“I like you better than my old doctor,” Cal says.
“Listen, would you. That American meat you were ating back home, that’s chock fulla hormones. They pump those into the cattle to fatten them up. So what d’you think they do to human beings?”
He waits for an answer. “Can’t be good,” Cal says.
“They’ll swell you up like a balloon and put tits on you like Dolly Parton. Mad yokes. The EU has them all banned, over here. That’s what put the weight on you to begin with. Now that you’re ating dacent Irish meat, it’ll fall off you again. We’ll have you looking like Gene Kelly in no time.”
Mart has apparently picked up that Cal has something on his mind today and is determined to talk him out of it, either from a sense of neighborly duty or because he likes the challenge. “You oughta market that,” Cal says. “Mart’s Miracle Diet Bacon. The more you eat, the more you lose.”
Mart chuckles, apparently satisfied. “Saw you heading into town there yesterday,” he mentions, just in passing. He squints across the garden at Kojak, who is getting serious about a clump of bushes, scrabbling hard to jam his whole front end in there.
“Yeah,” Cal says, straightening up. He knows what Mart is after. “Hold on.” He goes inside and comes back out with a pack of cookies. “Don’t eat ’em all at once,” he says.
“You’re a gentleman,” Mart says happily, accepting the cookies over the fence. “Did you try them yet?”
Mart’s cookies are elaborate constructions of pink fluffy marshmallow, jam and coconut that, to Cal, look like something you would use to bribe a five-year-old in a great big hair bow into quitting her tantrum. “Not yet,” he says.
“Dip them, man. In the tay. The marshmallow goes soft and the jam melts on your tongue. Nothing like it.” Mart stashes the cookies in the pocket of his green wax jacket. He doesn’t offer to pay for them. The first time, Mart presented the cookie run as a once-off, a favor that would make a poor old farmer’s day, and Cal wasn’t about to demand a handful of change from his brand-new neighbor. After that Mart treated it as a long-established tradition. The amused slide of his eyes at Cal whenever he takes the cookies says he’s testing.
“I’m a coffee man,” Cal says. “It wouldn’t be the same.”
“Don’t be telling Noreen about these, now,” Mart warns him. “She’d only find something else to take off me. She likes to think she’s got the upper hand.”
“Speaking of Noreen,” Cal says. “If you’re heading that way, can you pick me up some ham? I forgot.”
Mart gives a long whistle. “Are you after getting yourself into Noreen’s bad books? Bad move there, bucko. Look where that landed me. Whatever it is you done, get you down there with a bunch of flowers and make your apologies.”
The fact is, Cal wants to stick around home today. “Nah,” he says. “She keeps trying to set me up with her sister.”
Mart’s eyebrows shoot up. “What sister?”
“Helena, I think she said.”
“God almighty, man, then away you go. I thought there you meant Fionnuala, but Noreen must like the cut of you. Lena’s got a good head on her shoulders. And her husband was tight as a duck’s arse and he’d drink the river dry, God rest him, so she’s not suffering from high standards. She won’t go mad if you bring your muddy boots inside or fart in the bed.”
“Sounds like my kind of woman,” Cal says. “If I was looking.”
“And she’s a fine strapping lass, too, not one of them scrawny young ones that you’d lose if they turned sideways. A woman needs a bit of meat on her. Ah, now”—pointing a finger at Cal, who has started to laugh—“that’s your filthy mind, that is. I’m not talking about the riding. Did I say anything about the riding?”
Cal shakes his head, still laughing.
“I did not. What I’m saying”—Mart settles his forearms on the top bar of the fence, getting comfortable to expand on this—“what I’m saying to you is, if you’re going to have a woman in the house, you want one that fills a bit of space. It’s no good having some skin-and-bones scrap of a girl with a mousy wee voice on her and not a word out of her from one day to the next. You wouldn’t be getting your money’s worth. When you walk into the house, you want to be seeing your woman, and hearing her. You need to know she’s there, or what’s the point in having her at all?”
“No point,” Cal says, grinning. “So Lena’s loud, huh?”
“You’d know she was there. Away with you and get your own ham slices, and ask Noreen to set up that date. Give yourself a good wash, shave that wookiee off your face, put on a fancy shirt. Bring her into town, now, to a restaurant; don’t be bringing her down the pub to be stared at by all them reprobates.”
“You should take her out,” Cal says.
Mart snorts. “I’ve never been married.”
“Well, exactly,” Cal says. “Wouldn’t be right for me to take up more than my share of loud women.”
Mart is shaking his head vigorously. “Ah no no no. You’ve it all arseways, so you do. What age are you? Forty-five?”
“Forty-eight.”
“You look well on it. Them meat hormones must keep you young.”
“Thanks.”
“Either way, but. By the time he’s forty, a man’s either in the habit of being married or he’s not. Women have ideas, and I’m not accustomed to anyone’s ideas but my own. You are.” Mart extracted this and other key vital statistics from Cal on their first meeting, with such near-invisible expertise that Cal felt like the amateur.
“You lived with your brother,” Cal points out. Mart is at least reciprocal with information: Cal has heard all about his brother, who preferred custard cream cookies, was an awful gom but a great hand at the lambing, gave Mart that broken nose by hitting him with a spanner in an argument over the TV remote, and died of a stroke four years ago.
“He’d no ideas,” Mart says, with the air of someone scoring a point. “Thick as pig shite. I couldn’t have some wan bringing her ideas into my house. Wanting a chandelier, maybe, or a poodle, or me to do yoga classes.”
“You could find a dumb one,” Cal offers.
Mart dismisses that with a puff of air. “I’d enough of that with the brother. But d’you know Dumbo Gannon? On that farm there?” He points across the fields at a long, low, red-roofed building.
“Yeah,” Cal says, making an educated guess. One of the old guys in the pub is a little runt with a set of jug ears you could pick him up by.
“Dumbo’s on his third missus. You wouldn’t credit it, the head on him and the price of spuds, but I’m telling you. One of the women died and the other one ran off on him, but both times Dumbo had himself a new one inside the year. The same as I’d get a new dog if Kojak died on me, or a new telly if mine went, Dumbo goes out and gets himself a new missus. Because he’s in the habit of someone bringing in ideas. If there’s no woman in it, he doesn’t know what to have for the dinner, or what to watch on the telly. And with no woman in it, you won’t know what colors to paint the chambers in that mansion over there.”
“I’m gonna go for white,” Cal says.
“And what?”
“And white.”
“See what I’m telling you?” Mart says triumphantly. “Only in the heel of the hunt, you won’t. You’re in the habit of having someone bringing in ideas. You’ll go looking.”
“I can get in an interiors guy,” Cal says. “Fancy hipster who’ll paint it chartreuse and puce.”
“Where are you planning on finding one of them around here?”
“I’ll import him from Dublin. He gonna need a work visa?”
“You’ll do the same as Dumbo,” Mart informs him. “Whether you plan on it or not. I’m only trying to make sure you do it right, before some skinny bitta fluff gets her hooks into you and makes your life a misery.”