Foggage

by Patrick McGinley

  Festus put an arm round Kevin’s neck, and the fat farmer seized the heaven-sent opportunity to escape.

  “Kevin, you’re early, but not a minute too soon. I was telling this bugger from Borris—where’s he gone?—about extramarital sex, and all he could think of was how soon he could get home to his wife. I even told him the second law of thermodynamics, suitably edited of course, and he still failed to get even the teeniest erection.”

  “You’re drunk three hours ahead of schedule,” said Kevin.

  “If I’m drunk, it’s not without reason. I was called out to Lackey this evening to look at a sick cow, but it was too late. Too far gone. Some men are donkeys.”

  “You take life too seriously.”

  “But not life in the sense you mean it.”

  They took their drinks to a table in the corner and sat down. Phelan’s cocktail bar was new. It was the only cocktail bar in Killage, a market town with a population of 1,000 which boasted thirty pubs, one supermarket, two newsagents, and two petrol filling stations. The cocktail bar was patronized mainly by bank employees, shopkeepers, businessmen, and well-to-do farmers with wives who would not be seen dead in a mere pub. For this reason it had an air of unreality which acted synergistically on patrons who came in to forget the outside world. The low glass-topped tables, the red plush seats, and the dim lights concealed cunningly in the ceiling made Kevin wonder why he came. To that there was only one answer: He came because O’Flaherty came. When it first opened, the landlord decreed that it was first and foremost a doubles bar, that those who drank stout must drink it like ladies, from half-pink glasses with delicate stems; and when his patrons responded by ordering two glasses each time instead of one, he was sufficiently good-humoured to realize that he was on a loser, that the social aspirations of bank managers’ wives were unlikely to change the drinking habits of a man-dominated community that derived its philosophy from the vagaries of the weather and its income from tillage and cattle.

  “Have you ever heard of a bull with a pain in his balls?” Kevin asked after the first pint.

  “I’ve been up to my right armpit in cattle all day. For God’s sake have mercy on me, will you, in the evening. But I must tell you, I must tell you about the nicest thing that’s happened to me this week. I went over to Craigstown on Monday to have a look at a bull with strangury, and while I was there I met a well-preserved widow from Clonaslew who invited me to a whist drive the following evening. Now, as you know, I detest whist and all games of chance except the extramarital, but because she had weathered so well I accepted her invitation. It was lucky I did, because as soon as the last card was played she invited me back for a nightcap, which led to a conversation, which led to a kiss, which led to a slap, which led to an intercrural tickle.”

  “Did she laugh to show she had some tickles left?”

  “No, she was more original. She asked me if it were possible for a woman to hatch a hen egg in the heat of her oxter.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told her that I would go away and think about it. I said it because I could not think of a witty answer, but as it happened it was the best answer, because it gave her an excuse to ring me. To cut a long story short, she invited me to dinner. She gave me leek soup, grilled trout, veal and ham, which she swore was saltimbocca, stuffed peaches, and brandy and port that made me so randy that I couldn’t climb the stairs. It was not an irreparable tragedy, however, because she had a tiger skin in front of the log fire that was softer than any featherbed. The real tragedy is that now as I look back I cannot remember her face. All I can recall is the jangling of her bangles as I came, which reminded me of the sleighbells in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about Henry,” Kevin said in despair.

  “You know, there are times when I think you don’t come here for the brilliance of my conversation but for the benefit of my veterinary advice. Don’t rush me, Kevin. Henry is now in his loose box, dreaming of Friesians, which to him are more beautiful than any woman either of us is likely to meet. Have you ever thought of that? Of the high standard of beauty among heifers? You may laugh, but I’m serious. Just ask yourself when you last saw an ugly heifer, and then ask yourself when you last saw an ugly woman.”

