Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘Just for when you can’t be down yourself, like,’ Frankie said. ‘I can drop in on him the odd time, but it wouldn’t be the same.’

‘It’d be a big help,’ Mark said, and asked when his girlfriend was having the baby. January, Frankie said.

‘I don’t know how the hell we’re going to work out how to rear it,’ he said. ‘Michelle is in nearly more of a panic about it than I am. And that’s saying something.’ He laughed through a long intake of breath.

‘You’ll be grand,’ said Mark.

‘Jesus, I hope so. I suppose you’d know.’ He was quiet for a minute then; worrying, maybe, that he had said the wrong thing.

‘Let me know when she arrives,’ Mark said.

‘Will do,’ Frankie said, sounding relieved.

Frankie was right; the tractors were hard to sell. Mark photographed them that same day and, when he returned to Dublin, he uploaded the pictures and the details to the websites Frankie had recommended, but it was almost a month after Christmas before an offer came through. A contractor from Meath called Mark’s mobile and asked about both tractors. He said he had been looking at similar models new and this seemed too good to be true. It wasn’t, Mark said, and gave him the directions so that he could go down to Dorvaragh and see them.

‘Meath?’ his father said, when Mark phoned him later to let him know that the contractor would be calling around. ‘Whereabouts in Meath?’

‘Near Slane,’ Mark explained, though he knew his father did not know one town in Meath from another. ‘Near Newgrange, actually.’ It was early afternoon, and he was in the sitting room in Stoneybatter with Aoife. Sunlight was spilling through the blinds. She was on the floor, drawing with crayons in a notebook she had taken from him and declared her own. The crayons were making more contact with the carpet than with the paper. She sat back to survey what she had done and made a small noise that could have signalled anything from delight to disappointment. She turned to a fresh page.

‘Frigg Newgrange,’ his father said, through a mouthful of something.

‘Are you eating?’ Mark said, glancing at his watch.

‘I am,’ his father said. ‘Though the price you brought it all down to would nearly put me off my food. He has enough with the money he’ll be saving for himself on those tractors to build his own Newgrange if he wants.’

‘There’s an offer. That’s all that matters. We need to get them sold.’

His father grunted. ‘I suppose the fucker wants us to bring them up to him to see them and all?’

‘No,’ Mark said. ‘He’s driving down with his son to take a look at them on Saturday. Or his brother, or something. Anyway, he wants to know if that suits you. Saturday. Will you be there?’

‘I suppose,’ his father said. When he was silent for a long moment afterwards, Mark asked him what the matter was.

‘Ah, nothing,’ his father muttered.

‘It’s not nothing,’ Mark said, leaning over to Aoife and guiding her to take a blue crayon back out of one nostril. ‘Something’s wrong with you. Say it out.’

‘Ah,’ his father said, and down the line Mark could imagine the heavy shrug. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t have minded getting a look at it all the same.’

‘At what?’

‘Ah, it’s all right.’

‘No, it’s not all right,’ Mark said, taking the crayon from Aoife once again. ‘Not your nose,’ he said, in a scolding tone. She gave him a deadpan glance.

‘What?’

‘I’m talking to Aoife. And it’s not all right. Say it out, you, if you have something to say. What is it you want a look at? His farm, is that it?’ He cringed inwardly at the vision of his father going up to Meath for a gawk; the questions he would have for the other farmer, the jealousies he would incubate, the new set of insecurities and aspirations he would come away with. One look at a farm spread across the rich smoothness of Meath land and his father would take the tractors straight back off the market; he would hang on to them until they collapsed in a heap of rust and plastic sheeting if it meant having some trace of the trappings of a successful farm. His father had started referring to his cattle as ‘stock’ after seeing a couple of episodes of Dallas in the 1980s. A visit to a stud farm in Meath could only wreak worse havoc still.

‘Ah, no, not the farm,’ his father interrupted Mark’s thoughts. ‘Just that place, whatever you call it, that’s all.’

‘Whatever you call it?’

‘The place where the sun goes into it.’

Mark laughed. ‘You want to go to Newgrange?’

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ his father said, in his most reasonable tone. ‘I saw it on the television there before Christmas.’

‘A minute ago you were saying it wasn’t worth a fuck.’

‘Ah, now,’ his father protested. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Near enough,’ Mark said, and he laughed.

‘Well, anyway,’ his father said. ‘Sure it’s only meant to be ould rubbish they do in it anyway.’

‘What do you mean, rubbish?’ Mark said, looking again at Aoife. She was pushing scrawls of colour frantically on to a page that seemed certain to tear under the force. He thought for a moment about stopping her, but then that was what crayons were for. The carpet could be cleaned. She sensed his attention and looked up, showing him then the page she had made. It looked exhausted. Every inch of it was covered with her jagged scrapes.

‘Very good.’ He nodded to her, and she smiled and took the notebook back down to the floor.

‘What are you saying to me?’ his father said, with a snap of suspicion.

‘Aoife,’ Mark said, sitting back into the couch.

‘Oh, Aoife,’ his father said. ‘What’s she doing today?’

‘She’s drawing,’ Mark said. ‘Or she’s making a mess of the floor. Depends on how you look at it.’

‘That’s how she learns,’ his father said.

Mark turned and found himself blinking against the sunlight. ‘I suppose.’

He looked out to the back yard, where the feral cats basked. They looked utterly at home, though if you knocked on the window or opened the back door they would scatter as though you had released a slavering dog. The morning’s wash, on the clothes-line, looked shrunken, but it was still wet. The garden furniture, there now for more years than Mark knew, was faded and stained; it would need to be painted up when the summer came. He glanced back to Aoife, who was standing now and pulling at the undergrad essays he had left on the armchair; twenty separate ramblings on Don Quixote , to be graded and commented on by that evening. He lifted the pile out of her reach.

‘Are you there at all?’ his father said.

‘I’m here,’ said Mark, putting the essays on the windowsill. ‘So you want to go to Newgrange, you’re telling me?’

‘Ah, I don’t know,’ his father said, but there was a silence after the words, and Mark knew how he was expected to fill it.

‘You do know.’

‘Ah, I suppose,’ his father said. ‘Sure, it’d be something different.’

‘It would be interesting,’ Mark said slowly.

‘Would you be interested?’ his father said.

Mark looked out at the cats again. One had climbed up on to the garden table, stretching now in an attitude of somnolent bliss. He put his knuckles to the glass, but dropped them without rapping. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing it again,’ he said.

‘You were in it?’

‘Yeah. On a school tour. Years ago.’

‘Ah, sure, it might just be a load of ould shite.’

‘Well,’ Mark said, shrugging, ‘you decide. I can come down some weekend and we can drive up in my car if you’d like.’

‘Ah, you wouldn’t have time.’