*
Quick they were to water and ambulance. She was around by the time the ambulance men arrived and answering their questions. Yes lightheaded. No hadn’t eaten. Fasting. Seventy-two hours approximately. A religious fast. No, no not Ramadan. Jesus. Our Lord. She’s a Christian.
Was Our Woman, nearby mopping her legs and skirt, a relative? No, no, Our Woman shook. Would you drive this woman home? She cannot be alone and we’ve to get out and handle an angina attack out Foxford way.
Trapped. Our Woman would, of course she would. God bless you Mrs, the ambulance man said putting his hand to the small of her back. You’re very good. You’re very good.
— I’m not a Christian, she told him.
*
Red lived in a Ballina housing estate with a faux French misspelled name. Very difficult to find. Our Woman cannot believe the cruelty: trapped in a car with a woman who has crumbled her, delivered this crushing news. Our Woman took advantage of the chance to quiz her. Where did she work? An old folks’ home, with a funny name, mostly nuns. Was she married? No, she could never find anyone willing to marry her. How did she meet Himself? She’d rather not say.
Things were silent.
Will she come in for tea? Red asked.
Our Woman will not. Audacious, she thought, beyond audacious. Over the hills and far away nerve damage. As bold as life on Mars. As Red the Twit left, Our Woman hailed her back. How am I to believe what you’ve told me?
Listen take it easy on yerself, just forgive him.
— But if I am to forgive him, how will I know he did it?
There are items of mine in your house. He took one thing each time we met.
Red the Twit’s eyes said underwear. The international language.
On the drive home from Ballina, with few street lights to facilitate her, Our Woman considered crashing the car into a wall. There was a lovely black spot of a bridge, sharp and marked with the white crucifixes and moulded flowers of the other thirty taken non-deliberately in this spot. To be found mangled in a car, head to the wall or dashboard, might be easier than excavating the mind of the man who waited beyond at her kitchen table.
*
It was another way for the girls in her gang and their husbands. Our Woman observed their lives tied up and in with their husbands in small, significant ways that hers lacked during those days of her marriage. A husband might look out for his wife or display inquiry about his wife or the one that touched her most was how they could offer to relieve a burden.
They might lift a box for you. That would be useful. She was sure she had witnessed this, but couldn’t cite a clear example, with a name and set of knees attached. It must be enough that it happens.
Today with Himself gone out to the fields, she wipes the inside of a cup with a tea towel, the insulting slur of a tannin streak refusing to budge at the behest of her knuckles, while she tries again to retrieve such moments. Mostly she sees couples bickering in the upstairs cafe or between the clothing rails of Dunnes Stores. The groaning guts of those men spilling over the belts of their trousers, while handles of paper bags shackle them at the wrists. The most tenderness she can find is in teenagers, a young woman with her hand vulgarly slipped into the back pocket of a young fella. There’s aggression even in the way they kiss each other so flagrantly, like they’re trying to suck the other’s gums out, like an old horse chasing a lost scrap of ginger nut biscuit down the palm of your hand and up your sleeve.
So she cannot name them, but she’s seen these exchanges, she’s certain. That such things take place will have to do.
*
And behold, here he is now, Himself, my husband, in from the field to the kitchen, pulls his chair to the table for our evening sequence. I commence my bit, quick lay of the plate afore him, and back to hover and hope. There are a series of tiny motions I await, biteen actions that if totalled indicate he’s here. Daily I must ascertain this. That steam might rise from the food, register its heat, and thus celebrate my labour in making it. That he’ll pull his cup toward him, a gesture of inclusion. Best, when he engages all things on the table. If he’ll lift the salt, the pepper, swoosh it over the food, stamp it down and immediately up with his fork, before the dip of the chin to let the scooping begin. Oh I can watch this sequence, day beyond day, for it’s only in these sole actions I know he’s here with me. And I have learnt what prevails when these actions are interrupted, I’ve met what this leads to, that day in the bar of that bed and breakfast, when your one, Red the Twit, approached me. All this examination, all this watching, unsettles him.
— Sit down. What’s wrong with you standing there?
But I am waiting, hoping for a reach, not a ride like the young ones — talking between bites of a burger at Supermacs, say. My objective is ever to avoid sitting, or passing things into his palm. Instead I must hold back to register a reach, which I’ll see because the hairs on his arm become momentarily visible beneath the sleeve of his worn cardigan. Only then can I, will I, could I, would I, sit.
That day though there’s no stretch: eke it a second, wait now, mebbe, but no, he’s not going for the cup. He looks at me, waiting for a response. He indicates the chair opposite him. His hand willing me to sit, but that’s the very hand that must circulate around the table moving objects like a game of domestic draughts. And if I sit, those objects will be passed and passing robs me of the sequence.
— I’ve already had mine.
The truth is, I’m filling up on the reliable aspects of my daily life that my husband, no matter what else he does, will come home to me from the fields for his dinner, he expects to find me here, and I rely on this expectation and these days I study it. I study it because I know there were days I missed it and I have to mull over those days. I am learning how to pay attention.
*
Offensive: the offensive is to have him move the objects around the table the way I like them moved. An undertaking is what I want.
*
I lift the salt and hand it towards him. To tempt the undertaking: Do you need a bit of salt mebbe? Resistance. No words. Just a wave of the auld hand and a slight shake up around the eyebrows that say go ’way woman. They’re dismissing the salt. No, no salt.
And onto our second reliable sequence, he’ll dribble out a report of what did or did not take place beyond: who had cows to be moved or the trouble he was havin’ with a hose, what small repair was out of the question essential, or neither of us could carry on for a stampede of cattle would be in on top of the two of us. His voice scampers up with emphasis and insistence, like he’s instructing sailors on a boat about to sink. I can’t let it go any longer, the fence is down, the cows will be in the road, the dogs will get in at the sheep with it all down and what use will they be then? And then he mounts to the daily conclusion yes He must head out again. Sure it’s never ending, so it is.
— It’s never ending, I repeat for him.
— I don’t think people have a clue how hard farmers work.
— They. Do. Not. Three separate words I give him. Why was he telling me this? Disturbing. As if I’m not here. He’s here, I’m not. He’s out in the fields, I’m not here in the house. I’m gone from his daily activities. Am I gone?
Every dinner concludes with him heading out again. It was one of those nights that he headed out to the fields that I lost him, so I carry on down to the gate to be certain he is where he said he’d be.