“A holiday,” she echoed. “In this? Where were you, in dreamland? It’s nearly winter, mister.”
“Santorini. I saw a picture of it in a window the other day. Blue and white and nothing else.”
Kathleen Minogue headed back to the kitchen. He followed her.
“I heard that all they do there is get twisted drunk and dance on the tables,” she said.
“What’s wrong with that?”
She made a face at him and scalded the teapot.
“God. Have a sup of tea with me and you’ll wake up and talk sense.”
“There are more tears shed over answered prayers,” he muttered.
“Smart remarks department is closed today,” she said. Minogue stared out the window.
“Have you forgotten we’re going down to Clare tomorrow?” Minogue groaned inside. He had forgotten. Maura Minogue, a sister-in-law whose cheerfulness and vivacity seemed invincible to Minogue- the more a miracle, he considered, because she had been married to his brother Mick for over thirty years-had been on the phone to Kathleen. Maura hadn’t asked for anything, but she had cried on the phone once. His nephew Eoin had recently been arrested and charged with possession of a gun which the Guards had taken from a bag in the boot of his car. The bag belonged to his friend but Eoin, weaned on his father’s Republican cant and full of a touchy and twisted sense of loyalty to the friend he had given a lift to, had delayed his own acquittal by making haughty speeches to the Guards. Eoin was to inherit the farm from Minogue’s ailing brother Mick, who was now too arthritic to do anything but token jobs on the farm. Farmers had fallen on hard times in the last few years. Now that she was marooned on the farm with Mick, finances a bit sticky maybe, Maura’s morale was hitting bottom, Minogue surmised.
“Did you hear me?”
Kathleen had read her sister-in-law’s conversation to mean that Maura wanted him to try and talk Mick and Eoin into selling part of the farm while there was still value in it. Minogue closed his eyes.
“I hear you.”
By the clumps of sodden grass that covered the rubble, a figure stood still. The rain dribbled off the rim of his cap and the breezes tousled his beard and hair. The rain had saturated his coat completely now and he felt cold drops roll down along his spine. The noises had stopped. He took his fists away from his ears and opened his eyes. Just the ruin and wet grasses and bushes under a low sky with the rain steady over everything. The cold had begun to fasten about his chest. He had been standing there for almost half an hour. The dog had tired of exploring and now lay at his feet. Occasionally it would get up, shake itself and nudge at the man’s knees with its snout. He would soothe the dog with words and strokes before returning to stare at the remains of the cottage. The more he tried to imagine it, the harder it got. The frustration clawed at his heart again and he heard himself whispering aloud trying to concentrate. The rain seemed to be getting heavier. In the few months since his release, he had come here many times. He had seen the odd car slowing as it passed the ruin, the driver eying him, but he never returned their cautious nods of greeting. Once he had thought of calling out to them: Yes, it’s Jamesy Bourke, all right, back to set things right at last. You can tell the whole bloody world that too, damn you! He thought back to the fear which had seized him just two days ago when he had started throwing the pills into the fire. Each day now, he committed the day’s ration of seven pills to the fire. The first time he had done it, his hand had reached out reflexively to save the melting pills from the embers, as though that part of him knew better than what his mind had decided.
But now the images that came to him had become clearer than ever. In spite of his fears, the pictures that sometimes exploded in his mind had not been the ones he had had back in the cell, the ones he remembered with a vague but overwhelming dread. Wonder drugs, they called them, but he had known all along they were used to keep you stupid too. For a moment he saw in the steady rain the face of the social worker who visited weekly in his shiny Volkswagen, faking cheer and sympathy on that pink, unlined face behind the glasses. He had come to hate that face too. It belonged to another one he had to surrender to if he was to keep alive his chance of getting his life back. You run a very grave risk-he heard the words again against the slowly waving bushes that still rooted by the ruin which was also the ruin of his life-a very great risk of relapse if you don’t maintain the treatment. Grave, relapse. Fuck him.
All that remained were the stones and the slab which had made up the floor of the cottage. Sort of like a grave but no one tended it. Jane was buried out in Canada. Murty Maher, the farmer who had rented the place to Jane, had bulldozed the walls after the fire. Bad luck on the house no doubt, and Maher had kept away from the place ever since. His hands seemed to remember that night better than his brain. The skin burned nearly black from trying to pull down the door as it was burning, but he hadn’t felt it at the time. Drunk, of course, too drunk. Some things he remembered but they had never fitted together: the way the flames burst out the windows after exploding the glass, the roar of the fire, the thatched roof she had liked collapsing with a whoosh. The heat on his face, his own screams that ripped at his throat so that he thought he had swallowed part of the fire itself, a Guard’s face inches from his own, shouting at him while he dragged him away by the neck. The hospital, the jail, his dejection at the trial were clearer memories. He hadn’t been interested in living, he recalled.
The wind blustered and flung rain into his face and he turned away. He looked at the shrubs and bushes that had run wild as they leaned with the wind. Stray leaves flew around him. His coat was heavy on him, pulling down his shoulders. He hadn’t slept last night and he still didn’t feel bad. Maybe he’d try to take a snooze when he got home and changed. A slap, like a hammer-strike on wood, was carried faintly on the wind to him. Thunder? The dog stood slowly, her ears pricked and her head rolling from side to side to hear better. She whined and looked to him. He called to her and began to make his way down to the road, stepping up over the mound of rubble which had been pushed out from the house to block the laneway against tinkers drawing their caravans in and settling. He stopped then and turned for a last look at what had been Jane Clark’s house. Here his own life had stopped too: like the floor dropping beneath him, he had tumbled into a nightmare which had lasted twelve years. And it still wasn’t over. He’d never met any of the Minogues. He had known them to see but, like the rest of them now, he knew they would be wary of him, pitying at best. Yet again the thought wormed into him that even Crossan had promised he’d get in touch with Minogue, the big-shot Guard in Dublin, just to get rid of him. He’d go to Crossan’s office in Ennis before the week was out, by God, and see what he had done. A. Crossan, Barrister-at-Law, he recalled on the plate by the door. Huh. Crossan had changed like the rest of them. He’d had twelve years to do it in, to get on with his life. The office and the secretary with her eyes like bloody saucers when he had walked in. Crossan no more than fucking Dan Howard didn’t want to be reminded of things that they’d written off as dead and buried years ago. But Crossan was all he had for now.
The anger tingled in his arms before it burned his chest. The rainwater ran across the road in little rippling waves like the sea ebbing on the strand. The drugs would only keep him asleep. That was like letting part of himself stay dead. It was time to wake up. Better this way than hanging on, hanging around with half a life. He called out to the dog and his heart lightened when he saw the wagging tail, the willingness. There were prisons with bars, he thought as he set out for home, and there were other prisons too. His prison now was his own memory, but he had been locked out.