Tim Winton
The Riders

for Denise

Wasted and wounded

It ain’t what the moon did

I got what I paid for now

See you tomorrow

Hey Frank can I borrow

A couple of bucks from you

To go

Waltzing Matilda

Waltzing Matilda

You’ll go waltzing Matilda with me. .

Tom Waits, ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’

I

On Raglan Road on an autumn day

I saw her first and knew

That her dark hair would weave a snare

That I may one day rue. .

‘Raglan Road’ (traditional)

One

WITH THE NORTH WIND hard at his back, Scully stood in the doorway and sniffed. The cold breeze charged into the house, finding every recess and shadowy hollow. It rattled boards upstairs and lifted scabs of paint from the walls to come back full in his face smelling of mildew, turf, soot, birdshit, Worcestershire sauce and the sealed-up scent of the dead and forgotten. He scraped his muddy boots on the flagstones and closed the door behind him. The sudden noise caused an explosion in the chimney as jackdaws fled their fortress of twigs in the fireplace. His heart racing, he listened to them batter skyward, out into the failing day, and when they were gone he lit a match and set it amongst the debris. In a moment fire roared like a mob in the hearth and gave off a sudden, shifting light. The walls were green-streaked, the beams overhead swathed in webs and the floor swimming with trash, but he was comforted by the new sound and light in the place, something present besides his own breathing.

He simply stood there firestruck like the farmboy of his youth, watching the flames consume half-fossilized leaves and twigs and cones. There in the blaze he saw the huge burns of memory, the windrows of uprooted karris whose sparks went up like flares for days on end over the new cleared land. The walls here were a-dance now, and chunks of burning soot tumbled out onto the hearthstone. Scully jigged about, kicking them back, lightheaded with the stench and the thought of the new life coming to him.

The chimney shuddered, it sucked and heaved and the rubbish in the house began to steam. Scully ran outside and saw his new home spouting flame at the black afternoon sky, its chimney a torch above the sodden valley where his bellow of happiness rang halfway to the mountains. It really was his. Theirs.

• • •

IT WAS A SMALL HOUSE, simple as a child’s drawing and older than his own nation. Two rooms upstairs, two down. Classic vernacular, like a model from the old textbooks. It stood alone on the bare scalp of a hill called the Leap. Two hundred yards below it, separated by a stand of ash trees and a hedged lane was the remains of a gothic castle, a tower house and fallen wings that stood monolithic above the valley with its farms and soaklands. From where Scully stood, beneath his crackling chimney, he could see the whole way across to the Slieve Bloom Mountains at whose feet the valley and its patchwork of farms lay like a twisted shawl. Wherever you looked in that direction you saw mountains beyond and castle in the corner of your eye. The valley squeezed between them; things, colours, creatures slipped by in their shadow, and behind, behind the Leap there was only the lowest of skies.

He wasted no time. In what remained of the brief northern day he must seal the place against the weather, so he began by puttying up loose windowpanes and cutting a few jerry-built replacements out of ply. He dragged his tools and supplies in from the old Transit van and set a fallen door on two crates to serve as a workbench. He brought in a steel bucket and a bag of cement, some rough timber, a few cans of nails and screws and boxes of jumbled crap he’d dragged halfway round Europe. By the fire he stood a skillet and an iron pot, and on the bench beside some half-shagged paperbacks he dropped his cardboard box of groceries. All the luggage he left in the van. It was a leaky old banger but it was drier and cleaner than the house.

He lined up his battered power tools along the seeping wall nearest the fire and shrugged. Even the damp had damp. The cottage had not so much as a power point or light socket. He resigned himself to it and found a trowel, mixed up a slurry of cement in his steel bucket, stood his aluminium ladder against the front wall and climbed up onto the roof to caulk cracked slates while the rain held off and the light lasted. From up there he saw the whole valley again: the falling castle, the soaks and bogs, the pastures and barley fields in the grid of hawthorn hedges and drystone walls all the way up to the mountains. His hands had softened these past weeks. He felt the lime biting into the cracks in his fingers and he couldn’t help but sing, his excitement was so full, so he launched rather badly into the only Irish song he knew.

There was a wild Colonial boy,

Jack Dougan was his name…

He bawled it out across the muddy field, improvising shamelessly through verses he didn’t know, and the tension of the long drive slowly left him and he had the automatic work of his hands to soothe him until the only light was from the distant farmhouses and the only sound the carping of dogs.

By torchlight he washed himself at the small well beside the barn and went inside to boil some potatoes. He heaped the fire with pulpy timber and the few bits of dry turf he found, and hung his pot from the crane above it. Then he lit three cheap candles and stood them on a sill. He straightened a moment before the fire, feeling the day come down hard on him. It was sealed now. It was a start.

He put one boot up on a swampy pile of the Irish Times and saw beside his instep:

BOG MAN IN CHESHIRE

Peat cutters in Cheshire yesterday unearthed the body of a man believed to have been preserved in a bog for centuries…

Scully shifted his foot and the paper came apart like compost.

It was warm inside now, but it would take days of fires to dry the place out, and even then the creeping damp would return. Strange to own a house older than your own nation. Strange to even bother, really, he thought. Nothing so weird as a man in love.

Now the piles of refuse were really steaming and the stink was terrible, so with the shovel and rake, and with his bare hands, he dragged rotten coats and serge trousers, felt hats, boots, flannel shirts, squelching blankets, bottles, bicycle wheels, dead rats and curling mass cards outside to the back of the barn. He swept and scraped and humped fresh loads out to the pile behind the knobbly wall. The norther was up again and it swirled about in the dark, calling in the nooks of the barn. Stumbling in the gloom he went to the van for some turps, doused the whole reeking pile and took out his matches. But the wind blew and no match would light, and the longer he took the more he thought about it and the less he liked the idea of torching the belongings of a dead man right off the mark like this. He had it all outside now. The rest could wait till morning.

Somewhere down in the valley, cattle moaned in their sheds. He smelled the smoke of his homefire and the earthy steam of boiling spuds. He saw the outline of his place beneath the low sky. At the well he washed his numb hands a second time and went indoors.

When the spuds were done he pulled a ruined cane chair up to the hearth and ate them chopped with butter and slabs of soda bread. He opened a bottle of Guinness and kicked off his boots. Five-thirty and it was black out there and had been the better part of an hour. What a hemisphere. What a day. In twenty-eight hours he’d seen his wife and daughter off at Heathrow, bought the old banger from two Euro-hippies at Waterloo Station, retrieved his tools and all their stored luggage from a mate’s place in North London and hit the road for the West Coast feeling like a stunned mullet. England was still choked with debris and torn trees from the storms and the place seemed mad with cops and soldiers. He had no radio and hadn’t seen a paper. Enniskillen, people said, eleven dead and sixty injured in an IRA cock-up. Every transfer was choked, every copper wanted to see your stuff. The ferry across the Irish Sea, the roads out of Rosslare, the drive across Ireland. The world was reeling, or perhaps it was just him, surprised and tired at the lawyer’s place in Roscrea, in his first Irish supermarket and off-licence. People talked of Enniskillen, of Wall Street, of weather sent from hell, and he plunged on drunk with fatigue and information. There had to be a limit to what you could absorb, he thought. And now he was still at last, inside, with his life back to lock-up stage.

The wind ploughed about outside as he drank off his Guinness. The yeasty, warm porter expanded in his gut and he moaned with pleasure. Geez, Scully, he thought, you’re not hard to please. Just look at you!

And then quite suddenly, with the empty bottle in his lap, sprawled before the lowing fire in a country he knew nothing about, he was asleep and dreaming like a dog.

Two

SCULLY WOKE SORE AND FREEZING with the fire long dead and his clothes damp upon him. At the well he washed bravely and afterwards he scavenged in his turp-soaked rubbish heap and found a shard of mirror to shave by. He wiped the glass clean and set it on the granite wall. There he was again, Frederick Michael Scully. The same square dial and strong teeth. The broad nose with its pulpy scar down the left side from a fight on a lobster boat, the same stupid blue that caused his wonky eye. The eye worked well enough, unless he was tired, but it wandered a little, giving him a mad look that sometimes unnerved strangers who saw the Brillopad hair and the severely used face beneath it as ominous signs. Long ago he’d confronted the fact that he looked like an axe-murderer, a sniffer of bicycle seats. He stuck out like a dunny in a desert. He frightened the French and caused the English to perspire. Among Greeks he was no great shakes, but he’d yet to find out about the Irish. What a face. Still, when you looked at it directly it was warm and handsome enough in its way. It was the face of an optimist, of a man eager to please and happy to give ground. Scully believed in the endless possibilities of life. His parents saw their lives the way their whole generation did; to them existence was a single shot at things, you were a farmer, a fisherman, a butcher for the duration. But Scully found that it simply wasn’t so. It only took a bit of imagination and some guts to make yourself over, time and time again. When he looked back on his thirty years he could hardly believe his luck. He left school early, worked the deck of a boat, went on to market gardening, sold fishing tackle, drove trucks, humped bricks on building sites, taught himself carpentry and put himself through a couple of years’ architecture at university. Became a husband and father, lived abroad for a couple of years, and now he was a landowner in County Offaly, fixing an eighteenth-century peasant cottage with his bare hands. In the New Year he’d be a father again. Unbelievable. All these lives, and still the same face. All these goes at things, all these chances, and it’s still me. Old Scully.

He was used to being liked and hurt at being misunderstood, though even in Europe most people eventually took to Scully. What they saw was what they got, but they could never decide what it was they saw — a working-class boofhead with a wife who married beneath herself, a hairy bohemian with a beautiful family, the mongrel expat with the homesick twang and ambitious missus, the poor decent-hearted bastard who couldn’t see the roof coming down on his head. No one could place him, so they told him secrets, opened doors, called him back, all the time wondering what the hell he was up to, slogging around the Continent with so little relish. Children loved him; his daughter fought them off outside crèches. He couldn’t help himself — he loved his life.

As mist rolled back from the brows of the Slieve Bloom Mountains, the quilted fields opened to the sun and glistened with frost. Scully swung the mattock in the shadows of the south wall. The earth was heavy and mined with stones so that every few strokes he struck granite and a shock went up his arm and into his body like a boot from the electric fences of his boyhood. His hands stung with nettles and his nose ran in the cold. The smoke of valley chimneys stood straight in the air.

In the hedge beside him two small birds wheeled in a courting dance. He recognized them as choughs. He mouthed the word, resting a moment and rubbing his hands. Choughs. Strange word. Two years and he still thought from his own hemisphere. He knew he couldn’t keep doing it forever. He should stop thinking of blue water and white sand; he had a new life to master.

The birds lit on an old cartwheel beside the hedge to regard him and the great pillar of steam his breath made.

‘It’s alright for you buggers,’ he said. ‘The rest of us have to work.’

The choughs lifted their tails at him and flew. Scully smiled and watched them rise and tweak about across the wood below, and then out over the crenellations of the castle beyond where he lost them, his eye drawn to the black mass of rooks circling the castle keep. A huge ash tree grew from the west wing of the ruin and in its bare limbs he saw the splotches of nests. He tried to imagine that tree in the spring when its new foliage must nearly burst the castle walls.

He went back to his ragged trench against the cottage wall. The place had no damp-coursing at all, and the interior walls were chartreuse with mildew, especially this side where the soil had crept high against the house. The place was a wreck, no question. Ten years of dereliction had almost done for it. The eastern gable wall had an outward lean and would need buttressing in the short term at least. He had neither power nor plumbing and no real furniture to speak of. He’d have to strip and seal the interior walls as soon as he could. He needed a grader to clear centuries of cow slurry from the barnyard and a fence to keep the neighbours’ cattle out of his modest field. He needed to plant trees — geez, the whole country needed to plant them — and buy linen and blankets and cooking things. A gas stove, a sink, toilet. It hardly bore thinking about this morning. All he could manage was the job at hand.

Scully went on hacking the ground, cursing now and then and marvelling at how sparks could still be made off muddy rocks.

He thought of the others, wondered how long he would have to be alone. He wasn’t the solitary sort, and he missed them already. He wondered how Jennifer and Billie would cope seeing Australia again. Hard to go back and go through with leaving it forever. He was glad it was them. Himself, he would have piked out. One foot on the tarmac, one sniff of eucalyptus and he’d be a goner. No, it was better they went and finished things up. He was best used to get things ready here. This way he could go through with it. Scully could only feel things up to a certain point before he had to act. Doing things, that’s what he was good at. Especially when it had a point. This was no exception. He was doing it for Jennifer, no use denying it, but she appreciated what it had taken for him to say yes. It was simple. He loved her. She was his wife. There was a baby on the way. They were in it together, end of story.

He worked all day to free the walls of soil and vegetation, pulling ivy out of the mortar when the mattock became too much. He ran his blistered hands over the old stones and the rounded corners of his house and smiled at how totally out of whack the whole structure was. Two hundred and fifty years and probably not a single stone of it plumb.

Ireland. Of all places, Ireland, and it was down to Mylie Doolin, that silly bugger.

Scully had originally come to the Republic for a weekend, simply out of respect. It was the country boy in him acknowledging his debts, squaring things away. They were leaving Europe at last, giving in and heading home. It seemed as though getting pregnant was the final decider. From Greece they caught a cheap flight to London where they had things stored. The Qantas flight from Heathrow was still days away, but they were packed and ready so early they went stir crazy. In the end, Scully suggested a weekend in Ireland. They’d never been, so what the hell. A couple of pleasant days touring and Scully could pay his respects to Mylie Doolin who had kept the three of them alive that first year abroad.

Fresh off the plane from Perth, Scully worked for Mylie on dodgy building sites all over Greater London. The beefy Irishman ran a band of Paddies on jobs that lacked a little paperwork and needed doing quick and quiet for cash money. On the bones of his arse, Scully found Mylie’s mob in a pub on the Fulham Road at lunchtime, all limehanded and dusthaired and singing in their pints. The Paddies looked surprised to see him get a lookin, but he landed an afternoon’s work knocking the crap out of a bathroom in Chelsea and clearing up the rubble. He worked like a pig and within a few days he was a regular. Without that work Scully and Jennifer and Billie would never have survived London and never have escaped its dreary maw. Mad Mylie paid him well, told him wonderful lies and set them up for quite some time. Scully saved like a Protestant. He never forgot a favour. So, only a weekend ago now, Scully had driven the three of them across the Irish midlands in a rented Volkswagen to the town of Banagher where, according to Mylie, Anthony Trollope had invented the postal pillar box and a Doolin ancestor had been granted a papal annulment from his horse. That’s how it was, random as you please. A trip to the bogs. A missed meeting. A roadside stop. A house no one wanted, and a ticket home he cashed in for a gasping van and some building materials. Life was a bloody adventure.

He worked on till dark without finishing, and all down the valley, from windows and barns and muddy boreens, people looked up to the queer sight of candles in the bothy window and smoke ghosting from the chimney where that woollyheaded lad was busting his gut looking less like a rich American every day.

Three

SCULLY HACKED GRIMLY AT THE claggy ground, his spirits sinking with every chill roll of sweat down his back as he inched his way along the last stretch of trench in the mean light of morning. He was beginning to wonder if maybe this job was beyond him. After all, he was no tradesman and he was working in a country where he knew none of the rules. And he was doing it alone. Every time he saw that forlorn heap of clothes and refuse out behind the barn he’d begun to see it as his own. Would it happen? Sometime in the future a lonely pile like that marking his failure? Man, he was low this morning. He wasn’t himself. He watched a blur tracking uphill across the ridge. A hare. Funny how they always ran uphill. It dodged and weaved and disappeared into fallen timber.

Dogs barked in the valley below. He rested again, leaning on the smooth hickory handle of the mattock, and saw a car, a little green Renault van, labouring up the lane. Scully threw down the mattock hopefully and slugged across the mud in his squelching wellies to the front of the house where, thank God, the AN POST van was pulling in cautiously. He wiped his hands on his mired jeans. The driver killed the motor and opened the door.

‘Jaysus,’ said a long, freckled shambles of a man unfolding himself like a piece of worn patio furniture. ‘I thought it was the truth all along.’

Beneath the postman’s crumpled cap was a mob of red hair and two huge ears. Scully stood there anxiously.

‘So there’s someone livin back in Binchy’s Bothy.’

‘That’s right,’ said Scully. ‘My third day.’

‘Peter Keneally. They call me Pete-the-Post.’

Scully reached out and shook his freckled hand. ‘G’day.’

The postie laughed, showing a terrible complement of teeth.

‘Would you be Mister F. M. Scully, now?’

‘That’s me.’

‘You’re the Australians, then.’

‘One of them, yeah.’

‘By God, you’re famous as Seamus around here already. Jimmy Brereton down there by the castle says you saw this place and bought it in less time than it takes to piss.’

Scully laughed. ‘Close enough.’

‘Signed the papers in Davy Finneran’s pub, no less.’

‘Yeah, did it on the spot. And they say the Paddies are stupid.’

The postman roared.

‘My wife had… a feeling about the place,’ said Scully, needing to explain himself somehow, knowing that no explanation could sound reasonable enough for what they had done.

‘Well, I suppose that’s nothin to be laughin at, then.’

Scully shrugged. ‘It does seem stupid at certain moments of the day.’

‘Ah, but it’s a fine spot up here, high and away. And you’re very welcome.’

‘Thanks.’

Scully scraped mud from his boots and looked now at the pale envelope in the postman’s hands. The two men stood there poised awkwardly for a moment.

‘Thirsty work, no?’

After a long moment Scully realized the man needed a drink.

‘Don’t spose you fancy a nip?’

‘A nip?’ The Irishman squinted at him.

‘A dram,’ said Scully. ‘I know it’s early.’

‘Ah. Weeeell, it is a bit sharp out still.’

