The Boatman's Wife(14)

Jesse laughed. ‘It’s not such a dump,’ he said.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you looked at the floor!’ He was easy to talk with. Different from Irish boys, who said nothing until they were drunk, then never shut up.

‘I’ve always loved boats,’ Jesse told her. ‘My father had a small sailboat and he used to take me out when I was a boy.’

‘Was he a boatbuilder too?’

‘Oh no, he was an accountant,’ Jesse said, looking a little sad. ‘He always dreamed of coming back home to Ireland. Learning how to build traditional clinker boats.’

‘And did he?’

Jesse shook his head. ‘He died last year. Heart attack.’

‘Sorry,’ Niamh said, her interest pulled to the young American. When he spoke of his father, his eyes gleamed with pride. He was doing what his father had wanted him to do.

Niamh picked up the cloth and wiped the bar down again. It was already clean, but she needed to shift the air between her and Jesse. It felt thick, potent, and it made her uneasy.

‘So that’s why I’m here,’ Jesse continued. ‘Learning from the best. Then I’m going to set up the boatyard my dad dreamed of when I get back home to America.’

Niamh raised her eyes to meet Jesse’s enthused expression. She felt a twinge of envy. She had no such dreams. Tried never to think beyond the day she was in.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked Jesse.

‘You heard of Cape Cod?’

As Jesse described the coastal town where he lived on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and the building his dad had bought for the boatyard before he’d died, Niamh looked at him as if he were an apparition. This American boy had it all worked out. But that wasn’t real life, was it? Or maybe it was, and she was in the unreal world?

Niamh found her mind wandering to Brendan’s heavy bag under the floor of the outhouse. How long would the bag sit below the floorboards? Until it was covered in cobwebs and mouse shit? Would Brendan come back soon? Or would a stranger turn up like the time before, with a thick West Belfast accent and a hard handshake? She’d been lucky her mam had been out at work that time, but what if it happened when she was home? What would her mam say if she knew Niamh was mixed up in the very conflict which had caused her husband’s death?

‘Hey,’ Jesse said, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and offering her one. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, thanks,’ she said taking the cigarette, and letting him light it for her.

She couldn’t help noticing Jesse’s hands. Strong from boatbuilding, but not too big or the skin rough like Brendan’s.

‘So enough about me,’ Jesse said, taking a drag on his cigarette. ‘Look, you want to go out on Saturday night? I don’t know anyone round here apart from Joseph.’

Niamh was so astonished, she just stared at him. She’d never been asked out before, and so directly.

‘Say, would you like to?’ Jesse asked her again.

‘I can’t, I’m working here,’ she said.

‘What about Sunday then?’ he pushed.

‘No,’ she replied quickly.

Jesse’s eyes flickered. She could tell he wasn’t used to being told no, but still, he wasn’t so easily put off.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I need someone to show me around. It’s boring on my own.’ He gave her a begging look. ‘Besides, Joseph suggested I ask you.’

Niamh tilted her head on one side.

‘Oh I see, so you don’t really want to go out with me?’ she teased. ‘Merely doing what your new boss tells you to do.’

‘You said no; I had to try to guilt you.’

She felt something. It disturbed her, and all her instincts were screaming at her to stay away from the American boy, but her body had a different notion. She found herself giving him a slow smile.

‘Tell me where you live, and I’ll come pick you up.’ Jesse beamed at her, confident of her answer. She found it impossible to resist.



It was still raining when Niamh got back into her mam’s postal van to drive home. The road was dark and she drove extra slow, watching out for frogs hopping across the wet black tarmac. She rounded the last hill, but kept going past the entrance to their house, on down the lane to the cemetery. She pulled in by the old gate, not turning off the engine, just watching the wipers going. The rain kept on falling out of the sky, illuminated like tracks of silver by her headlamps. Ten years had passed since the day she’d watched her father’s coffin lowered into the ground, her mam clinging to her in hysterics. Though she’d only been twelve years old, she had felt so grown up. Brendan with his hand on her shoulder, always behind her. She still felt the weight of his hand on her now. Understood its full meaning. He had always had her back, sure, but he had also been marking her.

She had never let her daddy go. She’d turned his loss into fury, like a chained beast curled deep within. For years after her father’s death, Niamh had come to the churchyard at night. Stood snarling at her father’s headstone, twisted with rage. It was here that Brendan had found her on the three-year anniversary of her father’s death. He had helped her take the impotency of her anger and turn it into revenge. But now, as she looked out at the bleak graveyard, she wished so hard he had never found her or helped her that night.