The Shelter of Neighbours (13 page)

Clara's mobile phone rings.

Eoin.

‘Hi, Ma.' He sounds as if he's next to her in the car. ‘Just checking that everything's on track.'

‘Yes, sweetie,' she says, glancing out the window, which is open. ‘Everything's on track.' Her heart is thumping. There's a shake in her right knee. ‘I'm just leaving in the tax returns, you know, with the accountant.' The old woman's head is bent over the leaves, her rake is raking. The old man is gathering up the heaps of leaves and putting them into a green bucket. He clamps them down with his foot, to compress them, squeeze more in. ‘Someone is reporting me to the guards, for illegal parking. Some crazy people.' She says this very loudly, hoping they'll hear.

‘Oh.' Eoin sounds alarmed. ‘Don't worry, Mom. Don't mind them. Just drive away.
ok
?'

‘
ok
.'

The old man looks over at Clara and spits in her direction. The glob of spittle lands far from her, on the footpath outside his gate. He picks up the bucket and shuffles into the house with it, stooping under the weight of leaves.

Eoin says, ‘Promise me you'll drive away as soon as I ring off.'

‘Yes, yes,' says Clara.

There's a pause.

‘Have you sent in your
esta
form to Immigration?'

‘Yes, yes,' she says again. ‘I did that weeks ago.' All those stupid questions. Do you suffer from a contagious disease? Are you a drug addict? Have you ever been convicted of an offence by the police? Offense. Felony. That's not a word Clara ever uses. It's not a word used in Ireland. ‘I did it. I got an email back. That's all
ok
.'

‘
ok
.' There's a pause and he adds, ‘Ma, wear something ordinary, for the flight. You know what I mean?'

She smiles.

‘Just makes it easier at Immigration.' He sounds sheepish.

‘I'm not a complete eejit,' she says. The last time she saw Eoin his hair, red, was down to his waist, and he was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘FCUK'. ‘Don't worry. I'll put my hair in a nice little bun.' Her hair is partly purple and partly blond at the moment, but she'd already planned to dye out the purple bit before travelling. ‘I've got a nice black suit all ready. I'll look like a plain-clothes nun.'

‘That's the spirit,' he says.

She can see his grin but wonders if he's cut his hair? It's curly. It's beautiful. He looks like a poet.

‘See you on Friday then, 9.30 p.m.? Twenty-one thirty, right?'

‘Right! Twenty-one thirty,' says Clara. ‘What time is it over there now?'

She always asks this, even though she knows perfectly well that it's nine hours behind; in her head she has one of those clocks you see behind the reception desk in hotels. Hers gives the San Francisco time, so she knows what Eoin is likely to be doing at any hour of the day or night. She asks just to prolong the conversation. But he's already rung off.

Clara breathes deeply, turns the key in the ignition and drives off. She stops at a garage and fills the tank; she'll drive to the airport because she has to be there at cockcrow. Filling the tank cools her down, in spite of the latest hike in the price of petrol. One hundred and forty-six euro a litre today, and the Merc guzzles the gas.

All across the nation

Such a strange vibration

People in purple …

She flicks off the
cd
player and goes over to the radio.

There's a report of a court case on the news. John O'Hara, a farmer in the midlands, died after being assaulted by Dan and Robert Ryan, his neighbours. John O'Hara's heifer strayed into Robert Ryan's field and John went after the cow to make her come back to his own field, her own field. A row broke out about property and trespassing and the men fought. John O'Hara sustained head injuries and died almost a year later, never having come out of hospital. The question was, was it murder or manslaughter or neither? The jury would have to decide. The men were forty years old and this happened in 2008, although it sounded like the plot of a play you couldn't put on because it is so dated and old-fashioned.

When Clara comes home to Dunroon Crescent after the encounter with the people on Watermill Grove, she sits down at the old blue table in her kitchen, which is filled with stuff she's collected from skips and second-hand furniture auctions, and writes a letter to them. The letter says, ‘I have never encountered two old people whose faces were so uglified by anger.' It adds that she has reported them to the police.

She tears that letter up and writes another one.