‘I’ve got some Tullamore Dew inside.’

‘That’s a mornin whiskey alright,’ the postie said with a wink.

They went inside by the fire and Scully threw on a rotten fencepost. In the pale light of day the interior was foul and dismal.

‘Excuse the mess.’

‘That Binchy always was a dirty auld bastard, rest his soul. This is the best I’ve seen the place.’

‘I’ll get there.’

‘That you will, Mr Scully.’

‘The name’s Fred. Everyone just calls me Scully, even the missus.’

‘Well, if it’s good enough for her…’

‘They still had all his clothes and everything in here.’

‘Ten years, so. It just laid here rottin. Got to be people were nervous of it. Still, the Irish love to frighten emselves half to death.’

‘I would have thought his family might have come and taken his things.’

‘There is no family, poor man. He was gardener to the castle like his father before him. Everyone’s dead.’

‘Including the castle,’ said Scully. ‘When was the last time anyone tended to that garden?’

‘Oh, it was burnt back in the Troubles. No one’s lived in it since. The lords and ladies went their way and the Binchys stayed in the gardener’s bothy. It was left to them. Binchy and his Da grew some spuds and did a bit of poachin. They liked to drink, you might say.’

‘Oh, here.’ Scully dug the bottle out of his cardboard box and poured a little into tin cups.

‘Cheers.’

‘Slainte:’

The whiskey ran hot all through him. He only really liked to drink after dark.

Scully looked anxiously at the pale envelope in the postman’s hand. It was a telegram, he could see it now. He curled his toes inside his boots.

‘Your wife had a feelin, you say?’

Scully squirmed, lusting for the telegram, glad of the company and a little embarrassed about his own presence here. He couldn’t imagine what the Irishman must think of him.

‘Yeah. Yeah, she just went all strange and said this is it, that she felt she’d been here before, like déjà vu. She had this odd feeling that this is where we should live.’

‘She’s Irish, then.’

‘No. There’s no ancestral pull. People talk about things like that but… no, nothing.’

‘Well, you are. With a name like Scully.’

‘Well, bog-Irish maybe a long way back. Desert Irish by now.’

‘Ha, desert Irish!’ The postie stomped his feet.

The fire hissed and spat. The walls steamed and the house smelled like a locker room hosed down with fish blood. Scully looked at the black work cracks in the Irishman’s fingers.

‘D’you know where I could hire a cement mixer? I thought there might be a place in town.’

‘Ce-ment mixer? Conor’s your man.’

‘Conor.’

‘My brother from Birr. He’s the electrician, but he does a bit of this and that, you know.’

‘Terrific. Maybe I could get a phone number, or something?’

‘Be damn, I’ll bring it meself tomorrow,’ said Pete-the-Post slamming his cup down on the battered mantelpiece. ‘In that little green machine out there, piled in on the mail of the Republic, no less.’

‘Look, don’t go to any trouble.’

‘No trouble at all.’

Scully watched the postie lick his lips, as though tasting the last of the whiskey on them, with eyes shut to the wan light bending in through the window, and he wondered if he’d ever get his telegram.

‘Rightso, time to go.’ The postman whanged himself on the cheek with the heel of his palm. ‘Ah, nearly forgot — something from the Dublin Telegraphs.’

He handed over the envelope and Scully did his best not to snatch at it in his excitement.

‘Good news, I hope. Never liked telegrams, meself.’

‘Thanks,’ said Scully, stuffing it in his pocket and following Pete-the-Post to the door.

‘See you in the mornin!’

As the van pulled away, motor racing horribly, Scully tore the envelope open and the telegram in half so he had to stoop to the mud and fit the pieces together.

HOUSE ON THE MARKET. AGENT ASSURES QUICK SALE. PACKING NOW. BILLIE AT YOUR MUM’S. WILL BE BACK BEFORE CHRISTMAS. USE TELEGRAMS TILL PHONE ON THERE. JENNIFER.

A light drizzle began to drift in. Rooks and jackdaws came and went from the castle keep down in the misting hollow. Scully shifted from foot to foot, inexplicably deflated.

It was good news. It was contact, confirmation. But so damn businesslike. What was the result of the ultrasound? How was everybody? What did the wide brown land look like? Was it summer, real acetylene summer? And did she miss him half as much as he missed her? Though it was a telegram. You couldn’t exactly get hot and sweaty in a telegram.

He stuffed the paper into his pocket. It was actually happening. They could stop moving at last and make a home somewhere, the three of them. Maybe she’s right about magic in the spur of the moment. Could be she’s been cautious and sensible too long. It was her new thing, cutting loose.

It was her prevailing outlook ever since they came abroad, but he had to admit he liked her just as well the old way. She was like a sheet anchor sometimes, a steadying influence on him, on everyone around her. Made people laugh, that sensible streak in her, but it also made her someone of substance. Jennifer wasn’t just a good-looking woman, he once told her wincing parents, she was someone to be reckoned with. God, he missed her, missed them both. Their brown, swimming bodies and birdcall voices — even the sound of their sober, womanly peeing from behind a closed door. He missed dumb jokes with Billie and the warped games of Monopoly that she strung out endlessly with her insistence on ‘the true and right and proper rules’. Seven and a half. She was a bright kid, and all fatherly pride aside, he knew she was different from other kids. She felt things strongly. She was fierce, precocious and loyal. She took shit from no one and saw things so clearly at times that it took your breath away. Now that he thought of it, he’d spent more time with her than he had with Jennifer. He missed their companionable silences. They understood each other, him and Billie. He wondered sometimes if Jennifer saw it, the way the two of them moved together in a crowd, in a boat, at the breakfast table. It was almost as though they each recognized themselves in the other. It was weird, like a gift. Jennifer was always busy, but she must have seen it.

Late in the afternoon, heaving and gasping, with the walls finally clear of soil and stones, he sat down for air on a stump behind the barn and saw Binchy’s things piled out there, reeking of turps. He rattled the matches in his pocket but left them where they were. Why spoil the moment of triumph? He tilted his head back and let the sweat run through his matted hair. Tonight he’d boil up some water and take a real scrubdown. He’d rig up a bed from an old door and some bricks. The flags were too cold to sleep on another night. ‘Live like an animal,’ his father used to say, ‘and you’ll start thinkin like one!’ Scully laughed at himself. This was like the tree houses of his boyhood, the Robinson Crusoe factor, the steady search for creature comforts. A cup of tea would render him human — he knew it.

After dark, scrubbed and fed and hugely satisfied, Scully went walking, a mere shadow moving through the ash wood with the wind tearing at the bare crowns of the trees above him. He was sore and happy, his hands still stung with nettles and his boots were full of stones. He saw the lights of farmhouses down in the valley, and wondered what they did at night, these farming families. He hadn’t introduced himself yet. This was the furthest he’d been from the house since he arrived. But there’d be time. The night hardened with cold. The black mass of the castle loomed below. Scully sucked in the metallic air and watched the trees in turmoil, listened to their mob violence raging above him against the sky. When he turned and looked back uphill he saw the three candles burning in the curtainless window. The wind bullied at him, ripping through the cold wet of his hair, but he stood there a long time in the wood below his field, just watching those three candles twinkling in the empty house.

• • •

IN HIS DREAMS THAT NIGHT Scully ran through long grass between walls and hedges uphill with lights gathering behind him and only the cover of grass and night before him. On he ran, never stopping to see what it was behind him, blindly going on into darkness.

Four

SCULLY JERKED AWAKE. A motor idled outside. It was light already. He wriggled from his stained sleeping bag and went to the window but could see only his ragged reflection in the frost. He opened the top half of his front door, felt the fierce cold, and saw a filthy grey truck slipping and yawing down the icy hill with its tailgate flapping. Diesel smoke hung in the air. He went out barefoot across the frozen ground and saw two tons of builders’ sand heaped against the barn wall.

From around the bend on the hill came the little green van.

‘Boots are the go, Mr Scully,’ said Pete-the-Post getting out to unlock the back doors. ‘On a mornin such as this, it’s definitely boots, don’t you think?’

Scully grinned, curling his toes on the unyielding mud. He helped the postman unload the cement mixer and several bags of cement.

‘Cheaper than airmail, it is.’

‘I really appreciate this,’ said Scully.

‘There’ll be a load of blocks here within the hour, and meself 11 be by at one o’clock to start into it.’

Scully blinked.

‘Well, you’ll be needin a hod-carrier, I expect.’

‘Well. I. Haven’t you got the post to do?’

‘Diversify, Mr Scully, that’s my motto. We’re in the EC now, you know.’

‘The EC.’

‘This is the new Ireland you’re lookin at.’

‘Really?’

‘No, it’s the same auld shite, believe me,’ the postman said, laughing, ‘but don’t go tellin!’

• • •

THAT MORNING SCULLY CLEANED THE cottage out properly. He shovelled and scraped and swept until its four simple rooms were clean enough to move through without grimacing, and then he rearranged his equipment into an orderly system. He crawled across the upstairs floors on all fours, marking boards that needed replacing, and he went grimly through the barn, finding ancient bags of coal, cooking implements, some quite decent wood, and another wide door he sat on blocks to improve his temporary bed. Out behind the barn he looked again at Binchy’s things and took from the heap a small, black rosary which he set above the mantel on a nail in the wall. Beside it he stood a stiff black-and-white print of the three of them, Jennifer, Billie and him, that a friend had taken one freezing day in Brittany. He stared at it a good while, remembering the day. Their Parisian friend Dominique had the Leica going all weekend. She took so many photos they got blasé and began to pose. This one was in the cemetery at St Malo. All of them were laughing. Jennifer’s black hair falling from beneath a beret. His and Billie’s like matching treetops, just mad foliage from the same forest. It was a good photo. They hung together as a shape, the three of them. Just behind them was the circled cross of the Celts, its carved stone knotted with detail, the entwined faces of saints and sinners. It was beautiful, so handsome it made the three of them look dignified. Dominique knew her business. She could take a photo. They’d miss her. Half of what you did in travelling was simply missing things, sensations, people. He’d missed so long and hard these last couple of years he could barely think of it. And he still had some longing ahead of him, the worst kind, until Christmas.

He touched the photograph once. Coal burned lustily in the grate. The house began to steam and dry. Scully went out to survey the gable wall.

Five

THE DOOR SLIDES TO ON the lowing, dungspraying cows as the man in the cloth cap turns to see the scaffold up against Binchy’s Bothy and two figures beneath it like trolls atop the hill. The sky is the colour of fish, a Friday colour beGod, and the bare trees stand forlorn. It’s Pete-the-Post up there with that woolly young bastard with love in his eyes.

He fingers in his waistcoat for the damp fag he’s been saving. The stink of silage burns at the back of his gullet and he lights up to beat it off.

It’s love alright. Jimmy Brereton, bachelor unto the grave, recognizes a man doomed by love, snared by a woman. You could see it the day they turned up in that thresher of a Volkswagen. Her with the hair out like a black flag and her hands on the smooth stones of Binchy’s wall as if it had a fever pulse, and him, hairy as anything on Christ’s earth, waiting on her with eyes big and hopeless as a steer. The shackles of marriage, of doilies and lace curtains and mysterious female illnesses staring him in the face, and him cheerful as you like, and sheepish, sheepish like a lamb unto the slaughter, poor booger.

Jimmy Brereton kicks the shite from his boots and watches a while. He wishes they’d come down and bulldoze that eyesore nuisance of a damn castle out of his high field while the government’s asleep in Dublin. It’s a danger to one and all. In a big norther stones and rubble come belting down out of the keep, and a man can no longer leave his cattle in there out of the weather for fear of having them brained with Celtic history. He thanks God and Arthur Guinness he sleeps well enough at night not to worry himself sick about the things he’s seen here over the years. Things that make the hairs on your arms stand up, like every poor bastard mortared into the walls and fed to the pigs and tilled into the cellars of that place is stirring. Sometimes you hear voices on the wind and stones falling like men to the ground. Bawlers, stinks, a bedlam of rooks, and lights from the mountains, streams of them that he doesn’t look for anymore. It’s not madness or drink in all of this, though he bothers the bottle mightily. All the valley people are chary of the place. He remembers standing right here with his own Da watching the priest from Limerick bellowing Latin at the keep and waving his candles at no one in particular. No Brereton, man or child, would be up there after dark at that nasty fooker of a place. It’s a blight on his land, and it’s made him an early retirer, a six-pint man at sunset. But he’s not unhappy. Things might have turned out worse. He might have married Mary Finneran in 1969 instead of backing out like a man with spine. He might have a brother like Peter Keneally’s instead of no family to speak of. He might be up the hill there with those two mad boogers trying to save the long lost and working like black monkeys.

Sheepish, that’s him. That woolly booger with the hod on his shoulder and the love in his eyes.

Jimmy Brereton retires indoors to the company of Mr Guinness.

Six

JUST ON DARK, Scully and Peter Keneally laid the last block of their rough buttress and stood blowing steam on the makeshift scaffold.

‘That’s got her,’ said the postman. ‘Tomorrow we’ll render it!’

Scully laughed and leaned his brow against the gutter. The man could work. They’d hardly spoken all afternoon and now the postie seemed determined to make up for it.

‘So, where did you learn to throw blocks like a Paddy?’ said Peter.

‘London, I spose,’ said Scully looking down the valley. It was beautiful in an eerie, organized, European way.

‘Jaysus, throwin blocks for the English!’

‘No, an Irishman, actually,’ said Scully climbing down.

‘I went to London once.’

‘Once is enough.’

‘Oh, you got that right.’

Pete clanged the trowels together and they headed for the well.

‘I worked with a gang of Offaly boys,’ said Scully. ‘Hard men, I spose you’d call em. We did cash jobs, you know. Jobs light-on for a bit of paperwork, you might say.’

‘Like this one, you mean.’

Scully smiled. ‘Let’s have a drink, I’m freezin.’

At the well, as they stood washing the mortar off their arms, Peter hummed a tune, low in his throat. In the dark he sounded like an old man, and it occurred to Scully that he had no idea how old the postie might be. Abruptly, the humming stopped.

‘What was her name again? Your wife?’

‘Jennifer.’

‘They say she’s a beautiful girl.’

‘Geez, they’re quick around here, aren’t they?’

The postman wheezed out a laugh. ‘But are they liars?’

‘No, they got it right.’

‘Then you’re a lucky man.’

‘Mate, she’s a lucky woman.’

They went in tired and laughing to the swimming warmth of the hearth, and Scully poured them a porter each and they sat on a chair and box to listen to the whine of the fire. Scully wrote out a telegram message on the back of an envelope: GOOD NEWS. ALL WELL HERE. KEEP IN TOUCH. LOVE YOU BOTH. SCULLY.

‘Telegram? I’ll send it for you.’

‘Would you?’

‘You got snakes there in Australia,’ said Pete thoughtfully.

‘You bet. No St Pat out there.’

‘Poisonous snakes, eh?’

Scully grinned. ‘Dugites, taipans, king browns, tigers. A tiger snake once chased me all the way down the back paddock.’

‘Are they fast, then?’

‘I was on a motorbike.’

‘Aw, Jaysus!’

‘Snakes and sharks,’ said Scully, hamming it up. He handed Pete the soiled envelope.

‘And Skippy the bush kangaroo, beGod!’

Scully laughed. ‘Not as unpredictable as a Paddy, though. Those Irish boys in London were a wild bunch, I tell you. Talk about take no prisoners.’

‘Offaly boys, you say?’

‘Yeah, the boss was from Banagher.’

Pete licked his lower lip, uncrossing his legs slowly. ‘Banagher.’

‘Yeah, you probably know the bloke.’

Pete swallowed. ‘Could be.’

‘Bloke called Doolin.’

‘Mylie,’ the postie breathed.

‘You know him, then?’

‘Jaysus, Mary and Joseph.’

‘Silly bugger got busted in Liverpool.’

‘I heard he was… taken.’

‘The VAT man, I spose.’

‘You don’t need to pretend with me, Mr Scully.’

‘What?’

‘We don’t want any trouble here. I mean we’re all good Catholics here, but…’

Scully looked at him. The man was pale.

‘We just want to leave all that behind us. We don’t want the Guards crawlin all over the countryside, unmarked cars, questions at all hours.’

The postman’s huge ears were red now and a sweat had formed on his brow.

‘Pete —’

‘We just want to live our lives. I’m sorry to give the wrong impression.’

‘There’s something here I’m just not getting.’

‘I have two hundred pounds here in cash, and I’m a man who can keep his mouth shut. I should have known, oh God. You turnin up like that out of the blue and wantin this house in the middle of nowhere. It was the accent, I spose. I didn’t think… yeah, with Mylie inside you’d be recruitin lads.’

‘What lads?’

‘The lads,’ said Pete, tilting his head a moment to look directly at Scully for the first time. ‘What d’ye mean, what lads? Are ye playin with me?’

Scully stood up carefully. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Pete licked his bloodless lips. ‘You mean you don’t… before the Mother of God you’d swear you don’t know?’

‘Know what? Tell me what it is I’m supposed to know!’ Now that his blood was up and his eye wandering somewhat, Scully looked threatening to the uninitiated.

‘You swear it?’

‘Alright, I swear!’

‘You’re a Catholic, then?’

‘No, I’m nothing.’

‘So the name’s false.’

‘No, my name’s Scully, I was christened C of E.’

‘You mean it might be honestly possible that you don’t know? Oh, Jaysus, Peter, you fookin eejit of a man, what a fright you’ve given yourself! Mr Scully, it wasn’t the VAT man who got Mylie Doolin at Liverpool, it was the Special Branch. You’re fookin luckier than you think. What a sweet, innocent child of God you must be! Mylie is with the Provos.’

Scully put down his glass. ‘You mean… you mean the IRA?’

‘The very same.’

