Himself(10)

Mahony looks confused.

‘I wave me knickers, boy. Harvest Festivals. All is safely gathered in?’

Mahony laughs. He puts Mrs Cauley’s hand back on the bed and searches his pockets for his cigarettes.

‘Of course I have to be careful Annie Farelly doesn’t see or she’d report me to the priest for immoral behaviour.’

‘I crossed paths with the Widow today; she’s a charmer.’

‘She’s an article.’

Mahony watches as the dead man attempts to hang his hat on the bedpost. He gives up with a pained expression, puts it back on his head and drifts across the room, pulling his moustache morosely as he goes.

‘That’s a tall mouse you’re watching there.’ Mrs Cauley’s voice is warm honey but the set of grey eyes she has clamped on him are splinter sharp. ‘Have you always seen them? You do see them, don’t you?’

Mahony takes out a cigarette and taps it on the packet. He refuses to meet her eyes. You’d need to know him well to realise that his hackles have risen, for his forehead is entirely smooth and there’s a relaxed sort of smile on his face.

‘You mind?’ he says, holding up the fag and setting to light it.

‘Not at all.’

They sit for a while in silence, two poker players waiting on the next move.

Shauna appears with a lap tray. ‘Now, say good night to Mahony, Mrs Cauley.’

‘I haven’t finished with him.’

‘You have of course; eat your teacake.’

Mrs Cauley puts her head on one side and sings back Shauna’s own voice to her. ‘I could take a little package of crisps, Shauneen, for something salty.’

‘Good night, Mrs Cauley.’

‘Good night, Shauna, good night, Mahony.’ Mrs Cauley fishes up a teacake with her puckered fingers.

As they reach the foot of the stairs her voice careens out after them.

‘Don’t try it on with him, Shauna. He’s way above you, both spiritually and in terms of his looks. And, Mahony, mind she doesn’t get her hands on your gooter; she’d give you an awful dose. Just look at her: she’s sex-mad.’

Shauna shows Mahony to a large room at the top of the stairs. It’s powerfully musty despite the night air coursing in through the open windows. Mahony can hear the insistent chant of an owl, and some other noise, a panicky high-pitched bleat. Moths cast dancing patterns around the single ceiling light.

‘You can leave the windows open for air, although it’s noisy with the creatures in the forest murdering each other half the night.’

Shauna turns down the bed covers. Her movements are deft and assured when she doesn’t know she’s being watched.

‘I’m sorry about Mrs Cauley,’ she says.

‘She’s a handful, isn’t she?’

Shauna nods. ‘She’s that. Don’t listen too carefully to her, Mahony; she’s a little touched.’

‘I noticed.’ Mahony folds his jacket onto the chair and puts his cowboy boots squarely underneath it. He walks to the window and leans out. The air is cooler now and filled with the elemental smell of earth and trees and sea and sky. Out past the cries of foxes and dying birds, if he listened, he would hear the black waves lapping against the quay and the owls hunting over the fields. Or the sound of the houses as they settle and sigh in their sleep, all the way down to the bay.

‘I’m not really sex-mad,’ Shauna says as she hangs a towel on the ring next to the hand basin.

Mahony laughs over his shoulder at her. ‘You just haven’t met the right fella,’ he says.

Shauna gives the sink a quick wipe, blushing scarlet at the taps. ‘Breakfast is at eight. Night-night, Mahony.’

‘Night, Shauna, and thanks.’

‘Sure, you’re welcome.’

In the quiet room the night air steals in through the open window to whisper the soap dry in the dish. Mice bob around the boots corralled between the chair legs, stopping to nose at the worn heels and blunt toes, sniffing distant cities and a million steps from there to here. Inside the wardrobe a few crumpled shirts absorb the incense of mothballs and waxed wood. On top of the wardrobe a rucksack, heavier than it ought to be, is pushed back out of sight. Socks rest balled in a drawer, odd in their pairings.

Mahony is sleeping.

Come closer. Close enough to inhale tobacco and sweat, road dust and whiskey, sunlight and hair oil. Close enough to follow the swell of his shoulder all the way down to his inked and rounded bicep where a big-breasted mermaid swims. She blows you a kiss and fans her tail.

Come closer. Close enough to plot the lines on his forehead, the fine slope of his nose and the long-lashed crescents of his closed eyes. Now, hold your breath for this, slowly trace the teasing curve of his lips, open a little in sleep.

Look around you. The dead are watching too.

They rise through mouse-carved wall cavities and damp-blown stone. Through brittle flock paper and worn wooden floors. Through dust-dulled carpets and wide stone flags. They have been dead for a wing beat and for an age.

At the foot of the bed leans a pale blacksmith, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his dead mind still ringing with the chime of the hammer. His hands close around long-gone tools and he’s pulling those easy shapes out of soft metal again.

A grey lady stands by the head of the bed. She walks Rathmore House in her dead dreams. Hers is the face in the painting in the hallway, where the last reach of stairs turns past the stained-glass window. In life she planted shrubberies and instructed servants. She poured tea from bright teapots and took up sugar tongs with an enquiring look.