“If I’d known what I was letting myself in for,” Liddy said, “I’d never have come out here.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Kavanagh. “I’d have stayed in the city and saved myself a lot of trouble.”
“Trouble knows its way around,” Kavanagh said. “I’ve the bank on my case, I’ve the wife on my case, and I’ve this young fellow here to pay.” He pointed to the pile of Club Milk wrappers that had accumulated in front of Gerard. “Look at him; he’s half-starved.”
Apart from the crisps in the lorry earlier, Gerard hadn’t eaten anything since they had left Castletownbere shortly after four o’clock. He was about to open another Club Milk, but now he put it back on the plate.
“I’ll have it in a lump sum next time,” Liddy said.
“You’ll have it tonight, or I’ll turn that lorry around and drive back the way I came.”
“I’ve a man coming for pelts on Tuesday. Call in the next time you’re passing.”
A flush was edging up Kavanagh’s neck, spreading over his cheeks. “There’s nothing for nothing in this world,” he said. “You can pay me tonight or you can go to hell.”
“I wouldn’t have to go far,” Liddy said. “Look around you.”
A sullenness had come over Liddy. The forced banter of earlier had disappeared and in its place was a sour obstinacy that hardened into bitter lines around his mouth. Gerard had a sudden vision of how Liddy would look laid out: his body sunken in a too-big suit, a tie awkward at his throat, even the silk lining of the coffin pressing heavy on his arms.
There was a noise outside in the yard; the clank of metal on concrete. Kavanagh was first to his feet, the others following behind. The girl was on a forklift. She wore no helmet, and the wind that blew across the yard snatched at her hair, snaking it in black tails about her face. She had released the back of the lorry and was unloading a pallet of fish meal.
Kavanagh crossed the yard like a bull. The girl stopped the forklift but didn’t get out. Her face was pale in the light of the porch lamp. “Fucking cunt,” Kavanagh was roaring, and he started to swing bags of meal from the forklift like they were cotton candy. Liddy watched from a distance. Gerard went to help, but the girl had been intercepted early and already everything was back on the lorry. “I thought I’d make a start,” she said. “It’s getting late.”
“Do you think I’m some class of fool?” Kavanagh said.
The girl’s voice was soft, measured, as if calming a small child. “You’re no fool, Curly,” she said. “Come here and talk to me.” She patted the passenger seat of the forklift. Kavanagh looked away and shook his head. “I’ve enough time wasted,” he said, and began to walk toward the lorry.
The girl called after him. “Hey, Curly,” she said. “Don’t be like that.” Her voice dropped lower. “You can’t go yet. You haven’t seen the silver foxes.” She was leaning out of the forklift, her shadow stretching across the yard. “We brought them over from England last month. They’re still only cubs.” She was looking directly at Kavanagh, her head tilted slightly to one side, her lips parted. “Come down to the shed and I’ll show you. You’ve never seen foxes like these.”
Kavanagh had reached the door of the cab. He stopped, one foot on the step. In the forklift, the girl patted the passenger seat again and winked. Kavanagh appeared to be considering. Liddy was standing by himself, staring at the ground. For a while everything was very still, and there was only the sound of the wind rattling across the roofs of the mink sheds and the cry of a small animal in the trees beyond. Then Kavanagh strode across the yard to the forklift and climbed in. They drove off, the girl at the wheel, the wind whipping up her dark hair, Kavanagh bald and stocky in the seat beside her. The forklift went to the far end of the yard and disappeared behind some outbuildings.
Gerard and Liddy were left standing in the yard. Liddy looked like a man who had been struck. He did nothing for a moment, then turned and began his stooped walk back to the house. Gerard was about to go to the lorry and wait when Liddy shouted to him from the porch. “You might as well come in,” he said.
This time, instead of going into the sitting room, they continued down the hall and into a small wood-paneled kitchen. A table and two chairs were pushed tight against one wall, a stove, a sink, and an assortment of mismatched kitchen units against another. There was a wooden dresser stacked with old newspapers and chipped crockery. The stale grease of a fry hung in the air. To one side of the back door, in a glass display cabinet, was a stuffed brown mink. It was mounted on a marble base on which was inscribed something Gerard could not read. The mink stood on its hind legs, teeth bared in a rigid grin, front legs clawing the air.
