I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  Find a minute to run across to Nell with the present she would have been getting tonight, if the party had gone ahead. And no doubt there were plenty of other jobs she hadn’t yet thought of.

  She yawned again as Gavin reappeared. She’d have this glass and then she’d head up to bed, and maybe even sleep.

  The doorbell rang.

  Laura sat up. The doorbell? What time was it?

  ‘I’ll go,’ Gavin said, setting his glass on the mantelpiece.

  He left the room. She heard the front door opening, an eruption of voices in the hall.

  ‘Who on earth—?’ began Gladys.

  Laura scrambled to her feet, smoothing down her skirt, thinking fast.

  The sitting-room door opened and in waltzed Lelia, owner of Roone’s most popular café, baker of scones and a lot more. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ she cried, festive in a red and white party dress, flicking drops from her dishevelled hair before planting a kiss on Laura’s cheek. ‘You can blame the minibus, I told Pádraig to check it yesterday but I may as well have talked to the wall – and tonight not a dicky bird until he got the jump leads out.’

  ‘You came in the minibus?’

  ‘Of course we came in the minibus – how else would everyone fit?’

  Lelia’s carpenter husband Pádraig was the proud owner of an ancient twelve-seater vehicle that he dusted down every summer in order to ferry visitors around the island on a historical tour. According to Nell, most of the history had only happened in Pádraig’s head, but the tours were very popular.

  ‘Here we are—’

  ‘Hello there—’

  ‘Such a night—’

  And in they all surged, laughing and exhilarated after their dash in the wind and rain from the minibus to the front door. Thrusting bottles and gifts at Laura, filling the place with perfume and chatter and a whiff of the outside. In they all crowded, Nell and James, Imelda and Hugh, Ita and Dougie and Pádraig, exclaiming over the tree, shaking hands with Gladys, perching wherever they found a place – ledges, couch arms, windowsills – as Laura fled to the kitchen after hissing at Gavin to keep everyone talking.

  While the wine was heating she whipped the cream and tumbled the mince pies into the microwave – no time to wait for the proper oven – and assembled plates and glasses, listening to the bursts of laughter and snatches of chat from the front room.

  ‘Can I help?’

  Nell in blue, her hair pinned up with sparkly clips.

  Laura indicated the trays, stacked on a shelf under the worktop. ‘Grab a couple of those, and get out forks and napkins. And bags of nuts in that press – you can dump them into dishes. I would have had it all done, but I was sure nobody would make it with the weather.’

  Nell pulled open the cutlery drawer. ‘You haven’t been living here long enough. Takes more than a bit of a storm to stop us coming to a party. Did you notice, by the way, that Colette is missing?’

  ‘I didn’t, with the shock of you all arriving – where is she?’

  ‘Never got here. She was aiming for an afternoon ferry, so she must have been stranded. We can’t contact her with the phones gone.’

  ‘Ah no, that’s a shame.’

  ‘It is – I know James was looking forward to having her for Christmas, the first time she would have spent it on Roone. We’re assuming she headed back to Dublin, so she’ll be on her own for Christmas. Tim and Katy are gone to Donegal with the kids.’

  ‘Ah, too bad.’

  Tim, the man Nell nearly married, before she realised she preferred his brother James. Katy, the woman Tim found when Nell deserted him.

  The microwave pinged. Laura lifted out the pies and tossed in another handful. ‘What about your father? What kind of Christmas is he going to have?’

  Nell’s father Denis, who’d abandoned Nell’s mother Moira, his wife of over thirty years, and his long-standing job as principal of Roone’s primary school, when he’d fallen in love with someone else a few years earlier. The whole island, not surprisingly, thrown into a state of disbelief.

  The new romance hadn’t lasted – apparently she was married too – but there had been no reconciliation with Moira, who had since died. And for the past several months Denis had been volunteering in a refugee camp in Sudan. Making amends maybe, for past hurts.

  Nell tucked napkins around forks. ‘He says they’re planning a slap-up meal tomorrow. I’m not sure I believe him.’