  O’Flaherty’s thumb was biting into Kevin’s biceps, but Kevin, pretending not to be in pain, took another slug from his tumbler. O’Flaherty was tipsy, and his tipsiness was accentuated by the shock of red hair that kept falling down over his left eye. He was a big man with a fresh complexion and a ready smile that gave his face the look of a precocious baby’s. Kevin often wondered about him, about the softness of his features and his lack of manly stubble. It was odd that such a man should come from a wasteland of granite and quartzite like Connemara, and it was strange that in spite of the diversity of his sexual experience he should still bear in his countenance the marks of innocence. It was as if life had not touched him, which might well account for his success with widows and faithless wives. They all thought that he was lea land, but in this they were wrong. O’Flaherty was a jester, a laughing carefree man whose first allegiance was to cattle. He loved cattle. He talked to them as he treated them, and he remembered with unerring accuracy their case histories and the case histories of their progenitors He was in every respect a professional, a quality that never showed to greater effect than when he was called out early on a Monday morning with a scalp-raising hangover. On one such morning Kevin saw him cast a cranky Aberdeen-Angus bull with an effortless expertise he would never forget, the kind of art and scope he himself would love to possess. It was such a pity that O’Flaherty had a heart of stone.

  “I’ve thought of nothing but the widow for the last three days.” Festus sighed.

  “Do I know her?” Kevin asked.

  “She’s Rita Heaviside. She has a big house this side of Clonaslew and two bay hunters in the stable. For a woman who rides she has the smallest bottom you’ve ever seen, like two bantam eggs in a pocket handkerchief, so neat that I can span it like that with one hand. It even makes me want to break the third commandment of extramarital sex, the one that says thou shalt not commit adultery twice with the same woman. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind giving her a good rumbling, what I call a cockamaroo, this very minute. It’s very possible that I’m falling in love with her.”

  This was bad news. O’Flaherty normally looked at women with a cold, unblinking eye that never looked twice in the same direction. It was one of his axioms that the adulteress had not been born who could tempt him to an encore. If he was going to fall in love with the widow Heaviside, how could he interest him in Maureen?

  “Ah, she’s only a passing fancy,” Kevin said. “A man will often fall in love with a woman for two or three days and then forget her. It’s a natural enough reaction to cold weather.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “Once with a woman I never as much as spoke to. I just saw her on a train and she accidentally touched my knee.”

  “Tell me about her,” said Festus.

  Kevin told the story of the girl in the off-white bra while Festus pulled on his cigar and nodded.

  “She wasn’t a real girl,” he said when Kevin had ended. “She’s a fantasy girl. Nearly every man has one of those in his life, especially men who have fallen in love with themselves.”

  “Have you got one?”

  “Mine is a train girl too, but she’s different from yours. She appeared to me on the Galway-Dublin train about four years ago. She got on at Athenry and we found ourselves alone, sitting opposite each other with neither book nor newspaper. She didn’t say a word, just opened her legs and closed them quickly again, as if she were flashing messages at sea. At first I was too shy to look, but then I told myself to treat it like a free magic lantern show. She kept opening and closing her legs, and all the time she was leaving them open for a fraction of a second longer. Then I saw it, a big pink sea shell with a mouth full of folds, set in reddish seaweed. At
first I was horrified by the grossness of it, and then I realized that what I had seen was a surrealist picture painted by a pointillist on her panties. I knew because the hair on her “fanny” was red while the hair on her head was a lustrous black. I looked up at the ceiling and laughed, and she flashed again but not long enough for me to read the signature on the painting. Now, she is my train girl,” said O’Flaherty.

  Kevin felt ashamed for having given O’Flaherty such an opportunity. He had taken his precious girl in the off-white bra and turned her into a trollop. You should never talk seriously about sex with other men, he told himself. They never tell the truth, they just stamp on your dreams.

  “You haven’t answered my question about Henry,” Kevin said.

  “What about Henry?”

  “He’s standing on one hind leg, rubbing the inside of the other against his balls as if he were in pain. Can a bull have a pain in his briefcase?”

  “I suppose he can, just as you or I can.”

