by John Brady
“Might as well have a bit of crack,” said the one with the bottle. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s not crack we’re about at the present time,” said the other. He squatted down beside the guns and began wrapping them and the clips in the plastic.
“Jesus, it’s not like we’re doing stuff that really needs doing by a certain time now, is it? I’m getting fed up waiting around. Breaking windows is all we’re about so far as I can see.”
The one wrapping the gun was a few years older than his companion. He concentrated on fingering the rubber bands over the ends of the package.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“When do we get to, you know-”
“To what?”
“Ah come on now, Ciaran. You know. Use the fucking things right.”
“Jesus, are you mad? You can’t just decide to go around the place Waving these without having thought it out carefully. We’ll do the German’s place tomorrow night like we planned, and that’s it for the time being. So don’t keep on asking me.”
He picked up the package and stood. It’d be dark inside of a couple of hours.
“What’s to stop us doing a bank job or something?”
Ciaran didn’t answer.
“Well, why not? It’s like playing with yourself instead of having a proper ride-”
The other man whirled around and hit him in the shoulder with his fist.
“Give over, for the love of Jases, Finbarr!” He waved the package. “Do you think we’re doing this for entertainment value, is it? You’re such a gobshite sometimes. Here I am, getting you in on this like I used to get you in in London, and look at you-”
“Hey! Don’t fucking preach at me. We’re in it together!”
“Well, don’t you be slagging me about her! And don’t be swilling that stuff on the job either!”
“What job?” He pointed the bottle toward the cottage. “Sure my work is done for today. I can take a drink if I want to. We’re not up to anything tonight. What’s the big deal, so?”
“Just don’t be firing off that gun here.”
“No one can hear us up here, only the birds-”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a bad habit to treat it so casual is what I’m saying.”
“Bad habit! Hah! Look who’s telling me about bad habits!”
He tightened his grip on the package and watched his friend laugh and turn away. Something gave way in him then, and he felt the anger drop out of his chest. They had shared digs together, fallen into taxis pissed together, taken the mail-boat home together. His friend had only started going on the drink lately, really. No girlfriend…
“Well, is she still the holy terror she was the last time?” he heard him ask. If anyone was entitled to take the mickey out of him, it was Finbarr.
“She’s worse,” he murmured, the anger completely gone now. “I’m worn out.”
“Oh, you boy, you! Did she? Tell me, go on. What did she want this time?”
If only he’d act a bit more serious even.
“You’re such a cowboy, do you know that?” he muttered. “One of these days…”
He glared at his smiling, tipsy friend who stood now with his feet spread wide, swaying slightly while he looked out over the hedges to the rocky heights. Christ, he thought, the opposite of scenic. What the hell did foreigners want to visit here for?
“Come on,” he called out, anxious to shed the feeling which seemed ready to settle on him like the evening waiting close by. “Come on and we’ll put the stuff back. Get a pint in town.”
With the suburban Dublin traffic behind them, Minogue drove the Fiat fast along the Galway Road. He had had little trouble persuading Kathleen to go the Galway Road. Dinner in Galway city, a walk around the streets and then down to the farm by tea-time. Even with the new, widened stretches of roadway and the bypasses, he still considered Clare a long way off. The weeks of rain had deepened the colour of the grasses and left the air clear. He thought of last night’s Hallowe’en callers. It was either the effect of the Spanish wine or the fluorescent brightness of the cloth, but he had ranked a mummy as the best costume and given it the extra propitiation of a fifty-pence piece. How many years since Daithi and Iseult had gone out on Hallowe’en? Space blended with time as the countryside rolled by the Fiat. He thought of trips he had made all these years. When the kids were babies: that time Daithi had them up half the night with teething and he had forgotten to bring enough changes of clothes…
With his backside numb, Minogue piloted the Fiat through Athlone toward the River Shannon. He nudged Kathleen when they reached the middle of the bridge.
“Now we’re in business,” he said. “We’re in God’s country now, madam.”
