by Alison Walsh
The more people that knew, the harder it would be.
‘Rosie?’ He was getting impatient now.
‘Sorry. Mary-Pat’s,’ she said, the words coming out in a big rush.
‘Right then, what’s her address?’ He was all business now, pressing buttons on that bloody machine and looking at her expectantly.
‘46 Landscape Villas.’ The words came out of her mouth and she knew that things would just happen now, whether she liked it or not. It was too late. He tapped in the code, humming under his breath as he did so. The polite English tones of the sat nav announced that they had to turn right and then right again. As if she didn’t know. As if she didn’t know this place like the back of her hand, even after ten long years.
‘It’s kinda cute,’ Craig said as they drove towards Main Street. ‘All those little houses, and the pub and that old kinda stone bridge. You didn’t tell me it was this nice. It’s very … picturesque,’ he decided, slowing down as they drove past the Angler’s Rest, which used to be blue and was now painted a bright pink, with its thatched roof golden in the sunshine.
They drove down Main Street then, which was now festooned with bunting, a big sign announcing that Monasterard was the winner of the Tidy Towns 2011, past Nancy O’Beirne’s, which used to be filled with knick-knacks, china country cottages, Belleek teapots, snow globes with ‘A Souvenir from the Capital of Ireland’s Waterways’, a blue-painted strip of river with a tiny boat on it. Mary-Pat had hated Nancy O’Beirne. She’d said Nancy was a witch and Rosie was never to darken the door of her shop. ‘She thinks we’re knackers,’ had been her only explanation, ‘but we have more class than that bitch ever will.’
Maggie O’Dwyer’s little general stores had gone, where Rosie’d bought her Flying Saucers and Love Hearts when she’d been able to cadge money off Pi, and was now a 99-cent shop, with a bright green plastic sign and a lurid window display. Maggie would have hated that, that her tidy little shop had been replaced by a place that just sold tat. The chipper was still there, although it was called Borza’s now, not Aprile’s, and the red-and-yellow plastic chicken beside the name had long gone.
As they reached the end of the street, she told herself that she didn’t want to see it, the bamboo blinds of the Chinese takeaway, the jade lucky charm in the window. She didn’t want to see if it had changed, but then she found the word coming out of her mouth, ‘Stop.’ Craig slammed on the brakes, so that they both pitched forward, Rosie putting out her hands to stop herself, before falling back on the seat.
‘What the heck?’ Craig said.
‘Sorry, I just thought I saw someone …’ Rosie improvised. Craig gave a small tut and was about to drive off when the door of the restaurant opened, and he walked out, a large black bin-bag in his hand. He was wearing chef’s whites and his hair, underneath the small blue hat, was cropped close to his head. He must have heard the car because he looked up, and the bin-bag dropped to the street with a thunk. He peered at the car, with its Dublin reg, and then scratched his head before turning around and going back inside.
She couldn’t help it, she felt her chest tighten, and she had to reach into her handbag and rummage around for her inhaler, hands shaking. She pulled it out and took two quick puffs, before shoving it back into her bag.
‘Who’s that?’ Craig’s voice broke the silence.
‘Oh, no one … just someone I used to know.’
Craig didn’t say anything, putting the car into gear, looking quickly behind him as he pulled out onto the main street. Neither of them said a word as they drove in silence past the Protestant church and the gateway to Monasterard House, where Rosie reached out and switched off the sat nav. ‘Sorry, it’s driving me crazy. I’ll give you directions.’
Craig didn’t need to say that he was unhappy. Rosie had learned to read the signs. The set of his jaw, the way his shoulders tensed and his hands gripped the steering wheel. ‘Left here.’
‘Here?’ Craig slowed down and nodded towards the little lane that hardly seemed big enough to fit a car.
Rosie nodded. ‘It’s a shortcut.’ Or at least it used to be, she thought as they eased down the little road, an arc of green stretching above their heads, hawthorn branches brushing off the car. The lane was a long ribbon of road, stretching off towards the bog and the forest, where they’d used to go on picnics on their bikes in the summertime, the two of them stopping every five minutes because he’d cracked some joke that made her laugh so much she had to stop to catch her breath, or she’d spotted a newt or a tiny lizard slinking into the undergrowth.
