The Riders (3 page)

He stuffed the paper into his pocket. It was actually happening. They could stop moving at last and make a home somewhere, the three of them. Maybe she's right about magic in the spur of the moment. Could be she's been cautious and sensible too long. It was her new thing, cutting loose.

It was her prevailing outlook ever since they came abroad, but he had to admit he liked her just as well the old way. She was like a sheet anchor sometimes, a steadying influence on him, on everyone around her. Made people laugh, that sensible streak in her, but it also made her someone of substance. Jennifer wasn't just a good-looking woman, he once told her wincing parents, she was someone to be reckoned with. God, he missed her, missed them both. Their brown, swimming bodies and birdcall voices – even the sound of their sober, womanly peeing from behind a closed door. He missed dumb jokes with Billie and the warped games of Monopoly that she strung out endlessly with her insistence on ‘the true and right and proper rules'. Seven and a half. She was a bright kid, and all fatherly pride aside, he knew she was different from other kids. She felt things strongly. She was fierce, precocious and loyal. She took shit from no one and saw
things so clearly at times that it took your breath away. Now that he thought of it, he'd spent more time with her than he had with Jennifer. He missed their companionable silences. They understood each other, him and Billie. He wondered sometimes if Jennifer saw it, the way the two of them moved together in a crowd, in a boat, at the breakfast table. It was almost as though they each recognized themselves in the other. It was weird, like a gift. Jennifer was always busy, but she must have seen it.

Late in the afternoon, heaving and gasping, with the walls finally clear of soil and stones, he sat down for air on a stump behind the barn and saw Binchy's things piled out there, reeking of turps. He rattled the matches in his pocket but left them where they were. Why spoil the moment of triumph? He tilted his head back and let the sweat run through his matted hair. Tonight he'd boil up some water and take a real scrubdown. He'd rig up a bed from an old door and some bricks. The flags were too cold to sleep on another night. ‘Live like an animal,' his father used to say, ‘and you'll start thinkin like one!' Scully laughed at himself. This was like the tree houses of his boyhood, the
Robinson Crusoe
factor, the steady search for creature comforts. A cup of tea would render him human – he knew it.

After dark, scrubbed and fed and hugely satisfied, Scully went walking, a mere shadow moving through the ash wood with the wind tearing at the bare crowns of the trees above him. He was sore and happy, his hands still stung with nettles and his boots were full of stones. He saw the lights of farmhouses down in the valley, and wondered what they did at night, these farming families. He hadn't introduced himself yet. This was the furthest he'd been from the house since he arrived. But there'd be time. The night hardened with cold. The black mass of the castle loomed below. Scully sucked in the metallic air and watched the
trees in turmoil, listened to their mob violence raging above him against the sky. When he turned and looked back uphill he saw the three candles burning in the curtainless window. The wind bullied at him, ripping through the cold wet of his hair, but he stood there a long time in the wood below his field, just watching those three candles twinkling in the empty house.

•  •  •

I
N HIS DREAMS THAT NIGHT
Scully ran through long grass between walls and hedges uphill with lights gathering behind him and only the cover of grass and night before him. On he ran, never stopping to see what it was behind him, blindly going on into darkness.

S
CULLY JERKED AWAKE. A
motor idled outside. It was light already. He wriggled from his stained sleeping bag and went to the window but could see only his ragged reflection in the frost. He opened the top half of his front door, felt the fierce cold, and saw a filthy grey truck slipping and yawing down the icy hill with its tailgate flapping. Diesel smoke hung in the air. He went out barefoot across the frozen ground and saw two tons of builders' sand heaped against the barn wall.

From around the bend on the hill came the little green van.

‘Boots are the go, Mr Scully,' said Pete-the-Post getting out to unlock the back doors. ‘On a mornin such as this, it's definitely boots, don't you think?'

Scully grinned, curling his toes on the unyielding mud. He helped the postman unload the cement mixer and several bags of cement.

‘Cheaper than airmail, it is.'

‘I really appreciate this,' said Scully.

‘There'll be a load of blocks here within the hour, and meself 11 be by at one o'clock to start into it.'

Scully blinked.

