Chapter One #4
“The dinner can wait; you won’t starve, the size of you. Come see what we’ve got here.”
Mart disappears. Cal succumbs to curiosity and heads into the pub.
Seán óg’s is Saturday-afternoon full, mainly farmers who’ve finished up their weekend business early and need a pint or two on the way home.
The place currently has no link to anyone called Seán, being run by a guy named Barty who mostly appears to be having second thoughts.
It’s a good pub, which is a credit to Barty, since the nearest alternative is far enough away that he could run a shitty two-tap dive and still get the clientele.
Instead he knows what everyone drinks and when they should stop drinking it, brings out the ashtrays after closing time, and recently replaced the patchy linoleum flooring with something that looks almost exactly like wood, although he hasn’t got around to the peeling textured wallpaper.
Cal suspects that Barty harbors dreams of running a nice pub, someplace with craft beer and maybe a menu, scheduled live music instead of the occasional impromptu sing-along, and no smell of cow shit.
Seán’s has many excellent qualities, and Cal is fond of it, but no one would call it nice.
“Good man yourself,” Mart says, shepherding Cal towards the alcove where he and his cronies hang out. “Barty! Get the big fella a pint.”
“I’ll get it,” Cal says. “I’m only staying for one.” The round system is inviolable: if he lets Mart buy him a pint, he has to stay and buy Mart one in return, or be branded for life as a scabby round-dodger, which is up there with sheep-rustling on the scale of social unacceptability.
“Aren’t we all, sure,” Mart says. “I’m not here at all, myself; I’ll be in later, after the dinner, but now I’m mending walls. Only I had to welcome this gazebo back home.”
There’s a clump of guys in the alcove, around a table littered with pint glasses and what look like little plastic dolls.
The rest of the guys are younger than Mart—he’s well into his sixties, although he’s the little wiry type that never ages, while the rest are closer to Cal’s age, hanging around the edges of fifty.
Ardnakelty is too small to allow for much stratification; if you want company, you hang out with anyone who doesn’t drive you crazy, and probably some people who do.
Bobby Feeney is settled in the middle of the banquette, glowing with achievement like a new mama.
Over the summer, Bobby sold a few acres of poor grazing land to Tommy Moynihan, disregarding Mart’s warning that getting his hands on land would only further Tommy’s notions of upperosity.
Bobby and his mama used some of the money to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and a bus tour of the Gems of Southwest France.
Most of the guys have had vacations in Majorca or Lanzarote here and there, when they could find people to look after their farms, but gallivanting around France is in a different league.
Senan Maguire is ignoring Bobby completely, to stop him getting above himself, and talking loudly to Francie Gannon, who’s ignoring both of them and staring moodily into his pint.
P.J. Fallon has his lanky legs wound around the legs of his stool and is gazing at Bobby like he just got back from the moon.
“Well, hey,” Cal says, pulling up a stool. “You made it back. How was France?”
Bobby isn’t used to being the center of attention, and he’s pink with the excitement of it, right up to the top of his little round head—Bobby looks like a kid made him from balls of Play-Doh.
“Amazing,” he says. “Lourdes was a bit—you know. I knew there’d be rosaries, like, I just wasn’t expecting that many.
But the mammy was delighted; she’ll be the queen of the bingo club now.
And the rest of France is only brilliant. ”
“He et the lot of it,” Senan informs Cal. “Look at the state of him.”
Bobby is in fact even rounder than usual. “They’ve gorgeous food,” he tells Cal. “I had oysters and all.”
“Fuck me blind,” Senan says, staring at Bobby in disbelief.
“You. Eating oysters. We’re in the shite now, lads; there’ll be no living with him.
Didja eat them with a shovel?” Senan is a big guy, with a face like a ham and a lot of forceful opinions.
He and Bobby have been best friends all their lives, a fact that mainly manifests itself in Senan giving Bobby shit.
“You use a fork to loosen them,” Bobby informs him. “Then you just neck them. Straight outa the shell.”
“I’ve seen it all now,” Senan tells the alcove. “This gobdaw, with the sheep shite not washed off him, telling me how to eat oysters.”
“I heard they’re like snots,” Francie says.
“They are, a bit,” Bobby concedes. “Not in a bad way, but.”