  “What could it be?”

  “Any one of a number of ailments. It could be epididymitis, for example, but I’d have to examine him to know.”

  “And what’s epididymitis?”

  “Inflammation of the epididymis, which is attached to the testicles. I had better have a look at him right away.”

  “Is there such a thing as cancer down there?”

  “I’ve never come across a case in a bull, but I had a friend at university who got cancer of the scrotum at twenty-one, poor devil.”

  “Did he die?” Kevin tried to sound casual.

  “He spent a while on radiation treatment and he lost so much weight that he became a shadow of his former self.”

  “Did he die?” Kevin repeated.

  “Oh, yes, he died all right. What horrified me most, however, was not his death but the callousness of the doctor who said that he snuffed it trying to sing the Nunc dimittis in soprano.”

  Festus had passed across the march between tipsiness and drunkenness. He had to make two attempts on the phrase Nunc dimittis, his eyelids kept closing, and he spoke with a cigar in one corner of his mouth and the words in the other. At any moment now he would get up from the table and walk round the bar offering to buy a drink for anyone who could define the categorical imperative. Everyone who came into Phelan’s had heard the phrase at least once a week, but so far no one had managed to construe it.

  “It’s time you issued your weekly challenge,” Kevin said.

  “Not tonight. I’m going home with you now to look at Henry.”

  “Henry is fast asleep. His briefcase can wait till tomorrow.”

  “You hard-hearted bugger,” said O’Flaherty, gripping Kevin’s left knee. “How would you like to have a pain in your ballocks?”

  They left the bar, Kevin wondering how he could persuade Festus to go straight home. If he came to Clonglass now, Maureen would be in bed and the visit would not achieve its intended purpose. Outside, Festus found that luck was against him. First, he could not find his car, and then, having found it, he discovered to his amazement that the ignition key was too big for the keyhole.

  “Come on, Festus, you’re not fit to drive. Leave your car here and collect it in the morning. Jump in with me and I’ll drive you home.”

  “But I’m going to see Henry. An animal in pain is an animal in need of me.”

  “Look, Festus, there’s no electric light in the loose box. More than likely, you’ll have to cast the bastard, and how can you cast a bad-tempered bull in the dark?”

  “There’s no justice in the world. Here we are, enjoying the fleshpots of Killage while Henry writhes in agony in his loose box.”

  After much pleading and coaxing, Kevin bundled him into the Mercedes and drove the short distance down the road to his house. O’Flaherty pressed him to come in for a drink, but Kevin had no ambition to be used as a decoy in the nightly skirmish between Festus and his wife. She detested drunkenness, and for reasons of his own Festus contrived to give her the impression that he was drunk more often than he was. He would come home, singing his head off in Irish, at three o’clock in the morning for the simple reason that he did not want her to know that he had spent the previous three hours in another woman’s bed. And as she was convinced that he was a man of only one vice, she stayed with him in the hope of eventual reformation. Though their battles were legendary, and though she had crowned him with a skillet more than once, Festus respected her and needed her too. It seemed to Kevin that his third commandment, which forbade the committing of adultery twice with the same woman, had been formulated expressly to ensure that his wife would have less chance of finding him out.

  Kevin drove home alone. The road ran straight, gently undulating between leafless hedges, and he drove carefully, stopping at each blind crossroads, because he knew that he was slightly drunk. As the car came through the gate, Pup came round the corner of the hay shed furiously wagging his tail. Kevin got out, gave him a kick in the side, and shivered because the night was cold. As he stood in the lee of the hay shed waiting for his water to come, a fox barked sharply in the Grove. He felt defeated by the night. The pain had left his testicles, but he was still aware of it as he was aware of the emptiness of the landscape. He remembered once dosing a calf with poteen on Christmas morning, and the memory warmed him as the poteen had warmed the calf. Nevertheless, the past seemed such a long stretch of faceless time. He wondered if the future, when it had been strained through the present into the past, would seem so featureless, and he was grateful that he did not know. The fox barked again, and as he cocked his ear he drew comfort from the gentle breathing of the cattle in the cow houses.

