by Nicola White
‘I know.’
‘You should go to bed, love. It’ll feel better in the morning.’
Ali went over and bent to kiss her mother goodnight. The yeasty smell of the bedclothes rose around her like a comfort.
She didn’t go up to her room, but crept downstairs to stand outside Davy’s door. No light shone from under it. Ali pressed her ear to the yellowed paint of one panel and listened hard. There was a gently whooshing sound that could have been his breathing, deep in sleep, but might just as well have been the sound of her own blood circulating.
‘Davy?’ She spoke quietly into the crack of the doorjamb.
‘Yea?’ The reply came loud and from the right. Ali jumped and turned to see Davy emerging from the dark of the back hall, grinning, a glass in hand.
‘You bastard.’
She followed him back to the kitchen, crossed it quickly and turned on the small light over the cooker. On the table stood a bottle with a yellow label – Queen Anne Whiskey emblazoned in garish script.
‘What are you doing in the dark?’
‘Pull up a pew and sample some hard liquor. I’m having a wake.’
Davy was drinking from the glass with the Flintstones drawings on it, one she loved when she was a kid. She fetched a glass for herself – a fancy-looking stemmed one from a petrol station giveaway.
‘What are we having a wake for – is it me?’
‘You were all right.’
‘I don’t remember half of what I said. It was a nightmare.’
The whiskey was harsh and smelt of disinfectant. She went to the sink and diluted it.
‘I would say… you don’t make things easy for yourself.’
Ali groaned and pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead.
Davy smiled and shook his head slowly, ‘Cheers.’
She sat across from him, took her packet of ten out of her dress pocket and lit a cigarette. ‘So, what are you celebrating?’
‘Celebrate is too strong a word,’ said Davy, flapping his hand to divert the smoke. ‘I’ve got a job.’
‘Brilliant. Where?’
‘Buleen. My family needs me, it seems.’
‘You’re going back already? We’re your family too.’
‘I can’t go on living off your mother.’
‘I do.’
Davy laughed and poured himself another drink, pointed the bottle at her. Ali put her hand over the top of her glass.
‘Thanks, but it’s disgusting.’
‘Two ninety-nine. It should be disgusting.’ He clinked his glass against hers forcefully, a dull thunk. ‘Brendan’s got this business thing…’ Davy spun a hand in the air, looking for words. ‘Gaming machines in pubs. He needs a hand. He’ll pay.’
She watched his hand come to rest on the table and thought about touching it.
‘Can I come with you?’
‘Don’t know if you’re strong enough, those machines are bloody heavy.’
‘I’d like to get away from Dublin, Davy, far away from Mary O’Shea.’
‘I wouldn’t run away from her.’ He leered over the rim of his glass.
‘Shut up. Will you ask Una if I can come and stay?’
‘No need. Sure, she’s always asking about you. Our darling niece. You haven’t visited them in years.’
She swirled the last of her whiskey and water round the glass.
‘I was talking to Ma just now about the time we stayed with you, you know.’
Davy frowned into the depths of his drink.
‘Do you remember?’
When he looked up his eyes swam with the effort of focusing. Ali left him at the table, kissing the top of his head as she passed and making him promise to go to bed soon.
She went to the sink in her bedroom, turned on the tap and waited for the water to run hot. It didn’t. She shut it off and went to bed with her clothes on.
TEN
The cat would be raging – it was way past his usual breakfast time. Swan shoved his newspaper and packet of rashers under one arm while he struggled with the front door mortice lock. It took him a moment to realise it was already unlocked, that’s why he couldn’t turn the key. He slipped the Yale into the lock above, clicking the door open easily.
Benny was sitting in the middle of the hall, licking himself, a back paw sticking up over his shoulder like a Nazi salute. He’d obviously had his breakfast and was on to the next task of the day. Beside him was Elizabeth’s small blue case. A smell of coffee beckoned from the kitchen.
‘Vincent?’
His wife didn’t sound worried or annoyed, just calmly checking that it was her husband rather than a key-toting stranger. She was sitting at the breakfast room table, the garden a blaze of greens behind her.
‘I stayed at my mother’s,’ he said. ‘She needed the bit of company. When did you get back?’
‘Aunt Bridie was driving up early to the sales. She dropped me off half an hour ago.’
‘You should’ve phoned.’
Elizabeth shrugged. Swan placed the paper in front of her, put the bacon in the fridge, and helped himself to coffee from the pot on the table.
‘How’s Aunt Josie?’
‘Oh you know… up and down.’ Elizabeth was scanning the front of the paper, didn’t look at him as she spoke. ‘How are things with you?’
‘I guess up and down would cover it,’ said Swan.
They never talked much about his work. He preferred it that way, preferred to keep her away from it. She was wearing a pale lilac jumper he couldn’t recall having seen before.
Not for the first time he wondered whether there was a secret part to her life. He had absolutely no reason to doubt her. Elizabeth had always been close to her posse of aunts in Kilkenny. As they entered their fragile years, frequent health crises naturally pulled their only young relation back to them. But it was hard to judge the urgency of their calls, why they needed her to stay so often.