She looked up from her magazine at the Shannon. Black and wide, it idled toward Limerick and the sea.
“‘To hell or to Connaught,’” she murmured.
“Typical Dublin gurrier remark,” he said, and nudged her harder. “It’s west of the Shannon where civilisation actually starts, woman.”
She flicked the magazine upright.
“Huh. You’re beginning to sound like Jimmy Kilmartin more and more.”
They had had a half-bottle of wine with a not-bad dinner of chicken in Galway city. He negotiated an hour in the hotel foyer with a pot of coffee and the paper and very nearly fell asleep, but Kathleen prodded him to go out in the streets. Minogue liked Galway very much. He sensed that this City of the Tribes, this mecca for the travelling people of the West of Ireland, was infused with a vigour and abandon due to the immensity of the Atlantic at the ends of its streets. Its visitors were in keen and anticipatory transit, passing a little time here in this portal city.
A poster of a starving child, black, naked and bloated, caught his eye in a shop window. Famine Stalks Africa Again was printed in fading black letters atop the poster. Large, glassy eyes returned the Inspector’s stare. On the bottom was the follow-up. “Famine knows no borders. Give to Concern this Sunday.” Hoey, he thought then. Cheer him up with a phone call from his home county. And gather up any gossip without having to fence with Kilmartin. He found a phone in the post office. Eilis answered.
“No, he hasn’t checked in. Might be the flu. Or something.”
The irony in her halting utterance suggested to him that she too believed Hoey might have been on a batter and was too hung over. Or still pissed. Try him at home? No. Talk straight to him when he got back to Dublin, before Jimmy Kilmartin came to the boil about it and jumped on Hoey first.
A rising wind in from the sea brought more clouds. Minogue carried the cake and bottle of sparkling wine Kathleen had bought to the car, and they headed out of the city. They crossed into Clare a half-hour later and Minogue turned inland off the Coast Road. The road narrowed and the Fiat began its gradual ascent through the Burren. As Minogue drove slowly through the limestone wilderness, the masses of stone began to exercise a subtle effect on him. He imagined that they were all there was to the world, that the earth had been petrified and worn down into this landscape. Not even glimpses of distant green lowlands between the hills broke the spell. He thought of the miles of caves beneath him, few of them mapped, which had been carved out by the underground waters. Hours and even days after rain, the further reaches of the caves flooded without warning, emerging as wells and ponds that appeared and drained enigmatically over days or weeks or years.
The votive wells and springs near the farm still flowed. His sister, home from Toronto on a visit several years ago, had brought her youngest, Kevin-a gangling, sceptical and embarrassed North American kid-to Tobar Dearg, the Red Well, for an asthma cure, he recalled. Next to the well was the cillin, a children’s burial ground. For many years Minogue had thought of asking Kathleen if they could rebury Eamonn here amongst this tight cluster of stones. He had never actually talked to her about it. The idea of exhuming their infant son, gone a quarter of a century now, and bringing that small coffin west across Ireland w
ould be too much for her, he believed.
“Not enough earth to bury a man,” he murmured as they breasted a hill. “Not enough timber to hang him. Not enough water to drown him.”
“Name of God.” Kathleen elbowed him. She sat forward in the seat and looked hard at him.
“It’s just a saying about the Burren-”
“Can’t you come up with something a bit more, I don’t know…cheerful, man? Look up in the sky-the sun is shining. Finally get a bit of weather! Cheer up!”
Minogue nodded at the stricken uplands continuing to unfold around the car.
“Cheerful? All right. ‘Holy Mary of the Fertile Rock.’”
“Fertile Rock? What sense does that make?”
“That’s the dedication the monks put on Corcomroe Abbey back in the twelfth century or so-”
He felt the car slowing a little. A soft bump alerted him.
“Here, why are you stopping here?”
“We have a puncture. The back seat on my side.”
Kathleen followed him out onto the road and looked at the tyre. Minogue rummaged in the boot.
