The First Sunday in September

by Tadhg Coakley

  She isn’t the worst, of course, and she was very good to his mother, at the end. You’d have to be happy for Donie too, meeting somebody and getting married at his age. He never gave up hope, in fairness.

  But talk about non-stop. And hen-pecked Donie will be sour now until that Topaz forecourt in Cashel, when he can get a cup of tea and a scone into himself. The talk turns to the Clare forward line and how Cillian McMahon is impossible to mark.

  ‘I tell ya. The only man for him is Sean Culloty; he’s as cool as a breeze that fella, wherever he got it,’ Willie says. ‘Did his father hurl at all, Paddy?’

  ‘I heard he was adopted, Willie.’

  ‘Was he so?’ Willie says. ‘Well, whoever the filly and sire are, I hope there’s a few more foals in the stable.’

  ‘Jesus, Willie, you can’t say that,’ Cora says.

  ‘Why not? Sure we need more fellas like him, don’t we?’

  ‘Because you just can’t. You can’t say things like that any more. Sure you can’t, Donie?’

  Donie pretends not to hear and adjusts the air conditioning. Cora doesn’t approve of air conditioning since she found out it uses up so much diesel, but when there is four in the car on a hot day, sure it’s vital. And you can’t open the windows on the motorway as it makes a terrible racket.

  ‘Anyway,’ Willie says. ‘They should definitely put Culloty on yer man.’

  ‘I’d say they will, Willie,’ Paddy says. ‘Sure young Cashman is too loose altogether, he couldn’t mark his own shadow. I still don’t know why they dropped Paul S. Wright.’

  Of course there’s no adoption now, Paddy thinks. All those girls keeping their own children even though they can’t look after them and there isn’t a father to be seen. And all those poor couples crying out for babies in their big houses. No wonder the prisons are bursting. Of course you can’t say that either, these days.

  He thought they had made up, the day after the concert, on the drive home. That Sheila had seen sense. But when they stopped for petrol in Josephine’s in Urlingford and he came back to the car, he could see that she’d been crying again. As they approached Cork, she grew silent and her responses were monosyllabic.

  When he parked the car outside her house on the Curragheen Road, she looked straight ahead in the passenger seat: ‘I won’t be seeing you again, Paddy. I’m sorry, but …’

  She turned to him and burst into tears. Then she was gone.

  His shock transformed itself to temper in an instant. He gripped the steering wheel rigid and stared down the street as she got out of the car. The car boot slammed and he drove out of the city at breakneck speed, very nearly killing himself twice on the way home.

  He assumed she’d come around. He phoned and phoned and called to the house in Cork and to her parents’ farm above in Rathclaren. Her father, scruffy in old dungarees, leaned against the door of the Passat and said: ‘Paddy, boy, she doesn’t want to see you.’

  ‘Look, Joe, we had a row, that’s all. If I could only have a word.’

  Joe shook his head.

  ‘Paddy, she’s on the phone every night, crying to her mother. She doesn’t want to see you and that’s that. I’m not going to say it again.’

  Joe stepped back from the car and stared the younger man down. Paddy backed out of the yard, his wheels skidding on the concrete. He never returned.

  He heard a few months later that she was going out with one of the Whites from Timoleague. He saw her in The Emerald one Sunday night, after Christmas, but she was with Joe and Mary, so he didn’t approach them.

  Willie arrived to the house a few days later, and, over a cup of tea, when Paddy’s mother had gone to bed, he broke the news that she was gone to London. She’d gotten a big job in a hospital there, apparently.

  ‘Lord save us, all the traffic,’ Cora says. They are nearing Portlaoise, at a standstill with the volume of cars after the two motorways meet.

  ‘That’s the Clare gang now. They’ll have a big crowd up today, they’re cocksure of themselves,’ Willie says.

  ‘Lave ’em at it. They might be in for a surprise,’ Paddy says.

  ‘Ha ha de, they might, so,’ says Donie, shuffling. He looks in the mirror and changes down the gears to another stop. ‘Lads, I wonder will we take the next exit and head over towards Maynooth and in by the M50?’

