Pipe Dreams. Anne Schulman

up his drink.

      “You’re very quiet tonight, Meany. Has Julie dumped you?” Tom Scully called over from the bar, with a grin.

      “Her mam’s bad,” Meany explained in his quiet, good-natured way.

      Tom was always sniffing around Julie. Chatting her up. He fancied her like mad. She thought he was a bit of a poser. She’d come across enough of those in Dublin.

      “So when’s the big day then?” Tom jeered.

      “What big day?” Meany asked innocently.

      “Come on, you know what I mean,” Tom laughed.

      Meany frowned but ignored the question. It was naming the big day that was the cause of all his troubles. He thought of nothing else. Even in his sleep. And there had been precious little of that these past few weeks. Tom’s teasing did not usually rattle him. But Meany was not in the mood for his nonsense tonight. He had a lot of thinking to do.

       CHAPTER THREE

      Meany filled the blackened kettle and put it on the stove to boil. He pushed the table to one side and moved the old threadbare rug out of the way. The screwdriver fitted neatly between the two floorboards. With a firm tug one of the boards swung upwards. He removed the bank books from their hiding place and spread them on the table. Then, before he made the tea, he checked that there were no gaps in the curtains.

      Meany smiled as he turned the pages of his latest deposit book. He had been saving from the age of six. Even now, with interest rates at an all-time low, his cash was growing steadily. His heart raced as he saw the biggest amount of all, the payment from the sale of the five-acre plot next to Billy White’s farm. But his smile soon faded. The sight of the hefty sum brought a frown to Meany’s brow. Billy had swindled his mother. Wiped her eye without so much as a blink. He begged her to sell him the land so that he could produce more crops. He had a growing family to raise.

      “You’re not growing crops on it. What use is it to you?” Billy asked.

      He went on and on until finally she had given in. After all, it would bring a tidy sum for something they were not using anyway.

      Exactly one month later Billy White sold the land to some property developers for double the price. When the news of the sale broke, in Doyle’s pub, his mam took to her bed for two days. She had never done that before. Not even when she was sick. When she finally came downstairs she told Meany that Billy White’s name was never to be mentioned in her house again. And it never was.

      Meany was not a poor man, far from it. His father had always been careful. His mother even more so. With their savings and his own, Meany had a tidy cushion behind him. Apart from his bank manager, no one had any idea how much money he had. Plenty had tried to guess. Meany wished that the bank manager did not have to know either. His money was his affair, nobody else’s. If it had not been for the fire which gutted a neighbour’s farmhouse, Meany would never have talked his mother into using the bank in the first place. The farmer had not trusted banks one little bit and kept his life savings stashed all over the house.

      But, that was then, and this was now. How much of his money would be left if he married Julie? She saw no sin in spending. She teased him about his meanness all the time. Everyone did. But let them, he didn’t care.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      Meany stood behind Julie at the graveside. His heart ached for her. When she could bear no more, she turned to Meany and hid her face in his shoulder.

      Meany stood silently as she leaned against him. The nearness of her curled through him. He could smell her perfume. And feel the softness of her curls on his face. A blush stained his cheeks. This was neither the time nor the place to feel the way he did.

      Later, as people paid their respects to Julie and her sister, Meany waited quietly by the bay window of the cottage. Julie, her mother and her sister, Katie, had done a good job of restoring it. It looked different now. Bigger. Brighter. All white with just splashes of colour. A real picture-book cottage. Meany gazed through the window at the garden. What would happen to the cottage now? Julie and her sister both worked in Dublin. Would they sell the cottage or keep it? But more importantly, would Julie return to Dublin and stay there if he didn’t ask her to marry him? With her mam gone and the cottage sold, Julie would have no reason to come back to Wexford.

      Meany supposed that he and Julie had a kind of understanding. Nothing official. No engagement ring or anything. The thought of that made his blood run cold. The expense. God knows what a ring would cost. And then there was the farm. Julie would not live there as it was. She had thrown out enough hints about that. She had said so in lots of different ways. She was forever at him to modernise it. To have heating put in. Install a phone. Get a proper cooker and a washing machine. Buy comfortable furniture for himself. Clean up the garden. An endless stream of suggestions poured from those luscious, red lips.

      “I’ll probably go back to Dublin next week,” Julie told a neighbour. “There’s nothing to keep me here now, is there?”

      Meany’s hand shook. He wobbled the glass to his lips, his mind racing.

      “Nothing to keep her here,” he muttered to himself. “What about me?”