Stop it, will you, she thought to herself. Don’t bring it all up again.
Craig insisted on getting out of the car with her when they pulled up outside Mary-Pat’s, a neat terraced house with a riot of knick-knacks in the garden. She’d moved there a year after Rosie had left, leaving Pius to moulder away alone in the old house. ‘You’ll need back-up.’ He smiled and made his hands into the shape of two pistols, aiming them at the house. She had told him as little as she could get away with about her family, but Mary-Pat had figured more than once – she was like that, Mary-Pat. You could hardly ignore her. ‘She sounds a real character,’ Craig had said, which was one way of putting it.
He was trying to be funny, because he thought it would buoy her up, but Rosie just couldn’t smile. ‘Hey.’ He reached out and gave her hand a squeeze. ‘It’ll be OK.’
Rosie found herself gripping his hand tightly as she led him up the little crazy-paving front path, picking her way around an ornamental wishing well and a gnome clutching a shamrock. He squeezed back as she went to knock on the door and noticed that it was ajar. Mary-Pat never did lock the front door, she thought as she pushed it gently open. ‘Hello?’ Silence, apart from a hum of chat from a radio somewhere in the house. She could feel Craig behind her, his keys jingling in his pocket.
The two of them stepped inside the cool hall, which was immaculately clean and smelled of Jeyes Fluid. Rosie stepped forward, then a huge brown-and-white-spotted dog came out of a doorway and stood in front of them.
Rosie froze on the spot, but Craig pushed her gently to one side. ‘Honey, it’s a dog,’ he said reproachfully, ‘not a wild animal.’ He bent down to the dog. ‘Hey, buddy,’ Craig exclaimed. ‘Aren’t you a handsome boy?’ The dog turned its head from side to side as Craig spoke, as if trying to catch his words, then licked his hand. ‘Yes, you are,’ he murmured. ‘You sure are a handsome guy.’ And then he turned to Rosie, a smile on his face, as if to say, ‘See? Nothing to be afraid of.’ That’s easy for you to say, she thought. You’re a vet. If you didn’t like animals, there’d be something wrong with you.
The dog turned and walked down the hallway, as if leading the way. Rosie swallowed to try to push the lump in her throat down, before following him.
She could see her sister’s shape through the opaque glass of the kitchen door, a blur of blue and white. She was cleaning something under the running tap, the sound of splashing water and squeaking glass mingling with her singing. It was Frank Sinatra, Rosie knew. She’d always loved Frank Sinatra.
She pushed the handle on the door and it swung open, and then the dog nudged past her, its nails clicking off the kitchen tiles as it walked over to Mary-Pat, nudging her with its nose. Mary-Pat looked down at the dog and said, ‘Duke, you big eejit. You’d better not be looking for food,’ and she fondled his ears, her face splitting into a big beam. She looked the same and yet different, Rosie thought. Her hair was dyed blonde and she could see a line of grey along the roots, and her face, which had always been pink with health, now had a ruddy look to it, a patch of broken veins on her cheeks. Mary-Pat was big on top, her arms and breasts heavy, her legs short and slim.
Rosie cleared her throat then. ‘Mary-Pat?’
Her sister turned around, still with a half-smile on her face, and it took a second for the features to change, for her eyes to open wide and for her to give a little scream, as she dropped the glass in her hand. It rolled aw
ay over the kitchen titles but didn’t break. All Rosie could think to say was, ‘You never did lock the front door.’
2
It had been the Yank’s idea to have the wedding in the garden at the old house. He’d fallen in love with it as soon as he’d seen it, Rosie said. Fellow must have been blind, Pius thought. But that was the Yanks for you – thought a pile of old bricks and a sagging roof was ‘history’. Depends on what kind of history you had in mind.
Mary-Pat said the whole idea made her feel sick to her stomach, and it was typical of Rosie to spring it on them like this, but if Pius was OK with it, she’d have to go along with it. Pius felt as if she’d cast him adrift, left him on his own somehow. And he wasn’t really sure that he was OK with it – it wasn’t the practical side of things, the tidying and painting that would need to be done in three weeks flat, to make it look even halfway decent, and after the weekend he’d spent clearing out the spare bedroom for the two of them. Mary-Pat had sent John-Patrick up to him in the van with a bucket of cleaning stuff and a Hoover that looked like a spacecraft to do the job. Pius could have taken offence, but he knew his sister had a point. No human could have stayed in the spare room, even if he’d had to shove all those unread newspapers under his own bed. He’d get around to reading them eventually.
