Solace (38 page)

‘Go home,’ Mark said quietly, into the mirror, and after a moment, the tail-lights flickered again and the van moved away. Mark waited until the glow of it had gone from his mirror
and been replaced by the dark. He drove on.

*

‘What will I do with you?’ he said to her, and he looked at the clock; when he switched the television on she took the remote out of his hand and pushed the buttons
so that only static appeared on the screen. She pointed to it and shouted, but she would not give him back the remote. He got up and turned the set off at the switch. She pressed the buttons of the
remote again for a while, but nothing could happen.

He looked around the room for something to entertain her. He could see nothing. Photographs he did not want to look at and newspapers he had not read. Ornaments that she could break and cut
herself on. The dog. ‘Look at the doggie,’ he said, and she turned.

‘What’s the doggie’s name?’ he said, and she gave the dog a name of her own.

‘No, the dog’s name is Scruff,’ he said, and she ignored him.

Then the dog wanted to go out, so he opened the door for her. When he closed it again and turned back to the couch the child was regarding him with disapproval. ‘Had to do her
business,’ he said, but the child just stared. ‘Has your daddy no toys for you?’ he said, and at the mention of her father she looked towards the door.

A bag of Mark’s was leaning against the couch; it was like his old schoolbag, a muddy coloured canvas square buckled up with two straps. Maybe it was his old schoolbag, Tom thought, trying
to remember. But there had been biro scrawls all over that; he could remember asking Mark what the hell he had needed with them, why he would write on his bag and let others do the same. There was
nothing on this bag, no names or drawings or ink stains or cigarette holes.

‘Open!’ the child said, and he did as he was told.

‘Just books,’ he said to the child, an apology, but she tried to reach past him to pull out the books.

‘Not yours,’ he said to her, taking one of them from the bag; it was thick and heavy, hundreds of pages in it, the covers bound in thick plastic.

The child shouted her word.

‘These are your daddy’s books, not yours,’ Tom said, taking out another one, and another; there was nothing in the bag that he could read, or even show, to the child.

Whatever the child was saying, she said it again, and this time there was the beginning of a whine in her voice, so he took a book and let the pages open where they fell. The words seemed to run
into each other and the names were all strange, and whoever was telling the story was going about it a very long way. Along the sides of the page, Mark had written things in pencil. They made no
sense to Tom. He chose a passage of the story, and he read it aloud. It was something about a wake, something about a pile of coats, something about not being able to hear. The child seemed to like
it, or she liked the sound of the words; she watched his face as he read the sentences, as he did the different voices and spoke out the parts in between.

‘This is awful rubbish this fellow is telling us,’ he said to her, after a few minutes, but she put her hands to the book.

‘Look, someone here is saying hello to you,’ he said, seeing the word in pencil on the edge of the page. It seemed a strange word to be there, but no stranger than any of the others.
‘Hello,’ he said to the child, in a sing-song voice, and she frowned at him and shook her head.

‘Open,’ she said, and she grabbed at the book.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ he said, laughing, and she looked at him for a moment and moved her fingers to his hand. Her skin was soft and damp. She tugged at him.

‘Open,’ she said.

‘Keep going?’ he said, and she nodded and shouted a word he did not know.

‘Right you are,’ he said, and read on until the headlights of the car came up the avenue and spilled across the wall.

The phone conversation between Mark and Frankie the next morning was stilted at first. Frankie, Mark knew, was suspicious of him, and expecting that Mark would be equally
suspicious in return. No mention was made of the way they had met on the lane to Tommy’s old place the night before. No mention was needed.

Mark spoke calmly and explained what he was calling to ask, and when Frankie began to understand that he was not looking for an argument, not coming with an accusation, he began to talk, and he
told Mark almost everything he needed to know. Things became clearer. This did not make them easier to take. It had not been easy to hear about the state some of the animals had been in when his
father had put them up for sale. He had never known his father not to spot a lame cow, not to have her treated; whenever there had been fluke in the herd, the herd had been dosed. But this time had
been different. The animals Frankie had paid for had not been the animals Mark had imagined. The price Frankie had given for them had not, after all, been so low or so unreasonable.

