by Tom O'Neill
Most days though, he would light a Sweet Afton and hang out of the window to talk to Trócaire, the caretaker, who always seemed to have tidying jobs to do in the flower beds near Buzzcock’s window. Buzzcock was alright.
Today he was unusually alert. ‘Yes, Mr McLean, are you feeling okay? You are looking particularly tired today.’
The bell went. The others left the room for break. Buzzcock was shuffling around at the front desk putting his lunch box and a copy of the Racing Post into his old leather satchel.
Dark didn’t know why it came into his head to stop and say to him, ‘Mr O’Reilly, in Africa did you ever ... Well, hear of birds that could talk?’
Buzzcock looked at him, wary that he was being made fun of, which was the intention of most questions asked of any teacher in Dark’s school.
Dark added, ‘I don’t mean mimicry, like the canaries and the African Grey and all that.’
Buzzcock saw he was serious. He put down his bag and spoke slowly. ‘Well, not in Africa but here. I have read in some of the old scripts that birds only stopped talking nine hundred years ago. They did so in protest at the arrival of Benedictine monks who spread strict rules and lack of humour across the country. But you know, Arthur, I never heard of any evidence that the birds had lost the ability to talk.’
‘Thanks, sir,’ said Dark awkwardly, not sure whether he was glad he had asked. ‘See you later, sir.’
‘Yes, my boy, I’ll see you too,’ said the teacher, seemingly quite short of words for a change.
Dark and a few of the usual lads went down to Riverview Mall to hang around at the shops during lunchtime.
‘We don’t see you very often these days, Dark,’ said Sneakers Coogan. ‘You’re usually gone before lunchtime.’
The others laughed.
‘I stay some days,’ Dark said.
‘Yeah, like when it’s too wet to go fishing,’ said Coogan. ‘Who the feck else comes to school with a telescopic rod in their bag?’
That wasn’t it. Fishing was only one of his options on days when he had time to kill before he could show up at home. On rainy days he went to Davy Cash’s place. Cash had a pony and various kinds of bantams. He had long stopped going to school altogether.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Sneakers, ‘that place doesn’t work for me either. We’d all join you in a heartbeat except for the shit-storm it would land us in. How do you get them to ignore you the way they do?’
‘You remember Cash?’ said Dark. ‘After Sullivan became deputy head, she called him aside and told him they wouldn’t care if he stopped coming. So of course he stopped. And they just stopped calling his name in the mornings. Well, it’s like that with me. She all but wrote my name off the roll last year and now she is just waiting for me to stop appearing.’
‘So give them a little bother and they hassle the hell out of you,’ said another lad, ‘but give them a lot and they stop hassling you altogether. Is that it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Dark. In truth, he didn’t think he had ever given them all that much hassle.
‘You’re not a knacker though, Dark,’ said Sneakers, laughing. ‘Unless there’s something you’re not telling us.’
‘Cash is my friend,’ was all Dark said. Nobody ever used the word ‘knacker’ in Connie’s presence. They knew better.
‘Watch out,’ laughed one of the others. ‘You’re making him mad. You wouldn’t like Dark when he’s mad.’
Time passed as usual. Sneakers resumed throwing smart comments at people passing. The manager from the Spar came out to tell them to move and they moved just a few feet without looking at him.
Then, across the way, was Ciara. She was walking in their direction.
He had never seen her out of school at lunchtime before. She headed into Quirk’s School Books. The others hadn’t noticed. He plucked up his courage and said to them, ‘Lads, I forgot, I have to buy a notebook ... And things.’
They looked at each other, surprised, and shrugged.
He walked along the front of the shop looking down the stuffy aisles. The woman at the till was eyeing him suspiciously, as if all shopkeepers knew about him now.
She wasn’t there. He thought she must have gone straight out the other door into Emmet Lane. Then he spotted her in the stationery corner at the back just staring at the pens. He went over and stood next to her, saying, ‘Hey.’
She didn’t seem surprised that he was there at all. She must have seen him across the street after all. ‘I persuaded my dad I needed new stationery. I like buying nice pens and pencils.’
Dark always felt a bit awkward away from the between-classroom environment that usually shaped their conversations. He hadn’t anything to say but he could feel her warmth even through the inches of space and the jackets that separated their shoulders. He pointed out one he thought looked okay. She just picked it and went and paid for it as if he knew one pen from another.
‘Sorry about the other evening,’ he said, realising how stilted his rehearsed line was even as he was saying it. ‘I had just got a text about an errand I needed to run.’
‘I have some money,’ she said. ‘Do you maybe want to come for a coffee, since it’s not every day I have an excuse to come into town?’
Dark drank coffee every morning. Two heaped teaspoons from a Nescafe jar in a mug of boiling water to wake him up before his early morning calf feeding. But he had never ‘been for a coffee’. Sneakers and the lads were more interested in trying to persuade him to go for a lunchtime beer – as he looked the oldest, so they reckoned he’d be able to buy them bottles of Bavaria in the Emporium Bar.
