by Tim Buckley
“You wanna help me, gorgeous?” he said to her.
Cara nodded but said nothing and didn’t move.
“Tell you what then, why don’t you tell me which brick to lay next, yeah? You just point to the brick, and I’ll whack it on. Deal?”
She nodded again and Robbie laid more cement on the top of the wall and scraped away the excess.
“Right,” he said, turning back to Cara, “which one next?”
Cara leaned forward without moving her feet and pointed at the bricks laid out on the pallet.
“This one?” Robbie said, picking up a brick.
She nodded, her face serious as a judge.
“Nice one,” he said, and laid it on the cement bed.
This went on for a little while, Cara pointing at the pallet, Robbie laying the chosen brick. Then she got braver, shuffled a step closer, then another, then squatted down on her haunches beside Robbie as they built the wall. After that, Robbie would often come to find her so that they could do their jobs together and then some of the others involved her in what they were doing. I suppose she became a bit of a mascot and they got used to having her around so that she left a gap when she disappeared. When Stevie’s accident came on top of that, it was perhaps little wonder that the mood on site had darkened.
Nathan arrived early in the afternoon and we talked a bit about progress and budgets and changing lumber suppliers to get a better deal for the interior work.
“How’s Emily?” he said, when we’d finished what we were doing and we were on our own again. “Settled in at home again?”
“I think so,” I said, “she seems to be. At least she was until that Observer article. I’ve got a feeling she’s on a tightrope, it wouldn’t take much to knock her off and your guess is as good as mine which side she’d land. But she seems calmer, more at peace, so that’s good.”
“Why don’t you guys come over at the weekend? We’ll have a barbie, drink too much wine! Be good to see you both, it’s been a while.”
“Thanks, mate. I’ll talk to her tonight and…”
Just then one of those novelty musical car horns blasted out from the far side of the site. I looked over and didn’t recognise the car until the driver climbed out and leaned on the gate with a stupid grin plastered over his fat face. Gretz, with a few of his idiot mates.
“What the fuck…” I put down my coffee mug and strode over to the gate.
“Easy, Wilde,” Nathan said, following me over.
“G’day, Wilde,” Gretz grinned from under his baseball cap as I got to the gate.
“Get the fuck away from here, Gretz, or I’ll kick your stupid face in!” I growled at him.
“What?” he raised his hands in mock indignation. “Last I heard it was a free country, unless you own this too?” He gestured with a hand to the land he was standing on and his mates sniggered.
“I’m warning you, Gretz…”
His face changed and suddenly he was the mean little shit I’d seen so often before.
“Or what?” he sneered, but with no humour. “You’ll give me a kicking? I’m sure people would love to read about that in the Observer, ’cos you’re such a popular guy around town and all, eh?”
I reached out to grab him by the collar but Nathan pulled me back.
“Easy, Wilde,” he said, again.
I felt like my face was on fire and my breath was coming in short bursts. I knew Nathan was right, but I just wanted to strangle the last drops of life out of his fat-rolled neck.
“So next time,” Gretz said, leaning closer to me and dropping his voice, “maybe it’s your head gets stuffed in the bin. Not sure the cops’d be too interested in going after a local kid from a good, upstanding family, eh? Especially if he’s just taught a lesson to a blow-in that nobody wants around.”
He had me by the balls and he knew it. Maybe I could humiliate him, but he’d get over it. There was every chance he could get me driven out of town.
“Everything all right, boss?” Three of the workers had come over from the site and one of them spat on the ground in front of where Gretz was standing.
“It’s fine, boys,” Nathan said, “these kids were just off. Isn’t that right, Walter?”
Gretz took a step back, his bravado fading a little bit in the face of a few angry men.
“Yeah, we’re just off,” Gretz smirked, regaining his bluster among his back-slapping buddies. “See you soon, Wilde!”
They all climbed back into the car and he skidded away in a wheel-spun cloud of dust.
“Thanks, fellas,” Nathan said to the guys, “let’s get back to work, eh?”
“Little shit!” I spat the words out, seething as the car and the blaring horn faded into the distance.
“He’s got you, Wilde,” Nathan said, quietly. “He’s got you and there’s nothing you can do about it for now. So stay clear and wait your time. We’ll get him, don’t you worry about that, we’ll get him in the end.”
35
Emily wanted me to buy a new suit for the day we went to the National Lottery’s offices in Abbey Street to pick up the cheque, but I said no. It was a long time since I’d worn a suit and I told myself that this wasn’t going to change me, to change who I was. We had ticked the box that said we didn’t want our win to be made public and so there was no fanfare – no streamers or ticker tape or marching bands. It felt incongruous, like after the death of someone close when the world moves on because nothing much has happened, but your world will never be the same again.
