In Exile

by Billy O'Callaghan

  The women stood with Father O’Leary and smiled almost deliriously as they took turns repeating over and over what a happy day this was and what a lovely couple Kevin and Lucy made. ‘Kevin’s a good lad,’ Father O’Leary said, sipping sherry like the two women. ‘And Lucy’s one of the best. I know they’ll be very happy together.’

  ‘Thanks, Father,’ Hannah said, and Betty Feehan added that it had been a beautiful service.

  ‘Shame about the rain,’ said the priest, ‘but at least the farmers will be happy.’ No one mentioned the arrangement, because that didn’t matter anymore.

  At the near end of the bar, Kevin Feehan and his Best Man, Peadar Walsh, were drunk. The gloom was heaviest just here, away from the reach of the paraffin lamp. Peadar was only seventeen, a year younger than Kevin, but nobody made anything of it. They worked together as labourers for Cannon, and before that they’d been in school together. In the two hours of drinking they hardly spoke a word until after the fifth or sixth pint of stout Peadar leaned in and asked, ‘What was it like, Kev?’

  Kevin thought for a moment and then shrugged.

  ‘Ah come on. Tell us.’

  ‘I don’t know what it was like. There didn’t seem to be much to it, to tell you the truth. High bloody price to pay, though.’

  A nod. ‘Ah well. Lucy’s a nice girl. You’re as well off marrying her as anyone else.’

  Kevin wanted to say something in reply to that but the Murphy’s made it difficult to think, so he let it go. Down the bar his father was smiling with his eyes closed, the beads of sweat gleaming on his forehead and down his cheeks. Lucy’s father was leaning in, sharing something that was obviously a joke or a funny story.

  There had been no jokes or smiles that night Dan had called around. Kevin was in the kitchen, scrubbing the day’s dirt off his face and arms over a dish of cold water. He heard his father at the door, and the voice of Dan, steady. A moment later, his father’s voice rang out. ‘Kevin. Come in here.’

  No anger, because the decision had already been made. In the living-room, Dan sat in one armchair beside the fire, his father in the other. His mother stood, her face a mask of pained silence.

  ‘Hello, Mr Stack.’

  ‘Kevin.’

  John Joe leaned forward, his thick fingers rolling a cigarette by the light of the fire. ‘Dan here says his Lucy’s expecting.’ He put the cigarette to his mouth, then removed it again to pick a thread of Old Holborn tobacco from his tongue. He looked at Kevin. ‘What do you know about that?’

  The silence was answer enough. Finally, John Joe nodded to himself. ‘Well, you’ll have to do the right thing, boy, and that’s all there is to it. You’ve made your bed now.’

  His mother began to cry, but everyone ignored her.

  ‘I’ll go and get that bottle from the cupboard. You sit down here by the fire. We have something to drink to, I think.’ John Joe stood with a grunt, his bulk as well as the work he did, furniture removals for Nat Ross, had finally begun taking a toll on his back. As he moved past Kevin he patted his son on the shoulder, and it was a much appreciated gesture, a sharing of strength. Kevin dropped into the armchair by the fire and nodded at Dan. Dan nodded back, and over the whiskey that followed everything was settled.

  After a while, the Wedding Cake was cut, a sickly sweet thing baked by Kevin’s mother with icing that was oddly greasy. Father O’Leary ate a slice and then excused himself. He had early Mass in the morning, he announced, and really needed to be running along. He shook hands with everyone and wished the bride and groom all the happiness in the world. ‘God is smiling on you both,’ he said, and they nodded their heads and thanked him.

  Hassett, behind the bar, seemed to recognise that the formalities were reaching a conclusion, and he switched on the radio, working the dials until he found music. Something modern filled the bar, a song that nobody recognised, a man’s voice. With effort, Dan and Peadar dragged the centre table and the low stools to one side. Kevin and Lucy moved together and began to dance, awkwardly, given the confines of the small flagstone floor. Once, he stepped on the hem of her dress and heard the sound of material tearing, but by then everyone had consumed enough alcohol for that to no longer matter very much.