  ‘No!’ Willie and Cora say simultaneously.

  ‘I’d say it won’t gain us much,’ Paddy says. Donie can’t stand traffic at all. ‘I think there’s a crash up ahead; once we get past that, we’ll be moving again.’

  They drive slowly past the two crashed cars. One had obviously rear-ended the other. Six sheepish-looking young Clare fans stand beside the cars. A big, heavy-set lad has some kind of towel or tissues pressed against his nose. His shirt is covered in blood and he is wearing old tracksuit pants covered in mud, with long pointy brown shoes. A guard takes notes.

  ‘They won’t be in such a rush the next time,’ Cora says, tut-tutting.

  ‘At least there will be a next time,’ Paddy says, and immediately regrets it. There is a silence. He knows what they are thinking about.

  They are thinking about his younger brother, Denis, who was driving his van on the Bandon Road one night in 1998 after a feed of drink, when he proceeded to wipe out a young couple from Newcestown who had just gotten engaged and were on their way home in their little Toyota Starlet to tell their families. Denis had been arrested at the scene and charged with manslaughter, and was all set to plead guilty and to do his time, until he got off on a technicality because the guards had botched the breathalysing. He went to Australia soon after and never came back. Their mother hardly left the house after that and died three years later, a shadow of the fine, strong woman she had been. She was buried with only one son at her funeral instead of two.

  Everybody stopped asking Paddy about Denis after a while, when he let them know that he didn’t want to talk about him and never would. He had to tell Jamesie O’Halloran to shut up one night in The Sportsman’s Arms. The pained silence that followed and the shock on everyone’s face drove him out of the pub.

  But now, as he looks out at the wide-open rolling plains of the Curragh, he wonders if Denis is well and what it would be like to talk to him again. They were great pals, once. He wonders if Denis will watch today’s game in some Australian pub surrounded by other Irish people. He hopes that he will – that they will both watch the same match and cheer on the same team wearing the blood and bandage.

  They pass a Ford Fiesta with little red and white flags clipped onto its front windows. A couple in the front, a boy and girl in the back, all wearing Cork jerseys. The fair-haired woman has turned in the passenger seat and is explaining something to the solemn-looking children. The man grins and watches their rapt expressions in the rear-view mirror.

  As Paddy looks at the grin on the face of the man driving the Fiesta, the knowledge seeps its way through him with a bitter familiarity: he hadn’t needed more time with Sheila at all. She would have granted him all the time in the world if there had ever been a chance that he’d have found inside himself the courage to step into the unknown with her.

  He watches the man in the Fiesta until he can bend his neck no further.

  Passion

  The Aer Lingus Gold Circle Lounge at Heathrow was, Sarah thought, rather dowdy. They had tried to create a business feel, with little ‘secluded’ areas for small meetings, but it was completely ineffectual. Nothing like the British Airways lounges she had been in with Conor on his business trips to New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. There was just something special about BA; that touch of class, of glamour, that attention to detail. It wasn’t down to bias, because she was English – it was simply a fact.

  Of course she didn’t mention that to him.

  ‘If you didn’t play hurling and it wasn’t in your school, why do you love it so much?’ she said.

  Conor sipped his gin and tonic and contemplated his response. Sarah was drinking a Diet Coke.
She was seven weeks pregnant with his baby and she was certain that the weekend would provide the ideal moment to tell him.

  ‘It’s difficult to explain,’ he said. ‘My uncle used to bring me to games. He and my father played for Blackrock, a club in Cork city. Really, though, there’s just something about hurling. It draws you in. The skill. The speed of the ball. It’s Cork, too, of course.’

  He looked at her then with an expression of intensity, of passion. Not unlike the look that precedes sex, or that she had seen on men’s faces during sex. When everything is heightened; when their breathing turns to panting and every moment is engorged with the raw need, the hunger.

  She could feel herself become aroused and her face flushed with embarrassment. She wondered where the idea had come from. It was probably the hormones – she’d read somewhere that an increased libido occurred during the first trimester. She was trying to adjust, but there was a lot going on. And now this game, her first time in Ireland with Conor, and meeting his parents – she didn’t know what to expect. She wasn’t used to being nervous and she knew it didn’t suit her.

