Chapter Two #2
“I don’t know where you got that,” she says, careful to keep her voice even, “but you’ve got it wrong. Sean never in his life told me who to hang around with. That’s my own choice and always has been.”
“Ah, shite,” Rachel says, turning pink and slumping disconsolately over the cat.
“Now I’m after saying something stupid. Or it was my mammy that said it to start with, she said it was just like Sean to want you all to himself, just the two of ye, and the rest of the world could feck off—I think she usedta fancy him back in school, d’you know that?
Only he never even looked at her, it sounds like, and sure she’s happy as Larry with my dad, so that’s grand.
But it’s not my mammy’s fault, I was the one that went and said it to you. I’m an awful feckin’ eejit sometimes.”
Lena isn’t so sure. Claire, in school, was a skinny, vague little thing who spent half her time staring out the window and said “What?” whenever anyone talked to her, but apparently she wasn’t as oblivious as she seemed.
Lena is starting to wonder how much of Rachel’s chatter is an act, too, and what it covers.
“You’re all right,” she says. “Just, only two people ever know what goes on in a marriage. Anyone else who says they’ve a clue is pulling it straight outa their arse. Remember that.”
Slowly, with no drama, tears start to leak down Rachel’s face. “Sorry,” she says. She wipes them away with the back of a hand, smearing a swipe of mascara across her cheek, and looks at her hand ruefully. “Now I’m feckin’ crying again,” she tells Lena. “I’d say I’m due my period, d’you reckon?”
It sounds like Rachel is having some kind of trouble with Eugene Moynihan, which isn’t surprising, what with Eugene being a tosser.
By now Noreen would have the kettle boiling, Rachel on the sofa, an arm around her, and a stream of comfort and interrogation pouring out at ninety miles an hour.
But Lena has spent her entire adult life walling out Ardnakelty and its tangles, and now one of those tangles is sniffling on her kitchen floor.
Allowing gaps in her boundary walls for Trey is one thing; allowing them for a near-stranger too dim or too desperate to heed the keep-out signs is another.
“I wouldn’t know,” she says.
“I shouldn’ta bothered you,” Rachel says.
“Sorry. Just, you were the only one I could think of to ask. Everyone else around here, sure they wouldn’t have a notion what I was on about.
And then they’d go asking me questions, and then it’d be all round the townland before I even got home, and it’d all be even worse. I thought you might…”
The tears are coming down faster. Rachel fishes a bedraggled tissue out of her jacket pocket and dabs under her eyes, tilting her head back.
“I just don’t want people upset,” she says.
“And I don’t want them hating me. I’m a great big fat sap, I know I am, I oughta be all ‘Fuck the haters, it’s a them problem,’ but I’m not made like that.
Only it’s Eugene, he doesn’t like me arguing with him, and he’s a load smarter than I am and it all makes sense when he says it, you know?
And he was so patient explaining everything and I do appreciate it, honest to God I do, he only wants what’s best for the two of us.
Just…” She catches a huge sniffly breath that’s on the edge of a sob.
Her face, eyes closed tight, is clenched into a mask of wretchedness.
“I can’t think,” she says. “My head’s melted trying. I wish I wasn’t such a feckin’ thick.”
“Listen,” Lena says. “I haven’t a clue what the story is here, and it sounds like I wouldn’t be much good to you even if I did.
But I’ll tell you one thing I know for definite.
Whatever you do, you’ll piss people off along the way, whether that’s Eugene or someone else, but the world won’t end. If that’s what you’re asking.”
Rachel catches another long shaky breath.
“Yeah,” she says. “I s’pose you’re right, sure.
” She gives her face one more dab and stuffs the cat back into his carrier, where he turns his back haughtily on the pair of them.
“The state of me, bawling my eyes out on you. I’m only morto with embarrassment here.
I’m awful sorry. I won’t bother you again.
” She gets up off the floor, clumsily, trying to pick up the cat carrier at the same time.
“You’re grand,” Lena says. “Don’t let people wreck your head. It’ll sort itself in the long run.”
“Ah, yeah. Course. Thanks for, you know, having the look at Pugsy. I’ll do that, with his claws. Thanks. Sorry again.” She pulls up her hood and is out the door and heading for her car at a half-run, stooped low over the cat carrier.