The second letter says that she had not blocked their driveway, that their behaviour was antisocial and that they were a public nuisance. She adds that they would be hearing from her solicitor.

That one gets torn up, too.

Then she thinks she could shame them by using a bit of reverse psychology. She gets a thank-you card and signs it with a false version of her name – Ellie Murphy is the pseudonym she selects – puts it in an envelope, and addresses it to The Residents, Assisi, 134 Watermill Grove.

But she doesn't post that, either.

Clara has plenty to do – she should be packing, making lists, preparing for the long journey she must soon make the day after tomorrow. Buying a month's supply of food for Bran. But instead, she sits and writes letters to two cranky old people whose name she doesn't even know.

She can't get them out of her head.

At six o'clock, when it's dark, she gives Bran his evening meal and he settles down for his long night sleep in front of the stove. Clara takes the thank-you card and the porter cake she bought for Eoin – she can get another one tomorrow, or even at the airport, although it'll cost more there. She drives back to Watermill Grove, parks around the corner and walks to number 134, Assisi.

A small blue Micra is parked in the driveway – even in the dark she can see it is a very bright blue. That wasn't on the road this morning. It's such a screaming shade of blue, she couldn't have missed it. She wonders where their own car is, the red one. No sign of it. Then she wonders if they have a car at all. The Micra looks like the kind of car a grown-up daughter living at home, a schoolteacher or a civil servant, might have.

The curtains are drawn and there is no light at the front of the house, so she guesses they are in the kitchen, eating their evening meal. Their tea. Rashers and sausages, sliced pan. Something like that. She walks quietly up to the door and leaves the card and the fruit cake, in its bright tin, in the porch. A pot of geraniums catches her eye. Through the glass in the front door she sees a crack of light down the hall. She imagines she hears the sound of voices. The old woman's, she thinks, and a younger voice. The daughter's? Maybe it's just the news on
tv
. Almost without thinking what she's doing, she roots in the flowerpot. Her fingers find a keyring, buried just half an inch below the surface. Just what they're always warning you not to do. Two keys – the Yale and the long one for the safety lock.

She opens the hall door.

Inside, exactly what you'd expect the old farts to have. A crucifix on the wall, a horrible paper with a pattern of some sort of sharp, unnatural-looking grasses, like swords, all over the walls. The yellow anorak is hanging on one of those old walnut hall stands. It's cold in here. They are too poor or too mean to keep the heating on. It's a house in a time warp; it reminds Clara of the house she grew up in, forty years ago.

A door at the end of the hall opens and the old witch comes out. She is still wearing the gardening trousers. But she has an apron on – a surprisingly nice apron, white with pink flowers and frills. A present from someone, obviously. It's one of those aprons with a huge pocket all across the skirt and the old woman is carrying something, clothes pegs perhaps, in this pocket.

‘What?' Her face falls, falls as if it is an egg that has been hit with a fork and smashed. All the sharp, cross features collapse into a puddle of wrinkles and shock.

‘It's me,' Clara says. She's shy now, subdued by this old woman, just as she was this morning. Feeling silly, she holds out the fruit cake, proffering it: the peace offering.

The old woman lifts her hand. But she does not take the cake. No. She dips her hand into that big pocket on her apron and pulls out a knife.

Now it's Clara who gasps, ‘What?'

The witch lunges and stabs her chest.

Ineffectually, of course. It's quite a good quality knife she's got there, with a sharp point, and she does manage to make a tiny dent in Clara's leather jacket. But there's no way she could injure Clara, given her feebleness and the thickness of the purple leather, and Clara's agile dance to the side.

It's quite a good quality knife she has in her hand. And when that knife is in Clara's deft, strong hand, it easily slices into the old woman's scrawny throat – it slices into the bulging blue veins as easily as it would into the white flesh of an apple.

Blood spurts out. A red puddle spreads over the brown floor.

Clara is already out the door, down the path. She's in her car, driving down Watermill Grove, before the old woman has realised what has happened, before she has a chance to die.