  When they checked in to The Marker Hotel in the Docklands area of Dublin, the understated style and quality of the lobby and their suite took her by surprise. The rooms were done in lime and grey, set off by a stunning French lilac carpet. The staff were just as she liked them in hotels: friendly, attentive and competent, but not fawning. The area was so modern and clean – it reminded her of St George’s Wharf.

  The tall, narrow windows of their bedroom overlooked a plaza and a theatre, which was lit up that night in funky greens and reds. They ate tapas in the balmy Skybar on the roof and watched the sun drift low over the mountains. There was barely a breeze; it was one of those perfect late-summer nights.

  Her heart pounded in her chest when they gazed out over the river and he put his arm around her and pointed out the lights of the conference centre and the new bridge. She thought: now, now, now. But she lost her nerve at the last moment. She almost wept in the lift going down to their suite when she realised that another opportunity to tell him had passed.

  It took her an age to get to sleep amid the usual middle-of-the-night hotel sounds: a toilet flushing, a passing conversation in the hall, a muted TV from the floor above, traffic in the distance, and the dull intermittent buzz from Conor’s phone, on silent, receiving emails. She’d been surprised he hadn’t wanted sex, and was disappointed when he kissed her, said goodnight and turned away. He fell asleep in seconds. Sore and swollen breasts or not, her sister Natasha had suggested a good time to break the news might be after he’d ‘gotten his leg over’. It seemed to be happening less frequently these days, or perhaps she was imagining it.

  She used the time to practise her lines.

  ‘How far are you gone?’

  ‘The doctor isn’t sure, perhaps four weeks.’ A lie, it was closer to eight.

  ‘But how did it happen when you’re on the pill?’

  ‘It must have been around the time I had that tummy bug and we went back to my house. Remember? After that play?’ Another lie.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I was in shock. I had to come to terms with it myself, first. I was waiting for the perfect time.’ Mostly true. Mostly.

  Sarah had come off the pill in late April, when her prescription ran out. She hadn’t planned it. She was too busy to go to the doctor and the days just slipped by. It just sort of happened. Then it felt right. It wasn’t because he needed a push, or because she wanted out of her dead-end job in the gallery, or that her clock was ticking and a baby would complete her life. It just happened. Things just happen, sometimes. In any case, babies are a blessing. Nothing in the slightest to feel guilty about. He’ll be delighted to be a father. He may even propose.

  Or else he’ll want to get rid of it, and her.

  She looked up at the ceiling as he slept beside her. She turned on her side to spoon him. She put her hand on his bony hip, and on the rise and fall of his rib cage. The chill certainty that this would be their last night together passed through her with a jolt and she was reminded of the abortion clinic in Waterloo a few months after her mother died, when she’d had her crazy affair with Derek – that thorough shit who had been married to her aunt at the time. It doubled as an STD clinic, and reeked of people who had tumbled through their own wretched lives into a lesser, sordid existence. She remembered her determination as she had walked out its front door that day: never to fall so low again. Never.

  She woke up groggy and heavy-hearted. In the shower, it seemed as if her bump had already begun to show. How could that be possible, when at eight weeks the foetus was only the size of a kidney bean? And how could a baby the size of a kidney bean have hands and feet with webbed fingers and toes? How could its eyelids not yet cover its eyes? How tiny are those eyes? How could its breathing tubes extend from its throat to the branches of its lungs? It didn’t make any sense. Lungs, on a kidney bean.

  Natasha had been like a whale after just three months and the thought of being so fat and awkward dismayed Sarah. She turned her back to the bathroom door then, and, under the flow of the shower, she did let herself cry, hoping to feel better afterwards. It worked. Sort of.

  Late in the morning they met with his parents in the hotel foyer. His mother, Maureen, appeared to be quite nervous, her coffee and scone untouched. She barely took a breath between long rambling stories about their summers in Kerry when Conor and his brother were young. She spoke so quickly that Sarah found it quite difficult to understand what she said – her accent was somewhat guttural. Not to mention the distraction of that frightfully gaudy floral dress.

