If all were to be well it should have ended there. But as she’s leaving, he calls after her are her family well?
— There’s little left of them now. I lost my husband and my son recently as well.
He’s sorry. He won’t ask her what happened for he wouldn’t want to upset her like you know. Confused, he mutters, it’d probably be no harm if she was to have animals in about the place, he hasn’t been near it in years. But she better call back for he’d have to think about it. Goodbye now and in he’s gone, catching the tail of his dressing gown belt in the door and struggling before re-opening it. She’s careful and doesn’t look back. She won’t have him embarrassed. She knows what way fellas go when you catch them short. She hears the door slam. It may have lost her the house, the dressing gown belt may have scuppered it.
*
She wanted him to ask what happened. She wanted to be upset by his inquiry after her dead men. What is wrong with her? She’d be happy enough if someone was to take the time to assume they’d upset her by asking the questions she’s delighted to answer. I had a husband and a son and they were both taken from me suddenly and what have I learnt from this? I have learned no answers. I’ve learnt to act rather than wonder. I’ve learnt only how to misbehave.
*
On the bus back, the wobbly, straw-haired alcoholic the bus driver cautioned them about on the way down, this fella who selects Eastern Europeans to sit beside … well here he is now stagger-teetering his way back the bus. Heads are down, clear of his gaze — don’t, don’t sit beside me, whatever my sins, don’t choose me. Plunge, plonk. The smell hits her the way heat swipes your face at the oven door. His heat says drink hath been consumed and will continue to do so as long as there is a pulse left in me. He’s a desperate alcoholic, the one who’d see every limb removed before he’d quit. Below the above-the-waist stink of him, he’s soiled himself since he stepped off the bus and barely noticed because his inebriation insulates against the embarrassment of the trace of wet on a leg. Even the man’s eyebrows are in disarray.
A lean, his nostrils toward her.
— You’re going to Dublin, is it?
She nods. (She can’t speak to him because he’ll talk the whole way home.) The bus is headed the opposite direction. Should she tell him lightly that he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going today? She remembers the earlier refrain, arra he’s harmless enough. He can sleep it off instead.
There’s plenty harm in the smell of him as the stench now is turning her stomach. The small bangs from his right forearm which falls onto her every time the bus turns. What can she do with it, only shove it off, or lift him up by his sleeve.
Once he’s in a deep enough sleep, she’s an idea. A handful of baby wipes Joanie tucked into her handbag a while before — did Joanie think diabetes caused dribbling? She goes to work on him. His hands are in awful shape. She wipes one, tentative so he will not wake to see she’s repairing his hygiene. Above, she opens the air vent. No effect. She’s pegged in by him. He’s bitten the corner of his mouth and there are various scars on his face, but his hands are the worst. Swollen with muck and either hard drinking or hard work, his unnaturally widened fingernails and bludgeoned fingers are difficult to improve. He’s young enough beneath the damage, yet rolling through bottle to bottle. She could bring him home and fix him up. She could put him in the Blue House.
It’s the neglect that grabs her. He reminds her of an injury she once sustained trying to move a lump of rock in the field. It slipped back. An extended moment with her left hand pinned underneath it, a pain that gave way to a numb astonishment. Her screams brought Jimmy and he rolled the rock away. It was only in retreat did the scale of the pain raise itself back to an accurate octave. She remembered her son holding her left hand in his two hands, and pressing it into his armpit to bring the blood back to it and her roaring and him Mam, mam can you feel your fingers? and pulling her amid this distraction to the kitchen, him muttering oh Jesus Christ.
This fella today is under the rubble that’s himself, inebriated against it all, even a strange woman mopping him up on the bus. And what it is to have someone pull at your hand and demand the blood come back to it. What it is. What it is to have someone mutter oh Jesus Christ on your behalf. What it is.
Through the window, she forces her attention onto the landscape in the hope of any explanation that might take her from yet another public dissolve. Long finished, uninhabited developments gouge the edge of the countryside, leaking out from every village with names more redolent of fizzy wines than serious settlements. They infringe where cattle once grazed. Eventually there will be nothing left between villages, no lead into them and no lead out. You don’t see people walking so much anymore, she thinks. There’s no rhythm to lull you. There’s no slow pace of a person headed up the town. The town that’s two streets and a crossroads. They say the population is swelling but the roadside is so bereft of people you’d swear they’d been wiped off by an epidemic. The development and its pace are akin to the disgrace of him beside her. Caught up in itself it pays no heed to those wandering among it, just the gallop forward and he, like it, just the daily lift to the lips, never mind where he shits or sleeps or makes a fool of himself.
Yet there’s something to admire in all the disgrace of him, that he cares so little, that he’s proudly reduced. Were he in her situation he’d act on her desires. Desires that have taken her into this bus to Limerick to knock at the door of a man who has instructed her to return for his verdict. He’d lay his head whereever he has cause or need to and would not go to Limerick to ask permission, nor hesitate asking permission to do this or that. He needs no permission to head to the pub each day and there’s no pub would caution him until he started to smash the place up.
She’ll do like him. She’ll no more wait to enter the Blue House. She’ll go back to your man next week to seek his permission to be in a house he doesn’t give a toss about because she’s committed to do so. She’s tired of fellas telling her yes and no. Tomorrow she’ll go over to the house and decide on the state of it.
*
The next Thursday she found out how bitter he was. She returned against her better judgment, against instinct, she returned only because he told her to.
— Oh it’s you again, he snaps at the door.
— You told me come back.
— Well it’s a wasted journey. The place is not for rent. And I’ll hear no more about. Don’t come bothering me again do ya hear?
Before he can shut the brown door.
— Where was it again you were born, where in the family were you, the youngest or the middle?
— What would you want to know such a thing for?
— You’re not the youngest I am certain?
— That I am not. The youngest is gone. Cirrhosis of the liver he had and his own stupidity what gave it to him.
It’s just a moment. She stares into that moment. It’s interrupted by the clip of the door closing. But he has given her a moment and it means he’ll give it again.
Like a mad woman she calls through the letter box.
— I remember your granny at the front of the house. She had something in her hand she was always fixing. Bad tempered she was. I felt sorry for you all.
Silence.
— I don’t know why you hold onto such a place if there’s nothing good held in it for you.
Silence.
— I could make it nice and then you could come back to it.
The shadow marches back through the glass growing wider as she lifts her brow away from it. The door’s pulled back sudden.