Twelve
ALL DOWN THE LONG, stinky tube of the jumbo jet, the lights come on and people stretch like cats. Billie looks up from her comic book about the poor, ugly hunchback to see her mother yawn and uncoil on the seat beside her. Her hair is black. It shines like a crow’s wing, like something that can fly at a moment’s notice. She looks over at the picture of the bellringer and wrinkles her little nose at Billie.
‘That old thing.’
Billie shrugs. It’s still her favourite, even though the pages are ratty. Used to be Scully’s when he was a boy. She has all his old comics and his Biggies books (which are plain stupid, really) and The Magic Pudding. In a tea-chest somewhere now, she has a whole snake-skin, a stick for finding water, and an old bag with books and papers in it. It’s hard to think of your father as a kid. Milking cows. With no TV. Before space rockets, even. Living like Tom Sawyer, that’s how Billie thinks of it. She feels sorry for kids with ordinary fathers. They only made one Scully. He isn’t handsome, but he’s special. He taught her how to swim and ride a bike. Before school he taught her how to read and write. Billie doesn’t forget things like that. He knows things and he doesn’t have secrets. What you see is what you get, like he says.
Once, in Paris, a lady fell down in the street right next to them and started wriggling all over the cobbles. It was a fit. She went bubbly at the mouth and the whole works. Everyone started steering away, saying ‘Oh-la-la!’ But Scully made Billie stand there while he got down next to the lady and stuck his newspaper between her teeth to stop her from biting her tongue off. The lady bucked and jumped but he talked to her the way she imagined he talked to cows when he was a boy. Probably, like a cow, she couldn’t understand a word anyway because he talked in English, soft and friendly, while all the people around them gasped. He brushed her hair with his hand and Billie wanted to sick up right there. But she was glad he made her stay. He was crying, she saw him cry while the French lady bit on his newspaper and jiggled on the road. She knew it then, that they only made one Scully.
She jiggles her legs, careful not to kick the seat in front and get the old bloke with the hair growing out his ears all mad again.
Her mum grabs her handbag and slips on her shoes. Pretty feet with red nails. Pretty feet.
‘Just going to have a wash,’ she murmurs.
‘Okay,’ says Billie.
Billie goes back to her story. She likes the hunchback. He’s ugly and sad but his heart is good. He sees a long way out across the city. Paris. She lived there once and knows there should be an Eiffel Tower somewhere in this book, something the guy drawing the pictures forgot. Old Quasimodo can see forever. He’s got the free birds up there and the sky and the music of the bells that wrecked his ears, he loves them so much. Up there on big, scary Notre Dame with the statues stuck into doorways and the pigeons and donkeys out the front. When she closes her eyes she can see the bellringer darting around up there — she doesn’t need the comic anymore to do that. His hump weighing him down, bending him over like Jesus under the dragging cross. No one loves him, specially not the beautiful gypsy girl. She just sees his poor face and his hump. No one loves him the way Billie does because she knows there’s good in his heart.
People in the plane pull up the dinky little window sliders to let in some light. The plane is so high up it’s nearly in space. That nervous feeling comes back. She’s going to live in a little stone house with square windows and a chimney. Her dad will be there. She shouldn’t be afraid. But it’s hard to stay calm when you’re nearly in space, when you don’t know what’s coming.
Thirteen
SCULLY WOKE TO THE HARANGUE of a fresh norther in the slates, and at the thought of the cold outside the eiderdown his body stiffened. His face felt tender and his throat itched with the promise of a headcold. His hands tingled with nettle stings and one of his knees throbbed. He closed his eyes again in the still dim house on a hill in a strange country, and then with a slow burning in his limbs, he softened. This was it. Today was the day. He scrabbled at his watch. Man, he was late; it was after eight already and the flight got into Shannon at ten.
He whipped back the eiderdown and roared with the shock of the cold, and it was while he was wrestling with his jeans that he saw the mud on his legs. It was caked between his fingers, too, and there in the sheets. He remembered the cold and the riders distantly, as though recalling a dream. This afternoon he’d go down and have a look around, just to satisfy himself. Maybe talk to Brereton. But now he was late. Now the sun was up.
He stripped the linen and took it downstairs where the hearth drew breath and the windowpanes chattered. He should have been up two hours ago. With this day hanging before him so long, how could he have slept in?
In water cold and hard as brass, he washed himself standing in a tin tub. He shaved badly and ran upstairs with clean sheets. Then he found his Levi’s, his boots and pullover and pulled himself into shape.
Eight thirty-five. Now he was frantic, frantic enough to heave the tub of grey water against the closed kitchen window which sent it right back at him. He sat down, soaked and sober, moaning in frustration. He looked around, saw the dishes in the sink, the dirty sheets and mud-scuffs, the pool at his feet. He’d worked his guts out to get the place near perfect and now it looked like a student dive. Still, they’d see the change, they’d know how his heart had gone into it. He got up, lit the fire, stacked it with coal, and went out into the wind in his wet clothes.
• • •
ON THE TWISTING HEDGE ROAD into Roscrea, Scully drove hard and close, sending up curtains of mud everywhere he passed, with the walls and blackthorn against the streaming windows. Rain smeared his glimpses of fields and open places. There was no sky.
The town was jammed with cars parked wildly for Mass, and bells rang along the close grey rows of houses and shops. Out on the open road, Scully pushed the Transit to the limit, jiggling now, sweating with anticipation. The hills spewed cloud and water and the Tipperary fields opened up to the rain, sprouting here and there the ruined backbone of a tower, a gatehouse, a manor of old. He saw cottages collapsing under the weight of thatch wild with grass. All down the highway, across the country, there were solitary chimneys, great lonely walls, fallen churches with lichened crosses tilted like levers in the earth. Much rarer was the sight of a stand of timber, a wood, a forest remnant before more chocolate soil and squat, stucco farmhouses with grey gravel forecourts and Spanish arches. Every town said Failte, Welcome to Moneygall, Toomyvara, Nenagh, and each was jammed with the cars of Mass and the umbrellas of the walking faithful and the toll of bells, while the roads were quiet and blessedly free of trucks. Three cheers for a God-fearing nation, Scully thought, and for truckers on bended knee.
In the slate sprawl of Limerick he caught the time in a chipper’s window as 9.55. He crossed the bridge and saw the choppy surge of the Shannon beating seaward, and somehow his tension broke for a moment into wellbeing: he’d make it now, he’d be there soon.
The rain backed off. The road was clear.
• • •
ON THE LONG, flat dismal approach to the airport, Scully was grinning so hugely that other drivers veered away and kept their distance. A Pan-Am jumbo heaved itself into the air and passed over with its shadow trailing like a dragged anchor. Bon voyage, he thought; enjoy New York, have a happy life, all you people. The world is good and the aeroplane a gift of evolution.
• • •
INSIDE THE TERMINAL BUILDING the air was thick with cigarette smoke, the smell of wet serge and the shouts of people leaving and meeting. Here and there were the checkerboard slacks of Americans making their way to the Avis counter and the Dan Dooley Rent A Car. There were Irishmen in terrible jackets and thick-soled boots heading upstairs for a pint, and women with briefcases awaiting the shuttle back to London.