In the kitchen, Cathy was frying onions and cubes of bacon in a pan. “I thought we’d have omelets,” she said. “Something quick, so you can get back to the office.” She stood Gracie on a stool beside her and rolled up the child’s sleeves. He watched Gracie smash an egg against the edge of the bowl. Half of it slipped over the rim onto the countertop, the rest, studded with fragments of shell, slid into the bowl. Cathy dipped a finger into the raw egg, fished out shards of shell. There was a determined cheerfulness to the way she moved between stove and cupboard, gathering ingredients, a grim precision to the way she chopped another onion. He noticed that she had applied lipstick while he was upstairs, and her hair was brushed. “Why don’t we eat in the dining room for a change?” she said. “Gracie’s going to help me set the table, aren’t you, Gracie?” And she lifted the child down from the stool and led her away by the hand.
He stayed by himself in the kitchen, keeping an eye on the omelets, every so often shaking the pan to stop them catching. Through the window, he saw the frost retreating toward the mountains to the west, remnants of it forming an erratic patchwork on the bonnet of Cathy’s car outside the shed. After a few moments, he took the pan off the heat and went to the door of the dining room, a rarely used room on the other side of the hall.
Cathy was at the end of the table, bent over a large silver tray. It was something they had found in a market in Dublin before they married, and it held items of crystal they had received as wedding presents. Cathy picked up a glass, held it to the light, ran a finger along the rim to check for cracks. She polished it with a tea towel, then set it down on the table and took up another. Gracie was arranging red table napkins, folding them and folding them again, pressing them down, protesting as they sprung open when released. Cathy looked up and smiled. “I thought we’d open a bottle of wine,” she said. “You could have a glass with your lunch. One glass won’t make any difference.”
“I guess not,” he said. Through the dining room window, he saw Martha’s silver Volvo turn into the driveway. It came to a halt by the ruined pond, and he watched as Martha rolled down the window and stared for a while before continuing on toward the house. “What a lovely surprise,” Cathy said. “And she’s just in time for lunch.” She left the crystal and went past him into the hall to welcome her sister.
Gracie, finished with the napkins, slid down from her chair. She was looking not at her father but about the room, ready for whatever opportunity might next present itself. There was a determined jut to her chin that didn’t come from his side of the family and that always reminded him not so much of Cathy but of Martha. She headed now, with purpose, toward the tray of crystal. In an instant, she had reached up a small hand and grabbed the corner of a linen napkin on which rested a tall decanter in blue cut glass. She tugged at the napkin, and the decanter, unbalanced, began to topple sideways. “Gracie!” he heard Martha shout from behind him. But he was watching, as he was always watching, and he was there, just in time to catch it before it fell.
They stopped for diesel at a filling station outside Abbeyfeale. It was late evening, dusk closing like a fist around two pumps set in a patch of rough concrete and a row of leafless poplars that bordered the forecourt. Kavanagh swung down out of the cab and slapped the flank of the lorry as if it were an animal. He was a red-faced, stocky man in his late thirties. As a child he had been nicknamed “Curly” because of his corkscrew hair, and the name had stuck, even though he was now almost entirely bald, just a patch of soft fuzz above each ear.
There was a shop with faded HB ice cream posters in the window and boxes of cornflakes on display alongside tubs of Swarfega and rat pellets. “Fill her up,” Kavanagh said to the teenager who appeared in the doorway. Then he spat on the ground and walked around the back of the building to the toilet.
Gerard stayed in the cab and watched the boy, who was about his own age, pump the diesel. The boy was standing well back from the lorry, one hand holding the nozzle, the other clamped over his nose and mouth. When his eyes met Gerard’s in the side mirror, Gerard looked away.
Three months in and he was still not used to the smell. The fish heads with their dull, glassy eyes; the skin and scales that stuck to his fingers; the red and purple guts that slipped from the fishes’ bellies. The smell of dead fish rose, ghostlike, from the meal that poured into the factory silos. Gerard shaved his hair tight, cut his nails so short his fingers bled. At night in the pubs in Castletownbere, he imagined fine shards of fish bone lodged like shrapnel beneath his skin, and tiny particles of scales hanging in the air like dust motes. The smell didn’t bother Kavanagh, but then Kavanagh had been reared to it.
