by A. M. Shine
Peter had never driven in his life. He had drunk every day for fifty years and still he was thirsty. He looked like a man who had seen it all. A sage and a seer who kept secrets others could only dream of. Maybe it was the eyes that squinted out from beneath those bushy eyebrows, or the silvered beard that glistened all the brighter when his mouth of dark, yellowing teeth was nattering away about nothing. The fact was that Peter had seen nothing except the bottom of a thousand pint glasses, and the drink had aged him terribly.
Mina had been sitting outside the pub before the black clouds rolled in from the bay, bringing the big rain. The cobbles were uneven, and puddles already spread like sores across every street. The rain never bothered her, and it certainly never came as any surprise. She could read the sky like a face and knew when it was welling up long before the tears came. This was a far cry from autumn’s much-lauded epoch. Gone were the leaves – coiled and russet – that dragged the poet’s pen to paper. This was the tail end of the year. These were the sombre, leafless days of December, and the first Christmas that Mina would spend without her mum. Never had a gloomy sky felt so fitting.
People-watching was her distraction of choice, and that’s what led her back to the pub that afternoon. Of all her haunts, Quay Street was her dearest. Here there was coffee, ashtrays on tables, and always a barman in earshot to upgrade to something stronger. The street’s upper reaches were festooned with bright bunting that changed colour with the festivals, always overnight and never with any witnesses. As picturesque as a postcard with its quaint shopfronts and restaurants, crowds were drawn there like gulls to the open ocean. The pub’s furniture was set behind windbreakers that sometimes fell in a gale, but they kept Mina apart from the people, separating the artist from her subjects – those who, unlike her, probably had places to be or friends to meet. Mina kept reminding herself that she was doing all right on her own, and some day soon she was bound to start believing it.
Her coffee was cold, and bitter as it was black. Mina scanned both ends of the street, searching for that one perfect face. All the while the pencil fanned through her fingers, hovering over the page like a kestrel waiting to strike. Winter squalls complicated matters. People kept their heads down and never stood still. The cold days were worse as their scarves crept up from their necks, leaving only the eyes on show.
For months Mina had been collecting her strangers, as she called them. She only had to glance at a face to perceive its subtleties, to fasten it to her memory. And her sketchbook was full of them; page after page after rain-speckled, coffee-stained page. The paper was organic. Faces grew on it easily. And they diverted her thoughts just long enough to enjoy a moment’s peace.
There was the middle-aged homeless man with the jolly, bearded face, and kind eyes. His button nose made his hairy cheeks seem all the larger, like a stray Persian cat. There wasn’t a thread on top, but his eyebrows, too, were untamed. They curled skyward in a style that reminded Mina of French filigree. Whenever she passed him, he would say good morning or good afternoon or good evening, as though he was forever watching the sun. Sometimes she threw him a few coins. Other times she just smiled. It never seemed like he was begging. He would just sit there, waiting for his luck to change, or for the sun to sink out of sight; whichever came first.
Then there was the moustachioed older gent. His every feature was bruised from the drink, as though he couldn’t sweat it out, and so it gathered beneath the skin, bubbling up on the nose and cheeks. His eyes were marinated in the stuff. When eventually he dies no one will wonder why, and the blemishes will fade from his skin like an assassin escaping into the shadows.
Next was the android, as Mina had come to call her. The face was flawless; sharp and symmetrical, with alabaster skin so smooth that it had to be synthetic. Every detail was deliberately selected to maximise her beauty, probably by a scientist in a white coat. She was uncommonly tall; a multi-purpose robot with the athletic prowess to complement the looks. Science fiction writers had fantasised about this woman for decades.
Three times Mina had drawn her, and on each page her face was the same. She had never seen someone so sad, or so versed in hiding it. Suppressing a smile isn’t easy. The happiness always creeps out somehow. But sadness can be stashed under the skin like a dark secret. It doesn’t need tears to make its presence felt, and this woman’s face was devoid of even the slightest expression. Wherever she had come from and wherever she was going, she was flanked between a past and future that kept her lips from ever creasing into a smile.