Lena watches the sweep of the Mini’s lights, down the drive and out onto the road, before she shuts the door.
It sounds like Eugene has decided that any wife of his is required to have posher friends than whoever Rachel hangs around with.
Rachel, ditzy or not, understands what Ardnakelty will make of that.
Lena told Rachel the truth: she’s cut off from this townland by her own desire, but that desire had nothing to do with Sean and came long before him.
As far back as she can remember, she was planning a one-way ticket out, to vet training and then to Canada or New Zealand or anywhere far away that would have her.
The plan changed shape when Sean came along.
Lena knew from the start he would never leave his land.
She swapped her one-way ticket for him and hasn’t regretted it, but it meant she had to set her distances inside herself rather than outside.
She touches Ardnakelty at as few points as possible.
She won’t have the townland doing to her what it does, snuffling through the juicy innards of her life and her marriage and her mind.
She knows her distance makes people think she’s cold, or strange, or uppity, and has no problem with those. She didn’t know, and doesn’t like, that it lets people think she’s a poor pitiable victim.
Once she’s ignored that for long enough, the sting will fade. She should have guessed at it, anyhow. This townland doesn’t like being balked. If it isn’t fed what it wants, it’ll make its own fodder.
It’ll eat Rachel alive. Rachel is softer than Lena ever was; she’s not made to hold out against a siege.
Against her own instincts, Lena thinks about ringing Claire, but she doesn’t have Claire’s number and is on none of the WhatsApp groups for sports clubs and school classes and the Tidy Towns.
Noreen would have the number, but getting it from her would set off a tornado of questions and surmises, and Rachel doesn’t need that.
Rachel will find her own way, the same as Lena did.
Lena lets the dogs back into the kitchen and gives them their dinner.
She got Nellie and Daisy after they were dumped half-starved on a roadside; watching them, sturdy and glossy and secure, still gives her the same warmth she takes from the new ease in Trey’s walk.
While they eat, she leans back against the counter and thinks about Sean.
For the first year after he died, she would do anything not to think of him; she worked herself to exhaustion every day and walked herself to exhaustion into the night, to keep her mind from reaching for him.
These days she sets out time to think of him, deliberately and regularly, so that the man she knew won’t be lost.
Claire had Sean right, or close to it. He wanted very few things, but he wanted those with an intensity that seemed incapable of being sated.
Even when he and Lena lay down together, he could never get her close enough.
Sometimes she wondered if the flaw was in her, not in him; if she had bent her mind so hard to withholding parts of herself, she couldn’t stop.
But Sean was like that about other things.
The farm was family land, owned free and clear for generations, but he never felt it was his enough.
Lena came to think he would never be easy unless he cut himself open, put her and the farm inside, and sewed himself back up tight.
Lena wanted him just as deeply, but differently. She has a knack for contentment that he never had. She was happy with him. To her surprise, she’s happy again, without him.
The window is dark; the warm kitchen light catches in the haze of raindrops on the pane. Cal and Trey will be wondering where Lena is. “Come on,” she says to the dogs, and they follow her out to the car, snorting at the cold outside air.
“Another one bites the dust,” Mart says, on the way home.
He’s giving Cal a ride—Cal took a while to get accustomed to Ardnakelty’s attitude towards driving home from the pub, but they sanded the cop reflex off him in the end.
Mart’s car smells of sheep dip and his dog, Kojak, and has no shock absorbers to speak of, but so far it’s got him home.
“There’ll be wedding bells before next Christmas.
Can you picture Bobby in a tux? He’ll look like the fuckin’ Penguin. ”
“Jeez, man,” Cal says. “You’re as bad as Noreen. They just met.”
“Bobby’s smitten,” Mart says, taking one hand off the wheel to light the rollie in his mouth. “You saw the state of him: smitten ta fuck.”
“She might not be,” Cal points out.
“Doesn’t matter. Bobby’s a nice fella, but he’s not what you’d call a sex symbol, God love him.
If this Róisín one is courting him, ’tis one of two things: either they’re made for each other in heaven, or else she’s in the humor to settle down and she reckons wee Bobby’s the best she’ll get.
Either way, they’ll be headed down the aisle by the time I can get my suit dry-cleaned. Racing yourself and Lena to the altar.”
“Love is in the air,” Cal says. “You’ll be next.”