now.’ She tut-tuts again. ‘Where’s that nice girl you used to bring down here before? Your mother thought a lot of her. Go back to her!’
Poor Dilly in Declan’s day room that day, doped to the eyeballs. What do you do here all day, Dilly? He was only trying to make conversation. Do you read, Dilly? I’m not here to read, she said, I’m here to be mad. And then the talk came in torrents. She gave birth to a child when she was sixteen, fathered by her eldest brother, Michael. Michael Madden, respected town councillor, prosperous businessman, married for forty years with a grown-up family. Down the toilet it went with a plop, she said, I didn’t know what was happening. She tapped her head with her index finger. There’s a kink in every family, she whispered.
He touches her shoulder gently. ‘I have to go, Dilly, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’ He has to get away from her pained body.
He enters SuperValu and picks up a basket. Potatoes, carrots for the eyesight, McCloskey’s granary bread. Comté cheese. Coke. He buys the same staples every time. A sirloin at the meat counter. From the fridge, Denny’s hickory flavoured rashers, a half-pound of Denny’s sausages … Always Denny’s. Around a long time, 1904 at least. Leopold Bloom waiting at the butcher’s counter and the next-door girl asking for a pound and a half of Denny’s sausages. Bloom sneaking a look at her, fine pair of swinging hips on her. A bit mean of him, all the same, calling them hams. He puts his hand on a Clonakilty black pudding, then changes his mind. Cooked spicy pig’s blood. He moves along the fridge to the chickens, naked under cellophane, open pores where feathers were plucked, fat breasts injected with God-knows-what to plump them up. Short painful life in cages. Never eats them any more. Joyce liked chicken. His eye doctor in Paris called to the flat one evening. Clothes strewn everywhere, the state of the place, and Joyce and Nora sitting on the floor, a pan with a chicken carcass between them, a half-empty bottle of wine beside them.
At the end of an aisle he casts a quick glance up ahead. Tea, coffee, breakfast cereals, Mrs Whelan, his old English teacher from St Mary’s, now retired. He nods, smiles. ‘Lovely day, Mrs Whelan.’ It is indeed. He dawdles a bit, not wanting to be seen rushing to the wine. Aisle of flour, sugar, raisins, currants, sultanas, cornflour, Bird’s Custard. Cowardy cowardy custard. The sight of the red, yellow and blue container brings a flash of nostalgia. Sunday dinner, Mammy, Dadda, Josie, Lucy and, every summer, Ellen home from America. As he reaches for a microwaveable carton it strikes him that, other than Ellen, Dilly Madden might be the last person in the town who cares about him. As he places the carton of custard into his basket he catches the sweet scent of vanilla. Lucy loved the scrapings of the saucepan: custard, rice, semolina, porridge. Let the bottom brown, Mammy. Laced with sugar, melty, silvery sheen. His mouth begins to water. He’ll lob a spoon of ice cream into a bowl of hot custard later – delicious, the hot and cold sweet melt. Lucy is in Brisbane now. 28 Pear Street, Auchenflower. Came home alone for Mammy’s funeral two years ago. Wonder if her kids have inherited her tastes and habits. Oliver and Ellie. Sunny days in the back garden – the back yard they call it, like the Yanks. Jim lighting the barbecue in the evenings. The pretty wooden house that Jim built. No, renovated. He built the deck and the barbie, even the cot when Oliver was born. Jim Mitchell, a carpenter from Banagh, fifteen years her senior. In a past era, it would have been regarded as an elopement. Jim must be nearly fifty now. He’s ageing well, looking fit and tanned in photos. He doesn’t have the smarts that Lucy has. Luke goes on Facebook some nights and peeks at their life, hits ‘Like’, and occasionally adds a comment. Oliver is seven; he looks a bit soft, a bit girly. Might be gay. It’s obvious in some, there’s no hiding it. Screamers, Oisín Kelly called them – they come out of their mothers screaming it.
