Second Hand Jane (13 page)

She flinched
involuntarily at the mental image of Sean O’Flaherty with a big
white apron and long carving knife that flashed before her eyes.
Owen was right, though, she thought. Perhaps it could be said that
she watched far too much television but she had once seen an
undercover expose on pigs being kept inhumanely by farmers who
supplied well-known supermarket chains. Those poor animals hadn’t
had much chance for wallowing or foraging, not like Owen’s fat,
happy sows.

“They’re
amazingly intelligent animals—pigs, you know—more so than any other
domestic animal.”

She didn’t know
but then it had turned out there was an awful lot about pigs she
hadn’t known, like for instance the fact that pigs have very good
memories and that the reason they wallow in mud is not because they
are dirty—they were, according to Owen, extremely clean animals—but
because they can’t sweat and the mud cools their body temperature
down.

She had become
a mine of information on all things swine, listening to Owen as he
walked her around the first and closest of his paddocks. She’d
watched him curiously out of the corner of her eye as he became
positively animated, pointing out the area where the pigs wallowed
before showing her the little huts or kennels they used for
shelter. Initially, as he had held open the gate at the bottom of
the garden for her and she’d wandered out into the paddock, she had
felt slight trepidation at the sight of two hundred or so
free-ranging pigs. However, once she realised she wasn’t going to
be charged and trampled to death, she listened to Owen with
interest. It was hard not to when he was so amazingly passionate
about his animals. He was like a different person when he was
amongst his pigs; it was as though he came to life. His enthusiasm
for them was catching and she knew instinctively that from hereon
in she would never pick up a packet of budget pork sausies in the
supermarket again.

Jess glanced
down at her flat brown boots. She’d just squelched through a
particularly boggy part of the paddock but her feet were still dry
and her boots would clean up with a scrub under a hot tap, no
bother. She might have got the bra wrong but at least she’d had the
sense to wear sensible footwear. It was at that moment she’d nearly
gone flying, tripping over those same said sensibly clad feet. It
was all Owen’s fault, she thought, as he grabbed her elbow and
steadied her; he had just pointed out the area in the paddock set
aside for the pigs to root in—his words, not hers. As he caught
sight of the look of horror on her face, he’d let rip with a loud
laugh. It was only the second time she had heard it since he picked
her up from the station and she looked at him startled as he
informed her, “No, I don’t have a herd of rampant lesbian pigs!
Rooting is the term we use for the way the girls forage in the
soil.”

Jess had the
grace to look sheepish and once he had stopped laughing, he had led
her over to the barn, where she had met and fallen in love with
Wilbur.

“Would you like
to feed him?”

“Can I?” Her
eyes were wide, taking in the pink bundle whose plaintive squeak
was nothing like the robust squealing of the piglets she’d seen in
the stall next door. It tugged at her heartstrings.

“Here, hold him
like this.” He placed Wilbur carefully in her arms and she gazed
down with adoration as he began to suck feebly at the bottle.

“Is it cow’s
milk?” she asked.

Owen’s mouth
did that twitchy thing at the corners again. “No, it’s a sow’s milk
formula.”

She didn’t see
his expression; she was too concerned about Wilbur. “What will
happen to him?”

“Ah, well now,
runts don’t have a great survival rate so I don’t know for sure but
if I manage to get the little bugger up to a decent size, I will
put him back on his mother once her other piglets are weaned. That
would catch him up to his brothers and sisters in no time and
prevent his mother getting a bout of mastitis.”

Jess cringed,
remembering the terrible time Brianna had had with the breast
infection. She wouldn’t wish that on any mum.

“Tickle his
tum. They love that,” he said as the little piglet finished the
bottle.

He was right,
she thought, with delight; if Wilbur could coo, he would be cooing.
She sat contentedly like that, rubbing his tummy until she saw his
eyes beginning to shut. Gently placing him back in his box, she got
up and brushed her jeans down. “You will let me know how he gets
on, won’t you?”

Owen looked
bemused for a moment before he nodded and then their eyes met and
locked for a split second in an unspoken agreement that it was time
to head back to the cottage. They couldn’t avoid Amy any
longer.

