Trey can’t picture her mam having the energy to run off with anyone, and anyway no one ever comes knocking at their door. She had forgotten his smell, cigarettes and soap and an aftershave with some rich spice in it. Banjo is sniffing it too, and glancing up at her for clues on how to classify it. “Sit,” she says.
“I can’t get over the size of you,” her dad says, smiling at her. “Just a little biteen of a thing that’d run from her own shadow, you were, when I saw you last. And now look at you: near grown up, working away, in and outa houses all over this townland. I’d say you know half the people round here better than I would. D’you get on with them all right?”
“Lena’s sound,” Trey says. She can feel him wanting something from her, but she doesn’t know what.
“Ah, yeah. Lena’s grand. And I called in to your friend Cal Hooper. I reckoned if you’re going down there on the regular, I oughta get to know him a bit. Make sure he’s all right.”
Trey goes cold straight through with outrage. He said it like he was doing her a favor. He had no right anywhere near Cal. She feels like he stuck his hand in her mouth.
“He seems like a dacent-enough fella. For a policeman.” Johnny laughs. “Jaysus, a child of mine hanging around a Guard. Did you ever hear the like?”
Trey says nothing. Her dad grins at her. “Is he a nosy bollox, yeah? Always asking questions? Where were you on the night of the fifteenth?”
“Nah,” Trey says.
“I’d say he has the whole place afraid to put a toe outa line. If he caught the lads drinking poteen, heaven help us, he’d have them hauled up to the Guards in town before they’d know what hit them.”
“Cal drinks poteen,” Trey says. “Sometimes.” She thinks about punching her dad in the face, or running away and sleeping in an abandoned cottage somewhere on the mountainside. A couple of years back she would probably have done both. Instead she just stands there, with her fists in the pockets of Lena’s hoodie. Her anger is too dense and tangled to find a way out of her.
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” her dad says, amused. “He can’t be too bad if he can handle Malachy Dwyer’s stuff. I’ll have to bring some down to him one day, and we can make a night of it.”
Trey says nothing. If he does that, she’ll get Cal’s rifle and blow his fucking foot off, and see can he make his way down the mountain to Cal’s after that.
Johnny rubs a hand over his head. “Are you not speaking to me?” he asks ruefully.
“Got nothing to say,” Trey says.
Johnny laughs. “You always were quiet,” he says. “I thought it was only that you couldn’t get a word in edgewise, with Brendan about.”
Brendan has been gone more than two years. His name still feels like a jab to Trey’s throat.
“If you’re annoyed with me for going away, you can go on and say it. I won’t get angry with you.”
Trey shrugs.
Johnny sighs. “I went because I wanted to do better for you,” he says. “All of ye, and your mammy. You might not believe that, and I wouldn’t blame you, but at least have a think about it before you decide it’s only rubbish. There was nothing I could do for you here. You know yourself: this shower of gombeens act like the Reddys are nothing but shite on their shoes. Am I wrong?”
Trey shrugs again. She doesn’t feel like agreeing with him, but he’s right, or near enough. People are nicer to her and her family, the last couple of years, but the note underneath hasn’t changed, and she wouldn’t want their niceness even if it was real.
“There wasn’t one of them would give me a chance. Everyone knows my daddy was a waster, and his daddy before him, and that’s all they want to know. There’s a hundred jobs I’d be able for around here, but I was lucky to get a day shoveling shite. I’d go up for a factory job I could do in my sleep, and be turned away before I could open my mouth—and the job’d go to some feckin’ eejit that could barely tie his own shoelaces, but his daddy drank with the manager. And there was no point in trying Galway, or Dublin. This bloody country’s too small. Someone woulda known someone whose mam was from Ardnakelty, and they’da scuppered my chances just like that.” He snaps his fingers.
Trey knows the dark edge to his voice. It used to mean he was going to slam out and come home drunk, or not at all. It’s fainter now, just an echo, but her calf muscles still twitch, ready to run if she needs to.
“That wears a man down. It wears him till he loses sight of himself. I was turning bitter, taking it out on your mammy—I never usedta have a cruel bone in my body, but I was cruel to her, those last coupla years. She didn’t deserve that. If I’da stayed, I’da only got worse. London was the nearest I could be and still have a chance to get somewhere.”
He looks at her. His face is pulled into the taut lines she remembers from those same nights, but those are fainter too. “You know I’m telling the truth, am I right?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, to make him leave it. She doesn’t give a shite why her dad went. Once he was gone, Brendan was the man of the family. He felt like it was his job to look after the rest of them. If their dad had stayed, Brendan might still be there.
“Don’t be holding it against me, if you can help it. I done my best.”
“We’ve done grand,” Trey says.
“You have, of course,” Johnny agrees warmly. “Your mammy says you’ve been a great help to her. We’re proud of you, the pair of us.”
Trey doesn’t respond. “It musta been hard on you,” her dad says sympathetically, switching tone. She can feel him circling her, looking for ways in. “I’d say it didn’t help that Brendan went. The two of ye were always fierce close.”
Trey says, keeping her voice flat, “Yeah.” Brendan was six years older than her. Up until Cal and Lena, he was the only person who ever appeared to think about Trey by choice, rather than because he had to, and the only person who regularly made her laugh. Six months before Trey met Cal, Brendan walked out of the house one afternoon and never came back. Trey doesn’t think about those six months, but they’re layered into her like a burn ring inside a tree.
“Your mammy said he went looking for me. Is that what he said to you?”
“He said nothing to me,” Trey says. “I heard he went to Scotland, maybe.” This is true.
“He never found me, anyway,” her dad says, shaking his head. “I never thought he’d take it that hard, me leaving. Do you ever hear anything from him?”
The wind fingers restlessly through the trees behind them. Trey says, “Nah.”
“He’ll be in touch,” her dad says confidently. “Don’t you worry. He’s only off sowing his wild oats.” He grins, out to the slopes of dark heather. “And praying for a crop failure.”
Brendan is buried somewhere in these mountains, Trey doesn’t know where. When she’s out there she keeps watch for any sign—a rectangle of mounded earth, a space where the brush hasn’t had time to grow tall again, a tatter of cloth brought to the surface by weather—but there’s more of the mountains than she could look at in a lifetime. There are people in the townland who know where he is, because they put him there. She doesn’t know who they are. She watches for signs in people’s faces, too, but she doesn’t expect to find them. People in Ardnakelty are good at keeping things hidden.
She gave Cal her word that she’d say nothing and do nothing about it. Trey, seeing as she doesn’t have much else, puts a fiercely high value on her word.
“I came back,” Johnny points out cheerfully. “See? Brendan’ll do the same.”
Trey asks, “Are you gonna stay?”
It’s a plain question—she wants to know what she’s dealing with—but her dad takes it as a plea. “Ah, sweetheart,” he says, giving her a soft-eyed smile. “I am, of course. I’m going nowhere. Daddy’s home now.”