Himself(8)

‘You’d be welcome.’

Tadhg squints at the road. ‘I love a full woman. Did you see Annie? She’d just had a perm done, all those little curls, a head on her like a dandelion. Was she sharp in her greeting of you?’

‘I’ll cut my hair and she’ll love me like a son.’

Tadhg laughs and drums on the steering wheel to Bill Haley. ‘Well, you’ve worked a miracle here, Mahony. God, I love rock and roll. And I’d love to rock and roll Annie Farelly, Jaysus I would.’

‘Then you’re a brave man.’

Tadhg looks at him. ‘You all right? You’re a bit pale around the gills.’

‘I’m grand.’

‘Right so. Then we’re here.’





Chapter 3


April 1976


Rathmore House is the highest inhabited place in Mulderrig. On a clear day you can lean out of a top-floor window and see for miles. Out past the trees to the patchworked fields beyond, studded with tiny houses glowing white. On a clear day you can see the bay and the fishing boats coming in and out of it, and the lobster pots on the quayside, and the gulls rolling above them in the blue glassy sky.

Shauna Burke is in the big cave of a kitchen with her foot up on the draining board shaving her legs in the sink with her daddy’s razor. She can’t explain it but she’d felt, getting Mrs Cauley to bed, a definite change in the air. Mrs Cauley had felt it too and had been murderous. She’d taken hours to settle, demanding endless glasses of Pernod and asking Shauna to style out her good wig and wanting cream slathered on her leg sores.

Shauna is wearing little more than her drawers, so the sight of Tadhg’s big face pressed up against the window gives her more than a subtle fright. She grabs a tablecloth to hold around her.

‘Now then, Shauna, I’ve a guest for you,’ roars Tadhg through the closed door.

‘I’m not open.’

‘Ah now, don’t be like that. You’ve the room and the man’s melted with tiredness.’

Shauna wants to stab Tadhg with the bread knife. She opens the door, clutching the tablecloth to her bosom, and looks blackly at Mahony.

‘Is that my guest?’

‘Aye, it is,’ Tadhg nods enthusiastically.

‘You can pay?’

‘Aye, he can.’ Tadhg pushes Mahony into the kitchen. ‘Get the kettle on, Shauneen. He’s destroyed by travelling. How’s Mrs Cauley?’

‘An old bitch.’

‘Ah, the poor woman’s afflicted.’

‘Don’t I know it?’

Shauna has the look of a rabbit about her, soft and compact, with light-brown hair and pink-rimmed eyes. She moves like one too, with quick dashes and small dazed pauses. Mahony finds her comforting to watch and his dark gaze trails her about the untidy kitchen. She’s young, in her early twenties maybe, but she has the manner of someone much older. So that she fusses and mutters as she goes about her business, punctuating her tasks with sharp comments and sudden groans. She has changed out of the tablecloth into a dress and has pinned her hair half on top of her head. Her face has a clean, scrubbed appearance. A practical face: responsible, rushed and more than a little tired. She puts an ashtray down next to Tadhg’s elbow with a pointed look. Tadhg ignores her as he sprawls at the end of the table with the whiskey bottle. Mahony sits at the other end with a cup in his hand. In the middle of the table, between empty jam jars and piles of dusty china, a ginger cat blithely licks its arse.

‘I was having a spring clean, Tadhg.’

‘You should see the cleanliness down at the Widow’s, it’s godly.’

‘Don’t talk to me about her, Tadhg. I’ve enough dealing with one bitter old wagon today.’

Tadhg smiles benevolently and tells Mahony that Mrs Cauley is both Shauna’s finest patron and biggest curse. Mrs Cauley has the strong belief that she was once one of the greatest actresses to grace the stage of the Abbey Theatre. And of course wasn’t she the muse of a multitude of highly talented writers and poets? She’d descended on Rathmore House twenty-odd years ago, when Shauna’s mammy had run it as a premium hotel for English salmon fishers, and she’d stayed ever since. Mrs Cauley had paid very well for many years, keeping a roof on Rathmore House, a fire in the hearth and glass in some of the windows. Mrs Cauley had even stayed after the standards dropped when Shauna’s mammy ran off to England with a guest, leaving Shauna’s daddy hermited with grief in his workshop, reading about fairies and talking to himself in a Protestant accent.

‘Don’t tell lies now.’ Shauna flicks Tadhg with the edge of a tea towel. ‘Mammy is in Coventry helping Auntie with her angina. And there’s nothing wrong with my standards.’

Tadhg winks and, clutching heavily at the side of the table, he bids them goodnight.

‘Will he be all right driving back? He’s three sheets to the wind.’

‘He’ll survive if he keeps on going past Annie Farelly’s and doesn’t chance his arm for a nightcap. God love him, that woman’s steel and bolts.’

Mahony grins. ‘All right, well, take me up to bed then, Shauna.’

Shauna warns Mahony to tread carefully in the hallway so as not to wake Mrs Cauley, who lies in state in the library. In its prime Rathmore would have been imposing; its bone structure still mutters about good breeding. The ceilings are high and the finishings are fine, but the house seeps with damp and is ravaged by dry rot. The woodworms sing in the skirting boards and the moths hang out of the curtains. The mice have the run of the guest rooms, shredding blankets, skating in the basins and nibbling the soaps.