‘With a baby and all.’
‘A five-year-old isn’t a baby, Pete.’ No, he thought. For a baby you needed somewhere still and snug and anchored. Somewhere like this.
‘Whose idea was it?’
‘Hers, I spose.’
‘And you followed.’
‘I was game for a change, yeah. I didn’t exactly follow.’
‘Used to be the women who followed.’
Scully laughed, but it stung somehow. Admit it, Scully, he thought. You followed, you’d follow her anywhere. A few weeks ago you couldn’t sleep for dreams of home, of hot white beaches and the wicked scent of coconut oil and the Fremantle Doctor blowing the curtains inward against the long table there in that house you sweated on all those years. You were a mad dog for it, mate, like a horse in the home paddock, bolting with your nose in the air, kissing Europe goodbye, letting it kiss your cakehole for all you cared, and then wham! you turned on a penny for her sake. On a queer feeling, a thing she couldn’t explain, just to see her happy.
‘Well, maybe it’s our turn to follow anyway,’ he said.
‘Mebbe so. I don’t know about women. These boards need sandin now. You need the power on, Scully. You can’t do all this by hand.’
‘It’s the money, mate. I’m stuffed until the money comes through from home. I’m living on the change from my air ticket. I don’t know if I can even pay what I owe you already.’
‘What, you think I’m lyin awake at night waitin for to be paid? What a proddy you are. I’ll have Con come by in the mornin and put a box in, I shoulda thought of it Monday. I’ll be frigged if I’m comin by to do this shite by hand. And yev got holes in your chimney there, go make some mortar. Make it one part Portland, one of lime and six of good sand. If he don’t show by eleven tomorrow, you must go in and get him. It’s the Conor Keneally Electric in Birr. He’ll be the poor big bastard looks like me.’
Eight
BUT CONOR KENEALLY DIDN’T COME, not for days he didn’t, and Scully thought it best to wait it out. He scraped mildew and dirt and pulpy mortar from the interior walls and caulked up holes and cracks, and then rendered the whole surface anew, filling the place with the heady stink of lime. He scraped paint from the low attic ceiling of the upstairs rooms and sugar-soaped it till his hands were raw. The house filled with shavings and sawdust and paint flakes and wall scum and began to look like the galley of a prawn trawler. Scully found himself squatting by the hearth at night, eating with his hands. In his sliver of mirror he looked feral. He worked on without electricity, driving himself, sleeping only on his oak door amid the drifts and draughts. He just couldn’t bring himself to go into Birr and chase Conor Keneally up, not when the man’s brother came by every day with a pair of cover-alls over his postal uniform and a trowel in his hand and a pint of Power’s at the ready. The man came by with a gas bottle, for pity’s sake, and a kitchen sink and beds brought piece by piece atop the mail of the Republic. The two of them would stand about at day’s end silently observing the lack of electricity.
‘You should get out now and then, Scully,’ Pete-the-Post said. ‘You’re killin yeself here and meetin no one, not even your neighbours.’
‘You keep bringing me my food. I can never think of an excuse to go in. You second guess me.’
‘Well, I’m takin pity on ye, Scully.’
This caused Scully to laugh uncomfortably. Did he seem that pitiable? True, he was living rough, but it was a temporary thing.
‘I’m getting there.’
‘That you are, son. You work like a nigger.’
Scully winced but let it pass.
‘I just wish you’d bill me.’
‘Are you lookin for a job?’
‘Come New Year I will be, yeah.’
‘Well, when you get your job you’ll get your bills.’
Scully didn’t go looking for Conor Keneally out of respect. After a man said things like that, how could you go embarrassing him by pursuing his brother the way Scully felt like pursuing him, morning after morning when he failed to show? Scully’s power tools lay downstairs in an ugly row and daily he went at things by hand, by candlelight, by firelight, funnelling his anxiety into work.
In two mad days Scully painted out the whole interior in lime wash, and the place suddenly seemed brighter, bigger, cleaner, and so strangely wholesome that it made him realize how foul it had been before, what scunge he’d really been dealing with day and night. Then he sealed the timber floor upstairs and buffed it by hand, and he lacquered the oak banister of the stair and the great beams that ran from lintel to lintel downstairs. From pine boards in the barn loft he made a cabinet for the kitchen sink that lacked only its ply cladding and the hinges for its doors. He shaved down spare boards for bookshelves and set them upstairs beside Billie’s bed, and so pretty were they that he began to wonder whether electricity might spoil this life after all. Peter arrived with salvage ply and a box of panel pins and he finished the kitchen. The flags were dry and swept. It was a clean, simple place, his new house, a place he was glad to wake in now, but it was still without music, without voices and laughter for most of the day.
There were moments in Scully’s day when he simply could not use a brush or plane or hammer for the thought of the summer he was about to miss at home: the colourless grass prostrate before the wind, the flat sea whitehot at its edge and the boats paralysed at their moorings with the heat and the smell of the desert descending upon them in the marinas and coves and riverbends. The great glossy weight of grapes hanging overhead and the smell of snapper grilling over charcoal. The seamless blue sky and the loose clothing on brown bodies. Lord, it gave him bad pangs, the thought of leaving all that behind, the idea of Jennifer and Billie packing that life into tea-chests and walking out of their old Fremantle house. Maybe they should have gone halfway on this, taken out a loan in case things didn’t work out. The Fremantle house was worth ten times what they’d paid for this. They needn’t have sold really. But then he thought of that dreamy, sweet look of happiness on her face that day last month, that look of resolution which made her seem unreservedly confident for the first time in years. It was worth following, it had to be worth the risk of trust.
Worse than the pangs of doubt and fear he felt alone at work, Scully had waking dreams of her here. They were so vivid he could feel her breath on him. He saw linen on his bed and the two of them glistening, gasping in the quiet, her black hair a shadow upon the sheet. Billie’s sleeping form beside the gable window with the tarry sky behind her, and a cradle in the corner still swinging faintly in the clear, clear air.
Scully showered under the spray of a hose in the door arch of the barn at night, and so cold was the water that from out in the fields and down in the woods you could hear him bellow like a man truly suffering.
• • •
CONOR KENEALLY DIDN’T COME and didn’t come, and one afternoon when Scully couldn’t bear to be at it any longer, he threw down his tools and went out walking. The sky was low. The wind blew hard from the hills. He shoved his fists deep in his pockets and stumped between hawthorn hedges and fallen walls down the lanes into the valley. He heard a tractor slinging shed slurry onto a field somewhere and dogs barking. The smell of burning peat hung in the air. He skirted the castle and its farm and went on deep into the valley where the fields were dark and heavy and became bogs at the foot of the hills. A small church stood alone on the bend in the lane. Scully climbed the stile into the graveyard and walked among the granite tombs beneath the Celtic crosses and fossilized flowers. He loved those crosses with their topography of faces and plants and stories, so much more potent than the bare symbols of his Salvation Army upbringing. There was suffering there, life lived, and beauty. He touched their lichened veins and practised crossing himself a moment before walking on sheepishly.