  A second song replaced the first, and this was one that everybody knew: Frank Sinatra singing Night and Day. The others paired up, husbands with wives, bridesmaid with best man. They shuffled on the spot for a couple of minutes until that particular duty was done.

  ‘You look lovely,’ Kevin said, when the dance was over. The radio was still playing, something unfamiliar again, so he had to lean close. ‘Thanks,’ said Lucy, and she smiled even though the smell of his breath had a rotten tinge. She remembered that smell from other nights, walking home after dances, when he had kissed her. The stout had something to do with it, his decayed back teeth the rest. They stood awkwardly together in the middle of the floor.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Another hour and we’ll be on the bus.’ Fountainstown would be wild at this time of the year, but that didn’t matter. Three days by the seaside, time for them to get to know one another, to learn to make the best of things. ‘There’s long enough for one last drink, I’d say.’

  ‘I’ll go in and get changed,’ Lucy said. She nodded to Fiona and together they moved across the floor and disappeared into the back room.

  Hassett poured more pints. Dan told him to pour whiskeys too, large ones. ‘Get that down ya, boy,’ he said, laying an arm around his new son-in-law’s shoulders. ‘You’re a good lad. Make sure you do your best by her.’ Kevin drank his whiskey and said he would. He’d learned a lot over the past few weeks; he’d grown up. It didn’t surprise him anymore that nobody even thought to mention love in any of this. Love was for stories, not for the real world.

  This is the End

  Galloway read the letter through, then sat a while and read it again, slowly, digesting every bitter word. It had been just waiting for him, propped against the kettle. Maggie knew him better than anyone else, and she knew enough to leave it where it couldn’t be missed. He found it before he even knew that the house was empty. He had picked it up and stared at how his first name, Jack, looked when shaped by her handwriting, while he filled the kettle from the tap and set it on the stove to boil.

  As best he could remember, he hadn’t felt all that much. Curiosity, perhaps, but certainly not alarm. Most likely, he probably just assumed that she’d decided to spend a few nights at her sister’s. Something like that.

  While the kettle rumbled towards its boil, he thumbed back the envelope’s unsealed flap and pulled out the letter; one of those small lavender-coloured sheets that she always used, even though they cost more than paper should rightly be worth. ‘Elegant though,’ she said, whenever he complained, and there was no real arguing with that, because they were elegant, if still ridiculously overpriced.

  He scanned it as he made his tea, the tea bag straight into his favourite mug, the one with the Newcastle United crest flaked nearly unrecognisable, but he didn’t really even begin to take it all in until he was seated at the kitchen table.

  Jack, the letter read, I’m sorry but I’ve had enough. This is the end.

  And she’d signed it like it really was the end too; Maggie, in a scrawl that probably nobody but him could have made out.

  It was nothing like it should have been. In the movies, he would have heard her voice in the words. But that didn’t happen. And even trawling over the message, all that he could focus upon was the way she had signed off: just her barely decipherable name. No love, not even best wishes. Hardly a letter at all really, more of a memo or whatever it was that they called those quick note things. He couldn’t even begin to realise the implications of it all, but he still felt chilled to the bone by it.

  The radio was playing, tuned to that station that she liked, the one that played country music of a morning. He had just come in and switched it on, without thought, and now it was offering up Waylon Jennings and something sort of r
ockabilly-sounding that turned out to be Only Daddy That’ll Walk The Line. The day outside was threatening rain, filling the kitchen with a white gloom. He sipped at the tea, glad of its heat, and though it vaguely crossed his mind that things would seem better with a spike or two of whiskey, he settled instead for a couple of spoons of sugar.

  None of it made any sense.

  A big part of the problem was the lack of a date. It was conceivable that the letter could have sat there for days; he had, after all, been away since Sunday night. That made it nearly a week since he had seen her, and spoken to her, even, because the one time he had tried to call – either Tuesday night or Wednesday, he couldn’t be sure – the phone wasn’t picked up. At the time, he had just put it down to her stepping out for something, and maybe she had, or maybe she was over with her sister – which was so often the situation that the two of them might as well have been joined at the hip – and he certainly had intended to call back, but what with one thing and another … Well, no excuses; he should have but didn’t, and that was all there was to it.

