‘You look like you’re remembering the drive home from the hospital,’ Ken said.
‘Something like that. Is it that obvious?’
‘To some.’ Ken offered a cigarette. Martin shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you, though, the first time? Scariest hour and a half of my life. And we only lived forty minutes away. I crawled home. I remember every bump, every inch of that road.’ A match flared in front of Ken’s face. He puffed a ribbon of smoke and shook the match out. ‘This is your first?’
‘Only.’
‘I’ve had three go through myself already.’ Ken took his wallet from an inside pocket and opened it to show a creased picture of four little girls. The eldest was about six or seven, the youngest no more than a few months.
‘Four girls,’ Martin said.
‘Outnumbered,’ Ken winked. ‘But never outmatched.’
Eve’s mother beckoned as the others moved away.
‘So, Eve’s the baby?’ Martin said.
Ken smiled. ‘That she is.’
‘And how are they doing? The others, I mean.’
‘Some good. Some not so.’
They rounded a corner and came into a smaller, quieter square where the women and children gathered around a bench.
‘When you think about it, though,’ Ken said, ‘it’s ridiculous to expect that every one of them will just naturally be better than we are.’
‘Right.’
‘But the thing is, at the same time, it’s absolutely necessary.’
Eve’s mother handed the camera to a passing student, explained its workings and then marshalled the group. The two kids sat together on the bench while the parents stood behind them. Martin took his place between Ken and Anne. The camera flashed.
At a restaurant on Dawson Street, Martin waited with Ronan and Anne for the table she had reserved. They sat in plush armchairs in the front-of-house bar drinking complimentary cocktails.
‘So,’ Martin asked Ronan. ‘What’s next?’
Ronan set his glass down on the table and clasped his hands together between his knees. Martin admired the watch he’d managed to give while Anne was saying goodbye to Eve’s parents.
Ronan looked to his mother. She shrugged.
‘Actually, I’m thinking of taking a year off. I’m thinking of travelling a bit. Maybe Korea.’
‘Korea.’ Martin listened to his pronunciation of the word. ‘What’s in Korea?’
‘Lots of things,’ Ronan said. ‘I’m just thinking of trying it. For a while. You know, while I can.’
‘I think it’s a great idea,’ Anne said and ran a finger around the lip of her glass.
Behind the bar, a flat-screen TV showed a to-camera report from the street in front of the Mansion House. Martin found himself staring through a window at the back of his own head. He turned in his seat to look but a hostess came to tell them their table was ready. He picked up his glass, and together the Clearys stood.
Stations
The following year, the twenty-sixth fell on a Sunday. Mangan woke late to the howl of a neighbour’s dog. He breathed through his nose the coolness of the other pillow. His arm beneath his ear was numb; he waited for it.
At length, blood resumed its course and the fingers were his again. He rose and dressed, crept to the bathroom, lathered and razored his jaw. A crisp draught slapped his cheek as he knotted the tie at his throat. The suit was made of blue serge, its pockets wide and deep; he’d bought it only months before but now it sagged in the seat. Downstairs, he ate a slice of toast broken around a fried egg and drank a pot of black coffee at the sink until his hand steadied. Magnets held faded drawings to the fridge’s face behind him. Heaps of papers cried old news from the worktop at his elbow. Around noon, he set out for the Lifeboat, the sky above him loaded. His neighbours’ driveways mostly were empty, their curtains still.
At the far end of the laneway out of the estate, three boys not much older than Rory hunched in a glower of smoke. They were decked in gleaming trainers and drainpipe trousers, on their fingers rings too brightly gold to be made of gold. One of their phones whimpered tinny hip-hop. Mangan kept his eyes on the opposite wall’s graffiti and caught his toe as he passed on the pavement’s broken seam. The boys rocked together, honked together with laughter.
‘There goes the man, now,’ drawled the tallest of the three. Through his dark hair there shot a lightning bolt of bleach, and his sideburns were sharpened to points.
Outside the Lumsdens’ house on the corner a postman dismounted his bike. Ivy licked a wall of the sagging porch. At the front door, a stooped figure dressed in green appeared.
‘Is that young Mangan, there?’ Brendan Lumsden said and squinted down his nose. ‘Tell us now, will you ever be calling around the shop again to see us?’
Often as a child, Mangan had gone with his mother for sweets to the newsagent’s Brendan and his wife ran together on the harbour road. Sunday after Mass had been his mother’s time for presenting herself to the town, for doing messages and for paying visits and for stopping to swap scandal. Brendan now ran the shop alone, but still he referred to himself in the plural.
‘To be honest,’ Mangan said, ‘I’ve been keeping myself to myself.’
‘That’s the good thing sometimes,’ Brendan said. ‘I suppose.’ He sat on the garden wall to knead an ache from his thigh. Beside him the panicles of a butterfly bush reached heavily towards the pavement. The postman handed him an envelope and wheeled away one-legged.
‘It is,’ Mangan said.
‘But sometimes, though, it isn’t, do you know that way?’
More recently, Sunday had been his day about town with Rory. Brendan’s wife played peek-a-boo with the boy from behind the shelf of firelighters, called him ‘the up-and-coming heartbreaker’ and, once, daubed ice cream from his cheek with the collar of her cardigan. Her name was Peggy but Rory called her ‘Veggie’. She and Mangan’s mother had been in the hospice at the same time.
‘Isn’t it a hard old world?’ Brendan said.
‘It can be,’ Mangan said.
He took his leave then, feeling at fault for not having inquired after Liz. But that might have meant talking about Annette, and he was glad that Brendan hadn’t mentioned her. He crossed the street and wound towards town in the cool shade of the ice houses. Compressors hummed behind rusting doors with hinges glossed in rime, above which seagulls rode the gusts from sea to shore. One scaly-toed bird perched on the lip of a plastic crate where a soup of swim bladders ripened. It shuffled its feathers, goggled at Mangan, lowered its beak in stench.
The tremor came again to his hand as he rounded on to Strand Street, but at the Lifeboat he found only darkened windows. The pungency of old stout seeped from cracks in wood and grout. A handwritten sign affixed to the pub’s door announced a family matter. Mangan sucked his teeth and hid the hand in a trouser pocket. He looked across the street towards the rise of St Patrick’s bell tower, roofed in crumbling shingle and pointed with a cross. From the fine grain of the building’s brick, some luminous mineral shone.
After the funeral, he had started going to Mass again. For months, Annette spent her weekends in bed and Rory’s room remained untouched. But then, one Sunday morning, he read in the bulletin that the church was accepting donations. Soon afterwards, Annette saw a boy at the rugby pitch wearing a Lions jersey with a fraying sleeve. Mangan had come home to find her sitting at the kitchen table, the jersey spread beside her with its sleeve newly stitched. Within a week, Rory’s things were boxed, his bed and bookcase sold. A week later, Annette was gone.
Mangan had not been inside the church since, but now he felt the pull of blue stained glass and columned portico. He crossed the street to find the font empty save for a brittle sponge. The nave, where two old women knelt, was dark and stale. Along one wall, the confessionals were curtained in fraying purple velvet, and between them, cast in plaster, were the Stations of the Cross.