Malarky (23 page)

In the barn she's not sure this is such a grand idea because she's anxious vermin might scamper over her feet. It's dark, very dark, once the door is shut, stinky, and not even a shaft of light between the two of them, they can barely find each other. It's cold, she regrets not bringing a blanket and there are objects to negotiate that she's forgotten about, but she's a plan. She must know what her son experienced that day and here is the man to show her.

—Like this, she pushes on his shoulders, encouraging him down to her hips, and he commences precisely what she has come up here for. Biology somewhat absent from the original equation. She dragged his hands to the back of her, but he began to wobble on one knee.

Technically speaking, it did not work as well for her as it had for Jimmy that day. She'd never had a man's tongue, her husband's, between her legs that way and though she found plenty to recommend it, with the bale of straw scratching her backside and the tickling out front, it required an extreme balance and itching concentration act, with an increasing number of goose pimples on both their shivering flesh. She never stands still in a barn, she is in, out and about to the animals. She has a moving purpose entering the barn. Plus she's aware of the sounds outside and realizes this is an utterly lunatic arrangement. Is that a tractor passing along the road? A wheelbarrow coming up the path?

She'd inverted the positioning: she should have had him receive her sucking, since it was that sucking action that had bothered her the most. The hungry gobble of that young fella pulling at her son.

She'd ruined a recipe.

His awkward attempt within this arrangement to penetrate her failed. She'd resisted saying it's all wrong, not this way, and he complained of the uncomfortable prickle at the top of his thighs from the hay, which was lacerating her lower back. He suggested a return to the house to reunite with the comfort of a bed, but on exit Halim tripped on a spade and fell rather badly.

Back in the kitchen the bloody graze his elbow took on falling led to medical repair and since she did a good nursing act, which he lapped up, that led to the kettle rather than further flesh and they sat drinking tea together as though nothing had ever happened between them. In the harsh light of the bulb, she was terrified to touch him, for this table was where she sat with her husband watched him sigh over the salt pot and where she recorded the deaths of soldiers and
civilians. Another problem was whenever Halim sat down with no purpose, he began complaining vociferously about all aspects of his life.

The strangest things happened when men sat down around her.

That night she doesn't sleep well. All Halim's questions about childbirth confuse her as to their purpose. And she must stop this nonsense. When she looks in the bathroom mirror, she sees only how worn out her own face is, and how age has ravaged her and suddenly he looks tauter and younger and newer and polished, more elastic than he is. She doesn't smile when she thinks of him tonight. When she looks at her husband in bed, his nose just above the covers, she belongs here beside this relic, where they're drooping in unison.

By Sunday her mind is made up. She will not ask his age. She's more to do with him and she must get on with it, that's a fact.

As a matter of fact I must carry on.

Sunday and Halim's low. He's awful down.

—I can't stay in this country, it's too hard, they treat me very bad in my work. They think I am stupid but I am from a good family, I study hard and yet these people treat me stupid.

—Don't mind them, she tries to cheer him up, but he won't be cheered.

—My life is awful. I have disappointed my family. They had big hopes for me you know. I am from a very good family, he repeats.

—I'm sure you haven't disappointed them. And you're young, young and studying. I wish my son was still here studying.

He is briefly interested in her son, but wails further on his disappointment.

He repeats that he has disappointed them and he cannot tell her why.

—Nonsense, she says brightly. Go way outta that.

—You don't know anything. Nothing at all. You think I'm stupid. All these Irish are the same. They seem like they like you but actually they hate you. They think I'm not capable.

He's morose in this state, so she whisks herself away with the kettle's boiling.

On her return from the kitchen she brings a tray of tea.

—Sometime I will tell you about my wedding, he says.

Please God save me from it, Our Woman thinks. Offering him a Kimberly biscuit as consolation.

After that visit she settled on a pony, a Connemara pony. A lovely one with an overgrown fringe she could attend to and be shut of these morose, immodest men in her ears.

But first she'd another thing to do with him.

—Are you still having the visions?

—I am.

—And how are you managing them?

—I am doing what you suggested. My kitchen floor is ever so clean.

We laughed. It is important to reassure Grief, to let her know that I am behaving in my widowhood.

Everything else we discussed faded into the nice room, the nice floral lamp, and the cosy beige chairs we sat on. We could have been exchanging bingo numbers. All I knew was I was sat here for my reputation and for the Blue House. The Blue House with the gaping big hole in it.

—Kathleen, she told me warmly at the end of that session, you are doing very well. Much better than before.

I was not talking about the naked men. I was behaving. Progress had been made. For some reason I was Kathleen instead of Phil. I think she had confused me with someone who was doing better than I am. When I phoned to book my next appointment I called myself Kathleen. Whoever she was, she was doing better than me.