The Riders (7 page)

It was dark outside now and rain fell, light at first and then in roaring sheets. The fire hissed.

‘You're a lucky man to have a child,' said Pete staring into the fire.

‘Yes,' he said with his whole being. ‘Yes. It's a surprise, you know, nothing prepares you for it. Nothing better ever happened to me. Funny, you know, but I'm so bloody grateful for it. To Jennifer, to God.' He laughed self consciously. ‘You see, this stuff used to be automatic, you know, natural. Women aren't so keen to have them anymore, not where I come from, anyway. They've got other fish to fry, which is fair enough. But they don't realize, sometimes, what they're missing, or what they're withholding, you know? The power they have. I don't know if Billie was an accident or not. I thought she was. It's hard to tell, you see, with people. So I'm grateful, that's the truth of it.' Scully blushed. Yes. That was why he dressed her so meticulously when she was small, why he worried too much about seatbelts, why he infuriated the kid with lectures about tooth decay. It wasn't like him, but she wasn't to know. It was her, the fact of her. And when she fell from a bike or a tree she came running to him. It shamed him in front of Jennifer, the way Billie ran to him first. Did Jennifer feel what his own father must have felt, being the second
parent? Maybe he just took it all too seriously. Perhaps other people didn't feel these things.

‘You want some of your own, someday, then?'

‘Oh, I could imagine it,' said Pete, refilling his glass and resting his boot on the hearth. ‘There's just the little problem of matrimony, Scully. You know, if
I
wanted trouble,
I
'd move to Ulster. I like comin and goin as I fancy. And I have Con's own when the urge hits me.'

Pete watched as Scully got up and lit his three candles at the sill. Both of them stared at the twitching candle-flame and the reflection it threw along the panes.

‘Did you ever come close?' Scully asked. ‘To marriage.'

‘Aw, once. But I was young. There's no point goin back on it. All the adventures are ahead of you, not behind. You got to go and find em. And I might say,' he said with a mischievous cast in his eyes, ‘I believe in deliverin em now and then, too. You've been godly patient with my brother.'

‘Pete, we don't –'

‘No, no, I thank ye for your understandin on this.'

‘Look –'

‘Can you meet me in Birr tomorrow mornin early, say seven-thirty?'

‘Sure. Why?'

‘Power corrupts, you know, but without it,
you
can neither cook toast nor take a shit. Seven-thirty.'

•  •  •

T
HE STREETS OF
B
IRR WERE
almost light at seven-thirty next morning and its houses, shoulder to shoulder in the misty square, were grey and stirring with the shriek of kettles and the scuffle of dogs. Scully saw the van in the rain-slick high street
and pulled in beside it as Pete climbed out grimly waving.

Pete led them to the little green doorway at the side of a shopfront. Pete knocked and blew on his hands.

A jaded and fearful woman let them in wordlessly.

‘Mornin, Maeve.'

‘He'll not be up for hours, Peter. Don't even bother yourself.'

‘This is Fred Scully from out at the Leap.'

‘Oh, yes, the Australian,' she smiled wanly.

‘Pleased to meet you,' said Scully, smelling boiled cabbage, cigarette smoke, turf and bacon fat.

‘Peter talks about you all day.'

‘Oh. I hope it's not all bad,' he said limply.

‘Ready, Scully?'

‘Ready for what?' said Maeve Keneally.

Scully felt faint from the stuffiness and desperation of this house. It seemed no window had been opened here for generations.

‘Just keep the front door open, Maeve.'

Scully followed the postman through the gloomy house and into a foetid bedroom where Conor Keneally slept in his boots, and they took him by those boots, and dragged him off the bed, down the corridor with its greenish pictures of the Pope and the saints and Charlie Haughey, through the front door and out into the drizzling street where, finally awake, he began to struggle.

‘Watha fook! Geroffa me!'

‘We've got a job for you to do, so you can get in the van, Con.' Pete hauled at his brother but the man slid back onto the lumpy pavement.

‘I'm in the fookin wet street in me jammies, you bastard eejit!'

‘Aw, Conor Keneally, you slept in your duds as ever. Get in your van.'