‘Fuck a duck, you’re jokin!’

‘Do I look like a man enjoyin himself here?’

‘Shit. It can’t be.’

‘Ah, drink up now and don’t worry yourself,’ said Pete, wiping the sweat from his face and finding his grin again.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Life is mysterious, Mr Scully, but that I know for sure.’

‘I never even… you think he had anything to do with the Remembrance Day thing? All those bloody kids.’

Pete-the-Post emptied his glass and shrugged. A wind was moaning outside now. ‘He went in before. Weeks ago. Still, it was all such a fook-up, who could tell. You never know anybody properly, not the whole of em. A man barely knows himself, wouldn’t you say?’

Scully stared into the fire. Pete chuckled to himself a moment and hauled himself to his feet.

‘I’ll be by at one again. Don’t you worry about Mylie Doolin, that booger. By God, I nearly had mud in me trousers tonight! Goodnight, then.’

‘Yeah, righto. Watch out for snakes.’

• • •

ALONE, WITH THE FIRE WILD in the chimney, Scully drank and thought of that year of high-jinks with Mylie’s lads. He’d known they were hard men. Once, when some blazer-and-cravatted old bastard pleaded sudden poverty at the end of a job, knowing the Irishmen had no recourse to the law, Mylie opened up the fifth floor window and began calmly to hurl TV, microwave and stereo into the street until the cash appeared magically on the table. Another time, at the end of a horrible three-week lightning renovation at Hampstead, they discovered that the landlord had bolted to Mallorca and they would never be paid, so Mylie put instant concrete down all the toilets and sinks. A little Jetset here, a little Jetset there. You could almost hear it turn to stone. Three floors of plumbing utterly stuffed. It wasn’t the same as money in their pockets, but it gave them a bit of a glow in the pub afterwards. Mad Irish boys, he thought they were, but extortionists and bombers? Terrorists and thieves?

All evening he sat there, forgetting to eat, going through those London months again, wondering and not quite disbelieving, until near midnight he dragged his sleeping bag onto the old door and climbed in.

Seven

SCULLY WORKED ON, THAT NOVEMBER week, pausing only to eat and sleep, or to now and again find himself staring out across the valley to the Slieve Blooms and their changing light. He heard his own sounds in the cottage, his breathing, his footfalls and scrapings and hammerings, and knew that this was as alone as he’d been in all his life. So busy was he, so driven with getting the place habitable, that he had not even met his neighbours yet, though he knew them by name because of Pete-the-Post who came daily with mail, a newspaper, building materials and more often than not, a few pints of milk, a loaf of soda bread and a packet of bacon for the rough fryups they had on dark afternoons with the rain driving outside and the smell of burning peat in their faces. Pete gave him company most afternoons, made him laugh, and sped up the work enormously. Scully bragged shamelessly about his feisty daughter and all the barefaced things she said to people, how fearlessly she corrected teachers and shopkeepers and policemen. The way she’d sit and read for hours and draw elaborate comic strips of their life in Fremantle, Paris, Greece. How she was their safe-passage through Europe, the one who softened-up officials, won the hearts of waiters, attacked languages like new puzzles to be solved. The things she said, how she wondered what a marlin thought the moment it saw the boat it was attached to, the faces staring down from the transom as it lay exhausted on its side, its eye on the dry world. Scully could see how the idea of her tickled Pete. He did impressions of her little voice for him and the streams of talk she was capable of. Pete listened with his head cocked and his ears aglow. Maybe he didn’t believe him. Perhaps he thought it was just pride, just love. But Scully’s excitement was infectious, he could see it himself. The postie chortled and whanged the trowel approvingly against the stones. Scully liked him better than any man he could remember. He had worked with men all his life, since his fishing days and on farm after farm, where he knew what it was to be ridden, paid out on ruthlessly or ignored on site. Especially the fishing days, they were the worst; seven days a week working deck for a Serb with an iron bar in the wheelhouse. That bastard Dimic paid out on him all the way out and all the way back in to port, and what could you do twenty miles out to sea alone and unsighted? He worked with subdued Italian men in market gardens whose soil stank of rust and chemicals, whose women were boisterous and sexy and dangerous. But the biggest pricks of all were the whitebread heroes at the university, men who’d murder you with words for the sheer pleasure of it. They put an end to his working-class fantasies about the gentleness of the professional life. It was the suits you had to fear. They were the real bastards. He didn’t know what it was with Peter Keneally. It might just have been loneliness, but he was always glad as hell to see him.

The next Friday Pete brought another telegram with the pint of milk and parcel of chops.

Scully opened it carefully and stood by the window.

HOUSE SOLD. SETTLEMENT IN THREE WEEKS. ARRIVE SHANNON AE46, 13 DECEMBER. JENNIFER.

‘Shit,’ said Scully. ‘I better open an account at the Allied Irish.’

‘Good news?’

‘We sold our house. They’ll be here in three weeks.’

‘You better get busy, then. You can’t have em livin in a shite-hole, so.’

Scully folded the telegram soberly. So that was that. Their house was gone. But the idea, the fact of it stuck in his head. The limestone rubble walls he’d pared back himself, the stripped jarrah floorboards, the big-hipped iron roof, the airy verandahs and the frangipani blooms. The morning throb of diesels from the marina. It was the whole idea he had of their life together. The weirdest feeling. A fortnight to sell a house? God knows people had gone stupid in the West in boom, but hadn’t it all fallen over? Maybe they were buying real estate now — he didn’t understand economics. But they were coming. That’s all that counted. He had work to do. There was a house here. Wasn’t that the idea to work to, to the future!

‘Are you rich then?’ Peter asked from the top of the ladder that afternoon.

‘Rich?’

‘I don’t mean to pry,’ he laughed. ‘I just want to know if you’ve got a lot of fookin money.’

‘Is that why you won’t send me a bill, you crafty bastard.’

‘Now you’re gettin presumptuous,’ said Peter, swinging a bucket of mortar at him.

‘Look at these hands,’ said Scully. ‘Are they the hands of a rich man?’

Pete brushed a broken slate off into the air and they both watched it spear into the mud and disappear.

‘Well, that’s a disappointment to me,’ said the big redhead. ‘I thought you might be a drug baron or whatever they call em, cause you’re too ugly to be a rock-and-roll star.’

‘Have you been drinking that poteen again?’

‘Well, you have to consider it from an ignorant Paddy’s point of view. These two boogers come by one day in a Volkswagen, a Volkswagen from London Heathrow on the way to Perth Australia and say, aarrr, that’s a noise hows, arrl boy it mate! Now I figure it’s got to be three things: drugs, rock-and-roll, or fooking brain damage. Buyin this auld bit of shite in the Irish outback.’

‘Here, pull that gutter off while you’re up there.’

The postie dragged the rotten gutter down in a shower of rust and moss.

‘I figure if it’s rock-and-roll, it has to be your lovely wife who’s the star and you carry the bags. I mean, where does a man get a tan like that?’

‘Greece. We lived in Greece.’

‘Thought you said you lived in London.’

‘London first. Lived in Paris, too, most of last year.’

‘Paris. My God.’

‘Then Greece this year.’

‘The three of yez? Wanderin like a bunch of tinkers. Tell me straight, cause I’ve got nephews. Is it drugs?’

Scully looked at him, grinning. ‘Are you serious? Mate, I’m just a poor grafter like you. My wife’s a public servant — well, was a public servant cause she quit at the end of her long service leave. I’m not rich and there’s no drugs and precious little rock ’n’ roll. And no terrorism either, you silly bugger.’

‘Mind your head! Well, that’s the whole gutter gone. I’ve got a good auld piece in Roscrea for ye.’

‘Here comes the rain,’ said Scully retreating down the ladder. It sloped in silently, ignored by the postman, while Scully took shelter in the lee of the barn.

‘And what might you be doin, Scully?’

‘Getting out of the bloody rain, what d’you think?’

‘Afraid of a bit of soft weather, then?’

Scully shrugged.

‘Get used to it, lad!’

‘Bugger that,’ said Scully. He gathered up his tools and went inside.

By the time Pete came in Scully was upstairs prizing out rotten floorboards and setting new ones in their place. The brassy taste of nails was in his mouth. For some reason it reminded him of the cowshed, that taste, the slanting jerrybuilt pile his father kept tacked together for twenty years. He went everywhere with nails in his mouth, the old man. The smell of fresh-sawn wood was sweet now, and the rain pattered against the windows. Scully looked at the attic slope of the upstairs walls. It felt like a cubby house up here. These would be snug cosy rooms, warmed by the chimney that divided them. He could see them waking now on mornings quiet and wet as this, their sleepy voices close in the angled space.

‘Well come on, Scully,’ said Pete, suddenly beside him. ‘Don’t just sit there lookin lovesick, tell me about her.’

‘Jennifer?’

‘Ye tell me nothin, Scully. I’m beginnin to believe you’re English after all. A man works with you all day and ye don’t say fook. Just stand there lookin dreamy.’

‘Well.’

‘Well my ass.’

Scully smiled.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, man, tell me about Jennifer. Make the day go by, boy, give me somethin to chew on. She’s the workin type, you say?’

‘That’s right. Department of Immigration. Got to be a bit of a big-shot.’

‘And now she’s emigratin herself?’

‘Yeah, she’s quit. She hated it. Loved working, you know. She was never the type to stay in and look after the kids. That’s more me.’

Pete clucked. ‘And you claimin to be a workin man.’

‘When Billie — our daughter — was smaller, I worked part-time so I could be with her.’

‘Where did you work? What is it exactly that ye do, Scully?’

Scully laughed. ‘Those days I worked in a tackle shop. Sold lures and things, fixed reels. You ever seen a Mackerel Mauler?’

‘Oh, Jaysus I hate fish!’

‘I left school at fifteen, went north to work the deck of a rock lobster boat. Great money. I spose I’ve done all kinds of things.’

‘So where did you meet her?’

Scully wrenched a board up in a shower of dry rot. ‘Geez, you want details, don’t you?’

Pete poked in the recess with a chisel, searching out pulpy wood. ‘Was it a dance, now?’

‘Australians don’t dance or sing, believe me. No, we met at university, can you believe. I was trying to do architecture. Went back, finished school and got in. We were in a class together. I forget what it was. Something in the English Department, some unit I thought I’d pick up so I could read a few books, you know? She was the bored pube getting paid to improve herself at night. Black hair, pretty. I mean real pretty, and she didn’t say a word. Well, neither did I. I mean, there’s all these kids spouting books and people you never heard of, confident as you like. I just shut up and tried to keep me head down, and she was doing the same.’

Peter fiddled with the blade of the plane, adjusting it absent-mindedly. ‘And, and?’

‘She asked me if I wanted a beer one night.’

‘She asked you’

‘Oh, mate.’ Scully rolled his eyes thinking of it. She bailed him up against the window one night and came out with lines that had to be rehearsed. She’d been practising.

‘What a friggin country it must be. Must be because it’s so damn hot. No time for romance.’

Scully threw a handful of sawdust at him and went back to his sawing. ‘We both quit university and got married,’ he shouted. ‘Eight years!’

‘Well, what’re ye doin here? She quit a good job to go lurkin through strange places and end up here on a hill with Brereton’s cows?’

‘Well, she was bored with her job, and restless, and I was game for a change. We rented our house and travelled, you know.’

‘With a baby and all.’

‘A five-year-old isn’t a baby, Pete.’ No, he thought. For a baby you needed somewhere still and snug and anchored. Somewhere like this.

‘Whose idea was it?’

‘Hers, I spose.’

‘And you followed.’

‘I was game for a change, yeah. I didn’t exactly follow.’

‘Used to be the women who followed.’

Scully laughed, but it stung somehow. Admit it, Scully, he thought. You followed, you’d follow her anywhere. A few weeks ago you couldn’t sleep for dreams of home, of hot white beaches and the wicked scent of coconut oil and the Fremantle Doctor blowing the curtains inward against the long table there in that house you sweated on all those years. You were a mad dog for it, mate, like a horse in the home paddock, bolting with your nose in the air, kissing Europe goodbye, letting it kiss your cakehole for all you cared, and then wham! you turned on a penny for her sake. On a queer feeling, a thing she couldn’t explain, just to see her happy.

‘Well, maybe it’s our turn to follow anyway,’ he said.

‘Mebbe so. I don’t know about women. These boards need sandin now. You need the power on, Scully. You can’t do all this by hand.’

‘It’s the money, mate. I’m stuffed until the money comes through from home. I’m living on the change from my air ticket. I don’t know if I can even pay what I owe you already.’

‘What, you think I’m lyin awake at night waitin for to be paid? What a proddy you are. I’ll have Con come by in the mornin and put a box in, I shoulda thought of it Monday. I’ll be frigged if I’m comin by to do this shite by hand. And yev got holes in your chimney there, go make some mortar. Make it one part Portland, one of lime and six of good sand. If he don’t show by eleven tomorrow, you must go in and get him. It’s the Conor Keneally Electric in Birr. He’ll be the poor big bastard looks like me.’

Eight

BUT CONOR KENEALLY DIDN’T COME, not for days he didn’t, and Scully thought it best to wait it out. He scraped mildew and dirt and pulpy mortar from the interior walls and caulked up holes and cracks, and then rendered the whole surface anew, filling the place with the heady stink of lime. He scraped paint from the low attic ceiling of the upstairs rooms and sugar-soaped it till his hands were raw. The house filled with shavings and sawdust and paint flakes and wall scum and began to look like the galley of a prawn trawler. Scully found himself squatting by the hearth at night, eating with his hands. In his sliver of mirror he looked feral. He worked on without electricity, driving himself, sleeping only on his oak door amid the drifts and draughts. He just couldn’t bring himself to go into Birr and chase Conor Keneally up, not when the man’s brother came by every day with a pair of cover-alls over his postal uniform and a trowel in his hand and a pint of Power’s at the ready. The man came by with a gas bottle, for pity’s sake, and a kitchen sink and beds brought piece by piece atop the mail of the Republic. The two of them would stand about at day’s end silently observing the lack of electricity.

‘You should get out now and then, Scully,’ Pete-the-Post said. ‘You’re killin yeself here and meetin no one, not even your neighbours.’

‘You keep bringing me my food. I can never think of an excuse to go in. You second guess me.’

‘Well, I’m takin pity on ye, Scully.’

This caused Scully to laugh uncomfortably. Did he seem that pitiable? True, he was living rough, but it was a temporary thing.

‘I’m getting there.’

‘That you are, son. You work like a nigger.’

Scully winced but let it pass.

‘I just wish you’d bill me.’

‘Are you lookin for a job?’

‘Come New Year I will be, yeah.’

‘Well, when you get your job you’ll get your bills.’

Scully didn’t go looking for Conor Keneally out of respect. After a man said things like that, how could you go embarrassing him by pursuing his brother the way Scully felt like pursuing him, morning after morning when he failed to show? Scully’s power tools lay downstairs in an ugly row and daily he went at things by hand, by candlelight, by firelight, funnelling his anxiety into work.

In two mad days Scully painted out the whole interior in lime wash, and the place suddenly seemed brighter, bigger, cleaner, and so strangely wholesome that it made him realize how foul it had been before, what scunge he’d really been dealing with day and night. Then he sealed the timber floor upstairs and buffed it by hand, and he lacquered the oak banister of the stair and the great beams that ran from lintel to lintel downstairs. From pine boards in the barn loft he made a cabinet for the kitchen sink that lacked only its ply cladding and the hinges for its doors. He shaved down spare boards for bookshelves and set them upstairs beside Billie’s bed, and so pretty were they that he began to wonder whether electricity might spoil this life after all. Peter arrived with salvage ply and a box of panel pins and he finished the kitchen. The flags were dry and swept. It was a clean, simple place, his new house, a place he was glad to wake in now, but it was still without music, without voices and laughter for most of the day.

There were moments in Scully’s day when he simply could not use a brush or plane or hammer for the thought of the summer he was about to miss at home: the colourless grass prostrate before the wind, the flat sea whitehot at its edge and the boats paralysed at their moorings with the heat and the smell of the desert descending upon them in the marinas and coves and riverbends. The great glossy weight of grapes hanging overhead and the smell of snapper grilling over charcoal. The seamless blue sky and the loose clothing on brown bodies. Lord, it gave him bad pangs, the thought of leaving all that behind, the idea of Jennifer and Billie packing that life into tea-chests and walking out of their old Fremantle house. Maybe they should have gone halfway on this, taken out a loan in case things didn’t work out. The Fremantle house was worth ten times what they’d paid for this. They needn’t have sold really. But then he thought of that dreamy, sweet look of happiness on her face that day last month, that look of resolution which made her seem unreservedly confident for the first time in years. It was worth following, it had to be worth the risk of trust.

Worse than the pangs of doubt and fear he felt alone at work, Scully had waking dreams of her here. They were so vivid he could feel her breath on him. He saw linen on his bed and the two of them glistening, gasping in the quiet, her black hair a shadow upon the sheet. Billie’s sleeping form beside the gable window with the tarry sky behind her, and a cradle in the corner still swinging faintly in the clear, clear air.

Scully showered under the spray of a hose in the door arch of the barn at night, and so cold was the water that from out in the fields and down in the woods you could hear him bellow like a man truly suffering.

• • •

CONOR KENEALLY DIDN’T COME and didn’t come, and one afternoon when Scully couldn’t bear to be at it any longer, he threw down his tools and went out walking. The sky was low. The wind blew hard from the hills. He shoved his fists deep in his pockets and stumped between hawthorn hedges and fallen walls down the lanes into the valley. He heard a tractor slinging shed slurry onto a field somewhere and dogs barking. The smell of burning peat hung in the air. He skirted the castle and its farm and went on deep into the valley where the fields were dark and heavy and became bogs at the foot of the hills. A small church stood alone on the bend in the lane. Scully climbed the stile into the graveyard and walked among the granite tombs beneath the Celtic crosses and fossilized flowers. He loved those crosses with their topography of faces and plants and stories, so much more potent than the bare symbols of his Salvation Army upbringing. There was suffering there, life lived, and beauty. He touched their lichened veins and practised crossing himself a moment before walking on sheepishly.