There’s a lady there whose job it is, I suppose, to make sure that jackpot winners don’t run out and buy a chateau in the south of France or twelve stretch limousines or Carlow. She talked us through what would happen next and advised us to do nothing for one month, but to write down all of the ideas we had and to read that list again in thirty days. We would, she assured us, cross out most of the things as ridiculous indulgences, and then we could think more clearly about what was left on the list. She warned us that, despite opting for privacy, it was possible that news of our win might get out and that we might get begging letters from all kinds of seemingly worthy causes. She told us to add those to the list and look at them again in a month.
It was good advice and, for the most part, we listened to it. We did buy some new clothes and we treated ourselves to eating out, but it was more Four Star Pizza than Michelin-starred haute cuisine. I went to the taxman as instructed by Brian, but instead of working out a ten-month payment schedule I handed him a cheque for what I owed him and walked out with a spring in my step. I felt sure that the Lottery Lady would have approved and it felt really good. Like, fantastic good. I hadn’t fully appreciated the burden that had been weighing on my shoulders until I was finally able to come out from underneath it.
Emily and I talked about the row we’d had and, eventually, put it behind us. It had been, we agreed, a storm in a teacup borne of the stress that we were both under at the time. I told her that I had just been worried about her and about what she was throwing away; she told me that she never wanted to feel that she was alone in any decision she ever made again, no matter how ridiculous I thought it to be. I loved her, and none of our good fortune would have meant anything without her, so we moved on and we might even have been a bit better for it.
And so, with not much else to do – or that we dared to do before the Lottery Lady’s month was up – we were left to thinking about what we might do next. The money was enough to make our dreams come true but, during those weeks, I was struck by the slightly unnerving realisation that I didn’t really have any dreams. I sat listening to ideas flow out of Emily like a torrent of passionate possibility, but I couldn’t really articulate what this new-found wealth actually meant for me. Sure, it got me out of trouble with the taxman and it saved me from looking for an office job to pay the rent. But apart from that? The only dreams I had revolved
around writing an acclaimed novel, winning one of the great literary prizes, adapting the screenplay for Hollywood, winning an Oscar, being invited to address all of the great book festivals and, perhaps, being writer-in-residence at a top university. The money was great, but it didn’t make me a better writer. All it did was give me more time to be a mediocre one.
Brendan was, I think, genuinely pleased for me but warned me to be careful. The money, he said, wasn’t the end, only a means to get to the end. With all of the distractions it would bring, he warned me that writing might even be harder now, especially since I didn’t actually have to do it anymore. Fear of failing was a powerful force for a writer, he said, but only if failing was really a serious problem. For a rich man, it might not be such a big deal.
It was three weeks after our trip to Abbey Street and Emily and I were sitting on the sofa in the flat, a bottle of wine on the table in front of us, the lights turned down low and music playing softly. For maybe the first time in those three weeks, we had taken time to draw breath. We sat in silence for what must have been an hour before she turned to look at me.
“Every minute since this all started,” she said, “I’ve been asking myself what it all means for us – what we should do? How do we make sure that we make the most of every chance this has given us? How do we make sure we don’t waste it or let it ruin us?”
She paused to pour more wine.
“I’ve had hundreds of ideas, thousands maybe, but when I really think about each one, it turns out to be an anticlimax. And after all of that thinking, do you know what I’ve come up with?”
She paused again for effect and I shook my head.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And you know why?”
Emily was never a great drinker and, even though we were only halfway through the bottle of wine, she was already getting a little bit tipsy.
“I’ll tell you why,” she said, poking a finger into my chest. “I’ll tell you. Because my mind is trapped. My head is stuck here in Dublin and it can’t get out to where the real dreams are. Because they’re not here, Wilde, they’re not in Dublin. They’re out there, in the world, in places we haven’t even heard of.”
This was a departure that I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t that I was rooted in Dublin, I had never said that we would never leave. It was just that we hadn’t talked about it and I hadn’t really thought about where we would end up.
“You think we should leave Dublin?”
“I don’t think it, Wilde, I know it. We can stay here and be comfortable until we die, or we can get the hell out of here and live.”
I looked at her and let the words sink in.
“So where should we go?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what – every time I come up with a plan and that plan means being here, I come away with this empty feeling in my stomach, a feeling of disappointment. I can’t imagine using all of this to build a future here that’s going to make us happy, or one that’s going to inspire us.”
She put her glass down on the table and pointed her finger at me for maximum effect and to make sure there could be no misunderstanding.
“Listen to me. If we’re still here in ten years’ time, I know we’ll look back and we’ll realise we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve missed an amazing opportunity that very few people are given.”
I had tried not to think too much about the future or to make too many plans. I had taken the Lottery Lady’s advice very much to heart and I wanted to let the dust storm settle before I thought about what all of this meant for us and for our future. But in those quiet moments when I did allow my mind to wander and when I allowed myself little sneaky glimpses at the future, I had to admit that the future always looked sunnier and warmer and a lot more exotic than the present. I hadn’t thought about it, but it was like my head had already had some ideas and maybe those ideas weren’t set in Dublin.
