Kit pretended to sip his oily, cold tea and wondered what a bockety old borrie was. He assumed it wasn’t something great, although it had quite a nice ring to it. On the whole, he had to admit his hostess was hardly giving Coolarney House a rave review.
“What about Avis O’Regan?” he asked. “Is she, you know—”
“What?” Maureen prompted unhelpfully. “Is she what?”
“Well, is she all right?” Kit continued, wishing he were dead or asleep or just somewhere else.
“As well as any married woman living with two single men and not a husband in sight would be. Oh, there’s been no sign of Mr. O’Regan in more than thirty years. You might happen upon him while you’re digging for treasure.”
Kit couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, you make it sound like a great place,” he said, “and I can’t wait to get there. But I’m telling you now I’m not interested in digging for treasure or making babies or whatever else goes on up there.”
Maureen raised her eyebrows. “So you are going for an interview then, are you?” She answered her own question. “The old bollockses. Typical, just typical they’d draft a dirty blow-in rather than help out a local lad. Cheesemaker, my elbow!”
She pinched her lips even further and Kit suddenly felt very tired and very thirsty. The intensity of Maureen McCarthy’s scrutiny was sucking the life right out of him, and he felt the need to go somewhere very quiet and dark.
“Would you mind if I went to my room now?” he asked Maureen, leaning forward in his chair. “It’s been a long day and I am totally whacked.”
“Better be in good shape for your big interview tomorrow I suppose,” said Maureen caustically. “Never mind me sitting all on my own here in the dark with no one to talk to.”
Kit rubbed his temples and sighed. He’d spotted a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream on the cocktail cabinet and it was unnerving him. “I’m not going there for an interview,” he said, struggling to come up with a plausible reason for why he was going there. “I don’t know anything about any interview. I’m just going to be staying there awhile. I’m working on a, ah, on an investment project with—”
He could see Maureen leaning toward him to glean as much as she could.
“Avis has some, uh, financial issues that she—”
Maureen was in danger of toppling off her stool.
“You know what,” Kit said suddenly, standing up. “I lost my wife a few months back. I’ve been drinking a lot since then and I got fired from my job, so a friend of mine suggested I come and stay with Avis for a while to get myself cleaned up, you know? So if I could just go and lie down for a while and maybe get some sleep, I would really appreciate it, Maureen. I really would.”
Maureen’s eyes glistened with this newfound knowledge.
“I’m so sorry for your troubles, Christopher,” she said, trying very hard to keep the glee out of her voice. “Come upstairs and I’ll show you to your room.”
Kit picked up his luggage in the hallway and followed her up the narrow stairway to a room with a door so low he had to bend down to walk through it. His room consisted of a single bed, a nightstand, a framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and an even smaller door that opened into a tiny bathroom, complete with a purple, frighteningly carpetlike toilet-seat cover.
“Would you be after me waking you in the morning, Christopher?” she asked kindly. “I’ll be up anyway making your breakfast and getting ready to launder your linen.”
How, thought Kit, does one get ready to launder linen?
“Thank you, Maureen. If I’m not downstairs by 8:30 please rap on my door.”
He guided her out into the hallway and retreated to his tiny room, banging his head in both directions, then stripped off down to his boxers and T-shirt and flopped onto the bed, every fiber of his being crying out for sleep. Unfortunately, the mattress appeared to be stuffed with porcupine quills, every fiber of his being poked by a different one. Sleep, Kit realized, was to elude him for a while longer yet.
He let his mind drift to the events of the past few days. They seemed to have passed in a long, frightening blur, and it hurt to think about it. His stomach lurched back toward his spine as he lay on the bed and thought of the humiliating scene that had unfolded at the office. He could still feel the hollow rap of horror as George bawled him out. How could it be that his career had ended that way? He still felt as though George had him confused with somebody else, although he was nowhere near as convinced of that as he had been three days ago.
A tear slid down toward his ear as he relived the hot burn of shame he’d felt waiting at the elevator in the trading room with Niamh. Niamh. Without her, he thought, he would be sitting right now in some badly lit bar, crying into his pretzels and singing old Neil Diamond songs. God damn her. Lying on a prickly bed in a strange country in a funny pink house, he realized just how removed he had become from his life. He’d gotten along fine without Jacey for the first thirty-one years of his life, so why had his world come tumbling down once she was gone? How could he not have noticed that drinking had become his job and trading his hobby?
