The Riders

  But the sea is wide

  And I can’t swim over

  And neither have

  I wings to fly . . .

  The house smelled sweetly of turf and scrubbing. There was crockery on the pine dresser and a shelf beneath the stairs with old paperbacks on it already. There was a birch broom inside the door and a stack of larch kindling by the turfbox. An oilskin hung from a peg on the chimney wall above his Wellington boots. Beside him, the little refrigerator hummed on the flagstones. There were cheap curtains on the windows, blue against the whitewash, and the sun spilled in across the stainless steel sink. Admit it, he told himself, you like it, you like the place now that it’s full of things. Because you love things, always have.

  Scully was like his father that way. No matter what the Salvos said, the old fella thought certain objects were godly. Briggs and Stratton motors, the McCulloch chainsaw, the ancient spirit level that lived in the workshed beside the dairy, the same bubbly level that caused Scully junior to have ideas of drawing and building. Ah, those things. The old girl thought it was idolatry, but she had a brass thimble she treasured more than her wedding ring.

  It wasn’t getting things and having them that Scully learnt; it was simply admiring them, getting a charge out of their strange presence.

  Scully wiped the windowpane with his sweatered elbow and saw the rhinestone blaze of the frozen fields. Too good a day for working. He couldn’t spend another day at it, not while the sun was out. Pete was right, he wasn’t seeing anything, buried alive in work. He didn’t even know where he was living.

  On the kitchen table he began a letter home but he realized that it wouldn’t reach them in time. He looked at the little aside he had written to Billie in the margin. Even if I fall off the world, Billie Ann Scully, I will still love you from Space.

  He smiled. Yes.

  • • •

  THAT MORNING HE DROVE INTO birr and organised his banking. He had a cheque made out to Peter Keneally as part payment. He bought a leg of New Zealand lamb and a sprig of rosemary at insane cost. He found oranges from Spain, olives, anchovies, tomatoes, things with the sun still in them. Men and women greeted him as he humped a sack of spuds to the Transit in a light drizzle. He bought an Irish Times and read about the mad bastard in Melbourne killing eight in the Australia Post building. Jumped through a plate glass window on the tenth floor. Someone else in Miami, an estranged husband killed his whole family with a ball peen hammer and gassed himself so they could all be together again. Shit, was it just men?

  Two kids in fluorescent baseball caps walked by singing. He started the van. Yes, at least they sing here, whatever else happens.

  • • •

  ALONG THE WINDING LANES HE drove, contained between hedges and walls, swinging into turns hard up against the brambles, skidding mildly on puddles hard as steel, until he came to a tree in the middle of the road, with rags in its stark branches. It stood on a little island of grass where the road had been diverted around it. Scully pulled up alongside and saw the shards of cloth tied here and there, some pale and rotten, others freshly attached. A sad little tree with a road grown around it. It looked quite comical and forlorn. He drove on.

  • • •

  AT COOLDERRY HE PULLED UP outside the village school. He got out into the light and stood by the hurling pitch as the bell clanged for lunch. The bleat of children made his heart soar.

  A car idled down the hill.

  ‘How are you, Scully?’

  He turned and saw that it was Pete-the-Post with his arm out of the van.

  ‘Me? A bit toey, I’d say.’

  ‘Toey?’

  ‘Anxious, impatient, nervous . . .’

  ‘Antsy, then.’

  ‘No, toey.’

  Pete smiled and turned off the motor. ‘Not long, son. Two days now, isn’t it?’

  ‘How’s Conor?’

  The postman pursed his lips and looked out across the muddy pitch where gangly boys began to mill and surge, their sticks twitching. ‘Auld Conor’s losing, moment by moment. The drink, as if you didn’t know. It’s the saddest sight to see, Scully, a man lettin his own life slip through his hands.’

  Scully scuffed his boots in the gravel. ‘Any reason for it?’

  ‘Aw, too long a story to bother you with. Somethin terrible happened in the family, five or six year ago. Somethin . . . well, somethin terrible. Conor’s the kind of man who’ll not let it be. He never mentions it, of course, never utters a word. But he broods, you know. There’s things that have no finish, Scully, no endin to speak of. There’s no justice to it, but that’s the God’s truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em. Now listen to me goin on in your ear like a radio.’