“Do you want help?” she asked.
“No, thanks.”
She stepped over to the remains of a drystone wall and looked through a gap between the ridges across Galway Bay at the Connemara mountains. Minogue bent to loosen the nuts before placing the jack. Aware of her watching him now, he stopped and looked over at her. A breeze caught her hair and swept it down over her forehead. She made to smile but a frown spread across her face instead. Her gaze wandered away to the heights inland. Worried, he thought. What was she thinking about?
One of the nuts was very tight and he paused several times to secure his grip. He felt himself being watched but, when he turned to Kathleen, her back was to him. He looked over the rocks. Nobody. The nut gave way suddenly and the wrench clattered onto the road.
“Mind yourself,” she called out, and turned back toward the uplands.
He stood up, stretched his back and rolled the spare wheel over. He eyed her while he tightened the nuts again. She looks as if she sees something up there that she doesn’t want to see, he thought. Suddenly aware of his eyes on her, she looked over and shivered.
“God, it’s like a different continent or something.” Her voice trailed off but her frown remained.
Guided by the light from the kitchen window, the Inspector stepped into the cobbled farmyard. He had forgotten how dark a country night could be. He hoped that the cutting night air would banish the headache he felt coming on. It was only half nine. He shivered as he walked over the stones toward the car. He stopped by the gate and let the memories swirl around him. A breeze hissed through the hawthorn still rooted by the gate. A dog barked twice in the far distance and then fell silent. Minogue shivered again. Fretting breezes and gusts batted turf-smoke from the kitchen range down into the farmyard around him. The sweet smell almost warmed him. The back door of the farmhouse opened and light spilled across the yard. Eoin came out into the yard, wrestling his way into a coat.
“The da’s just getting himself ready,” Eoin said.
Minogue sat into the back seat of the Opel. Eoin left the door half-opened and the interior light stayed on. Minogue studied his nephew’s profile for several moments. The same high cheekbones as his mother, the same thick, wavy hair even, but he had his father’s thin lips. Even Mick’s mannerisms, Minogue reflected dispiritedly.
“That was great ye came down now,” Eoin said. “Mamo has been a bit odd this last while.”
“She’s had it tough this last while, all right,” said Minogue.
Eoin turned in his seat. “How do you mean, like?”
Minogue considered backing away.
“You said she’s had it tough. Is there something she’s been keeping from us here-”
“No. I meant the farming, of course.”
“True for you, Uncle Matt. True for you.”
“And that gun in the boot of your car,” Minogue added. He heard his nephew draw in a breath.
“I wondered if you’d bring that up. I had no idea that Liam was carrying a gun in his bag.”
“If you had known, would you have kicked him out of the car?”
“Think what you like, Uncle Matt. I don’t have anything to do with that kind of stuff.”
Minogue thought of the fire glowing in the Aga in the kitchen, Maura laughing, a hand of cards maybe. Tell stories, a glass of whiskey. But Kathleen had dispatched him to the pub with a twenty-pound note to loosen tongues. And that bloody envelope was still lying on the hall table for him.
“Tell me something, Eoin,” he began. “Have ye considered selling a bit off, maybe? A few acres. Who knows, you could probably get planning permission for houses or something.”
“We’re farmers here,” Eoin declared. “We put the food on your tables up in Dublin.”
“You and some poor divils growing onions in the arse end of Spain, you mean.”
Anger flashed out of Eoin’s eyes.
“With all due respect, Uncle Matt, what do you know and you up in Dublin this thirty years?” His voice rose, “Dublin’s a different world entirely. Maybe you’ve forgotten who we are here.”
“Forgotten what?”
Exasperation rippled across Eoin’s face.
“The family farm and all that it means. ’Twas the country people brought us our freedom in ’21. The people of Clare and plenty more that won our land back from the landlords in Parnell’s day. We took pikes in our hands when we had no guns. We deserve every blade of grass that’s under our feet.”
