‘Would you have any auld scrap lying around? Any auld iron or copper?’
‘Devil the bit,’ Luke says. He keeps his eyes hard on the driver, then makes a big show of looking into the back of the van. Plastic bags, lengths of rusty iron, a marble fireplace. ‘Ye’re not local, are ye? I haven’t seen ye around here before.’
‘Ah, not far, boss – the far side of Mallow. What about new windows?’ He nods towards the house. ‘This man here can get the best of PVC windows for you.’
‘No, no, ye’re grand. I’m not interested.’ He slaps the roof of the van twice, takes a step back. ‘All right, so … Good luck, now.’ Off with ye and don’t come back, he wants to add.
He waits until the van is out of sight at the end of the avenue, then sits on the step. He needs to put up gates at the entrance and proper mortice locks on the front and back doors. He’ll come home some day to find the place cleaned out. One kick to the back door and they’re in. The Adam fireplace, the furniture, Dadda’s gold pocket-watch, Ellen’s trunks. A small fortune sitting in there.
The granite step is warm. It was on this step his mother was felled two years ago. A beautiful day in June. Sitting here talking away to him while he planted annuals in the flowerbed beside the front door. She had had him all to herself for several years. No more Josie, no more aggro. He had begun to enjoy her too – her fierce wit, her ferocious tongue.
‘Get me an ice cream,’ she ordered. He tipped a little plant out of its pot and set it in the soil, then turned to look at her. Her eyes were closed, her face tilted upwards towards the sun. He stood and looked out over the fields and down across the river to the town. A perfect day, he thought. He went inside and brought her out a choc-ice and bent again to the flowerbed, his back to her. A little puff of wind blew the ice cream wrapper past him, and he reached out his hand to try and catch it. It came to rest against a pot. Stay, he urged it. But another little gust blew it on; it stopped and started and worried along for a few more feet. He stood up and went after it.
‘You’re a rip!’ he said, waving the wrapper as he returned. ‘Why do you always have to make work for me?’ His role now was the exasperated parent to her naughty child. It was the way she loved too – with robust gesture and combat. He resumed the planting and waited for her mocking jibe.
But none came, and he prodded again. ‘Here I am, morning, noon and night, serving you … Jesus, and you haven’t an ounce of gratitude or consideration for me – or for anyone! Do you know that?’
Again, no response. He turned to look at her. On her face, a wry crooked smile, a fixed grin.
‘What?’ he asked. The grin remained, lending her a look of stupidity. Mimicking Josie, he thought. I have a thundering bitch for a mother. ‘Stop that,’ he said and turned back to the work. Again he waited for the quip, the wisecrack reply. Again, none came. He turned around. The same frozen grin.
‘Stop messing, Mammy … For fuck’s sake … Stop it, it’s not funny.’
Her face was tilted, her left eye half closed. The choc-ice slipped from her fingers onto the step. Mammy, he said urgently, jumping up. From her twisted mouth came a guttural sound. Her head slumped to one side. He leaned towards her and touched her face, then lifted her left arm. It fell, slack. His stomach lurched. He took out his phone and dialled. He kept saying her name. ‘It’s okay, you’ll be all right.’
He lays his hand on the warm granite. On this stone a cataclysmic neurological event occurred in his mother’s brain. He rubs the granite. We know not the day nor the hour, nor the stone. He wonders if she had a premonition. After four weeks in hospital she recovered sufficiently to be moved to rehab. Then, in the ambulance en route there, she was struck by a greater and, this time, fatal cerebrovascular event.
Just after eleven, another vehicle – a small yellow car – comes up the avenue. Again he goes to the front door. The car stops and a girl steps out. Small, striking-looking with very pale skin and short, jet-black hair. She nods and half turns to close the car door. Then she stands before him and meets his gaze calmly. She is thirty, perhaps thirty-two. Not a girl, but a woman.
‘Hello,’ she says, smiling. She glances at Lily, standing in the doorway behind him.
‘Hello,’ he says.
Lynch’s Friesians are grazing in the field behind her. Just as she puts one foot in front of the other in a forward motion to offer her hand, a cow moves gracefully behind her head, from right ear to left, oblivious in her grazing to the beautiful simplicity in the motion of cow and girl.
She introduces herself, Ruth Mulvey, and he does likewise.
‘I’m sorry for barging in on you like this,’ she says. ‘They told me in SuperValu that you might want a dog. I was going to put up a notice and the woman at the till said you might be interested. Katie, her name was.’ Then, a little bashfully, ‘She said to say she sent me.’
She gestures towards the car. ‘It’s my uncle’s dog. He’s gone into a nursing home. I have to go back to Dublin and I can’t take him with me.’
Luke peers into the car. A small brown dog is curled on a blanket on the back seat. Without lifting its head, its eyes fix anxiously on Luke. Katie Cullen works part-time in SuperValu, and has the same bleeding heart for animals as he has. She comes up and feeds his cats whenever he goes away. The size of your place, she says, if I had it, I’d have fifty dogs.
The girl looks to Luke before opening the back door of the car.
‘Go on, sure take him out,’ he says, with a nod.
She lifts out the dog, its ears flattened, its body trembling in her arms.
‘This is Paddy,’ she says. She grips him tighter to mask the trembling.
‘Paddy,’ Luke repeats. ‘How are you, Paddy!’
She raises her face to his and when their eyes meet her mouth widens into a broad smile, and he smiles back, elated.
They are standing very close. She comes up only to his shoulders. He can see the top of her head, the line of scalp where her hair is parted. He had forgotten how good it feels to be this physically close to a woman.
‘Bring him into the house,’ he says and turns and leads the way.
She sets the dog down on the rug in the drawing room. Rigid, tense, wary, the dog doesn’t move and they stand staring at him.
‘The poor devil,’ Luke says softly, then turns to her. She has long dark eyelashes. Green eyes. Beautiful. Something a little funky about her – her hairstyle maybe. ‘Sit down,’ he tells her. ‘I’ll get him a bit of meat or something. Will you have something yourself – tea, coffee?’
‘No thanks, I’m grand. And don’t worry about Paddy – he’s probably too anxious to eat. He’s had a lot of change lately and I think he’s sensing there’s more to come.’
He goes down to the kitchen and runs the cold tap and fills two glasses of water. When he returns, the dog is crawling on its belly towards her feet.
She is from Curraboy, three miles away.
‘Only out the road,’ he says. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever met before, have we?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. Although we may well have, at some stage, around the town. At football matches maybe.’ Then she gives a little laugh. ‘Or Irish dancing years ago – everyone meets at Irish dancing!’
‘Did you go to St Mary’s?’
‘No. I went to Curraboy National School. And then I went to boarding school in Limerick.’
Villiers, probably. She might be Protestant.
‘But we were always in and out of town and we came to Mass in Clonduff,’ she says. ‘I’m sure our