In the morning when Clara crossed the road from the accountant's house, what she had thought was this: that they looked like figures in a soothing pastoral painting, with a title such as
The Reapers
, or
The Gleaners
. So rhythmical were their movements, so accustomed were they to working together. Like a couple working together making hay, or footing turf, or gathering seaweed, on a golden morning in a blessed landscape in the west of the country, miles and miles and miles away from this cold suburb, which looks as if all its roads and houses fell out of the sky and just happened to land on these unremarkable fields, miles from anywhere that makes sense. Miles from the city and miles from the mountains and miles from the river. Miles and miles from the silver sea.

When Martha wakes up in the middle of the night, she stays right where she is, in bed, and waits for sleep to return and rescue her from her worries – which it invariably does, although often not till about half an hour before it's time to get up. During that half-hour, sleep is as sweet as cut grass. On this night in September she has spent more than an hour brooding over something her neighbour, Mitzy, said to her. Something about how public servants are parasites, ruining the country. It's over a week since Mitzy said that. It's a common, a banal, opinion; every time you turn on the radio someone is dissing public servants and blaming them for the economic downturn. But it annoyed Martha and it's still on her mind, coming between her and her night's sleep. None of her usual tricks works – visualising a peaceful rural scene – a lake, a green field, some fluffy sheep – or imagining that her body is being sponged down from the toes to the crown of the head with warm water. So she tries a new strategy. She gets up. She gets up to make herself a cup of tea. An article about insomnia in the Sunday newspaper – today's, or yesterday's now – recommended this. Anything is better than lying there, the article, which was in the ‘Life' section, said. Martha agrees. Even though the last thing she feels like, at 4.20 a.m. – she glances at the time on her the clock – is a cup of tea, a drink she never much cared for.

Seamus, Martha's husband, is snoring away. His neat body is a low wave in the pale duvet; a cap of glossy grey-black hair peeps over the top like the head of a seal who has got stuck in a net. Seamus is one of those lucky sods who fall asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillow, and never opens an eye till morning. The snoring – and the tossing and turning, the sleep-shouting (at pupils, or colleagues, or maybe at her) – is one of the reasons for Martha's insomnia. She could move to another room but she knows he'd hate that, so she's hasn't suggested it. Yet.

Yawning – and how can she yawn when she's wide awake? – she pads over to the window and opens it. A breath of air comes into the room and kisses her face like a friendly animal. She hears a bird singing, clear as a star. The front garden is ghostly in its pale coat of dew but there's a rosy stripe in the navy blue sky over the houses on the other side of the street: Dunroon Crescent is edging into daylight. At this in-between time a deep harmony settles over the road. Everything looks perfect: the white houses, the clipped gardens behind their tight hedges. Maybe it would be better if people stayed in bed, sleeping? It's when they wake up that all the hassle starts.

She thinks these thoughts and notices the sliver of rosy sun and the velvet hush and the eerie grass. But the main thing Martha notices is that the O'Keefes have their green bottle bin out. Finn is always quick off the mark with the bins. And of course he gets through plenty of wine; he could keep the bottle recycling crowd in business all on his own.

Lucky she got up.

She goes downstairs and puts on the kettle, then hobbles out the back to get the bin. Clara Byrne's dog, Bran, one of life's great opportunists, tries to get in as soon as she opens the kitchen door. He seems to live on Martha's patio, waiting for the main chance. ‘Shoo, Bran,' she says. Usually she lets him in – sometimes she has to ask Clara, who is a beautician and works from home in a shed in her back garden, to look after her cat, Fluff, when they're are away, so Martha gives Bran a lot of leeway. (And food. Fluff's leftovers. Fluff is a Norwegian Mountain Cat, a cat with a capital C, a fusspot.) But today she kicks Bran, not all that gently, in his scruffy behind, and down the garden he shoots like a bullet into the shadows, yelping. Unbelievable the speed of him, and he fifteen years old if he's a day. Martha can't be bothered working that out in dog years at this hour of the morning. You don't have to do the sums to know that Bran's ancient.

