Islandbridge

by Brady, John

  “Where’ll you go then?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “You can leave Liam with me. I’ll put him on the team.”

  As if hearing those words, Liam stirred in the playpen, groaned, and then went back to sleep.

  “I’ll paint the new place for you. How about that?”

  She told him she’d take him up on it if only she knew where she’d be. He smiled and poured more tea.

  “Your fella’s not telling you, is it?”

  She looked down toward where he had nodded, said nothing. The engagement ring: she had forgotten. His voice dropped when he spoke again.

  “I know what happened,” he said.

  She heard him sipping at his tea, and it reminded her of growing up, with her father in from the fields or the barn or the milking, mad for a cup of tea.

  “Sorry if I’m butting in, now.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You’ve a good eye for things that men don’t notice.”

  He gave her a pirate’s wink, and he sat back.

  “Engagement rings are nothing to me,” he said. “I’m nearly allergic to them at this stage. Sure, I have three daughters.”

  The sounds from the hall and the clumping upstairs had died down now.

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying that now.”

  She shook her head.

  “A person has to keep going, don’t they?”

  “They do,” she agreed.

  “A nephew of mine, a terrible thing, a few years back. He was knocked down and killed by a car. His wife, sure she’ll never be over it. I says to her a while ago, ‘Helen,’ I says. ‘Helen, will you pay no heed to them what’d be telling you what you can or can’t do. Find a fella, get married.’ And tell them I sent you.”

  “How did that go over?”

  He sucked in his breath, and shook his head once.

  “Oh I got a fair raking over the coals for that one. But I didn’t care. That’s the way I am, I speak my mind. And didn’t she do it? A grand fella, very quiet and good living – but like I said, she’ll never be over Gerry, the first one. The thing is, she doesn’t have to get over anything. She figured it out, you see? You can’t get over anything. You only carry things. Am I right?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s asking too much, I’m telling you. But now, sure, Helen she has company and someone to carry her over the bad parts. So it gets easier. Things fall into place.”

  He suddenly scratched the back of his head and gave a little snort.

  “Declare to God, her new husband’s quiet and decent, but he’s a quick worker. They have two youngsters – already.”

  A frown descended on his face then, taking away the smile. He blinked and looked away. He thinks he has said too much, Eimear believed.

  “Well, I’m lucky,” he said. “Sheila tells me to mind me own business. She’s right. Sometimes, only.”

  She finished her own tea and watched Liam squirm and grimace as he began to surface from his sleep. His hair had come in even fairer than she’d expected.

  She was aware that Danny was looking at her again. She looked back into his quizzical, half-smiling face.

  “Watch for the quiet ones,” he said. “Like Helen’s one. I’m telling you.”

  “Oh he’s far from quiet,” she said. “He’s loud and he’s big.”

  “A Guard?”

  She nodded.

  That seemed to change something. Danny was soon up, putting the cups and saucers by the sink.

  “Well good luck to you now, Eimear.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “It won’t be Eimear long.”

  He smiled warily.

  “I’m going to go with my middle name from now on. I actually prefer it.”

  “Well good luck in the new job,” he said. “Before I forget.”

  “Thanks,” she said. It was one of the few things she’d noticed, and it still disturbed her a bit since coming off the sedatives. Sometimes she wasn’t sure if she had told someone something, or only thought she might tell them.

  “Personnel, right? People? That’s great. That’s the future, no doubt – if this bloody country ever gets off its hind legs and there’s jobs to be had. What are we now, nineteen and eighty-five? Sure the Common Market thing, that’s been ten or fifteen years now. Another cod, I say. I just hope my ones don’t end up taking the boat too.”

  He called her Eimear again as they shook hands but she said nothing. One by one the other three shook hands with her. There was something solemn and too respectful in it, she reflected later. Danny must have told them of her troubles.

  Liam was fierce cranky waking up. Maybe the fumes from the paints or wallpaper were getting to him. She changed him and cut up some banana and gave him warm milk in his Duck mug. Still he was clingy and hot. She looked at his gums again. She carried him around to show him the furniture back in the place and pictures hung, and then upstairs to look out the windows to see the birds in the shrubs opposite. Auntie Róisín would be coming for tea, she told him.

  Below, in the driveway, was her car. The house was hers. The Guards union, the Representative Body, had pushed her case to the forefront, and the widows’ pension would be getting an increment before the end of the year. Falling into place, that was the expression Danny the painter had used. But of course, not without help. So much she owed them: Róisín and her mother – her father, even, in spite of his quietly sly hints that she should move on, and away from this disgrace that Declan had gotten them into. Declan’s family, yes, Breda . . . for all her crying.

  But still she felt that peculiar weight on her, and that sense something was always following her around. Well, the psychiatrist wasn’t going to be the one to put names on things for her – she’d found that out quick enough – but had coaxed, or goaded, her into thinking out loud, and trying to say things. Maybe it was all the what-could-have-beens following her around, or her own remorse at not giving Declan the chance to leave. Anger, of course, that Declan had bottled it all up, like men do, and then let it build up until that day. Shift work, the baby, she had decided, when she’d noticed his moods and sleeplessness.

