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, Sinйad 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.
Nobody else has had any luck with threading out of the island of Ireland for two or three days now. Pat Joe spoke with his cousin in Ardmore in East Cork last night, however, and holds court for a few minutes. Apparently two hundred Asylumites from Portugal landed on the beach in five or six vessels, and are now living in an old zombie estate built back in the Tiger Days. “As bold as you please,” says Pat Joe, nursing his soup, “as if they own the place, like. So the Ardmore town mayor, he leads a—a deputation up to the zombie estate, my cousin was one of them, to tell the Asylumites that, very sorry and all, but they can’t winter there, there’s not enough food in the Co-op or wood in the plantation for the villagers as it is, let alone two hundred extra mouths, like. This big feller walks out, takes out a gun, cool as you please, and shoots Kenny’s hat off his head, like in an old cowboy western!”
“Shocking! Shocking!” Betty Power is a theatrical matriarch who runs Kilcrannog’s smokehouse. “What did the mayor do?”
“Sent a messenger to the Stability garrison in Dungarvan, asking for assistance, like—only to be told their jeeps had no feckin’ diesel.”
“The Stabilityjeeps had no diesel?” asks Molly Coogan, alarmed.
Pat Joe purses his lips and shakes his head. “Not one drop. The mayor was told to ‘pacify the situation’ as best he could. Only how’s yer man s’posed to manage that when his deadliest weapon’s a feckin’ staple gun?”
“ Iheard,” says Molly Coogan, “that the Sun Yat-sen”—one of the Chinese superfrigates that accompanies the Chinese container ships on the polar route—“sailed into Cork Harbor last week with five hundred marines on deck. A bit of a show of force, like.”
“Sure you’re missing a zero, there, Moll,” says Fern O’Brien, who leans over from the next table. “My Jude’s Bill was on loading duty at Ringaskiddy that day so he was, and he swears there wasn’t a man under five t’ousandtrooping the color under the Chinese flag.”
I can imagine Ed, my long-dead partner, making hang-dog eyes at the authenticity of this so-called news but there’s more to come as talk switches to a sister-in-law of Pat Joe’s cousin in County Offaly, who knows a “Man in the Know” at Stability Research in the Dublin Pale who reckons the Swedes have genomed a rustproof, selffertile strain of wheat. “I’m only passing on what I’ve been told,” says Pat Joe, “but there’s talk of Stability planting it all over Ireland next spring. If people have full bellies, the Jackdawing and rioting’ll stop.”
“White bread,” sighs Sнnead Fitzgerald. “Imagine that.”
“I’d not want to go pissing on your snowman now, Pat Joe,” says Seamus Coogan, “but was that the same Man in the Know who said the Germans had a pill that cured Ratflu, or that the States was reunited again, and the president was sending airdrops of blankets, medicine, and peanut butter to all the NATO countries? Or was it that friend of a friend who met an Asylumite outside Youghal who swore on his mother’s life that he’d found a Technotopia where they still have twenty-four-hour electricity, hot showers, pineapples, and dark chocolate mousse, in Bermuda or Iceland or the Azores?”
I think about Martin’s remarks on imaginary lifeboats.
“I’m only passing on what I’ve been told,” sniffs Pat Joe.
“Whatever the future has in store,” says Betty Power, “we’re all in the hollow of God’s hand, so we are.”
“That’s certainly how Muriel Boyce sees it,” says Seamus Coogan.
“Martin’s doing his best,” says Betty Power, crisply, “but it’s clear that only the Church can take care of the devilry falling over the world.”
“Why will a loving God only help us if we vote for him?” asks Molly.
“You have to ask,” blinks Betty Power. “That’s how prayer works.”
“But Molly’s saying,” says Pat Joe, “why can’t He just answer our prayers directly? Why does he need us to vote for him?”
“To put the Church back where it belongs,” says Betty Power. “Guiding our country.”
The conversation heats up but I may as well be listening to children arguing about the acts and motives of Santa Claus. I’ve seen what happens after death, the Dusk and the Dunes, and it was as real to me as the chipped mug of tea in my hand. Perhaps the souls I saw were bound for an afterlife beyond the Last Sea, but if so, it’s not the afterlife described by any priest or imam. There is no God but the one we dream up, I could assure my fellow parishioners: Humanity is on its own and always was …
… but my truth sounds no crazier than their faith, no saner either; and who has the right to kill Santa? Specially a Santa who promises to reunite the Coogans with their dead son, Pat Joe with his dead brother, me with Aoife, Jacko, Mum, and Dad; and even put the Endarkenment into reverse, and bring back central heating, online ordering, Ryanair, and chocolate. Our hunger for our loved ones and our lost world is as sharp as grief; it howls to be fed. If only that same hunger didn’t make us so meekly vulnerable to men like Father Brady.
“Fallen pregnant?” Betty Power covers her mouth. “Never!” We’re back to Sheep’s Head gossip. I’d like to ask who’s pregnant, but if I do so at this point they’ll all wonder if I’m going deaf or turning senile.