  A slap-up meal in a refugee camp didn’t sound very likely. Probably wouldn’t feel remotely like Christmas either, under the blazing African sun. And Nell would miss him: those two had a strong bond.

  ‘Has he any plans to come home?’

  ‘He says Easter. We’ll see.’ She paused, a napkin halfway around a fork. ‘The weird thing is, I think he’s genuinely happy now. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Considering where he is, and the conditions he must be living in. I’m sure he doesn’t tell me half of it. But he does seem to have found … I don’t know, some kind of peace of mind there. After all that had gone before, I mean.’

  ‘He’s helping others,’ Laura said. ‘He’s making a difference. I think that always brings its own happiness.’ She ladled steaming wine into glasses. ‘Go out to the scullery and look at my cake, see what you think.’ Give her a laugh.

  A moment of silence from the scullery, and then: ‘Wow. That’s … some cake.’

  ‘I know it looks shocking. Hopefully it’ll taste OK.’

  ‘You’re not cutting it tonight?’

  ‘I can’t – the icing isn’t set, we’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Imagine the look on Gladys’s face when she lays eyes on it – I’ve managed to hide it from her so far.’

  ‘Never mind Gladys – well done to you, your first Christmas cake. There’ll be no stopping you after this.’

  ‘You must be joking; never again. You can make ours next year – I’ll be happy to pay you in apples and eggs, or you could have one of the goats.’

  ‘Tell you what – you bake it, I’ll ice it.’

  ‘Done.’ She put the last of the glasses on the tray. ‘Well, this is thrown together, but it’s the best anyone is going to get tonight, so let’s bring it in.’

  And for the next few hours she forgot about everything else as they talked of the progress of the new community centre, and agreed that the street decorations in the village were charming, and bemoaned the cutbacks that had reduced the mobile-library visits to once every three weeks, and marvelled at Annie Byrnes for her accurate weather predictions, and laughed at the notion of Santa’s toys being blown from his sleigh.

  And mercifully, Lelia and Gladys seemed to have forgotten the earlier scone incident – or if it wasn’t forgotten, it was being tacitly ignored by both of them. Gladys must have decided to behave herself for Christmas.

  Outside, the storm raged on, the rain and wind showing no sign of lessening. And then, shortly before midnight, just as people were starting to talk about going home, the various lamps in the room gave a few simultaneous rapid flickers before finally blinking off, leaving the place lit only by the fire.

  And while everyone was exclaiming in dismay, Gavin called, ‘Shush – listen!’

  They stopped. Laura became aware, beneath the noise of the storm, of a peculiar creaking sound, like a heavy ancient door being pushed slowly open. Increasing in volume, becoming too loud to be nothing. Too loud not to be working up to something bad.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked – but before anyone could respond there was a gigantic deafening crash, so intense and booming that it caused the floor to vibrate beneath their feet, it rocked the old house to its foundations.

  When it stopped, there was a second of total silence in the room.

  ‘What was that?’ Nell breathed – and as if the words released her, Laura leaped from her seat, banging her thigh painfully against a table, sending plates and glasses crashing to the floor as she stumbled in the flickering light towards the door.

  The hall was in complete darkness. Ove
r the shriek of the wind, over the sound of the various alarmed voices behind her, she could hear something far more chilling: a child’s scream.

  Her children.

  Heart in her mouth, terror beating in her chest, she rushed blindly up the pitch-black stairs.

  It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon when they pushed open the door of the pub. Tilly’s first impressions were of heat and noise and a pleasant sweetish burned smell, and lots and lots of people – every one of whom, it seemed, turned to stare as Tilly entered with her companion, who had introduced herself by then as Colette.

  They approached the bar counter, the sea of people parting like water to let them through, nobody making any secret of their curiosity. Did they never see strangers here?

  One of the two men behind the counter nodded cheerfully at them as he skimmed foam from the top of a pint glass and delivered it to a nearby customer. ‘Bad day,’ he said, through the bushy gingery beard that covered the bottom half of his face, and a good proportion of his torso. ‘But ye’re not too drenched.’

