“Do you know if Stability’ll be distributing any coal before the winter sets in?”
Martin’s face says, Wish I knew. “If it gets here, the answer’s yes. Same old problem: There’s a tendency for our lords and masters in Dublin to look at the Cordon Zone, think, Well, that bunch are living off the fat of the land, and wash their hands of us. My cousin at Ringaskiddy was telling me the collier docked last week with a cargo of coal from Poland, but when there’ll be fuel enough to fill the trucks to distribute it is another matter.”
“And a shower o’ feckin’ thievers ’tween Ringaskiddy and Sheep’s Head there are so,” says Fern O’Brien, appearing from nowhere, “and coal falls off lorries at a fierce old rate. I’ll not be holding my breath.”
“We raised the subject,” says Martin, “at the last committee meeting. A few o’ the lads and me’re planning a little excursion up Caher Saddle for a spot o’ turf cutting. Ozzy at the forge has made a — what’s the word? — a compressor for molding turf logs, so big.” Martin’s hands are a foot apart. “Now sure it’s not coal, but it’s a sight better than nothing, and if we don’t leave Five Acre Wood alone, it’ll be No Acre Wood in no time, like. Once we’ve the logs dried, I’ll have Fíonn drop down a load each to you and Mo on his next diesel run to Knockroe Farm — whoever you cast your ballot for. Frost doesn’t care about politics, and we need to look after our own.”
“I’m voting for the incumbent,” I assure him.
“Thank you, Holly. Every last vote will count.”
“There’s no serious opposition, is there?”
Fern O’Brien points behind me to the church noticeboard. Over I go to read the new, large hand-drawn poster:
ENDARKENMENT IS GOD’S JUDGMENT
GOD’S FAITHFULL SAY “ENOUGH!”
VOTE FOR THE LORD’S PARTY
MURIEL BOYCE FOR MAYOR
“Muriel Boyce? Mayor? But Muriel Boyce is, I mean …”
“Muriel Boyce is not to be underestimated,” says Aileen Jones, the ex — documentary maker turned lobster fisherwoman, “and thick as thieves with our parish priest, even if they can’t spell ‘faithful.’ There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling. I’ve met it before.”
I ask, “Father McGahern never did politics in church, did he?”
“Never,” Martin replies. “But Father Brady’s cut from a different cloth. Come Sunday I’ll be sat there in our pew while our priest tells us that God’ll only protect your family if you vote for the Lord’s Party.”
“People aren’t stupid,” I say. “They won’t swallow that.”
Martin looks at me as if I don’t see the whole picture. I get this look a lot these days. “People want a lifeboat and miracles. The Lord’s Party’s offering both. I’m offering peat logs.”
“But the lifeboat isn’t real, and the peat logs are. Don’t give up. You’ve a reputation for sound decisions. People listen to reason.”
“Reason?” Aileen Jones is grimly cheerful. “Like my old doctor friend Greg used to say, if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn’t be any religious people. No offense, Martin.”
“I’m beyond offense at this point, Fern,” says our mayor.
UP CHURCH LANE we come to Kilcrannog square. Ahead is Fitzgerald’s bar, a low, rambling building as old as the village. It’s been added to over the centuries and painted white, though not recently. Crows roost on its ridge tiles and gables as if up to no good. On our right’s the diesel depot, which was a Maxol garage when I first moved here, and where we used to fill up our Toyotas, our Kias, our VWs like there was no tomorrow. Now it’s just for the Co-op tanker that goes around from farm to farm. On the left’s the Co-op store, where the ration boxes’ll be distributed later by the committee, and on the south side of the square’s the Big Hall. The Big Hall also serves as a marketplace on Convoy Day, and we go in, Martin holding the door open so I can wheel in my pram. The hall’s noisy but there’s not a lot of laughter today — Hinkley Point casts a long shadow. Martin says he’ll see me later and goes off electioneering, Aileen looks for Ozzy to speak about metal parts for her sailboat, and I start foraging through the stalls. I browse among the trestle tables of apples and pears and vegetables too misshapen for Pearl Corp, home-cured bacon, honey, eggs, marijuana, cheese, homebrewed beer and poitín, plastic bottles and containers, knitted clothes, old clothes, tatty books, and a thousand things we used to give to charity shops or send to the landfill. When I first moved to the Sheep’s Head Peninsula thirty years ago, a West Cork market was where local women sold cakes and jam for the craic, West Cork hippies tried to sell sculptures of the Green Man to Dutch tourists, and people on middle-class incomes bought organic pesto, Medjool dates, and buffalo mozzarella. Now the market’s what the supermarket used to be: where you get everything, bar the basics found in the ration boxes. With our modified prams, pushchairs, and old supermarket trolleys, we’re a hungry-looking, unshaven, cosmeticless, jumble-sale parody of a Lidl or Tesco or Greenland only five or six years ago. We barter, buy, and sell with a combination of guile, yuan, and Sheep’s Head dollars — numbered metal disks engraved by the three mayors of Durrus, Ahakista, and Kilcrannog. I turn forty-eight eggs into cheap Chinese shampoo you can also use to wash clothes; some bags of seaweed salt and bundles of kale into undyed wool from Killarney to finish a blanket; redcurrant jelly — the jars are worth more than the jelly — into pencils and a pad of A4 paper to stitch some more exercise books, as the kids’ copy books have been rubbed out so often that the pages are almost see-through; and, reluctantly, a last pair of good Wellington boots I’ve had in their box for fifteen years into sheets of clear plastic, which I’ll use to make rain capes for the three of us, and to fix the polytunnel after the winter gales. Plastic sheeting’s hard to find, and Kip Sheehy makes a predictable face, but waterproof boots are even rarer, so by saying, “Maybe another time, then,” and walking off I get him to throw in a twenty-meter length of acrylic cord and a bundle of toothbrushes as well. I worry about Rafiq’s teeth. There’s very little sugar in our — or anyone’s — diet, but there are no dentists west of Cork anymore.
I chat with Niamh Murnane, Tom Murnane’s wife, who’s sitting at a table with hemp sacks of oats and sultanas; Stability no longer has any yuan to pay teachers, so it’s sending out salaries of tradeable foodstuffs instead. I was hoping to find sanitary towels for Lorelei, too, as Stability no longer includes them on the list of necessities, but I’m told there weren’t any on the last Company container ship. Branna O’Daly uses strips of old bedsheets, which we’ll need to wash, ’cause even old bedsheets are getting rarer. If only I’d had the foresight to lay in a store of tampons a few years back. Still. Complaining is rude to the three-million-odd souls who have to somehow survive outside the Cordon.
• • •
IN THE ANNEX, Sinéad from Fitzgerald’s bar serves hot drinks and soup made on the kitchen range that keeps the Big Hall warm in winter. As I trundle up with my pram, Pat Joe, the Co-op mechanic, pulls up a chair for me with his giant oily hands, and by now I need the sit-down. The road from Dooneen gets longer every Friday, I swear, and the pain in my side’s more acidy than before. I should’ve spoken with Dr. Kumar, but what could she do if it’s my cancer waking up? There’s no CAT scans anymore, no drug regime. Molly Coogan, who used to design websites but who now grows apples in polytunnels up below Ardahill, and her husband, Seamus, are also at the table. As the Englishwoman there, I’m asked if I know anything about Hinkley Point, but I have to disappoint them.