  Scully waved his apology aside. ‘You’re a good brother to him.’

  ‘There’s a grand singin pub over to Shinrone I’m goin to tomorrow night. Why don’t ye come with me and we’ll celebrate your last night as an Irish bachelor.’

  Scully squinted, hesitating. He felt as reluctant as a hermit, and foolish for feeling so.

  ‘Come on, Scully, be a divil!’

  ‘Okay,’ he smiled. ‘Thanks.’

  Scully stood in the blue cloud the AN POST van left behind and heard Pete go crashing gears through the village. He stamped his feet and heard girls squealing behind him. The little van suddenly braked on the hill, U-turned and came whinnying back. Pete pulled in again, blushing fiercely and shoved an arm out the window.

  ‘Knew I stopped by for somethin. Telegram, Scully.’

  He opened it while Pete drove off again.

  SETTLEMENT THROUGH. CONFIRMED AE46 SHANNON SUNDAY MORNING. JENNIFER.

  He stuffed it in his pocket and stood uncertainly there by the school, imagining them suddenly here with him. His hands shook. And then he realized – the bastard had read it. Peter knew before be did. Country life!

  • • •

  SATURDAY NIGHT SCULLY SHAVED and pulled on his best jeans, his roo-skin boots and a black pullover. From the tin trunk in the Transit he pulled the sleek black greatcoat bought one day in Place Monge in the desperate days of Paris. Four hundred francs secondhand. He shook his head even now at the thought. He’d worked hard for that coat. He brushed it down by the hearth and hung it up a while to air while he scrubbed his teeth with iron concentration. Scully, he thought, you look like a convict. You confirm every Englishman’s deep and haughty suspicion. You can’t help the face, but for goodness’ sake get a haircut.

  He stoked the fire and loaded it with turf, and then gathered up the house keys, big medieval things, that felt heavy as a revolver in his pocket.

  He read the crumpled telegram again. CONFIRMED, SUNDAY. The paper lay pale and odd on the scrubbed pine table, casting shadows from the firelight across the wood.

  He thought of the night they bought this place. When he woke in the wide musty room above Davy Finneran’s pub to see Jennifer standing naked at the window, lit by the neon of the chipper across the street as the last drinkers rolled home down the street. Her body was dark from the Greek sun. The bed held the scent of their sex. Billie slept on a sofa by the door, her limbs every which way. Scully didn’t move for a while. He lay in the hammocky bed, his mouth dry from celebrating. He just watched her over by the window as the church bells tolled. Her shoulders twitched; she sniffed. Scully loved her. He was not going home, he would never see his house and all his stuff again, but he loved her and she must know it. She wiped her eyes, wiped them and turned, startled to see him awake.

  ‘A . . . a dream,’ she whispered.

  But she seemed not to have even been to sleep.

  ‘You alright?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Come to bed.’

  For a moment, her body suddenly graven, she hesitated before padding across to him. She was cold, almost clammy against him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured.

  ‘About a dream?’

  Her breath was warm against his shoulder. He held her to him
and slept.

  Now Scully heard the Renault labour up the hill. He stoked the fire and switched out the light and went outside to meet Peter.

  • • •

  PETE-THE-POST DROVE THEM slowly through the gathering rain to Shinrone, passing the half-pint of Bushmills to Scully now and then who sipped and watched the tunnel the headlights made between the hedges and stone walls.

  ‘That’s a grand coat.’

  ‘Bought it in Paris.’

  ‘Paris. Friggin Paris, eh?’

  Scully laughed. ‘Paris.’

  ‘Is it like the movies?’

  ‘Not so you’d notice.’

  ‘I liked them Gene Kelly sorta fillums, you know with the dancin and the umbrellas and the kissin by the fountain.’

  ‘Well, we did a lotta that, of course.’

  ‘So what the frig did you do?’

  Scully sighed. ‘Worked me arse off, Pete. I painted and Jennifer wrote.’

  ‘Painted? You didn’t tell me you’re the artist type.’

  ‘I painted apartments, mate. Cash money. Worst job of my life, don’t ask.’

  ‘And the writin?’

