“A woman’s work is never done!” Clara says. It’s so great not to be made to feel guilty, even though she’s ridiculously late.
The woman sighs contentedly.
“If there’s a problem, I’ll give you a ring.”
While Clara was in the accountant’s shed the sun came out. Now golden light washes the houses, so they glow softly in their frames of autumn shrubs and trees. In the driveway of one of them, just beside where Clara parked her car, a woman is raking leaves. Light mounds of golden foliage are lined up along the sides of her drive, like a range of tidy little mountains. It is a pleasant sight. All across the nation…there’s a whole generation…people in motion. Clara smiles at the woman as she is about to say, “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
The woman looks up from her sweeping.
Venomous.
That’s the only word to describe the expression on her face.
“Are you the person who blocked my driveway?” she hisses.
Clara glances at her car, a twenty-year-old Mercedes Benz, the only luxury—near luxury—she allows herself. It is parked very close to the edge of the gateway. She hadn’t paid much attention to how she was parking because she was so glad to be getting the tax papers out of her hair.
“Oh gosh, I’m really sorry!” she says in dismay. “I didn’t notice I was so close to your drive.” She smiles then and adds, “But not to worry, I’m off now anyway!”
The woman is not placated. Instead her face grows angrier.
“You parked illegally,” she hisses. “You broke the law. Do you always park like that?”
“What?” Clara is puzzled. “I’m sorry!” She looks carefully at the woman. Elderly. Her clothes are verging on the shabby: grey pants and an anorak in a drab shade of yellow old women often wear. The clothes are ordinary but her face is not. It is contorted with rage, like the face of a witch.
Clara wonders if the woman might be a little disturbed. “It was only for a few minutes!” she shrugs, dredging her keys up from the chaotic depths of her handbag.
The old woman snarls. “It was not a few minutes! It was not a few minutes! You broke the law. Are you always breaking the law?”
Are you always breaking the law?
Clara inhales deeply. She feels like a child, in her tight jeans and purple leather jacket, her high boots. She feels like a child although in fact she is probably not that much younger than this angry old woman.
“You broke the law,” the woman says again. “I couldn’t get into my drive.”
Clara glances at the car parked behind hers and assumes several things without thinking about them. One of those assumptions is that the car behind hers, a red Yaris, is the woman’s. She must have arrived when Clara was in with the accountant’s wife and had to park on the road, instead of on her driveway. But would that be so irritating that you’d eat the face off a complete stranger? Not being able to get into your drive is not quite the same as not being able to get out of it.
“You’re overreacting,” says Clara, frowning. She glances at the house. It has a name, carved on a piece of fake wood: “Assisi.” Probably holy statues all over the place inside. She shakes her head.
She should go now, before she says things she’ll regret. One part of her is urging her to leave. But some emotion boiling up inside stops her doing that. She’s getting drawn in.
“You’re crazy,” she can’t stop the words erupting.
“And you’re a criminal!” the woman’s voice rises to a real scream.
Then Clara makes a supreme effort, suppresses her annoyance, and climbs into her car.
She has to retreat down Watermill Grove, do a U-turn, and come back up to get out onto the main road. As she drives back towards the corner she sees that a small crowd has gathered at the old woman’s gate. There’s a young woman, with a pram, and an old man, with a face as angry as the old woman’s. The old woman is pointing at Clara and the others are looking at her accusingly. There’s something unreal about the group. It looks choreographed, like a scene from an opera or a ballet.
The old man beckons Clara over, crooking his finger and gesturing menacingly. With his big hooked nose he’s the evil count. He could be wearing a black cloak and three-cornered hat, shiny pointy-toed boots, a dagger in his belt. But his clothes are as ordinary as his wife’s. It’s the eyes that belong to the other dimension, as they splutter and sparkle with rage. The two old people glare at her. The house and driveway are like a backdrop on a stage. The faces are like masks, not like real faces, which change expression in response to what people say. She wonders, seriously, if this is some sort of reality TV hoax. But Watermill Grove isn’t the sort of place where they do reality TV hoaxes. It’s too far from town. It’s too boring. It’s too real.