In a quiet wood beyond he saw pheasants and a few fleeing rabbits. His own footprints were sinister in the leaf litter and his breath spouted out before him. The valley reminded him of the dairy farm of his childhood with its standing puddles and makeshift gates and diesel murmurs somewhere on the air. The buildings were stone here and had outlived whole family lines, pre-dated nations and accents and understandings, while the sheds and houses of Scully’s childhood were all hewn from the forest around them, their flapping tin and sunsilvered wood ancient before their time. That was the life the banks had taken from his father. The suits came swooping and the farm slipped away. Scully only had the memory, the stirring now and then of that life before chest hair and girls and shopping malls. Maybe that’s why I’m here, he thought, surprised. Maybe I’m buying back the farm in a way, buying back childhood. He thought of his broken father living out an adaptation in the suburbs, his mother dazedly behind him. The quick decline. The strokes. The suits alighting once again. Buying the farm, what a good way to describe oblivion.

Looking back he saw his tiny faded white house up on the hill against the sky. Between him and it were the sodden fields rising up to the huge bald oak before the shell of the castle and its outbuildings with all their black staring windows. He imagined six hundred years of peasants looking up from their work to see the severe Norman outline of that sentry at the head of the valley. It had as many eyes as God, that shadow up there. Little wonder they burnt it.

Scully stumped across the miry fields feeling the wind bright on his cheeks.

As he approached a stone wall looking for a stile, Scully heard dogs. He stopped and cocked his head and almost went backwards into the slurry as two rangy hounds came silently across the wall and over his head.

‘Good day to ye!’ yelled a farmer with one leg over and the butt of his broken shotgun following.

‘G’day,’ said Scully with the dogs about his legs.

The farmer eased down the wall to land steady on his feet in the mud. He was dressed for hunting.

‘My name’s Scully. We’re neighbours now, I spose.’

‘Ah, you’re the Australian boy from Binchy’s Bothy, then.’

‘That’s me. Pleased to meet you.’

Scully shook his little spotted hand. He was gaunt and gingery with crazy fat sideburns and bad teeth, and Scully liked the look of him.

‘Jimmy Brereton, man of leisure. I don’t mind tellin ye the first time I saw them candles in the window up there last week I nearly shit meself. I thought, it was auld Binchy back again, the lazy booger.’

‘No, it’s just me.’

‘And the family comin, they tell me.’

‘You been talking to Pete-the-Post.’

‘Aw, Jaysus no,’ the man laughed. ‘Peter’s been talkin to me!’

‘He’s a good bloke.’

‘Ah, he’s great gas is Peter. Follow Pete, they say, for wherever Pete is the crack is mighty.’

Scully laughed. ‘Well they’re right.’

‘He says you’re doin a fine job of it up there, workin like a nigger.’

‘He’s been a great help,’ said Scully. ‘I’ll die when I get his bill, I spose.’

Jimmy Brereton kicked his dogs away apologetically and moved closer. ‘Just between us, you know, Peter’s the one keepin the show goin in there. He’s as good as feedin his brother’s family, God save him. Himself won’t get out of bed most days now.’

‘Conor?’

‘I’d buy a whole big box of candles if I was waitin on power from Conor Keneally.’

Scully must have looked stricken because the other man laughed good naturedly then and swung his twelve gauge about.

‘Ah, ye would’na been the first either, lad. Peter’s doin all but the stuff you need a ticket to do, and even some of that, but there should be laws for good men and laws for eejit bastards. That’s what I’d say if I was God.’

‘How can you tell em apart?’ said Scully with a smile. ‘Good men and eejit bastards.’

‘Well, if you were God and you couldn’t tell you’d be out of a job, no? Us poor mortal friggers have to find out by experience. We have to be on the receivin end of good and evil in order to figure it out.’

Scully looked up at the big two-storey place near the road where smoke tore from four great hewn chimneys.

‘That’s your place there?’

‘The auld coach house and stables. In the family, well God knows how long. By God, them horses had it good once.’

‘So the castle’s yours too?’

‘Aye, since the Troubles, friggin thing. It’ll fall on me one day, the bad-humoured heap of shite. The government won’t let me knock it over.’

‘Mind if I have a poke around it sometime?’

‘Go by on your way home, but mind yourself. It’s at your own risk, now. Bastard of a place. Should have done the job proper, those lads back then. Save everybody a lot of pain. Stop by one evenin, Mr Scully, and we’ll have a pint.’

‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’

‘Bring your gals with you when they come, hear? You see any thin movin down in them woods?’

‘Coupla rabbits.’

‘Come on, boys!’

Scully watched him go bandylegged down the slope toward the stands of ash and larch at the foot of the hills with the dogs streaking ahead into hedges and deadwood.

He heaved himself over the wall and walked up into the field below the castle whose foundation seemed to be a great granite tor buried in the brow of the hill. The closer he came and the deeper into its shadow he walked, the clearer its size became. He saw it plainly now. Scully had long thought that architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades because the land was long gone, the wildness was no longer even a memory. But this… this was where architecture became landscape. It took scale and time, something strangely beyond the human. This wasn’t in the textbooks.

It was not beautiful. The blunt Norman keep rose scarfaced between later gothic wings whose crenellations seemed afterthoughts and whose many tree-spouting windows ran on and on like a child’s drawing. Scully stood beneath the oak tree which grew at the foot of the entry stairs and spread its bare fingers into the air beneath the first windows. The stones of the steps were in-worn and puddled with rain, bristling with moss. Grass and ivy and bramble sucked against the walls to smother the single gothic door. Scully whistled through his teeth and heard the cattle complaining from Brereton’s sheds fifty yards away.

Scully pressed in through the vegetation and the half-open door into the rubble-strewn pit of the great hall whose floorboards lay in a charred and mossy pile in the cellar below. Everything had fallen through onto everything else. Great oak beams lay like fallen masts and rigging across cattle bones and tons of cellar bricks. Above it all, beyond the smoke-blackened gallery into whose powdery walls generations of local kids seemed to have cut their initials, loomed the vaulted ceiling, dark as a storm sky. He picked his way round a flagstone edge and heard the sickening burr of unseen wings high above. He came to the staircase built into the cavity of the keep wall. Walls twenty feet thick. A gust of wind angled through the place and stirred the scorched air. Scully got seven or eight steps up the spiral when he began to think of his warm kitchen and the iron kettle that would by now be hissing at its edge. Once around the first turn, the only light entering the staircase came from somewhere above. Grottos and torch niches became pits of shadow and his boots rang louder than he preferred. The light grew and a small chamber opened off to the side. Scully stepped up into its slot-like dimension and saw the huge bed of sticks and reeds left by the birds. The weapon slits let in planks of light and he looked down into the ash wood below his place. Birds wheeled down there, their cries rose plan-gently. He went on up the stairs, emboldened, and felt his way through the long damp curve until there was light again and a similar side chamber that he pushed on past to a long pillar of a door which yielded only slowly to his weight. Before him was a vaulted hall with long wide windows that let in blue light and illuminated the sea of twigs and marbled guano which stretched wall to wall. Rooks buffeted about, escaping as he came on, beating him to the glassless window where he stood looking out across the valley into the pass between castle and mountains where every puddle and window and flapping sheet of tin caught the light and rendered itself defenceless to the eye. The peaks of the Slieve Blooms ran with streaks of cloud and the ploughed fields fell away herringboned and naked. Scully crossed to the uphill window to look upon his little scab-roofed cottage beyond the wood. Its chimney ripped with smoke. Lanes and hedges and stands of timber and boggy boreens went out at all angles under his gaze as the wind tore his hair. From here it all seemed orderly enough, leading, as it did, to and from this very spot in every direction. It was a small, tooled, and crosshatched country, simple, so amazingly simple from above. Every field had a name, every path a stile. Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn’t the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes. Here the wildness was pressed into something else, into what had already been. And out there beneath the birds, in the gibberish of strokes and lines and connections of the valley was his new life.

Nine

AT DAWN NEXT DAY, when the ground was frozen thick and mist hung on him like a bedwetter’s blanket, Scully knew that his days of coming out behind the barn with a spade and a roll of floral paper were at an end. Like reinforced concrete, the earth yielded only after the most concerted flogging with the sharp end of the mattock, and the hole he made was no bigger than a jam tin. It smoked evilly and caused him to moan aloud. It took the hope from his morning, that nasty little bore hole, and he felt utterly ridiculous crouched over it like some ice fisherman dangling his lure. His backside froze, his hands screamed pain. And only yesterday he’d hunkered down in the mist to have Jimmy Brereton come by in his tractor, waving gamely across the hawthorn hedge and doffing his cap ironically. Top of the mornin, indeed.

It wasn’t even winter yet, and it could only get worse. Taking a dump was getting to be the most strenuous and cheerless occasion of the day, and for a languid outhouse merchant like Scully, who liked to plot and read and reminisce with his trousers down and the door ajar, the sacrifice had become too great.

As soon as his hands thawed and the pan was on the fire, he found pencil and paper and began to plan the septic system. What had Binchy and his family done all those years? Generations of them squatting out in the rain, the mud, the snow, in the barn itself, judging by the uneven sod floor. The trials of defecation alone might have driven the poor buggers to drink.

He was digging in the partly thawed field late in the morning when a black car drew by, hissing slow and quiet down the long hill with a train of other cars in its wake. He leaned on his shovel to watch the procession snake through the hedges, fifty cars and more making the turn to Birr with the sky the colour of dishwater above. Scully stood there, the minutes it took to pass, while the fields faded from their lustrous green, and when the last car was gone, the air was heavy, and the world suddenly becalmed.

• • •

PETE-THE-POST FOUND HIM waist-deep in the earth a little after midday. The ground was littered with the stones, bones and pieces of metal he’d heaved up past the mound of chocolate soil at the hole’s rim. It was unpleasant in the ground which smelled too rich for a man grown up in sand. It was too soft, too spongy underfoot and he was relieved to see the postie come smirking across the field, mail flapping.

‘Didn’t you hear, they’ve dug all the gold out of Ireland, Scully.’

‘I’m not withdrawing,’ said Scully, heaving up a spadeful. ‘I’m depositing. This is the septic. There will always be a corner of some foreign field that will be forever Scully.’

‘Aw, you witty bastard. Depositin, now, is it.’

‘How you been? Haven’t seen you for days.’

‘Bit of family business.’

Scully leaned against the wall of dirt and wiped his brow. The earth smelled burnt and rotten like the inside of that castle.

‘Everythin alright?’ he said.

‘Grand, grand. Some mail for you.’

‘Can you leave it inside? I’m filthy, Pete.’

Pete looked down into the hole and then along the pegs marking the trench uphill to the barn. The fall was good, the distance was good. ‘Puttin the lavvy in the barn, are we?’

‘No room in the house. Back home I’d stick it outside, but here no way. I don’t wanna leave the skin of me bum on the toilet seat of a morning.’

Pete laughed and his ears glowed. ‘I’ll have you a pipe and a liner by four. You don’t mind them pre-loved, as the Americans would say? I’ve even got a pan, pink and all.’

‘Mate, pink is my colour and pre-loved is my destiny.’

‘Rightso. Um, what about water, Scully?’

Scully looked up and gripped his shovel. ‘Gawd! I forgot that.’

‘Even if the pan is Teflon-coated I think you might have some problems without water.’

‘Smartarse. Can we run it off the pump, you reckon? Hand pump the cistern full?’

‘Jaysus, you’re goin basic here, Scully. I presume you had it better at home.’

‘A damn sight better,’ Scully muttered.

‘You need an electric pump off your well and full plumbin.’

‘Well.’

‘I know, I know. I’ll see you at four. Sign this. Ah, you dirty booger. Wash your hands.’

• • •

SCULLY READ HIS MAIL BY the fire with a mug of tea steaming beside him. There was a card from his mother with a hurt, distant tone to it. The picture showed the Swan River at dusk with the lights of Perth budding against a purple sky. A query from the Australian Taxation Office about why he had not filed for the past two years. This had been forwarded by Jennifer, it seemed, along with a card from the wife of a mate from his fishing days. Judging from the incoherent message she was drunk. The card showed a koala bear surfing, GREETINGS FROM GERALDTON. In a fat envelope was a news-stand poster from the Daily News, sent by a mate from the tackle shop, JOH GOES! Bjelke-Petersen, the doddery despot had finally quit politics. Thank God. In the registered envelope were all the documents relating to the sale of the Fremantle house ready for signing, and under separate cover, a cheque from Jennifer for two thousand dollars. The cheque was in her name from an account he didn’t recognize, a bank neither of them had accounts with. There was no note. The writing and the signature were hers, the envelope postmarked Fremantle a few days ago. Why didn’t she just transfer money into the account here with Allied Irish? It must be something specific. Maybe just enough to tide him over, clear the debt on the credit card. Money, it always made him nervous. He turned to the final item, a card from Billie. On the face of it was a photograph of the Round House, the old convict prison on the beach at Fremantle. Its octagonal limestone walls softened by sunset, rendered scandalously picturesque. It was somewhere they went often, him and her. Jennifer would be at work and the two of them would wander through town to the beach, talking about buildings, about what had been. He was grateful for those years, to have been the one who had her most days. She listened so carefully, you could see her hungry mind working. It was the reason he didn’t have so many friends anymore, as if the kid was suddenly and unexpectedly enough for him.

Today I went to Bathers Beach with Granma and now I am thinking about the convicts. They must of thought God forgot them. Like they fell off the world. When we went to London I was five. I felt like a convict, like it was too different for me. But I was only a kid. Granma says the tailer are good now. I can tie a blood knot, so there. Don’t fall off the world, Scully. Do not forget about me, that is BILLIE ANN SCULLY.

(all for one!)

And one for all, thought Scully. The house was quiet but for the mild expirations of the turf fire. Scully looked at the postmark and felt raw and unsettled. What a kid. She put the wind up him, sometimes.

He could see her now, the way she was the day they bought this place. Reading that old comic. She had all his old Classics Illustrated in a cracked gladstone bag from the farm. She had them all. Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Count of Monte Cristo. Yes, he saw her lolling back in that shitheap rented VW with her absolute favourite, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with its gaudy pictures and forests of exclamation marks. Her lips moving as she snuffled at a bag of Tato chips, humming some Paul Simon song. Her hair bouncing, wide mouth rimmed with salt. The laces of her shoes undone.

On that strange day, when Jennifer got out and looked at the bothy, they exchanged looks, him and Billie, and he couldn’t tell what it meant. Mutual doubt, perhaps. And even when he’d been won over by Jennifer’s pleading, her infectious excitement and happiness, Billie remained doubtful. He remembered that now. That and how resistant she was at the airport. Crying at the departure gate, tugged down the hall by her mother who looked simply serene. That was the only word for it — serene. Being pregnant maybe, or being decided. The afterglow. Black hair glossing out behind her. Arms swinging like a woman content and on course at last, relaxed the way she had never been before. Yes, her features serene but indistinct even now. And Billie like a sea anchor, dragging all the way to the plane.

• • •

BY THE END OF THE next day, Scully had himself a connected, waterless toilet. On the barn wall beside it he had taped his poster: JOH GOES! He filled the cistern with a bucket and flushed it, hearing the water run away downhill. He laid planks on blocks between house and barn for a bridge across the mud. Pete stood by with a wry grin.

‘Pumpin out the bilges, it’ll be.’

‘Come in and have a drink, you cheeky bastard.’

The north wind rattled the panes of the Donegal windows at their backs and the chimney snored beside them as they drank their pints of Harp. The room was warm and humid with simmering stew.

‘You think your gals’ll take to this place, Scully?’

‘Well, I don’t think Jennifer’ll need convincing.’

‘How old is that little one?’

‘Billie? Seven, seven and a half.’

‘A grand life for her here. You can bring her into Birr to play with Con’s.’

The very mention of Conor Keneally caused Scully to go stiff with irritation.

‘And there’s a school bus by here to Coolderry. Nice little school.’

‘She’s not a Catholic you know.’

‘Aw, they don’t give a toss. And anyway, she might just become one. A little bit of civilization never hurt.’

Scully laughed. The thought of them trying to ‘civilize’ Billie! But they’d learn, and they’d like her. The Irish and her, they’d get on. They liked a bit of spirit, didn’t they?

It was dark outside now and rain fell, light at first and then in roaring sheets. The fire hissed.

‘You’re a lucky man to have a child,’ said Pete staring into the fire.

‘Yes,’ he said with his whole being. ‘Yes. It’s a surprise, you know, nothing prepares you for it. Nothing better ever happened to me. Funny, you know, but I’m so bloody grateful for it. To Jennifer, to God.’ He laughed self consciously. ‘You see, this stuff used to be automatic, you know, natural. Women aren’t so keen to have them anymore, not where I come from, anyway. They’ve got other fish to fry, which is fair enough. But they don’t realize, sometimes, what they’re missing, or what they’re withholding, you know? The power they have. I don’t know if Billie was an accident or not. I thought she was. It’s hard to tell, you see, with people. So I’m grateful, that’s the truth of it.’ Scully blushed. Yes. That was why he dressed her so meticulously when she was small, why he worried too much about seatbelts, why he infuriated the kid with lectures about tooth decay. It wasn’t like him, but she wasn’t to know. It was her, the fact of her. And when she fell from a bike or a tree she came running to him. It shamed him in front of Jennifer, the way Billie ran to him first. Did Jennifer feel what his own father must have felt, being the second parent? Maybe he just took it all too seriously. Perhaps other people didn’t feel these things.