Another tear slid down as Kit contemplated the possibility that his reason for existing had disappeared down the drain with his vodka collection. There didn’t really seem any point in anything, he thought miserably. He didn’t have a home or a wife or a job, and without any of it, his job especially, he didn’t know who he was. Hell, even with it he’d gotten confused. Kit moved his gaze from the ceiling to the Sacred Heart.
He knew now that the vodka had become a problem. He knew that when one minute after Niamh had left his apartment he had turned the whole place upside down looking for a secret stash. He knew it even more when she called half an hour later to see if that was what he had done. He knew it when she came back and slept on his sofa while he paced the floor, alternately wanting to kill her, kill himself, kill a drink.
Every time he thought of Jacey lying on the floor, the promise of their baby leaking out of her, his hand had wanted to fly out and grab something—and a drink seemed to make the most sense. His thirst only worsened every time he thought of his mother or father or Flynn.
Niamh had stayed with him at the apartment, booked his travel, arranged this place in Schillies, made all the necessary calls, even packed his bags. She’d come with him in the cab to the airport and waited until the last possible moment before waving him through the departure gate, urging him to be strong when it came to the duty-free liquor.
“It will be all right, Kit,” she had whispered into his ear as she’d hugged him good-bye. “You’ll be all right.”
True, he had resisted all offers of drink during the eight-hour flight—in Economy, for chrissakes, where alcohol was practically compulsory—had managed to walk past the airport bar in Cork before getting on his bus and had ignored the shelf heaving with spirits at the Schillies village store. But lying there on that prickly bed, his pillow soaking up the tears, Kit felt a growing emptiness that he desperately needed to fill, and he wondered if he ever really would be all right again.
With the bleeding heart of Jesus on the wall his only company, he prayed with all his heart that Avis O’Regan could help him. Then he fell into a deep, deep sleep.
CHAPTER TEN
“Show me a man who doesn’t eat cheese, and I’ll show his arse my boot.”
JOSEPH FEEHAN, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives
Fee looked out the window of the upstairs den at the raggedy bunch of hopefuls lined up by the farmhouse, waiting for the cheesemaker interviews to begin. There were six in all and his instinct was that there was not a cheesemaker among them. Usually he would have pointed this out straightaway, but Corrie had been so dispirited since the curd turned that Fee was loath to shatter their hopes at such an early stage. Anyway, his instinct was telling him that all was not lost.
“I think Brian Clancy is still fluthered from last night,” he said, stepping back behind the drapes and taking a sip of his tea. “He’s go
t hiccups, and yesterday’s drawers poking out the bottom of his trousers.”
Corrie raised his eyebrows at this piece of information and dipped a bit of Avis’s home-baked raisin bread into his teacup. “Does there look to be a cheesemaker among them, Joseph?” he asked.
“It’s hard to tell,” Fee answered, “from this distance. With the ivy and all that.”
Corrie sighed. He’d thought as much. “Who’ve we got, then?” he asked. “Apart from Brian?”
Brian would not be their cheesemaker. He was a nice enough fellow and in fact knew quite a lot about cheese, having worked in the high-end hospitality industry for years up in Dublin. However, he was severely hampered by often being unsteady on his feet, uncommonly attached, as he was, to the drink. Reliability was one of the keys to being a good cheesemaker, but Brian was something of a stranger to reliability and nearly everybody in Schillies had a story to demonstrate this.
“Dermot McGrath, for a start,” Fee intoned, peering through the glass, unimpressed.
Dermot was a big lump of a lad in his twenties, swollen with a lifetime of successful bullying and his doting mother’s dedication to overfeeding him. He wore a sleeveless vest designed to show off muscular biceps, but his upper arms in fact resembled two uncooked hams. His eyes were small and black; his hair dark, stringy and thinning on top, a fact he disguised, not very well, by wearing a baseball cap two sizes too small perched on top of his head. He’d had a lot of hot dinners had Dermot, and almost as many jobs, most of which were lost to him after a display of the nasty temper he kept well hidden until asked to do something.