Liddy took a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard beneath the sink and wiped two glasses on the end of his cardigan. He sat at the table and gestured at Gerard to sit beside him.
“She’s gone five years now,” Liddy said, pouring the whiskey. Gerard didn’t understand at first. He had been thinking of the girl behind the outbuildings with Kavanagh. The white breasts, the dark eyes. Her mouth, wide and loose; her red lips and a stud on her tongue that had flashed silver when she smiled at something earlier in the evening. Then he realized Liddy was staring at a photograph high on the wall above the dresser. It was of a woman, tall and angular, with straight brown hair, her hand resting on the shoulder of a girl in a Communion dress. “I’m sorry,” Gerard said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say and it was what people had said when his mother died.
“Oh, I’m not sorry,” Liddy said, throwing back his whiskey and pouring another. “There’s a lot I’m sorry about, but not that.” His weariness had been replaced with anger. “She took herself off to Belfast. She told me she was going to stay with her sister, but you can be sure she had a man waiting. It was always the same with that woman: She’d tell you that day was night.” His head jutted forward and Gerard smelled the sourness of his breath. “I asked her to take the girl with her,” Liddy said, “but she wouldn’t.” He put down his glass and spread his hands wide, palms upward, in supplication. “What sort of life is it for a young girl out here, I asked her, but she left us to it, Rosie and myself.”
Rosie. The girl’s name didn’t suit her, Gerard thought. It was too tame, too domesticated. It was a name for a spoiled poodle in a wicker basket, not a girl with a tongue piercing who could drive a forklift. Liddy drank more whiskey. “Rosie was twelve when she left,” he said, “and what did I know about raising a child? A girl needs her mother. Boys are different. Boys can make their way, but girls need mothers.”
Liddy fell silent, swirled whiskey around the end of his glass. Gerard wanted to get up and leave but he knew that he could not. It was a moment before Liddy spoke again. “It was coming out here did it,” he said. “She was always a flighty woman. She had one eye on the door from the day I married her, but we got along well enough up to that. A couple of winters here and nothing could hold her.”
Liddy was becoming more and more agitated, his hands moving incessantly, almost knocking over his glass. Gerard’s own glass was barely touched. He thought of Kavanagh and the girl in the shadows of the outbuildings. He wondered if silver foxes were the same as ordinary foxes, only silver, or if they were some different creature entirely, and then he wondered if there were any silver foxes at all. He imagined the cubs in Kavanagh’s rough hands and Kavanagh, awed and silent, turning them this way and that.
“Her mother, bitch and all that she is, would make a better hand of her,” Liddy said. “Rosie’s a good girl, a fighter, but what chance has a girl out here?”
Gerard knew that he should say something but had no idea what.
“Rosie will be okay,” he said. “Rosie’s a smart girl.”
Liddy stared at him, his eyes bloodshot. All of the anger left him and he sagged over the table. “She is,” he said. “She’s a smart girl. And a good girl.”
He set his glass down on the table and buried his head in his arms. The kitchen was utterly quiet, noth
ing but the sound of the wind whistling under the back door. A strange sound came from Liddy, half cough, half sob. Then another that caught and lengthened until it became a wail. Liddy was crying, his shoulders quivering, the top of his head shaking. Gerard took a mouthful of whiskey, felt it burn the pit of his stomach. Liddy was bawling now, his head still in his arms. Gerard pushed his chair back and stood up. He went over to the sink and placed his glass on the draining board. He took one last look at Liddy crumpled over the table, then left the kitchen and went back down the narrow hall and outside to the yard.
When he got to the lorry, he discovered that Kavanagh had locked it and taken the key. The night had grown colder. Gerard remembered his jacket, still in the sitting room where he had left it earlier, but he thought of Liddy weeping inside the house and decided to do without. A light was on in a prefab, but the door, when he tried it, was padlocked. He took shelter instead beneath the overhang of the prefab’s roof, next to a row of barrels. He wrapped his arms around himself and hoped that Kavanagh would not be long. Something warm brushed against his legs, and he saw a cat dart from behind a barrel and streak across the yard.