‘You want some of your own, someday, then?’

‘Oh, I could imagine it,’ said Pete, refilling his glass and resting his boot on the hearth. ‘There’s just the little problem of matrimony, Scully. You know, if I wanted trouble, I’d move to Ulster. I like comin and goin as I fancy. And I have Con’s own when the urge hits me.’

Pete watched as Scully got up and lit his three candles at the sill. Both of them stared at the twitching candle-flame and the reflection it threw along the panes.

‘Did you ever come close?’ Scully asked. ‘To marriage.’

‘Aw, once. But I was young. There’s no point goin back on it. All the adventures are ahead of you, not behind. You got to go and find em. And I might say,’ he said with a mischievous cast in his eyes, ‘I believe in deliverin em now and then, too. You’ve been godly patient with my brother.’

‘Pete, we don’t —’

‘No, no, I thank ye for your understandin on this.’

‘Look —’

‘Can you meet me in Birr tomorrow mornin early, say seven-thirty?’

‘Sure. Why?’

‘Power corrupts, you know, but without it, you can neither cook toast nor take a shit. Seven-thirty.’

• • •

THE STREETS OF BIRR WERE almost light at seven-thirty next morning and its houses, shoulder to shoulder in the misty square, were grey and stirring with the shriek of kettles and the scuffle of dogs. Scully saw the van in the rain-slick high street and pulled in beside it as Pete climbed out grimly waving.

Pete led them to the little green doorway at the side of a shopfront. Pete knocked and blew on his hands.

A jaded and fearful woman let them in wordlessly.

‘Mornin, Maeve.’

‘He’ll not be up for hours, Peter. Don’t even bother yourself.’

‘This is Fred Scully from out at the Leap.’

‘Oh, yes, the Australian,’ she smiled wanly.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Scully, smelling boiled cabbage, cigarette smoke, turf and bacon fat.

‘Peter talks about you all day.’

‘Oh. I hope it’s not all bad,’ he said limply.

‘Ready, Scully?’

‘Ready for what?’ said Maeve Keneally.

Scully felt faint from the stuffiness and desperation of this house. It seemed no window had been opened here for generations.

‘Just keep the front door open, Maeve.’

Scully followed the postman through the gloomy house and into a foetid bedroom where Conor Keneally slept in his boots, and they took him by those boots, and dragged him off the bed, down the corridor with its greenish pictures of the Pope and the saints and Charlie Haughey, through the front door and out into the drizzling street where, finally awake, he began to struggle.

‘Watha fook! Geroffa me!’

‘We’ve got a job for you to do, so you can get in the van, Con.’ Pete hauled at his brother but the man slid back onto the lumpy pavement.

‘I’m in the fookin wet street in me jammies, you bastard eejit!’

‘Aw, Conor Keneally, you slept in your duds as ever. Get in your van.’

Conor struggled to his feet. He was bigger than his brother and redfisted. His sideburns were like flames down his cheeks as he braced himself against the Toyota van, copping a bit of PVC pipe in the back of the head as he staggered.

‘No one tells me.’

‘Shut up and get in the van,’ said Pete trying to smile.

‘Who’s gonna make me, gobshite?’ The big man straightened, smelling of the hop fields of the Republic. ‘You, Mr Post?’

‘No,’ Pete said, pointing at Scully. ‘Him.’

Conor struggled to focus on the scarred and wonk-eyed face of the Australian, who quite simply looked mealy enough to be up to it. It was no postman face.

‘Now, Conor, this is one of Mylie Doolin’s London boys and he needs a job done.’

The electrician slumped and held a great meaty hand to his head in horror.

‘Aw! Awww, fook me now! Jaysus, what’re you doin Peter Keneally, you eejit!’

‘Don’t be askin stupid questions. Get a meter box and all the guff.’

‘There’s one in there,’ Conor said, sickly dipping his head to the van. ‘I was after comin from Tullamore —’

‘Let’s go, then,’ interrupted Pete gruffly. ‘Our man will follow in the Transit.’

Conor covered his face with both hands now. ‘Holy Mother, Peter. Mylie Doolin.’

‘Aye,’ said Peter winking over his brother’s shoulder at Scully, ‘Mylie himself.’

He watched them climb into the Toyota with a jug of sloe poteen. A dog barked. The rain fell.

• • •

SCULLY STAYED CLEAR OF THE bothy all morning, keeping to the draughty barn to sand down and varnish an old mahogany chair he found in the loft. Now and then he heard shouts from the house: anger, exasperation, hangover, fear. It was funny alright, but he felt sorry for poor Conor, labouring in there with an imaginary gun at his head and a very real hangover inside it. Scully worked away in the giddy fumes grateful to Mylie once more.

Just before noon when he could stand the cold no longer he went inside and heard a transistor playing fiddle music in the kitchen.

Conor was at the table shakily filling out some paperwork, and Pete was throwing turf on the fire.

‘Power to the people, Scully.’

‘Don’t suck up, brother.’

Scully just grinned. Conor held out the sheets of paper to Scully who took them without speaking.

‘Now that electric drill will work, Scully, me boy,’ said Pete. ‘Bit of kneecappin, no?’

Conor paled.

‘C’mon, Pete,’ said Scully, speaking in Conor’s presence for the first time that day. ‘Give the bloke a break.’

‘This fooker’s not Irish!’

‘Australian,’ said Scully.

‘Desert Irish, you might say.’

The table crashed forward and Conor was reaching for his brother’s throat when the noon Angelus suddenly sounded on the radio. Without hesitation, both Irishmen went slack, and adopted the prayerful hunch, snorting and trembling, as the church bell rang clear. Wind pressed against the panes. The fire sank on itself, and the bell tolled on and on into the false calm. Scully watched the fallen forelocks of the Keneallys and fought the fiendish giggle that rose in his neck. And then the last peal rang off into silence. The men crossed themselves and Conor Keneally noticed how upright Scully was, how his hands stayed in his pockets.

‘Good Christ, he’s not even Catholic, let alone Irish!’

‘And that’s not all,’ said Peter, chuckling and preparing to be pummelled. ‘He thought Mylie was in gaol for the VAT.’

Conor looked at Scully with a sudden mildness on his face — pity. ‘Jaysus, man, where did you go to school?’

‘Elsewhere, you might say.’

‘You bastards.’ Conor slapped his cloth cap against his knees. ‘You fookers had me banjanxed. He’s not with the Provos at all, is he.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Scully.

Pete tipped his head back and laughed, and he didn’t stop for a moment as Conor dragged him outside and rammed him into the door of the Toyota, and he kept it up as his roaring brother beat his head against the roof, holding his ginger forelock and slamming down once, twice until the big man let go and stood back and began to weep.

‘Oh, God, my life.’

From the door of his house which poured music and the smell of burning soil, Scully watched as Pete grabbed his brother and held him fiercely in the wind. The big man sobbed and dripped tears and snot. His roadmap face glowed with shame and despair and a kind of impotence Scully had never seen before. Peter’s hands were in his brother’s ginger curls and he wept too, his eyes averted, his head high in the wind.

Scully went inside and stood by the fire, hung the kettle on the crane, threw on some more turf. The radio played a ballad, and a woman’s mournful voice filled the cottage. He went back to the front door and offered the Keneallys a cup of tea. They straightened up, accepted with dignity and kicked the mud from their boots.

Ten

ON THE ELEVENTH OF DECEMBER, a Friday with sunlight and sharp, clean air, Scully stood at a sink full of hot water and sang in his broken, growly voice, an old song he had heard Van Morrison bawling yesterday on the radio.

But the sea is wide

And I can’t swim over

And neither have

I wings to fly…

The house smelled sweetly of turf and scrubbing. There was crockery on the pine dresser and a shelf beneath the stairs with old paperbacks on it already. There was a birch broom inside the door and a stack of larch kindling by the turfbox. An oilskin hung from a peg on the chimney wall above his Wellington boots. Beside him, the little refrigerator hummed on the flagstones. There were cheap curtains on the windows, blue against the whitewash, and the sun spilled in across the stainless steel sink. Admit it, he told himself, you like it, you like the place now that it’s full of things. Because you love things, always have.

Scully was like his father that way. No matter what the Salvos said, the old fella thought certain objects were godly. Briggs and Stratton motors, the McCulloch chainsaw, the ancient spirit level that lived in the workshed beside the dairy, the same bubbly level that caused Scully junior to have ideas of drawing and building. Ah, those things. The old girl thought it was idolatry, but she had a brass thimble she treasured more than her wedding ring.

It wasn’t getting things and having them that Scully learnt; it was simply admiring them, getting a charge out of their strange presence.

Scully wiped the windowpane with his sweatered elbow and saw the rhinestone blaze of the frozen fields. Too good a day for working. He couldn’t spend another day at it, not while the sun was out. Pete was right, he wasn’t seeing anything, buried alive in work. He didn’t even know where he was living.

On the kitchen table he began a letter home but he realized that it wouldn’t reach them in time. He looked at the little aside he had written to Billie in the margin. Even if I fall off the world, Billie Ann Scully, I will still love you from Space.

He smiled. Yes.

• • •

THAT MORNING HE DROVE INTO birr and organised his banking. He had a cheque made out to Peter Keneally as part payment. He bought a leg of New Zealand lamb and a sprig of rosemary at insane cost. He found oranges from Spain, olives, anchovies, tomatoes, things with the sun still in them. Men and women greeted him as he humped a sack of spuds to the Transit in a light drizzle. He bought an Irish Times and read about the mad bastard in Melbourne killing eight in the Australia Post building. Jumped through a plate glass window on the tenth floor. Someone else in Miami, an estranged husband killed his whole family with a ball peen hammer and gassed himself so they could all be together again. Shit, was it just men?

Two kids in fluorescent baseball caps walked by singing. He started the van. Yes, at least they sing here, whatever else happens.

• • •

ALONG THE WINDING LANES HE drove, contained between hedges and walls, swinging into turns hard up against the brambles, skidding mildly on puddles hard as steel, until he came to a tree in the middle of the road, with rags in its stark branches. It stood on a little island of grass where the road had been diverted around it. Scully pulled up alongside and saw the shards of cloth tied here and there, some pale and rotten, others freshly attached. A sad little tree with a road grown around it. It looked quite comical and forlorn. He drove on.

• • •

AT COOLDERRY HE PULLED UP outside the village school. He got out into the light and stood by the hurling pitch as the bell clanged for lunch. The bleat of children made his heart soar.

A car idled down the hill.

‘How are you, Scully?’

He turned and saw that it was Pete-the-Post with his arm out of the van.

‘Me? A bit toey, I’d say.’

‘Toey?’

‘Anxious, impatient, nervous…’

‘Antsy, then.’

‘No, toey.’

Pete smiled and turned off the motor. ‘Not long, son. Two days now, isn’t it?’

‘How’s Conor?’

The postman pursed his lips and looked out across the muddy pitch where gangly boys began to mill and surge, their sticks twitching. ‘Auld Conor’s losing, moment by moment. The drink, as if you didn’t know. It’s the saddest sight to see, Scully, a man lettin his own life slip through his hands.’

Scully scuffed his boots in the gravel. ‘Any reason for it?’

‘Aw, too long a story to bother you with. Somethin terrible happened in the family, five or six year ago. Somethin… well, somethin terrible. Conor’s the kind of man who’ll not let it be. He never mentions it, of course, never utters a word. But he broods, you know. There’s things that have no finish, Scully, no endin to speak of. There’s no justice to it, but that’s the God’s truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em. Now listen to me goin on in your ear like a radio.’

Scully waved his apology aside. ‘You’re a good brother to him.’

‘There’s a grand singin pub over to Shinrone I’m goin to tomorrow night. Why don’t ye come with me and we’ll celebrate your last night as an Irish bachelor.’

Scully squinted, hesitating. He felt as reluctant as a hermit, and foolish for feeling so.

‘Come on, Scully, be a divil!’

‘Okay,’ he smiled. ‘Thanks.’

Scully stood in the blue cloud the AN POST van left behind and heard Pete go crashing gears through the village. He stamped his feet and heard girls squealing behind him. The little van suddenly braked on the hill, U-turned and came whinnying back. Pete pulled in again, blushing fiercely and shoved an arm out the window.

‘Knew I stopped by for somethin. Telegram, Scully.’

He opened it while Pete drove off again.

SETTLEMENT THROUGH. CONFIRMED AE46 SHANNON SUNDAY MORNING. JENNIFER.

He stuffed it in his pocket and stood uncertainly there by the school, imagining them suddenly here with him. His hands shook. And then he realized — the bastard had read it. Peter knew before be did. Country life!

• • •

SATURDAY NIGHT SCULLY SHAVED and pulled on his best jeans, his roo-skin boots and a black pullover. From the tin trunk in the Transit he pulled the sleek black greatcoat bought one day in Place Monge in the desperate days of Paris. Four hundred francs secondhand. He shook his head even now at the thought. He’d worked hard for that coat. He brushed it down by the hearth and hung it up a while to air while he scrubbed his teeth with iron concentration. Scully, he thought, you look like a convict. You confirm every Englishman’s deep and haughty suspicion. You can’t help the face, but for goodness’ sake get a haircut.

He stoked the fire and loaded it with turf, and then gathered up the house keys, big medieval things, that felt heavy as a revolver in his pocket.

He read the crumpled telegram again. CONFIRMED, SUNDAY. The paper lay pale and odd on the scrubbed pine table, casting shadows from the firelight across the wood.

He thought of the night they bought this place. When he woke in the wide musty room above Davy Finneran’s pub to see Jennifer standing naked at the window, lit by the neon of the chipper across the street as the last drinkers rolled home down the street. Her body was dark from the Greek sun. The bed held the scent of their sex. Billie slept on a sofa by the door, her limbs every which way. Scully didn’t move for a while. He lay in the hammocky bed, his mouth dry from celebrating. He just watched her over by the window as the church bells tolled. Her shoulders twitched; she sniffed. Scully loved her. He was not going home, he would never see his house and all his stuff again, but he loved her and she must know it. She wiped her eyes, wiped them and turned, startled to see him awake.

‘A… a dream,’ she whispered.

But she seemed not to have even been to sleep.

‘You alright?’

She nodded.

‘Come to bed.’

For a moment, her body suddenly graven, she hesitated before padding across to him. She was cold, almost clammy against him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured.

‘About a dream?’

Her breath was warm against his shoulder. He held her to him and slept.

Now Scully heard the Renault labour up the hill. He stoked the fire and switched out the light and went outside to meet Peter.

• • •

PETE-THE-POST DROVE THEM slowly through the gathering rain to Shinrone, passing the half-pint of Bushmills to Scully now and then who sipped and watched the tunnel the headlights made between the hedges and stone walls.

‘That’s a grand coat.’

‘Bought it in Paris.’

‘Paris. Friggin Paris, eh?’

Scully laughed. ‘Paris.’

‘Is it like the movies?’

‘Not so you’d notice.’

‘I liked them Gene Kelly sorta fillums, you know with the dancin and the umbrellas and the kissin by the fountain.’

‘Well, we did a lotta that, of course.’

‘So what the frig did you do?’

Scully sighed. ‘Worked me arse off, Pete. I painted and Jennifer wrote.’

‘Painted? You didn’t tell me you’re the artist type.’

‘I painted apartments, mate. Cash money. Worst job of my life, don’t ask.’

‘And the writin?’

Scully took a pull of the hot, peaty Bushmills. Paris really wasn’t the kind of thing he had in mind on a fun night out. He wanted to forget the damn place once and for all. The long miserable days scraping the ceilings of tight-arsed Parisian skinflints. The desperate scuffle outside the school every morning with Billie, and those evenings of tears and rage when Jennifer’s frustration was like an animal in the room with them. It was a kind of affliction for her. After the early buzz, the heady weeks of hope and excitement, the days she slugged it out in the tiny apartment alive with ideas, and new friends to try them on, she became this thwarted creature.

Some nights they stayed up and drank too much pastis while he tried to console her but she lashed out like something wild and cornered. It was his fault, she said. He was lazy, under — motivated — he had no ambition, no guts, which struck him as a bit rich, considering his circumstances. He did shit work all day so she could write. And gladly. God how he wanted her to break through into some kind of success, some new version of herself that made her happy.

But Paris was a black hole, somewhere where Jennifer came hard up against the wall of her limitations while all he could do was stand by and watch.

‘Scully?’

‘Hm?’

‘Tell me about the writing. Are you asleep or drunk already?’

‘Well, I liked it.’

‘What did she write? For certain, she’s the poetical type, takin the bothy the way she did.’

Scully smiled and passed back the bottle. ‘Actually she’s very businesslike, Pete. Likes things neat and sharp, you know. Comes from a very proper family. Escaped from them really. She’s always thought her parents held her back from doing what she’d like to try. They pressured her into a career in the public service and stuff. She says they made her ordinary when she wasn’t. Safe, dull, that kind of thing, which she isn’t. I liked her because she was so… straight, I guess. But she hates that, being straight. Writing was one of those things she always thought of doing. You know, weird, risky things, the kind of things parents hate. All this travelling was her chance. She quit her job, had her heart set on Paris. Paris was poetry for her. And she wrote some nice poems, showed em to people and was kind of… crushed. Those bastards, her mates, they thought it was a bit of a joke. Well, fuck them. I thought the poems were good.’

‘You liked them cause you love her.’

‘No, I liked them cause I liked them.’ Scully watched the ragged hedges peel by. ‘Anyway, it didn’t work out.’

‘So much for dancin by the fountains.’

‘Yeah.’

Pete chugged on the whiskey bottle and gasped with pleasure. He steered with his knees a while and hummed theatrically.

‘By God, Scully, you’ve seen the world!’