They were walking slowly, near each other, and he got the courage to reach for her hand as they walked to the Spa Café at the back of Dunnes Stores. She didn’t take her hand away. Neither of them said anything about it. She ordered a cappuccino and he said, ‘The same please, with a rock bun.’ He had forgotten to bring any lunch.
The coffee machine was acting up and by the time they got their cups, it was already nearly time to be heading back.
‘It’s only SPHE or something, they won’t even miss us,’ said Dark, who had not been thinking of going back for the afternoon anyway.
‘It’s science. Won’t we get in trouble?’ she said. They both knew the answer to that. She would because they expected better of her. He wouldn’t because they didn’t.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said.
She seemed a bit nervous too and talked without stopping. He was glad of that. He heard about her sister in London who was a high-flying actuary. Dark did not even know what that was. She spoke more about Dave, the retired Goth brother who stayed in a flat in town with several other lads. They spent their dole on dope, beer and stuff from the Noble Weed. Her father had locked her brother out. Her mother kept them all together and doted on Ciara so openly that it embarrassed her.
‘So what possessed you to move from the city to live out in the wilds with your uncle?’ she asked.
Why had he? He still didn’t know how his mam had thought it was her only option. After Seán had died, the invite came to stay for as long as they wanted – in a place so remote that the Google Maps satellites did not even see it. An invite from a brother who people said had gone off the rails a bit and given up an archaeology job in the US to come back to the McLean farm. On reflection ‘not coping very well’ did not quite cut it for his mother’s state back then. So they had come to live in a damp old flagstoned house with laggy signal and a local town that was smaller than the suburb he used to live in. He didn’t ask why anymore, because he was no longer sorry. Connie had sorted out certain things for him at school and over time had brought back his mother’s embarrassing giggle.
‘I don’t know,’ said Dark.
The time passed and they both knew that going back for Sullivan’s maths lesson after science was not on. Ciara would have been too obvious walking in the school gates so late. She was tense. He texted Kevin and asked him to bring her bag out wi
th him after school. And then she smiled and sat back and said, ‘But it’s kind of nice. Even though I know I’m going to get in trouble later. This time is nice, the time before getting caught. Like stolen time.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. It was kind of like that.
‘But I still know nothing about your family,’ she said.
‘Not much to know,’ said Dark, feeling in a corner. ‘We’re fairly average.’
‘Arthur!’ She laughed. The way she said ‘Arthur’ sounded nice. ‘Come on, I have seen your uncle and his amazing old jeep.’
Dark realised that he had managed not to think about Connie all day. Or about what could be wrong with him. It had been nice. Like stolen time.
‘Average would hardly be the word that comes to anyone’s mind when the McLean name is mentioned,’ said Ciara.
People at school still talked about Connie since the morning he had driven up to the office door in the Queen Mary. He had called Principal Magill out into the yard for a chat. Connie’s chats were always as loud as his laugh. So several people had heard him say, ‘Still the same old bullying lech, eh, Mags? Next time you have issues with our Art, don’t call Helen. Call me.’ People remembered it because they had never before seen Magill himself cower and slink away as his students did when leaving his grubby office.
‘A little larger-than-life,’ she said, ‘would that be fair to say?’
‘I don’t really know what that means,’ said Dark. Not larger than life now, he was thinking. Smaller than life.
‘I haven’t seen him for a while though?’
‘He’s not very well at the moment,’ he said.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said. She tried to change direction. ‘Your mum. I only saw her a few times when you came here first. All the girls think she’s stunning looking.’
‘Things have been better,’ he said, looking back at her. She hadn’t asked about his father. Maybe they all knew about that.
‘Well is there something I can do? My dad is a doctor. What is wrong with your uncle? Maybe if he needs to see a specialist or something my dad could put in a word to speed it up.’
Dark wondered for a minute if he should tell her something. It would be nice to talk to someone, a normal person about some things. But if he allowed himself to say anything there was a danger that one long string of things might come out of his mouth each tied to the next like magician’s handkerchiefs. The bits about burglary wouldn’t impress a coffee-drinking doctor’s daughter very much. And the bits about talking birds and taking a chalice from another girl with green eyes, that would just freak her out.
‘Nothing,’ he said, eventually. ‘I don’t know much about it.’
‘Look, I’m sorry if I asked you things I shouldn’t have asked,’ she said curtly, looking at her watch. ‘I’d better be going anyway.’
On the way home Dark got a puncture. He was near the Brown River and when he had it fixed he leaned over the old humpback bridge for a while, turning the conversation over in his head and wishing he hadn’t clammed up, wishing he’d made a chance to hold her hand on the way back to school, and wishing he had parted with her on a less feeble note than, ‘Maybe,’ when she said, ‘See you around then?’ He felt dumb and useless.
When he got home he looked in on Connie. Helen was trying to get him to eat a spoon of yoghurt. Dark’s mam thought the good bacteria in yoghurt could make most ailments better. The same man who Dark had once seen eat an entire leg of lamb was now so wasted that he could barely open his mouth. There was more yoghurt on his beard than inside him. It was a bit disgusting actually. His mam looked up and said, ‘There are fried mushrooms and potatoes on the pan beside the cooker, love.’