Then the pages settled on that sketch – the self-portrait that Mina had drawn after one too many glasses. Beside a hungry ashtray and two bottles of wine she had stared at her reflection until it seemed to smile back at her. Ironic really, all things considered.
This was her realised by her own hand with just enough honesty and disdain to make it matter. Mina had considered ripping the page out the following morning, but maybe that’s where she belonged, lost amidst a crowd of strangers. No better, no different, just another face judged in that moment on her expression alone. Immortalised in that sad, pathetic second when life’s seams were starting to fray.
The eyes looked close to tears. Even the eyeliner couldn’t hide it. All that black only accentuated the sadness. They didn’t stare at Mina. Instead, they looked right through her with a disinterest bordering on rejection. The lips didn’t work, like moulding clay left in the air for too long. Smiling had become uncomfortable. Even talking now felt like a chore. The nose was neat and dead straight. It was boring. The cheekbones were high, and her whole face was this hackneyed heart shape. Everything else was uninspired. Small ears, tidy chin. Even the teeth, though you couldn’t see them, were straight and orderly.
The hair was jet black, and the jaggedly chopped bob seemed like a good idea at the time. So did the fringe, but now Mina wasn’t so sure. No matter what she did to bluff some individuality, she might as well have been made on a factory line. Her beauty was the generic sort, and where was the beauty in that?
If she had seen this face on the street, she wouldn’t have drawn it. She would have kept on looking. Here we go again. Mina took a deep breath, slammed the book shut, and slid it back into her bag. She hated when she got like this: all sullen and melodramatic, as her sister would say. Besides, the night before had been one of her better ones. Her black dress had kept everyone’s concentration off their cards. The bills would be paid, and the rent would be met. Wasn’t that enough to imitate a smile?
The first bombs of rain began to fall; slow and sloppy warning shots. The main strike was approaching and no siren was necessary to clear the streets. Mina returned inside, taking her cold coffee with her, and there was Peter by the bar, swaying like a broken mast after too many storms. It was still early enough in the day to make sense of him, but late enough that you might not want to. His face always lit up whenever Mina landed through the door of the pub. He was old and ugly. She was all the opposites.
‘There’s a collector of rare birds and parrots and whatnot up in Connemara,’ he told her. ‘And I’ve this parrot. Well actually, it’s not mine. It’s Tim’s. But we’re selling it together. It’s called a golden conure, and he’s worth a pretty penny. That’s a golden conure,’ he repeated slowly, emphasising every syllable.
Mina hadn’t heard of Tim before that day. It was strange to think that Peter had friends stashed somewhere away from the pub. She threw a glance towards the barman, Anthony, who leaned on the Guinness tap, listening in with a smirk on his face. The man’s thirty-odd years were splashed in silver across the sides of his black hair. He was classically good-looking, like an early James Bond portrait, but lacked the charisma to realise the likeness.
‘What was the bird’s name again?’ he asked, goading Peter into saying it for what felt like the millionth time.
‘Gol-den-con-yure,’ he repeated, to which Anthony just laughed and walked away, leaving Mina with a man who may have already drunk more than she had suspected.
A pint of Guinness waited to be topped off, waves of bistre rippling above the black. Cups and saucers chinked. Stools were dragged across the floor. Everything was wooden and warm, and no voice was too loud. Anthony worked by the coffee machine, hammering out the old and pressing in the new. The steam gurgled the milk, burning it nearly every time. The register rang open and snapped closed, and there was music, all weaved together into a comfort blanket of familiar sounds. The pub was a safe place. Timeless until the lights flashed, and the last orders drew down the taps.
The windows were fogged up. Voices and breaths, toasties and soup – this hot, wholesome, almost nauseating air was trapped in an airlock, and only when the door opened did it explode outside, much to the dismay of those who distrusted the draught. It stole lives once upon a time, and now it stole the heat.
‘You want me to drive this bird to Connemara?’ she asked, both hands cradled around the hot whiskey poised just below her nose.
‘That’s right. A day’s drive, no more and no less, and you can keep two hundred of the euro. Mind you, that’ll have to cover the petrol cost. If you don’t want the job, then I’ll ask someone else. But listen, Mina,’ he whispered with toxic breath, leaning in closer, ‘this is easy money, and you’d be doing myself a favour.’