‘On the cheap, mate, on the cheap.’

‘And what did you do in Greece, lie in the bakin sun and drink them little drinks with hats on em?’

Scully laughed. ‘No, I worked for a stonemason humping granite up a hill. Loved it. Great place. Greece is like Australia invaded by the Irish.’

‘Good gravy, man!’

‘It’s true. Nothin works and no one gives a shit. Perfect.’

‘And what did Jennifer do?’

‘She painted.’

‘Houses?’

‘No, art painting. Well, you know, she had to have a try. She was okay, I thought. Trouble with Jennifer is she can turn her hand to anything. She’s quite good at a lot of things, but she wants to be a genius at one thing. Maybe it’ll happen. One day. She deserves a break.’

‘You love the girl.’

‘I do.’

They coasted into Shinrone, rain drifting oblique in the lights of the little town which seemed choked with parked cars.

‘Arlo Guthrie was here last year, Scully. I came to see him myself. Remember that song:

Comin into Los Angeles

Bringin in a coupla keys

Don’t touch my bags

If you please, Mr Customs ma-aan!’

‘I remember. That’s a drug song, Pete.’

‘It never was!’

Scully took the bottle from him and laughed till it hurt.

‘One of them U2 lads was down from Dublin to see the auld Arlo. I nearly knocked him over in the pisser. Where would we be without music, eh? It’s not really a drugs song, is it?’

Scully only laughed, nodding.

‘Fookin hell!’

• • •

IN THE HOT WILD FUG of the pub that night, Scully lost the anxiety that had come upon him a couple of hours ago. The band tossed from jig to reel and the dust rose from the foul floors with the stomp of dancing and the flap of coats and scarves. The fiddle was manic and angular, the tin whistle demented, and the drum was like the forewarning of the headache to come. Someone came in with a set of pipes and an old man grabbed up the microphone and the fever of the place subsided as a ballad began. Scully couldn’t recall a sweeter sound that the sad soughing of those pipes. This was no braying Scots pipe; this was a keening, a cry loaded with desire and remorse. The old man sang with his tie askew and his dentures slightly adrift, a song of the Slieve Blooms, of being left behind, abandoned in the hills with winter coming on. Scully listened, transfixed, until in the final chorus he put down his glass and shoved his way to the door.

Outside it was raining and there was no one in the street but a sullen black dog chained to a bicycle. Across the road the chipper was heating up his fat for closing time, his hard fluorescents falling like a block of ice into the street. Scully’s face was numb in patches, and he stood with his cheeks in the rain, trying to account for his sudden moment of dread in there. That’s what it was, dread. It’s a song, Scully.

Pete stood in the doorway, peering out. ‘You’re not goin to puke, now are ye?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘You don’t like the music?’

‘The music’s great. Grand, in fact.’

‘By God, there’s some rascally girls from Tullamore in there.’

‘Go to it, son.’

‘You alright, then?’

‘I’ll be in in a moment.’

Pete slipped back into the hot maw of the pub and Scully shook the rain from his face. The black dog whimpered. He went over and let him off the chain. It nipped him and bolted into the night.

• • •

AMID THE GREASY STEAM OF a parcel of chips the pair of them drove home singing.

Keep your hands off red-haired Mary

Her and I are to be wed

We see a priest this very morn

And tonight we’ll lie in a marriage bed…

They came to the odd little tree in the middle of the road with its sad decoration of rags, and Scully asked about it.

‘A wishing tree,’ said Peter, stopping beside it and winding down the window to let in a blast of cold air. ‘People tie a rag on and make a wish.’

‘Does it work?’

Pete guffawed. ‘Does it fookin look like it, son? Does the country seem so much like the island of Hawaii? Not many of us get our wish in Ireland, Scully.’

‘Things aren’t that tragic here, surely,’ said Scully, feeling the mood slip from him.

‘Jaysus,’ yelled Pete. ‘Can you imagine how fooked it’d be if we did!’

The postie’s teeth were huge and hilarious in the gloom.

For a long way up the hill behind Binchy’s Bothy, a hare ran doggedly before them at the roadside, his tail bobbing in the headlights as they slowed. On and on it ran, weaving now and then to seek an opening in the stone wall, skittering across glassy patches of mud, until finally, it veered left into a boreen and claimed the darkness of the field. Scully and Peter Keneally cheered him all the way to the crest of the hill.

At the cottage, Scully climbed out and stood a moment by the van.

‘Cheer up, Scully. It’s tomorrow already.’

‘Tomorrow it is.’

‘God bless you now.’

‘Thanks for tonight. Thanks for everything.’

‘Ye want me to drive ye down to Shannon after mass?’

‘Thanks, but it’s probably best on my own.’

‘Well, see you Monday, then,’ said Pete, setting off down the hill. His lights burned down the hedges and disappeared.

Scully opened the door. There was still some life in the fire. He heaped on some more turf and a few chunks of coal and stirred it back to brightness. Room by room he went through the place, trying to imagine them all in it, but he was too tired and drunk perhaps, for the images skidded away from him as he straightened a rug here, stood a chair there, then finally went to bed upstairs in sheets that smelled of factories and shops and sunnier places.

Eleven

SCULLY WOKE SOMETIME IN THE night, his throat raw and dry. He heaved himself out of his bed into the cold and stumped downstairs for a glass of water. Cattle bellowed from Brereton’s sheds down beyond the castle. At the sink he saw that the sky had cleared and there were stars out. A misshapen moon hung high and bright in the black. Down at the castle there were lights. He stood there naked and shivering by the window, watching them move through the trees. Kids, he guessed, local teenagers playing up on a Saturday night. He drank his water and placed the glass in the sink. He wondered if Jimmy Brereton knew. It couldn’t hurt to take a look.

By the door he slipped on his greatcoat, walked into his gum-boots and pulled a scarf about himself. The hard, icy air hit him flat in the face as he stepped outside into the night. The luminous dial on his watch said three in the morning.

Scully went cautiously down the field in the darkness. There was no wind, only a sharp mist rising from the ground. Down there through the trees — no, beyond the trees, right down in the valley — lights were moving. As he climbed the stile at the edge of his field, Scully saw how the lights snaked; they were a procession. He cocked his head for the sounds of revelry, but heard nothing except the sound of Jimmy Brereton’s cows.

Scully crossed the road and climbed through the wall where the ash wood met the road. He picked his way over fallen branches, crunching through the frosty detritus with his own breath like a beacon before him. The great shadow of the castle reached out beyond the trees, silent, blank, still. With frozen grass snapping at his bare shins, he crossed the courtyard beside the ruins of the pumphouse, now just dark, reeling blocks at the corner of his vision, and came to the brow of the decline to see the romping melée of burning torches turn in across the fields and come circling beneath the bare oak beneath the castle steps. Torches. Yes, they were flames he saw travelling high off the ground. Now Scully heard the thud of feet, and as the lights passed beneath the old tree, he saw the glistening, steaming bodies of horses, he saw the bearded faces of men. Staffs. A lank standard. The breaking mud rose before them like a bow wave.

Ripping through blackberry and nettle, Scully bolted for the cover of a crumbling wall. The cold had reached his balls now, they felt brittle as Christmas baubles between his thighs. He pulled the coat harder about himself and peered through a gap in the stones. Down there, in the gently sloping field beneath the castle steps, the horsemen had assembled. There were about twenty of them in fancy dress. They were wildhaired, cloaked and highbooted. Two of them wore spattered grey chestplates and rags across their brows. Scully heard the horses snorting and heaving for wind. They shot out columns of steam and rattled metallic shudders. With firelight in the dark balls of their eyes, the riders looked up at the keep, and Scully tried to think, to find his way ahead of all this. He shook with cold. Out in the valley there were no more lights, no floods burning in the yards of local farms, no handy sign of life. He watched and waited, mesmerized. He saw weapons now, scars and blood, the restless twitching of reins. He saw the sheen of sweat along the horses’ flanks and the united gaze of the horsemen. They looked a mercenary lot, fierce and stoic. In all his life he’d never seen men like these. From where he crouched he couldn’t quite see the front of the castle keep, whether or not a light showed, if a door was ajar, or if someone was up there.

Around the ruined yard wall he crawled on his hands and knees till he could clamber across a mossy pile of rubble and make the cover of the blackthorn hedge hard up against the forecourt itself, but halfway to the hedge Scully put a foot down a hole and staggered and lost his balance completely. He tumbled and crashed and cursed down the slope, and when he came to a halt, smarting with pain and fright, he was out in the open, plain as midday. There was no use running. He figured it was just as well to stand and show himself in the weird light of the sputtering torches. He pulled himself upright, feeling the soft mud shift beneath the broken surface, but the riders sat unmoved from their fixed stations of expectation. Each of them was saddled, tense, eyes upcast to the keep where no light shone and no figure moved. Almost out of politeness he cleared his throat and kicked a couple of stones together to get their attention, but it felt as though he didn’t exist.

With arms held high, he stumbled down onto the muddy grass into the strong smell of horses. Closer there was a sourer scent, the stink of unwashed men. At the sudden splash of piss from a horse in the rear, Scully grunted in fright but not a man stirred. Their torches crackled, flames rigid in the still air, giving off the reek of pitch. With his pulse like an animal trapped beneath his skin, Scully moved between the riders, all but touching the heaving, rancid flanks of their mounts. Some of the horses had black, congealed wounds on their chests, and they looked as tired and cold and dazed as their riders. Some were boys, their scrawny legs bare and stippled with gooseflesh. And how they craned their necks, these riders. It was as though any moment some great and terrible event would explode upon them, as if something, someone up there could set them in motion. The sky was a comfortless blanket on them. The ground was mired and trodden. Shit stood in vaporous cakes between hoofs. The castle keep rose as a cudgel before them. He felt himself craning, waiting, almost failing to breathe. A horse shook its mane and Scully felt the mist of sweat against his cheek. His feet took root in the ground as they continued to wait and he waited with them. It was true, he knew it, something was about to happen.

But the awful stillness went on.

‘Is anybody there?’ Scully cried out toward the keep, his voice breaking with the strain of it. He was gasping with cold now and feeling the earth suck at him, drawing him into the fecund mire. ‘Is anyone here, then? Anyone at all?’

No head turned. Nothing stirred in the yawning dark of the keep and its broken wings. The ivy feeding off the ancient stones glittered with firelight. The crooked hewn steps of the castle approach stood bare of everything except rabbit pellets but the riders waited on undeterred. Scully’s skin hurt now. His eyes felt blistered. The air in his lungs scorched him and the buttons of his greatcoat burned all down his body. His legs stiffened and he was suddenly afraid of being swallowed up by the earth. It would kill him to stay any longer, but he stood transfixed, unable to imagine a cold worse than this, unable to convince himself to move. You’ll die, he told himself, you’ll die if you don’t go. He

heard his heart creaking in his chest. Like a man outside himself he saw his body move. He was a man trying to fly and the earth and the cold tore like a curtain as he pulled the coat about himself and ran.

• • •

AT THE TOP OF THE hill, quaking at his own door and sobbing with cold and fright, he turned again and saw the lights that burned patient as nature itself, burning as stars through the trees.

Twelve

ALL DOWN THE LONG, stinky tube of the jumbo jet, the lights come on and people stretch like cats. Billie looks up from her comic book about the poor, ugly hunchback to see her mother yawn and uncoil on the seat beside her. Her hair is black. It shines like a crow’s wing, like something that can fly at a moment’s notice. She looks over at the picture of the bellringer and wrinkles her little nose at Billie.

‘That old thing.’

Billie shrugs. It’s still her favourite, even though the pages are ratty. Used to be Scully’s when he was a boy. She has all his old comics and his Biggies books (which are plain stupid, really) and The Magic Pudding. In a tea-chest somewhere now, she has a whole snake-skin, a stick for finding water, and an old bag with books and papers in it. It’s hard to think of your father as a kid. Milking cows. With no TV. Before space rockets, even. Living like Tom Sawyer, that’s how Billie thinks of it. She feels sorry for kids with ordinary fathers. They only made one Scully. He isn’t handsome, but he’s special. He taught her how to swim and ride a bike. Before school he taught her how to read and write. Billie doesn’t forget things like that. He knows things and he doesn’t have secrets. What you see is what you get, like he says.

Once, in Paris, a lady fell down in the street right next to them and started wriggling all over the cobbles. It was a fit. She went bubbly at the mouth and the whole works. Everyone started steering away, saying ‘Oh-la-la!’ But Scully made Billie stand there while he got down next to the lady and stuck his newspaper between her teeth to stop her from biting her tongue off. The lady bucked and jumped but he talked to her the way she imagined he talked to cows when he was a boy. Probably, like a cow, she couldn’t understand a word anyway because he talked in English, soft and friendly, while all the people around them gasped. He brushed her hair with his hand and Billie wanted to sick up right there. But she was glad he made her stay. He was crying, she saw him cry while the French lady bit on his newspaper and jiggled on the road. She knew it then, that they only made one Scully.

She jiggles her legs, careful not to kick the seat in front and get the old bloke with the hair growing out his ears all mad again.

Her mum grabs her handbag and slips on her shoes. Pretty feet with red nails. Pretty feet.

‘Just going to have a wash,’ she murmurs.

‘Okay,’ says Billie.

Billie goes back to her story. She likes the hunchback. He’s ugly and sad but his heart is good. He sees a long way out across the city. Paris. She lived there once and knows there should be an Eiffel Tower somewhere in this book, something the guy drawing the pictures forgot. Old Quasimodo can see forever. He’s got the free birds up there and the sky and the music of the bells that wrecked his ears, he loves them so much. Up there on big, scary Notre Dame with the statues stuck into doorways and the pigeons and donkeys out the front. When she closes her eyes she can see the bellringer darting around up there — she doesn’t need the comic anymore to do that. His hump weighing him down, bending him over like Jesus under the dragging cross. No one loves him, specially not the beautiful gypsy girl. She just sees his poor face and his hump. No one loves him the way Billie does because she knows there’s good in his heart.

People in the plane pull up the dinky little window sliders to let in some light. The plane is so high up it’s nearly in space. That nervous feeling comes back. She’s going to live in a little stone house with square windows and a chimney. Her dad will be there. She shouldn’t be afraid. But it’s hard to stay calm when you’re nearly in space, when you don’t know what’s coming.

Thirteen

SCULLY WOKE TO THE HARANGUE of a fresh norther in the slates, and at the thought of the cold outside the eiderdown his body stiffened. His face felt tender and his throat itched with the promise of a headcold. His hands tingled with nettle stings and one of his knees throbbed. He closed his eyes again in the still dim house on a hill in a strange country, and then with a slow burning in his limbs, he softened. This was it. Today was the day. He scrabbled at his watch. Man, he was late; it was after eight already and the flight got into Shannon at ten.

He whipped back the eiderdown and roared with the shock of the cold, and it was while he was wrestling with his jeans that he saw the mud on his legs. It was caked between his fingers, too, and there in the sheets. He remembered the cold and the riders distantly, as though recalling a dream. This afternoon he’d go down and have a look around, just to satisfy himself. Maybe talk to Brereton. But now he was late. Now the sun was up.

He stripped the linen and took it downstairs where the hearth drew breath and the windowpanes chattered. He should have been up two hours ago. With this day hanging before him so long, how could he have slept in?

In water cold and hard as brass, he washed himself standing in a tin tub. He shaved badly and ran upstairs with clean sheets. Then he found his Levi’s, his boots and pullover and pulled himself into shape.

Eight thirty-five. Now he was frantic, frantic enough to heave the tub of grey water against the closed kitchen window which sent it right back at him. He sat down, soaked and sober, moaning in frustration. He looked around, saw the dishes in the sink, the dirty sheets and mud-scuffs, the pool at his feet. He’d worked his guts out to get the place near perfect and now it looked like a student dive. Still, they’d see the change, they’d know how his heart had gone into it. He got up, lit the fire, stacked it with coal, and went out into the wind in his wet clothes.

• • •

ON THE TWISTING HEDGE ROAD into Roscrea, Scully drove hard and close, sending up curtains of mud everywhere he passed, with the walls and blackthorn against the streaming windows. Rain smeared his glimpses of fields and open places. There was no sky.

The town was jammed with cars parked wildly for Mass, and bells rang along the close grey rows of houses and shops. Out on the open road, Scully pushed the Transit to the limit, jiggling now, sweating with anticipation. The hills spewed cloud and water and the Tipperary fields opened up to the rain, sprouting here and there the ruined backbone of a tower, a gatehouse, a manor of old. He saw cottages collapsing under the weight of thatch wild with grass. All down the highway, across the country, there were solitary chimneys, great lonely walls, fallen churches with lichened crosses tilted like levers in the earth. Much rarer was the sight of a stand of timber, a wood, a forest remnant before more chocolate soil and squat, stucco farmhouses with grey gravel forecourts and Spanish arches. Every town said Failte, Welcome to Moneygall, Toomyvara, Nenagh, and each was jammed with the cars of Mass and the umbrellas of the walking faithful and the toll of bells, while the roads were quiet and blessedly free of trucks. Three cheers for a God-fearing nation, Scully thought, and for truckers on bended knee.

In the slate sprawl of Limerick he caught the time in a chipper’s window as 9.55. He crossed the bridge and saw the choppy surge of the Shannon beating seaward, and somehow his tension broke for a moment into wellbeing: he’d make it now, he’d be there soon.

The rain backed off. The road was clear.

• • •

ON THE LONG, flat dismal approach to the airport, Scully was grinning so hugely that other drivers veered away and kept their distance. A Pan-Am jumbo heaved itself into the air and passed over with its shadow trailing like a dragged anchor. Bon voyage, he thought; enjoy New York, have a happy life, all you people. The world is good and the aeroplane a gift of evolution.