  Scully took a pull of the hot, peaty Bushmills. Paris really wasn’t the kind of thing he had in mind on a fun night out. He wanted to forget the damn place once and for all. The long miserable days scraping the ceilings of tight-arsed Parisian skinflints. The desperate scuffle outside the school every morning with Billie, and those evenings of tears and rage when Jennifer’s frustration was like an animal in the room with them. It was a kind of affliction for her. After the early buzz, the heady weeks of hope and excitement, the days she slugged it out in the tiny apartment alive with ideas, and new friends to try them on, she became this thwarted creature.

  Some nights they stayed up and drank too much pastis while he tried to console her but she lashed out like something wild and cornered. It was his fault, she said. He was lazy, under – motivated – he had no ambition, no guts, which struck him as a bit rich, considering his circumstances. He did shit work all day so she could write. And gladly. God how he wanted her to break through into some kind of success, some new version of herself that made her happy.

  But Paris was a black hole, somewhere where Jennifer came hard up against the wall of her limitations while all he could do was stand by and watch.

  ‘Scully?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Tell me about the writing. Are you asleep or drunk already?’

  ‘Well, I liked it.’

  ‘What did she write? For certain, she’s the poetical type, takin the bothy the way she did.’

  Scully smiled and passed back the bottle. ‘Actually she’s very businesslike, Pete. Likes things neat and sharp, you know. Comes from a very proper family. Escaped from them really. She’s always thought her parents held her back from doing what she’d like to try. They pressured her into a career in the public service and stuff. She says they made her ordinary when she wasn’t. Safe, dull, that kind of thing, which she isn’t. I liked her because she was so . . . straight, I guess. But she hates that, being straight. Writing was one of those things she always thought of doing. You know, weird, risky things, the kind of things parents hate. All this travelling was her chance. She quit her job, had her heart set on Paris. Paris was poetry for her. And she wrote some nice poems, showed em to people and was kind of . . . crushed. Those bastards, her mates, they thought it was a bit of a joke. Well, fuck them. I thought the poems were good.’

  ‘You liked them cause you love her.’

  ‘No, I liked them cause I liked them.’ Scully watched the ragged hedges peel by. ‘Anyway, it didn’t work out.’

  ‘So much for dancin by the fountains.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Pete chugged on the whiskey bottle and gasped with pleasure. He steered with his knees a while and hummed theatrically.

  ‘By God, Scully, you’ve seen the world!’

  ‘On the cheap, mate, on the cheap.’

  ‘And what did you do in Greece, lie in the bakin sun and drink them little drinks with hats on em?’

  Scully laughed. ‘No, I worked for a stonemason humping granite up a hill. Loved it. Great place. Greece is like Australia invaded by the Irish.’

  ‘Good gravy, man!’

  ‘It’s true. Nothin works and no one gives a shit. Perfect.’

  ‘And what did Jennifer do?’

  ‘She painted.’

  ‘Houses?’

  ‘No, art painting. Well, you know, she had to have a try. She was okay, I thought. Trouble with Jennifer is she can turn her hand to anything. She’s quite good at a lot of things, but she wants to be a genius at one thing. Maybe it’ll happen. One day. She deserves a break.’

  ‘You love the girl.’

  ‘I do.’

  They coasted into Shinrone, rain drifting oblique in the lights of the little town which seemed choked with parked cars.

  ‘Arlo Guthrie was here last year, Scully. I came to see him myself. Remember that song:

  Comin into Los Angeles

  Bringin in a coupla keys

  Don’t touch my bags

  If you please, Mr Customs ma-aan!’

  ‘I remember. That’s a drug song, Pete.’

  ‘It never was!’

  Scully took the bottle from him and laughed till it hurt.

  ‘One of them U2 lads was down from Dublin to see the auld Arlo. I nearly knocked him over in the pisser. Where would we be without music, eh? It’s not really a drugs song, is it?’

  Scully only laughed, nodding.

  ‘Fookin hell!’