“He’s teasing poor Jamie,” Fee noted, “the nuisance.”
“Our Jamie? Jamie Joyce?” Corrie asked. “What’s he doing out there in the first place?” Corrie asked.
“It helps to have a man on the inside,” Fee said knowingly.
“Ah, but poor Jamie?” Corrie was worried now. “That big lump of a boy will make a mess of him.”
“He’ll be all right,” said Fee, exasperated. “The state of you, sitting there with a face like a plateful of mortal sins! It’s not the end of the feckin’ world, you know.”
But for Corrie it was. A life without Fee looked dark and grim and altogether pretty hopeless.
“Anyway,” said Fee, changing the subject, “you don’t need to worry about Jamie. He can stand up for himself. He’ll be grand.” He peered through the window again, just in time to catch Dermot holding Jamie up against the factory wall by his chin.
“Say Ulysses,” Dermot was demanding.
“Pardon me,” Brian Clancy said, interrupting the taunting by belching loudly and sinking to a sitting position on the ground against one of the flower barrels.
“Say she sells seashells on the scheaschore.” Dermot’s jeering continued.
“Oh, feck off, would you.” Michael Cullen poked at Dermot with his walking stick. “Leave the poor lad alone.”
“What the feck!” Fee cried excitedly in the upstairs den. “There’s old Mickey Cullen! Jaysus, I thought he was dead. He must be more than a hundred by now. What’s he doing here?”
“Making a nuisance of himself with his stick, no doubt,” said Corrie.
Polio had left a young Mickey with a gimpy leg and in the many decades since the offending limb had withered, he’d become a deft hand in the stick department. Rumor had it that he’d once removed a man’s spleen through his belly button with the offending staff, and although nobody could actually back that up, there was many a man down at Blorrie Flatt’s bar who had worn the stick around the back of his neck for drinking other men’s pints or being slow to put his hand in his pocket.
Dermot was rubbing his pudgy arm and eyeballing Mickey’s stick. Although he was thick in the head, he wasn’t so thick that he’d mess with the stick.
“What are you here for anyway, Mickey?” asked Fergal Whelan, who was kicking stones carelessly around the courtyard. “What do you care about working?”
Spotting Fergal from above, Fee growled and narrowed his eyes.
Corrie looked up from his newspaper. “Who’s got the face like a plateful of mortal sins, now?” he asked. “What’s happening?”
“Fergal Whelan’s out there,” Fee said darkly, watching Fergal chat good-humoredly with Mickey. “That’s what’s happening.”
Corrie watched his friend closely. He’d never understood why Fee had such a switch about Fergal. He was a good-looking boy just a year or so older than Rose, and he’d worked at Blorrie Flatt’s since he left school. He had the air about him of someone who might have gone on to bigger and brighter things if only he’d bothered his arse. He was a bit of a dreamer but he could still look you in the eye and have a half-decent conversation, which is more than you could say for many. It was hard to suppose what there was to not like.
“It’s not a matter of not liking him,” said Fee, reading Corrie’s mind as he stepped back behind the drapes again. “Oh, don’t bother yourself about it.”
“I’m not here for the work,” Mickey answered Fergal down below. “I’m here to find the money.”
“Pardon me?” Brian Clancy repeated after another heinous belch.
“What money?” Thomas Brennan asked quickly.
“G’wan!” barked Fee, squashing his nose against the upstairs window for a better look. “If it isn’t Thomas Brennan!”
Corrie got out of his seat and shuffled to the window, looking down below. “Will you look at that,” he breathed.
“All fur coat and no drawers, that one,” Fee announced almost admiringly. “The cut of him!”
Thomas was wearing a three-piece suit and tie and was carrying a briefcase.
“Does he think there’s a job going in management?” Corrie wondered aloud as he retreated back to the comfort of his chair.