No, it wasn’t that, it was the fact that the whole thing made him feel uneasy, the way he sometimes did before a thunderstorm, standing at the front door, watching the clouds roll in across the fields. But he’d smiled and said, of course, he thought it was a great idea, just great, and had pretended to be pleased when Rosie threw her arms around him in thanks. He wasn’t sure if she was pleased for her husband-to-be or herself – it was hard to tell.
Pius found that if he just concentrated on the present, if he didn’t let anything else push its way in, just kept the darkness back at the edge of his mind, he could relax to the point where his unease began to fade into the background, to become just a vague nagging doubt that would surface every so often and which he’d dismiss. ‘For God’s sake, you’re being paranoid,’ he’d tell himself whenever he’d wonder about herself and that Yank and how they didn’t quite look right for each other, or why there was still that awkwardness between herself and Mary-Pat after all this time. Or if it had really been such a good idea, writing to Rosie about Daddy even though Mary-Pat had told him she’d wring his neck if he breathed a word about it. All that kind of thing distressed him because it made him realise just how bad he was at it. At subtexts.
He could read that she was surprised at the state of him, though, Rosie. There was no subtext there. It was the beard, he supposed, long and grey and bushy, and his hair, like a tangled rosebush on top of his head, the only remnant of his youthful dark colour in his beetle-black brows above a pair of almost-black eyes. Daddy’s eyes, so help him. And Daddy’s sallow colouring and his high cheekbones. Pius supposed that his clothes could probably have done with some … updating. He didn’t shop much: he didn’t like it, only firing up the Volkswagen Beetle to trundle into Mullingar for essential supplies. He couldn’t take Dublin at all – he’d get into a panic at all the crowds and forget what he came for. Instead, he allowed Mary-Pat to supply him with PJ’s cast-off shirts and jumpers, even though he was three times the size of Pius, and he wore Daddy’s old corduroy flares, even though they had great big worn patches on the behind. It didn’t bother him, the way he looked, anyway. It wasn’t as if he had anyone to impress, after all.
Mary-Pat’s son John-Patrick called him ‘The Missing Beach Boy’. He’d had to explain to Pius that one of the band had spirited himself away to a remote beach in the middle of nowhere to escape fame and everything that went with it and had emerged ten years later with hair down to his ankles and small animals living in his beard. Pius had found the description oddly hurtful: he lived in the world, didn’t he? So what if it was the ‘arse end of the universe’, as his nephew put it. He was happy with it.
But he’d registered the look on Rosie’s face that first time, when she’d stood at the door and looked at him and at the house, crumbling around him, and he’d thought, ‘That bad, eh?’ And there was something about that look, from someone who hadn’t seen him in ten years, that had made him go up to his bedroom – Mammy and Daddy’s old bedroom – later that afternoon and stand in front of the mirror and look at himself in a way he hadn’t done in a long time. Maybe he did look a bit … wild, he’d thought, combing his hair with his fingers and tutting in irritation as it stood up even more, tugging the end of PJ’s old GAA shirt, bright white with a green St Brigid’s cross on it, Cill Dara marked out in dark green letters. He could do with a pair of trousers, he’d supposed, examining the way Daddy’s trousers bagged around his knees. He’d stroked his beard again, and the man in the mirror, whom Pius didn’t quite recognise, had stroked his beard too. And then it suddenly dawned on him. ‘I look shit,’ he’d said out loud. ‘I really look shit.’
It was funny, thought Pius now, as he bent his head low through the henhouse door, scanning the little space as the hens scattered, squawking and clucking furiously. Maybe it took a visit from someone who hadn’t seen you in a while to shift things; pennies could drop and you’d realise something that you’d been hiding from yourself for so long. He pinched his nose at the smell – god, he hated the smell of chicken shit – and looked for Bessie. She hadn’t been laying in a while and he wanted to have a closer look at her. She was outraged, of course, puffing up her feathers and giving him what he supposed was an angry look, only relaxing when he lifted her out of the henhouse into the sunshine, stroking her and cooing gently in her henny ear.