  • • •

  IN THE HOT WILD FUG of the pub that night, Scully lost the anxiety that had come upon him a couple of hours ago. The band tossed from jig to reel and the dust rose from the foul floors with the stomp of dancing and the flap of coats and scarves. The fiddle was manic and angular, the tin whistle demented, and the drum was like the forewarning of the headache to come. Someone came in with a set of pipes and an old man grabbed up the microphone and the fever of the place subsided as a ballad began. Scully couldn’t recall a sweeter sound that the sad soughing of those pipes. This was no braying Scots pipe; this was a keening, a cry loaded with desire and remorse. The old man sang with his tie askew and his dentures slightly adrift, a song of the Slieve Blooms, of being left behind, abandoned in the hills with winter coming on. Scully listened, transfixed, until in the final chorus he put down his glass and shoved his way to the door.

  Outside it was raining and there was no one in the street but a sullen black dog chained to a bicycle. Across the road the chipper was heating up his fat for closing time, his hard fluorescents falling like a block of ice into the street. Scully’s face was numb in patches, and he stood with his cheeks in the rain, trying to account for his sudden moment of dread in there. That’s what it was, dread. It’s a song, Scully.

  Pete stood in the doorway, peering out. ‘You’re not goin to puke, now are ye?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘You don’t like the music?’

  ‘The music’s great. Grand, in fact.’

  ‘By God, there’s some rascally girls from Tullamore in there.’

  ‘Go to it, son.’

  ‘You alright, then?’

  ‘I’ll be in in a moment.’

  Pete slipped back into the hot maw of the pub and Scully shook the rain from his face. The black dog whimpered. He went over and let him off the chain. It nipped him and bolted into the night.

  • • •

  AMID THE GREASY STEAM OF a parcel of chips the pair of them drove home singing.

  Keep your hands off red-haired Mary

  Her and I are to be wed

  We see a priest this very morn

  And tonight we’ll lie in a marriage bed . . .

  They came to the odd little tree in the middle of the road with its sad decoration of rags, and Scully asked about it.

  ‘A wishing tree,’ said Peter, stopping beside it and winding
down the window to let in a blast of cold air. ‘People tie a rag on and make a wish.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  Pete guffawed. ‘Does it fookin look like it, son? Does the country seem so much like the island of Hawaii? Not many of us get our wish in Ireland, Scully.’

  ‘Things aren’t that tragic here, surely,’ said Scully, feeling the mood slip from him.

  ‘Jaysus,’ yelled Pete. ‘Can you imagine how fooked it’d be if we did!’

  The postie’s teeth were huge and hilarious in the gloom.

  For a long way up the hill behind Binchy’s Bothy, a hare ran doggedly before them at the roadside, his tail bobbing in the headlights as they slowed. On and on it ran, weaving now and then to seek an opening in the stone wall, skittering across glassy patches of mud, until finally, it veered left into a boreen and claimed the darkness of the field. Scully and Peter Keneally cheered him all the way to the crest of the hill.

  At the cottage, Scully climbed out and stood a moment by the van.

  ‘Cheer up, Scully. It’s tomorrow already.’

  ‘Tomorrow it is.’

  ‘God bless you now.’

  ‘Thanks for tonight. Thanks for everything.’

  ‘Ye want me to drive ye down to Shannon after mass?’

  ‘Thanks, but it’s probably best on my own.’

  ‘Well, see you Monday, then,’ said Pete, setting off down the hill. His lights burned down the hedges and disappeared.

  Scully opened the door. There was still some life in the fire. He heaped on some more turf and a few chunks of coal and stirred it back to brightness. Room by room he went through the place, trying to imagine them all in it, but he was too tired and drunk perhaps, for the images skidded away from him as he straightened a rug here, stood a chair there, then finally went to bed upstairs in sheets that smelled of factories and shops and sunnier places.

  Eleven

  SCULLY WOKE SOMETIME IN THE night, his throat raw and dry. He heaved himself out of his bed into the cold and stumped downstairs for a glass of water. Cattle bellowed from Brereton’s sheds down beyond the castle. At the sink he saw that the sky had cleared and there were stars out. A misshapen moon hung high and bright in the black. Down at the castle there were lights. He stood there naked and shivering by the window, watching them move through the trees. Kids, he guessed, local teenagers playing up on a Saturday night. He drank his water and placed the glass in the sink. He wondered if Jimmy Brereton knew. It couldn’t hurt to take a look.