Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  As the door of the Templemore Arms hissed shut behind him and the pub’s snugness enveloped him, he found himself among a crosssection of country townsfolk landed directly from church and from every Irish movie and from every whimsical Irish novel ever written. Most of them were drinking Guinness and eating many versions of potatoes, baked, mashed, boiled and chipped, with slabs of roast beef.

  Here in Irish-Novel-and-Film-World, Ryan’s expectations were comfortably confirmed. Talkative alderman types in Sunday suits and camelhair overcoats were drinking with clerks in cardigans and farmers in tweeds and bearded, ponytailed forty-somethings in motorbike leathers. Immediately Ryan was on the lookout for Cleary resemblances. This was important. Who in this crowd was his Irish family?

  What about that churchy-looking couple in matching Aran sweaters by the window, the only abstainers in the room, silently sipping fruit cordial, slowly munching beef, and staring over their partner’s head at the overcast sky outside? Contemporary loveless Clearys? He hoped not. He wanted to be related to a mob of cheery Irish novel-and-film reprobates with recognisable Cleary faces and generous natures who’d invite him back for dinner and drinks into the night, and be friends for life.

  Head thrown back, hand still gripping a half-full glass, a dark-haired youth slept in his chair, ignored by three generations of his companions. Dead drunk by noon. Was this snoring pisspot a Cleary?

  All smiles after their Holy Communion, neatly dressed children were thronging into the bar, too, and under a mirrored sign for Tullamore Dew their proud mothers began photographing them in their communion clothes. Apple-cheeked young Clearys?

  ‘Hold hands,’ a mother instructed a ginger boy and a dark-haired girl.

  ‘Eeeww,’ said the girl.

  To tell the truth, Ryan had never taken to Guinness. Too dark, too bitter, too rich, too somehow much. But he felt bound by all those Irish novels and films, as well as traveller’s good manners, to order the national beverage. When in Templemore. A pint was eventually poured by a tiny harassed barmaid who rushed back and forth while conducting a ferocious conversation with someone supportive but out of sight: ‘I don’t blame him for screwing her – it’s her I’m angry with! The skank! It wasn’t Eamon’s fault. He’d had four pints!’

  As he sieved through the faces of the bar’s inhabitants for Cleary lookalikes, Ryan considered the barmaid’s sorry situation. An unfaithful boyfriend. Was this Eamon here?

  What did a love rat look like? Every third male looked like a priest in mufti; every fourth one was almost drunk at 1 p.m., and some of them were already singing – but not the same song. He kept perusing them for family resemblances. Among the older men there were plenty of doppelgangers. With their big noses and elongated ears, many of these earnest drinkers could pass for Cleary great-uncles and grandfathers.

  A portrait of Saint Teresa glared down on three charity collection tins on the bar: tins to Help Send a Sick Child to Lourdes, The Holy Ghost Missions and The Cleft Palate Association of Ireland. He managed a second Guinness while hardly noticing it, and dropped a euro in the cleft-palate tin.

  A wave of fatigue struck him but he drank his way through it. ‘Sick kids should go to hospital, not Lourdes,’ he muttered to a taxi-dermied animal on a shelf beside Saint Teresa.

  His roaming gaze now focused on the fierce moth-eaten beast as he struggled to think of the name of any Irish animal. Did Ireland have any wild animals? Certainly no snakes. The circumstances called for a third Guinness but by now he felt less obliged to suck up to the Guinness company or demonstrate faux Irishness and boldly ordered a lager.

  ‘What’s that stuffed creature over the bar?’ he asked the little agitated barmaid as she poured his Heineken. Its black lips curled back over small vicious teeth. The ears had withered off. Evil glass eyes glinted. The animal was so frayed and ancient its tail had separated from its body and lay alongside it. ‘Is it a weasel? Maybe a stoat?’

  ‘A timber wolf,’ said the barmaid.

  ‘A timber wolf? It’s hardly a foot long!’

  ‘Well, he’s shrunk. He’s been there since 1905.’

  ‘And how long have you been here?’

  ‘Not quite as long. Since January. And I haven’t shrunk. I was always a little squirt.’

  Despite her tenseness she looked a bright spark. Milk-white Irish skin. Crow-black Irish hair and beautiful eyes to match. Straight out of any Irish book or film, of course. Another Irish cliché. A local girl, his further inquiries discovered, who’d just finished an MA thesis at Mary Immaculate College (The Effect of the Potato Famine on the Urban Development of Templemore, Co. Tipperary) and was now awaiting a teaching job while considering doing a PhD.

