The first bus to arrive was a private coach from Shercock. I boarded it, wondering if anyone in that small town still remembered Peter Mathews, a petty thief who limped into town on a crutch and got caught withdrawing money from a stolen post office book, which he hid before the guards came. He found himself stripped and bent over a chair in the police station. He found himself dead from a heart attack with his pancreas bleeding from a blow to the stomach. Guards who’d had better ways to spend their Saturday afternoon contradicted each other in court. Swearing in the jury, the judge asked anyone if they had to declare an interest in the case. One juryman had spoken up. ‘I have no interest in the case, Your Honour, I’m not interested in it at all.’ He might have been a spokesman for my father’s generation. ‘I have no interest in seeing what’s in front of my eyes, no interest in things I don’t want to know about. If people didn’t turn a blind eye, Your Honour, we’d all be fucked.’
Half the bus would be fucked tonight if they got the chance, I suspected as I looked around it. Thick-calved Cavan girls wearing skirts the size of a mouse’s parachute and platform heels that needed health warnings for acrophobia. They shared lipstick and gossip in a suffocating reek of perfume. A radio almost drowned out the lads behind me discussing the new satellite channel a local consortium had set up to beam video highlights of junior local hurling matches into selected pubs until 10 p.m., when the frequency was taken over by a porn channel from Prague.
We crossed the Boyne near the turn for Johnstown. To the left a line of mature trees blocked out any view of the Clancy family residence, a Palladian mansion with an additional wing built on by Slab McGuirk and Mossy Egan the year my father left private employment. County Council workers had extended a six-foot stone boundary wall for free when the road was being widened. Beyond it the road grew lonely, broken by the lights of isolated homesteads and livestock huddled in the corners of fields. I stared out into the dusk as we reached the first turn for Tara, the dung-splattered seat of the ancient High Kings.
‘Let’s stop at Tara, I’ve never seen it,’ Phyllis had pleaded as we passed here on the second occasion I met her, six months after our night at the dog track. By then, the secret was all over Navan about my father having remarried. Nobody seemed sure about how long he had been living a double life in Dublin or why he told none of his old friends. But people were impressed by stories of Barney Clancy being best man at the wedding and treating them to dinner in the Shelbourne Hotel. Brian Lenihan and two other Government ministers were rumoured to have joined in their celebrations, which became a near riot when Donough O’Malley arrived and my father reluctantly allowed his wedding night to be hi-jacked, flattered by the attention of such great men.
My father ignored Phyllis’s request to stop at Tara in the car that day. Her interest in seeing it would have been negligible. But her apprehension and self-doubt about having to confront her new neighbours was evident, even to me, two months past my ninth birthday. Even the way she spoke was different from how I remembered her Dublin accent at the dog track, so that she seemed like a child unsuccessfully trying to sound posh.
My father, on the other hand, wanted the business finished, with his new bride installed and the whispers of neighbours faced down. He had accepted the job of heading a special development task-force within the planning department of Meath County Council and needed to live in Meath full-time. A more than respectable period of mourning had passed since my mother was knocked down by a truck on Ludlow Street, and it was several years since Phyllis’s first husband, a Mr Morgan, passed away in his native Glasgow, leaving her with one son, Cormac, a year younger than me.
Neither Cormac nor I spoke to each other on that first journey into Navan. Cormac looked soft enough to crush, pointing out cattle to his teddy bear through the window and keeping up an incessant, lisping commentary. We shared the same freckles and teeth but his hair was a gingery red. Even though I was preoccupied in struggling against back-seat nausea, I could see the effect that his whispered babbling and the unmanly teddy bear were having on my father.
‘Does this mean we’ll be going to see the dogs again?’ I asked.
‘You never saw your mother at the dog track. She was never there. Do you understand?’
My father didn’t turn as he spoke, but his eyes found mine in the rear-view mirror. Mother. Was that what I was meant to call her? Half the town probably saw them at the dog track, but to my father power was about controlling perceptions and this was to be his wife’s stage-managed arrival into Navan.
Some time during their first night in the house I cried out. Perhaps my tears were caused by a sense of everything changing or maybe the inaudible shriek of a ghost being banished woke me, with no untouched corner left for my mother to hide in. All evening the house – already immaculately cleaned by Josie, whose services were now dispensed with – had been scrubbed by Phyllis. Neat cupboards were pulled apart like an exorcism, old curtains torn down before her new Venetian blinds had even arrived, and alien sounds filled up the house.
I just know that I cried out again, waiting for the creak of his bed in response and for yellow light to spill across the pattern of roses. Cormac’s eyes watched like a cat in the dark from the new camp-bed set up across the room. But it was Phyllis who entered to hover over my bed. My crying stopped. How often have I relived that moment, asking myself who Phyllis was and just how insecure she must have felt? A young twenty-five years of age to his settled, confident thirty-eight. Had they been making love, or did I startle her from sleep to find this house – twice the size of the artisan’s cottage she was reared in – closing in around her like a mausoleum to the goodness conferred by death onto another woman, knowing she would have to constantly walk in that other woman’s footsteps, an inappropriately dressed outsider perpetually scrutinized and compared.
Her hand reached out tentatively towards my wet cheeks, her white knuckle showing off a thickset ring. I flinched and drew back, startling Phyllis who was possibly more scared than me. Eyeball to eyeball with a new life, sudden responsibilities and guilts. We were like two explorers wary of each other, as she stretched out her fingers a second time, hesitantly, as if waiting for me to duck away.
‘Why were you crying?’ Her voice, kept low as if afraid of wakening my father, didn’t sound like a grown woman’s. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Were you scared?’
‘Yes.’
It wasn’t me who replied; it was Cormac, his tears deliberately staking his claim to her. Phyllis turned from my bed, crooning as she hugged her son, her only constant in this unfamiliar world of Meath men.
I never knew proper hatred before Cormac’s arrival. Josie’s granddaughter and I had played as equals, conquering foes in the imaginary continent of her back garden. But soon Cormac and I were fighting for real territory, possession of the hearthrug or ownership of Dinky cars and torn comics. He watched me constantly in those first weeks, imitating my every action and discovering my favourite places to play in, then getting there before me. ‘It’s mine, mine, mine!’ Our chorus would bring Phyllis screeching from the kitchen.
It was the same in the schoolyard, where he shadowed me from a distance. Phyllis watched from the gate, making sure I held his hand until the last minute. But once she was gone I let him stew in the stigma of his different accent, refusing to stand up for him when boys asked if he was my new brother. The funny thing was that I had always wanted a brother, but I could only see Cormac as a threat, walking into my life, being made a fuss of by people who should have been making a fuss of me. Previously my father had been away in Dublin a lot, but I’d always had him to myself when he got home. Now Phyllis was there every evening in the hallway before me, perpetually in my way like a puppy dog needing attention. I was put to bed early just so they could be alone and even then I had to share my room with a usurper.