand slowly in some sort of farewell. He
felt intensely foolish and intensely calm.

At the back door, a woman with a pregnant belly was shushing the dog. Mark kept to the shadows of the house and walked back along the crisp white lane to the car.

He had been driving only for a couple of seconds when he met headlights coming around the bend. They dimmed. From the number-plate, and from the startled face in the glare of his own lights just
before he dimmed them, he saw that the other driver was Frankie. As they passed each other slowly, both squeezed tight to the ditch on the narrow lane, he watched Frankie’s face turn from
surprise, through confusion, to suspicion. Mark raised his hand from the wheel and gave him the wave of one driver to another; a quick, light-handed salute. They were past each other before
Frankie’s hand could come any distance from his wheel. In the next instant, in his rear-view mirror, Mark watched the tail-lights of the van brighten and dim as Frankie stalled, as he tried
to decide whether there was something he needed to do.