***

“That’s her,”
he said, plucking one of the photos Jess had spied on the
mantelpiece earlier and holding it out to her. “That was taken a
few months before she died.”

Jess was
settled into the leather armchair and she placed the cup of tea he
had made her when they’d come back inside down on the side table
before leaning forward to take the frame from him. She didn’t know
what she expected really, but the young girl who was smiling out at
her made her draw a sharp breath.

Amy was quite
beautiful. Her hair was dark like her brother’s but her skin was
much fairer than his. They both shared the same startlingly light
grey eyes, though. She looks just like how I always pictured Snow
White, Jess thought, wondering at the irony of that as she mentally
swapped the seventies orange-and-brown knit dress and the long
straight hair, parted down the middle, for a long red dress with
puffy sleeves and waves of shiny black curls. This was the girl she
had come to meet.

“She looked
just like me Ma,” Owen said, handing her another picture.

This one was a
group shot, showing a much younger Owen. He looked like a typical
boy with a shock of sticky-up hair, the kind of lad who would have
pinged the girls’ bra straps in school. He also looked as if he
would rather be anywhere than standing around having his picture
taken with his older sister and parents. Mr and Mrs Aherne rested
their hands on their children’s shoulders, their pride in their
offspring evident as the foursome stood together frozen in time out
the front of the cottage.

Jess couldn’t
help but think it was a good thing that none of us knew what lay in
store for us and our families. Mrs Aherne was indeed a beauty while
her husband had that certain swarthiness about him—Owen had it,
too, now Jess realised. His parents made a handsome couple. Amy,
Jessica could see instantly, was the spit of her mother, and she
would have grown into a stunning young woman given the chance. Owen
was a real mix of both his Mum and Dad. He obviously got his dark
colouring from his father. Their noses were identical, too;
slightly bent to the right and with their heavy eyebrows, it gave
them both an almost hooded, brooding look. They even had the same
tall and rangy builds but Owen’s grey eyes and full mouth were
those of his mother and his sister.

“I can see the
family resemblance, alright. You were a handsome lot,” she
murmured, handing him back the two pictures.

He gazed at
them himself for a moment before placing them back on the mantel.
“Aye, peas in a pod, us Ahernes.”

“Amy would have
grown up to be a real stunner. She looked so much like your
Mum.”

“Aye, she did.
All me mates had a thing for her. I was the most popular lad at
school thanks to her. As for Ma, she was Miss County Down when she
met Da.”

Jess caught a
glimpse of that rare smile as he crouched down to light the fire.
“He used to tell me and Amy a tale about how he’d won Ma over with
the gift of a pig and a bunch of roses.”

Looking at him
over the rim of her mug, Jess was unsure where this story was going
because it certainly wasn’t the romantic tale befitting the woman
in the photo that she had been expecting.

The fire
suddenly roared into life and Owen took a step away from it,
catching her bewildered expression as he did so. “Not exactly
Cinderella, is it? But Ma had a soft spot for animals and roses—she
planted all the bushes out the front of the cottage—and the wee pig
Da gave her was a runt, not unlike your Wilbur out there. Ma called
her Marigold and she grew up to be a very fat, spoilt old sow. The
way she told the tale was that she took pity on the tiny runt and
Michael Aherne the poor pig farmer who needed the love of a good
woman. If the truth be told and you do the maths, Da got her up the
duff. That was the end of her reign as Miss County Down because she
had to become Mrs Michael Aherne and pronto.”