“Daylight robbery,” Kavanagh said when he returned to the lorry. He handed the pump attendant the money. “Bring me out two packets of Tayto and have a packet for yourself.” He shook his head as he climbed back into the cab. “Daylight robbery,” he said again. “Four cents a liter dearer than Slattery’s.”
Gerard didn’t ask why they hadn’t gone to Slattery’s. Slattery’s had stopped their tab a few weeks back, and Kavanagh had been keeping his distance since.
Kavanagh hummed tunelessly while he waited for the boy to return with the crisps and his change. It was a fragment of a ballad he had taken up sometime after they passed Gurrane, forty miles earlier, and he had not let it go since. Taped to the walls of the cab were pictures torn from magazines of women in an assortment of poses. They were mostly Asian and in varying states of undress: Kavanagh had a thing for Asian women. A photograph of Kavanagh’s wife, Nora, taken at last year’s GAA dinner dance, was stuck between a topless girl on a Harley-Davidson and two dark-eyed women in crotchless panties. Nora had blond wispy hair and glasses, and the straps of her dress dug furrows into her plump shoulders.
“We’re in Injun territory now,” Kavanagh said when he saw the boy coming across the forecourt. “These Limerick bastards would rob the teeth out of your head,” and he counted the change down to the last cent before putting it in his pocket.
It was almost dark when they pulled back onto the road. Kavanagh threw a packet of crisps across the cab. “That’ll keep you going,” he said. “We can’t count on Liddy for grub.” Four miles before Kilcroghan, they turned down a narrow side road, grass growing up the center. Briars tore at the sides of the lorry. “There’s a man in Dundalk runs one of these on vegetable oil,” Kavanagh said. “Did you ever hear anything about that?”
“No,” said Gerard, although he remembered reading something in a newspaper a couple of months back. If he let on that he knew anything at all, Kavanagh would have him tormented. Kavanagh had a child’s wonder for the new and the strange. Each new fact was seized upon and dismantled, taken apart like an engine and studied in its various components. He had been bright at school but had left at fourteen to work in the fish factory.
Kavanagh shook his head. “I don’t think I could stand it,” he said. “The smell. It must be like driving around in a fucking chipper.” Gerard glanced across at Kavanagh and tried to work out if he was serious. Kavanagh was watching the road, fingers drumming the steering wheel, humming to himself again. The light from the dashboard lent a vaguely sainted glow to his features. Gerard decided not to say anything. Kavanagh broke off his humming and sighed. “You’re all chat this evening,” he said. “I can’t get a word in edgewise. Are you in love or what?”
“Fuck off,” Gerard said, but he was smiling as he turned to look out at the trees that reached black and tall from the hedges, their branches slapping against the lorry’s window.
Gerard had first been to Liddy’s mink farm back in August, six weeks after he started working for Kavanagh. He had not been able to shake the memory of the place since. It was partly the farm itself and it was partly Liddy’s daughter. She was about seventeen with blue-black hair, eyes heavily ringed with black liner. When Kavanagh had gone inside with her father, she had taken Gerard across the yard to show him the mink.
The mink were housed in sheds a couple of hundr
ed feet long, twenty or thirty feet wide, with low, sloping roofs of galvanized sheeting. The sides were open to the elements, wind blowing in from the mountains to the west. Gerard followed the girl into the first shed and along a sawdust path down the center. In wire-mesh cages on either side were thousands of mink, mostly all white, with here and there a brown one. They darted back and forth and stood on their hind legs, heads weaving, snouts pressed against the wire. Their eyes glittered like wet beads, and they twisted and looped, twisted and looped, hurling their bodies against the sides of the cages.
Gerard stood in front of a cage and poked a finger through the mesh. A mink stopped chewing its fur and looked at him, a vicious tilt to its chin. It sniffed the air, crept closer, and snapped, grazing the tip of his finger. Then it backed away to stare at him from a distance.
The girl was a couple of paces ahead, watching. “I suppose you think it’s cruel,” she said. Her hair was tucked into the hood of her jacket, and she had her arms folded across her chest.