‘Well, you'll be needin a hod-carrier, I expect.'

‘Well. I. Haven't you got the post to do?'

‘Diversify, Mr Scully, that's my motto. We're in the EC now, you know.'

‘The EC.'

‘This is the new Ireland you're lookin at.'

‘Really?'

‘No, it's the same auld shite, believe me,' the postman said, laughing, ‘but don't go tellin!'

•  •  •

T
HAT MORNING
S
CULLY CLEANED THE
cottage out properly. He shovelled and scraped and swept until its four simple rooms were clean enough to move through without grimacing, and then he rearranged his equipment into an orderly system. He crawled across the upstairs floors on all fours, marking boards that needed replacing, and he went grimly through the barn, finding ancient bags of coal, cooking implements, some quite decent wood, and another wide door he sat on blocks to improve his temporary bed. Out behind the barn he looked again at Binchy's things and took from the heap a small, black rosary which he set above the mantel on a nail in the wall. Beside it he stood a stiff black-and-white print of the three of them, Jennifer, Billie and him, that a friend had taken one freezing day in Brittany. He stared at it a good while, remembering the day. Their Parisian friend Dominique had the Leica going all weekend. She took so many photos they got blasé and began to pose. This one was in the cemetery at St Malo. All of them were laughing. Jennifer's black hair falling from beneath a beret. His and Billie's like matching treetops, just mad foliage from the same forest. It was
a good photo. They hung together as a shape, the three of them. Just behind them was the circled cross of the Celts, its carved stone knotted with detail, the entwined faces of saints and sinners. It was beautiful, so handsome it made the three of them look dignified. Dominique knew her business. She could take a photo. They'd miss her. Half of what you did in travelling was simply missing things, sensations, people. He'd missed so long and hard these last couple of years he could barely think of it. And he still had some longing ahead of him, the worst kind, until Christmas.

He touched the photograph once. Coal burned lustily in the grate. The house began to steam and dry. Scully went out to survey the gable wall.

T
HE DOOR SLIDES TO ON
the lowing, dungspraying cows as the man in the cloth cap turns to see the scaffold up against Binchy's Bothy and two figures beneath it like trolls atop the hill. The sky is the colour of fish, a Friday colour beGod, and the bare trees stand forlorn. It's Pete-the-Post up there with that woolly young bastard with love in his eyes.

He fingers in his waistcoat for the damp fag he's been saving. The stink of silage burns at the back of his gullet and he lights up to beat it off.

It's love alright. Jimmy Brereton, bachelor unto the grave, recognizes a man doomed by love, snared by a woman. You could see it the day they turned up in that thresher of a Volkswagen. Her with the hair out like a black flag and her hands on the smooth stones of Binchy's wall as if it had a fever pulse, and him, hairy as anything on Christ's earth, waiting on her with eyes big and hopeless as a steer. The shackles of marriage, of doilies and lace curtains and mysterious female illnesses staring him in the face, and him cheerful as you like, and sheepish, sheepish like a lamb unto the slaughter, poor booger.

Jimmy Brereton kicks the shite from his boots and watches a while. He wishes they'd come down and bulldoze that eyesore nuisance of a damn castle out of his high field while the government's asleep in Dublin. It's a danger to one and all. In a big norther stones and rubble come belting down out of the keep, and a man can no longer leave his cattle in there out of the weather for fear of having them brained with Celtic history. He thanks God and Arthur Guinness he sleeps well enough at night not to worry himself sick about the things he's seen here over the years. Things that make the hairs on your arms stand up, like every poor bastard mortared into the walls and fed to the pigs and tilled into the cellars of that place is stirring. Sometimes you hear voices on the wind and stones falling like men to the ground. Bawlers, stinks, a bedlam of rooks, and lights from the mountains, streams of them that he doesn't look for anymore. It's not madness or drink in all of this, though he bothers the bottle mightily. All the valley people are chary of the place. He remembers standing right here with his own Da watching the priest from Limerick bellowing Latin at the keep and waving his candles at no one in particular. No Brereton, man or child, would be up there after dark at that nasty fooker of a place. It's a blight on his land, and it's made him an early retirer, a six-pint man at sunset. But he's not unhappy. Things might have turned out worse. He might have married Mary Finneran in 1969 instead of backing out like a man with spine. He might have a brother like Peter Keneally's instead of no family to speak of. He might be up the hill there with those two mad boogers trying to save the long lost and working like black monkeys.