“If some fucker asked me to pay top whack for a big snot,” Francie says, “I’d tell him to shove it up his hole.” Francie has nothing against Bobby personally, but he’s happiest putting a damper on things.
“You’re missing the point,” Mart tells him.
“The big snot isn’t important. It coulda been anything: a roasted hedgehog, say, or that beet soup the Russians go mad for.
The point is, he hadn’t et one before, and now he has.
The scientists are after discovering that that’s the best thing you can do for your health: try something new.
It grows back the brain cells, when they’re dying of boredom from doing the same thing every day.
This fella’s probably after adding a year to his life, just with them big snots. ”
“I wouldn’t eat hedgehog either.”
“No one’s making you. Don’t come crying to me when you die young.”
“I’d eat an oyster,” P.J. says, having given this some thought—P.J., aware that his thought processes aren’t the fastest in town, likes to give them time before he commits himself. “Just the one, like. In case I mightn’t get another chance.”
“Sweet fuck,” Senan says to Bobby. “See what you’re after doing? You’ll have this whole place living on oysters and fuckin’ caviar. Barty’ll haveta order in champagne.”
“You’re only jealous ’cause you haven’t had champagne since that horse piss at your wedding,” Bobby says, smugly and surprisingly.
Most times, Bobby can’t come up with much more than an outraged sputter in response to the other guys’ ribbing.
The prestige of the trip appears to have put fresh sass into him.
“I’da brought you home some of the real stuff, if I’da thought you’d know the difference. ”
“Oooh,” Senan says to the group. “Burn, isn’t that what the young people say? I wonder will I survive.”
“That reminds me,” Bobby says to Cal, ignoring Senan.
“I brought you this.” He digs into a supermarket bag at his feet and pulls out another of the small plastic objects.
It turns out to be a figurine of the Virgin Mary.
On closer inspection Cal realizes it’s a bottle, filled with some kind of clear liquid.
The cap, in a tasteful shade of blue, is Mary’s crown.
“That’s holy water inside it,” Bobby informs him. “Taken straight from the spring at Lourdes, and then blessed by a priest.”
“One for everyone in the audience,” Mart says, patting his on the head.
“Well, many thanks,” Cal says. “I appreciate that. Do I drink it?”
“Use it as a mixer,” Senan tells him. “Goes great with gin.”
“You do not,” Bobby says, shocked. “Well, you might take a sup if you had cancer or something, maybe. I wouldn’t say it’d taste nice, after being in the bottle so long.
But mostly you’d use it to bless things with.
Yourself, like, or your house. I put a bitta mine on the car, with the way people drive around here, and I was going to do the sheep, only I haven’t enough to go round. ”
“You can eat these,” Francie tells Cal, “if you fancy a taste.” He pushes a tin of candy across the table.
“They’re mints,” Bobby explains. “Made with Lourdes water. Not blessed, like, so I don’t know how much good they’d do you, but they’re lovely. The mammy had the both of us sucking them on the flight all the way home, so the plane’d stay up.”
The candies are little white lozenges, each with Mary stamped neatly on the front. “I wouldn’t risk it,” Mart advises Cal, “and you a Protestant. I’d say they’d burn the mouth off you.”
Cal, while not particularly religious in any direction, is iffy on the propriety of eating Mary.
“I better play it safe,” he says. “Thanks. Besides, I don’t figure they’d go with Smithwick’s.
” Barty helps him out by appearing at this moment with his pint.
“Here’s to France,” Cal says, raising his glass to Bobby.
“I heard the French ones’d all go topless on the beaches,” Francie says. “Is that true?”
“I wasn’t on any beaches,” Bobby says. He looks like a kid realizing he missed out on a candy store.
“Ahhh,” Senan says. “Would your mammy not let you?”
“It’s November,” Cal points out. He feels an obligation to take the heat off Bobby every now and then, although Bobby seems less in need of this than usual. “How many bathing beauties was he gonna find in this weather?”
“More than he would here, anyhow.”
“Nah,” Cal says. “Other way around. Here, you get five minutes of sunshine and everyone’s out toasting themselves, regardless of how cold it is. Over there, they can afford to save it for hot weather. They’re not gonna risk getting frostbite on their delicate parts.”
“When did you see topless women sunning themselves around here? Laid out in rows on the footpath in front of Noreen’s, is it?”