‘They weren’t a herd of fat tics, Mark,’ he said, and Mark could hear that he would have preferred not to be going back over this ground. ‘There was a couple of them only
in middlin’ shape.’

‘They were never like that before,’ Mark said, and immediately at the other end of the line Frankie murmured in assent.

‘I know that, sure,’ Frankie said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

The tractors were something else Mark was glad of the chance to talk about. Frankie had seen them, and he agreed that they needed to be put up for sale. Their value, he said, would dwindle by
thousands for every week that Tom held on to them.

‘They’ll be an absolute cunt to get rid of, the way things are gone,’ he said, gloomily, ‘but if you put a price on them that’s any way reasonable, there’ll
be some fucker from Meath or Kildare that’ll take them off your hands.’

Frankie told him other things as well. That for Tom to start again, to start small with a couple of animals, was the right idea; that there was a mart coming up in Edgeworthstown where he could
buy a couple of heifers and bullocks to be going on with. He gave Mark an idea of much Tom should be willing to spend. He talked to him of the deadlines Tom needed to meet with his grant
applications for the coming year. There was farm help Tom could get, too, Frankie said; someone who would come around a couple of times a week and help him to keep the place going.

‘Just for when you can’t be down yourself, like,’ Frankie said. ‘I can drop in on him the odd time, but it wouldn’t be the same.’

‘It’d be a big help,’ Mark said, and asked when his girlfriend was having the baby. January, Frankie said.

‘I don’t know how the hell we’re going to work out how to rear it,’ he said. ‘Michelle is in nearly more of a panic about it than I am. And that’s saying
something.’ He laughed through a long intake of breath.

‘You’ll be grand,’ said Mark.

‘Jesus, I hope so. I suppose you’d know.’ He was quiet for a minute then; worrying, maybe, that he had said the wrong thing.

‘Let me know when she arrives,’ Mark said.

‘Will do,’ Frankie said, sounding relieved.

Frankie was right; the tractors were hard to sell. Mark photographed them that same day and, when he returned to Dublin, he uploaded the pictures and the details to the
websites Frankie had recommended, but it was almost a month after Christmas before an offer came through. A contractor from Meath called Mark’s mobile and asked about both tractors. He said
he had been looking at similar models new and this seemed too good to be true. It wasn’t, Mark said, and gave him the directions so that he could go down to Dorvaragh and see them.

‘Meath?’ his father said, when Mark phoned him later to let him know that the contractor would be calling around. ‘Whereabouts in Meath?’

‘Near Slane,’ Mark explained, though he knew his father did not know one town in Meath from another. ‘Near Newgrange, actually.’ It was early afternoon, and he was in the
sitting room in Stoneybatter with Aoife. Sunlight was spilling through the blinds. She was on the floor, drawing with crayons in a notebook she had taken from him and declared her own. The crayons
were making more contact with the carpet than with the paper. She sat back to survey what she had done and made a small noise that could have signalled anything from delight to disappointment. She
turned to a fresh page.

‘Frigg Newgrange,’ his father said, through a mouthful of something.

‘Are you eating?’ Mark said, glancing at his watch.

‘I am,’ his father said. ‘Though the price you brought it all down to would nearly put me off my food. He has enough with the money he’ll be saving for himself on those
tractors to build his own Newgrange if he wants.’

‘There’s an offer. That’s all that matters. We need to get them sold.’

His father grunted. ‘I suppose the fucker wants us to bring them up to him to see them and all?’

‘No,’ Mark said. ‘He’s driving down with his son to take a look at them on Saturday. Or his brother, or something. Anyway, he wants to know if that suits you. Saturday.
Will you be there?’

‘I suppose,’ his father said. When he was silent for a long moment afterwards, Mark asked him what the matter was.

‘Ah, nothing,’ his father muttered.

‘It’s not nothing,’ Mark said, leaning over to Aoife and guiding her to take a blue crayon back out of one nostril. ‘Something’s wrong with you. Say it
out.’

‘Ah,’ his father said, and down the line Mark could imagine the heavy shrug. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t have minded getting a look at it all the same.’

‘At what?’

‘Ah, it’s all right.’