He could see Rosie and the Yank marking out spaces for the tables in the garden, the pair of them standing together, hands in their back pockets, examining their handiwork, a look of utter seriousness on both their faces. The way they stood was oddly similar, Pius thought, as he felt Bessie relax in his arms, like they were siblings, not lovers. They seemed to get on well, he had to give them that, and yet there was something … He was hardly an expert, Pius thought, but there wasn’t much electricity – that was it. Surely you needed that in a relationship?
Mammy and Daddy had had electricity, that was for sure, enough to power the national grid, and look where that had got them. The trouble was, theirs was the kind that would give you a nasty shock; it had a too-vivid quality to it, like a flash of blue from faulty wiring. And it was the kind of love that damaged – themselves and others. Maybe Rosie and the Yank had the right idea. Steady as she goes. And she hadn’t said she wasn’t happy, had she?
He tilted his head back and felt the hot sun on his face. The sky was the palest blue, like a pheasant’s egg. The sun felt good after all those months of rain. It warmed his aching bones. The pain had been getting worse lately, a dull ache in his joints that refused to go away. Maybe he should start smoking some of his own weed, he thought. But that was strictly business, a few plants in the old outhouse at the back of the vegetable patch to pay for food and the odd bit of petrol. Wasn’t cannabis medicinal anyway? But he was careful not to touch the stuff any more; that’s what had got him into trouble before, smoking too much of it. He’d thought it was helping, draping a thick blanket over all the things he didn’t want to think about, but, in fact, it had made it all worse. Paranoia: he could write a book about it.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and the smell was back in his nostrils, the disinfectant that they spread so liberally around the ward. That bloody smell had clung to his clothes, so pungent that he’d had to get rid of them all once he came out. He’d burned them in a barrel in the back garden. He’d never been able to tolerate it since. Had had to ask Mary-Pat if she minded not using it any more around the house. ‘I’m allergic to it,’ he’d said, by way of explanation. She hadn’t said a word, but the next time he’d dropped in, the kitchen floor had smelled of lemons. She might be a dragon, but she did care, Pius knew that. And he couldn’t have managed without her. ‘That’s what families are f
or,’ she’d told him all those years ago as they’d sat in that miserable waiting room, waiting to see the on-duty guy, squeezing his hand tight. ‘That’s what they do.’
‘Pi, you there?’ Rosie’s voice came from around the back of the house.
‘Here!’ He jumped up, Bessie still under his arm, and walked around past the lean-to and Daddy’s shed to the back of the house, where the Yank and Rosie were standing, looking at something. Pius couldn’t make it out because he was short-sighted but could never find his glasses. ‘Wouldn’t that be swell for the vows?’ the Yank was saying.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Rosie turned as Pius came towards them. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said to Craig. ‘What do you think, Pi?’ and she waved an arm at the old gazebo. Her hair tied up in an old yellow scarf that looked vaguely familiar, her hands in the pockets of her tiny blue jeans, a puzzled look on her face as if she was trying to unravel some mystery – she looked like a little doll, he thought, that if you twisted her limbs too much she’d break. She’d always been tiny, Rosie, but she’d had spirit, a fire inside her. Now, he wasn’t so sure. But maybe that’s what happened when you grew up. And she’d sure grown up.
She was nodding her head in the direction of the gazebo and it was all Pius could do not to blush a bright, hot red. ‘Al fresco,’ Katy had called it that time. She’d taken him by the hand and led him towards it, her naked skin almost blue in the moonlight. She’d made him take off all his clothes. He’d asked if he could leave on his underpants, but she’d been adamant. ‘No clothes. You need to really feel what it’s like, the night air on your skin.’ He wasn’t bothered about that – after all, he’d spent most of his childhood naked: Mammy had been a big fan of it. But this was hardly the nakedness of a seven-year-old, he’d thought, as he’d felt the cold air on his erect penis, so swollen it was painful to walk. He’d had to half scuttle, like a crab, his cheeks reddening with a mixture of self-consciousness and lust.