‘It isn’t as though I’ve much to do here,’ Elizabeth had said as she packed. Her voice was apologetic but somewhere in that statement another intention lurked – something pointed.
‘That film you wanted to see is on at the Carlton,’ she said now, ‘the one with the gangsters.’
‘I have to go in to work for a while – but I should be free in the evening.’
She took her eyes from the paper and studied him.
‘They should give you a proper weekend. You look tired.’
‘It’s been a busy week.’
The light shifted in her eyes. ‘It’s not the baby case is it? Oh, Vincent…’
This was why he preferred not to tell her things. Especially this case. Now she was upsetting herself, and it had nothing to do with them. Oh Vincent… like he’d brought the corpse home in his briefcase.
‘I think we should look at the garden after coffee – talk about that arch thing you said you wanted.’
Elizabeth produced a patient sigh. ‘If you like.’
Swan was changing into his work clothes when the doorbell rang. Elizabeth went to answer it and he heard a woman’s voice in the hall. By the time he got downstairs Gina Considine was sitting at his table and Elizabeth was asking if she wanted tea or coffee.
Considine was only a bit younger than his wife, but they made such a contrasting pair that he felt like he was looking at women from different eras; Elizabeth subtle and airy in her pale clothes, a vase of garden flowers beside her, Considine with angled cuts in her black hair, shiny leather boots, jacket belted tight against all comers.
They hardly acknowledged his arrival. He could feel the charge of mutual curiosity between them, the way Considine followed his wife with her eyes, the returning glances that Elizabeth kept sneaking over her shoulder as she prepared tea.
The mug that Elizabe
th put in front of Considine was sprigged with little pink roses.
‘I’ll leave you two to talk.’ She closed the door behind her.
‘Sorry,’ said Considine, ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. Your wife insisted. Barrett said to come and collect you if I had the time.’
‘Where’s Barrett?’
‘Following up leads in Dodder Vale.’
And putting Considine in her place, thought Swan.
‘So how was your visit to east Clare?’
‘Good. The policeman I met has been there forever. Nice little town, I suppose, the Garda station’s the size of this kitchen. He brought me to see a doctor who knows the family and it turns out he was asked to the house on Christmas Day in 1972. He says the baby was stillborn.’
Swan took a seat opposite her. ‘The doctor saw it?’
‘He said he examined the mother. She wasn’t a member of the Devane family – that’s their name – she was a girl who cooked and cleaned for them. Joan Dempsey she was called, but I’ve written it all up for you. It’s on your desk’
‘How did our girl come to find it?’
‘Oh… I didn’t ask that. Sorry. Not sure he knew. I think he was called afterwards.’
‘Did you talk to the family or the mother?’
‘You said not to waste time.’
‘So I did. That’s fine.’
A stream of piano notes floated down the hall. Schubert, perhaps. He was never certain.
‘Is that a record?’
‘No, it’s Elizabeth. She’s a musician.’
‘God, that’s amazing.’ Considine smiled in open admiration and Swan’s chest tightened with pride even while he worried she’d tell the others, that they’d find something to ridicule in his wife’s talent.
He left Considine to finish her tea, and went to get his jacket from the coat hooks in the hall. He slipped into the front room to kiss the back of his wife’s neck. Elizabeth smiled and kept playing.
‘I’ll try to get back in time for the pictures,’ he whispered.
Swan hummed the tune as he folded into the passenger seat of Considine’s little hatchback. It was all right that she’d come into the house, seen something of his life. It was fine.
She drove fast through the dawdling weekend traffic, nipping into gaps, her hand always on the gearstick.
‘Barrett said you got the post-mortem results yesterday,’ she said.
‘Mmmm.’
‘He didn’t have time to tell me about them.’
‘No huge surprises. Cause of death was the severing of the spinal cord from a single blow to the nape. The bruising on the back was also caused by trauma from some kind of blunt weapon – a bar or heavy stick. The skin was broken in places. Harbison thinks this might have been after the blow to the neck.’
She was silent for the rest of the journey. Swan knew they were both doing the same thing; playing out scenes of violence in their heads, imaginations reaching into the dark for actions that could fit the consequences.
ELEVEN
Ali watched Davy sleep, his cheek vibrating against the train window, his skin the colour of lard. She ate crisps and drank tea from a plastic beaker, watching hedges and fences scroll by. In an hour or so, she would be at her aunt and uncle’s, see her cousins for the first time in years. She had four cousins in Buleen – Roisín, married the year before, Brendan, the eldest, who now worked the farm with his dad, and the twins Michael and Eamonn – those rowdy boys who teased her when she was small and made her cry. She hadn’t seen them enough over the years to think of them as friends.
A man passing down the aisle turned his head to stare at her, and she wondered whether he recognised her from the telly. There was no way of telling how conspicuous she had become. She kept her eyes on the window as much as she could. After a time, she shook Davy’s arm.
‘Hey, we’re almost there.’
He stretched and rubbed at his mouth. He frowned at the passing view and executing a wailing yawn that gave her a full view of his gullet.
‘My, what a big mouth you have.’
‘All the better to regurgitate my innards through,’ he said.