‘No, it’s not all right,’ Mark said, taking the crayon from Aoife once again. ‘Not your nose,’ he said, in a scolding tone. She gave him a deadpan glance.

‘What?’

‘I’m talking to Aoife. And it’s not all right. Say it out, you, if you have something to say. What is it you want a look at? His farm, is that it?’ He cringed inwardly at
the vision of his father going up to Meath for a gawk; the questions he would have for the other farmer, the jealousies he would incubate, the new set of insecurities and aspirations he would come
away with. One look at a farm spread across the rich smoothness of Meath land and his father would take the tractors straight back off the market; he would hang on to them until they collapsed in a
heap of rust and plastic sheeting if it meant having some trace of the trappings of a successful farm. His father had started referring to his cattle as ‘stock’ after seeing a couple of
episodes of
Dallas
in the 1980s. A visit to a stud farm in Meath could only wreak worse havoc still.

‘Ah, no, not the farm,’ his father interrupted Mark’s thoughts. ‘Just that place, whatever you call it, that’s all.’

‘Whatever you call it?’

‘The place where the sun goes into it.’

Mark laughed. ‘You want to go to Newgrange?’

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ his father said, in his most reasonable tone. ‘I saw it on the television there before Christmas.’

‘A minute ago you were saying it wasn’t worth a fuck.’

‘Ah, now,’ his father protested. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Near enough,’ Mark said, and he laughed.

‘Well, anyway,’ his father said. ‘Sure it’s only meant to be ould rubbish they do in it anyway.’

‘What do you mean, rubbish?’ Mark said, looking again at Aoife. She was pushing scrawls of colour frantically on to a page that seemed certain to tear under the force. He thought for
a moment about stopping her, but then that was what crayons were for. The carpet could be cleaned. She sensed his attention and looked up, showing him then the page she had made. It looked
exhausted. Every inch of it was covered with her jagged scrapes.

‘Very good.’ He nodded to her, and she smiled and took the notebook back down to the floor.

‘What are you saying to me?’ his father said, with a snap of suspicion.

‘Aoife,’ Mark said, sitting back into the couch.

‘Oh, Aoife,’ his father said. ‘What’s she doing today?’

‘She’s drawing,’ Mark said. ‘Or she’s making a mess of the floor. Depends on how you look at it.’

‘That’s how she learns,’ his father said.

Mark turned and found himself blinking against the sunlight. ‘I suppose.’

He looked out to the back yard, where the feral cats basked. They looked utterly at home, though if you knocked on the window or opened the back door they would scatter as though you had
released a slavering dog. The morning’s wash, on the clothes-line, looked shrunken, but it was still wet. The garden furniture, there now for more years than Mark knew, was faded and stained;
it would need to be painted up when the summer came. He glanced back to Aoife, who was standing now and pulling at the undergrad essays he had left on the armchair; twenty separate ramblings on
Don Quixote
, to be graded and commented on by that evening. He lifted the pile out of her reach.

‘Are you there at all?’ his father said.

‘I’m here,’ said Mark, putting the essays on the windowsill. ‘So you want to go to Newgrange, you’re telling me?’

‘Ah, I don’t know,’ his father said, but there was a silence after the words, and Mark knew how he was expected to fill it.

‘You do know.’

‘Ah, I suppose,’ his father said. ‘Sure, it’d be something different.’

‘It would be interesting,’ Mark said slowly.

‘Would you be interested?’ his father said.

Mark looked out at the cats again. One had climbed up on to the garden table, stretching now in an attitude of somnolent bliss. He put his knuckles to the glass, but dropped them without
rapping. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing it again,’ he said.

‘You were in it?’

‘Yeah. On a school tour. Years ago.’

‘Ah, sure, it might just be a load of ould shite.’

‘Well,’ Mark said, shrugging, ‘you decide. I can come down some weekend and we can drive up in my car if you’d like.’

‘Ah, you wouldn’t have time.’

‘I could make time,’ Mark said evenly.

‘Would we not do it when we were bringing the tractors up to your man?’

‘That’d be this weekend,’ Mark said. ‘I can’t be away from here this weekend. Besides, that’d be too much messing. Let him put in the work to see the tractors
if he wants them. We can take my car up whenever suits us.’