  Everything in the kitchen was in order, but that was no indication of when she might have left. Even the half dozen letters strewn across the floor in the hallway could have been this morning’s yield or could have built up over most of the week. It comprised – apart from a quarterly electricity bill – entirely junk mail, of course; a ‘You have won a Mi££ion!’ lie, and a book club offer of six books for 99 pence being the pick of the litter. He thought about another mug of tea but he was suddenly very tired and to make it seemed too much like work, so he swayed instead towards the easier option of the whiskey bottle so lonely in the drinks cabinet, pouring a water glass halfway full and then putting the bottle’s stopper in his pocket so that he wouldn’t be tempted to give up too early. Well, that at least was no problem.

  The drink helped. It burned going down, but at least that was some kind of sensation, and with the worst of it over he gave the letter another try. I’ve had enough. This is the end. All right, so maybe what they had wasn’t exactly Mills & Boon, but who had that, for Christ’s sake? He supposed that it couldn’t have been easy for her, what with him being away from home so much, but he had to work, didn’t he, and she’d have had a different tune to play if he spent his days divided between the pub and the betting shop, like plenty of others around here. She always had money to spend; well, not always, but a sight more than most, including her sister. They had this place, and it was pretty nice. A bit small, maybe, but it was just the two of them, and how much room did they need, anyway? And the area was good too, safe enough to walk to the corner shop of an evening without having to fear for your life. He doubted that she missed the place where she had grown up, a place where even twenty years ago they’d have knifed you for your cigarettes. This is the end was pretty melodramatic, but surely she knew when she had a good thing going.

  Slowly he worked at the bottle, and it was easy work, knowing that the seal had already been cracked when he got there. Even if he managed to drain the thing – and that, more or less, was the plan – at least he wouldn’t have the guilt of knowing that he’d finished out the entire bottle.

  She’d left him; that came as the whiskey worked its bitter kind of magic, turning him morose. She’d found someone else and she’d left him in the lurch. What was he, fifty-five? Which made her forty-eight. No spring chicken, and a little hard around the edges, but she was still a handsome-looking woman. He had kept her too goddamned well, that was his mistake. It wasn’t just divorced men who had to pay maintenance.

  Well, that was fine when he was getting the benefits of it, but now some other dirty bastard was moving in on her.

  Even thinking all of this he recognised the edge of the whiskey in the words, the kind of aggression that wasn’t really him at all. He indulged in such thoughts a while, sipping at the whiskey, holding onto each mouthful before swallowing so that he could keep the heat for his tongue, but once his mind had exposed them for what they were they lost much of their edge and, really, ceased to matter. Well, if that was what she wanted, to hell with her. What they had going was a thin enough thing these days, and the only times that they collided much any more was after a good night down at the pub when it was that age-old situation, any port in a storm, or else when they argued. And it was the second of these things which dominated. It was doubtful that either of them could have remembered what had drawn them to one another in the first place. Black magic, her sister said. So if she wanted out, he’d not be the one to barricade the door. But if she went, let her remember who was doing the walking. He’d put enough into her; let her fancy man take up the tab from now on, and that included keeping a roof over her head. Because this roof was spoken for.

  Actually, her going might not have been a bad thing, as far as he was concerned. He was fifty-five, yeah, but that wasn’t over the hill these days, not by a long way. His work kept him well enough, which made him an enticing prospect as far as most around here were concerned. Yeah, there was life in the old dog yet, maybe he could finally get himself a little bit of enjoyment out of the world. Down at the local, he’d seen some of the girls, early twenties and dressed like strip-o-grams, some of them, three or four vodkas and they were anyone’s. He could keep them fed with vodka by the bottle. Maybe all of this would turn out to be the best thing that could have happened for him.