Conor struggled to his feet. He was bigger than his brother and redfisted. His sideburns were like flames down his cheeks as he braced himself against the Toyota van, copping a bit of PVC pipe in the back of the head as he staggered.

‘No one tells me.'

‘Shut up and get in the van,' said Pete trying to smile.

‘Who's gonna make me, gobshite?' The big man straightened, smelling of the hop fields of the Republic. ‘You, Mr Post?'

‘No,' Pete said, pointing at Scully. ‘Him.'

Conor struggled to focus on the scarred and wonk-eyed face of the Australian, who quite simply looked mealy enough to be up to it. It was no postman face.

‘Now, Conor, this is one of Mylie Doolin's London boys and he needs a job done.'

The electrician slumped and held a great meaty hand to his head in horror.

‘Aw! Awww, fook me now! Jaysus, what're you doin Peter Keneally, you eejit!'

‘Don't be askin stupid questions. Get a meter box and all the guff.'

‘There's one in there,' Conor said, sickly dipping his head to the van. ‘I was after comin from Tullamore –'

‘Let's go, then,' interrupted Pete gruffly. ‘Our man will follow in the Transit.'

Conor covered his face with both hands now. ‘Holy Mother, Peter. Mylie Doolin.'

‘Aye,' said Peter winking over his brother's shoulder at Scully, ‘Mylie himself.'

He watched them climb into the Toyota with a jug of sloe poteen. A dog barked. The rain fell.

•  •  •

S
CULLY STAYED CLEAR OF THE
bothy all morning, keeping to the draughty barn to sand down and varnish an old mahogany chair he found in the loft. Now and then he heard shouts from the house: anger, exasperation, hangover, fear. It was funny alright, but he felt sorry for poor Conor, labouring in there with an imaginary gun at his head and a very real hangover inside it. Scully worked away in the giddy fumes grateful to Mylie once more.

Just before noon when he could stand the cold no longer he went inside and heard a transistor playing fiddle music in the kitchen.

Conor was at the table shakily filling out some paperwork, and Pete was throwing turf on the fire.

‘Power to the people, Scully.'

‘Don't suck up, brother.'

Scully just grinned. Conor held out the sheets of paper to Scully who took them without speaking.

‘Now that electric drill will work, Scully, me boy,' said Pete. ‘Bit of kneecappin, no?'

Conor paled.

‘C'mon, Pete,' said Scully, speaking in Conor's presence for the first time that day. ‘Give the bloke a break.'

‘This fooker's not Irish!'

‘Australian,' said Scully.

‘Desert Irish, you might say.'

The table crashed forward and Conor was reaching for his brother's throat when the noon Angelus suddenly sounded on the radio. Without hesitation, both Irishmen went slack, and adopted the prayerful hunch, snorting and trembling, as the church bell rang clear. Wind pressed against the panes. The fire
sank on itself, and the bell tolled on and on into the false calm. Scully watched the fallen forelocks of the Keneallys and fought the fiendish giggle that rose in his neck. And then the last peal rang off into silence. The men crossed themselves and Conor Keneally noticed how upright Scully was, how his hands stayed in his pockets.

‘Good Christ, he's not even Catholic, let alone Irish!'

‘And that's not all,' said Peter, chuckling and preparing to be pummelled. ‘He thought Mylie was in gaol for the VAT.'

Conor looked at Scully with a sudden mildness on his face – pity. ‘Jaysus, man, where did
you
go to school?'

‘Elsewhere, you might say.'

‘You bastards.' Conor slapped his cloth cap against his knees. ‘You fookers had me banjanxed. He's not with the Provos at all, is he.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Scully.

Pete tipped his head back and laughed, and he didn't stop for a moment as Conor dragged him outside and rammed him into the door of the Toyota, and he kept it up as his roaring brother beat his head against the roof, holding his ginger forelock and slamming down once, twice until the big man let go and stood back and began to weep.

‘Oh, God, my life.'

From the door of his house which poured music and the smell of burning soil, Scully watched as Pete grabbed his brother and held him fiercely in the wind. The big man sobbed and dripped tears and snot. His roadmap face glowed with shame and despair and a kind of impotence Scully had never seen before. Peter's hands were in his brother's ginger curls and he wept too, his eyes averted, his head high in the wind.

