Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘This lad is the envy of the whole place with his little Anglia,’ Keogh said, clapping his hand to the roof of the car. ‘I’d say ye cover fierce country in her all the days we see Tom heading off there on the Longford road.’

Almost before Maura had nodded in reply he had her door open and was pulling her out; she was too surprised to resist, and found herself being ushered on through the shop door. There was a step down, and then she was in what seemed like a storeroom packed with everything anyone could ever want to buy. Plastic toys hung on strings from the ceiling beside onions and hoses and kitchen pans. Sacks of potatoes and cattle feed were lined up together along the inside wall. Women’s aprons and housecoats were slung and stacked above the shelved cans and packets of food; bottles of orange and lemonade were stuffed into the legs of new wellingtons. In one corner a child’s pram held boxes of carrots and parsnips, and in a set of shining metal buckets the local newspapers stood in neat, fat rolls. A machine for making ice-cream cones was the biggest thing in the room, and from its rubber-tipped handles a broken piece of Christmas tinsel trailed. Tom was hunched with both elbows on the counter, looking over his shoulder to where she stood at the door. He was buying a Swiss roll, a packet of cigarettes and a bag of Rowntree’s Eclairs. When the woman came out from behind the counter to shake her hand, Maura saw that she was heavily pregnant; she looked only a couple of weeks from her time.

‘You’re used to seeing bellies like that, of course, lassie,’ said Paddy Keogh, and Maura heard, as though on a crossed wire, the echo of the gossip about her that must have been exchanged in this very room. She imagined the snatches of information: how she was from Dromod, was a nurse in the manor; her father was dead; her mother entered knitting and embroidery into the summer shows; her brother ran the farm. She imagined them talking about how she and Tom had met at the dance in Newtown, and they had been to dances as far away as Athlone and Drumshanbo since then, as though the local dances weren’t good enough for them.

Maura knew the drill: it was the same in Dromod when someone from around started going with someone from somewhere else. The particulars were quickly gathered and gleefully spread. Bits were tacked on to the stories, extra details added, regardless of their distance from the truth. She didn’t care. Tom was a good man, and a good-looking man, and she was proud to be seen with him. Still, she wished Paddy and Breda Keogh would stop looking her up and down with their small little eyes.

‘And you’ll be gettin’ used to bellies like that yourself, Tom, be the looks of it,’ Keogh spluttered with laughter.

‘We’re not all poor cornered bastards like you, Paddy,’ Tom said. Taking up his shopping, he nodded to Maura to follow him, and she said an awkward goodbye to Keogh and to the woman, who were both now red in the face and looking out after Tom. In the car, the two of them laughed like children, and it was a relief to Maura to laugh over it, because it stopped her having to think about how else she should take it, what Tom had just said. Anyway, he proposed to her the next month, so whatever he’d meant by it, it couldn’t have been what she’d feared. Probably he had just thought of it on the spur of the moment. Probably it had meant nothing at all.

Mark had begun to slouch when he walked; that was something Maura noticed about him now. He carried the batch loaf under one arm as though it were a newspaper, and he had the thin plastic bag of ham bunched up in his hand. She thought about saying something to him about that slouch, but then she was wondering, instead, about those worn-looking canvas runners he had on his feet. She tried to think about when she had first seen him in those shoes, when the soles had been bright and white instead of yellow and scuffed. It seemed like years. She didn’t think it was lack of money had him going around with his shoes falling off him like that. She hoped not. He had his grant coming in, and he said that was enough to live on, and he had been with Mossy in that same house for six or seven years now, and the rent, he said, had hardly gone up at all. He never seemed to be wanting for money, and apart from the shoes, which really were in tatters now that she looked at them more closely, he was dressed smartly enough. A hooded top, like he was always wearing, and his jeans looked new, and he had a nice-looking watch on his wrist.

‘That Annie McGurk is a nosy bloody bitch,’ Mark said, tossing the groceries into the back of the car.

‘Where are you after pegging my good bread?’

‘It’s batch. It’s meant to be hardy.’

‘You wouldn’t know what kind of junk your father had on that back seat when he took the car this morning.’

‘It’s fine,’ Mark said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t interested in talking about bread, or back seats, or his father.

She drove out past the petrol pumps, past the parked cars she recognized and put faces on as instinctively as though they were their owners themselves and not her neighbours’ Almeras, Mondeos, Hilux jeeps. Even at this time of day the traffic was heavy: not for a few moments was it clear enough for her to pull out on to the road for home.

‘First she wanted to know how long I was back for,’ Mark said. ‘Then she wanted to know whether I liked being at home. Then she wanted to know if I preferred being at home to being in the city. Then she wanted to know how I could stand living up there in the city, because she could never stand it herself, living in the middle of all those strangers and hooligans and junkies, and she wanted to know did I live in a house by myself or in digs, and when I said neither, she wanted to know how I could be sure of the people I was living with, and would I not be worried that they’d steal from me, or be ’ithin in their bedrooms doing drugs or something, and then did I hear what happened to Jimmy Flynn’s niece ’ithin in the town, and did I ever see drugs myself, and did I know anybody who did drugs, and did I think that the judge would go hard on Jimmy’s niece for what she did, sorry, what she done, and were you glad to see me, and wasn’t Dad doing a great job around the place without me, and would I ever think of moving home and. .’ He shook his head and looked out the window. ‘Jesus Christ, she’s a bag.’

‘She’s full of questions, anyway.’

‘Fuckin’ bitch,’ Mark said, and Maura wondered if she should say something to him, but he was past that a long time now and, anyway, he was probably right.

‘Jimmy’s niece was caught dealing Ecstasy or something, I don’t know,’ she said, trying to change the subject.

‘I don’t know her.’

‘She’s younger than you. Poor Jimmy had to bail her out. I think the case is up next week. They say she’ll probably be all right unless she gets Naughton.’

‘Naughton is the woman?’

Maura nodded. ‘She’s the one is always being given out about on Liveline . The one that said things about Africans hanging around the shopping centre and girls dressing up like they wanted to get raped.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Mark said, but he was barely listening to her now, she could tell: he was looking at his phone. He wiped the screen with the pad of his thumb and clicked through the keys. Wondering who he was making contact with, or who was making contact with him, was an old instinct Maura had learned to bat down in herself as quickly as it bubbled up; still, it did bubble up, and her mind flicked, as it used to do when he was a teenager answering the phone in the house, through a rapid list of possibilities. She knew some of his friends, heard him talking about others, had a gallery of imagined faces for the rest; the kinds of friends he must have now, the kinds of women he might be associating with, going with, sleeping with, which was something she still found strange to think. At nearly thirty, how many women would a man have slept with, these days? Was it really like the television programmes made it out to be, that parade of one-night stands, that stumbling from one hurried, noisy affair to another? No problems taking their clothes off in front of each other nearly straight away, no problems looking each other in the eye afterwards, no problems doing it at parties or in toilets or in public, even, girls not even blinking about going down on their knees and opening their mouths in the corner of a nightclub? She couldn’t imagine. Before Tom, other men had slid their hands between her thighs in the front of a car, and there had been the backs of cars, too, but there were things everybody got up to and there were things you knew it wasn’t permitted to do, and that night in the Abbey Hotel had been her first time, Tom her first man, and what people Mark’s age did with each other now she regarded with a mixture of envy and exhaustion.