The wind ploughed about outside as he drank off his Guinness. The yeasty, warm porter expanded in his gut and he moaned with pleasure. Geez, Scully, he thought, you’re not hard to please. Just look at you!
And then quite suddenly, with the empty bottle in his lap, sprawled before the lowing fire in a country he knew nothing about, he was asleep and dreaming like a dog.
Two
SCULLY WOKE SORE AND FREEZING with the fire long dead and his clothes damp upon him. At the well he washed bravely and afterwards he scavenged in his turp-soaked rubbish heap and found a shard of mirror to shave by. He wiped the glass clean and set it on the granite wall. There he was again, Frederick Michael Scully. The same square dial and strong teeth. The broad nose with its pulpy scar down the left side from a fight on a lobster boat, the same stupid blue that caused his wonky eye. The eye worked well enough, unless he was tired, but it wandered a little, giving him a mad look that sometimes unnerved strangers who saw the Brillopad hair and the severely used face beneath it as ominous signs. Long ago he’d confronted the fact that he looked like an axe-murderer, a sniffer of bicycle seats. He stuck out like a dunny in a desert. He frightened the French and caused the English to perspire. Among Greeks he was no great shakes, but he’d yet to find out about the Irish. What a face. Still, when you looked at it directly it was warm and handsome enough in its way. It was the face of an optimist, of a man eager to please and happy to give ground. Scully believed in the endless possibilities of life. His parents saw their lives the way their whole generation did; to them existence was a single shot at things, you were a farmer, a fisherman, a butcher for the duration. But Scully found that it simply wasn’t so. It only took a bit of imagination and some guts to make yourself over, time and time again. When he looked back on his thirty years he could hardly believe his luck. He left school early, worked the deck of a boat, went on to market gardening, sold fishing tackle, drove trucks, humped bricks on building sites, taught himself carpentry and put himself through a couple of years’ architecture at university. Became a husband and father, lived abroad for a couple of years, and now he was a landowner in County Offaly, fixing an eighteenth-century peasant cottage with his bare hands. In the New Year he’d be a father again. Unbelievable. All these lives, and still the same face. All these goes at things, all these chances, and it’s still me. Old Scully.
He was used to being liked and hurt at being misunderstood, though even in Europe most people eventually took to Scully. What they saw was what they got, but they could never decide what it was they saw — a working-class boofhead with a wife who married beneath herself, a hairy bohemian with a beautiful family, the mongrel expat with the homesick twang and ambitious missus, the poor decent-hearted bastard who couldn’t see the roof coming down on his head. No one could place him, so they told him secrets, opened doors, called him back, all the time wondering what the hell he was up to, slogging around the Continent with so little relish. Children loved him; his daughter fought them off outside crèches. He couldn’t help himself — he loved his life.
As mist rolled back from the brows of the Slieve Bloom Mountains, the quilted fields opened to the sun and glistened with frost. Scully swung the mattock in the shadows of the south wall. The earth was heavy and mined with stones so that every few strokes he struck granite and a shock went up his arm and into his body like a boot from the electric fences of his boyhood. His hands stung with nettles and his nose ran in the cold. The smoke of valley chimneys stood straight in the air.
In the hedge beside him two small birds wheeled in a courting dance. He recognized them as choughs. He mouthed the word, resting a moment and rubbing his hands. Choughs. Strange word. Two years and he still thought from his own hemisphere. He knew he couldn’t keep doing it forever. He should stop thinking of blue water and white sand; he had a new life to master.
The birds lit on an old cartwheel beside the hedge to regard him and the great pillar of steam his breath made.
‘It’s alright for you buggers,’ he said. ‘The rest of us have to work.’
The choughs lifted their tails at him and flew. Scully smiled and watched them rise and tweak about across the wood below, and then out over the crenellations of the castle beyond where he lost them, his eye drawn to the black mass of rooks circling the castle keep. A huge ash tree grew from the west wing of the ruin and in its bare limbs he saw the splotches of nests. He tried to imagine that tree in the spring when its new foliage must nearly burst the castle walls.