Just as she's pushing her bin through the gateway, someone comes around the corner of the road. Martha feels a cold bite of fear. She can't see the man's face. But there are young men in hoodies around this neighbourhood – they live in Lourdes Gardens, the Corporation housing estate at the other side of the railway line – who frighten her even when she meets them in broad daylight. Those eyes they have – defeated and aggressive at the same time, eyes that tell you they'd think nothing of scratching
your
eyes out if you so much as looked at them sideways. It's not their fault they're so sad and angry. But it's not hers either and she'd rather steer well clear of them. She'd move to another, more secure, neighbourhood if it weren't for Seamus. She'd like to try living in the middle of the city – but Seamus won't hear tell of it. He loves Dunroon, a
rus in urbe
, between the mountains and the sea (they're two of his reasons for loving it; he can come up with quite a list, if pushed; he's good at rationalising his whims and desires). Seamus feels strongly about the house and has told her, if she moves, she moves alone. Also, that she can move when he's dead – as if she needs to be told that.

The man sees Martha seconds after he turns the corner and he stops dead in his tracks. Just stands there on the footpath. Frozen. Why? What is he afraid of? A short, tubby, middle-aged woman in her nightdress? She's hardly reached the path and the bin is over the dish of the gateway but she leaves it exactly where it is, half in and half out, and takes to her heels. Like the hammers of hell, she sprints across the garden and in through the side door.

They call it a side door but it's not a door. It's a wrought-iron gate, with a complicated pattern of twisted black leaves and shoots and branches, some of them rusting. As soon as she closes it she peers out through the wrought iron. The person is walking right past her house now – she can see him over the escallonia hedge. And it isn't a man at all. It's just a girl. Or woman, really. It's just Siobhán Moriarty from next door. Mitzy's daughter.

Siobhán is skinny as a sweeping brush, and nearly six feet tall – the height she gets from her father, Eugene, who is the biggest man in the parish. She has herself all wrapped up in a big anorak or coat or something, so in the half-light she looks like a man. Still, Martha has known her since she was five years old – Siobhán must be over thirty but she's living at home at the moment, between jobs or relationships or flats or something.

Martha shakes her head and smiles at her own foolishness. How did she not recognise Siobhán's walk? Siobhán has that gait all the girls have these days when they're out on the town, dressed up (or down, because they go out in their underwear, it looks like). They mince along on their spindly high heels like blackbirds after a worm in the grass. Siobhán is more like a young heron as she picks her way along Dunroon Crescent. She must have come home on the Nitelink, or a taxi – does the Nitelink run this late? She could have waved, then Martha wouldn't have felt scared. But Siobhán had been startled, too – the old and the young don't normally meet on the road at four thirty in the morning on Dunroon Crescent.

The kettle is well boiled when Martha gets back into the kitchen and she has to switch it on again. She makes her cup of tea, and sits at the black granite counter in their new extension and drinks it – then she goes back to bed and, yes, she manages to fall asleep, as usual, exactly one hour before the alarm rings and another week starts.

The Moriartys have been Martha's neighbours for ages. They were already living on the road when she and Seamus moved in. Eugene wasn't the friendliest then. He had a way of examining Martha with a shifty look in his sharp green eyes – the eyes of a pet fox. It was as if he suspected she was capable of doing something abrupt and untoward – taking a swipe at him or something. He didn't know what to make of her, he told her later, when they got to know each other better. She wasn't – she isn't – warm and chatty like most of the women on the road, and didn't take care of her appearance, like Mitzy. Martha was surprised to hear this, since it seemed to her that she took plenty of care – it's just a different appearance from that of the other wives on the road. More casual and, in those days, hippyish: maxi skirts, flat sandals, and she wore her mop of curly hair parted in the middle and tumbling down any old way over her shoulders – no hairdresser got within a hairdryer's roar of Martha in those days. Mitzy, however, always looks as if she's just stepped out of a salon; she's as smart as the president of Ireland even when she's, say, driving up to the shop for a bottle of milk; but she's a dote, inside and out.