• • •

INSIDE THE TERMINAL BUILDING the air was thick with cigarette smoke, the smell of wet serge and the shouts of people leaving and meeting. Here and there were the checkerboard slacks of Americans making their way to the Avis counter and the Dan Dooley Rent A Car. There were Irishmen in terrible jackets and thick-soled boots heading upstairs for a pint, and women with briefcases awaiting the shuttle back to London.

Scully sat a moment beside a coin-operated fire engine and saw a man cross himself — spectacles, testicles, wallet and keys — on his way up the escalator to Departures. Go well, old fella, he thought.

The flickering monitor said the Aer Lingus flight from London would land in a minute or two. What timing! They’d be tired after the twenty Qantas hours from Perth and the wait at Heathrow. He’d cook them lunch, stoke the fire and put them to bed with the wind rattling outside. Hell, he’d climb in with them, sleep or no sleep. He wondered if he could find a decent bottle of wine somewhere in this country before dark. Not on a Sunday. Now he needed a leak. He was like a kid, jiggling and fidgeting.

Down the hall he found the Men’s. At the mirror he stared at himself a moment. His curls were ragged and upstanding, and his dodgy eye and flushed complexion gave him a desperate look. He was lucky the Gardai at the terminal entrance hadn’t pulled him aside to search him for a Semtex suppository. He grinned slackly, straightened himself up best he could, pushed his hair down with the sweat of his palms and went out to meet them.

The monitor flashed LANDED. A wall of people curved around the electric doors of the customs exit. Scully wormed his way in and with a bit of foul play he found himself at the front rail itself.

The briefcase jobs appeared first, snapping their trenchcoats about them, hardly looking up at the press of other people’s relatives at the chrome barrier. Then came the trolleys with their teetering stacks of suitcases pushed by the bleary and the weeping. Shouts of recognition commenced. Families grappled and sobbed at the rail. Babies were passed head-high to the front. Scully could barely stand the guffaws and shrieks of other people’s happiness. He was crushed sideways and shunted from behind and he began hopping from foot to foot, straining to catch some familiar feature in the oncoming stream of faces.

And then, waist high, he saw the blonde curls.

‘Billie!’

She disappeared behind someone else’s trolley.

‘Billeee!’

When she emerged he saw the small tartan suitcase in her hand, the fluorescent green backpack on her shoulders and the female flight attendant beside her. Billie’s eyes found him and blinked recognition. The poor kid looked pale and tired, completely wrung out. Scully looked for the trolley behind, that Jennifer must be pushing. He couldn’t imagine the excess baggage they must have forked out for. But the trolleys behind were all pushed by men. Scully saw the green sticker on Billie’s jacket. Saw her small hand holding the hand of the woman in uniform. Saw the clipboard and the brittle, cosmetic smile. He leapt the rail.

‘Billie, you should have waited for Mum.’

He grabbed her up, case and all, and felt her clinch him like a boxer. My God, but it felt good. She smelled of raspberry and of Jennifer. Through the haze of Billie’s hair he saw the trolleys coming on in small batches, then petering out altogether.

‘Mr Scully?’

He turned. The Aer Lingus woman smiled.

‘I’m afraid we need some identification, sir. The regulations, you know. She’s such a quiet girl.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I… she’s got her passport, hasn’t she?’

‘Oh, yes, I have it here.’

Billie pressed into his neck so that he felt his blood beating against her forehead.

‘Well, what identification? Have they lost the bags?’

‘No, sir, this is all there was.’

‘It’s okay, we’ll wait,’ he said, smelling Billie’s hair; he was delirious.

‘Just a driver’s licence, Mr Scully, and a signature. All unaccompanied child passengers need —’

‘What did you say?’

He lifted Billie and saw the Junior Flyer badge. He put the child down and took the proffered clipboard as though it was a bloodied weapon. Unaccompanied Child Passenger B. Scully, female, seven years old. Scully held the little pen in his hand and let it shake above the paper and then looked back at the Aer Lingus woman.

‘Right there where it’s marked, sir.’

Scully signed, and his name was barely recognizable. The arrival doors closed now. There was no one else coming. He looked back at the form. London Heathrow-Shannon, December 13. Jennifer’s signature.

‘The ID, sir?’ The woman’s smile had begun to fade.

Scully looked down at his daughter. She was white, stiff as a monument.

‘What’s happening? Weren’t there enough seats? Is she bringing the bags on the next flight, then? You probably left the note in your pocket, eh, Bill?’

Billie stared at him with the gaze of a sleepwalker. Christ, he suddenly needed to shit.

‘Mr Scully, please —’

He dug in his back pocket for the thin wallet, flicked it open without even looking at her. His International Driver’s Licence, the American Express card, an old photograph of the three of them on the beach. The woman scribbled down details and snapped her clipboard shut.

‘Goodbye, Billie,’ she murmured, and left.

Billie looked at people passing.

‘What the hell’s going on, love? Why isn’t she here? Where’s all our stuff? She shouldn’t have made you come ahead on your own.’

He stooped and went through the many pockets of Billie’s denim jacket. Wrappers, a packet of raspberry gum, a plastic Darth Vader, ten English pounds, but no note from Jennifer. Right there on the floor he unzipped her little tartan case, and to the great amusement of the next shift of meeters and greeters, he went through it with unmistakeable desperation. Gay coloured clothes, an ancient comic book, toiletries, a folder full of documents, for Godsake, and some photographs. Toys, more clothes. His mouth went gluey. His bowels turned. He glanced up at the monitor. The next flight from London was a British Airways in twenty minutes, and there was another Aer Lingus at noon, a Ryanair in the middle of the afternoon and nothing much else till six.

‘Come sit over here a minute, mate,’ he said shakily, ‘I have to go to the toilet.’

He got her to a vinyl bench, put her suitcase beside her.

‘Now don’t move, okay? Don’t talk to anyone, just stay there. And while I’m gone,’ he said, trying to get his voice down from panic pitch, ‘think hard so you can tell me what happened at London, orright?’

Billie blinked. He just couldn’t stay.

In the bright, horrid cubicle he shook. He was shitting battery acid. His toes curled in his boots. What? What? What? She’s too responsible to break a plan. She’s too solid, too bloody Public Service to deviate without a hell of a reason. His mind boiled. Qantas to Heathrow, Lingus to Shannon. Any delay and she’d telegram and wait, keep everything together. Sunday, Scully, no telegrams. Okay, but she’s a bureaucrat, for Godsake, she knows about order and the evils of surprise. She’d think of something. She’d send a message with Billie. No, something’s happened. Call the cops, Scully. Which bloody cops? No, no, just slow down, you’re panicking. Just settle down and get it clear and straight. Clear and straight — Jesus.

• • •

SCULLY PUT THE BUCKET OF chips and the orange juice in front of his daughter and tried to think calmly. She’d said not a word since arriving and it compounded his anxiety. They sat across the white laminex table from one another, and to strangers they looked equally pasty and stunned. Billie ate her chips without expression.

‘Can you tell me?’

Billie looked at the buffet bar, the procession of travellers with red plastic trays in hand.

‘Billie, I’ve got a big problem. I don’t know what’s happening. I expected two people and only one came.’

Billie chewed, her eyes meeting his for a moment before she looked down at her juice.

‘Did Mum get hurt or sick or something at the airport in London?’

Billie chewed.

‘Was there a problem with the bags?’

Shit, he thought, maybe it was Customs… but she didn’t carry anything silly, unless there was some mistake, some mix-up. And would she go through Customs in London, or would she just have been in transit there? Scully held his head.

‘Was she on the plane with you from Perth? She must have been. She had to be. Billie, you gotta help me. Can you help me?’

Scully looked at her and knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t small, not when you saw the terrible stillness of her face. She was a chatterbox, you couldn’t shut her up usually, and she could handle a small hitch, ride out a bit of a complication with some showy bravery, but this.

‘Tell me when you can, eh?’

Billie’s eyes glazed a moment, as though she might cry, but she did not cry. He held her hand, touched her hair, saw his hands shaking.

• • •

AT THE BRITISH AIRWAYS COUNTER, Scully tried to cajole Jennifer’s name from the passenger list, but the suits were having none of it.

‘I’m afraid it contravenes security regulations, sir.’

‘I’m her husband, and this is her daughter. What security?’

‘I don’t make the rules, sir. It lands in a moment. Then you’ll see for yourself.’

‘Thanks for shit.’

Scully dragged Billie over to the Aer Lingus counter where he moved into lower gear and hoisted the child onto his hip.

‘I know it’s agin the rules and all, mate,’ he said to a soft-faced fellow with sad eyes, ‘but we’ve been waiting for our mum, haven’t we, love, and she wasn’t on the flight a while ago from London and…’

‘Aw, sir, it’s awful for you, I know, but they’s the rules.’

‘Well, I’m just thinking should I wait here all day, or what d’you think? The little girl’s just put in twenty hours from Australia and you can see how tired she is. I just drove all the way in from County Offaly, and if I go back and my wife arrives… and the little girl’s so keen to see her mother… I mean, what harm could it do to know if she’s coming or not?’

Scully saw the genuine apology in the first reluctant shake of the head and pounced.

‘Listen, why don’t I give you her name? If she’s not there you just turn away. Any sign of Mrs J. Scully on a BA flight to Ireland today, orright?’

The Aer Lingus man sighed. Oh, thank God for the hearts of the Irish, Scully thought. The keys on the console rattled. Scully clung to Billie, sweating again.

‘No.’

‘You don’t even have to say anything, just nod or shake your head.’

‘No, I mean she’s not listed, today, yesterday or tomorrow. I’m sorry sir.’

Scully felt it go down like a swallowed ice cube, shrivelling his guts. ‘Thanks anyway, mate. Is there a Qantas office in Ireland?’

‘Doubt it, sir. They don’t fly here.’

‘Of course.’

‘Goodbye now, sir.’

• • •

SCULLY WAITED TILL THE LAST exhausted bugger staggered off the British flight and the last trolley heaved into the hall before gathering Billie’s case and leading her towards the exit. That was it.

‘D’you want to go to the toilet first, love?’

Billie let go his hand and veered for the Ladies’. Scully stood there as the door swung shut. He held the tartan case and faced the wall. He could smell Jennifer on the bag and even on his neck, and how it hurt to smell it. One of his legs began to shake independently of the rest of his body. He stood alone in the milling crowd, staring at the door that said Ladies, until the panic crept on him like a spasm of nausea. His little girl was in there alone, in an airport in a foreign country. Her mother was lost and he was standing out here trustingly like an eejit. He all but knocked down the shrieking women as he barged through the door and went madly among the cubicles calling her name.

Fourteen

ALL THE WAY BACK UP the Dublin road, though the rain had stopped and the wind had eased, the land looked flattened and every human monument grey as bathwater. It was a litany of ditches and slurry-smears, wracks and failures. The men he saw in the streets of grimy towns were coarse-faced idiots and the sky above them a smothering blanket about to fall. Scully clawed the wheel. He tried to think of things he could say, reassuring things, but it was all he could do not to break out screaming and plough them both deep into the fields of the Republic. The small girl sat with her feet not touching the floor, saying nothing for miles, until, mercifully, she went to sleep.

• • •

SCULLY POURED COAL INTO THE grate and heard it tumble and hiss. The bothy was warm and momentarily heartening. He went out into the afternoon chill to bring Billie in from the Transit. She was tilted back awkwardly, mouth agape, and she merely stirred when he murmured in her ear and touched her, so he unbuckled her belt, took her in his arms and carried her upstairs to her new room. It was cool up there, but the stones of the chimney kept it from being cold. As she lay on her bed he unlaced her boots and slipped them off. He eased her from her jacket and slid her in under the covers, where, on the pillow, she seemed to find new ease and the faintest beginning of a smile came briefly to her face.

At the end of the bed, he unzipped her case and pulled out the small bald and one-legged koala that was her lasting vice. He held it to his face and smelled the life that he knew. He tucked it in beside her and went downstairs.

He set the iron kettle over the fire and sat at the table with his hands flat before him. My wife has sent my child on alone. No message, no note, no warning. Yet. It’s Sunday, so no telegrams. There’ll be a message tomorrow. It’s no use panicking or getting bloody self-righteous about it. You’re worried, you’re disappointed, but just show a bit of grit here, Scully. Tomorrow Pete’ll bring a telegram and we’ll all laugh like mad bastards about this.

• • •

THE SUN WAS GONE BEFORE four o’clock. Scully found himself out behind the barn in a strange cold stillness looking at the great pile of refuse he’d hauled out there on his first day. The rain had battered all Binchy’s chattels down into a slag heap, a formless blotch here at his feet. In the spring, he decided, he’d dig up this bit of ground and plant leeks and cabbage, and make something of it. Oh, there were things to be done, alright. He just had to get through tonight and the rest of his life would proceed.

The light from his kitchen window ribboned out onto the field. Scully’s nose ran and his chest ached. He told himself it was just the cold, only the cold. A cow bawled down the hill in some miry shed somewhere, and Scully watched, marvelled, really, as his breath rose white and free on the calm evening air.

• • •

THAT NIGHT SCULLY KEPT A vigil of sorts. It was doubly lonely sitting in the bothy knowing Billie slept upstairs remote from him in whatever dream it was that had hold of her. Poor little bastard, what must she be feeling?

He unpacked all her clothes and folded them carefully. Her little dresser smelled of the Baltic, of the wax of aunts and calm living. Downstairs he looked through her things, her Peter Pan colouring book, her labelled pencils, the Roald Dahl paperbacks. He put aside her tiny R.M. Williams boots and brushed some nugget into them. In the kitchen the sound of the polishing brush had the comfortless rhythm of a farm bore. On the table he opened her folder of documentation. Birth Certificate, 8 July 1980, Fremantle Hospital. Yes, the wee hours. He went home that morning with the sound of off-season diesels thrumming in the marina. Yellow vaccination folder. School reports, one in French, the other in Greek. A single swimming certificate. Three spare passport shots — the perky smile, the mad Scully curls. Taken in the chemist’s on Market Street. A creased snapshot of her standing at the mouth of the whalers’ tunnel at Bathers Beach with some kid whose name escaped him.

Scully went upstairs to watch her sleep. It was warmer up there now under the roof. It was late. His eyes burned but there was no question of sleeping, no chance. Not till this was over, till he knew Jennifer was alright. Carefully he lay beside Billie and held her outside the eiderdown, felt her hair and breath against his face. In the band of moonlight that grew on the far wall he saw the flaws of his hurried limewash. The long, relentless unpeeling of the night went on.

Just before dawn, in the milled steel air, he filled buckets with coal in the barn by the light of the torch. The land was silent, the mud frozen. At the front door he paused a moment to look down at the castle but saw no lights. The stars were fading, the moon gone. He went in and built up the fire. For a moment he thought about their baby, whether this house would be warm and dry enough. And then he caught himself. God Almighty, where was she?

The day came slowly with the parsimonious light of the north, and Billie slept on. Scully resolved to list out all the possibilities on a sheet of paper, but all he got was her name three times like a cheesy mantra. He re-read all his mail, looked at each of the smudged telegrams. Nothing. It was only a month — what could happen in a month, or in an hour at Heathrow?

Late in the morning he put the leg of lamb into the oven. The smell filled the house but Billie slept on and the roast cooled on the bench, juices congealing beneath it. Scully ate a cold spud, made himself a cup of Earl Grey.

The mail van slewed along the lane sometime past noon. He heard it bumbling round in the valley and he went outside nearly falling in his haste, but it never came back his way. No mail. No telegram. Out on the thawed mud, Scully puked his cup of tea and his roast potato, and when he straightened to look back at his smoke-pouring house, wiping the acid from his chin, he saw Billie at the open door rumpled with sleep.

‘Rip van Winkle,’ he said brightly, scuffing the soiled mud with his wellingtons.

Billie shivered, her legs squeezed together.

‘Need a pee?’

She nodded solemnly.

‘I’ll show you. It’s out in the barn.’

She gave him a doubtful look but let him carry her across the mud on the duckboard bridge to the barn, where, at the back the old Telefon booth stood in the corner. She looked at the JOH GOES! poster.

‘Great, eh?’

He put her down on the rotting straw and she pulled open the door dubiously, and then turned, waiting for him to leave.

‘Great dunny, what d’you reckon?’ he said, retreating outside. The sun’s shining, Scully, he thought; show a bit of steel, for Godsake and brighten up. She doesn’t want you to hang over her on the bog.

He looked down the valley and saw the birds wrapping the castle keep and the low clouds motionless on the mountains. Light broke in sharp moments all across the fields. The trees stood bare and maplike with their knots of nests plain to see. It was a rare day.

He heard the flush.

‘What a toilet, eh?’ he said as she emerged, blinking at the miry ground. She looked out at the empty fields, at the hedges and fences and sagging gates. For a long moment, she stared down at the castle keep.

‘No animals, huh? First thing I noticed,’ he said. ‘They keep them indoors because of the cold. Imagine that. Every couple of days you see tractors hauling these big trailers that hurl poop all over the paddocks. What a scream. Come on, I’ll get you something to eat. What d’you think of the house? Did I do a good job? Haven’t painted it yet.’

Billie held his hand and walked with curling toes across the duckboards. It frightened him, this silence. They were so close, the two of them, such mates. Nothing innocent, no small thing could close her up like this.

She drank Ovaltine by the fire and ate her bread. Scully warmed some fresh clothes on a chair by the hearth and poured hot water into the steel tub.

‘You can wash yourself while I make your bed. New Levi’s, I see. A present from Gran?’

Billie chewed and looked at the coals.

‘I’ll be upstairs.’

Wait, he told himself. Think and wait. The telegram will turn up. Hours left in the day yet. Upstairs he leaned against the warm patched chimney and prayed the Lord’s Prayer like a good Salvo, the words piling up like his thoughts in the snug cap of the roof.