Sheepish, that's him. That woolly booger with the hod on his shoulder and the love in his eyes.

Jimmy Brereton retires indoors to the company of Mr Guinness.

J
UST ON DARK
, Scully and Peter Keneally laid the last block of their rough buttress and stood blowing steam on the makeshift scaffold.

‘That's got her,' said the postman. ‘Tomorrow we'll render it!'

Scully laughed and leaned his brow against the gutter. The man could work. They'd hardly spoken all afternoon and now the postie seemed determined to make up for it.

‘So, where did you learn to throw blocks like a Paddy?' said Peter.

‘London, I spose,' said Scully looking down the valley. It was beautiful in an eerie, organized, European way.

‘Jaysus, throwin blocks for the English!'

‘No, an Irishman, actually,' said Scully climbing down.

‘I went to London once.'

‘Once is enough.'

‘Oh, you got that right.'

Pete clanged the trowels together and they headed for the well.

‘I worked with a gang of Offaly boys,' said Scully. ‘Hard
men, I spose you'd call em. We did cash jobs, you know. Jobs light-on for a bit of paperwork, you might say.'

‘Like this one, you mean.'

Scully smiled. ‘Let's have a drink, I'm freezin.'

At the well, as they stood washing the mortar off their arms, Peter hummed a tune, low in his throat. In the dark he sounded like an old man, and it occurred to Scully that he had no idea how old the postie might be. Abruptly, the humming stopped.

‘What was her name again? Your wife?'

‘Jennifer.'

‘They say she's a beautiful girl.'

‘Geez, they're quick around here, aren't they?'

The postman wheezed out a laugh. ‘But are they liars?'

‘No, they got it right.'

‘Then you're a lucky man.'

‘Mate, she's a lucky woman.'

They went in tired and laughing to the swimming warmth of the hearth, and Scully poured them a porter each and they sat on a chair and box to listen to the whine of the fire. Scully wrote out a telegram message on the back of an envelope:
GOOD NEWS. ALL WELL HERE. KEEP IN TOUCH. LOVE YOU BOTH. SCULLY.

‘Telegram? I'll send it for you.'

‘Would you?'

‘You got snakes there in Australia,' said Pete thoughtfully.

‘You bet. No St Pat out there.'

‘Poisonous snakes, eh?'

Scully grinned. ‘Dugites, taipans, king browns, tigers. A tiger snake once chased me all the way down the back paddock.'

‘Are they fast, then?'

‘I was on a motorbike.'

‘Aw, Jaysus!'

‘Snakes and sharks,' said Scully, hamming it up. He handed Pete the soiled envelope.

‘And Skippy the bush kangaroo, beGod!'

Scully laughed. ‘Not as unpredictable as a Paddy, though. Those Irish boys in London were a wild bunch, I tell you. Talk about take no prisoners.'

‘Offaly boys, you say?'

‘Yeah, the boss was from Banagher.'

Pete licked his lower lip, uncrossing his legs slowly. ‘Banagher.'

‘Yeah, you probably know the bloke.'

Pete swallowed. ‘Could be.'

‘Bloke called Doolin.'

‘Mylie,' the postie breathed.

‘You know him, then?'

‘Jaysus, Mary and Joseph.'

‘Silly bugger got busted in Liverpool.'

‘I heard he was . . . taken.'

‘The VAT man, I spose.'

‘You don't need to pretend with me, Mr Scully.'

‘What?'

‘We don't want any trouble here. I mean we're all good Catholics here, but . . .'

Scully looked at him. The man was pale.

‘We just want to leave all that behind us. We don't want the Guards crawlin all over the countryside, unmarked cars, questions at all hours.'

The postman's huge ears were red now and a sweat had formed on his brow.

‘Pete –'

‘We just want to live our lives. I'm sorry to give the wrong impression.'