Clara could decide to ignore him and drive away from this farce. She’s calmer than she was; she’s distanced herself. Discretion is the better part of valour, that she knows. But something holds her, some dark spell. She stops the car. The evil count stalks up to her and she rolls down the window.
“Show me your driving licence,” he barks.
“What?” she wasn’t expecting this.
“Do you have a driving licence?”
“Of course I have a driving licence,” Clara says.
“I’d like to see it,” he snarls.
Naturally, Clara hasn’t a clue where it is.
“I’m not showing it to you,” she says.
“In that case I’m going to report you to the guards.”
She laughs in surprise. “Okay,” she says, with an elaborate shrug. “Go right ahead. Report me to the guards!”
Now he’s taken aback.
“Go on,” she says, encouraged. “Report me! Report me to the police!”
Repetition is the name of the game.
“I will,” he says, uncertainly. “I will. I will.”
He ambles off across the road and into his house.
The young woman moves away and pushes her pram down the road, her head bent towards the contents of the pram. The old woman picks up her rake and begins to work at the leaves. The scene is beginning to lose momentum; everyone senses it’s time to draw the curtain. But the old man hasn’t made his final exit. He returns with an old envelope and pencil and makes an elaborate show of taking down the registration number of Clara’s car. He gives a last grunt, scowls at her and returns to his garden.
Clara’s mobile phone rings.
Eoin.
“Hi Ma,” he sounds as if he’s next to her in the car. “Just checking that everything’s on track.”
“Yes, sweetie,” she says, glancing out the window, which is open. “Everything’s on track.” Her heart is thumping. Thump thump thump. There’s a shake in her right knee. “I’m just leaving in the tax returns, you know, with Michael.” The old woman’s head is bent over the leaves, her rake is raking. The old man is gathering up the heaps of leaves and putting them into a green bucket. He clamps them down with his foot, to compress them, squeeze more in. “Someone is reporting me to the guards, for illegal parking. Some crazy people,” she says this very loudly, hoping they’ll hear.
“Oh,” Eoin sounds alarmed. “Don’t worry, Mom. Don’t mind them. Just drive away. Okay?”
“Okay.” The old man looks over at Clara and spits, in her direction. The glob of spittle lands far from her, on the footpath outside his gate. He picks up the bucket and shuffles into the house with it, stooping under the weight of leaves.
Eoin says, “Promise me you’ll drive away as soon as I ring off.”
“Yes yes,” says Clara.
There’s a pause.
“Have you sent in your ESTA form to Immigration?”
“Yes, yes,” she says, again. “I did that weeks ago.” All those stupid questions. Do you suffer from a contagious disease? Are you a drug addict? Have you ever been convicted of an offence by the police? Offense. Felony. That’s not a word Clara ever uses. It’s not a word used in Ireland. “I did it. I got an emai
l back. That’s all okay.”
“Okay,” there’s a pause and he adds, “Ma, wear something ordinary, for the flight. You know what I mean?”
She smiles.
“Just makes it easier at Immigration,” he sounds sheepish.
“I’m not a complete eejit,” she says. The last time she saw Eoin his hair, red, was down to his waist, and he was wearing a T-shirt saying “FCUK.” “Don’t worry. I’ll put my hair in a nice little bun.” She’d already planned to dye out the purple bit of her hair before travelling. “I’ve got a nice black suit all ready. I’ll look like a plainclothes nun.”
“That’s the spirit,” he says. She can see his grin but wonders if he’s cut his hair? It’s curly. It’s beautiful. He looks like a poet. “See you on Friday then, nine-thirty P.M.? Twenty-one thirty, right?”
“Right! Twenty-one thirty,” says Clara. “What time is it over there, now?”