  His eyebrows, as bushy as the beard, shot wildly from his forehead and ran together above his flame-red nose, as if trying to compensate for his completely bald and very shiny head. ‘Ye weren’t heading to Roone, by any chance?’ he asked, shoving coins into a cash register and slamming it shut. ‘I’d say Leo had to cancel the ferry, had he, with the weather?’

  ‘He had,’ Colette replied, their first opportunity to get a word in. ‘I’ve been trying to phone the island and I can’t get through. Leo rang from there about ten minutes ago, but now there seems to be no service.’

  ‘Hold on,’ he said, ‘I have a cousin there.’ He pressed keys on the phone he took from his breast pocket and listened for a few seconds before shaking his head. ‘Nothing – must be a mast down. We usually go when the island goes.’ He tried another number, shook his head again, returned the phone to his pocket with a shrug. ‘What can you do?’ he asked.

  The same fatalism Tilly recalled Paddy displaying when they’d arrived at the pier to see the ferry disappearing. The same acceptance Colette had shown when the ferry had been cancelled. Probably the most sensible reaction, in the face of unchangeable circumstances.

  ‘What’ll ye have?’ he asked them, and Colette said they were looking for accommodation, but in the meantime she’d like a Baileys, no ice. Tilly chose apple juice, wondering how much it cost but feeling obliged to order something.

  She needn’t have worried. ‘On the house,’ he said, ‘for Christmas. I’ll get Ursula to show ye the rooms in a while.’ Winking at Tilly as he spoke, turning away to attend to someone else before they had a chance to thank him.

  Colette lifted her glass. ‘Isn’t that nice of him? I wonder what the rooms will be like – we might have to stay after this.’

  Tilly sipped her juice. She hadn’t said anything on the short drive there about her money situation, still trying to decide what her best option was. Should she enquire about the nightly rate before she bothered Paddy and Breda? Maybe she could do one night here if it wasn’t too expensive, and take her chances on the next.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ Colette went on, ‘but I could do with something to eat. Let’s see if they do any food, when I can catch his eye again.’

  Food now: this was getting out of hand. Time to come clean. ‘Listen,’ she began, and told her companion as briefly as she could about her misadventure in London, and Breda and Paddy’s hospitality the night before. ‘I need to find out how much they charge here,’ she said. ‘If it’s too dear I need to go back to Dingle.’

  But Colette shook her head. ‘There’s no sense in dragging that man out again in this weather. I’m happy to cover your stay here, it’s not a problem.’

  Tilly looked at her in astonishment. ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly expect you to do that.’

  Colette smiled. ‘My dear, it’s nothing at all. I can well afford it – and to be honest, I’ll be glad of the company, especially if the lodgings are a bit … haphazard, which I suspect they might be. Now,’ she went on, raising a hand in the barman’s direction, ‘let’s see if they can feed us first, will we?’

  ‘Ye’re in luck,’ the barman told them. ‘We don’t normally do food, only crisps and peanuts – but we have grub in today for the Christmas, for this lot of rowdies, and we were just about to throw it out to them’ – and with that, he and his companion produced little baskets that were filled with sausages and French fries and chicken wings. They made their way through the bar, depositing their offerings on tables and counter, to the delight of the locals, who had plenty to say about it:

  ‘Ye must have won the Lotto, lads.’

  ‘They’ll be hikin’ up the price of our pint after this.’

  ‘I hope them sausages aren’t past their sell-by date, Bernard.’

  ‘Eat up,’ a man close to Tilly and Colette advised. ‘These savages will have them polished off if ye don’t’ – so Tilly took a sausage.

  ‘You’re not from around here,’ the man remarked, and Tilly told him she was Australian.

  ‘Is that a fact now?’ He turned towards the crowd and yelled, Tony MacMonagle! in a bark that carried easily above the conversations that had resumed all around them.

  An equally loud What? came back from somewhere to their left.

  C’mere – you’re wanted!

  And presently a man emerged from the knots of people, half a sausage in his hand. Small and bony and weather-beaten, he wore a raggedy cable-knit bottle-green jumper that ended halfway down his thighs, and trousers so stained with numerous splashes of paint that it was difficult to be sure of their original colour.