Still, it was hardly surprising that Thomas had turned up for the job—he was probably Schillies’ best-known unemployed person. The poor galoot had gone to Dublin a few years before with a great hiss and a roar to be something dot-com, a fact his mother Gertie never stopped reminding everyone and anyone who didn’t see her coming and manage to duck into a doorway first. The poor woman had been quite conspicuous in her absence since her golden boy came home in disgrace. Rumor had it that Thomas had been relieved of his employment months before anyone knew, pretending even to his live-in girlfriend that he was going off to work when really he was leaving their Temple Bar apartment to sit in Bewleys all day long drinking coffee.
Normally, a situation such as this would have inspired much sympathy among the good people of Schillies. But since his return Thomas had insisted on keeping up the pretense that he was running a major telecommunications empire from his mother’s kitchen; even after he had dropped his laptop computer case on the forecourt outside the Schillies co-op only to have it spring open and reveal nothing but three Playboys and a peanut butter sandwich, he maintained the façade, shouting into his cell phone (unconnected to any network) as he walked the village’s single main street.
Down in the courtyard, “What money?” Thomas asked Mickey, as he snapped the offending phone shut and put it in his pocket.
“Don’t listen to a word he says,” Fergal warned him lazily. “He’s just messing with you. It’s none of it true.”
“It’s none of it proved,” corrected Mickey. “That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“What’s not true? What’s not proved?” Thomas implored.
“Well,” started Mickey as Fergal rolled his eyes, “the story goes that somewhere not very far from where we all stand right here there is a small fortune buried.”
Jamie started to chortle, then checked himself.
“Shut up, stupid,” Dermot said, not loud enough for anyone else to hear, flicking one of his huge fat fingers and stinging Jamie’s neck. “How do you know about this then, Mickey?” he asked, in his big slow voice.
Inside the back door, Avis was getting the gist of the conversation as she tipped a tray of fresh baked raspbe
rry muffins onto a wire rack for cooling. The hidden treasure story got bigger and better every time she heard it.
“When they were building this place three hundred years ago it was Cullen hands that laid the brickwork,” Mickey said. “We were allus a hardworking bunch, we Cullens, big as oxen and strong like Samson in the Bible.”
Fergal Whelan took in Mickey’s wizened stature and tried not to choke with derision. “You’re out of your mind, Mickey. There’s never been a Cullen could reach the top shelf of the pantry let alone throw bricks about the place.”
“And you’re the genealogical expert all of a sudden, are you, Fergal?” Mickey threatened, waving his walking stick in the bartender’s direction. Fergal just rolled his eyes again.
“What about this fortune then?” Thomas prompted.
“Pardon me,” belched Brian. “Jaysus, me guts are killing me.”
“So it was Cullens built this great big house,” Mickey continued, “with all its bedrooms and sitting rooms and water closets and the rest of it, and even though they threw it up in record time, did the master of the place shout them so much as a single pint? Did he shite!”
Brian went six different shades of green before settling on a hue that exactly matched the foliage on which his head was slumped.
“Would a smoke bring you round, Brian?” Fergal asked, rolling him one anyway.
“He paid them their weekly insult did old Joey Corrigan, but when it came to putting his hand in his pocket for a man with a mouth on him, you can forget it,” continued Mickey. Brian took a drag on the cigarette Fergal had rolled him and Jamie watched his face slip from leafy green to clammy gray then to an almost human shade of pinkish-white. His eyes opened properly for the first time all morning as he expelled a lung full of tobacco smoke.
“Still,” Mickey continued, “when it came time to build the cheese factory, there wasn’t much of anything else happening work-wise so the Cullens came back, despite the boss being so mangy with the gargle. For months they dug into the ground with just a single pickax between the lot of them, excavating two fancy underground ‘caves’ so Himself could cure his cheeses just like the French do, oh la feckin’ la. Anyway, they finished, and were ready to start work on the rest of the building. When,” continued Mickey, thrilled with such an attentive audience, “who should appear out of this very back door here but old Joey Corrigan himself with three bottles of Irish Whisky and cheese and oatcakes for the lot of them. Well, naturally, the boys were thirsty, but the old devil had slipped something into the drink so strong that they all, one after the other, fell into a deep sleep. When they woke up the next morning, the caves had been sealed and the lads were given their marching orders. And that, my friends,” he finished proudly, “is the story of the buried treasure. It’s down there, all right,” he said, shaking his stick at the factory, “and ripe for the picking.”