He pressed his face against the prefab window. The walls were hung with pelts: thousands of headless, bodiless furs, their arms spread wide and pinned to wooden racks. On a bench was a machine with long silver-toothed blades and, beside it, a pile of dead mink. He noticed a smell coming from the barrel nearest him and lifted the lid. Inside were the skinned corpses of the mink, pink and slippery and hairless. He dropped the lid of the barrel and stepped back from the window.
The wind carried fragments of laughter up the yard and he saw Kavanagh and the girl returning on the forklift. This time Kavanagh was driving, the girl beside him, an arm flung across his shoulder. They slowed as they passed the pelt shed and waved. Gerard stepped out from the shelter of the building and walked behind the forklift to the lorry. A drizzle blew in from the mountains, stinging his face. Kavanagh, flushed and sweating, jumped out of the forklift. “Give us a hand,” he said to Gerard without looking at him, and together they began to unload the lorry. Gerard shivered in his shirtsleeves, but the cold, like the smell, didn’t seem to bother Kavanagh.
Gerard felt someone touch his arm. The girl was behind him, holding his jacket. She didn’t say a word, but Gerard held out his arms and allowed her to slip the jacket on, let her zip it up and smooth it down over his shoulders.
Afterward, as they turned the lorry in the yard, Gerard noticed Liddy standing alone on the porch. Gerard raised a hand and waved, but Liddy didn’t wave back. The girl was by the forklift, hands in her pockets. Gerard watched her in the rearview mirror as the lorry drove out of the yard, saw her turn and walk toward the house, saw the light go out on the porch.
Kavanagh didn’t speak until they reached the end of the muddy track and were back on the road. “I’m calling on Clancy tomorrow,” he said. “He owes me a few bob. I’ll sort you out then.”
“It’s all right,” Gerard said.
They drove in silence for a while, the only sound the relentless squeak of the wipers as the rain grew heavier. “Tell me,” Kavanagh said. “Did you ever see a silver fox?” Gerard shook his head. Kavanagh let out a low whistle. “Beautiful animals,” he said. “Beautiful. But why do you think their fur is that color? Aren’t they foxes, at the end of the day?”
Gerard shrugged and looked out the window. Kavanagh kept talking, his voice becoming more animated, his hands restless on the steering wheel. “They weren’t silver, exactly,” he said. “You’d be expecting silver but it was more…” He paused, and his eyes scanned the cab—his wife’s photograph, the pictures of the Asian women, the collection of knickknacks on the dash. When his surroundings failed him, he clicked his tongue in exasperation. “They were a sort of bluey black,” he said. “White bits on their tails and faces. Little balls of fur.” He went suddenly quiet, as if he had embarrassed himself.
Back on the main road, the lorry picked up speed as they headed south. A few miles on, Kavanagh spoke again. “What kind of life is it at all?” he said. “Weaned at six weeks and shipped off in a crate?”
It was cold in the cab, and Gerard pulled his jacket tighter around him. He put a hand to the inside pocket, felt for his wallet, and realized that it was gone. Shadowy trees and ditches blurred past. The wind blew dark, shapeless things across the path of the lorry, things that might have been alive or might have been dead: tiny night creatures and flurries of fallen leaves. They drove on through small, half-lit towns, through dark countryside whose only light was the flicker of wide-screen televisions in bungalow windows. Kavanagh began to hum. It was the chorus of a country and western song, full of love and violence, and he kept it up until they reached Bantry and took the dark coast road for Castletownbere.
The train stopped at a station east of Rome, a small, bucolic station with tomatoes stacked high in wooden crates. The doors opened and an odd rancid smell rushed the carriage, hot and sweaty and carnal, like meat on the point of turning. The young Austrian woman sitting across from Lily noticed it, too. She looked up from her notebook and frowned, the same quizzical, slightly nervous frown she’d presented to the ticket checker earlier, even though she had a ticket, had it ready for inspection since the train pulled out of Termini.
“Oleanders,” Lily said. She’d seen them growing along the edge of the railway line as the train wheezed into the station, a profusion of white-flowering bushes depositing petals onto the tracks. The Austrian woman smiled and looked relieved, as if the smell had sent her mind down a siding filled with other things, things darker and unflowery.