Gerard examined his finger and shrugged. “It’s none of my business,” he said.
The girl had stared at him for a moment, saying nothing, her dark eyes narrowing. Then she sighed. “It’s what they’re bred for,” she said, turning away. “They don’t know any different.”
It was dark when Kavanagh swung the lorry through a muddy entrance with rough concrete pillars on either side. The lorry lurched along an uneven track, lined with chain-link fencing. In the distance, Gerard could make out the long, dark rows of the mink sheds, moonlight glinting on the metal roofs, and beyond them a huddle of outbuildings. “Liddy hasn’t paid since June,” Kavanagh said, “so he’ll need to come up with the cash tonight. I’ll sort you out then.”
“It’s all right,” Gerard said. “It’s grand,” although it wasn’t all right anymore. Kavanagh hadn’t paid him in three weeks, and on his last visit home Gerard had to borrow from his father to pay the rent. “I’ll sort you out,” Kavanagh repeated as the lorry turned into the yard.
The farmhouse was a square two-story building, its whitewash fading, weeds growing from crevices in the front steps. A cat ran across the lorry’s path and hid behind a row of tar barrels. Liddy’s mud-spattered Jeep was parked in the yard, a back light broken. “It would be easy to feel sorry for Liddy,” Kavanagh said, “but what would be the use in that?” and they both got out of the lorry.
A light came on in the porch and Liddy himself appeared. He was a stooped, wiry man, a gray cardigan hanging loose from his shoulders, and his eyes darted from Kavanagh to Gerard and back again as he came toward them across the yard. His skin had the waxy, pinched look of a museum doll. It reminded Gerard of how his mother had looked in the months before she died, and he knew immediately that Liddy was sick.
“How’re the men?” Liddy held out a bony hand to Kavanagh, who took it in his own vast paw and squeezed until Gerard expected to hear bones crack. Liddy’s daughter had come out onto the porch. She was slouched against the doorframe, arms folded, her black hair pulled loosely into a ponytail.
Liddy looked up at the night sky with its shifting mass of cloud. “The rain will be on soon,” he said. “You might as well get her unloaded. I’ll put the kettle on for tea.”
Gerard went to release the back of the lorry, but Kavanagh held up a hand. “Hold on a minute,” he said. “If it was tea I was after I could have stayed at home. Tea is fuck all use to me.”
The girl, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a vest, was coming down the porch steps and across the yard. She had the same black-ringed eyes that Gerard remembered from before.
Liddy had already begun to shuffle toward the house. He called back over his shoulder to Kavanagh. “Don’t you know I’m good for it?” he said. “Have I ever let you down yet?”
Kavanagh didn’t budge. “That’s three loads you owe me now,” he said. “I’ve bills to pay. I’ve this young fella here to pay.” He nodded at Gerard, who stood waiting by the lorry.
Liddy stopped. He gave a wheeze that shook his chest and caused him to bend almost double, hands on his knees. “Sure, what could a young lad like that want?” he said, when he righted himself again. “A young lad like that would be happy sitting under a bush with a can.” He laughed then, but Kavanagh didn’t.
“Leave it, for the time being.” It was the girl, her voice slightly muzzy as if she had been sleeping. She raised both hands behind her head and stretched like a cat. “We can talk about it inside.” She turned and walked toward the house, and the three men followed.
The porch was stacked with bags of coal and kindling. A plastic bucket and a broom stood in one corner beside two pairs of Wellington boots caked with mud and sawdust. A picture of Pope John Paul II, arms outstretched, hung next to a calendar from the Fortrush Fisherman’s Co-op, two years out of date, days circled and crossed in spidery ink. Beyond the porch was a dark, narrow hallway. Liddy faltered, but the girl pushed open a door into a small sitting room.
There was a mahogany chest of drawers with ornate carvings that must have come from a bigger, grander house. Squares of faded linen were folded on top, next to a family of blue china elephants. The room smelled of things put away, of dust laid down on dust. The carpet was brown with an orange fleck, and along one wall was a sofa in a dull mustard color. On either side of the fireplace were two matching armchairs, their plastic covers still in place. A copy of the Fur Farmers’ Yearbook and a few tatty paperbacks sat on a coffee table.