He checks his watch. Brisbane is ten hours ahead. Lucy will be going to bed now. Or making the kids’ lunches for school or laying things out for breakfast. No, tomorrow is Saturday. Winter there. He stops and reaches for a bottle of bleach, then changes his mind. Need to allow for the weight of wine. Rioja, or maybe a Barbera … cúpla buidéal, it being Friday. Or a nice crisp white maybe. An image of the evening ahead rises: sitting out on the lawn as the sun sets, sipping a dry white, chilled to perfection.
Outside, he leaves the bags down on the footpath and lights a cigarette. One of these winters, he’ll visit Lucy. Christmas dinner on the beach. He hasn’t been much of a brother – he should have gone out that time Ellie was ill. Febrile convulsions. Nearly lost her. Josie had epilepsy all her life. Wonder if Lucy admitted the fault line to the doctors. The falling sickness. The suggestible nature of certain words – he can feel the gravitational pull of those. Lear had it. Tis very like he hath the falling sickness. The sudden, frightening way that Josie used to fall forward. Once, while she was on the ground, Lucy chalked around her limp body. He remembered that when Ellie was sick. He was afraid something was coming home to roost for Lucy, some bad karma.
He throws away the cigarette butt. Too early to go home – the day is stretching out before him. He heads up the hill towards the square. The shopping bags are heavier than he expected. John O’Grady, sitting inside the garage window, looks up as he passes and Luke nods at him. He doubts if John is a trained mechanic at all; probably just fell into the family business. Never married, sits there in the window all day waiting for customers.
Suddenly he remembers: Caesar it was, not Lear, who had epilepsy. King George, too. Such a medieval-sounding ailment, consistent with a flat earth, Galileo, burnings at the stake. Haemophilia is like that too. The poor devils, thinking they had only one skin.
Up ahead John-Joe Cleary crosses the street, heading for the Sullane Valley Hotel for the €5 lunch. It used to be a fine place; had the meal there after Dadda’s funeral. Now, the clientele is OAPs and bachelors. Wonder what’s on the menu today. John-Joe was a good friend to Dadda always, helping out around the farm for years. He still helps out up at Blake’s during the hunting season. Every now and again he goes on a bender. A quiet boozer, never a nuisance. Probably waiting for the mother to die and leave him the house. You’ll never miss your mother till. Never saw him with a woman. Probably a bit afraid of women, thinks they’re complicated. Keep life simple, get the €5 lunch every day. Before you know it, you’re fifty. Wake up one day and you’re sixty. Not long left then. An ease when it’s all over.
Luke crosses the street, slows as he passes the hotel door and reads the chalkboard menu. Bacon and cabbage today. Inside, it’s dark, with no sign of John-Joe. Too late now to enter, he thinks. Anyway he’s not hungry. Wouldn’t mind a chat with John-Joe though. Often has the impression John-Joe keeps something back, that he knows more about Luke than Luke himself knows. But Luke trusts him – John-Joe is faithful to his father’s memory and to the family. Some residual sympathy still exists for the family, going back to the double tragedy in 1941 when his father’s twelve-year-old sister, Una, fell down the well on New Year’s Day and their father dropped dead in the yard six months later. Those who remember are dying out now, and the sympathy is waning.
The sun burns down on his head. He continues along Main Street, past Kealy’s bar. His father was wearing a tweed waistcoat with a pocket-watch when he walked into Kealy’s and first laid eyes on his mother on a summer’s evening almost forty years ago. Who do you think you are, you and your waistcoat? she thought, as she pulled his pint. Fifteen years her senior and countless stations above her, he was instantly smitten. She’d been a barmaid in Coventry, escaping, for a few years, the drunken father and cowed mother and the two-roomed cottage full of kids on the side of Croghan mountain. He spent a long time courting her, convincing her. The waistcoat still hangs in the wardrobe, its girth too great for Luke.
He crosses the street to the shade and sits on the windowsill of a boarded-up terraced house. Half the houses and shops in the town are boarded up. The feeling of decay and dereliction always in the air. Stagnancy. Listlessness in the young men – nothing to do, no work – hanging around the town. He feels a little light-headed. He reaches into one of the bags and brings out the bottle of Coke and takes a few slugs. The street is deserted. At the top of the hill, teachers’ cars are parked in a line in the lay-by outside