  ‘A Templemore expert. Just the person I need to talk to,’ he enthused. ‘For my own research.’ He introduced himself: Ryan Cleary, whose family had emigrated from Templemore to Richmond, Victoria in the mid 19th century. Who was on a mission to trace his roots. The religious designation was unmentioned.

  ‘I’m Siobhan.’

  ‘Any Clearys living in town these days, Siobhan? I don’t suppose there are any in the bar now?’ He glanced around again, alert to a sudden Cleary springing forth.

  ‘Maeve Cleary ran the tanning and nail salon. But she passed on a few years ago.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘She liked to party. Unmarried. A bit of a goer, Maeve.’

  Aunty Eily would be disappointed. All emigrated, he guessed. To America, Canada, Australia. Or gone to the tanning salon in the sky with Maeve the goer. His gaze followed Siobhan’s speedy progress around the room as she collected empty lunch plates. Despite the unlucky ancestor search, he was feeling convivial in this place. Tired but cheery. Afghanistan fell away.

  Given the conversational leeway allowed a foreign pub customer, especially an Australian (which was like being a nephew or kid brother), was it too brash to voice concern for this pretty girl who reminded him of Audrey Hepburn as she poured him a further beer? He did anyway. He felt he’d known her for ages. Siobhan with a rat for a boyfriend.

  ‘So, Siobhan, how’s life treating you at this very moment?’ Why was he talking like a leprechaun? Where had that lilt come from? Just in pronouncing that very Irish name of hers: Sha-VAWN.

  She frowned. ‘It’s been better, Ryan.’

  ‘Boyfriend troubles?’

  His eavesdropping got him a glance as stern as Saint Teresa’s. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  From his sympathetic look, yes he did. ‘You sounded upset.’

  She sighed as she bustled about, doing barmaid tasks. Wiping, polishing, rinsing, pouring. ‘That Eamon Flanagan attracts slutty girls like flies.’

  ‘I’m not keen on the sound of Eamon Flanagan.’

  ‘Eamon’s main trouble is that he oozes charisma.’

  ‘Now I’m sure of it.’

  ‘He’d charm the devil. For a boy without a job he’s got a very cool way of facing life.’ Now she was defending the charismatic rat. ‘Catch him sober and you wouldn’t meet a nicer fellow, a boy all the girls want to mother. He’s a sniper’s nightmare, Eamon.’

  Ryan lacked sleep and food and he’d been drinking for three solid hours since leaving a war zone. ‘A sniper’s nightmare?’

  ‘Meaning he’s a very thin boy. Hard to shoot.’

  ‘Dump the skinny oozing bastard, Siobhan.’ The priest had spoken. Sound Jesuitical advice.

  By the time, feeling gassy, he’d moved on to Irish whiskey to settle his stomach, the more sedate after-church lunchers were leaving the premises to the serious drinkers and singers.

  A light tenor in a Galway United hoodie pressured him into performing ‘Waltzing Matilda’, his turn to be a national cliché, then he was bullied into reciting The Man from Ironbark – only surrendering because this other pub extrovert, an Elvis renditionist (and a dairy farmer, the fellow said), had only one arm, which jolted his brain back to Afghanistan. Because by 5 p.m. (and how totally foreign to his personality was this?) h
is new Irish friends not only knew he’d come straight from the war but had inveigled him to share war stories.

  During this increasingly boisterous afternoon he’d always intended to eat one of those big roast beef and four-styles-of-potato meals, but apparently lunch had stopped at three. Now it was five and he hadn’t eaten since Afghanistan. In a five-hour-different time zone. And when was that? A day, a lifetime, ago?

  Strange that Jameson’s – a single shot or nip or tot, whatever they called it in County Tipperary– didn’t last as long as he expected. Hardly a drink at all. Three or four sips and it was gone. So he began drinking doubles. Hold the ice. And tried to retain enough tasteful equilibrium to stop after the first explosive-device horror story. Or think he had.

  ‘War stories are bad form,’ he slurred gravely to the one-armed dairy farmer, the hooded light tenor and Siobhan, whose momentum had slowed with the end of her shift, and who poured herself a white wine, pulled up a stool and joined them.

