“Maybe Pat doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”
“Oh, really, Da? I thought that principles are supposed to cost you something. I told him to sort himself out and then get in touch with me when he’s ready.”
The waitress laid down bowls of vegetable casserole. Minogue lost heart at the sight of the steam rising from them.
“Get in touch?” he asked. “Is he banished back home to think it over maybe?”
She poked at cauliflower with her fork.
“No. I left.”
Minogue looked down at her fork working. This food was too good for you, he thought: lentils, cauliflower, beans. Iseult’s moody excavations with her food brought him back twenty years. Ma, I hate cabbage, I hate it! Either by design or indifference, her hair was all over the place. Her mauve t-shirt and worn jeans looked like she’d worn them gardening. The heat had made her eyes glisten and brought colour to her cheeks. There was a smell of turpentine or paint around her. She glanced up at him.
“Don’t you like this stuff?”
He was too far gone to prevaricate.
“A lump of meat in the middle would do the job. A bit of a caveman, I’m afraid.”
Iseult began to describe the panels she was planning for an installation in the hall of a gallery. She wasn’t being paid. It would be great exposure.
“The idea is why we keep things to look at,” she said around a piece of carrot. “We kill them with our minds. We interpret them and we classify them. Do you get it?”
Minogue chewed on the half-cooked stalk of a legume he couldn’t identify. “Back Then” indeed: like starving peasants who’d eat roots and bushes during the Famine. Chic.
“Not really. Did you say you’d moved out of the flat?”
“No, I didn’t say.” She speared broccoli.
“So you have.”
“Temporarily.”
“Until your intended gets some sense.”
“Precisely.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“He can fuck off, so he can.”
Minogue dropped his fork. Iseult twisted away a smile.
“Listen to me, now. Maybe if we gave some thought to Pat’s reasoning?”
“I’m not going to analyse anything, Da. To hell with that. That’s just rationalizing.”
“Sorry for trying to be reasonable. I rather like Pat.”
“Good for you.”
“Well, where are you staying for the moment then? What’s the name of your friend, the photographer, I’m always forgetting her-”
“Aoife. No.”
“Which friend then?”
“I’m like you, Da. I’ve no real friends. Scared them off, I think.”
Minogue sat back and folded his arms.
“You know, Da,” she said. “I have that thing too. The difference is, I’m still not used to it.”
She ran her fingers through her hair.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, Da,” she said. “You pretend you don’t understand because you’re afraid I can’t handle it or something.”
“Did I fall asleep and miss-”
“You know what I’m talking about,” she broke in. “Don’t treat me like a kid. Don’t protect me, I don’t need that. Teach me. Teach me about being alone.”
Every part of Ryan’s Pub seemed to be oozing out smells. Minogue tried to take stock of them while he waited for the barman: varnish from the stools and counters, the hop tang of beer and stout from the taps, the ashtrays, hot dishes and glasses from the dishwasher, even diesel fumes? The doors had been jammed open. The sky to the west was orange on the dusty windows. He looked back to where Iseult had commandeered two stools. Modern primitive, he thought. Drinking orange juice in a pub must be the latest outrage. He carried the drinks over.
“Well, how bad can it be,” he said after his first swallow. “Trying to please people is not the most ignoble of things. Pat has parents, doesn’t he?”
“What do you think? The Immaculate Conception or something?”
He bit back a comment about Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.
“Try that one on your mother, why don’t you,” he said instead.
“What I mean is that Pat doesn’t believe in this crap any more than I do. And you’re only making excuses for him. You like Pat, that’s the problem.”
“Problem, is it. Fight your own fights, love. I’ve had to recover from too much friendly fire over the years.”
“Big help you are. Maybe Daithi was right.” He looked up from his glass.
“Now what does that mean?”
“You know. You were allergic to telling him what to do.”
He took a gulp of his drink and glared at her.
“See?” she said.
He tried to steer the conversation away. She shrugged off questions about jobs. The talk drifted to his holiday in Greece, the fact that traffic in Dublin was out of control. Iseult’s best friend from primary school had just gotten married. Minogue was dopey from the beer. Would she have another orange juice? No. Thanks. She had detected no sarcasm in her father’s offer.
She slipped off the stool. He followed her outside and took his bearings. The new car smell in his Citroen still held its own. Iseult began fiddling with the electric sunroof and then the windows.
“God, the laziness,” she said. He thought about phoning the squad-room.
“What do you want to do? Will you come home with me?”
“Remember the Sundays we used to go to the zoo,” she said.
“The zoo.”
“We had lemonade and crisps and chocolate and ice cream. I remember all of it.”
Minogue looked over at her. Hormones, he thought. She hadn’t brushed away the strands of hair which had drooped as she had fiddled with the dashboard.
“The installation I’m doing. It has the zoo in it. The animals looking in at the people and the mess they’re making of things. How we ruin everything.”
“That’s clever,” he said without thinking.
“Clever?” she cried. “I don’t want clever, Da! I want fucking real!”
He turned the car without a word and drove through the lights onto the Main Road which ran the two and a half miles through Phoenix Park. He knew that she knew the zoo was closed. True, he thought with a tight ache around his heart: I think I have that thing too, Da. All the while preparing to forge her own bonds-and Minogue believed that she loved Pat and wanted him to win her in this trial-his daughter was still driven to untie them in advance. Contrariness, the family heirloom. She was laughing now.
“Remember the ice pops and the salt and vinegar crisps?”
“How could I forget.”
“Gallons of lemonade and everything? Chocolate? God, we were spoiled! How did we ever keep it down!”
“Ye didn’t always. I well remember carrying Daithi one warm day in the Botanical Gardens…”
She guffawed. His sadness moved off. He kept the Citroen cruising along in second gear. Shrubs and trees had thickened in the dusk. An oncoming car flashed headlights at him. He had forgotten.
“I can smell the elephants,” she said. “Or something. Dung.”
He coasted by the railings set into the hedges which marked the boundaries of the Dublin Zoo. The car seemed to be gliding now. He glanced over at Iseult’s arm draped out the window. Over the lisp of tires he heard a screech alien to Irish birds.
“Hear that?” she whispered. “Macaws, I’ll bet you.”
She fell to staring at the passing trees. The Citroen seemed to have found its own speed, and its own route. They heard the birds’ screeches again. Minogue looked across the grass toward the coppices and groves where deer occasionally sheltered. Her hair hid her face from him. She drew in her hand from the window and held it folded over the other. The bob of her head alerted him. He heard the first sob.