Scully went inside and stood by the fire, hung the kettle on the crane, threw on some more turf. The radio played a ballad, and a woman's mournful voice filled the cottage. He went back to the front door and offered the Keneallys a cup of tea. They straightened up, accepted with dignity and kicked the mud from their boots.

O
N THE ELEVENTH OF
D
ECEMBER
, a Friday with sunlight and sharp, clean air, Scully stood at a sink full of hot water and sang in his broken, growly voice, an old song he had heard Van Morrison bawling yesterday on the radio.

But the sea is wide

And I can't swim over

And neither have

I wings to fly . . .

The house smelled sweetly of turf and scrubbing. There was crockery on the pine dresser and a shelf beneath the stairs with old paperbacks on it already. There was a birch broom inside the door and a stack of larch kindling by the turfbox. An oilskin hung from a peg on the chimney wall above his Wellington boots. Beside him, the little refrigerator hummed on the flagstones. There were cheap curtains on the windows, blue against the whitewash, and the sun spilled in across the stainless steel sink. Admit it, he told
himself, you like it, you like the place now that it's full of things. Because you love things, always have.

Scully was like his father that way. No matter what the Salvos said, the old fella thought certain objects were godly. Briggs and Stratton motors, the McCulloch chainsaw, the ancient spirit level that lived in the workshed beside the dairy, the same bubbly level that caused Scully junior to have ideas of drawing and building. Ah, those
things
. The old girl thought it was idolatry, but she had a brass thimble she treasured more than her wedding ring.

It wasn't getting things and having them that Scully learnt; it was simply admiring them, getting a charge out of their strange presence.

Scully wiped the windowpane with his sweatered elbow and saw the rhinestone blaze of the frozen fields. Too good a day for working. He couldn't spend another day at it, not while the sun was out. Pete was right, he wasn't seeing anything, buried alive in work. He didn't even know where he was living.

On the kitchen table he began a letter home but he realized that it wouldn't reach them in time. He looked at the little aside he had written to Billie in the margin.
Even if I fall off the world, Billie Ann Scully, I will still love you from Space.

He smiled. Yes.

•  •  •

T
HAT MORNING HE DROVE INTO
birr and organised his banking. He had a cheque made out to Peter Keneally as part payment. He bought a leg of New Zealand lamb and a sprig of rosemary at insane cost. He found oranges from Spain, olives, anchovies, tomatoes, things with the sun still in them. Men and women greeted him as he humped a sack of spuds to the Transit in a light drizzle. He bought an
Irish Times
and read about the
mad bastard in Melbourne killing eight in the Australia Post building. Jumped through a plate glass window on the tenth floor. Someone else in Miami, an estranged husband killed his whole family with a ball peen hammer and gassed himself so they could all be together again. Shit, was it just men?

Two kids in fluorescent baseball caps walked by singing. He started the van. Yes, at least they sing here, whatever else happens.

•  •  •

A
LONG THE WINDING LANES HE
drove, contained between hedges and walls, swinging into turns hard up against the brambles, skidding mildly on puddles hard as steel, until he came to a tree in the middle of the road, with rags in its stark branches. It stood on a little island of grass where the road had been diverted around it. Scully pulled up alongside and saw the shards of cloth tied here and there, some pale and rotten, others freshly attached.
A
sad little tree with a road grown around it. It looked quite comical and forlorn. He drove on.

•  •  •

A
T
C
OOLDERRY HE PULLED UP
outside the village school. He got out into the light and stood by the hurling pitch as the bell clanged for lunch. The bleat of children made his heart soar.

A car idled down the hill.

‘How are you, Scully?'

He turned and saw that it was Pete-the-Post with his arm out of the van.

‘Me? A bit toey, I'd say.'

‘Toey?'

‘Anxious, impatient, nervous . . .'

‘Antsy, then.'

‘No, toey.'

Pete smiled and turned off the motor. ‘Not long, son. Two days now, isn't it?'

‘How's Conor?'