I suppose I knew, deep down, that it was a leap. We had only been together for a relatively short time and the wisdom in heading off on our own to some far-flung corner of the world probably wouldn’t stand up to much of an interrogation. But, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much to keep us there. We weren’t tied by our careers, we rented the flat and we really didn’t have very much in the way of belongings. Cian and Ronan and the others that I hung around with were good friends but, honestly, our friendship was based on a place and a time and it would change and be overtaken by other priorities as we got older and as our lives took shape. We might have been close but I didn’t really think that they’d miss me any more than I’d miss them. Emily’s friends, likewise, weren’t so embedded in her life that leaving them behind would be so much of a wrench. Her parents were far away and as for my family, well, that part of my life was long over.
So why wouldn’t we take off together? Why would we not look for inspiration wherever we might find it? Why wouldn’t we take the chance we’d been given to see the world and start afresh? And it wasn’t like we could never come back, was it?
Turns out there was no reason why not and so that’s what we did.
36
I didn’t hear from Cathal for a long time after he and Seán stormed out of the meeting in the solicitors’ office in Thurles and, to be honest, I didn’t really expect ever to hear from him again. We were never brothers and whatever bond we shared as cousins was irrevocably cut that day. Gerry had bitched and griped about my refusal to fall in with the wishes that Eoin had set out in his will but he had to concede eventually that I didn’t have to accept my inheritance and that he would just have to sort it out. As I said, I had cards from Mairéad on my birthday and at Christmas, but that was it. There were times when I would have liked to have had a family, but mostly I couldn’t miss what I had never really had. When Cara was born, it hurt a little that I couldn’t share the joy of it with my father and mother, but even that was tempered by the fact that Emily’s parents weren’t part of it either and so I wasn’t given anything to miss. I didn’t really miss having Eoin or Mairéad in our lives at that time. Eoin was my hero, but he could never be my father.
Hence my surprise when I answered my phone one day to hear Cathal’s voice on the other end of the line.
“All right, Wilde?” he said.
“Cathal! How’s it going? It’s been a long time.”
We swapped a bit of awkward small talk and he told me about his wife and that he had two children. To be honest, he didn’t really tell me anything, just the unembellished bare facts – names, ages, colour of hair and eyes, that was about it. He told me about Seán and his wife and kids, again just the bare bones, and he talked a bit about Mairéad. She, he did tell me, had faded in the years after Eoin died. He sounded wistful when he talked about her, perhaps for the mother she was to him and hadn’t been for a while. Maybe he lost both his parents in that accident. I told him about Emily and Cara and about the lighthouse that I’d just bought but I got the sense that he couldn’t really have cared less about what was going on in my world. He avoided any mention of the farm until he came to the point of the call and then it all started to make sense.
He had, with another local farmer, set up a production facility to make local artisanal cheeses. I’m not sure what made them “artisanal” but in an Ireland newly obsessed with craft beers and micro-distilleries, small and quirky was, apparently, golden. They’d borrowed money to buy the machinery and to provide some working capital while they got the whole thing off the ground. The venture, however, had stubbornly refused to get airborne and they had fallen behind with the bank repayments. They had never even considered that the venture might fail and Cathal had somehow, and naively, been talked into providing a personal guarantee as the security for the loan. The relationship had soured under the pressure of the business and now his partner could walk away scot-free if the bank foreclosed while Cathal could lose everything. I thought about Mairéad and how, to her, it must have felt
like the worst kind of déjà vu, the banks beating at their door and threatening to take everything all over again.
And that, predictably enough, was why he had called. I had told Mairéad about our Lottery win and we had given her some money, not a lot but enough to assuage any guilt I might have had. She had obviously told Cathal and, to be fair, I hadn’t asked her not to. I hadn’t offered anything to Cathal or to Seán; it might have been churlish but I had felt absolutely no need. The lady from the Lottery had warned us that we would feel obliged to help friends and family. It had taken longer than she might have expected, but that train had finally pulled into the station.
“Look, Wilde,” he said, after setting out the crisis he faced, “I don’t want to do this. After everything that’s happened, you can probably tell how hard it is for me to ask you, but I’m desperate. If I don’t get the money in the next ten days, I’m going to lose the house. Me, Helen, the kids, we’ll be out on the road. The factory will be sold and they’ll take my land. I’ll be ruined, the family will be ruined.”
He stopped and waited, I said nothing. I would probably have to do something to help him out but I didn’t want to commit to anything until I’d had time to think it through.
“You could move back into the old place,” I said, at last. I was surprised at the chill in my voice but we had all grown up in that house and surely it was the obvious answer now in these direst of times.