‘Not this weekend,’ Mark said now, but he knew it would not be enough for Nagle.
‘Jesus, Casey, even when it’s lashing rain you seem to be down there fucking around at some animal or other. Sun’s splitting the stones today, and yet here you are, up to your balls in beer. What, did you finally get them off your back? What, did your old lad die?’
Beside Nagle, Mossy shook his head in laughing disapproval. ‘Nagle, you bollocks.’
Nagle affected a wide-eyed look, the only effect of which was to accentuate his jowls. ‘What? It’s a fair assumption. Isn’t it, Casey? I mean, Jesus, I’m basically not sure if I’ve ever seen you in the sunshine before.’
‘Right, right,’ Mark said, as drolly as he could.
‘I mean, for a while there, back in college, I was starting to look for fangs on this guy,’ Nagle said to Mossy. ‘No joke.’
‘You’re some tool,’ said Mossy, reaching for one of Nagle’s cigarettes. Mark could see Nagle noting this move as he inhaled, deciding to let it go as he blew the smoke out in a formless cloud.
‘You ready for another?’ Mark nodded to Mossy’s glass. It was only half empty, but he wanted to get away. He took a long gulp of his own pint as though to justify the question.
Mossy nodded. ‘I’ll go with you,’ he said. ‘I need smokes.’
‘Fucking right you do, Flanagan,’ Nagle said, snatching up his pack of Marlboro and turning his attention to the girls at the next table. ‘Beautiful day, ladies,’ he said, to the back of one sleekly ponytailed head.
‘Arsehole,’ said Mossy, as they entered the cool darkness of the inside bar. In here, the place looked as it would at this time on any day, in any month of the year, a hard-chaw bar on a hard-chaw street in inner-city Dublin, full of life-pocked locals, all scowls and silences and sagging midriffs, all watching — they all seemed to be watching — as Mark and Mossy came in through the back door. But glancing up, Mark saw what they were actually watching: highlights of the rugby match on a huge television high on the wall. On the screen, a player was panting and pawing at his gumshield.
‘When did everyone in this country start giving such a shit about rugby?’
Mossy shrugged. ‘Civilized times, man.’
The barman signalled to say he’d be over in a moment.
‘I didn’t realize you still knew Nagle,’ Mark said to Mossy, with more accusation in his tone than he’d intended. He cleared his throat. ‘What’s he up to, these days?’
‘Over in one of the big banks on Stephen’s Green. Doing well for himself. Doing something suss with other people’s money. The usual.’
‘See much of him?’
‘The odd time,’ Mossy said. ‘Think whoever brought him in here today did a legger on him. He came up to me there at the bar like I was a brother of his back from the dead. Pure relief to see someone he could talk to.’
Mark looked around the bar. ‘Probably afraid one of this crowd would go at him with a dirty syringe.’
‘No harm,’ Mossy said. ‘Though they’d have a job ramming it into that neck.’
The barman came to them, and Mark ordered the drinks. ‘He’s still as obsessed with my old lad’s farm as he ever was.’ He shook his head. ‘Prick.’
‘Yeah,’ Mossy said. ‘Though I have to say I was wondering the same thing myself.’
‘Wondering what?’
‘Well, y’know. This good weather. I mean, I was sure you’d be heading down home. I thought I’d be getting up to an empty house this morning.’
‘I have work on,’ Mark said, without looking at Mossy. ‘This deadline for McCarthy.’
‘Decent of them to leave you at it for a change.’
‘Five missed calls since yesterday evening.’
‘Fuck.’ Mossy whistled.
‘Yeah.’
‘Ah, man, that’s a hard old buzz. You didn’t chat them at all, no?’
‘Ah, yeah,’ Mark shook his head. ‘I mean, I talked to my mother this morning. Told her the score. She understood. I said I’d be down Tuesday.’
‘Good stuff.’
‘Good stuff as long as this weather holds,’ Mark said.
‘Well,’ Mossy said, with a wince, and then gestured apologetically over to the cigarette machine, as though it were an obligation he could not escape, as though he would much have preferred to stay at the bar with Mark, reassuring him about the weather, about his chapter, about parents and the things they expected their sons to do. But, then, Mossy’s parents did not expect their son to do things. Mossy’s parents were busy with their own lives, with the friends they had, with the trips they took, with the visits from their children that they sweetly encouraged but would never demand.
‘I’ll just get these,’ Mossy said, and he was gone.
Mark settled closer in to the bar. The irritation he had felt at Nagle’s goading had faded, but still he was not keen to return to the beer garden, and to be alone with Nagle, even for the length of time it would take for Mossy to return from buying his cigarettes. What he wanted, he realized, was for Mossy to go out there alone and start up a conversation with Nagle, a conversation about anything, and for Mark to return to find the two of them absorbed in that subject, and to come in on it, and take part in it, mindlessly, for the rest of the evening, until the beer started to really take hold, until it no longer mattered what anyone said, because nothing could get at you.
On the phone that morning, his mother had spoken in the vague, terse sentences that meant, he knew, that his father was in the room. His father had never been one to talk on the phone, but that did not mean he relinquished his determination to know — and, as though by a sort of hypnosis, to control — what was being said and what was being agreed to at the other end of the line. Mark had seen it countless times: his mother, standing at the kitchen counter where the phone was kept, trying to get the conversation over with, while his father sat nearby, his chin pushed into his knuckles, his eyes roving the floor as he followed and weighed and dismantled every word — the words he could hear and the words at which he could only guess. It was a harmless charade, really, comical half of the time, because half of the time his father got it all arseways: the imagined details, the assumed scenarios. He was bored, Mark knew; he craved news, craved some new narrative to add to his day, and if, eavesdropping on Mark’s mother’s phone calls, he couldn’t glean that thing ready-made, he would invent it for himself.
And his father would long since have invented his own reasons for Mark’s decision to stay in Dublin that weekend despite the unfolding, on the farm, of the exact science they both knew so welclass="underline" this was the second day with clear skies and temperatures above the mid-twenties, the second day in what was forecast to be a five-day spell, and it was a July day, so the meadows would be at their readiest, the ground would be baked firm. It was the day to cut, and tomorrow was the day to bale, and the next day was the day to gather, and without Mark, none of this could be done quickly or easily. And yet Mark was staying away. And as the explanation for that fact, his father would either settle on something depressingly wrong — that it was something to do with a woman — or depressingly right: that he was up shit creek with his college work. Though his father would add to the actual problem an extra dimension of crisis: Mark, he would decide, was on the verge of losing not just his funding, but his place on the programme, his right to continue with his thesis, to walk through Front Arch and set foot on campus at all. He would be thrown out. He would be disgraced in the eyes of Dublin. And the eyes of Dublin would be nothing compared to the eyes of home.
Mark knew that his PhD work, and any mention of it, held a power over both his parents; a power that was often very convenient for him. In the face of what his father insisted on calling Mark’s ‘studies’, they became as quiet and uneasy as though they had opened a solicitor’s letter or answered the door to a guard. It was to them something alien, unfathomable, something utterly intimidating, a degree beyond a degree, an essay that would take years of their son’s life, that would turn him, at the end of all, into something just as alien and unfathomable: a university lecturer, a writer of books without storylines, papers without news.