The Shelter of Neighbours (15 page)

‘I think so,' said Mitzy. ‘I think people will pay more for a house that is really nice and ready to walk into than for somewhere that needs a lot of work.'

She bought an old Edwardian house for fifty thousand pounds. This was at the end of 1996. The owner of that house had been trying to sell it for more than a year. The place was a dump, inside and out. Mitzy got the worst of the structural problems attended to, and did a big redecoration job herself – she could paint and hang wallpaper and bore holes in the wall for hanging things. The garden was a wilderness but she trimmed and tamed it in no time, popped in a few flowering shrubs and geraniums in pots. In November the following year she sold it for three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. And then she bought two small Corporation houses in Harold's Cross. They tripled in value by the time she sold them nine months later. By 2000, Mitzy was a millionaire twice over, and set to get richer.

Even though Mitzy was busier than she ever had been, Martha got to know her much better after she went part-time herself. Mitzy was busy but she worked from home – she set up an office in one of the bedrooms. They had six, so there was room for it. As the first decade of the new millennium moved on she worked less. The restoration of houses she left to others, and she bought and sold less and less, anyway – it cost so much to buy property, even a run-down shack, that the business was not as lucrative as it had been at the start of the decade. She and Martha had lunch together on Fridays, and on these occasions they talked about their families mostly, and the neighbourhood, and their houses. But also about themselves.

Because Mitzy was so cheerful, good-looking, elegantly turned out, Martha had always assumed she came from a well-to-do background. But this was not the case. Mitzy (she had been called Patricia, even Patsy, as a child) was not even from the city. She had been born on a farm. Twenty acres, six cows. ‘Yes, I was up before school, feeding chickens!' It was hard to imagine. Not because of her posh accent, or her clothes. But there was something about her face that looked quintessentially urban – classical, absolutely regular, with a tiny nose and large, slightly hooded eyes. She always looked made up, even when she wasn't. When Martha heard that Mitzy had been brought up on a farm, the image that popped into her head was of
Green Acres
. Who was the star in that? Eva Gabor?
New York is where I'd rather stay
, that was the line in the theme song,
I get allergic smelling hay
.

‘I loved it,' she said. ‘Mucking about. There was a great sense of purpose to it. And you belonged not just to your family, but to a community. Everyone knew everyone. And looked out for them.
Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine
.' She quoted the well-known proverb in Irish, about neighbours depending on one another.

Martha nodded, surprised because she had never heard Mitzy say a word of Irish before. They were at either side of the long, stripped pine table Mitzy had in her enormous kitchen – new. Like almost everyone on the crescent, Mitzy had built an extension, even though her house was already huge. Behind her was a pale yellow Aga, and an old dresser filled with painted jugs and plates – all the most well-known potters in the country were represented on it. She'd replicated the country style here on Dunroon Crescent, although everyone knew no real country kitchen had ever looked like this.

‘It's so different now for the kids in the suburbs,' Mitzy said. ‘I pity them.'

‘But they have an easier life.' Martha was thinking of the swimming clubs, the piano lessons, the designer tracksuits. Now it looked as though they would have their choice of careers, too – that they would not be forced to take whatever job they got, and stick to it for life, lest they don't get a second chance, which was what she had done.

‘I'm not so sure about that,' Mitzy said.

That's when she told Martha about Siobhán, who wasn't a kid, anyway.

She had tried to kill herself a few months ago.

‘Overdose,' Mitzy said. ‘She took all the pills she could find in the house and swallowed them.'

‘Why did she do it?'

‘Broken heart. She was living with Mark for four years. He seemed so nice!'

Martha remembered him, although to her all young men look pretty much the same.

‘Some tart from Poland got her mitts on him!'

‘These things happen,' Martha said, remembering, with a sour twist in her stomach, her own history.

Mitzy laughed – harshly, for her, like a magpie squawking – and shook her head. ‘That was just the immediate cause. But there's something deeper. She was carted off to the hospital, of course, to be detoxed, and they insisted on sending her to John of God's.'