Peter was more tuned in than people gave him credit for. Or it was possible that Mina was so scattered that they shared the same social static. Some weeks earlier she had posted an advert online for him. It was for a beat-up cello that looked as though he’d found it in a second-hand charity shop. But it had sold for five hundred euro, of which Peter had slipped Mina an easy hundred. A few more friends like him and she wouldn’t have to treat every bill like the enveloped equivalent of Pandora’s box.
‘Where in Connemara would you be sending me?’ she said. ‘It’s a big place.’
‘I’ve a map,’ he replied with a wink and nod. ‘Your man, the buyer, he told me where he lives, and sure you can’t get lost these days.’
‘And when does he want this…?’ Mina asked, forgetting.
‘Gol-den-con-yure,’ he said, even slower this time. ‘I told him that he’d have it tomorrow.’
‘Jesus.’ Mina laughed. ‘That was nice of you.’
The rain against the window was reason enough to let her decision linger. Mina had worn her leather jacket; the short one that barely reached down her back. Loose threads marked where the buttons used to cling, and its elbows and shoulders had faded to grey. A few badges were pinned around its lapels. Her sweater was woollen white with black stripes, so long that its sleeves stretched down to her fingers. At least she had the good mind not to wear a skirt. The jeans slipped snugly inside her ankle boots, scuffed from too many winters and not enough polish.
Mina had yet to touch the canvas in her studio. Its blankness had bothered her since she agreed to the job, like an unwanted pet constantly crying out for attention. Commissioned work paid well, but she hated it more than counting out her change to afford a cup of coffee. The client was in control, and it always felt like homework. As if there was a right and a wrong answer to art. The cards had been kind. She had won enough to tide her over for a while. But luck like that was rare. Two hundred euro was a lot. Besides, the drive might clear her head. Amazing it was how after all those hot whiskeys the delivery of the bird seemed like a perfectly good idea.
‘I knew I could count on you,’ Peter said as he signalled for another round to celebrate. ‘Easiest money you’ll ever make, and that’s the truth.’
The alcohol-fuelled optimism of that evening felt like a false memory as Mina unfurled the map across the windshield. In hindsight, she probably should have inspected it sooner, but there had been plenty of signposts when the roads still held some tarmac. Its paper stank of Peter’s wax jacket and was so tattered that it must have lived in his pocket since he bought it a decade earlier. Mina had to wrench her seat back just to wrap her head around what she was looking at. When eventually she found the dog-eared section where she was supposedly parked with two wheels in the ditch, she saw that Peter had drawn a circle in blue biro, seemingly at random. Its circumference swallowed up most of the page. But never mind where she was supposed to be going, Mina didn’t even know where she was.
‘For fuck’s sake, Peter,’ she whispered to herself. ‘If ever a map was more useless.’
The roads had narrowed. Their uneven walls had long fallen to rubble, and a matted spine of grass brushed under the car as it trudged forward, its wheels plunging into pits of crackling ice. Any variety to keep the eyes entertained died with the sun, and soon a chill mist swept softly over the surrounding bogs. Mina searched the horizon eagerly for any signs of life – the light of a distant house or the last vestiges of some backwoods people, but there was nothing. Even those bastard sheep that ambled down from the hillsides had abandoned her. Every animal was burrowed out of sight, demoralised by a day too short to make a difference. Silent and uncertain was the winter, and in Connemara it was never so bleak.
Every station on the radio had fizzled to static, and so Mina listened instead to the car’s weary rattle and the thrum of her fingers on the steering wheel, waiting patiently for an answer to the question she kept asking herself – where the fuck am I? Her headlamps had been the only light as far as the eye could see – like a fallen star on a dead planet – and for the first time in a long time her loneliness was starting to trouble her. She should have arrived at the buyer’s house hours ago. Peter’s map was splayed on the passenger’s seat beside her. Now and again, she’d frown at it from the corner of her eye. Every móinín and crooked stretch of road seemed to lead her back to nowhere. And the headlights only revealed so much – the same scraggy strip of muck and stone.