She always asks this even though she knows perfectly well that it’s eleven hours ahead; in her head she has one of those clocks you see behind the reception desk in hotels. Hers gives the San Francisco time, so she knows what Eoin is likely to be doing, at any hour of the day or night. She asks just to prolong the conversation. But he’s already rung off.
All across the nation…
There’s a whole generation…
People in motion…
She flicks off the CD player and goes over to the radio.
There’s a report of a court case on the news. John Murphy, a farmer in the midlands, died after being assaulted by Dan and Robert Ryan, his neighbours. John Murphy’s heifer strayed into Robert Ryan’s field and John went after the cow to make her come back to his own field, her own field. A row broke out about property and trespassing and the men fought. John Murphy sustained head injuries and died almost a year later, never having come out of hospital. The question was, was it murder or homicide or neither? The jury would have to decide. The men were forty years old and this happened in 2008, although it sounded like the plot of a play you couldn’t put on because it is so dated and old fashioned.
When Clara comes home after the encounter with the people on Watermill Grove she sits down at the old blue table in her kitchen, which is filled with stuff she’s collected from skips and second-hand furniture auctions, and writes a letter to them. The letter says, “I have never encountered two old people whose faces were so uglified by anger.” It adds that she had reported them to the police.
She tears that letter up and writes another one.
The second letter says she had not blocked their driveway, that their behaviour was antisocial, and that they were a public nuisance. She adds that they would be hearing from her solicitor.
That one gets torn up too.
Then she thinks she could shame them by using a bit of reverse psychology. She gets a thank-you card and signs it with a false version of her name—Ellie Murphy is the pseudonym she selects—puts it in an envelope, and addresses it to the Residents, Assisi, Watermill Grove.
But she doesn’t post that either.
Clara has plenty to do—she should be packing, making lists, preparing for the long journey she must soon take, the day after tomorrow. But instead she sits and writes letters to two cranky old people whose names she doesn’t even know.
She can’t get them out of her head.
At six o’clock, when it’s dark, she takes the thank-you card and the porter cake—she can get another one tomorrow, or even at the airport, although it’ll cost more there. She drives back to Watermill Grove, parks around the corner and walks to “Assisi.”
A small blue Micra is parked in the driveway—even in the dark she can see it is a very bright blue. That wasn’t on the road this morning. It’s such a screaming shade of blue, she couldn’t have missed it. She wonders where their own car is, the red one. No sign of it. Then she wonders if they have a car at all. The Micra looks like the kind of car a grown-up daughter living at home, a schoolteacher or a civil servant, might have.
The curtains are drawn and there is no light at the front of the house, so she guesses they’re in the kitchen, eating their evening meal. Their tea. Rashers and sausages, sliced pan. Something like that. She walks quietly up to the door and leaves the card and the fruitcake, in its plastic wrapper, on the porch. A pot of geraniums catches her eye. Through the glass in the front door she sees a crack of light down the hall. She imagines she hears the sound of voices. The old woman’s she thinks, and a younger voice. The daughter’s? Maybe it’s just the news on TV. Almost without thinking what she’s doing, she roots in the flowerpot. Her fingers find a key ring, buried just half an inch below the surface. Exactly what they’re always warning you not to do. Two keys, the Yale and the long one for the safety lock.
Her hand opens the hall door.
Inside, exactly what you’d expect the old farts to have. A crucifix on the wall, a horrible paper with a pattern of some sort of sharp, unnatural looking grasses, like swords, all over the walls. The yellow anorak is hanging on one of those old walnut hallstands. Brown lino on the floor. It’s cold. They are too poor or too mean to keep the heating on.
A door at the end of the hall opens and the old witch comes out. She is still wearing the gardening trousers. But she has an apron on—a surprisingly nice apron, white with pink flowers and frills. A present from someone, obviously. It’s one of those aprons with a huge pocket all across the skirt and the old woman is carrying something, clothes pegs perhaps, in this pocket.
What?
Her face falls, falls as if it is an egg which has been hit with a fork and smashed. All the sharp cross features collapse into a puddle of shock.
