He heard stirring upstairs: his wife turning over in bed, he decided. Kathleen had become a heavy sleeper since they had had the house to themselves. Their daughter, Iseult, had moved to a flat in Cabra, to be with her fella, Pat the Brain, Minogue guessed. Kathleen knew this too and pretended not to know. Iseult worked mostly with embroidery out of a shared studio in Temple Bar. This last year she had been given a grant to travel the length and breadth of the country working up murals on school walls. Sometimes he liked to think of his daughter as beginning a mural in Donegal and painting it all the way down to Kerry, cutting a swath of colour and life across the island.
The Minogues’ son, Daithi, was biding his time in Boston, three months away from a Donnelly visa allowing him to work legally in the U.S. Daithi had displayed an American girlfriend on a visit home eighteen months ago. He had spoken feelingly of the States being full of opportunity. Kathy had slept in the attic, talked glowingly of her Irish ancestors and been unremittingly cheerful during her two-week stay. She had an enthusiasm for learning more about the Celts and learning Gaelic. Even Kathleen had been impressed.
The rain seemed to have let up. He moved away from the window and again considered the Jamesons. Maybe read for a half-hour to settle his thoughts down. He pulled down glossy folders from the top of the television set and studied the floor plans. Kathleen had the bug about selling their house and moving into these apartments or a townhouse. What about a garden, he had asked. What for, was her answer to that. Land, he had told her-something to walk on, somewhere to plant things that she thought still came mysteriously from the supermarket. No need to be sarcastic, she had replied, and then took the high road: why not something different from the run-of-the-mill? A terrace, a Japanese style of place with lumps of rock and shrubs and what have you, somewhere he could sit and read. He had retired from the fray at that stage and had spent his energies in avoiding the topic since.
He yawned and studied the floor plans. Fitted kitchens, security systems, prestigious addresses, easy access to the city. Huh, he thought. “Easy access to the city”: Dublin? Must be a joke. He felt the resentment prowling behind his thoughts then. He dumped the folder on the chair and hot-footed it to the kitchen with the words sour and ugly in his mind: lifestyle, state-of-the-art, unrivalled. Kathleen worked as a secretary for an auctioneer and came home with these brochures almost daily now. Her employer could get them a deal, she argued. How could he tell her that the last thing he wanted was a deal? Kathleen had been the thrifty and sensible gatherer all these years but he had lately begun to see in himself a stronger urge to shed. He grasped the bottle of Jamesons and cast about for a tumbler. He paused then and, leaning against the counter kitchen, stared at the sink. Manslaughter’d have Jelly Nolan on the street inside five years. If Cartys, the loan sharks, didn’t do for Nolan one way or another, inside or outside the nick, that is.
Minogue’s thoughts fastened suddenly on Shea Hoey. Hoey was drinking. He, Minogue, second-in-command to Jimmy Kilmartin-the Killer, as he was known for his leadership of the Murder Squad-had not approached anyone about it. Hoey had had a smell of drink to him two days in a row last week, Minogue remembered. Looked washed out. What to say, what to do.
The Jamesons was sharp and it cut at the back of his throat. There was nothing new about Gardai drinking hard off-duty. Hoey’s girlfriend, Aine, had signed up to teach for a stint in Zimbabwe and had flown out in September. Minogue had met Aine twice. She was cheerful, freckled and opinionated. That was teachers for you, he supposed. Hard on the heels of his last gulp from the tumbler came an urge for more. Duty-free, Minogue’s familiar gargoyle jeered nearby. Might as well at that price, go on, can’t you? He took the bottle into the living room, slipped out of his shoes and lay on the couch.
The prevailing winds sweep in from the Atlantic and skim spume from the waves before they slam into the cliffs and inlets of west Clare. Carried up over the cliffs come the faint and massive slaps of the water’s battery, the screeches of sea birds, the winds’ roar. Behind the cliffs’ edges, the grasses flatten and hiss as the gales buffet the headlands of this western edge of Clare and Ireland and Europe known as the Burren. The winds whistle through gorse and heather before they move across the patchwork of fields and drystone walls which creep up the Burren hillsides. Above the fields, boulders appear as a thickening crop which the soil cannot resist pushing to the surface. Higher yet, on the plateaus where the boulders give way to fissured limestone terraces, the gales race on. But in this wilderness which looks to be the work of nature alone, a careful eye can spot marks of ancient settlement. The Famine completed the work of centuries of erosion and left the Burren almost deserted. Behind them, the waves of settlers have left their ruined castles and churches, their deserted villages, their ancient ring-forts and their graves.
Over Fanore and Kilcorney, through Lismara and Tuamashee, the winds course, battering and caressing, rippling the surfaces of turloughs, those seasonal lakes brimming with dark water. Like cattle labouring home full, the clouds move with the wind over the towns and villages and the long wet ribbons of roads that lead across the midland plains. With rain on the wind, the whole island can be wet within hours of those first clouds descending on the Burren. Although the hills on the west coast draw down heavy, dreary rains, they still leave enough for the midland pastures and even for Dublin city. In the Kilmacud suburb of that city, Minogue, long exiled from the precincts of the Burren, slept fitfully on the couch.
Kathleen Minogue, Dublinwoman, opened the bedroom curtains just in time to see the Dublin Mountains fade into the mist as the rain rolled down into the suburbs. She plugged the kettle in, tiptoed back to the doorway and surveyed her husband. He stirred and laid an arm over his eyes. Asleep in his jacket even, she thought. She was caught between exasperation and pity. He was very long.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he murmured. She started. His eyes stayed dosed as he raised his forearm from his eyes and stretched. The kettle wheezed and ticked stronger in the kitchen.
“Don’t be so sure of yourself,” she said.
Awake but fuzzy from the whiskey, Minogue tried to pull back a piece of his dream as it fell into obscurity. All that remained was a face indistinctly recalled and fading fast: a man, young, smiling at him, asking him or telling him something. Familiar, gone. At least it wasn’t Jelly Nolan’s face.
“Looking over the wreckage and wondering, I’ll bet,” he said. “Go on, tell me you aren’t now. I’m a detective. You can’t cod me.
“We have an early start on Hallowe’en here with you on the couch. Frankenstein or something.”
“Now I know where Iseult gets her wit.”
She folded her arms and watched Minogue’s eyelids flutter. A tight and pleasant ache cradled itself in her stomach and rose up in her chest. At my age, she thought. Last week he had reached for her in bed, stifling her giggles. She remembered him keen and gentle, whispering to her, saying her name as he coiled about her. Not heavy at all but arching easily, waiting. She flushed and tightened the belt on her dressing gown.
“Raining again,” he said.
“Go up to bed, can’t you.”
“I will not,” he declared. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “And what’s more, I have news for you. You can tell that boss of yours, that go-by-the-wall auctioneer, that after-shave gurrier, that you need a holiday. Are you listening to me?”