  Well, enough was enough. He drained his glass and rose unsteadily, took the bottle, now seriously depleted, by the neck and made for the living-room, dropping into his favourite armchair and out of habit reaching for the television’s remote control. Thoughts of all the local girls with their low-cut tops and fleshy legs could keep until later; for now, he had all the company he needed in his whiskey and the television’s twenty-eight inches of Grandstand. It didn’t much matter what sport they were showing. Tired as he was, the rhythms of Football Focus and then Davis Cup tennis, inter­rupted now and again by racing from Northampton, were wonderfully soothing. The whiskey put up no ­struggle either, and some time after it was gone the stupor was invaded by a creeping sleep.

  When he woke, it was late, dark outside, and inside too, apart from the television screen showing something gruesome. He watched it, bleary-eyed and vacant, and though his head was beating like it was about to hatch, he recognised enough of it to know that it was some kind of crime series. Cop shows were heavy on grit, these days. It was supposed to be reality, but who’d want that kind of reality? Everyone believed in crackheads and rapists and paedophiles, but nobody wanted them in their living-rooms of an evening. He punched at the buttons of the remote control, and he had to back up when he realised that One Foot in the Grave was on and that he had passed it. Old-fashioned humour. That was what television should always be.

  It hurt to move, but eventually thirst overpowered any kind of pain, and he forced himself. Tea was just the ticket. He set the kettle on the stove, bearing the noise of the water rising to the boil as a necessary price to be paid. And while he waited, he slumped down at the kitchen table.

  The note was there; his hand had it and his eyes were reading it: I’ve had enough. This is the end.

  And the implications of the words bloomed through his head with a suddenness that was jarring. He had to force a breath, wondering how he could possibly have missed this. How he could possibly have seen it any other way?

  She was dead. Maggie, his wife of more than thirty years. All right, so they’d had their moments, but he had always worked hard for her, had given her everything he could to make her happy. A nice house, money to spend, the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Well, maybe not that last one, not exactly, but he had never complained much when she went missing for hours at a time to visit her sister. And through it all, there was this thing that he had never noticed, or which he had simply chosen, long ago, to ignore. Grief, he supposed it was, maybe some sort of depression. It had always been just the two of them, no children, and he knew that could upset a woman. But surely she was past all of that, fo
rty-eight was a bit old to be getting broody. Must be that the menopause was kicking in, probably playing havoc with her hormones.

  Still, whether it was mostly down to her or not, there was no denying the guilt that he felt over the situation, and the whiskey probably didn’t help there either. To think he had been home, what? must be ten, twelve hours anyway, and all he had done after reading the note was to drink himself stupid and crash out in front of the horse racing. And all the while she was lying dead somewhere. Had to be, because if she had been found surely he’d have known about it.

  The tea was good against his stirring hangover, and he sipped at it and winced at how hot and sweet it was. His mind was still working at a slow crawl, and it was a minute of radio noise, some generic and forgettable tune, before he began to think of how she might have done it. This at least was something to hang on to, a grizzly subject but a substantial one.

  A gun was out of the question. Too messy, for a start, given her general sense of neatness. Of course, the mess wouldn’t be hers to clean up, but still, he couldn’t quite see her taking that option. And anyway, how would she get her hands on a gun? All right, so there were backstreet pubs in town where you could find one if the price was right, but Maggie wouldn’t know that, wouldn’t know where to begin.

  No, not a gun, and keeping to the neatness theory, probably not a razor blade or knife either. She wouldn’t fancy the pain of that, or the sight of her own blood. She had such a dread fear of injections that she refused to take the yearly hay fever shot, even though she suffered most brutally with pollen. So, ruling those things out, he was still left with the options of a pills overdose, a hanging, or a plunge into the river. None of which was very pleasant but all of which seemed possible. She’d be efficient, whichever way she chose; that much he knew for certain. Of those three, assuming that he wasn’t overlooking any other method, the rope would probably leave the least room for failure. With an overdose or with jumping into the river, someone could well happen along in time to intervene. The rope, once she had settled on a quiet enough place – and it must have been quiet, since she obviously hadn’t yet been found – would take only a few seconds. If she did it right. If the knot slipped it could have been a slow process, death by strangulation instead of the single brisk snap that would close the door on everything.