The psychiatric hospital. Martha tried to look deeply shocked and sad – the fact was she had heard some of this already, though in disjointed scraps, from other neighbours.

‘She was there for three months.'

‘But she's
ok
now?'

Mitzi shrugged. ‘She's back at work. I don't think she'll ever be
ok
. She'll never get over it.'

But you have to, Martha thought. Everyone has to get over things like that.

That conversation with Mitzy took place about a month ago. Martha is listening to the eight o'clock news. Seamus has already left for school; he goes off just after seven. She's exhausted, after being up during the night. She puts Fluff out for her morning pee and sees Bran slinking around the fuchsia bushes. He hates her now, after that kick – well, he'll get over it. In the end, most people and animals get over everything, if you give them time.

Martha's dopey as she drinks her coffee and eats her All-Bran. There's the usual dispiriting news about the downturn in the economy. The leader of the small businessmen's association is interviewed and calls, it must be for the hundredth time, for a reduction in the number of public servants and for more cuts to their pay. He has convinced the journalists and the public that public servants caused the financial crisis.

Martha thinks those people are the Nazis. They're looking for a scapegoat. And for a while, until the hand of blame is pointed elsewhere, she and Seamus, the public servants, are it. It's astonishing how easy it is to influence public opinion, and how easy it is for public opinion to influence the politicians. You plant an idea and keep watering it on the airwaves, and very soon a myth is transmogrified into a fact.

This is the very thing Mitzy and she fell out about last week.

Mitzy is feeling the pinch. She has four properties on her books now that she can't sell, or even let, and she lost money in some sort of investment shares she has – not the kind the government is protecting, obviously.

‘We'll be all right,' Mitzy said. It was Friday, one of their Friday lunches. This one was in Mitzy's house. ‘But we've taken a hit.' She shook her head sadly and pursed her lips, but she didn't disclose details.

They were in the conservatory at the back of the house, overlooking the pool Mitzy had put in a few years back. The water in the pool glistened under the autumn sunshine; Mitzy's lemon trees, in tubs behind the glass, were in flower – they flowered at the strangest times – and their intoxicating scent filled the air. Martha could inhale that perfume as if it were opium – this must be against the law, she said sometimes, as she sniffed greedily. The white wine sparkled in the shining glasses. They were eating smoked salmon terrine and Caesar salad, and the soft smoked Wexford cheese they loved that you could only get at the farmer's market in Glendalough. (Dunroon Crescent women drove down especially, on Sundays, to buy it.) A year and a half into the downturn and their lunches hadn't changed. Or their clothes or their holidays. As yet nothing in their lives had changed, although they were hearing every day that the country was in recession and that disaster was on the horizon.

That's when Mitzy took a swipe at the public servants.

‘They're bleeding the economy dry,' she said, waving her pale hands in the air, and repeating what you could hear on the radio any time you turned it on.

Then she told a little story.

‘A friend of Siobhán's was working in some department last year,' she said. ‘Education, I think. I'm not sure. And in November, some of them said, “We haven't taken our sick leave yet!” And they took two weeks off, before the Christmas holidays!'

Mitzy shook her head in disgust. Her fringe was silver now, but it was as thick and shining as ever.

Martha's innards boiled; her stomach felt like a pot of poisoned stew on a high flame, ready to erupt.

She looked out the window, instead of into Mitzy's eyes. There was a congress of starlings in the garden. Hundreds of them were sitting in the big sycamore trees, looking like black plums on the branches, gathering for that thing they do. A murmuration?

‘I'm a public servant.' Martha kept the lid on. As she always did. Almost always. ‘And so is Seamus.'

Mitzy was confused, but not for long. Mitzy was never confused for long.

‘I don't mean you,' she said quickly. She laughed. Her earrings danced. They were silver now, to match her hair, and her white linen blouse. ‘I don't think of you in that light. I meant …' She paused. ‘I meant, you know … the mandarins who sit in offices all day drinking tea at the taxpayers' expense.'

