In case you’ve fallen out with Carty, at the other end of the village is Lynch’s funeral parlour. There you can exit the world through Toby Lynch’s sitting-room-turned-undertakers. Toby turns off the television and lays a doily over it when he has a corpse, except that time during the World Cup. In my mind he’s played by Vincent Crummles, Theatrical Impressario in Nicholas Nickleby (Book 681, Penguin Classics, London). A lovely man, as they say hereabouts. A lovely man. Toby does the make-up for the Drama Group during Festival season and so Lynch’s is a good choice if you like a little Red Number Seven and Brown Number Four on your cheeks or are planning on making a Good Entrance in the next life.
If you get past Death and enter the village proper you’ll pass Culligan’s Hardware that’s no longer a hardware shop and MacMahon’s Drapery that’s no longer a drapery since Lidl came to Kilrush and started selling Latvian wellingtons for nothing and blue one-piece overalls that make the farmers look like they’re Nuclear Waste inspectors. The shops still have the names over the doors though and Monica Mac still has some leftover stock in her front sitting room which she sells to select clients who can’t countenance living without being à la Mode MacMahon, which basically means ‘Washes like a hanky’ Mam says.
Hanway’s Butchers is an actual shop. Martin Hanway too is a lovely man, huge hands, he’s one of those farmer-butchers who have their own animals in the fields out back and on warm wet fly-buzzing days in June he leaves the back door open and you can see next month’s chops looking cow-eyed at the stall. I turned vegetarian when I was ten. Nolan’s Shop doesn’t say Nolan’s over it, it says SPAR in garish green, but no one calls it that. You ask someone where Spar is you’ll get blankety blank, as Tommy Fitz says. Despite the Boom and despite the Bust, Nolan’s are hanging on. They survive on selling sweets to the scholars and Clare Champions to the pensioners. Sometimes they have out-of-date cornflakes and Weetabix on Special and get a run on customers who don’t believe in time. Since we decided to impress the Germans and save the world by abolishing plastic bags in Ireland there’ll be any number of customers trying to balance eggs milk carrots turnips cabbage and bread loaves in their arms coming out the door.
The village has three pubs, all of which the Minister for Fixing Things Not Broken wiped out when the drink-driving laws changed and petrol stations started selling Polish beer. Clohessy’s, Kenny’s and Cullen’s are all ghost pubs now. They have about seven customers between them, some of whom are still living. Seamus Clohessy says one roll of toilet paper does for a month.
At the end of the village there’s the Post Office which is no longer a Post Office since the Rationalisation, but following the edict Mrs Prendergast refused to surrender her stamps. Back in the day when Mina Prendergast first got the position from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and moved into High Office as Postmistress of Faha, she felt a little ascension. She was officially lifted just a few inches above everyone. She started wearing open-toed shoes and hats to Mass, Nan says. And, as Mrs Nickleby said of Miss Biffin, that lady was very proud of her toes. To which there was nothing more that needed saying. The Prendergasts were The Quality, and even though they were living in the rainy forgotten back-end of the country they proved what Edith Wharton said about a defeated people who are without confidence in their own nature, they will cling to the manner and morality of their conquerors. So the Prendergasts had the doilies and the little embroidered napkins and proper teacups and saucers and these tiny teaspoons that you’d need about five scoops with to stop the Earl Grey tasting of ladies’ bathwater. They had the BBC. For Mina the Post Office was proof that she was just that little bit Upper. So taking the stamps from her was out-and-out devastation. She wouldn’t countenance it. And she didn’t. So now the shoes coat and hat ensemble goes to Kilrush weekly and buys stamps, comes back, lays them on the counter and opens for business regardless. Let the Minister run the rest of the country, Mina Prendergast is running Faha PO until the end of this life.
Next to the Post unOffice is Father Tipp’s, the dilapidated Parochial House that was once Grimble the land agent’s, a big imposing two-storey, ten empty rooms commanding the river view where Father Tipp dilutes the pain of exile in Clare by indulging in buttered Marietta biscuits and horse-racing, lives with a fine collection of mahogany, an almighty congregation of mice.
Last house out the road, with footpath, flowerbed, pedestrian crossing and streetlight in front, is the wrought-iron and stone-fronted magnificence of our Councillor, whom pretty much everyone calls Saddam after he went on the trade mission to Iraq. As I live and breathe, Barney Cussen said when the Councillor came into Ryan’s, if it isn’t Saddam. The Councillor didn’t object. A vote is a vote. And it was better than Leatherballs. He had a bald head by twenty-two which gave him a passing impression of intelligence and resulted in him being consulted on all manner of things. Some people become what others think of them, that’s what I’ve decided. So, once the Councillor started getting asked his opinion, fatally he became convinced of the existence of his own intelligence. You ask him a question you get a paragraph. He is focused intently on fulfilling his mandate, he’ll tell you, nodding slow and shrewd and narrowing his eyes to the distance behind you, as if his mandate is all the time trying to escape his focus.
End of the village is the graveyard; it’s crooked and dark and slopes to the river which is always trying to rise and take it, but it’s convenient for the church and means that dead parishioners never have to leave the parish, can enter the next world without having to learn new customs.
You’re out the end of the village now. Take a right and bear left at the Y and you’ll come to a cross. A right at the cross and a left that doesn’t look like a proper left but is more broken-down rough cut by the place Martin Neylon with six pints in him singing ‘Low lie the fields’ climbed the ditch in his Massey Ferguson the time of the ice, widening the road at no charge and leaving his own mark on history in the name Neylon’s Bend.
You’ll feel lost, which is all right, and you’re the only car now which is good because the road is only that wide and you have to slow down anyway behind Mikey who in his turned-down wellies is walking his Ladies, eighteen milking cows, along in front of you. He’ll know you’re behind him and in a salute he’ll sort of raise the bit of black pipe he uses to welt the backsides of those same ladies but he doesn’t turn around or turn the cows in to the side because they’re walking bags of milk those girls and it’s their road too and they graze the bits of grass that grow along the ditches but on the dung-slathered sight of their hanging udders you’ll swear you’ll never drink milk again.
So you travel along at cowspeed and you’ve time between the wipers coming and going to see the houses near the road and the ragged fields that fall down the valley to your left and because it’s summer when you come there’s the yellow gorse bushes that we call furze and when I was small used think was furs. It sort of glows in the fields and because you’re not a farmer you’ll think it’s lovely and not that it shows how poor the land is. You’ll think those patches of rushes are just shading or some other kind of grass they grow here and because you’re driving at cowspeed behind Mikey you’ll have time to look across and now you’ll see this gleam that is the River Shannon and you’ll feel the sense of an ending.