Eoin’s eyes strained as they looked into his uncle’s. Whatever he saw there didn’t seem to be the right answer. He blinked and returned to tapping the steering wheel. A speech worthy of his father, Minogue thought, as Mick Minogue stepped awkwardly out into the yard and began his laboured, sideways walk to the car. He thought of the afternoon’s drive through the Burren. Notions of property or boundaries seemed to falter and then fade entirely on the slopes of the desolate hills. Minogue suddenly felt his nephew’s angry bewilderment as something familiar now, without menace.
“I farmed these fields, Eoin,” he murmured. “It was hard then, too.”
“All right,” Eoin said. “So you know what it’s like to see some bloody foreigner with pucks of money come in and snap up scraps of fields that’d mean the world to us. They put up bloody holiday homes… They’re killing our way of life. I don’t want to end up making their beds and cooking their dinners.”
Mick Minogue let himself slowly down into the passenger seat. The Inspector again studied his nephew’s face. Its frown of sincerity and anger, regret then as the brows lifted, moved Minogue. Dublin is a different world? The cold coming in under his arms and along his legs made Minogue shudder. Eoin talked while he drove the three miles into the coastal village of Portaree. It was a conversation that his passengers neither wanted to keep alive nor let die. So-and-so had sold out their twenty acres. Talk was that the buyer had planning permission for holiday homes. A folk village and museum was to be built nearby, too. At least the buyer was local, Eoin added.
“Who?” asked Minogue.
“Who else?” said Eoin. “Dalcais. Tidy Howard’s outfit. Dan Howard runs it now.”
“With the blessing of that bloody association, of course,” Mick grunted.
“Which?”
“The PDDA,” said Eoin. “The Portaree and District Development Association.”
“There’s one bloody farmer in that outfit,” Mick said between his teeth. “Townies grubbing for money. It’s a long way from Tidy Towns they’ve come.”
Dan Howard, Senior, had put Portaree on the map years ago by promoting it in Ireland’s Tidy Town contest, and the village had won the title several times since. Window boxes and fresh paint had been taken for granted in the town for two decades now. In tribute to Howard’s astute business sense in connecting tidiness with tourism with development, the local people had wryly tagged him with his
honorific, Tidy.
“I didn’t know Tidy was gone,” said Minogue.
“Oh no,” said Mick. “Not gone to glory yet. He’s in a nursing home after a stroke. They say he’s lying up in the bed like a vegetable or something. They’re not sure if he has his wits about him. Poor divil. For all you might have said ag’in him when he was in the whole of his health…”
The Opel shuddered on a pothole and Minogue glimpsed his brother’s grimace. The first lights of Portaree flared on the windscreen.
A craft studio, a restaurant with candles and American Express signs in its windows and a big grocery shop slipped by their car. A flux of memories took over Minogue’s mind. Save for market days and Saturdays, his Portaree had been like a town asleep. He remembered cycling in for pints, cycling home again, drunk and dreamy, sometimes bitter, with escape carved on his heart. Mick seemed to read his brother’s thoughts.
“Money in town now,” he said. “We’d fork souls into the mouth of hell if the money were right.”
The pub was half-full. Faces turned to the Minogues and heads nodded greetings. They drew up to the bar. Minogue noted the brass foot-rail, the oil-lamps hanging from the wall. The dismal shebeen of his own youth had been made over several times by the Howards. A barman unknown to Minogue raised his eyebrows at him. Before Minogue had asked Mick and Eoin what they would drink, a fat man turned on his stool by the bar. He cocked his cap back on his head, settled it and greeted Mick.
“Gob now, Mick Minogue, is it yourself that I’m seeing in a pub? It must be the Christmas.”
He chortled and swallowed from a pint glass of beer. The barman looked on, bemused and careful. The man’s face put Minogue in mind of a pear, his nose pitted and large. The recessed eyes twinkled and the fat man spoke in a tone of mock earnestness.