It’s me, Clara says. She’s shy again, subdued by this old woman, just as she was this morning before her temper erupted. Feeling silly, she holds out the fruitcake, proffering it: the peace offering. She can’t find any words to go with it.
The old woman’s face becomes rigid. She doesn’t smile. She has never seen this woman smile, it occurs to Clara. And that is an odd thing, even for someone you’ve met just twice. The old woman lifts her hand. Clara moves closer, to hand over the cake. The old woman does not take the cake, however. No. That is not her plan at all. She dips her hand into that big pocket of hers and pulls out what she has hidden there. Which is a knife.
Now it’s Clara who gasps: What?
The witch lunges and stabs Clara in the chest.
It’s quite a good quality knife she’s got there, with a sharp point, and she does manage to make a dent in Clara’s leather jacket. But there’s no way she could injure Clara, given her own feebleness and the thickness of that purple leather.
It’s quite a good quality knife she has in her hand. And when that knife is in Clara’s hand, strong and deft and skillful, it slides easily into the old woman’s scrawny throat—it slices through the bulging blue veins as smoothly as it would into the white flesh of a boiled potato.
A puddle the colour of a cheerful red flower spreads over the brown floor.
Clara is already out the door, down the path. She is in her car, driving down Watermill Grove, before the old woman has realised what’s happened, before the old woman realises she’s going to die, on this ordinary autumn night, a few days before Halloween, while her daughter is down at Tesco’s getting a barbecued chicken for their tea and her husband is down at the chapel, at evening Mass.
It’s dark as Clara gets up but by the time she’s made the coffee morning has broken and another bad day begins. Rain spits against the window and turns to tears on the cold glass. A blast of wind ruffles the palm tree in her patio so badly that it looks like the tossed hair of some garden giant.
When she’s washing up, though, the sun creeps out from behind a cloud and casts light on the west side of the garden, shining on the heaps of leaves that lie in big drifts under the hedges. She’ll have to rake them up before she goes, if she gets a chance, if the rain holds off, if all goes well. Alan used to do that sort of thing, before they broke up, a
ges ago when Eoin was five. Eoin has never raked leaves, or done anything much in the garden. Your children know the garden is not their responsibility, whatever about the inside of the house.
A wild gust sends the leaves charging down the garden like a cavalry racing through the sleeping grass.
It’s then that she sees the old woman, in her mind’s eye, raking the leaves off her driveway, making those neat hillocks of golden light along the edges, and her husband helping her. She sees them there, moving together rhythmically, old people clearly accustomed to working together, raking leaves or washing dishes, hanging clothes on the line. They look like characters in a soothing pastoral painting, with a title such as “The Reapers,” or “The Gleaners.” They look like a couple working together making hay, or footing turf, or gathering seaweed, on a golden morning in a blessed landscape in the west of the country, miles and miles and miles away from this cold suburb, which looks as if all its roads and houses fell out of the sky and just happened to land on these unremarkable fields, miles from anywhere that makes sense. Miles from the city and miles from the mountains and miles from the river. Miles and miles from the silver sea.
TRANSLATED FROM IRISH BY THE AUTHOR
[IRELAND: ENGLISH]
KEVIN BARRY
Doctor Sot
Late in January, Doctor Sot felt the bad headaches come on again and he drank John Jameson whiskey against them. The naggins slipped pleasingly into a compartment of his leather satchel but they needed frequent replacing and he thought it best not to replace them always from the same off-licence in town. He aimed the car for the twenty-four-hour Tesco on the outskirts of the town. A cold morning was coloured iron-grey on the hills above town—brittle and hard the winter had been, and it was such clear, piercing weather that brought on the headaches. The heater in his eleven-year-old Mégane juddered bravely against the cold but inadequately and his fingers on the wheel had the look of a corpse’s. Steady nips of the Jameson, he found, kept in check the visions of which these headaches were often the presage.
Best European Fiction 2011 Page 26