‘Jesus, what are you? A nun or something?’ scoffed Angela. Angela was blunt and a little frightening; she would call the men over when they passed at the end of lunch hour and tease them. But Marion was immune to Angela, to all of us. One day she said, ‘If I as much as eat one Rich Tea finger I can feel it going straight to my hips.’ I was lying on the grass watching a jet cross the sky. I thought of the journey of the little biscuit down the short lumpen body to her hips. She lived with her widowed mother and her older sick brother in a terraced house in Bohermore. She was the sole breadwinner. I had known girls like her in school—old beyond their years, tough, proud, cunning, who would hold things together for others, no matter what. She was the kind of girl who wore flesh-coloured tights and pencil skirts but never jeans, and would grow into the kind of woman I never wanted to be.
Gus lived about three miles from us at home but I had never once spoken to him. I used to see him in his car after Mass on Sundays, waiting for his mother, as my mother steered us kids to our car and my father stood in a huddle of men at the side door of the church. I saw him in the village, too, at the petrol pump or coming out of the shop with his messages. One evening in May my mother drove me up a dry rutted lane to his house to ask for the lift to the city.
‘Tell him it’ll only be for the summer, it’s only a summer job,’ she said as I got out.
‘No, I better not,’ I said. ‘Come in with me.’
We walked up the path under trees, between two strips of overgrown garden. There was a line of smoke coming out the chimney. The two-storey house had once been handsome but the paintwork and masonry were flaking and crumbling and the wood at the base of the front door was rotten. At the side of the house there was a row of slate-roofed barns. An old bicycle lay under a tree and a wooden barrel stood at the gable end of the house to catch water from a downpipe. My mother rapped lightly on the door and then stepped well back. Inside on the windowsill I could see a pile of ancient looking paperbacks, their spines faded from the sun. I tilted my head to read the titles—The Big Sky, The Virginian, Hopalong Cassidy, Riders of the Purple Sage.
There was a shuffle and the door scraped open. He wore no shoes and his grey woollen jumper was stained. A black and white sheepdog sheltered timidly behind his legs. In the dark interior I saw the white banisters of the stairs. At the sight of us Gus’s eyes grew panicked. He and my mother knew each other and after they had exchanged greetings, she told him what we wanted. I think that he’d have consented to almost anything just to close the door and be left in peace again.
We walked down the path and the sunlight fell through the trees onto my head. I thought of the lines of a poem I had learnt in school… Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon. But I remembered it now as Dapple-dawn-drawn light, because the light flowing through the branches touched me and enveloped me in a new and strange way, as if I were encountering trees and leaves and light for the very first time. I thought of that poem and all the poems in my book, and felt the pull of all the books that would cross my path if I went to college that autumn. I felt a sudden calm, a sense of promise, and I’d like to have remained there for a little while under those trees.
‘That’s an awful way to live,’ my mother said when we got into the car. ‘The people who went before him would be ashamed.’ She reversed the car and faced it onto the lane. ‘D’you know we’re distant relations?’
I turned to her. ‘How distant?’
‘Oh, second or third cousins—my mother and his mother were second cousins, I think.’
‘Well, B-Baby Face, were they all nice to you in there today?’ Gus asked me one Friday evening as we set off to pick up Martha. His arm was almost touching mine. I could smell the previous night’s alcohol seeping from his pores. There were other smells too and I tried not to think of his body. When he spoke he hung his head a little and lowered his voice. I knew he was trying to deflect from his body and in the effort his words came out full of apology and shame.
He had dubbed me Baby Face from the start. Little by little we had grown accustomed to each other, and when we were alone he spoke in a slightly conspiratorial voice.
‘They were,’ I replied. ‘They were grand.’
‘I hope Marion is nice to you.’
‘She is. She’s very nice.’
And then my heart sank and I reddened. One day under the trees the factory girls had quizzed me about where I was from and what school I’d gone to and if I had a boyfriend. They were all from the city. Then Marion said. ‘You get a lift with that Gus fella, don’t you?’
‘I do.’
‘Jesus. You’re some girl! And you don’t mind sitting there beside him in the car?’
I shook my head and felt all their eyes on me.
‘How d’you stick it—the BO? I’d say that fella never took a bath in his whole born life. Every single girl that ever came into the place here was afraid to go near him, d’you know that? He’s like… something out of a zoo!’
She kept looking at me. ‘They’re a bit strange from your part of the country, aren’t they?’
My heart took fright. ‘I don’t know. Are they?’
She tilted her head. ‘Oh, you get pockets of it everywhere, indeed,’ she said, and for a second she had a soft look and I thought I was safe. But then she said ‘We had a guy here a few years ago. He was a porter up at the Visitors’ Centre for a while. Came from your part of the country too—he knew Gus. They used to go up to Coen’s at lunchtime every day and knock back a few. He got shown the door eventually because you couldn’t have that kind of thing—the smell of drink—you couldn’t have that kind of thing and the tourists walkin’ in the door past him.’ She turned to me again. ‘Seanie Ryan… that was the porter. D’you know him?’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t know any Seanie Ryan.’
‘Anyway, on our staff night out that Christmas he told me a story. He was well jarred but I believed him. He said when he was young he knew Gus’s father, and that he was an alko too and spent his whole life drinking and fighting. I said to Seanie you’d never guess from Gus, would you!’ The others laughed. I wanted to say that Gus doesn’t fight.
‘Anyway this guy Seanie tells me this story… he says that Gus’s father himself used to tell it in the pub… It was a summer years ago and your man—Gus’s father—was in the bog, cuttin’ turf, and it was an awful hot day and of course your man got thirsty, and he set off across the bog in the direction of the nearest pub, two or three miles away. And when he got there he told the barman how a terrible thirst had come on him in the bog. “So I tied the young fella to the cart,” he said, “and headed off walking…” And he did, too, Seanie said, he did, too! He tied the son to the cart and left him there all day in the sun. And that was Gus! Gus was the son!’
I had grown used to seeing him cross the factory floor, and come to know the intervals of his crossings. In the first weeks I timed my own little trips to the sink so that our paths might cross and I might hear a familiar voice from my own country. He never spoke, just nodded and turned his eyes down and continued on his way. There was something vague and distant about him inside the factory. Other men would pass with their trolleys or machinery and they’d wink and flirt and say ‘How ya doin’, sweetheart?’ and make me blush. Gus would plough on, lugging his wagon past the sinks and the tables and the kilns, purple-faced and sweating, as if he’d drawn the clay up from the bowels of the earth.
When she finished her story Marion turned to me. ‘He’s an oddity all right… And you’re a great girl to stick that car every day…’ Then she peered at me. ‘You’re not related to him or anything, are you?’
‘No!