‘You shouldn’t have drunk all that whiskey. Tell me what Una said on the phone. Are you sure it’s okay?’
‘She said you were more than welcome. She’s making up Roisíns old room.’
‘Davy?’
‘Mmmn?’
‘I’ve only ten pounds with me, and I don’t know how long I’m staying. I feel I should give her something.’
‘Nonsense, she’s your aunt. Buy her some Milk Tray. You might need a bit more for drinking money, though. Maybe Brendan will make me rich and I’ll give you a favourable loan.’
‘Gee thanks’
Her cousin Brendan was leaning against an iron pillar on the platform at Kinmore. Last time Ali had seen him he was an almost mute adolescent. He still looked grumpy, still wore glasses, but was as tall as a drainpipe and, in his narrow black trousers and wrecked denim shirt, somehow more youthful than he had been as a child. She was immediately conscious of wanting him to think well of her.
He greeted Davy with an open-handed blow to his shoulder.
‘Alright?’
Davy just winced.
‘Travel sickness,’ said Ali.
‘Me arse,’ said Brendan, ‘looks self inflicted to me.’ He looped his arms around Ali in an awkward hug.
‘Saw you on the telly!’
Ali groaned.
‘You’re not to mind Mam if she gets at you for some of the things you said. She’s old-fashioned.’
‘She’ll probably have the priest waiting to exorcise you,’ Davy said.
Brendan gave a short laugh. ‘Not everyone gets called a slut on The Late Late. It’s quite an honour for us.’
A faded red transit van stood outside the station and Brendan urged them to praise it, even though rust frothed at the door corners. He found space for their bags among a collection of bulky gaming machines in the back. Their fake wood sides made Ali think of coffins.
They sat in a high row behind the windscreen, Ali sandwiched in the middle. They left Kinmore and sped along beside high hedges and overhanging trees heavy with summer’s growth and the dust of the road. The Clash sang about Spanish bombs on the tape deck, and Brendan shouted along, thumping the steering wheel. Davy was leaning out the open side window, jaw clenched against nausea.
They turned on to a main road. Here there were no hedges and Ali could see fields stretching out around her, rising and falling in gentle humps. Between two hills the bright silver pan of Lough Dreena appeared briefly.
‘Why are we going this way?’ asked Davy.
‘Just a little side trip, Big D.’ Brendan pointed ahead to a large ochre-coloured building. It sat naked on empty ground like a box fallen from the sky. Big red letters made to look like rustic logs spelled out ‘Red Rock Saloon’ on the gable end.
He pulled the van into the vast car park, executing an unnecessarily tight turn into one of its empty bays. They could feel the machines tip and bang as they bumped to a halt.
‘Give us a hand here – I’ll run you in gently.’
Davy grunted and climbed out of the van.
Ali followed, standing on the hot tarmac while Brendan hooked a wooden ramp to the back of the van and manoeuvred one of the machines down it on a porter’s trolley.
‘Get the plug will ye?’
Davy picked up the trailing flex and walked after Brendan. Ali waited, glad of the stillness and sunshine. A liver-coloured spaniel walked along the side of the road, all on its own. When it spotted Ali, it increased its pace, trotting by and looking over its shoulder as if it didn’t want to be associated with the likes of her. Maybe it had seen The Late Late. The word slut wouldn’t leave her ears.
The boys finally appe
ared again, bickering loudly. Davy had staged some kind of miraculous recovery from his hangover. His colour was better and he was laughing. Brendan carried a cloth bag in his hand, heavy with a clot of coins. When they got back in the van she smelled the beer.
‘We had to,’ protested Brendan, banging the gearstick into reverse, ‘you can’t be stand-offish in this business.’
It wasn’t long until they came to the grotto on the outskirts of Buleen. Ali craned forward to look at the town. They passed the church first, a big Italian-style basilica the colour of strawberry ice-cream.
‘I see God’s sticking with pink,’ said Ali.
‘Man!’ said Davy, ‘I could sell a machine to Father Philbin to put in a side chapel. That’d bring in the young folk alright.’
‘In your arse.’
They drove down the wide village street. Brendan slowed the van and stopped outside a tiny pub with the name Melody over the door.
‘Won’t Auntie Una be waiting for me?’
‘No rush,’ said Davy, opening the door.
‘It’s business,’ said Brendan, ‘I’m persuading them into a CD jukebox.’
Ali didn’t follow them in immediately. Buleen hadn’t changed much from her last quick visit, down for granddad’s funeral about five years before. It looked a little fancier maybe – the hotel had been freshly whitewashed and frothing hanging baskets flanked the door. A blackboard was propped beside it with a list of dishes that made her mouth water – poached salmon, chicken casserole, lasagne. She’d eaten nothing but a packet of crisps since breakfast.
She entered the pub and stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. Brendan was at a table with two pints and a glass of lager. Davy was up at the counter, talking with Mr. Melody. She went and sat beside Brendan, lifted the lager to her lips.
Brendan put his pint down, adjusted the beer mat under it, cleared his throat.
‘Are you alright? After what happened… are you okay in yourself?’
‘Yea, thanks. I’d rather forget it, though.’
Brendan nodded, pushed the beermat again.