Belinda McKeon - Solace

Aoife whimpered as he heaved her out of the seat. He tugged her dress down over her nappy and tried to get her to take her blanket, but she was too cranky. He draped it over his shoulder, smelling its beautiful tang of sleep and powder and piss. It needed a wash.

The front door opened, and his father was there. ‘Well, button,’ he said to Aoife, taking a step forward with his arms outstretched towards her. He nodded to Mark. ‘Well. You got down.’

‘She’s not awake yet,’ said Mark, nodding a greeting in reply. The dog was sitting alert in front of his father’s chair, her tail thumping the ground, a question in her eyes.

The place looked different, but not in a way that he could place immediately. All the furniture seemed to be exactly as it had been, and even the small things — teapot, sugar bowl, bread bin — were in the same places they had always been, yet the place seemed somehow stripped back. There was something spare about it that made it seem not neat or tidy but instead held in some kind of quietness, some kind of shock. The smell was different: frying-pan grease and cooked meat and something else, too, something artificial and high on the air.

As his father shut the door to the hall Mark turned to him. ‘Why are the lights on in the shed ’ithout?’

His father came over to the couch and reached a hand out to Aoife, laying it flat on the crown of her head. ‘She’s tired from her journey,’ he said.

‘She’s not tired, she’s still half asleep,’ said Mark. ‘She slept the whole way down. It’ll be a nightmare to get her down now again.’

‘What do you think of this lassie, Scruff?’ his father said to the dog, kneading its ears. It panted with pleasure. On its breath, Mark caught the smell that was hanging in the air: dogfood from a can.

‘What’s going on in the hayshed?’ he said to his father.

‘Ah. .’ His father shook his head as though whatever it was did not matter. But when he looked at Mark, his eyes were shining. In his chest, in his arms, Mark felt wariness thicken and deepen.

‘I’ll show you in a while,’ his father said.

‘Show me what?’

‘Just. .’ his father shook his head again. ‘Something I want you to look at.’

He seemed pent up with something, seemed almost high, as though one nudge or one question would tip him into giddy laughter. When Aoife whined, Mark was glad of the chance to look towards her and lift her. ‘I might as well bring her upstairs,’ he said. ‘It’s late.’

His father reached a hand out to Aoife again. This time she stared at him. ‘I don’t think she knows me at all,’ he said.

‘She’s just sleepy.’

‘It’s all set up for you anyway,’ his father said, nodding towards the ceiling. ‘I put the electric blanket on the cot and all.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Sure I might as well go out to the shed and you can come out to me when you’re ready,’ his father said. The dog was at his feet, tongue out, tail dancing. They looked one with the same excitement. They looked like two friends who had discovered what it was that wagged the whole world.

*

The sight knocked the breath out of Mark. He steadied himself against the wall of the shed.

‘What the fuck is this?’ he started to say, but his father was already walking over to one of the tractors, a red beast of a thing with a curved bonnet and a front weight block like a fist.

‘What do you think of this lassie?’ his father said, clamping a hand to a front tyre that was almost as tall as him.

Mark stared. His mind would not work. ‘Are you going to fucking live in it?’

Tom laughed and moved on to the second machine. It was also colossal. It was of a green so bright and lurid it could have belonged to a float in a Paddy’s Day parade.

‘Where the fuck did you get these from?’ Mark tried again. ‘What the fuck are they for?’

‘Gerry Brady’d be able to tell you all about them,’ his father said. ‘I can’t remember the half of it. But you’d want to hear Brady, the way he goes on about them. Hydraulic this and telescope that, and some new type of transmission, and wait till you see the way the cab ’ithin is laid out.’ He gestured up to the door. He was lit up like a bride. ‘Go on there, get up into her. She’s like an airplane in there, I’m telling you.’

The step up into the tractor cab was spotless. The interior was so luxurious that Mark almost laughed. The seat on the old Massey had been like a small metal stool; this one looked like a recliner, with a cushioned cover and a headrest and armrests, and beside it, a jumpseat that folded neatly down. The gears and the controls were laid out like a buffet, presided over by what looked like a computer screen. The steering-wheel extended from the floor on a muscular base; the dash itself was a sleek black panel of glass. As Mark sat, his mind hurtled through attempts at calculation. A figure came and he stared at it. It was disgusting. But it was probably close to the truth.

‘What do you think of that, now?’ his father said, stepping up and looking into the cab. He touched the jumpseat. ‘There’s room enough in it for the two of us.’

Mark said nothing. He stared at the sleeping darkness of the dash.

His father gestured towards it impatiently. ‘Turn her on, can’t ya?’

It was quieter than Mark expected it to be: a low, confident thrum. On the dash, the needles of two dials blinked into life; a monitor between them told him the time was close to ten. He looked to the other screen: it was a GPS, showing the road and the lane in storybook colours, an eager red ring marking their spot.

His father leaned in closer. ‘That’s the command centre there, now,’ he said, pointing to a cluster of gears. ‘And this is a panorama cab you’re in. And you see that plug there?’ He pointed somewhere under the steering-wheel. ‘Do you know what you can put into that?’

‘No,’ Mark said warily.

‘Your laptop,’ his father said, in a tone of absolute triumph. ‘You plug your laptop into that, or your phone, and you can do whatever you have to do.’

Mark killed the engine. Every little dancing and flashing piece of red and yellow circuitry vanished back to where it had come from.

‘And all those controls, the most of them is electronic,’ his father said. He shrugged with the same glad air. ‘Ah, it’s beyond me, I’m afraid, though.’

Mark looked at him. ‘Then what are you doing with it?’

His father seemed ready for the question; he seemed amused by it. He shrugged again; a dance of the shoulders.

‘The horsepower on this thing must be ridiculous,’ Mark said.

‘I couldn’t tell you, to be honest. Brady would tell you.’

‘It must be near three hundred,’ Mark said.

‘Chancy but it is.’

‘And what — you buy two of the fucking things in case you need one to pull the other out of a bog hole?’

His father grinned as though he were being teased about a new girlfriend. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘In the long run, I’m telling you, they’re worth it. Sure, the farming is hardship enough.’

Mark got out of the cab, jumping from the first step to land heavily on the floor of the shed. It was a habit he’d had since he was tall enough to get out of a tractor cab without being lifted; he’d imagined himself to be MacGyver, or Magnum PI, or one of the guys from the A-Team. And he’d imagined this while he was jumping out of a scrawny Massey Ferguson from the arse of the seventies, all the time wishing his father would buy a new tractor, a modern tractor, so that he could really pretend he was an American detective on a souped-up set of wheels. Now the souped-up wheels were everywhere he looked in the hayshed, huge, obnoxious in their streamlined sheen, and all he could feel was a plummeting dread.