Her name was Etta, and she was traveling to Gariano, where she would spend two weeks. She’d laughed, but not in an unkind way, at something Lily said about Sacher torte, and when Lily had mentioned that she’d nothing to read, Etta had given her a book—a French novel in translation—and told her to keep it. She was in her midtwenties, a doctoral student in geothermal energy, something she’d spoken about fervently before they’d moved to the more manageable topic of Italian rail timetables. She closed her notebook now and put it in one of the myriad zipped pockets of her holdall. At every stop along the route, at every tiny backwater, she’d taken out the notebook and copied down the name of the station in tiny, neat handwriting, as if they were pebbles she might need to find her way back.
They’d fallen into conversation shortly after Peroli, the second to last stop before Rocosalto, where they were both getting out. Etta had blond hair in a ponytail and blond brows and the lightest fuzz of blond hair on her upper lip. Lily watched her take a tiny mirror from the holdall and dab at the sweat beading her hairline. Her blouse had slid off one shoulder, exposing a delicate clavicle no thicker than a chicken bone and perilously close to the surface. In the waiting room at Rocosalto, she settled herself one bench down from Lily and took out the notebook. It was unclear whether or not she desired company. Their conversation on the train, though fleeting, had been pleasant, very pleasant, but now Lily wondered if perhaps its pleasantness might have been rooted in the very fact that it was fleeting, if perhaps she should leave well enough alone.
It was just the two of them in the waiting room, apart from a woman with a child of about three or four. The child slid from his mother’s lap and, going over to the vending machine, delivered a kick to the glass front. The man behind the cashier’s desk stood up—to scold the child, Lily presumed, but instead he switched the sign on the hatch from APERTO to CHIUSO and pulled shut the grille. A moment later, he came out a door in the corner of the room and, giving the barest of nods, left. The child lay on the floor and inspected the cord that ran from the machine to the wall, tugging at it, poking his fingers into the weave of exposed wires. Children were like that, Lily thought; children added to the dangers of an already dangerous world, and how was it that so few people besides her seemed to realize this? The child’s mother jumped up and slapped him hard across his legs before dragging him back to their seat, where he cli
mbed again onto her lap and began to cry softly.
Etta got up and came over. “Do you think he’s coming back?” she said, inclining her head toward the cashier’s window.
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “Do you need to buy a ticket?”
“I don’t think so, but they should have somebody here, shouldn’t they? And I’d like to get a map.” She was frowning again, biting on her lower lip. Lily wondered if she should invite her to sit. The sweet, uncomplicated pleasure of their encounter on the train was now a hair’s breadth from descending into awkwardness. If someone didn’t arrive for one or other of them soon, it would be spoiled entirely. Things were very easily spoiled.
“Here,” Lily said, taking out a map she’d picked up at the airport. “Have this.”
Etta shook her head. “Thank you,” she said, “but I have that one already. I wanted to get a different one. Perhaps he will be back.” She hesitated then, and her gaze seemed to shift from Lily’s face, moving higher and a little to one side. Another frown. “Keep still,” she said, and she reached out, rummaged with her fingers in Lily’s hair. When she withdrew her hand, she was holding a petal between thumb and forefinger, one of the gauzy oleander petals that were blowing like confetti up and down the platform and in through the door of the waiting room.
“Thank you,” Lily said.
“You have very beautiful hair,” Etta said. “I thought to tell you that on the train, but I didn’t. Such a beautiful color, like nutmeg.” And then she scuttled back to her own bench.
Rocosalto was a small, faded town, at least those parts visible from the train station: a strip of flat-roofed shop units, a couple of bars, a tabaccheria. Taking her suitcase with her, Lily got up and went to the door of the waiting room. Sandra, being the organized one, had booked this year’s holiday immediately upon their return from last year’s. She had a thing for “off the beaten track,” which more often than not translated into soup in chipped bowls and bunk beds. Lily had worked out exactly what she’d say when Sandra asked for her half of the money back; she’d written it out on a piece of card. But Sandra hadn’t asked.
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