Andrew Fox - Over Our Heads

Melissa followed, wearing now, I thought, the other polka-dot dress. I felt the urgency of a hair’s sweep, of a tooth-print on a lip — mark of sadness. Ciarán dug a hand into his jacket pocket and Melissa smiled when she saw what he offered.

‘Just cleaning out the car,’ Ciarán said as she affixed the earrings. ‘Came across them.’

Blasts of wind shook the trees and tore at the bushes. A hungry pool of water swallowed the drops that slashed its face.

‘Brollies,’ Ciarán said and took two golf umbrellas from the stand by the door. ‘Bring the car around, son?’

‘Very funny,’ I said.

‘I just can’t understand it,’ Siobhán said. ‘How does someone get by at your age having never learned to drive?’

‘City boy.’ I lifted our bags. ‘Never the need, I suppose.’

‘Suburban boy.’ Siobhán sucked her teeth. ‘Your mother.’

‘Will you leave him alone,’ Ciarán told her as we braved the driveway. ‘Sure, there’ll be need enough soon enough when the children start arriving.’

The Land Rover was cold, its carpets spotless. I squeaked close to Melissa on the leather seat but she leaned away from me. Siobhán and Ciarán bundled in and Ciarán set the wipers fighting.

‘My Christ,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this? We’ll be rounding up the animals two by two in a minute.’

The Land Rover jolted over the cattle grid and sloshed to the centre of town. Cars stood abandoned by the kerb at hasty angles. Old women and teenagers avoided each other beneath the Pricebuster’s awning. We revolved slowly at a roundabout and slipped on to a ramp for the dual carriageway. I peered out through the windscreen and the rain and saw two lines of slow red lights.

‘I know what we can do to pass the time,’ Ciarán said. ‘Why don’t we play a little game?’

‘Because, Dad, that’d be tedious.’

‘Well, what better ideas do you have?’

‘Turn on the radio,’ Siobhán said.

Ciarán tuned through static to a wall of hysterical pop, against which Siobhán objected; then on to a murmur of lachrymose country, against which Melissa did. He found a GAA match report: Siobhán and Melissa groaned in unison.

‘Well, then.’ Ciarán snapped the radio off. ‘If that’s going to be your attitude then we can just sit here in silence.’

Melissa’s legs were crossed and she was staring straight ahead, eyes fixed, jaw set. What was her expression?

‘All right, Mel?’ I said. ‘Are you warm enough, there?’

‘Fierce weather altogether,’ Ciarán said. ‘Fierce.’

I wiped my window and looked out at heavy branches tilting over a rusted guiderail. A single shoe scudded by on the current. I groped in the footwell for my umbrella.

‘I think I’ll get out,’ I said, ‘and go see what the problem is.’

‘Good man, yourself,’ Siobhán said.

‘Are you serious? You’ll be drownded.’ Ciarán swivelled in his seat. ‘Will you stop him, Melissa?’

‘He’s free to do what he wants.’

The sky twisted grey into black, and thundered. Water surged in the ditch beyond the shoulder and the trees and hedges shook. Would we ever make it back to Dublin? And if we did, would Melissa stay angry with me all the way? In front of her parents? What was her expression?

The umbrella made little difference: rain seeped into my shoes and trousers and found its way to the corners of my eyes. I pushed on, squinting in through fogged windows at bouncing children and stone-eyed parents. Engines ticked away frustrated. Headlights lit the rain. At the head of the jam, at a dip in the road, a pond had formed across all four lanes. Traffic moving in the opposite direction slowed and waded through, but the pond was deeper on our side. In the fast lane a van sat spluttering. In the slow lane a Mercedes hunkered, dark and vacant. A man and two children stood marooned nearby.

The man hopped and waved. Was he calling for me? I picked my way towards him through the tangle of clamouring bonnets.

‘Hey.’ The man had to shout above the rain. ‘Hey, I need some help.’ His shoulders were stooped from cold or worry but his clothes promised a comfortable room in which later to discuss all this. ‘I have to get back to the car and fetch my phone. We bailed out when the water started coming in the doors and I forgot it. Can you watch these two for just a minute? Please.’

The children gawped up at me. They both wore scarlet raincoats. The little girl’s nostrils were muzzled in snot. The little boy’s teeth were tiny.

‘This is Gráinne,’ the man said. ‘And this is Michael.’

Michael lunged for me and took me by the hand. His skin was soft but through it his bones felt oddly strong. Gráinne edged closer and installed a finger in a nostril. I angled my umbrella over the children’s heads. Behind us car horns honked a low lament and somewhere an aeroplane added its whine to the sizzle and gurgle. The man waded into the water, knees high, arms spread. My arm jerked as Michael dropped into a series of high-energy squat thrusts. The man reached the car, hauled its passenger door open and ducked inside. Michael rose and fired a toe deep into his sister’s shin. An anguished vowel escaped her lips and she buckled but didn’t fall. The torturer resumed his calisthenics. Gráinne pressed her face against my hip.

The man waded back holding his phone aloft in triumph. He ignored the children — one sobbing, one smirking.

‘Thanks a lot,’ he said.

‘You’re grand,’ I said. ‘But you should know that Michael —’

‘Thanks a lot,’ the man said again.

He dialled a number and raised the rescued phone to his ear. Michael waved a manic goodbye and Gráinne crept up behind her brother, wrapped her ankle around his and shoved. The boy fell on his face with a splash and a hollow pop.

‘Jesus!’ The man dropped to his hunkers.

I backed away and put the width of a bonnet between us. Michael writhed in the water. Gráinne tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and bent to help her brother to his feet. The man returned to his phone.

I traipsed back along the length of the jam and looked again through windows. Brows were furrowed, knuckles strained. The furious and the panicked were pulling U-ies in the reservation. Beyond the seething treeline, the fields accepted water.

After a while I found the Land Rover. Through the windscreen I could see Ciarán gazing into his lap and Siobhán staring straight ahead. Between them I could make out a sliver of Melissa’s shoulder.

I looked back towards the trees. Their leaves fitted together, shook apart, rejoined.

I thought about running.

I didn’t run.

The new armoires will arrive on Wednesday morning, but the truck to take the old ones away can’t make it until Thursday afternoon. Randy, the general manager, and Agnes, the head of housekeeping, call Luis and me into the back office first thing Monday to figure out a plan.

Randy wears contrast shirts with a rim of grease at collar and cuff. Agnes has a thatch of orange hair that rasps against her boxy shoulder pads. As they deliberate, Luis stares into his hands, chin lolling on the chest of a brown polyester shirt three sizes bigger than mine. And when Agnes decides that the two of us should hump four floors’ worth of oversized mock-rococo armoires to the roof and cram them beneath the patio canopy, Luis ignores her, nods at Randy and says:

‘Yes, boss.’

But in the elevator it’s a different story.

‘Goddamn it,’ he says, ‘have you seen those motherfuckers? They’re six feet tall and three wide. They’re two hundred fucking pounds.’ He drives a boot into the base of the panelled door; the elevator jolts on its cable. ‘Man, it wouldn’t take too much more to make me hate this place, you know? I mean, really hate it. All we ever do is fix it up, but it’s still a dump. Why don’t they just bulldoze it all to hell and start again?’