‘Okay! Okay! Okay!’
Clive was staring at his chest; staring at it pumping up and down; pumping up and down as if it were some far-off mountain range; some far-off mountain range with no connection to him.
‘Okay,’ said the woman, Casey. ‘We’re out of time.’
Her head and arms were drooped like a hanged person’s, her knees fallen wide apart.
He remained on his side and regarded her for a moment. He sat up, and dropped her fee — $150 for the initial consultation, a sign read — in the hat at her ankles. He regarded the money in the hat.
He said, ‘There’s another thing that perhaps I should confess, while I’m with you. I once stole a huge amount of money. Tens of thousands of dollars.’
‘If you want to continue with this some other time, please ring ahead.’
***
Jean Dotsy ‘put her foot to the gas’. She felt exhilarated with fear. A man in a herringbone overcoat sat in the passenger seat of her car. He had a brimmed hat set back on his crown leaving a high forehead exposed, and large but neat black eyebrows. He had yellow teeth, each edged with brown streaks of caries. He occasionally prodded the dashboard as he spoke. His fingers were peculiarly thick and long and smoothened. They had just left the county of Dublin, via some back road at the foot of the mountains. The stranger had a very particular idea of a route they would take.
‘At Edenderry then we will turn north.’
‘Where is Edenderry?’ said Jean.
‘It’s not for a while yet.’
‘I don’t have enough petrol to get back to Donegal.’
‘You will have enough petrol.’
‘I will need to stop at a garage.’
‘You will not stop at a garage.’
‘Will I die?’
‘You have already died.’
‘Will I die again?’
‘Not while you are of use.’
‘Am I alive now?’
‘Yes you are.’
‘Have I you to thank?’
‘Yes you do.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank ye, you mean. You can thank us all when you arrive.’
‘What do they want me for?’
‘You will wet-nurse a child. You will be put to proper and natural use. You were no use to anyone with your interests lying the way that they did. And you will perform your duty because you have been given another chance. Be grateful that you have been returned. Be grateful that your body was not replaced with a changeling, as is the normal routine of these things, and then you would have had nothing to return to.’
‘What is a changeling?’
‘A shambles put in the place of someone who has been called to better use.’
‘You have called me to another use and have not even left a shambles for my family to mourn over?’
‘We have not. As far as your family are concerned you have disappeared on them.’
‘How have I anything to be grateful for?’
‘Because you have been returned.’
‘How can you be sure that I will produce milk?’
‘You are a woman so you will produce milk.’
‘My fingers are very cold,’ said Jean. She could not feel them on the wheel. ‘I do not feel alive.’ Only the fear, she felt, was animating her.
‘Carry on now.’ He tapped the windscreen and she noticed he was wearing a garnet ring.
They had entered the plain of the Curragh. There was no hedge or wall or fence to hem the road in and on either side the grass stretched away into the distance. The clouds hung low, lobed and frowning. A squall blew up across the grasslands, buffeting the car from the side, carrying with it a riddle of hail. The air became a fizz of white and black speckles, like on a television screen; soon there was no black at all, it all was white. The rattle on the metal and glass brought her back, temporarily, her head among the typewriters in the central secretariat going like crazy and the windows fogging up from the heat of bodies; a scene such as she had escaped that morning in her car to go to Dunleary; and she had an urge come over her to have her vitality confirmed, to feel the little shots of ice pummel and pinch her skin. She leaned to her right and put her cheek on the window, to feel the cold and the movement of the engine. Then she stretched her left arm to bring the engine up to fourth; she could not reach, and in a moment’s panic her foot, by instinct, stamped down on the brake. The seat belt suddenly tightened at her neck and she was pressed hard against the door from the centrifuge as the car spun on the road. Miraculously, when it came to rest it appeared to be still on the road. And then, as suddenly as it had descended, the squall blew over and away, beyond, to Wicklow; to Wicklow, she knew, because that was the way her car was pointed, towards the mountains.
The clouds separated and became the most beautiful white and sublime things and the sun and the blue shone through. She thought of the Assumption. The stranger in the passenger seat was gone.
In the same direction as Wicklow was Dublin, and Dunleary, whence she had come. She looked at the little white balls strewn all over the tarmac and as far as she could see back up the road. Some poor sheep was collapsed on its front knees. She looked around her at the exposed plain. She thought she would go back to Dunleary, get the boat across and get out, take herself away, put herself beyond use — to who knows where. To America, eventually, if she could arrange it. The USSR and some gulag. Somewhere where she would be the most useless woman that ever came into being.
Rickard enjoyed the most magical few hours of his life. It was a day he hoped wouldn’t end, and indeed thought would go on into the night, until Fondler told him that she had to work an evening shift. By that moment he knew, anyway, that they were sweeties. The day began with a breakfast of vegetables at a former stevedores’ hut on the East River, one of the last of its kind in the city. He found the food largely indigestible, but the radio gave them endless terrible music to joke about and he was able, easy enough, to leave most of his food to one side on the pretext that he was laughing too much. At the end of their meal Rickard thought that they might part ways; that awkward moment came when knives and forks were left neatly on plates and throats were cleared. He suggested that they go for a walk so that she could burn off her food. She looked at him with a deadly serious avidness; ambitious, from deep behind her eyebrows. He noticed a tint to those darkest black eyes now: a golden sparkle, like the flash of quartz in the deepest pool.
But soon he felt completely relaxed in her company, and sensed that she was in his, and he allowed himself to believe that she was not so at ease with everyone she met. They sauntered here and there, with no route or destination in mind. He walked with his hands behind his back; she with hers swinging freely, or gesticulating energetically. She did most of the talking, and he was happy to listen. He learnt to his surprise that she was from Canada, and that her surname, which he forgot immediately, had a Q in it. She had threatened to throw herself in the Saint Lawrence Seaway numerous times over various Don Juans she’d been barred from seeing. She liked dogs and cats, and would like a house in the country. She had only taken up smoking recently, and would never smoke in her own house. Ideally, she would like one of those cute barn-like houses, with land, near the sea.
They stopped at a home-décor store and his thoughts raced out from him, but not at such a pace that he began to fret; they flowed one into the next, like little bubbles of dawn, dreamlike and pleasant; they were of barns, animals, pumpkins, straw, roof beams, gingham, snow, the Amish, handshakes, threshing machines, a brood of children. When she handled two small dried scented mandarin oranges and made suggestive remarks he surprised himself again by not becoming embarrassed. They laughed, in fact, both of them — so loudly in the middle of the shop that others joined in. By now they were able to laugh at anything: Puffball and the white terror; that he was a stalker and he would fucking murder her.
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