Solace (2 page)

‘I saw the child’s seat ’ithin in the jeep, all right,’ Keogh said quietly. ‘Ah, she’s a nice little one, isn’t she.’

Tom said nothing.

‘Lovely little one,’ Keogh said.

In the shop, the two women were pushing the children up close to each other; they seemed to be encouraging them to kiss. The boy stared, sullen, at Aoife as his tongue kept a steady stroke on
his cone. As the shopgirl moved closer to him, he slowly and carefully moved the ice-cream out of Aoife’s reach, almost above his head, his gaze still dull on her face. Aoife, throwing her
head back and twisting herself, caught sight of Tom. Her cry came as a long moan of protest; she flung one arm towards him and, screaming now, arched her back higher still. The boy stared. The
women’s faces crinkled with sorry-eyed smiles.

‘Here.’ Tom rummaged in his pocket and drew out the notes he knew to be there. He handed them to Keogh. ‘Fifteen a bale, isn’t it?’

‘Spot on.’ If it had been too little he would have been told. Nothing made it all right to give Keogh too little.

‘Yous are great to be doing so well with her,’ the girl said, as she came outside with the child. ‘She’s a real little pet.’

Aoife, sobbing now and sticky-faced with snot and tears, her yellow dress driven high over the fat plastic of her nappy, looked ready to thrash her way out of the shopgirl’s arms. She
pushed sharply into Tom as he took her.

‘She’s her granddaddy’s girl,’ Keogh said, and as he reached out a hand to Aoife she howled and buried her face in Tom’s chest. Keogh laughed. ‘She knows well
where she wants to be.’

‘Good luck,’ said Tom, and he walked away from them. As he settled Aoife in her seat she quietened and began to reach towards the radio knobs. When he had the key turned in the
ignition he clicked through the stations for her, watching her eyes following his moving hand, her wet fingers reaching out for his. He stopped at a music station and backed the car out between the
petrol pumps, keeping one eye on Keogh and the girl in the rear-view mirror. They were talking and nodding and shaking their heads. They were putting the whole world to rights. Beside him, the
child shouted with happiness at the music so close to her hands.

*

The tractor was stopped on the crest of the hill when Tom turned into the lane for home. As he drew nearer, he could see that the cab was empty.

‘What’s your daddy at?’ he said to the child.

She ignored him, her steady chatter all for herself, her attention now on the toy set of keys she gripped and shook with one fist. From her lips hung a heavy thread of drool. He reached over to
wipe at it; she jerked her head away, her babble pooling into a squeal. But he got it, caught its glooping wetness on his cuff, wiped it into the thigh of his trousers as he turned in for the
house. Aoife whined and banged the toy against the side of her seat. As Tom carried her in he gave her his keys to play with as well as her own.

Through the glass of the hall door he could see Mark sitting at the kitchen table, chewing, a thick-sliced sandwich in his hand. His eyes were on the child as Tom brought her into the room. The
neighbour girl who had come that morning to mind her was on the couch, a magazine open on her lap.

‘Well,’ Mark said, through a mouthful of bread.

‘Well.’

‘You got the twine all right?’

‘All yours,’ Tom said to the neighbour girl, as he placed Aoife on the couch beside her. The girl looked at him with wide eyes.

‘Well?’ Mark said, staring at him, holding a mug in midair. There was a cut across his knuckles, Tom noticed. He must have skinned himself somehow.

‘I got it, I got it, of course I got it,’ Tom said, walking up to the table and putting his palm to the belly of the teapot. It was still warm. He poured a mug, heaped in two sugars
and slopped milk in from the carton. He leaned against the sink to drink it down. It was sharp, almost bitter, and only warm. Mark must have been at the table a good twenty minutes. Regardless, Tom
drained the mug. He had no desire to make another pot, and the girl was busy with Aoife. He laughed a short laugh, just loud enough for Mark to look at him, and gestured out towards the jeep.
‘Keogh’s a fierce fuckin’ nuisance, all the same.’

