Stay

by Aislinn Hunter

  “Hey ya,” Janey smiled at Michael, picking up the two empty pint glasses left at the edge of the table.

  “How’re ya?” She looked right at him, waiting for an answer.

  “Grand, thanks very much.”

  “Two Guinness,” Dermot said.

  “Be right back,” she’d replied, winking at Michael before she turned to go.

  Dermot started to ask a question but stopped himself. Michael raised his eyebrows and lifted his shoulders. “I have no idea.”

  “None?” Dermot eyed him warily.

  “None. But I’m fine with it all the same.”

  “Sad day when a Brit can get laid in Ireland.”

  Except for nights at Mahones, Dermot kept to himself. He wrote away to foreign universities, pounding out his credentials on an old typewriter with a sticky “e,” seeking a post in mediaeval studies. He had no recommendations and knew that anyone who called Trinity would be told he wasn’t suitable. The rejections came one after the next, Missus McGuire sliding them under his door then inquiring at tea what the business from Zurich might have been, saying, “My, Mr. Fay, but you seem to have lofty ambitions.” After a while Dermot would fill out formal applications with an addendum saying that he was qualified but too liberal for Ireland. He would cite Joyce’s problems with publication and go on for pages about how repressive states cripple the educated. He signed these with a great flourish and mailed them promptly before he’d time to reconsider.

  In the end, after six years in Clifden, Dermot cleaned out Fitch’s old barn and turned it into some semblance of a home. He took two wingback chairs from his parents house for which he paid the new property owner twenty pounds. When Dermot was a boy, his parents had sat in those chairs every night over tea while he was shushed to the back of the house for bed. They’d be sitting there again in the morning, and his mother would rise from her seat when Dermot came in. It was as though they’d never even gone to bed. He didn’t miss them once they were gone. He’d understood this when he left behind the photographs, the radio, the cake plate that was his grandmother’s. There were too many weighted objects in that house; his mother had been unable to have another child, and his parents’ hearts were hung with that sadness so that everything about them, every object touched by them, seemed tinged with regret. No, he didn’t miss them. What he missed was being a boy: waking up to the smell of toast and eggs, the cutlery spaced out on either side of his plate on the far side of the table; his mother getting up to ruffle his hair and serve him. He missed being sure of things—where to sit, where to go, who to come home to.

  Frank

  THE Italian restaurant Angela has chosen is packed—typical for Temple Bar on a Thursday night. Abbey slides into the booth next to Fenton. A candelabra on the table, napkins folded like swans. Over by the far wall a man in a tuxedo sings an aria, his a cappella almost eerie. People speak in hushed tones so as not to disturb him. The waitress, a busty woman in a black dress, drops off four menus, introduces herself as Irene. A waiter comes along a second later with a basket of warm bread. Angela excuses herself and heads for the loo.

  “Do you like Hornby?” Brendan asks Abbey. They’d just been to the films where they’d seen a movie based on one of Nick Hornby’s books.

  “I’ve only read High Fidelity.”

  “Did you see the film version of it?”

  “No. But I remember John Cusack was in it.”

  “They made it so American.” Fenton sounds disappointed. “Fever Pitch is the best.”

  “Do you follow football, Abbey?” Brendan raises his eyebrows in Fenton’s direction.

  “Not really.”

  After Angela comes back, Irene brings a round of water and takes the order for drinks. Doesn’t write anything down, just spins the silver bracelet on her right wrist with her left finger. She has a small tattoo, two Japanese symbols, on the inside of her arm. “Back in a min!” She turns on her heel and walks away.

  Fenton leans in towards Abbey’s shoulder and looks at her menu. His aftershave is musky and pleasant. “What are you havin’?”

  “The eggplant penne, I think.” Abbey looks across the table to Angela.

  “Yeah, the penne’s good,” Angela says, tapping her teeth with her fingernail, glancing at Brendan. “How’s the fettucine alfredo? Have you had it?”

  “It’s grand, yeah.”

  “I’m for the mackerel.” Fenton closes his menu. He leans back against the booth’s velvet upholstery, turns to look at Abbey. Abbey doesn’t want him to think this is a date but she hasn’t brought up the fact that she’s living with Dermot. And she knows Angela probably didn’t mention it to him either.