  She couldn’t sit here and fall into brooding. She got up from the chair, hefted Liam on her hip again. He laid his cheek on her shoulder. She heard a little rasp somewhere in his breathing. She began to hum to him, and he tried to join her. Together they walked and swayed around the kitchen, out into the hall, and back.

  She had her wits about her from early on, it had to be said. Was it just some survival thing, a new mother’s instincts taking over? No, she had decided, and she had grown proud of how she had managed it all – them all – her mother and father, Róisín and Breda, the Guards, everyone – as they had swarmed around her in those first few terrible weeks. No, not a swarm: it was more like being in the middle of a stampede. Even in that half-waking, halfdreaming state the damned medication had left her, she had come through, kept herself in one piece.

  Still, the hard part now was that she wanted to tell someone, just one person, what she wanted in the future, where she wanted to go. The only trouble was, she didn’t have the words. Something had been stolen from her, left unfinished. There was a huge hole. It wasn’t revenge she wanted, no.

  “Wook!” said Liam, suddenly lifting his head.

  There was Theresa Murphy working in her garden opposite.

  “Do you want to go out in the garden?”

  He began to buck in her arms, and then lay down on her shoulder again.

  “Soon,” she said. “When you’re really awake, right?”

  She resumed her walk, through the sitting room, into the dining room, and back into the hall, listening to Liam’s gurgled words. Theresa was going goodo with planting some shrubs, she saw, when they came back to the kitchen window.

  The road was already taking on more of a lived-in look, after just two years. It would be so easy to just stay. She was house proud, with all her flowers and shrubs, and she was not afraid
to admit it. For all his talk about dirty Dublin, her new husband would fit in here just grand. So what if anyone wondered at her remarrying only a couple of years after Declan.

  He was old-fashioned, and it was good enough for her. For all his big talk, he was a softie. He had that protective attitude, wanting to look after her. It was sweet, and sincere. He was dependable. Yes, a Guard, but he was very ambitious. It was only an odd time she wondered if he’d become like these other ones, the ones who’d talked to her about Declan. Would he ever lose that boyish sweetness, the longer he’d be in the job, or the higher he’d rise up the ranks of the Gardai?

  She recalled the Guards who had talked to her about Declan, their vague, condescending answers and their looks that said damaged goods, all the while coming up with their hypocritical words of sympathy. Surely in some part of them, one of them even, they’d know that Declan’s last tortured months had been down to them as much as that bastard Rynn. They couldn’t have protected him from Rynn and his people. They probably would have pushed Declan back in, to play him to Rynn so they could use him too.

  The fact was, they’d looked at her as an accomplice: it was as simple and as brutal as that. They didn’t believe her, any more than they’d have believed Declan. And Declan had known that too, all too well: that’s why he was backed into a corner. The last straw had to have been the humming and hawing when the issue of the widow’s pension came up. She was certain right from the start that they weren’t above using it as leverage. When she’d finally gotten it settled – and then only through some influence and pleading through a local councillor friend of her mother’s – she had been as much as told that from then on, the best she could expect from them was to be forgotten about.

  Liam was restless. His cheeks were rosy still, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t from lying on her shoulder. She tried to look at his gums again, but this time he wouldn’t have any of it. She didn’t push it. She’d humour him a bit longer.

  She walked from room to room upstairs, listened to him saying things. Then he grew quiet again, and held her shoulder, reaching out sometimes to touch the mobile that circled over the bed. She stood by the window awhile. Theresa had two big shrubs in. Digging away, like a farmer. The back gardens were dotted with sheds now, and vegetable patches. There were swings and balls and bikes all over. Soon the trees and bushes would hide the walls. Here, on this road, with a good number of couples their age, was the future she and Liam had planned. Maybe assumed, was the better word.

  The woman from the estate agent had told her she’d get what she paid but the market was flat. If she did a proper paint job – not just the original stuff – and showed up the kitchen more, it’d sell quicker anyway.

  She looked across the rooftops in the direction of the city, and she wondered what it’d be like when she was full-time at the new job. What would it be like in the mornings, having to leave the baby at a minders, would he cry his eyes out? Would she, and would she be worrying all day? And would they let her go early some days, or give her time, if Liam got sick?

  Maybe she should wait. But they were expecting her, her mother said. It was her mother had contacted a man from home who knew the owner, and it was the owner alone, Michael, who had interviewed her. The typing and filing was all she’d expected, just like in the civil service. Michael said he’d hoped she’d try more, when she was ready. A nice enough man, but the phrase told her that he’d give her a start based on sympathy and pull from her family, that he wasn’t expecting much.

  At least her mother and father had moved more her way, she recognized. They’d realized she wouldn’t be swayed by their appeals to move home or at least out of Dublin, where this awful thing had happened. Well, she wasn’t going to just get up and move. She’d show them what she was able to do, all of them. Mitchell Personnel, her own family too. Most of all, she’d show those Guards at the meetings she’d had to go to, with their dull eyes and their sparing, barren words.