Dark closed the bedroom door and left the house. There was muck to clear from the cow yards. He put the scraper on Jenny and opened the throttle. It was one of his favourite jobs, reversing the perfect Massey 135 around tight corners at high speed with muck flying off the wheels. He was very good at that. Brian arrived to do the milking and flagged him down. He said, ‘Jesus Christ, Arthur, you put the heart sideways in me. Take it handy, the brakes aren’t great on that little girl, you’ll end up in the slurry pit.’
In the evening, the house was quieter. He sat with Connie for a while. Connie wasn’t trying to ask anything more. He just looked at Dark with pain creasing the smile from his face. His favourite wind-up clock stood on the mantelpiece ticktocking so laboriously that it sounded like each second was going to be its last. He only became animated when Dark’s mam said, ‘This is just crazy. We have to take you back to hospital.’ He shook his head as fiercely as he was able.
She called Dark to the kitchen. ‘We’ll see how tonight goes, okay? After that, he’s going whether he wants to or not.’
‘Okay,’ said Dark.
‘Another thing I’ve been meaning to say to you,’ she said in a frail voice. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you now.’
Dark did not like the sound of this. He did not need any more things piled onto his head.
‘Con, your uncle Connie, has come to mean more to me than he did at first. We ...’
‘Fine,’ said Dark, cutting her off, relieved that it was nothing more but not wanting to hear a long explanation from her on this subject.
She suggested that they take turns sitting up with Connie for the night, increasing the frequency at which they tried him with drinks and custard. Dark did not see what good that would do Connie. He didn’t want to just sit there looking at him. But he couldn’t argue with her when there was a shake in her voice and tears not far away. Another night without a visit to the rath.
The next morning Dark was quite disorganised when setting out for school. He was two miles along the road when he realised he had forgotten lunch again and he had no money. Days went even slower when he was hungry so he turned back intending to look for some coins. As he came around the last curve on the driveway, an alarming sight stopped him. There was the red pickup parked at the front door. And there was Saltee coming out of the house. Saltee was the one neighbour who had never visited when Connie was well. And if Connie had still been able to talk, Dark was pretty sure he wouldn’t be visiting now.
Even in the cold morning air, his shirt was open and he had some kind of amulet swinging from his skinny neck. Dark’s mam came out into the front door.
As he opened the car door with the ‘Saltee Entertainment Ltd’ sticker, he said, ‘All this so soon after the loss of Seán. Such a nice, sensitive guy he was. Remember now, Helen, give me a bell when you need any help whatsoever.’
After she’d closed the door, he spotted Dark approaching. He waited. Then he winked and said, ‘Well.’ Neither as a greeting nor a question. ‘Seánie’s sprog, still hanging about, I note.’
No doubt remained in Dark’s mind, from that one look. Saltee knew about the shop. And he was letting Dark know that he knew and that he was just biding his time.
‘Youze all have a great day now ya hear,’ he said in the slightly American overlay that his Kerry accent had acquired since the businesses had started. He got in the pickup and drove slowly out past the yard, making a point of looking all around him as he drove. He had done his very best to ensure that it was not going to be a good day for anyone in that house.
Dark went in. He didn’t say anything to his mam about why she had invited Saltee in. He had never said an angry word to his mother any more than she had to him. And he never would. But she must have seen it in his face. She said, ‘I know, I know, Arthur, I know the history and I know Connie is not his biggest fan. Don’t look at me like that. He called. I didn’t invite him. And he is offering help. And frankly we are not in a strong position to turn down any of that.’
It was not going to be a good day for anyone in that house.
Dark loved his mam more than anything. But sometimes he just didn’t get her.
Dark went down to the back room hoping Connie would be asleep and maybe would not have heard Saltee’s voice in his house. But the eyes exp
loding with anger told him otherwise. Of course. That was the main purpose of the visit – just to let Connie hear him chatting happily with Helen in Connie’s kitchen, expressing good wishes for a speedy recovery for Connie, while trying to aggravate him into faster decline; leaving no doubt that he was scheming again about how to take the land – and all. And Dark would be powerless to stop him. Dark sat next to Connie and whispered, ‘Don’t worry about that guy.’
Connie raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m ... you know,’ tried Dark. ‘I’m making progress, you know, with Maire Fada and all that.’
Connie’s eyes calmed. He looked at Dark and gave a faint nod.
Dark kissed his mam and set out for school again. He had lied to Connie and made his mother feel he was angry with her. The only two people in the world who cared a single thing about him. Not a good start to the day.
Ciara was not in school. He found himself hoping during first lesson, she’d walk in late. Of course she was never late. But she was never absent either, not even when she had a cold. That was why he kept expecting to see her.
At first break, he couldn’t deal with any more and set off. Since his mam would be home today he couldn’t go straight there. He had to kill time. He went to the river. It was too bright for fishing but he took his rod out of his bag anyway. He somehow felt less guilty for idling if he was fiddling at the same time. He went to his spot. It was one of the hollows that Connie had shown him in the first days here. He remembered what Connie had called it now – a fulacht fian. An ancient cooking place. 10