He checks his watch. Brisbane is ten hours ahead. Lucy will be going to bed now. Or making the kids’ lunches for school or laying things out for breakfast. No, tomorrow is Saturday. Winter there. He stops and reaches for a bottle of bleach, then changes his mind. Need to allow for the weight of wine. Rioja, or maybe a Barbera … cúpla buidéal, it being Friday. Or a nice crisp white maybe. An image of the evening ahead rises: sitting out on the lawn as the sun sets, sipping a dry white, chilled to perfection.
Outside, he leaves the bags down on the footpath and lights a cigarette. One of these winters, he’ll visit Lucy. Christmas dinner on the beach. He hasn’t been much of a brother – he should have gone out that time Ellie was ill. Febrile convulsions. Nearly lost her. Josie had epilepsy all her life. Wonder if Lucy admitted the fault line to the doctors. The falling sickness. The suggestible nature of certain words – he can feel the gravitational pull of those. Lear had it. Tis very like he hath the falling sickness. The sudden, frightening way that Josie used to fall forward. Once, while she was on the ground, Lucy chalked around her limp body. He remembered that when Ellie was sick. He was afraid something was coming home to roost for Lucy, some bad karma.
He throws away the cigarette butt. Too early to go home – the day is stretching out before him. He heads up the hill towards the square. The shopping bags are heavier than he expected. John O’Grady, sitting inside the garage window, looks up as he passes and Luke nods at him. He doubts if John is a trained mechanic at all; probably just fell into the family business. Never married, sits there in the window all day waiting for customers.
Suddenly he remembers: Caesar it was, not Lear, who had epilepsy. King George, too. Such a medieval-sounding ailment, consistent with a flat earth, Galileo, burnings at the stake. Haemophilia is like that too. The poor devils, thinking they had only one skin.
Up ahead John-Joe Cleary crosses the street, heading for the Sullane Valley Hotel for the €5 lunch. It used to be a fine place; had the meal there after Dadda’s funeral. Now, the clientele is OAPs and bachelors. Wonder what’s on the menu today. John-Joe was a good friend to Dadda always, helping out around the farm for years. He still helps out up at Blake’s during the hunting season. Every now and again he goes on a bender. A quiet boozer, never a nuisance. Probably waiting for the mother to die and leave him the house. You’ll never miss your mother till. Never saw him with a woman. Probably a bit afraid of women, thinks they’re complicated. Keep life simple, get the €5 lunch every day. Before you know it, you’re fifty. Wake up one day and you’re sixty. Not long left then. An ease when it’s all over.
Luke crosses the street, slows as he passes the hotel door and reads the chalkboard menu. Bacon and cabbage today. Inside, it’s dark, with no sign of John-Joe. Too late now to enter, he thinks. Anyway he’s not hungry. Wouldn’t mind a chat with John-Joe though. Often has the impression John-Joe keeps something back, that he knows more about Luke than Luke himself knows. But Luke trusts him – John-Joe is faithful to his father’s memory and to the family. Some residual sympathy still exists for the family, going back to the double tragedy in 1941 when his father’s twelve-year-old sister, Una, fell down the well on New Year’s Day and their father dropped dead in the yard six months later. Those who remember are dying out now, and the sympathy is waning.
The sun burns down on his head. He continues along Main Street, past Kealy’s bar. His father was wearing a tweed waistcoat with a pocket-watch when he walked into Kealy’s and first laid eyes on his mother on a summer’s evening almost forty years ago. Who do you think you are, you and your waistcoat? she thought, as she pulled his pint. Fifteen years her senior and countless stations above her, he was instantly smitten. She’d been a barmaid in Coventry, escaping, for a few years, the drunken father and cowed mother and the two-roomed cottage full of kids on the side of Croghan mountain. He spent a long time courting her, convincing her. The waistcoat still hangs in the wardrobe, its girth too great for Luke.
He crosses the street to the shade and sits on the windowsill of a boarded-up terraced house. Half the houses and shops in the town are boarded up. The feeling of decay and dereliction always in the air. Stagnancy. Listlessness in the young men – nothing to do, no work – hanging around the town. He feels a little light-headed. He reaches into one of the bags and brings out the bottle of Coke and takes a few slugs. The street is deserted. At the top of the hill, teachers’ cars are parked in a line in the lay-by outside the primary school. Inside, he pictures little heads bent over desks. Not long now before the summer holidays.
He heads out the Dunmore road. He does not want to go home. He remembers the can of gloss paint waiting in the basement. He turns left onto the bridge, leaves down his bags and leans on the wall. Below him, the glimmer of water, the play of sunlight and wind and trees and sky on the surface, the currents and underwater motion almost invisible. Reeds, green and nervy, rise from the shallows. He turns his head. Half a mile downriver, the concrete bunker of the abandoned chicken factory is just visible beyond the trees. Decades’ worth of chicks hatched out at one end. Birth to death in a hundred yards. Other dark goings-on there too for years. Poor boys from the terraces desperate for summer jobs and Vinnie Molloy, supervisor, pervert, brute, had the giving of the jobs. For certain favours rendered. Conor Mahon. Sean Byron. Kevin Kelly. Trying not to cry out with the pain. Always the poor who get raped.
He leans over the top of the bridge and searches for his reflection in the water. The shadow of a drowned man is supposed to be waiting for him in the water. Conor Mahon’s shadow waiting for him here when he was twenty-one. Luke sat beside Conor in first year in secondary school, the two of them full of devilment. That day the priest came in to give a sex education lesson. Take these little bookeens home with ye, lads, he said. He returned the next day. Well, Conor, did you read the book? Oh I did, Father, I did … and ’twas the dirtiest book I ever read. Conor used to play the banjo. Started a band with three young ones when he was sixteen – Three Birds and a Badger, he called it. Luke cornered Molloy one night after Conor’s death, threatened to cut off his fingers and toes if he ever touched another lad in the town. You’ll be fucken walking on your heels, you scumbag, you’ll have to be fed through a tube. Molloy hanged himself the week before his trial.
Luke straightens up. There has always been a pall over the town, he thinks, something dark and blighting, the cause of which he cannot put his finger on. Even during the economic boom, the air of depression and neglect never lifted. Old usurper’s shadow still hanging over the valley. Imperialist thieves. Sir Richard, like his Blake forefathers, still collecting ground rent from businesses in the town but never giving back a penny to plant a tree or put a lick of paint on the terraces or a bench in the square. Take, take, take. A wave of anger flares in him.
He draws his gaze back to the flow of water rounding the bend in the river. He remembers the day in third class when Miss Fahy ran her wooden pointer along the line of a river on the physical map of Ireland. When the river suddenly changed direction Luke made the connection and transposed in his mind the river on the map to the river at the end of the town, and suddenly the penny dropped and it dawned on him that this was their river, and their bend and their land – O’Brien land – and it was up there on the map of Ireland for the whole class and the whole world to see. It was the first surge of familial pride that was woken in him. Here, at the little