He went back to his ragged trench against the cottage wall. The place had no damp-coursing at all, and the interior walls were chartreuse with mildew, especially this side where the soil had crept high against the house. The place was a wreck, no question. Ten years of dereliction had almost done for it. The eastern gable wall had an outward lean and would need buttressing in the short term at least. He had neither power nor plumbing and no real furniture to speak of. He’d have to strip and seal the interior walls as soon as he could. He needed a grader to clear centuries of cow slurry from the barnyard and a fence to keep the neighbours’ cattle out of his modest field. He needed to plant trees — geez, the whole country needed to plant them — and buy linen and blankets and cooking things. A gas stove, a sink, toilet. It hardly bore thinking about this morning. All he could manage was the job at hand.
Scully went on hacking the ground, cursing now and then and marvelling at how sparks could still be made off muddy rocks.
He thought of the others, wondered how long he would have to be alone. He wasn’t the solitary sort, and he missed them already. He wondered how Jennifer and Billie would cope seeing Australia again. Hard to go back and go through with leaving it forever. He was glad it was them. Himself, he would have piked out. One foot on the tarmac, one sniff of eucalyptus and he’d be a goner. No, it was better they went and finished things up. He was best used to get things ready here. This way he could go through with it. Scully could only feel things up to a certain point before he had to act. Doing things, that’s what he was good at. Especially when it had a point. This was no exception. He was doing it for Jennifer, no use denying it, but she appreciated what it had taken for him to say yes. It was simple. He loved her. She was his wife. There was a baby on the way. They were in it together, end of story.
He worked all day to free the walls of soil and vegetation, pulling ivy out of the mortar when the mattock became too much. He ran his blistered hands over the old stones and the rounded corners of his house and smiled at how totally out of whack the whole structure was. Two hundred and fifty years and probably not a single stone of it plumb.
Ireland. Of all places, Ireland, and it was down to Mylie Doolin, that silly bugger.
Scully had originally come to the Republic for a weekend, simply out of respect. It was the country boy in him acknowledging his debts, squaring things away. They were leaving Europe at last, giving in and heading home. It seemed as though getting pregnant was the final decider. From Greece they caught a cheap flight to London where they had things stored. The Qantas flight from Heathrow was still days away, but they were packed and ready so early they went stir crazy. In the end, Scully suggested a weekend in Ireland. They’d never been, so what the hell. A couple of pleasant days touring and Scully could pay his respects to Mylie Doolin who had kept the three of them alive that first year abroad.
Fresh off the plane from Perth, Scully worked for Mylie on dodgy building sites all over Greater London. The beefy Irishman ran a band of Paddies on jobs that lacked a little paperwork and needed doing quick and quiet for cash money. On the bones of his arse, Scully found Mylie’s mob in a pub on the Fulham Road at lunchtime, all limehanded and dusthaired and singing in their pints. The Paddies looked surprised to see him get a lookin, but he landed an afternoon’s work knocking the crap out of a bathroom in Chelsea and clearing up the rubble. He worked like a pig and within a few days he was a regular. Without that work Scully and Jennifer and Billie would never have survived London and never have escaped its dreary maw. Mad Mylie paid him well, told him wonderful lies and set them up for quite some time. Scully saved like a Protestant. He never forgot a favour. So, only a weekend ago now, Scully had driven the three of them across the Irish midlands in a rented Volkswagen to the town of Banagher where, according to Mylie, Anthony Trollope had invented the postal pillar box and a Doolin ancestor had been granted a papal annulment from his horse. That’s how it was, random as you please. A trip to the bogs. A missed meeting. A roadside stop. A house no one wanted, and a ticket home he cashed in for a gasping van and some building materials. Life was a bloody adventure.
He worked on till dark without finishing, and all down the valley, from windows and barns and muddy boreens, people looked up to the queer sight of candles in the bothy window and smoke ghosting from the chimney where that woollyheaded lad was busting his gut looking less like a rich American every day.