  The waitress drops off the drinks and takes their order. The boys dig in to the bread. The conversation goes back to football and the Hornby football novel, and then on to Brendan’s work at an indie recording company two streets over. He offers Abbey a tour sometime and she agrees. Waits for an opportunity to mention Dermot, but it never arrives.

  What surprises Abbey most is how much fun she has. After dinner the four of them go to Blackhouse Records then to The Mean Fiddler to dance. Angela knows the doorman there, a guy called Buzz whose real name is Fergal. He has a microphone headset on and when he sees Angela, he pulls it off to kiss her. Dance music comes down the stairs from the club, fills the street.

  “Goin’ in?” he asks. There’s a queue of about fifty people waiting behind a yellow rope.

  “Is it all right?” asks Angela. Buzz usually comps her.

  “Ah, it’s grand. There’s some big CD release job goin’ on but it’s a good crowd.”

  He lifts the second rope at the foot of the stairs and lets the four of them in free, says “Four V.I.P’s coming up,” into the headset in his hand.

  Inside the music is deafening and the crowd pressed in tight. The whole room smells of sweat. On stage, two English DJs spin dance music, adding their own mix over an album that sounds like it’s straight out of the 1980s. People jump up and down in front of the stage, everyone to a different rhythm. Abbey can feel the bass line thumping against her chest.

  “I’ll get us drinks.” It’s Fenton beside her, shouting into her ear. When he comes back he hands her a pint of lager, tips his glass to hers; the foam spilling over the rim. He licks his hand and smiles. He’d told her at dinner that he’s twenty-four, which makes him just two years younger than Abbey. “An older woman,” he’d said, as if things were well underway between them. Abbey takes a sip from her pint and nearly spits the lager back into the glass. She looks up at Fenton and shouts over the music, “What is this?” “Bud!” he mouths, giving her a thumbs-up.

  Fenton takes off his leather jacket and Abbey hands him her coat, watches as he walks over to a booth set up along the wall, puts their stuff over the end of it, asking the girls who’re sitting there if they’d mind. They watch him saunter back towards Abbey and it occurs to her that he’s probably considered a bit of a catch. He has a wiry build, the kind girls seem to go for, cropped black hair, sideburns, and almost girlish, doe eyes. He showed up for the film in dark jeans that were folded up at the hem, and a white T-shirt, like something out of a Calvin Klein ad.

  Fenton nods sideways towards the middle of the crowd. “This music’s not my thing, but do you wanna dance?” Abbey turns around and looks towards the bar but Angela is nowhere in sight.

  “Yeah. Great.”

  Fenton takes her by the hand, and holding their pints close to their chests they weave through the throng of bodies. Somewhere towards the middle of the room Fenton drains half of his pint and nods at Abbey to do the same. “So you don’t spill it,” he shouts in her ear. She takes a few sips and then tries to swallow a mouthful. They start to dance. Two hundred kids bob up and down to techno music around them; the coloured lights over the DJs turntable arc across the walls and ceiling. A flash of a yellow light flicks across Abbey’s arm. Fenton, eyes closed, accidentally knocks into her, shouts “Sorry!” And Abbey shouts back, “It’s okay.
”

  ——

  Abbey’s dream that night is so real that she wakes up with her heart pounding against her chest. A noise in the kitchen, a dish settling in the sink, something Abbey can’t place exactly, wakes her up. She looks around to get her bearings, sees the TV set in the corner, the other couch on the far wall, the door to Ange’s bedroom. In the dream, Frank’s coffin was empty. Abbey closed it and turned around to find a bear behind her, rearing up on its back legs. The maw came down towards her head and then she felt a sharp pain and then there was darkness. Her mother somewhere inside it, so that even though Abbey knew she was dying, she didn’t care, because her mother was in there too. And Frank. Outside Abbey could hear Dermot. He was looking for her, talking the bear down, using a gentle voice, using reason. But maybe somewhere in the body of the bear, beyond all the pain, maybe Abbey and her mother could find each other. A choice had to be made. Then the sound in the kitchen woke her up and Abbey, scared out of her wits, thinks that Frank is there beside her. She can see him for a second, his hair pressed up against his head as if he too has been sleeping. Abbey wants to ask, “Why are you doing this to me?” Knowing that he isn’t really there, that she won’t get an answer.