  ‘This young girl is from Australia,’ the first man told him. ‘I think you might have a song for her, would you?’

  A song? Tilly was bemused, but Tony MacMonagle showed no surprise. He solemnly finished his sausage and wiped both hands on his trousers before offering Tilly his right to shake.

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ he told her. ‘Welcome to the kingdom of Kerry. You’ve come to the best part of Ireland’ – and immediately he threw back his head and launched into a song, which prompted instant shushing among the crowd.

  He sang in a most unexpectedly soulful tenor voice. He was word perfect and unselfconscious. He sang with eyes closed of his true love who had black hair and lips like roses; he sang of his sadness because they were apart – and for the few minutes that the song lasted, nobody at all made a sound.

  When he had finished, his audience broke into enthusiastic applause. He gave a little bow to Tilly and vanished once more into the crowd before the whoops and cheers had fully faded.

  ‘Now so.’ The bearded barman, whose name they now knew was Bernard, materialised behind the counter again. ‘’Tisn’t every day you get serenaded, I’d say.’ Cutting slices from a lemon, flinging them into a glass, tumbling ice in after it, moving swiftly away before she could respond.

  As she and Colette ate, they were drawn into conversation by those around them, who plied Tilly in particular with questions. Many of her interrogators seemed to think there was every possibility that she’d met their various relatives who’d emigrated to Australia, and she felt almost apologetic when she had to admit to not knowing them.

  At one stage a man approached the counter and introduced himself, while he waited to be served, as Kieran McHugh, owner of the village newsagent’s and petrol pumps.

  ‘’Tis quiet here in the winter,’ he told them, ‘although it can be lively enough in the summertime. Kerry is a popular spot with the tourists, and Roone in particular gets its share – and most of them have to pass through here on the way to the island. We like having it to ourselves when the season is over, but ’tis nice every now and again to see a few new faces.’

  Somewhere along the way, Tilly learned that the smoky smell was from the turf that burned in the fireplace, turf that had been growing in a nearby bog. ‘That fire hasn’t gone out in over ninety years,’ a man in a knobbl
y cream sweater told her. ‘Bernard and Cormac build up the new one from the old ashes every morning.’

  Bernard and Cormac were brothers, and joint owners of the bar. ‘Ursula is Cormac’s wife,’ the man went on, indicating a woman in a tight red blouse – improbably black hair, lipstick the colour of blueberries – who was taking a turn behind the bar with her husband while his brother went around collecting the empties. ‘Bernard is still a bachelor,’ the man added, ‘no woman has been quick enough to catch him yet, though plenty have tried, including Ursula.’

  Tilly looked at him in astonishment.

  ‘Oh yes – before she married Cormac she was doing a strong line with Bernard. We thought it was only a matter of time, but then we heard it was all off – and within six months wasn’t she walking down the aisle with Cormac.’

  Had she thrown Bernard over, or had it been the other way around? Tilly watched the barman as he gathered up the glasses, stopping often to exchange a smiling remark with his customers. She wouldn’t have taken him for a ladies’ man, but by the sound of it he and Ursula had been pretty close. She wondered how Cormac felt, married to a woman who’d chosen his brother first. Maybe it didn’t bother him. Maybe he only cared that she’d ended up with him.

  Then again, maybe Ursula had planned it that way all along, going out with one brother only until she’d figured out how to get her hands on the other. Who knew, when it came to love? Certainly not Tilly. She hadn’t a clue how it worked.

  The afternoon wore on. The food baskets were cleared away, and more songs were sung, and an old man recited a poem with several verses on the theme of winter. At one stage a group of men came in carrying fiddles and guitars, and something that resembled an outsize tambourine. They were enthusiastically welcomed, and space was made for them to the left of the giant fireplace.

  The music they played was similar to the snatches Tilly had heard coming from the Dingle pubs the evening before. Lively and cheerful, dipping and swooping, and accompanied by many yips and yahoos from the listeners. The tambourine, she was told, was a type of Irish drum made with goatskin, whose name was very peculiar. Its owner beat out a tattoo using both ends of a stubby stick, his hand moving so fast that at times it became a blur.