Part Two
Chapter Seventeen
With Mark gone back to the city, there was less for Tom to do in the morning. Tea could be made in a mug, the used bag tossed into the small bin on the draining-board. A slice of bread with butter and marmalade was enough for breakfast; the smell of bacon and pudding browning on the pan seemed too heavy now on the air of the small room. Afterwards, he would rinse the mug and the spoon and the plate and the knife and put them back in the cupboard, ready for the next morning. At midday he would make himself another mug of tea and eat a sandwich — baked ham well sharpened with salt — and later he would boil four potatoes, empty a can of baked beans into a saucepan, and fry a pork chop in a dark, spitting pool of butter and oil.
There were no longer enough scraps from the table to feed the dog. She followed him around the kitchen. He began to buy cans of dog food in Keogh’s. There was more than a euro in the difference between the cheapest and the most expensive. The brand he chose had a dog like her pictured on the label.
He spent most of the day outdoors, moving between the hayshed and the yard, the byre and the fields. He drove around the lower meadows and into the bog, over the back lane to call on Sammy Stewart or Jimmy Flynn, over to Keogh’s to shop for groceries. If he sat into the bar for a pint during the day, he took the newspaper with him. There were seldom many others there and they talked to him only of farming and of football, of the going prices for land or for animals, of the weather and how it had been. He had his pint, and he left, and he found something to tip around at for the rest of the day. The dog went everywhere with him, riding high in the cab of the tractor, her back pressed warm against his.
In the evenings, soap operas came on the television. He began to follow some of them. The Australian one after the news was for youngsters, he thought, but he liked looking at it, liked the scenes of fighting and smiling and fussing played out against the backdrop of the beach. The tumbling blueness of the waves and the sky filled the television screen. The girls were impossibly good-looking, blonde and suntanned, wearing short dresses and swimsuits. They were all very young. There was one older woman in it, and she, too, was very attractive, but she was made out, most of the time, to be a sort of laughing-stock. She gossiped or eavesdropped or interfered, and her actions always backfired. When the programme ended, always with a mystery or a surprise, he would go to the kitchen and cook his dinner, standing over the range until it was ready, turning the meat and stirring the beans, putting a plate in to warm when the potatoes yielded to the touch of a fork.
He ate at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk with his food. He spread butter thickly across the steaming potatoes cracked open on the plate. He sprinkled grains of salt and watched them melt. The dog sat at his feet. From the other room he could hear the drone of the television, bursts of talk and music and applause, and the louder blasts of the advertisements. When he had finished eating, he washed and dried the things he had used and returned to the armchair. Before the news at nine o’clock there were two English soaps and one set in Dublin, moving between offices and sitting rooms and pubs. In these, the women were older, their clothes duller, their mouths downturned, their accents either sullen or shrill. The men sat nursing pints in bars that were too quiet to be real. Outdoors, the skies always looked swollen with rain, but no rain fell. The young people’s lives were ruined with worries about sex and money and family. The old people worried about petty things, sick pets and broken ornaments and the carry-on of drunken neighbours. Their worries were there for the sake of comedy. He sometimes laughed.
While the news was on a second time he would make a mug of tea and cut a slice of sweet cake or apple tart from the biscuit tin over the fridge. He would feed the dog, scooping the glistening meat out of the can with a spoon he rinsed afterwards in boiling water. He put the empty can in a plastic bag and hung it on the doorknob. He took his tea and his slice and sat back down to watch whatever it was they had on after the news. He never changed the channel after nine. Before Mark left he had paid for the television to be hooked up to some huge number of American channels, as well as to the English ones, which had never come properly into the house with the old aerial. Mark had shown him how to use the new machine under the television, the slim white box with the three buttons and the dial that you had only to touch lightly to operate. But when he had tried to work it himself, the first evening on his own, he had only been able to get channels with no picture, in some other language. At first he thought it was Irish.
He left one of the lamps on in the kitchen at night. The dog slept on an old rug under the table, and he liked to leave her a dish of water. He locked the front and back doors and climbed the stairs in darkness. In the bathroom, he took his dentures out and left them in a plastic mug on the washbasin. After he had used the toilet, he did not bother to zip his trousers back up or to redo his belt. He did not flush: it could wait until morning. He did not like the sudden noise in the quiet and the dark. He undressed at the foot of the bed. He turned the light out. The sheets were cold. The pillows held his head in a firm embrace. Some nights, through the window, he could see the roof of the hayshed and the tops of the garden oaks etched hard against the moonlit sky. When the moon was small, he could see only vague shapes, and sharp stars, and on other nights, he could see nothing but the blackness of the air. Sleep was slow in coming, but it came. He went towards it. He took no interest in his dreams.
Chapter Eighteen
Mark heard from his sister now more often than he would have liked. They had little to say to each other, but between them, they worked out a bearable routine. Nuala asked the same questions; he gave the same answers. Nuala asked about their father, knowing that Mark would have talked to him earlier; Mark knew that Nuala would have been talking with him too. She asked about Aoife. She asked how Mark himself was doing. In those first days, those nine days, she had asked about Joanne. But even then, Mark had known that all Nuala really wanted to talk about was their mother. She was panicking, Mark knew. He was going through it too. Trying to claw everything back into view and into focus, trying to recall everything, to preserve it, to have it for keeps — and she was losing it. Forgetting it. Realizing that she could no longer hear, clear in her head, the sound of their mother’s voice. That she could no longer remember the set of their mother’s face. And so every phone call became a clutching after one more memory, one more detail. Had their mother said this that time one Christmas, or had she said that? What did Mark remember of their holidays in Spiddal? What kinds of books had their mother been reading over the last few years? What had she liked to listen to on the radio? Was RTÉ still making episodes of the thing she used to listen to when Nuala was a child?
Harbour Hotel. No. It was long gone. And Mark could not bring himself to look through the pile of books on their mother’s bedside table — still on the bedside table — so he could not answer that question for Nuala. These were, anyway, little things. He knew that. Nuala knew that. But they were the clippings and the shavings and the locks of hair that Nuala needed for the collage she was trying so desperately to make and to control. Sometimes on the phone she would let out a sob, or a sigh that Mark knew to be chased by tears. But usually she was steady, almost chatty, briskly asking and avidly gathering, as though she were doing market research, as though she had a quota of answers to get and spaces to fill. Which she did, Mark knew. As did he. The difference was, he already knew he could not think fast enough, could not hold everything together. Everything had never been held together in the first place. It was gone. The parts were gone. To try to gather them was to try to gather leaves from an autumn five, ten, twenty years ago; there was the sense that countless things had fallen and scattered, but nothing to grasp at, nothing to sweep.