  Chapter 18

  PECKISH NOW, AND FRUSTRATED by this clumsy, half-arsed, door-to-door effort they were doing, Minogue was still managing to bite back his complaints. He followed Malone into a place called the Orient Express. He sort of remembered Iseult saying it was good, but dear.

  The woman adding up something on a pad of paper looked like someone famous, but he couldn’t remember who. A very skinny waiter was walking between the tables, fixing napkins or something. Minogue saw from his backward reading of the sign pasted to the window that it had only just opened for the day.

  He kept his card ready but let Malone do the talking. The woman had a country accent that she hadn’t troubled much to tame for the cosmopolitan Dubliners she now fed and profited from. Handsomely too, Minogue was certain, and he turned the last page of the menu to see if the wine, even, wasn’t priced as extraterrestrially as the food. It was worse than he had expected. He closed it.

  “We do go through an employment agency,” she said.

  The “do go” counted for a lot with Clareman-in-exile Minogue. This was all the more so, he knew, because his recall of the English Lagerlout Touring Team episode was still circling in his mind.

  “It’s hard to get people,” she said. “For the jobs in the back especially.”

  “Marina, we believe,” said Malone. The woman seemed to consider it, but then shook her head.

  She might have been seen with a fella,” Minogue said then. “A great big lad. Foreign accent but has the English no bother.”

  She made a vague smile and looked up and out the window into the now greying afternoon sky over Dublin and then shook her head.

  “There’s a wojous lot of foreign accents now,” she said.

  “Wojus . . . ?” asked Malone.

  “A hell of a lot,” said Minogue. “That is to say. An expression from God’s country.”

  Who had she now working in the kitchen, Malone asked. She laughed.

  “My sister’s two young ones, up from Bandon. It’s only for a month and then I’ll have to find someone. Go to an agency, I suppose. But that’s the way things are nowadays.”

  Minogue waited for Malone to try his last-chancers. It went on more than he expected when Malone got sidetracked into talking about woks. He watched the passersby, and cast an eye up. That light was deceptive, he was beginning to think. There could well be rain before the day was out.

  He was ready to jack it in now. They should work out a way to get proper manpower from Tynan to canvass the place properly, not this hit and miss.

  He left a card on the glass beside her pad, and thanked her. Iseult, he thought of then, a future treat here?

  “When’s your busy time here?”

  “We open at five. It’s go go go from about the half-five mark, I’d have to say. Until eleven, sometimes midnight.”

  That was just when night-owl artist and dangerous welder Iseult Minogue, almost a single mother now, would be getting started.

  A teenager passed the windows, and the light caught the glint of a chain around his neck.

  “This man that might be with her sometimes,” Minogue said. “He likes his rings and things. Not that hip-hop hobo going by now, but a chain. Big lad.”

  “Yeah,” said Malone. “Like Tom Jones, but without the wrinkles.”

  She made to smile and stopped. She looked out again.

  “You know now, there was a man . . .”

  Minogue waited. She turned to catch his eye.

  “A big man, but a black shirt – not a polo. Had a nice chain, I remember eyeing it and thinking I’d like one. Had big hairy arms, with a big watch. Rings too, yes.”

  “An accent maybe?”

  “Well now. I remember he laughed.”

  “Who was he with?”

  She frowned and shook her head slowly.

  “This is a while back,” she said.

  “A long while, was it?”

  He saw her draw a breath before replying.

  “I don’t remember. Sorry.”

  The tight
, business smile she offered now said goodbye, and be quick about it, thank you very much.

  “Maybe someone else on your staff might?”

  “Hardly,” she said.

  “But you remember something . . .”

  “Look, I’ll tell you something,” she said. “I don’t do scratch-your-back for anyone, even the Guards.”

  “Do you mean, especially Guards?” Minogue asked.

  She started gathering menus. Minogue waited.

  “It concerns a matter relating to people being mistreated,” Minogue said. “Particularly girls, women, we think, from over that way.”

  She was about to say something but decided not to.

  “We’re real Guards,” said Malone, “we’re not iijits, you know.”

  “Are you not, now. What happened with your face, do you mind me asking?”

  “He had a contretemps with an alien, we think,” said Minogue. “He’s one of the people we’re looking for.”

  “An alien.”

  “That’s their official name here. Russian, Turkish – we don’t know.”

  She looked toward Malone again.

  “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll keep your number here and maybe I can phone you if this man comes by here.”

  Minogue gave her a few moments.

  “This whole place has come a long way, hasn’t it,” he said. She looked up from the card. Minogue was sure she was holding back something now.

  “Not just this lovely place, the food and all,” he went on. “Not even the whole Temple Bar thing – not even Dublin, actually.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I meant how a citizen can say that to a Guard, she might help. If it suits her.”

  Her eyes lost any warmth.

  “We do criminal investigations, did you know that? Real policemen, yes.”

  “Are you trying to insinuate something?”

  “Know what Moldova is?”

  “It’s a place, I think.”

  “You’re right. It’s a country that doesn’t have much of anything like we have here now. It has lots of misery though, and crime, and girls who are desperate and gullible and vulnerable and probably not half as educated as to the wider world now as we are.”