  She had a rather worn-down look, a severity around her thin lips that the claret lipstick could not mask. So unlike her own mother, who had been gentle and open, and who had pulled everyone into her soft, warm Italian bosom. Poor Mama, who had pined away after Father dumped her for that bitch nearly half his age, and died at forty-five from bowel cancer. She was only skin and bone at the end – she looked like a famine victim, an ancient travesty of herself.

  Conor’s father, Alan, was more reserved, his speech measured with an educated tone. He also had a distinct glint in his eye. At one point, she was astonished to realise that he was flirting with her. She turned to Conor and saw him scowling at his father – she hadn’t imagined it. Remarkable.

  Sarah sensed a strain between the men. They’d hardly glanced at each other, even when they said hello. Conor sat still and watchful during the conversation. She knew that look well, it meant he was on guard.

  She noticed a tremor in Alan’s hand when he put down his cup. A hesitation in his walk, that rigid expression. It was Parkinson’s for sure; she knew it from her uncle, William. But why hadn’t Conor told her? Perhaps he had, but surely she would have remembered.

  They were so alike. There was no doubt where Conor had gotten his good looks from, but there was a hollowness in the older man’s cheeks – the beard couldn’t mask it. A wateriness to the eyes.

  And yet, he’d flirted with her!

  She remembered to tone down her accent, smile a lot, listen keenly, look them in the eye, say little and keep her knees together. All in all, she judged it a success. But how Maureen clearly adored Conor. She had tried to mask her emotion in their parting kiss, but Sarah could see her fight back tears. Surely Maureen would be on her side when the news broke, happy to hear that Conor will be a father, that she, herself, will be a grandmother. Wasn’t that every mother’s dream?

  ‘It was awfully good to meet your parents, Conor. Your Mum was ever so nice,’ she said as they left the hotel to walk to Croke Park. She smiled at him and held his hand.

  ‘Yeah, sorry about Mam’s ramblings, she does go on,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all. You’re certainly the apple of her eye, anyway.’

  ‘Hmm. Sometimes.’

  They stopped at traffic lights by the new bridge.

  ‘I thought I saw a shake in your father’s hand
.’

  ‘Yes, did I tell you he has Parkinson’s?’ Conor said.

  They crossed the road.

  ‘I don’t think so. Is it advanced?’

  ‘I think he’s had it for a while and said nothing. I noticed it first in June and then Mam told me. Apparently he didn’t want anyone to know, and he won’t talk about it.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, and she glanced at him.

  ‘He’s very proud,’ Conor said. ‘And he thinks he’s God’s gift to women, did you notice that?’

  She was suddenly on alert; there was something too casual in the way Conor had spoken.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘All that stuff about “The English Rose”? Spoofer. He was all over you like a rash,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be silly, he was just being friendly.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  They walked on in silence.

  When they turned away from the river the atmosphere changed. A buzz of good humour permeated the streets. Groups of fans wound their way up the hill and luxuriated in the sunshine with their smiling, flushed pink and red faces. There were almost as many girls as boys.

  Pockets of laughter drifted out of crowded-looking pubs. She was glad Conor didn’t want to go into one – there seemed to be a lot of drinking. She tried to see it all through his eyes, but she felt so out of place. Excluded, like a pagan at a church service.

  The people they passed, especially the men, weren’t particularly handsome. That was one of the things she liked most about Conor – that he looked more Scandinavian than Irish. Of course, she daren’t tell him that. She had never been interested in a man who wasn’t at least six-foot tall and Conor was six-two in his socks, with his blue eyes and fair hair and lantern jaw.

  Sarah had been surprised when he’d suggested that she travel to Dublin with him for the game. She knew how much it meant to him. He’d already gone home to attend one match with his mates that summer.

  She had jumped at the opportunity. It was surely a sign.

  ‘There it is,’ Conor said, as they turned the corner of a tree-lined square and saw the towering mass of concrete and metal rise high above the rows of houses.