Mark took another bite of his sandwich and chewed slowly. ‘Why’s that?’ he said eventually, vaguely, the question hardly in his words at all. He pulled with finger and thumb at
his earlobe. He’d had that ear pierced, Tom remembered; he’d worn a small silver ring in it through the pus and the swelling that came on after he’d had the hole made, and for
days his mother had left the room every time he walked in. The ear would heal around it, Tom had warned him, but he would not listen; he kept on wearing the ring through the redness and the crusts.
After a while, it had disappeared. The hole was no longer visible. Though maybe he was looking at the wrong ear.

‘Ah,’ he said, laying a hand down heavily on the edge of the sink. ‘You know yourself. Full of questions. He’s a bloody plague.’

Gathering his plate and his mug, Mark came to the sink. He said nothing as Tom stood aside, but ran the cold tap and bent to splash his face, rubbing the water up over the back of his neck. The
skin there was brown as a saddle. The cut on his knuckle was matted with dust from the field. He pulled away from the sink, still gripping it, and exhaled hard.

‘Don’t bring Aoife off again without telling Miriam,’ he said.

Tom stared. Mark was running cold water into a mug now, the same mug he had drunk his tea from, his eyes straight ahead on the window to the yard. His jaw was tight. He was letting the tap run
on even though the mug was full, letting the water spill over on to his hand, his cut hand.

‘Don’t bring her away without telling me,’ he said, and he shut off the tap.

Tom wanted to laugh. ‘Sure you knew I had her,’ he said. ‘Sure you saw me taking her with me when I went to get the twine.’ As he spoke he was admiring the sense that ran
through his words, the straightness of what he was saying; he was basking in it, barely even ready for the possibility of a reply, when Mark lifted the mug a hand’s height and landed it on
the bottom of the sink with a bang. Water went everywhere. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw the girl rise from the couch with the child and move quickly into the next room.

‘Miriam didn’t see you taking her with you,’ Mark said, swinging an arm towards where the girl had been. ‘Miriam came running down the fields, crying that she’d put
Aoife up in her cot this morning at eleven and that she’d gone up to check on her twenty minutes later and that she wasn’t in the cot any more, and did I know where she was, or did
you?’ He drew breath. ‘Because Miriam thought the two of us were out at the hay with the tractors, me and you, and that someone was after coming into the house while she was out with
the washing, and that someone was after taking the fucking child.’

Now Tom’s laugh came, and it came like something hocked up. ‘For fuck’s sake. You’re not going to listen to that sort of giddy rubbish from her, are you? What does she
think this is, the television?’

Mark faced him. ‘What did you take her out of the cot for?’ He turned the tap on again. ‘Miriam puts her to bed and you go up there without telling anybody and you take her
down again. She was meant to be sleeping. She was meant to be on her nap. What did you do that for? Ha?’

His lips were pulled back from his teeth with anger. His fists were clenched on the counter. This was how it was getting with him: further and further from reason every day. He wanted to argue
over everything, he wanted to agree over nothing, he wanted to pick and bicker and drag everything out past its natural end. Or else he was silent, going out to the fields in the mornings almost
without saying a word, never stopping to ask Tom what needed to be done, never listening to Tom’s thoughts on how to do things – even that morning, Tom had to admit to himself now, he
himself had done all of the talking, and all of the listening too. Mark would just sit there, waiting for the child to waken, and for the girl from over the road to arrive, and then as soon as the
work outside was done he would be back in to the child, and then gone for the rest of the day, off in the car to Longford or Carrick or Cavan. What he did there he never said. At night was when
they spoke, when the child was upstairs and they were in front of the television; at night Tom tried with him, tried the small things of the day on him, tried the weather, tried the neighbours,
tried the jobs yet to be faced into that summer. Everything was simple. Everything was straightforward. But everything sent Mark further and further into himself. He never spoke about his mother.
He never spoke about Joanne. Tom tried with him; he could, he supposed, have tried harder, but it was hard for him to know where to start talking about them himself. The best he could do was try to
talk to him about the child, and even that much Mark seemed to resent.

‘The child was awake,’ Tom said. ‘She was roaring. I went upstairs and brought her down with me, and there was no sign of anyone to look after her. So I took her out with me.
And then she was happy enough. What did you expect me to do? Leave her in there, screaming down the walls?’

‘But you knew Miriam was here with her. You knew Miriam had come down this morning to mind her.’

