Himself(93)

Mahony glances in the kitchen door; there’s the flash of a floral apron as Bridget ducks. He laughs.

She smiles. ‘It was a gas, wasn’t it?’

And he’s there with her and for a moment he’s holding her, nearly on his knees, with her desperately small in his arms.

But then he’s standing and shouldering his rucksack.

Mrs Cauley looks up at him with a fierce love in her eyes. ‘Fair play to you, Mahony, fair play to you.’

In the pantry Bridget needs a tablecloth to dry her tears.

Mahony throws his bag in the back of the car and starts the engine up. A vehicle that once had its own notions of when to stop and start now behaves like a perfect lady. But then with Mahony as her new owner there are no longer chickens on the dashboard or ferrets in the footwell.

As for the Eldorado? Tadhg has almost forgiven him.

Mahony joked that she had as many dents in her fender as he had. But as Mahony’s body healed he had worked on her too, and he had worked a variety of magic, so that now you hardly notice the damage to her lovely lines. And no longer perfect, Tadhg drives her wherever the hell he wants.

Mahony turns out onto the road with the sun behind him.

On the veranda Bridget Doosey wipes her nose with the hem of the tablecloth and downs a dry sherry. ‘Oh, my grief, I’ve lost him surely.’

‘Pull your beak in, woman,’ says Mrs Cauley. ‘Can you blame him for becoming restless? You’ve said yourself that a fatherless man is always searching.’

Bridget takes up a pack of cards. ‘He knows where his father is: he’s at the bottom of the Shand.’

A smile haunts Mrs Cauley’s face. ‘And isn’t it a wise man who knows his own father?’

Bridget shuffles, deals, puts down the deck and arranges her cards. Mrs Cauley waits.

Bridget looks up and stares at her. ‘It wasn’t Jack.’

Mrs Cauley laughs. ‘So that’s why all the wives of Mulderrig are still having unquiet dreams?’ She takes up her cards. ‘Well, I’d say that’s grounds for another investigation, wouldn’t you, Doosey? I’d say it’s time to give this town another good shake.’

A slow grin spreads across Bridget Doosey’s face. ‘You really are a horrific, meddling old bitch.’

Mrs Cauley tips her visor and surveys her cards. She has a great hand.

Mahony switches the engine off and gets out of the car. He takes a can from the boot and makes his way to the clearing, sometimes climbing over fallen branches, sometimes wading through flurries of bright leaves. He walks slower now, there’s a drag to his left leg, but he holds himself easy through it, so you could say it was almost deliberate, a bar-room saunter, a pirate’s landlocked roll. Sometimes he stops and puts down the can and looks around himself. Above him leaves spiral down from breeze-caught branches and crows sweep the sky and blacken the treetops.

Now and then Mahony imagines he catches a glimpse of pale blue in the bracken or hears a faint line from an angry little song, although he knows he is alone now.

In the months that have passed the forest has grown in around Thomas Sweeney’s place. Mahony can see traces of other visitors. Local kids no longer held at bay by Jack Brophy and the threat of Tom Bogey. The door of his grandfather’s caravan is hanging off and his mattress has been dragged outside and disembowelled.

Mahony puts down the can and climbs up the steps.

Inside the caravan there’s a powerful foxy smell. A dark musk reek, as if a wild animal has been kept inside against its will. Mahony’s boot heels skitter on broken glass: all that’s left of the shelves of jars.

Someone has pissed in one corner and someone has tried to light a fire in another. Mahony can see where the bottom of the curtain caught and smouldered and went out again, leaving a melted edge of blackened lacework.

The floor is rotten, the wood bloated with rain and the laminate sloughing off in strips. In a couple of places Mahony can see right through to the ground below. He kicks aside bottles and fag ends and sits down in the doorway.

For a moment he thinks of a yellow yo-yo and an upturned nose, scuffed shoes and a serious smile. Secrets and untold stories, lost toys and found treasure. Spittle and sounds without letters, and the animal panic in a dying man’s eyes.

He looks out at the clearing; the bathtub Ida once danced in is still there.

When Mahony has emptied the can of petrol he throws a lit match. The flames catch and leap. They run up the side of the caravan and over the roof. They catch the timber floor and blacken the window. The curtain twists and is gone.

Mahony drives into town as the light fades. He drives at a fast walking pace with the window rolled down and his elbow out.

Down past Roadside Mary, her ruddy face benign in the setting sun, watching over Desmond Burke, who sits looking out over the rooftops. As the car passes, Desmond stands. Mahony doesn’t stop and Desmond doesn’t want him to. Mahony watches him grow smaller in the rear-view mirror, standing at the side of the road.

Mahony drives past whitewashed cottages, where washing jackknifes on clothes lines and dogs bark at nothing. The town is quiet at this time of day, with the mammies inside getting the dinner and the daddies inside waiting to go out for a jar. The dead too are nowhere to be seen. They have drifted up into dusty attics to creak and settle with the floor joists. Or retired to disused guest rooms or dark neglected corners.