‘Bloody curse.’
Down the line, as his father sighed, Mark heard what sounded like a car passing. ‘Are you outside?’ he said, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.
‘Down at the road.’
Mark took the phone away from his ear and checked the time. It was just past six o’clock. From the bedroom, Aoife’s whining grew more insistent. He walked to the door, and she seemed to sense him: she began to howl.
‘I’ll have to go,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’
‘That’s Aoife I can hear, is it?’
‘I’ll talk to you.’
*
His father was coping. Adapting, that was the word. Fitting himself to the shapes of things; steeling himself to the day. Moving through the world — his world — as though he recognized it. As though it recognized him. He seemed to be up every morning at dawn. He called Mark twice a day. His voice always sounded calm. It always sounded sure.
All summer, Mark had watched him. He had spent the first months after the funeral in Dorvaragh with him because he knew he had to be there. Nuala could get away from her job in London for only so long, and the two of them had decided — during one of the very earnest, very focused conversations they seemed capable of during those first weeks — that Mark should stay around. There was no other way, they agreed, of knowing how their father would manage once the shock of what had happened began to fade. There was no other way of ensuring his well-being. He was a man alone in a house in which he had not been alone for more than thirty years, and he could not be expected to face that. It was a change, and he would have to be eased through it. Carried through it.
As for you, Nuala had said to Mark, and Mark had told her not to go there. Not to go on. He was staying at home for their father, he said. He was staying at home because there was a summer of work to be done. What he did not say was that the house in Stoneybatter was not a place he could be. Not yet. Dorvaragh was familiar in some way he did not have to think about. And there was Aoife. Around the work of the farm, a steady routine for Aoife began to mould itself, and for a long time Mark could not imagine having to start with another. So, for almost three months, he stayed.
The work was his father’s succour. It was his centre. The hay and the cattle and the machinery seemed not just to ground him, but to fill him with some kind of optimism, to fuel him with something like zeal. In the mornings he was like a child as he chattered to Mark about what needed to be done, what approach would be best, what problems might arise. As they worked he consulted Mark on everything. He came to him for the kind of advice that, before, he had always been the one to impose. When relatives and neighbours came to visit, as they did often, Tom talked to them of the farm, and the men nodded and gave their own stories of work finished and unfinished, and the women talked of how good it was to be busy, to have something on which to focus the mind.
Mark watched. He worked, and he did everything that needed to be done, but more than that, he watched. For the first time in his life, he realized, he was trying consciously to learn from his father. He was trying to understand how to manage in his father’s way. But the work kept failing him; the work kept leaving him with himself. It did not take him over the way he needed; it did not burn his thoughts away. Almost every day after he came back in from the farm, he would take Aoife up in his arms and carry her out to the car. He took her to places he had been as a child. To the wasteland of Barley Harbour. To the bog lakes at Currygrane and Gurteen. To the old farmyards at Carriglass, where the developers had started work on the new hotel. To the low peak of Corn Hill. Outside the building that had once been Edgeworthstown House, he sat in the car and watched the old people shuffle between the smoking hut and the porch.
When they returned to Dorvaragh, his father would have some kind of dinner on the table. It usually involved black pudding and potatoes and baked beans. Mark ate it. Aoife ate some version of it. If his father asked where he had been, he told him he had been to Longford, or to some other town. At night, while they sat in front of the television, his father would talk about the farm. He would look to Mark for answers. Mark would try to watch the programmes, but the storylines always seemed impossible to grasp.
In August, the house in Stoneybatter began to press itself on his thoughts. He began to feel guilty about it; he imagined its rooms growing dusty, growing stale. And he imagined, sometimes, that Joanne was in those rooms, waiting for him, somehow. Confused about where he and Aoife might be. When he left for the city, he told his father he would return to the farm every weekend that he could. His father had nodded, and tapped his stick against the ground, and gone down to the lower fields to check on a fence that the cattle had been breaking through, a fence they had repaired together the previous day. ‘Call me when you get there,’ he said to Mark, as he went. Mark had been on the road five minutes when his father phoned to tell him that the fence had held.
*
Later on Sunday Mark took Aoife to the swimming-pool. It was something he had been meaning to do. He found the tiny swimsuit someone had given her as a gift long before she was big enough to wear it, and he found his own trunks, baggy and grey. He stuffed a couple of bath towels into a bag. They walked into town along the quays.
In the changing room, a single long bench faced the showers. Under the flow nearest the door, an elderly man stood with his back turned, his head facing down, sodden trunks clutched in his right hand. The water slapped onto his freckled shoulders, the paps of his elbows, the bumps of his spine.
As Mark got her into her swimsuit, Aoife shouted and pointed to the old man, to the water leaping off his skin. While Mark undressed, she wandered closer to the showers and stood watching, her hands loosely clasped behind her back. When beads of water hit her skin, she flinched, but she did not come back to Mark.
Mark inflated the plastic armbands he had bought at the entrance desk. ‘Come over here,’ he called to Aoife. She shook her head vigorously and pointed again at the old man.
‘Aoife,’ he called again, and in the same instant, the man turned. He was cupping his dick and balls — washing them, Mark thought, he hoped. He dropped both hands by his side now, and he gazed at the child. His beard was full, though narrowed and pointed now by water, and his heavy eyebrows, too, were slicked down. He was almost bald. As he stood watching Aoife, the flow from the showerhead stopped.
‘Hello there,’ he said. Aoife continued to stare. Mark stood and brought her back to the bench where he had laid her clothes. She let him carry her, but when he tried to get her into the first armband, she snatched it from him and threw it to the floor.
The old man stepped forward and picked it up. ‘You need to let some of the air out,’ he said to Mark.
‘Thanks,’ said Mark, taking it from him.
‘Once you get it up to the elbow, you need to open the little valve there, and let some of the air out so that it’ll go over,’ the man said, squeezing water out of his trunks. ‘Then you blow it back up the whole way.’ He shook the trunks briskly and walked to the other end of the bench. ‘You’ll pull the arms off her otherwise,’ he said, and wrapped a striped towel around his waist.
‘Thanks,’ Mark said again. He opened the white rubber valve on the side of the armband and let out some of the air. Aoife complained as he pushed it up her arm, and when he put his lips to the valve and blew until he could feel the plastic hardening, she tried to shake him off. When he reached for the second armband, she turned her back on him, and when he pulled her to him, she began to scream. He put both arms tightly around her, turned her away from him, and held her still. She screamed more loudly and kicked her legs. Her fingernails dug into his forearms.