Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘I’m very glad you came,’ said Robinson. ‘Though I’m afraid I haven’t been very good company for you.’

‘No, no.’ Mark shook his head energetically. ‘I mean, you have. Of course you have.’

‘I’m always like this when I’m working, I’m afraid,’ Robinson said. ‘And now more so than ever, because I don’t think that what I’m working on is going anywhere. I always think that, but this time I’m sure.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Mark said. ‘I know the feeling.’

‘To feel it at my age is infinitely worse,’ Robinson said, seeming sharper suddenly, and he led Mark to the hall.

‘What’s it about?’ Mark said.

‘It’s nothing I really want to talk about,’ Robinson said, as they reached the front door. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I remember telling Joanne about it, actually, that day I bumped into her.’ He frowned. ‘Or maybe it was another day.’

‘I’d love to hear about it,’ Mark said.

‘I just think it’s something I’m going to have to abandon,’ Robinson said, reaching to the latch. ‘I’m sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘Little point in talking about what’s already lost.’

Mark opened his mouth to reply, but the words would not come. He walked through the front door to the path outside. He turned and offered his hand. They shook.

‘Thank you again for coming,’ Robinson said. ‘I’m so sorry about what has happened.’

‘Don’t give up,’ Mark managed to say. ‘On the idea, I mean. I’d like to read it eventually.’

Robinson looked at him oddly. Giving Mark the slightest of nods, he closed the door.

All that week, a fist of frost held the land in mute submission. The low fields, and the bog they sank into; the bushes of berries and the brittle trees that lined the laneway to the house; the trimmed hedges of the garden and the livid briars of the yard — all stood stiffened as in a spell. When Tom hauled open the high iron door of the hayshed, the machinery within glinted, seemed to quiver, in the sudden icy shaft of light from the moon. He pushed out a sigh, and the shape of his breath hung white for a moment in the blind air.

Twice a day now — just after it came light in the morning, and again by evening, as the first scarves of dusk settled into the corners of the meadow — he would come to stand here, with the sheepdog panting gladly at his back. He would keep one hand on the cold rim of the door as his gaze travelled over the hulking forms of the tractors, their sheet-glass cabs, their pristine surfaces, the huge black haunches of their tyres, on to the hexagonal baler, the red-skirted mower, and the other equipment filling the space in which, that summer, he and Mark had stacked two hundred bales. Whistling to the sheepdog, he moved in to walk among the machines.

The tractor seats were still clothed in clear plastic. A film of yellow oil still coated the blue axle of the seed-spreader. The inner lip of the baler still held a fine dust of brown hayseed from August. All was exactly as he had left it that morning. He whistled a shorter note to the dog and strode back out into the yard, tapping the side of each machine with his stick as he went.

Traffic was already terrible by the time Mark backed the car out of Sitric Road and down on to Arbour Hill. Friday evening at rush-hour: there could be no stupider time to head west. It moved at a crawl down to the river and out the quays past Heuston, and it did not ease until he was on the M4.

He did not mind the drive in the dark. There was a comfort in the straightness of the road and the width of it, and the yellow glow of the streetlamps overhead. There was a sense of ditches and fields and forest at the edges of everything, and the small squares of light that were the windows of houses. On the car radio, the talk was of hope and change in one country and of everything going to fuck in another. He was still waiting for it to make a difference to him, this disaster that everyone was talking about, still waiting for it to make his life impossible, this collapse of everything, this end of everything. Apparently the country was dying on its feet. But things seemed strangely the same to him.

He let himself sink into the chatter. At some level, he realized, he was listening to everything, but there was a filter, or there were only some words about which he cared enough to make him listen. They mentioned Garryowen, and he looked to the radio in surprise: he had been rereading the Edgeworth story of that name the night before. But it was about Garryowen the rugby club. Then, job losses, and something about a vaccination. Banks needing billions. An item about the computer games on the market for Christmas.

When the news came on he switched to a CD. The drive-time programme, with its arguments and commentary, was one thing, but he still did not want to listen to the news. There was almost always a certain kind of headline, and he did not want to hear it; yes, they sounded sorry, yes, they sounded sad, but to them it was just another news story. And to someone else, it was just the start, and it was something he did not want to think about. The CD did nothing to offend. In Edgeworthstown, a guy he had gone to school with was smoking outside the Park House. At the chipper, the evening buses were pulling in. Headlights swooping, rucksacks lifted, boot doors popping open. Students home for the weekend. He glanced in the mirror to check that Aoife was still asleep.

Keogh already had the Christmas decorations up in the shop. The bollocks, he imagined himself saying to his father. It would be a way in. It was the way in he had been looking for, he realized, all the drive down. None of the items on the radio programmes would have given them anything to talk about; none of them was useful enough in that dull, pragmatic way. Besides, he would not be stupid enough to try to have a conversation with his father about anything that had happened outside his father’s world. Paddy Keogh having a Christmas tree in the window and blue icicle lights hanging down from the eaves at the beginning of November was good enough. A mean-looking little runt of a tree too, he imagined himself saying, crooked as a whin, and don’t you know well it was the cheapest he could get? The cheapest? Tom would ask, in mock disbelief. Surely you don’t think he paid for it? And the back and forth would be under way, and somehow they would keep going from there. Mark felt his language sit into the groove he had made for it, somewhere along the line; the mould he had taken from his father. The conspiratorial mutter, the accent thick again on the tongue, the head nodding or shaking along with every second sentence. The vocabulary of half-phrases, of words that meant nothing and meant everything. He passed the last houses before the lane and looked up ahead to the farm.

Light. The hayshed door was a square of yellow light against the darkness. The surprise of it almost caused Mark to miss the turn for the lane. The lights were never on in the hayshed. Even if an animal was sick, or a calf being born, everything happened in the low houses to its rear. Mark had not thought that there was even a light to switch on in the hayshed. What would it shine on? From where? The shed should have been packed from wall to wall, and right to the roof, with the summer’s round bales. There should have been no room for light.

He resisted the temptation to drive right around to the farmyard; his father would expect Mark to come straight into the hayshed and help him with whatever the problem was. The last thing he wanted to do was to spend the night standing and kneeling in straw and shit and in the dust of the hay, watching an animal kicking and dying and staring at him out of one frightened yellow eye. He would have to face it in a couple of minutes, but not yet. Not now. He parked outside the house.