  She tapped a brisk text message on her phone, sighed deeply, and said loudly, ‘That’s Eamon done then. We were never going to amount to anything. The stupid bastard can count himself well and truly feckin’ dropped.’

  ‘You did the right thing,’ he burbled, and high-fived her, laboriously avoiding whiskey spillage by using his left hand.

  The dairy farmer and the hooded tenor now interrupted their impressions of Elvis singing ‘In the Ghetto’ to loudly discuss the looks of a girl in the corner. ‘She’s got a body off Baywatch and a face off Crimewatch,’ the tenor summed up. They both laughed uproariously.

  ‘Juvenile sexists,’ said Siobhan. Serious dark eyes now looked at Ryan over her wineglass. ‘What happens after Afghanistan?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’ The room was beginning to spin and he concentrated on articulating his next sentence, which was quite hard to say.

  ‘I’m very interested in your thesis for Mary Immaculate.’

  Mary Immaculate and Elvis in the ghetto were the last things he remembered when he woke the next morning to the sound of a panicky bird flapping and thumping against windows, and he gazed around a strange attic bedroom with an open skylight through which the bird had undoubtedly entered.

  Above him was a square of pumice-coloured sky. He was lying on an unfamiliar bed, fully dressed except for his shoes and jacket. He heard a toilet flush and in walked Siobhan.

  Jet-lagged, drunk, battle-weary, he’d spilled his guts the night before. Apparently there was no stopping his overwrought revelations, starting with admitting to being a padre, followed by his descriptions of various Tarin Kowt episodes that had ended in the last rites.

  They hadn’t done so at the time, but remembered faces and wounds brought him to tears in Templemore. Encouraged by Jameson’s he was eventually steered away from explosions and limb-gathering, the blessing of a booted foot here, half a torso, a lone ear and jawbone there. His pub friends turned to more mundane and intimate questions.

  A priest? ‘Seriously, Ryan, in this day and age?’ Siobhan had wondered. ‘Even Irish boys have stopped choosing that line of work. How did this thing happen?’

  And from what sweet and inquisitive Siobhan told him over their Monday-holiday breakfast in McDonald’s, it seemed he’d blabbed everything.

  ‘You went on and on about you loving this girl Kate in your student days,’ Siobhan said. ‘All very romantic. “Her eyes were out of an old film,” you told us. “Ava Gardner eyes.”’ And here the hooded tenor had chipped in, ‘Who’s that?’

  It started to come back. His rave about Kate marrying this fellow Ranald Margan instead of him. And Kate and Ranald separating after eight years.

  ‘Ranald was a wealthy farmer and a drunk,’ he’d ranted to the pub drinkers while righteously downing another double Jameson’s. ‘A white-wine alcoholic. Fancy a bloody farmer being a chardonnay drunk!’

  This was the dire situation Kate faced, he’d told them: Ranald getting through five bottles a day – chardonnay, riesling, sauvignon blanc – moving on to red for his fifth and final daily bottle, the merlot nightcap on his bedside table.

  ‘So copious red-wine spillage on the bedding. Acidic wine breath, wine seeping from every pore. And they were the better excretions.’ Ranald was a thirty-year-old blob by mid-afternoon. The farm was suffering. He couldn’t keep his farm workers. Kate had told him all this. She’d moved bedrooms first, then moved out.

  Hearing this from Siobhan, Ryan felt ashamed. Speaking so peevishly, he must have sounded like a wowser aunt. This wasn’t the way he thought of himself, not the wise and non-judgemental modern Jesuit priest. More like the sanctimonious prat he also recognised.

  ‘I see her point. It sounds like quite a serious grog habit,’ Siobhan said.

  He’d told them everything. How Kate had left Ranald Margan and moved to the city, to Melbourne, and how he’d accidentally run into her in Readings bookshop in Carlton one Friday afternoon.

  They were both twenty-nine and he was still single. No, of course he wasn’t a priest then. Or a celibate. His new Tipperary friends were especially curious about the celibacy situation. He was a lecturer in American literature at the University of Melbourne. Melville, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow, McCarthy, DeLillo. Who ever heard of a celibate arts lecturer?

  One who still carried a torch for Kate. While deep in his cups had he spared his pub companions the ensuing erotic and dramatic details? Kate’s and his first weekend away in Sydney, for example? The little boutique hotel in Woollahra? The bedroom so small it was called a cosy? Apparently not. Of course he’d mentioned the denouement, too. Try stopping him.