Liddy took one armchair, Kavanagh the other. As he lowered himself onto the sofa, Gerard caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror above the fireplace. His skin was still lightly tanned from days spent on the pier over the summer. His shorn hair carried a hint of menace to which he had not yet grown accustomed. He took off his jacket and placed it beside him on the sofa, and as he did so he thought that he caught a faint odor of dead fish. Through the open curtains, he saw the moon reflecting in the puddles that lay like small lakes upon the surface of the yard.
“You’ll have a drop of something?” The girl spoke like a woman twice her age. Standing there, waiting for an answer, she could have been the woman, not just of the house, but of the farm and the yard, the dark rows of mink sheds, and the wet fields and ditches out beyond.
Kavanagh shook his head. “Tea’s grand,” he said.
Her eyes settled next on Gerard, who felt his face grow red.
Kavanagh looked across and chuckled. “He’s the strong, silent type,” he said. “He has the women of Castletownbere driven half-mad.” He winked at the girl. “You could do worse.”
The girl, momentarily shy, gazed at the carpet and tucked a wisp of hair behind one ear. “Tea’s fine,” Gerard said, and the girl smiled at him before going out of the room.
After she had gone, the men sat in silence. Kavanagh was never short of something to say, and Gerard knew the silence was a shot across the bow: Kavanagh’s way of sending a message to Liddy.
Liddy stared into the empty grate for a while and then, when there was still nothing from Kavanagh, he addressed himself instead to Gerard. “What part of the country are you from, yourself?” he said. “And through what misfortune did you end up with this latchico?”
Gerard was a second cousin of Kavanagh’s on his mother’s side, and Kavanagh had taken him on at the fish factory after he finished school that summer. It was partly Kavanagh’s way of looking out for the boy after the death of Gerard’s mother the year before. It was also because Gerard’s father had lent Kavanagh the money to fix the factory roof after the storms the previous winter, and Kavanagh had yet to repay him.
Gerard could feel Liddy’s eyes on him, waiting for an answer. He was saved by Kavanagh breaking his silence. “Isn’t he the lucky boy to have a job at all?” he said. “Every other lad his age is in Australia.”
“Luck is a two-faced whore,” Liddy said. “There’s people said I was lucky when I got this place.”
Kavanagh fell quiet and when he spoke again it was to inquire after a relative
of Liddy’s who was in the hospital at Croom. The talk turned next to football and greyhounds and, for a while, a peace of sorts settled on the room.
When the girl came back with the tea she had changed into a low-cut pink top and a short black skirt that clung to her hips and thighs. Her hair, freshly brushed and more indigo than black, hung past her shoulders. She was carrying a tray with the tea and a plate of Club Milks, and as she bent to set it down on the coffee table Gerard’s eyes went to her plump, white breasts and slid into the valley between them. The girl was putting cups in saucers, pouring tea. Without warning she raised her head and caught him looking. She stared at him until, blushing, he returned the stare, and he noticed for the first time that her eyes, which he had thought were brown, were in fact a very dark blue, almost navy. Then she straightened up, tucked the empty tray under her arm, and went out of the room.
Kavanagh unwrapped a Club Milk, took half of it into his mouth in one bite, and chewed slowly. “Well, Liddy,” he said. “What have you got for me?”
Liddy leaned forward in his chair. “We had the activists a while back,” he said. “Ten minutes with a wire cutter and I’m down a thousand mink. Next morning, I’ve a farmer at my door with a trailer full of dead lambs, all with holes in their throats.” Liddy shook his head and brought a hand to his own thin throat.
“Those fuckers should be shot,” Kavanagh said. “Thundering bastards. I know what I’d do with their wire cutters.”
Liddy’s hand left his throat and settled instead on his knee, which immediately began to jig. “We had a cull last month: Aleutian disease.”
Kavanagh sighed and put his cup down heavily on the table. “Listen,” he said. “Do I look like Mother Teresa? There isn’t any of us has it easy.”
Dinosaurs on Other Planets Page 6