Jess laughed.
“They were happy, though? I mean before Amy, well, um, before…”

Owen
interrupted her. “I know what you mean and aye, they were happy
enough. Farming was a hard life back then, though, and they had
their share of hard times. I sometimes felt Ma wondered about what
might have been, you know, if she hadn’t been forced to settled
down so young. They both changed after Amy died, though, blaming
themselves for a long time. They kept her room like a shrine for
years and Ma used to sit on her bed, holding Amy’s teddy for hours
on end. When she came out, all she would go on and on about was how
she should have put her foot down and made us all leave the
godforsaken North years ago.” His gaze flickered to the mantel.
“She’d wanted us to go over to the family she had in Liverpool or
even go to the States to start a new life. Da wouldn’t hear of it,
though; this place was his home and I think she blamed him for not
wanting to leave the farm. I can understand it, though. What would
he have done? The farm was his life; he didn’t know anything else.”
Owen shrugged. “I’ve learnt that you can’t rewrite the past, no
matter how much you might want to and this farm is the only bit
left of our past now, so I am glad we never left in that
respect.”

“You said your
Mum kept Amy’s room like a shrine? Would I be able to have a look?
It would give me a real sense of her.”

He shook his
head. “No, she got rid of everything in the end—took a couple of
bin bags into her room and filled them. She was so angry—part of
the whole grieving process, I suppose. It wasn’t long after that
she got sick. Cancer like.”

“That must have
been so hard for you and your Dad.”

“Aye, it was
but she left us emotionally the day Amy died. For his part, though,
Da never stopped adoring her. He always called her Bridgette his
Beauty Queen and it didn’t really matter that she could never bring
herself to forgive him for not wanting to leave Glenariff because
he could never forgive himself. Amy was the apple of me Da’s eye.”
His eyes moved toward the front door. “He was a great one for the
stories. Do you see that old walking stick over there?”

Jess followed
his gaze to where an umbrella stand housed a battered-looking black
brolly and an old cane walking stick. She nodded.

“Well, it
belonged to me Grand-da and it was Da’s wee joke that he kept it
there because it would come in handy one day for beating all the
boys off when they came a-calling for our Amy.”

Jess smiled at
that, thinking briefly of how her mother would have kept a walking
stick by the front door for quite a different purpose. It would
have been used to hook any red-blooded males under the age of forty
who came-a-calling around the neck, drag them inside and then marry
them off to her first born.

“He stopped
telling his tall tales after Amy died.”

They were both
silent for a moment, Owen lost in the flickering flames of the
fire.

Something was
puzzling Jess, though. Owen had told her that that terrible day in
Lisburn Amy had gone up to see a boy who, according to her best
friend, wasn’t the least bit interested in her. Having seen her
photo, Jessica couldn’t understand how any young man in his right
mind could have been anything but smitten with the gorgeous
teenager. She voiced her bewilderment and Owen frowned; it leant a
harshness to his face and his voice grew bitter.

“Evie told us
that Amy had chatted up the lad at a dance in Banbridge a few weeks
earlier. She wasn’t shy in coming forward, our Amy. She had that
awareness about herself that young girls have, you know?”

Jess nodded.
Yes, she could remember thinking she was pretty hot to trot at the
Blue Light Discos she had frequented many moons ago.

“Anyway, this
lad—he didn’t belong in Banbridge and he should never have been at
the dance in the first place because he was asking for trouble
like. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before one of the local lads took
umbrage with him talking to one of their girls and the dance ended
with a fight. Amy was like you—into her stories. She was a right
dreamer and she was always waiting for something exciting to happen
and for her, that was it.” He picked up the poker and stabbed at
the fire. “I suppose she saw the situation as a Romeo and Juliet
scenario, you know? That whole forbidden love rot, and she was
determined to see this fella again despite him telling her in no
uncertain terms to leave him alone after the fight. He’d gotten a
battering and he didn’t want any more trouble. She wouldn’t leave
him be, though, even though there was no way in hell that lad would
have even looked at her again.”

There was a
hole in the story Jess just couldn’t figure. “What do you mean ‘one
of their girls’?”

“We’re
Proddies. It was a Protestant dance and this lad was Catholic. It
was more than his life was worth to go near her again but Amy was
motivated by fashion, not by politics, and she couldn’t understand
why what religion you were mattered so much. ‘We’re all human
beings, so why can’t we all just get along?’ she once asked our Da
and he told her it wasn’t that straightforward. She just said, ‘Why
not? It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.’ Then she shrugged her
shoulders and walked away from him.”