No telegram came.

Billie slept again. Scully napped and sweated. He prowled the stairs, listening for the sound of a car, the arrival of an end to this scary shit. But nothing came. In the wee hours he was mapping things out, thinking of London, of his friends there, of a simple explanation. Jesus, why didn’t he get the phone on?

The night reeled on, lurching from hour to hour, from impasse to foggy hole with the world silent beyond.

• • •

NEXT MORNING, SCULLY DROVE INTO Roscrea with Billie, bubbling away cheerlessly like a jolly dad on the first day of the holidays. He could see it didn’t wash for a minute because Billie stared mutely out at the countryside, bleak as the breaking sky. Not a thing. Not a word. Well, the waiting was over. He had to do something before it killed him.

He drew a blank at the Post Office. Pete was out on his round. No telegram anyway. He cashed a bagful of change and made for a Telefon down the high street.

• • •

‘I JUST NEED TO CHECK whether she was on QF8 from Perth via Singapore the day before yesterday,’ he said as evenly as he could manage to the voice in London. ‘This is the fifth… No, no there isn’t a problem, really.’ The phone booth fogged up with their breath. ‘I just wanted to make sure, you know — twelve thousand miles is a long way. I know what can happen with schedules… Yes, I understand.’

Billie passed him up some more coins from her squatting position in the booth.

‘Ah, terrific, so she was aboard then… out at Heathrow, great. And did she have an onward transfer from there?’

A truck from the meatworks heaved itself up the hill, shaking the glass beside his face, MAURA SUCKS NIGGERS, someone had written on the wall in felt pen. Absently, Scully began to scrape it out with the edge of a 20p coin. He noticed the beauty of the design on the coin. A horse, like a da Vinci study. Only the Irish. The voice turned nasty in London.

‘Yeah, but, I know, but I’m her husband, you see. Yes, but be reasonable about this… No, I don’t think I have to… oh, listen, I’m asking you a… well, fuck you!’

He whacked the receiver down and coins spilled free. Billie sniffed blankly.

‘Scuse my French. Sorry.’

Scully looked down the narrow, grey street and went back to scraping. So, she arrived in Heathrow, sent the kid on alone. Either she’s in London, or, or she’s gone on somewhere else. But why? Oh, never mind bloody why, Scully, where is the issue first up. Think, you dumb prick. Start at the least likely and work your way back. What are the possibilities? The house deal falling through? Some stock market economic glitch, some problem with the papers? Maybe she’s gone back to sort it out, save you worrying.

He dialled the house in Fremantle. Evening in Australia. Summer. The Telecom message chirped — disconnected. Automatically he dialled his mother but hung up before it could ring. No.

London. It made all the sense. She’d be at Alan and Annie’s. She was having a bleed. God, it was trouble with the baby and she was stuck in… but Alan and Annie, they were saints. They’d be looking after her. Yes, pain at the airport, a cab to Crouch End.

He rang them, his fingers tangling in the stupid dial.

‘Alan?’

‘Sorry, he’s out with Ann.’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Well might I ask.’ Who was this snot with the Oxbridge lisp?

‘When will they be back?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Scully,’ he said. ‘A friend.’

‘The Australian.’

‘Listen, when will they be back?’

‘Don’t know.’

Scully hung up. It was Tuesday for Godsake. They worked at home — they never went anywhere on a Tuesday. He called back.

‘Listen, it’s me again. Have they had visitors this weekend?’

The kid at the other end paused a moment. ‘Well, I’m not sure I like the way this conversation is going.’

‘Bloody hell. Son, listen to me. I want to know if a woman called Jennifer —’

The kid hung up. Shit a brick. Who else could he call? They had friends all over Europe, but in London they had all their eggs in one basket. There was no one who knew them as well as Alan and Annie. The house was always full of waifs and strays. In London it was the only place she’d go. What could he do — call the embassy? Everyone else he knew from London was probably IRA. Sod that.

He waited. He scraped. He dialled Fremantle again. Nothing. He dragged the little address book from his pocket and called the number Pete once gave him. Nothing. Twists of paint dropped into Billie’s hair. He began to shuffle on the spot. He made a fist, pressed it against the glass. She was losing the baby and he was in some frigging Irish abbatoir town, helpless.

He dialled Alan’s again.

‘Scully?’

‘Alan, thank God!’

Alan sounded startled, a little sharp even. Maybe he’d got an earful from young Jeremy Irons or whoever.

‘How’s Ireland?’

‘Ireland?’

‘We’re dying to come out and see the place. Maybe we can pretend to be Aussies. You know, improve our standing.’

‘Alan, listen, did Jennifer drop by yet?’

‘Jennifer? Are they back from Australia yet?’ Scully’s mind rolled again. He couldn’t pull it back. But Alan sounded odd.

‘Course she’s very welcome, they both are. Great about the house, eh?’

‘How, how d’you know about the house?’

‘Got a card. Is everything alright, Scully?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine.’ Tell him, he thought. Tell him.

‘Should I expect them, you think? We can make up a bed.’

‘You wouldn’t hide anything from me, would you, mate? I mean, she’s your friend as well.’

‘What’s happening, Scully?’

Why can’t you tell him? What kind of stupid suspicious pride is it that -

‘Scully, are you alright?’

Scully listened to the hiss of the Irish Sea in the wires.

‘I thought it might be the baby,’ he murmured.

‘What baby? No one told us about a baby. Annie! Annie, get the desk phone will —’

Scully hung up. He couldn’t do it anymore. His mind was twisting. They were the only people in the world he could trust. It wasn’t London. Friggin hell, it wasn’t London.

Coins jangled out onto the floor. Billie looked up at him knowingly. She knew. He could see it, but what could he do, beat it out of her?

‘Listen sweetheart,’ he said to Billie, dropping to her level, wedging himself like a cork at the bottom of the booth. He grabbed her by the hands and looked imploringly into her shutdown face. ‘You gotta help your dad. Please, please, you gotta help me. If you can’t talk I understand, but don’t… don’t not talk because you’re angry, don’t do it to get back at me. I’m worried too. I’m so worried… I’m… Tell me, was Mum sick or anything on the plane, at the airport? Did she seem sort of strange, different somehow? Did she say anything to you, when she’d be coming, where she was going to, did she tell you to say something to me?’

Billie’s forehead creased. She clamped her eyes shut. Scully put his fingers gently on her eyelids. So tired, so frail and shell-shocked. This was a terrible thing, too terrible. He wanted to ask other things, worse things. Was there anyone else on the plane, in the airport? Had there been anyone else around these last weeks in Australia? But there were things that, once uttered, couldn’t be reigned back. He had the fear that saying more might bring some worse calamity down on his head. Once you stopped thinking of innocent possibilities, the poison seeped in, the way it was already leaching into him, the ghastly spectrum of foul maybes that got to him like the cold in the glass around him. Old Scully, who according to Jennifer, hadn’t the imagination to think the worst. Something she said once, as though neurosis was an artform. Said without bitterness, accepted with a shrug.

Scully felt himself levelling off again, going back to the likely alternatives. Did she just have cold feet? Okay, she made a mistake, it wasn’t too late to change their minds about Ireland. Maybe the sight again of their old house in Fremantle after two years had brought all their plans down around her ears. Hell, it was a whimsical idea in the first place, and plainly hers. She was embarrassed, that’s all. It could be that simple. But why this? Why the silence? Being pregnant hadn’t made her strange before. Maybe more timid than usual. Could be that. But women didn’t suddenly lose their brains with a baby on board. Could be she was biding time for a while, trying to work up courage to tell him she couldn’t go through with Ireland. All this was manageable, they could ride it out. Only it just didn’t feel right to him, none of this did. He was dangling, just hanging, dammit! What was it? Was she trying to send a message about the marriage, expressing some dissatisfaction? She wouldn’t be that cruel, surely. And then he thought of those ugly Paris nights, the rage she had when cornered. His gut churned. She could have some surprise lined up. No. Today’s mail would tell. By one o’clock Pete-the-Post would be by. And there was still time for a telegram to arrive. Do the right thing and wait. Think of Billie.

But if it wasn’t London and there was no telegram? The glass was cold against his cheek. A ragged convoy of Travellers’ vans ground slowly past with horses and donkeys in tow. He watched them all the way up the hill.

‘Let’s go to the travel agent, Bill. We’ll get you some nice brochures you can cut the pictures from.’

He crashed the booth door open, free of the cupboard air, and felt some kind of resolution settling on him. Yes, he had to do something.

• • •

THE TRAVEL AGENCY DOWN BY the river was a modest affair. It catered mostly to locals’ trips to London and Lourdes and Rome, or packages to the Costa del Sol. Scully went in fired up with smiling charm, but the agent, a small woman with flaming pink cheeks, was nervous all the same.

‘I’m just looking for flight connections, you know, good connections from London.’

‘Er, when would that be for, sir?’ the woman said, smiling gratefully when someone else walked into the little shop.

Scully was flushed and fidgety, his eye roving alarmingly in his woolly head.

‘Hm, today, yesterday, ah, about this time of year,’ he mumbled. ‘Listen, why don’t you serve this lady and toss me the book and I’ll flick through.’

Billie sat in a cane chair looking at her feet. The travel agent looked at Scully uncertainly, and passed him the thick schedule book, transferring her attention to a tall tweedy woman with a fedora and a horsey Anglo accent.

Scully sat back with Billie and lurched around the book. He found yesterday and his heart sank at the mass of information. He thought of Billie’s flight and arrival into Shannon. Okay, about an hour’s flying time, say a nine-thirty flight out of London. The Qantas flight in was a six a.m. arrival. Now… Did she put Billie on the Irish flight herself? He simply had to believe that a mother would do that, whatever her state. Then she was still at Heathrow till… there it is, Aer Lingus 46… till 9.35. Now, where did she go from there? A cab into London, maybe, but if not?

Scully found a list of flights out of London close to 9.35.

Karachi, 9.40.

Kuala Lumpur, no.

Moscow — in December?

Miami.

New York.

Rome.

Paris. Maybe, yes, maybe. But why would she go back to the scene of her failure?

Barcelona.

Athens, 10.25. Yes. A Qantas flight, too. She was paranoid about air safety. Yes. Greece made sense. She knew it and loved it. The island would be a kind of sanctuary. Somewhere to sort herself out. If it hadn’t been for the pregnancy she’d have stayed on indefinitely, he knew. He felt more or less the same. If the shit hit the fan, where in Europe would he go to hole up? Greece. Yes. Yes.

Scully looked back at the Paris flight. British Airways — she hated them and she wouldn’t fly with them or anyone American. Hmm, they were quite the world travellers now, weren’t they. No, it was only Qantas, Singapore, Thai or KLM. The Athens flight, then, it had to be. How bloody easy it was, plonking down the magical, scary credit card and moving from place to place. As long as the card didn’t melt and the magic didn’t evaporate. A trickle of poison seeped into his chest. Had she told no one? Not even Alan and Annie? Didn’t she know Scully would call them first? He had to believe they didn’t know. Leaving no message — it seemed crazy, but wasn’t leaving no message a signal in itself? Hell, he needed some sleep. But didn’t she know he would figure this out, that if it wasn’t London it had to be Greece? He knew how her mind worked. It was private, a thing between them, like the baby. God, it was a message. She needed to talk, to meet, but somewhere safe, somewhere good, familiar. Like the island, where things had been best.

For a moment, it seemed, the fog of hurt and tiredness left him. He made a map in his head, a schedule. He did a bit of mental arithmetic and took out his American Express card. Even now he held it like a working-class man, as though it might go off in his hands at any second. He double-checked his figures. Yes, he had some credit left, maybe half a card’s worth. Enough anyway. He held his breath and placed the card carefully, almost reverently, on the counter. It was a relief, like a suddenly open window, the feeling of doing something, of making decisions and acting. Yes, it was a start.

• • •

SCULLY TRACKED PETER KENEALLY DOWN on the road from Roscrea. It had just finished raining and water stood in bronze sheets by the lane. He saw the little green van through a stand of bare ash and pulled over as far as he dared onto the soft shoulder until he saw the van reverse out onto the road.

‘He’s a friend of mine,’ said Scully, shaky with resolution. ‘See, he never looks in his mirrors, he’ll get skittled one day.’

The postie pulled out and swivelled his head. His eyes widened in surprise.

‘Well, I’ll be damned to hell if it isn’t the Desert Irish himself!’ said Pete as Scully pulled up beside him. Pete’s cheeks were aglow, his uniform askew and his hat was capsized on the seat beside him. In his lap was a sorry nest of envelopes.

‘G’day, Pete.’

‘Well, go on, man, tell me how it all went. Aw, Jaysus, I see someone up there beside you. I wonder who this could be now? Good day to ye! She’s a grand lass, Scully.’

‘Billie, this is Peter.’

Billie lowered her eyelids bleakly.

‘Aw, she’s shy, now. Look at that suntan on ye, looks like ye just came from Africa.’

Scully saw her observing Pete’s ears. They were like baler shells — he’d become used to them.

‘We’ll be gone a few days, Pete. Would you mind keeping an eye on the place? I’ll leave a key in the booth in the barn.’

Pete’s grin softened and disappeared. ‘Is everything alright?’

‘Just some business to sort out.’

Pete’s mouth failed to complete several movements. You could see him straining good naturedly to mind his own business. Scully thought: I hope to God he doesn’t think I’m doing a runner and leaving him with the bill.

‘Couple of days, Pete. Listen, gimme your home number again, just in case.’

Puzzled, Pete recited the number. Scully wrote it on the strap of Billie’s backpack, more as a show of stability than anything else. ‘Any mail for me?’ he said, feeling a last bubble of hope in the back of his throat. ‘A telegram?’

‘Not a thing.’

Scully closed his eyes a moment.

‘You want help?’

The postie licked his chapped lips, anxious now.

‘I’m fine, mate.’

‘You look shot and killed.’

‘See you in a coupla days.’

Scully put the Transit in gear and lurched away.

• • •

IN THE COOLING BOTHY, Scully made lamb sandwiches and sat down with Billie to eat dutifully, mechanically, the way he ate those too-early fishermen’s breakfasts hours before dawn in another life, chewing for his own abstract good and without pleasure. From the china jug he poured glasses of milk. At the mantelpiece he took down the photo Dominique had taken and he cut it down to fit inside his wallet. The sound of the scissors was surgical. Three faces, a tilted Breton headstone.

He laid their documents on the table, checked their visas, the state of their crowded passports. Map. Swiss army knife. Some aspirin. Cash. Into Billie’s tartan case he packed a change of clothes for each of them. He placed their documents in her fluorescent backpack with the Walkman, her Midnight Oil tapes, her comic and her colouring gear. She pulled the Darth Vader out and put it on the mantel.

‘Are you alright, love?’

She sat down and drank. The milk left a moony glow on her upper lip. She shrugged.

Scully found a brush on the sill and gently straightened her hair. It was so like his own. In a few years it would be exactly his, completely beyond redemption, the kind of clot you run your fingers through and shrug at.

‘I like this house,’ he murmured, packing a few toilet things. ‘Everything’ll be alright in this house, Bill. I promise you. Here, I polished your boots. You need a horse with boots like that. An Irish hunter. Yeah.’

He stood, feeling the stillness of the place, the look in her eyes.

A car heaved up the hill in low gear. Scully waited for it to pass, but it pulled in and he recognized it.

‘Scully,’ said Peter at the door.

‘Hi, Pete.’

‘You’re off then.’

‘To the train station, yeah.’

‘Dublin?’

‘Yep.’

‘Let me drive you.’ Pete pressed his hands together and leant from boot to boot, averting his eyes.

‘You needn’t worry, mate. We’ve got a flight to Athens in the morning.’

‘Athens, Greece? If you leave that van there at the station the friggin tinkers’ll have it up on blocks before dark. Let me take you.’

Scully stood there with his hand in Billie’s hair watching the postie think.

‘Fair enough. Thanks.’

‘Athens. Can we have a drink?’

‘It’s just two days, Pete. Don’t look so worried.’

‘Oh, it’s not worry, son, it’s just fresh out today.’

Smiling, Scully took the bottle of Bushmills off the mantel. ‘Here. Slainte.’

‘Slainte.’

Then Scully took the bottle back and took a good hard slug, felt it bore down cruelly into his roiling gut. ‘You’re right,’ he said, laughing emptily. ‘It’s cold out.’

• • •

A LITTLE WAY DOWN THE road in the tiny green van, Pete slowed down and pulled up beside the frail tree in the middle of the road.

‘Can I have a loan of your handkerchief, Scully?’ he said, opening the door and stamping his feet on the glistening road.

Scully dragged out his disgraceful face rag, expecting to see the postman lean over and throw up into the muddy grass. But Pete strode across to the wizened little tree and tied the handkerchief to a branch. He crossed himself twice and came gravely back to the van.

‘Don’t say a word, Scully. Not a blessed word.’

• • •

THE TRAIN PULLED INTO ROSCREA station, easing up onto the deep granite cutting to stop right before the three of them. Pete opened a carriage door and helped Billie up the step, doffing his cap comically like a doorman.

‘Don’t do anythin clumsy, Scully, ye hear me?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Just be back for Christmas.’

‘Are you kiddin? This is two days, Pete.’

‘I tell you, I don’t understand women or God.’

Or men, thought Scully, who could think of nothing dignified or honest to answer him with, short of telling him everything, breaking down on the platform here and blurting out all his fears. He was a friend, wasn’t he, a frigging patron, even. He deserved to know, but some iron impulse told Scully to shut up and get on with it, to stop feeling and start acting. Doors slammed along the line. Scully hesitated, stepped up.

‘Look after that girl, Scully.’

‘You look after my house.’

The train moved away.

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