Mitzy called on Martha the day after they moved in with a loaf of bread. ‘It's an American custom,' she said. Martha thought for some time that Mitzy was from America. It would have explained something about her – her confidence, her teeth – even though she spoke in her own polished version of the local drawl. ‘We got used to it when we were in Boston.' Eugene had worked in an international bank in the
us
for two years, before he got his job as something significant in health insurance over here. (He's an actuary, able to work out when people are going to die. Though when Martha once asked him to reveal the fateful date to her, he laughed and said, ‘If only!') ‘Welcome to Dunroon Crescent,' Mitzy smiled and gave a little mock bow. Martha said nothing. For a few seconds her mind turned to sponge as she stared at Mitzy: her thick fringe of auburn hair, her cream polo neck, her small golden earrings. Mascara, grey eye-shadow. Against the backdrop of the neglected garden, all scutch and dandelions and thistles, she looked like a princess who had strayed into a pigsty. Then Martha felt the heat of the bread through the white linen tea cloth and she inhaled its smell – as nutty and yeasty and calming as a mother's love. It restored her. ‘Would you come in for a cup of tea?' she asked, even though she hadn't the time, and Mitzy said yes, even though she hadn't time either – Siobhán and Conor were due to be collected from school; Mitzy's mother was with Lauren, but couldn't be relied upon to watch her for long – not many people could, Lauren was a real monkey. But Mitzy always accepted invitations to tea, knowing that a refusal can be hurtful.

‘Excuse the mess,' Martha said, delighted that Mitzy had agreed to come in, that she already was making friends after just one day in her new home. ‘A mess' did not go halfway towards describing the house. That implies untidiness, unopened boxes, furniture in the wrong places. It doesn't indicate that there was a huge damp patch on the hall ceiling, that the lamps in the living room had been pulled off the wall, leaving exposed wires, that the lino had been ripped off half the kitchen floor, leaving depressing patches of grey concrete here and there, like puddles of rain. Seamus had insisted that the house, which was not too far from where he worked, was in walk-in condition because it had central heating, unlike lots of the older, more picturesque ones he had decided against. But apart from the heating, which didn't work properly anyway, it had nothing. It was a shell. Martha planned to move out after a few years and get a house she liked herself.

They sat at the table – Martha's first table, made of shiny beige Formica imitating wood – and drank instant coffee out of china cups painted with roses, which Martha's mother had given her when she and Seamus bought the house. Mitzy, who took in the state of the house and of Martha in one discreet glance, gave her some useful information about the neighbourhood: after Mass on Sunday is a good place to meet people; you can play tennis by the hour at the club, you don't need to be a member; and the Protestant school is the best by far, but you need to put your child's name down the minute it is conceived.

Martha shook her head and laughed. She assumed she would never have a baby, because her periods were light and irregular. Seamus wasn't desperately interested in getting a child, since he already had one, a son, Shane, who lived with his mother. And on top of all this, they weren't married, since there was no divorce. But, in fact, she was already pregnant as this conversation was taking place, although she didn't realise it for another six weeks. Then she went to the doctor because she believed she was suffering from travel sickness. She was working, then as now, in an office in the city – the Department of Justice – fifteen miles away. She commuted by train, the old brown diesel train that ran along the coast of Dublin before the
dart
came on track, in 1984, and changed life for the better. It stopped at Dunroon station at 8.15 a.m. If she missed it, the next one was at one o'clock. She came home again on the five fifteen – there was another evening train at six and that was it. Because it ran so seldom, the train was always crammed. People were squeezed into every crevice – even the accordion-pleated corridors were packed with bodies. You had closer physical contact with strangers on that train than you had with any other human being, ever, apart from your spouse or lover. Everyone on the train had the same fantasy, as, glued together into one writhing snake of human flesh, they lurched from the suburbs into the city. And it wasn't an erotic daydream. The fantasy was about Jews on the trains going to the concentration camps. Everyone knew the association was absurd. Martha, too. But she couldn't stop it popping into her head as she endured the nightmare, morning and evening, those first months of her life with Seamus. They must have felt like she did. Sick as dogs. Sick as dogs, and trapped, and unable to move one inch.

‘Good news,' the doctor said. She had a chirpy English accent. Martha was speaking to her on a public telephone in the entrance hall of the Four Courts, beside a statue of a flabby naked woman with a broken nose, holding a tiny weighing scales in her right hand. Martha knew what good news meant. But she stalled as she took it in and said, ‘What do you mean?' She'd only been living with Seamus for three months. They didn't have a sofa for the front room, or a proper double bed, just two singles shoved together, one lower than the other.