Tom shook his head. ‘I saw no sign of anyone. The dishes were in the sink and the child’s clothes were all over the floor and there was music on the radio there going full blast.
Wasn’t much sign of anyone doing any minding as far as I could see.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ In three long strides, Mark was at the back door. ‘You’re great, aren’t you?’

‘Sure, for Jesus’ sake, the girl hardly thought someone had come in to take the child? For Christ’s sake, you can’t be blaming me because she let her mind run away with
itself ? Who in fuck’s name is going to come in here and take the bloody child? Ha?’

‘Watch your mouth.’

‘Sammy Stewart? Jimmy Flynn, racing up the stairs and snatching her off to live with him?’ He snorted. ‘Get a hold of yourself, would you? You’re as big a havril as the
little girl.’

‘You should have let Miriam know you were taking her. You should have let me know you’d taken her up without Miriam knowing.’

‘Well, I’m telling you now.’

Standing on the step into the back kitchen, Mark ground with his foot at the floor. ‘Just leave her,’ he said. ‘Leave her be. She needs her routine. She needs things to be like
normal.’

He walked off into the yard. From the next room, Tom could hear the girl talking to Aoife in a low voice, the child’s woozy laughter, the sound of some complicated toy plucking high notes
above neighbours’ engines on the day’s hot air.

Everything was plastic in the beer garden. Plastic chairs. Plastic tables. Plastic pint glasses. The barbecue food tasted plastic – as, Mark noticed, did the beer. It was
his second pint, or his third; he couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. It was a rare hot Saturday in a summer that was already halfway through, and there was no point in
complaining.

The place was mobbed. Teenagers from the flats. Pillheads still going from the night before. The rugby fans, spilling in after the match. The weekend crowd: groups of couples gabbing at each
other around big tables, and guys in short-sleeved shirts and bootcut jeans, and women with shopping bags flapping at their sides like huge broken wings.

Mark was here because he had not been able to force himself to be where he was meant to be, which was in his carrel in the college library, finishing the chapter that was due on his thesis
supervisor’s desk on Monday morning. He had a chapter title – ‘Patronizing the Place’ – and he knew he wanted to do something on Edgeworth and her relationship to the
local people she wrote about, but that, and a clutch of increasingly frenzied notes, was pretty much all he had. This was to be his second chapter. His introduction he had written during the first
months of the PhD, in a white heat of interest he could now hardly believe he had ever achieved, and his first chapter he had wrenched out painfully, piecemeal, over the course of the following two
years. Even by then he had begun to wonder about the wisdom of the idea: a thesis on Maria Edgeworth, the nineteenth-century novelist who had lived most of her life in the manor just ten minutes
away from his childhood home. Even by then he had questioned his ability to see the thing through. By now he was almost in despair about the thesis, prone to moments of wishing that Edgeworth had
actually thrown herself out of the upstairs window on which she had perched, at the age of five, telling the maid who pulled her back in how very unhappy she was; there were days, now, when Mark
thought he knew how she had felt.

He spent his time trudging through the books on education Edgeworth had written with her father, or trying to decipher her wiry, cross-hatched handwriting on yellowed pages in the National
Library. Or looking for his theories in her fiction. Scouring the novels and the tales for proof of the argument he had once so firmly believed he could make. He could see, now, only
naïveté in the conviction with which he had chosen Edgeworth as his subject, in his confidence that a local connection would somehow give his research some edge, some particular
authority. Because what did it add, to know Edgeworthstown as a real town, as something more than a placename in a biography? So what if he had walked its main street – its only street
– a thousand times, if, as a kid, he had parked his bike against the walls of the old coach house where she had once taught; if, as a teenager, he had gone knacker drinking in the graveyard
where she and her family had their tomb? So he knew how the old house looked inside: what of it? It was no longer the old house in any case, had not been for decades; the Sisters of Mercy had long
since gutted it and turned it into the hospital where Mark’s mother had been a nurse before he and his sister were born, and once again when they were settled at school. They were no use to
his thesis, Mark’s memories of those evenings driving up to the manor with his father to collect his mother after her shift, waiting for her in the high-ceilinged hall. And anyway, he
remembered little: the phlegmy splutters of the old people doddering in the shadows; the nuns, in their thick-soled shoes, moving noiselessly across the parquet floors. The sound of a cry,
sometimes, that maybe was only someone caught up in a dream.