  Abbey wakes up a second time to the sound of Angela’s alarm clock going off in the next room. The dream was so vivid it’s like a film she could play over and over again. Part of her wonders if she ever really fell back asleep. She remembers pulling the afghan down from the back of the couch over top of her, she remembers taking off her skirt because after the dream she’d realized she’d fallen asleep in last night’s clothes. They’d stayed at the Fiddler until three and then come back to Ange’s for a last round of drinks. They’d had Bailey’s at the end of it, on top of all that beer. Abbey had finally gone to bed at four, after checking the machine to see if Dermot had called. Now Abbey looks over at the clock on the microwave. It’s eleven. She sits up, pushes the heels of her palms against her eyelids. Everything goes black. She drops her hands, looks over to the living room window instead, the cut of light between the curtains.

  The year her mother left, Abbey was eight. They’d just taken the apartment on Ridge Street and Frank was looking to go back to work for the city. One minute Karen was there, in jeans and a T-shirt, carrying in boxes, lugging them from the U-haul truck to the elevator, then into the apartment at the far end of the hall. And then she was gone. Nowhere. Frank took Abbey out to the near-empty truck and the two of them drove up and down the street, trying to find her.

  A month after they’d unpacked, after Frank had finally found work and put Abbey back in school, Abbey woke up in the middle of the night to find him climbing onto their tenth floor balcony, his right foot on the top rail. For a whole minute she thought she was dreaming and so she stood there, unsure if what she was seeing was actually happening. Then Frank instructed her to get back to bed, go to sleep, and something in his voice told her “this is real.” Abbey remembers she had to take his hand to get him to come down. That she was the one who said not to worry, that everything would be okay.

  Getting off the couch and going into Angela’s bathroom, Abbey wonders if that’s how Frank would have remembered those years. Or if he’d only remember how every so often, while walking with him in the city, Abbey thought she saw her mother. Sometimes it was a stranger, or a woman with peroxided hair, or a woman who happened to be wearing a red t-shirt like the one her mom was wearing the day they moved. There was no reason behind the thought—just a trait, a detail that made Abbey want to go up to the woman, force her to turn around. Once, though, Abbey was sure. They were on Ouelette Avenue and it was late. They’d just come out of the movie theatre. Across the street a woman walked out of a bar and headed down towards the river. And even though it was dark, something about her was so familiar. Abbey tore at Frank to let her go, scratched at his hands as he gripped her shoulders. Choking out “mom,” as if that might make her turn around.

  Into the Muck

  MICHAEL makes his way across the bog, looking ahead to where Angus said he’d find the orange flag. At the end of the fourth field, with the workmen behind him, he comes to a trench. It’s six feet deep and about four feet across, murky brown run-off in the bottom. The Bord na Móna men wait for him to cross over. Propelling himself forward, Michael feels the weight of his stomach pull him down, his boot slip on his heel. He lands with a thunk, his legs taking the impact. Looking behind him, he catches his breath. The trench looks like nothing; still, he feels like he’s just hurdled a river bed. Michael walks over towards the slope of the fifth field, where Angus has directed him. The lough starts at the end of the field like an estuary, the wind rippling the water. In the middle of the small lake is a well-treed Island, a ruckus of birds. Then the bog starts again in all directions, mostly stripped save for the area along the lough, a narrow plain of gorse and sedge.

  Midway across the fifth field Michael finds the orange flag and bends down, conscious the workmen by the trench are watching. He shakes his head. The flag is sitting on its side, not even pole down in the peat. A big enough wind, a curious bird might have moved it.