Martha nodded and ate a bit of salmon. She could never think of the right thing to say when a friend insulted her. The smart retort always occurred to her long after the conversation was over, when it was too late.

And – when it was too late – Martha remembered that she'd heard that rumour before – the story about the sick leave. She'd heard it from her own mother about thirty years ago. Now it was doing the rounds again. When it was too late, Martha remembered that no civil servant is allowed more than two days' sick leave at a stretch, without a doctor's certificate. And the Public Service year doesn't end in December, anyway, but in March, so there'd be no reason to use up any kind of leave in November. When it was too late, Martha realised that Mitzy's story was just one of those urban myths. But you never cop on to the urban myths until it's too late, that's the way they work.

She finished the terrine and the wine, although she couldn't stomach the cheese. She watched the starlings lift off the sycamore tree in one giant black flock and then vanish into thin air. How do they do that? So abruptly and so thoroughly. Where do they go?

She has not spoken to Mitzy since that day. If Mitzy is in her front garden when Martha comes out of her house, Martha withdraws and waits till she has gone, even if it means being late for work. And she didn't invite her to lunch last Friday. Now Mitzy has got the message. When she spots Martha, she makes herself scarce.

Morning Ireland
.

‘A report has just come in about a body found in the south suburbs this morning.'

Martha, filling the kettle, turns off the tap to listen properly.

‘The woman is believed to be in her late twenties and her body was discovered by a man walking his dog in shrubbery near the railway track in Ashfield. The woman, who sustained multiple stab wounds, has not yet been identified. The state pathologist is on her way to the scene. It is believed that she was killed in the early hours of the morning.'

Later it is revealed that the dead woman is Katia Michalska, aged twenty-five. She had been at a party in town but left alone. It was thought that she had walked home and been attacked when she was within two hundred yards of her own house, which was in Ashfield Park, the next suburb to Dunroon.

On Dunroon Crescent, it's generally assumed that somebody from Lourdes Gardens murdered the Polish woman. Those thugs were bound to murder someone, sooner or later. There's a rumour that Katia was mixed up with a fellow over there, and that she was into drugs.

‘She was no better than she should be,' Mitzy said. In the excitement of it all she has forgotten that she and Martha have fallen out and aren't on speaking terms. They're talking over the garden wall. ‘Not that that excuses anything. Poor creature!'

According to Robbie, Katia was involved with Siobhán's ex, Mark.

Mitzy didn't seem to be aware of that.

Hmm.

Over the next few days the Gardaí call to every house in the neighbourhood.

‘We're doing a routine check,' one of the two Gardaí says. They are in Martha's sitting room. Seamus and she have to give an account of their movements on the night of the murder. Sunday night. Robbie has already been questioned – they talked to the young folk first, naturally.

Seamus does most of the talking. They'd gone to bed at 11 p.m. on that Sunday night. Robbie was in bed, too, because he had to get up for college in the morning.

‘Didn't you wake up at some stage?' Seamus puts this question to Martha.

The guard has only asked a few things, and it's clear that he doesn't expect anything to come of this interview. He gives Martha an interested look.

‘I suffer from insomnia sometimes,' Martha says to him. ‘I woke up in the middle of the night.'

She sees Siobhán, walking down the road, wrapped up in that enormous coat. It hadn't been cold. And young people hate coats even when it is. Mostly they wear tiny jackets in the middle of winter. Or no jackets at all.

She hears Mitzy, sitting at her table overlooking the swimming pool, saying, ‘They're bleeding the economy dry.'

‘I got up and made a cup of tea, and I drank it. I heard a bird singing and I went to the window to look out.'

The bird must have been a blackbird. She can still hear its song – one line, repeated over and over again. She can't write music but she knows the bird had three or four notes and the line sounded like words.
Help you me, help you me, help you me
.