‘Any ideas?’ she asked her passenger on the back seat. ‘No? I didn’t think so.’
Even a call from Jennifer would be a welcome break from the parrot’s stale company. But conversations with her sister always left Mina exhausted. Jennifer would talk at length about her new husband and their new home, barely stopping to catch a breath. This was routinely followed by a few anecdotes from the weekend just gone. These involved hills or hiking, or anything that produced fifty photographs to share with the world. All filtered so that the sky resembled a cheap watercolour. You had to be there, Jennifer would then say. Mina could think of nothing worse.
Jennifer had rung two days earlier, after lunchtime and then again in the evening. Both times Mina had stared at her sister’s name as it vibrated hostilely on the table; one hand reaching to answer and the other holding it back. The longer they went without talking, the guiltier she felt. The second missed call had left a voicemail behind it like a stain that Mina hadn’t removed yet. Now seemed as good a time as any.
‘You ready for this?’ she said to the parrot as she unlocked her phone. ‘This is my sister. You’ll get to hear the shit that I’ve to deal with now.’
Not surprisingly, the voicemail began with a long sigh of frustration. ‘Why don’t you answer your phone? I’m only calling to see how you are. I don’t understand why you want to make this so difficult. I get it, you’re an artist and you need time to, whatever, do your art. But it’s time to get your life on track, you know? You can’t muddle on like this, selling the odd painting or, I don’t know. Listen, I’m not going to call you again, okay? I’ll leave it up to you. Mum wouldn’t have wanted this, Meens.’
That’s what Mina’s mum had rechristened her. Jennifer began using the name after she had passed away, as if Meens was a responsibility passed down through the family, like a broken heirloom they couldn’t fix. Mina’s mum was the only one who held her together, and the cracks glistened all the brighter beside the light of Jennifer’s perfect life. Selling the odd painting? She shouldn’t have listened to that. Her sister’s voice had only made a bad situation worse. Eyes on the road. Don’t think about it. There had to be a light in the dark soon.
‘Keep it together, Meens,’ she said to herself. ‘All paths lead s
omewhere,’ just like her mum used to remind her whenever life took an unexpected turn.
It was then that the dashboard’s instruments disappeared, like a pilot’s cockpit losing power over uncharted lands. In the blink of an eye the world was drained of light and sound. There was only the moon, like a bulb in muddy water. Mina’s hand had jiggled with the keys in the ignition, and when that failed, she fumbled around for her phone. She held down its power button like a paramedic searching for a pulse, but still the darkness remained unbroken. Mina dipped her hands blindly into her bag and rummaged around for a lighter. Her fingers found keys, lipstick, a pack of playing cards, lipstick again, and then she felt it. Click. Click. She took a deep breath. Nobody could be this unlucky. Click. There was light. No more than a single, heroic flame. But it was enough to help Mina find her tobacco pouch without further foraging. She always kept one pre-rolled for emergencies. This was definitely such an occasion.
Her breathing seemed louder in the absence of all else. She pined for the engine’s warm purr; the companionship of something as simple as sound. Mina’s hands were trembling now. They wouldn’t stay still, as though they belonged to somebody else; someone whose nerves had clearly got the better of them. She smoked quickly, with the cigarette suspended by her mouth, staring at nothing, because there was nothing to see. The bird thrashed its wings against the cage, making Mina jolt from her seat. How was everything suddenly so loud? The clang of its thin, iron bars was deafening.
‘Take it easy,’ she said, rolling the window down and waving the smoke outside with her hand. ‘Jesus, you’re worse than my sister.’
Mina took her thumb off the lighter. There was no telling how much gas remained, and she knew better than to waste any. The ember of the cigarette would have to light the way for now. The bird calmed itself as the cold air crept inside. Soon the only sound was Mina’s pursed lips drawing in smoke, and the tired exhalation that followed. She sat with her arm stretched out the window, her head arched to the side so that she could see the stars. It was eerily quiet. She closed her eyes and thought of all the places that she would rather be – anywhere but the middle of nowhere.