  ‘Your sexy shenanigans certainly brought the singing to a screaming halt,’ Siobhan said. ‘What with you being a priest and so forth.’

  ‘I wasn’t one then,’ he reminded her.

  He’d told of them making plans another evening in Jimmy Watson’s. Of Kate’s relief at how civilised Ranald was being about her leaving. He was subdued, naturally, but calm and somehow resolved. Thankfully, there were no children to complicate matters.

  And his new pub friends learned of Ranald and Kate flying together back to their property in the Western District to discuss the divorce, to pick up her belongings and finalise things.

  To conclude things. And of how on that clear and windless summer Sunday morning Ranald Margan, whether inept, hungover, angry, insane, or perhaps all four, had piloted his Cessna 172 into a highly visible sandstone mountain in the Grampians.

  ‘So,’ Ryan had mumbled to Siobhan and the one-armed dairyman and the hooded light tenor as they helped him from the pub. ‘So.’

  Siobhan didn’t say, but he guessed by that stage he was probably weeping. ‘So. From that Sunday morning, January the nineteenth, 2004, nearly thirty years of age, not a naive kid, old enough to know my own mind, I was on my way to the priesthood.’

  ‘Men have joined up for lesser reasons,’ Siobhan said. He thought he remembered her holding his hand.

  Outside her flat on this holiday Monday the streets were almost deserted. The pale sun had departed to a mystery location and the cold Tipperary sky had the drabness of asphalt. So did the pebble-brick facade of her apartment block, and the hoodies of the two teenagers sauntering past carrying hurling sticks, and the anonymous grey birds huddling together on the wires. Ireland blended into its bitumen backdrop.

  His hire car stood by the curb; the hooded tenor had driven them here, he learned. He felt as jumpy and nervous as on any Afghan morning. Amazingly, it had been an Afghan morning only twenty-four hours before.

  Inside McDonald’s the air was fuggy-sweet, an aroma redolent of fries and baby vomit. She asked for a dish called Flahavan’s Quick Oats porridge and he liked the sound of her voice as she ordered it.

  ‘I see the McDonald’s Irish breakfast menu is a bit different from ours at home,’ he said, sticking with the familiar bacon-and-egg McMuffin.

  As she tucked into her porridge, Siobhan said, ‘In case you’re worried about it, you didn’t try a
nything last night. The holy orders, I guess, and the drink. A well-behaved boy, apart from the snoring.’

  There was a limit to his embarrassment then, here in the town and country of his ancestors, where a nice girl smiled at him and the trapped bird still flapped and thrashed in his head, and he was grateful for that. He’d made new friends, flown the Cleary flag, and wasn’t the whole purpose of the Jesuits the propagation of the faith by any means possible?

  6

  The Yips had been placated. Carefully avoiding Rosie Godber and her clump of cronies, gingerly marshalling Audrey Yip over the rough and dusty surface of the now well-trodden paddocks, Hugh led the Chinese trio into the vines.

  An unseasonably warm northerly gusted across the vineyard. On the dusty wind came the moans of cows from distant and nearby farms, mourning the late-spring weaning and the calves abruptly stolen from them. At the grieving sounds Mrs Yip jumped and the wind ruffled her copious body coverings.

  Fortunately, Christine had eventually surfaced, and though appearing a little distracted she immediately soothed the visitors with local souvenirs she kept on hand for important visitors: Eureka gold coins, with a scene of gold-panning miners on one side, Queen Victoria on the other. Real gold coins, too, containing 0.5 of a gram of 99.9 per cent pure gold. They’d cost $59.95 apiece.

  The coins saved the day. Christine could turn on the charm when necessary, Hugh knew. Having considered the Yips’ possible financial interest in the vineyard, she’d clearly decided to do so, and he was grateful. However, her distant manner with him continued. Now and then he caught her staring at him seriously, as if trying to remember who he was, and what was their connection, then looking away, as if still unsure.

  He was weary of asking, ‘What’s up?’ In twenty years had that question ever gathered any other response than ‘Nothing’? But ‘nothing’ always meant ‘something’. Something important. Something he, however innocently and inadvertently in his view, had done wrong. He was weary of quietly holding her stiffening shoulders. Of aiming a small well-intentioned kiss that ended up on the side of her head. Of her answer, and vague, forced smile: ‘Nothing. Just tired.’ Or ‘Just very busy.’