  “Here?” He shouts over to the foreman, a paunchy balding man with a sour look on his face. Tomás mock salutes him, which Michael assumes means yes. He picks the flag up and plants it, pulls the survey map out of his bag, studies the notes his team made last time they were here. Nothing. Five years before, the WU did a preliminary dig in field three. This was before Michael’s time. He was still helping out in the office then, overseeing the conservancy process when material was brought in. And he liked the office better, was never a digging man. He didn’t have the back for it. Last year was meant to be a one-off, a field supervisory position that would mean four trips to the bog over the course of the year and six assistants who did all the real work. “A favour” was how the Superintendent had put it. A man of your expertise. Maam had been a big zero on the find scale and no one, including Michael, expected that to change. He’d only renewed his contract with the WU because the money was good considering the workload and he thought it might help him get a permanent position at the University or at the Museum. He was tired of the contract work, the bits and pieces. He wanted something whole he could sink his energy into. Things in Ireland had changed in the past ten years. He could get the work—the WU, the University, the conservancy stints at the Museum. But they weren’t changing fast enough. He still couldn’t get a position. Last year he told Dermot that he’d give it one more year, that if things didn’t get better he’d go back to London. But he didn’t really want to live there. He liked it here on the coast, he liked the people, his students. He even derived a certain amount of pleasure from the fact that he was different. He appreciated the small bureaucracy that was the Irish archeological community. In London you could never get by on knowledge alone, you had to prove things, loudly and in public, you needed a platform. Knowledge—intelligence for that matter—came second to position. Position came from backstabbing your peers with a degree of civility. And that didn’t sit well with Michael. Excavation. Ex cavare. Cavare, to make hollow. That’s the way things were seen in the UK. But that wasn’t how they saw it here. In Ireland it’s about making history, wrenching history from the ground.

  Kneeling, down, Michael sweeps his fingers over the soil, moves them lightly, drags bits of roots and peat crumb around. He pulls four wood stakes and a ball of twine from his bag, looks over his shoulder. The foreman Tomás, and the blond-haired kid Liam, are over by the trench, smoking. They watch Michael as he gets up, pushes a large spike into the ground with his boot, takes a tape measure out of his pocket. He marks out a two metre square, jams the other smaller stakes into the peat, reels out the twine as he goes.

  Once the base line, datum point and perimeter are set up, Michael pulls out his camera and notebook. The lads watch him and Michael signals that they can go. They’re off work today, the four days between harvests, but apparently they decided to come down anyway, to see how much of a disr
uption the WU might cause. Michael knows some of them from Maam. Last year he worked with Angus on a different section of the bog. And two weeks ago Michael and his team did a survey of this block of fields though they didn’t talk to the workers and didn’t find anything interesting. Maam wasn’t like Ballybeg in Offaly. The Wetland Units there are working around the clock. Every twenty metres in Ballybeg there’s a trackway or some rise in the field surface that indicates an underlying structure. Annie, the supervisor there, spends more time in the peat than anyone Michael knows.

  Michael writes the location of the site on a slate board and sets it by the stake that will act as the main data point. Then he loads a roll of film into the camera, looks up at Peter and the one with the shaved head they call Egg, who are standing by the trench with the others. The film loaded, Michael takes photographs of the cordoned-off area from a few different angles and then turns and snaps a photo of the lads for a laugh. They look suddenly uncomfortable. Tomás stubs out his cigarette and stares at the ground; Liam wipes his mouth with his coat sleeve. To make them feel more at ease, Michael extends the camera directly out from his face. He smiles big and the flash goes off.

  Michael loops the camera strap around his neck and opens his note pad. Then he sits down on the driest part of the turf, a few feet outside his newly formed square, and he starts with the notes. Maam Bog, 9:20 AM. He photographs one view from the north, then the east; he photographs the bog from every direction and after each click he scrawls the exposure number and the directional information in his book. Dirt from his hands falls down the page.

  The whole process takes an hour. By noon Una and Gerry, two of the younger WU members on his team, should be out with the shovels and brushes to start digging. They’ll work six hours today and get back to it on Monday. Michael briefly wonders if that’ll mean he can go home early and leave it to the youth. Una is especially keen, although arguably too careful at times, too full of trepidation. Gerry is the first one to pick up the shovel and haul out a pile of soil. Michael chose the two of them for this site in the hope that they might temper each other, find a middle ground. Still, Michael decides he will have to stay with them, pull his fair share of the load. A “find,” no matter how insignificant, requires a supervisor and a preliminary dig, and this, for better or worse, is one of Michael’s sections at Maam.