  He took off his shoes and sat in front of the range in the kitchen wiggling his toes, waiting for the kettle to boil. He had felt constrained in Phelan’s because he could not be straight with Festus. He was a man of secrets, or at least one secret that was so heavy that it felt like a turnip in the pit of his stomach. If only he could go down to the Grove and whisper it to one of the larches for relief. But there was no relief. Life itself was wrapped in secrecy. The great arches of life—birth, copulation, death—were the things that people most often concealed. When Concepta was born, he and Maureen played in the kitchen while the midwife was busy in the bedroom. They did not know that she was a midwife. All they had been told was that their mother was too unwell to make their tea, and that the midwife had come to look after them. And when his mother lay dying of cancer, their father decreed that she must not be told the name of the dread disease. She must be made to think that she was recovering from a successful operation for gallstones, that she would be up and about in six weeks. The terrible pain would go away and all would be well again. She lay in the canoelike bed, not eating, not speaking, until one day she called for Kevin.

  “Kevin,” she said. “You were always a sensible lad. What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “The gallstones have been removed and you’ll be better before you know.”

  “Kevin, you’re a man now. You don’t have to sniff your father’s heels.”

  Ashamed, he went downstairs and out into the field to thin fodder beet, but all day he could only think of her face. He came in at nightfall and went straight to her room. She was lying on her back, the sheet tucked under the unflinching chin, her dark eyes closed. He was reluctant to wake her, and he turned to the door.

  “What did you come to say to me, Kevin?” she asked without opening her eyes.

  “You have cancer, Mother, cancer of the stomach, and I’m sorry. The gallstones were Daddy’s idea. He didn’t want you to worry.”

  She opened her eyes and offered him a thin hand. It was the first time she had touched him voluntarily since he was a boy.

  “I can face the devil I know,” she said, closing her eyes again.

  He stood in the dark bedroom uneasily holding her hand until she inquired if Maureen had found the nest of the bantam that had been laying out.

  He went down the stairs questio
ning the emptiness in his mind. He went out into the twilight, hopped on his tractor, and had reached the gate before he knew what he was doing.

  “Life is loss, life is loss, life is loss,” he repeated aloud. The words seemed to come from nowhere, as if someone else had put them in his mouth, as if there had been no corresponding thought in his mind.

  He was up at eight the following morning, in time to see the paling of the sky behind the Grove. As soon as he came down, he took the big kettle from the range and put it over a low gas so that it would have boiled by the time he had done his jobs. No sooner had he foddered the animals and sat down to his breakfast of cold beef and mustard than he heard the purr of a car in the yard. It was Festus in a donkey jacket, flushed and wind-swept, inquiring after the state of Henry’s health. Kevin told him that Henry was much improved, that he had stopped chafing his briefcase with his hind leg, that there was really no need to worry. Festus, however, had other ideas.

  “It may be one of those symptoms that come and go. Now that I’m here I’m going to get to the root of it.”

  As if in reply to his expressed intention, there was a rattling of chains in the loose box and Henry emerged into the bull yard. Festus expanded his chest and with arm outstretched declaimed:

  “O piebald king, great-pintled aurochs!

  Are you the cock, the scrotum or the ballocks?”

  He entered the bull yard and walked round Henry with his hands in the pockets of his donkey jacket.

  “He doesn’t look like an animal in pain, but his hooves could do with a trim. I’m surprised you’ve allowed them to grow so long. Come on, we’ll cast him first, and after I’ve felt the contents of his briefcase I might even do a manicuring job on his feet for you.”

  “I think you’re wasting your time, Festus. He’s better. You can tell from the way he’s standing. Yesterday he was standing with a hump as if he couldn’t bear the cold.”

  “Is there a dry field where we can cast him? It will only take fifteen minutes.”