It was late morning before you found a rhythm—not his, but it would do. Your body had warmed itself, and as you gathered the red bricks into a neat pile, the world was silent, laid out before you slow and wide, punctuated by an occasional songbird and the wet scraping of your father’s shovel, like the gentle ticking of the day.
“Who lives here?” you say.
He stopped shoveling, and his breaths came quick as he leaned his hip against the wall, searching the sky above, his gums showing.
“Who lives here?” you say again.
“The people who have a broken garden wall live here,” he says. “Do you want them for something?”
“I do,” you say. “I want to buy the place and give us both a day off.”
He smirked, and that was lovely. He put a fresh cigarette to his mouth. A blue Bic lighter was dwarfed in his hand; he sparked it, then shook it a few times, and it took. Gray smoke came out his nose.
“It’d be some penny now, that house,” he says, looking over the three floors of pale sandstone, the perfect windowpanes.
“It’s big,” you say.
“Big all right, but big and all as it is, you can only be in one room at a time, no matter how much money you have.”
All but a single window on the top floor was covered with heavy fabric. The ground floor had closed wooden shutters. The longer you looked, the more decay began to show itself. Thick green moss along the line of the gutter. The plaster was cracked, and you could see into the exposed innards under the sill.
“Must be eleven?” he says. The question drifted and was not to you; his weight shifted, and he made a decision.
“Go on and get the sandwiches,” he says, and you found yourself about to run to the car, but you held fast and walked like someone whose body was heavy.
You sat almost side by side on the bricks you had stacked, unfolding the tinfoil, biting roughly at the sandwiches.
“You’d think she’d throw out a cup of tea,” he says, his voice low, still chewing.
“Who?” you ask.
“Your woman, in there.” He says, “You’d think a house like that, she’d spare a few tea bags and some feckin’ hot water.” He searched the blank windows. “Feck it,” he says, throwing his bread back
into the tinfoil. He stood and walked along the path to the door. His fist landed on the wood like two gunshots, then three. Someone moved past the upstairs window, but it might have been your imagination. Then you heard a woman’s voice muffled from inside.
“Yeah,” your father says. “Yeah . . . I just wanted to get in and make a tea, a cup of tea.” The roughness had gone from his mouth.
“Good enough, yeah.” He nodded at you as he walked down the path and sat back on the bricks. “Jesus, you’d give a stranger a cup of tea.” His voice low, satisfied. “That’s how they are, this lot, they’d walk all over you if you let them. That’s how they hold on to the money.” He dug his heavy boot into the earth and turned the heel.
You picked at dead skin on your hands, hoping you’d find a callus or a good cut. There were none, but red dust from the bricks lined the undersides of your nails.
A latch clicked on the other side of the door, and you and him cocked your heads like stray dogs. A woman emerged, trying to balance a tray in her hands and hold the door with her foot. “Go on and help her,” he says, and you felt his elbow hit your arm. You stood attentive, but that was all. She came toward you along the little garden path, her eyes fixed on the tray.
“Frank, I’m so sorry, but I got a late start today,” she says. She was English.
“That’s all right, ma’am,” he says. “But for the sandwiches get a bit dry without it.” Her fair hair blocked her face, but you already knew the smile rich people gave when they talked to someone they thought stupid. He stood up as she came closer. “Take the tray,” he says to you, but you didn’t, you stood motionless. Her head rose up, and without meaning to be bold, you let yourself look at her.
She wasn’t old at all, not in the way you’d expected—it surprised you—but she wasn’t young either. She was beautiful.
“Oh,” she says, noticing you beside your father. Her eyes were green and worn in, like she was watching from a big room behind them.
“And who is this?” she says to your father, her voice like a newsreader’s.
“Oh, that’s me lad,” he says, and his stout figure was transported to a market day out west, standing in the mud and shit, tipping his hat to a passing carriage.
“Hello, lad,” she says with a faint smile. “I’m afraid I’ve not brought you a cup.”
“That’s all right, ma’am,” says your father. “He’s fine without.”
“Are you fine without?” she says.
“Yeah,” you say, quick to agree. She stepped toward you, passing the tray, her smile lines still showing, and for a moment you knew how she smelled.
“There’s a few biscuits there—not the good ones, I’m afraid. I’ve not been out.” She lowered her head and searched around her feet.
“Oh, thanks, ma’am,” he says, then stared in silence. She pushed her hand into the pockets of what you assumed to be a man’s bathrobe. Sizes too big, worn and tartan—the kind old men wear in hospitals. You could see the flesh of her hand through a hole in her pocket where her finger had scratched from the inside a thousand times and broken through.
“How’s the work going?” she asks.
“Good now. Won’t be long getting done.”
She looked at the wall a moment, the way you might look at a jigsaw puzzle you were never going to do. “Great,” she says, and there was more silence. She looked at you again, this time in a lazy way. “Good of you to give your dad a hand today.”
“Oh, he’s a good one all right, smart too, not the building for him. He’s a good job up in McCann’s butcher’s during the week after school. Smart all right, get a trade indoors.”
You couldn’t look at her then. You could feel a burning across your face. Shut up, shut up, shut up, you thick culchie bastard.
“It’s a good profession,” she says simply and without interest, and turned and glanced at the back door.
“Good all right,” says your father.
“Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” she says.
“Good enough, ma’am.” He sat back on the pile of red bricks.
“Oh,” she says. “If you need the toilet, it’s through that door, up the stairs, and . . .” She paused. Her hand fluttered in the air. “Yes . . . first door on the landing to the right.” Her smile landed in the middle of you both. And silently she went back along the little path, inside.
“Stop gawking like an eejit,” you heard him say. “Pour that tea and sit.”
The tray was wooden, smooth and lovely to touch. You set it carefully on the grass and poured his tea from an old-fashioned teapot. Your father fingered through the biscuits on a small plate that looked to be from the same set. He picked one up and held it under his nose, then flung it back with such force that it skipped off the tray.
“She didn’t kill herself with that spread, did she?”
You left the biscuits untouched even though you wanted one.
“Weak piss,” he says after the first